Pre-filed testimony in support of the ten persons group by Nathan G. Phillips

I have two interrelated technical concerns with the Enbridge Model used by MassDEP to grant the air permit for the proposed Weymouth, which invalidate the air permit. I state these immediately below and elaborate on them thereafter. Rural Designation Ignores Coastal Site. Enbridge mischaracterized the site as “rural” when in fact it is a coastal, shoreline site embedded in an urban coastal community. This means the model cannot assess key meteorological phenomena important for pollution dispersion. Using an incorrect site characterization - even if surface meteorological measurements were made in a reasonably comparable location (Logan Airport compared to 50 Bridge Street, Weymouth) - means that the model cannot represent coastal/shoreline advection and incorrectly assumes that surface winds are uniform across a uniform surface rather than exhibiting sharp spatial gradients in surface energy balance and resulting atmospheric stability, winds, and air mixing associated with the water-land boundary. Shoreline Boundary Layer Development and Thermal Inversions Ignored. Since the Enbridge model is incapable of capturing shoreline effects it cannot assess the potential of pollution trapping through under-developed thermal internal boundary layers that may blanket residential areas. Moreover, MassDEP made no data collection or model validation across seasons, crucially ignoring winter coastal temperature inversions and resulting pollution trapping. Thermal and radiative inversions occur typically over vertical length scales of 150 meters, whereas the paired surface and upper air temperature measurements (from Gray, Maine, 185 miles away) used in the Enbridge Model are intended to and can only capture mesoscale effects, and cannot resolve crucial shoreline inversion events. The applicant’s consultant does not state what altitude it used for “upper air” measurements (www.mass.gov/files/documents/2018/06/11/algonquin-modeling.pdf) but according to EPA guidance these are typically several kilometers. The Enbridge Model mistakenly effectively assumes a fully-developed boundary layer condition and is thus unable to produce conditions that produce shoreline-induced looping or downwelling fumigating plumes that can expose residents to intermittently high concentrations of pollutants.https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vZdk_nbW7QwY8aQR9s8wDvbwATy0dj-izt6MP1Ef7PM/edit2021-02-24Published versio

Reducing the length of a Goldberg Based Personality Questionnaire using Item Response Theory & Confirmatory Factor Analysis : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Objectives: This study seeks to reconstitute an existing personality questionnaire by identifying the items that capture the best quality information as measured through item Response Theory (IRT). This process will reduce the length of this measure and increase its measurement precision. Method: A polytomous IRT model (Graded Response: Samejima, 1969) will be used to assess the psychometric properties of each item in this questionnaire and produce item level graphs in order to select the best three items for each of the 26 first-order factors. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) will be used to assess the model fit and unidimensionality before and after the IRT selections are made. This will illustrate the improvement gained through both the deletion of redundant items and the selection of high-quality items. Results: This questionnaire was reduced from 246 items down to 78 items with three high-quality items identified for each of the 26 first-order factors. The model fit considerably improved through this selection process and the reduction of information was minimal in comparison to the amount of items that were deleted. Conclusions: This study illustrated the power of using IRT for test development. The item selections are not only of benefit for the organisation that supplied the data for this study, but also the original developers as well as any other users of these items as they are freely available via an online source

What Cities can learn from Trees: Lessons in Urban Ecomimicry

Tree physiologists use a vernacular that translates amazingly well as a lens for understanding the structure, function, and sustainability of cities. Concepts of tree architecture such as efficiency, safety, vulnerability and their tradeoffs find parallels in our urban water, energy and food networks. In this talk I will compare and contrast the world of trees with that of cities and explore how urban planners and policymakers can learn from trees how to build more resilient and sustainable cities

Seeing the invisible: from imagined to virtual urban landscapes

Urban ecosystems consist of infrastructure features working together to provide services for inhabitants. Infrastructure functions akin to an ecosystem, having dynamic relationships and interdependencies. However, with age, urban infrastructure can deteriorate and stop functioning. Additional pressures on infrastructure include urbanizing populations and a changing climate that exposes vulnerabilities. To manage the urban infrastructure ecosystem in a modernizing world, urban planners need to integrate a coordinated management plan for these co-located and dependent infrastructure features. To implement such a management practice, an improved method for communicating how these infrastructure features interact is needed. This study aims to define urban infrastructure as a system, identify the systematic barriers preventing implementation of a more coordinated management model, and develop a virtual reality tool to provide visualization of the spatial system dynamics of urban infrastructure. Data was collected from a stakeholder workshop that highlighted a lack of appreciation for the system dynamics of urban infrastructure. An urban ecology VR model was created to highlight the interconnectedness of infrastructure features. VR proved to be useful for communicating spatial information to urban stakeholders about the complexities of infrastructure ecology and the interactions between infrastructure features.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102559Published versio

Evaluating The Merit Of Implementing A Safety Management System Into An Unmanned Aerial Systems Company

Safety Management System (SMS) implementation into small Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) organizations is only now beginning to happen. Because of the lack of research into this area and its cutting edge application in unmanned aviation, a look into the potential benefits as well as the differences from manned avation seems appropriate

Characterizing urban landscapes using fuzzy sets

Characterizing urban landscapes is important given the present and future projections of global population that favor urban growth. The definition of “urban” on a thematic map has proven to be problematic since urban areas are heterogeneous in terms of land use and land cover. Further, certain urban classes are inherently imprecise due to the difficulty in integrating various social and environmental inputs into a precise definition. Social components often include demographic patterns, transportation, building type and density while ecological components include soils, elevation, hydrology, climate, vegetation and tree cover. In this paper, we adopt a coupled human and natural system (CHANS) integrated scientific framework for characterizing urban landscapes. We implement the framework by adopting a fuzzy sets concept of “urban characterization” since fuzzy sets relate to classes of object with imprecise boundaries in which membership is a matter of degree. For dynamic mapping applications, user-defined classification schemes involving rules combining different social and ecological inputs can lead to a degree of quantification in class labeling varying from “highly urban” to “least urban”. A socio-economic perspective of urban may include threshold values for population and road network density while a more ecological perspective of urban may utilize the ratio of natural versus built area and percent forest cover. Threshold values are defined to derive the fuzzy rules of membership, in each case, and various combinations of rules offer a greater flexibility to characterize the many facets of the urban landscape. We illustrate the flexibility and utility of this fuzzy inference approach called the Fuzzy Urban Index for the Boston Metro region with five inputs and eighteen rules. The resulting classification map shows levels of fuzzy membership ranging from highly urban to least urban or rural in the Boston study region. We validate our approach using two experts assessing accuracy of the resulting fuzzy urban map. We discuss how our approach can be applied in other urban contexts with newly emerging descriptors of urban sustainability, urban ecology and urban metabolism.This research was partially supported by "Boston University Initiative on Cities Early Stage Urban Research Awards 2015-16" (Gopal & Phillips) and the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions. (Boston University Initiative on Cities Early Stage Urban Research Awards; Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2016.02.002Published versio

Tuning transcriptional regulation through signaling: A predictive theory of allosteric induction

Allosteric regulation is found across all domains of life, yet we still lack simple, predictive theories that directly link the experimentally tunable parameters of a system to its input-output response. To that end, we present a general theory of allosteric transcriptional regulation using the Monod-Wyman-Changeux model. We rigorously test this model using the ubiquitous simple repression motif in bacteria by first predicting the behavior of strains that span a large range of repressor copy numbers and DNA binding strengths and then constructing and measuring their response. Our model not only accurately captures the induction profiles of these strains but also enables us to derive analytic expressions for key properties such as the dynamic range and $[EC_{50}]$. Finally, we derive an expression for the free energy of allosteric repressors which enables us to collapse our experimental data onto a single master curve that captures the diverse phenomenology of the induction profiles.Comment: Substantial revisions for resubmission (3 new figures, significantly elaborated discussion); added Professor Mitchell Lewis as another author for his continuing contributions to the projec