Enhanced Response Plan for Woodland Primary School

The city of Woodland, Washington sits along the very busy north and south railroad line that connects Portland and Vancouver with the Tacoma and Seattle areas and beyond. Each day over a dozen trains carrying a vast assortment of cargo goes rumbling by, some of it is mundane and some are volatile. What is very worrisome is that the Woodland Primary School is only a hundred meters from the tracks. Although remote, there is always the possibility of a train derailment close to the school. The local emergency services have plans for a train derailment, they fall under their standard operating procedures; the biggest concern is the plans that are in place at the Primary School level, they are lackluster and only cover the basics of what needs to be done in an emergency. These shortcomings will be addressed and new plans put into place that better serve the Woodland Primary School and the community in a time of emergency

Hubble Space Telescope Constraints on the Winds and Astrospheres of Red Giant Stars

We report on an ultraviolet spectroscopic survey of red giants observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, focusing on spectra of the Mg II h & k lines near 2800 A in order to study stellar chromospheric emission, winds, and astrospheric absorption. We focus on spectral types between K2 III and M5 III, a spectral type range with stars that are noncoronal, but possessing strong, chromospheric winds. We find a very tight relation between Mg II surface flux and photospheric temperature, supporting the notion that all K2-M5 III stars are emitting at a basal flux level. Wind velocities (V_w) are generally found to decrease with spectral type, with V_w decreasing from ~40 km/s at K2 III to ~20 km/s at M5 III. We find two new detections of astrospheric absorption, for Sigma Pup (K5 III) and Gamma Eri (M1 III). This absorption signature had previously only been detected for Alpha Tau (K5 III). For the three astrospheric detections the temperature of the wind after the termination shock correlates with V_w, but is lower than predicted by the Rankine-Hugoniot shock jump conditions, consistent with the idea that red giant termination shocks are radiative shocks rather than simple hydrodynamic shocks. A full hydrodynamic simulation of the Gamma Eri astrosphere is provided to explore this further.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, to appear in The Astrophysical Journa

The United States Postal Service: A Government Corporation Requiring Changes: Past, Present, Future

This project determines the cost of maintaining the postal service currently. It explores whether this cost is justifiable on the grounds of binding the Nation together or if these costs are impairing the overall value of such service to the people . Whether these costs are viewed as reasons for continued postal deficits or seen as the need for radical changes in the structure and operation of the postal service (even to the point of creating a private corporation from it) will determine the future course of action in regard to it

Peer Mediation Programs: Teaching Students Alternatives to Violence

With the ever-rising occurrence of violence\u27 within schools2 and the high level of both student apathy and dropout rates, many people are wondering what, if anything, can be done to stem the tidal wave that seems about to crash our nation\u27s schools upon the rocks of failure. Increasing security measures in schools, such as metal detectors,3 armed police guards, and locker searches, may prevent the violence,4 but will probably not alleviate the underlying causes.

Elements of Infrastructure Demand in Multiplayer Video Games

With the advent of organized eSports, game streaming, and always-online video games, there exist new and more pronounced demands on players, developers, publishers, spectators, and other video game actors. By identifying and exploring elements of infrastructure in multiplayer games, this paper augments Bowman’s (2018) conceptualization of demands in video games by introducing a new category of ‘infrastructure demand’ of games. This article describes how the infrastructure increasingly built around video games creates demands upon those interacting with these games, either as players, spectators, or facilitators of multiplayer video game play. We follow the method described by Susan Leigh Star (1999), who writes that infrastructure is as mundane as it is a critical part of society and as such is particularly deserving of academic study. When infrastructure works properly it fades from view, but in doing so loses none of its importance to human endeavor. This work therefore helps to make visible the invisible elements of infrastructure present in and around multiplayer video games and explicates the demands these elements create on people interacting with those games

A Network View of Social Media Platform History: Social Structure, Dynamics and Content on YouTube

Social media sites are prone to change from many internal and external causes, yet it is difficult to directly explore their histories in terms of the content itself. Search and browsing features are biased toward new and paid content, archives are difficult to navigate systematically, and their scale makes any observations challenging to contextualize. Here, we present results of an ongoing study of YouTube’s history (currently with more than 76 million videos) using a combination of iterative browsing, network crawling and clustering within and across time periods. Through this method, we are able to identify historical patterns in YouTube\u27s content related to internal and external events. Our approach thus illustrates an adaptation of network analysis for understanding genre evolution in the histories of social media platforms

COVID-19 Information on YouTube in the Early Pandemic

As people sheltered globally during the COVID-19 pandemic, many YouTube videos and channels pivoted to providing COVID-19 information. But were these videos helpful and constructive or did they undermine official public health messaging? This paper addresses these questions through a mixed methods study of COVID-19 videos on YouTube produced from January to May 2020. We find that a preponderance of YouTube COVID-19 videos either came from major news studio outlets or offered official public health communication. While YouTube moved quickly against obvious false messages, other more subtle ones still managed to leak through. Medical information channels presented conflicting information at times, reflecting factors such as medical uncertainties, political currents, and audience pressures associated with uncertain information around a novel pandemic

YouTube Children’s Videos: Development of a Genre under Algorithm

YouTube children’s video has been claimed to have a preponderance of violent, disturbing or otherwise in-appropriate content. To assess this claim, we conduct a content analysis of a sample of children’s videos published between January 2016 and December 2018. Our analysis reveals an evolving ecosystem involving a variety of production modes and messages which nonetheless bears the heavy imprint of the algorithm-centered commercial incentives of marketing to children and attracting YouTube advertising. Hence, while content formerly causing public concern appears to be effectively policed at this juncture, algorithmic incentives do appear to distort children’s content in potentially unhealthy ways