A Comparison: Symptomatic Improvement of Childhood Asthma versus Occupational Asthma after Removal of Causative Agents

Asthma is a chronic respiratory condition that causes airway inflammation and narrowing which leads to symptoms such as coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, and dyspnea.1 In 2017 it was estimated that 25.1 million Americans had asthma, including 6.1 million children and 19 million adults.2 From 2008-2013 the average cost of asthma in the United States (US) was $81.9 billion a year, this includes medical costs, lost days of work, and lost days of school.1 Asthma is often a result of environmental triggers both children and adults experience throughout their day. The consequences of asthma have been studied at great lengths in both children and adults, specifically adults experiencing occupational asthma (OA). However, there have been no comparisons between these two groups with regards to reduction of symptoms after removal of environmental factors. With the economic burden of asthma in the US, asthma treatment should focus on limiting environmental triggers rather than only treating asthma symptoms

Freezing Innovation: How the Platform Competition and Opportunity Act Will Freeze Funds in the Tech Start-Up Market

The rise of technological giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook motivated the House Judiciary Committee to pass a slew of new antitrust legislation bills to curb these companies’ considerable market power. The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act proposes to significantly cut a dominant online platform’s ability to continue growing by deeming certain acquisitions presumptively unlawful. The Act shifts the burden to the acquiring company to prove the proposed transaction would not be anticompetitive by eliminating a potential competitor. In an effort to protect competition, the Act has good intentions to protect start-up companies that are fearful of being acquired by big tech companies. However, severely limiting transactions in the tech industry could have significant ramifications for both the start-up companies and the consumers it seeks to protect. Venture capital firms play a crucial role in developing a start-up company by providing considerable capital at the onset. Part of the evaluation process for start-up companies involves valuing the exit opportunities, like acquisitions. Eliminating this option will decrease the value of start-up companies and cause a domino effect detrimental to innovative development. Venture capital firms will be even more selective in their investing, entrepreneurs will be hesitant to enter the market, and, with less ideas funded, innovation will freeze

System Engineering Analysis of Terraforming Mars with an Emphasis on Resource Importation Technology

This project uses System Engineering principles to delve into the viability of different methods for Terraforming Mars, with a comparison between Paraterraforming, Terraforming and Bioforming. It will then examine one subsystem that will be integral to the terraforming process, which is the space infrastructure necessary to import enough gases to recreate Earth’s atmosphere on Mars. It will analyze the viability of Chemical Rockets, Nuclear Rockets, Space Elevators, Skyhooks, Rotovators, Mass Drivers, Launch Loops and Orbital Rings for this subsystem and provide recommendations for an implementation plan

Design, development and application of an automated framework for cell growth and laboratory evolution

Precise control over microbial cell growth conditions could enable detection of minute phenotypic changes, which would improve our understanding of how genotypes are shaped by adaptive selection. Although automated cell- culture systems such as bioreactors offer strict control over liquid culture conditions, they often do not scale to high-throughput or require cumbersome redesign to alter growth conditions. I report the design and validation of eVOLVER, a scalable DIY framework that can be configured to carry out high- throughput growth experiments in molecular evolution, systems biology, and microbiology. I perform high-throughput evolution of yeast across systematically varied population density niches to show how eVOLVER can precisely characterize adaptive niches. I describe growth selection using time-varying temperature programs on a genome-wide yeast knockout library to identify strains with altered sensitivity to changes in temperature magnitude or frequency. Inspired by large-scale integration of electronics and microfluidics, I also demonstrate millifluidic multiplexing modules that enable multiplexed media routing, cleaning, vial-to-vial transfers and automated yeast mating

Human-Powered Swing Generator

Many developing countries lack sufficient resources to provide enough electricity for every family to live with a satisfying level of comfort and convenience. Our project proposes a solution that provides families with an alternative access to electricity using a playground swing. This project addresses the design and construction of the Human-Powered Swing Generator, which converts mechanical energy to electrical energy for charging a battery. The charged battery serves as a source of DC energy for potential DC purposes, such as charging a cell phone

Real-time Measurement and Control of Urban Stormwater Systems

Urban watersheds are being stressed beyond their capacity as storms are becoming more frequent and intense. Flash flooding is the leading cause of natural disaster deaths in the United States. Simultaneously, population pressures are changing landscapes and impairing water quality by altering the composition of urban stormwater runoff. Presently, the only solution to combat these challenges relies on the construction of larger infrastructure, which is cost prohibitive for most cities and communities. Advances in technology and autonomous systems promise to usher in a new generation of “smart” stormwater systems, which will use city-scale sensing and control to instantly “redesign” themselves in response to changing inputs. By dynamically controlling pumps, valves and gates throughout the entire city this paradigm promises to push the performance of existing assets without requiring the construction of new infrastructure. This will allow for entire urban watersheds to be dynamically controlled to meet a variety of desired outcomes. Despite technological advances and an established fundamental knowledge of water systems, it is presently entirely unclear how “smart” stormwater systems can actually be built. This dissertation conducts a review of existing “static” solutions and provides an assessment of a number of limited, but highly promising, real-world control studies. An analysis of sensor network scalability is then carried out, focusing on how large water sensor networks can be enabled by leveraging wireless connectivity and web-services. A study of urban water quality follows, which shows how real-time data improve our watershed-scale understanding of pollutant loads during storm events. In turn, through an unprecedented real-world study, it is illustrated how this improved understanding can be used to control flows across a watershed. A feedback control-based approach is then introduced to enable the control of urban watersheds. Through extensive simulation, this framework is applied to identify which control assets have the highest potential to improve watershed performance and to determine how many sites must be retrofitted to achieve desired outcomes. Finally, an analysis of input uncertainty is carried out, which quantifies the importance of weather forecasts in improving control performance across the scale of urban headwater catchments. The dissertation closes by laying out future directions in the emerging field of “smart” stormwater research.PHDCivil EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140797/1/bpwong_1.pd

Experimental Evaluation of a Coarse-Grained Switch Scheduler

Modern high performance routers rely on sophisticated interconnection networks to meet ever increasing demands on capacity. Regulating the flow of packets through these interconnects is critical to providing good performance, particularly in the presence of extreme traffic patterns that result in sustained overload at output ports. Previous studies have used a combination of analysis and idealized simulations to show that coarse-grained scheduling of traffic flows can be effective in preventing congestion, while ensuring high utilization. In this paper, we study the performance of a coarse-grained scheduler in a real router with a scalable architecture similar to those found in high performance commercial systems. Our results are obtained by taking fine-grained measurements of an operating router that provide a detailed picture of how the scheduling algorithm behaves under a variety of conditions, giving a more complete and realistic understanding of the short time-scale dynamics than previous studies could provide. We also examine computation and communication overheads of our scheduler implementation to assess its resource usage and to provide the basis for an analysis of how the resource usage scales with system size