The Just Green City: A Vision of the South Holyoke Neighborhood

Landscape Architects need to take their place as formative roles in the planning and design of our cities in the era of climate change. Not only do we have to be a part of the collaborative efforts, but we also have to bring it to the communities who need it most to create long-lasting impacts. Climate change is an equity issue and without tackling our social problems, we cannot tackle climate change. Our role is to not reinforce the status quo but to change it. The Just Green City takes place in Holyoke Massachusetts. This legacy city was once the queen of paper manufacturing up until the Great Depression. Thanks to a series of urban renewal practices and ingrained cultural turf wars, many parts of Holyoke have been left with an environment that offers little to the people that live there. South Holyoke is a neighborhood that has seen disinvestment for decades in a community largely composed of Puerto Rican, non-English speaking, mixed-generation families that need to be brought into the larger picture for the city of Holyoke. Through analysis layered into the various city plans already conducted by other planners/designer, we found that promoting community cohesion through green infrastructure and art can be the civic infrastructure Holyoke needs to take care of their vulnerable communities. This plan lays out a vision of what South Holyoke could be if we address our social disconnects to each other in layers of environmental improvements

Engineering lipases and solvents for trans/-esterification of used vegetable oils

Diminishing petroleum reserves and increasing environmental awareness has led to an urgent need to develop alternative fuels, such as biodiesel. However, the conventional method to produce biodiesel uses environmentally harmful chemical catalysts. A relatively new development in the production of biodiesel is through enzymatic trans/- esterification with a lipase catalyst. Despite several advantages, there are a few technical and economical obstacles that limit this process: (1) immiscibility of the hydrophilic methanol and hydrophobic triglyceride which results in the formation of an interface leading to mass transfer resistance, (2) insufficient availability of large quantities of inexpensive lipase suitable for catalysis, and (3) stripping of essential water from the active site by the strong polarity of methanol causing a reduction in enzyme activity after multiple reuses. Each obstacle is addressed by: · Examining the effect of 15 organic solvents on activity of lipase from three sources, namely Candida antarctica, Pseudomonas cepacia, and Thermomyces lanuginosus, in the trans/-esterification of used vegetable oil with the goal of recommending the best solvent through solvent engineering. · Cloning and over-expressing recombinant lipase from T lanuginosus in tobacco for the enzymatic production of biodiesel in order to develop an abundant inexpensive biocatalyst. · Investigating the effects of reaction parameters on the trans/-esterification of used vegetable oil and their effects on enzymatic activity over consecutive reactions with a view to lowering costs. The major findings are: (i) there appears to be a correlation between the solvent\u27s hydrophobicity (log P) and biodiesel yield, (ii) the choice of lipase can have a considerable effect on the reaction kinetics and biodiesel yield, (iii) a thermophilic fungus lipase gene can be constitutively expressed in tobacco without adversely affecting plant growth or development, (iv) plants systems offer a promising platform for producing recombinant enzymes for biodiesel production, (v) the type of methanol addition does not appear to greatly affect the biodiesel yield when fresh enzyme is used, but does significantly affect the enzyme\u27s activity during subsequent reuse, and (vi) optimization of reaction parameters such as methanol addition, reaction temperature, and solvent can minimize enzymatic deactivation and increase enzyme reusability without significantly affecting biodiesel yield

Part and parcel of eliding partitives

This paper argues that bare determiners as in the sentence Many sat down should be analyzed as involving the elision of a partitive phrase, as opposed to a noun phrase as is commonly assumed (Lobeck 1991, 1995; Bernstein 1993; Panagiotidis 2003; Alexiadou and Gengel 2011; Corver and van Koppen 2009, 2011). This analysis is supported by (i) the anaphoric interpretation of the bare determiners in context; (ii) the syntax of bare determiners; and (iii) deep event anaphora. Further, the adoption of partitive ellipsis comes with the suggestion that partitive DPs do not involve null intermediary noun phrases (cf. Jackendoff 1977, Sauerland and Yatsushiro 2004, and Ionin et al 2006), but rather that determiners can take partitive phrases as internal arguments (Matthewson 2001). The existence of such a phenomenon also militates in favor of a meaning isomorphy approach to the licensing of ellipsis (Merchant 2001), rather than structural isomorphy (Fiengo and May 1994)

Pilot scale hybrid fed batch and continuous processing of biologics

Pfizer Bioprocessing R&D is focused on developing enabling technologies that will reduce capital and operational expenses, decrease equipment scale, increase automation and utilize fewer FTEs. To realize this vision, our Pilot Facility has partnered with our cell culture process development colleagues to adapt a fed batch platform 150L stainless steel bioreactor to run in hybrid perfusion, standard perfusion, low volume cell controlled perfusion, and continuous stirred tank modes. Through adjustments to impeller configuration, sparging strategy, and addition ports the bioreactor was able to deliver multiple batches that produced ~3X gains in cell density and volumetric productivity versus conventional fed batch platform methods

Anaphors and the Missing Link

Three types of nominal anaphors are investigated: (i) pronouns, (ii) partitive ellipsis and (iii) the contrastive anaphor `one'. I argue that in each case, the representational basis for anaphora is the same, a semantic variable ranging over singular or plural entities, rather than syntactic as previous approaches have suggested. In the case of pronouns, I argue against syntactic D-type approaches (Elbourne 2005) and semantic D-type approaches (Cooper 1979). Instead, I present arguments in favor of the set variable representation assumed under Nouwen (2003)'s approach. Following this, I consider a number of cases usually taken to involve the elision of a noun phrase, and argue that instead they involve the deletion of a partitive phrase containing an anaphoric plural pronoun. Third, I turn to the contrastive anaphor `one' and its null counterpart in French. Here again, I argue that the basis for anaphora is a semantic set variable, where this anaphor differs from pronouns in being of category N rather than D, and in having a pragmatic requirement for contrast. This analysis differs from previous ones which hold that this expression is a syntactic substitute of category N′, or the spell-out of the head of a number phrase followed by ellipsis of a noun phrase. Finally, I discuss the phenomenon of event anaphora. Given the phenomenon's interaction with the anaphors discussed prior in this dissertation, I argue that it is better seen as a case of deferred reference to an event on the basis of anaphoric reference to a discourse segment, following Webber (1991). This contrasts with what I call metaphysical approaches, which hold that the anaphor directly resumes an event introduced to the context by a previous clause (Asher 1993; Moltmann 1997)

Determinants of Homodimerization Specificity in Histidine Kinases

Two-component signal transduction pathways consisting of a histidine kinase and a response regulator are used by prokaryotes to respond to diverse environmental and intracellular stimuli. Most species encode numerous paralogous histidine kinases that exhibit significant structural similarity. Yet in almost all known examples, histidine kinases are thought to function as homodimers. We investigated the molecular basis of dimerization specificity, focusing on the model histidine kinase EnvZ and RstB, its closest paralog in Escherichia coli. Direct binding studies showed that the cytoplasmic domains of these proteins each form specific homodimers in vitro. Using a series of chimeric proteins, we identified specificity determinants at the base of the four-helix bundle in the dimerization and histidine phosphotransfer domain. Guided by molecular coevolution predictions and EnvZ structural information, we identified sets of residues in this region that are sufficient to establish homospecificity. Mutating these residues in EnvZ to the corresponding residues in RstB produced a functional kinase that preferentially homodimerized over interacting with EnvZ. EnvZ and RstB likely diverged following gene duplication to yield two homodimers that cannot heterodimerize, and the mutants we identified represent possible evolutionary intermediates in this process.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Award GM067681)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CAREER Grant)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowshi

Struwwelpeter: a song cycle for soprano and chamber ensemble

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on July 1, 2013Thesis advisor: James MobberleyVitaThesis (M.M.)--Conservatory of Music and Dance. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2013Der Struwwelpeter: A Song Cycle for Soprano and Chamber Ensemble, sets seven of the stories from the iconic, mid-19th century children's story by Heinrich Hoffmann. The text set is from a widely published, anonymous English translation, dating contemporaneously to the original work. Chief among the thematic and compositional problems presented by the text is the question of how best to subvert or embrace the sing-song cadence of the children's poetry and the grotesque imagery. The piece seeks a path that straddles the dual impulses of the poems, creating a work that is simultaneously cute as a button and ugly as sin.Abstract -- Score -- Vit

A 100-element HBT grid amplifier

A 100-element 10-GHz grid amplifier has been developed. The active devices in the grid are chips with heterojunction-bipolar-transistor (HBT) differential pairs. The metal grid pattern was empirically designed to provide effective coupling between the HBTs and free space. Two independent measurements, one with focusing lenses and the other without, were used to characterize the grid. In each case, the peak gain was 10 dB at 10 GHz with a 3-dB bandwidth of 1 GHz. The input and output return losses were better than 15 dB at 10 GHz. The maximum output power was 450 mW, and the minimum noise figure was 7 dB. By varying the bias, a signal could be amplitude modulated with a modulation index as large as 0.65. Tests show that the grid was quite tolerant of failures-the output power dropped by only 1 dB when 10% of the inputs were detuned. The grid amplifier is a multimode device that amplifies beams of different shapes and angles. Beams with incidence angles up to 30° were amplified with less than a 3-dB drop in gain