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Computational modules were developed to numerically determine electronic band structures, berry curvatures, Chern numbers, localization lengths, and critical exponents for tight- binding and related models. These modules were applied to a variety tight-binding and related models including the Hofstadter Model, Anderson Model, and the Chalker- Coddington model. When analytic solutions were available, numeric energy bands agreed with analytic solutions to within machine precision. In addition Chern numbers for well known models were reproduced, and localization lengths and critical exponents agreed with values in the literature.

Instituted in 1749, the British Lying-In Hospital served as a charity hospital for married pregnant women. Existing analysis of lying-in hospitals in Britain emphasizes the history of midwifery. This project approaches the subject from a different angle, centering the patients instead of the medical staff. The project focuses on an account book from the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library that lists the hospital’s income and expenses from 1767 to 1782. Analysis of this archival source reveals the hospital’s regulatory power over the poor. This regulation enforced the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor inside and outside the hospital walls.

This timeline documents the history of modern synthetic detergent products, beginning with the sulfonation of castor oil in 1831, to the development of present day detergent products such as Tide. Through this timeline, you can explore how chemical, health, environmental, military, legal, media, and gender factors intertwine to form the history of modern detergent and related products such as dryer sheets and fabric softeners.

Lynd Ward’s wood engravings for the 1934 illustrated edition of Frankenstein push the boundaries of what it means to “read” an illustrated edition of a novel in conversation with its cultural afterlives, its material dimensions, and its queer undertones. Using French literary theorist Gérard Genette’s definition of hypertextuality, this paper explores the radical ways in which nontraditional texts like Ward’s wood engravings and Shelley Jackson’s 1995 hypertext novel Patchwork Girl speak to the reading experience through their use of framing devices—a tool borrowed from Shelley herself. This essay reads Ward’s work through the lens of Patchwork Girl’s critical apparatus, concentrating on how the emphasis on the creature’s body speaks back to the voyeuristic desires and expectations of the reader.

Abstract: The concept of "right versus privilege" is inherent in a nation's system for funding health care. Privatized health care, such as that in the U.S., promotes an inequitable distribution of healthcare resources that leave several populations without access to health care needs. Completely nationalized medical care, like that found in the United Kingdom, provides more broad-based and equitable care but access to specialized health care on a timely basis is difficult, and there is little incentive to offer more costly technological diagnostic or preventative advancements. Japan, which has a hybrid public/private healthcare system, appears to offer the best model for equitable and advanced medical treatments, and clearly provides the best outcomes. However, the growing elderly population places an extreme burden on all three countries, and Japan's health care system, due to its culture, is more vulnerable to this change in population demographics. Ideally, a national healthcare system has a moral obligation to provide for the countries' citizens, and this can best be accomplished by analyzing the approaches of three different countries (the privatized U.S., the socialized U.K., and the hybrid Japan) to create a health insurance system that is equitable, not financially burdensome, and which promotes the best outcomes for all its patients.

Questioning established scientific fact walks a fine line between promoting scientific progress and ignorant denialism.  Historically, important breakthroughs, such as the development of germ theory, relied on such challenges to the scientific norm. However, healthy skepticism can cross the line into dangerous denialism, as evidenced by denial of HIV as the cause of AIDS, as well as the anti-vaccine movement. Both of these cases have had dire consequences, costing many lives. They exemplify when baseless opposition becomes a significant threat to public health. Thus, this paper seeks to answer the question:  At what point does it become unacceptable to deny well-established medical fact? In addition, it proposes possible solutions to the problem posed by medical denialism.

An Asian American bestseller and a required reading in many classrooms, The Joy Luck Clubby Chinese American author Amy Tan has prompted substantial debate—some zealously laudatory of its rich narratives and cultural insights, some seethingly critical of its Orientalist motives, some neutrally analytical of its cultural symbols—over its representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans in the literary mainstream. Unfortunately, few scholars have considered detaching representational power from ethnic texts and alleviating the burden on ethnic writers to represent their communities. This thesis uses cultural criticism and reception theory to examine three things: the novel’s cultural and linguistic inaccuracies, the role of shame in forming the Chinese American identity, and the cumulative influences of popular reviews, educational guides, and public commentary on readers’ tendencies to attach representational value to the novel. I find that the novel functions as a subjective (fictional) Chinese American experience more so than an all-encompassing Chinese cultural and linguistic lesson; there ispotential for Chinese Americans to transcend the “Chinese” and “American” binary and exist with nuance and without dual alienation; it is the novel’s reception, notTan herself, that has constructed its representational power. These findings suggest that the experiences and identities of American ethnic minorities are multifaceted and nuanced, and therefore incapable of being comprehensively represented and dichotomously regarded. To prevent absolute dependence on media for developing multicultural awareness, readers must consume critically and introspectively, maintaining the awareness of our reader subjectivity and of the limits of literature—especially fictional literature. 

The early modern period in England (c. 1500-1800) is often best remembered for dramatic developments that transformed the political, religious and economic life of the country. Henry VIII’s rejection of the papacy in the 1530s severed the English church and its worshippers from the wider Catholic community. In 1649, the execution of Charles I at the end of the Civil War marked the beginning of a transformation in the relationship between king and people. That relationship continued to evolve and in 1689, it was recast in the Bill of Rights, which subordinated the Crown to the people. The economy thrived through much of the period and by the eighteenth century England was both a leader in European and in the overseas colonies for which so many nations vied. This exhibit seeks to explore the lives of ordinary people who lived through these dramatic events. While such developments were important, they did not always gure in the everyday lives of those who were not members of the political nation. For them, concerns about their work, families, education and spiritual lives loomed larger than the activities and debates taking place at Westminster. The objects here reveal the concerns, desires and fears of some of the English people during the early modern era and how they sought to manage them--not always successfully.