Cultural Bubbles in Ecuador

While still in the midst of their study abroad experiences, students at Linfield College write reflective essays. Their essays address issues of cultural similarity and difference, compare lifestyles, mores, norms, and habits between their host countries and home, and examine changes in perceptions about their host countries and the United States. In this essay, Haley Parson describes her observations during her study abroad program at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador

Adventures in Tena

Postcard from Haley Parson, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuado

RRS "Charles Darwin" Cruise 169, 17 Feb-19 Mar 2005. Hydrothermal exploration of the southern Mid-Atlantic Ridge

The principal objective of this cruise was to identify the first site or sites of high temperature hydrothermal venting anywhere on the southern Mid-Atlantic Ridge, to characterize their geological setting, preliminary chemical nature and to identify, where possible, the nature of any vent-endemic species that might inhabit such vents to investigate whether this ridge system might represent a new biogeographic province. Initially we used the TOBI deep-tow sidescan system equipped with a CTD system and optical backscatter sensors, together with Miniature Autonomous Plume Recorders (MAPRs) to identify two new sites in which diagnostic chemically- and particle-laden plumes indicated the presence of high-temperature hydrothermal venting. Subsequently, we used the ABE autonomous underwater vehicle to (1) locate the core of one of these hydrothermal plumes, (2) obtain a detailed map of the underlying seafloor and (3) photograph three discrete hydrothermal sites (2 black-smoker systems, 1 diffuse-flow) and their associated ecosystems. A series of CTD stations were occupied for water column investigations and a number of rock-coring and dredging stations were also undertaken to provide groundtruthing of sidescan sonar images of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge seafloor

Using hidden Markov models for iterative non-intrusive appliance monitoring

Non-intrusive appliance load monitoring is the process of breaking down a household’s total electricity consumption into its contributing appliances. In this paper we propose an approach by which individual appliances are iteratively separated from the aggregate load. Our approach does not require training data to be collected by sub-metering individual appliances. Instead, prior models of general appliance types are tuned to specific appliance instances using only signatures extracted from the aggregate load. The tuned appliance models are used to estimate each appliance’s load, which is subsequently subtracted from the aggregate load. We evaluate our approach using the REDD data set, and show that it can disaggregate 35% of a typical household’s total energy consumption to an accuracy of 83% by only disaggregating three of its highest energy consuming appliances

A hidden Markov model-based acoustic cicada detector for crowdsourced smartphone biodiversity monitoring

In recent years, the field of computational sustainability has striven to apply artificial intelligence techniques to solve ecological and environmental problems. In ecology, a key issue for the safeguarding of our planet is the monitoring of biodiversity. Automated acoustic recognition of species aims to provide a cost-effective method for biodiversity monitoring. This is particularly appealing for detecting endangered animals with a distinctive call, such as the New Forest cicada. To this end, we pursue a crowdsourcing approach, whereby the millions of visitors to the New Forest, where this insect was historically found, will help to monitor its presence by means of a smartphone app that can detect its mating call. Existing research in the field of acoustic insect detection has typically focused upon the classification of recordings collected from fixed field microphones. Such approaches segment a lengthy audio recording into individual segments of insect activity, which are independently classified using cepstral coefficients extracted from the recording as features. This paper reports on a contrasting approach, whereby we use crowdsourcing to collect recordings via a smartphone app, and present an immediate feedback to the users as to whether an insect has been found. Our classification approach does not remove silent parts of the recording via segmentation, but instead uses the temporal patterns throughout each recording to classify the insects present. We show that our approach can successfully discriminate between the call of the New Forest cicada and similar insects found in the New Forest, and is robust to common types of environment noise. A large scale trial deployment of our smartphone app collected over 6000 reports of insect activity from over 1000 users. Despite the cicada not having been rediscovered in the New Forest, the effectiveness of this approach was confirmed for both the detection algorithm, which successfully identified the same cicada through the app in countries where the same species is still present, and of the crowdsourcing methodology, which collected a vast number of recordings and involved thousands of contributors.</p

Extrusion of aluminium-lithium alloys

Imperial Users onl

Are STEM Syllabi Gendered? A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis

This study explored the gendered nature of STEM higher education institution through a feminist critical discourse analysis of STEM course syllabi from a Midwest research university. I explored STEM syllabi to understand how linguistic features such as stance and interdiscursivity are used in the syllabus and how language and discourses used in the syllabus replicate the masculine nature of STEM education. Findings suggest that the discourses identified in the syllabi reinforce traditional STEM academic roles, and that power and gender in the STEM syllabi are revealed through exploration of the themes of knowledge, learning, and the teaching and learning environment created by the language used in the syllabus. These findings inform and extend understanding of the STEM syllabus and the STEM higher education institution and lead to recommendations about how to make the STEM syllabus more inclusive for women