KANSAN.COM / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / MONDAY, APRIL 11, 2011 / NEWS
3A
SCIENCE
Weather balloon collects geographical data, images
BY IAN CUMMINGS icummings@kansan.com
A team of 18 students in the geography department launched a weather balloon Saturday from the grassy field behind Nichols Hall, 2335 Irving Hill Road on West Campus. The balloon landed in a cow pasture about two hours later near Fleming, Mo., east of Kansas City, Mo.
About 50 people watched the launch and some brought telescopes and binoculars to follow the balloon into the sky.
"It was the coolest thing ever to see it take off," Kelsey Miller, a senior from Waterloo, Ill., and a geography student, said.
The weather balloon, a helium-powered vehicle for a 23-foot apparatus of remote sensing equipment, was launched as part of a project called Geohawk for the geography
department's "Remote Sensing II" course.
Ryan Callihan, a graduate student from Lenexa, said the students would break into teams for the rest of the semester to use the images and data collected in research projects on remote sensing, mapping and image processing.
The balloon itself measured four feet wide and six feet tall and pulled a tail strung with a parachute, a set of radar reflectors and about five pounds of sensors to record temperature and air pressure. A camera dangled from the end, pointed downward, automatically snapping photographs every 10 to 15 seconds.
As the balloon took off, it recorded hundreds photos of Lawrence and Douglas County from a range of altitudes. About 20 miles — or halfway to Kansas City — the balloon burst in the air because of
decreasing air pressure, releasing a parachute to allow it to slowly descend back to the ground.
At these heights, Federal Aviation Administration safety regulations apply to the construction of the vehicle, requiring radar reflectors to mark its presence for other aircraft.
Miller said the Fleming cow pasture was very close to the predicted landing site. The Geoahawk team used weather conditions, together with the vehicle's weight and lift speed, to calculate the probable flight path.
"It looks like the payload hit pretty hard," Miller said. She said the team still needed to examine the contents of the vehicle to see if they were damaged in the landing.
— Edited by Samantha Collins
Geography students prepare to launch a weather balloon Saturday in the field behind Nichols Hall, 2335 Irving Hill Road. The balloon recorded hundreds of photos of the Lawrence area.
Contributed Photo
RESEARCH
From film to folklore, awards help students explore interests
BY IAN CUMMINGS icummings@kansan.com
Josh Nathan, a senior from McPherson, and Grant Babbit, Nathan's director of photography, film "A Light Opera" at a DeSoto gas station. Nathan was one of 48 undergraduate students to receive research grants this semester.
The University Honors Program awarded research grants to 48 undergraduates this semester, supporting projects in a wide variety of areas. Undergraduate research awards, ranging from $750 to $2,000, went to student projects in disciplines like film, anthropology and industrial design. The following research studies are some of the undergraduate projects that received funding.
A LIGHT OPERA
Joshua Nathan, a senior from McPherson studying film and media, took the title for his short film from a passage in Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Slaughterhouse Five." He used the experience he gained as a production assistant on the television series "Leverage" and a $750 grant from the honors program to write, direct and produce "A Light Opera." The film, a meditation on the role of chance and fate in human lives, follows a day in the life of two gas station employees whose lives are changed forever — in the case of one of them, suddenly cut short — by a winning lottery ticket. Nathan said he applied for a research award at the urging of faculty after mentioning his idea of shooting a film for his honors project.
"They said, 'What you're doing is exactly what they're giving out money for.' Nathan said.
Nathan organized a crew of 120 people and shot the film in two days at a gas station in DeSoto. He is submitting it to several film festivals, including the Kansas City Film Festival, the KU Student Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival. Oldfather Studios will host a special event to screen the film April 18.
Nathan said "A Light Opera" posed questions about probability and determinism, but doesn't provide any easy answers.
"There are crazy, crazy things; things that we recognize but don't know how to internalize," Nathan said. "I want the audience to think about this in their own lives."
ORAL TESTIMONIES OF THE CH'ORTI MAYA
Joseph Stogsdill's project took him to the western mountains of Honduras, where Copán, one of the greatest of the ruined Maya cities, sits among fields of coffee and banana trees. Stogdsill, a junior from Lawrence studying history and environmental studies, went to Copán Ruinas, Honduras, with a multi-disciplinary group advised by Brent Metz, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas.
Contributed Photo
"It was a pretty big culture shock, going down and seeing the poverty that exists in Central America," Stogsdill said.
An undergraduate research award covered the cost of Stogdill's travel, helping him to film a series of interviews with elders of the local Chorti Maya community and write a historical study of this indigenous population. He spoke with the elders about their folkloe and creation stories, and how their land has been changed by technology and property theft by outsiders.
MAKING THE DENTIST'S CHAIR MORE COMFORTABLE FOR THE DENTIST
Stogsdill and other students worked with local communities to help market traditional crafts to tourists and conduct water quality studies in partnership with CONIMCHH, National Council of Indigenous Chorti Maya of Honduras, a local development organization.
Stogsdill said the trip did much to improve his Spanish. The rural people of Honduras have a distinct vocabulary and accent.
"It was pretty difficult to understand," Stogsdill said. "It can make you very uncomfortable, but through that discomfort you can really grow as a Spanish speaker and as a person."
Although many patients are quite conscious of the discomfort involved in dental care, few consider how uncomfortable it can be for the dentist. The hunching and contortion performed by practitioners, including dental hygienists, as they navigate a patient's mouth, can lead to musculoskeletal disorders like carpal tunnel syndrome and injuries of the neck and upper back.
Riley Griffith, a senior from Lyndon studying industrial design, is researching how to change the dentist's chair to alleviate these problems, which Griffith said can be serious and expensive. He spoke with a former dental hygienist who traded in her tools for a receptionist's desk because of chronic pain in her hand muscles. Griffith said his own dentist's chronic pain led to the removal of a disc between his second and third vertebrae.
A single case of carpal tunnel syndrome can cost $21,000 and 250 days of lost work, Griffith said.
These problems are well known to the American Dental Association, which teaches practitioners to reposition the patients for comfort.
"They're trained to ask people to move, but my observation was that people don't want to do that," Griffith said.
He said one factor was practitioners' need to maximize the number of patients they see per day.
Griffith said he thought a different kind of dental chair could relieve the discomfort by making the patient easier to move around.
"As a hygienist, your hands are always full," Griffith said. "If they were floating in space, if you could move them anywhere you wanted, you would."
He used $1,700 from an undergraduate research award to develop a design that would emphasize mobility and access for the practitioner. The new style of chair would tilt and swivel on more than one plane, moving on up to six axes.
He created a design of the chair as an illustration of the concept, but the work would also have to take into account aesthetics and engineering, Griffith said.
"If people look at something, they don't want to be scared of it," he said. "They're already really scared."
Edited by Helen Mubarak
FOR MORE INFORMATION
University Honors Program
Nunemaker Center
PHONE:(785) 864-4225
EMAIL: honors@ku.edu