An Improved Living Environment, But...

In 2000, the CHA received a HOPE VI grant to revitalize the Madden/Wells community by demolishing the nearly 3,000-unit dilapidated development and replacing it with a new mixed-income community named Oakwood Shores. Another development, Dearborn Homes, was slated for revitalization a few years later and was often used to house residents from other CHA developments targeted for demolition who were reluctant to leave CHA housing or had not qualified for mixed-income housing or vouchers.The plan for Dearborn Homes was to substantially rehabilitate its buildings.For over 10 years, the Urban Institute has been researching the outcomes of residents from these developments. This brief examines whether and to what extent the original residents of these distressed developments ended up in an improved living environment 3 to 10 years after relocating from Madden/Wells (the Panel Study sample) or 1 to 3 years after relocating from either Madden/Wells or the Dearborn Homes (the Demonstration sample).In general, these CHA families live in better housing in substantially safer, but still very poor, neighborhoods. Yet these gains are fragile; relocatees experience significant material hardship, and too many of those who have moved with vouchers live in neighborhoods where drug traf?cking and violent crime remain significant problems

MEMS 411: St. Louis Science Center Vibration Station

Student groups work on an open-ended mechanical design problem and finish the semester with a physical prototype, a design report, and a presentation delivered to an external review board. Groups are guided through the engineering design process by completing a set of project deliverables. The quality of these deliverables provides a basis for the evaluation of individual and team performance. This course emphasizes the importance of user-centric design, communication and presentation skill, consideration of real-world constraints, sketching and creativity, prototyping, and data-driven decision-making using engineering models and analyses

Massive Waste Diversion from Landfill During Move-out from Residence Halls

Dump&Run is an annual campus-wide waste diversion event, organized by Students for Recycling and Ohio State Student life. Each year, items are collected from residence halls during move-out each year then, recycled items are then taken to a storage unit and sorted into categories and usage over the summer. On the first Friday of autumn semester, Students for Recycling holds a one-day sale of all collected items, selling them back to be reused by students for an incredibly low price. Items that are possibly not sold are donated to local charities and properly recycled or disposed of to minimize move-out waste from landfill. The Dump&Run is a great sustainable tradition that has been established at Ohio State since 2004, and shows the entire campus can be united in pursuing a more sustainable future. This student-run event not only has diverted several tons of waste from residence halls that Ohio State would have to pay to be removed but, fights financial insecurity around The Ohio State's campus by providing cheap alternatives to furniture and dorm essentials. Students for Recycling is looking to pair with either the university or a community partner to carry out logistical challenges faced by Dump&Run such as storage facilities, sale location, manpower, transportation of items, and potential expansion of collection units. This event strives to help Ohio State achieve its zero waste initiatives and promote sustainable lifestyles through participation and education.AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Hailey Hayes, president, Ohio State Students for Recycling, [email protected] (Corresponding Author)Our ignite session will include a summary of our annual Dump&Run event along with statistics from other universities with similar programs and a comparison of success among student-involved, move-out waste diversion. It will also include challenges we've faced due to recent changes in resources previously provided by the university, and why those resources are essential to our mission and to carry out this project. We will discuss previous community partnerships and how those particular partnerships influenced the success of the Dump&Run event. We will discuss the importance of community engagement and how both parties benefit from events like ours. We also will discuss responsibilities on both parts of the partnership and what Dump&Run specifically needs for the upcoming annual sale. This 14-year-old event is proven to be effective in diverting waste and can be beneficial to community-based organizations that provide used goods

CHA Residents and the Plan for Transformation

This series of policy briefs presents findings from more than a decade of research on the people who lived in Chicago Housing Authority properties when the agencylaunched its Plan for Transformation in October 1999. The ongoing, multiyear effort sought to improve resident well-being by renovating or demolishing decaying public housing properties and replacing them with new, mixed-income development

A typology of drought decision making: Synthesizing across cases to understand drought preparedness and response actions

Drought is an inescapable reality in many regions, including much of the western United States. With climate change, droughts are predicted to intensify and occur more frequently, making the imperative for drought management even greater. Many diverse actors – including private landowners, business owners, scientists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and managers and policymakers within tribal, local, state, and federal government agencies – play multiple, often overlapping roles in preparing for and responding to drought. Managing water is, of course, one of the most important roles that humans play in both mitigating and responding to droughts; but, focusing only on “water managers” or “water management” fails to capture key elements related to the broader category of drought management. The respective roles played by those managing drought (as distinct from water managers), the interactions among them, and the consequences in particular contexts, are not well understood. Our team synthesized insights from 10 in-depth case studies to understand key facets of decision making about drought preparedness and response. We present a typology with four elements that collectively describe how decisions about drought preparedness and response are made (context and objective for a decision; actors responsible; choice being made or action taken; and how decisions interact with and influence other decisions). The typology provides a framework for system-level understanding of how and by whom complex decisions about drought management are made. Greater system-level understanding helps decision makers, program and research funders, and scientists to identify constraints to and opportunities for action, to learn from the past, and to integrate ecological impacts, thereby facilitating social learning among diverse participants in drought preparedness and response

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Sleeve Gastrectomy Provides Cardioprotection from Oxidative Stress In Vitro Due to Reduction of Circulating Myeloperoxidase

Bariatric surgery, including sleeve gastrectomy (SG), improves systolic and diastolic function, which is independent of weight loss in rodent models. The cause of weight loss-independent improvements in cardiac function are unknown but may originate from the gastrointestinal tract. In this study, we investigated whether a circulating blood factor is a mechanism for acute cardioprotection after SG by testing the utility of rodent SG plasma to reduce metabolic stress in vitro. For the initial experiment, obese male Zucker rats underwent SG, ad lib sham, or pair-fed sham surgeries (n = six SG, n = eight SH, n = eight PF). For all other studies, a second group of Zucker rats underwent SG or ad lib sham surgeries (n = eight SH, n = six SG). Six weeks following surgery, plasma was collected from each group, both in the fasting and post-prandial (pp) state. This plasma was then pooled per surgical group and nutrient state and tested in multiple in vitro cell culture and extra-cellular assays to determine the effect of SG on myotubular metabolic stress compared to the sham surgeries. Post-prandial SG plasma (ppSG), but not fasting SG, pp, or fasting sham plasma, reduced the metabolic stress of the H9c2 cells as measured by lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release (p p < 0.01). The MPO global knockout plasma also had a rate of extracellular hydrogen peroxide consumption and peroxidatic activity comparable to the ppSG plasma. These studies suggest that one of the weight loss-independent mechanisms by which SG improves myocellular function could be a reduced pro-oxidative environment due to lower circulating levels of MPO. It appears that the gastrointestinal tract is of critical importance to these findings, as the MPO levels were only lowered after enteral, nutrient stimulation in the SG rats. If this surgical effect is confirmed in humans, SG may be a unique surgical treatment for multiple diseases with a pathogenesis of inflammation and oxidative damage, including obesity-associated heart failure with preserved ejection fraction

A comprehensive evaluation of the impact of telemonitoring in patients with long-term conditions and social care needs: protocol for the Whole Systems Demonstrator cluster randomised trial

Background It is expected that increased demands on services will result from expanding numbers of older people with long-term conditions and social care needs. There is significant interest in the potential for technology to reduce utilisation of health services in these patient populations, including telecare (the remote, automatic and passive monitoring of changes in an individual's condition or lifestyle) and telehealth (the remote exchange of data between a patient and health care professional). The potential of telehealth and telecare technology to improve care and reduce costs is limited by a lack of rigorous evidence of actual impact. Methods We are conducting a large scale, multi-site study of the implementation, impact and acceptability of these new technologies. A major part of the evaluation is a cluster-randomised controlled trial of telehealth and telecare versus usual care in patients with long-term conditions or social care needs. The trial involves a number of outcomes, including health care utilisation and quality of life. We describe the broad evaluation and the methods of the cluster randomised trial Discussion If telehealth and telecare technology proves effective, it will provide additional options for health services worldwide to deliver care for populations with high levels of need. Trial Registration Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN4300209