The American Beaver

Paul Fischer
4/24/2017
Professor Alice Daniels

The American Beaver

Before engineering, the first things everyone thinks of when a beaver is mentioned are the unique bright orange teeth that mark one of the mammal’s favorite past-times: forest felling. In fact, they are not completely orange, but instead this appearance is from a layer of outer enamel that is harder than the rest of the dentin in the tooth (Holland, 353). As an herbivore, the largest rodent in North America actually uses the sharp, beveled edge created by movement of the incisors against lower teeth to fell trees, shorten twigs, and sharpen their teeth as a recreational activity as seen in figure 2.

Such dams are necessary for breeding as they give beavers access to the water where the mating occurs almost exclusively as well as to the surrounding environment in the bitter cold of the months January to March (407). The escape of beavers during the occasional January thaw to retrieve fresh food can be seen in tracks such as that in figure (368). Females have a short period of time when they are receptive to the attention of the male, around 22-24 hours, and a successful incident will result in between three and six kits, or young beavers, being born between May and July.

Young beavers will frequently spend several weeks of their life inside the dams, or lodges one of which can be viewed in figure 1 (84). This is because of another fascinating feature of beavers, the oil and castoreum used to grease and waterproof fur, that develops a little later. They will be driven from the home after a few years and before little siblings are born, meaning brother and sister are terms without meaning for beavers.

Oil to waterproof the beavers are not the only fascinating aspect of the beaver that adapts the prolific mammal to life in water and on land alike. In fact, the adaptations that allow the beaver to exist on land and underwater are numerous and relatively unique among rodent species (321-3). From webbed feet to a nictitating membrane, or transparent third eylid, the top of the beaver to the tail has been dramatically altered for survival in a variety of warm and cold, dry and wet environments. Even the respiratory system of the beaver is fundamentally altered from that of other species to allow use of five times as much of the oxygen inhaled as humans and to voluntarily increase bloodflow to the brain allowing toleration of higher levels of CO2. To put that in perspective, some beavers might be able to survive, for a period at least, without a suit on parts of Mars, where oxygen levels run at under 1% the level found on Earth, though humans have permanent brain damage as levels of oxygen decrease to under 5 or even the 12% found at higher altitudes (Williams).

A high distribution of predators means that stealth is not only limited to ease of transport in multiple environments and naturally nocturnal behavior, but even the communication of beavers has been altered. Rather than using calls or acrobatic body language, their primary means of communication is through scent mounds of mud and vegetation mixed with pungent gland residue.

Figures:

Figure 1: Beaver dam in a wetland

Centennial Woods Natural Preserve, Vermont, 2017

Figure 2: Evidence of beaver lodge-building activity

Centennial Woods Natural Preserve, Vermont, 2017

References:

Holland, M. (2010). Naturally Curious. Trafalgar Square Books.

Williams, D. R. (2016). Mars fact sheet. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center: Greenbelt, MD Retrieved from http://nssdc. gsfc. nasa. gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact  (April 24, 2017).

We Got You Covered

Paul Fischer

4/17/2017

Professor Lisa Dion

We Got You Covered © started as a pet project to give users an automated experience playing music without the hassle of getting up to turn pages or invest in a complicated system to turn pages as you play live music. By bringing your music and the music of your favorite artists from the sheets to the stage your cover band or quintet can easily master the most complicated music recorded in history. Get started here and hop into our sheet music: let us cover your dive into our unique automatic page-flipping mechanism. You can play an old rag tune with little more than a washboard and chickenbones or even organize an entire orchestra by porting the website through mobile devices. Yes, you are reading correctly, this website is fully mobile-optimized!

The fun doesn't end with performance. We Got You Covered also provides a contextualized service that allows even a novice music historian to place artists into a cohesive vision of modern and classical music theory provided by the website’s trained experts. Fun facts, pictures, and, of course, music lists can all be accessed through this brand new up and coming website.

Should you be interested in picking up more cool information and music or sharing your own tidbits or comments, our website also has a fully functional email list and submit option. Music has been developing for thousands of years and there is no reason that trend should stop with you. Start the next trend by composing and submitting your own work or the work of your favorite artists to be considered for  inclusion into the website!

We hope you enjoy your interactive trip through musical history with this multimedia extravaganza of popular songs, symphonies, quintets, and even ballets. If you know of a hot musical trend you can submit the idea and your contact information to get updates.  It was fun to make the site and provides an educational experience for users as well as developers: we look forward to hearing from you!

All three of the web designers have basic HTML coding credentials now and varied backgrounds that have allowed the website to develop appropriately. John learned FORTRAN (Formula Translation) and COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) for professional reasons before becoming interested in modern website design. Rachel studies film and television with a focus on television and is now beginning to learn website programming for computers. Paul is a history and environmental studies major who has taken classes in music before, fields that jived well with the topic of our website. He has learned programming in C and C++ and is completing a certificate in cybersecurity has well.

The University of Vermont is proud to sponsor musical and historical endeavors as well as STEM initiatives training young students in the languages of the future. This has become more critical to workplace functionality in recent years and both of these are foci inclusive of the academic goals at this research institution. No corporate or competing sponsorship has been disclosed in the development of the website. Right now this website operates under standard educational copyright standards

Environmental Justice: From Cancer Alley to the Aarhus Convention

Paul Fischer

4/11/2017

Teaching Assistant Jeremy Romanul

Professor Katlyn Morris

Environmental Justice: From Cancer Alley to the Aarhus Convention

One group that bears the effects of environmental pollution disproportionately are rural farm-workers. This is because protective gear does not always work and because the government is not present to ensure the efficacy of such gear. More importantly rampant illiteracy among this group in nations such as South Africa or Brazil mean that members of this group are frequently associated with a sense of hopelessness that reflects their inability to take action to better such a situation. This is a classic example of environmental injustice. Organizations in the developed world such as the Farmworker Association of Florida have taken steps to try and better fellow workers attempts to complete their work.

One such organization, Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL), deals with another group of the disenfranchised: the chronically poor who live in Kosovo and other Central and Eastern European areas. One study from these regions showed that 88% of the children under the age of 6 had severe lead poisoning such that immediate medical intervention was necessitated. These groups communicate through the forum of conventions, such as the 1998 Aarhus Convention, which HEAL adheres to.

Both farm workplace poisoning as well as lead poisoning are specific examples of environmental harms that can exist without groups who stand in the way of corporate or national interests. An example of benefits that can occur as a result of Environmental Justice activism includes the success of Concerned Citizens of Norco, founded by Margie Richard in 1990. The town in Louisiana is home to 120 petrochemical facilities, incinerators, and landfills and is known by Chemical Corridor or Cancer Alley. After a prolonged period of visible campaigns and a 2001 presentation in the Netherlands at the headquarters of Royal/Dutch Shell, relocation was offered to community members affected by pollution and emissions were reduced by 30%. Richard won the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize.

One area that remains muddy is how corporations have avoided to make environmental justice concerns a fundamental pillar of economic and political considerations even in the United States, nevermind other nations with severely affected or culpable communities. NGOs are a start, but even the EPA is clearly not sufficient to adequately direct the actions of massive corporations many times the size of any government bureau or office. Because many resource of Earth are shared, and the effect of pollution is rarely contained to any one entity, it may be time for international organizations to step up in a major fashion to achieve tangible goals and objectives.

History of Musical Trends in the 1850s to 1900

Paul Fischer

4/3/2017

History of Musical Trends in the 1850s to 1900

The 1850s saw the burgeoning classical music industry ripen with an almost pungent odor of success. While new musical forms such as jazz, salsa, and eventually pop would shock and invigorate listeners across the globe within a century, this final stage of classical dominance heardsome of the most technically proficient and abundant masterpieces. The romantic period saw the ripening of the careers of traditional musicians exemplified in Brahms' Liebslieder (1869) and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (1892). Both of these works equate the joys of childhood and innocence with the themes of romanticism already latent in European painting and literature. As perhaps an example of the only time period in which the profits and yields of industrialization could be focused on one set of objectives, the development of a Euro-centric romanticism, the work not only eclipsed but surpassed the work of innovators in the field in a definitive manner.

Expansion of the railroads during this period is evident in the music of the artists such as Josef Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony and the manner in which brassy sections open and present mark a rivalrous departure from other choral and religious composers of the time, despite the common musical ancestry of Mozart and, more recently, even Beethoven. Many different themes are inherent in the incredible development of classical music in Europe at the time. These include the religious grounding and explosion of fervor seemingly justified by not only the discovery but the realization of riches, populations, wars, emotions and tragedy on a scale not only previously unimaginable, but unimaginable from any scale previously imaginable.

Not all music of the period, however, was limited to the realm of classical work and opera houses. Home on the Range is provided as an example of tune composed in 1871 by Daniel Kelly to a poem written by Brewster Higley. In addition to the European infrastructural inward expansion allowing a greater proliferation of musical geniuses than in all the history of mankind prior to that point, American railroads were redefining the perceptions of peripheries as social and cultural constructs. A melting pot of Irish-American, African-American, European and other counter-cultures were all at the cusp of recognition, a throbbing hub of innovation just under the surface of the frontier lifestyle. By the 1900s, the music industry had dramatically changed and perhaps the most important aspect of this was the move from live audiences to gramophones and rags, both of which were finally commercially available to the masses by virtue of mass production and assembly-line factories.

Latin Jazz and the End of an Era

The end of the period saw the musical industry begin chugging as steadily as the steam engines, and Scott Joplin’s Solace (1909) will be included as an example of the developing Latin Jazz genre. While it was only published in 1909, a combination of musical and racial discrimination meant that habanera music had been popular in America for decades before any “rags” were published. By the 1940s this would become an entire genre and produce award-winning albums through the 1970s with broad popular appeal. For listeners in the late 1800s, though, the clave-style beat and off-center gathering of instrumental acoustic devices created a whirlwind of counter-cultural production right in the middle of urban areas.

The Indian Infrastructural Bottleneck: Frustration for the Green Revolution

Paul Fischer

3/21/2017

Teaching Assistant Jeremy Romanul

Professor Katlyn Morris

The Indian Infrastructural Bottleneck: Frustration for the Green Revolution

The success of the Green Revolution was a moment of relief for humanitarian efforts across the globe as advances in agricultural technology allowed for the end to world hunger to momentarily be in sight. Even though global food production possibilities could still feed almost twice as many people as forecasts from previous decades expected, infrastructural bottlenecks in economic market systems continue to contribute to regional and domestic shortages. The globalized agrofood system will be examined locally as narrow interpretations of the right to life are disregarded to embrace the actuality of international treaties, covenants and commitments responsible parties including corporate entities and national governments and the implications for a larger view of effective solutions.

Use of Eastern India as a regional example of effective solutions in need of committed commodity control and redistribution will be an example of food systems in food sovereignty and food security (Morris, 101). One fundamental part of food security is the structural investment and the sources it comes from. The efficacy of public investment to open up new farmland and to allow development of private endeavors has been hotly contested. While it may appear at a first glance that private investment is growing at an adequate pace to address hunger issues in the region, microeconomic analysis has shown that in fact globalization and trade factors confound the apparent trend, and these stimuli offset the failure in certain regions of private investment to cover all of the costs associated with an optimal economic outcome (Rao, 1944).

In Latin America a movement known as La Via Campesina, characterized by “local autonomy, local markets, local production-consumption cycles, energy and technological sovereignty and farmer-to-farmer networks” (Morris, 145), has accomplished many of the goals that would sustain the goals of food sovereignty efforts in Eastern India. The difference between these and larger-scale efforts to provide adequate funding lies in the intensity of land use; increases in food supplied to local populations are estimated in the regions where the peasant and small-farmer organization is active by between two hundred and one thousand percent. Macro-steps to accomplish the same goals have been stunted in India after decades of positive change. That is not to argue the primacy of the status quo over the precedent, but instead the inferiority of the status quo to the optimal scenario of secure food resources in the region under discussion.

Recapturing the data which determines the co-ordination between public and private sector and reallocates the business which was eaten up during the rapid expansion of global trade during the 90s reveals a very close relationship between the two forms of investment. It can be taken in turn, then, that continued erosion of the sources of public funding could lead to a critical minimum that sees all forms of investment collapse into failure in the region. In order to avoid this outcome multiple steps have been taken, best classified as autonomous adaptation (Morris, 115). The transient nature of the steps which have been taken to establish such food sovereignty predicate a distinction from planned operations. The natural conclusion of whether the gains which have been made in other regions are applicable to Eastern India requires attention towards energy policy to be evaluated for practical application.

The two primary factors can be used to gauge the efficacy of measures are comprised of productivity and poverty alleviation. In these measures energy security can be seen as having a similar tradeoff identified in terms of agricultural functions (Rao, 1947). A distinct discrepancy between sustainable technological progress can be found between regions affected by excessive ratios of private investment to public investment. While some technologies, notably buses and clean water pumps, are beneficial to the environment in the region, many others are not and may not develop adequately in regions without adequate public investment.

Less intensive agricultural development also means greater overall land use, a premise that leads to Protected Area evictions and other negative outcomes or external costs for the public sector. One way to optimize outcomes would be to improve the praxis between engineers and the general public (Morris, 183). This is a way to address the examples identified by microanalysis of regions while also expanding the technical skills and profit margins of private interests into regions buoyed by the benefits of trade more fully. It can also address potential degradation of the land from overly intensive agriculture: a prime example of agricultural degradation can be found in the declining fish stocks of the Tonle Sap region in Cambodia (Morris, 185). That also demonstrates the inter-connectivity between energy and agricultural security.

The implications for agriculture do not finish with agricultural security as a result of greater facilitation between engineers and energy interests, but also extend into direct benefits for energy security as a result of intensive agriculture as well. While biofuel is not recognized as an effective solution to energy problems, in some areas development of effective mixtures can make the difference between costly shipments of fuel and near or complete energy independence. Investments in agricultural technology in India have lead to anticipated blends of 20% biodiesel and bioethanol fuels though that technology is expected to increase food imports by 5%, and food prices by .2% in accordance with the elasticity of the market. This will give a new meaning to burning the crops. More importantly the expected price of fuel is expected to change by a significant nearly 5%, making the overall equation a massive winner in the regions which benefit from the new technology, priced at around 20 billion dollars a year of private sector research investment currently (Gunatilake).

The tradeoffs and rewards which are offered by economic cases need to be handled by experts on an individual basis. Corporations and nations no longer have a choice to make mistakes in this field. In order to see the region transform for social justice and for agricultural and energy security, the effects must be taken as a sum of economic and environmental goals that neither macro approaches embodied in Eastern India nor micro approaches seen in Latin America properly address alone. Together they produce a veritably optimal outcome.

References:

Gunatilake, H., Roland-Holst, D., & Sugiyarto, G. (2014). Energy security for India: Biofuels, energy efficiency and food productivity. Energy Policy, 65, 761-767.

Morris, Katlyn S. (2015). International Environmental Studies. Cognella, University of Vermont.

Rao, C. H. (1998). Agricultural growth, sustainability and poverty alleviation: recent trends and major issues of reform. Economic and Political Weekly, 1943-1948.

The Urban Farmer

Paul Fischer

3/21/2017

Teaching Assistant Jeremy Romanul

Professor Katlyn Morris

Karen Washington and Co-ops in Urban Areas

Urban areas such as the lower Bronx are facing a crisis in food system technology. The problem is not supply, the home of Karen Washington is located next to one of the largest suppliers of fresh fruits, vegetables, and other food products in the country, but instead of access. A number of policies, infrastructural and systemic, have seen the obesity crisis in urban areas reach a critical point in urban communities across the country outlined by the entrepreneur in a recent speech hosted by the University of Vermont at the Silver Maple Ballroom in the Davis Center. This was a presentation that spoke to me personally, as I had seen a similar effort in Montreal thrive in the once depressed Lionel-Groulx area. It is now a hotspot not just for community organic food systems and social justice programs, but also hipsters, musicians, and students.

By laying out what was at stake, diseases from heart disease to diabetes that develope at least partially as a consequence to sedentary lifestyles and obesity and then showing a successful action plan which had helped introduce a healthier manner of living in the Lower Bronx, students at the University of Vermont were able to take home a strong lesson in community planning and action. The latter of those ailments currently kill 200,000 people a year, nearly half of which are preventable, a statistic which was pointed out in the presentation. Also referenced was the estimated cost of the dramatic rise in diabetes which could see that number rise 5 to 10 fold in the coming generation. While the trends are geographical, the increase has not been and the crisis affects nearly the entire country. Digging a little deeper revealed, that because the disease involves many other disorders and affects patients for most of their life, that the estimated costs are currently nearly half a trillion dollars (almost the same size as all organized crime in the country for reference), and if action is not immediately taken, could swell to a quarter of the overall American economy (Hex, 858).

La Familia Verde Community Garden Coalition helped kickstart City Farms Market, which became the first inner city farm of its nature. Following this early success, Karen Washington was able to buy almost a couple dozen square miles upon which a full scale farm entered into operation. One notable challenged posed by local law enforcement which was overcome was a prohibition of the cultivation of bumblebees for honey due to their reputation as ferocious animals, illegal according to city ordinances intended for such creatures as lions and tigers.

That wide and, one might ironically say, vicious interpretation of the law of the land reminded me of a similar investigation into the cultivation of pigs near a subway station in Montreal. Unfortunately, that is a battle which still has to be fought, though I remember from a couple of years back, having checked out the relevant legislation when it came up in an unrelated legislative investigation into urban city ordinances, that it should be one which has a fair chance of success as well. At the time that legislation was passed, in the 1800s, cattle and other livestock were prohibited from inside city boundaries due to the actuality of collision with carriages and cutting edge research into microbiology that suggested the city’s sewage systems were woefully inadequate to deal with even the necessary horse traffic and human waste. Obviously, the prohibition was intended to be a mitigating factor with no relevance in the modern world.

Questions and answers brought up some more of the social justice issues and the geographical distribution problems of the obesity crisis. Other agricultural concerns such as the recent legalization of marijuana which has seen farmers become wealthy while .7% of the prisoners in jail who were incarcerated during prohibition were predominantly minorities also came up. This brought the question of affirmative action to the business world in a unique fashion. Finally, free Ben and Jerry’s was offered as an example of how investments in recreation can sometimes offset an indulgence, such as the flavor Maple Blondie that honored Vermont Olympian Hannah Teter. Such promotions both promote interest in athletics and in that case also provided clean water to her hometown in Kenya.

References:

Hex, N., et al. "Estimating the current and future costs of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes in the UK, including direct health costs and indirect societal and productivity costs." Diabetic Medicine 29.7 (2012): 855-862.

Washington, Karen. “Presentation at the University of Vermont Silver Maple Ballroom” The University of Vermont (2017).

ID your Wetlands as Functionally Significant!

Criteria for a functionally significant wetland:

	Flood Flow Alteration
	Upslope wetlands < 5% of the wetland’s watershed
	Wetland area <20% of watershed area
	Majority of the watershed is made of impervious surfaces
	Most soils (>80%) have a slow infiltration rate <.06” /hour
	Wetland is located near intermittent or first order stream
	Wetland > 81 hectares
	Surface Water Improvement
	Watershed => potential pollutants
	Majority of watershed != forest or scrub
	Wetland < 5% watershed acreage
	Upslope wetlands < 5% of the watershed
	Avg. slope > 10% in watershed
	Wetland type => riparian
	Soil Type histosol or frequently flooded mineralized soil with high clay and organic materials levels
	Near a 1st order or intermittent stream
	Wildlife Habitat
	1+ wetland of a different type bordering the wetland
	Least common among other watershed types
	Connection to surface water network
	A football field or more of natural vegetation along the perimeter of the defined wetland
	Hydrologically connected to another wetland within 400 meters

Reference:
Cedfeldt, Paul T., Mary C. Watzin, and Bruce Dingee Richardson. "Using GIS to identify functionally significant wetlands in the Northeastern United States." Environmental management 26, no. 1 (2000): 13-24.