M-Theory -- CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

From Undergraduate Research Repository  (Roosevelt University) in CARLI Digital Collections.

I had forgotten the excitement that comes when you first encounter Big Ideas and realize that you have the power to contribute to them.

The featured image is cropped from page 21 of Rory Stewart's "M-Theory: How the Cosmic Symphony Shapes Our Views on the Search for a Unified Theory." Stewart ends his thesis with this thought: "As we have seen time and time again through the rather minuscule spit of our existence, we will always dig deeper, ask difficult questions, and eventually break the norm; rewrite the books on the views of our universe."

All of the works in this collection of exceptional undergraduate student research are well worth reading. Here are quotes from each of them:

"The stale, antiquated ideas that support free-market thinking and form the backbone of ideologies proclaiming the gained efficiencies and benefits of free markets and open, unfettered trade have finally revealed the true disease that ails the workers of the world. ... The true issue is a dislocation of personality -- a dislocation of a human being with purpose.”--Joshua Evans, "Purpose and Personality: Worker Restoration in an Economic Model."

"[E]very individual has the power to make an impact on food deserts by taking a stand and unifying with other people who want to see these neighborhoods changed. Collaboration not only works well with public and private sector initiatives, it also works well when fed up constituents of a community speak up for the issues they feel passionate about and demand change."--Brian Coleman, "'Food Deserts': Government vs. Private Sector Approaches"

"All beings have good. All beings have evil. ... [W]hat I have settled on is that beings are composed of inherent desires for love, family, comfort, independence, and self-expression."--Alexandra Leigh Ramsay, "How Innately Selfish? An Investigation into the Nature of Human and Nonhuman Species.'

'Modern racism is characterized by the belief that racial discrimination ... is no longer a problem in American society. ... The American society has changed quite a bit since the Civil Rights movement, and any expression of racism is formally looked down upon (while informal prejudice in a group of friends may still pass), effectively decreasing the chance of honest expression of such sentiment."--Kateryna Chaykovska, 'Participant Interpretation and Performance on Common Implicit and Explicit Measures'

"DIVVY's [bicycle sharing operating services company] claim to be servicing residents around the city based on residential density and income value has inconsistencies ... [W]e realize that the audience DIVVY is predominantly serving ... are individuals who are of a white majority.'--Brenden Paradies, "Narrative of DIVVY and the Challenges Faced Integrating into Low-Income Neighborhoods"

"History is not just the past, but it is a process to understand the present and the future, and archival science as a profession exists to protect the process of making history. ... Fortunately, an archives is built not only to enable ethnocentrism or anachronism, but to one day enable the end of such fantasies (when humans are capable, that is)."--Jocelyn Dunlop, "Documenting the Subaltern Voice in Bolivia and Guatamala"

 

Contributed by Mary Rose, Metadata Librarian, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville