Western White Research Articles

Non-Contact Laser Doppler Vibrometer for Characterization of Guided Waves in Timber Structures with Varying Moisture Content and Grain Orientations

Timber structures have been widely used in critical engineering applications throughout history. The need for Non-Destructive Testing of timbers has arisen, and ultrasonic-guided waves (GWs) have proved their efficacy in studying structural integrity. The effect of the grain direction in orthotropic timber structures on the propagation characteristics of GWs is not well understood, especially in the presence of moisture. This study aims to comprehend the effects of timber-grain orientations and the moisture content (MC) on dominant GW modes, specifically, on the anti-symmetric A0 mode. The study is based on samples extracted from a Western White Pine utility pole, in three different orientations including longitudinal, tangential, and radial. The MC is introduced using a desiccator with a saturated salt solution. The studied MC conditions included dry, ambient MC, and high MCs varying from 10% to 27%. The GWs were excited using piezoelectric actuators and sensed with a Scanning Laser Doppler Vibrometer with Free-Free boundary condition. Phase velocities were obtained using the frequency-wavenumber plots of the measured line scans and were compared to the analytical curves for mode analysis. The results showed that the experimental A0-mode phase velocities match well with those generated analytically. The difference was negligible for longitudinally oriented specimens with a percentage difference ranging from 0.28% to 5.34%, as the MC varied. The phase velocity decreased by about 7% as the MC increased from 0% to 27%. A noticeable difference in the phase velocity was measured with different orientations; at dry conditions, the A0 propagated at 958 m/s in the longitudinal specimens, while it decreased in the tangential specimens to about 760 m/s, and had the lowest phase velocity in the radial direction reaching 433 m/s. The results show a high sensitivity of the propagating GWs to the direction of the fibers and the MC present in the timber.

ChatGPT and accounting in African contexts: Amplifying epistemic injustice

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are likely to amplify epistemic injustice through the lack of transparency and traceability of data sources. The unethical alienation of original knowledge producers from their intellectual products, which are repackaged by LLMs as artificial intelligence, conceals power asymmetries in the global knowledge production and dissemination system. As elaborated by Miranda Fricker (2010), Western White male actors traditionally dominate knowledge production; therefore, ChatGPT and other LLMs are inclined to reproduce patriarchal perspectives as universal understandings of the World. Our commentary applies this logic to accounting practice and research in Africa, and asserts that epistemic injustice, resulting from colonization and racism, means that ontological and epistemological approaches situated in the accounting needs and experiences of African communities are missing from or poorly articulated by ChatGPT and other LLMs. If LLMs are to attain legitimacy as (ethical) sources of knowledge, regulation must be enforced to ensure transparency—as a foundation for promoting pluriversality and eliminating epistemic injustice.

The frequency of wing damage in a migrating butterfly.

The ability to fly is crucial for migratory insects. Consequently, the accumulation of damage on the wings over time can affect survival, especially for species that travel long distances. We examined the frequency of irreversible wing damage in the migratory butterfly Vanessa cardui to explore the effect of wing structure on wing damage frequency, as well as the mechanisms that might mitigate wing damage. An exceptionally high migration rate driven by high precipitation levels in their larval habitats in the winter of 2018-2019 provided us with an excellent opportunity to collect data on the frequency of naturally occurring wing damage associated with long-distance flights. Digital images of 135 individuals of V. cardui were collected and analyzed in Germany. The results show that the hindwings experienced a greater frequency of damage than the forewings. Moreover, forewings experienced more severe damage on the lateral margin, whereas hindwings experienced more damage on the trailing margin. The frequency of wing margin damage was higher in the painted lady butterfly than in the migrating monarch butterfly and in the butterfly Pontia occidentalis following artificially induced wing collisions. The results of this study could be used in future comparative studies of patterns of wing damage in butterflies and other insects. Additional studies are needed to clarify whether the strategies for coping with wing damage differ between migratory and nonmigratory species.

Examining racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in occupational science research: Perspectives of persons of color

ABSTRACT Diverse sociodemographic identities, including race, culture, ethnicity, and gender, are important influences on one’s occupational patterns and choices. However, occupational science theories and research were originally driven by Western White middle-class researchers and conducted on White participants. With a focus on the Western context, we sought to identify areas for improvement in the delivery and conduct of occupational science research with considerations of race, ethnicity, culture, and occupation among underrepresented racial groups. A critical content analysis was conducted of empirical research undertaken in Western countries between 2015 and 2020 and published in the Journal of Occupational Science (JOS). This analysis asked (a) What is the stated positionality of first author? (b) What are the racial or ethnic orientations of research participants? and (c) Is there explicit discussion of a racial/ethnic phenomenon? The findings reveal a lack of scholarship on race, ethnicity, and culture. Many primary authors did not explicate their positionality in relation to the research topics and study participants. The findings reify that the current production of occupational science research continues to occur within a wider field of social relations that is characterized by the agendas, interests, and values of the dominant group. Informed by critical race theory, we urge occupational science academic journals and their contributing authors to commit to epistemological antiracism. We recommend making space for racialized perspectives; acknowledging how these identities affect engagement and choice of occupations; clarifying who regulates, narrates, and participates in occupational science research; and creating inclusive scholarly ecosystems.

An Analysis of Orientalism in Heart of Darkness

The world is commonly divided into the West and the East, two parts that are inherently not alike in many aspects but are tied in one way or another. However, the clash between the two led to the superiority of European powers and hence created a point of view from which Western imperialists understood the Orient and the relation they had with it. Edward Said gave the term “Orientalism” to refer to this mode of representation of the Orient from Western imperial powers’ imagination, while Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a novella that is exactly centered around the interplay between colonialist and natives from the colonial viewpoint, or in other words, their Orientalist prism. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad shows much sympathy for Africans’ suffering and harsh condemnation of the imperialism. However, at the same time he unwittingly assumes sort of Western White’s superiority and commits the myth of imperialistic ideology by distorting the images of African land as wild, dark, barbarous, mysterious and backward, African people as barbaric, savagery, greedy and primitive while African culture as wicked and horrible.

İnsan Dışı Hayvanların Ticari Ürünlere Çevirisi: Süt Reklamlarının Postkolonyal Eleştirisi

The aim of this paper is to explore how milk is translated into a product for human consumption. In this study, translation works as a metaphor that is used for carving up an alternative reality. The metaphor of translation is informed by postcolonial translation studies, in particular the view in which translation is seen as “a channel of colonization”. For this purpose, three diary commercials are selected and a form of multimodal thematic analysis with a critical framework has been employed in order to discover the themes used in milk commercials. These themes are interpreted taking into account how translation is conceptualized by postcolonial approaches. The analysis demonstrates that colonial subjects and animals have many commonalities. Translation functioned for the colonizer as a force to assist in the silencing of the Other, to remove agency, to distort representations, to fabricate volunteer victims, to create familiar subjects, and to impose Western reason-based thought. Similarly, dairy commercials ‘translate’ cows so that they are silenced, their agencies are either removed or used in favor of the industry, the real lives of cows are obscured and their experiences are distorted, they are portrayed as being happily exploited, and they are reduced to subordinate creatures in relation to Western white, male subjects. Translation, in this study, demonstrates the power it yields in dominating others. Yet, translation can also bridge gaps, and foster nonexploitative relationships between humans and nonhuman animals.

Позднесредневековое смолокуренное производство на озере Верхнее Куйто. К вопросу о «лопарских древностях» в Западном Прибеломорье

In 2008, archaeological excavations of the “Lopar pit”, described by a Finnish ethnographer at the end of the XIX century, were carried out on Lake Verkhnee Kuito on the island of Lietesuari near the village of Voknavolok in North Karelia. The object is interpreted as a place for the production of tar, which existed from the end of the XV to the XVIII centuries. Two topics are considered: the problems of the “Lopar question” for the territory of the Western White Sea and the specifics of tar production in the farms of this region.

Legal Rights for Whose Nature?

In this article, we explore rights of nature (RoN) as an emerging rights-based environmental governance that intends to reframe nature from property to an entity with a right to exist unharmed. Its proponents claim this is a paradigm shift that reworks the imbalanced human–nature hierarchy. We interrogate this claim using data collected from more than 60 U.S. communities where RoN ordinances have been implemented. Our analysis identifies three reoccurring themes within the U.S. settler colonial context, including a coconstitution of rights for nature alongside a community’s right to a healthy environment, the emphasis of self-governance and individual community empowerment, and the overwhelming Whiteness of settler communities that implement RoN laws. We put these themes into conversation with critical race scholarship, which evaluates the racialized impacts of a liberal legal system of rights to examine how within the U.S. settler colonial context RoN mobilizes Western White liberal conceptions of legal rights to address our current environmental crises. In analyzing these themes through the lens of critical race scholarship, we contend that rights-based environmental governance in the form of RoN laws appears to reinforce many of the entrenched social-legal-environmental relations that characterize White liberalism recast through a language that claims universal rights.

What Is Engineering and Who Are Engineers? Student Reflections from a Sustainability-Focused Energy Course

In the spring of 2021, the University of San Diego’s Department of Integrated Engineering taught the course, “Integrated Approach to Energy”, the second offering of a new required course, to nine second-year engineering students. The sociotechnical course covered modern energy concepts, with an emphasis on renewable energies and sustainability, and it exposed the students to other ways of being, knowing, and doing that deviated from the dominant masculine Western White colonial discourse. Following the course completion, we interviewed five students by using a semistructured protocol to explore how they perceived of and communicated about engineers and engineering. We sought to identify the takeaways from their course exposure to sustainability and the sociotechnical paradigm, which were central to the course. The findings suggest that the students were beginning to form sociotechnical descriptions, and that they were still developing their understanding and perceptions of engineers and engineering. Moreover, we observed that they were still wrestling with how best to integrate sustainability into those perceptions. There was an a-la-carte feel to the students’ conceptualizations of sustainability as it related to engineering, as in, “you can ‘do’ sustainability with engineering, but do not have to”. We argue that engineering students likely need these pedagogical paradigms (sociotechnical engineering and sustainability) woven through the entirety of their engineering courses if they are to fully accept and integrate them into their own constructs about engineers and engineering.

What Does Western White Prose Fiction Teach the Woke Generation About Othering and Belonging?

This research explores the portrayal of otherness and non-conformity in Western literature and proves that modern phenomena such as “cancel culture” are giving contemporary authors a new relevance. Using William Faulkner’s Light in August and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as my foundation, I intend to demonstrate that the lessons they provide on race, gender, and extremism are often ignored by Generation Z, yet applicable to modern discourse. By referencing earlier works including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as George Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, I want to prove that the warnings given about the consequences of trying to eradicate otherness are multi-dimensional and deeply entrenched. Ultimately, my research illustrates that despite the societal tendency to make distinctions between normative and “other”, the line between the two is non-existent: in attempts to eliminate otherness, we become violent "others" ourselves, possessing characteristics to the “bestial” individual that we originally sought to oppress.

Sylvia Wynter, racialized affects, and minor feelings: unsettling the coloniality of the affects in curriculum and pedagogy

ABSTRACT This essay builds on the notion of ‘racialized affects’ in conjunction with recent educational theorizing of Sylvia Wynter’s work on ‘the human’ to consider how these insights might extend conceptualizations on the ‘coloniality of the affects’ in curriculum and pedagogy. Specifically, the analysis shows how bringing into conversation Wynter’s account on the overrepresentation of Western (White) Man with recent theorizations of ‘racialized affects’ and the ‘coloniality of the affects’ can make a significant contribution to unsettling affective norms and practices of contemporary schooling in societies shaped by ongoing White supremacy. The essay examines how White European bourgeois theories of affect are implicated in both colonization and racialization, thus naming and disrupting racialization can enable the use of affect theory in education to become more attentive to plural affective perspectives and histories (‘minor feelings’) and to support more just and equitable schooling.

Susceptibility of sugar pine, Shasta red fir and Sierra lodgepole pine to mountain hemlock dwarf mistletoe (Arceuthobiumtsugense subsp. mertensianae, Viscaceae) in south central Oregon

AbstractIn southern Oregon and northern California, mountain hemlock dwarf mistletoe (MHDM; Arceuthobium tsugense subsp. mertensianae) commonly parasitizes mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana) in multiple mountain ranges such as the Cascades, Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountains. However, limited information is available on the susceptibility of sugar pine (Pinus lambertiana), Shasta red fir (Abies magnifica var. shastensis) and lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) to MHDM. From 2015–2019, I found MHDM on sugar pine at multiple sites in northwestern Klamath County, Oregon. To evaluate the susceptibilities of sugar pine, Shasta red fir and Sierra lodgepole pine to MHDM infection, 41 temporary, fixed‐radius plots (area 182.4 m2) were established at five sites in 2018 and 2019 around an overstory tree (western white, sugar and whitebark pines along with one mountain hemlock) severely infected with MHDM in each plot centre. Live trees ≥2.6 cm in diameter at breast height (1.37 m; dbh) were assigned a dwarf mistletoe severity rating (6‐class system) and incidence (% infection) of MHDM on live trees at the tree level were used to estimate host susceptibilities. To confirm the identity of the dwarf mistletoe infecting live trees in each plot, dwarf mistletoe specimens were collected from the severely infected tree at the centre of each plot and from all tree species bearing dwarf mistletoe in each plot. Morphological characters were used to identify the dwarf mistletoe plants on each tree species and included plant heights, length of the third internode and plant colour. Dwarf mistletoe plants were collected from each affected tree species, and morphological characteristics of aerial shoots of dwarf mistletoes were examined in the laboratory. Morphological measurements confirmed the dwarf mistletoe infesting each plot was MHDM. Mountain hemlock dwarf mistletoe was found on sugar pine in all 41 plots. At the tree level after pooling larger sugar pine trees from all plots (total of 164 live trees ≥2.6 cm dbh), incidence was 76%. Morphological characteristics of MHDM aerial shoots, such as colour, shoot height and third internode length, were consistent with previous descriptions of MHDM plants. These data indicate that sugar pine should be classified as a secondary host of MHDM in the Oregon East Cascades, and not as a rare host as previously reported. No dwarf mistletoe plants were found on 98 living Shasta red fir trees ≥2.6 cm dbh in 26 plots. Shasta red fir should be classified as immune to MHDM. No MHDM was found on 573 living lodgepole pines of this size in 41 plots, and the tree species should be classified as immune to MHDM. Western white (Pinus monticola) and whitebark (Pinus albicaulis) pines were severely parasitized by MHDM with 92% and 100% incidence, respectively. However, because the sample sizes for these white pines were relatively small, additional work is needed to evaluate the susceptibility of these pines to MHDM.

Multidecadal Growth of Western White Pine and Interior Douglas-Fir Following Site Preparation

Site preparation is used to favor seedling regeneration and establishment by enhancing growing conditions and increasing resource availability, yet few studies have compared different site preparation techniques on growth and yield of trees over multiple decades. We destructively sampled 34-year old trees of western white pine (Pinus monticola Douglas ex D. Don) and Interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco var. glauca (Beissn.) Franco planted at two sites using a replicated experiment to test the effectiveness of different site preparation treatments: (1) no site preparation, (2) scalping, (3) bedding, and (4) bedding plus three years of competition control with herbicide. Growth and yield were compared among the treatments, and models of growth were developed for each species and treatment combination. The herbicide treatment was the only treatment that consistently improved growth and yield of both species resulting in 19%–30% gains in height, 43%–63% gains in diameter, and 31%–109% gains in stem volume by age 34. Height growth response to herbicide was sustained until age 14 for white pine and age 12 for Douglas-fir, while the diameter response was sustained until age 23 for white pine and 20 for Douglas-fir. The later peak in growth for white pine suggests a better response to treatment and that the species was able to maintain higher growth following crown closure. Both species exhibited a Type 2 growth response to herbicide, suggesting competition control resulted in sustained gains over time with associated age shifts of 8.5 and 9.7 years for white pine and 7.1 and 10.2 years for Douglas-fir, height and diameter, respectively. This compares to scalping and bedding which produced no detectable difference in growth compared to the control, and in some instances, reduced growth. In the Northern Rocky Mountains, moisture is most limiting. This is likely why trees showed the greatest response to competition control. Interestingly, this growth was sustained well beyond seedling establishment.

“Look! A Black Ethnographer!”: Fanon, Performance, and Critical Ethnography

This article engages the possibility of a critical Black ethnography and a performative fugitivity. Drawing on the author’s ethnographic research, it examines the tension between being a racialized and gendered person and becoming an ethnographic self. This tension rises when critical Black ethnographers are visually rendered outside the domain of the ethnographer, a category forged against the template of Western White male subjects. Instead, they are interchangeable with the populations they perform research with and suspect to performances of racialized and gendered violence. This opens up an emergent politics for the possibility of a critical Black ethnographer who alters how ethnographic practice is undertaken to grapple with the realities of race and gender by the critical Black ethnographer in the field. That said, the critical Black ethnographer must reconcile being Black, becoming an ethnographer, and what it would mean to be a critical Black ethnographer. To do so, this article draws on Frantz Fanon and situates him as both a performer and a critical ethnographer to analyze how does a critical Black ethnographer engage with performance, performativity, and the performative.

Native American Stereotypes in Literature

Historically, Western White society has portrayed Native American societies as utopias that we canlook to for political, spiritual, and artistic inspiration. For example, Columbus’s original “Letters ofDiscovery” began this tradition by writing the natives as a primitive, pure, communal society, andMontaigne’s “Of the Cannibals” continued this tradition with his similar portrayal of native peoples.Such portrayals ultimately lead to harmful stereotypes, expectations, and marginalization of NativeAmerican people by White society. With the aid of Robert Berkhofer Jr’s The White Man’s Indian,this essay explores the idea of the noble savage in conjunction with utopian ideals and breaks downthe process by which Native ways of life have been falsely portrayed as utopias. Additionally, itexplores the consequences of such stereotypical depictions and looks at attempts to dispel suchutopian myths.

Black “Matter” Lives

Since its inception, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has opened space for three interrelated discourses on the polysemic nature of matter, but so far two have dominated Black and communication studies. First, the BLM organization promotes the thought that Black lives, as human lives, should matter enough to convict White people of the murder of unarmed Black people. Second, some argue that while BLM is an important organization, historically, the lives of Black people in the West have not mattered. The third discourse, one suggested in the growing work of Black feminist new materialism, is more complicated, as it inherently calls into question the human: Why do Black lives equal matter? This article interrogates the relationship between blackness, matter, and communication to argue that racial violence situates Black bodies as matter/“elemental media” necessary for the materialization of Western (White) man as the dominant raced, gendered genre of humanity.

Eucalyptus camaldulensis Extract as a Preventive to the Vibriosis in Western White Shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) in Bushehr Province

Objective: In order to prevent the unusual use of antibiotics and promote green aquaculture, researchers have used various herbs as medicines proposed in the aquaculture industry. One of medicinal plants is Eucalyptus camaldulensis which has been identified in different studies for the antimicrobial activity of the extract in controlling and eliminating bacterial and fungal strains which was evaluated in this study. Methods: In this research, a variety of soxhlet and rotary extracts of ethanol, methanol, acetone and water soluble compounds and its antibacterial effect was investigated by agar diffusion method in a well. For this purpose, Vibrio Harveyi and Vibrio azureus (Kj018724.1) were isolated and identified by the sequencing of 16SrDNA. Results: The results showed that 2.5 μg/ml extracts of ethanol, methanol, acetone and 10 μg/ml of aqueous extract of the herb had minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC)and also 10 μg/ml of ethanol, methanol, acetone and 40 μg/ml of aqueous extract conferred minimum bacterial concentration (MBC) against V. harveyi in addition, 5 μg/ml of each methanolic and acetone, 2.5 μg/ml of ethanolic and 10 μg/ml of aqueous extracts had MIC on V. azureus and 5 μg/ml of ethanolic and 10 μg/ml of methanolic and acetone and 20 μg/ml of aqueous extracts showed MBC against V. azureus. Moreover, by examining the kinetics of V. harveyi and V. azureus, the Eucalyptus camaldulensis extract had growth inhibitory effect on the both species. Conclusion: The effects of various environmental factors such as temperature, salinity and time on the antimicrobial activity, the extract exhibited a good performance and can be used as an environmentally proper and compatible antimicrobial agent in ecological conditions and shrimp breeding areas, especially in southern Iran.

Prioritizing Young Western White Pine Stands for Blister Rust Pruning on the Warm Springs Reservation

Prioritizing Young Western White Pine Stands for Blister Rust Pruning on the Warm Springs Reservation

Audiences out of the box: Diasporic sexual minorities viewing representations of sexual diversity

Much has been written about the representation of sexual minorities in the media, but the meanings of such representations for audiences have hardly been explored to date. Moreover, most of this writing only addresses Western representations and White, Western audiences, so the current picture is limited and culturally specific. This article draws on in-depth interviews with (children of) migrants living in Belgium, discussing their readings of representations of sexual diversity. In media from their country of origin, but also in Belgian and Western media, they identify many of the ‘old’ problems discussed in the literature on lesbian, gay and bisexual and transgender representation: invisibility, negativity and stereotyping. While they are also critical about the lack of diversity in the media, particularly in terms of non-White, non-Western representations, they generally ‘make do’ with what is available This research shows how patterns of representation are all but even across the world, and how strongly the meanings and implications of these representations depend on the readings of audiences, situated in particular cultural, social and media contexts.

Forest Habitat Reduces the Flight ofPontia occidentalis(Reakirt) (Lepidoptera: Pieridae) Relative to Alpine Meadow Habitat

ABSTRACT. We compared the movement of Pontia occidentalis in forest and meadow habitat. We hypothesized that flight distances and overall movement would be greater in forested habitat than in meadow habitat. This hypothesis was based on forging theory predicting that organisms should spend less time in areas where resources are scarce than where they are abundant. Because this species is a generalist in its use of open habitat and regularly encounters forest when dispersing and hilltopping, we also hypothesized that forested habitat would not impose a physiological limitation on their flight. To test this hypothesis we released 68 butterflies in either forest or alpine meadow habitat and followed their movement. Contrary to our hypothesis, the total distance moved, mean flight distance, and rate of flight were all lower in forest relative to meadow habitat. Forest habitat did not exert an edge effect for Pontia occidentalis flying in meadow habitat. Contrary to our second hypothesis, differences in moveme...