The Sea Ranch: Unforeseen Failures and Statewide Successes of an Ecologically Conscious Coastal Community

The term “residential development” or “planned community” brings to mind images of a stereotypical suburbia. The planned community of The Sea Ranch, along the Sonoma County coast in Northern California is a direct challenge to the suburban ideal. Construction of the nearly 1500 homes began in the late 1960s and continues to present day. All of the homes must meet specific design requirements including being ecologically sound and they must fit within the landscape. The strict architectural elements is what provides the distinct look of the community. The construction of a housing development along a ten-mile strip of untouched and inhospitable California coastline was challenged by conservation groups. One result was the formation of the California Coastal Commission, which gained regulatory powers for all coastal developments in California. This paper is an interdisciplinary examination of The Sea Ranch community. Through the humanities disciplines of art and design, landscape response, philosophy, history, and the legal challenges faced by this community, these findings show how the Sea Ranch overcame the obstacles to provide a thriving ecologically minded community

Unangan Orthodox Christianity: Conversion Through Similarity

Between 1741, when Russians first entered the Aleutian archipelago, to 1867, when Russia sold Alaska to the United States, virtually the entire Aleutian indigenous population, the Unangan peoples, having been minimally missionized and influenced only by traders, had subsumed their ancient religious beliefs and practices into a new framework and converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity. This, despite the fact that by 1800, murder, disease and forced labor at the hands of the Russian traders were major causes of a near-extinction-level Unangan population decline of eighty percent. This thesis will argue that, despite the injustices suffered by the Unangax at Russian hands, a major contributing factor in their conversion to Orthodox Christianity was their perception of impressive similarities between the two outlooks. This thesis will explore in detail four major points of correspondence that the Unangax likely perceived between their religiosity and that of Russian Orthodoxy, namely: 1) their cosmologies; 2) the ritual uses of Unangan masks and Orthodox icons; 3) the roles of water in rituals of purification; and 4) their practices of prayer. This thesis will conclude that because of these similarities, the Unangax found Orthodox beliefs and practices far from alien, and thus adoptable without an emotionally prohibitive abandonment of their own spiritual sensibilities

Effect of Moving Ice Loads on the Plastic Capacity of a Ship’s Structure

The IACS unified polar rules define the design ice load as a glancing impact on the bow shoulder. The load and structural response model in the polar rules ignore the tangential motions and assumes the interaction occurs at one location. If the impact duration were sufficient, the ice may “score” along the hull during a glancing impact. This paper examines the questions of how structure responds to moving loads, in comparison to normal loads. An explicit nonlinear numerical model was created and validated against full-scale physical experiments. Moving load scenarios were then simulated. The structure’s capacity to withstand moving loads causing “progressive damage” was found to be generally less than its capacity to withstand static loads

Realistic Moving Ice Loads and Ship Structural Response

Prior work by the authors has shown that moving ice loads incite a significantly different structural response in steel grillage structures than do stationary ice loads. The work was based on a validated explicit numerical model of a steel grillage. The main drawback was that the ice load model was largely unrealistic in terms of the distributed pressure and ice motions. The present work employs two realistic ice load models: a dynamic 4D pressure model, and a validated "crushable foam" ice model. Results using these realistic ice load models lend credence to previous findings and enable more realistic modeling of the whole ice-ship impact scenario

Response of IACS URI Ship Structures to Real-time Full-scale Operational Ice Loads

Moving ice loads can incite significantly different structural responses in a steel grillage structure than can stationary ice loads. This is significant because the accepted standard for the design and analysis of ice-classed ship structures is to assume a stationary ice load (LACS URI 12.3.1). The following work utilizes the 4D Pressure Method ((Quinton, Daley, and Gagnon 2012)) to apply thirty-five of the most significant ice loads recorded during the USCGC Polar Sea trials (1982-86), to fourteen IACS URI PCI-7 classed grillages; using explicit finite element analyses. Two grillage variations for each of the seven PC classes were examined: grillages with "built T" framing and grillages with "flatbar" framing. In short, the following simulations directly employ real-time/real-space measured full-scale ice loads, and thus provide insight into the structural capabilities of the various IACS URI polar classes when subject to actual (moving) ice loads