Blueprint Buffalo Action Plan: Regional Strategies for Reclaiming Vacant Properties in the City and Suburbs of Buffalo

Over a period of about nine months, the NVPC team conducted interviews and gathered insights that have resulted in this report. During the study period, Buffalo–Niagara emerged as a region broadly challenged by decades of disinvestment and population loss, but also as a close network of communities singularly blessed with a wealth of historic, transit-friendly, and affordable neighborhoods and commercial areas. Building on the City of Buffalo’s “asset management” strategy first proposed in 2004 by the Cornell Cooperative Extension Association—and now formally adopted by the Buffalo Common Council as part of its comprehensive 20-year plan for the city—the NVPC team sought to reexamine how the revitalization of Buffalo’s vacant properties could actually serve as a catalyst to address the region’s other most pressing problems: population loss, a weak real estate market in the inner city, signs of incipient economic instability in older suburbs, quality-of-life issues, school quality, and suburban sprawl

The Structure of Cementitious Materials Produced by Alkali Activation of Calcium Aluminosilicate Glasses.

A comprehensive investigation, using scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive x-ray analysis, x-ray diffraction, and \sp{29}Si and \sp{27}Al magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, was conducted on the NaOH-activated blastfurnace slag system. Integration of the results from these techniques accommodated characterization of the unreacted glass, identification of the crystalline hydration products, and presentation of a proposed structure for the C-S-H phase. Crystalline hydration products identified by x-ray diffraction were CSH(I) and (C,M)\sb4AH\sb{\rm x}, and the proposed structure for the C-S-H phase consists mainly of imperfect layers of tobermorite. The structures of the hydrated phases were found to be closely related to that of the unreacted glass. Examination of the effects of time, temperature, and pH on the hydration process revealed influences on the degree of reaction only, with basically the same products formed in all samples tested. The results obtained from the NaOH-activation investigations are applicable to many alkali-activated slag systems, as manifested by the generation of similar characterizations in systems involving other hydroxides. Finally, the study was extended through the analysis of a perlite glass, the structure of which differs greatly from that of the slag, and which produces a P zeolite upon reaction in a NaOH solution. Once again, a strong relationship was discovered between the structure of the glass and the hydration products generated by alkali-activation

The Burge correspondence and crystal graphs

The Burge correspondence yields a bijection between simple labelled graphs and semistandard Young tableaux of threshold shape. We characterize the simple graphs of hook shape by peak and valley conditions on Burge arrays. This is the first step towards an analogue of Schensted's result for the RSK insertion which states that the length of the longest increasing subword of a word is the length of the largest row of the tableau under the RSK correspondence. Furthermore, we give a crystal structure on simple graphs of hook shape. The extremal vectors in this crystal are precisely the simple graphs whose degree sequence are threshold and hook-shaped.Comment: 19 pages; final version to appear in European Journal of Combinatoric

Greening US legacy cities: urban agriculture as a strategy for reclaiming vacant land

Repurposing vacant land for food production is expanding as a response to urban blight, food insecurity and food deserts. As municipalities integrate urban agriculture in their sustainability plans and zoning regulations, scholars are beginning to take a broader look at the benefits from this and other types of greening strategies. This article investigates current state of research and practice of urban agriculture as an emerging strategy for regenerating shrinking cities. It highlights key findings while offering observations on how public officials and practitioners can leverage this research to enhance urban agriculture as a treatment for vacant land

Effect of mixing and spatial dimension on the glass transition

We study the influence of composition changes on the glass transition of binary hard disc and hard sphere mixtures in the framework of mode coupling theory. We derive a general expression for the slope of a glass transition line. Applied to the binary mixture in the low concentration limits, this new method allows a fast prediction of some properties of the glass transition lines. The glass transition diagram we find for binary hard discs strongly resembles the random close packing diagram. Compared to 3D from previous studies, the extension of the glass regime due to mixing is much more pronounced in 2D where plasticization only sets in at larger size disparities. For small size disparities we find a stabilization of the glass phase quadratic in the deviation of the size disparity from unity.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, Phys. Rev. E (in print

Uncrowding algorithm for hook-valued tableaux

Whereas set-valued tableaux are the combinatorial objects associated to stable Grothendieck polynomials, hook-valued tableaux are associated to stable canonical Grothendieck polynomials. In this paper, we define a novel uncrowding algorithm for hook-valued tableaux. The algorithm ``uncrowds'' the entries in the arm of the hooks and yields a set-valued tableau and a column-flagged increasing tableau. We prove that our uncrowding algorithm intertwines with crystal operators. An alternative uncrowding algorithm that ``uncrowds'' the entries in the leg instead of the arm of the hooks is also given. As an application of uncrowding, we obtain various expansions of the canonical Grothendieck polynomials.Comment: 32 page

Promotion and growth diagrams for fans of Dyck paths and vacillating tableaux

We construct an injection from the set of $r$-fans of Dyck paths (resp. vacillation tableaux) of length $n$ into the set of chord diagrams on $[n]$ that intertwines promotion and rotation. This is done in two different ways, namely as fillings of promotion--evacuation diagrams and in terms of Fomin growth diagrams. Our analysis uses the fact that $r$-fans of Dyck paths and vacillating tableaux can be viewed as highest weight elements of weight zero in crystals of type $B_r$ and $C_r$, respectively, which in turn can be analyzed using virtual crystals. On the level of Fomin growth diagrams, the virtualization process corresponds to Krattenthaler's blow up construction. One of the motivations for finding rotation invariant diagrammatic bases such as chord diagrams is the cyclic sieving phenomenon. Indeed, we give a cyclic sieving phenomenon on $r$-fans of Dyck paths and vacillating tableaux using the promotion action.Comment: 40 pages, 13 figure

Digital Orthopaedics: A Glimpse Into the Future in the Midst of a Pandemic.

BackgroundThe response to COVID-19 catalyzed the adoption and integration of digital health tools into the health care delivery model for musculoskeletal patients. The change, suspension, or relaxation of Medicare and federal guidelines enabled the rapid implementation of these technologies. The expansion of payment models for virtual care facilitated its rapid adoption. The authors aim to provide several examples of digital health solutions utilized to manage orthopedic patients during the pandemic and discuss what features of these technologies are likely to continue to provide value to patients and clinicians following its resolution.ConclusionThe widespread adoption of new technologies enabling providers to care for patients remotely has the potential to permanently change the expectations of all stakeholders about the way care is provided in orthopedics. The new era of Digital Orthopaedics will see a gradual and nondisruptive integration of technologies that support the patient's journey through the successful management of their musculoskeletal disease

Early detection of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis infection in cattle with multiplex-bead based immunoassays

Johne’s Disease (JD), caused by Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP), results in significant economic loss to livestock production. The early detection of MAP infection in animals with extant serological assays has remained challenging due to the low sensitivity of commercially available ELISA tests, a fact that has hampered the development of effective JD control programs. Our recent protein microarray-based studies identified several promising candidate antigens that are immunogenic during different stages of MAP infection. To evaluate these antigens for use in diagnostic assays and reliably identify animals with MAP infection, a multiplex (Luminex®) assay was developed using color-coded flourescent beads coupled to 6 MAP recombinant proteins and applied to screen 180 serum and 90 milk samples from cows at different stages of MAP infection including negative (NL), fecal test positive/ELISA negative (F+E-), and fecal positive/ELISA positive (F+E+). The results show that while serum antibody reactivities to each of the 6 anti-gens were highest in F+E+ group, antibody reactivity to three of the six antigens were identified in the F+E- group, suggesting that these three antigens are expressed and provoke antibody responses during the early infection stages with MAP. Further, antibodies against all six antigens were elevated in milk samples from both the F+E- and F+E+ groups in comparison to the NL group (

pGQL: A probabilistic graphical query language for gene expression time courses

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Timeboxes are graphical user interface widgets that were proposed to specify queries on time course data. As queries can be very easily defined, an exploratory analysis of time course data is greatly facilitated. While timeboxes are effective, they have no provisions for dealing with noisy data or data with fluctuations along the time axis, which is very common in many applications. In particular, this is true for the analysis of gene expression time courses, which are mostly derived from noisy microarray measurements at few unevenly sampled time points. From a data mining point of view the robust handling of data through a sound statistical model is of great importance.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We propose probabilistic timeboxes, which correspond to a specific class of Hidden Markov Models, that constitutes an established method in data mining. Since HMMs are a particular class of probabilistic graphical models we call our method Probabilistic Graphical Query Language. Its implementation was realized in the free software package pGQL. We evaluate its effectiveness in exploratory analysis on a yeast sporulation data set.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We introduce a new approach to define dynamic, statistical queries on time course data. It supports an interactive exploration of reasonably large amounts of data and enables users without expert knowledge to specify fairly complex statistical models with ease. The expressivity of our approach is by its statistical nature greater and more robust with respect to amplitude and frequency fluctuation than the prior, deterministic timeboxes.</p