Human Rights Accountability Through Treaty Bodies: Examining Human Rights Treaty Monitoring for Water and Sanitation

Framing scholarship on human rights accountability through treaty bodies, this article examines the water and sanitation content of state human rights reporting to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In this novel application of analytic coding methods to state human rights reports, the authors trace the relationship between human rights advancements on water and sanitation and treaty body monitoring of water and sanitation systems. These results raise an imperative for universal human rights indicators on the rights to water and sanitation, providing an empirical basis to develop universal indicators that would streamline reporting to human rights treaty bodies, facilitate monitoring of state reports, and ensure accountability for human rights implementation

Remedial landscape for Hanford's nuclear future

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2013.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-103).The groundbreaking discovery of nuclear fission opened up new possibilities for generating power and resources for people. Nuclear energy was much preferred over fossil fuel because of its efficiency in production, availability of resources, and cost. However, the reoccurring nuclear disasters around the world provoke us to reconsider the future of nuclear energy. This thesis acknowledges the contemporary issues particularly surrounding nuclear waste contamination and the risks that associated toxins present to human health and the existing ecosystem. The risk of exposure to radioactive materials and groundwater contamination can be reduced with proven technological methods but the public perception of nuclear waste treatment remains a daunting deterrent, preventing people from confronting the waste management issues effectively. The thesis investigates ways to create new typology of remedial infrastructure where nuclear waste management technologies can co-exist with cultural programs; the new typology becomes an instrument that helps people to rethink the future of nuclear energy. The Experiential Bridge enables greater adoption of environmentally friendly nuclear waste treatment by exposing the process to the public and creating an educational experience for people. The Experiential Bridge not only treats toxins, but also serves as a pathway for recreational activity, and a source of education for the treatment of contaminated water and soil.by YuNa Kim.M.Arch

Weather and Crime: New York State

The present study assesses the degree to which temperature affects the crime rates in all 62 counties in the State of New York. Five different crimes (i.e., robbery, aggravated assault, burglary; larceny, and motor vehicle theft) for the year 2019 were selected from the Division of Criminal Justice Services of New York to be examined. The current study examined whether the rate of these crimes was associated with the changes in weather, with the assumption that higher weathers would lead to higher property and violent crimes, when controlling for the effect of various control variables. The findings suggest that the likelihood of all five crimes to happen was, indeed, affected by weather when controlling for the population, age, gender, race, and immigration trends of the counties. Relevant policy recommendations are suggested in light of these findings

Harm Reduction and Substance Use: Examining the Politics and Policy Impacts

This dissertation evaluates the impacts and political dynamics of harm reduction policies concerning substance use in North America. In doing so, this three-essay dissertation focuses on two substance use policies: medical marijuana laws (MMLs) and supervised injection services (SISs). The first two essays evaluate the unintended impacts that result from the implementation of MMLs in the U.S. The first essay evaluates the impact of state-level MML implementation and specific policy dimensions (i.e., dispensaries, patient registries, and in-home cultivation) in the U.S. on non-drug related arrest rates and crime rates for violent and property crimes. The second essay analyzes the effect of each MML policy dimension on the probability of cigarette smoking among U.S. adults. Considered together, these two essays highlight various unintended downstream impacts that need to be taken into consideration as policymakers adopt and implement MMLs. The third essay is a political evaluation of the barriers to adopting SISs in North America. The dearth of SISs in North America is puzzling considering the wealth of evidence suggesting their effectiveness in preventing overdoses and connecting injection drug users with treatment resources. Using the Canadian province of Ontario as a case study, this essay identifies the political barriers to adopting SISs and considers the limits and possibilities of establishing SISs in the North American context. Taken as a whole, this three-essay dissertation provides valuable information to policymakers considering the implementation of MMLs or SISs. Policymakers considering marijuana legalization should be cognizant of the impact of particular policy dimensions on arrest rates and tobacco use to mitigate additional costs that may outweigh benefits. Moreover, this research underscores the importance of understanding the political environment in which harm reduction policies are made.Doctor of Philosoph

Possible Skull Base Erosion After Prolonged Frontal Sinus Stenting

Frontal sinus stenting is widely used with the goal of maintaining nasofrontal duct patency after sinus surgery. The general recommendation is to leave stents in place for 6 months; however, prolonged stenting up to 6 years has been reported with no complication. We present the first reported case of frontal sinus posterior table and skull base erosion following prolonged frontal sinus stenting. A 57-year-old female presented with chronic sinusitis and nasal obstruction. Imaging revealed pansinusitis with retained stents in each frontal sinus that were placed 8 years prior. On the right, there was an area of skull base erosion at the tip of the stent. The patient underwent functional endoscopic sinus surgery with polypectomy. The stents were removed, revealing posterior table erosion on the right side but intact mucosa. Two months after surgery, there were no signs or symptoms of cerebrospinal fluid leak or other complications. Recent literature has suggested that prolonged stenting is safe; however, this case highlights a complication with potentially serious outcomes that can result from prolonged stenting. We recommend stent removal once stable nasofrontal duct patency has been achieved. If prolonged stenting is utilized, patients should be closely monitored and consideration should be given to periodic imaging to evaluate stent position

Automatic 3D City Modeling Using a Digital Map and Panoramic Images from a Mobile Mapping System

Three-dimensional city models are becoming a valuable resource because of their close geospatial, geometrical, and visual relationship with the physical world. However, ground-oriented applications in virtual reality, 3D navigation, and civil engineering require a novel modeling approach, because the existing large-scale 3D city modeling methods do not provide rich visual information at ground level. This paper proposes a new framework for generating 3D city models that satisfy both the visual and the physical requirements for ground-oriented virtual reality applications. To ensure its usability, the framework must be cost-effective and allow for automated creation. To achieve these goals, we leverage a mobile mapping system that automatically gathers high-resolution images and supplements sensor information such as the position and direction of the captured images. To resolve problems stemming from sensor noise and occlusions, we develop a fusion technique to incorporate digital map data. This paper describes the major processes of the overall framework and the proposed techniques for each step and presents experimental results from a comparison with an existing 3D city model

An essential role for a mammalian SWI/SNF chromatin-remodeling complex during male meiosis

Germ cell development and gametogenesis require genome-wide transitions in epigenetic modifications and chromatin structure. These changes include covalent modifications to the DNA and histones as well as remodeling activities. Here, we explore the role of the mammalian SWI/SNF chromatin-remodeling complex during spermatogenesis using a conditional allele of the ATPase subunit, brahma-related gene 1 (Brg1, or Smarca4). Not only do BRG1 levels peak during the early stages of meiosis, genetic ablation of Brg1 in murine embryonic gonocytes results in arrest during prophase of meiosis I. Coincident with the timing of meiotic arrest, mutant spermatocytes accumulate unrepaired DNA and fail to complete synapsis. Furthermore, mutant spermatocytes show global alterations to histone modifications and chromatin structure indicative of a more heterochromatic genome. Together, these data demonstrate a requirement for BRG1 activity in spermatogenesis, and suggest a role for the mammalian SWI/SNF complex in programmed recombination and repair events that take place during meiosis

Efficient Privacy-Preserving Matrix Factorization via Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Recommendation systems become popular in our daily life. It is well known that the more the release of users’ personal data, the better the quality of recommendation. However, such services raise serious privacy concerns for users. In this paper, focusing on matrix factorization-based recommendation systems, we propose the first privacy-preserving matrix factorization using fully homomorphic encryption. On inputs of encrypted users\u27 ratings, our protocol performs matrix factorization over the encrypted data and returns encrypted outputs so that the recommendation system knows nothing on rating values and resulting user/item profiles. It provides a way to obfuscate the number and list of items a user rated without harming the accuracy of recommendation, and additionally protects recommender\u27s tuning parameters for business benefit and allows the recommender to optimize the parameters for quality of service. To overcome performance degradation caused by the use of fully homomorphic encryption, we introduce a novel data structure to perform computations over encrypted vectors, which are essential operations for matrix factorization, through secure 2-party computation in part. With the data structure, the proposed protocol requires dozens of times less computation cost over those of previous works. Our experiments on a personal computer with 3.4 GHz 6-cores 64 GB RAM show that the proposed protocol runs in 1.5 minutes per iteration. It is more efficient than Nikolaenko et al.\u27s work proposed in CCS 2013, in which it took about 170 minutes on two servers with 1.9 GHz 16-cores 128 GB RAM

Monitoring Observations of the Jupiter-Family Comet 17P/Holmes during 2014 Perihelion Passage

We performed a monitoring observation of a Jupiter-Family comet, 17P/Holmes, during its 2014 perihelion passage to investigate its secular change in activity. The comet has drawn the attention of astronomers since its historic outburst in 2007, and this occasion was its first perihelion passage since then. We analyzed the obtained data using aperture photometry package and derived the Afrho parameter, a proxy for the dust production rate. We found that Afrho showed asymmetric properties with respect to the perihelion passage: it increased moderately from 100 cm at the heliocentric distance r_h=2.6-3.1 AU to a maximal value of 185 cm at r_h = 2.2 AU (near the perihelion) during the inbound orbit, while dropping rapidly to 35 cm at r_h = 3.2 AU during the outbound orbit. We applied a model for characterizing dust production rates as a function of r_h and found that the fractional active area of the cometary nucleus had dropped from 20%-40% in 2008-2011 (around the aphelion) to 0.1%-0.3% in 2014-2015 (around the perihelion). This result suggests that a dust mantle would have developed rapidly in only one orbital revolution around the sun. Although a minor eruption was observed on UT 2015 January 26 at r_h = 3.0 AU, the areas excavated by the 2007 outburst would be covered with a layer of dust (<~ 10 cm depth) which would be enough to insulate the subsurface ice and to keep the nucleus in a state of low activity.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, ApJ accepted on December 29, 201