Water and healthcare access disparities: Impacts on health, wealth and education.

Rural communities in the United States and developing countries face a common problem of access. Lack of clean water or medical specialists can be solved by current technology, but there is a lack of resources and understanding of the problems. Rural communities in developing countries have a lack of access to clean water. Expansion of current water infrastructure and sanitation facilities could be done, but these are large costly projects. The lack of clean water, however, has dire negative effects on child mortality, household morbidity and overall household earning potential. In the United States, rural communities face a similar problem with access to a medical specialist. These specialists are in high demand and limited quantity, and a rural hospital does not have the required resources to justify the employment of said specialist. The lack of these specialists leads to higher overall medical costs and much worse patient health outcomes. This dissertation investigates the potential positive effect when these disparities are reduced or removed. We will use a combination of methods (instrumental variables, difference and difference, synthetic control, etc..) to look at how access to clean water can improve household wealth ware indicators. We will compare two different modeling approaches to determine the best methods for modeling cost and health outcomes from reducing access to care disparities for stroke patients. We find in all instances that a reduction in disparities leads to better outcomes for the individual, household, and community as a whole

Wireless Local Area Network Performance Inside Aircraft Passenger Cabins

An examination of IEEE 802.11 wireless network performance within an aircraft fuselage is performed. This examination measured the propagated RF power along the length of the fuselage, and the associated network performance: the link speed, total throughput, and packet losses and errors. A total of four airplanes: one single-aisle and three twin-aisle airplanes were tested with 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g networks

Reducing Stress in 3D printed parts made with Laser Engineered Net Shaping

Thermal cycling and repeated melting/solidification cycles characteristic of 3D metal printing processes causes buildup of residual stress in 3D printed parts. Using laser engineered net shaping (LENS®), residual stresses are formed leading to deformation and possible cracking of the 3D printed metal components. The LENS process offers opportunities for rapid prototyping, alternative manufacturing processes, and repair of worn/broken components so it is important to be able to minimize the effects of residual stress. Work was performed to understand the benefit of substrate heating on reducing residual stress in metal parts made using the LENS process. Substrate deformation, and destructive methods are used to determine residual stress at various levels of bed heating. Components printed at a range of heated bed temperatures will be compared, simulations that demonstrate the effects of the heating will be shown, and results will be discussed

Dynamic Compaction Prepares Supermarket Site

This paper presents a case in which dynamic compaction (DC) was used as site preparation for a proposed supermarket. The site was located immediately adjacent to a steep, 15 ft. high slope leading down to the Hudson River. Test borings revealed subsurface conditions consisting of uncontrolled miscellaneous fill extending 10 ft. below river level. Stability evaluations indicated that the slope was unstable under rapid drawdown conditions, and placement of the supermarket at the crest of the slope further decreased its stability. There were also concerns regarding possible differential settlement of the supermarket due to the variability of the fill. Dynamic compaction was selected as a cost-effective way to create a more uniformly dense foundation material, and to improve the factor of safety against deep seated slope failure. Verification test borings were performed after both the first and second DC passes. Vibration data obtained during monitoring of the DC program is presented

Characterizing Clustering Models of High-dimensional Remotely Sensed Data Using Subsampled Field-subfield Spatial Cross-validated Random Forests

Clustering models are regularly used to construct meaningful groups of observations within complex datasets, and they are an exceptional tool for spatial exploratory analysis. The clusters detected in a recent spatio-temporal cluster analysis of leaf area index (LAI) in the Columbia River Basin (CRB) require further investigation since they are only derived using a single greenness metric. It is of great interest to further understand how greening indices can be used to determine separation of sites across an array of remotely sensed environmental attributes. In this prior work, there are highly localized minority clusters that were detected to be most dissimilar from the remaining clusters as determined by annual variation in remotely sensed LAI. The objective of this study is to discern what other environmental factors are important predictors of cluster allocation from the mentioned cluster analysis, and secondarily, to construct a predictive model that prioritizes minority clusters. A random forest classification is considered to examine the importance of various site attributes in predicting cluster allocation. To satisfy these objectives, I propose an application-specific process that integrates spatial sub-sampling and cross-validation to improve the interpretability and utility of random forests for spatially autocorrelated, highly-localized, and unbalanced class-size response variables. The final random forest model identifies that the cluster allocation, using only LAI, separates sites significantly across many other environmental attributes, and further that elevation, slope, and water storage potential are the most important predictors of cluster allocation. Most importantly, the class errors rates for the clusters that are most dissimilar, as detected by the cluster model, have the best misclassification rates which fulfills the secondary objective of aligning the priorities of a predictive model with a prior cluster model

Spline Modeling and Localized Mutual Information Monitoring of Pairwise Associations in Animal Movement

to a new era of remote sensing and geospatial analysis. In environmental science and conservation ecology, biotelemetric data recorded is often high-dimensional, spatially and/or temporally, and functional in nature, meaning that there is an underlying continuity to the biological process of interest. GPS-tracking of animal movement is commonly characterized by irregular time-recording of animal position, and the movement relationships between animals are prone to sudden change. In this dissertation, I propose a spline modeling approach for exploring interactions and time-dependent correlation between the movement of apex predators exhibiting territorial and territory-sharing behavior. A measure of localized mutual information (LMI) is proposed to derive a correlation function for monitoring changes in the pairwise association between animal movement trajectories. The properties of the LMI measure are assessed analytically and by simulation under a variety of circumstances. Advantages and disadvantages of the LMI measure are assessed and alternate measures of LMI are proposed to handle potential disadvantages. The proposed measure of LMI is shown to be an effective tool for detecting shifts in the correlation of animal movements, and seasonal/phasal correlatory structure

Master of Arts

thesisHistorians of the American West have often used the dichotomy of federal involvement and local exceptionalism to frame the patterns of Western history as well as the direction of Western historiography. To the most famous of early Western historians, the West offered the truest version of what it meant to be American and resulted from individual efforts that yielded positive national results. Yet, some more recent New Western historians suggest that the conquest of the West evidences the worst of what it means to be American and that federal efforts yielded negative local results. This thesis argues that the history of the Geneva plant in Orem, Utah illustrates a comprehensive view of the West as a confluence of federal, regional, and local involvement that produced dynamic situations only understood when considering these three powers. The history of the Geneva plant began as a response to federal initiatives, foundations placed by regional powers, and adaptations or rejections by local powers. It continued as locals refined their views of the plant and their relationship to larger national corporations while attempting to assimilate the plant and its Eastern owners. The Geneva plant ended as the local economy surpassed its influence, locals grated under the polluted skies it produced, and its Eastern owner relinquished control to local interests that could not afford to continue operations much beyond the new millennia

Smoothing Splines of Apex Predator Movement: Functional Modeling Strategies for Exploring Animal Behavior and Social Interactions

The collection of animal position data via GPS tracking devices has increased in quality and usage in recent years. Animal position and movement, although measured discretely, follows the same principles of kinematic motion, and as such, the process is inherently continuous and differentiable. I demonstrate the functionality and visual elegance of smoothing spline models. I discuss the challenges and benefits of implementing such an approach, and I provide an analysis of movement and social interaction of seven jaguars inhabiting the Taiamã Ecological Station, Pantanal, Brazil, a region with the highest known density of jaguars. In the analysis, I derive measures for pairwise distance, cooccurrence, and spatiotemporal association between jaguars, borrowing ideas from density estimation and information theory. These measures are feasible as a result of spline model estimation, and they provide a critical tool for a deeper investigation of cooccurrence duration, frequency, and localized spatio-temporal relationships between animals. In this work, I characterize a variety of interactive relationships between pairs of jaguars, and I particularly emphasize the relationships in movement of two male–female and two male–male jaguar pairs exhibiting highly associative relationships