No Californian Left Behind: Clean and Affordable Transportation Options for All Through Vehicle Replacement

As California focuses in on new, high-tech, best-in-class transportation strategies, it risks leaving behind an important subset of households and communities who could most benefit from the transition to a cleaner, cheaper, and more sustainable transportation future. Hundreds of thousands of low-income Californians, particularly those in rural parts of the state, live with some of the worst air pollution in the U.S. They also often drive relatively old, inefficient, unsafe, and highly polluting vehicles, and struggle to cover the costs of their basic transportation needs. For these Californians, getting into a relatively more efficient vehicle is more realistic than getting into a new electric vehicle, which is expensive, or onto public transit, which is often ineffective in serving rural and non-urban households.The state has recognized this problem and attempted to address it by focusing on vehicle repair and retirement programs. However, by merely repairing and retiring vehicles and not replacing them with cleaner, more efficient ones, existing programs do not maximize long-term air benefits or lessen the financial burden these inefficient vehicles currently place on low-income Californians. To help address this issue, Senate Bill 459, signed by Governor Brown in September 2013, directs the California Air Resources Board (ARB) to rewrite the guidelines of California's Enhanced Fleet Modernization Program (EFMP). This program has been in place since 2010, and is designed to allow residents who own the highest-emitting vehicles in the state to retire and/or replace them.In this report, we discuss the contribution made by these highly polluting vehicles to the state's air quality problems; we also discuss the serious drag that driving these vehicles can have on household budgets. After outlining these problems, we discuss the state's current policies aimed at promoting vehicle retirement and replacement and offer some recommendations for improving those programs.California is already a leader in advanced and high-tech transportation and transit solutions. It is time we also became a leader in pragmatic solutions for a population that is sometimes left behind in these discussions: non-urban, low-income, car-dependent households. Bringing solutions to these communities will have a huge impact on our current air quality and family budgets; it will also widen the circle of Californians who play an active part in moving this state toward a cleaner, less oil-dependent future

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationPaleoecological reconstructions provide important information regarding climate affects on vegetation and forest disturbance return intervals. In recent decades, bark beetles (Dendroctonus spp.) have rapidly and profoundly altered subalpine forest ecosystems across interior forests in western North America. Disturbance records for bark beetle epidemics extending beyond the most recent few centuries are absent from the paleoecological literature. The research presented here examines sedimentary pollen records from subalpine lake basins to assess both historic and Holocene disturbance by spruce beetle (D. rufipennis) and wildfire. It is evident that limited vegetative change has occurred over the last 9,000 years and climate is driving fire disturbance regimes rather than forest composition. As insolation-driven seasonal climate extremes ameliorated from the early to the middle Holocene, annual precipitation regimes transitioned from rain- to snow-dominated with perennial lakes developing in south-central Utah. The early Holocene was characterized by high fire peak magnitude and fire frequency, forced by strong seasonal temperature and moisture contrasts. The middle Holocene was relatively warm, with dry winters and wet summers, facilitating frequent, low-magnitude fire episodes. The late Holocene was relatively cool and wet driven by decreasing summer insolation and increasing amplitude and frequency of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability. Landscape-scale stand-replacing fire disturbance becomes essentially absent over the last 3,000 years until the arrival of European settlers to the region. Pollen ratios from host and nonhost trees assessed during the historic period allow us to infer two high-severity spruce beetle epidemics during the Holocene at ca. 4,000 and 8,200 cal yrs BP

Impacts of International Wheat Breeding Research in the Developing World, 1988-2002

Crop Production/Industries, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

The Importance of Coordinate Frames in Dynamic SLAM

Most Simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) systems have traditionally assumed a static world, which does not align with real-world scenarios. To enable robots to safely navigate and plan in dynamic environments, it is essential to employ representations capable of handling moving objects. Dynamic SLAM is an emerging field in SLAM research as it improves the overall system accuracy while providing additional estimation of object motions. State-of-the-art literature informs two main formulations for Dynamic SLAM, representing dynamic object points in either the world or object coordinate frame. While expressing object points in a local reference frame may seem intuitive, it may not necessarily lead to the most accurate and robust solutions. This paper conducts and presents a thorough analysis of various Dynamic SLAM formulations, identifying the best approach to address the problem. To this end, we introduce a front-end agnostic framework using GTSAM that can be used to evaluate various Dynamic SLAM formulations.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, submitted to ICRA 202

Morphological and functional variation between isolated populations of British red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris)

Isolation due to habitat fragmentation can lead to morphological and functional variation between populations, with the effect being well documented in rodents. Here, we investigated whether such morphological variation could be identified between British populations of the Eurasian red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris). This species was once widespread across Great Britain, but suffered a severe population decline across the 20th century, leaving a highly fragmented distribution. The aim was to test for morphological and biomechanical variation of the mandible between the remaining British red squirrel populations, and between British and continental European red squirrels. Linear and geometric morphometric methods were used to analyse shape in a sample of over 250 red squirrel hemi-mandibles from across Britain plus a sample from Germany representing the central European subspecies. Procrustes ANOVA identified significant shape variation between populations, with particularly distinct differences being noted between red squirrels from Germany and several British red squirrel populations, which may reflect their evolutionary history. Linear biomechanical measurements showed that the red squirrels from Formby and Jersey had a significantly lower mechanical advantage of the temporalis muscle than other British populations, suggesting they were less efficient at gnawing. This functional difference may be related to many factors, such as founder effect, potential inbreeding and/or past supplemental feeding with less mechanically resistant food items

Long-Term Landscape Changes in a Subalpine Spruce-Fir forest in Central Utah, USA

Background: In Western North America, increasing wildfire and outbreaks of native bark beetles have been mediated by warming climate conditions. Bioclimatic models forecast the loss of key high elevation species throughout the region. This study uses retrospective vegetation and fire history data to reconstruct the drivers of past disturbance and environmental change. Understanding the relationship among climate, antecedent disturbances, and the legacy effects of settlement-era logging can help identify the patterns and processes that create landscapes susceptible to bark beetle epidemics. Methods: Our analysis uses data from lake sediment cores, stand inventories, and historical records. Sediment cores were dated with radiometric techniques (14C and210Pb/137Cs) and subsampled for pollen and charcoal to maximize the temporal resolution during the historical period (1800 CE to present) and to provide environmental baseline data (last 10,500 years). Pollen data for spruce were calibrated to carbon biomass (C t/ha) using standard allometric equations and a transfer function. Charcoal samples were analyzed with statistical models to facilitate peak detection and determine fire recurrence intervals. Results: The Wasatch Plateau has been dominated by Engelmann spruce forests for the last ~10,500 years, with subalpine fir becoming more prominent since 6000 years ago. This landscape has experienced a dynamic fire regime, where burning events are more frequent and of higher magnitude during the last 3000 years. Two important disturbances have impacted Engelmann spruce in the historical period: 1) high-grade logging during the late 19th century; and (2) a high severity spruce beetle outbreak in the late 20th century that killed \u3e90 % of mature spruce (\u3e10 cm dbh). Conclusions: Our study shows that spruce-dominated forests in this region are resilient to a range of climate and disturbance regimes. Several lines of evidence suggest that 19th century logging promoted a legacy of simplified stand structure and composition such that, when climate became favorable for accelerated beetle population growth, the result was a landscape-scale spruce beetle outbreak. The lasting impacts of settlement-era landscape history from the Wasatch Plateau, UT may be relevant for other areas of western North America and Europe where sufficient host carrying capacity is important in managing for resistance and resilience to outbreaks

Recurrence rates of nonmelanoma skin cancer after malignant destruction : a single center retrospective analysis of 984 tumors

Includes bibliographical references."Nonmelanoma skin cancer (NMSC) is the most common human malignancy with estimated treatment costs of $8.1 billion annually in the United States 1 . Malignant destruction (MD) is one very commonly used technique for treatment of these malignancies. In this study, we sought to assess differences in recurrence rates for NMSC treated with different malignant destruction techniques: electrodessication with curettage (EDC), cryotherapy with curettage (CC), curettage alone, and cryotherapy alone. ... This analysis demonstrates noninferiority of CC when compared to other methods of malignant destruction, but raises concern about the efficacy of malignant destruction as a treatment for facial NMSC. Recurrence rates after destruction in this study fall within the range previously reported 2,3 , thus indicating these data may be generalizable beyond our institution. Further, the analysis includes at least 20 different dermatologists; therefore, variations in technique from provider to provider are accounted for."--Introduction and Conclusion

A Public Literary Twitter Role-Play

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Petra Dierkes-Thrun has run several iterations of the public literary Twitter role-play assignment, having students reenact and inhabit texts like The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Lolita, and Frankenstein. Each experiment uses a different prompt to engage students in her physical class and also virtual participants around the world. Her larger goals focus on “close-reading, critical thinking, and critical writing,” allowing students to comment on the text and also put their readings to use, drawing nonscholars into animated language-play and literary discussion. Dierkes-Thrun does not make students participate openly online but invites them to. When asking students to work on the open Web, it’s important to give thought to student privacy, data, and FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), but what is most important is that students be given space to make informed choices about how they will occupy the Web

La formación de competencias investigativas en los estudiantes de informática mediante el uso de las tecnologías de la información y el conocimiento

El término competencias se toma en consideración en los contextos educativos de nivel superior como representante de los retos a los que se deben enfrentar todos los educadores de este tipo de enseñanza. Por ello, las universidades se encuentran inmersas en un proceso de educación en competencias con el objetivo de lograr un profesional con conocimientos, habilidades, actitudes y valores que le permitan desde su formación integral, desempeñarse de manera adecuada, solucionando deficiencias que se manifiestan hoy en día en la esfera laboral, y de manera independiente, continuar aprendiendo a lo largo de su vida. Es por ello que el objetivo de este trabajo va encaminado a realizar un estudio acerca de la formación de competencias investigativas mediante el uso de las Tecnologías de la Información y el Conocimiento (TIC) de los estudiantes de la carrera Ingeniería Informática de la Universidad “Máximo Gómez Báez” de Ciego de Ávila