Plumbing Pipe Music – Building a PVC Flute
Last week, while watching various people play the bass guitar on Instagram, I was presented with a video of a person playing a home-made stringed instrument. This guy, Nicholas Bras, was certainly having...
Science & Technology Outreach Blog
Tracking Birds Across the Globe as they Pass By the University of Oregon – MOTUS Tracking
Earth Day 2022 With loss of habitat around the world, many of our migrating bird species are in great decline. This is because these globe flying birds use multiple areas during different...
Search & Rescue on a Local Scale – Radio Transmitter Hunts
This last Saturday 25 people including about 10 University of Oregon community members gathered at one of our local parks by campus to work on a transmitter hunt to find a hidden...
Seeing the Unhearable, A Digression on Listening to Bats
A spectrogram of bat echolocating food, recorded by the author This is a mainly a story about listening to bats, but also about computers and conservation and a few other things like physics...
From 7YB to N7DUX – HAM Radio at the University of Oregon
N7DUX Historically speaking, the newly formed HAM radio club on campus is not new. Back in the day, and I mean “back,” the U of O had a previous club. The University of...
The STEM Power of Rocketry
Rocketry, at the high-power level, really offers lots of opportunities for STEM learning. I have been involved with L1 and L2 rocketry for more than a decade and the DeArmond Makerspace in Price Science...
The Power of Graph Databases as Explored via an Alaskan Food Web
Most of us are familiar with databases on at least some basic level. I maintain a database of plant and animals from Oregon just for my own interest. There are tables that have...
Software Defined Radio – SDR
I have written about the advantages of a ham (amateur) radio license and the experimental opportunities that such a license leads to. Probably one of the easiest starting points with beginning to understand radio...
MaxEnt Species Distribution Modelling
Species distribution models (SDM) may seem somewhat esoteric. These mathematical models take environmental data such as local weather conditions and topographic position and compare them to the point locations of an organism, whether plant...
Fun with R-Studio and the Lubridate Library
The statistical package R, and its complement interface R-Studio, combine to form an extremely power team for statistical analysis. And, although the program is command-line driven, it is much more intuitive to use than...
Maps with animation: Bird movements in the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest
I am always astounded at the tools and data that are available right at our fingertips. I recently had the opportunity to analyze a few data sets from the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest here...