Reclaiming the Modern World for the Imagination: Guest of Honor Speech at the 19th Annual Mythopoeic Conference

Guest of Honor speech, Mythcon 19. Defines indigenous fantasy—fantasy in a contemporary, “real-world” setting—and illustrates its techniques as demonstrated in Wizard of the Pigeons and Little, Big

Reinventing Masculinity in Fairy Tales by Men

Though fairy-tale retellings by women writers are noted for their usefulness in reinventing femininity, men have also begun to use the form to redefine masculinity. Looking at Michael Cunningham’s 2015 collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales in conjunction with other recent fairy-tale versions from literature, drama, and dance, this essay examines the way male writers use traditional characters and plots to challenge what R. W. Connell terms hegemonic masculinity. Drawing on motifs from the Grimms, Hans Christian Andersen, and other sources, Cunningham and his contemporaries create character types that evade cultural norms and offer alternative ways to be a man

Investigating the effects of internally trapped residuals on the performance of a homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) engine

Homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) combustion introduces great opportunity for decreased emissions along with greater engine efficiencies. Implementing an innovative combustion mode such as HCCI presents a great challenge for the engine research community. One such challenge is controlling the innate cyclic variability from this chemical kinetics controlled auto-ignition event when transitioning to or from a SI operating mode. This work includes the study of cycle-to-cycle dynamics that occur within the partial burn regime of an HCCI engine as it approaches the misfire limit. Within this regime there are many successive incomplete combustion events that will impact the next cycle through the fuel/air residual, the chemical kinetics, and the pressure-temperature history of the cylinder during the combustion process. A better understanding of this process will provide information relevant to developing control methods for multi-mode operating strategies. Experiments were conducted using a single cylinder HCCI engine operating in an unstable combustion regime in order to observe cyclic variability using rapid exhaust pressure and temperature measurements to appropriately capture any deterministic behavior of the combustion dynamics. On-board syn-gas strategies were also explored by injecting a reactive species gas, carbon-monoxide, directly into the cylinder in order to perturb the intake charge and study the effects this mass injection had on the onset of combustion in HCCI. This could be utilized as one method of control by an engine control unit in order to push the limits of unstable combustion as well as keep the engine within stable operating regions --Abstract, page iii

How Humboldt County Native Populations Reacted and Rebounded from COVID-19

COVID had an immeasurable affect on businesses and life as we know it. That is no surprise, however, studies about COVID have focused far too long on the long-term economic and cultural impact that this pandemic has wrought upon the world. The human impact is far greater, and in the bubble of Humboldt country, the local population has felt that impact to a great degree, no more than the local native populations in and around Humboldt County, like the Karuk of Happy Camp, CA. I spoke to tribal chairman Buster Attebery, in order to discover how experiences of the Karuk people and the lives of other local native populations have changed drastically through the COVID-19 pandemic. I also spoke with youth advocate at Two Feathers and HSU Grad student, Amada Lang, in order to ascertain how native health and family services reacted to the pandemic, as well as how they are attempting to return to normalc

Industrial Real Estate Prices and Market Efficiency

This study employs a multivariate Granger-causality procedure to examine causal relationships between selected economic and financial variables and industrial real estate prices. Empirical results indicate that relationships between several of these variables' lagged values and current values of price exist. We also find a significant relationship between past and current prices.