This lab uses Google Earth to measure the rate of seacliff retreat. It touches upon coastal processes, natural hazards, and coastal management issues. The central focus of the lab is in the Monterey Bay area.

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Students will explore an interactive data visualization of state-by-state population growth as measured by the decennial censuses of 1790 through 2010. Students will also analyze and make inferences about the causes of more recent shifts in U.S. population.

Using Lab Measurements to determine the power output of a solar module and the economic feasibility of photovoltaic panels

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Students are challenged to a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery in which they construct their own decay curves of melting ice to determine time-zero.

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The purpose of this exercise is to guide students through the initial stages of a hypothetical water supply complaint investigation for 3 scenarios where methane has been detected in surface water in PA. This activity uses data accessible through the CUAHSI database (Shale Network (2015)) at three stream locations, and introduces three different potential sources of the observed in-stream methane. The data were collected by personnel from Penn State, the U.S. Geological Survey, and volunteers.

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CRISPR-Cas9 is a gene-editing technology with potential to expand the agricultural industry and improve human health. However, this technology may have unforeseeable consequences and adverse effects for society. Statistical procedures are often used to study public perceptions of controversial technologies. In this unit plan, students will design and administer surveys to investigate how their peers feel about various applications of gene-editing technology. In the process, students will apply random sampling methods and learn how to minimize response bias. Once their surveys are completed, students will analyze the results using contingency tables, confidence intervals, and hypothesis tests. The ultimate goal of this unit will be to help students to create clear policies for regulating the use of CRISPR-Cas9 and defend these policies with their statistical findings.

In this activity, students use MATLAB to compare two data sets of organic matter content in order to provide quantitative evidence that tests the null hypothesis that sediment samples have the same fluvial source. Students must load the data, conduct analyses, and plot the results by writing an efficient MATLAB script, and must "publish" their code to a well-organized, well-commented, .pdf document or .html file online.
After completing this exercise, students will have a better understanding of population distributions and the statistical test to distinguish two samples. They will also gain experience producing visually clear diagrams to present the results of their analysis.

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Prior to this project, students have measured sections in the field and have had a lot of experience interpreting physical processes of sedimentation from real sedimentary sequences. They have had in-depth exposure to three depositional systems (deep water, shelf, and beach), but not much exposure to others. I typically show them some good quality seismic lines of a continental margin right before this project begins. I take them on a tour of the tank, but this is not required. Instead, students can read the GSA Today article on Jurassic Tank that summarizes how it works, what it's used for, etc.:

Paola,C., Mullin, J., Ellis, C., Mohrig, D., Swenson, J., Parker, G., Hickson, T., Heller, P., Pratson, L., Syvitski, J., Sheets, B., Strong, N., 2001, Experimental Stratigraphy; GSA Today, Geological Society of America, Vol. 11, pp. 4-9.

The students have three weeks to complete the poster that is the final product for this project and, because this is part of a project-based course, I do very little formal lecturing during this project. I act as a facilitator, directing students to readings, Fuzzim basin modeling software, web resources, and, importantly, the resources that help them understand how Jurassic Tank works. In class, students are given a dip section image of stratigraphy produced in Jurassic Tank, their 'outcrop' or 'seismic line'. They then must answer three major questions (each a different component of their poster). First, what real-world depositional environments might the JT deposit effectively emulate? JT deposits can be viewed as an analog for several different, real-world environments (laterally linked and vertically stacked via Walther's Law); on a digital version of their dip section, students label these different environments by outlining their deposits in different colors and they provide images of these environments downloaded from the web or scanned in. Second, what would measured sections look like at three different locations on the cross section and what would a correlation diagram look like? The measured sections should embody the real-world depositional environments that they outlined above (i.e. the facies should be realistic representations of facies encountered in each depositional environment). The stratigraphic sections shouldn't just be coal and sand, but should take into account the actual sedimentary features one might expect to find in the depositional environments that they cross. Third, what parameter was changed to create the stratigraphy in the dip section and how was that parameter changed through time? At this point, students know that one of three rates were changed: rate of base level rise or fall, subsidence rate, or sediment feed rate. They need to choose one and defend their interpretation. The beauty of this exercise is that a defensible interpretation can be made for any of these forcings; this is an important concept to get across in the end.

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Students will examine questions from 1940, 1960, and 2010 census questionnaires to analyze socioeconomic changes in the U.S. population before and after World War II.

To prepare for this project / assignment, students could view the 'A Civil Action' movie, the instructor could read to them excerpts from the book and/or the trial testimony, and show them images from Woburn, wells G and H, the subsurface geologic materials, geologic cross sections, the trial participants, and the federal courtroom in Boston (see below). The materials in Bair (2001) about scientists in the courtroom, specific (excerpted) testimony presented by the three expert witnesses in the 'A Civil Action' trial, a chart summarizing the differences in their testimony, and the views of a federal judge on the goal of science versus the goal of a civil trial may also be worthwhile reading by the class prior to the assignment.

The instructor could show students the large plates included in the USGS report by Myette and others (1987) that display potentiometric data and contours before and after the critically important aquifer test performed in December 1985 and January 1986, just before the trial, and discuss the significance of the stream discharge measurement made by the USGS upstream and downstream of municipal wells G and H to the experts' testimony and the outcome of the trial.

The instructor could also show the animations of TCE movement from 1960 to 1986 from the five known sources of TCE contamination at the Woburn Wells G & H Superfund Site (W.R. Grace, UniFirst dry cleaners, Olympia Trucking, Beatrice Foods, and New England Plastics) and the animation showing temporal changes in induced infiltration from the Aberjona River to wells G and H that were created by Martin van Oort (M.S., 2005) based on the research of Maura Metheny (M.S., 1998; Ph.D., 2004) at Ohio State University.

The article by Bair and Metheny (2002) concerning the remediation activities subsequent to the famous trial at the Wells G & H Superfund Site could be used to show how groundwater contamination is cleaned up, why different remediation schemes needed to be used in different hydrogeologic settings, and why cleanup to U.S. EPA standards can take decades.

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In this lab, students learn to use the matlab seawater toolbox and use this tool to test a number of things that I have asserted to them in class with regard to the contribution of temperature and potential temperature to density variability in the ocean.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module/Geology of National Parks course. Students estimate travel times and costs of a driving/camping trip to visit national parks in the Colorado Plateau.

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For this task, Minitab software was used to generate 100 random samples of size 16 from a population where the probability of obtaining a success in one draw is 33.6% (Bernoulli). Given that multiple samples of the same size have been generated, students should note that there can be quite a bit of variability among the estimates from random samples and that on average, the center of the distribution of such estimates is at the actual population value and most of the estimates themselves tend to cluster around the actual population value.

Lecture notes for risk and valuation models for financial risk management , part 1

In this problem set students are provided with an EXCEL spreadsheet containing major element analyses of lavas frm Thingmuli Volcano in Iceland. They are asked to construct variation diagrams (Harker plots) and then explain the trends they see for various elements. I use this problem set to introduce the use of EXCEL and to help students to think about the connections between mineral assemblage and rock chemistry.

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An in-class activity or homework for graphically solving slope-stability problems with vectors.

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This laboratory experiment emphasizes the exponential nature of post-glacial rebound and reinforces the relationship between the rate of rebound and the viscosity of the mantle.

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In order to better understand ductile deformation and the growth of folds students perform a series of experiments with readily available viscous analog materials. Students begin by exploring the concept of viscosity and viscous flow problems by using Stoke's Law to measure viscosity of corn syrup from the terminal velocity of a falling steel ball. The students then complete a second series of experiments folding a stiffer material (fruit leather) within a corn syrup matrix. By varying the thickness of the fruit leather layer they discover the linear relationship between layer thickness and dominant wavelength predicted by viscous fold theory.

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Learners use the UNAVCO GPS Velocity Viewer, or the included map packet to visualize relationships between earthquakes, volcanoes, and plate boundaries as a jigsaw activity.

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We examine the factors of race and environmental contamination, starting from the premise (and data proving) that race is not a biological, scientifically valid category, but a social, historical construction with real world consequences for equal access to health, resources, and power.

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