Social Sciences Newsblog

Category: Research

Graduate Student Prehoda In the News

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image144321-persABC-10 News aired a story, about the potential for using solar energy in the UP, quoting Michigan Tech graduate student Emily Prehoda.

She is working on a survey that will be conducted in L’Anse next fall, a collaborative effort of the Western Upper Peninsula Planning and Development Region, the Village of L’Anse, WPPI Energy, and Michigan Tech’s Keweenaw Research Center and Department of Social Sciences.

Residents of the village buy their power from WPPI Energy, a non-profit company.

Prehoda was also featured in USA Today (“The US could prevent a lot of deaths by switching from coal to solar“), and on NBC and CBS with researcher Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE).

Also in print, Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) and social sciences PhD Student Emily Prehoda coauthored, potential lives saved by replacing coal with solar photovoltaic electricity production in the U.S., in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews that can be read here.

 

 

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Will Solar Power Work in the U.P.?

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Emily Prehoda
Emily Prehoda

ABC-10 News aired a story about the potential for using solar energy in the UP, quoting Michigan Tech graduate student Emily Prehoda. She is working on a survey that will be conducted in L’Anse next fall, a collaborative effort of the Western Upper Peninsula Planning and Development Region, the Village of L’Anse, WPPI Energy, and Michigan Tech’s Keweenaw Research Center and Department of Social Sciences. Residents of the village buy their power from WPPI Energy, a non-profit company. See here.

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Winkler- MTU/UNH Research Finds Migration Making Most American Counties More Diverse

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Richelle Winkler
Richelle Winkler

Richelle Winkler co-authored a research brief, Moving to Diversity, with Kenneth Johnson from the University of New Hamphire.  Using new data and techniques, they find that net migration between counties increased racial diversity in each of the last two decades.  The full report can be found here: https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/moving-diversity.

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Anthropology Student participates in Undergrad Research Symposium

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imedImageJoe Iwanicki – Anthropology – Social Sciences
Iwanicki’s research, The Archaeology of Trade: A Study of a Twentieth Century Logging Camp, was presented at Michigan Tech’s 2017 Undergraduate Research Symposium this past week. With the assistance of LouAnn Wurst, Iwanicki looked at archaeological data from a 1900’s lumber camp in the Munising Michigan area called Coalwood. The data consists of artifacts that allow for investigation of trade and commodity flows. The archaeological record is combined with GIS to map and recreate the trade networks of the past, something rarely explored by archaeologists.

The Undergraduate Research Symposium highlights the amazing cutting-edge research being conducted on Michigan Tech’s campus by some of our best and brightest undergraduate students.

The students showcasing their work today have spent a significant portion of the past year working alongside Michigan Tech faculty and graduate students to explore, discover and create new knowledge. They’ve spent long hours in the lab or out in the field designing experiments, gathering data, creating new models and testing hypotheses. They’ve applied their classroom knowledge in new and sometimes unexpected ways, and developed new skills that will propel them forward in their careers.

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Schelly Quoted in Article on the Inter-connectivity of Food Production, Energy, and Water Usage

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Chelsea Schelly
Chelsea Schelly

Chelsea Schelly was quoted in the Sierra Magazine article Think Your Household Is Susatinable?  Think Again.   Schelly is a co- principal investigator on the project, “Reducing Household Food, Energy and Water Consumption: A Quantitative Analysis of Interventions and Impacts of Conservation.”,  that has received a $1,477,068 grant from the National Science Foundation.

 

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Options For Calumet’s Future Discussed

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Calumet-Village-Office-300x169From The Keweenaw Report

The Villages of Calumet and Laurium and Calumet Township all have highlights and their own challenges.

Dwindling populations and median household incomes well below the state average–especially in Calumet Village–have reduced the availability of services to residents over the years.

A team from Michigan Tech’s Department of Social Sciences has spent the last four months looking at the advantages and disadvantages of several options for the area.

Doctoral Student Kelley Christensen said, “We looked at five different possibilities.  We looked at keeping the status quo, we looked at intergovernmental agreements, revenue sharing, the possibility of the Village of Calumet dissolving into the township, and we also looked at the possibility of Laurium and Calumet Village becoming a city.”

Changes could take years to implement and a monumental effort would be needed by all community members involved, but Christensen says it all starts with people willing to talk about the possibilities.

Christensen said, “We just really hope that this starts a conversation.  Our purpose here was to provide information to them and give them a list of options, and then we’re hoping that it will facilitate discussion and participation in government.”

Their report is online for the public to review.

http://www.mtu.edu/social-sciences/research/reports/

The team will also post the power point presentation from Monday’s meeting online.  Questions can be directed to Dr. Richelle Winkler of Michigan Tech’s Department of Social Sciences.

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A Geospatial Approach to Uncovering the Hidden Waste Footprint of Lake Superior’s Mesabi Iron Range

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Jextractive industries and societyohn Baeten, Nancy Langston, and Don Lafreniere recently published an article titled: “A Geospatial Approach to Uncovering the Hidden Waste Footprint of Lake Superior’s Mesabi Iron Range” published in The Extractive Industries and Society.

The article is available for download until January 26, 2017 at the following link:  https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1UAjI,oMyQ5uEu

Article Abstract: “For decades, the Lake Superior Iron District produced a significant majority of the world’s iron used in steel production. Chief among these was the Mesabi Range of northern Minnesota, a vast deposit of hematite and magnetic taconite ores stretching for over 100 miles in length. Iron ore mining in the Mesabi Range involved three major phases: direct shipping ores (1893–1970s), washable ores (1907– 1980s), and taconite (1947–current). Each phase of iron mining used different technologies to extract and process ore. Producing all of this iron yielded a vast landscape of mine waste. This paper uses a historical GIS to illuminate the spatial extent of mining across the Lake Superior Iron District, to locate where low- grade ore processing took place, and to identify how and where waste was produced. Our analysis shows that the technological shift to low-grade ore mining placed new demands on the environment, primarily around processing plants. Direct shipping ore mines produced less mine waste than low-grade ore mines, and this waste was confined to the immediate vicinity of mines themselves. Low-grade ore processing, in contrast, created more dispersed waste landscapes as tailings mobilized from the mines themselves into waterbodies and human communities.”

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