Sustainable Approaches for Highway Runoff Management During Construction and Operation

publishedVersio

Sustainable Approaches for Highway Runoff Management During Construction and Operation

Paper V and paper VI have not been published yet.Environmentally friendly approaches for highway runoff management during construction and operation are considered in this project. First, the state of the art in runoff management in terms of characterization, treatment, and modeling approaches were surveyed, and knowledge gaps were identified. Then, the characterization and treatment of tunneling wastewater (by natural and chemical coagulants) was investigated. In the next stage, the vulnerability of water quality to road construction activities was investigated by analyzing field monitoring data. In addition, two different approaches, involving information theory and gamma test theory, were suggested to optimize the water quality monitoring network during road construction. Lastly, the application of satellite data (i.e., Sentinel-2 Multi-Spectral Imager satellite imagery products) for water quality monitoring was examined. Based on the results, it can be shown that site-specific parameters (e.g., climate, traffic load) cause spatiotemporal variation in the characterization of highway runoff and performance of best management practices (BMP) to protect water quality. There is a knowledge gap regarding the characterization of highway runoff under different climatic scenarios, as well as the continuous monitoring and assessment of roadside water bodies. Analysis of the field monitoring data indicates that blasting, area cleaning, and construction of water management measures have the highest impact on surface water quality during road construction. Additionally, the application of information theory and gamma test theory indicate that the primary monitoring network assessed here is not optimally designed. The number and spatial distribution of monitoring stations could be modified and reduced, as the construction activities vary over time. Additionally, the suggested remote sensing techniques applied in this project are able to estimate water quality parameters (i.e., turbidity and chlorophyll-a) in roadside water bodies with a reliability consistent with field observations, reflecting the spatiotemporal effects of road construction and operations on water quality. Finally, an efficient two-step treatment strategy (15 min sedimentation followed by chemical coagulation and 45 min sedimentation) is suggested for the treatment of tunneling wastewater. The optimum coagulant dosages in the jar test exhibit high treatment efficiency (92-99%) for both turbidity and suspended solids (SS), especially for particle removal in the range of 10-100 μm, which is hard to remove by sedimentation ponds and may pose serious threats to the aquatic ecosystem. It is hoped the knowledge generated by this project will help decision-makers with management strategies and support UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The proposed approaches directly contribute to managing highway runoff and achieving SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation) and especially target 6.3 (water quality).publishedVersio

The global industrial metabolism of e-waste trade:A Marxian ecological economics approach

Case-studies of informal e-waste recycling sites in Ghana and China

Improving intrusion detection systems using data mining techniques

Recent surveys and studies have shown that cyber-attacks have caused a lot of damage to organisations, governments, and individuals around the world. Although developments are constantly occurring in the computer security field, cyber-attacks still cause damage as they are developed and evolved by hackers. This research looked at some industrial challenges in the intrusion detection area. The research identified two main challenges; the first one is that signature-based intrusion detection systems such as SNORT lack the capability of detecting attacks with new signatures without human intervention. The other challenge is related to multi-stage attack detection, it has been found that signature-based is not efficient in this area. The novelty in this research is presented through developing methodologies tackling the mentioned challenges. The first challenge was handled by developing a multi-layer classification methodology. The first layer is based on decision tree, while the second layer is a hybrid module that uses two data mining techniques; neural network, and fuzzy logic. The second layer will try to detect new attacks in case the first one fails to detect. This system detects attacks with new signatures, and then updates the SNORT signature holder automatically, without any human intervention. The obtained results have shown that a high detection rate has been obtained with attacks having new signatures. However, it has been found that the false positive rate needs to be lowered. The second challenge was approached by evaluating IP information using fuzzy logic. This approach looks at the identity of participants in the traffic, rather than the sequence and contents of the traffic. The results have shown that this approach can help in predicting attacks at very early stages in some scenarios. However, it has been found that combining this approach with a different approach that looks at the sequence and contents of the traffic, such as event- correlation, will achieve a better performance than each approach individually

Green Jobs: An Alternative to Neoliberalism? Recycling in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Toronto, Canada

In recent years, environmental organizations and labour unions have begun to more seriously campaign for the promotion of green jobs as a way to address the twin problems of climate change and economic stagnation, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. They variously suggest that green jobs will be created through increased investment in green sectors; for some, this requires public investment and the adoption of a Green New Deal (GND) policy orientation, while for others this requires only increased private investment in green industries. The former emphasize that since green sectors are more labour-intensive than traditional industries, investment in green infrastructure could thus generate comparatively more employment per dollar invested. At the heart of these proposals is the proposition that capitalist economic growth could be made consistent with social and ecological justice. This dissertation is a critical engagement with the propositions of the green jobs campaign through the concrete examination of two diverse cases of residential (i.e. post-consumer) recycling, a quintessentially green sector, in Buenos Aires and Toronto. Defining recycling as the (global) production of value from waste, the analysis pays particular attention to both the labour process and historical development of recycling. Through a combination of qualitative document analysis, archival research, and qualitative interviews, this thesis argues that purely market-coordinated recycling is not able to simultaneously deliver large-scale employment creation and improved socio-ecological outcomes because of the inherent tension between labour intensiveness and methods of increasing productivity. This tension, in turn, is rooted in the distributive conflict characteristic of capitalist production, the resolution of which requires increased economic growth. From an ecological perspective, then, this is simply a deferment of the problem. In line with proponents of the Green New Deal, this dissertation argues that mediation of this tension in a direction favourable to both ecological and social concerns requires collective intervention. However, going beyond the Green New Deal, it concludes that commitment to social and ecological justice requires moving in the direction of decommodified, cooperative production and collective consumption

Tracing the Creative Influence of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Psychology Notes’: The ‘Three Novels’ and Krapp’s Last Tape

Sammendrag Avhandlingens hovedargument er at notatkorpuset om psykologiske og spesielt psykoanalytiske emner som Samuel Beckett utarbeidet i 1934-1935 mens han var i terapi hos Wilfred Bion representerer en sentral og vedvarende innflytelse på hans litterære verk. Den umiddelbare anvendelsen av disse psykologinotatene i arbeidet med romanen Murphy er velkjent, men avhandlingen gjennomgår denne opprinnelige kreative bruken på nytt for å vise hvordan Beckett etablerer en form for parodisk overdrevet bruk av det lærebokaktige språket i mange av kildene som han hentet sine notater fra. Dette indikerer en kritisk avstandstagen fra psykoanalysen som disiplin, som også førte til en plutselig avslutning av det terapeutiske forholdet til Bion in 1935. De to første kapitlene i avhandlingen diskuterer konteksten for komposisjonen av psykologinotatene og diskuterer en rekke kreativt sentrale tematikker for Beckett. En ledetråd for diskusjonen er at Becketts tilnærming til det psykoanalytiske lærebokspråket fungerte både tiltrekkende og motstandsgivende for ham som forfatter. På den ene siden finner vi både i Becketts tekster og i psykoanalysen en fascinasjon for det avskyvekkende, mens på den annen side kan vi spore hos Beckett en bevisst motstand mot psykoanalysens forpliktelse til å søke mot helbredelse, kontroll og meningsfullhet. Becketts tekster iscenesetter en avvisning av det psykoanalytiske språket som et feilslått medium for å skrive om selvet, gjennom sin ironiske undergraving av psykoanalysens kognitive, autoritetsbaserte og terapeutiske utgangspunkt. Implikasjonene av dette utvikles i avhandlingen gjennom en nærlesing av romanene Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable, og det korte teaterstykket Krapp’s Last Tape. I denne lesningen behandles Becketts psykologinotater som genetisk kildemateriale som fortsatt ble anvendt kreativt lenge etter de opprinnelig ble komponert. Avhandlingen tar utgangspunkt i en mest mulig empirisk etterprøvbar og manuskriptgenetisk tilnærming til kildene, med utstrakt bruk av Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project og andre arkivressurser som støtte for sin argumentasjon. Men et pragmatisk forhold til behandlingen av tekstlig innflytelse som går utover det som kan føres sikre bevis for er også nødvendig, for en viss grad av usikkerhet er umulig å unngå. Likevel fastslår avhandlingen at en nylesning av disse verkene av Beckett med utgangspunkt i hans egne psykologinotater kan både utvide og korrigere fokuset i den eksisterende faglitteraturen. Videre har det kritiske fokuset og opptreningen som denne avhandlingen presenterer også et potensiale til å kunne generere en ny litteraturkritisk tilnærming til alle verkene i Becketts karriere som ble skrevet etter psykologinotatene.Abstract This study argues that the corpus of notes on psychological and especially psychoanalytic topics composed by Samuel Beckett in 1934-1935 during his therapy with Wilfred Bion represents a crucial and continuous creative influence on his literary work. While the immediate use of the ‘Psychology Notes’ in the writing of Murphy is well established, it is revisited here to suggest that this initial creative deployment is characterized by a parodic over-indulgence in the ‘textbook’ language of the sources Beckett was drawing on. This indicates a critical distancing from the discipline of psychoanalysis that also manifested itself in a sudden disruption of his therapy with Wilfred Bion in 1935. Drawing on the original context of the composition of the Notes, and developing a taxonomy of creatively important themes for Beckett, the first two chapters of the thesis trace a formative attraction-repulsion ambivalence in Beckett’s approach to the use of psychoanalytic textbook language in his writing. On the one hand, there is a shared obsession with ‘abjection’ between Beckett’s texts and the discipline of psychoanalysis, whereas on the other, the commitment to cure, control and meaning in psychoanalysis is being resisted in Beckett’s texts. Beckett’s later texts stage the rejection and failure of the psychoanalytic language as medium of writing the ‘self’ by ironically subverting its cognitive, authoritative and therapeutic purposes. This argument is developed through detailed close readings of the ‘Three Novels’ (Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable) and the short play Krapp’s Last Tape, treating the ‘Psychology Notes’ as genetic source material that continued to be actively deployed long after its initial composition and creative impact. While the thesis is based on an empirical, genetic approach, making extensive use of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and other archival sources, its approach is also pragmatic in its approach to influence, recognizing that conclusive evidence of intertextual relationships is not always possible to establish. Nonetheless, re-reading these Beckett works with the Notes to hand can both expand upon and correct the emphases of previous scholarship on these texts. Ultimately, the critical focus and training provided by this thesis is therefore intended to provide a scholarly tool for re-engaging all of Beckett’s post-Notes work.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Floral Interactions in Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx, New York

Van Cortlandt Park is New York City\u27s third-largest park at 464 hectares. Despite 300 years of land-use history, this heavily impacted ecosystem shows surprising resiliency, and can act as a proxy for understanding global issues based on climate change, fragmentation, and anthropogenic impact. A park-wide inventory conducted over six years returned three times the amount of taxa observed in any prior survey suggesting the park has been historically undersampled. At 1102 species, the richness of the park supports the hypothesis that urban regions harbor greater species-richness than historically presumed. Approximately 70.6% of park listings comprise herbaceous plants. Non-natives make up 50% of the total floristic sightings, most of Eurasian or East Asian provenance. With 30 NY state-listed plants, the park represents a refugia for endangered taxa for New York State despite frequent burns, vandalism, and exotic invasion. A parsimony analysis of presence/absence data returns groupings based on species composition responding to environmental factors such as moisture, sun, and forest fragmentation. Partitioning the data set into separate herbaceous versus woody matrices suggests the two components of the flora track different life histories. Findings concur with similar results from non-metric multidimensional (NMS) ordination and unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA). Parsimony analysis of ecological data has use as a monitoring tool since the read-out produces a list of what taxa can be found at each site. Quantitative ecological analyses based on woody frequency data from a quadrat survey shows the three most abundant trees in the park are Prunus serotina (black cherry), Acer platanoides (Norway maple), and Quercus rubra (red oak). Importance Value analyses return the same three taxa but place Quercus rubra in first place position based on its greater diameter-at-breast height (DBH). Alpha diversity indices suggest the park is biodiverse from a woody perspective yet not necessarily even; addition of herbaceous data significantly increases diversity even more. Overall the northern end of the park is more diverse than the southern end. Disturbance specialists in the canopy of the southern park depress richness and evenness. Beta diversity analysis comparing a southern species-poor region versus a northern species-rich region shows turn-over in the park with the woody data having a higher turn-over rate than the herbaceous data. The ecology of a city environment is a suitable proxy for understanding problems putatively predicted for global warming, e.g. the influence of increased temperatures (e.g. city \u27urban island\u27 heat effect) and forest fragmentation on diversity. If so, results from VCP suggest richness may increase following climate warming due to non-native recruitment but long term biodiversity may change if areas are not monitored properly