It Takes A Stewardship Village: Is Community-Based Urban Tree Stewardship Effective?

Abstract: It is believed that involving the public in street tree (i.e. curbside or sidewalk tree) stewardship is an essential part of achieving urban forest canopy goals. However, the incremental benefits of such involvement have not been well studied. Because urban forest stewards contend with many factors that can reduce street tree longevity and offset the benefits of stewardship, quantifying and communicating the overall benefits may help spur stewards’ commitment. To assess the net effect of volunteer street tree stewardship, this article summarizes the development of a community-wide street tree stewardship program and the impact of stewardship on street tree mortality rates over a span of five years. Binary yes-or-no data on whether a steward cared for a street tree were collected for 3,083 growth years, 1,036 of which were for street trees assigned to street tree stewards. The street trees tracked encompassed every street tree within the highly urbanized TriBeCa* neighborhood in lower Manhattan. It was found that significant differences in street tree mortality rates were observed when street trees were stewarded. Odds ratios show an expectation of substantially reduced street tree mortality rates when tree stewards are caring for trees. Other factors regarding where the data was collected, especially specific neighborhood characteristics that may have had an effect on the study, are discussed

A Re-emergent Analysis of Early Algebraic Learning

In this paper, we discuss a novel approach for collaborative retrospective analysis. One researcher was directly involved in a classroom teaching experiment, adopting an emergent perspective as an interpreter-witness of classroom interactions during a four-week algebra instructional unit with sixth-grade students. The other researcher experienced and analyzed the data in reverse chronological order. We describe how this re-emergent perspective revealed aspects of students’ early algebraic reasoning

Discourses of Deception: (Re)Examining America\u27s War on Drugs

America\u27s war on drugs is a failed experiment that has caused more damage than it will ever prevent. From its original design to its contemporary manifestations, the war on drugs is a conflict that remains firmly rooted in white supremacy. In contemporary Western societies, the rhetoric of both political leaders and mass-mediated narratives becomes the raw material of subjective reality. Since the war on drugs began nearly a century ago, the spectacle of mass media has been consistently utilized by white political elites as a vehicle of misinformation - as a well-oiled machine for spreading the false social narrative that drugs are dangerous and deadly, that drug dealers and users are infectious and criminal, and that drug use should be punished. From newspapers to sitcoms to commercials to blockbuster films, these narratives also work to associate drug use with crime and race in ways that reinforce racist stereotypes often used in the service of white supremacy. A century into the war on drugs, American prisons are packed with people of color, many working full-time jobs for little or no wages while lacking the most basic of human necessities, all because drug possession and use are socially constructed as dangerous and criminal. Once released from prison, the convicted drug criminal faces life-long barriers to legitimacy. The drug addict is especially at risk, forced to live in the crevices of society and damned to the dangers of the criminal underworld. The war on drugs isn\u27t responsible for saving the lives of addicts or helping drug dealers find more lucrative (and legal) employment. The war on drugs is a catalyst of mass incarceration, a threat to public health, and a guaranteed source of income to underworld organizations

Enhanced Vascularization of Cultured Skin Substitutes Genetically Modified to Overexpress Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor11The authors declared in writing to have no conflict of interest.

Cultured skin substitutes have been used as adjunctive therapies in the treatment of burns and chronic wounds, but they are limited by lack of a vascular plexus. This deficiency leads to greater time for vascularization compared with native skin autografts and contributes to graft failure. Genetic modification of cultured skin substitutes to enhance vascularization could hypothetically lead to improved wound healing. To address this hypothesis, human keratinocytes were genetically modified by transduction with a replication incompetent retrovirus to overexpress vascular endothelial growth factor, a specific and potent mitogen for endothelial cells. Cultured skin substitutes consisting of collagen-glycosaminoglycan substrates inoculated with human fibroblasts and either vascular endothelial growth factor-modified or control keratinocytes were prepared, and were cultured in vitro for 21 d. Northern blot analysis demonstrated enhanced expression of vascular endothelial growth factor mRNA in genetically modified keratinocytes and in cultured skin substitutes prepared with modified cells. Furthermore, the vascular endothelial growth factor-modified cultured skin substitutes secreted greatly elevated levels of vascular endothelial growth factor protein throughout the entire culture period. The bioactivity of vascular endothelial growth factor protein secreted by the genetically modified cultured skin substitutes was demonstrated using a microvascular endothelial cell growth assay. Vascular endothelial growth factor-modified and control cultured skin substitutes were grafted to full-thickness wounds on athymic mice, and elevated vascular endothelial growth factor mRNA expression was detected in the modified grafts for at least 2 wk after surgery. Vascular endothelial growth factor-modified grafts exhibited increased numbers of dermal blood vessels and decreased time to vascularization compared with controls. These results indicate that genetic modification of keratinocytes in cultured skin substitutes can lead to increased vascular endothelial growth factor expression, which could prospectively improve vascularization of cultured skin substitutes for wound healing applications

A combined pumping test and heat extraction/recirculation trial in an abandoned haematite ore mine shaft, Egremont, Cumbria, UK

A pumping test at rates of up to 50 L s⁻¹ was carried out in the 256 m-deep Florence Shaft of the Beckermet–Winscales–Florence haematite ore mine in Cumbria, UK, between 8th January and 25th March 2015. Drawdowns in mine water level did not exceed 4 m and the entire interconnected mine complex behaved as a single reservoir. Pumping did, however, induce drawdowns of around 1 m in the St. Bees Sandstone aquifer overlying the Carboniferous Limestone host rock. During a second phase of the pumping test, a proportion of the 11.3–12 °C mine water was directed through a heat pump, which extracted up to 103 kW heat from the water and recirculated it back to the top of the shaft. Provided that an issue with elevated arsenic concentrations (20–30 µg L⁻¹) can be resolved, the Florence mine could provide not only a valuable resource of high-quality water for industrial or even potable uses, it could also provide several hundred to several thousand kW of ground sourced heating and/or cooling, if a suitable demand can be identified. The ultimate constraint would be potential hydraulic impacts on the overlying St Bees Sandstone aquifer. The practice of recirculating thermally spent water in the Florence Shaft produced only a rather modest additional thermal benefit

Identification of Factors Associated with Subsequent Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis Using Machine Learning Over Complex Large-scale Longitudinal Health Data

We seek a Pitt Momentum Teaming Grant to support the data extraction, analysis, and planning needed to secure large-scale research funding for a new Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research initiative among faculty and trainees who have never worked together, most of whom have never worked on AD but whose skill set will support a novel approach to understanding this intractable disease. Because AD pathogenesis begins a decade or more before the onset of clinical symptoms, we seek to identify in electronic health records (EHRs) antecedents of disease that warrant additional scrutiny as possible contributors to or protectors against disease onset. We have identified over 37,000 unique patients in the UPMC EHR with a diagnosis of AD or dementia since 2016, almost 15,000 of whom have EHR data from visits 10 or more years before this diagnosis. With IRB approval, we will apply both case-control and machine learning approaches to the EHR datasets extracted (diagnoses, medications, test results). The results of these initial analyses will be used to plan larger scale studies that incorporate neuroimaging, genetics, neuropathology, lifestyle, and other types of data (including longitudinal causal time series modeling) combined with natural language processing and literature-based discovery to develop causal models of disease predictors, onset, and progression. We will seek funding from the National Institute on Aging to conduct these follow-on larger scale analyses with the guidance of an AD program officer, Suzana Petanceska, who has indicated her enthusiasm for helping us plan projects focused on secondary data analyses and causal discovery. Toward this goal, in October, our team of faculty and trainees from the Schools of Medicine (Boyce, Silverstein, Aizenstein, Malec, Karim, Ly), Public Health (Albert, Shaaban), and Computing and Information (Munro, Taneja) began weekly meetings to work on IRB protocols, analysis strategies, data interpretation, and manuscript and grant preparation

A Written Instrument for Assessing Students’ Units Coordination Structures

Units coordination refers to students’ abilities to create units and maintain their relationships with other units that they contain or constitute. In recent research, units coordination has arisen as a key construct that mediates opportunities for student learning across several domains of mathematics, including fractions knowledge and algebraic reasoning. To date, assessments of students’ stages of units coordinating ability have relied upon clinical interviews or teaching experiments whose time-intensive nature precludes opportunities for conducting large-scale studies. We introduce a written instrument that teachers and researchers can use with large populations of students. We report on the reliability and validity of assessments based on the instrument

Topical Nutrients Promote Engraftment and Inhibit Wound Contraction of Cultured Skin Substitutes in Athymic Mice

Routine treatment of burns with cultured skin substitutes (CSS) has been limited by poor engraftment and by scarring. Hypothetically, topical application of essential nutrients and/or growth factors may support epithelial survival temporarily during graft vascularization, CSS, composed of human epidermal keratinocytes and dermal fibroblasts attached to collagen-glycosaminoglycan substrates, were incubated for 19 d in media optimized for keratinocytes. CSS, human xenografts, murine autografts, or no grafts were applied orthotopically to full-thickness skin wounds (2 × 2 cm) in athymic mice. Wounds were irrigated for 14 d with 1 ml/d modified cell culture medium or with saline containing epidermal growth factor, or were treated with dry dressings. After 6 weeks, treated sites were scored for percentage original wound area (mean ± SEM) and percentage HLA- ABC-positive healed wounds [(number positive/n) × 100], and tested for significance (analysis of variance, p < 0.0001; Tukey test, p < 0.05). The data showed that CSS irrigated with nutrient medium were not statistically different in wound area (67.8 ± 5.1%) from murine autografts (63.3 ± 2.9%) but were statistically larger than human xenograft, no graft, or CSS treated with saline irrigation or dry dressings. HLA- ABC expression was 100% in CSS with nutrient irrigation, 86% in CSS with saline irrigation, 83% In CSS without irrigation, and 75% in xenografts with nutrient irrigation. These findings suggest that availability of essential nutrients supports keratinocyte viability during graft vascularization of CSS