Urban agriculture as an integral part of urban growth management strategies and the implications on urban form policy: the case of Auckland NZ

Urban agriculture potential is examined in three suburbs of increasing density in Auckland, NZ. A review of the relationship between urban indicators (net density and housing patterns) and potential solar energy available at ground level is done. Since soils are generally fertile and water readily available solar access to ground level becomes an indicator of productivity. Using the subtraction method and satellite photography from Auckland council GIS viewer, potentially productive land is estimated in three residential blocks-Mt Eden, Sandrigham and New Lynn. Based on the results the food energy potential of each site is determined. Preliminary results indicate that low density New Lynn has the highest potential for sustainability with surplus food energy. Medium density Sandrigham could meet 50 per cent of its vegetable dietary requirement while high density Mt Eden is unsustainable in UA. Recommendations are suggested as to how UA maybe integrated in urban growth strategies

Multistatic Passive Weather Radar

Practical and accurate estimation of three-dimensional wind fields is an ongoing challenge in radar meteorology. Multistatic (single transmitter / multiple receivers) radar architectures offer a cost effective solution for obtaining the multiple Doppler measurements necessary to achieve such estimates. In this work, the history and fundamental concepts of multistatic weather radar are reviewed. Several developments in multistatic weather radar enabled by recent technological progress, such as the widespread availability of high performance single-chip RF transceivers and the proliferation of phased array weather radars, are then presented. First, a network of compact, low-cost passive receiver prototypes is used to demonstrate a set of signal processing techniques that have been developed to enable transmitter / receiver synchronization through sidelobe radiation. Next, a pattern synthesis technique is developed which allows for the use of sidelobe whitening to mitigate velocity biases in multistatic radar systems. The efficacy of this technique is then demonstrated using a multistatic weather radar system simulator

Simulation of Polarimetric Phased Array Weather Radars

Polarimetric phased array radars (PPARs) are a rapidly developing area of research interest in weather radar. However, they present intrinsic challenges for calibration and operation. Foremost among these are the adverse effects of copolar radiation pattern mismatch as well as cross-polar fields on polarimetric measurement accuracy. Characterization of the impact these effects have on weather radar observations and the effectiveness of proposed methods for mitigation of those impacts can be time-consuming and costly if conducted using radar hardware. Furthermore, few operational PPARs exist to serve as testbeds. Alternatively, the effects of copolar and cross-polar fields can be studied using numerical simulations. In that regard, this work outlines a simulation method that allows for the characterization of PPAR performance and the prototyping of techniques to mitigate cross-polar biases. To achieve this, a simulation volume is populated by thousands of scattering centers, whose movement and scattering characteristics at any point in space and time are governed by a high-resolution numerical weather prediction model. Each of these scattering centers has its own individually calculated Doppler spectrum in both the horizontal (H) and vertical (V) polarizations. These spectra are used to determine instantaneous scattering parameters that are combined with a highly flexible radar system model in order to compose time-series signals in H and V. This simulation method is used to evaluate and compare the performance of several bias mitigation techniques that have been previously proposed

Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Intake Trends in US Adolescents and Their Association with Insulin Resistance-Related Parameters

The purpose of this study was to evaluate current sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption trends and their association with insulin resistance-related metabolic parameters and anthropometric measurements by performing a cross-sectional analysis of the NHANES data during the years 1988–1994 and 1999–2004. Main outcome measures included SSB consumption trends, a homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance, blood pressure, waist circumference, body mass index, and fasting concentrations of total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol, and triglycerides. Although overall SSB consumption has increased, our data suggest that this increase was primarily due to an increase in the amount of SSBs consumed by males in the high-SSB intake group alone. Multivariate linear regression analyses also showed that increased SSB consumption was independently associated with many adverse health parameters. Factors other than SSB consumption must therefore be contributing to the increasing prevalence of obesity and metabolic syndrome in the majority of US children

Reconstructing Indo-European Syllabification

The chief concern of this dissertation is to investigate a fundamental, yet unsolved problem within the phonology of Proto-Indo-European (PIE): the process of syllabification. I show that by analyzing the much more easily reconstructable word-edge clusters we may predict which types of consonant clusters can occur word-medially, provided that we assume a special status for certain consonants at word’s edge. Having thus analyzed the entire PIE phonological system, I believe I have developed the first working hypothesis of Indo-European syllabification, which we may now use to pre- dict which types of syllable-driven rules of consonant deletion and vowel epenthesis occurred within PIE. My dissertation argues that there existed at least five phonologi- cal processes of this type. The second half of the dissertation focuses on the problem of Sievers’ Law, through which I argue for the tendency in PIE to keep morphemes syllabically distinct, in accordance with a high-ranking constraint ALIGN. I conclude by proposing that the assumption of morphological relevance in the syllabic derivation provides us with a mechanism to reconcile the well-established principle of ONSET MAXIMIZATION with the reconstructable parsing of VCCV sequences as VC.CV