A spatial analysis of vehicle dismantling in California

Vehicle dismantling facilities play a critical role in recycling metals from end-of-life vehicles (ELVs). However, these facilities can impose environmental burdens on nearby communities, including noise, air pollution, and groundwater contamination, especially when operations do not comply with legal standards. While the siting of hazardous facilities has been widely studied through an environmental justice (EJ) lens, vehicle dismantlers have received limited attention. This study examines these patterns in California, highlighting their unique characteristics and implications for social and environmental equity.Using a Heteroskedastic Binary Logit model to capture local differences, this thesis shows that vehicle dismantlers are more likely to be located in census tracts with higher levels of social disadvantage, although not disproportionately in low-income areas. Composite variables, such as the CalEnviroScreen score and components of the Social Vulnerability Index, are important for predicting the presence of dismantlers, linking these facilities to broader patterns of environmental and social vulnerability. While results do not explicitly find racial disparities, findings suggest that vehicle dismantlers are concentrated in highly polluted areas, which are often disproportionately inhabited by disadvantaged populations, which raises environmental injustice concerns. Conversely, population density vi is also a significant factor, which is inversely correlated with the presence of vehicle dismantlers. These facilities often require substantial land, which is expensive in densely populated urban areas. A better understanding of the factors influencing the siting of these facilities is useful to craft better policies to address social and environmental injustices, promote sustainability and enhance social equity

Centrifuge Modelling of the Monotonic and Cyclic Response of Ring Anchors in Shared Configuration for Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

The development of offshore wind is rapidly growing to meet the rising demand for renewable energy. However, a large portion of the global wind energy potential is located in deep water regions where wind turbines with fixed foundations become economically and technically unfeasible. In these locations, floating offshore wind turbines (FOWT) supported by mooring system with subsea anchors offer a feasible solution. The deeply embedded ring anchor is a new anchorage system for FOWT that can offer higher material efficiency compared to traditional monopiles and caissons. Additionally, the ring anchor can generate greater capacity than the drag anchor due to its greater embedment depth and more reliable deployment. The ring anchor is compatible with the shared anchor configuration, which can significantly reduce the number of required anchors. However, the shared anchor configuration poses new challenges like the summation of the vertical line force components and the more complex load direction variations. To further understand the behavior of ring anchors subjected to monotonic tensile loading and long-term cyclic loading in both clay and sand deposits, four series of centrifuge load tests on ring anchors were performed at the University of California Davis Center for Geotechnical Modeling (CGM) at an acceleration of 70g. The monotonic behavior of the ring anchor was investigated in both clay and sand considering the effects of anchor embedment depth and load inclination angle. The ring anchors were loaded at a constat velocity by an actuator with taut steel wire lines, while instrumentation was installed to record the force, displacement, and inclination on the taut line. The results indicate that in both soils, the capacity of the ring anchors increases as the embedment depth is increased and the line inclination angle is decreased (i.e., becomes closer to the horizontal). Analysis in the normalized forces reveals that the failure mechanisms were similar for both embedment depths in clay, while different failure mechanisms took place in sand for the shallow and deep embedment. The effect of disturbance induced by the installation of the anchors was important in sand and minimal in clay because of the in-flight consolidation. These results offer valuable insights regarding the monotonic tensile loading behavior of the ring anchors for future field practices and establish baseline values for designing the cyclic load experiments in the second part of this dissertation.The cyclic tests on the ring anchors investigated their long-term performance. These tests were performed using three independently controlled actuators that simulated a three-way shared anchor scenario or one actuator to simulate a single-line anchor scenario. Each shared anchor was subjected to load packets that covered a 180° back-and-forth sweep in out-of-plane angle to investigate their behavior during multiple storm events. Analysis of the data focused on the line force-displacement measurements, anchor displacement trajectory, and displacement and stiffness responses during individual load cycles.The results of cyclic load test in clay indicate that for a given load, the shared anchors displaced with steeper trajectory in comparison to the single line anchor. The anchor embedment depth did not have a significant impact on the anchor behavior when the loads were scaled based on the corresponding anchor vertical capacity. Increases in both mean load magnitude and cyclic-to-mean load ratio of the resultant force led to greater anchor displacements, but only the cyclic-to-mean ratio affected the line cyclic stiffness. Changes in the out-of-plane angle of the resultant force influenced the displacement and stiffness responses of individual lines despite the magnitude of the resultant force staying constant. The dissipation of excess pore pressures and resulting consolidation during the period of load application had a significant effect on the response of the anchor. Specifically, it resulted in increases in the undrained shear strength as the clay consolidated, which is evidenced by the pore pressure measurements showing constant dissipation and the continuously decreasing rate of anchor displacement accumulation. The effect of line inclination for shared anchor behavior was inconclusive and requires further investigation.While the test results in sand indicate that the effects of embedment depth, line inclination, load magnitude, and out-of-plane angle were similar to the tests in clay, the response of shared and single-line anchors were distinctly different. Due to the evolution of the mobilized passive zones within the surrounding soil, the shared anchors tended to accumulate more displacements compared to the single-line anchors in both vertical and horizontal directions. The difference became more pronounced as the number of applied load cycles increased and as the out-of-plane angle varied. The primary failure mechanism for shared anchors in sand was progressive failure towards the vertical direction due to strain-induced softening. This type of failure can be triggered by large cyclic amplitudes, where the resulting fast accumulation of deformations results in a transition of sand contraction to dilation. This investigation characterizes the monotonic and cyclic loading behavior of the ring anchor in both single-line and shared configurations across a range of soil types, embedment depths, line angles, and applied loads. This study provides data for the assessment of the stability of shared ring anchors in clays and sands, with insights into the underly failure mechanisms. The conclusions suggest that the ring anchor can be a viable solution for floating wind turbines with shared anchor configurations. However, the shared anchors accumulated higher vertical displacement than the single-line anchors under similar cyclic load events in certain conditions, likely due to the more inclined resultant force and potential weakening affect induced by change of load directions. Despite this, this study shows that the shared anchor configuration can be designed to be a safe and more efficient foundation for FOWTs if the soil properties at the site and the expected line loads are well-characterized

Fostering climate resilience and social equity in ocean sustainability initiatives

This dissertation explores pathways to fostering climate resilience in fishery systems and equity in ocean knowledge production. By examining the interdependencies between social and ecological resilience, as well as social and environmental metrics and individual motivations, it identifies both mechanisms that drive and obstacles that impede the capacity of existing ocean sustainability initiatives to foster climate resilience and social equity. Chapter 1 synthesizes 18 global case studies to identify key pathways for achieving climate resilience in social-ecological fishery systems, introducing five fishery archetypes and two resilience pathways. Chapter 2 investigates how social and environmental indicators in Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs) relate to climate resilience. It demonstrates that progress on social responsibility indicators—closely tied to social equity—greatly contributes to our capacity to assess climate resilience in the seafood sector and is needed for FIPs to directly confer resilience across its dimensions. Chapter 3 explores how inequities in knowledge production can foster equity-centered motivations among external scientists when collective relational dynamics are viewed as poor. These studies together illustrate the importance of advancing social equity in ocean sustainability initiatives and its instrumental value to climate resilience

Dual role of FOXG1 in regulating gliogenesis in the developing neocortex via the FGF signalling pathway.

In the developing vertebrate central nervous system, neurons and glia typically arise sequentially from common progenitors. Here, we report that the transcription factor Forkhead Box G1 (Foxg1) regulates gliogenesis in the mouse neocortex via distinct cell-autonomous roles in progenitors and postmitotic neurons that regulate different aspects of the gliogenic FGF signalling pathway. We demonstrate that loss of Foxg1 in cortical progenitors at neurogenic stages causes premature astrogliogenesis. We identify a novel FOXG1 target, the pro-gliogenic FGF pathway component Fgfr3, which is suppressed by FOXG1 cell-autonomously to maintain neurogenesis. Furthermore, FOXG1 can also suppress premature astrogliogenesis triggered by the augmentation of FGF signalling. We identify a second novel function of FOXG1 in regulating the expression of gliogenic cues in newborn neocortical upper-layer neurons. Loss of FOXG1 in postmitotic neurons non-autonomously enhances gliogenesis in the progenitors via FGF signalling. These results fit well with the model that newborn neurons secrete cues that trigger progenitors to produce the next wave of cell types, astrocytes. If FGF signalling is attenuated in Foxg1 null progenitors, they progress to oligodendrocyte production. Therefore, loss of FOXG1 transitions the progenitor to a gliogenic state, producing either astrocytes or oligodendrocytes depending on FGF signalling levels. Our results uncover how FOXG1 integrates extrinsic signalling via the FGF pathway to regulate the sequential generation of neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes in the cerebral cortex

Least Effort and Alignment in Task‐Oriented Communication

Conversational partners align the meanings of their words over the course of interaction to coordinate and communicate. One process of alignment is lexical entrainment, whereby partners mirror and abbreviate their word usage to converge on shared terms for referents relevant to the conversation. However, lexical entrainment may result in inefficient mimicry that does not add new information, suggesting that task-oriented communication may favor alignment through other means. The present study investigates the process of alignment in Danish conversations in which dyads learned to categorize unfamiliar "aliens" using trial-and-error feedback. Performance improved as dyad communication became less verbose, measured as a decrease in the entropy of word usage. Word usage also diverged between partners as measured by Jensen-Shannon Divergence, which indicates that alignment was not achieved through lexical entrainment. A computational model of dyadic communication is shown to account for the alien game results in terms of joint least effort. The model shows that alignment of partner referents can increase as a result of minimizing both the joint entropy of dyadic word usage and the conditional entropy of individual referents given the joint signal distribution. We conclude that the principle of least effort, originally proposed to shape language evolution, may also support alignment in task-oriented communication

Pharma[e]cology: How the Gut Microbiome Contributes to Variations in Drug Response

Drugs represent our first, and sometimes last, line of defense for many diseases, yet despite decades of research we still do not fully understand why a given drug works in one patient and fails in the next. The human gut microbiome is one of the missing puzzle pieces, due to its ability to parallel and extend host pathways for drug metabolism, along with more complex host-microbiome interactions. Herein, we focus on the well-established links between the gut microbiome and drugs for heart disease and cancer, plus emerging data on neurological disease. We highlight the interdisciplinary methods that are available and how they can be used to address major remaining knowledge gaps, including the consequences of microbial drug metabolism for treatment outcomes. Continued progress in this area promises fundamental biological insights into humans and their associated microbial communities and strategies for leveraging the microbiome to improve the practice of medicine

Pavement Environmental Life Cycle Assessment Tool for Local Governments

The processes in the pavement life cycle can be defined as: material extraction and production; construction; transport of materials and demolition; the use stage, where the pavement interacts with other systems; the materials, construction, and transport associated with maintenance and rehabilitation; and end-of-life. Local governments are increasingly being asked to quantify greenhouse gas emissions from their operations and identify changes to reduce emissions. There are many possible strategies that local governments can choose to reduce their emissions, however, prioritization and selection of which to implement can be difficult if emissions cannot be quantified. Pavement life cycle assessment (LCA) can be used by local governments to achieve the same goals as state government. The web-based software environmental Life Cycle Assessment for Pavements, also known as eLCAP has been developed a project-level LCA tool. The goal of eLCAP is to permit local governments to perform project-level pavement LCA using California specific data, including consideration of their own designs, materials, and traffic. eLCAP allows modeling of materials, transport, construction, maintenance, rehabilitation, and end-of-life recycling for all impacts; and in the use stage it considers the effects of combustion of fuel in vehicles as well as the additional fuel consumed due to pavement-vehicle interaction (global warming potential only). This report documents eLCAP and a project that created an interface for eLCAP that is usable by local governments

Farming of Non-human Animals for Food and Fibre

This paper discusses the moral implications of raising non-human animals for food and fibre. The systematic privation to which these animals are subjected, the serious compromise to their welfare and the lack of necessity for an animal-based diet are documented. Although suggestions are offered for improvement in the manner in which these animals are raised, it is argued that discontinuing our dependence on animal-based products is the only way to prevent animal suffering. The core issue of human overpopulation as a driving force for an increasing destruction of animals and environmental degradation is briefly mentioned