Archive for month: April, 2016
Hidden Dragon Outside Sign
Update 4/25/16
This week I spent time reorganizing my poster. I realized that there was far too much text to include in a poster and I re organized and reworded my text. I also participated in a school function not related to the TP directly but was able to include it in a water symposium at an elementary school in which effects of drought and other limiting factors for local plants and vegetation.
The Final Stretch
Hello, students! As we enter our last three weeks, I just want to remind you to keep revising. At this point in the semester, we’re looking at sample portfolios, working through the revision packet during class, and you’re meeting with me for conferences. Remember to sign up for conferences with me early as my conference times are already filling up. Also, don’t forget the wonderful resource that is the Writing and Multiliteracy Center! They fill up as well, so schedule your appointments now. In three weeks, you’ll be turning in your portfolio and that will conclude your work for my class.
Remember, this is the time to really revisit your essays and make them as strong as possible as you can for portfolio. You want to show the portfolio committee how hard you’ve been working for the past fifteen weeks. As always, email or come see me with any questions (or talk to me after class).
We’re almost there!
CSU COAST 2016 Annual Meeting
Our consortium for the study of the coast and ocean here in the California State University System (aka CSU COAST) just held our annual meeting in Long Beach. While this group’s focus is the entirety of our coastal and marine environment, much of this has a direct bearing on oil spills and how we go about monitoring them. Indeed, this year’s annual meeting focused on monitoring and so was directly applicable to so many aspects of our assessments of spilled petroleum in the coastal zone. While the Chancellor did not make it to this year’s meeting, he was there last year.
Overview
This is a great introduction to CSU COAST if you know nothing about it or what we do. This presentation was by the Director of COAST, Dr. Krista Kamer.
Monitoring Overviews from Partners Across California
Estuary Monitoring
Marine Protected Area Monitoring
Our Work
Rather than showing a professor blab on about our search, two of our undergrads (Tevin Schmitt and Dorothy Horn) did a great job the previous month at the same location. I’ll let them explain what we are doing…
General Meeting Notes
Welcome
- Really big meeting this year, only Sonoma state is missing (due to an illness).
COAST Plan
- Took feedback and changed. Also addressed requirements of EO 1103 so that COAST is now an official CSU institute, permitted to use the logo, etc.
COAST looking to hire new person: policy and engagement specialist
- could be independent staffer
- could be faculty member on reassigned time/buy-out
Summary of the rest of the meeting
- considerable time devoted to talking about monitroring efforts in the CSU
- presentations on research opportunities by partners
- NOAA Sanctuaries West Coast Regional Office
- Tijuana River National Estuary Research Reserve
- Ocean Science Trust
- California Department of Fish and Wildlife
- all campuses shared their monitoring efforts in quick 2 minutes summaries
- conversation: research happens in the CSU and we need external stakeholders to know it (guests agreed that research interactions with CSU have been of highest quality), Chancellor White is identifying this as the next growth opportunity for the CSU
- product: using Google Earth, locations and descriptions of monitoring efforts were plotted together; was supposed to spur a discussion about gaps and opportunities, but people pointed out the UCs have monitored efforts that might fill some of those gaps; also talked about the need to connect monitoring efforts (e.g., through common protocols) and need to make data available
Refugio Spill Public Lecture
A few weeks ago saw me up in Simi Valley speaking to folks from young to old about what began last May 19 at Refugio Beach. I always enjoy giving one of our monthly installment of the CSU Channel Islands Library Lecture Series, an array of public lectures held across Ventura County open to all comers. This presentation had a lot of great input and probing queries from this much-engaged crowd. My screencast below only captures some of this back and forth that extended for 45 minutes post-talk. Keep those questions coming and keep staying hungry for answers. More are on the way, but we must be vigilant and never stop our engagement if we hope to have a safer and more sustainable energy infrastructure.
Oil Spills in Context: Understanding Ecological & Sociological Impacts of the
May 2015 Refugio Oil Spill
The Plains All American pipeline rupture on May 19, 2015 spilled an estimated 79,000 l (21,000 gallons, 500 barrels) of unrefined crude oil onto Refugio State Beach (Santa Barbara County, California) and into the Pacific Ocean. Heavy coastal oiling affected Refugio and El Capitan State Beaches immediately. We then entered a period of highly variable tarring episodes impacting beaches as far as 170 km from the break over the ensuing weeks, which in turn created a unique arena in which to test tarring impacts. Sandy beach ecosystems dominate the shorelines of this region and so bore the brunt of the impacts from this spill. The animal diversity on the coast dropped and heretofore unobserved conspicuous dead Emerita analoga (sand crabs) became common in the swash zone across several beaches although an independent decline in sandy beach infaunal diversity/abundance across the region over the past year made oil-associated impact detection problematic. Laboratory experiments confirmed the toxicity of deposited tar to developing crab embryos, juveniles, and adults. The spill had immediate but mostly ephemeral effects on people: reducing summer spending at/near the most heavily tarred beaches by an order of magnitude, halving the number of people who felt Santa Barbara-area seafood was safe to eat, and bolstering support for offshore drilling bans. We will discuss this recent spill in the context of other infamous oil spills including the 1969 Santa Barbara Spill, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, and many others.
ENVI Dark Object Subtraction
I spent several hours this past week tying up loose ends of the project by learning a new mapping software called ENVI. This key program is a vital source of my project because it has a tool that GIS doesn’t have, called ‘Dark Object Subtraction (DOS)’. This DOS tool searches the image for the darkest pixel and then subtracts that value from the whole image. This subtraction helps reduce hill shadows, cloud coverage, and floating particle accumulation.
Student Research Competition Presentations
On Friday, April 22nd, CI’s participants in the CSU Student Research Competition will present their research for the CI community. This is an opportunity for students to hone their presentations and receive constructive feedback from faculty and students. This session will begin at 9 AM in Broome Library 2490. The schedule of talks is as follows:
9:00 Ande Murphy & Soraya Zarook, “Humanity for Robots: A Guide to Passing as a Person”
Faculty Mentor: Brad Monsma
9:15 Reily Pratt, “Establishing Giant Brown Kelp as Biosentinel of Environmental Mercury”
Faculty Mentor: Simone Aloisio
9:30 Maria Pimentel, “Is Education the Great Equalizer? Comparing the Wages of Native and Immigrant Latinos and Asians in California: 2000-2012”
Faculty Mentor: Luis Sanchez
9:45 Zosimo Geluz, “Neurocognition and Personality Processes: A Study of the Dark Triad”
Faculty Mentor: Kimmy Kee-Rose
10:00 Cordell Tarrant, “Just how far will that tweet go? Quantifying the Social Media Impact of United States Senator’s Twitter Activity”
Faculty Mentor: Bryan Tomlin
10:15 Brittany Marberry, “Investigating Individual and Contextual Factors Related to Arrests across Latino Immigrant Generations”
Faculty Mentor: Luis Sanchez
10:30 Vanessa van Heerden, “Assessing the health of coral reefs in an era of anthropogenic stressors at Aitutaki, Cook Islands”
Faculty Mentor: Sean Anderson
10:45 Tevin Schmitt “Ecological Impact of the Refugio Oil Spill on Sandy Beach Systems”
Faculty Mentor: Sean Anderson
11:00 Samantha Freitag, “Analysis of Mercury concentration in cigarettes as a viable source of human absorption of the top two brands sold in the United States”
Faculty Mentor: Simone Aloisio
Vegetation Signatures
I finished the official 2015 vegetation signatures several weeks ago and recently produced a scatter plot example of how the program (GIS) is able to determine these ‘signatures’ based off mathematical equations and different light frequency bands (red, green, blue, inferred ext..). An example is the the dark green blob, which signifies mixed woodland.
Relief & Contemplation
April 19
Hi everyone,
Hope you guys are having a good week and even more so now that our group inquiry paper has been completed! (Whoop whoop!) Please comment and let me know what you guys did your project on, I am curious and interested. Overall, I feel pretty good about me and my partner’s paper. More confident than I felt for my personal inquiry project that’s fer sure. Do you guys remember the reflection we completed after submitting our personal inquiry project? Well in my reflection I had stated that I should have went more in depth in analyzing my topic within the lenses I chose. I might of worded it differently but my statement was along those lines. However, when writing our group inquiry project I wanted to avoid feeling like I should have done better. There is always areas of improvement but this time around my partner and I established sub categories within our actual interdisciplinary lenses. Establishing subcategories encouraged us to further discuss our topic in each discipline. As stated in my last post our three disciplines were health science, communication, and sociology. In which, are subcategories comprised of Oxytocin, communicative clarity, affections/ nurturance, and environments “baby talk” is prone to be used in such as, hospitals. Since, we will be discussing our topic through our poster presentation, I am going to stop myself from going into detail of the technicalities behind our paper to avoid redundancy of what you guys will hear in our presentation.
To that end, I want to discuss a current interdisciplinary dilemma I am going through. In my last post I mentioned I was currently working on a presentation for my MKT 442 class also known as Psychology of Judgement Decision making. In which, my presentation covered prospect theory and some of the underling factors behind prospect theory. The underlying factors my group and I discussed in our presentation were loss aversion, framing, and endowment effect. However, we applied these factors to the use of marketing. We did this comparison by showing two different commercial ads that were essentially asking the same thing (animal shelter donations) yet they each framed their add differently. One portrayed animals as being sad, hurt, and neglected while the other only captured happy healthy animals. We then compared the endowment effect to how companies offer free trials of their products and or services. For those of you who may not know the endowment effect occurs when we grow fonder of a product or service the longer we acquire it. For example, Netflix offers a 1 month free trail, they do this so the consumer can start to embed their service in their routine. Once they are hooked it conveniently is the time their subscription is going to expire. What does the consumer do? Well by nature since we do not like the feeling of losing, the consumer is most like going to subscribe to the service.But now onto the dilemma I am currently dealing with, my group and I are going to discuss what we presented in class in our paper. However, to yield 15 to 20 pages we need another angle that will connect prospect theory and marketing together. So currently what we are going to discuss further in our paper is under debate.
Well that is enough of my interdisciplinary discussion for now, hope you guys have a good rest of the week!
