Exploring Ways Social Media Data Inform Public Issues Communication: An Analysis of Twitter Conversation During the 2012-2013 Drought in Nebraska

Social networking sites often are used to maintain close social ties, but increasingly they are used for information and news dissemination, specifically about major events and crises. In 2012, a historic drought struck the Midwest, destroying or damaging portions of major field crops in major agricultural production states. By the end of August 2012, 90% of Nebraska was declared in extreme or exceptional drought, leading to bans on irrigation, damaged crops, and record-low yields as well as damaging the state’s leading economic sector. This case study used social media monitoring and analysis to explore online Twitter conversations related to this historic drought in Nebraska during a one-year period. Researchers determined Twitter conversations increased in quantity as drought conditions worsened, and agricultural issues, environmental impact, extreme weather, effects on the public, and proposals of solutions to address drought were dominant themes among conversations. Twitter served as a news outlet for information and updates about drought conditions, and it contained information from local, national and international sources. The researchers suggest an opportunity exists for educational institutions and organizations to serve as leaders on social media and in social networks to disseminate timely and relevant information related to important public issues, while also monitoring and participating in surrounding discussions. Specifically, attention should be paid by public institutions to building brand equity through the use of concept marketing, audience engagement, use of big data, and thinking personally — strategies that have served private corporations well in monitoring issues of importance to their audiences

Exploring Ways Social Media Data Inform Public Issues Communication: An Analysis of Twitter Conversation during the 2012-2013 Drought in Nebraska

Social networking sites often are used to maintain close social ties, but increasingly they are used for information and news dissemination, specifically about major events and crises. In 2012, a historic drought struck the Midwest, destroying or damaging portions of major field crops in major agricultural production states. By the end of August 2012, 90% of Nebraska was declared in extreme or exceptional drought, leading to bans on irrigation, damaged crops, and record-low yields as well as damaging the state’s leading economic sector. This case study used social media monitoring and analysis to explore online Twitter conversations related to this historic drought in Nebraska during a one-year period. Researchers determined Twitter conversations increased in quantity as drought conditions worsened, and agricultural issues, environmental impact, extreme weather, effects on the public, and proposals of solutions to address drought were dominant themes among conversations. Twitter served as a news outlet for information and updates about drought conditions, and it contained information from local, national and international sources. The researchers suggest an opportunity exists for educational institutions and organizations to serve as leaders on social media and in social networks to disseminate timely and relevant information related to important public issues, while also monitoring and participating in surrounding discussions. Specifically, attention should be paid by public institutions to building brand equity through the use of concept marketing, audience engagement, use of big data, and thinking personally — strategies that have served private corporations well in monitoring issues of importance to their audiences

Natural Gas Conversion into Clean Hydrogen and Carbon for Li-ion Battery Electrodes Using Renewable Energy

The global green hydrogen market, set to increase 54% by 2030, was valued at 1.83 billion USD in 2021 (Precedence Research, 2022). Making use of the recent availability and affordability of solar energy as well as the high demand for green hydrogen, major strides have been made in the decarbonization of the commodity chemicals industry. Traditionally energy intensive processes, such as steam methane reforming (SMR) for the production of hydrogen and natural gas fired furnaces (NGFF) for the production of carbon black, can be replaced with alternative renewable electricity powered processes. This project proposes one such process in which solar energy is used to power the conversion of methane from renewable natural gas (RNG) into green hydrogen and acetylene black. The microwave conversion of renewable natural gas reduces water consumption by 86.7% and carbon dioxide emissions by 99.9% compared to SMR. Compared to NGFF, this process reduces water consumption by 99.5% and carbon dioxide emissions by 99.8%. Leveraging low carbon fuel standards in Southern California, the plant will produce 10 TPD of hydrogen sold at a premium. The plant was found to have an ROI of 113%, IRR of 86%, and a NPV of 20,625,800 USD

Emerging Scholars Program—A PLTL-CS Program That Increases Recruitment and Retention of Women in the Major

The Emerging Scholars Program (ESP) in Computer Science is a Peer Led Team Learning (PLTL) approach to bringing undergraduates new to the discipline together with peer mentors to work on computational problems, and to expose them to the broad array of disciplines within computer science. This program demonstrates that computer science is necessarily a collaborative activity that focuses more on problem solving and algorithmic thinking than on programming. In spring 2012 the computer science department at an urban research university university completed the 9th iteration of ESP, with 104 women and 36 men completing the program. Our evaluation data indicates that ESP increased enrollment in the computer science major. 47% of students who took ESP along with the introduction to computer programming course at the university study site during this study majored in computer science. In addition, survey results indicated that a large majority of students intended to take another computer science course, were enthusiastic about the program, and found the workshop topics exciting and engaging. Participants reported that they learned more about computer science in ESP, and would recommend ESP to others

The Low CO Content of the Extremely Metal Poor Galaxy I Zw 18

We present sensitive molecular line observations of the metal-poor blue compact dwarf I Zw 18 obtained with the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer. These data constrain the CO J=1-0 luminosity within our 300 pc (FWHM) beam to be L_CO < 1 \times 10^5 K km s^-1 pc^2 (I_CO < 1 K km s^-1), an order of magnitude lower than previous limits. Although I Zw 18 is starbursting, it has a CO luminosity similar to or less than nearby low-mass irregulars (e.g. NGC 1569, the SMC, and NGC 6822). There is less CO in I Zw 18 relative to its B-band luminosity, HI mass, or star formation rate than in spiral or dwarf starburst galaxies (including the nearby dwarf starburst IC 10). Comparing the star formation rate to our CO upper limit reveals that unless molecular gas forms stars much more efficiently in I Zw 18 than in our own galaxy, it must have a very low CO-to-H_2 ratio, \sim 10^-2 times the Galactic value. We detect 3mm continuum emission, presumably due to thermal dust and free-free emission, towards the radio peak.Comment: 5 pages in emulateapj style, accepted by the Astrophysical Journa

A 3D radiative transfer framework: I. non-local operator splitting and continuum scattering problems

We describe a highly flexible framework to solve 3D radiation transfer problems in scattering dominated environments based on a long characteristics piece-wise parabolic formal solution and an operator splitting method. We find that the linear systems are efficiently solved with iterative solvers such as Gauss-Seidel and Jordan techniques. We use a sphere-in-a-box test model to compare the 3D results to 1D solutions in order to assess the accuracy of the method. We have implemented the method for static media, however, it can be used to solve problems in the Eulerian-frame for media with low velocity fields.Comment: A&A, in press. 14 pages, 19 figures. Full resolution figures available at ftp://phoenix.hs.uni-hamburg.de/preprints/3DRT_paper1.pdf HTML version (low res figures) at http://hobbes.hs.uni-hamburg.de/~yeti/PAPERS/3drt_paper1/index.htm

The NIRSPEC Brown Dwarf Spectroscopic Survey. I. Low-Resolution Near-Infrared Spectra

We present the first results of a near-infrared (0.96-2.31 micron) spectroscopic survey of M, L, and T dwarfs obtained with NIRSPEC on the Keck II telescope. Our new survey has a resolving power of R = 2000 and is comprised of two major data sets: 53 J-band (1.14-1.36 micron) spectra covering all spectral types from M6 to T8 with at least two members in each spectral subclass (wherever possible), and 25 flux-calibrated spectra from 1.14 to 2.31 microns for most spectral classes between M6 and T8. Sixteen of these 25 objects have additional spectral coverage from 0.96-1.14 microns to provide overlap with optical spectra. Spectral flux ratio indexes for prominent molecular bands are derived and equivalent widths (EWs) for several atomic lines are measured. We find that a combination of four H2O and two CH4 band strengths can be used for spectral classification. Weak (EW~1-2 angstrom) atomic lines of Al I and Ca I disappear at the boundary between M and L types.Comment: 60 pages, 25 figures. To appear in the Astrophysical Journal Vol 596. Received 2003 March 31; accepted 2003 June 20. Web site at http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~mclean/BDSSarchiv