HETEROGENEITY IN THE HINTERLAND: A TYPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF OHIO EXURBAN AREAS

Located between suburban and rural regions, exurban areas are among the fastest growing regions in the U.S. To better understand exurban changes and their policy implications, we develop a typology of rural-urban places and use statistical methods to examine township patterns of exurban change in Ohio.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

The interactional community: a structural network analysis of community action in three Midwestern towns

The research examines how the structure of individual and organizational interaction within a community influences community action. The analysis is based on data from three rural, Midwestern communities. Data from a survey of community residents, leadership and organizational network data, and profiles of local community action projects are used to examine the relationship between the structure of local interaction and community action. The findings support a structural approach to the interactional community and confirm that social capital (the structure and character of individual interaction) and social infrastructure (the structure of group-level interaction patterns) influence community action processes. The findings have a number of implications for future community research and community development practice, such as the inclusion of network theory and methods as a tool for development of place-based communities

Explaining Residential Energy Consumption: A Focus on Location and Race Differences in Natural Gas Use

Researchers have long considered factors related to residential energy consumption. We contribute to this genre of work by exploring how residential location (rural-urban) and race are related to residential natural gas consumption. We also consider whether these relationships, if they exist, are functions of differences in housing characteristics, investment in energy efficiency, and weather conditions. Analyzing four waves of the Residential Energy Consumption Surveys, we find that natural gas consumption differs by residential location only to the extent that investment in energy efficiency and weather conditions are not taken into consideration. We also find race differences in natural gas consumption, with African-Americans consuming more per year than whites. African-Americans’ higher natural gas consumption persists even after the effects of housing characteristics, investment in energy efficiency, weather conditions, and other critical covariates of energy consumption are statistically held constant. More work, especially field research, is needed to understand why African-Americans consume more natural gas than other groups

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): Building Community Among Farmers and Non-Farmers

Conflict at the rural-urban interface may often be due to a lack of social connections or communication between farmers and non-farmers. Extension educators may be at a loss as to how to bring these two groups together. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), or a variation of CSA, may be one avenue for developing connections. Findings from a qualitative study of a Midwestern CSA reveal a number of ways CSA met the goals of participants while also building community among farmers and non-farmers. Extension personnel might promote CSA at the rural-urban interface to build community and support for local agriculture

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER)

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER) is a balloon-borne cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimeter designed to search for evidence of inflation by measuring the large-angular scale CMB polarization signal. BICEP2 recently reported a detection of B-mode power corresponding to the tensor-to-scalar ratio r = 0.2 on ~2 degree scales. If the BICEP2 signal is caused by inflationary gravitational waves (IGWs), then there should be a corresponding increase in B-mode power on angular scales larger than 18 degrees. PIPER is currently the only suborbital instrument capable of fully testing and extending the BICEP2 results by measuring the B-mode power spectrum on angular scales $\theta$ = ~0.6 deg to 90 deg, covering both the reionization bump and recombination peak, with sensitivity to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio down to r = 0.007, and four frequency bands to distinguish foregrounds. PIPER will accomplish this by mapping 85% of the sky in four frequency bands (200, 270, 350, 600 GHz) over a series of 8 conventional balloon flights from the northern and southern hemispheres. The instrument has background-limited sensitivity provided by fully cryogenic (1.5 K) optics focusing the sky signal onto four 32x40-pixel arrays of time-domain multiplexed Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers held at 140 mK. Polarization sensitivity and systematic control are provided by front-end Variable-delay Polarization Modulators (VPMs), which rapidly modulate only the polarized sky signal at 3 Hz and allow PIPER to instantaneously measure the full Stokes vector (I, Q, U, V) for each pointing. We describe the PIPER instrument and progress towards its first flight.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9153. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014, conference 915

Science-based intensive agriculture: Sustainability, food security, and the role of technology

Sustainable agriculture describes crop management approaches that address the interdependent goals of increasing or at least maintaining yield while protecting the environment, conserving natural resources, and slowing climate change. Numerous authors have espoused limiting synthetic fertilizer and pesticides and promoting organic agriculture (Lechenet et al., 2014; Martinez-Alcantara et al., 2016; Muller at al. 2017), less meat consumption (West et al., 2014; Poore and Nemecek, 2018; Springmann et al., 2018), or combinations of these strategies as viable solutions to achieve those goals, thereby improving agricultural sustainability

PTF10nvg: An Outbursting Class I Protostar in the Pelican/North American Nebula

During a synoptic survey of the North American Nebula region, the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) detected an optical outburst (dubbed PTF10nvg) associated with the previously unstudied flat or rising spectrum infrared source IRAS 20496+4354. The PTF R-band light curve reveals that PTF10nvg brightened by more than 5 mag during the current outburst, rising to a peak magnitude of R~13.5 in 2010 Sep. Follow-up observations indicate PTF10nvg has undergone a similar ~5 mag brightening in the K band, and possesses a rich emission-line spectrum, including numerous lines commonly assumed to trace mass accretion and outflows. Many of these lines are blueshifted by ~175 km/s from the North American Nebula's rest velocity, suggesting that PTF10nvg is driving an outflow. Optical spectra of PTF10nvg show several TiO/VO bandheads fully in emission, indicating the presence of an unusual amount of dense (> 10^10 cm^-3), warm (1500-4000 K) circumstellar material. Near-infrared spectra of PTF10nvg appear quite similar to a spectrum of McNeil's Nebula/V1647 Ori, a young star which has undergone several brightenings in recent decades, and 06297+1021W, a Class I protostar with a similarly rich near--infrared emission line spectrum. While further monitoring is required to fully understand this event, we conclude that the brightening of PTF10nvg is indicative of enhanced accretion and outflow in this Class-I-type protostellar object, similar to the behavior of V1647 Ori in 2004-2005.Comment: Accepted to the Astronomical Journal; 21 pages, 11 figures, 6 tables in emulateapj format; v2 fixes typo in abstract; v3 updates status to accepted, adjusts affiliations, adds acknowledgmen