A comprehensive, sustainable food security program for the Carver and Langston Communities of northeast Washington D.C.

As stated in the thesis project, "The Langston and Carver Communities are located in Ward 5. Carver/Langston Coalition, Inc. services the geographic area known as census tracks 89.3 and 89.4. Approximately ten thousand residents live in the two adjoining neighborhoods. They consist of multi unit apartments, town house style flats and single family residential housing. Historically, (CLC. Inc.) was founded to focus on strategies aimed at correcting some of the many similar problems faced by low income residents, (in particular, public assistance recipients), their families and communities. The mission of CLC, Inc. is to increase neighborhood education, socialization, and economic development through use of grant programs, contracts and innovative training methods. This strategy has been referred to as community-based, holistic, integrated and comprehensive. The major goals of CLC, Inc. are to move families towards self-sufficiency, their communities towards revitalization, and both towards community empowerment. Door to door surveys performed in 1995 by the Langston/Carver Community Building Project, a HUD funded empowerment program utilizing residents as interns of community development, revealed that an overwhelming majority of the residents in both public housing and low income rental properties viewed food and hunger as a major barrier towards achieving self sufficiency. In 1995 and 1996, the Carver/Langston Food Program, while distributing over two thousand pounds of free food weekly, observed that it only made a small dent in the total need and that regardless of how many truck loads of food were brought into the community to feed the needy, it was never enough. In 1997, with the help of grant funds obtained from non-profit philanthropic sources, the amount of food distributed was dramatically increased to 15 thousand pounds per month. Now, with larger distributions the impact is substantial, however, the need still far outweighs the available supply. As an ongoing priority to answer the needs of the community, CLC, Inc. seeks to establish a community wide initiative to reduce hunger, increase food nutrition, and provide savings on food supplies for many of it's residents. With the introduction of new welfare legislation in the District of Columbia, it is anticipated that many residents will face increasing food and nutrition related problems. When not addressed, these are real barriers that foster stress, perpetuate frustration, breed sickness and significantly hamper individual attempts to achieve self sufficiency. The residents of Carver Terrace and Langston Dwellings have expressed the need and desire for innovative food programs. During the goal setting process, while participating in a series of formal empowerment and capacity building workshops. And then, over the preceding years, many residents voted for and subsequently participated in what has now become the Carver/Langston Food Program. It is by far been CLC, Inc.'s most enthusiastically supported program and has the highest rate of participation and is the most asked for service from residents in both Carver and Langston." (Library-derived description)Karim, A. M. (1998). A comprehensive, sustainable food security program for the Carver and Langston Communities of North East, Washington DC. Retrieved from http://academicarchive.snhu.eduMaster of Science (M.S.)School of Community Economic Developmen

Essays on commodity market uncertainties : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Finance at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Listed in 2020 Dean's List of Exceptional ThesesThis dissertation presents three essays on commodity market uncertainties. Fundamentally, uncertainty relates to a decrease in investment and reduction in the production of goods and services that causes a momentary decline in aggregate output as well as employment. Hence, the increase in uncertainty has a pervasive impact on the aggregate income received by all the factors of production in an economy. In the first study, we measure the daily price uncertainty of 22 commodities and analyze the time and frequency connectedness among them. Applying spillover analysis and network graphs, we find that overall connectedness among commodity uncertainties increase during the global financial crisis (GFC) and the oil price collapse of 2014-16. Network analysis shows more spillover within a specific commodity class, and that precious metals due to less spillover with other commodities may serve as safe-haven during the crisis. The decomposition of the spillover index reveals that commodity markets are more connected in the long-run. The second study builds on the energy – stock nexus by investigating the impact of energy commodity uncertainties on the systematic risk of twelve industries in the US. The dynamic betas indicate that real estate, financials, and basic materials are the high-risk industries. Notably, the systematic risk of the oil and gas sector was significantly affected during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Shale Oil Revolution (SOR) sub-periods. Our results provide convincing evidence of the positive impact of energy uncertainties on basic material, basic resources, financials, oil and gas, and real estate. On the other hand, we identify the negative impact on consumer goods, consumer services, health care, industrials, and technology industries. Finally, our third study investigates the causal impact of global factors as drivers of transmission between oil and other commodity markets using the commodity uncertainty indexes. We estimate strong bi-directional transmission between oil and metal (agriculture) markets. Our analysis also suggests that oil is a net transmitter to other commodity uncertainties, and this transmission significantly increased during the period of the global financial crisis. The use of linear and nonlinear causality tests indicates that the global factors have a causal effect on the overall connectedness, especially on the total transmission from oil to other commodity uncertainties. Further segregation of transmissions between oil to individual commodity markets indicates VIX, TED spread, and EPU as the most influential drivers of connectedness among commodity markets

ISOLATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF NITRATE REDUCING/DENITRIFYING BACTERIA FROM TALLGRASS PRAIRIE SOILS

This dissertation addresses the long term impact of crude oil/brine (e.g. salt water) spills on biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen in tallgrass prairie soils. The study sites were prairie soils that were accidently contaminated with crude oil and/or brine 5-10 years prior to this study. These sites had been partially bioremediated but still had low levels of oil and brine which could affect the abundance and species composition of denitrifying bacteria. The abundance of culturable nitrate reducing (NR) and denitrifying (DN) bacteria in the soil samples was estimated by 5-tube Most Probable Number (MPN) method using nitrate broth. The strength of the association of the abundance of NR and DN bacteria with various environmental factors including soil moisture, brine and/or crude oil, oxygen, and nitrate was estimated using multivariate statistics. The MPN tubes were the source of NR and DN isolates used to determine if molecular detection methods for NR and DN genes matched the ability of these strains to perform nitrate or nitrite reduction. My results showed that the NR and DN bacteria were as abundant in the long-term contaminated sites as in the uncontaminated sites. Soil moisture had a slight positive effect on the abundance of NR and DN bacteria in both contaminated and uncontaminated sites. In general, nitrate treatment did not produce an increase in numbers of NR and DN bacteria in contaminated sites. The degree of culturable bacterial diversity in the contaminated prairie sites was not lower than that in prairie uncontaminated sites. However, species composition of nitrate-reducing bacteria varied among different sites where brine contaminated soils selected for salt tolerant bacteria like Bacillus while crude oil-contaminated sites selected for ã-Proteobacteria. Nitrate reducing and DN functional genes were detected in roughly half the strains that reduced nitrate or nitrite which suggests that the PCR-molecular detection methods underestimate the number of NR and DN bacteria. However, a high proportion of ã-Proteobacteria was correctly identified by PCR detection methods. These results indicate that both molecular and phenotypic methods are needed to correctly identify NR and DN bacteria. Examining a link to bioremediation through bioavailability of organic contaminants, I showed that naphthalene 1,2-dioxygenase (NDO) can enzymatically alter a variety of humic and fulvic acids and the extent of NDO-specific NADH oxidation paralleled the percent aromaticity of the humic and fulvic acids. Humic substances have not previously been known to be substrates for dioxygenases; even more significant was that dioxygenase enzymes can facilitate condensation between indole-like functional groups well-known to be present in humic and fulvic acids. The NDO enzyme retained activity for two weeks under ambient conditions suggesting prolonged extra cellular activity. These results illustrate how enzymes like NDO might alter the bioavailability of organic contaminants associated with soil when released into the environment upon microbial death

Design of a Recommender System (RS) for Job Searching Using Hybrid System

By and large, searching for work while examining a rundown of enlisting positions on enrollment locales, which truly cost a lot of time and cash is an irritating thing to do Although most of the time those jobs are not always suitable with users, or users are not satisfy. By doing this, recruiters waste their time by making sure that they are qualify or not. This thesis seeks to address a very important issue on the recruitment process which is about matching jobs seekers with jobs offers. These days, the coordinating procedure between the candidate and the activity offers is one of the serious issue’s organizations need to deal with. Short listing candidates and screening resumes are long time-consuming tasks for the company, especially when 80 percent to 90 percent of the resumes received for a role are unquailed. We have designed and proposed a hybrid personalized recommender system used for job seeking and online recruiting websites adapted to the cold start problem using a collaborating predictive algorithm

Pandemic crisis versus global financial crisis: Are Islamic stocks a safe-haven for G7 markets?

This study draws a comparison between the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to assess the safehaven potential of Islamic stocks for G7 stock markets. We employ the cross-quantilogram framework of Han et al., which considers the non-linearity in the relationship, and thus captures the correlation between the Islamic and G7 stock markets across various quantiles reflecting different market conditions. The analysis also includes the time-varying cross-quantile correlation to observe the evolution of Islamic stocks’ safe-haven potential. Our full sample analysis shows that Islamic stocks do not exhibit safe-haven properties for G7 stock markets. During the GFC period, Islamic stocks show some diversification benefits for the G7 stock markets. Notably, Islamic stocks emerged as a robust safe-haven asset for the G7 stock markets during the pandemic crisis. The study carries essential insights for equity investors and regulators of G7 and other countries to implement diversification/hedging strategies that would involve Islamic stocks to protect equity investments and the overall financial system amid the financial downturns