Tokyo Smart City Design at Shinagawa

The Tokyo smart city project is an international collaboration from 2016 to 2020 between the Eco Urban Lab of School of City and Regional Planning and School of Architecture at Georgia Tech, Global Carbon Project (GCP), the National Institute for Environmental Studies of Japan, and the Department of Urban Engineering of the University of Tokyo.The Tokyo smart city project is an international collaboration from 2016 to 2020 between the Eco Urban Lab of School of City and Regional Planning and School of Architecture at Georgia Tech, Global Carbon Project (GCP), the National Institute for Environmental Studies of Japan, and the Department of Urban Engineering of the University of Tokyo. Tokyo provides a living urban laboratory for designing complex urban settings, agglomerations of physical, cultural and technological systems. The Tokyo Smart City Studio in Spring 2020 investigates Shinagawa and its surroundings at the Tokyo Bay waterfront area in the context of new maglev high speed rail station area development, one of the biggest urban development projects in the City of Tokyo of the next decade. The operation of the new high-speed maglev rail station from 2030 will make Shinagawa a 70-70 new gateway, 70 minutes from Tokyo to Osaka for a region with 70 million population. The new infrastructure will compress the concept of space and time, and will change the inter-cities relation. Its future city vision will have profound impact to the urban forms, functions and experiences of the city. The project aims to develop a test bed of urban systems design to demonstrate how a smart community is designed, evaluated, and implemented in Japan by incorporating governmental agencies, stakeholders and communities, with focuses on urban design and modeling, urban analytics of big data, Internet of Things (IoT), smart mobility and eco urban performance evaluation

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7