Local Food and Agriculture Awareness: The Literacy of Local Produce and Agriculture in Northwest Arkansas

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that adolescents and children, both male and female, are failing to meet the daily fruit and vegetable consumption requirements (Kim et al., 2011; Upton et al., 2012; Harris et al., 2012). Other studies have shown that with increased exposure and availability of produce, students (K-5) tend to consume more fruits and vegetables (Cullen et al., 2009; Evans et al., 2012). The purpose of this study is to identify whether Northwest Arkansas eleventh grade high school students possess experience and knowledge of local produce and agriculture. Out of 1054 students enrolled at the three high schools that participated (Bentonville, Farmington, and Lincoln) 50 students were surveyed. Thus the results are presented as a case study to inform future work. In this case study, the following results were found: 1. Most students (less than 25%) did not meet the daily fruit and/or vegetable consumptions recommended by the CDC. 2. Students lacked knowledge of where to purchase local produce (38% had proficient knowledge) and how far their food travels (32% of students were aware). 3. Students displayed a strong ability to identify most of the six types of produce and four fast foods depicted in the survey. Students\u27 ability to identify these fruits and vegetables were not affected by most of the experiences, except for the school in which they attended and their gardening experiences. 4. Increased fast food consumption decreased the students\u27 ability to identify places offering local produce for sale. 5. Increased fast food consumption decreased students\u27 awareness of Arkansas\u27 most grown crop. 6. Gender was not found to have a major effect on local produce and agriculture experience, knowledge, and perceptions. However, it was found that male students were more likely to enroll in high school agricultural classes and know how far produce travels on average from the farm to the dinner table. While female students believed that local produce had lesser disadvantages. This case study is a start to a better understanding of the amount of experience and knowledge of local produce and agriculture within Northwest Arkansas high school students

Wart Eliminator Project Report

The Wart Eliminator is a product based on the theory of resonant frequency and its ability to devitalize pathogens with the use of electronic pulses. Using the resonant frequency of the wart’s pathogen, the device is operated by the user with two switches for power and a probe connected by a wire to the device for applying to the affected area of the user while running three minute cycles. The product is in the beginning stages with only a prototype made. The product needed a proper ergonomic design to be easily used by the user and a cost analysis to be ready for a possible future production. The studies showed that with a curved design, it was more ergonomically friendly to the user and that even though it would be more expensive, the user would be willing to pay more money if the device provided customer satisfaction. The cost analysis showed that the product could be sold at a price that is relatively inexpensive to the user. With this knowledge, the social impact on this product could be a huge impact providing home users the ability to cure their ailments without having to receive medical help at a price that is more affordable and a more effective cure

A Decomposition of Gallai Multigraphs

An edge-colored cycle is rainbow if its edges are colored with distinct colors. A Gallai (multi)graph is a simple, complete, edge-colored (multi)graph lacking rainbow triangles. As has been previously shown for Gallai graphs, we show that Gallai multigraphs admit a simple iterative construction. We then use this structure to prove Ramsey-type results within Gallai colorings. Moreover, we show that Gallai multigraphs give rise to a surprising and highly structured decomposition into directed trees

The ISCIP Analyst, Volume X, Issue 7

This repository item contains a single issue of The ISCIP Analyst, an analytical review journal published from 1996 to 2010 by the Boston University Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy

The ISCIP Analyst, Volume X, Issue 1

This repository item contains a single issue of The ISCIP Analyst, an analytical review journal published from 1996 to 2010 by the Boston University Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy

The ISCIP Analyst, Volume X, Issue 5

This repository item contains a single issue of The ISCIP Analyst, an analytical review journal published from 1996 to 2010 by the Boston University Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy

The ISCIP Analyst, Volume X, Issue 2

This repository item contains a single issue of The ISCIP Analyst, an analytical review journal published from 1996 to 2010 by the Boston University Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy

Autonomous Monitoring of a Diverse Ground Station Network

Planet Labs owns and operates the largest commercial earth-imagery CubeSat constellation. Planet’s ground station network is responsible for the earth-to-space communication link that gathers health and telemetry data, keeps the spacecraft schedule up-to-date, and downlinks the payload data from the spacecraft. The ground station network contains fifteen geographically diverse sites with a combination of leased and owned equipment from multiple vendors. Across those sites, the team monitors over 1600 services on nearly 500 devices. The scale of the network and diversity of equipment present challenges for operations and network health monitoring. Planet’s Ground Station Operations team monitors assets through a combination of active monitoring scripts on timers, event-based monitoring feedback, real-time metric analysis, and periodic automated long-term metric analysis. Active polling by monitoring scripts and real-time metric analysis catch configuration, software, and hardware issues as they arise independent of contacts with satellites and enable operators to quickly fix problems with little to no loss of satellite contact time. Meanwhile, event-based monitoring flags issues when outcomes differ from the expected results based on deterministic actions and uncover issues that are either transient or hidden from an active polling script. Last, long-term metric analysis gives insight into the slow degradation of system components and can be used to schedule targeted preemptive maintenance to efficiently maintain high operational uptime. With this combination of monitoring approaches and through using a wide array of tools that feed back into specific operator “dashboards” for a fast top-level view of issues, Planet’s Ground Station Operations team is able to maintain greater than 99% uptime and less than 90 minute incident response time without continuous 24-hour staffing. In total, the network takes over 2800 contacts per day with Planet’s Low Earth Orbit constellations. The Ground Station Operations team emphasizes automation, fail-over, and targeted redundancy to give on-call staff tools to rectify or triage issues quickly, efficiently, and at scale

Merging Diverse Architecture for Multi-Mission Support

Planet Labs Inc. (“Planet”) currently operates the world’s largest commercial earth observation constellation with over 150 active on-orbit satellites collecting daily medium resolution imagery of the whole earth, and high resolution imagery of targeted areas of interest. In 2017, Planet combined the SkySat high-resolution satellite constellation with its own existing medium resolution Dove constellation to expand its ability to make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. While the two satellite designs use largely similar ground station architectures, nuances in implementation caused early operations to focus on maintaining separate, siloed ground station networks with unique software and hardware. As Planet looks to expand its on-orbit constellations and diversify orbits to meet customer needs, our Ground Station Operations team has begun work to combine software and hardware architectures to support multiple missions from the same stack. By enabling multi-mission support, we realize benefits in increasing daily average contact duration and minimizing per-satellite contact gaps. This in turn decreases our reaction latency on-orbit and increases our individual ground station utilization to increase our total possible throughput. In this paper, we will discuss our network modeling for coverage and access planning, our general strategies for combining architectures for multi-mission support, results thus far, and lessons learned along the way. Planet’s Ground Station Operations team has built out and operates a network capable of downlinking over 15TB of earth imaging data from our on-orbit constellations in a single day and looks forward to continued high-reliability and low cost support of Planet’s on-orbit assets in the future

Planet High Speed Radio: Crossing Gbps from a 3U CubeSat

Planet is a vertically integrated aerospace and data analytics company that operates the world\u27s largest commercial fleet of remote sensing satellites. Our mission is to image the whole world everyday, and make change visible, accessible, and actionable. We have launched over 350 satellites and built up an automated mission control and ground station infrastructure to monitor and control the satellites, and download the imagery data. Historically, small satellite radios have been downlink limited because of tight size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints. Rapid prototyping, iteration, and adaptation of the latest commercial-o_-the-shelf (COTS) technology has allowed for continuous improvements in data throughput on our high speed radio from a very low-cost cubesat platform. In this talk, we will report on our latest X-band radio and antenna solution which has achieved a data rate over 1.6 Gbps from a 3U CubeSat on-orbit. Planet\u27s High Speed Downlink 2 (HSD2) is the latest generation compact, low-mass, and low-power radio that was built and deployed on 3U form-factor imaging CubeSats in December 2018. This system operates at X- band and is built using COTS parts with a dual polarization antenna. The two physical channels represent the two polarization modes, right hand circular polarization (RHCP) and left hand circular polarization (LHCP) and each physical channel utilizes 300 MHz of total bandwidth. Within each physical channel, there are three logical channels spaced 100 MHz apart center-to-center frequency. The individual channel symbol rate is 76.8 Msps. Each physical channel has 1 W RF output power and 15 dBi antenna gain. The total DC power consumption of the radio including the processor and the FPGA is 50Wand the total volume occupied by the radio and antenna, including the mechanical deployment structure for the antenna is 0.25U. The commercial digital television broadcasting standard DVB-S2 is used for modulation and coding. An adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) scheme is used to dynamically change the modulation and coding for each channel individually based on the available link margin. Our ground station network includes 15 dishes (29 dB/K gain-to-noise-temperature) across 5 sites located around the world. The HSD2 is capable of providing downlink volume of over 80 GB during a single ground station pass