Publication Type: Oral Presentation
Abstract: With the recent spike in fuel costs there has been a renewed interest in alternative fuels. Biodiesel has received a lot on interest from the farming community not only as a fuel to run farm equipment but also interest in learning more about oil seed crops and their role in biodiesel production. Reports have been made that people have been injured making biodiesel and that equipment manufacturers are not standing behind warranties when biodiesel is used. The South Hampton Roads RC&D Council determined that local producers needed information on how to make quality biodiesel and how to make it safely. Additionally, producers needed to know more about oil seed crops that are suitable for their region. The council partnered with Hampton Roads Clean Cities, Virginia Cooperative Extension, James Madison University, Virginia Department of Mines and Minerals and a Biodiesel Cooperative to host a workshop on the topic of Biodiesel. The workshop was a huge success with potential participants having to be turned away. Biodiesel production was reviewed and demonstrated as was how to make it safely. Quality control measures were presented and manufacturer’s warranties statement were provided. Cooperative Extension reviewed a variety of oil seed crops that are suitable for our region and how they could be incorporated into existing cropping rotations and how they could improve soil quality.
The Biodiesel Workshop was successful. There is a lot of information “out there” that may not be geared to local producers. It was important to give them accurate, timely information.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Alternative media have been identified as a variety of aspects contrasting to preceding and existing mass media. With respect to the media environment in which alternative media are claimed, Marxist and critical scholars stress dominant hegemony involved in mass media, while Foucault and his followers focus on immanent power engaged in knowledge production. This study describes key concepts of alternative media as proposed by many scholars and attempts to draw on a typology of existing definitions. A wide range of definitions of alternative media, however, can be generally reconsidered in two ways: counterhegemonic or participatory media. Examining compatibility of both approaches, this study describes how alternative media are related with social movements in the new media age. Finally, this study suggests conceptualizing digital alternative media in the global age as decentralized-communication-networks against centralized-corporate-globalization.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper is simultaneously a critique of gay marriage politics, an examination of the queer response to marriage politics, and a nascent articulation of an alternative approach. The argument is primarily grounded in a critique of texts by Michael Warner, Judith Butler, and Cathy Cohen. What I retain from Warner and Butler is a pressing skepticism towards any sexual politics that leverages its claims to justice by degrading non-normative identities and intimacies. What I find inadequate is their inattention to structure. Their analyses of materiality, distribution, and social policy write the phenomena outside of, or at least ancillary to, the purview of sexual politics. A robust queer alternative to the marriage agenda should account for distributive injustices as contributive to sexual misrecognition. What I retain from Cohen, and then extend, is a political vocabulary that addresses how structural racial and class subordination impinges sex, sexuality, and sexual relations. What I find inadequate are her experiential qualifications necessary to cultivate political action. A sensible progressive sexual politics beyond “Beyond Gay Marriage" emerges by mediating between Warner, Butler and Cohen, and engaging feminist investigations of marital and other sexually-regulatory policy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: I canvass the best and worst of gay marriage politics, the queer critique of marriage, and the intersectional approach, to anatomize a theory of sexual justice that is cross-identitarian, structurally attentive, and politically efficacious.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: One of the most troublesome topics in calculus is the technique of integration by parts. The usual approach to this technique is $\int u\,dv=uv-\int v\,du$. This method is a general one applicable to a wide variety of integrals. Selecting the right function for u is the most difficult task for many students of calculus. In this article, we explain a method that, once mastered, may facilitate the ubderstanding of how the techniqu works.