MFA Student Presentations: Powered by PechaKucha

Get to the point, your research point, in 20 PowerPoint slides. Printmakers may be poetic, purposeful, provocative, performative, progressive, palpable, passionate, pizazzy, P.H.A.T, or all of the above. PenchaKucha is a power point presentation with a simple format: 20 images x 20 seconds. This keeps presentations concise and moving. It’s a great equalizer for participants. More specifically, the format is 20 images that advance automatically every 20 seconds for a total presentation time of 400 seconds or 6 minutes and 40 seconds. PechaKucha was created by Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, of Tokyo based Klein-Dytham Architecture (KDa), to keep architectural presentations concise. Since the creation of PechaKucha, over 600 PechaKucha nights have occurred worldwide in numerous cities and have been used in teaching and research situations at various universities and conferences. Wired Magazine: Issue 15.09 states “Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down.” Dytham is quoted as saying “Suddenly…there’s no preciousness in people’s presentations. Just poetry.” PechaKucha 20x20 is a concise way for printmakers to present work, meet and mingle

Reclamation Design for a Hypothetical Coal Strip-Mine Dunn County, North Dakota

This document is a plan and design for the reclamation of a coal strip-mine in Dunn County, North Dakota, where lignite mining is likely to occur in the future

Wearing purple for a purpose

"Spring 2011

Analysis of fractionation in corn-to-ethanol plants

As the dry grind ethanol industry has grown, the research and technology surrounding ethanol production and co-product value has increased. Including use of back-end oil extraction and front-end fractionation. Front-end fractionation is pre-fermentation separation of the corn kernel into 3 fractions: endosperm, bran, and germ. The endosperm fraction enters the existing ethanol plant, and a high protein DDGS product remains after fermentation. High value oil is extracted out of the germ fraction. This leaves corn germ meal and bran as co-products from the other two streams. These 3 co-products have a very different composition than traditional corn DDGS. Installing this technology allows ethanol plants to increase profitability by tapping into more diverse markets, and ultimately could allow for an increase in profitability. An ethanol plant model was developed to evaluate both back-end oil extraction and front-end fractionation technology and predict the change in co-products based on technology installed. The model runs in Microsoft Excel and requires inputs of whole corn composition (proximate analysis), amino acid content, and weight to predict the co-product quantity and quality. User inputs include saccharification and fermentation efficiencies, plant capacity, and plant process specifications including front-end fractionation and backend oil extraction, if applicable. This model provides plants a way to assess and monitor variability in co-product composition due to the variation in whole corn composition. Additionally the co-products predicted in this model are entered into the US Pork Center of Excellence, National Swine Nutrition Guide feed formulation software. This allows the plant user and animal nutritionists to evaluate the value of new co-products in existing animal diets

Differentiation and Technology: A Study of an Elementary School’s Use of Technology in Differentiated Lessons

The purpose of this study was to examine teacher reports and use of differentiation and to examine the use of technology in differentiated lessons. The researcher posed two questions: (a) What is the association between teacher reports of differentiation use and observed differentiation strategies used; and (b) How are teachers using the differentiation strategies of which they are aware when planning and implementing lessons that involve technology in the areas of content, process, product, and learning environment? This mixed-method study used three tools for data collection: a questionnaire, structured observation protocol, and a focus group. The questionnaire and observation protocol were previously used and validated by Hobson (2008) and Tomlinson (2000). Interview questions were developed from areas of the questionnaire and the observation form and asked specific questions about technology used for differentiation. Upon analysis of data, similarities of use of differentiation strategies in two particular areas of differentiation occurred. Technology use for differentiation was also used in these areas. Based on these results, the researcher was able to make recommendations regarding professional development, technology, and suggestions for further research

Evolution of Subjective Hurricane Risk Perceptions: A Bayesian Approach

This paper studies how individuals update subjective risk perceptions in response to hurricane track forecast information, using a unique data set from an event market, the Hurricane Futures Market (HFM). We derive a theoretical Bayesian framework which predicts how traders update their perceptions of the probability of a hurricane making landfall in a certain range of coastline. Our results suggest that traders behave in a way consistent with Bayesian updating but this behavior is based on the perceived quality of the information received.risk perceptions, learning, Bayesian learning, event markets, prediction markets, favorite-longshot bias, hurricanes