Trends in Smart City Development

This report examines the meanings and practices associated with the term 'smart cities.' Smart city initiatives involve three components: information and communication technologies (ICTs) that generate and aggregate data; analytical tools which convert that data into usable information; and organizational structures that encourage collaboration, innovation, and the application of that information to solve public problems

The Future of Work In Cities

The latest report in our City of the Future series examines societal shifts and advancements in technology that are impacting the rapidly changing American workforce. The report outlines solutions to help city leaders plan for the fast-approaching future, while forecasting the economic viability of two distinct sectors – retail and office administration – in which a quarter of Americans are currently employed

Cities and Drones: What Cities Need to Know about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

NLC's municipal guide, Cities and Drones, is designed to serve as a primer on drones for local officials, providing insight into the recently released federal rules relating to drone operation, as well as offering suggestions for how local governments can craft their own drone ordinances to encourage innovation while also protecting their cities.Drones have the potential to revolutionize many industries and city services, particularly as their technology advances. There are many applications for drones within the public sector at the local and state level. Drones can be used for law enforcement and firefighting, as rural ambulances, and for inspections, environmental monitoring, and disaster management. Any commercial arena that involves outdoor photography or visual inspection will likely be experimenting with drones in the near future, as will retailers who want to speed up package delivery.However, drones also present challenges. There are some safety issues, for instance, when operators fly their drones over people or near planes. City residents often have privacy concerns when any small device hovering nearby could potentially be taking photos or video. The FAA's final rule on drones left some opportunity for city governments to legislate on this issue. Rather than ban them outright, city officials should consider how this new technology might serve residents or enhance city services

Local Agency Balanced Mix Design with Superpave Volumetric Foundation

Asphalt Concrete (AC) mix design has been a common challenge to provide sustainable roadways with high performance over their pavement service life. Several mix design methods have evolved with the same target of generating durable and stable pavements under various traffic and climatic conditions while considering the visco-elastic behavior of asphalt binders, which may alter pavement responses at a certain temperature and aging level . Current asphalt mixture design methods are structured around meeting a range of volumetric requirements. Although this allows for volumetric parameters to be monitored and controlled during production, it does not give much engineering insight as to how the mixture will perform in the field.The aim of this research study is to present for the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County (RTC) an implementation strategy to switch from Marshall mix design method to an optimized mixture design for flexible pavement following the Balanced Mix Design (BMD), using the Superpave gyratory compactor. Shifting toward to a BMD approach based just on performance testing, could be a precarious move for any agency considering new concepts in designing asphalt mixtures. Therefore, the design analysis adopted in this study was based on the balanced mix design approach, while considering both requirements for the volumetric properties and performance thresholds known as “Volumetric Design with Performance Verification”. Eight new mixtures generated in this study were designed to meet the Superpave volumetric criteria, and subsequently verified with performance testing intended to be related to the most prevalent distresses in Northern Nevada including long-term durability (cracking and stripping resistance) while maintaining a rutting resistance test that also provides additional moisture resistance data

THE ROLE AND REGULATION OF THE CAUDAL GENE IN TRIBOLIUM CASTANEUM SEGMENTATION

The embryo of the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum develops sequentially by adding segments in an anterior-to-posterior progression using a “clock”-like mechanism similar to that of vertebrates. Previous studies indicate that the oscillations of this segmentation clock are driven by a gradient of the transcription factor caudal (cad), which activates and regulates the clock. Knocking down the cad gene using parental or early embryonic RNAi leads to animals with only head segments. We hypothesized that progressively later embryonic knockdowns would produce animals with progressively more segments if the function of cad does not change during segmentation. To examine this, we knocked down the gene using RNAi at three different timepoints prior to segmentation: 4, 8.5, and 11.5 hours after egg lay (hAEL). We found that segment addition was affected for the two earlier timepoints as expected, but late blastoderm embryos (11.5 hAEL) did not require cad to add segments despite having very few segments already patterned. Therefore, our results suggest that cad is regulating segmentation in very early development only, and we propose that a different regulatory network is controlling late segmentation. Additionally, it has been shown that the frequency of the clock changes during development, hence we hypothesized that cad might be dynamically regulated by various transcription factors during different phases. We performed bioinformatics analyses using the MCAST tool to establish predictions of transcription factor binding clusters that might be regulating cad gene expression, and used these predictions as the basis to clone putative enhancer regions for yeast one-hybrid and cross-species transgenics. We infer that a change in cad regulation causes its function to change through development as we observed in our knockdowns

Injectable and Spatially Patterned Microporous Annealed Particle (MAP) Hydrogels for Tissue Repair Applications.

Spatially patterned hydrogels are becoming increasingly popular in the field of regenerative medicine and tissue repair because of their ability to guide cell infiltration and migration. However, postfabrication technologies are usually required to spatially pattern a hydrogel, making these hydrogels difficult to translate into the clinic. Here, an injectable spatially patterned hydrogel is reported using hyaluronic acid (HA)-based particle hydrogels. These particle hydrogels are sequentially loaded into a syringe to form a pattern and, once injected, they maintain the pattern. The applicability of this hydrogel in a wound healing skin model, a subcutaneous implant model, as well as a stroke brain model is examined and distinct patterning in all models tested is shown. This injectable and spatially patterned hydrogel can be used to create physical or biochemical gradients. Further, this design can better match the scaffold properties within the physical location of the tissue (e.g., wound border vs wound center). This allows for better design features within the material that promote repair and regeneration

LGBTQ+ Civil Rights: Local Government Efforts in a Volatile Era

LGBTQ+ issues at the local level pose some of the most pressing civil rights challenges in the current U.S.context. This analysis provides insight into what is taking place in major municipalities and how these efforts can be improved to bolster equity and civil rights for LGBTQ+ populations. At a time when identity, language, and public sector values are inherently intertwined and constantly changing, the following question is ripe for analysis: how are major U.S. municipalities addressing the civil rights needs of the LGBTQ+ population? To answer this question, an analysis of government websites from the top 10 U.S. cities by population is conducted, examining the policies, programs, and services that municipalities offer LGBTQ+ residents and the language used to frame these policies, programs, and services as expressions of power, representations of identity, and the website presentation itself

Constructing and Implementing Transgender Policy for Public Administration

Sex and gender are increasingly complex topics that prompt new policy and administrative responses within public agencies. As the federal workforce evolves, federal employment policy must accommodate the needs of employees who do not fit traditional sex/gender categories. One emerging area of policy targets transgender employees, particularly policy that guides the employer response throughout the transitioning process. This research seeks to answer the following questions: How can transitioning policy and implementation within federal agencies affect employees? and How should transitioning policy be crafted and implemented? This work addresses organizational behavior and management issues by presenting a successful case of a workplace transition. Interviews of an administrator guiding the transitioning process and one of the first federal employees to complete a transition while in a federal field office are conducted. Ultimately, this research explores challenges with emergent policy and suggests avenues for designing and enacting future transitioning policy

Digitizing Deliberation: Normative Concerns for the Use of Social Media in Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy as a form of citizen engagement and social media as a means to achieving greater citizen engagement have both received considerable attention in recent years; however, little attention has been paid to the way deliberative democracy and social media function together. The central aim of this research is to highlight the normative considerations surrounding social media in a deliberative democratic process. To do this, the article uses Iris Marion Young\u27s model of deliberative democracy that is rooted in inclusion, political equality, reasonableness, and publicity. Applying this model\u27s normative values to the use of audience response systems demonstrates that social media have the capacity to fundamentally shift the normative dimensions of deliberative democracy by changing the process itself. The broad philosophical and social-theoretical concerns related to the implications of social media for long-standing ontological and epistemological questions of achieving the public good and structuring deliberative democratic processes underlie this work