2014-15 Funded SRG Abstracts
Slawek Tulaczyk
Professor
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Earth & Planetary Sciences
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $6400
Melting Greenland Ice Sheet has become one of the most enduring symbols of climate warming. In California, future sea-level rise will have significant impacts on human coastal infrastructure and coastal habitats. The most recent IPCC report (2013) still puts large uncertainties on predictions of future sea level rise due to mass loss from polar ice sheets. These uncertainties stem ultimately from insufficient understanding of the mechanisms by which such ice sheets react to climate warming. Whereas one can calculate reasonably well how much more ice will melt on the surface of Greenland Ice Sheet under different climate scenarios, it is much harder to quantify the documented tendency of this ice sheet to move faster as it melts more. Past Antarctic research demonstrated that presence of weak, water-lain sediments beneath ice makes it easier to change flow velocity by increasing delivery of meltwater to the bed. Yet, current computer models of Greenland Ice Sheet assume that it is moving over solid rock, a situation that makes it more difficult for these models to change the simulated ice velocity rapidly. A team of my UK colleagues has been funded in 2013 to undertake an ambitious ice sheet drilling project on a fast and dynamic outlet glacier of Greenland Ice Sheet (Store Glacier near Uummannaq). However, they do not have any instrumentation that will allow them to directly sample sediments from beneath ice. Since my research group successfully developed and used such a tool (a borehole piston corer) in Antarctica, I request funding from COR to travel with our borehole corer in July 2014 to sample the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet with the UK team. The collected sediment samples will be used by my research group to improve quantitative treatment of ice sheet sliding for use in predictive models of Greenland ice sheet. The proposed project will help me strengthen my ability to pursue future NSF and NASA funding for research in Greenland.
Flora Lu
Associate Professor
Social Sciences Division
Environmental Studies
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $7000
The increasing role of China in Latin America as a source of foreign direct investment and a participant in the mineral and energy sectors exemplifies the changing geopolitics and economies of the Global South. Nowhere is this Chinese role more pronounced than in Ecuador, a petro-state with an outspokenly leftist President, Rafael Correa, who has rejected US influence and neoliberalism, defaulted on $3.2 billion in debt to the US, and committed almost all of his country's near future oil shipments to China. This project explores the impact of Chinese-led mineral and hydrocarbon extraction through the eyes of local indigenous and mestizo communities in the southern and northern Amazon region, respectively. Through participatory mapping, key informant interviews and focus groups, this study will explore the lived experiences of households in eight communities in zones of extraction to document the practices, policies, and impacts of Chinese corporations such as Petrooriental and Ecuacorriente. This project builds on over a decade of Ecological Anthropological research on Amazonian development in Ecuador by the principal investigator, enriching her longitudinal understanding by focusing on China and studying mining activities in addition to oil extraction. Preliminary data from the project will be used in future external grant proposals to NSF and USAID, and the project budget will support the participation of students who will receive faculty mentoring and gain valuable field research experience.
Catherine Ramirez
Associate Professor
Social Sciences Division
Latin American and Latino Studies
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $2393
This book project examines the nexus of race, education, and assimilation. Part intellectual history, part recovery project, it excavates assimilation's alternative history. Using a broad array of sources, including archival materials, academic treatises, and literary works, and focusing on the school as a mechanism for assimilation, my manuscript shows how the concept is implicit in earlier practices, policies, institutions, and narratives, such as efforts to “civilize” (i.e., proselytize and educate) Native Americans and to “resettle” (i.e., deport or segregate) African Americans.
The chapter for which I seek support juxtaposes “Negro” and Indian education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Research I conducted on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first Native American boarding school in the United States and an offshoot of the African American Hampton Institute, has led me to hypothesize that a primary objective of “Negro” education, especially during the Jim Crow era, was the creation of a “separate but equal” Black society. Where Native Americans were seen as a vanishing people, one that could be absorbed by the white majority via religious conversion, exogamy, and miscegenation, African Americans were deemed a separate race, one that needed to be contained and segregated from the white mainstream. Differences notwithstanding, policy and practice signal that the former group was to be assimilated via annihilation, while the latter would be rendered an internal alien. I posit that the differing purposes and effects of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indian and “Negro” education continue to inform and distort American notions of race, difference, and assimilability.
Hinrich Boeger
Associate Professor
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $8000
We propose a new interdisciplinary collaboration between laboratories in MCD Biology and Electrical Engineering to analyze the structure of single gene molecules by atomic force microscopy. The imaging of single gene molecules allows us to test theories of the structural dynamics of gene regulation. The novel approach has been successfully pursued in my lab using electron microscopy. We believe that for our purposes the atomic force microscope will prove superior to the electron microscope.
J. Cameron Monroe
Associate Professor
Social Sciences Division
Anthropology
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $5718
Why and how centralized states emerged in the past have been primary questions for archaeologists for over a century. Although archaeologists have generally targeted the earliest states of the ancient world, recent work has examined how leaders inculcated political authority in a range of more recent experiments in political centralization. The project for which I seek support examines a recent example of state formation in the New World; the short-lived Kingdom of Haiti (1811-1820), which emerged in the years following the Haitian Revolution. In partnership with the Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National (ISPAN) and the Université d’Etat, Haiti, the Milot Archaeological Project (MAP) will conduct archaeological research in Haiti’s Parc National Historique, in the town of Milot in northern Haiti. This research will target the UNESCO World Heritage site Sans Souci, the royal palace of Henry Christophe as well as the broader community of Milot, mobilizing archaeological evidence to explore the relationship between architectural space and political power in this experiment in state formation. This project represents the only systematic archaeological research in Haiti since the seventies, and will play an important role in long-term development plans for Northern Haiti. The support of a COR SRG will allow the MAP to follow up on initial architectural survey conducted in 2013. During the summer of 2014, the MAP will assess site structure and chronology using cutting edge subsurface geophysical survey technologies, laying the necessary groundwork for long-term fieldwork at this important UNESCO World Heritage site.
Boreth Ly
Assistant Professor
Arts Division
History of Art and Visual Culture
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $4050
My research project investigates the so-called iconoclasm that took place under the auspices of a Hindu King, Jayavarman VIII of Cambodia (reigned 1243-1295). He ordered the destruction of—and in some cases, effacement and recarving of—Buddha images and inscriptions at Buddhist edifices built by his predecessor, King Jayavarman VII (1181-1218 CE) at Angkor, the ancient capital, and at two temple complexes, Banteay Chmar and Preah Khan, located in the distant provinces. I argue that unlike iconoclasm that took place elsewhere (which literally means the destruction of images), the recarving and rewriting of inscriptions to serve the purpose of a different religion and political regime was not unusual in Ancient Cambodia. Ancient Cambodia (and the region of Southeast Asia writ large) was grounded in a military culture. The invasion of neighboring kingdoms and looting of religious icons, especially those made of precious metals, was quite common. In brief, there are precedents for the recarving and repurposing of images that we see in King Jayarvarman VIII’s reign. Is the “iconoclasm” a true break, or can we view it in more varied contexts to greater historical purpose? How do these contexts help us better understand Ancient Khmer visual culture?
Yiman Wang
Associate Professor
Arts Division
Film and Digital Media
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $5533
“Orientally Yours” is the first book-length study of the full career of Anna May Wong (1905-1961), a pioneer Chinese-American performer who built an international career that encompassed theater, film, radio, and television during the segregationist era.
By examining Wong’s negotiation with the early 20th Century race-gender-class hegemony and national politics, my study not only carefully reconstructs her historical, political and cultural milieu, but also produces an original analysis of her unique strategies of identity performance vis-à-vis her international audiences. I argue that Wong’s strategic identity performance holds important ramifications for today’s minority groups’ identity construction and empowerment.
“Orientally Yours” interweaves critical race and ethnic studies, performance studies, film studies, gender studies, and Asian-American and Pacific studies. By exploring Wong's paradoxical agency in the complex transnational entertainment industries, the book formulates a new interdisciplinary field of “minor” ethnic performer-worker studies, reshaping traditional theories in film, theater, media, and performance studies. The concept of “minor” performer-worker refers to: 1) a performer locked into a minor position by an inequitable labor-capital relationship; 2) a performer who nonetheless may occupy and strategize a “minoritarian” position, playing within the system while gradually estranging, even sabotaging its rules. (The second dimension is drawn from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature,” i. e., literature written from a minoritarian position.)
My approach is both historical and comparative, involving heavy archival research. The grant would enable me to expand my previous research and focus on four European countries where Wong performed in the mid 1930s. By tapping into the so-far ignored archival materials, I hope to uncover an important dimension of Wong’s career.
Irene Lusztig
Assistant Professor
Arts Division
Film and Digital Media
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $8000
Over the coming year, I hope to begin research and initial filming on a new long-form documentary film project. Tentatively called the questions outnumber the answers, this project will be a lyrical essay film that will combine photographs, letters, journals, contemporary footage, and archival film materials to intertwine a portrait of my enigmatic grandfather, Mordechai Abraham – a Hungarian-Jewish ichthyologist, disillusioned Socialist-Zionist kibbutz founder, and amateur filmmaker who vehemently denied the existence of my mother (his only daughter) for most of his life – with an exploration of 20th century Israeli history.
My research has an on-going engagement with the production of historical memory and the intersections and disjunctions among personal, collective, and national / official memories. I’m interested in exploring explore how private experience is shaped by and in resistance to official histories and ideologies, and I’m deeply committed to the idea that filmmaking itself can constitute a profound act of reframing, recuperating, or reanimating neglected or forgotten histories.
Using my grandfather’s self-produced biology education films (about snail dissection, locust swarms, and sea urchin communities) as a point of departure and visual frame, my film will be a meditation on memory, genetic transmission, family secrets, and the limits of what is knowable.
At the same time, my project will expand into a larger rumination on the history of Israel, national memory and collective forgetting, the vanishing kibbutz landscape, and the troubled legacies of early 20th century Zionist utopianism. I’m interested in the space of the current-day kibbutz as a metaphor for historical amnesia and mortality, and as a physical reminder of the traces left behind by the complex interweaving of personal and national histories in the first half of the twentieth century.
Jin Zhang
Professor
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Chemistry and Biochemistry
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $5000
The primary objective of this project is to experimentally determine intermediates involved in the adsorption of CO2, H2, and H2O onto an In2O3 surface and to help establish the adsorption/desorption and reaction mechanisms behind catalytic CO2 conversion into useful chemical fuels. Specifically, we will use low temperature Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) to determine the existence and structure of adsorption intermediates. We will design and build a new low temperature sample handling system and use it in conjunction with our existing FTIR spectrometer. The focus will be on evaluating each gas (CO2, H2, and H2O) separately first, then as binary mixtures, and finally as tertiary mixtures to determine systematically the major intermediates involved for each case. This will help to gain insights into how the different gas molecules may interact with each other and thereby affect what intermediates may be formed. Furthermore, we will determine the final products using FTIR in conjunction with gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectroscopy (MS). With these data in conjunction, we will be able to establish a clear picture regarding the adsorption and reaction mechanisms and compare to previous theoretical studies. The results will be significant in understanding CO2 adsorption and the conversion reaction on metal oxide surfaces in general and ultimately have a major impact to managing the CO2 level for economic development and global environmental sustainability.
Michael Dine
Professor
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Physics
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $6000
In less than a year, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva will resume operation, with energy and intensity much higher than its initial run. There is the possibility of significant discoveries, which will require analysis and interpretation. This project will consider proposals for and interpretation of signals for a range of possible phenomena. These include the possibility of a new symmetry of nature, known as supersymmetry, as well as the possibility that the Higgs boson is a bound state of more fundamental constituents (so-called "composite models"). We have the opportunity to hire, on a part time basis, an outstanding postdoctoral fellow. Together with the research associate, we will make detailed predictions for the upcoming LHC run based on proposed models for new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles. Theorists working at UCSC have the advantage of close, almost daily contact with leading figures in one of the two LHC experiments (ATLAS). The group brings expertise in both the phenomenology of particle physics and the closely related problem of the search for dark matter. This proposal requests partial funding for the postdoctoral fellow.
Mary-Kay Gamel
Professor
Humanities Division
Literature
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $8000
Every theatrical production is an experiment requiring extensive research. Productions of earlier scripts test what these scripts can mean to contemporary audiences. The plays of Aristophanes offer special challenges because the scripts are full of topical references to Athenian culture; as a result few reach the stage except LYSISTRATA (sex conflict is a timeless theme). But they deserve to be staged.
EKKLESIAZOUSAI is a prime example. The women of Athens, disgusted with the decisions of the males-only Assembly, dress in drag, get elected, and proceed to make laws they like better. This script is especially appropriate at a time when approval of the U.S. Congress has sunk to an alltime low—and is also hilarious.In winter 2015 the UCSC Theater Arts Department will
produce my new adaptation, directed by Danny Scheie, on the Mainstage. As I have argued in print, adaptation, which makes the issues clearer to contemporary audiences, is more appropriate than literal translations.
One element of the original productions, however, is essential—music. Greek tragedies and comedies were musicals including a large Chorus singing and dancing. Music punctuates the drama, highlights the issues, and raises the show to a higher emotional level. In Athens the music was one of Athenian drama’s many acknowledgements of the ideals of democracy, when average citizens proved themselves just as capable of performance as aristocrats. Yet financial and logistical constraints mean that few modern productions include music.
We are applying to make music with our show. Philip Collins, a Santa Cruz composer who can write in any style, and I have collaborated on six productions, most recently ORESTES TERRORIST (2011), directed by Danny Scheie. An SRG will make possible the composition, conducting, and performance of music in CONGRESSWOMEN.
Eric Aldrich
Assistant Professor
Social Sciences Division
Economics
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $8000
This project seeks funding for high-quality financial data that will be used for the estimation of volatility in financial markets. Volatility is a surrogate measure for the inherent risk of an asset, and measures the likelihood of both large upswings and large downswings in price. The rise of electronic trading and rich intra-day datasets has been beneficial for volatility estimation since the large number of intra-day returns has allowed for more precise estimation of daily volatility. This project will apply modern statistical filtering techniques to financial data with the objective of improving upon current estimates of daily volatility.
The data that will be purchased with the grant money consists of all trades and price quotes for all assets traded on the New York Stock Exchange between January 2003 and January 2014. This is an incredibly rich data set, both in terms of observations on a single asset, as well as the total number of assets available. In order to afford the data, I am committing $5000 of my own library research funds, as well as a $6500 already committed from the university library (conditional on execution of an acceptable license with the New York Stock Exchange).
Finally, the data will not only be useful for the project outlined in this proposal - it will be an important asset for the newly launched Center for Analytical Finance (CAFIN) here on campus and will be used in research projects conducted by undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty affiliated with CAFIN.
Chad Saltikov
Associate Professor
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $7998
Nearly 100 million people within Southeast Asian countries may be consuming groundwater with arsenic levels exceeding the current safety standard of 10 µg/L. Consequently, people in these regions have high incidences of cancer and arsenic related skin diseases. Geology and microbiology studies have established that in the environment bacteria biochemically alter arsenic into a form that is water soluble and highly toxic to humans. A past study showed that animals consuming arsenic could induce changes in the gastrointestinal tract such that the arsenic is converted into a more soluble and toxic form similar to what happens in a groundwater environment. Several arsenic-reducing bacteria were isolated in this study including a Citrobacter strain, which are common GI tract bacteria that can also be pathogenic. A draft genome sequence of this Citrobacter strain was completed but surprisingly no genes of established arsenic transformation pathways were found. This raised questions about how this organism can grows on arsenic and reduce it to the toxic form called arsenite. The objective of this work is to determine the genes responsible for anoxic growth on arsenic and transformation. The experimental approach will be to use RNA sequencing and bioinformatics to determine which genes are expressed in cultures exposed to anoxic conditions with arsenic relative to growth in the absence of arsenic. Genes that are uniquely expressed in arsenic conditions could encode a “novel” arsenic transformation pathway. These genes will be further characterized by introducing genetic mutations into the organism and screening for arsenic growth deficiencies. Results from this study could help us identify a "new" gene pathway for arsenic metabolism that may be specific to GI tract microbes. The work will also advanced the hypothesis that arsenic-reducing bacteria may be a risk factor for cancer in people consuming arsenic in their drinking water.
Maria Evangelatou
Assistant Professor
Arts Division
History of Art and Visual Culture
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $3900
I am seeking the support of a SRG in order to cover the cost of a research assistantship for the undertaking of a number of tasks necessary for the publication of a book under contract with the academic publishing house Alexandros Press. There are two main categories of work that I would like to assign to an assistant: a. correspondence with copy-right holders and collection of images for the illustration of the book, and b. investigation of recent publications on Byzantine material, to identify books and articles of interest for the updating of my research and bibliographic references. A potential third area of work would be the copy-editing of the final manuscript before publication. I am planning to finalize the manuscript of the book by the end of 2014, and to complete all practical tasks necessary for publication, especially pertaining to image collection, in 2015. The amount of time-consuming work involved in the above tasks is considerable, given that the book will have more than 250 images from more than 40 museums, libraries and monuments, and it will discuss numerous topics central to Byzantine culture, on which recent publications are becoming more and more numerous and hard to track. The collaboration of an assistant would allow me to dedicate valuable time to primary scholarly research and writing, and leave more practical matters to be handled by the assistant. Such help will facilitate a more speedy and thorough preparation of the publication material. The resulting book aims to make a significant contribution to Byzantine scholarship: it deals with three of the most important surviving Byzantine manuscripts and proposes readings that considerably advance our understanding not only of these specific codices, but also of their broader socio-cultural context.
Kenneth Pedrotti
Professor
Engineering School
Electrical Engineering
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $8000
The objective of this research is to demonstrate a newly developed approach to the recursive estimation of frequency, amplitude and phase of a sinusoidal signal in noise. The approach here is transformational, and is called the “Fast Frequency Estimator” (FFE). This can serve as a superior replacement for the ubiquitous Phase Locked Loop (PLL), one of which occurs on almost every Integrated circuit produced today. From the theoretical and signal processing point of view the FFE is an embodiment of a novel modification of the Extended Kalman Filter Frequency Estimator (EKFFE) in high speed analog circuitry. This theory provides a rich background of results supporting the near optimality of this approach and its superiority to the PLL. To date our FFE circuit simulations in both MATLAB and SPICE show stability, rapid response to changing input signals “infinite” pull-in range and extremely rapid signal acquisition. This is much more than an order of magnitude of improvement over existing methods. In this work we propose to design a proof-of- concept chip and submit it for Integrated Circuit (IC) fabrication. The intent is to demonstrate solution of the many implementation issues that complicate any analog iC design and allow the pursuit of extramural funding to address specific applications such as clock and data recovery, demodulation of wireless communication signals, tracking filters and phased array RADAR, to name a few.
Jennifer Parker
Associate Professor
Arts Division
Art
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $7200
The goal of this proposal is to seek funds for an educational project that expands a successful pilot into full creation of a “Let’s Talk” app for parents and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) professionals. The project has be developed in collaboration with the THRIVE infant family program, an interdisciplinary group of mental health-care professionals in Los Angeles working at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai and students in UCSC’s OpenLab Research Center (housed in the Digital Arts & New Media Department). THRIVE educates NICU staff, as well as parents with children in NICU, to achieve strong medical outcomes, physically and mentally. This App will serve as a resource tool developed in collaboration for parents experiencing the premature birth of a child and for health care professionals to work directly with the parents and the child.
Su-hua Wang
Associate Professor
Social Sciences Division
Psychology
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $6530
Before they enter kindergarten, many children have had opportunities to play with touch-screen devices or tablets. Whether tablet usage is regular or sporadic, children’s play may have undergone qualitative changes since they are introduced to this new technology. However, the developmental consequences of replacing traditional play materials with apps on tablets remain unclear to parents, educators and researchers. The proposed project investigates the relations between cognitive development and the use of tablets for play. Specifically, preschool-aged children’s ability to manage their cognitive resources (an ability generally termed “executive function”) will be analyzed with the history of their device usage. Executive function allows children to manage their thought and action effectively, and has been strongly associated with social competence and school readiness. A secondary goal is to compare children’s play behavior in a puzzle game when they use traditional materials (puzzle pieces) versus a tablet (a puzzle app). Sixty pairs of parents and children at the age of 3 to 5 years will be recruited. Parents will fill out a survey on the history of the child’s usage of tablets and other electronic devices. Children will first participate in four tasks designed to examine different facets of executive function and then participate in two play sessions involving either traditional materials or a tablet. The first analysis will focus on the relations between children’s executive-function performance and the history of their device usage. The second analysis will compare children’s behavior when playing with physical puzzle pieces versus a puzzle app. Findings from this project will elucidate the relations between children’s use of tables for play and the development of executive function. Furthermore, they will provide educational implications on the optimal integration of new technology into a child’s life.
Grant McGuire
Assistant Professor
Humanities Division
Linguistics
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $6300
This project is for the collection of an audio-visual speech database. Each of the 100 participants will provide isolated word stimuli, sentence stimuli, and spontaneous speech. All stimuli will be tagged for future acoustic and visual analysis. The goal of the corpus is to facilitate experimental research into the role of talker saliency, typicality,and gender in speech perception.
Patricia Gallagher
Professor
Arts Division
Theater Arts
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $3850
I have been invited to be Artist-in-Residence in the 10th Anniversary Season of the Rogue Theatre (Tucson, Arizona). Rogue has invited me to direct, choreograph and/or perform in three shows: Waiting for Godot (Beckett), The Lady in the Looking Glass (Virginia Woolf) and Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare). Because I do not have teaching leave during the period in which this work takes place, I seek travel support to allow me to do this research.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Associate Professor
Social Sciences Division
Anthropology
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $2600
What Matters: Autism, Neuroscience, and the Politics of American Brains focuses on alternative neuroscientific practices in the 20th century – cybernetics, psychoanalysis, and invasive neurology – to unpack assumptions about normative human functioning and its pathologies. I juxtapose intellectual biographies of key thinkers in these fields, namely Gregory Bateson, Felix Guattari and Jose Delgado, with contemporary ethnography of autism experts (families, educators, clinicians) to conceptualize how assumptions in American society lead to the proliferation of disabilities. This project builds on my earlier research on non-normative human biologies to argue for a robust ethics and politics of human biological variation, rather than intensifying regimes of medicalization.
Rick Prelinger
Acting Associate Professor
Arts Division
Film and Digital Media
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $4721
CITY (working title), a feature-length archival film currently in pre-production, bridges the gap between the lived experience of city dwellers and 20th-century North American urbanism/urban development as theorized by urbanists and historians. The footage for this experiment into "experiential ethnography" will be drawn completely from my collection of approximately 5,200 digitized (and 5,000 still to be digitized) home movies, many of which contain both striking and quotidian imagery of cities, city dwellers, and former city dwellers who left for suburbs. I will be PI, director and editor for this film; a producer may be hired at a later time.
Many filmmakers have sought to retrace the contours of urban history, but none have attempted to reconstruct the history of the ascendancy, eclipse and revitalization of North American cities using images created by their residents. Scale is a key factor in this film, which privileges localized micronarratives created by families and individuals over generalized, emblematic archival imagery. While this will be my second full-length feature built completely from home movies and my sixteenth feature-length film compilation, it diverges from my recent work in that it will not be made for a live audience encouraged to comment on the film in real time. This grant seeks initial research funds for the film, requesting $4,721 to hire an undergraduate research assistant who will view, tag and categorize footage so that it can be evaluated for inclusion, and computer hardware and software to support this effort.
As climate change, evolving demographics and economic reorientation trigger new urban models, it is urgent to revisit and learn from previous modes of urban settlement and exurban dispersal. Far from a nostalgic film, CITY will draw vectors directly from past to future, organizing and interrogating personal film records in order to defamiliarize received ideas about urban history and propose future modes of city living.
Linda Burman-Hall
Professor
Arts Division
Music
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $5455
Second only to the Galapagos in its number of endemic species, the Mentawai Archipelago, ±150 km. west of Sumatra (Indonesia) has four endemic primates that are all endangered by deforestation. The most significant of these is a small singing ape species found at the 100-150 foot level in emergent rainforest trees, called scientifically Kloss's gibbon (Hylobates klossii) and locally known as bilou. When I visited Mentawai Archipelago in 2011 to take the first videos of brachiating and singing bilou, — formerly central to Mentawai animist cosmology, — I found the bilou was severely reduced in its range by deforestation, and also that songs and stories about the bilou had been forgotten following the advent of Christianity.
This COR-SRG project primate song expands on my 4 years of work with the vocalizations of Mentawai primates and the old Sabulungan (animist) songs of elders who were in their youth Sikerei, shamans. I request support to collect songs about primates from Sipora island. These have so far been overlooked by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists and will be stylistically distinct from the existing material that Tenaza, other scholars and I have separately collected.
I have had sole access to University of the Pacific primatologist Richard Tenaza's remarkable scientific archive of fieldwork recordings and photographs documenting Mentawai wildlife over 40 years. This application expands the original concept for the CD 'Mentawai: Celebrating Primates', using my unique access to Tenaza's six 1972 Siberut field recordings, his 1986 Pagai recordings, and my 2012 documentation and 2013 recordings, by adding geographically unique 2014 recordings.
Expenses include travel by air and sea, recording equipment, lodging, and field assistant stipend. This grant augments an Arts ARI grant. Mastering and publication for the CD (and cassettes for the informants and source villages) will be the subject of future grant requests.
Professor
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Earth & Planetary Sciences
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $6400
Are Slippery Subglacial Sediments Responsible for Recent Unstable Ice Sheet Behavior in Greenland? Proposed UCSC Addition to a UK Research Drilling Project in Greenland
Melting Greenland Ice Sheet has become one of the most enduring symbols of climate warming. In California, future sea-level rise will have significant impacts on human coastal infrastructure and coastal habitats. The most recent IPCC report (2013) still puts large uncertainties on predictions of future sea level rise due to mass loss from polar ice sheets. These uncertainties stem ultimately from insufficient understanding of the mechanisms by which such ice sheets react to climate warming. Whereas one can calculate reasonably well how much more ice will melt on the surface of Greenland Ice Sheet under different climate scenarios, it is much harder to quantify the documented tendency of this ice sheet to move faster as it melts more. Past Antarctic research demonstrated that presence of weak, water-lain sediments beneath ice makes it easier to change flow velocity by increasing delivery of meltwater to the bed. Yet, current computer models of Greenland Ice Sheet assume that it is moving over solid rock, a situation that makes it more difficult for these models to change the simulated ice velocity rapidly. A team of my UK colleagues has been funded in 2013 to undertake an ambitious ice sheet drilling project on a fast and dynamic outlet glacier of Greenland Ice Sheet (Store Glacier near Uummannaq). However, they do not have any instrumentation that will allow them to directly sample sediments from beneath ice. Since my research group successfully developed and used such a tool (a borehole piston corer) in Antarctica, I request funding from COR to travel with our borehole corer in July 2014 to sample the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet with the UK team. The collected sediment samples will be used by my research group to improve quantitative treatment of ice sheet sliding for use in predictive models of Greenland ice sheet. The proposed project will help me strengthen my ability to pursue future NSF and NASA funding for research in Greenland.
Flora Lu
Associate Professor
Social Sciences Division
Environmental Studies
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $7000
The Dragon and the Condor: China's Growing Role in Resource Extractivism in Ecuador
The increasing role of China in Latin America as a source of foreign direct investment and a participant in the mineral and energy sectors exemplifies the changing geopolitics and economies of the Global South. Nowhere is this Chinese role more pronounced than in Ecuador, a petro-state with an outspokenly leftist President, Rafael Correa, who has rejected US influence and neoliberalism, defaulted on $3.2 billion in debt to the US, and committed almost all of his country's near future oil shipments to China. This project explores the impact of Chinese-led mineral and hydrocarbon extraction through the eyes of local indigenous and mestizo communities in the southern and northern Amazon region, respectively. Through participatory mapping, key informant interviews and focus groups, this study will explore the lived experiences of households in eight communities in zones of extraction to document the practices, policies, and impacts of Chinese corporations such as Petrooriental and Ecuacorriente. This project builds on over a decade of Ecological Anthropological research on Amazonian development in Ecuador by the principal investigator, enriching her longitudinal understanding by focusing on China and studying mining activities in addition to oil extraction. Preliminary data from the project will be used in future external grant proposals to NSF and USAID, and the project budget will support the participation of students who will receive faculty mentoring and gain valuable field research experience.
Catherine Ramirez
Associate Professor
Social Sciences Division
Latin American and Latino Studies
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $2393
From Hampton to Carlisle: Educating and Assimilating the Nation's Racial MinoritiesBudg
This book project examines the nexus of race, education, and assimilation. Part intellectual history, part recovery project, it excavates assimilation's alternative history. Using a broad array of sources, including archival materials, academic treatises, and literary works, and focusing on the school as a mechanism for assimilation, my manuscript shows how the concept is implicit in earlier practices, policies, institutions, and narratives, such as efforts to “civilize” (i.e., proselytize and educate) Native Americans and to “resettle” (i.e., deport or segregate) African Americans.
The chapter for which I seek support juxtaposes “Negro” and Indian education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Research I conducted on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first Native American boarding school in the United States and an offshoot of the African American Hampton Institute, has led me to hypothesize that a primary objective of “Negro” education, especially during the Jim Crow era, was the creation of a “separate but equal” Black society. Where Native Americans were seen as a vanishing people, one that could be absorbed by the white majority via religious conversion, exogamy, and miscegenation, African Americans were deemed a separate race, one that needed to be contained and segregated from the white mainstream. Differences notwithstanding, policy and practice signal that the former group was to be assimilated via annihilation, while the latter would be rendered an internal alien. I posit that the differing purposes and effects of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indian and “Negro” education continue to inform and distort American notions of race, difference, and assimilability.
Hinrich Boeger
Associate Professor
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $8000
Chromatin structure analysis of single gene molecules by atomic force microscopy.
We propose a new interdisciplinary collaboration between laboratories in MCD Biology and Electrical Engineering to analyze the structure of single gene molecules by atomic force microscopy. The imaging of single gene molecules allows us to test theories of the structural dynamics of gene regulation. The novel approach has been successfully pursued in my lab using electron microscopy. We believe that for our purposes the atomic force microscope will prove superior to the electron microscope.
J. Cameron Monroe
Associate Professor
Social Sciences Division
Anthropology
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $5718
Geophysical Archaeological Survey at Milot, Haiti
Why and how centralized states emerged in the past have been primary questions for archaeologists for over a century. Although archaeologists have generally targeted the earliest states of the ancient world, recent work has examined how leaders inculcated political authority in a range of more recent experiments in political centralization. The project for which I seek support examines a recent example of state formation in the New World; the short-lived Kingdom of Haiti (1811-1820), which emerged in the years following the Haitian Revolution. In partnership with the Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National (ISPAN) and the Université d’Etat, Haiti, the Milot Archaeological Project (MAP) will conduct archaeological research in Haiti’s Parc National Historique, in the town of Milot in northern Haiti. This research will target the UNESCO World Heritage site Sans Souci, the royal palace of Henry Christophe as well as the broader community of Milot, mobilizing archaeological evidence to explore the relationship between architectural space and political power in this experiment in state formation. This project represents the only systematic archaeological research in Haiti since the seventies, and will play an important role in long-term development plans for Northern Haiti. The support of a COR SRG will allow the MAP to follow up on initial architectural survey conducted in 2013. During the summer of 2014, the MAP will assess site structure and chronology using cutting edge subsurface geophysical survey technologies, laying the necessary groundwork for long-term fieldwork at this important UNESCO World Heritage site.
Boreth Ly
Assistant Professor
Arts Division
History of Art and Visual Culture
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $4050
Looking at Iconclasm in Thirteenth-Century Cambodian Art and Architecture
My research project investigates the so-called iconoclasm that took place under the auspices of a Hindu King, Jayavarman VIII of Cambodia (reigned 1243-1295). He ordered the destruction of—and in some cases, effacement and recarving of—Buddha images and inscriptions at Buddhist edifices built by his predecessor, King Jayavarman VII (1181-1218 CE) at Angkor, the ancient capital, and at two temple complexes, Banteay Chmar and Preah Khan, located in the distant provinces. I argue that unlike iconoclasm that took place elsewhere (which literally means the destruction of images), the recarving and rewriting of inscriptions to serve the purpose of a different religion and political regime was not unusual in Ancient Cambodia. Ancient Cambodia (and the region of Southeast Asia writ large) was grounded in a military culture. The invasion of neighboring kingdoms and looting of religious icons, especially those made of precious metals, was quite common. In brief, there are precedents for the recarving and repurposing of images that we see in King Jayarvarman VIII’s reign. Is the “iconoclasm” a true break, or can we view it in more varied contexts to greater historical purpose? How do these contexts help us better understand Ancient Khmer visual culture?
Yiman Wang
Associate Professor
Arts Division
Film and Digital Media
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $5533
“Orientally Yours”: Anna May Wong, Cosmopolitan Renegade in a Segregationist Era
“Orientally Yours” is the first book-length study of the full career of Anna May Wong (1905-1961), a pioneer Chinese-American performer who built an international career that encompassed theater, film, radio, and television during the segregationist era.
By examining Wong’s negotiation with the early 20th Century race-gender-class hegemony and national politics, my study not only carefully reconstructs her historical, political and cultural milieu, but also produces an original analysis of her unique strategies of identity performance vis-à-vis her international audiences. I argue that Wong’s strategic identity performance holds important ramifications for today’s minority groups’ identity construction and empowerment.
“Orientally Yours” interweaves critical race and ethnic studies, performance studies, film studies, gender studies, and Asian-American and Pacific studies. By exploring Wong's paradoxical agency in the complex transnational entertainment industries, the book formulates a new interdisciplinary field of “minor” ethnic performer-worker studies, reshaping traditional theories in film, theater, media, and performance studies. The concept of “minor” performer-worker refers to: 1) a performer locked into a minor position by an inequitable labor-capital relationship; 2) a performer who nonetheless may occupy and strategize a “minoritarian” position, playing within the system while gradually estranging, even sabotaging its rules. (The second dimension is drawn from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature,” i. e., literature written from a minoritarian position.)
My approach is both historical and comparative, involving heavy archival research. The grant would enable me to expand my previous research and focus on four European countries where Wong performed in the mid 1930s. By tapping into the so-far ignored archival materials, I hope to uncover an important dimension of Wong’s career.
Irene Lusztig
Assistant Professor
Arts Division
Film and Digital Media
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $8000
The Questions Outnumber the Answers: Family Secrets, Historical Amnesia, and The Utopian Kibbutz
Over the coming year, I hope to begin research and initial filming on a new long-form documentary film project. Tentatively called the questions outnumber the answers, this project will be a lyrical essay film that will combine photographs, letters, journals, contemporary footage, and archival film materials to intertwine a portrait of my enigmatic grandfather, Mordechai Abraham – a Hungarian-Jewish ichthyologist, disillusioned Socialist-Zionist kibbutz founder, and amateur filmmaker who vehemently denied the existence of my mother (his only daughter) for most of his life – with an exploration of 20th century Israeli history.
My research has an on-going engagement with the production of historical memory and the intersections and disjunctions among personal, collective, and national / official memories. I’m interested in exploring explore how private experience is shaped by and in resistance to official histories and ideologies, and I’m deeply committed to the idea that filmmaking itself can constitute a profound act of reframing, recuperating, or reanimating neglected or forgotten histories.
Using my grandfather’s self-produced biology education films (about snail dissection, locust swarms, and sea urchin communities) as a point of departure and visual frame, my film will be a meditation on memory, genetic transmission, family secrets, and the limits of what is knowable.
At the same time, my project will expand into a larger rumination on the history of Israel, national memory and collective forgetting, the vanishing kibbutz landscape, and the troubled legacies of early 20th century Zionist utopianism. I’m interested in the space of the current-day kibbutz as a metaphor for historical amnesia and mortality, and as a physical reminder of the traces left behind by the complex interweaving of personal and national histories in the first half of the twentieth century.
Jin Zhang
Professor
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Chemistry and Biochemistry
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $5000
FTIR Study of Mechanism and Intermediates of CO2 Adsorption and Hydrogenation on In2O3 Nanostructures
The primary objective of this project is to experimentally determine intermediates involved in the adsorption of CO2, H2, and H2O onto an In2O3 surface and to help establish the adsorption/desorption and reaction mechanisms behind catalytic CO2 conversion into useful chemical fuels. Specifically, we will use low temperature Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) to determine the existence and structure of adsorption intermediates. We will design and build a new low temperature sample handling system and use it in conjunction with our existing FTIR spectrometer. The focus will be on evaluating each gas (CO2, H2, and H2O) separately first, then as binary mixtures, and finally as tertiary mixtures to determine systematically the major intermediates involved for each case. This will help to gain insights into how the different gas molecules may interact with each other and thereby affect what intermediates may be formed. Furthermore, we will determine the final products using FTIR in conjunction with gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectroscopy (MS). With these data in conjunction, we will be able to establish a clear picture regarding the adsorption and reaction mechanisms and compare to previous theoretical studies. The results will be significant in understanding CO2 adsorption and the conversion reaction on metal oxide surfaces in general and ultimately have a major impact to managing the CO2 level for economic development and global environmental sustainability.
Michael Dine
Professor
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Physics
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $6000
Searching for Terascale Phenomena
In less than a year, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva will resume operation, with energy and intensity much higher than its initial run. There is the possibility of significant discoveries, which will require analysis and interpretation. This project will consider proposals for and interpretation of signals for a range of possible phenomena. These include the possibility of a new symmetry of nature, known as supersymmetry, as well as the possibility that the Higgs boson is a bound state of more fundamental constituents (so-called "composite models"). We have the opportunity to hire, on a part time basis, an outstanding postdoctoral fellow. Together with the research associate, we will make detailed predictions for the upcoming LHC run based on proposed models for new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles. Theorists working at UCSC have the advantage of close, almost daily contact with leading figures in one of the two LHC experiments (ATLAS). The group brings expertise in both the phenomenology of particle physics and the closely related problem of the search for dark matter. This proposal requests partial funding for the postdoctoral fellow.
Mary-Kay Gamel
Professor
Humanities Division
Literature
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $8000
Staging a new adaptation of Aristophanes' CONGRESSWOMEN with music
Every theatrical production is an experiment requiring extensive research. Productions of earlier scripts test what these scripts can mean to contemporary audiences. The plays of Aristophanes offer special challenges because the scripts are full of topical references to Athenian culture; as a result few reach the stage except LYSISTRATA (sex conflict is a timeless theme). But they deserve to be staged.
EKKLESIAZOUSAI is a prime example. The women of Athens, disgusted with the decisions of the males-only Assembly, dress in drag, get elected, and proceed to make laws they like better. This script is especially appropriate at a time when approval of the U.S. Congress has sunk to an alltime low—and is also hilarious.In winter 2015 the UCSC Theater Arts Department will
produce my new adaptation, directed by Danny Scheie, on the Mainstage. As I have argued in print, adaptation, which makes the issues clearer to contemporary audiences, is more appropriate than literal translations.
One element of the original productions, however, is essential—music. Greek tragedies and comedies were musicals including a large Chorus singing and dancing. Music punctuates the drama, highlights the issues, and raises the show to a higher emotional level. In Athens the music was one of Athenian drama’s many acknowledgements of the ideals of democracy, when average citizens proved themselves just as capable of performance as aristocrats. Yet financial and logistical constraints mean that few modern productions include music.
We are applying to make music with our show. Philip Collins, a Santa Cruz composer who can write in any style, and I have collaborated on six productions, most recently ORESTES TERRORIST (2011), directed by Danny Scheie. An SRG will make possible the composition, conducting, and performance of music in CONGRESSWOMEN.
Eric Aldrich
Assistant Professor
Social Sciences Division
Economics
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $8000
Filtering Methods for Volatility Estimation
This project seeks funding for high-quality financial data that will be used for the estimation of volatility in financial markets. Volatility is a surrogate measure for the inherent risk of an asset, and measures the likelihood of both large upswings and large downswings in price. The rise of electronic trading and rich intra-day datasets has been beneficial for volatility estimation since the large number of intra-day returns has allowed for more precise estimation of daily volatility. This project will apply modern statistical filtering techniques to financial data with the objective of improving upon current estimates of daily volatility.
The data that will be purchased with the grant money consists of all trades and price quotes for all assets traded on the New York Stock Exchange between January 2003 and January 2014. This is an incredibly rich data set, both in terms of observations on a single asset, as well as the total number of assets available. In order to afford the data, I am committing $5000 of my own library research funds, as well as a $6500 already committed from the university library (conditional on execution of an acceptable license with the New York Stock Exchange).
Finally, the data will not only be useful for the project outlined in this proposal - it will be an important asset for the newly launched Center for Analytical Finance (CAFIN) here on campus and will be used in research projects conducted by undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty affiliated with CAFIN.
Chad Saltikov
Associate Professor
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $7998
Determining how a gastrointestinal tract bacterium, Citrobacter, metabolizes arsenic
Nearly 100 million people within Southeast Asian countries may be consuming groundwater with arsenic levels exceeding the current safety standard of 10 µg/L. Consequently, people in these regions have high incidences of cancer and arsenic related skin diseases. Geology and microbiology studies have established that in the environment bacteria biochemically alter arsenic into a form that is water soluble and highly toxic to humans. A past study showed that animals consuming arsenic could induce changes in the gastrointestinal tract such that the arsenic is converted into a more soluble and toxic form similar to what happens in a groundwater environment. Several arsenic-reducing bacteria were isolated in this study including a Citrobacter strain, which are common GI tract bacteria that can also be pathogenic. A draft genome sequence of this Citrobacter strain was completed but surprisingly no genes of established arsenic transformation pathways were found. This raised questions about how this organism can grows on arsenic and reduce it to the toxic form called arsenite. The objective of this work is to determine the genes responsible for anoxic growth on arsenic and transformation. The experimental approach will be to use RNA sequencing and bioinformatics to determine which genes are expressed in cultures exposed to anoxic conditions with arsenic relative to growth in the absence of arsenic. Genes that are uniquely expressed in arsenic conditions could encode a “novel” arsenic transformation pathway. These genes will be further characterized by introducing genetic mutations into the organism and screening for arsenic growth deficiencies. Results from this study could help us identify a "new" gene pathway for arsenic metabolism that may be specific to GI tract microbes. The work will also advanced the hypothesis that arsenic-reducing bacteria may be a risk factor for cancer in people consuming arsenic in their drinking water.
Maria Evangelatou
Assistant Professor
Arts Division
History of Art and Visual Culture
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $3900
Funding research assistantships for the publication of the book Theia graphe: word and image in the Byzantine Psalters of the Iconoclast aftermath"
I am seeking the support of a SRG in order to cover the cost of a research assistantship for the undertaking of a number of tasks necessary for the publication of a book under contract with the academic publishing house Alexandros Press. There are two main categories of work that I would like to assign to an assistant: a. correspondence with copy-right holders and collection of images for the illustration of the book, and b. investigation of recent publications on Byzantine material, to identify books and articles of interest for the updating of my research and bibliographic references. A potential third area of work would be the copy-editing of the final manuscript before publication. I am planning to finalize the manuscript of the book by the end of 2014, and to complete all practical tasks necessary for publication, especially pertaining to image collection, in 2015. The amount of time-consuming work involved in the above tasks is considerable, given that the book will have more than 250 images from more than 40 museums, libraries and monuments, and it will discuss numerous topics central to Byzantine culture, on which recent publications are becoming more and more numerous and hard to track. The collaboration of an assistant would allow me to dedicate valuable time to primary scholarly research and writing, and leave more practical matters to be handled by the assistant. Such help will facilitate a more speedy and thorough preparation of the publication material. The resulting book aims to make a significant contribution to Byzantine scholarship: it deals with three of the most important surviving Byzantine manuscripts and proposes readings that considerably advance our understanding not only of these specific codices, but also of their broader socio-cultural context.
Kenneth Pedrotti
Professor
Engineering School
Electrical Engineering
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $8000
Fast Frequency Estimator
The objective of this research is to demonstrate a newly developed approach to the recursive estimation of frequency, amplitude and phase of a sinusoidal signal in noise. The approach here is transformational, and is called the “Fast Frequency Estimator” (FFE). This can serve as a superior replacement for the ubiquitous Phase Locked Loop (PLL), one of which occurs on almost every Integrated circuit produced today. From the theoretical and signal processing point of view the FFE is an embodiment of a novel modification of the Extended Kalman Filter Frequency Estimator (EKFFE) in high speed analog circuitry. This theory provides a rich background of results supporting the near optimality of this approach and its superiority to the PLL. To date our FFE circuit simulations in both MATLAB and SPICE show stability, rapid response to changing input signals “infinite” pull-in range and extremely rapid signal acquisition. This is much more than an order of magnitude of improvement over existing methods. In this work we propose to design a proof-of- concept chip and submit it for Integrated Circuit (IC) fabrication. The intent is to demonstrate solution of the many implementation issues that complicate any analog iC design and allow the pursuit of extramural funding to address specific applications such as clock and data recovery, demodulation of wireless communication signals, tracking filters and phased array RADAR, to name a few.
Jennifer Parker
Associate Professor
Arts Division
Art
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $7200
“NICU Let's Talk" app for parents and professionals
The goal of this proposal is to seek funds for an educational project that expands a successful pilot into full creation of a “Let’s Talk” app for parents and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) professionals. The project has be developed in collaboration with the THRIVE infant family program, an interdisciplinary group of mental health-care professionals in Los Angeles working at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai and students in UCSC’s OpenLab Research Center (housed in the Digital Arts & New Media Department). THRIVE educates NICU staff, as well as parents with children in NICU, to achieve strong medical outcomes, physically and mentally. This App will serve as a resource tool developed in collaboration for parents experiencing the premature birth of a child and for health care professionals to work directly with the parents and the child.
Su-hua Wang
Associate Professor
Social Sciences Division
Psychology
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $6530
Children’s Use of Tablets for Play and Their Executive Function
Before they enter kindergarten, many children have had opportunities to play with touch-screen devices or tablets. Whether tablet usage is regular or sporadic, children’s play may have undergone qualitative changes since they are introduced to this new technology. However, the developmental consequences of replacing traditional play materials with apps on tablets remain unclear to parents, educators and researchers. The proposed project investigates the relations between cognitive development and the use of tablets for play. Specifically, preschool-aged children’s ability to manage their cognitive resources (an ability generally termed “executive function”) will be analyzed with the history of their device usage. Executive function allows children to manage their thought and action effectively, and has been strongly associated with social competence and school readiness. A secondary goal is to compare children’s play behavior in a puzzle game when they use traditional materials (puzzle pieces) versus a tablet (a puzzle app). Sixty pairs of parents and children at the age of 3 to 5 years will be recruited. Parents will fill out a survey on the history of the child’s usage of tablets and other electronic devices. Children will first participate in four tasks designed to examine different facets of executive function and then participate in two play sessions involving either traditional materials or a tablet. The first analysis will focus on the relations between children’s executive-function performance and the history of their device usage. The second analysis will compare children’s behavior when playing with physical puzzle pieces versus a puzzle app. Findings from this project will elucidate the relations between children’s use of tables for play and the development of executive function. Furthermore, they will provide educational implications on the optimal integration of new technology into a child’s life.
Grant McGuire
Assistant Professor
Humanities Division
Linguistics
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $6300
Building the Santa Cruz Audio-Visual Talker Corpus
This project is for the collection of an audio-visual speech database. Each of the 100 participants will provide isolated word stimuli, sentence stimuli, and spontaneous speech. All stimuli will be tagged for future acoustic and visual analysis. The goal of the corpus is to facilitate experimental research into the role of talker saliency, typicality,and gender in speech perception.
Patricia Gallagher
Professor
Arts Division
Theater Arts
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $3850
Artistic Residency, Rogue Theatre's 10th Anniversary Season
I have been invited to be Artist-in-Residence in the 10th Anniversary Season of the Rogue Theatre (Tucson, Arizona). Rogue has invited me to direct, choreograph and/or perform in three shows: Waiting for Godot (Beckett), The Lady in the Looking Glass (Virginia Woolf) and Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare). Because I do not have teaching leave during the period in which this work takes place, I seek travel support to allow me to do this research.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Associate Professor
Social Sciences Division
Anthropology
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $2600
What Matters: Autism, Neuroscience and the Politics of American Brains
What Matters: Autism, Neuroscience, and the Politics of American Brains focuses on alternative neuroscientific practices in the 20th century – cybernetics, psychoanalysis, and invasive neurology – to unpack assumptions about normative human functioning and its pathologies. I juxtapose intellectual biographies of key thinkers in these fields, namely Gregory Bateson, Felix Guattari and Jose Delgado, with contemporary ethnography of autism experts (families, educators, clinicians) to conceptualize how assumptions in American society lead to the proliferation of disabilities. This project builds on my earlier research on non-normative human biologies to argue for a robust ethics and politics of human biological variation, rather than intensifying regimes of medicalization.
Rick Prelinger
Acting Associate Professor
Arts Division
Film and Digital Media
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $4721
City: The 20th-Century North American City as Documented By Its Residents
CITY (working title), a feature-length archival film currently in pre-production, bridges the gap between the lived experience of city dwellers and 20th-century North American urbanism/urban development as theorized by urbanists and historians. The footage for this experiment into "experiential ethnography" will be drawn completely from my collection of approximately 5,200 digitized (and 5,000 still to be digitized) home movies, many of which contain both striking and quotidian imagery of cities, city dwellers, and former city dwellers who left for suburbs. I will be PI, director and editor for this film; a producer may be hired at a later time.
Many filmmakers have sought to retrace the contours of urban history, but none have attempted to reconstruct the history of the ascendancy, eclipse and revitalization of North American cities using images created by their residents. Scale is a key factor in this film, which privileges localized micronarratives created by families and individuals over generalized, emblematic archival imagery. While this will be my second full-length feature built completely from home movies and my sixteenth feature-length film compilation, it diverges from my recent work in that it will not be made for a live audience encouraged to comment on the film in real time. This grant seeks initial research funds for the film, requesting $4,721 to hire an undergraduate research assistant who will view, tag and categorize footage so that it can be evaluated for inclusion, and computer hardware and software to support this effort.
As climate change, evolving demographics and economic reorientation trigger new urban models, it is urgent to revisit and learn from previous modes of urban settlement and exurban dispersal. Far from a nostalgic film, CITY will draw vectors directly from past to future, organizing and interrogating personal film records in order to defamiliarize received ideas about urban history and propose future modes of city living.
Linda Burman-Hall
Professor
Arts Division
Music
2014 SRG - Special Research Grant
Award: $5455
MENTAWAI: SIPORA ISLAND RECORDINGS FOR PRIMATE SONGS CD
Second only to the Galapagos in its number of endemic species, the Mentawai Archipelago, ±150 km. west of Sumatra (Indonesia) has four endemic primates that are all endangered by deforestation. The most significant of these is a small singing ape species found at the 100-150 foot level in emergent rainforest trees, called scientifically Kloss's gibbon (Hylobates klossii) and locally known as bilou. When I visited Mentawai Archipelago in 2011 to take the first videos of brachiating and singing bilou, — formerly central to Mentawai animist cosmology, — I found the bilou was severely reduced in its range by deforestation, and also that songs and stories about the bilou had been forgotten following the advent of Christianity.
This COR-SRG project primate song expands on my 4 years of work with the vocalizations of Mentawai primates and the old Sabulungan (animist) songs of elders who were in their youth Sikerei, shamans. I request support to collect songs about primates from Sipora island. These have so far been overlooked by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists and will be stylistically distinct from the existing material that Tenaza, other scholars and I have separately collected.
I have had sole access to University of the Pacific primatologist Richard Tenaza's remarkable scientific archive of fieldwork recordings and photographs documenting Mentawai wildlife over 40 years. This application expands the original concept for the CD 'Mentawai: Celebrating Primates', using my unique access to Tenaza's six 1972 Siberut field recordings, his 1986 Pagai recordings, and my 2012 documentation and 2013 recordings, by adding geographically unique 2014 recordings.
Expenses include travel by air and sea, recording equipment, lodging, and field assistant stipend. This grant augments an Arts ARI grant. Mastering and publication for the CD (and cassettes for the informants and source villages) will be the subject of future grant requests.
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