Mountain Scholar (Digital Collections of Colorado and Wyoming)
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Hashtag activism interrogated and embodied: case studies on social justice movements
No full textIncludes bibliographical references and index.This volume analyzes the ways hashtags repurpose and reclaim societal narratives, carrying over into external spaces and are embodied by both participants and spectators alike. A diverse set of contributors from a range of disciplines utilize a variety of methodologies to interrogate trajectories and strategies of specific hashtag campaigns.--Provided by publisher.Introduction: redefining hashtag activism / Melissa Ames and Kristi McDuffie -- Networked intervention and the emergence of #BostonHelp / Megan McIntyre -- Sticky hashtags: the role of emotions and affect in hashtag activism / Salma Kalim -- Affecting digital activism: comparative study of tweets from the March For Our Lives rallies and Women's Marches / Melissa Ames and Kristi McDuffie -- #iLookLikeAnEngineer: women reclaiming STEM through hashtag activism / Holly M. Wells -- The ideograph and the #pussyhat: multimodal rhetorics of brevity in the Women's March / Sarah Riddick -- Imagi(ni)ng radicalism in the context of Indian student activism: the discursivity of hashtags and memes / Avishek Ray and Neha Gupta -- Wake up Mr. West: Kanye West, the Sunken Place, and the rhetoric of Black Twitter / Kyesha Jennings -- Lexa deserved better: how one character's death sparked a revolution and changed media representation for the LGBTQ+ community / Erin B. Waggoner -- Constructing digital diasporic spaces and reframing Black masculinity through Insecure's #LawrenceHive / Robert Barry Jr. -- Meme warfare and fake hashtag activism: 4chan's alt-right trolling culture / Jeffrey J. Hall -- A rhetoric of zaniness: trolling, the alt-right, and Pepe the Frog / Sean Milligan -- Who's the #FakeHistorian?: the rhetoric of #FakeHistory among conservative (counter)publics on Twitter / Anonymous -- Digital matters: Twitter reacts and hashtivist narratives / Gabriel I. Green and Morgan K. Johnson -- Conclusion: capturing a moving target: ethical research practices for hashtag activism / Elizabeth Buchanan, Rosemary Clark-Parsons, Stephanie Vie, William I. Wolff, and Kristi McDuffie
Principles of Macroeconomics 2e support material for OpenStax textbook: week 1, introduction - OER project materials
No full textMissing weeks are exam review weeks. There is a discussion prompt but no recitation material for week 4 (exam review).ECON 204.Week 1 discussion: Introductions. The material included here was developed to support the use of the OpenStax textbook Principles of Macroeconomics 2e. The material includes two components: (1) weekly discussion prompts that were developed for use on online discussion boards; and (2) weekly recitation worksheets and answer keys.Please see online textbook: https://openstax.org/details/books/principles-macroeconomics-2e.The materials were collected for the OER project funded by the Colorado OER Council Grant (AY 2021)
Influence of habitat complexity on diversity and community structure of arboreal spiders in grassland-shrub systems
No full textIncludes bibliographical references.2023 Spring.Revealing the ecological drivers of species distribution is one of the central issues in ecology. The ecological niche concept recognizes that distribution of species is influenced by abiotic (e.g., temperature, landscape characteristics, and nutrients) and biotic (e.g., food availability) factors through both direct and indirect mechanisms. Many of these niche factors can influence the spatial position of plants in a landscape. Plant communities often determine the physical structure of the environment (microclimate, plant architecture) and therefore, have a considerable influence on the distribution of animal species, such as arthropods, and on local community structure. For instance, vegetation structure provides spatial complexity by creating microenvironments that may enable more interactions with other species that live on plants or allow resource partitioning. In grasslands, much of the arboreal habitat is in the form of shrubs, but the role and importance of shrubs in distribution and diversity of arthropods in grasslands is unknown. Spiders are a useful indicator for examining the role of shrubs in arthropod ecology because they are genetically and behaviorally diverse predators and prey that can be captured and counted with a single method. Spiders are a key component of invertebrate communities of grasslands and arboreal spiders of grasslands provide a unique ecological system to study habitat association and community assemblage. However, most spider studies in prairie ecosystems have focused on ground dwelling taxa or those associated with agroecosystems. Only limited data exist for shrub-dwelling species and few studies have compared arboreal spider occupancy across different grassland shrub species. I endeavored to understand this system in more detail by investigating how arboreal spider community structure responds to native shrub species, plant community composition and landscape complexity. Since landscape complexity can be evaluated at multiple scales, landscape characteristics can be significant predictors of presence and abundance for a variety of taxa. I collected and identified 3,053 specimens to family, genus or species level and found that presence of certain shrub species predicted spider species occurrence and suggested diversity community structure patterns. I found that habitat association to combinations on shrub species indicated habitat specific niche partitioning of arboreal spiders in two Colorado grassland systems. Because shrub species occurrence is largely dependent on elevation and moisture gradients, spider occupancy may also be tied to similar gradients correlated with these landscape factors. Changes in the topography of the sampling area affected the local plant communities of shrubs across a recognized elevational gradient, which correlated to habitat zones for arboreal spiders in the local area
Quinton Holder: capstone
No full text2023 Spring.Colorado State University Art and Art History Department capstone project.Capstone contains the artist's statement, a list of works, and images of works.The artist's statement: My name is Quinn Holder and I am a 28-year-old artist with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a Graphic Design concentration from Colorado State University, as well as a previous Associate of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in Painting. I grew up here in Fort Collins and have lived here my entire life with no real plans on leaving the area. Through my strong background in painting and color theory, my recent graphic design studies have gone very smoothly. I have more than 10 years worth of creative experience under my belt, so my portfolio of work is very broad. I enjoy web building, logo design, graphic and media production, and producing works that both myself and others can interact with in positive ways. A few things I enjoy in my free time aside from creative work are spending time with the people I care about, skateboarding with my friends, playing video games, and continuing to build and work on my ever expanding skill set. Even if my work isn't your particular cup of tea, I hope my work inspires you and others and can potentially spark a conversation
Chloe Leline: capstone
No full text2022 Fall.Colorado State University Art and Art History Department capstone project.Capstone contains the artist's statement, a list of works, and images of works.The artist's statement: I grew up hearing people tell my mother "You've got a great eye" as they would walk through whatever space was currently our home. I grew up seeing my dad draw on the back of the receipt at every restaurant we'd go to. As time passed I saw myself in them. Doodling on my math tests and helping my friends hang posters and paintings up in their room because they liked the way I worked with the layout. Now I'm a graphic designer. I used to feel like I couldn't call myself an artist because there's not one solid theme in my artwork or one specific style that shines through in my design. What I once saw as a weakness, I realize now is what makes me good at my craft. I am able to mold myself and my art to fit the job that needs to be done. One of my professors once told me "Everything you make is your style of art because you are the one that made it. " One thing that stays true to each project I do is my process. Even if the work I'm doing will result in a digital product, I always start with pen to paper. I like to treat my sketchbook as a scrapbook, filling it with bits and pieces of anything and everything, glued and taped in alongside my sketches to bring the whole thing to life. That's how I like to work, and now I understand that the process holds just as much artistry as the designs that result from it. I wasn't one of those people who always knew what they wanted to be when they grew up, it changed often, jumping from chef to fashion designer. Still, all of my interests have revolved around the act of creation. Even though graphic design can be more technical, there's still creative freedom to it. I believe that the key to a good designer is to be able to find a balance between them. If I'm not pushing myself and growing as a designer with each chance I get, I'm doing it wrong
Manure management decision-making of cattle-feed growers in northeastern Colorado
No full textIncludes bibliographical references.2023 Spring.Rural water supplies, including household wells and small-town water systems, located near livestock production and irrigated agriculture operations are often at risk for high nitrate-levels resulting from concentrated feedlot manure disposal as administered by livestock-feed farmers. Efficient manure management is one approach to minimizing nutrient pollution of rural groundwater and surface waters, and crop-farmers near the feedlots are de facto manure managers. This study observes how farmers value manure and whether they frame manure as a waste disposal issue, as an important fertilizer resource, or both. This distinction places manure management in the overlap between environmental sociology and natural resource sociology. The study identifies factors related to how farmers choose fields on which to apply manure, the monetary value of cattle manure as perceived from a farmer's perspective, and how densely farmers choose to apply manure. Using response data from a mail-survey of farmers operating near feedlots, I found that a farmer's manure source, perceptions about manure application, and practical knowledge, along with some personal and farm-operation characteristics, are related to how farmers perceive manure's value, and to how efficiently they apply it. Having one's own livestock and viewing manure as an inexpensive fertilizer are factors that appear to increase manure's perceived value. Factors that reduce manure's perceived value include years of experience in farming, cover-crop nutrient crediting, size of an operation, and concern for the hazard of water pollution. Recognizing the nutrient value of applied manure to reduce the quantity of commercial fertilizer being applied could substantially increase a farm's profitability while protecting water resources from over-application of nutrients. Yet while farmers typically reduced the nitrogen application on a manured field, that reduction was usually small relative to the nutrients added. This concurs with the results of numerous other studies concluding that many farmers are deliberately over-fertilizing to seek the best possible yield and applying extra nitrogen to plan for the most favorable climatic conditions possible. While farmers might be expected to distribute manure more sparingly over a larger field, the opposite turned out to be true. This finding is consistent with the plausible hypothesis that larger fields are especially appealing as places to dispose of large amounts of manure. In addition to exploring some of the practical aspects of a farmer's role as a manure manager, I have found it relevant to consider some of the structural background elements that make it inevitable for most farmers to over-apply nitrogen as a means of maximizing yield when growing cattle-feed crops. Farmers' economic success depends in large part on complying with the recommendations of agricultural conglomerate companies that supply their inputs. Note that nitrogen is typically over-applied to corn crops even in areas where no manure is used or available. Being expected to over-apply nitrogen, farmers are unlikely to hold back on applying manure, and are likely to see only benefits in adding organic matter to the land they are cropping. The primary research presented here provides some dimensions in which to work with farmers, aiming toward curbing the over-application of crop nutrients
The association between political environment and COVID-19 mortality in selected Colorado counties
Full text link2023 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.The SARS-CoV-2 virus spread worldwide triggering a global Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. COVID-19 remains a public health threat today and may continue to do so into the future dependent on the emergence of variants and our ability to mitigate harm through vaccines and other public health measures. The COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States during a time of great political tension and divide under the administration of President Donald Trump. State-level variation in mitigation measures may have been influenced by political views. COVID-19 mortality rates also varied by county. This paper seeks to investigate whether the county-level political environment was associated with differences in COVID-19 mortality in the state of Colorado. We examined the association between political environment and county-level age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality rates during 2020 and 2021. Political environment is measured using data from the 2016 and 2020 Presidential election vote distribution by county, obtained from the Colorado Secretary of State. Outcome data was obtained from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), having already been age-adjusted using direct standardization based on the 2010 Census. Any counties with 3 of fewer deaths in a calendar year were excluded, leaving a total of 48 counties in 2020 and 56 in 2021. Rate ratios and 95% confidence intervals were estimated using Quasi-Poisson regression models, separately for 2020 and 2021 mortality data. The models were adjusted for population density, the percentage of county residents without health insurance, and the demographics percentile from the Colorado EnviroScreen Environmental Justice Tool. Models were further evaluated for the presence of effect modification by population density. There are a total of 64 counties in the state of Colorado. In the 2016 election, 42 counties voted for Donald Trump. In the 2020 election, that dropped to 40 counties. Age-adjusted mortality rates ranged from 14.3-458.0 per 100,000 over the two years of data. For 2021 mortality data, the estimated mean adjusted mortality rate was 78% higher among counties where aggregated individual votes were highest in percentage for Donald Trump in 2016 as compared to counties with highest vote percentage for Hilary Clinton. (RR = 1.78; 95% CI: 1.26-2.59). For 2020, the estimated mean adjusted mortality rate was found to be 24% higher among counties voting in highest percentage for Donald Trump in 2016 as compared to counties voting in highest percentage for Hilary Clinton, though this association was not statistically significant. (RR=1.24; 95% CI: 0.81-1.94). Similar results were observed for the 2020 election data (comparing county-level voting results for Trump vs. Biden). We did not observe evidence that the association was modified by population density. This study observed an association between county-level political environment and age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality rates, specifically finding an association that became statistically significant during the pandemic. These results build on a growing body of evidence studying the links between politics and COVID-19 outcomes. Strengths of this study include the use of publicly available datasets, state-wide analysis, multiple model options with similar results indicating robustness, and utilization of a novel environmental justice metric to adjust for multiple confounders simultaneously. As this was an ecological study, inference cannot be extended to individuals. Future research may want to further explore both the individual and community political exposures that may influence mortality. It may also be suggested to investigate election data as a continuous rather than binary variable to tease out the relationship in more detail. Studies such as this may be useful as the COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing, and in preparation for any future pandemics
Chasing the sound
No full text2023 Spring."Chasing the sound" has been a direction in my mind from the moment I first heard a violin played. My primary relationship with the instrument has been fundamental to the shaping of my relationship with my body and with other bodies. I have been humbled by the process of writing these poems, allowing them to arrive, tuning their forms, sequencing and re-sequencing their positions, and identifying guide notes and echoes, toward orchestrating a coherent whole. The MS writes into interwoven questions concerning identity, connection, and belonging, representative of a particular stage of my becoming as woman and artist. These poems have taught me how to better read myself, have shown me ways toward a re-integration of Self, in the context of intergenerational trauma, mental illness, relational complexity, and queer identity. To me, this collection embodies an ecology with a basis in sound and sounding(-out). If asked to describe this poetry collection in two words, I would respond: inheritance, desire. I feel these poems traveling the contours of longing and loss, harmony and dissonance. I find that they reflect a process of healing off-the-page with respect to disentangling the relationship of the body with the instrument from: the relationship of the body with nourishment from: the relationship of the body with a beloved. Perhaps most striking to me is the way these poems have opened me toward a forward-movement of my body, how reaching or "walking" back toward points of origin has offered an embrace of creativity that includes the possibility of future motherhood. An early and abiding intention of the manuscript has been to bring the embodied experience of musicmaking to the page. In my first workshop here, I found myself taking up a work of uncovering/recovering Indigenous heritage on my mother's side, a conversation begun years prior at my grandmother's kitchen table. At the center of my inquiry was the interlinkage of bodies across four generations through the life of an instrument (my great-grandmother Orleta's fiddle). I am the sole violin-player today across both maternal and paternal (Irish American) bloodlines. I have felt drawn to bring musicmaking to the page as a site of intergenerational encounter. I encounter a poetic form as an inheritance of the body, the body in turn an inheritance of the surrounding world/landscape (of dimensions both corporeal and spiritual). Through my time in this program, the field of the page has further opened to me and the poems, allowing for more fully embodied forms, projective of both identity and place. The heightened participation of white space in the musical scoring of a poem has also propelled my coming-into a more intentional gestural logic of punctuation, in particular, use of the colon, with the parenthesis and em dash especially behaving in dynamic relation. The colon feels vital to transformative possibility within and across poems, as threshold, entryway, opening, movement between manifest and unmanifest. Dimensionality and directionality, parataxis and hypotaxis, centrifugal and centripetal motion—sculptural shape has been teaching me how to write narratively without plot, and, to enact a generative tension between feeling and understanding. Composing along multiple axes has expanded my repertoire for enacting multiplicity/multivocality. The forms of these poems feel more authentically aligned with my lifeway as a musician, scored through exchange between nonverbal and verbal, human and greater-than-human, the improvised and composed. Inclinations to speak/not speak or reveal/conceal guide holding of silences and absences relative to inheritance—musicmaking, maternal lineage, epigenetics, human: greater-than-human interactivity. There is variation in the way these poems engage in spatial mapping of the proprioceptive, as well as, and in contrast with, showing a process of thinking on the page, which feels both vulnerable and gratifying. A significant development through this writing process has been diversifying the relationship between syntax and the line, elongating breath and cognitive movement through cumulative sentence structure, experimenting with inversion and the provisional. The prose poems, as well as the series of compressed untitled poems (marked by ~), represent a shift from open field to portraying movement of the mind within bounded form—the need for a kind of structured improvisation. I'm interested in the way form can variously hold content—to protect, expose, declare, recall. I experience form participating in contours of grace and mercy—allowing space or enclosure for processing, healing, dialogue, with self and with others, past, present, and future. The compilation of these poems has charged me with pushing synesthesia within my work, e.g., in the form of rhyming images, in play with aural refrain. Additionally, I have become more conscientious about how section breaks can serve to clarify scene/simultaneity/boundary/ threshold. Each of these aspects feels aligned with an embrace of fluidity, in one sense, a search for relinquishing repressive forms of (self-)control, and in another, a deepening in the queering of erotics in the work. I'm interested in how this collection might articulate those moments of living double, where grief and hope/joy are two sides of one fold, and self a continuum of becoming through interrelation. It has been a fulfilling process to get my arms around these poems as a body entire, puzzling out the sectioning and ordering of the collection, given the number and range of poems. The 83 poems collected here represent a passage across: ground of being in relationship with music/the violin; to origin through my maternal line, writing into questions of Seminole heritage and inheritance; to a navigation of beloved relationships; to an intertwining of these facets in a final section that re-situates the speaker in community. My greatest challenge in bringing these poems together has been to make more legible the interplay between pronouns. I am satisfied in where I've arrived in terms of distinguishing for the reader the meaning of the "she" and "i" with respect to the estrangement from Self I experience when in a depressed state/depressive episode. The "she" in the manuscript also works on the level of engaging the gifts of depression, particularly depression as a threshold of access to ancestral experience and re-connection. Beginning last semester, I have been engaged in an independent study of movement/dance alongside the writing practice, which has deeply re-informed my own bodily understanding of this multiplicity of self. Furthermore, I needed to find a balance in making evident the various beloveds in the "chasing the sound" section, approaching this via gender, while also allowing for fluidity of experience. Finding a three-part movement across this section allowed me to situate a beloved "you" that affirms where I am in my current lived experience as a bisexual woman, affirming attraction and romantic love as being not about the gender, but about the person. Additional valences of "you" include the primacy of relation between myself and the violin, and myself and my twin sister
Interpolating RGB radar images based on machine learning
No full text2023 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Weather radar interpolation is the process of estimating and predicting rainfall data in areas that are not directly observed by radar. This technique is commonly used in weather forecasting, flood prediction, and agricultural planning. The main goal of weather radar interpolation is to produce accurate and reliable precipitation maps in areas with limited radar coverage or where the radar data is incomplete. The interpolation methods can be categorized into two main groups: deterministic and stochastic. Deterministic methods use mathematical equations and physical models to estimate the rainfall, while stochastic methods rely on statistical algorithms to analyze the correlations between the radar measurements and ground observations. In recent years, machine learning algorithms have also been applied to weather radar interpolation, showing promising results in accuracy and robustness. In this paper, we mainly propose a radar image interpolation method based on spatio-temporal convolutional networks. The experiments are mainly compared and analyzed for different combinations of networks, connection methods, and different loss functions
Strategies to maintain market access for pork and enhance functionality of beef proteins
Full text link2023 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.African swine fever is a high-consequence foreign animal disease endemic to sub-Saharan Africa and the island of Sardinia. The U.S. is the world's third largest pork producer, and ASF introduction would severely disrupt the pork supply chain, emphasizing a need to protect market access for U.S. proteins. However, niche producers raising swine intended for exhibition may not follow stringent biosecurity protocols and livestock show circuits may promote untracked animal movement across the country, potentially exacerbating virus spread in the event of ASF incursion into the U.S. Two Qualtrics surveys designed to evaluate knowledge, understanding, and perceptions of ASF and biosecurity principles of youth swine exhibitors and adults involved in the exhibition swine industry were distributed via flyers, emails, and canvassing at livestock shows. Youth exhibitors (age 21 and under) answered questions assessing their knowledge and provided basic demographic information, including their home state and states to which they traveled for exhibitions. Adult respondents answered the same questions assessing their knowledge and provided information on their time involved in the swine industry and number of shows attended by the youth they advise (if any). Youth respondents (n = 127) lived in 14 states and exhibited in 23 states, with 35% and 28% holding membership in state and national swine organizations, respectively. When provided with a list of ASF clinical signs, 34 individuals (26.9%) correctly identified all symptoms. Twenty-nine individuals (23%) incorrectly responded that ASF has been found in the U.S., and ten (7.9%) believed the virus cannot spread between pigs. Increased biosecurity understanding in youth exhibitors showed a significant relationship with an increase in years involved (p0.05) in water activity, pH, or shear force values between the treatment groups. Additionally, trained sensory panelists did not discern differences between treatment or control samples when asked to rate attributes that included beef flavor intensity, seasoning intensity, springiness, and mouth coating, indicating that NOVAPRO® powder could be added to processed meat products to reduce costs without compromising product quality