By snoadmin
From Martian space probes to experimental wind turbines, Thursday’s All University Celebration of Research, Scholarly and Creative Activity featured notable research projects and study findings from Cal State Long Beach student and faculty.
In the front of the showcase were rockets launched by the engineering department. Deepak Verma, a senior aerospace major, talked about the preparation of the launch of a four-feet-by-25-inch Prospector-14 rocket with the help of Garvey Spacecraft Corporation. The rocket’s propulsion system uses cryogenic methane fuel.
“Here the methane itself is largely [of interest to] NASA because there is methane on Mars,” Verma said. “Theoretically you could produce methane on Mars. So if you could get a rocket that runs on methane, you don’t really have to use a propellant. You could use the air.”
However, the first time Verma’s team tried to transport the methane, it evaporated in the tank.
“The tank itself was really large, and we only had about 20 gallons in there,” Verma said. “So when you have a large surface like that, it heats up really quickly, and then it all evaporates.
“In this case, we bought a smaller tank… and you fill the whole thing up and it keeps itself cool,” Verma said.
The P-14 rocket was funded by the Air Force Research Lab.
“They’re different fundings, because the school doesn’t have all that much to provide for such large projects” Verma said.
A miniaturization of a large wind turbine was also on display. Professor Hamid Rahai from the mechanical and aerospace engineering department finished the turbine in 2005 with a grant from the California Energy Commission (CEC).
“We increased the power efficiency [of the wind turbine] from 24 percent to 36 percent,” Rahai said. “If there is a wind velocity of up to six [mph] or higher, you have the potential for electricity generation.”
The turbine is not a propeller, but a 30-foot cylinder-shaped tube on a vertical axis. Rahai said that birds can see it and they don’t fly into it. The CEC has recently started to ask the engineering department to promote the use of these wind turbines.
One dissertation on display in The Pointe was Alexandra Jaffe and Lee Le’s paper on “Media Representations of Linguistic Diversity.”
Le, a senior linguistics, Asian studies and Chinese studies major, said that they analyzed the transcripts of speakers in the BBC “Voices” project, which featured regional varieties of speakers. These speakers included varieties of British English, as well as Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Guernsey French, Welsh and Manx.
“Our theory was that representations [of dialects] in the media were not neutral,” Le said. “For example, we looked at two speakers. One of them described himself as educated Scottish. The other one described himself as having a broad accent, which means very heavily dialectal.”
Although there were words by the dialectal person that were pronounced in a standard manner, they still were misspelled by the transcript writer, because of the writer’s perception of the person’s academic level.
“For example, the word ‘could’ is ‘culd.’ Because of the perceptions of the person who made the transcription, they spelled it differently,” Le said. “And here for the educated person, there were places where they could have spelled it differently. [For instance], he said, ‘work it,’ instead of ‘working.’ So they spelled it normally because of their perceptions of the educated person speaking.”
Jaffe and Le’s conclusion states that “strategies used to portray authentic speakers unintentionally reinforce sociolinguistic hierarchies – that is, they attribute those speakers with lesser authority.”
