Summer Researchers 2011
Posted: 08/04/2011
From ecotourism branding to school enrollment trends to mold-inhibiting bacteria, a bumper crop of research projects has involved more than 30 faculty members and 50-plus students for several weeks of intensive work this summer. This week they offered public talks, Q & A鈥檚, and poster sessions. Here is just a sampling.
In Skidmore鈥檚 newest academic program鈥攁rts administration鈥攆aculty member David Howson and Kate Imboden 鈥�13 have been working 鈥渉and-in-hand with the staff鈥� of the Depot Theatre in Westport, N.Y. Imboden designed a marketing survey and collected data about donor behaviors. The small, seasonal, nonprofit playhouse relies on community and patron fundraising, so she and Howson hope tooptimize procedures and build predictors to help the staff 鈥渂etter forecast and maximize contributed revenues.鈥�
Computer scientist Mike Eckmann and Adam Steinberger 鈥�12 knew that digital cameras use internal software to create complex, full colors from pixels that sense just red or green or blue. And that this software varies in each model of camera, leaving a 鈥渇ingerprint鈥� on the images it creates. Gathering some 5,500 images from 20 cameras, Steinberger wrote and optimized computer code to analyze how their pixel colors were arrived at鈥斺�渁 good diagnostic鈥� for which camera created them, and a good step in perfecting the science of forensic image analysis.
In other projects, Lubin Professor Amy Frappier worked with Alena Chubet 鈥�12 and Maryann Countryman 鈥�13 to study stalagmites, which, since they preserve the chemistry of the dripping water and eroding minerals that gradually form them, can reveal a lot about climate in the distant past and over time. Field work was key for neuroscientist Rob Hallock and partners Carolyn O鈥機onnor 鈥�12 and Janel Schietzelt 鈥�13 as they hunted and analyzed toxic mushrooms in Skidmore鈥檚 North Woods, and also for environmental-studies professor Cathy Gibson and partners Andrea Conine 鈥�13 and Sondra Lipshutz 鈥�13 as they measured how Catskill-area streams take up and retain phosphorus and ammonium.
Sociologist John Brueggemann and Willa Jones 鈥�12 explored civic and social movements that operate outside of, and sometimes against, market and government forces. They focused on groups working for safety, health, sustainability, and justice relating to food issues. And artist Sang-Wook Lee and his student Katherine Humphreys 鈥�12 took the term 鈥渕ixed-media鈥� to a new extreme, developing a way for music to affect the mechanisms of a loom and help shape the textile it creates.
Click here for a full list of projects and participants.
Photos by Sam Brook 鈥�12, Gary Gold, and Depot Theatre