Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship最新文献

{"title":"Screening for Heavy Metals in Tea Leaves from Bangladesh Using X-Ray Fluorescence","authors":"Amber T Wolf","doi":"10.4148/2373-0978.1095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4148/2373-0978.1095","url":null,"abstract":"Trace metal contamination is a global health issue. This study evaluated boxed and loose-leaf tea from Bangladesh using a Handheld X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) analyzer for lead and other metals to rapidly screen tea as a potential hot spot of heavy metal exposure. Of the 33 elements measured, several priority pollutants were below the limit of detection (LOD) in all samples, including lead (LOD 2.17 mg/kg) and arsenic (LOD 1.68 mg/kg). Loose-leaf tea samples had higher copper (1.5-fold), zinc (1.3-fold), and manganese (1.8-fold) concentrations compared to boxed tea. Estimated daily intake (EDI) of lead from tea was calculated using three assumed extractability levels, 20%, 50%, and 100%, and assuming the lead concentration was at the LOD. The EDI for lead ranged from 0.008 μg/kg/bw day to 0.041 μg/kg/bw for adult males and 0.010 μg/kg/bw day to 0.049 μg/kg/bw day for adult females. Based on these tested samples, tea is not likely a primary source of lead exposure in the two sampled areas, Sirajdikhan and Pabna. Future research can evaluate potential processing steps for why some metals were higher in loose-leaf tea compared to boxed tea, including copper, zinc, and manganese. Other potential lead sources could be tested in the tea preparation process, including water sources and dishware used to prepare and consume the tea.","PeriodicalId":438637,"journal":{"name":"Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship","volume":"304 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113990306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An “Indian” American Congressman: Dalip Singh Saund’s Indian Heritage and His 1956 Journey to Congress","authors":"Bhadrajee S. Hewage","doi":"10.4148/2373-0978.1093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4148/2373-0978.1093","url":null,"abstract":"Indian Americans have managed to become one of the most successful minority communities in the United States. With the rise of politicians such as Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley, and Bobby Jindal, Indian Americans have also reached the upper echelons of U.S. political life. Yet half a century ago, a very different picture emerges. Coming to the U.S. just three years after the 1917 Immigration Act which effectively barred Asian immigration, Dalip Singh Saund progressed from student to citizen to the U.S.’s first Asian Congressman over a period of thirty-six years. With his meteoric rise coming at a time when attitudes toward Indians were predominantly negative, this manuscript explores the role of Saund’s Indian heritage in his journey to Congress and explains that Saund’s good works and commitment to U.S. values rather than his Indian background was responsible for his journey to Congress.","PeriodicalId":438637,"journal":{"name":"Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116738203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Seeing Reality from a New Dimension","authors":"Jakob Hanschu","doi":"10.4148/2373-0978.1066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4148/2373-0978.1066","url":null,"abstract":"Edwin A. Abbott’s book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions presents the world of Flatland as a utopia from which the reader can gain an enhanced perspective on their constructed reality. Because all humans are restricted by what is known, assumed, and perceived, fiction literature peels away some of these restrictions by exercising peoples’ imaginations. When we think “outside the box,” as we often must do to wrap our minds around fiction works, we are presented the chance to realize that our perceptions are limited by our reality, and that our realized reality is limited by our perceptions. Flatland encourages this by recounting the fantastical journey of A Square from his limited world of two dimensions to Spaceland. The novel stretches the imagination while also making the reader aware that what they perceive as “real” is entirely dependent upon the “dimension” (i.e., socially, culturally, and historically constructed reality) in which they are situated. When we gain new perspectives, we arrive closer to truths about our world, and truths about ourselves. To do so, we must escape our own “flatlands.”","PeriodicalId":438637,"journal":{"name":"Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132311905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The “Anarchy” of King Arthur’s Beginnings: The Politics that Created the Arthurian Tradition","authors":"A. Pringle","doi":"10.4148/2373-0978.1068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4148/2373-0978.1068","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘Anarchy’ of King Arthur’s Beginnings: The Politics that Created the Arthurian Tradition” examines Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae in a political and historical context to illuminate the 12th-century politics that started the Arthurian tradition and show how those politics influenced later works about the legendary king. Based on literary and historical research, this paper covers the transmission of politics in the Historia in three sections: a summary of the politics during the time Geoffrey wrote the Historia, an examination of the way those politics were integrated into the Historia, and finally a consideration of how the political themes of the chronicle have been transformed and changed through adaptation. This paper sets out to show the influence the Historia’s politics had on the King Arthur tradition and to argue that some features of those politics remain within the Arthurian literary tradition.","PeriodicalId":438637,"journal":{"name":"Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129588829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ADHD and The Deficit of Knowing: What?","authors":"Katie N Schenk","doi":"10.4148/2373-0978.1064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4148/2373-0978.1064","url":null,"abstract":"This research-based essay explores the author’s experience with ADHD, as the essay’s formatting and usage of space evolves into a visual representation of the ADHD mind and questions the human capacity to identify, label, and differentiate inaccessible experiences. The common, often misinformed understanding of ADHD is disputed through in depth analyses of various brain functions. In particular, the atypical development of the executive functions housed in the ADHD person’s frontal lobe are explored through both contemporary research and personal experience, which are variously compared and contrasted to the supposed neurotypical experience. Consideration of ADHD’s lifelong stigma emphasizes the emotional components of the disorder that rarely receive attention, despite being equally integral to the disorder as any other attentional or behavioral components. Various theorists and theories of literature are invoked in order to create a dialogue within the essay concerned with the acquisition of knowledge and the impossibility of certainty, which merges into the main narrative at the end to contemplate self-acceptance.","PeriodicalId":438637,"journal":{"name":"Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship","volume":"277 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132931777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Girls and the Others: Racialized Anthropomorphism in the First Season of The Powerpuff Girls","authors":"J. Thompson","doi":"10.4148/2373-0978.1053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4148/2373-0978.1053","url":null,"abstract":"The Powerpuff Girls (1998) chronicles the lives of three kindergarten-aged girls with superpowers. Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup were conceived in a laboratory by a scientist, Professor Utonium, out of “sugar, spice, and everything nice” with an accidental spill of “Chemical X” which in turn gives the girls their superpowers to “fight the forces of evil.” As protectors of Townsville, the suburban community in which they reside, each episode shows the girls battling with various villains (usually men) who are established as outsiders to Townsville. The villains are represented as ethnic minorities through racialized anthropomorphism which associates their evilness to their ethnicity. The girls’ fight against “the forces of evil,” then, is a fight keep to maintain a society in which ethnic minorities are not welcome, conveying racist and classist messages. In this paper, I argue that Creator Craig McCracken produces a series in which places white male figures—Professor Utomium and the narrator—establish a white, middle-class, patriarchal society, or a “Townsvillian” society, that the girls must maintain. In a series that appears to pass as a girl power text, the stereotyped representations of the villains relate the series with problematic and less progressive messages, ultimately making it a non-feminist text.","PeriodicalId":438637,"journal":{"name":"Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121674557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fossil-Fueled Discourse","authors":"Henry Walter","doi":"10.4148/2373-0978.1047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4148/2373-0978.1047","url":null,"abstract":"As industrial civilization confronts the realities of devastating global climate change and the local environmental catastrophes precipitated by coal, oil, and natural gas extraction, this paper moves away from mainstream analyses of demand-side choices and instead considers how miners and rig workers make decisions surrounding the ethicality of their work. This article considers corporate publications including investor and sustainability reports and company-sponsored employee magazines, industry magazines, and news sources in top-producing fossil fuel producing localities in the United States. A discursive analysis of this set of publications uncovers a dense rhetorical lattice of misinformation and disinformation surrounding fossil fuel workers. This essay finds that company publications develop a foundation for engendering positive feelings and loyalty towards one’s employer and that industry magazines construct a sense of identity centrally determined by being a fossil fuel extractor, but no relationship is found in local newspapers. Cover Page Footnote Henry Walter, from Overland Park, Kansas, graduated from the University of Kansas in December 2018 with degrees in economics and political science. Henry began this particular project in the spring of 2017 while he was a member of the University Scholars cohort. Henry is currently an intern for Senator Jerry Moran and will begin law school in the fall of 2019. In part because of the themes explored in this paper, Henry hopes to practice international, environmental, or antitrust law. This article is available in Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship: https://newprairiepress.org/crossingborders/vol3/iss1/3 Fossil-Fueled Discourse Introduction As the world approaches irreversible climate tipping points and critical levels of environmental degradation, much attention has been given to how governments might respond and how individuals might go about altering their own consumption, but comparatively little thought has been devoted to the knowledge infrastructure surrounding fossil fuel production decision makers. Although many argue that it is the profit-driven CEO who controls all production decisions and, as such, cannot be swayed, that model of decision making fails to account for the incredibly complex logistical challenge that characterizes the entire fossil fuel supply chain. Although executives certainly do have the greatest power to influence company policy writ large, those policies are only as effective as their implementation and enforcement by those at the point of extraction. As such, an unexplored yet critical question is to determine the nature of the informational discourse surrounding those at the ground level. Tremendous bodies of research have shown that the fossil fuel worker is not particularly well-off in the industry and by choosing to mine, pump, or otherwise produce fossil fuels, that worker is endangering his or her own local as well a","PeriodicalId":438637,"journal":{"name":"Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125732173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}