Walking Towards a Healthier Future: A Pocket Guide to Walking Routes in Colchester and the Health Benefits of Walking

The obesity epidemic is a complex problem necessitating a multifaceted long-term response. While there is no single solution to this decade-evolving issue, exercise remains one of the most important health interventions available. This project aims to serve as a resource for patients seeking to lose weight; outlining some of the walking routes local to Colchester Vermont, as well as the health benefits of a sustained exercise plan.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1808/thumbnail.jp

Global warming, energy efficiency and the role of the built environment

Thesis (S.M. in Real Estate Development)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, Center for Real Estate, 2008.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-81).This thesis attempts to explore the relationships between the Buildings Sector, energy efficiency and global warming. Through a qualitative analysis the author illustrates the connection between these three areas and shows how both energy efficiency, as a key policy measure, and the Buildings Sector, as the key recipient of such policies, can act together to significantly mitigate the effects of global warming and resulting climate change. First, the reader is given the tools to understand the issues surrounding global warming and climate change. This is accomplished through an overview of related science, history and environmental and economic impacts. Future climate scenarios are explained and mitigation options are offered. Second, an overview of energy efficiency as the primary mitigation option for global warming is given. Terminology, history and mitigation potential of energy efficiency and how it applies across market sectors are reviewed. Barriers to implementation of energy-efficiency projects and the need for strong policy are also explored. Third, the Buildings Sector, showing the most promise for greenhouse gas mitigation through energy-efficiency investments, is analyzed. This analysis focuses on the current consumption patterns of buildings, on available energy-efficient technologies, and on the characteristics of efficiency projects in buildings and how they support the goals of broader climate change policy. The analysis concludes with a review of the barriers to such projects along with an overview of the policies in place meant to overcome these barriers. Finally, the author summarizes her research and offers her conclusions.by Donna K. DiBona.S.M.in Real Estate Developmen

Information foraging through the analysis of semantic network topology

Information seekers are posed with multiple challenges in gathering an unbiased and comprehensive body of information. The costs of analyzing documents often drive searches toward a small subset of documents. Additionally, modern search tools may reinforce the confirmation bias of users by providing only those documents that closely match their search query. The end result is a decision or hypothesis that is ill-considered and substantiated by potentially biased information. Information seekers need an information foraging tool that can help them explore the document corpus to find relevant topics and text snippets, while finding the hidden information that may be buried in the corpus or may not have been known a priori. An automated information foraging tool can mitigate these challenges by automatically identifying a wide breadth of topics for the user, extracted directly from a document corpus. When documents are decomposed and reconstituted into a semantic network, there is value in the topological structures formed. Leveraging a suite of information retrieval and graph analysis algorithms that analyze the semantic network, a framework is defined for assisting information seekers in both exploring and exploiting relevant information from a corpus to support unbiased decision making