On Monday, December 4th, President Donald Trump announced a reduction of the Bears Ears National Monument by as much as 90%. President Obama protected these mesas, cliffs, and canyons that are home to over 100,000 Native American archaeological and cultural sites. Some of these sites date back 12,000 BCE and the Obama Administration argued they have […]
Archives for 2017
Should We Be So Concerned About Extinction? A Response To Alexander Pyron
Dr. Alexander Pyron’s central argument in his piece We Don’t Need to Save Endangered Species. Extinction is Part of Evolution. can be summarized as follows: Mass extinctions have historically happened and allowed life recover throughout the history of life on Earth. If mass extinctions have historical precedence, then they are natural. If mass extinctions are natural, […]
Notes From Data Collection
I am currently in the middle of data collection, digging through Crunchbase finding Ag Data and Precision Ag companies. I have just about wrapped up California companies, finding and coding for 24 different companies. However, three of these companies were no longer active or difficult to find data for and four companies focused on something other […]
Time for Data Collection
This past week I have been collecting data and settling on interesting and doable methodology. My focus question is currently set as: To what extent have precision agriculture technologies been successful in achieving sustainable development goals in California and India? This question is driven by sustainable development goals and what current technologies are achieving. However, farming data […]
The Outline of an Outline
This week was focused on creating an outline that will be used for both the 5-page paper at the end of the semester and my final paper/thesis outcome. The following outcome was created with pretty strict adherence to the guideline for situated research as posted on the ENVS page. Outlining was helpful for identifying the […]
Time For a Timeline
As the semester is entering its final third, it is time to reflect on what I have accomplished so far and what else I will need to do for the rest of the semester. So far, I feel that I have a framing question and a solid base of research that forms the basis for […]
Concept Mapping – What’s In An Actor?
This week I dove into my first situated context: precision agriculture in California. Through this process I created an Actor-Network map: This really helped to organize my thoughts around California agriculture and got me to think about several actors and relationships that I need to research further. A big actor that has currently been mostly absent […]
Having Too Many Options – Thinking About Focus Questions
This past week I have spent a lot of time thinking about my focus question and possible research methods. Through this process, I am trying out several different question types and going to see what makes the most sense to go forward with. What are sustainable development values held for various future agriculture technologies? I […]
Learning From Past Projects and Finding a New Focus
Through continued research and looking at capstones from previous students I realized something critical: I am already feeling kind of bored with my capstone. I could go through the motions and have a fine capstone about the sustainable development impacts of artificial intelligence in rice agriculture in California and North India. But I can already […]
Progress Update: Lots To Do
This week I want to take a moment to provide updates from the previous week, reflect on where I am so far, and look towards where I am going in the next several weeks. First, I changed my framing question to In what ways does new technology adoption further or inhibit sustainable development? My previous question […]