Stop and Frisk 2012: NYCLU Briefing

This report discloses detailed information about all aspects of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program, including detailed breakdowns by precinct. New to this report is an analysis of marijuana-related aspects of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk regime

Surveillance of molluscan (gastropod) intermediate hosts for the emerging infectious disease Angiostrongyliasis (Angiostrongylus cantonensis) in Oklahoma.

Angiostrongylus cantonensis, the rat lungworm, is the etiologic agent of an emerging infectious zoonosis, angiostrongyliasis. To date there is relatively little known about this parasite from a public health perspective. Because snails play a critical role in the rat lungworm's life cycle, as intermediate hosts, it is paramount that snail species able to harbor this disease are identified to increase awareness of the geographic spread of this disease locally and globally. Our research aimed to identify the parasite within endemic Oklahoman molluscan intermediate hosts and to provide current geographic distribution within these intermediate hosts. The most abundant aquatic snails and bivalves were collected by hand in southeast Oklahoma between the months of September 2016 and September 2017 (N=351). The sampling resulted in the collection of three species including Physa spp., Planorbella trivolvis and Corbicula fluminea, the Asian clam. Total digestion of tissue was performed before extraction of DNA for each sample. Quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) was utilized for amplification of the internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) region of A. cantonensis. Melt-curve analysis was implemented with qPCR for secondary confirmation. Further confirmation was performed by resolving all amplified products on an agarose gel via electrophoresis and identifying the presence or absence of a band at the target DNA size belonging to A. cantonensis (267bp fragment). Further optimization was conducted to ensure highest quality of results including temperature gradients, primer concentration gradients, different primer sets (including self-created sets), varying cycle conditions, different modes of PCR such as touchdown-PCR, utilizing intercalating dyes as well as probe-based qPCR, and inclusion of more refined assay components such as a black hole quencher (BHQ). After performing the optimized assay on all 351 collected gastropod samples none yielded positive confirmation of A. cantonensis DNA. These results indicate that Oklahoma creates bottlenecks in many forms such as geographic, climatic and biologic that inhibit the ability of this parasite to gain a foothold beyond southeast Oklahoma. The absence of rat lungworm DNA within the most abundant aquatic intermediate hosts in this region confirm the unsuitability of these species as intermediate hosts for this parasite

Tellurite Fiber for High Power Mid-Wave Infrared Supercontinuum Generation

Broadband, high-power, mid-infrared sources are critical for many applica-tions. Fiber based supercontinuum generation is the optimum mid-infrared broad-band source that can provide extended bandwidth and good coherence. Compared to alternatives such as fluorides and chalcogenides, tellurite fibers are more robust and can handle much higher power. Tellurite fibers also have high nonlinearity and a ma-terial zero dispersion wavelength close to 2 µm. This makes them ideal for nonlinear processes pumped by Tm-doped silica fiber lasers. We demonstrated tellurite fibers by using a simple stack and draw process. This fabrication method requires simple setup and is easily repeatable. Due to the difficulty in producing soft glass tubes, we have drawn a stack-and-draw preform without the need for an over-clad tube. The stack-and-draw process provides several advantages over other solid and micro-structured designs. Our solid tellurite fiber design shows potential for broadband mid-infrared supercontinuum generation. We have also shown that designs with low dispersion are the key for broadband mid-infrared supercontinuum generation in tellurite fibers pumped at 2 µm

Multiparametric 3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging as a clinical tool to characterize prostate cancer

Scientists have come a long way in understanding prostate cancer as a disease and how its progression affects the men who develop it. Prostate adenocarcinoma may be present without causing clinical symptoms. Prostate cancer may metastasize, which increases the likelihood of fatality. The cause of the disease is still not completely clear, but genetics, race, tissue damage, history of previous infections, diet, and environmental influences appear to play a role in its development. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an excellent clinical tool to characterize prostate cancer without the use of ionizing radiation or surgery. It is concluded that MRI is the optimal imaging modality to achieve detection, characterization, and staging of intracapsular and extracapsular prostate disease. The advances in MRI technology, particularly 3 Tesla, allows for reduced surgical intervention thus improving quality of life for patients with the disease

Beyond Wilderness: Wildness as a Guiding Ideal

This thesis is largely a response to William Cronon’s essay “The Trouble with Wilderness or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” found in The Great New Wilderness Debate. Cronon is himself responding to many things, in large part to Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature and also to the wilderness vision typified by Dave Foreman; thus this thesis is also a response to McKibben and in many respects a defense of Foreman-like thought. Besides Cronon, I consider a wide variety of sources, taking from them in order to build a case for, and to explicate, wildness as a guiding ideal. I affirm one of Cronon’s objections to wilderness and thus argue that given the previous presence of humans in many wilderness landscapes and the continued presence of wildness within peopled landscapes, a more viable position is to see a continuum between unpeopled and peopled landscapes rather than a drastic discontinuity. I next turn to Jack Turner’s The Abstract Wild to begin to consider wildness itself, especially in terms of protected areas. Turner criticizes preserved areas as not being very wild. National Parks especially, but Wilderness Act wildernesses also, have their wildness diminished for several reasons. Some of these are small size and lack of predators, but the one he is most critical of is scientific management which results in control, surveillance, and commodification. I next discuss the importance of the ‘wilderness experience,’ largely using Turner. Turner claims, and I affirm, that both the wild and direct experience of the wild are being lost, both by the current state of wildlands and by other threats such as technological mediation. I then discuss at length what wild and wildness mean using authors such as Thoreau, Turner, Griffiths, and London. I write that wild things can be affected, but not controlled by us. I further argue that we are homeless in our world and thus a conception of a wilderness we cannot inhabit as a guiding ideal is only a small component of this alienation. I look at our alienation from a variety of perspectives including Jared Diamond’s anthropology, Csíkszentmihályi’s psychology, Karl Marx, and David Strong. I argue that we are creatures at home in the wild. A major theme of this paper is thus the reciprocal relationship between us and the world. I argue that the world, our conception of the world, and our existence are all inseparable. One transition in all three is from a mechanistic world and worldview to an organismic. Another is to see the world and ourselves as spiritual. Fundamentally my concern is with human freedom which necessarily involves the freedom of the world at large. Seeing ourselves as inseparable from the world, seeing wildness as a part of homecoming, and recognizing the landscape as continuous from the wilderness to the built world, leads to wildness as a guiding ideal. Wildness as a guiding ideal means that the wild serves as a basis and a fundamental criterion in, not only preserved areas, but in all that we do. It is necessary to rethink our being and building in terms of the wild, hence my introduction of wild building and wild being. The thrust of my analysis of homelessness is that we are cut off from the flow of the world and I use flow as a basic metaphor for the wild. I continue with the metaphor of flow from three different perspectives: Csíkszentmihályi’s psychology; in terms of the Tao, and in Dolores LaChapelle’s experience of deep powder skiing. Part of both wild building and wild being are empty spaces in life and land where we allow the wild - the uncontrived and uncontrolled, the complex and nonlinear, the dangerous and challenging, the mysterious and potential, autonomy and vitality, and ultimately freedom, to thrive. Though it is good to have spaces apart from us, we likely cannot have places totally independent of us on earth, and either way we need such spaces to be a part of our lives. Finally I conclude with a qualified slogan, ‘resist efficiency, cult

Assessing levels of reliability for design criteria for hurricane and storm damage risk reduction structures

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) updated design methodologies and required factors of safety for hurricane and storm damage risk reduction system (HSDRRS) structures to incorporate lessons-learned from the system performance during Katrina and results of state-of-the-art research in storm surge modeling and foundation behavior. However, the criteria (USACE 2008) were not calibrated to a target reliability, which creates the need to understand the reliability provided by designs using those criteria, especially for pile-founded structures subject to global instability. This dissertation presents a methodology for quantifying the reliability of pile-founded structures that can be applied to hurricane risk reduction structures or more broadly to other types of pile-founded structures. The emphasis of this study is on a representative hurricane risk reduction structure designed using the new USACE criteria, for which the reliability is quantified for comparison to industry target reliabilities. A designer-friendly methodology for quantifying the reliability of hurricane risk reduction structures is presented, along with recommendations developed from a state-of-the-art review of geotechnical, hydraulic, and structural uncertainty data. This methodology utilizes commercial software and routine design methods for the development of inputs into an overarching framework that includes point estimate simulation models and event tree methods to quantify the structure’s system reliability. The methodology is used to illustrate differences in analysis results with and without accounting for variance reductions due to spatial correlation are also presented through stability and flowthrough limit states. Element reliabilities and overarching “system” reliabilities for a representative structure are quantified for hydrostatic hurricane storm surge loadings, soil loading, and dead loads. Wave loadings and impact loadings are not considered. The use of variance reductions on undrained shear strengths for point estimate simulations produced higher system reliability indices than the simulations not considering variance reductions for the stability and flowthrough limit states. Using the reduced variances, computed element and system reliabilities were above the industry target reliability indices presented in the literature