Strategies Teachers can use to Help Support Comprehension in Struggling Readers

This study was completed to provide the benefits of using comprehension strategies for struggling readers. The strategy that was mainly focused on in this study was using predicting to help enhance the reader’s comprehension. The research was conducted by working with a student one-on-one, using questionnaires, direct instruction, modeling expected behaviors, and allowing the student to complete tasks independently. The finding suggest that using strategies, such as predicting, help students not only gain a better understanding of what they are reading, but help build confidence in their abilities to read

Can Online Trials Be Fair During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

In the year 2020, the United States of America was ravaged by the global COVID-19 pandemic. However, even in a pandemic, crimes are committed, and people are imprisoned. The severely overloaded court system was forced to adapt and continue to adjudicate cases while navigating the challenges imposed by COVID-19. A widely adopted solution that appeared to mitigate the health risks of a highly transmittable disease was the use of Zoom, YouTube, and other video services to hold court and try cases. However, this shift in court proceedings has revealed a plethora of concerns respecting the rights of those on trial, the state, victims, and more. At the forefront of this discussion is an overarching concern – can online trials be fair during the COVID-19 pandemic? This paper sets out to answer this question, or at least provide clarity and distinctions that will allow the reader to formulate their own opinions on issues with real life implications. To accomplish this task, several steps need to be taken. First, the American standard of fair trials must be examined and analyzed. While there is no comprehensive list of standards, expectations and rights are enumerated within the Sixth Amendment and other statutes. With the characteristics of a fair trial determined, sights are then set to detailing the health and societal concerns presented by COVID-19 and the reasons why online trials are being used to mitigate these risks. Finally, this wealth of information is combined and applied to answer the question – can online trials be fair during the COVID-19 pandemic

Die Ökobilanz der energetischen Holzverwertung: Faktoren für einen hohen ökologischen Nutzen

FWN – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

Does car sharing reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Life cycle assessment of the modal shift and lifetime shift rebound effects

Car-sharing platforms provide access to a shared rather than a private fleet of automobiles distributed in the region. Participation in such services induces changes in mobility behaviour as well as vehicle ownership patterns that could have positive environmental impacts. This study contributes to the understanding of the total mobility-related greenhouse gas emissions reduction related to business-to-consumer car-sharing participation. A comprehensive model which takes into account distances travelled annually by the major urban transport modes as well as their life-cycle emissions factors is proposed, and the before-and-after analysis is conducted for an average car-sharing member in three geographical cases (Netherlands, San Francisco, Calgary). In addition to non-operational emissions for all the transport modes involved, this approach considers the rebound effects associated with the modal shift effect (substituting driving distances with alternative modes) and the lifetime shift effect for the shared automobiles, phenomena which have been barely analysed in the previous studies. As a result, in contrast to the previous impact assessments in the field, a significantly more modest reduction of the annual total mobility-related life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions caused by car-sharing participation has been estimated, 3-18% for three geographical case studies investigated (versus up to 67% estimated previously). This suggests the significance of the newly considered effects and provides with the practical implications for improved assessments in the future.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures (in the end of the file

Prospective LCA to provide environmental guidance for developing waste-to-PHA biorefineries

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) production from waste streams using mixed microbial cultures (MMC) can unlock the potential of PHA to substitute oil-based plastics. However, these processes are still at low technology readiness level (4–6). Demonstrating a better environmental performance would boost their deployment at industrial scale. Hence, including environmental guidance during their development, when there are still opportunities for major alterations, is essential. To the best of our knowledge, this work elucidates for the first time how waste-to-PHA biorefineries could develop in the future by combining prospective LCA with scenario methodology and where the attention of stakeholders should be focused. Four future scenarios were derived considering both surrounding (e.g., scale, environmental or bioeconomy policies) and technological parameters (e.g., acidification yield, PHA content in biomass or recovery yield). Those scenarios derived under ambitious environmental and bioeconomy policies shop up to 50% lower environmental impacts than those under business-as-usual policies. These differences are caused by the different background processes’ environmental burdens (e.g., electricity mix with low renewable energies share) and the higher consumption of chemicals and utilities. However, the environmental impacts caused by lower yields can be partially mitigated by valorizing the intermediate waste streams into biogas. Sensitivity analysis results pointed out recovery yield and PHA content as the parameters that influence most the environmental performance, being responsible for up to 60% of variance in environmental performance. These parameters determine the chemicals and utilities consumption in PHA downstream processing, which is confirmed as the main environmental hotspot. This work goes beyond previous LCA studies on PHA production and quantifies the influence of different parameters on the environmental performanceS

Ex-ante life cycle assessment of polyols using carbon captured from industrial process gas

Horizon 2020(H2020)768919Industrial Ecolog

Making the use of scenarios in LCA easier: the superstructure approach

Purpose Much progress has recently been made in modelling future background systems for LCA by including future scenario data, e.g. from Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), into life cycle inventory (LCI) databases. A key problem is, however, that this yields potentially dozens of scenario LCI databases (i.e. LCI databases that represent different scenarios and reference years), instead of a single background database, which is very impractical for LCA modelling purposes. This paper proposes an approach to overcome this problem. Methods The approach consists of transforming all scenario LCI databases into a single superstructure database and an associated scenario difference file. The superstructure database is also a regular LCI database, but is constructed to contain all unique exchanges (elementary and intermediate flows) and processes that exist across all scenario LCI databases. The scenario difference file stores the differences between all scenarios and can be used to turn the superstructure into a specific scenario LCI database. This is very fast as it can be done in memory during LCA calculations. Results and discussion A key advantage of the superstructure approach is that a single LCI database can be used to represent different background systems. Therefore, the practitioner does not need to re-link a foreground system to multiple LCI databases, which is work-intensive and invites modelling errors. LCA results for all scenarios and reference years can be calculated automatically. We also illustrate how the superstructure approach has been implemented in the Activity Browser open source LCA software. Although this paper introduces the superstructure approach for background scenarios, it can also be used to model foreground scenarios, and even, as implemented in the Activity Browser, combinations of background and foreground scenarios. Finally, we briefly discuss further challenges that need to be addressed for a more widespread use of background scenarios in LCA. Conclusions The superstructure approach presents a practical solution for making the use of future background scenarios more wide-spread and, therefore, to overcome the problem of performing prospective LCA with temporally inconsistent foreground and background systems. The implementation in the Activity Browser makes the approach available for anyone and may serve as inspiration for other LCA software to implement the superstructure approach or a similar concept. While this may be an important technical milestone, additional coordination between data providers, scenario generators, LCA practitioners, and software developers will be required to further facilitate the use of background scenarios in prospective LCA studies.Industrial Ecolog

Consistent Incorporation of Multiple Background Scenarios Into One Background Database: Proposition of a New Approach

When analyzing future impacts of emerging technologies, one has to account for future developments in the background system to ensure temporal consistency between the foreground and background system. This can be achieved by incorporating scenarios into a background database, such as ecoinvent. Combining multiple scenarios can cause conflicts if several scenarios adapt the same process, and can result in an intransparent generation of scenario databases. We propose an approach which enables a transparent and reproducible incorporation of multiple scenarios into a single background database. It builds on and extends already existing brightway libraries, such as wurst and the superstructure. The recently developed brightway library wurst allows to systematically incorporate electricity scenarios from one source, i.e., the integrated assessment model of IMAGE. Incorporating additional scenarios, e.g., with higher regional resolution or for more sectors, such as greener steel production, extends the scope and accuracy of future background databases. An example for regional conflicts would be the incorporation of both average electricity scenarios for Europe and specifically for Germany. Our approach builds on the superstructure principle which produces one scenario database combining the background database with the processes and flows required for the scenarios. Secondly, it generates excel sheets which specify the values of flows for all scenarios. The scenario database and scenario excel sheets can be imported into the activity-browser, the graphical user interface for Brightway. The activity-browser enables a scenario-based LCA calculation and interpretation, which is easy-to-use also for nonpythonic LCA practitioners. Moreover, the generated superstructure database along with the scenario excel sheets can be easily shared. Our approach provides an extension to the superstructure principle to resolve conflicts caused by different scenario sources. We aim at creating a reliable and reproducible workflow to transparently generate a superstructure database which consistently combines scenarios from multiple sources. The goal is to make this approach available to the LCA-community as an open-source tool. Thus, our proposed approach contributes to the usability of background scenarios, and facilitates the cooperation as well as the exchange of scenarios between LCA practitioners