Digital Commons Network^™

Gender Responsive Budgeting And The Aid Effectiveness Agenda: Experiences From Mozambique, Nathalie Holvoet, Liesbeth Inberg

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines how gender-equality objectives have been addressed within the context of the Paris Declaration and related aid-reform processes. The focus of the article is on gender-responsive budgeting (GRB), an approach that is being increasingly advanced to increase the gender sensitivity of changing aid modalities, but which has thus far remained understudied. With our case study of Mozambique, we aim to fill this gap. It highlights the contribution of GRB towards increasing the gender sensitivity of national policy documents and budget processes with which donors increasingly (intend to) align, within the context of changing aid processes. Additionally, our study …

The Power Plant Mapping Student Project, Kelsey Tayne, Tom Oda

STAR Program Research Presentations

The Power Plant Mapping Student Project: Bringing Citizen Science to Schools

Kelsey Tayne¹, Tom Oda²

¹STEM Teacher and Researcher (STAR) Fellow, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132

²NOAA ESRL, Global Monitoring Division, Boulder, CO 80303

Emissions inventory (EI) is a conventional tool to monitor changes in anthropogenic emissions and can visually show geographical patterns of emission changes. The EI community is aware of significant errors in the geographical locations of point sources, including power plants. The Power Plant Mapping Student Project (PPMSP) is a platform designed for students in 4^th through 12 …

Analysis Of Semi-Distributed And Global Hydrological Models In The Central Tropical Basins Of The Gulf Of Mexico To The Effects Of Extreme Hydrometeorological Phenomena, Sara Patricia Ibarra Zavaleta, Mariana Castañeda González, Rabindranarth Romero López, Eduardo Castillog Onzalez, Alberto Brando Báez Camarena, Annie Poulin, Mathias Glaus, Robert Hausler

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

In the last years extreme hydrometeorological phenomena have increased in number and intensity affecting the inhabitants of various regions, an example of these effects are the central basins of the Gulf of Mexico (CBGM) that they have been affected by 55.2% with floods and especially the state of Veracruz (1999-2013), leaving economic, social and environmental losses. Mexico currently lacks sufficient hydrological studies for the measurement of volumes in rivers, since is convenient to create a hydrological model (HM) suited to the quality and quantity of the geographic and climatic information that is reliable and affordable. Therefore this research compares the …

Minimum Data Requirements For Integrating Urban Development And Urban Water Infrastructure Models, Christian Mikovits, Michael Mair, Wolfgang Rauch, Manfred Kleidorfer

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Data quality and availability is a common problem in many modelling studies dealing with regional, spatially distributed case studies. This is true for both, urban development models and urban water management models. As current research in urban water management more and more tries to benefit from an integrated view of the performance of water networks in the context of dynamically growing and shrinking cities, this problem of data scarcity increases. Having different applications with different levels of details available, the question arises which data (and which temporal and spatial resolution) is really necessary to be collected in a modeling study …

A Virtual Lab Environment For Improving Students’ Understanding Of Infiltration And Runoff Processes, Tom Vanwalleghem, Cristina Aguilar, Miriam Carpintero, Antonio Espejo-Pérez, Juan Vicente Giráldez, María José Polo

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Infiltration of water in the soil is a key process in the hydrological cycle and its understanding is paramount for students of any course related to Hydrology. Different equations exist, which, in function of boundary conditions and the level of detail required in any particular case can become complex to solve in an analytical way. Water movement in the soil can be described by the Richards equation, but its solution requires numerical methods. Therefore, amongst the most used ways of calculating water infiltration are the Green and Ampt method, Horton’s equation, Philip’s equation and the Curve Number method. In all …

Assessment Of Climate Change On Flood Dynamic With Deterministic Hydrological Model. Application To The Vugia-Thubon Catchment - Viet Nam, Ngoc Duong Vo, Philippe Gourbesville

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

In recent years, Climate Change is commonly known as global warming and associated with sea level rise. Such processes are some one of the most serious challenges facing the human beings in the 21st century. Under the impact of this phenomena, extreme climatic phenomena are supposed to more frequent and serious, leading to natural disasters especially related to water. Flood risk represent a major issue especially for developing countries where the economy as well as the adapted capacity against disaster are still poor. As shown in World Bank studies, with more than 70% of the population works in the agriculture, …

Interoperability Between Grdc's Data Holding And The Geoss Infrastructure, Volker Andres, Henning Bredel, Ralf Busskamp, Simon Jirka, Ulrich Looser, Manuela Schlummer, Adrian Strauch, Michael Utech

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) operates under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization as an international data centre for hydrological data and information on a global scale. Its primary objective is to support the water and climate related programmes and projects of the United Nations, its specialised agencies, and the scientific research community on global and climate change and integrated water resources management. The Global Runoff Database maintained by the GRDC is a valuable data resource and a subset of its data is contributed to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems’ (GEOSS) freely accessible Data Core. As …

Volunteered Geographic Information For Water Management: A Prototype Architecture, Maria Antonia Brovelli, Luca Dotti, Marco Minghini, Massimo Pancaldi, Giorgio Zamboni

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Driven by Web 2.0 technology and the almost ubiquitous presence of mobile devices, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is knowing an unprecedented growth. These notable technological advancements have opened fruitful perspectives also in the field of water management and protection, raising the demand for a reconsideration of policies which also takes into account the emerging trend of VGI. This research investigates the opportunity of leveraging such technology to involve citizens equipped with common mobile devices (e.g. tablets and smartphones) in a campaign of report of water-related phenomena. The work is carried out in collaboration with ADBPO - Autorità di bacino del …

A Resource Centric Approach For Advancing Collaboration Through Hydrologic Data And Model Sharing, David G. Tarboton, Ray Idaszak, Jeffery S. Horsburgh, Jefferson Heard, Dan Ames, Jonathan L. Goodall, Lawrence E. Band, Venkatesh Merwade

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

HydroShare is an online, collaborative system being developed for open sharing of hydrologic data and models. The goal of HydroShare is to enable scientists to easily discover and access hydrologic data and models, retrieve them to their desktop or perform analyses in a distributed computing environment that may include grid, cloud or high performance computing model instances as necessary. Scientists may also publish outcomes (data, results or models) into HydroShare, using the system as a collaboration platform for sharing data, models and analyses. HydroShare is expanding the data sharing capability of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System by broadening the classes …

Cloud Computing Solutions For Aiding Urban Water Management, Peter Cheung, Vinicius Battistelli Lemos, Bruno Andrade

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The management of Urban Water Systems is a complex problem to not only under viewpoint of water supply but also storm water and sewer systems. Growth of urban areas, rise of the social class and economic empowerment of population mainly in developing countries have caused significant changes under water cycle. Several tools are needed to help water managers in the decision making process. In addition, the availability of these tools may be helpful in providing the regulatory body of rational frameworks for the policy-level decisions. Considering last advances of Information Technology (IT), such as the development of multi-core processors, virtualization, …

A Foss Based Web Geo- Service Architecture For Data Management In Complex Water Resources Contexts, Maria Antonia Brovelli, Carolina Arias, Matteo Giuliani, Andrea Castelletti

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Advances in environmental monitoring systems from remote sensing to pervasive real and virtual sensor networks are enlarging the amount and types of data available at local and global scale at increasingly higher temporal and spatial resolution. However, accessing and integrating these data for modeling and operational purposes can be challenging and highly time consuming, particularly in complex physical and institutional contexts, where data are from different sources. This research focuses on the design of a web geo- service architecture, based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), to enable collection and sharing of data coming from complex water resources domains …

Model Validation Using Crowd-Sourced Data From A Large Pluvial Flood, Vedrana Kutija, Robert Bertsch, Vassilis Glenis, David Alderson, Geoff Parkin, Claire Walsh, John Robinson, Chris Kilsby

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

On 28 June 2012, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, was hit by a large convective storm delivering 45 mm of rain in less than two hours. Although not large on a world scale, the event had a big local impact. Widespread areas of the city were inundated and traffic was blocked in and around the city for about 6 hours. The following morning there was very small amount of visible evidence that the event happened. To gather data about the event through crowd sourcing Newcastle University organised and publicised a web page inviting public to upload their flood photographs, pin them …

Data Driving Better Decisions In The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin, Michael Piskur, Becky Pearson

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin contains approximately twenty percent of the world’s surface freshwater. The five Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario) provide drinking water for 24 million people and support industry, agriculture, and a world-class fishery and ecosystem. The region includes parts of two nations, eight U.S. States and two Canadian Provinces, many Tribes and First Nations, thousands of municipalities and local governments, and a range of stakeholders. These various governments and partners work across borders to manage and protect the region’s water resources and share data and information through a legal and political framework that …

Statistically Downscaled North American Precipitation Using Support Vector Regression And The Big Brother Approach., Carlos F. Gaitan, Keith W. Dixon, Venkatramani Balaji, Renee Mcpherson

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

We implemented a hybrid downscaling model using classification and regression trees and support vector regression with evolutionary strategies to statistically downscale precipitation occurrences and amounts from 16 points across North America. All the selected points belong to different climate regions. In addition, to evaluate the downscaling model’s historical and future performances we used daily precipitation outputs (from a high resolution ~25km grid spacing global atmospheric model) as predictands, and coarsened versions of the same high-resolution outputs from the nearest nine gridpoints (interpolated to a ~100km grid), as predictors. This experimental setup, known as “Big-Brother” allows us to use the high-resolution …

Levels Of Data Interoperability In The Emerging North American Groundwater Data Network, Boyan Brodaric, Nate Booth, Eric Boisvert, Jessica Lucido

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The Canadian Groundwater Information Network (GIN) and the US National Ground-Water Monitoring Network (NGWMN) connect data from a variety of sources including states, provinces and federal agencies. Data heterogeneity is a major challenge faced by these networks, one that must be overcome at five distinct levels: systems, syntax, structure, semantics, and pragmatics. This paper discusses approaches taken at each of the five levels to ensure interoperability between the Canadian and American networks. The result is an emerging North American Groundwater Data Network, which enables users to access data transparently and uniformly on either side of the shared border.

Linked Water Data For Water Information Management, Edward Curry, Viktoriya Degeler, Eoghan Clifford, Daniel Coakley, Andrea Costa, Schalk-Jan Van Andel, Nick Van De Giesen, Christos Kouroupetroglou

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The management of water consumption is hindered by low general awareness and absence of precise historical and contextual information. Effective and efficiency management of water resources requires a holistic approach considering all the stages of water usage. A decision support tool for water management services requires access to a number of different data domains and different data providers. The design of next-generation water information management systems poses significant technical challenges in terms of information management, integration of heterogeneous data, and real-time processing of dynamic data. Linked Data is a set of web technologies that enables integration of different data sources. …

Evaluating Alternative Water Allocation Policies Among Competing Users In Bow River Basin, Alberta, Canada, Wei Xu, Nader Khoshroo, Henning Bjornlund

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Demand for water from rivers and aquifers for consumptive use has grown greatly due to population and economic growth and changing lifestyle and dietary habits. Consequently, aquatic ecosystems, especially in semi-arid and arid regions across the world, suffer adverse environmental impacts of over-extraction. Historically, Alberta’s water allocation system has been based on the first-in-time-first-in-right (FITFIR) system, granting the preference to the licensees based on the seniority of their licenses. In recent years, scientists, policy makers, and water users have raised questions whether FITFIR will continue to be the most appropriate allocation system to manage increasing scarce water resources in Alberta. …

Effects Of 2d And 1d Modeling On Mapping Aquatic Habitat Quality, Rohan Benjankar, Daniele Tonina, Jim Mckean

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The distribution of aquatic habitat at the organism scale, i.e. 1 by 1m or smaller is typically predicted from local physical characteristics of stream flow, bed, banks and sediment characteristics and a set of biological preference curves. The flow properties are typically predicted with numerical modeling whereas stream bed and bank characteristics defined from interpolated DEM generated by topographical surveys and field observations. Information on the effects of flow properties and streambed morphology due to numerical modeling dimensionality on aquatic habitat modeling is limited. Two-dimensional (2D) modeling is becoming the most popular method to map micro-habitat but its application is …

The Political Economy Of Oil Spill Damage Assessment: Nrda And Deepwater Horizon, Matt Nichols, Judith T. Kildow Dr

Working Papers

The federal effort to quantify and capture non-market damages to coastal ecosystems from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Phase II of United States of America v. BP Exploration and Production, centers on the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) process. This paper makes the case that the current NRDA process has done a poor job protecting the public interest and resolving the issues surrounding oil spills from deep water drilling activities. After 5 years, the findings of the NRDA still remain sealed from both affected maritime communities and academic researchers until litigation is settled with civil and criminal fines …

The Gap Between Science And Policy: Assessing The Use Of Non-Market Valuation In Estuarine Management, Jing Guo, Dr. Judith T. Kildow

Working Papers

Estuaries, which are among the most productive natural systems on earth, provide an array of human welfare benefits if well managed. Non-market valuation (NMV) is considered a powerful tool, which can contribute to informed policies for estuarine management. More than 30 year of research valuing estuaries around the world does not appear to have had a major impact on estuarine management. Published examples of policy applications using estimates from these studies, are rare, leading to the question whether the effort and money spent on this research has been useful and worth the cost. Despite raising public awareness of the importance …

Creating Value Through Prizes For Undergraduate Research In Sustainability, Lynette Overby, Roger Jr. Strong, Mark Christel, Rebecca Pappert Maniates

Research Collection Library

Gale-Cengage Learning, a leading e-research and educational publisher, has established a successful prize program recognizing undergraduate interdisciplinary research into sustainability issues, in collaboration with several universities. The research awards offered by this program support institutional faculty and student needs in teaching and learning, particularly regarding the growing need to recognize interdisciplinary research. Collaborations involve Temple University, the University of Delaware, the College of Wooster, and, most recently, Pennsylvania State University.

Light Pollution Research Through Citizen Science, John Kanemoto

STAR Program Research Presentations

Light pollution (LP) can disrupt and/or degrade the health of all living things, as well as, their environments. The goal of my research at the NOAO was to check the accuracy of the citizen science LP reporting systems entitled: Globe at Night (GaN), Dark Sky Meter (DSM), and Loss of the Night (LoN). On the GaN webpage, the darkness of the night sky (DotNS) is reported by selecting a magnitude chart. Each magnitude chart has a different density/number of stars around a specific constellation. The greater number of stars implies a darker night sky. Within the DSM iPhone application, a …

Call For Papers: "Changing Families, Changing Women." Deadline Extended To: November 1, 2015

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

The Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought invites contributions for its next issue: "Changing Families, Changing Women." Deadline extended to: November 1, 2015. There is no denying that families, particularly in the West, are changing, and will continue to do so in the future. At the same time, women are also undergoing radical change. What are the implications for society as a whole and for each of us as individuals? While the traditional definition of family as a basic social unit consisting of parents and their children, considered as a group, whether living together or not, still holds, the interpretation and …

Distributed And Asynchronous Data Collection In Cognitive Radio Networks With Fairness Consideration, Zhipeng Cai, Shouling Ji, Jing He, Lin Wei

Faculty Articles

As a promising communication paradigm, Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) have paved a road for Secondary Users (SUs) to opportunistically exploit unused licensed spectrum without causing unacceptable interference to Primary Users (PUs). In this paper, we study the distributed data collection problem for asynchronous CRNs, which has not been addressed before. We study the Proper Carrier-sensing Range (PCR) for SUs. By working with this PCR, an SU can successfully conduct data transmission without disturbing the activities of PUs and other SUs. Subsequently, based on the PCR, we propose an Asynchronous Distributed Data Collection (ADDC) algorithm with fairness consideration for CRNs. ADDC …

Reforming Medicare-Financed Graduate Medical Education, Kate Maher

Journal of Contemporary Health Law & Policy (1985-2015)

No abstract provided.

The Standard Deviation: Attitude Transference And Perceptions Of Deviant Behavior, Candace Forbes Bright

Dissertations

This dissertation uses a three-article dissertation model to 1) compare how deviance is defined and what is considered deviant comparing the United States to South Korea using content analysis, 2) test socio-demographic and social network variables in the development of one’s approval of deviance using eleven ordinary least squared regression models, and 3) examine the association between social networks and approval of deviant behaviors using social network analysis. All three articles use data from a survey on perceptions of deviant behavior. The survey was conducted in English and Korean. The first article provides comparisons on how deviance is defined and …

Debtor's Empowerment: Muhammad Yunus And The Rhetoric Of Microfinance, Kaleb W. Brooks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the rhetoric of Muhammad Yunus as an articulation of a new governing logic, one that reconstitutes the concept of poverty and binds the poor to the apparatus of global capitalism through a new logic of micro-enterprise. Working within a Foucauldian critical framework informed by the rhetorical scholarship of Ronald W. Greene and Joshua Hanan, the argument proceeds by first paying careful attention to Yunus' work as constitutive of a new grid of intelligibility through which to view the poor and then demonstrating the application of this reformed discourse on "creditworthiness" in articulating a novel regime of commensuration. …

Heuristic Rules In The Field: Evidence From Royalty Shares In Scientific Teams, Reddi Kotha, Dan Lovallo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business

Using field data from a large U.S. technology transfer organization with over $50 million in annual revenue, we investigate four related issues regarding the sharing of licensing revenues by academic teams. First, we find that the main empirical regularity is a heuristic-based allocation of shares 1/n, equal shares to all unique inventors in a single invention team, and the use of the partition dependence (PD) rule, whereby inventors receive equal share within an invention and shares across inventions included in the same contract are equal. Second, when we examine the performance consequences of such equal sharing, we find it is …

Help-Yourself City: Market-Driven Planning And D.I.Y. Responses In Making The “Neoliberal” Streetscape, Gordon Douglas

Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning

Since the 1970s, the consequences of global economic restructuring and the rise of free-market “neoliberal” ideologies in governance have been visible in most every arena of social life, but are perhaps nowhere more visible than in urban space. The humble bus stop, a basic element of local transit service, is today often turned over in large part to private advertising interests and in the process has become both an indicator of neglect and a symbol of the commodification of public space. This paper examines such physical manifestations of neoliberal planning policy in the urban streetscape – spatial neglect and inequality …

Predicting Baseflow Using Genetic Programing, Ali Meshgi, Petra Schmitter, Vladan Babovic, Ting Fong May Chui

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Developing reliable methods to estimate baseflow has been a subject of research interest over the past decades due to its importance in catchment response and sustainable watershed management (e.g. ground water recharge vs. extraction). Limitations and complexities of existing methods have been addressed by a number of researchers. For instance, physically based numerical models are complex, requiring substantial computational time and data which may not be always available. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as Genetic Programming (GP) have been used widely to reduce the challenges associated with complex hydrological systems without losing the physical meanings. However, up to date, in …