Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The John Muir Newsletter, Winter 2007/2008, The John Muir Center For Environmental Studies

Muir Center Newsletters, 1981-2015

Muir SLETTEB YfeRSnY OF THE PACIFIC, STOCKTON, CA Volume 18, Number 1 Winter 2007/20081 John Muir's World Tour (part VI) Introduction by W.R. Swagerty Director, John Muir Center In this, the sixth and final segment of John Muir's World Tour, 1903-1904, we complete his journey from March 2 to May 27, 1904 from open waters in the Tasman Sea to San Francisco. Muir continues writing in his Collin's Paragon Diary, 1904, purchased in Australia and reflecting the calendar for the Southern Hemisphere. This form of "journal" allowed the author to enter one page per day. If he needed more space, …

The John Muir Newsletter, Fall 2007, The John Muir Center For Environmental Studies

Muir Center Newsletters, 1981-2015

John Muir Hanna: A Biography Bill Hanna, Napa, California FAMILY John Muir Hanna was born on March 15, 1909 in Oakland to Wanda Muir and Thomas Rae Hanna. He was the second child of six. His older brother was Strent (Strentzel) who was born in 1907. His younger siblings were Richard, Robert, Jean, and Ross. His grandfather was the naturalist and preservationist John Muir and his grandmother was Louie Strentzel Muir whose parents had settled in Martinez in 1853. John's mother, Annie Wanda Muir, was the elder daughter of John Muir and Louie Strentzel. She and her sister, Helen, were …

Qcd Equation Of State With 2+1 Flavors Of Improved Staggered Quarks, James E. Hetrick, C. Bernard

All Faculty Articles - School of Engineering and Computer Science

We report results for the interaction measure, pressure, and energy density for nonzero-temperature QCD with 2+1 flavors of improved staggered quarks. In our simulations, we use a Symanzik improved gauge action and the Asqtad O (a2) improved staggered quark action for lattices with temporal extent Nt = 4 and 6. The heavy quark mass ms is fixed at approximately the physical strange quark mass and the two degenerate light quarks have masses mud ≈ 0.1ms or 0.2ms. The calculation of the thermodynamic observables employs the integral method where energy density and pressure are obtained by integration over the interaction measure.

The John Muir Newsletter, Spring/Summer 2007, The John Muir Center For Environmental Studies

Muir Center Newsletters, 1981-2015

The John Muir University of the Pacific, Stocktoi, CA BER2/3 Sprint; Summer 2< John Muir's World Tour (part V) Lex Chalmers, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Preface by W. R. Swagerty, Director, John Muir Center This past spring, I had the good fortune to travel to New Zealand and Australia through sponsorship of the J. William Fulbright Program of the U.S. State Department. At University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand on the North Island, Dean Daniel Zirker introduced me to Professor Lex Chalmers, a distinguished geographer and researcher on his faculty. It turns out that Professor Chalmers had plans to travel to the United States on family business. After learning my interest in following John Muir's trail from his 1904 visit to New Zealand, Lex agreed to help with this project. In May, Chalmers visited us in Stockton and spent time in the John Muir Papers, clarifying the route and obtaining pertinent transcripts and details from the manuscripts. The document that resulted is his excellent work, not mine. I am indebted to Chalmers and the University of Waikato for the time spent helping the world better understand Muir's unpublished travels in New Zealand from the difficult-to-read notebooks that he kept while traveling abroad, and from Linnie Marsh Wolfe's transcriptions from the 1940s or 1950s. We are planning a more extensive academic publication from this preliminary work and share with you the fifth of six segments in the piece that follows. WRS John Muir's remarkable 'World Tour' began on May 29, 1903 with his departure from New York, and ended almost exactly a year later when he arrived back in San Francisco on May 27,1904. For most of this time Muir maintained a detailed daily journal, commenting on the botany, geomorphology and the patterns of human occupance that he encountered. These journals, closely written in pencil and often illustrated, are held in the Holt-Atherton Collection at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Ca. The collection also holds some of Muir's correspondence written during his travels, and part of the Library collection he established. The journals have attracted scholarly attention, most notably in the transcription work undertaken by Linnie Marsh Wolfe to support her commentaries and 1946 biography of John Muir (Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir). Wolfe's biography, not without its critics, place her at the forefront of commentators on John Muir's contribution to conservation, and her work was recognised by the award of the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Her typescript records of John Muir's journals are an important contribution and they provide the best research source for (Continued on page 6) page 1

Jews John Muir in the New World Proposed Film Documentary with Director Catherine Tatge PRESS RELEASE Source: Global Village Media/PRNewswire/USNewswire New York, July 18, 2007 The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a grant of $80,000 to Global Village Media in support of their new documentary, "John Muir in the New World." The grant will be used during the scripting phase of the project. John Muir is one of the tall trees in environmentalism and western ecological thinking. He was one of the first conservationists …

Does Spelling Count? Reflections On Writing In The Mathematics Classroom, Christopher D. Goff

College of the Pacific Faculty Presentations

The written word is scarce in the stereotypical mathematics course, which instead emphasizes the routine solving of problems. But having students explain their solutions in writing can pave the way to more critical mathematical thinking. This talk will examine the use of writing as a tool to learn mathematics. We will reflect on: reasons to incorporate writing in a mathematics class; which courses lend themselves to writing assignments; what types of assignments to use; samples of student work; and whether using writing can actually improve student learning. Depending on the assignments, writing can also incorporate several “Basic Principles” of AMATYC’s …

Solution Conformations Of Three Small Cluster Oligosaccharide Mimetics (Scom) From D-Glucosamine, D-Altrosamine, And (-)-Quinic Acid, Q. L. Nguyen, L. Olmstead, S. Bains, Andreas H. Franz

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

Three small cluster oligosaccharide mimetics were synthesized, and their CDCl3 solution conformations were determined with NMR experiments. In this paper, we confirmed conformational similarities in rings A and B in all three compounds, and we provide the overall solution geometries. In all cases, an unusual cyclohexane twist-boat conformation with longrange 4 J-(W)-coupling was observed. The origin of the bias towards the twist-boat was attributed primarily to the fused ring system between the cyclohexane ring and the dioxacyclopentane (acetal) including hydrogen bonding. Temperature-annealed molecular dynamics simulations complemented the NMR experiments and supported the overall assignment.

Sulfite Reduction In Mycobacteria, Rachel Pinto, Joseph S. Harrison, Tsungda Hsu, William R. Jacobs Jr., Thomas S. Leyh

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

Mycobacterium tuberculosis places an enormous burden on the welfare of humanity. Its ability to grow and its pathogenicity are linked to sulfur metabolism, which is considered a fertile area for the development of antibiotics, particularly because many of the sulfur acquisition steps in the bacterium are not found in the host. Sulfite reduction is one such mycobacterium-specific step and is the central focus of this paper. Sulfite reduction in Mycobacterium smegmatis was investigated using a combination of deletion mutagenesis, metabolite screening, complementation, and enzymology. The initial rate parameters for the purified sulfite reductase from M. tuberculosis were determined under strict …