Jewish Community Study of New York: 2011 Special Report on Poverty

The sheer scale of needs associated with being poor or near poor dwarfs the resources of even the largest Jewish community in the United States. One is tempted to believe that the scale of need is so vast that the Jewish community should abandon this field to others.Yet since the earliest days of Jewish communal life in New York, the organized Jewish community has accepted its responsibilities to care for those in need. Even since the New Deal, when the federal government took on the primary role of providing a societal safety net, the Jewish community has been active in providing philanthropic support and services for poor and near-poor Jews.The numbers of poor and near-poor Jewish households, the enormous increase in the number of these households over the past 20 years, and the diverse groups affected by poverty create an imperative for an extraordinary response -- from government, the voluntary sector, the philanthropic sector, and all segments of society. These findings suggest that the organized Jewish community needs to take a hard look at current planning, advocacy, service delivery, and resource investment

Continuous and discrete models of cooperation in complex bacterial colonies

We study the effect of discreteness on various models for patterning in bacterial colonies. In a bacterial colony with branching pattern, there are discrete entities - bacteria - which are only two orders of magnitude smaller than the elements of the macroscopic pattern. We present two types of models. The first is the Communicating Walkers model, a hybrid model composed of both continuous fields and discrete entities - walkers, which are coarse-graining of the bacteria. Models of the second type are systems of reaction diffusion equations, where the branching of the pattern is due to non-constant diffusion coefficient of the bacterial field. The diffusion coefficient represents the effect of self-generated lubrication fluid on the bacterial movement. We implement the discreteness of the biological system by introducing a cutoff in the growth term at low bacterial densities. We demonstrate that the cutoff does not improve the models in any way. Its only effect is to decrease the effective surface tension of the front, making it more sensitive to anisotropy. We compare the models by introducing food chemotaxis and repulsive chemotactic signaling into the models. We find that the growth dynamics of the Communication Walkers model and the growth dynamics of the Non-Linear diffusion model are affected in the same manner. From such similarities and from the insensitivity of the Communication Walkers model to implicit anisotropy we conclude that the increased discreteness, introduced be the coarse-graining of the walkers, is small enough to be neglected.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures in 13 gif files, to be published in proceeding of CMDS

BIOCONTROL POTENTIAL OF ENDOPHYTIC Aspergillus spp. AGAINST Fusarium verticillioides

Fusarium verticillioides is the causal agent of ear, stalk and root rot of maize that results in the severe reduction in yields and quality of infected products. Endophytic fungi have been purported as potential candidates in controlling pathogens since they are considered strong plant mutualists that confer disease resilience to their host. The present study was carried out to determine the in vitro antagonistic activity and biocontrol potential of endophytic Aspergillus spp. associated with P. amboinicus leaves against F. verticillioides. Three fungal endophytes from the genus Aspergillus were isolated and identified from the leaves of P. amboinicus, namely A. flavus, A. terreus and A. niger. The fungal isolates were tested for antagonism against F. verticillioides in dual culture plates. Results indicate that the Aspergillus endophytes can restrict growth of F. verticillioides and employ varying mechanisms of antagonism. A. niger inhibited F. verticillioides by 47.37%, followed by A. flavus (41.02%) and A. terreus (27.91%) respectively. Observations of dual culture plates revealed that A. flavus and A. niger antagonized the pathogen via overgrowth mechanism while A. terreus employed antibiosis to restrict the growth of F. verticillioides. The varying degrees of antagonism exhibited by the Aspergillus endophytes show their potential as biocontrol agents and source of bioactive compound

Electrified externally heated rotary calciner for calcination of cement raw meal

publishedVersio

A Method for Fast, High-Precision Characterization of Synthetic Biology Devices

Engineering biological systems with predictable behavior is a foundational goal of synthetic biology. To accomplish this, it is important to accurately characterize the behavior of biological devices. Prior characterization efforts, however, have generally not yielded enough high-quality information to enable compositional design. In the TASBE (A Tool-Chain to Accelerate Synthetic Biological Engineering) project we have developed a new characterization technique capable of producing such data. This document describes the techniques we have developed, along with examples of their application, so that the techniques can be accurately used by others

Efficient Control of Active Transformers for Increasing the PV Hosting Capacity of LV Grids

The increased penetration of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems in low-voltage (LV) grids creates concerns about overvoltage in these grids. The proposed methods to prevent overvoltage, such as reactive power absorption by PV inverters and active power management of customers, focus on decreasing the voltage rise along LV feeders, and the potential of active medium-voltage to low-voltage (MV/LV) transformers for overvoltage prevention has not been thoroughly investigated. This paper presents the application of active MV/LV transformers for increasing the PV hosting capacity of LV grids. The potential interferences between the operation of active transformers and the reactive power absorption by PV inverters are investigated, and a voltage droop control approach is proposed for the efficient control of these transformers during high PV generation periods. The proposed method can potentially increase the PV hosting capacity of the grid, while eliminating the need for a complex and centralized controller. The voltages of specific locations or the grid state estimations provide adequate data for adjustments of the droop parameters. The simulations and field test results associated with the implementation of the proposed method to a newly developed active LV grid with high PV penetration in Felsberg, Germany, confirm the efficiency of the proposed method

A CT Database for Research, Development and Education: Concept and Potential

Both in radiology and in surgery, numerous applications are emerging that enable 3D visualization of data from various imaging modalities. In clinical practice, the patient's images are analyzed on work stations in the Radiology Department. For specific preclinical and educational applications, however, data from single patients are insufficient. Instead, similar scans from a number of individuals within a collective must be compiled. The definition of standardized acquisition procedures and archiving formats are prerequisite for subsequent analysis of multiple data sets. Focusing on bone morphology, we describe our concept of a computer database of 3D human bone models obtained from computed tomography (CT) scans. We further discuss and illustrate deployment areas ranging from prosthesis design, over virtual operation simulation up to 3D anatomy atlases. The database of 3D bone models described in this work, created and maintained by the AO Development Institute, may be accessible to research institutes on reques