For the Love of Land and People: An Evaluation of The Food Project as an Empowering Youth Development Program

For the Love of Land and People uses youth experiences to examine The Food Project, a youth development and urban agriculture organization from the Greater Boston area. Both youth experience and program structures are viewed through the framework of Critical Youth Empowerment in order to analyze how youth experience empowerment and personal growth in The Food Project\u27s youth programs. This study finds that The Food Project youth programs demonstrate effective empowerment because they successfully create safe spaces, engage youth in work that is meaningful to them, and give youth the confidence and skills to effect change in their world

Interaction of crippling and torsional-flexural instabilities for centrally loaded columns

Empirical technique predicts failure loads for centrally loaded columns with thin-walled, open cross sections. Interaction of two failure modes is predicted by modification of the Johnson-Euler equation

Fire safety in buildings

Many buildings, in many countries, throughout the world have substandard fire safety features. This discussion is restricted to hotels and hostels, which are often the only types of buildings readily accessible by visitors to a country. It attempts to explore some of the difficulties in that many building regulatory agents in some countries are not ensuring all buildings are safe from fire. It recommends that in the absence of fully safe buildings from the statutory approval process, private consortia of building owners should be initiating their own safety checklists

Deposit-Refund Systems in Practice and Theory

A deposit-refund system combines a tax on product consumption with a rebate when the product or its packaging is returned for recycling. Deposit-refunds are used for beverage containers, lead-acid batteries, motor oil, tires, various hazardous materials, electronics, and more. In addition, researchers have shown that the approach can be used to address many other environmental problems beyond waste disposal. By imposing an up-front fee on consumption and subsidizing “green” inputs and mitigation activities, a deposit-refund may be able to efficiently control pollution in much the same way as a Pigovian tax. Theoretical models have shown that alternative waste disposal policies, such as virgin materials taxes, advance disposal fees, recycled content standards, and recycling subsidies are inferior to a deposit-refund. These results have been corroborated in calibrated models of U.S. waste and recycling. And in theoretical models that consider joint environmental problems and product design considerations, the deposit-refund continues to have much to recommend it as a component of an overall socially optimal set of policies. More empirical research into deposit-refund systems is needed, particularly the upstream systems used for many products. In these systems, the processors or collectors of recyclables—rather than consumers—receive the refund. Upstream systems may have lower transaction costs and better environmental outcomes than traditional downstream systems.deposit-refund, waste disposal, recycling, source reduction, illegal dumping, Pigovian tax, advance disposal fee, upstream pollution, design for environment

Transient thermal stress recovery for structural models

A method for computing transient thermal stress vectors from temperature vectors is described. The three step procedure involves the use of NASTRAN to generate an influence coefficient matrix which relates temperatures to stresses in the structural model. The transient thermal stresses are then recovered and sorted for maximum and minimum values. Verification data for the procedure is also provided

Modelling and managing reliability growth during the engineering design process

[This is a keynote speech presented at the 2nd International Conference on Design Engineering and Science, discussing modelling and managing reliability growth during the engineering process.] Reliability is vital for safe and efficient operation of systems. Decisions about the configuration and selection of parts within a system, and the development activities to prove the chosen design, will influence the inherent reliability. Modelling provides a mechanism for explicating the relationship between the engineering activities and the statistical measures of reliability so that useful estimates of reliability can be obtained. Reliability modelling should be aligned to support the decisions taken during design and development. We examine why and how a reliability growth model can be structured, the type of data required and available to populate them, the selection of relevant summary measures, the process for updating estimates and feeding back into design to support planning decisions. The modelling process described is informed by our theoretical background in management science and our practical experience of working with UK industry

Multivariate reliability modelling with empirical Bayes inference

Recent developments in technology permit detailed descriptions of system performance to be collected and stored. Consequently, more data are available about the occurrence, or non-occurrence, of events across a range of classes through time. Typically this implies that reliability analysis has more information about the exposure history of a system within different classes of events. For highly reliable systems, there may be relatively few failure events. Thus there is a need to develop statistical inference to support reliability estimation when there is a low ratio of failures relative to event classes. In this paper we show how Empirical Bayes methods can be used to estimate a multivariate reliability function for a system by modelling the vector of times to realise each failure root cause