Global Cultures Local Interpretations: A Comparison of Wearing Tattoos in Ecuador and in the United States

This thesis explores the practice of tattooing and how it has been affected by the globalization of local practices. Tattooing is an ancient practice that virtually all societies have performed. Today, tattooing is practiced in an infinite number of ways and it is interesting to understand local influences as well as global themes portrayed in modern day tattooing. A study abroad trip from September 2012 to May 2013 in Ecuador gave me the opportunity to study tattooing in the Latin American country. A series of the same interviews in the United States from September 2013 to December 2013 allowed me to gain another perspective on the practice of tattooing. Tattooing in Ecuador is happening in an informal, unregulated manner in which there are professional tattoo shops and also informal and often unhygienic shops that have popped up around the country. Due to the lack of regulations and the conservative catholic pressures of the mainstream Ecuadorian society, tattooing has been deemed out of the norm. Furthermore, those that tattoo have replicated the same social structure of the mainstream society, which has caused a type of self-imposed norm in the tattoo world. Meanwhile, in the United States tattooing is an accessible way to purposefully assert one’s uniqueness. People in the United States are constantly pushing the boundaries of tattooing while at the same time struggling to conform to Corporate-America standards. Many Americans tattoo in easily covered places to assure that their tattoos do not prevent them for being hired

De la inseguridad a la estabilidad: como Pablo Neruda utiliza el amor y la poesia para superar el exilio

This thesis explores exile and its effects on the lives of those who experience it. Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet of the 20th century, lived in exile for three years, during which he continued to write and publish his poetry. The negative and positive consequences of exile, such as the loss of identity and the experience of traveling and knowing others, respectively, can be seen clearly in the poetry of Neruda during and after his exile. Exile has a great effect on the personal life of the exiled and this logically is expressed in the exile’s work, especially for an artist like Neruda. In this study, I analyze two collections of poetry by Neruda, The Capitan’s Verses, Los versos del cpaitán (1952), and Fully Empowered, Plenos poderes (1962). The former was written and published while Neruda was in exile and the latter was written some years after Neruda had returned to Chile. This study puts the two works in conversation to better identify the changes in tone, audience, and focus of the collections in order to understand the effect of exile on Neruda’s life and his poetry. The most notable conclusion of this thesis is the fact that Neruda used love as a force to combat the negative consequences of exile. He writes about his love for his county and most notably for his lover and future wife Matilde in The Captain’s Verses, and it is clear that his purposeful focus on the positive gave him hope in a difficult time of his life

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead