EPOCA House: The Implementation Strategy

This capstone report provides a written strategic implementation plan for EPOCA House. EPOCA, Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement, is a non-profit dedicated to creating better resources and opportunities for prisoners and ex-prisoners in Worcester. The organization’s most recent initiative, EPOCA House, is a transitional facility that will provide reentry services and temporary housing to ex-offenders in and around the Worcester area. Recently, Massachusetts passed a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill that will dramatically reduce the number of people being incarcerated; however, little attention is focused on what will happen to individuals after they leave prison. At the same time, funding for halfway houses and reentry programs have decreased across the country and there are very few adequate services offered for ex-offenders in the city. To address this need, Yoshada Kwaning, the Community Outreach Director at EPOCA came up with the idea for EPOCA House Inc. While EPOCA staff members have extensive knowledge about the needs of prison population, they lacked the time and resources to create a strategic action plan to implement their vision. This report employs a secondary data analysis methodology to compare ex-prisoner reentry programs across four specialization areas: education programming, vocational training, wellness programs, and sustainability initiatives. This report also draws on advice from experts and local practitioners in the field, who provide valuable insight into criminal justice issues in Worcester. Transcripts of these interviews can be found in the appendices

Diverse family of layered frustrated magnets with tailorable interlayer interactions

We acknowledge the Royal Society for the award of a Newton International Fellowship (140881) and Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2013-343). The research data supporting this publication can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.17630/7c07f087-a968-4203-906dfca90e48ffd7.PostprintPostprintPeer reviewe

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Impacts of Tree Canopy Cover on Microclimate and Human Thermal Comfort in a Shallow Street Canyon in Wuhan, China

Increasing the number of street trees can be a promising method to reduce impacts of climate change currently impacting urban public health. However, the quantitative relationships between tree canopy cover and thermal comfort remains unclear, particularly in areas with high temperature and high humidity. This study aims to provide a better understanding of the effects of different degrees of tree canopy cover on human thermal comfort in shallow street canyons in a high temperature, high humidity area of China. Microclimatic measurements and qualitative surveys were conducted on sunny summer days in a shallow street canyon in Wuhan. The results suggest that microclimate benefits are greater for areas with a high-percentage tree canopy cover compared to medium- and low-percentage tree canopy cover—especially at noon. In streets with a high-percentage tree canopy cover, afternoon air temperatures and mean radiant temperatures can be reduced by up to 3.3 °C and 13.9 °C, respectively, compared to a similar street with no tree shade. The thermal sensation prediction formula is proposed and the relationship between human thermal sensation and microclimate factors is established. Blocking solar radiation and increasing wind speed are more feasible than controlling air temperature and humidity as ways to improve human thermal comfort

Accumulation of three different sizes of particulate matter on plant leaf surfaces: Effect on leaf traits

Plants not only improve air quality by adsorbing particulate matter (PM) on leaf surfaces but can also be affected by their accumulation. In this study, a field investigation was performed in Wuhan, China, into the relationship between seven leaf traits and the accumulation of three different sizes of PM (PM11, PM2.5 and PM0.2) on leaves. The retention abilities of plant leaves with respect to the three sizes of PM differed significantly at different sites and species. The average PM retention capabilities of plant leaves and specific leaf area (SLA) were significantly greater in a seriously polluted area, whereas the average values of chlorophyll a (Chl a), chlorophyll b (Chl b), total chlorophyll, carotenoid, pH and relative water content (RWC) were greater at the control site. SLA significantly positively correlated with the size of PM, but Chl a, Chl b, total chlorophyll, RWC significantly negatively correlated with the size of PM, whereas the pH did not correlate significantly with the the PM fractions. Additionally, SLA was found to be affected by large particles (PM11, p<0.01); PM2.5 had a more obvious effect on plant leaf traits than the other PM (p<0.05). Overall, the findings from this study provide useful information regarding the selection of plants to reduce atmospheric pollution

Climate Change and Its Attribution in Three Gorges Reservoir Area, China

Climate change in dam areas is one of the environmental problems associated with dams. However, the main factors and mechanisms that impact climate change in dam areas remain unclear. In this study, linear regression, the observed minus reanalyzed (OMR) method, and multi-source data are used to assess climate change in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area of China and investigate the main impact factors among the controversial factors (land cover change, environmental climate, and reservoir impoundment). Our results indicate that turning points of trend changes for annual fog days (FD), annual average temperature (T), and annual average relative humidity (RH) occurred at around 1996 during the period 1973&ndash;2013, and annual precipitation (PRE) suggested no obvious turning point. The change trends after 1996 were steeper than before 1996. These changes are mainly closely correlated with environmental climate. In particular, temperature was significantly correlated with environmental temperature (1979&ndash;2013: r = 0.799, p &lt; 0.01), and their relationship was stronger after 1990 (r = 0.842, p &lt; 0.01). Moreover, the turning point for FD, T, and RH also correlated with land use/cover change. In addition, reservoir impoundment showed an obvious humidification effect (OMR RH correlated with water area: r = 0.566, p &lt; 0.01). Our findings support the view that climate change in dam areas is mainly affected by environmental climate changes

Data from: Improving conservation effectiveness of nature reserve for golden snub-nosed monkey, a niche-based approach

Reserve selections are often opportunistic rather than strategic and coordinated, and consequently many reserves are ineffective to achieve their intended goals of conservation. Here we assessed the conservation effectiveness of a reserve for the golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) with a niche-based approach. We assessed habitat usage of the monkeys in Shennongjia Nature Reserve (SNR) and attributes of 14 environmental variables that could potentially affect the monkeys’ habitat use. Spatial distribution of potentially suitable habitat for the monkeys was then modeled with Maxent, a niche-based model, and conservation effectiveness of SNR was assessed by comparing the current boundary of the reserve with the spatial distribution of the modeled potential habitat and the current habitat area of the monkeys. Only 59% of the habitat area and 61% of the predicted potential habitat area were under the protection of SNR. To improve conservation effectiveness of SNR, we proposed that the current SNR be enlarged by 270 km2. The enlarged reserve would encompass 100% of the existing habitat area plus 89% of the predicted potential habitat area. Using the niche-based approach, we were able to integrate habitat usage data of the target species with that of remote sensing to identify areas potentially suitable as habitat for the species. This information not only can be used for improving conservation effectiveness of existing reserves but also for the effective planning and designing of new reserves