Improving Access to Trails and Green Space: Brightwood Neighborhood, Springfield, Massachusetts

Accessibility has been an issue with the Connecticut River Walk and Bikeway (River Walk) since its completion in 2003. Our project focuses on designing better connections between this Springfield, MA rail trail and the local environmental justice communities it is meant to serve. As a team of four undergraduate design students, we have spent three months conducting a comprehensive research study on the trail. Ultimately, we will be turning over our research to the Appalachian Mountain Club which intends to use it for reference in their efforts to secure funding for improving River Walk access in the city of Springfield. As part of an undergraduate design studio class under the instruction of Professor Michael DiPasquale, our team conducted extensive research on the Connecticut River Walk and Bikeway. Looking through the lens of equity, we identified a cogent lack of access to this rail trail from the Brightwood neighborhood, to which it runs parallel. Similar environmental justice issues in Springfield have been studied by UMass students in the past, such as “Making Connections — Envisioning Springfield’s North End,” and Healthy Place-Making: Revitalizing Springfield’s Medical District, completed in graduate urban design studios in 2009 and 2019, respectively. Our work this semester builds upon these previous studies, while also delineating itself through our focus on the River Walk specifically. Our study consists of four parts: research, community engagement, design solutions, and deliverables. Much like a traditional planning project, these objectives were completed in a partially chronological fashion. Our approach consisted of overlaps between each component — as much as our research informed our engagement, what we learned from our engagement also informed our research, and so on. With the ultimate goal of providing the Appalachian Mountain Club with a wealth of information supporting the need for funding for improvements to the Connecticut River Walk and Bikeway, our team combined the results of our research, engagement, and design into this document: our deliverable for the project

Genetic Variation in Heat Tolerance of the Coral Platygyra Daedalea Indicates Potential for Adaptation to Ocean Warming

Ocean warming represents the greatest threat to the persistence of reef ecosystems. Most coral populations are projected to experience temperatures above their current bleaching thresholds annually by 2050. Adaptation to higher temperatures is necessary if corals are to persist in a warming future. While many aspects of heat stress have been well studied, few data are available for predicting the capacity for adaptive cross-generational responses in corals. Consistent sets of heat tolerant genomic markers that reliably predict thermal tolerance have yet to be identified. To address this knowledge gap, we quantified the heritability and genetic variation associated with heat tolerance in Platygyra daedalea from the Great Barrier Reef. We tracked the survival of ten quantitative genetic crosses of larvae produced form six parental colonies in a heat tolerance selection experiment. We also identified allelic shifts in heat-selected (35°C) survivors compared with paired, non-selected controls (27°C). The narrow-sense heritability of survival under heat stress was 0.66 and a total of 1,069 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were associated with different survival probabilities. While 148 SNPs were shared between several experimental crosses, no common SNPs were identified for all crosses, which suggests that specific combinations of many markers are responsible for heat tolerance. However, we found two regions that overlap with previously identified loci associated with heat tolerance in Persian Gulf populations of P. daedalea, which reinforces the importance of these markers for heat tolerance. These results illustrate the importance of high heritability and the complexity of the genomic architecture underpinning host heat tolerance. These findings suggest that this P. daedalea population has the genetic prerequisites for adaptation to increasing temperatures. This study also provides knowledge for the development of high throughput genomic tools which may screen for variation within and across populations to enhance adaptation through assisted gene flow and assisted migration

“I Think I Became a Swimmer Rather than Just Someone with a Disability Swimming Up and Down”: Paralympic Athletes Perceptions of Self and Identity Development

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Disability and Rehabilitation on 27 September 2016, available online at:DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2016.1217074.Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the role of swimming on Paralympic athletes’ perceptions of self and identity development. Method: A hermeneutic phenomenological approach was taken. During semi-structured interviews five Paralympic swimmers (aged 20-24 years) were asked questions about their swimming career, perceptions of self, integration, and impairment. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Results: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis1 yielded three superordinate themes: a) ‘One of the crowd’; none of the participants viewed themselves as disabled, nor as supercrips; these perceptions stemmed from family-, school-, and swimming- related experiences, b) ‘Becoming me’; participation in swimming facilitated self- and social-acceptance, and identity development, and c) ‘A badge of honour’; swimming presented opportunity to present and reinforce a positive identity. Conclusions: Swimming experiences enabled the participants to enhance personal and social identities, integrate through pro-social mechanisms, and to develop a career path following retirement from competition.through pro-social mechanisms, and to develop a career path following retirement from competition.Peer reviewe

Genome-wide association study identifies 30 loci associated with bipolar disorder.

Bipolar disorder is a highly heritable psychiatric disorder. We performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) including 20,352 cases and 31,358 controls of European descent, with follow-up analysis of 822 variants with P < 1 × 10-4 in an additional 9,412 cases and 137,760 controls. Eight of the 19 variants that were genome-wide significant (P < 5 × 10-8) in the discovery GWAS were not genome-wide significant in the combined analysis, consistent with small effect sizes and limited power but also with genetic heterogeneity. In the combined analysis, 30 loci were genome-wide significant, including 20 newly identified loci. The significant loci contain genes encoding ion channels, neurotransmitter transporters and synaptic components. Pathway analysis revealed nine significantly enriched gene sets, including regulation of insulin secretion and endocannabinoid signaling. Bipolar I disorder is strongly genetically correlated with schizophrenia, driven by psychosis, whereas bipolar II disorder is more strongly correlated with major depressive disorder. These findings address key clinical questions and provide potential biological mechanisms for bipolar disorder

“Hot Hand” on Strike: Bowling Data Indicates Correlation to Recent Past Results, Not Causality

Recently, the “hot hand” phenomenon regained interest due to the availability and accessibility of large scale data sets from the world of sports. In support of common wisdom and in contrast to the original conclusions of the seminal paper about this phenomenon by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky in 1985, solid evidences were supplied in favor of the existence of this phenomenon in different kinds of data. This came after almost three decades of ongoing debates whether the “hot hand” phenomenon in sport is real or just a mis-perception of human subjects of completely random patterns present in reality. However, although this phenomenon was shown to exist in different sports data including basketball free throws and bowling strike rates, a somehow deeper question remained unanswered: are these non random patterns results of causal, short term, feedback mechanisms or simply time fluctuations of athletes performance. In this paper, we analyze large amounts of data from the Professional Bowling Association(PBA). We studied the results of the top 100 players in terms of the number of available records (summed into more than 450,000 frames). By using permutation approach and dividing the analysis into different aggregation levels we were able to supply evidence for the existence of the “hot hand” phenomenon in the data, in agreement with previous studies. Moreover, by using this approach, we were able to demonstrate that there are, indeed, significant fluctuations from game to game for the same player but there is no clustering of successes (strikes) and failures (non strikes) within each game. Thus we were lead to the conclusion that bowling results show correlation to recent past results but they are not influenced by them in a causal manner