Cleaner production for environmental conscious manufacturing in the foundry industry

The purpose of the paper is to illustrate application of the cleaner production concept so as to incorporate environmental protection into business performance. The study analyses areas pertaining to the foundry industry that impact negatively on the environment leading to unsustainable resource utilisation and suggests options for promoting sustainable development within the industry, with specific focus on a foundry in a lower income country (LIC)

Inequities in Social Determinants of Health Factors and Criminal Behavior: A Case Study of Immigrant Ex-Offenders

When immigrants arrive in a new country, they often discover that being an immigrant does not allow them to integrate easily into the new society. Immigrant offenders are more likely to engage in criminal behaviors due to inequities in social determinants of health factors as a source of strain.  This study was focused on utilizing the personal experiences of immigrant offenders to discover the various circumstances that contributed to their criminal behavior. General Strain Theory has been shown to be a useable theoretical model in explaining the relationship between race/ethnicity and criminal behavior. The participants in this study were adult immigrant ex-offenders in the province of Alberta, Canada.  The results of the study indicated a consensus among ex-offenders that there are social determinants of health factors such as stress, income problem, education issues, employment issue, and health risk behaviors that have led them to commit crime.  The recommendations presented below are divided into three groups. Recommendations include:  (a) future research in federal, provincial and territorial correctional systems, (b) identification of multiple risk factors that lead an individual to commit crime, (c) crime prevention strategies that help prevent criminal behavior for immigrants.

Assessing biological condition in small streams of the Puget Sound lowlands through collaborative regional monitoring

In 2015, the condition of Puget Sound Lowland streams was evaluated by collecting data for stream invertebrates, algae, water and sediment quality, and instream and riparian habitat. The study was designed and implemented as part of the Stormwater Action Monitoring program, a collaborative, regional stormwater monitoring program funded by more than 90 Western Washington cities and counties, the ports of Seattle and Tacoma, and the Washington State Department of Transportation. The goal of this long term program is to inform stakeholders on the status and trends of small streams within the Puget Lowlands and to track whether stream condition improves as a result of stormwater management practices in the region. A comparable number of sites were randomly selected inside and outside the Urban Growth Area (UGA). Benthic invertebrate taxa were used to calculate the benthic multi-metric index (B-IBI) and three stressor index scores for each of the 104 sites. All sites showed that sites within UGAs had poorer invertebrate condition compared to sites outside the UGA. Similar patterns were shown for algae, with the Trophic Diatom Index (TDI) indicating elevated nutrients inside the UGA compared to outside the UGA. We used boosted regression trees and a relative risk/attributable risk analysis to determine the most important human and natural factors influencing biological condition in the region. For the B-IBI, the most important factors influencing scores were December precipitation, watershed percent urban development, percent of watershed and riparian canopy cover, and stream substrate. For the TDI, the most important factors influencing condition were mean summer total phosphorus and nitrogen concentrations and watershed percent urban development. The intent is to use this status year of data to refine the sample design, and begin trend monitoring in the coming years with the goal to determine if streams are getting better or worse over time

Addiction Professionals\u27 Attitudes Regarding Treatment of Nicotine Dependence

The objectives of this study were: to establish the extent to which addiction professionals are willing to treat nicotine addiction concurrently with other addictions, and to evaluate what factors affect their attitudes. A 21-item questionnaire was developed and distributed to therapists, physicians and other mental health workers in different treatment settings in Southeastern Virginia. CD staffers own smoking histories were significantly related to: their perceptions of the impact of nicotine use, and how likely they were to intervene in patients\u27 nicotine use. Intervention in CD staffers own smoking behavior may increase the treatment of nicotine dependence in their patients

What\u27s working to restore Puget Sound? Connecting investments, actions, and outcomes

Throughout Puget Sound, long-term funding and investment in recovery actions have resulted in measurable improvements. Results from individual projects have been reported anecdotally in terms of improved water quality, habitat condition and wildlife, and salmon populations. Yet our ability to report these positive outcomes to funding agencies has been limited. This is because information and results are scattered across databases maintained by multiple local, state, tribal, and federal agencies. Data sets are typically well curated, but not connected. We have developed a prototype of a web tool that combines information about actions and outcomes to demonstrate the value of investments for Puget Sound recovery. Working across agencies and data sets, our approach summarizes data at the subwatershed scale (HUC12), tests for changes in environmental condition using statistical meta-analysis, and illustrates how restoration and management actions are effective, or not, to nontechnical audiences, including funders, elected officials, and sponsors. The web application is a regional prototype that demonstrates how data collected from multiple organizations can be connected to measure change over time and scaled over larger and smaller watershed areas

Translocal imagination of Hong Kong connections: the shifting of Chow Yun-Fat's star image since 1997

Anyone who is interested in Hong Kong cinema must be familiar with one name: Chow Yun-fat (b. 1955). He rose to film stardom in the 1980s when Hong Kong cinema started to attract global attention beyond East Asia. During his early screen career, Chow established a star image as an urban citizen of modern Hong Kong through films such as A Better Tomorrow/Yingxiong bense (John Woo, 1986), City on Fire/Longhu fengyun (Ringo Lam, 1987), All About Ah-Long/A Lang de gushi (Johnnie To, 1989), God of Gamblers/Du shen (Wong Jing, 1989), and Hard Boiled/Lashou shentan (John Woo, 1992)

Integration of Art Pedagogy in Engineering Graduate Education

The integration of STEM with the Arts, commonly referred to as STEAM, recognizes the need for human skill, creativity, and imagination in technological innovations and solutions of real-world technical problems. The STEAM paradigm changes the dominant “chalk and talk” lecture and “closed-ended” problem-solving orientation of traditional engineering pedagogy to a hands-on, studio-based, and open-ended creative learning approach, typical in art education. A growing body of literature has provided evidence of the favorable impact of situating STEAM in K-16 education. The long-term objective of this work is to promote creativity in engineering students by integrating learning methods and environments from the Arts into graduate STEM education. To this end, an integrating engineering, technology and art (ETA) educational model is developed and is currently being tested. This ETA educational model systematically merges technical instruction with studio-based pedagogy. The ETA model consists of three courses, which were piloted in the year 2017. In each course, engineering and art instructors and students collaborated for 15 weeks on design projects. These projects ranged from drones to architectural installations

Meta-Analysis of Project Effectiveness: Learning at the Regional Scale

Many regional monitoring programs are designed to answer questions about the effectiveness of restoration or management actions. How do we evaluate regional effectiveness of restoration efforts from project scale studies? Regional decision-making depends on results from local-scale projects. Statistical meta-analysis provides a method for determining which restoration actions are the most effective. Meta-analysis is widely applied in other fields to evaluate the effectiveness of medical treatments and educational programs. We define an effectiveness study as one in which monitoring data are collected before and after a restoration action. Many examples of effectiveness monitoring studies exist in Puget Sound, including projects to reduce pollutants or contaminants in rivers, nearshore areas, and sediment. Other examples include projects designed to restore habitat such as riparian forest or estuarine areas. Project success may be measured in terms of improved water quality, reduced toxics, or increased fish use. Meta-analysis provides a framework for comparing across studies and across restoration endpoints that use different response variables to measure change over time. To make these comparisons, meta-analysis standardizes the response variable by calculating a unitless statistic from each study, called Cohen’s d. The change statistic is calculated as the difference before and after the restoration action divided by the pooled variance. Cohen’s d can be used to identify which treatments are most effective and which variables most responsive. We compared a diverse set of projects to evaluate which types of projects are most successful in terms of measurable change over time. Because meta-analysis depends on the data available for the study, we vetted our results with regional experts who collect and work with these data

Application of Reflected Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS-R) Signals in the Estimation of Sea Roughness Effects in Microwave Radiometry

In February-March 2009 NASA JPL conducted an airborne field campaign using the Passive Active L-band System (PALS) and the Ku-band Polarimetric Scatterometer (PolSCAT) collecting measurements of brightness temperature and near surface wind speeds. Flights were conducted over a region of expected high-speed winds in the Atlantic Ocean, for the purposes of algorithm development for salinity retrievals. Wind speeds encountered were in the range of 5 to 25 m/s during the two weeks deployment. The NASA-Langley GPS delay-mapping receiver (DMR) was also flown to collect GPS signals reflected from the ocean surface and generate post-correlation power vs. delay measurements. This data was used to estimate ocean surface roughness and a strong correlation with brightness temperature was found. Initial results suggest that reflected GPS signals, using small low-power instruments, will provide an additional source of data for correcting brightness temperature measurements for the purpose of sea surface salinity retrievals