The Distribution of the Triplet Reflector in the Northwestern Gulf of Mexico as Observed on High-Resolution Subbottom Profiles

A regionally persistent sequence of closely spaced, parallel reflectors known as the Triplet was studied using high-resolution profile data and sediment core data collected throughout the slope of the Gulf of Mexico. When reflectors are regionally persistent, they may be of value for two reasons: their distribution provides important clues about the nature of broad-scale environmental processes, and they can serve as reference horizons for both scientific and engineering applications. Sediments accumulating in the northwest Gulf of Mexico serve as an archive for glacial-interglacial changes in climatic and oceanographic conditions. Specifically, it is thought by other researchers that the Triplet marks a significant flux of terrigenous sediments into the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the last glaciation, which happened when glacial meltwater from the Laurentide Ice Sheet and associated Lake Agassiz flowed through the Mississippi River drainage. In this study, the occurrence and character of the Triplet was carefully documented using reflectors on high-resolution subbottom profiles collected during twenty-eight surveys of various locations across the continental slope. Analysis of this data was conducted using the IHS Kingdom seismic software platform, and sediment physical properties and radiocarbon ages from a previous study provided a means to ground truth the reflectors. Synthetic seismograms generated from sediment physical properties were quite similar to actual subbottom profiles, and synthetic seismograms corresponding to incrementally increasing sedimentation rates were compared to regional changes in actual reflector character. Results show the characteristics of the Triplet reflectors change with distance from the Mississippi River in ways that are consistent with it being the source sediment variations that produced the reflectors

Driver Performance While Interacting with the 511 Travel Information System in Urban and Rural Traffic

The national “511” highway information system is heavily used by drivers, especially during inclement weather, to plan and replan their trips. Few studies have explored the safety and usability of the 511 user interface, especially in the context of a mobile phone user who has the added workload of driving a vehicle. In this study, 36 drivers were divided into three groups (hand-held cell phone, hands-free cell phone, and control group) and drove a series of urban and rural scenarios in a high fidelity driving simulator. Drivers in the cell phone groups interacted with the Montana 511 travel information system to obtain road information on a segment of highway. Performance on the primary driving task (e.g., lanekeeping and speed control) was not affected by use of the 511 traveler information system. Driving tasks that required urgent attention (e.g., responding to unexpected traffic conflicts) were degraded by using the 511 travel system regardless of the type of phone used. Drivers using either cell phone to interact with the 511 information system were found to have a higher number of collisions and less situation awareness than those not interacting with the 511 system. Drivers using a hand-held cell phone were also found to have a higher frequency of braking responses. The increased crash risk of the phone users in our study (3.0 - 3.8) was very comparable to that reported by earlier studies of the risk of cell phone conversations

Creating and Sharing Fedora Installation Package for Ubuntu

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersOpen repositories are enterprise information systems that face ongoing challenges of maintaining low operating costs, high efficiency, and high reliability. This poster proposal presents an open source strategy to help address some of these challenges. The NSF funded NSDL Materials Digital Library Pathway (MatDL) offers a Fedora-based open repository and is moving toward using the Ubuntu distribution of Linux on all of its servers to capitalize on the advantages of Ubuntu. However, currently there is no easy way to implement Ubuntu with Fedora-based repositories. This poster describes MatDL's efforts to co-develop and host a Fedora installation package for Ubuntu.The Materials Digital Library Pathway (DUE-0532831) is supported by the National Science Foundation

Between the hedges: stories music cooperating teachers tell of their identities as teacher educators

A plethora of literature on cooperating teachers exists, but it is written from university researchers’ perspectives, leaving cooperating teachers’ voices silenced. Most researchers discuss what cooperating teachers do rather than who cooperating teachers say they are, particularly when they speak of themselves as teacher educators. The focus of this study was specifically on music cooperating teachers, and its purpose was to investigate their identities as narrative constructions. I employed Connelly and Clandinin’s (1999) stories to live by, Bruner’s (1987; 1991; 2002) self-making, and Ricoeur’s ipse-identity and idem-identity to suggest that identity stories were multiple, mobile, and contingent. Still, human beings sought continuity in their identity stories over time, and such stories were shaped in social and institutional contexts. Using touchstones of narrative inquiry (see Clandinin & Caine, 2013), I held six planned conversations with two other music cooperating teachers, which first generated field texts, and then, led to many follow-up conversations. The participants and I engaged in an eight-month process of co-constructing interim research texts. Clandinin acknowledged that, because identity stories were works in progress, standard research texts often were ineffective vehicles used to convey narrative identity. Therefore, I implemented a novella, an emotional story relying on character development, to present the final research text, and I entitled it “Between the Hedges.” Within my interpretations and reflections on “Between the Hedges,” I discussed how, when considering ourselves as music teacher educators, we told public and private stories of family and school, further situated as children, students, and parents. Parents and music teachers were highly influential figures, and not always in positive ways. Although the situated identity stories were multiple, each cooperating teacher wove a thread of sameness between his or her stories as they were retold and relived. I concluded that the sameness in each story was key to understanding rationales for cooperating teachers’ practices of mentoring student teachers

Rare Disease Week - Cooper Library Display

The Rare Disease Week book display in Cooper Library aims to highlight the history, stories, and impact of rare diseases. This display seeks to demonstrate the many types of rare diseases in the world, the foundational research texts behind disease identification and epidemiology, and the ways that communities can help support individuals living with a rare disease