STRATA
STRATA, the STudent Research, Academic, and Talent Archive, is a collection of selected Fort Lewis College student work, including undergraduate research, senior seminar papers, published works, conference presentations, and other creative and artistic projects. Search by name, subject, title, or academic department.
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- Analysis and Interpretation of Offshore Hazards in Arctic Waters of Alaska
- Bathymetric surveys of the seafloor in search of structures, geological or manmade, that may pose a threat to maritime navigation and the construction of pipelines and platforms for oil and gas production are conducted in arctic coastal waters of Alaska. These structures, also termed 'hazards,' vary from shallow shoals and scours to ship wreckage. As part of my internship with TerraSond, multibeam sonar equipment was used to determine efficient navigational routes in the Bering Strait and the occurrence and migration of strudel scours in coastal waters of the North Slope of Alaska for a proposed pipeline route. These structures known as strudel scours form from erosional processes brought on by off-coast fluvial runoff during the yearly spring flooding on arctic sea ice which surrounds arctic deltas. Surveys conducted as long as 50 years ago (McManus, 1963) are compared and analyzed with surveys conducted in 2015 (TerraSond Ltd.) to discern the movement of a massive shoal known as the Prince of Wales Shoal in the Bering Strait. TerraSond also conducted surveys in the Beaufort Sea focusing on strudel scours, which were compared and analyzed with surveys conducted in the late 1990's (Coastal Frontiers, 1997-1999). The bathymetric data collected by TerraSond in the Bering Strait were remarkably analogous to the bathymetric data acquired by McManus in 1960, differing by only a tenth of a fathom in most sections of the shoal within the survey area. However, the strudel scour surveys conducted in the Beaufort Sea of the North Slope of Alaska yielded different findings. Average water depth of strudel scours observed from the 2015 TerraSond surveys (1.9 m) indicate the shoaling of strudel scours in the survey area relative to data from the 1997-1999 Coastal Frontiers surveys (2.3 m). Further monitoring of strudel scours in the Beaufort Sea is crucial for efficient construction and maintenance plans for a pipeline in the region, with focus on the processes of transgression.
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- Analysis of Antimicrobial Activity of Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)
- With the increased use of antibiotics, antibiotic resistant bacteria have become prevalent. Plants have been a valuable source of medicinal compounds to treat infections. Achillea millefolium (yarrow) has been used for many medicinal purposes and recent studies show that yarrow extracts may exhibit antimicrobial activity. The goal of this study is to test if yarrow has antimicrobial activity; specifically, if the flower extract will be effective at inhibiting the growth of certain microorganisms. Both ethanolic and petroleum ether flower extracts were tested against the microorganisms Staphylococcus aureus, a gram positive bacteria, Escherichia coli, a gram negative bacteria, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a eukaryotic budding yeast. In the Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion test, the ethanolic flower extract had the greatest inhibitory effect against Staphylococcus aureus and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The ether extract slightly inhibited the same two microorganisms. Both extracts showed no significant activity against Escherichia coli. This research could be beneficial because it could lead to a new antibiotic and perhaps certain bacteria would be unable to gain resistance to it.
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- Analysis of Mercury Bonding and Concentration in Soils from the Missionary Ridge Burn Area, Near Durango, CO
- Mercury in the environment is detrimental to human and ecological health. In 2006, four years after the Missionary Ridge Fire, the EPA issued a fish consumption advisory for Vallecito Reservoir. This study aims to determine how forest fire impacts mercury mobility in soils affecting the nearby watershed. The study site is located near Vallecito Reservoir in La Plata County, Colorado. During this study, 48 soil samples were collected from within the Missionary Ridge fire perimeter and tested for mercury concentration. The samples were from unburned, low intensity, and high intensity burned sites. They also included two vegetation types: mixed Conifer, and Pine. Four unburned samples were chosen for a mercury adsorption experiment. Half of each sample was burned at 400°C for 20 minutes. Mercury was then added at concentrations from10 -9 M to 10 -4 M and modeled using isotherms and distribution coefficients to represent both strong and weak mercury bonding sites. In the samples analyzed in this study, mercury concentrations in unburned soils were the highest, containing an average of 48.6 ng/g. Soils sampled in the high intensity burned areas had the lowest mercury concentrations (13.7 ng/g). The mercury adsorption experiment demonstrated that mercury had a greater affinity to burned soils than unburned soils especially at lower concentrations. The dissolved organic matter was greater in the unburned sites (11.6-23.8 mg C/L) than it was in the burned sites (6.7-12.3 mg C/L). Previous studies of mercury/soil interactions are consistent with the observed higher concentrations in unburned, organic-rich soils (Biswas et al., 2006). Volatilization of mercury into the atmosphere is consistent with the lower concentrations observed in burned soils that also lost most of their organic component. The lab analyses of the effects of burning soils are problematic and are still under investigation. The Missionary Ridge fire decreased the amount of mercury in soil, possibly via atmospheric emission, consequently decreasing the amount available in runoff to pollute the reservoir. If the lab analyses prove correct, then mercury bonds to burned soil better than it does to unburned soil. Both of these results suggest that the Missionary Ridge Fire decreased the influx of mercury into the reservoir from runoff. Other sources of mercury contamination in the reservoir need to be examined.
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- Analysis of Predator Density in Unburned Versus Burned Forest; 9 Years Post Missionary Ridge Fire
- In the event of a fire, almost all of the wildlife tends to escape to safer habitat and return post fire to exploit the ecological benefits fire may have by promoting natural re-generation of plants. According to prior research, ungulates such as American elk (Cervus elaphus) and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) tend to prefer to feed upon the new aspen shoots around 1 or 2 years post fire. The return of carnivorous mammals to post-wildfire habitat, on the other hand, has not been studied extensively, as far as we can tell. In this paper we explored the Missionary Ridge area, nine years post wild fire and designed a study to detect carnivore presence on the National Forest land north of Durango, Colorado. Non-invasive track and camera surveys were set up with a scent lure to detect carnivores in the burned and unburned areas. We predicted that if the ecosystem is healthy or if it is returning to a healthy state, then we would expect to see carnivore densities evenly distributed over the two habitat types (burned vs. un-burned). The overall density of predators was higher in the unburned habitat, and correlations were drawn that showed preference of predators to areas with abundant tree coverage. This research suggests that predators occupy a variety of habitats post fire, yet tendencies to return to a previously burned area are not very strong at first. A longer period of forest succession is preferred in order for predators to return to a previously burned habitat.
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- Ancient Spooks through Modern Specs: The Contemporary Demand for Esoteric History
- An astounding amount of evidence on the subject of "magic" and the occult has been found in the ancient world, including cure tablets, recipes, and stories. From the Book of the Dead to the myths surrounding the island of Thessaly, ghosts, witches, and necromancy all appear in historical texts. Yet these topics have only begun to be analyzed in earnest. Ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, two immortal civilizations of the ancient world, have recently been found to be rife with what is, to the modern eye, grotesque practices and dark ideas about the nature of life and death. In the last several decades, there has been an explosion of study focused on this topic and an increased interest in magic, its definition, and uses within the historical context. Where does this sudden attention come from? Because modern American and European culture has become enamored with the esoteric, there has been a sudden increase in demand for arcane history. This focus has been romanticised from the contemporary framework which has built supernatural up to be so unusual and strange.
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- Anonymizing Medical Audio Databases Through Steganographic Concealing of Confidential Information
- As electronic databases of sensitive medical information continue to grow in the medical industry, the necessity for maintaining patient confidentiality within these files while simultaneously making large datasets available for doctors, medical students, and researchers is quickly growing. The potential for incredible medical advancements is unlocked with the distribution of large sets of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to researchers and the public. Of course, as files are stored in medical records along with patients' confidential personal information, it would be a violation of the Health Information Privacy Protection Act (HIPPA) to distribute large EHR datasets to researchers without first anonymizing each individual file. In particular, medical audio files such as echocardiograms, sonograms, and venous dopplers all have the potential to be incredibly useful to researchers, but are almost always accompanied by sensitive identifying information of the patient. By using a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) in combination with a form of hard thresholding, we will modify these audio files, and embed sensitive patient data into the audio file using a steganographic process. This allows us to delete obvious sensitive data and distribute the files to researchers. Should they desire to do so, patients would be able to release any sensitive information to researchers even after anonymization by disclosing the details of the steganographic processes.
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- Anonymous: Reimagining Deep Play in the Internet Age
- The proliferation of social interaction mediated through the Internet across the globe within the past two decades has altered the very way in which cultures form and interact. New cultures are evolving devoid of place and physical, face-to-face interaction, generating and flourishing through interaction limited to social media and online chat rooms. One such cultural group, Anonymous, a collective of computer hackers, has evolved out of the Internet to produce acts of defamation and resistance against those it opposes in an in-your-face manner, capturing international headlines and the attention of governments and revolutionaries alike. Through a literature review of Anonymous and computer hacker culture, as well as an ethnographic analysis of Anonymous' Twitter and Facebook feeds, it is evident that the means by which Anonymous communicates and engages in direct, daily actions of resistance or sabotage against its targets can be understood through the application and adaptation of anthropologist Clifford Geertz's concept of deep play. The hacks carried out by Anonymous pose high stakes for players in that the individual is on the line, much in the same way as Geertz's Balinese cock-fighters risk their livelihood and social position by engaging in illegal cockfighting. Just as the cockfight enables the Balinese to symbolically engage in societal critique and competition, the hacking executed by Anonymous functions to provide the same type of engagement while simultaneously extending this critique to directly challenge status hierarchies and the inequalities embedded within both global and local social matrices.
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- Application of the Transit Method for Exoplanet Detection
- Data was collected on the star WASP-43 in order to verify the presence of an expected orbiting planet, WASP-43 b, using the Photometric Transit Method. SuperWASP data was used to predict the transit time of the exoplanet, which was observed several times throughout the course of 5 months. Due to time and equipment constraints, only verification of the differential change in magnitude was possible. To accomplish this project, the coordinates for a star in the SuperWASP field of view that was predicted to dim in brightness at a time and date between November 2013 and March 2014 was acquired. The star was observed at the time and date predicted by the SuperWASP data using the telescope at the Fort Lewis College Observatory. The transit was recorded with a series of images that were taken with a CCD camera through the telescope as the planet traversed the star. The images were processed and the relative brightness of the star was recorded for each image during the transit. From these values for relative brightness, a light curve was created to visually show the starting and ending times of the transit and the magnitude of the change in brightness during the transit. The observed average change in brightness of the transit matches the data predicted by the SuperWASP program within a margin of uncertainty.
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- Applications of Fourier Analysis and Permutation Representations on Ranked Datasets
- Applications of Fourier analysis and permutation group representations on ranked data sets will be explored. For large data sets this analysis simplifies data processing. Examples of ranked data sets include certain voting data and customer preference rankings.
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- Aquatic Botball
- This workshop introduces concepts in underwater robotics such as hydrodynamics, stability of an aquatic vehicle, robot pose and inertial navigation. It also provides a conceptual model of a simple underwater robot that can be constructed using a standard Bobtail kit with a few add ons for waterproofing.
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- Arbuscular and Ecto-Mycorrhizal Propagule Densities in Various Levels of Sudden Aspen Decline in Southwest Colorado
- Sudden aspen decline (SAD) is rapid mortality that results in the loss of whole aspen (Populus tremuloides) stands. Southwestern Colorado has the greatest occurrence of SAD in the state. The purpose of our study was to look at mycorrhizal associations in different levels of SAD. We conducted our study June-September 2010. Our study plots were located in the Dolores Ranger District of the San Juan National Forest in Southwestern Colorado. We quantified aspen forest stand characteristics, which include tree canopy cover, tree density, basal area, shrub cover, pathogens present, and tree regeneration, for three levels of SAD (categorized by percent canopy cover low 0-30%, moderate 30.1-70%, and high 70.1-100%). We also quantified arbuscular (AM) and ecto-mycorrhizae (ECM) root colonization across the levels of SAD and determined correlations between AM and ECM root colonization and aspen forest stand characteristics. The main findings were a higher abundance of ECM and AM in low (healthy) SAD plots. Significant correlations found were between AM and tree density, along with basal area. ECM was significantly correlated with tree density and with tree canopy cover. The low abundance of mycorrhizae colonizing roots in high SAD plots could cause a shift in the aspen understory plant communities by allowing invasive plant species, which are generally non-mycorrhizal, to establish. Higher densities of AM and ECM propagules in the low (healthy) SAD stands make plants more drought tolerant by having increased uptake of water and nutrients and less susceptibility to pathogens, making them more resilient to climate induced dieback and changes.
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- Art As a Vehicle for Social Change
- Art is a subjective term to many people. It can have a multitude of meanings ranging from purely aesthetic to a form of therapy, historical reference, or advertising. Without art, our world would look very different. It would not only look so, but it would be different as well. In addition to its ability to make a personal impact, art has served as an aid to political revolutions, social change, and community based transformations. The subject of art is typically not the first thing that comes to mind when these topics are brought up, but it holds a magnitude of power when attempting to make a change. In this chapter, I propose to show the reader various ways in which art has been used historically as a tool in social movements.