Cemeteries allow us to connect with our past and better understand our heritage on an emotional level. In the case of the Kennecott Cemetery, the historic landscape provides a valuable resource to interpret the social history of a mining community that has ceased to exist. From 1908 until 1938, Kennecott was a thriving copper mining town. Hundreds of men worked in the mines and many of those who lost their lives in work-related accidents are buried in the cemetery. When mining operations were terminated in 1938, the entire workforce departed and Kennecott became a desolate ghost town. The cemetery is the only landscape that provides physical evidence of religious influences being present at Kennecott and further reinforces such activities taking place throughout the entire period of the town’s settlement. To date, Kennecott is located within the boundaries of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska, and was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1986. As an intern for the National Park Service, I partook in conducting an analysis and evaluation of the historic features present at the Kennecott Cemetery. This research contributed to producing a Cultural Landscape Report and Interpretive Plan which will provide planning, management and treatment recommendations for the cemetery. Overall, these documents will be a vital resource to improve the ability of Park managers to identify and protect existing resources and interpret the significance of the landscape to an expansive audience.

Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore is a novel that tells the story of two protagonists who never meet, Kafka and Nakata. They are on a journey across Japan in order to escape an Oedipal curse and elude the authorities for a murder that they both are connected to yet have no recollection. I am drawn to this story because it proposes the significance of self-awareness for the sake of cohesive understanding of oneself and, as a result, to those perceived as alien. My presentation takes the form of a nine minute solo performance of an inspired original enactment of Kafka’s clash with his conscious inner self, Crow, on the topic of the socially constructed reasons that motivate Kafka to return to Tokyo in order to clear matters with authorities as opposed to simply rejecting the arbitrary constructs that perpetuate the idea of duty. The narrative applies the theories of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment, supplemented by research into ideology and discourse, in order to establish the relevancy of discourse, a particular way of talking or thinking, which ideology, a system that maintains and reproduces the social relations of the prevailing social order which imposes on individuals a conception of themselves, is ingrained in, as a constructed condition. Because discourse is in language, a mode of communication, and ideology is ingrained in discourse, art, a series of coded signs manipulated to communicate a message, must also have associated ideology. Through the creative process of composition, the experiment attempts to fuse different modes of artistic disciplines in order to expose both the resonant and dissonant qualities of multiple ideologies colliding. The result of the experiment serves to evaluate the effectiveness of specific compositional tools in developing material based on the clarity and effectiveness of the delivery of the performance’s key concepts.

          Disproportionate collapse is a phenomenon in which the localized failure of a small portion of a structure triggers the failure of adjoining members, resulting in damage disproportionate to the original cause. In Steel Gravity Framing Systems (SGFSs), connections between members are designed solely to support nominal gravity loading in shear, exemplifying a system which may be particularly vulnerable to collapse if subjected to unanticipated loading.  If unanticipated loading compromises a column’s ability to resist gravity loading in a SGFS, demands on the shear connections become significantly more complex. Under this scenario, gravity loading initially induces primarily shear and bending moment on the connections, which are resisted through friction and clamping forces and later through horizontal bearing forces at the bolt holes when the friction is overcome. As the beams rotate, the gravity loading becomes resolvable into components perpendicular and parallel to the beam axes, generating large tension forces in the connections. Thus, connections originally designed only to resist shear are subjected to a complex combination of bending moment, shear, and tension forces.  This research experimentally investigates the behavior of steel gravity framing connection subassemblages under loading consistent with a column losing its load carrying capacity in order to evaluate connection performance and system-level integrity of existing SGFSs. Furthermore, once the demands on the connections are adequately characterized, practical solutions to improve connection robustness and SGFS integrity can be developed.

Steel Plate Shear Walls (SPSWs) are structures used to mitigate damage to a building due to lateral forces caused by earthquakes. A literature review is being conducted on SPSWs to create a unified database that will be made public on the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Website. The database will include information on Steel Plate Shear Wall tests, such as wall properties and information on drift levels for various repair states. Drift is a measurement of lateral displacement divided by total wall height. Repair states correspond to the values of drift at which a certain type of repair of the wall is required. Drift levels will be organized by their associated repair state to create fragility functions. Fragility functions are cumulative distribution functions that tell the probability of a SPSW reaching a specific damage state at a specific drift level. These functions can help engineers design SPSWs and predict what level of damage or repair is expected under a certain level of earthquake shaking.

As carriers of globally prevalent diseases such as Malaria and Dengue Fever, mosquitoes are an important model for research in vector biology. Previous studies have shown that many mosquito species are capable of changing their host-seeking behavior to match environmental shifts in host availability. However, the sensory mechanisms that mediate the shifts in hosts remain unknown. Because many other insect species are capable of learning novel associations throughout their lives, we hypothesized that this behavioral shift in mosquitoes was an indication of a similar capacity for learning. This study examines the degree, speed, and accuracy with which female Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes respond to Pavlovian conditioning. We paired seven different odors with a blood reward to gauge the change in the insects’ reactions to these scents over time. We found that mosquitoes were capable of Pavlovian learning, but not when stimulated with odors known to be naturally repellent to mosquitoes. Moreover, compared to other insects, mosquitoes quickly learned the association between the reward and the novel odor. They also demonstrated selectivity towards the odors they were trained on, and showed little response to odors that were similar to the trained odor, suggesting that their learning process is highly odor-specific. These findings suggest that learning behaviors may be an important factor to mosquito survival in natural conditions. Pavlovian learning in mosquitoes has never before been shown, and further research into the neural mechanisms mediating the shift in host preferences could very well lead to advancements in the prevention of mosquito-borne pathogenic infections.

Renaissance poet George Herbert is known as an innovator in poetic style and construction, but conservative or traditional in his content and subjects. This research explores an alternative interpretation that argues instead that his poems are actually radical innovations in structure that express and reveal the substance – function reflecting form. Herbert’s poems “Paradise” and “Easter Wings”, demonstrate this subversive and subtle, even subliminal, messaging. This methodology reveals his revolutionary attitude toward both poetic structures and content. By embedding alternative readings and perspectives into his poems, Herbert simultaneously explored the malleability of interpretations of both form and content, while subtly subverting and redefining traditional interpretations of his topics. Style and textual shapes are his tools for melding the cyclical elements of his topical inspiration with the outward appearance of the pieces. When read “in the round,” these poems reveal Herbert viewing cycles in life and text through slightly different perspectives and elements, creating duality and continuity. Both forwards and backwards, the content and form echo the other, as the circular readability contributes to and reflects the cyclical nature of the topic and content of the two poems. In this way, Herbert radically experimented in redefining the boundaries between form and focus.