Identifying Environmentally Burdened Neighborhoods in Minneapolis Through a Cumulative Approach

Environmental problems are not confined to political boundaries and tend to impact population beyond their sources, yet some communities are more impacted than others. This GIS project calculates a Cumulative Impact (CI) Score of environmental hazards for each neighborhood in Minneapolis based on the following four measures: environmental effects, public health effects, sensitive populations, socioeconomic factors. The higher the CI score, the more environmentally burdened a neighborhood is. The scope of this GIS project is limited and it is the hope of many environmental organizations in Minnesota that Minnesota Pollution Control Agency will take the lead and develop a more scientific and comprehensive mapping tool for Twin Cities and beyond. An effective mapping tool for Minnesota will not only help policy makers attend to the needs of the most impacted but also help community members become more educated, informed and empowered to better their living environments

College of Saint Benedict Marie and Robert Jackson Fellow (2014)-Center for Earth Energy and Democracy

Center for Earth Energy and Democracy was founded by a group of researchers, educators and community activists who saw the need to affirm and revitalize principles of democracy and social justice. CEED’s mission is to work at the intersection of energy, environment and community development to develop solutions that are democratic, sustainable and socially just. As a mapping tool student researcher at CEED, 2014 Jackson Fellow Chendan Yan, an Environmental Studies and Philosophy double major from Shanghai, China, contacted agencies, collected, and analyzed data for Environmental Justice (EJ) Mapping tool. She developed Infographics demonstrating disparities among neighborhoods and created visual images for marketing purposes. She also analyzed data from community energy survey, prepared PowerPoint for Morris Climate Dialogue, and developed ideas for CEED website narratives

Eco-Centre|Eko Centar - Bosnia and Herzegovina 2013 summer global internship

The Eco Center of Blagaj was inaugerated in 2007 with the aim of contributing to nature conservation and increasing environmental awareness. It is a project under the non-profit organization Novi Val. Nine years after it was established, the youth club Novi Val started the project entitled Eco development in rural areas of Bosnia nad Herzegovina and Serbia. Within this project, Novi Val is carrying out activities through several programs: protection of the white vultures, development of cattle farming, protection of the indigenous Tornjak dog species, protection of the Velez Pramenka sheep, preservation of biodiversity, protection of cultural and historical monuments of Blagaj, as well as educational and ecotourism programs

A New Three-Dimensional Indoor Positioning Mechanism Based on Wireless LAN

The researches on two-dimensional indoor positioning based on wireless LAN and the location fingerprint methods have become mature, but in the actual indoor positioning situation, users are also concerned about the height where they stand. Due to the expansion of the range of three-dimensional indoor positioning, more features must be needed to describe the location fingerprint. Directly using a machine learning algorithm will result in the reduced ability of classification. To solve this problem, in this paper, a “divide and conquer” strategy is adopted; that is, first through k-medoids algorithm the three-dimensional location space is clustered into a number of service areas, and then a multicategory SVM with less features is created for each service area for further positioning. Our experiment shows that the error distance resolution of the approach with k-medoids algorithm and multicategory SVM is higher than that of the approach only with SVM, and the former can effectively decrease the “crazy prediction.

Chinese Location Word Recognition Using Service Context Information for Location-Based Service

With the development of mobile networks and positioning technology, extensive attention focuses on the location-based service (LBS) which processes the application data including user queries, information searches, and user comments by the location information. In LBS, the recognition of the location word in user messages is meaningful and important. The location word recognition in LBS is different from the traditional named entity recognition, owing to the additional information such as user location coordinates in LBS. This paper proposes a method that adds the service context information including user location coordinates and message timestamps into the machine learning to improve the accuracy of the Chinese location word recognition. The experiment based on microblog datasets in mobile environment proves the viability and effectiveness of this method

Illegitimate Recombination between Duplicated Genes Generated from Recursive Polyploidizations Accelerated the Divergence of the Genus Arachis

The peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) is the leading oil and food crop among the legume family. Extensive duplicate gene pairs generated from recursive polyploidizations with high sequence similarity could result from gene conversion, caused by illegitimate DNA recombination. Here, through synteny-based comparisons of two diploid and three tetraploid peanut genomes, we identified the duplicated genes generated from legume common tetraploidy (LCT) and peanut recent allo-tetraploidy (PRT) within genomes. In each peanut genome (or subgenomes), we inferred that 6.8–13.1% of LCT-related and 11.3–16.5% of PRT-related duplicates were affected by gene conversion, in which the LCT-related duplicates were the most affected by partial gene conversion, whereas the PRT-related duplicates were the most affected by whole gene conversion. Notably, we observed the conversion between duplicates as the long-lasting contribution of polyploidizations accelerated the divergence of different Arachis genomes. Moreover, we found that the converted duplicates are unevenly distributed across the chromosomes and are more often near the ends of the chromosomes in each genome. We also confirmed that well-preserved homoeologous chromosome regions may facilitate duplicates’ conversion. In addition, we found that these biological functions contain a higher number of preferentially converted genes, such as catalytic activity-related genes. We identified specific domains that are involved in converted genes, implying that conversions are associated with important traits of peanut growth and development

Conversion between 100-million-year-old duplicated genes contributes to rice subspecies divergence

Abstract Background Duplicated gene pairs produced by ancient polyploidy maintain high sequence similarity over a long period of time and may result from illegitimate recombination between homeologous chromosomes. The genomes of Asian cultivated rice Oryza sativa ssp. indica (XI) and Oryza sativa ssp. japonica (GJ) have recently been updated, providing new opportunities for investigating ongoing gene conversion events and their impact on genome evolution. Results Using comparative genomics and phylogenetic analyses, we evaluated gene conversion rates between duplicated genes produced by polyploidization 100 million years ago (mya) in GJ and XI. At least 5.19–5.77% of genes duplicated across the three rice genomes were affected by whole-gene conversion after the divergence of GJ and XI at ~ 0.4 mya, with more (7.77–9.53%) showing conversion of only portions of genes. Independently converted duplicates surviving in the genomes of different subspecies often use the same donor genes. The ongoing gene conversion frequency was higher near chromosome termini, with a single pair of homoeologous chromosomes, 11 and 12, in each rice genome being most affected. Notably, ongoing gene conversion has maintained similarity between very ancient duplicates, provided opportunities for further gene conversion, and accelerated rice divergence. Chromosome rearrangements after polyploidization are associated with ongoing gene conversion events, and they directly restrict recombination and inhibit duplicated gene conversion between homeologous regions. Furthermore, we found that the converted genes tended to have more similar expression patterns than nonconverted duplicates. Gene conversion affects biological functions associated with multiple genes, such as catalytic activity, implying opportunities for interaction among members of large gene families, such as NBS-LRR disease-resistance genes, contributing to the occurrence of the gene conversion. Conclusion Duplicated genes in rice subspecies generated by grass polyploidization ~ 100 mya remain affected by gene conversion at high frequency, with important implications for the divergence of rice subspecies