Digital Commons Network^™

The Real Things: Photographing Scenes Of The 1960s, Nicholas Bromell

English Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Relationship Of Serum Fatty Acid Composition And Desaturase Activity To C-Reactive Protein In Japanese Men And Women, Kalpana Poudel-Tandukar, Masao Sato, Yuko Ejima, Akiko Nanri, Yumi Matsushita, Katsumi Imaizumi, Tetsuya Mizoue

Elaine Marieb College of Nursing Faculty Publication Series

Background: Although fatty acid composition in serum and desaturase activity, which alters serum fatty acid composition, has been associated with C-reactive protein (CRP) concentration in Western populations, no study has been carried out in non-Western populations. We examined the association of serum fatty acids and estimated desaturase activity with CRP concentrations in Japanese men and women. Methods: Subjects were 489 Japanese municipal employees aged 21–67 yearswhoparticipated in a survey at the time of a periodic health check-up. Serum high-sensitivity CRP concentrations were measured using the latex agglutination nephelometry method. Fatty acid composition was measured in serum cholesteryl esters and desaturase …

Anatomy Of A Nanoscale Conduction Channel Reveals The Mechanism Of A High-Performance Memristor, Feng Miao, John Strachan, Jianhua Yang, M Zhang, Ilan Goldfarb, Antonio Torrezan, Peter Eschbach, Ronald Kelley, Gilberto Medeiros-Ribeiro, R Stanley Williams

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publication Series

By employing a precise method for locating and directlyimaging the active switching region in a resistive random access memory (RRAM) device, a nanoscale conducting channel consisting of an amorphous Ta(O) solid solution surrounded by nearly stoichiometric Ta2O5 is observed. Structural and chemical analysis of the channel combined with temperature-dependent transport measurements indicate a unique resistance switching mechanism.

2011 Quinstar Use Survey, Hilary A. Sandler

Cranberry Station Research Reports and Surveys

No abstract provided.

Technology, Distribution And The Rate Of Profit In The Us Economy: Understanding The Current Crisis, Deepankar Basu, Ramaa Vasudevan

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper offers a synoptic account of the state of the debate within Marxist scholars regarding the current structural crisis of capitalism, identifies two broad streams within the literature dealing, in turn, with aggregate demand and profitability problems, and proceeds to concentrate on an analysis of issues surrounding the profitability problem in two steps. First, evidence on profitability trends for the Nonfarm Nonfinancial Corporate Business, the Nonfinancial Corporate Business and the Corporate Business sectors in post-War U.S. are summarized. A broad range of profit rate measures are covered and data from both the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (NIPA and …

Land, Poverty And Human Development In Kenya, Mwangi Wa Githinji

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The question of poverty has become central to the work of development economists in the last decade and a half. The 2000 World Development Report was entitled Attacking Poverty and the UN held a series of World Conferences in the 1990s, all of which addressed in some form or fashion the problem of poverty. Despite this and because of limited data there has been relatively little empirical work at the household level on determinants of poverty in Africa generally and Kenya specifically. In the few econometric studies that have been done for Kenya land has not been a significant determinant …

Small And As Productive : Female Headed Households And The Inverse Relationship Between Land Size And Output In Kenya, Mwangi Wa Githinji, Charalampos Konstantinidis, Andrew Barenberg

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Access to land and particularly its distribution has reemerged as an important part of both academic and policy discussions in the last decade, leading to the resuscitation of the debate on the relationship between size of holdings and output per land unit. Across the world, studies have suggested the existence of a decreasing relationship between land size and output per unit of land. The most-widely accepted explanation for this relationship is that households with smaller holdings tend to be labor rich relative to land, and therefore can achieve higher output through the increased application of labor. Despite the rich literature …

Evaluation Of Wind Load Integration In Disproportionate Collapse Analysis Of Steel Moment Frames For Column Loss, Simos Gerasimidis, C. Baniotopoulos

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publication Series

The design of steel structures, in most cases, depends majorly on the level of wind loads which are prescribed by codes and regulations and are used in the structural analysis due to the fact that steel structures being light and ductile systems are strongly affected from a slight difference in the values of wind loading. During the last decades, disproportionate collapse analysis has become of major interest mainly due to the increasing number of failures occurring in that pattern. Commonly accepted guidelines and methods of analysis have been produced, the most dominating of which being the Department of Defense Facilities …

Reconnecting People To Springfield’S Riverfront: From The South End To Forest Park, Nathaniel J. Bernard, Matthew S. Gallagher, Amanda Hart, Kyle J. Jackson, Corey E. Lammerding, Michael Naughton, Nicholas A. Petrouski, Jim P. Reichheld, Michael J. Ritacco, Matthew J. Silveria, Rebecca Leona Tran, Alisha L. Walls

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

This report documents the work of the Senior Urban Design Studio on Springfield’s southern riverfront. What is Springfield’s riverfront of tomorrow? The primary goal of the project was to develop a vision to connect the neighborhoods of the South End and Forest Park to the Connecticut River. What are new imaginative ways to engage the southern waterfront of Springfield as a place for people? How can a landscape engage water-ecology with both functional and sensual-aesthetic values?

Our proposals offer new planning and design strategies for this great location in Springfield.

The studio articulated four major design objectives:

1. Improving and creating …

Population 7 – Lyman Street Art Intervention, Carli Foster, Elizabeth Ann Englebreston, Eric Wojtowicz, Yiwei Huang

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

POPULATION 7 started as an experiment in the fall of 2011 as an Urban Art Laboratory “Art – Place – Tour” with the vision to make a tangible impact to the culture of public art in Springfield. At first sight art seems to be not existent in the public realm. We are searching for an organic, sustainable concept with the potential to grow from inside to outside. Our goal is to invite to a discussion about public art and art in general that is introduced through minimal but diverse, economical eventually temporary, site-responsive interventions. We see our art as personal …

Mcgrath Corridor - A Vision For The Future In Somerville, Ma, Youjin Kwon, Tai-Hsiang Cheng, Ryan Patrick Ball, Feiqiang Tong, Andrew Weir, Patrick Mcgeough, Nathan A. Frazee, Jennifer H. Masters, Kathryn Ostermier, Fangfang Wang

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Project Goals

This project seeks to create opportunities for green connections and city beautification along the McGrath Highway corridor. Key directives are: • Build greenway connections including pedestrian path and bike lanes • Increase open space • Minimize storm water flows and create on site infiltration through green infrastructure. • Improve tree canopy • Enhance economic growth and revitalization The studio’s primary goal is to plan this urban greenway project at multiple scales. The studio synthesizes information about natural features, recreation resources, and development patterns to create a green infrastructure network that addresses the unique problems and opportunities of the …

Transparency Without Accountability, Mwangi Wa Githinji, Frank Holmquist

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Kenya has been going through a period of political reform from 1991 when section 2A of the constitution that had made Kenya a de jure one party state was repealed. The reform followed a prolonged struggle by citizens both within and without the country. Their call for democracy was one that, post the fall of the Berlin wall, was embraced by western countries. Via diplomatic pressure and conditionality on aid, western donors played an important role in the repeal of section 2a, the return of multi-party elections and in the creation and reform of a number of political institutions and …

Business Cycles, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This note outlines and discusses some of the strands in the post-Keynesian literature on business cycles. Most post-Keynesians have focused on endogenously generated cycles, but the mechanism varies: some focus on the goods market, others on financial markets, the labor market, or political intervention. The merits of formal modeling of the cycles have also come in for debate.

Distributional Biases In The Analysis Of Climate Change, Peter Skott, Leila Davis

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The economic analysis of global warming is dominated by models based on optimal growth theory. These representative-agent models have an intrinsic distributional bias in favor of the rich. The bias is compounded by the se of revenue-neutrality in the allocation of emission permits. The result is mitigation recommendations that are biased downwards.

Public Debt And Full Employment In A Stock-Flow Consistent Model Of A Corporate Economy, Soon Ryoo, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper examines the fiscal requirements for continuous full employment. We find that (i) changes in the financial behavior of households and firms require adjustments in tax rates and public debt, (ii) the stability of the steady-state solution for public debt depends on the .fiscal instrument and the household consumption function, (iii) in stable cases, a fall in government consumption (or a decline in another component of autonomous demand) requires an increase in the steady-state ratio of public debt to capital, and (iv) the steady-state tax rate may be positively or negatively related to the level of debt.

Imposing A Balance Of Payment Constraint On The Kaldorian Model Of Cumulative Causation, Arslan Razmi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We combine two strands of Post Keynesian growth theory by imposing a balance of payments constraint on a Kaldorian cumulative causation model. The effects of external and internal shocks, and the degree to which cumulative causation comes into play depends on the exchange rate and capital account regimes. Exports act as the only exogenous drivers of growth only under a regime of fixed exchange rates and in the absence of relative price effects. Under flexible exchange rates, by contrast, it is internal demand that serves as the only exogenous driver of of growth. Moreover, regardless of the type of shock, …

Relative Mortality Improvements As A Marker Of Socio-Economic Inequality Across The Developing World, 1990-2009, Deepankar Basu

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Using cross country regressions, this paper constructs a novel distance-to-frontier metric for tracking broad socio-onomic inequality (including access of the poor to health infrastructure) over time for individual countries. Given the unavailability of reliable and consistent direct measures of inequality for most poor countries, especially related to non-income aspects of living standards, the metric developed in this paper can be used as an alternative indirect measure that is intuitive and easy to compute. To highlight its potential use, the metric is used to rank countries in terms of improvements in socio-economic inequality for the period since 1990. Notable examples of …

Can Asia Sustain An Export-Led Growth Strategy In The Aftermath Of The Global Crisis? An Empirical Exploration, Gonzalo Hernandez, Arslan Razmi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Many developing countries have attempted to pursue the East Asian growth model in recent decades. This model is widely perceived to have been based on export-led growth. Given that developed countries are likely to grow at a slower rate and be less willing to run trade deficits in the post financial crisis world, can this growth model be sustained? Using panel data for Asian countries, this paper contributes to addressing this question by distinguishing between different kinds of export- and tradable-led growth in order to more precisely identify the nature of growth in the pre-crisis decades. We find in particular …

Heterodox Macro After The Crisis, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Macroeconomics is in crisis and this creates openings for alternative perspectives. The dominant heterodox traditions, however, have shortcomings that need to be addressed, both to improve our understanding of the real world and to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the irrelevance of most mainstream macro. This paper discusses three examples of areas that need attention: (i) investment functions (where popular specifications lack behavioral and empirical support), (ii) income distribution (where key developments have received little attention) and(iii) the relation between income inequality and financial markets (where extensions of existing models may help explain financial instability)

Public Debt In An Olg Model With Imperfect Competition, Peter Skott, Soon Ryoo

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Fiscal policy is needed to avoid dynamic inefficiency and maintain full employment in a modified Diamond OLG model with imperfect competition. A distributionally neutral tax scheme can maintain full employment in the face of variations in .household confidence.. No variations in taxes will be needed if households correctly anticipate future taxes: the tax policy functions as an insurance scheme.

Positional Goods, Climate Change And The Social Returns To Investment, Leila Davis, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The economic analysis of global warming is dominated by models based on optimal growth theory. This approach can generate biases in the presence of positional goods and status effects. We show that by ignoring these direct consumption externalities, integrated assessment models overestimate the social return to conventional investment and underestimate the optimal amount of investment in mitigation. Empirical evidence on the influence of relative consumption on utility suggests that the bias could be quantitatively significant. Our results from a simple survey support this conclusion.

Increasing Inequality And Financial Instability, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Rising inequality affects the composition of asset demands as well as aggregate demand. The poor have few financial assets and their portfolio is skewed towards fixed-income assets. The rich, by contrast, hold a large proportion of their wealth in stocks. Thus, an increase in inequality tends to raise the demand for stocks. This generates capital gains, and these gains can fuel a bubble, as desired portfolios shift further towards stocks.

Wachusett Reservoir Contaminant Spill Modeling Using Ce-Qual W2, Cory S. Devonis

Environmental & Water Resources Engineering Masters Projects

This research studies contaminant spills in the Wachusett Reservoir by two dimensional modeling utilizing CE-QUAL W2. The Wachusett Reservoir, located in central Massachusetts, has a capacity of 65 billion gallons and is the primary water source for the metropolitan Boston area. There are numerous inflows and outflows to and from the Wachusett Reservoir, with the Quabbin Aqueduct supplying approximately half of the total water entering the Wachusett. The Quabbin Aqueduct connects the Quabbin Reservoir (412 billion gallons) to the Wachusett Reservoir and supplies water to maintain desired water surface elevations in the Wachusett during time of high demand and low …

Perchlorate Reduction By Sulfur Oxidizing Bacteria, Amber R. Boles

Environmental & Water Resources Engineering Masters Projects

Perchlorate (ClO4-) contaminated water is becoming a wide-spread problem as more sites are being identified worldwide. Biological perchlorate reduction is a promising alternative to conventional physical/chemical treatment processes and has the advantage of reducing perchlorate to the benign products, chloride and oxygen. A number of bacteria are capable of reducing perchlorate using a variety of electron donors including organic carbon compounds, hydrogen, iron, and reduced sulfur compounds. Previous studies in our laboratory successfully used a novel, sulfur oxidizing bacterial consortium (SUPeRB) to reduce perchlorate in both batch culture and in packed bed reactors (PBR). There were two main objectives of …

Sub-Daily Multi-Objective Models For Optimizing Hydropower In The Deerfield River, Kelcy Adamec

Environmental & Water Resources Engineering Masters Projects

This document is part of the Connecticut River Watershed Project, a federally authorized collaborative project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (US ACE), the Nature Conservancy (TNC), the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The project began in September 2008 with Congressional funding for this project with TNC and the USACE as equal funding partners.

The Connecticut River Watershed Project will identify management modifications for more than seventy influential dams in the Connecticut River Basin to increase environmental benefits while maintaining beneficial human uses such as water supply, flood control, and hydropower generation. Key …

Investigating Estrogenic Endocrine Disrupting Compounds And Their Disinfection Byproducts Within Drinking Water Treatment, Kirsten E. Studer

Environmental & Water Resources Engineering Masters Projects

Emerging public health concerns relating to the epigenetic effects of EDCs, along with the

reconceptualization of dose response curves, provides a compelling rationale for addressing

estrogenically active contaminants in drinking water. These environmental health concerns are

now known to have long lasting impacts, especially on fetal development. For this drinking

water research, the estrogenic EDC byproducts were identified and the treatment processes were

compared using the dose applied, the number of byproducts formed and the relative

quantification of the treatment byproducts. The analytical optimized method presented and

implemented in this research successfully determined the percent degradation of the parent

compound …

Investigating Estrogenic Endocrine Disrupting Compounds And Their Disinfection Byproducts Within Drinking Water Treatment, Kirsten E. Studer

Environmental & Water Resources Engineering Masters Projects

Emerging public health concerns relating to the epigenetic effects of EDCs, along with the reconceptualization of dose response curves, provides a compelling rationale for addressing estrogenically active contaminants in drinking water. These environmental health concerns are now known to have long lasting impacts, especially on fetal development. For this drinking water research, the estrogenic EDC byproducts were identified and the treatment processes were compared using the dose applied, the number of byproducts formed and the relative quantification of the treatment byproducts. The analytical optimized method presented and implemented in this research successfully determined the percent degradation of the parent compound …

Envisioning Yantian Urban Greenway: A Part Of Pearl River Delta Greenway System In China, Xiao Zhou

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Masters Projects

This master project proposes an urban greenway for Yantian district in Shenzhen, China. Various challenges in the selected area are analyzed including urban green space fragmentation, water pollution, high building density, lack of open space, singular land use and loss of cultural identity. A greenway solution is proposed based on field visit/study, literature review, background data study and case studies. Greenway theories and precedence study provide guidance on the selection of strategies to deal with those challenges in the urban area. Specific sustainable urban development concepts such as stormwater management, material reuse and mixed land use are adopted.

The greenway …

American Indian Reservation Schools: The Achievement Gap, Caitlin Daley

Commonwealth Honors College Theses and Projects

Census trends have made the link between salary and the level and quality of education very clear. Education is guaranteed to American Indians by the federal government through the trust relationship. There is, however, a gap in the achievement of students in schools on American Indian reservations and in national averages. Citing government documents, scholarly journals, and published books from experts on American Indian education, this paper argues that this achievement gap not only exists, but that it can also be largely attributed to the underfunding of American Indian schools, as well as a classroom atmosphere that does not account …

The American Indian Mascot, Carol Huben

Commonwealth Honors College Theses and Projects

The issue of American Indian mascots is one that has generated much controversy. This research aims to show that these mascots are harmful to American Indian people and others, and that the refusal to discard these offensive caricatures is the result of a complete disregard for native cultures and ways of life, generated in part by mainstream America‟s ignorance in regards to modern American Indians. This ignorance is partially due to the cultural appropriation practiced extensively throughout the United States from the colonial period up to the present day. This research aims to show that, because of the damaging effects …