Hello world!
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Gang,
This is our blog home. Note that this is separate from our “information” page. That page will be maintained by Dr. Steele. This will be the site wherein we post info about our trip. You should have all gotten the logon information. Please try posting an interesting Cook-related factoid today to make sure you can post text and images.
Thanks!
-Dr. A
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ENGL 102.02 is now open to general enrollment. Please check CI Records for the latest availability.
If you are looking for ENGL 105, remember that our fall sections were primarily filled by sophomores. As noted during orientation, we advise incoming students to plan on taking ENGL 105 in the spring, when we will have plenty of open sections.
If you have a question, please use our form near the bottom of this page. And be sure to check CI Records often, as course availability changes frequently as students adjust their schedules. Thank you and good luck!
The CI Composition Team
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This past Monday, I returned to the KVTA Morning show with Tom Spence and Rich Gualano to discuss the past month in our Refugio Oil Spill saga. We discuss the evidence that pipeline oil spanned at least three counties, the problem with a lack of access in the early part of the spill timeline, and the impacts to ecosystem elements.
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. — Albert Einstein
We have been fortunate to have been running a Summer Institute for undergraduates from CSU Channel Islands and our regional Community Colleges since 2009. Every June we pull in students from these campuses and embed them in intense academic research in a variety of disciplines. Most recently Project ACCESO, a program funded by a grant from the US Department of Education, has been the funder of this summer work. Our ESRM faculty have worked collaboratively to study beaches over the past three years. This year, we adapted some of our planned work to document and assess the oiling of many of our beaches. These 13 students were awesome and really stepped up to the plate.
When we talk about scientific work we frequently talk about the numbers of papers published in academic journals or the amount of grant money we are able to bring into our respective institutions. This is usually a “we rock, you suck” type endeavor with the good ol’ boys or good old ways of doing things begetting more good ol’ boys or the same old same old. But there are many, many more important metrics that are often hard to quantify. These are often intangibles or things for which we do not have a well-developed framework for assessing (although we could if we got serious about this). The ultimate goal for those of us working on training people to better conserve our natural resources centers around an amalgamation of:
We have just compiled a small set of such metrics for our Summer Institute work (for the three weeks it ran in June). They are fun to look over (if you are into these kinds of things).
Category | Value | Metric |
Environmental Variables | ||
Stressors | 62 | dogs counted |
38 | off leash dogs | |
24 | on leash dogs | |
2,491 | cars counted parked at beach | |
326 | trash cans | |
5,131 | humans counted on the beach | |
2.8 | kg of tar collected from 0.25m 2 quadrats | |
Organisms Encountered | 146 | grunions seen |
500 | grunion eggs found | |
12 | dead vertebrates (fish, birds, pinnipeds) found on beach | |
66 | crabs killed in EcoToxicology Experiments | |
3,332 | crabs measured | |
2,265 | birds counted | |
10,218 | infaunal invertebrates counted | |
3,488 | parasites encountered | |
Sampling Logistics | ||
Things Sampled | 49 | beaches assessed |
4 | Counties visited | |
78 | sand samples sieved for grain size | |
190 | infaunals transects | |
652 | datasheets filled out | |
5,358 | shovels/core scoops of sand | |
3,655 | quantiative cores of sand | |
1,703 | supplemental shovels to find crabs | |
Opinion Polling | 210 | opinion polls conducted |
115 | people who were asked, but declined to take our opinion poll survey | |
Transportation | 84 | gallons of gas used |
2,130 | miles driven (across all vehicles) | |
26 | km walked during quantiative bird surveys | |
2.45 | km 2 of beach surveyed intensely | |
Equipment Damaged | 1 | clam guns lost |
3 | transect tapes compromised | |
23 | article of clothing lost to tarring | |
Surviving Our Sampling | 74 | cups of coffee consumed |
512 | songs listened to | |
414 | metal songs | |
1 | parking tickets | |
14 | lbs of chips (primarily tortilla) consumed | |
12 | pieces of equipment needing de-oiling | |
8 | sand sifting screens destroyed by tar | |
25 | Sean’s random additional surveys | |
Student Growth | ||
13 | Summer Institute Student Researchers | |
4 | Summer Institute Faculty | |
2,584 | person hours | |
1,768 | person field hours | |
52 | person hours in the field in the rain | |
816 | person lab hours | |
3 | weeks of work | |
121 | people asked our students what they were doing | |
38 | people thanked students for doing their work | |
59 | rejected hypotheses | |
1 | games created | |
1 | TV News stories featuring Summer Institute Students | |
7 | students presenting scientific data (in poster form) for the first time | |
6 | students speaking in public for the first time about science |
Our colleagues at Santa Barbara Channelkeeper just ran another subtidal inspection on Naples Reef (a few minutes south of the Refugio spill epicenter) and happily again found no obvious sign of major oiling in the area. This combined with our previous surveys in this same area a few weeks back and California Reef Check‘s surveys off of Refugio last week imply that we avoided any massive subtidal oil deposition. That is awesome, but we still need to conduct quantitative surveys of the areas most likely to accumulate oil (something prevented by the closure still in effect).
See the KEYT coverage of the most recent inspection by clicking the image below and clicking through to the embedded video:
Anyone wanting to get out to Naples Reef post-spill now has an easy way to do so. The Santa Barbara Channelkeepers are offering a discounted dive trip to the area tomorrow. If anyone is interested is seeing the reef that lies about a mile offshore, head to Channelkeepers website to sign up. Last word from Ben, was that there was still space on tomorrow’s trip!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!