Digital Commons Network^™

25 Under 25 Fest, Michael Frank

Baker/Koob Endowments Awarded Projects

The 25 Under 25 Fest is a student-organized, two-day film festival in San Luis Obispo that is dedicated to giving young California filmmakers a platform to show their work. The festival will highlight filmmakers under the age of 25 that are making films less than 25 minutes long. It’s an opportunity to only grow the already established film culture within San Luis Obispo county. It will be open to all young people within the state of California, which is the center of American film. We are currently in cooperation with ARTS Obispo and have started to gather other sponsors. With …

Sympatric Serpentine Endemic Monardella (Lamiaceae) Species Maintain Habitat Differences Despite Hybridization, Kathleen M. Kay, Suzie Woolhouse, Brett A. Smith, Nathaniel S. Pope, Nishanta Rajakaruna

Biological Sciences

Ecological differentiation and genetic isolation are thought to be critical in facilitating coexistence between related species, but the relative importance of these phenomena and the interactions between them are not well understood. Here, we examine divergence in abiotic habitat affinity and the extent of hybridization and introgression between two rare species of Monardella (Lamiaceae) that are both restricted to the same serpentine soil exposure in California. Although broadly sympatric, they are found in microhabitats that differ consistently in soil chemistry, slope, rockiness and vegetation. We identify one active hybrid zone at a site with intermediate soil and above-ground characteristics, and …

Diversity And Functional Traits Of Lichens In Ultramafic Areas: A Literature Based Worldwide Analysis Integrated By Field Data At The Regional Scale, Sergio E. Favero-Longo, Enrica Matteucci, Paolo Giordani, Alexander G. Paukov, Nishanta Rajakaruna

Biological Sciences

While higher plant communities found on ultramafics are known to display peculiar characteristics, the distinguishability of any peculiarity in lichen communities is still a matter of contention. Other biotic or abiotic factors, rather than substrate chemistry, may contribute to differences in species composition reported for lichens on adjacent ultramafic and non-ultramafic areas. This work examines the lichen biota of ultramafics, at global and regional scales, with reference to species-specific functional traits. An updated world list of lichens on ultramafic substrates was analyzed to verify potential relationships between diversity and functional traits of lichens in different Köppen–Geiger climate zones. Moreover, a …

Biological Crusts Of Serpentine And Non-Serpentine Soils From The Barberton Greenstone Belt Of South Africa, Arthurita Venter, Stefan Siebert, Nishanta Rajakaruna, Sandra Barnard, Anatoliy Levanets, Arshad Ismail, Mushal Allam, Bianca Peterson, Tomasz Sanko

Biological Sciences

Climate and geography can influence biological soil crust (BSC) community composition, but local heterogeneity in variables such as soil characteristics or microclimate gradients can also impact cryptogamic diversity. Heavy metals and nutrient imbalances in serpentine soils are known to influence the distributions of higher plants, but cryptogamic species appear to be more tolerant of substrate. The aim of this study was to compare the cryptogamic composition of serpentine and non-serpentine soils by using integrative taxonomy, which combines morphological and DNA barcoding data, to determine how soil characteristics in combination with rainfall can influence BSC community composition. Samples from serpentine and …

A Review Of Subsidence Measurements Near Mendota, California, Tom Mastin, Stuart Styles, Kyle Feist

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

The image of Dr. Poland of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) standing next to a marked powerline in 1977 is circulated as a striking example of land subsidence. This and other historical data are common references for modern subsidence studies. Because of the significance of this data, recent work was conducted to analyze the historical data as well as independently measure the magnitude of subsidence since 1975, within the same study area southwest of Mendota, CA. The results indicate that local subsidence in the area of the photo is less than 0.5 meters between 1975 and 2017. Furthermore the …

Case Study: Flow Measurement And Control In Walker River Irrigation District, Stuart Styles, Sierra Layous, Robert Bryan

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

Walker River Irrigation District (WRID) is located in Nevada around the community of Yerington and contains approximately 95,000 hectares (235,000 acres), 32,000 hectares (80,000 acres) of which are irrigated. The district operates a canal system centered around the three forks of the Walker River. Starting in 2009, the district has worked with the Irrigation Training and Research Center (ITRC) to modernize its system by improving the accuracy of the measured diversions from the Walker River and enhancing the real-time control capabilities of the water managers. A “package” was developed for the headworks of canals diverting water from the river, consisting …

Mitogenomics Supports An Unexpected Taxonomic Relationship For The Extinct Diving Duck Chendytes Lawi And Definitively Places The Extinct Labrador Duck, Janet C. Buckner, Ryan Ellingson, David A. Gold, Terry L. Jones, David K. Jacobs

Social Sciences

Chendytes lawi, an extinct flightless diving anseriform from coastal California, was traditionally classified as a sea duck, tribe Mergini, based on similarities in osteological characters. We recover and analyze mitochondrial genomes of C. lawi and five additional Mergini species, including the extinct Labrador Duck, Camptorhynchus labradorius. Despite its diving morphology, C. lawi is reconstructed as an ancient relictual lineage basal to the dabbling ducks (tribe Anatini), revealing an additional example of convergent evolution of characters related to feeding behavior among ducks. The Labrador Duck is sister to Steller’s Eider which may provide insights into the evolution and ecology …

Senecio Conrathii N.E.Br. (Asteraceae), A New Hyperaccumulator Of Nickel From Serpentinite Outcrops Of The Barberton Greenstone Belt, South Africa, Stefan Siebert, Nadine Carol Schutte, Stoffel Pieter Bester, Dennis Mmakgabo Komape, Nishanta Rajakaruna

Biological Sciences

Five nickel hyperaccumulators belonging to the Asteraceae are known from ultramafic outcrops in South Africa. Phytoremediation applications of the known hyperaccumulators in the Asteraceae, such as the indigenous Berkheya coddii Roessler, are well reported and necessitate further exploration to find additional species with such traits. This study targeted the most frequently occurring species of the Asteraceae on eight randomly selected serpentinite outcrops of the Barberton Greenstone Belt. Twenty species were sampled, including 12 that were tested for nickel accumulation for the first time. Although the majority of the species were excluders, the known hyperaccumulators Berkheya nivea N.E.Br. and B. zeyheri …

Evaluation Of A Substitute Structure Method To Estimate Seismic Displacement Demand In Piers And Wharves, Rakesh K. Goel

Civil and Environmental Engineering

This paper compares seismic displacement from the MOTEMS and the ASCE/COPRI 61-14 substitute structure method (SSM) with results from the nonlinear response history analysis (NLRHA). It is found that the SSM is biased toward overpredicting displacement demand for short-period systems and under-predicting displacement demand for long-period systems. The overprediction was found to be excessive for very-short period systems (i.e., systems with periods shorter than the period at which the design spectrum transitions from linearly increasing spectral acceleration to constant spectral acceleration). It is recommended that the SSM not be used for such systems. It is also recommended that the SSM …

A Global Forum On Ultramafic Ecosystems: From Ultramafic Ecology To Rehabilitation Of Degraded Environments, Guillaume Echevarria, Alan J. M. Baker, Robert S. Boyd, Antony Van Der Ent, Takafumi Mizuno, Nishanta Rajakaruna, Shota Sakaguchi, Aida Bani

Biological Sciences

The 9th International Conference on Serpentine Ecology (ICSE) was held in Tirana and Pogradec (Albania) from June 5 to 9, 2017. More than 100 delegates from 29 countries around the world gathered to present their research on recent advances in: (i) ultramafic soils, (ii) biogeochemistry, (iii) diversity of ultramafic flora, microflora and fauna, (iv) ecophysiology of ultramafic-adapted organisms, (v) interactions between ultramafic organisms and their ecology, (vi) nature rehabilitation of degraded ultramafic environments (resulting from mining activities), and (vii) the production of bio-based metals through agromining technology. Additionally, the ICSE featured the first symposium on ultramafic aquatic ecology and ecotoxicology. …

Ultramafic Vegetation And Soils In The Circumboreal Region Of The Northern Hemisphere, Anzhelika Teptina

Biological Sciences

The paper summarizes literature on climate, soil chemistry, vegetation and metal accumulation by plants found on ultramafic substrata in the circumboreal zone (sensu Takhtajan, Floristic regions of the world, 1986) of the Northern Hemisphere. We present a list of 50 endemic species and 18 ecotypes obligate to ultramafic soils from the circumboreal region of Holarctic, as well as 30 and 2 species of Ni and Zn hyperaccumulators, respectively. The number of both endemics and hyperaccumulators are markedly lower compared to that of the Mediterranean and tropical regions. The diversity of plant communities on ultramafics soils of the circumboral region is …

Graduate Internship Report Aged 539, Frank C. Roche Iii

Agricultural Education: Graduate Internship Reports

This internship and project report includes documentation required in meeting the quality criteria for secondary-level programs of instruction in agriculture. The documents are concurrently used for the Agriculture Incentive Grant review process at Corcoran High School conducted by representatives of the California Department of Education. The supporting material includes information to receive state and local funding, outline the goals and objectives of the program, along with an overview of Corcoran High School, the agriculture program and the community.

Graduate Internship Report- Ceres High School, Mardel Runnels

Agricultural Education: Graduate Internship Reports

This Graduate Internship Report is based on an internship of teaching at Ceres High School and advising the Ceres FFA Chapter. The candidate examined and investigated the program according to the twelve Quality Criteria for Agricultural Education in the State of California. The report includes reflections and supporting documents that evaluate the quality of the Agriculture program and determine its eligibility for the Agriculture Incentive Grant funds. In addition, it demonstrates the process of creating a Comprehensive Program Plan for the Ceres High School Agriculture Program as part of the internship.

Graduate Internship Report- Salinas High School, Rachel Nicole Martinez

Agricultural Education: Graduate Internship Reports

This AgEd 539 Graduate Internship report includes validation documents required in meeting the quality criteria for secondary-level programs of instruction in agriculture. The documents are currently used for the Agriculture Incentive Grant review process at Salinas High School.The internship project includes the creation of an Agriculture Advisory Committee for Salinas High School. The included information and supporting materials are required to received local and state funding. An overview of the Salinas High School Program can be found in the Comprehensive Program Plan that is included in this document.

Wifi Gate Guard: A Captive Portal Implementation For Home Networks, Ben Blumenberg

Computer Science and Software Engineering

WiFi Gate Guard aims to improve the user experience for authentication on home wireless networks, by alleviating some of the hardships causes by passwords and by offering a platform on which further security enhancements could be built. It accomplishes this by using captive portal technology, making it extremely easy for guests to authenticate without needing to ask for a password. Home network administrators can approve or deny access using a simple iOS app. WiFi Gate Guard is built to run on basic home routers, with minimal other hardware requirements. Once it’s up and running, passwords never need to be used …

Self-Administering Pediatric Vital System, Matthew Rochford, Ryan Brown

Electrical Engineering

The objective of this project is to create a device for pediatric divisions in hospitals to improve gathering vital signs of their patients by incorporating biometric sensors into a stuffed animal. Children tend to be extremely difficult patients because they are scared of being in a hospital, being sick, and feeling unsafe. Giving a child a stuffed animal that acts as a medium for both comforting the child and taking vitals not only frees up doctors and nurses but gives the child something safe in a foreign world.

Currently on the market there are similar devices but they do not …

Integrated Computer Science Unit For Early Exposure To A Diverse Population, Di Hoang

Master's Theses

Reports from major tech companies, such as Airbnb, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo, indicate that gender diversity and ethnic diversity are lacking in the tech industry [22]. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projected a 24% increase in the number of software development positions (roughly an increase of 300,000 jobs) between 2016 and 2026 [64]. The main motivation behind this thesis is to expose computer science to young children and encourage teachers to include computer science in their classrooms in the hope of contributing to the current effort of increasing diversity within tech fields in the next decade.

This …

Sok: A Practical Cost Comparison Among Provable Data Possession Schemes, Alex Michael Bartlett

Master's Theses

Provable Data Possession (PDP) schemes provide users with the ability to efficiently audit and verify the integrity of data stored with potentially unreliable third-parties, such as cloud storage service providers. While dozens of PDP schemes have been developed, no PDP schemes have been practically implemented with an existing cloud service. This work attempts to provide a starting point for the integration of PDP schemes with cloud storage service providers by providing a cost analysis of PDP schemes. This cost analysis is performed by implementing and analyzing five PDP schemes representative of the dozens of various PDP approaches. This paper provides …

Analysis Of Verification And Validation Techniques For Educational Cubesat Programs, Noah Weitz

Master's Theses

Since their creation, CubeSats have become a valuable educational tool for university science and engineering programs. Unfortunately, while aerospace companies invest resources to develop verification and validation methodologies based on larger-scale aerospace projects, university programs tend to focus resources on spacecraft development. This paper looks at two different types of methodologies in an attempt to improve CubeSat reliability: generating software requirements and utilizing system and software architecture modeling. Both the Consortium Requirements Engineering (CoRE) method for software requirements and the Monterey Phoenix modeling language for architecture modeling were tested for usability in the context of PolySat, Cal Poly's CubeSat research …

Optimizing The Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model For Uncertainty Assessment With Serial, Multicore And Distributed Accelerations, Andrew Adriance

Master's Theses

Hydrology is the study of water. Hydrology tracks various attributes of water such as its quality and movement. As a tool Hydrology allows researchers to investigate topics such as the impacts of wildfires, logging, and commercial development. With perfect and complete data collection researchers could answer these questions with complete certainty. However, due to cost and potential sources of error this is impractical. As such researchers rely on simulations.

The Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model(also referenced to as DHSVM) is a scientific mathematical model to numerically represent watersheds. Hydrology, as with all fields, continues to produce large amounts of data …

Hands-On Activities To Increase Student Engagement In Undergraduate Structural Dynamics Course, Chad D. Facciolo, Anahid A. Behrouzi

Architectural Engineering

This report documents the design and implementation of several physical models and hands-on lab activities incorporated in an undergraduate structural dynamics lecture and laboratory course pairing offered at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo in the Architectural Engineering department during the Winter 2018 quarter. In previous quarters, the laboratory course has lacked opportunities for students to conduct their own physical experiments and has consisted primarily of MATLAB programming activities. Efforts to illustrate the dynamic behavior of various structures have primarily involved instructor demonstrations or online videos.

The addition of physical models in the Winter 2018 offering promotes an engaging …

Seismic Forces In Ancillary Components Supported On Piers And Wharves, Rakesh K. Goel

Civil and Environmental Engineering

This paper presents a simple procedure to estimate seismic forces in ancillary components (secondary systems) supported on marine structures such as piers, wharves, and marine oil terminals (primary systems). Since many such marine structures can be idealized as single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) systems, this study uses a simple linear-elastic model with two DOF, one representing the marine structure and the other representing the ancillary component. This study shows that acceleration at the base of the secondary system is approximately equal to spectral acceleration at the fundamental period of the primary system. It also proposes a formula, which is an improvement over current …

A Framework For Assessing The Economic Impacts Of Agricultural Equipment Emission Reduction Strategies On The Agricultural Economy In The San Joaquin Valley, Michael Mccullough, Lynn Hamilton, Duncan Macewan, Jay E. Noel, Richard E. Howitt

Agribusiness

The objective of this study is to collaborate with experts to develop a framework that will enhance the California Air Resources Board’s (ARB or Board) existing economic analysis capability to assess the impact of regulatory costs on the agricultural economy in the San Joaquin Valley (SJV) of California. The San Joaquin Valley includes portions of the following counties: San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Kings, Tulare, and Kern. This study is the first phase in a series that develops a framework that can be used to assess the economic impact of additional regulations on San Joaquin Valley agriculture from the …

Academic Senate - Meeting Minutes, 5/1/2018, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Minutes

No abstract provided.

Graduate Internship Report: San Jacinto High School, Lindsey Stiff

Agricultural Education: Graduate Internship Reports

Created and submitted courses for the creation of pathways within the ag department. Also built a six nest chicken coop to start a laying hen project. Students built the coop and take care of the laying hens. We will start using the chickens in our other courses.

Implementing An On-Site Concrete Batch Plant On A Large Construction Project In The Bay Area, Gabe Zagorski

Construction Management

The demand for ready mix concrete in the San Francisco Bay Area continues to grow with the booming development and construction industry. Concrete is a very common construction material with a wide range of use on projects ranging from parking garages all the way to high-rise buildings. The typical method of ready mix concrete delivery is to order concrete from a ready mix supplier who trucks the concrete to the project from a nearby batch plant. Concrete is a perishable commodity that demands timely batching and delivery to meet customer requested specifications. The small number of batch plants and congested …

A Recommendation To Implement A Quality Assurance/Quality Control Topics Course, Jacob W. Stapp

Construction Management

The purpose of this report is to recommend and gauge student interest/need for the addition of a Quality Assurance/Quality Control topics course to the Construction Management curriculum. Both Quality Assurance and Quality Control are vital for all construction projects, and without proper implementation there is no way to ensure high quality results. In an industry that demands high quality projects, it is important that our department prepares our students to be well-rounded in all aspects of construction. This will enable our graduates to enter the workforce in full stride, contributing efficiently from the start. Our University’s motto is “Learn by …

Determining Interest For A Subcontractor Career Fair, Jesseka Zappe

Construction Management

Companies look to Cal Poly Construction Management as a great place to come and recruit for summer interns and new full time positions. But of the 141 companies that recruit at Cal Poly, only 16% of them are subcontractors. With so many general contractors, subcontractors often get passed over. This study looks at the interests from both students and industry to hold a separate recruiting event for subcontractors. It also investigates the best type of event to hold and other logistics.

Tiny House Permitting In San Luis Obispo, Luke I. Schveibinz

Construction Management

Tiny houses are a rising trend in housing that provide affordable, environmentally friendly dwellings for those inclined to a minimalist lifestyle. Across the Unites States, municipalities have begun creating special provisions for tiny houses, but there remain many barriers to building and permitting tiny houses affordably. There has been much progress in the acceptance of ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units), specifically in the state of California. Legislation on ADUs leads the way for the community integration of tiny houses. This study investigates the current state of legislation and permitting for tiny houses in San Luis Obispo, California. An interview was conducted …

The Well Building Standard: Assessment Of Effectiveness, Zachary Richardson

Construction Management

This study aims to assess the effectiveness of the WELL Building standard. The WELL Building standard is a certification very similar in nature to that of LEED, where there are criteria that must be met in order for a building to be certified. The International WELL Building Institute claims that by adhering to their standards, building owners will be able to improve many health aspects in the lives of the occupants, as well as creating more effective workplaces for business. Through a careful analysis of the physical and mental health aspects WELL claims to improve, as well as surveying building …