The Political Water Web of the United States

The United States’ water systems are interstate in their nature; these systems are governed by Congressional compact agreements. Water compacts have been influenced by common factors that have reverberated throughout the water-web of the country. These impacts varied in their scale, national level federal regulations, such as the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and recent concerns about climate change are macro-scale influences. Localized drivers such as regional economics and population change are localized impacts. While these concepts and issues influence water compacts as a whole, their impacts occur at different periods, albeit for the same reason. As such, we see a political web emerge that ties all the water compacts within the country, this web is impacted by the same drivers that reverberate at different times

A Socio-Technical System to Understand and Mitigate The Negative Impacts of Planned Disruptions on People’s Well-being

Planned disruption events such as highway construction typically span a relatively longer period of time and hence have negative impact on the health and wellbeing of people living in the surrounding communities. Further, these communities tend to have low socio-economic status with high unemployment rate and limited resources (Environmental Justice Communities). The goal of this dissertation is to understand and mitigate the negative impacts of planned disruption projects via a socio-technical system linking data from smartphone apps integrated with existing air quality and transportation APIs. Our focus in this project is on a highway expansion construction project in North Denver, USA (the C70 Project) and its surrounding communities. We started by designing an developing a smartphone app called PureMotion in a three-round usability study with community members from the affected area. After that we deployed PureMotion over two cohorts spanning for four months in total (two month each) and reported results from the analysis done on the data collected. Finally we designed, developed and deployed two intervention apps, PureNav and PureConnect, that contributed in helping community members mitigate the top issues that we have learned from the first two studies, transportation and lack of information.</p

Using Sociotechnical Systems to Understand the Effects of Planned Disruptions on People’s Emotions and Well-Being

A construction project in northeast Denver has started at the end of summer 2018. This project will definitely have negative impact on the neighbouring communities. We have started building sociotechnical system in order to study these negative effects. As part of our system, we have built an Android app called PUREmotion. The app have different methodologies to allow us to collect data for the study. These methods include: one-time demographics form, daily entries, rewards system, social feedback, and location tracker. The app is fully implemented and ready for the next phase of the study

MAVERICK: An App-independent and Platform-agnostic Approach to Enforce Policies in IoT Systems at Runtime

Many solutions have been proposed to curb unexpected behavior of automation apps installed on programmable IoT platforms by enforcing safety policies at runtime. However, all prior work addresses a weaker version of the actual problem due to a simpler, unrealistic threat model. These solutions are not general enough as they are heavily dependent on the installed apps and catered to specific IoT platforms. Here, we address a stronger version of the problem via a realistic threat model, where (i) undesired cyber actions can come from not only automation platform backends (e.g., SmartThings) but also close-sourced third-party services (e.g., IFTTT), and (ii) physical actions (e.g., user interactions) on devices can move the IoT system to an undesirable state. We propose a runtime mechanism, dubbed Maverick, which employs an app-independent, platform-agnostic mediator to enforce policies against all undesired cyber actions and applies corrective-actions to bring the IoT system back to a safe state from an unsafe state transition. Maverick is equipped with a policy language capable of expressing rich temporal invariants and an automated toolchain that includes a policy synthesizer and a policy analyzer for user assistance. We implemented Maverick in a prototype and showed its efficacy in both physical and virtual testbeds, incurring minimal overhead.Comment: 13 pages, full version with material cut from version accepted at ACM WiSec 202

أثر قاعدة التأسيس أولى من التأكيد في بناء المعنى التفسيري - دراسة تفسيرية تطبيقية- The Effect of “the Foundation is More Important than Emphasizing” in the Construction of the Explanatory Meaning: An Applied Explanatory Study

هدفت الدراسة إلى الكشف عن كيفية تعامل المفسرين مع قاعدة التأسيس أولى من التأكيد، موافقة أو مخالفة للقاعدة مع الوقوف على الأسباب التي دعتهم لهذه المخالفة. وقام الباحثان باستقراء عدد من الآيات التي وقف عندها بعض المفسرين وتحليل استنباطاتهم وبيان ما يتفق منها مع القاعدة وما يخالفها مستخدمين المنهج الاستدلالي الترجيحي. ومن أهم النتائج التي خلصت إليها الدراسة أن العمل بالقاعدة لا يقف عند آيات الأحكام، بل يشمل آيات القصص وآيات دلائل القدرة وغيرها. ومنها أن بعض المفسرين رجح ما لا يتفق والقاعدة لاعتبارات متعددة بينتها الدراسة، منها ثبوت حديث صحيح أو سبب نزول صحيح يرجح معنى يخالف القاعدة، ومنها اعتماد بعض المفسرين على القراءات الشاذة في تقرير معنى يخالف القاعدة. الكلمات المفتاحية: التأسيس، التأكيد، أصول الفقه، تفسير القرآن. This study aims to explore the way interpreters use the rule of “the foundation is more important than emphasizing,” whether confirming or validating it, highlighting the causes of such violation. The researchers extrapolated a number of verses that some interpreters stopped at, analyzed their deductions, and indicated what is consistent with the rule and what contradicts it, using the weighted inferential approach. One of the most important findings of the study is that applying the rule does not stop at the verses of rulings, but rather includes the verses of stories and the verses of evidence of power, among others. Among them is that some interpreters gave preference to what does not agree with the rule due to various considerations showed in the study, including the proof of a true hadith or the reason for an authentic revelation that favors a meaning that contradicts the rule, and among them is the reliance of some interpreters on abnormal readings in determining a meaning that contradicts the rule. Keywords: Foundation, Confirmation, Principles of Jurisprudence, Interpretation of The Holy Qur\u27an

Simultaneous determination of paracetamol, caffeine and codeine in tablets and human plasma by micellar liquid chromatography

A simple, rapid, sensitive and eco-friendly liquid chromatographic method was developed and validated for the simultaneous determination of paracetamol (PAR), caffeine (CAF) and codeine (COD). The separation was performed on cyano column using a micellar mobile phase consists of 140 mM sodium dodecyl sulfate, 25 mM phosphate buffer and 10% acetonitrile at pH = 3. The analysis was performed at a flow rate of 1 mL/min and a column temperature of 30 °C under direct UV detection at 210 nm. Total analysis time was below 6 min. Baclofen (BCF) was used as an internal standard. The validation was performed according to the ICH guidelines. The proposed method was linear over the ranges of 0.2-100.0, 0.02-12.0 and 0.2-12.0 µg/mL for PAR, CAF and COD, respectively. The limits of detection were 0.031, 0.007 and 0.054 µg/mL and limits of quantification 0.103, 0.02 and 0.164 µg/mL for PAR, CAF and COD, respectively. The results show that the procedure is suitable for the routine analysis of drugs in tablet dosage forms. The method was further extended to the determination of the studied drugs in spiked human plasma with mean percentage recoveries of 99.61±0.530, 99.28±0.523 and 99.52±0.385 for PAR, CAF and COD, respectively

A Review of Non-Invasive Haptic Feedback stimulation Techniques for Upper Extremity Prostheses

A sense of touch is essential for amputees to reintegrate into their social and work life. The design of the next generation of the prostheses will have the ability to effectively convey the tactile information between the amputee and the artificial limbs. This work reviews non-invasive haptic feedback stimulation techniques to convey the tactile information from the prosthetic hand to the amputee’s brain. Various types of actuators that been used to stimulate the patient’s residual limb for different types of artificial prostheses in previous studies have been reviewed in terms of functionality, effectiveness, wearability and comfort. The non-invasive hybrid feedback stimulation system was found to be better in terms of the stimulus identification rate of the haptic prostheses’ users. It can be conclude that integrating hybrid haptic feedback stimulation system with the upper limb prostheses leads to improving its acceptance among users

Characterization of timing and spacial resolution of novel TI-LGAD structures before and after irradiation

The characterization of spacial and timing resolution of the novel Trench Isolated LGAD (TI-LGAD) technology is presented. This technology has been developed at FBK with the goal of achieving 4D pixels, where an accurate position resolution is combined in a single device with the precise timing determination for Minimum Ionizing Particles (MIPs). In the TI-LGAD technology, the pixelated LGAD pads are separated by physical trenches etched in the silicon. This technology can reduce the interpixel dead area, mitigating the fill factor problem. The TI-RD50 production studied in this work is the first one of pixelated TI-LGADs. The characterization was performed using a scanning TCT setup with an infrared laser and a $^{90}$Sr source setup

Accelerated Dynamic MRI Using Kernel-Based Low Rank Constraint

We present a novel reconstruction method for dynamic MR images from highly under-sampled k-space measurements. The reconstruction problem is posed as spectrally regularized matrix recovery problem, where kernel-based low rank constraint is employed to effectively utilize the non-linear correlations between the images in the dynamic sequence. Unlike other kernel-based methods, we use a single-step regularized reconstruction approach to simultaneously learn the kernel basis functions and the weights. The objective function is optimized using variable splitting and alternating direction method of multipliers. The framework can seamlessly handle additional sparsity constraints such as spatio-temporal total variation. The algorithm performance is evaluated on a numerical phantom and in vivo data sets and it shows significant improvement over the comparison methods