The Community Development Coporation

Review of Community Development Corporation (CDC) Model, its role as a community action agency, and the Community Self-Determination Act of 1968

Problems of containment and the promise of planning

Book ChapterWhen the expansion of cities is constrained either by natural barriers, such as New Orleans, or by policy efforts to limit urban sprawl, development pressures in hazardous areas can markedly increase. As floodplains, steep slopes, earthquake fault zones, and other hazardous locations are converted to urban uses, the locality's vulnerability to hazard events increases as does the potential for serious losses of lives and property in natural disasters. The devastation of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina is an extreme example of the phenomenon. But this threat can be neutralized if hazards are recognized in advance of exposure and appropriate counter-measures are adopted. The difficulty is that in the absence of state planning and hazard mitigation requirements, many localities ignore hazards in planning for and regulating urban development, as shown most recently by Steinberg and Burby (2002). New Orleans and Miami, Florida, provide excellent examples to evaluate the effects of adequate planning and preparation for cities in hazardous areas. New Orleans provides an example of what can occur in a city with severe constraints on buildable land and a lack of adequate public concern for hazards or urban development planning. In contrast, decisions made by policy makers in the State of Florida and by the Miami-Dade County Government illustrate how concern for hazard avoidance and resource protection can lead to policies that sharply limit development in flood-prone areas. To see if lessons revealed by these two cases could be replicated nationwide, we examine natural disasters and associated property damages in samples of metropolitan counties with varying degrees of containment brought about by policy decisions or natural conditions and with varying degrees of planning. And our findings are extremely telling. Metropolitan counties with either natural or policy containment experienced higher property losses in disasters when states left planning and development decisions wholly to local government discretion. Where states intervened and demanded that localities plan and manage development with hazard mitigation in mind, property losses are strikingly lower

Emergency Room Use by Undocumented Mexican Immigrants

This study examined emergency room use by undocumented Mexican immigrants and their sources of health care information. Thirty-eight percent of the respondents reported that they would use a hospital emergency room (ER) for primary medical care. ER use rates declined with time spent in the United States. Emergency room use rates varied significantly by region. Respondents receiving information from a church reported less ER use, compared to all others; respondents receiving information from U.S. newspapers reported higher ER use rates. Lack of health care access for undocumented immigrants remains a public health issue as well as a social justice concern

Path planning and reactive based control for a quadrotor with a suspended load

This paper presents a solution to quadrotor cargo transportation, more precisely when cargo is suspended as a sling load. The challenge lies in payload position control and swing attenuation, which we approach by dividing the model into subsystems: attitude quadrotor in free flight, and translational and attitude load dynamics. We propose a solution based on reactive control, in the sense that we utilize a reactive force that reacts to the error position and the oscillation in the load. Asymptotic stability of the system's closed-loop equilibrium is proved using Lyapunov theory. Additionally, a three-dimensional path planning algorithm is proposed based on cubic splines, which give us a natural path between initial and final desired points. Moreover, we convert the path planning problem into trajectory tracking with a spline's correct parametrization. Control and path planning performance are demonstrated with numerical simulations in three different scenarios

Present day partisanship and the legacy of structural inequality has helped fuel the spread of COVID-19 in Native nations

The pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on Native nations in the US with COVID-19 rates 350 percent higher among Native Americans compared to whites. In new research Raymond Foxworth, Laura E. Evans, Gabriel R. Sanchez, Cheryl Ellenwood, and Carmela M. Roybal contextualize the history of colonization and policy neglect by federal and state governments to explain the unequal impact of the pandemic. They find that this disparity is related to a lack of basic infrastructure like safe running water, a shortage of health information available in Native languages, and the high rate of non-tribal members visiting tribal lands during the pandemic. State-level partisanship also plays an important role; Republican dominated states were less likely to implement pandemic mitigation policies such as mask mandates, which in turn has put Native American lives in danger

Lithologic Mapping of HED Terrains on Vesta using Dawn Framing Camera Color Data

The surface composition of Vesta, the most massive intact basaltic object in the asteroid belt, is interesting because it provides us with an insight into magmatic differentiation of planetesimals that eventually coalesced to form the terrestrial planets. The distribution of lithologic and compositional units on the surface of Vesta provides important constraints on its petrologic evolution, impact history and its relationship with Vestoids and howardite-eucrite-diogenite (HED) meteorites. Using color parameters (band tilt and band curvature) originally developed for analyzing lunar data, we have identified and mapped HED terrains on Vesta in Dawn Framing Camera (FC) color data. The average color spectrum of Vesta is identical to that of howardite regions, suggesting an extensive mixing of surface regolith due to impact gardening over the course of solar system history. Our results confirm the hemispherical dichotomy (east-west and north-south) in albedo/color/composition that has been observed by earlier studies. The presence of diogenite-rich material in the southern hemisphere suggests that it was excavated during the formation of the Rheasilvia and Veneneia basins. Our lithologic mapping of HED regions provides direct evidence for magmatic evolution of Vesta with diogenite units in Rheasilvia forming the lower crust of a differentiated object.Comment: Accepted for Meteoritics and Planetary Science special issue for Composition of Vesta/Dawn Missio

Tilting refractive x-ray lenses for fine-tuning their focal length

In this work, we measure and model tilted x-ray refractive lenses to investigate their effects on an x-ray beam. The modelling is benchmarked against at-wavelength metrology obtained with x-ray speckle vector tracking experiments (XSVT) at the BM05 beamline at the ESRF-EBS light source, showing very good agreement. This validation permits us to explore possible applications of tilted x-ray lenses in optical design: we demonstrate that tilting 1D lenses around their focusing direction can be used for fine-tuning their focal length with possible applications in beamline optical design.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures, 38 references to be submitted to Optics Expres

Effect of La3+/Sr2+ ordering on the magnetic properties of La2/3Sr1/3MnO3 by first principles calculations

In this work, using DFT + U formalism, we investigate the effect of order-disorder in the A-site occupation byLa3+and Sr2+on the stability of the ferromagnetic order in La2/3Sr1/3MnO3with−Rc3symmetry. To date, adetailed theoretical discussion of such phenomenon, using a combination of different representations of theelectronic structure, is still missing in the Literature. We employed structural models consisting of 120 atomsupercells constructed according to the precise stoichiometry of the compound. Two configurations, describingrandomized and ordered occupation of the La3+/Sr2+ions, were evaluated. We demonstrate that the ferro-magnetic arrangement of La2/3Sr1/3MnO3with randomly distributed La3+and Sr2+ions is more stable. In suchconfiguration wefind that the Mn3+and Mn4+ions are not distinguished, favoring the double-exchange me-chanism, enhanced by the higher degree of covalence in the MneO bonds near the Fermi level between thespin-upMn-egorbitals and the O-porbitals

Phoenix: A CubeSat Mission to Study the Impact of Urban Heat Islands Within the U.S.

Phoenix is a student-led CubeSat mission, developed at Arizona State University (ASU), to study the effects of Urban Heat Islands in several U.S. cities through infrared remote sensing and educate students on space mission design. The spacecraft is designed using commercial off-the-shelf components (COTS) and several custom support boards developed by the student team. As such, the student team was responsible for the design, test, and validation of the spacecraft to demonstrate the capability of using COTS hardware to conduct high-fidelity science. This paper details the mission’s concept of operations, as well as the spacecraft and ground system design that was developed to complete the mission objective. In addition, it details the mission’s current status now that Phoenix has entered the operations phase, along with resources which have proved beneficial to the team while working with the spacecraft in orbit