Food Security at the University of Richmond

The University of Richmond’s Strategic Plan states the University’s goal to be “a leader in innovative practices that sustain our environmental, human, and financial resources” (Crutcher 2017). The University has also signed multiple national and global sustainability commitments such as the Talloires Declaration (2003), the American College and University President’s Climate Commitment, (2007) and the American Campuses Acton Climate Pledge (2015). These commitments set ambitious climate action goals and address the responsibility of colleges and universities not only to cultivate an environmental consciousness on campus but also to transform the conventional operation systems on which college and universities depend. While the University has taken active steps to integrate sustainability into its academic, administrative, and operational practices, there remains much room for improvement. We identified the University’s food system as one area of campus particularly vulnerable to changing climate conditions. Prompted by dining’s low score (1.13 out of 7) on the University of Richmond’s 2017 Sustainability Report (Andrejewski 2017), this project seeks to both determine the current state of food security among students at the University as well as to analyze the larger context in which our food system is embedded. Poster prepared for the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar/Geography Capstone

Food Systems and Security at the University of Richmond

In the past fifteen years, the University has signed multiple national and global sustainability commitments, such as the 2003 Talloires Declaration, the 2007 American College and University President’s Climate Commitment, and the 2015 American Campuses Act on Climate Pledge (OFSb 2017). These commitments set ambitious climate action goals and address the responsibility of colleges and universities not only to cultivate a culture of environmental stewardship on campus but also to transform their conventional operational systems into sustainable systems. The University of Richmond’s 2017 Sustainability Report highlights the steps the University has taken to achieve these goals and identifies areas in need of improvement. The report adopts the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS), which is a transparent, self-reporting framework used by hundreds of colleges and universities worldwide to measure their sustainability performance (AASHE 2017). In 2016, the University earned a Silver STARS rating, demonstrating the considerable efforts made by the University to integrate sustainability into its campus-wide practices (OFSa 2017). Even so, there remains much room for improvement. One area of campus that scored low in the Sustainability Report was Dining Services (1.13/7.00), which we determined was an important operational function of the University to demonstrate leadership in its environmental resources. Given the challenges of maintaining a sustainable food system in the context of climate change and prompted by Dining’s low score in the 2017 Sustainability Report, this project seeks to determine the current state of food security among students at the University as well as to analyze the larger context in which our food system is embedded. Paper prepared for the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar/Geography Capstone

Conservation tillage increases soil bacterial diversity in the dryland of northern China

International audienceAbstractAgricultural practices change soil’s physical and chemical properties, therefore modifying soil microbial communities. Conservation tillage is widely used to improve the soil texture and nutrient status in the dryland regions of northern China. However, little is known about the influence of soil properties on microbes, in particular on the effect of conservation tillage on soil bacterial communities. Here, we studied the effect of a 5-year tillage treatment on soil properties and soil bacterial communities in the dryland regions of northern China using a high-throughput sequencing technology and quantitative PCR of 16S rRNA genes. We compared the changes in soil bacterial diversity, and composition was measured for conservation tillage, including zero plow or chisel plow, and for conventional tillage using plow. Our results show that conservation tillage increased the Simpson index by 378 % and exhibited significantly dissimilar polygenetic diversity, with r of 1, and taxonomic diversity, of r higher than 0.49, compared to conventional tillage. This finding demonstrates that conservation tillage modifies soil bacterial diversity. Chisel plow and zero tillage increase the abundance of the genus Bacillus, including 85 % of the phylum Firmicutes, and of Rhizobiales belonging to the Alphaproteobacteria. Overall conservation tillage increased the abundance of profitable functional bacteria species

A Fusion-Denoising Attack on InstaHide with Data Augmentation

InstaHide is a state-of-the-art mechanism for protecting private training images, by mixing multiple private images and modifying them such that their visual features are indistinguishable to the naked eye. In recent work, however, Carlini et al. show that it is possible to reconstruct private images from the encrypted dataset generated by InstaHide. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that Carlini et al.'s attack can be easily defeated by incorporating data augmentation into InstaHide. This leads to a natural question: is InstaHide with data augmentation secure? In this paper, we provide a negative answer to this question, by devising an attack for recovering private images from the outputs of InstaHide even when data augmentation is present. The basic idea is to use a comparative network to identify encrypted images that are likely to correspond to the same private image, and then employ a fusion-denoising network for restoring the private image from the encrypted ones, taking into account the effects of data augmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack in comparison to Carlini et al.'s attack.Comment: 15 page

Association of Affected Neurocircuitry With Deficit of Response Inhibition and Delayed Gratification in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Narrative Review

The neural networks that constitute corticostriatothalamocortical circuits between prefrontal cortex and subcortical structure provide a heuristic framework for bridging gaps between neurocircuitry and executive dysfunction in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “Cool” and “Hot” executive functional theory and the models of dual pathway are supposed to be applied within the neuropsychology of ADHD. The theoretical model elaborated response inhibition and delayed gratification in ADHD. We aimed to review and summarize the literature about the circuits on ADHD and ADHD-related comorbidities, as well as the effects of neurocircuitry on the executive dysfunction in ADHD

Research on CVDs Prediction and Early Warning Techniques in Healthcare Monitoring System

Abstract-Chronic diseases are gradually becoming the principal factors of harm to people's health. Fortunately, the development of e-health provides a novel thought for chronic disease prevention and treatment. This paper focuses on the research of cardiovascular disease (CVDs) prevention and early warning techniques using e-health and data mining. In this paper, we will use weighted associative classification algorithm to model the data in healthcare database to determine the level of cardiovascular risk. Besides, on the basis of data mining and knowledge discovery, intelligent warning mechanisms are proposed to provide different services to patients with different levels of risk. The experimental results show that the used classification algorithm is a more effective mining algorithm in the field of healthcare with higher accuracy and better comprehension. Our study is of definite significance to help control risk level of CVDs patients