SUNY-ESF Engineering for a Sustainable Society: Changing the World One Community at a Time

Students at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) started humanitarian engineering clubs called Engineering for a Sustainable Society Club and Engineers Without Borders Club (jointly, ESS/EWB) to achieve the student ambitions of improving the world putting theory into practice. Each humanitarian engineering project managed by the ESF students in these clubs has the goal of delivering more ecosystem and engineered services to benefit those with the greatest need while addressing environmental, economic, and social sustainability criteria. For every trip, design, and implementation project ESS/EWB adopts, the clubs dedicate 1000s of person hours to research on appropriate humanitarian engineering methods; most students have taken ESFs Humanitarian Engineering course to train in these methods. Over time members have expanded their knowledge of erosion control, water treatment and supply, hydro-electric generation, photovoltaic installation, sustainable construction, and cultural diversity as well as technical skills including professional reporting and communication, computer aided design, and mapping. The ESS/EWB clubs have successfully created an erosion management plan to protect coral reefs in Roatan, Honduras, funded and built a community water supply for a village in Honduras, brought solar panels and new hydroelectric generator technology to a village in Peru and Dominica, and initiated new projects for watershed reforestation and soil regeneration through human waste composting for areas of Haiti and improving sanitation conditions for a primary school in the Palajunoj Valley in Guatemala. The ESS/EWB clubs are empowering communities to sustain their resources while improving their quality of life. The ESS/EWB clubs plan to continue to revolutionize humanitarian relief across the globe by providing long-term, innovative, and sustainable solutions for generations to come

Developing a Localized Predictive Model for Sugar Maple Sap Production Season Termination

For thousands of years, humans have been extracting the sap of the sugar maple tree for use in many areas of life. The ability to predict, as a function of environmental conditions, the critical events, like the change in the flavor of maple sap, can be critical for the success and profitability for modern maple syrup production. Four models are developed to correlate the accumulation of heating and cooling over specified periods of time with the change in maple sap flavor at a maple operation in Attica, NY. Growing degree days and cooling degree days are used to simulate this heating and cooling accumulation. After testing the four models with varying date ranges, threshold/base temperatures, cooling accumulation thresholds, and heating start dates, the data suggests there is no significant correlation between heating and cooling accumulation and the flavor change of maple sap at this location

Spatial analysis of landfills in respect to flood events and sea-level rise

Recently in the news, media coverage of flood events has garnered much attention due to tropical storms like Hurricane Matthew and the costly damages that resulted. Under climate change, events like sea-level rise (SLR) and flooding threaten infrastructure, which make it necessary for proper planning before, during, and after installation to mitigate risk. Studies in Austria and the UK have revealed that many landfills are located in flood zones as well as coastal areas effected by coastal erosion. In the U.S. however, there have not been publications on landfill locations related to flood events and SLR. The interest of gaining knowledge on flood prone and SLR at-risk landfills is that studies reveal that inundation of landfills can spread contaminants to other areas (e.g. marshes) that can have both ecological and health risks. To begin addressing this issue, figuring out what landfills are at risk from floods or sea level rise, how many, and the extent to which they could become inundated or eroded is the focus of this study. Using GIS software, and publicly available data, maps of landfills were created in the gulf-state area of the United States with flood and rising sea level data to then be analyzed and categorized based on spatial risks. Although incomplete, the study has shown the potential for hundreds of landfills to be at risk from either flooding, SLR, or both

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The distance and neutral environment of the massive stellar cluster Westerlund 1

The goal of this study is to determine a distance to Westerlund 1 independent of the characteristics of the stellar population and to study its neutral environment, using observations of atomic hydrogen. The HI observations are taken from the Southern Galactic Plane Survey to study HI absorption in the direction of the HII region created by the members of Westerlund 1 and to investigate its environment as observed in the HI line emission. A Galactic rotation curve was derived using the recently revised values for the Galactic centre distance of $R_\odot = 7.6$ kpc, and the velocity of the Sun around the Galactic centre of $\Theta_\odot = 214$ km s$^{-1}$. The newly determined rotation model leads us to derive a distance of $3.9\pm 0.7$ kpc to Westerlund 1, consistent with a location in the Scutum-Crux Arm. Included in this estimate is a very careful investigation of possible sources of error for the Galactic rotation curve. We also report on small expanding HI features around the cluster with a maximum dynamic age of 600,000 years and a larger bubble which has a minimum dynamic age of 2.5 million years. Additionally we re-calculated the kinematic distances to nearby HII regions and supernova remnants based on our new Galaxic rotation curve. We propose that in the early stages of the development of Wd 1 a large interstellar bubble of diameter about 50 pc was created by the cluster members. This bubble has a dynamic age similar to the age of the cluster. Small expanding bubbles, with dynamical ages $\sim 0.6$ Myr are found around Wd 1, which we suggest consist of recombined material lost by cluster members through their winds.Comment: 8 pages, accepted for publication in A&

Bayesian Inference and Data Augmentation Schemes for Spatial, Spatiotemporal and Multivariate Log-Gaussian Cox Processes in R

Log-Gaussian Cox processes are an important class of models for spatial and spatiotemporal point-pattern data. Delivering robust Bayesian inference for this class of models presents a substantial challenge, since Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms require careful tuning in order to work well. To address this issue, we describe recent advances in MCMC methods for these models and their implementation in the R package lgcp. Our suite of R functions provides an extensible framework for inferring covariate effects as well as the parameters of the latent field. We also present methods for Bayesian inference in two further classes of model based on the log-Gaussian Cox process. The first of these concerns the case where we wish to fit a point process model to data consisting of event-counts aggregated to a set of spatial regions: we demonstrate how this can be achieved using data-augmentation. The second concerns Bayesian inference for a class of marked-point processes specified via a multivariate log-Gaussian Cox process model. For both of these extensions, we give details of their implementation in R

A Synthesis of the Daily Behavior Report Card Literature from 2007 to 2017

Daily behavior report cards (DBRCs) have shown to be effective in addressing academic and behavioral challenges for a variety of students in past literature. The purpose of this literature review and analysis is to update and summarize findings on the use of DBRCs on academic and social behavior for students considered to have disruptive behaviors or identified with disabilities. We identified eleven studies in the literature examining DBRCs with 390 participants with attention‐deficit hyperactivity disorder, specific learning disabilities, emotional behavioral disorders, speech and language, multiple disabilities, other health impairments, or considered to have disruptive behavior in Pre‐K through sixth grade academic settings. We also calculated effect sizes overall for each study and student‐based characteristics. Findings suggest that using DBRCs have a range from weak to strong impact on the academic and social behaviors of students considered to have disruptive behaviors or students with disabilities in classroom settings. We present implications for research and practice

Imaging topologically protected transport with quantum degenerate gases

Ultracold and quantum degenerate gases held near conductive surfaces can serve as sensitive, high resolution, and wide-area probes of electronic current flow. Previous work has imaged transport around grain boundaries in a gold wire by using ultracold and Bose-Einstein condensed atoms held microns from the surface with an atom chip trap. We show that atom chip microscopy may be applied to useful purpose in the context of materials exhibiting topologically protected surface transport. Current flow through lithographically tailored surface defects in topological insulators (TI)---both idealized and with the band-structure and conductivity typical of Bi$_{2}$Se$_{3}$---is numerically calculated. We propose that imaging current flow patterns enables the differentiation of an ideal TI from one with a finite bulk--to--surface conductivity ratio, and specifically, that the determination of this ratio may be possible by imaging transport around trenches etched into the TI's surface.Comment: Extensively rewritten, better introduction. 12 pages, 10 figure