One Month, One Class, No Bags

According to the website, theworldcounts.com, we consume about 5 trillion plastic bags per year. This translates to roughly 160,000 bags per second. This rapidly increasing consumption of plastics has led to the harming of natural ecosystems and the endangerment of many species. At the College of DuPage, our Honors English Composition class decided to address this issue and propose a solution at the local level. As a class, we broke up into several research groups, each tackling a different section of research related to plastic bags: its history, nationwide legislation, counterarguments, and connection to Illinois’ plastic bag legislation. The groups gathered news articles and legislative documents, as well as conducted interviews and surveys to understand plastic bag consumption and its impacts on the environment. We also participated in what we called the “Plastic Bag Challenge”, where we refrained from using plastic bags for one month. Each student recorded video diaries to recount their experiences, as well as conflicts and obstacles that surfaced. Once the research component of our project was complete, we brainstormed ways to present our findings to the public. Our goal was to persuade the State of Illinois to enact legislation banning the use of plastic bags. During our course, we studied the history of rhetoric, its persuasive appeals and the effectiveness of the classical argument. We knew our argument would use rhetoric and follow the structure of the “classical argument” to persuade our audience. However, the presentation of this structural argument was something we had to discuss as a class; we wanted something that would be able to reach a large audience. We decided to create a video and a website that would present our research and advocate for the ban of plastic bags in Illinois. We formed two main groups to finish this part of the project -- one to make the video and the other to make the website. Once we were finished, we critiqued the projects before releasing them to the public. However, our work was not done when we published the video and website. We analyzed the public feedback (or lack thereof), and the results were somewhat disappointing. Our video received about 100 views, with 14 likes and 1 dislike. The video analytics also showed that we lost most viewers one minute into the video. While the results themselves were not very promising, we gained a favorable learning experience. The results led to a class discussion on why our project was not as successful as we wanted and ways we could have improved it. Now, we hope to inform our audience at the HCIR Student Symposium about our experience with trying to develop a rhetorical argument in modern-day society

Upstream passage and attempt behaviour at a sloping weir by migrating adult river lamprey: are studded tiles effective in improving longitudinal connectivity?

The performance of weir-mounted studded tiles for passing upstream-migrating lamprey (Lampetra fluviatilis) was compared with unmodified parts of a Crump flow-gauging weir and with use of a bottom-baffle fishway on the River Derwent, Northeast England. Equidistantly-studded tiles were fixed horizontally on the weir face near the right bank, forming a 1m-wide treatment lane, neighboured by a tileless control lane. A bottom-baffle fishway was present at the right bank, alongside a hydropower tailrace. Two further left-bank controls enabled, together with right-side controls, comparison of lamprey attraction relative to the dominant flow on the right side. Downstream and upstream ends of the right-hand weir-face lanes and of the fishway, downstream ends of the left-hand weir face lanes, and the entrance of the hydropower tailrace area were instrumented with PIT antennas (n=9 total). Of 395 PIT-tagged lamprey, over 10 release sessions in early winter 2017 (turbines on for 21/43 days), 363 (91.9%) were detected at any of the antennas (mean ± SD minimum delay: 14.8 ± 8.9 days). All lamprey detected at the left-bank antennas (attraction efficiency AE: 255/395 (64.6%)) were detected elsewhere also. The fishway was ineffective (AE: 343/395 (86.8%); passage efficiency PE: 5/343 (1.5%)). However, overall passage using the studded-tile corridor doubled (44/395 cf22/395) relative to the adjacent bare weir-face route (AE tiled lane: 172/395 (43.5%); PE tiled lane: 44/172 (25.6%) - AE control lane: 257/395 (65.1%); PE control lane: 22/257 (8.6%)). Fewer PIT detections were logged at the turbine tailrace and fishway entrance, respectively, when turbines were on (n=441 and n=700; median [range] river discharge turbines-on: 18.7 [10.5-36.3] m3 s-1) compared to turbines-off conditions (n=1005 and n=2457; discharge: 36.2 [10.4-52.3] m3 s-1). While improved passage efficiency was achieved using surface-mounted studded tiles, further in situ evaluations are needed to optimize their performance

The City: Art and the Urban Environment

The City: Art and the Urban Environment is the fifth annual exhibition curated by students enrolled in the Art History Methods class. This exhibition draws on the students’ newly developed expertise in art-historical methodologies and provides an opportunity for sustained research and an engaged curatorial experience. Working with a selection of paintings, prints, and photographs, students Angelique Acevedo ’19, Sidney Caccioppoli ’21, Abigail Coakley ’20, Chris Condon ’18, Alyssa DiMaria ’19, Carolyn Hauk ’21, Lucas Kiesel ’20, Noa Leibson ’20, Erin O’Brien ’19, Elise Quick ’21, Sara Rinehart ’19, and Emily Roush ’21 carefully consider depictions of the urban environment in relation to significant social, economic, artistic, and aesthetic developments. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1029/thumbnail.jp

Proceedings of the 2015 WA Chapter of MSA Symposium on Music Performance and Analysis

This publication, entitled Proceedings of the 2015 WA Chapter MSA Symposium on Music Performance and Analysis, is a double-blind peer-reviewed conference proceedings published by the Western Australian Chapter of the Musicological Society of Australia, in conjunction with the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, edited by Jonathan Paget, Victoria Rogers, and Nicholas Bannan. The original symposium was held at the University of Western Australia, School of Music, on 12 December 2015. With the advent of performer-scholars within Australian Universities, the intersections between analytical knowledge and performance are constantly being re-evaluated and reinvented. This collection of papers presents several strands of analytical discourse, including: (1) the analysis of music recordings, particularly in terms of historical performance practices; (2) reinventions of the \u27page-to-stage\u27 paradigm, employing new analytical methods; (3) analytical knowledge applied to pedagogy, particularly concerning improvisation; and (4) so-called \u27practice-led\u27 research.https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecubooks/1005/thumbnail.jp

Global Carbon Budget 2022

Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO$_2$) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere in a changing climate is critical to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe and synthesize data sets and methodologies to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. Fossil CO$_2$ emissions (E$_{FOS}$) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land-use change (E$_{LUC}$), mainly deforestation, are based on land use and land-use change data and bookkeeping models. Atmospheric CO$_2$ concentration is measured directly, and its growth rate (G$_{ATM}$) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO$_2$ sink (S$_{OCEAN}$) is estimated with global ocean biogeochemistry models and observation-based data products. The terrestrial CO$_2$ sink (S$_{LAND}$) is estimated with dynamic global vegetation models. The resulting carbon budget imbalance (B$_{IM}$), the difference between the estimated total emissions and the estimated changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, is a measure of imperfect data and understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ. For the year 2021, E$_{FOS}$ increased by 5.1 % relative to 2020, with fossil emissions at 10.1 ± 0.5 GtC yr$^{−1}$ (9.9 ± 0.5 GtC yr$^{−1}$ when the cement carbonation sink is included), and E$_{LUC}$ was 1.1 ± 0.7 GtC yr$^{−1}$, for a total anthropogenic CO$_2$ emission (including the cement carbonation sink) of 10.9 ± 0.8 GtC yr$^{−1}$ (40.0 ± 2.9 GtCO$_2$). Also, for 2021, G$_{ATM}$ was 5.2 ± 0.2 GtC yr$^{−1}$ (2.5 ± 0.1 ppm yr$^{−1}$), S$_{OCEAN}$ was 2.9  ± 0.4 GtC yr$^{−1}$, and S$_{LAND}$ was 3.5 ± 0.9 GtC yr$^{−1}$, with a B$_{IM}$ of −0.6 GtC yr$^{−1}$ (i.e. the total estimated sources were too low or sinks were too high). The global atmospheric CO$_2$ concentration averaged over 2021 reached 414.71 ± 0.1 ppm. Preliminary data for 2022 suggest an increase in E$_{FOS}$ relative to 2021 of +1.0 % (0.1 % to 1.9 %) globally and atmospheric CO$_2$ concentration reaching 417.2 ppm, more than 50 % above pre-industrial levels (around 278 ppm). Overall, the mean and trend in the components of the global carbon budget are consistently estimated over the period 1959–2021, but discrepancies of up to 1 GtC yr$^{−1}$ persist for the representation of annual to semi-decadal variability in CO$_2$ fluxes. Comparison of estimates from multiple approaches and observations shows (1) a persistent large uncertainty in the estimate of land-use change emissions, (2) a low agreement between the different methods on the magnitude of the land CO$_2$ flux in the northern extratropics, and (3) a discrepancy between the different methods on the strength of the ocean sink over the last decade. This living data update documents changes in the methods and data sets used in this new global carbon budget and the progress in understanding of the global carbon cycle compared with previous publications of this data set. The data presented in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.18160/GCP-2022 (Friedlingstein et al., 2022b)

Search for narrow resonances in dilepton mass spectra in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV and combination with 8 TeV data

Peer reviewe

Search for heavy gauge W ' bosons in events with an energetic lepton and large missing transverse momentum at root s=13TeV

Peer reviewe

Multiplicity and rapidity dependence of strange hadron production in pp, pPb, and PbPb collisions at the LHC

Peer reviewe