Inspired to Serve: Representing the U.S. Overseas

The idea of working overseas conjures thoughts of exotic locales and exciting adventures. For Joshua Johnson ’04 and Kelsey Lyle ’07, the joys of being an expat are simpler than that

The Multi-Sport Athlete

Jade Everage \u2718 is busy. The communication arts major, campus leader and two-sport athlete doesn\u27t have much wiggle room in her schedule. Still, she\u27s happy she chose this path – even if it did take her a while to figure out how to manage it all

Alumni Profile

Feature about a Linfield alumnus or alumna. In this issue, Elizabeth (Dozier) Kelley \u2702: Advice from the White House

WASH Education: Need for More than Water Treatment for Floating Villages in Cambodia

Point of use (POU) water treatment systems are widely used around the world to provide microbiologically safe drinking water in developing countries. Work done in Cambodia by Brown et al. (2007) and Liang et al. (2010) have documented ceramic and biosand filters as cost effective point of use treatment systems capable of removing over 95% E. coli bacteria when properly used and maintained. Bridgewater State University and Water for Cambodia (WfC) explored using BioSand filters (BSF) to provide microbiologically safe drinking water for people in the Moat Khla floating village on the Tonle Sap Lake in Siem Reap Province. All 189 families use the lake for their water source which by WHO standards is deemed unsafe. An intensive follow up study in February 2011 of 40 families using BSF’s and 40 families not using BSF’s showed over 90% of the households were using high risk lake source water(\u3e 100 CFU’s of E. coli /100 ml). However, only 2.5% of BSF households had bacteria levels in the high risk range in their filtered water while 40% of Non-BSF households had storage water in the high risk range. Demand for BSF’s increased to 80 by February 2011 even though a floating UV filtration system funded by regional aid agencies was placed in the community. Non-BSF families that could purchase UV or BSF treated water, or who boiled their water still had high levels of bacteria in their stored water raising questions on appropriate water treatment and storage technology for remote floating villages in Cambodia

The Herbicide and the Butterfly

Clutching a mallet and metal pipe in his left hand, Liam Home \u2720 hops down from a five-foot-tall metal gate. He turns back to help his biology professor, Chad Tillberg, navigate the obstacle. Safely over the gate, they head into the waist-high grass in search of a series of small orange flags

Revisit the moment

Americans are paying attention to vote-by-mail more than ever before, thanks to the run-up to and fallout from the 2020 presidential election. The pandemic made voting in person problematic, and states are now arguing over whether to continue vote-by-mail in future elections

Revealing Relationships among Relevant Climate Variables with Information Theory

A primary objective of the NASA Earth-Sun Exploration Technology Office is to understand the observed Earth climate variability, thus enabling the determination and prediction of the climate's response to both natural and human-induced forcing. We are currently developing a suite of computational tools that will allow researchers to calculate, from data, a variety of information-theoretic quantities such as mutual information, which can be used to identify relationships among climate variables, and transfer entropy, which indicates the possibility of causal interactions. Our tools estimate these quantities along with their associated error bars, the latter of which is critical for describing the degree of uncertainty in the estimates. This work is based upon optimal binning techniques that we have developed for piecewise-constant, histogram-style models of the underlying density functions. Two useful side benefits have already been discovered. The first allows a researcher to determine whether there exist sufficient data to estimate the underlying probability density. The second permits one to determine an acceptable degree of round-off when compressing data for efficient transfer and storage. We also demonstrate how mutual information and transfer entropy can be applied so as to allow researchers not only to identify relations among climate variables, but also to characterize and quantify their possible causal interactions.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of the Earth-Sun System Technology Conference (ESTC 2005), Adelphi, M