Traditional Skin Preparation Methods

I am an Alaskan Native artist who is trying to learn more about my culture and to pass the information on to others before it is lost. Alaska Native cultures have been working with animal skins for thousands of years. Very few people today possess the knowledge to work these materials. I am interested in the use of the material for home dwellings and clothing. I am researching different ways that animal skins are turned into leather, specifically moose and salmon skins. I conducted interviews with local elders. I investigated the contrasting chemical material process that modern industry uses to produce tanned skins. The research has culminated in an installation made out of moose hide and wood in the Regents Great Hall April 23-27, 2012. The space will provide the viewer with a life sized environment simulating a traditional skin dwelling. I took a traditional preparation method used for salmon skins and transformed them into pieces of contemporary native art

More Sound-Spelling Correspondences

This article is a sequel to Sound-Spelling Correspondences in the May 1985 Word Ways, providing additional spellings for the indicated pronunciations. All have been taken from Webster\u27s Third Edition

Lost Wax Method Bronze Casting

Large scale bronze casting is a work intensive process that requires adequately equipped studio space, time, and a set of highly refined skills to complete the eight stages of the process. My goal was to construct a life sized bronze statue of a traditional Athabascan fisherman. I chose to sculpt a classically proportioned Greek style statue, using similar processes and ratios. I looked over photographs that I took in the Vatican museum and several anatomy books. Wendy Croskrey supported my research in large scale bronze casting a project this size. Through experimentation I discovered the importance of using the correct plaster and reinforcing molds properly. The process provided me with many firsts, such as a mold cracking open, plaster not setting, and having to recast a piece. Through hard work and careful consideration I was successful in completing the project

Conservative effects in spin-transfer-driven magnetization dynamics

It is shown that under appropriate conditions spin-transfer-driven magnetization dynamics in a single-domain nanomagnet is conservative in nature and admits a specific integral of motion, which is reduced to the usual magnetic energy when the spin current goes to zero. The existence of this conservation law is connected to the symmetry properties of the dynamics under simultaneous inversion of magnetisation and time. When one applies an external magnetic field parallel to the spin polarization, the dynamics is transformed from conservative into dissipative. More precisely, it is demonstrated that there exists a state function such that the field induces a monotone relaxation of this function toward its minima or maxima, depending on the field orientation. These results hold in the absence of intrinsic damping effects. When intrinsic damping is included in the description, a competition arises between field-induced and damping-induced relaxations, which leads to the appearance of limit cycles, that is, of magnetization self-oscillations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure