Intra-urban agriculture in Nanjing, China: Practices, motivations, and challenges

China has experienced strong economic growth in the last three decades through urbanization and economic transitions. However, increasing population and rapid urbanization have resulted in profound social, economic, and ecological challenges, which have also affected China’s food system. These challenges, which include the rapid loss of farmland, environmental degradation and pollution, and the changing and more resource intensive diets of affluent urban citizens, have often been overlooked in favour of economic development. China’s economic focused policies have resulted in criticisms of the country’s food system and concerns surrounding food safety and food scandals have created a high level of mistrust among consumers and producers. As a result, opportunities exist to re-examine how urban spaces in China are being developed and how urban inhabitants are being fed. One promising avenue to ensure the sustainability of urban food systems may be the expansion of urban agriculture into cities. Urban agriculture is a practice that is seen by many scholars as beneficial socially, economically, and environmentally in both post-industrial and developing cities due to its localized food system and urban food production focus. Moreover, urban agriculture can be seen as a pragmatic response to current environmental global discourse about the conventional agricultural system. However, current urban agriculture discourse in China has largely been a state-defined project dominantly concerned with growing food for the city, rather than within it. Amidst these pressures and the noted lack of empirical research on the perceptions and benefits of intra-urban agriculture in China, the purpose of this research is to better understand the motivations of residents practicing urban agriculture and what role it may have in dealing with food-related issues in an urbanized China. This research utilized semi-structured interviews and questionnaires to achieve the following research objectives: (1) to assess the demographics of small-scale, individual intra-urban agriculture practices within Nanjing and where it is taking place, (2) to identify the various modes of intra-urban agriculture in Nanjing, (3) to determine the motivations of populations engaging in small-scale intra-urban agriculture, and (4) to identify how China’s evolving socio-political and economic context and increasing integration within global institutional and market networks affects urban agriculture development. This study found that intra-urban agriculture in China remains largely an informal practice, dominated primarily by older, working-class individuals growing vegetables on yards, balconies, rooftops, in “empty” non-built-up spaces in the around the city and on areas of ceased development. Moreover, participants mentioned several social wellbeing/health benefits. Lastly, non-monetary values associated with growing included freshness, food safety and recreation. Challenges among participants included: space limitations, weather, soil quality, age, confrontations with construction crews and other city officials. Based on the literature and interviews with government officials in Nanjing, it would appear that within a Chinese context the government sees or defines intra-urban agriculture as a means of modernization, with mixed high-tech plans of urban integration and rural revitalization (multifunctional) of peri-urban agriculture projects. This is juxtaposed with growing civic agriculture movements around China that continue to align more with urban agriculture movements seen in the Global North (e.g.,food sovereignty, against industrial agriculture) and opposes what is happening informally on the ground in Nanjing. In sum, the notable diversity of motivations for urban farmers that exist within Nanjing challenges many of the assumptions about urban agriculture as being a dominantly urban poor activity in the Global South

Evidence of School Nursing Impact: Applying the Omaha System to Individual Healthcare Plans (IHPs) to Document Nursing Services and Demonstrate Student Outcomes

School nurses are the health safety net for children and youth including the one in five who have chronic health conditions. As health care providers in a non-health system, school nurses are challenged to legitimize their role by showing impact on the health and education of children and youth. The Omaha System is a standardized nursing language that has the capacity to document nursing assessment, intervention and client outcomes and is used in clinical and community settings. This study examined the feasibility of using the Omaha System in the school setting. While there would be significant logistical hurdles and a steep learning curve, expert school nurses found the Omaha System to be workable and potentially useful in their practice

School Nurses Coordinate Care for Children and Youth with Chronic Health Conditions: A Planning and Implementation Model

Children and youth with special health care needs have the dual task of learning, growing and developing, and learning to live with a chronic health condition. The health care system is improving health care delivery through person-centered care and medical homes, focusing on parents as the primary care-givers. However, an important question is who is caring for the children on a daily basis? Starting as early as age four, during the school year children are in school the majority of their weekday waking hours. The school nurse is their health caregiver, teacher, advocate and collaborator, ensuring they stay healthy and safe at school. For children with chronic health conditions, school nurses’ role as care coordinator is vital. With incremental change in practice, school nurses can improve their child-centered, proactive interventions and document an even greater impact on children’s health status and academic success. This paper proposes a guide for school nurses in planning and implementing the care coordination role

A Complete Characterization of Near Outer-Planar Graphs

A graph is outer-planar (OP) if it has a plane embedding in which all of the vertices lie on the boundary of the outer face. A graph is near outer-planar (NOP) if it is edgeless or has an edge whose deletion results in an outer-planar graph. An edge of a non outer-planar graph whose removal results in an outer-planar graph is a vulnerable edge. This dissertation focuses on near outer-planar (NOP) graphs. We describe the class of all such graphs in terms of a finite list of excluded graphs, in a manner similar to the well-known Kuratowski Theorem for planar graphs. The class of NOP graphs is not closed by the minor relation, and the list of minimal excluded NOP graphs is not finite by the topological minor relation. Instead, we use the domination relation to define minimal excluded near outer-planar graphs, or XNOP graphs. To complete the list of 58 XNOP graphs, we give a description of those members of this list that dominate W3 or W4, wheels with three and four spokes, respectively. To do this, we introduce the concepts of skeletons, joints and limbs. We find an infinite list of possible skeletons of XNOP graphs, as well as a finite list of possible limbs. With the list of skeletons, we permute the edges of a skeleton with the finite list of limbs to find the complete list of XNOP graphs. In this process, we also develop algorithms in SageMath to prove the list of full-K4 XNOP graphs and prove that the list of skeletons of XNOP graphs is finite

Quantum Chemistry for Solvated Molecules on Graphical Processing Units Using Polarizable Continuum Models

The conductor-like polarization model (C-PCM) with switching/Gaussian smooth discretization is a widely used implicit solvation model in chemical simulations. However, its application in quantum mechanical calculations of large-scale biomolecular systems can be limited by computational expense of both the gas phase electronic structure and the solvation interaction. We have previously used graphical processing units (GPUs) to accelerate the first of these steps. Here, we extend the use of GPUs to accelerate electronic structure calculations including C-PCM solvation. Implementation on the GPU leads to significant acceleration of the generation of the required integrals for C-PCM. We further propose two strategies to improve the solution of the required linear equations: a dynamic convergence threshold and a randomized block-Jacobi preconditioner. These strategies are not specific to GPUs and are expected to be beneficial for both CPU and GPU implementations. We benchmark the performance of the new implementation using over 20 small proteins in solvent environment. Using a single GPU, our method evaluates the C-PCM related integrals and their derivatives more than 10× faster than that with a conventional CPU-based implementation. Our improvements to the linear solver provide a further 3× acceleration. The overall calculations including C-PCM solvation require, typically, 20–40% more effort than that for their gas phase counterparts for a moderate basis set and molecule surface discretization level. The relative cost of the C-PCM solvation correction decreases as the basis sets and/or cavity radii increase. Therefore, description of solvation with this model should be routine. We also discuss applications to the study of the conformational landscape of an amyloid fibril.United States. Office of Naval Research (N00014-14-1-0590

Exascale Deep Learning for Climate Analytics

We extract pixel-level masks of extreme weather patterns using variants of Tiramisu and DeepLabv3+ neural networks. We describe improvements to the software frameworks, input pipeline, and the network training algorithms necessary to efficiently scale deep learning on the Piz Daint and Summit systems. The Tiramisu network scales to 5300 P100 GPUs with a sustained throughput of 21.0 PF/s and parallel efficiency of 79.0%. DeepLabv3+ scales up to 27360 V100 GPUs with a sustained throughput of 325.8 PF/s and a parallel efficiency of 90.7% in single precision. By taking advantage of the FP16 Tensor Cores, a half-precision version of the DeepLabv3+ network achieves a peak and sustained throughput of 1.13 EF/s and 999.0 PF/s respectively.Comment: 12 pages, 5 tables, 4, figures, Super Computing Conference November 11-16, 2018, Dallas, TX, US