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similarity index 100%
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diff --git a/mysql/main_8-31-16.csv b/mysql/main_2016-08-31.csv
similarity index 100%
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rename to mysql/main_2016-08-31.csv
diff --git a/mysql/main_8-31-16.sql b/mysql/main_2016-08-31.sql
similarity index 100%
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rename to mysql/main_2016-08-31.sql
diff --git a/mysql/main_3-19-17.sql b/mysql/main_2017-03-19.sql
similarity index 100%
rename from mysql/main_3-19-17.sql
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diff --git a/mysql/main_2017-06-02.sql b/mysql/main_2017-06-02.sql
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..531b06c
--- /dev/null
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+ `id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
+ `year` enum('freshman','sophomore','junior','senior') NOT NULL DEFAULT 'freshman',
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\n \n
HONORS 205
\n
Autumn 2015 Freshman
\n
\n
\n
Final Project — This University Life
\n \n
\n \n
\n
The culmination of Honors 205 was a final project. We were to use some form of media to showcase the various ways of knowing and cross-disciplinary strategies we covered in class. My group chose to create a fictitious podcast called This University Life, à la This American Life, telling the stories of experiences each group member has had with the content of the class. It was supposed to be the equivilent of a 10-page paper. I’d estimate we spent about 6 hours recording over the course of two weeks and around 18 hours editing the raw audio into the final product. The music in the podcast is from http://bensound.com.
Honors 205 was the only class this quarter not taught in the traditional lecture method and it was very enlightening to participate in the group discussion throughout the quarter. Hearing how other people understand and view a topic in ways that I never would have thought of allowed me to augment my own understandings and views. Writing my children’s story, “Turning Point”, I learned more about the ethics of climate engineering than simply by reading about it. Explaining something complicated to someone who knows nothing of it forces one to think and fully comprehend a topic so that the distilled version is an accurate representation of the whole. This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to teach something that I’ve learned, especially in the form of a story aimed at middle readers.
In this class, we were charged with creating our own algorithmic art using a programming langage called Processing. I created a program that generates random formulae using the sin, cos, average, and multiplication functions. These functions always return values in the interval [-1,1]. The functions are generated at a recursive level of complexity. A level 1 formula may be cos(πx) while a level 3 may be (sin(πy) * sin(πx) + (cos(πz) + cos(πy)) / 2.0) / 2.0. The program then uses three formulae to calclate RGB values for different (x,y,z) coordinates on a cube. The results look amazing and have incredible sinusoidal patterns.
As part of this introductory course to the University of Washington, we had to reflect on who we are, what we wanted to do, and how out paths led to UW.
“In ‘Making Hope & History Rhyme,’ Farmer asks the graduating class: ‘Imagine you are coming back ... for your twentieth year reunion. What would the world look like if hope and history have started to rhyme?‘ Throughout the Farmer readings, he speaks to the value of partnerships, imagination, compassion, innovation, and thinking ‘fractally.’ Think of a global challenge not addressed in this chapter, and, applying these values, critically reflect on how this challenge might be solved in a world where ‘hope and history rhyme.’ What efforts are necessary to make this imagined future a reality? Share your thoughts in a 1-page, single-spaced response.”
This class, Philosophical Issues in Law, was definitely outside my realm of comfortability but I ended up really enjoying the class. I figured it would mostly be long, empassioned arguments about women\'s access to abortions or the right to privacy but most of the cases we covered were like Priestley v. Fowler, a case from the 1800s involving compensation for injuries caused when a cart full of meat fell on a butcher\'s employee. Nevertheless, it was a thoroughly interesting class, even if the readings did take several hours a week. You can read a paper I wrote on the philosophical impications of the decision of the 2014 supreme court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. by clicking the ”Read it“ link above.
Practice-It is a tool used by hundreds of thousands of people globally to practice and learn computer programming. After trying to build my own version of the website from scratch, I managed to get a research position in the UW Computer Science Department working on the real thing. I worked with faculty members and professors to improve the website. I\'m nowhere near done with this research opportunity but so far it\'s been insightful and a lot of fun.
One of the projects I made for this class was entitled “Half Full.” It explored the common “glass half empty/half full” concept in more unexpected ways. One glass, for example, was bisected and and one half was attached to a mirror such that when it is half full, it looks completely full. In another, blue and clear water are separated by a perforated disk with nothing but surface tension keeping them separate. The slightest disturbance will cause the two to mix.
This was a very interesting course, although I was initially dreading it. After the first day of class where the professor mentioned the two essay exams and the 15 page research paper, I almost dropped the class. I'm glad that I didn't. We studied influences of gender, sexuality, and race throughout American history. We looked into topics of shopping, fashion, cooking, drugs, and amusements.
\n\n
For the research assignment, I decided to write about a topic that I thought was ridiculous: unnecessary gendered advertising. I\'m talking about men\'s yoghurt, men\'s earplugs, men\'s razors. It was an enlightening topic and it really gave me insight into why these advertising methods are still used. You can read it by clicking the link above.
\n
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+ (1,'crisis','Read','A Crisis of Compassion','
“In ‘Making Hope & History Rhyme,’ Farmer asks the graduating class: ‘Imagine you are coming back ... for your twentieth year reunion. What would the world look like if hope and history have started to rhyme?‘ Throughout the Farmer readings, he speaks to the value of partnerships, imagination, compassion, innovation, and thinking ‘fractally.’ Think of a global challenge not addressed in this chapter, and, applying these values, critically reflect on how this challenge might be solved in a world where ‘hope and history rhyme.’ What efforts are necessary to make this imagined future a reality? Share your thoughts in a 1-page, single-spaced response.”
',NULL,NULL,'“In ‘Making Hope & History Rhyme,’ Farmer asks the graduating class: ‘Imagine you are coming back ... for your twentieth year reunion. What would the world look like if hope and history have started to rhyme?‘ Throughout the Farmer readings, he speaks to the value of partnerships, imagination, compassion, innovation, and thinking ‘fractally.’ Think of a global challenge not addressed in this chapter, and, applying these values, critically reflect on how this challenge might be solved in a world where ‘hope and history rhyme.’ What efforts are necessary to make this imagined future a reality? Share your thoughts in a 1-page, single-spaced response.”','
With the worsening of the conflict in Syria, millions of Syrians are emmigrating to nearby countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe in an effort to escape the violence in their own country. In addition, millions are leaving Iraq in response to the rise of ISIS. The culmination of this exodus is a massive and problematic migrant crisis, the largest since World War II, across Europe. Despite their dire circumstances, not every country is welcoming the “swarm of people,” as the prime minister of the United Kingdom so colorfully put it1. In a recent sensationalized video clip, while a large group fled from a refugee holding camp, a Hungarian reporter purposely kicked and tripped a refugee—a father—carrying a child. Although she was censured and fired for her actions, her attitude typifies that of many European countries towards the millions of displaced people looking for a new home. From the Hungarian Prime Minister telling these émigrés: “Please, don’t come,” to Danish ads attempting to deter immigrants from seeking asylum in Denmark2, there is a general sense of hostility towards these people who want nothing more than to find a new place to live their lives in peace.
\n\n
Surprisingly, one of the few countries receiving these people with open arms is Germany. There are even stories of Germans waiting at train stations to welcome and applaud incoming refugees. The world could learn a valuable lesson from Germany and the incredible compassion they have demonstrated. As the influx has increased, the Germany’s exuberance seems to have somewhat faded as it would for any country inundated by hundreds of thousands of lost souls. Working together, the powers of Europe could help millions and mitigate the refugee crisis by distributing the burden amongst all countries instead of battening down the hatches and hoping other countries will handle the situation.
\n\n
These countries need to think at several different levels simultaneously. In addition to the humanitarian aspect of helping those in need, accepting large numbers of refugees, in almost all cases, leads to economic improvement in the countries that accept them because they contribute more than they receive3. Accepting refugees also helps combat the low fertility rate and aging populace plaguing most developed countries.
\n\n
By demonstrating compassion and working tandem, European countries could help their own citizens and the millions of people escaping their war-torn homelands. Together they could globally improve quality of life and promote true change in today’s feckless political climate of xenophobia and eschewal of responsibility. This could very easily become a reality if world leaders began thinking in three dimensions instead of the narrowminded one dimension they usually do. They would need to recognize the local, global, societal, and economic ramifications of the refugee crisis and the impact they could have as part of the solution in order to work together to be the solution.
Michael Birnbaum and Griff Witte, “‘People in Europe are full of fear’ over refugee influx,” The Washington Post, 3 September 2015, http://wpo.st/fZJm0
As part of this introductory course to the University of Washington, we had to reflect on who we are, what we wanted to do, and how out paths led to UW.
',NULL,NULL,'I cannot say who I am, however, I can say who I was. When I was in high school, I was a good student. I read the assigned readings, memorized the assigned facts, and once I wrote them on a test, I discarded them to prepare for the relentless influx of new non-contextualized and fragmented morsels of information. I came to college, to the University of Washington, because I sought an end to the torrent of indifference and monotony. I chose to apply to the honors department because I did not want to simply take classes within a narrow scope, germane to my interests, while continuing to squirrel away facts for the future like acorns for the winter.','
I cannot say who I am, however, I can say who I was. When I was in high school, I was a good student. I read the assigned readings, memorized the assigned facts, and once I wrote them on a test, I discarded them to prepare for the relentless influx of new non-contextualized and fragmented morsels of information. I came to college, to the University of Washington, because I sought an end to the torrent of indifference and monotony. I chose to apply to the honors department because I did not want to simply take classes within a narrow scope, germane to my interests, while continuing to squirrel away facts for the future like acorns for the winter. I wanted to see the interconnectedness of what I learn, the gleaming web connecting physics, art, psychology, and philosophy, and every other discipline. It can only be found with a bright enough light, but once it presents itself, everything makes sense.
\n\n
My past self is a mere acquaintance with whom I share fond memories but will never interact again. The haze of time distorts the view of our past selves, and though I remember what he has done, he will never know what I will do. For as bad as humans are at recollecting the past, we are worse at predicting the future. The shriveled husk of myself that was left behind as a snake leaves behind its skin does not know the experiences I have endured. He does not know the feeling of true love and the accompanying desolation. He does not know leaving everyone behind to move across the country. He does not know the feeling of staying awake with his mother and watching her die. As much as I wish now that he could have known these things so that my past actions could be altered, he will not. Only when the events of my life fade into the obscuring and disfiguring fog of time will he know, and by that time I will no longer be who am I today. I will be a new person, and what I was before will become a part of the shadow that is persistently trailing my present self.
\n\n
I cannot say who my future self will be. I can never hope to know him, but he will know me. His formation is determined by the actions I take today and I hope that he will look back fondly and thank me for what I have done, although I am sure there will be things I will want to have done differently but that is a consequence of the inevitability of time. Here I hope I will provide my future self with the tools, knowledge, and experiences I need for the rest of my life. I hope to expand upon my love of learning and to learn how to continue to sate my appetite beyond college. I wish to develop and mature, to grow to see beyond the superficial facade of reality and into it?s inner workings and truths.
\n\n
I would like to guide myself to be a better person in the future than I am now which is an arduous feat to accomplish. When we project ourselves into the future, we see ourselves as we are now. We seldom think of the actions we take today as changing who we will be, when in fact, it is nearly impossible to take actions that are not. If my past self is two dimensional and immutable and my current self is three dimensional and changing, then my future self is four dimensional, in constant flux and superposition; he is impossible to fully comprehend and predict. All I can hope is that one day, when all of the future possibilities collapse into the certainty of the present, that I am happy with the outcome.
\n ',1),
+ (3,'','','Final Project — This University Life','
\n \n
\n
The culmination of Honors 205 was a final project. We were to use some form of media to showcase the various ways of knowing and cross-disciplinary strategies we covered in class. My group chose to create a fictitious podcast called This University Life, à la This American Life, telling the stories of experiences each group member has had with the content of the class. It was supposed to be the equivilent of a 10-page paper. I’d estimate we spent about 6 hours recording over the course of two weeks and around 18 hours editing the raw audio into the final product. The music in the podcast is from bensound.com.
Honors 205 was the only class this quarter not taught in the traditional lecture method and it was very enlightening to participate in the group discussion throughout the quarter. Hearing how other people understand and view a topic in ways that I never would have thought of allowed me to augment my own understandings and views. Writing my children’s story, “Turning Point”, I learned more about the ethics of climate engineering than simply by reading about it. Explaining something complicated to someone who knows nothing of it forces one to think and fully comprehend a topic so that the distilled version is an accurate representation of the whole. This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to teach something that I’ve learned, especially in the form of a story aimed at middle readers.
\n',NULL,NULL,'Writing my children’s story, “Turning Point”, I learned more about the ethics of climate engineering than simply by reading about it. Explaining something complicated to someone who knows nothing of it forces one to think and fully comprehend a topic so that the distilled version is an accurate representation of the whole. This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to teach something that I’ve learned, especially in the form of a story aimed at middle readers.','July 21st, 2037 \n
There aren’t as many clouds as there used to be; it’s quite dismal. I adored looking out to where the rough blue of the water met the smooth blue of the sky and watching the clouds saunter over the horizon like great behemoths indifferent to what’s happening below. That’s not really possible anymore. It seems like the drought has been going on for an eternity. The lake is a fraction of its former self and the skies are barren. Even when a parade of clouds comes marching by, it’s too hot to sit outside for longer than a few minutes. Now that we can’t go outside as much, Mom said that I should keep a journal although I can barely remember to do my homework so who knows how often I’ll remember to write in here.
\n
Anyway, I remember learning about what’s happening in history class. Mom told me about it too; she’s a climatologist. She said it’s called climate change. Surprisingly, a few decades ago they didn’t even believe it was real. In 2015, the U.S. senate held a vote to decide whether climate change was real or not. Doesn’t that seem absurd, a bunch of old men voting to decide whether a fact is true or not? Could you imaging if the senate had to vote to decide whether or not clouds exist? Well, just like clouds, climate change exists whether you believe in it or not. My teachers said that the land around here used to be covered with grass, shrubs, and trees but over time it got warmer and dryer until most of the plants turned to dust and blew away with the wind. It’s not like this everywhere though. Places near the oceans like New York City and Louisiana have constant problems with flooding. Many cities have even had to build levees to keep the water from saturating the streets. I’ve heard there’s even parts of Florida that are completely underwater now. I’m not too worried about it, I know that people like Mom are working diligently to try to fix this.
\n\n September 14th, 2037 \n
I’m starting 8th grade this Wednesday. I’m not nervous about that; however, I am nervous about Mom. She seems very anxious. She said that scientists think soon the cities on the coasts won’t be around much longer and the droughts won’t end any time soon. Not only that, but things all over the world are getting worse. I see her sitting with her computer late at night working. Sometimes I silently watch her from the staircase. She looks so stressed.
\n\n December 20th, 2037 \n
I can half-remember playing with snow when I was a kid. It’s such a distant memory that it’s practically like watching a movie. There hasn’t been a white Christmas here in a long time. There’s no snow but there’s definitely wind. Sometimes there’s even storms but instead of rain or snow it’s just dust, which might be even worse. In science class they said that since so much vegetation has died, there isn’t much holding the soil down so when the wind blows the dirt goes with it. Apparently the same thing happened a long time ago during the Dustbowl in the 1930s. Back then, it was so horrendous that people contracted dust pneumonia from inhaling too much dust. This all seems very ominous.
\n
Mom sat me down to let me know what’s happening. She said that an international organization of scientists is trying to figure out how to stop climate change and reverse its effects. The thing is, they don’t know if they have the right to do it. But if climate change continues, more people will die. She said that already thousands of people have died from the flooding and storms caused by the rising sea levels and warming oceans and that if we do nothing to stop it, millions of people could die. The thing is, if we do try to stop it, we could cause unintended effects and end up making it worse; millions of people could die or the next ice age could start!
\n\n April 1st, 2038 \n
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything, I’d almost forgotten about this journal until I saw a report about climate engineering on the news. Hearing the reporters talk about it, it seemed almost magical. They talked about a myriad of different ways that scientists could try to diminish the effects of climate change. My favorite (for obvious reasons) was cloud seeding and marine cloud brightening. Seeding involves spraying chemicals into the air over land to cause more clouds to form. The chemicals act as a catalyst, sort of as seeds that grow into cloud. The hope is that the increased number of clouds will cause it to rain more often and provide water to drought-ridden areas. Cloud brightening involves spraying seawater into the air in the oceans to make more and denser clouds. By covering the dark surface of the water with more clouds that are brighter, more sunlight will be reflected away from the surface so that the earth can stay a little cooler. I just hope they do this so I can watch the clouds drifting through the sky.
\n\n July 20th, 2038 \n
We’re well into July now and there’s been a huge heatwave ravishing the country. In parts of the south, it’s been over 130 degrees for almost two weeks. In all of the news reports on TV, the grass looks dead and bleached blonde by the sun. There have been dozens of rampaging wildfires, many of them caused by fireworks for the 4th of July; apparently even a drought can’t stop drunk people with explosives.
\n
It’s terrifying. The terrain of the United States is no longer a mild forest with regions of hot and cold; it is now a land of extremes. Wildfires rage through forests while water ravages cities. Dust storms and hurricanes compete for destruction. It seems like some places are completely unlivable now. Even with rationing in effect in California, they’ve been shipping hundreds of millions of gallons of water in just to meet demand. Is this the fate for the rest of the world?
\n\n August 16th, 2038 \n
Mom will be gone all of this week. She’s going to a United Nations conference with politicians and scientists to discuss climate change. The president gave a speech a few months ago, when the heatwave was at its peak, declaring a national state of emergency and promoting climate change reversal to the country’s top priority. Hopefully people will actually do something about it this time. In the early 2000s, when there it had not yet had much of an effect on the globe, people had the opportunity to alter the future but everyone thought someone else should deal with it, so instead they chose to push the problem to a later time.
\n
I understand that some newer countries feel it’s wrong for them to be responsible for stopping climate change because they’re not the ones who initially damaged the environment. I’d be frustrated too, just like I am when my brother does something wrong but my parents punish me for it instead.
\n
My mom said they’re meeting specifically to discuss climate engineering. The global situation is only getting worse and now there are countless lives in immediate danger. If we’re going to try to fight this, this may be our last chance. There’s a variety of methods that they could use to combat the warming climate but they’re still not sure which one is the safest and most effective. Scientists have been researching hundreds of different methods of climate engineering for decades in an attempt to find the panacea we so desperately need. From storing CO2 in plants and burying them underground to launching them into space, they’ve pretty much exhausted every avenue, leaving nothing to the imagination. It’s even been suggested that we build a factory on the moon that makes giant reflectors to carefully position in between the earth and the sun to stop some of the sun’s light from reaching the earth’s surface.
\n
By the end of the conference, the leading scientists in the world will have made a final decision about what to do. They’ll decide whether to take action to stop the self-destructive machine of climate change set in motion during the Industrial Revolution or let nature take its destructive course. Whatever they do, I hope they make the right choice.
\n\n August 23th, 2038 \n
My mom is back and with her she brings the conference’s decision. It hasn’t even been released to the media yet; the United Nations will be announcing it in a press release later tonight. She said that there were representatives from almost every country in the world present at the meeting. There were countless hours of presentations, discussions, arguments, and votes. Not only did they have to find the best scientific strategy, but they also had to grapple with the ethical implications, political complications, and the logistics of implementation. They had to find a strategy to fight climate change that every country could agree on. Climate change is a global problem and the only way to combat it is globally. Whatever action we take to alter its path affects every single person across the entire planet. It is quite possibly the only truly global issue that humanity has had to face. I’m sure that today will be a day preserved in history for years to come. It will possibly decide the fate of the planet.
\n
A solution was proposed, a discussion was held, and a vote was taken. With an almost unanimous vote, the world has decided to attempt to derail the course of nature. Hopefully it will be better than the last time humanity interfered with nature too much, which is what started this whole mess. They decided that given the severity of the problems the world is facing and the immediate danger posed to its inhabitants, we need to take extreme, decisive action. In a combined global effort, within two months, we will begin releasing chemicals (specifically sulfate aerosols) into the stratosphere.
\n
The idea came from analysis of past ice ages. Many were caused by the explosive force of volcanoes shooting ash and gasses into the atmosphere which blocked out the sun and dramatically reduced the planet’s temperature. Among the debris projected were sulfate compounds which scientists theorize stopped a large amount of sunlight from entering the atmosphere could stop the warming of the planet. This plan is not without risks. It is possible that the earth could be cooled too much and another ice age would begin or that introducing a chemical into the atmosphere could cause problems that we didn’t foresee. Some are hesitant to solve climate change by pumping yet another chemical into the atmosphere but the conference decided that it is worth the risk. That’s the problem with all of these climate engineering solutions, they’re all untested. It’s almost impossible to accurately test something like pumping chemicals into the atmosphere without actually doing so.
\n
They’re confident that this is the best solution. If it’s works, we’ll be able to see the effects almost immediately but it will still take decades for the planet to recover from the immense damage we’ve caused it. Hopefully, soon healing can begin.
\n\n October 12th, 2038 \n
Every news channel is showing the same thing. They’re opening the first array of sulfate dispersion apparati during a huge ceremony today. The world is sitting in motionless anticipation, with hesitant hope, waiting to see what our fate will be. This could save the world or end it. Will this new technology be our saving grace or our ultimate destruction? Have we made the right decision? Our fate, whatever it may be, is immutable now and soon it will greet us.
\n\n
October 15th, 2038 \n Soon I’ll finally be with the clouds again.
',2),
+ (5,'glass','Look','Glass Art','
One of the projects I made for this class was entitled “Half Full.” It explored the common “glass half empty/half full” concept in more unexpected ways. One glass, for example, was bisected and and one half was attached to a mirror such that when it is half full, it looks completely full. In another, blue and clear water are separated by a perforated disk with nothing but surface tension keeping them separate. The slightest disturbance will cause the two to mix.
\n','.text h3 {\n margin-bottom: 0.5em;\n }',NULL,'A series of projects that I made for ART 233: Intro to Kiln-Formed Glass','
\n
\n \n Half Full\n
\n
\n
One of the projects I made for this class was entitled “Half Full.” It explored the common “glass half empty/half full” concept in more unexpected ways. One glass, for example, was bisected and and one half was attached to a mirror such that when it is half full, it looks completely full. In another, blue and clear water are separated by a perforated disk with nothing but surface tension keeping them separate. The slightest disturbance will cause the two to mix.
\n
\n
',8),
+ (6,'law','Read','Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.','
This class, Philosophical Issues in Law, was definitely outside my realm of comfortability but I ended up really enjoying the class. I figured it would mostly be long, empassioned arguments about women\'s access to abortions or the right to privacy but most of the cases we covered were like Priestley v. Fowler, a case from the 1800s involving compensation for injuries caused when a cart full of meat fell on a butcher\'s employee. Nevertheless, it was a thoroughly interesting class, even if the readings did take several hours a week. You can read a paper I wrote on the philosophical impications of the decision of the 2014 supreme court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. by clicking the ”Read it“ link above.
',NULL,NULL,'Hobby Lobby is an arts and crafts supply company founded and owned by David Green\nthat is privately held and employs over 23,000 people. Green explicitly operates his business\naccording to his Christian faith, closing down on Sundays, even if the result is a loss of profit, so\nhis employees can take the day off for worship, family, and leisure. Under the Affordable Care\nAct, health care provided to employees by employers must cover the cost of FDA-approved\ncontraceptive medications. Guided by Christian principles, Green refused to do as such. Hobby\nLobby filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Burwell\n(originally against Kathleen Sebelius prior to her resignation) in protest of this new government\nmandate.','
Hobby Lobby is an arts and crafts supply company founded and owned by David Green\n that is privately held and employs over 23,000 people. Green explicitly operates his business\n according to his Christian faith, closing down on Sundays, even if the result is a loss of profit, so\n his employees can take the day off for worship, family, and leisure. Under the Affordable Care\n Act, health care provided to employees by employers must cover the cost of FDA-approved\n contraceptive medications. Guided by Christian principles, Green refused to do as such. Hobby\n Lobby filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Burwell\n (originally against Kathleen Sebelius prior to her resignation) in protest of this new government\n mandate.
\n\n
The legislation of access to contraceptives in this case brings to mind the cases Griswold\n v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird. Mainly, this case revolves around a conflict of rights.\n Green believes he has a right to religious freedom, guaranteed by the First Amendment, that\n allows him to refrain from engaging in activities that violate his religious views. At the same\n time, there is a clear right to access to contraceptives established in Griswold and Eisenstadt.\n One could make an argument, weak as it may be, that despite not having contraceptive medicine\n covered by employer health care, those employees who desire it do have the ability and right to\n purchase it independent of health care coverage; however, it is clear that Green’s refusal of\n coverage is a hinderance in the obtainment of contraceptive medications that places an undue\n burden of cost upon those who work for him that others do not have to contend with. The\n question is: does Green’s religious right to freedom give him power to extend his moral views on\n contraceptives over his employees? By refusing to pay for contraceptives for his employees,\n Green is essentially pushing his religious and moral views onto his employees. Additionally, by\n doing so, he is saying that his right to defend his morals is greater than the right to bodily\n autonomy of thousands of employees.
\n\n
There is a well-founded, important tradition of religious freedom in United States law and\n culture. This right is founded in the idea of autonomy and self-governance. As Mill says, the\n only person who knows what moral (or religious) values suit one the best is that person alone.\n This right of control, however, begins and stops with the individual. The Constitution affords no\n such right to control the religious or moral views of others to an individual, no matter the\n relationship between the two people. As seen in West Virginia State Board of Education v.\n Barnette (the case that overturned Minersville School District v. Gobitis), the Supreme Court has\n held that religious freedom allows individuals to express and practice their beliefs freely and\n without impediment. This decision was incredibly important in supporting religious freedom in\n the United States; when Minersville was originally decided, over 1,000 Jehovah\'s Witnesses\n were physically attacked across the country and labeled traitors as a result of the court’s decision\n before it was overturned (Peters). Despite the unarguable importance of religious freedom, it\n would be ludicrous to say that one student’s right not to salute the flag based on a personal\n interpretation of Exodus grants them the ability, in order to suit their individual beliefs, to force\n all other students in the room not to salute the flag. Even if it were the teacher, a person in a\n position of power, whose religious beliefs precluded saluting the flag, they would still have no\n right to force their views upon their subordinate students just as an employer cannot force their\n beliefs on employees.
\n\n
Similar to this was the infamous Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis. Following the\n holding of Obergefell v. Hodges which allowed same-sex couples to marry nation-wide, she\n refused to issue marriage licenses to these couples in her country on religious grounds. She was\n ordered by a court to issue the licenses. Following her refusal, she was found in contempt of\n court and jailed. Obviously the court did not view her right to religious freedom as proper\n justification for the denial of a fundamental right to all of the same sex couples in her county.\n I feel to properly examine the concept of religious freedom as it appears in this case, it is\n necessary to divorce this situation from Christianity, to which our society has a clear bias.\n Suppose Green were a devout Muslim. Among the beliefs outlined in the Qur’an is the sinfulness\n of intoxication. If Green were to demand that all of his employees refrain from drinking alcohol,\n there would be massive public outrage. Perhaps he could even go as far as to require all female\n employees to wear burkas or follow the Second Pillar of Islam and pray to Allah five times a\n day, but of course that would be absurd and no doubt result in public indignation. But in the\n current situation with Christian morals, there is an outpouring of support. Following the logic\n used, could Green not also prohibit his employees from other things the Bible forbids: wearing\n clothes of mixed fiber, eating meat of animals with uncloven hooves, or perhaps even saluting\n the flag? The public\'s lack of outrage is a clear indication of our acceptance and integration of\n Christian values into society. The Establishment Clause of the constitution, however, had\n generally been interpreted to forbid the government from establishing a national religion and\n more importantly from favoring or benefiting one religion over another and our society\'s ideal of\n equality tell us the same. Finding in favor of Hobby Lobby in this case—when, substituted with\n any other religion, there would have been a much different outcome—violates this tenet of our\n society and our constitution.
\n\n
Aside from the deontological argument, from a utilitarian standpoint the outcome is the\n same. If either Green or his employees see their rights as being infringed upon if contraceptive\n medicines are covered or if they are not, then utilitarianism guides us toward the solution that\n leads to the greatest happiness and the violation of the fewest rights. Given the choice between\n offending one man’s morals and depriving potentially 23,000 employees of medication which\n can prevent unintended pregnancy and a myriad of other effects unrelated to pregnancy, the\n answer is clear. Granting the employees access to contraceptive medications covered by health\n care is the best option.
\n\n
The decision of this case is both logically and morally troubling and leads to many\n questions regarding the response to this conflict of rights and the lauded and favored position of\n Christianity in United State’s law and society.
',7),
+ (7,'gendered-advertising','Read','Influences of Gender in Consumerism','
This was a very interesting course, although I was initially dreading it. After the first day of class where the professor mentioned the two essay exams and the 15 page research paper, I almost dropped the class. I'm glad that I didn't. We studied influences of gender, sexuality, and race throughout American history. We looked into topics of shopping, fashion, cooking, drugs, and amusements.
\n\n
For the research assignment, I decided to write about a topic that I thought was ridiculous: unnecessary gendered advertising. I\'m talking about men\'s yoghurt, men\'s earplugs, men\'s razors. It was an enlightening topic and it really gave me insight into why these advertising methods are still used. You can read it by clicking the link above.
\n','.text h3 {\n text-align: center;\n}\n\n#works-cited {\n padding-left: 0;\n list-style: none;\n font-size: 75%;\n}\n\n#works-cited li {\n text-indent: -3em;\n padding-left: 3em;\n line-height: 200%;\n}',NULL,'The very existence of these products negatively affects women financially and sustains harmful stereotypes that men and women have irreconcilable and fundamental differences, that women must be smaller, slimmer, duller, meeker, beautified, and embellished. A step toward ending this view of women can be taken by removing the pointless, artificial gendering of products purely for advertising purposes.','
Since the rise of industrialism, the world has been consuming en masse at an ever increasing rate. Now with the development of materialism in the past few decades, the goods we buy are more intertwined with our perceptions and personalities than ever before. Even in 1890, philosopher and psychologist William James described modern consumerism, saying that a person is the sum of all that they can call theirs, including their body and their mind but also their physical possessions (Belk 139). Stores today are filled with thousands upon thousands of items, with dozens of options and varieties for each. This has lead to the interesting appearance of “artificially gendered” products (Harris). This facet of product marketing came to my attention when “Dude Wipes” showed up as a product suggestion while browsing Amazon. Dude Wipes, like men's yoghurt, men's earplugs, and men's hair ties, are an example of completely superfluous gendered branding. Dude Wipes are described as a “huge”, “scientific”, and a “premium solution” to the problem of keeping one's “dude region” clean (“DudeProducts”). Now, this is obviously an attempt to create a masculinized version of baby wipes, which despite having a multitude of uses aside from childcare, have a name that clearly denotes femininity due to traditional associations of child rearing with female roles.
\n\n
As Williams points out in Inside Toyland, children are raised into consumerism by their parents (4, 138) The “covert instruction or hidden curriculum” present in parent-child shopping “[include] lessons about gender and consumerism.” These lessons can quietly instill beliefs of social inequalities surrounding gender, class, and race in the minds of budding child consumers (147). I have been purchasing products for years, countless times with my parents, and have encountered many that have led me to question my own thinking. When buying body wash, why do I find myself drawn to Suave Men's Body Wash over any other? Is it really simply that I prefer the scent over all others or are there deeper meanings behind my purchasing decisions or even my preference in fragrance?
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Regardless, these artificially gendered products are obviously not created without reason. I will discuss how products can be given gendered appearances and connotations, how these gendered attributes influence consumers opinions and actions, why advertisers continue to gender products, and what negative effects this gendering has on consumers.
\n\n
Gendering Products
\n
Products are gendered in a multitude of different ways. All involve associating a product or brand with stereotypical images of masculinity or femininity; reliance on these stereotypes is necessary to convey these cultural meanings to consumers. Tilburg et al. found that a product's appearance is a strong indicator of its gender, including characteristics “such as shape, scale, proportion, material, color, reflectiveness, and ornamentation” (423). Masculinity is portrayed by products with bulky, straight designs and many dark colors while femininity is associated with light, slim, and round products using fewer and lighter colors. The brand of a product itself can be gendered as well, with bold, solid, and angular logos being associated with masculinity whereas smooth, airy, and delicate logos denote femininity (432-434). These aesthetic characteristics of products are chosen carefully by designers and advertisers. Five in-depth interviews with product designers revealed that they all considered gendered aesthetics when designing a product and identified the same design characteristics associated with femininity and masculinity that they use to convey product gender (425).
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Gendered products are not limited simply to aesthetic differences defined by stereotypes. The products themselves can serve to also perpetuate stereotypes with their gendered functions. Take, for example, a stark juxtaposition in a split-page advertisement for protein shakes examined by Dworkin and Wachs in Body Panic. On one side of the page, a women's version and on the right side, a men's version. The cosmetic differences previously described can be noted here with the men's version of the product having a much darker colored label. But there is also a difference in the function of the product itself. The women's shake is emblazoned with “lean” and described by how few calories it contains and how great it tastes while the “?mean' male counterpart . . . needs no mention of being low cal.” In this case the products are differentiated by characteristics more fundamental than product design and in doing so perpetuate stereotypes of male and female body size, with males being expected to gain copious amounts of muscle and women to remain lean and trim (75).
\n\n
The protein shake is an example of a product gendered based on societal stereotype of men and women. According to society, men need more protein and as many calories as possible in order to “get ripped” while women need to get fit but slim and make sure they don't look too muscular or too fat. This is a category of products that branding expert Harry Beckwith calls artificially gendered products. These are products that have gender unnecessarily imposed on them by marketers in order to target a certain consumer base but they also perpetuate negative ideas that men and women are fundamentally different. Virginia Slims were a gendered form of cigarette produced by Philip Morris that were also unnecessarily gendered. They were the same as regular cigarettes except for one trait “aimed [at] women: a longer and thinner cigarette that had, to some, the graceful lines of an Audrey Hepburn” (Harris).
\n\n
In addition to slim cigarettes, there are Men's Bread, girl's Legos, and men's baby wipes. I've even seen pictures of men's and women's earplugs, the former being larger, darker, and shaped like bullets while the latter are small and pink. These gendered products rely upon pre-existing stereotypes, “reflecting wider social and cultural processes of gendering,” but at the same time they assist in perpetuating them (Worth et al. 461). Beckwith says that “[if] we cared less about making this symbolic distinction between males and females, this could all go away” (Harris).
\n\n
Influence on Consumers
\n \n
Of course, marketers aren\'t in the business of affirming stereotypes but rather making money. They make the explicit choice to gender the products they sell in these ways and they do this because they feel it helps achieve their solitary goal: sell more. Advertising products using traditional views of masculinity and femininity is one tool that can be used to increase sales; this tool has been used to sell products for as long as there have been advertisements. When consumers have many choices when buying a product, gender differentiations provide one way to narrow down the choices (Harris). Additionally, “[i]ndividuals express themselves through what they buy . . . [P]ersonal identity is expressed even through the purchase of the most mundane products and services” (Duesterhaus et al. 185). Often we regard the products that we purchase as an extension of ourselves and and tools with which we define ourselves (Belk 150). Williams noted that toys, which are gendered based upon typecast notions of gender, can be used by adults to reinforce and impose traditional ideas of gender onto children, thus allowing the ideas' continued existence (171). Advertisers most likely feel that consumers, who often align with typical societal gender roles, will identify with products that are aimed toward their gender.
\n\n
There are data to support this. Morrison found that “[a]dvertisements are persuasive communications and they are ?effective' . . . if they create relatively favorable attitudes toward the advertised product and convince consumers to purchase them” (Duesterhaus et al. 269). In her study, Morrison confirmed that participants viewed as following societally traditional notions of gender had more favorable reactions and felt more of a need to purchase products that were advertised using traditional masculine and feminine stereotypes. On the other hand, the data also showed that consumers categorized as aligning with non-traditional gender roles showed more interest in products that were non-traditionally advertised. Despite this fact, traditional consumers make up the majority of the market, in this study alone, 59% of participants; however, in the general public this number could be greater than in the group of college students sampled. Due to this majority, marketing relying on and perpetuating gender stereotypes are still warranted from an advertiser's perspective (269-273).
\n\n
Additionally, consumers' understandings of themselves are an integral influence in their behavior. There is evidence to suggest that consumers do not purchase products merely for their functionality, but for the way in which they complement their personality, not only in their view but the perceptions of others (Worth et al. 18). Data again shows that “[s]ubjects clearly preferred the product described in terms congruent with their own self-ratings of gender” (22).
\n\n
By marketing products in a gendered fashion, advertisers are able to influence consumers to purchase a certain product by artificially adding another dimension to take into account when making purchasing decisions. An interesting thing to note is that these gendered distinctions often disappear with products advertised to lower income people. Often time, generic cheap products aren't gendered. Cheap hygienic products such as disposable razors, toothpaste, and soap are often ungendered. Perhaps marketers feel that they've already maximized their consumer base by making very cheap products and see no sales benefit from creating male and female versions.
\n\n
Recently, another marketplace has appeared where advertisers are ready to enact their gendered product ideas: the Internet. This is a relatively new market that is growing at an incredible rate, and advertisers must find ways to adapt their practice of “dividing the market into homogeneous groups” to this new medium (Pascual-Miguel et al. 1550). Many of the products sold in stores are also available online, so much of the gendered marketing and designs for these products remains constant across sales platform; however, there is a new type of product emerging: intangible, digital goods. Despite relative equality in the gender distribution of online shoppers, men purchase digital products more often than women (1554). Data also shows that, during digital purchases, women tend to more often take social influences (the opinions of those close to them) into account when making a purchasing decision while men tend to consider the risk when buying a product (will it meet expectations; will it be high quality). (1553, 1553). When buying non-digital goods online, the main factor influencing purchasing decisions was the expected effectiveness of using an online store to purchase goods, while the social influence for men and women was the same (1554, 1555). The causes for these differences in influencing factors on purchasing are currently unknown, as there is little research being done at the cross section of the purchase of digital/non-digital goods and gender (1550).
\n\n
Regardless of where purchasing takes place, consumers buy into this advertising artifice literally and figuratively. Most consumers elect to buy products that match their gender, regardless of a price difference. To many, this price difference seems justified by fundamental differences between males and females. But can we “really believe that men's deodorant wouldn't work, or do men believe that the generic lotion won't heal dry skin” or are they merely choosing products to assert their femininity or masculinity to themselves and others (Duesterhaus et al. 187)?
\n\n
Negative Effects
\n\n
As we have seen, by marketing products using gender stereotypes, advertisers perpetuate harmful ideas about femininity and masculinity. These ideas can range anywhere from stereotypes about color preference to the idea that women must use makeup to appear presentable but men are naturally acceptable. Advertising products this way “reinforce[s] essentialist thinking about gender (i.e, that women and men are biologically different)” (Duesterhaus et al. 176).
\n\n
Ideas surrounding the underlying differences between genders began with theologians expressing that “man and women [were created] for different purposes, and those reproductive differences were decisive” (Kimmel 22). When ideas of Darwinian evolution came to the forefront, sexism adapted. Now, due to simple biological processes (mainly menstruation), women were “unfit for the public world and for school.” Even Darwin himself postulated that “the chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man's attaining to a higher eminence . . . than can a woman?whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination.” (22-23). Women's attempts to vote, work, learn, or hold office were in diametric opposition to that which their bodies and minds were intended for and were a violation of the natural order according to scientists. Efforts to attain higher education were met with farcical admonitions that women could never comprehend such matters, and if they could it would be “at the cost of her health, of her emotions, and of her morale” (24). Thankfully, many of these harmful notions are diminished today but their vestiges remain.
\n\n
Advertising based on concept of the dissimilarity of genders protracts the existence of these ideas. When consumers purchase these products, they buy into the idea that there is some intrinsic difference between genders. By doing so, people assume the roles of those who are supposed to use separate products and this separation becomes a justification for its very existence (103, 106). The only way to rid ourselves of these notions is to intentionally stop the chain; to recognize the continuing pattern of separation, along with its historical foundations and fallacies, and purposefully stop it.\nAssisting in the endurance of gender stereotypes is not the only way that gendered products can negatively impact those who consume them. Along with supporting notions that men and women have fundamental and irreconcilable differences, gendered advertising also “places an additional economic burden on those who already earn less” (Duesterhaus et al. 176). Once this notion of difference is ingrained in the minds of consumers, women become willing to pay more as they see it as a natural consequence of the difference of the sexes while some might not notice it at all (Keverline).
\n\n
Since the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963, employers have been federally mandated to pay men and women equally. Unfortunately, we know that employers do not always follow the law or find legal ways to circumvent it (Kimmel 205). Aside from a disparity in the amount of income women receive, there is also what has been called a “pink tax” or an “invisible tax”. This is the notion that just by being a woman, one must pay more for goods and services than men must. The existence of a pink tax is not expressly forbidden by law; in fact, only a few states and cities, including California and New York City, have made different pricing based on gender for equal goods illegal (Duesterhaus et al. 176). Even in cities where this practice is against the law, it is often hard to prove any wrongdoing on the part of the seller or manufacturer as claims that women's products are more expensive to make are hard to disprove.
\n\n
Despite its pseudo-illegality, price discrimination “has been shown to exist in different markets on the basis of race, gender, and class” (176). A study by Ayres and Siegelman revealed that car dealerships discriminated against people of color and women when making offers during car sales. They found that their introductory offers to white men were $200 lower than for white women, $400 lower than for black women, and $900 lower than for black men. After haggling and negotiation, the profit margin on the sale was as much as four times higher for black men than for white men, with white women and black women sitting in between (177). This situation is one in which there is almost no conceivable excuse for price discrimination, the process of selling a car is no different when the buyer is a white male or otherwise. The difference is simply due to either the instructions of dealer management or the personal biases of sales staff themselves. It would be interesting to see a more detailed study to investigate whether saleswomen or sales staff of color also participate in this discriminatory price-hiking.
\n\n
There are other retail scenarios in which sellers do try to justify their differing prices. Gender-based price discrimination has also been noted in hair salons and barber shops. In a random survey of 100 unisex salons in a metropolitan area, only 15 had equal base haircut prices for men and women and none had male haircuts that were more expensive. For a haircut, women can pay anywhere from $0 to $25 more than a man, the average being $8.71 more, although this disparity is, in actuality, most likely higher as many salons add additional charges based on hair type and haircut difficulty. It is also interesting to note here that again there is a class dimension to the pricing, similar to generic, cheap hygiene products. The 100 salons surveyed were stratified into low-end, mid-range, and high-end salons. The price difference between men's and women's haircuts at high-end salons averaged $12.24 while at low-end salons it was just $2.17 (181, 182). Again this shows how gendered differences in products is a luxury that only the wealthier can afford. Being able to pay for an expensive, exclusively female haircut at a high-end salon may also be seen as a symbol of status. Why go to MasterCuts, an inexpensive low-end salon where a male and female haircut are both $16 when you can go to Bang! where a long haircut is $70 and almost twice as expensive as a short haircut (MasterCuts Prices; \"STYLES.\"). Purchasing exclusively feminine products and services can also be a way for women to identify themselves as feminine in a male-dominated world (Duesterhaus et al. 185).
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It is important to note that there may be truth behind salons' explanations of gender-based pricing. I contacted several acquaintances of mine who are licensed cosmetologists and have worked in salons before. They agreed that cutting women's hair is justifiably more expensive due to the larger amount of time required to complete the cut, the amount of experience needed, and the greater amount of hair product used during the cut. It was also interesting to hear that often when men with long hair go to a salon, they will be charged for a women's cut and short-haired women, a men's cut. When asked why haircuts are not labeled as “short” or “long” as opposed to “male” or “female”, one respondent remarked: “because [the salons] are sexist.”
\n\n
Another interesting observation I have made is gendered hair pricing differs geographically. I grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, a city not known for being very progressive. Over the 10 years I lived there, I have been to several hair salons, high end and low end. Most of the salons I frequented had their prices labeled as “men's” or “women's” prices (LaBeau). Now that I have moved to Seattle, a much more progressive locale, most of the salons I have been to have their cuts labeled as “short” or “long” (“STYLES.”). I think these differences in price descriptions reflect the local population\'s ideas surrounding gender stereotypes and offer hope for their demise of these stereotypes.
\n\n
The final area that Duesterhaus looked into was personal-care items, products that tend to be highly gendered. They examined deodorant, shave-gel, razors, and body spray, all of which tend to have separate sections in stores based on gender. Price analyses across four different national retailers with a sample size of over 500 products found that in the case of body spray, deodorant, and razors, the women's versions of the products were more expensive; they were anywhere from 20 to 30 cents more expensive per ounce (or per razor) (Duesterhaus et al. 180-184).
\n\n
Now, it is possible that these increased prices are justified. Perhaps women's fragrances contain more expensive ingredients than men's or more research goes into razors that are used on fragile feminine skin but this does not change the fact that women do spend more on equivalent products and services than men do. This consequence is exacerbated by the fact that women already earn less than men for equivalent work, not to mention the multitude of products that women purchase either out of necessity or societal pressure that most men do not such as make up, tampons, and bras (Keverline).
\n\n
Conclusion
\n\n
The relative social acceptance of gender based product differences “reflects the cultural perception that gender categories are fixed and that women and men really are radically different types of human beings, in need of different products” (Duesterhaus et al. 187). Advertisers depend heavily on societal gender stereotypes when designing products and brands to appeal to people of certain genders. \nThese gendered advertisements and product categorizations influence consumers and make them more likely to buy these products because many feel a need for a gendered product over an androgynous or ungendered product. They may buy these products in part to affirm their own gender identity to themselves and others. This preference toward gendered products is a benefit to advertisers who can use such techniques to increase sales and artificially create new men's and women's markets. While it may act to benefit advertisers and manufacturers, products with gender distinctions often exist as a function of class and appear more often with more expensive products, with generic products being less gendered. Often people will purchase more expensive, gendered products despite not having sufficient income because they feel they must. Customer preference for these more expensive products can be detrimental to women in society who already earn less than men and spend money on additional products marketed exclusively to women.
\n\n
The very existence of these products negatively affects women financially and sustains harmful stereotypes that men and women have irreconcilable and fundamental differences, that women must be smaller, slimmer, duller, meeker, beautified, and embellished. A step toward ending this view of women can be taken by removing the pointless, artificial gendering of products purely for advertising purposes.
\n\n\n
Works Cited
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Belk, Russell W. “Possessions and the Extended Self.” Journal of Consumer Research 15.2 (1988): 139-168. Web.
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“DudeProducts.” DudeProducts. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 May 2016.
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Duesterhaus, Megan, et al. “The cost of doing femininity: Gendered disparities in pricing of personal care products and services.” Gender Issues 28.4 (2011): 175-191.
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Dworkin, Shari L., and Faye Linda Wachs. Body panic: Gender, health, and the selling of fitness. NYU Press, 2009.
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Harris, Misty. “Little Boy Blue: Why Gendered Products Not Only Persist but Thrive.” Postmedia News [Don Mills, Ont.] 02 Apr. 2014: Postmedia News, Apr 2, 2014. Web.
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Keverline, Kate. “An ‘Invisible Tax’ for Women Creates Higher Price for Gendered Products.” University Wire [Carlsbad] 20 Jan. 2015: University Wire, Jan 20, 2015. Web.
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Kimmel, Michael S. The Gendered Society. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.
“MasterCuts Prices - Salon Price Lady.” Salon Price Lady. Salon Price Lady, 2015. Web. 26 May 2016.
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Morrison, Maria Michelle, and David R. Shaffer. “Gender-role congruence and self-referencing as determinants of advertising effectiveness.” Sex Roles 49.5-6 (2003): 265-275.
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Pascual-Miguel, Félix J., Ángel F. Agudo-Peregrina, and Julián Chaparro-Peláez. “Influences of gender and product type on online purchasing.” Journal of Business Research 68.7 (2015): 1550-1556.
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“STYLES.” BANG SEATTLE. BANG!, n.d. Web. 26 May 2016.
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Tilburg, Miriam, et al. “Beyond ‘Pink It and Shrink It’ Perceived Product Gender, Aesthetics, and Product Evaluation.” Psychology & Marketing 32.4 (2015): 422-437.
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Williams, Christine L. Inside toyland: Working, shopping, and social inequality. University of California Press, 2005.
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Worth, Leila T., Jeanne Smith, and Diane M. Mackie. “Gender schematicity and preference for gender?typed products.” Psychology & Marketing 9.1 (1992): 17-30.
\n
',10),
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+ (9,'pit-application','Read','UW Practice-It Application','','.text p {\n margin-left: 4rem;\n}',NULL,'UW Honors Experiental Learning application for working on Practice-It for UW\'s Computer Science department.','
Experiential Learning Category
\n
Research
\n\n
Summarize your proposed experiential learning activity, including the primary focus of your activity, your intended actions, and the expectations of your supervisor and/or organization/partners.
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I will be working with other research students and teaching assistants to improve Practice-It, an educational system run by UW's computer science department that allows students in introductory CS classes to practice programming questions for personal edification and exam preparation. I will be working on the code for the project, adding new features and fixing bugs.
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Explain how your activity demonstrates the values of the Honors Program Experiential Learning area you selected. Rather than reiterating our definition, outline how your activity embodies this definition.
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This research opportunity will give me the chance to work in a field that I hope to major in and collaborate with faculty members. I will also get to add features of my own design to Practice-It.
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How and why did you select this engagement? What skills or experiences do you hope to gain from it?
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I selected this engagement because it gives me the opportunity to work in a field that I hope to major in and it will give me experience and the foresight into my enjoyment of the field. I hope to gain professional programming experience from this research and also experience collaboratively coding with others, as that is expressly forbidden by the introductory Computer Science courses.
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How does this activity connect to your concurrent or past coursework? How does it speak to your broader education goals and experiences?
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I took CSE 142 and 143 this year, so this research will connect very well to my coursework as it involves programming. It speaks to my broader goals because I hope to major in Computer Science in the future.
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How will your activity contribute to the larger goals of the organization/your partners?
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My work on Practice-It would help the computer science department by improving their software and thus help students taking introductory programming classes better understand the course topics.
Practice-It is a tool used by hundreds of thousands of people globally to practice and learn computer programming. After trying to build my own version of the website from scratch, I managed to get a research position in the UW Computer Science Department working on the real thing. I worked with faculty members and professors to improve the website. I\'m nowhere near done with this research opportunity but so far it\'s been insightful and a lot of fun.
',NULL,NULL,'Over the past several years, I taught myself to program. It was always so interesting and captivating; I would find myself awake at 4 A.M. typing away through bleary eyes trying to coerce the computer into doing what I wanted. It is then that I knew: this is what I wanted to do for a living.','
Over the past several years, I taught myself to program. It was always so interesting and captivating; I would find myself awake at 4 A.M. typing away through bleary eyes trying to coerce the computer into doing what I wanted. It is then that I knew: this is what I wanted to do for a living.
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Working as a student developer on Practice-It has done nothing but reaffirm those notions. Honestly, I never knew that work could be this fun. I was essentially getting paid to have fun. Over the course of the past few months, I've worked with Alex Miller and Marty Stepp to get a brand new version of Practice-It out to students. I've made websites before but never ones that get tens of thousands of hits a month and never while working with other people. While working on this project, I was able to apply much that I had learned in the introductory computer programming courses I took in the fall. I've spent hours fixing bugs and adding new features. Initially I planned to work ten hours a week, but it was just too much fun and I ended up working the maximum twenty hours every week. It was a great opportunity to collaborate with faculty and other students. Alex and I worked with a group of students from the Human Centered Design and Engineering department to work on creating an improved, more functional website. A few weeks ago, we were able to launch the public beta for the new version of Practice-It, which was wonderful. I love seeing and hearing how users interact with something that I helped make. Even before the beta was made public, I showed my friends how to use the new version and asked them for their feedback.
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While working on this project, I acquired a plethora of new knowledge and experiences from the finer technical points involved with writing a website to how to get my paycheck and work with a team. I've been offered a continuation of this position, along with higher pay, over the summer and I have every intention of continuing with this project. It's amazing to be able to do work that I love; I suppose it's also a bonus that I get paid for it. This experiences has further cemented my plans for majoring in Computer Science and working as a programmer once I graduate.
In this class, we were charged with creating our own algorithmic art using a programming langage called Processing. I created a program that generates random formulae using the sin, cos, average, and multiplication functions. These functions always return values in the interval [-1,1]. The functions are generated at a recursive level of complexity. A level 1 formula may be cos(πx) while a level 3 may be (sin(πy) * sin(πx) + (cos(πz) + cos(πy)) / 2.0) / 2.0. The program then uses three formulae to calclate RGB values for different (x,y,z) coordinates on a cube. The results look amazing and have incredible sinusoidal patterns.
For the final research project of this course, I wanted to analyze how Muslim people and the religion of Islam are potrayed and perceived by the American public. Over the course of my research, I gathered almost 2.5 million tweets from 2013 to 2017 and analyzed each to plot average sentiment over the course of several years.
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The data was surprisingly clear. In it, large and pronounced drops can be seen following religiously motivated terrorist attacks in the U.S. and abroad by Muslim terrorsits, especially after the 2015 Paris bombings. Additionally, there are also visible drops on the day President Trump was elected and the day the travel ban executive order was signed.
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To see a more in-depth analysis, click \"Explore\" above. To see the code and data used to generate my graphs, see Tweetomatic on GitHub
','.sidenote {\n padding: 1.5em;\n font-size: 75%;\n}\n\nh4 {\n border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(62, 62, 62, 0.77);\n margin-top: 1.5em;\n}\n\n.analysis {\n border: 1px solid rgba(62, 62, 62, 0.77);\n border-radius: 0.25em;\n padding: 1em;\n padding-bottom: 0;\n margin-bottom: 2em;\n}',NULL,'For the final research project of this course, I wanted to analyze how Muslim people and the religion of Islam are potrayed and perceived by the American public. Over the course of my research, I gathered almost 2.5 million tweets from 2013 to 2017 and analyzed each to plot average sentiment over the course of several years.\nThe data was surprisingly clear. In it, large and pronounced drops can be seen following religiously motivated terrorist attacks in the U.S. and abroad by Muslim terrorsits, especially after the 2015 Paris bombings. Additionally, there are also visible drops on the day President Trump was elected and the day the travel ban executive order was signed.','
For the final research project of this course, I wanted to analyze how Muslim people and the religion of Islam are potrayed and perceived by the American public. I‘ll begin by describing how the Tweetomatic works from a high level. If you want to get more in-depth info, check out my source code on GitHub.
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Process
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Tweets are fetched from the unofficial Twitter API using a TwitterCriteria object, which contains the requirements for the search, such as location, language, keywords, number of tweets, and time range. For my analysis, I fetched about 1,000 tweets for every day in my range, anywhere from 2 weeks to a year at a time. In total, I analyzed just over 2.2 million tweets from 2013 to 2017\n
\n Note: I used the “unoffical” API for two reasons. First, the official twitter API only allows searching of the last 7 days worth of tweets. Also, it has a rate limit of 180,000 tweets per hour which was no where near fast enough for my purposes. (I was in a time crunch and only had three days to conduct this research).
\n \n The unofficial API is actually just the endpoint that your browser hits when you scroll through your twitter feed. It returns HTML encapsulated in JSON, which is then parsed to extract the tweet data. This has the benefit of 1. not requiring any authentication as this is a public endpoint and 2. not having a rate limit.\n
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The contents of the tweet are sanitized. This means the removal of @ mentions, links, picture links, and un-hashtagification. Unfortunately, it\'s very difficult to turn a hashtag back into parseable English, but it\'s relatively easy if the words in it have been capitalized properly.\n
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The text of each tweet is processed using the Stanford CoreNLP library. This assigns each word a (likely) part of speech. This is an important step in sentiment analysis as the way in which it is used can have a large effect on it\'s interpreted sentiment.\n
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The word/part-of-speech pairs are then associated with a sentiment using SentiWordNet 3.0.0, a map of word and part of speech to preassigned sentiment values, usually between 1 and -1. Any words not in the map are assigned a sentiment of 0.0\n
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Finally, the sentiments of all words in a given tweet is summed together to yeild the overall sentiment
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Nothing is as easy as it should be
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There are a few things wrong with this sentiment analysis technique. Mainly, it doesn‘t handle sarcasm or typos well. If you tweeted \"wee neede too kil pupppies\" or \"WeNeedToKillAllPuppies\", you\'d get a sentiment score of 0.0. Also, the sentiment score is a relative measure of sentiment dependent on the length of the text being analyzed (because the sentiment is the sum of each word&lrquo;s sentiment). For my purposes, I assumed that this had a negligible effect as most tweets are around the same length and all are less than 140 characters. If I were to conduct this research again, I would normalize the sentiment scores by dividing them by the number of words in each tweet.
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In addition, simple sentiment analysis is incapable of capturing the true meaning of complex sentences. For example, a very well intentioned tweet: “No hate, Muslims are not terrorists #BanTheBan #FuckTrump” would have an extremely negative sentiment value due to the words it contains, although it‘s obvious that it is positive. Unfortunately, this is a fundamental incompatability between computer understanding and human linguistics that computer scientists have been trying to reconcile for decades through complex probabilistic systems and natural language processors. As such, this is an issue that most, if not all, sentiment analysis programs grapple with. For this very reason, I considered excluding tweets containing the word “ban” from the 2017 data, however the data with “ban” did not seem out of line with trends from previous years, so I made the decision to leave it in.
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Analysis
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In total, I collected over 2 million data points. The data was, to the best of my efforts, in English and from the United States and all tweets contained the words “muslim” or “Islam”. To analyze the data, I averaged the tweets in a given day to yield an average sentiment.
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I then plotted this information, which contained wild variations, along with a 10 day moving average. The graphs I produced using excel can be seen below. The axes are a little hard to read, but if you click on each graph, they will enlarge.
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There are clearly visible depressions in average sentiment corresponding to major world events,\n most notable the 2015 Paris attacks. Most events are followed by a depression in sentiment lasting\n anywhere from weeks to months. Since the 2015 Paris attacks, average sentiment hasn‘t\n substantially risen above zero.\n
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2016 inherited a lower average sentiment due to the 2015 Paris attacks.\n And as we can see, a string of periodic attacks kept sentiment well\n below neutral. Interestingly, it appeared that sentiment was becoming more\n positive and even headed towards positive values following the 2016 Nice attack;\n however, this trend was halted by President Trump\'s election.\n
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There‘s not that much data for 2017, but you can see a marked decrease\n in sentiment immediately following the announcement of President Trump\'s travel\n ban executive order.\n
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This represents the culmination of my research. This graph tracks sentiment concerning\n Islam and Muslims from 2013 to 2017. I also analyzed tweets from 2012, however the data\n almost exactly followed the 2013 data, uneventful and flat, so I decided to omit it to\n allow for a more readable graph.\n
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It shows a consistent, downward trend in American sentiment\n towards Muslims and I believe is indicative of deeply held and growing resentment towards\n Muslims due to attacks in the U.S. and abroad. This theory is in agreement with many studies\n showing growing Islamophobic feelings in the U.S. population.\n
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I did this one just for fun. First, I calculated interaction by adding retweets plus\n favorites. I then took my entire dataset of 2 million tweets and computed average\n positive sentiment and average negative sentiment for each value of interaction. The\n data appears to show that the more popular a tweet is, the more polarizingly\n positive or negative the sentiment is.\n
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\n',18),
+ (13,'','','Data Structures and Parallelism','
\nThis was probably my favorite class this quarter, but also the hardest. It was a lot of fun to learn about data structures that I\'d heard about but never really understood. I also really enjoyed the parallelism portion, as writing correct and efficient parallel code is generally considered pretty hard, so being able to do it is sure to blow away some people in interviews.\n
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\nThe various projects were also a lot of fun. Again, due to UW policy I can\'t link to any of my code, but in the course of these projects I got to implement many different data structures including a stack, queue, heap, linked list, AVL tree, prefix trie, hash table, and hash map. I also implemented an AlphaBeta and Jamboree chess robot, which was definitely able to beat me along with the other testing robots.\n
',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,17),
+ (14,'conway','Watch','Conway\'s Game of Life','
Even though I\'m not a Computer Engineering major, I found this class extremely interesting. It even made me consider switching majors for a bit there, but that thought was counteracted by my desire not to take the physics series.
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This class focused mainly on digital logic design which we practiced during various labs using an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). This essentially allowed us to write “programs” in SystemVerilog, a Hardware Description Language. I put program in quotations because it is very different from writing a program in a sequential logic lanugage such as Java or Python. In this language, all statements (except for those that occur at a trigger such as a clock edge) occur continuously and in parallel. The coolest part is that instead of the code being compiled and run on a CPU, the code is instead analyzed and converted to a combination of digitial logic gates (AND, OR, NOR, NAND, etc) then loaded onto the FPGA which can rearrange its internal connections to match the combination. This means that the logic one wirtes is actually executed in hardware; very cool.
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For the final project of this class I implemented Conways Game of Life on an 8 by 8 RBG LED Array. Unfortunately, I can’t link to it here because that would violate UW policy, but you can watch a short video of it in action!
![\"A](\"/files/images/cube.png\")
\n ![\"My](\"/files/images/glass.jpg\")
\n ![\"My](\"/images/glass.jpg\")
','.text h3 {\n margin-bottom: 0.5em;\n }',NULL,'A series of projects that I made for ART 233: Intro to Kiln-Formed Glass','![\"A](\"/images/cube.png\")
\n ![\"Graph](\"/images/sentiment.png\")
\n\n![](\"/files/tweetomatic/diagram.svg\")
\n ![](\"/files/tweetomatic/2015.svg\")
\n ![](\"/files/tweetomatic/2016.svg\")
\n ![](\"/files/tweetomatic/2017.svg\")
\n ![](\"/files/tweetomatic/total.svg\")
\n ![](\"/files/tweetomatic/interaction.svg\")
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