Removal of PFOA from Water Using UV Treatment, Chemical Oxidation, & Adsorption by Activated Carbon & Zeolites

The objective of this project was to evaluate the removal of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) from water through various oxidation and adsorption treatment methods. PFOA is a fluorosurfactant and is found in many firefighting foams. Even though the manufacture of PFOA has declined over the past few years due to its persistence in water and toxicity, there are still traces of PFOA in numerous water bodies. Treatment by chemical oxidation was performed with dichromate, calcium hypochlorite, sodium persulfate, potassium permanganate, potassium ferrate, and UV light. Adsorption with granular activated carbon and zeolites was also attempted. Adsorption proved to be a successful and promising technique for removing PFOA from water compared to oxidation

The (In)Ability to Develop Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas in Canada: A Literature Review

The Canadian federal government’s latest conservation plan is hoping to achieve protected area targets of 25% of the land and water by 2025 and then increasing to 30% by the year 2030. The federal government also intended to move forward with reconciliation efforts and put into practice the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Conservation targets will only be possible with Indigenous support and involvement and therefore in 2018, the term Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) was created to move towards a conservation model, which included Indigenous Peoples’ values and traditions. Unfortunately, some groups believe this process might potentially be a double-edged sword, because this places a colonial framework of conservation on Indigenous land, which could be perceived as colonial entanglement instead of an act of reconciliation. Indigenous efforts to conserve or protect ecosystems in Canada are lengthy processes and the purpose of this research was to synthesize written resources to gain a better understanding of what it means to develop and designate IPCAs as well as some common challenges. The research involved a systematic literature review of Canadian supportive documents and was complimented by one-on-one semi-structured interviews with four practitioners. These methods were performed to gain insight on the written resources and education tools used when creating an IPCA in Canada. Five key themes were generated from assessing 148 documents, namely governance, habitat, cultural and spiritual values, sustainable economies, and boundaries that were all highly interconnected with one another. Key results of the research concluded that the ability or inability of the development of a successful IPCA and its designation was the result of collaboration efforts between Indigenous communities, industry, and government(s). The literature suggests it is possible to achieve effective collaboration between parties through the framework of “Ethical Space” or using a “Two-Eye Seeing” approach

Movies as a source of non-occupational noise exposure

This paper examines the noise levels of movies and whether or not movie theater sound levels may be hazardous to audience members

What Explains the Gender Gap in Financial Literacy? The Role of Household Decision-Making

Research has shown that financial illiteracy is widespread among women, and that many women are unfamiliar with even the most basic economic concepts needed to make saving and investment decisions. This gender gap in financial literacy may contribute to the differential levels of retirement preparedness between women and men. However, little is known about the determinants of the gender gap in financial literacy. Using data from the RAND American Life Panel, we examined potential explanations for the gender gap including the role of marriage and division of financial decision-making among couples. We found that differences in the demographic characteristics of women and men did not explain much of the financial literacy gap, whereas education, income and current and past marital status reduced the observed gap by around 25%. Oaxaca decomposition revealed the great majority of the gender gap in financial literacy is not explained by differences in covariates - characteristics of men and women - but due to coefficients, or how literacy is produced. We did not find strong support for specialization in financial decision-making within couples by gender. Instead, we found that decision-making within couples was sensitive to the relative education level of spouses for both women and men

Volatility of Tetrachloroethylene on Cape Cod

Tetrachloroethylene (PCE) is a known volatile carcinogen that has been found in many groundwater plumes. This study investigates the levels of PCE in air samples taken from inside well casings on Cape Cod. Results show that there are traceable levels of this chemical in the collected air samples which could potentially pose a threat to those exposed

Enabling On-Demand Database Computing with MIT SuperCloud Database Management System

The MIT SuperCloud database management system allows for rapid creation and flexible execution of a variety of the latest scientific databases, including Apache Accumulo and SciDB. It is designed to permit these databases to run on a High Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) platform as seamlessly as any other HPCC job. It ensures the seamless migration of the databases to the resources assigned by the HPCC scheduler and centralized storage of the database files when not running. It also permits snapshotting of databases to allow researchers to experiment and push the limits of the technology without concerns for data or productivity loss if the database becomes unstable.Comment: 6 pages; accepted to IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing (HPEC) conference 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.492

Lustre, Hadoop, Accumulo

Data processing systems impose multiple views on data as it is processed by the system. These views include spreadsheets, databases, matrices, and graphs. There are a wide variety of technologies that can be used to store and process data through these different steps. The Lustre parallel file system, the Hadoop distributed file system, and the Accumulo database are all designed to address the largest and the most challenging data storage problems. There have been many ad-hoc comparisons of these technologies. This paper describes the foundational principles of each technology, provides simple models for assessing their capabilities, and compares the various technologies on a hypothetical common cluster. These comparisons indicate that Lustre provides 2x more storage capacity, is less likely to loose data during 3 simultaneous drive failures, and provides higher bandwidth on general purpose workloads. Hadoop can provide 4x greater read bandwidth on special purpose workloads. Accumulo provides 10,000x lower latency on random lookups than either Lustre or Hadoop but Accumulo's bulk bandwidth is 10x less. Significant recent work has been done to enable mix-and-match solutions that allow Lustre, Hadoop, and Accumulo to be combined in different ways.Comment: 6 pages; accepted to IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference, Waltham, MA, 201

Assessment of metabolomic and proteomic biomarkers in detection and prognosis of progression of renal function in chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is part of a number of systemic and renal diseases and may reach epidemic proportions over the next decade. Efforts have been made to improve diagnosis and management of CKD. We hypothesised that combining metabolomic and proteomic approaches could generate a more systemic and complete view of the disease mechanisms. To test this approach, we examined samples from a cohort of 49 patients representing different stages of CKD. Urine samples were analysed for proteomic changes using capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry and urine and plasma samples for metabolomic changes using different mass spectrometry-based techniques. The training set included 20 CKD patients selected according to their estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) at mild (59.9±16.5 mL/min/1.73 m2; n = 10) or advanced (8.9±4.5 mL/min/1.73 m2; n = 10) CKD and the remaining 29 patients left for the test set. We identified a panel of 76 statistically significant metabolites and peptides that correlated with CKD in the training set. We combined these biomarkers in different classifiers and then performed correlation analyses with eGFR at baseline and follow-up after 2.8±0.8 years in the test set. A solely plasma metabolite biomarker-based classifier significantly correlated with the loss of kidney function in the test set at baseline and follow-up (ρ = −0.8031; p<0.0001 and ρ = −0.6009; p = 0.0019, respectively). Similarly, a urinary metabolite biomarker-based classifier did reveal significant association to kidney function (ρ = −0.6557; p = 0.0001 and ρ = −0.6574; p = 0.0005). A classifier utilising 46 identified urinary peptide biomarkers performed statistically equivalent to the urinary and plasma metabolite classifier (ρ = −0.7752; p<0.0001 and ρ = −0.8400; p<0.0001). The combination of both urinary proteomic and urinary and plasma metabolic biomarkers did not improve the correlation with eGFR. In conclusion, we found excellent association of plasma and urinary metabolites and urinary peptides with kidney function, and disease progression, but no added value in combining the different biomarkers data