Abstract

We know that local farms are important, but how do we assess their value to the community? This report summarizes work completed in the summer of 2016 that attempts to better understand the role of farms in the local economy of the Williamstown area. Our goals include understanding the economic contribution of farms to the economy through jobs and the purchasing of local resources, as well as the availability of said resources to the farms. We intend to use this information to inform the public of the importance of farms and to discover ways in which farmers and the greater Williamstown community can better support each other.

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Summary

A sample of projects for the Williamstown Farmers Market. I designed and developed graphic flyers, blog posts, and web pages to promote small agricultural and artisan businesses.

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Abstract

We describe DooFuS, a peer-to-peer distributed file system intended for small networks of users with limited space who want control over probabilistic data availability at the file level. Distributed file systems render transparent a network of nodes collaborating to maintain data consistency and redundancy to the user who interacts with it as one would a local file system. Peer-to-peer networks use complete functional homogeneity to create highly resilient networks with little established infrastructure. We describe the underlying modules and logic that are responsible for DooFuS’ functionality and analyze the application’s performance.

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Abstract

We analyzed existing GPS data of African forest elephants in four different populations in Western Africa with the goal of understanding how and why elephants navigate. We focused our efforts on the elephants’ movements with respect to the earth’s magnetic field. The African forest elephant is a vulnerable species greatly affected by poaching and habitat loss, and understanding how and why elephants navigate could help conservationists understand and predict elephant behavior in order to protect the animals. We understand that such understanding could also be beneficial to poachers; However, it couldn’t do much to increase the already-high poaching rate and would likely do more help than harm. Although we didn’t utilize enough data to produce significant results, we found intriguing patterns in the elephant’s magnetic field coordinates, which can be explored to a greater degree in the future.