Federal Programs for Addressing Low-Income Housing Needs: A Policy Primer

Provides an overview of federal rental assistance programs, their scope, and their limitations, with data on recipients by type, region, family income and structure, and race/ethnicity. Outlines policy implications for children and community development

In the cells of Fortress Europe: an interview with Marianna Economou, director of The Longest Run

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Interiority, identity and the limits of knowledge in documentary film

In the cinema, as Marian Keane has noted, “the medium of film - and specifically the camera - takes the nature of human interiority as its fundamental subject." Keane is writing about fiction film, where scripted dialogue, actor performance and codifications presented by mise en scene, framing, camera movement, editing patterns, lighting and music, typically offer cues to characters’ states of mind and emotions. But these resources are not always readily available, or deemed appropriate, across the heterogeneous terrain of non-fiction film. Any confrontation with the “limits on the expressibility of human interiority” presents a particular hermeneutic dilemma for documentary. This piece focuses on a number of films that take interiority as their key problematic by staging inquiries into the possibility of, and constraints on, gaining access to the inner life of the other. My argument begins with examples that pursue traces of a subject assumed to be always already other than the audience: that of the child viewed by adults, or the blind person seen by the sighted. I then turn to the role of the documentary interview in two flims by Errol Morris. The final third of my inquiry centres on an analysis of Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life, an assemblage of recollections and anecdotes about a woman who lay dead in her bedsit for three years. Intended as a memorial of sorts, the film can also be understood as a self-reflexive inquiry into the means by which documentary might lay claim to this absent other, and the ultimate restrictions on such a project

Dustbuster: a compact impact-ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer for in situ analysis of cosmic dust

We report on the design and testing of a compact impact-ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer for analysis of cosmic dust, suitable for use on deep space missions. The instrument, Dustbuster, incorporates a large target area with a reflectron, simultaneously optimizing mass resolution, particle detection, and ion collection. Dust particles hit the 65-cm2 target plate and are partially ionized by the impact. The resulting ions, with broad energy and angular distributions, are accelerated through a modified reflectron, focusing ions of specific m/z in space and time to produce high-resolution mass spectra. The cylindrically symmetric instrument is 10 cm in diameter and 20 cm in length, considerably smaller than previous in situ dust analyzers, and can be easily scaled as needed for specific mission requirements. Laser desorption ionization of metal and mineral samples embedded in the impact plate simulated particle impacts for evaluations of instrument performance. Mass resolution in these experiments ranged from 60–180, permitting resolution of isotopes. The mass spectrometer can be combined with other instrument components to determine dust particle trajectories and sizes

Changes in NDVI and human population in protected areas on the Tibetan Plateau

Understanding the Tibetan Plateau’s role in environmental change has gained increasing scientific attention in light of warming and changes in landmanagement. We examine changes in greenness over the Tibetan Plateau using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the Global Inventory Monitoring and Modeling Study (GIMMS3g) to identify significant changes over the entire plateau, six ecoregions, and protected areas based on a multiyear time series of July imagery from 1982 to 2015. We also test whether there have been changes in human populations in protected areas. There has been relatively little change in mean NDVI over the Tibetan Plateau or ecoregions, however, there were significant changes at the pixel level. There are sixty-nine protected areas on the Tibetan Plateau; sixtytwo protected areas had no significant change in mean NDVI and seven protected areas experienced a significant increase in NDVI. There has been an increase in population within protected areas from 2000 to 2015; however, mean populations significantly increased in two protected areas and significantly decreased in four protected areas. Results suggest a slow greening of the Tibetan Plateau, ecoregions, and protected areas, with a more rapid greening in northern Tibet at the pixel level. Most protected areas are experiencing minor changes in NDVI independent of human population

Electric Grid Decarbonization Pathways: Landscape Impacts, Policy Interactions, and the Need for Cooperation

Climate change has motivated governments around the world to ratify aggressive greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets. Meeting these targets will require improved energy efficiency, behavior changes, and energy system decarbonization. Many climate change and energy policy targets imply the deployment of large amounts of low carbon, renewable energy resources like wind turbines and solar photovoltaic (PV) panels but do not specify how these resources will be sited on the landscape. The relationships between weather conditions, terrain, land cover, existing electric grid infrastructure, and electricity consumers will govern how these wind and solar PV infrastructure configurations develop and how quickly they will be implemented. This dissertation develops methods for modeling policy goal-compliant wind and solar PV infrastructure configurations and their land use requirements, extends these methods to explicitly account for the resulting land use/land cover change patterns, and concludes with a macro-scale discussion of energy system geographies and their co-evolution with the societies that rely upon them in a decarbonized electric grid future. Chapters 2 and 3 each feature a case study of Vermont and its ambitious energy and emissions-related goals. We find that Vermont can meet many of these goals with less than 1% of its land area occupied by wind and solar PV infrastructure using a wide variety of infrastructure ratios and siting strategies. Chapter 4 views energy systems through the proposed ‘energyshed’ lens. We define energysheds as the geographic area over which energy is produced, refined, transported, stored, distributed, and consumed. We argue that energy system decarbonization offers opportunities to democratize and decentralize energy systems physically and administratively and that the spatial relationships between energy system infrastructure, ownership, and energy consumers will dictate the trajectory of the electric grid decarbonization process

Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) of Additively Manufactured Metal (AMM) Parts Using Ultrasonic Testing (UT)

Additive manufacturing is a category of emerging manufacturing processes that have applications in creating metal components with high value and complexity. The adoption of these parts is limited by the lack of fully developed nondestructive techniques for identifying internal defects. The use of ultrasonic testing for detecting and measuring internal features in additively manufactured metal parts is investigated. A low-cost ultrasonic immersion testing system was designed, constructed, and validated for the inspection of an additively manufactured titanium specimen with artificial defects as well as other metal artifacts. An ultrasound calibration block was additively manufactured from stainless steel type 316L and directly compared to a conventionally produced AISI 1018 steel block using standard inspection techniques. It was found that additively manufactured stainless steel has noticeable acoustic anisotropy with its speeds of sound varying nominally by 8% and greater attenuation than 1018 steel by a factor of at least 0.2 Np/in. To accompany experimental results, elastic wave simulations in a commercially available finite element package were explored