The Vice President for Research Office announced the Research Execellence Fund Awards. From the Department of Social Sciences Don Lafreniere, Assistant Professor of Historical Geography and GIS, was awarded a Research Seed grant and Chelsea Schelly, Assistant Professor of Sociology, was awarded a Scholarship and Creativity grant.
See the full article in Tech Today.
Professor Carol MacLennan has been awarded the 2015 Ka Palapala Poʻokela prize for non-fiction for her book “Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaiʻi.” It was selected by the Hawaiʻi Book Publisher’s Association, which recognizes books published in and about Hawaiʻi.
From Tech Today
Professor Barry Solomon (Social Sciences) published an updated version of his paper, Energy Resources and Use. In Warf, B., ed. Oxford Bibliographies: Geography (New York: Oxford University Press). It is available at: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199874002/obo-9780199874002-0021.xml?rskey=vNQy2z&result=16&q=
From Tech Today:
Outstanding students, staff, and a special alumna were honored on April 17, 2015 at Michigan Tech’s 21st Annual Student Leadership Awards Ceremony. This year’s recipient of the Provost’s Award for Scholarship was Melissa Michaelson, Departmental Scholar from Social Sciences majoring in Anthropology.
According to the Student Affairs and Advancement, “each academic department nominates one student to represent their department as its Departmental Scholar. From the collective departments, one student is selected to receive the Provost’s Award for Scholarship.
The Provost’s Award for Scholarship is given to a senior who best represents student scholarship at Michigan Tech. This outstanding student is considered excellent not only by academic standards, but also for participation in research scholarship activity, levels of intellectual curiosity, creativity, and communication skills.”
Congratulations Melissa!
9:00-10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, April 28 in AOB 201. Open to all.
Join in celebrating the work of students from Intro GIS for Social Sciences class on Tuesday, April 28th as they present their Final Project Posters.
Poster presentations and student teams include:
“Gauging Hope: Mapping Material Changes in an Industrial Townscape” John Arnold, Adrian Blake, and Emily Oppliger
“Identifying Sustainable Forest Biomass Sources Using Spatial Criteria Analysis: A Case Study of Rothschild, Wisconsin” Miranda Aho, Brad Barnett, Jeff Kelly, and Melissa Michaelson
“Predictive Modeling of Industrial Archaeology and Pollution Potential in Urban Brownfields” Eric Pomber and Dan Trepal
“Mapping the Potential Impacts of Unconventional Oil and Gas Exploitation in Michigan” Nicolette Slagle
4:00 P.M. on Friday, April 24th in AOB 201.
Professor Fred Quivik will present “The Deepwater Horizon Trial: United States v. BP, under the Clean Water Act”.
Professor Quivik will present an overview of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the nature of the trial under the Clean Water Act, a summary of his testimony and the role that the United States hopes it will have played at trial, and a description of how he came to develop the expertise he used in the Deepwater Horizon case and some reflections on what that means for General Education at Michigan Technological University.
Kelly Boyer Ontl co-authored a paper, New evidence on the tool-assisted hunting exhibited by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in a savannah habitat at Fongoli, Senegal published in the Royal Society Open Science,
was summarized in numerous news articles highlighting the team’s chimpanzee research including Chimps that Hunt Offer a New View on Evolution from the New York Times, Women are better at DIY (in chimps at least): Female primates can master and use tools more easily than males from Daily Mail, and Female Chimps More Likely Than Males to Hunt With Tools from Smithsonian.
ABSTRACT:
For anthropologists, meat eating by primates like chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) warrants examination given the emphasis on hunting in human evolutionary history. As referential models, apes provide insight into the evolution of hominin hunting, given their phylogenetic relatedness and challenges reconstructing extinct hominin behaviour from palaeoanthropological evidence. Among chimpanzees, adult males are usually the main hunters, capturing vertebrate prey by hand. Savannah chimpanzees (P. t. verus) at Fongoli, Sénégal are the only known non-human population that systematically hunts vertebrate prey with tools, making them an important source for hypotheses of early hominin behaviour based on analogy. Here, we test the hypothesis that sex and age patterns in tool-assisted hunting (n=308 cases) at Fongoli occur and differ from chimpanzees elsewhere, and we compare tool-assisted hunting to the overall hunting pattern. Males accounted for 70% of all captures but hunted with tools less than expected based on their representation on hunting days. Females accounted for most tool-assisted hunting. We propose that social tolerance at Fongoli, along with the tool-assisted hunting method, permits individuals other than adult males to capture and retain control of prey, which is uncommon for chimpanzees. We assert that tool-assisted hunting could have similarly been important for early hominins.
12:00 noon on Friday, April 17th in AOB 201.
Kelly Boyer Ontl will present: “CHIMPANZEES IN THE ISLAND OF GOLD: Impacts of artisanal small-scale gold mining on chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in Fongoli, Senegal”.
ABSTRACT:
Artisanal small-scale gold mining (ASGM) has a long history in West Africa, supplementing agricultural livelihoods and helping to fuel West African empires, ancient Egypt, and medieval Europe via extensive trade routes. ASGM continues today but has taken on different dimensions through the influence of globalization and mechanization. The widespread practice now threatens the habitat, health and future of West African wildlife including endangered West African chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus). In this talk I will be discussing the socio-ecological impacts of ASGM activity on chimpanzee behavior and resource use at the Fongoli field site in southeastern Senegal. The surge in gold prices over the past 10 years has intensified gold mining in Senegal, increasing transnational migration, human population, and environmental degradation, and consequently altering how chimpanzees use the landscape. The impacts of ASGM are now considered among the species’ largest threat in Senegal, and conservation efforts are underway to protect the country’s remaining chimpanzee population last estimated at 500 individuals.
Michigan Tech’s Mine Water Geothermal team won 2 awards at the EPA’s National Sustainable Design Expo in Washington DC this weekend (April 10-13). The team won an EPA Honorable Mention Award and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ (AIChE)s Youth Council on Sustainable Science and Technology (YCOSST) Award.
From Tech Today:
Assistant Professor Don Lafreniere (SS) co-authored a paper, “All the World’s a Stage: A GIS Framework for Recreating Personal Time-Space from Qualitative and Quantitative Sources,” in Transactions in GIS, Vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 225-246.
Abstract:
This article presents a methodological model for the study of the space-time patterns of everyday life. The framework utilizes a wide range of qualitative and quantitative sources to create two environmental stages, social and built, which place and contextualize the daily mobilities of individuals as they traverse urban environments. Additionally, this study outlines a procedure to fully integrate narrative sources in a GIS. By placing qualitative sources, such as narratives, within a stage-based GIS, researchers can begin to tell rich spatial stories about the lived experiences of segregation, social interaction, and environmental exposure. The article concludes with a case study utilizing the diary of a postal clerk to outline the wide applicability of this model for space-time GIS research.