Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

It’S Art About Water Treatment! An Interview With Mallory Chaput, The Artist Inspiring Future Water Leaders-One Artwork At A Time, Swati Hegde

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

This article throws a spotlight on Mallory Chaput, an artist inspiring future water leaders to take up water careers. Through her coloring pages, paintings, and comics about the water treatment, Mallory is helping children re-imagine the water sector. Originally a landscaper, Mallory developed a profound interest in water and wastewater treatment and learned about it by visiting plants, talking to professionals, and studying engineering books. This article is a transcript of an interview with Mallory, featuring her background, her imaginative creations and her future goals.

Where There Are No Sewers: The Toilet Cleaners Of Lucknow, Sharada Prasad, Isha Ray

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

Enormous progress has been made in the global effort to provide safe and affordable toilets for the world’s poorest citizens since World Toilet Day was first declared in 2001. Significant strides have been made in “reinventing” toilet designs for low-income, water-short, un-sewered urban zones; celebrities such as Bill Gates and Matt Damon have brought this once-taboo topic into the open; and the Prime Minister of India – the country with the highest number of people still practicing open defecation – has publicly declared that his country needs toilets over temples.

Well over 2 billion people today lack access to basic sanitation ...

El Agua Es Oro: A Human Centered Solution For The City Of Cochabamba, Bolivia, Natalia Mendoza, Camilia Olmedo

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

The purpose of El Agua Es Oro (The Water is Gold) is to satisfy social needs, specifically for women living in peri-urban areas, with a more advanced efficiency. El Agua Es Oro creates an added value for people’s well-being by maximizing socio-environmental context and not just focusing on for-profit economics. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy to generate economic resources to sustain the impact that the organization seeks to achieve. El Agua Es Oro is a social enterprise based on the application of social innovation with the methodology and tools of a people-centered design, focusing on teenage girls and women. The ...

Climate Change, Differential Impacts On Women And Gender Mainstreaming: A Case Study Of East Rapti Watershed, Nepal, Anupama Ray

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

Women and water share a great deal of nexus in several ways. However, women have still minimal control over the management of water resources, making them more vulnerable to climate change. This paper assesses how climate change impacts differently across different women groups using an intersectionality lens, thereby exploring the situation of gender mainstreaming in water sector in three communities, namely, Karaiya, Basauli, and Dadagaun in Khairahani Municipality located in the East Rapti watershed, Nepal. In this perception- based study, we conducted three key informant interviews and household interviews with 45 women of different castes, ages, communities, education levels, and ...

Gender In The Water Industry One Man Of Transgender Experience’S Story, Ari Copeland

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

is a complex topic Most people often confuse gender and sex; Most folks don’t realize that there are at least 57 genders and gender is a spectrum Some people within our workplace and the water industry don’t identify as a man or a woman, and/or their gender is more fluid (gender-expansive. In our day-to-day interactions with others, we often assume someone’s gender based on their appearance, mannerisms, and other social cues that vary depending on the culture Additionally, assuming everyone fits into the gender binary (just men and women is often-times a barrier to being inclusive ...

Exploring Sustainable Degrowth-Based Adaptation To Climate Change-Aggravated Water Insecurity In Parts Of Rural India: A Gender Relations Approach, Nairita Roy Chaudhuri

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

This article reviews the theoretical concept of ‘sustainable adaptation’ to climate change and water scarcity using a gender-relations approach by answering the following questions: i) What is a sustainable adaptation to climate change? ii) Based on a literature review, how does gender interact with climate change adaptation to water scarcity and droughts in rural India? (iii) How do the concepts of sustainable adaptation, degrowth, and gender relations interact on the ground, pertaining to water justice?

The paper argues that climate change adaptation and development goals can harmonize only if they rectify root causes of vulnerabilities. For adaptation actions to yield ...

Women And Water: Lessons Learned From A Humanitarian Intervention At Igusi Clinic, Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, Rachel C. Svetanoff, Ifeoma Ilobodo

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

This article highlights the disproportionate impact of water scarcity on women and girls in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe. We emphasize one Zimbabwean woman's efforts to implement a sustainable water solution for a community of 20,000 citizens. Lumbie Mlambo, Founder and President of the nonprofit JB Dondolo, Inc., took action following reports that people in the community her father was aiding were falling ill, mothers could not carry their pregnancy to full terms, and infant mortality rates were rising. Before Lumbie's intervention, the only water available was contaminated by polluted soil. Moreover, the climate change-induced droughts and floods made the ...

Sop Of Be-04, Hiromichi Yamamoto

Standard Operating Procedures

The standard operating procedure of BE-04

Sop Of Met-03, Hiromichi Yamamoto

Standard Operating Procedures

The standard operating procedure of MET-03

Sop Of Met-01, Hiromichi Yamamoto

Standard Operating Procedures

The standard operating procedure of MET-01

Sop Of Met-02, Hiromichi Yamamoto

Standard Operating Procedures

The standard operating procedure of MET-02

Sop Of Met-04, Hiromichi Yamamoto

Standard Operating Procedures

The standard operating procedure of MET-04

Physical Models Of Living Systems Prologue: A Breakthrough On Hiv, Philip C. Nelson

Department of Physics Papers

No abstract provided.

Magnetron Sputtering Explorer14 Standard Operating Procedure, Hiromichi Yamamoto

Standard Operating Procedures

Explorer14 standard operating procedure

Improving Neural Network Robustness Via Persistency Of Excitation, Kaustubh Sridhar, Oleg Sokolsky, Insup Lee, James Weimer

Departmental Papers (CIS)

Improving adversarial robustness of neural networks remains a major challenge. Fundamentally, training a neural network via gradient descent is a parameter estimation problem. In adaptive control, maintaining persistency of excitation (PoE) is integral to ensuring convergence of parameter estimates in dynamical systems to their true values. We show that parameter estimation with gradient descent can be modeled as a sampling of an adaptive linear time-varying continuous system. Leveraging this model, and with inspiration from Model-Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC), we prove a sufficient condition to constrain gradient descent updates to reference persistently excited trajectories converging to the true parameters. The sufficient ...

Econometric Analysis Of Labor Income And Job Seeking Disparities In The United States, Shaolong "Lorry" Wu

Summer Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR)

In the labor market of the United States, a wide range of socioeconomic and demographic factors impact workers’ income and decisions to seek new jobs, which are two critical metrics of labor income dynamics. Studies of income dynamics have historically been examining major demographic and situational factors such as marital and family matters of Americans from the 1960s to 2000s. However, technological breakthroughs have drastically changed the landscape of the labor force and economy, and individuals face a more complex and diverse context. This paper recognizes the need to analyze the factors behind these two income dynamics metrics in the ...

Detecting Oods As Datapoints With High Uncertainty, Ramneet Kaur, Susmit Jha, Anirban Roy, Sangdon Park, Oleg Sokolsky, Insup Lee

Departmental Papers (CIS)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to produce incorrect predictions with very high confidence on out-of-distribution inputs (OODs). This limitation is one of the key challenges in the adoption of DNNs in high-assurance systems such as autonomous driving, air traffic management, and medical diagnosis. This challenge has received significant attention recently, and several techniques have been developed to detect inputs where the model’s prediction cannot be trusted. These techniques detect OODs as datapoints with either high epistemic uncertainty or high aleatoric uncertainty. We demonstrate the difference in the detection ability of these techniques and propose an ensemble approach for ...

Reconfiguring Non-Convex Holes In Pivoting Modular Cube Robots, Daniel Adam Feshbach, Cynthia Sung

Lab Papers (GRASP)

We present an algorithm for self-reconfiguration of admissible 3D configurations of pivoting modular cube robots with holes of arbitrary shape and number. Cube modules move across the surface of configurations by pivoting about shared edges, enabling configurations to reshape themselves. Previous work provides a reconfiguration algorithm for admissible 3D configurations containing no non-convex holes; we improve upon this by handling arbitrary admissible 3D configurations. The key insight specifies a point in the deconstruction of layers enclosing non-convex holes at which we can pause and move inner modules out of the hole. We prove this happens early enough to maintain connectivity ...

Verisig 2.0: Verification Of Neural Network Controllers Using Taylor Model Preconditioning, Radoslav Ivanov, Taylor Carpenter, James Weimer, Rajeev Alur, George Pappas, Insup Lee

Departmental Papers (CIS)

This paper presents Verisig 2.0, a verification tool for closed-loop systems with neural network (NN) controllers. We focus on NNs with tanh/sigmoid activations and develop a Taylor-model-based reachability algorithm through Taylor model preconditioning and shrink wrapping. Furthermore, we provide a parallelized implementation that allows Verisig 2.0 to efficiently handle larger NNs than existing tools can. We provide an extensive evaluation over 10 benchmarks and compare Verisig 2.0 against three state-of-the-art verification tools. We show that Verisig 2.0 is both more accurate and faster, achieving speed-ups of up to 21x and 268x against different tools, respectively.

Modelguard: Runtime Validation Of Lipschitz-Continuous Models, Taylor J. Carpenter, Radoslav Ivanov, Insup Lee, James Weimer

Departmental Papers (CIS)

This paper presents ModelGuard, a sampling-based approach to runtime model validation for Lipschitz-continuous models. Although techniques exist for the validation of many classes of models, the majority of these methods cannot be applied to the whole of Lipschitz-continuous models, which includes neural network models. Additionally, existing techniques generally consider only white-box models. By taking a sampling-based approach, we can address black-box models, represented only by an input-output relationship and a Lipschitz constant. We show that by randomly sampling from a parameter space and evaluating the model, it is possible to guarantee the correctness of traces labeled consistent and provide a ...

Improving Discrete Time Btyd Model With Covariates And Non-Parametric Priors, Zhangyi Fan

Wharton Research Scholars

Overall, the paper explored the discrete buy-till-you-die process by incorporating covariate effects and non-parametric priors. In doing so, the paper hopes to enrich the space of customer lifetime value modelling. Using a simulation-based approach, the paper found that models with non-parametric priors is capable of adequately picking up simplified parametric distribution shapes without drastically overfitting and offer some predictive improvement in cases where a multi-modal distribution exists. In addition, the paper also found that models missing covariate specification, when such effect is present, may generate systematic upward bias to the parameter values. Such bias will lead to a bad aggregate ...

Physical Models Of Living Systems New Chapter: Single Particle Reconstruction In Cryo-Electron Microscopy, Philip C. Nelson

Department of Physics Papers

This chapter extends Part III of the book Physical Models of Living Systems (WH Freeman 2015). This preliminary version is made freely available as-is in the hope that it will be useful.

Counting On The News: Data And Sentimentality. A 40-Year Text Analysis Of The New York Times., Angela J. Schmitt

Joseph Wharton Scholars

This paper set out to analyze trends in data usage within mainstream American news. Analyzing a sample of over 60,000 New York Times articles from 1981 to 2021, data usage, article subjectivity, and article polarity were measured. The purpose of this analysis was to test whether the prevailing narrative that the past 20 years is the ‘data age’ and that data usage is bigger than ever was true within the context of print journalism. Overall, current public confidence in mainstream newspapers is low and readership is decreasing. Thus, the value of journalists as collectors, interpreters, and presenters of data ...

Physics 516: Electromagnetic Phenomena (Spring 2020), Philip C. Nelson

Department of Physics Papers

These course notes are made publicly available in the hope that they will be useful. All reports of errata will be gratefully received. I will also be glad to hear from anyone who reads them, whether or not you find errors: pcn@upenn.edu.

Improving Classifier Confidence Using Lossy Label-Invariant Transformations, Sooyong Jang, Insup Lee, James Weimer

Departmental Papers (CIS)

Providing reliable model uncertainty estimates is imperative to enabling robust decision making by autonomous agents and humans alike. While recently there have been significant advances in confidence calibration for trained models, examples with poor calibration persist in most calibrated models. Consequently, multiple techniques have been proposed that leverage label-invariant transformations of the input (i.e., an input manifold) to improve worst-case confidence calibration. However, manifold-based confidence calibration techniques generally do not scale and/or require expensive retraining when applied to models with large input spaces (e.g., ImageNet). In this paper, we present the recursive lossy label-invariant calibration (ReCal) technique ...

Women Water Leaders In The Making: South Asian Water Leadership Programme On Climate Change, Sreenita Mondal, Mansee Bal Bhargava, Mélanie Robertson

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

The South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies (Saci- WATERs) a water policy research institute based in Hyderabad, India, launched the South Asian Water (SAWA) Leadership Programme on climate change in 2017. The SaciWATERs is hosting the programme in collaboration with four partner engineering institutes from four South Asian countries, and with funding support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada. This academic-oriented programme is aimed at facilitating the creation of a group of interdisciplinary women leaders in South Asia that share a common understanding of the crosscutting scientific and societal issues of water resource management. The four-year ...

Understanding Barriers And Challenges For Women’S Access To Water In Northern Rwanda, Megan Swanson, Helina Alvarez, Amber Sample, Brett Bruyere

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

Clean drinking water and sanitation have been acknowledged as basic human needs and rights by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly. According to the UN, water must be sufficient, affordable, physically accessible, and safe in order to meet human needs. In this study, a survey and a Water Source Mapping participatory method were employed to investigate a sample of Rwandan women’s access to water. Two hundred and seven (207) women were surveyed regarding water use and access, and results were compared based on education levels and membership in income-earning cooperatives operated by a local organization, the Gorilla Guardians Village ...

Eleanor Allen: On A Mission To Provide Safe Water For Everyone, Forever, Wh2o Staff

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

Eleanor Allen is a global water expert dedicated to helping millions of people access the safe and sustainable water and sanitation services needed to save lives, stay healthy, earn more money, and thrive. Eleanor is fiercely passionate about improving the state of the world with respect to water and sanitation. She has dedicated her career to this goal, first as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, then as a consulting engineer (at CH2M/Jacobs and Arcadis), and now as the CEO of Water For People. Eleanor has lived and worked all over the world. As a professional civil ...

Using Participatory Design To Develop A Menstrual Hygiene Management Intervention: Designing Wash Up! Girl Talk In Zimbabwe, Kim Foulds, Alyson Moskowitz, Abby Bucuvalas, Morris Chidavaenzi, Albert Ndanga, Silindile Sibanda, Neckiot Kagodo, Charity Mvere, Nobuhle Mlotshwa, Peter Hynes, Margaret L. Schmitt, Allie Carney

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

Globally, as more girls transition from primary to secondary education, there is a new generation of girls who will have to manage their menses in school environments. Few schools are designed with girls’ menstrual hygiene management (MHM) needs in mind and many girls begin menstruating without knowing what is happening to them. This lack of knowledge about menstruation is associated with profound psychological and reproductive health issues. As such, school-based WASH interventions, especially those focused on MHM, can improve educational opportunities, promote lifelong health, and enhance the wellbeing of children and their families. In Zimbabwe, these global realities hold true ...

Addressing Women’S Sanitation-Related Safety Concerns In Slums Of Maharashtra, India, Mehul Banka, Pratima Joshi, Smita Kale

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

Through this paper we explore women’s vulnerability during sanitation activities and the impact that household toilets have on women’s safety-related concerns. This study covers 4 cities in the state of Maharashtra– Pune, Pimpri- Chinchwad, Thane, and Kolhapur - where Shelter Associates has provided many slum households with toilets under its One Home One Toilet (OHOT) programme. A good part of the programme’s intention is to offer women an alternative to using their existing, inadequate public sanitation facilities, a problem that was highlighted during discussions with slum women themselves. Shelter Associates is a Maharashtra-based NGO established in 1993 that ...