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Background Obesity rates are recognized to be at epidemic levels throughout much of the world, posing significant threats to both the health and financial security of many nations. The causes of obesity can vary but are often complex and multifactorial, and while many contributing factors can be targeted for intervention, an understanding of where these interventions are needed is necessary in order to implement effective policy. This has prompted an interest in incorporating spatial context into the analysis and modeling of obesity determinants, especially through the use of geographically weighted regression (GWR). Method This paper provides a critical review of previous GWR models of obesogenic processes and then presents a novel application of multiscale (M)GWR using the Phoenix metropolitan area as a case study. Results Though the MGWR model consumes more degrees of freedom than OLS, it consumes far fewer degrees of freedom than GWR, ultimately resulting in a more nuanced analysis that can incorporate spatial context but does not force every relationship to become local a priori . In addition, MGWR yields a lower AIC and AICc value than GWR and is also less prone to issues of multicollinearity. Consequently, MGWR is able to improve our understanding of the factors that influence obesity rates by providing determinant-specific spatial contexts. Conclusion The results show that a mix of global and local processes are able to best model obesity rates and that MGWR provides a richer yet more parsimonious quantitative representation of obesity rate determinants compared to both GWR and ordinary least squares.

With over half of the world's population living in cities, there is mounting evidence indicating that investments in urban sustainability can deliver high returns on socioeconomic and environmental fronts. Current scholarship on urban agriculture (UA) reports a wide range of benefits which have been shown to vary with the scale and type of benefit examined. Notably, most city-scale studies do not align benefits of UA with locally meaningful goals. We fill this gap by conducting a city-scale analysis for Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the USA by population, and evaluate these benefits based on their ability to contribute to select desired outcomes specified in Phoenix's 2050 Sustainability Goals: the elimination of food deserts, provision of green open space, and energy and CO2 emissions savings from buildings. We consider three types of surfaces for UA deployment-undeveloped vacant lots, flat rooftops, and building façades-and find that the existing building stock provides 71% of available UA space in the study area. The estimated total food supply from UA is 183 000 tons per year, providing local produce in all existing food deserts of Phoenix, and meeting 90% of current annual consumption of fresh produce based on national per capita consumption patterns. UA would also add green open space and reduce by 60% the number of block groups underserved by public parks. Rooftop deployment of UA could reduce energy use in buildings and has the potential to displace more than 50 000 tons of CO2 per year. Our work highlights the importance of combining a data-driven framework with local information to address place-based sustainability goals and can be used as a template for city-scale evaluations of UA in alternate settings.

Injection of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, a form of solar geoengineering, has been proposed as a means to reduce some climatic changes by decreasing net anthropogenic radiative forcing. The cost and technical feasibility of forming aerosols with the appropriate size distribution are uncertain. We examine the possibility of producing the relevant sulfur species, SO2 or SO3, by in situ conversion from elemental sulfur onboard an aircraft. We provide a first‐order engineering analysis of an open cycle chemical plant for in situ sulfur to sulfate conversion using a Brayton cycle combustor and a catalytic converter. We find that such a plant could have sufficiently low mass that the overall requirement for mass transport to the lower stratosphere may be reduced by roughly a factor of 2. All else equal, this suggests that—for a given radiative forcing—the cost of delivering sulfate aerosols may be nearly halved. Beyond reducing cost, the use of elemental sulfur reduces operational health and safety risks and should therefore reduce environmental side effects associated with delivery. Reduction in cost is not necessarily beneficial as it reduces practical barriers to deployment, increasing the urgency of questions concerning the efficacy, risks, and governance of solar geoengineering. Key Points This study describes a method of converting sulfur to sulfur oxides onboard an aircraft to form stratospheric sulfate aerosols for solar geoengineering Onboard conversion could roughly halve the mass transported to the stratosphere for a given radiative forcing, substantially reducing costs Direct costs of deployment are likely much smaller than indirect costs and should play a minor role in decisions about geoengineering

Urban community gardens hold the potential to serve as a form of multifunctional green infrastructure to advance urban sustainability goals through the array of ecosystem services they afford. While a substantial body of literature has been produced that is dedicated to the study of these services (e.g., providing fresh produce, promoting socialization, and enhancing urban biodiversity), less attention has been paid to the strategic planning of urban community gardens, particularly in an expansive urban setting, and in the context of the co-benefit of mitigating extreme heat. The research presented in this dissertation explores the potential of community gardens as a form of multifunctional green infrastructure and how these spaces can be planned in a manner that strives to be both systematic and transparent. It focuses on methods that can (1) be employed to identify vacant or open land plots for large metropolitan areas and (2) explores multicriteria decision analysis and (3) optimization approaches that assist in the selection of “green” spaces that serve as both provisioning (a source of fresh fruits and vegetables) and regulating (heat mitigation) services, among others. This exploration involves three individual studies on each of these themes, using the Phoenix metropolitan area as its analytical backdrop. The major lessons from this piece are: (1) remotely sensed data can be effectively paired with cadastral data to identify thousands of vacant parcels for potential greening at a metropolitan scale; (2) a stakeholder-weighted multicriteria decision analysis for community garden planning can serve as an effective decision support tool, but participants' conceptualization of garden spaces resulted in social criteria being prioritized over physical-environmental factors, potentially influencing the provisioning of co-benefits; and (3) optimized urban community garden networks hold the potential to synergistically distribute co-benefits across a large metropolitan area in a manner that systematically prioritizes high-need neighborhoods. The methods examined are useful for all metropolises with a preponderance of open or vacant land seeking to advance urban sustainability goals through green infrastructure.

The Hickory Shad Alosa mediocris is an anadromous fish species of the family Clupeidae. Little is known about its distribution, life history, and status. Adult Hickory Shad are found seasonally during spring spawning in estuaries and coastal watersheds along the East Coast of the United States from Maryland to Florida, and during late summer as far north as Connecticut. To provide information on stock identification and watershed fidelity the distributional patterns of 17 morphometric and four meristic characteristics of adult Hickory Shad were analyzed from spawning populations along its range. A total of 687 specimens were examined along the latitudinal gradient from the Susquehanna River, Maryland, to the Wekiva River, Florida. Due to low sample sizes (n<13) for some rivers as well as missing measurements or counts, some specimens had to be excluded from multivariate analysis. Prior to statistical analysis morphometric characters were corrected for size-dependent variation using an allometric formula. After correction morphometric characters were natural log transformed to better approximate multivariate normality. Correlation analysis on transformed measurements and SL confirmed the results obtained from the allometric method; yet showed fork length and total length were strongly correlated (>0.80) and therefore excluded. Multivariate analysis of variance of pooled morphometric and meristic characters showed a significant effect of sex (P < 0.05) therefore, all analyses were separated by sex. Analysis of variance showed highly significant difference (P < 0.003) for 15 characters between 10 locations for males and 12 characters between 12 locations for females. Non-significant characters were excluded and only significant characters for males and females were used for subsequent analysis including Principle Components Analysis (PCA) and Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA). PCA extracted 6 and 4 components (eigenvalues > 1) cumulatively explaining 63.67% and 60.88% of the variance for males and females, respectively. Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was significant (P < 0.05) and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy was 0.60 for males and 0.68 for females, which confirmed appropriateness of the data for PCA. Principal component 1 for males and females was most correlated (> 0.4) with the head region and fin lengths. Using Quadratic Discriminant Function Analysis (QDFA), 77.9% and 80.3% of males and females, respectively, were correctly classified to their rivers of collection using separate-groups covariance matrix and equal prior probabilities. Individual river classification varied between 58.6% - 100%. The Tar-Pamlico River had the lowest percent correct classification for both male (58.6%) and female (62.0%) QDFAs. Tributary level discrimination was achieved in two instances: the James and Appomattox rivers, and the Roanoke and Cashie rivers. Overall, results of this study suggest that meristic and morphometric characters are a viable and potentially lower cost method to identify separate spawning populations (stocks) of Hickory Shad. Fishery management agencies desire more basic life history information to better manage the species. One large gap in knowledge is the untested assumption of natal homing in Hickory Shad; though the results of this study cannot directly confirm this assumption, the significant variation between river populations provides support for natal homing. The results of this work offer foundational information for creating a unique management plan for Hickory Shad.

The anadromous Hickory Shad Alosa mediocris (Mitchill, 1814) (Clupeiformes: Clupeidae) is reviewed, specifically regarding morphometric and meristic variation. Despite its long history as recognized species, few descriptions of Hickory Shad morphometric and meristic characters exist in the literature. Most authors of the historic literature have failed to provide capture location for specimens, analyze large numbers of Hickory Shad, or document how morphometric and meristic characters of the species vary spatially. To address this information gap, a total of 717 mature Hickory Shad were collected from 23 different locations in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida using electroshocking, gill net, or rod and reel. All specimens were frozen, thawed, and 17 morphometric characters and four meristic characters were examined; a random subset (n = 463) were analyzed for an additional four meristic counts of gill rakers. Overall specimens ranged from 206-389 mm SL with a mean + SD of 278.41 + 27.69 mm, 232-435 mm FL with a mean of 310.98 + 30.35 mm, and 272-508 mm TL with a mean of 365.62 + 35.52 mm. The linear relationships between FL and TL, and FL and SL, were investigated and found to be: TL = 1.169*FL + 1.660 (n=705, r2=0.995) and SL = 0.909*FL - 4.274 (n=717, r2=0.992). Substantial differences in character means for many morphometric measurements were found between male and female specimens, suggesting strong sexual dimorphisms relating to shape. However, meristic characters did not show differences in character means by sex. No one morphometric measurement could distinguish Hickory Shad from other morphologically similar clupeids, but the meristic count of gill rakers on the lower limb of the first arch were important to separate Hickory Shad (19-22) from American Shad A. sapidissima (Wilson, 1811), Alewife A. pseudoharengus (Wilson, 1811), and Blueback Herring A. aestivalis (Mitchill, 1814).

For many schorlars, \"folk costume\" is an outmoded term that refers to a narrow range of ethnic, sectarian, and occupational clothing traditions. At the same time, folklorists tend to overlook some kinds of clothing choices because they seem merely to reflect \"everyday dress.\" In this article, the authors examine how and why contra dancers choose what they wear to dance events as an example of how semiotic approaches introduced by Bogatyrev and others can reveal underlying clothing traditions-dress codes-applied to a subset of so-called everyday dress. Two instances of clothing behavior in particular, namely, the use of tee-shirts by dancers of both sexes and the growing use of skirts by male dancers, serve to \"unpack\" the complex communicative resources available to participants and suggest that folkloric research in this relatively unexplored area may produce rich results.

Jordan-Smith examines the way in which a group of contra dancers in South Carolina dealt with an issue that threatened to divide the community into factions. The study shows how a group articulates and implements its values and negotiates situations in which values come into conflict.

An ideal companion to the new 4th Edition of Nonlinear Ordinary Differential Equations by Jordan and Smith (OUP, 2007), this text contains over 500 problems and fully-worked solutions in nonlinear differential equations. With 272 figures and diagrams, subjects covered include phase diagrams in the plane, classification of equilibrium points, geometry of the phase plane, perturbation methods, forced oscillations, stability, Mathieu’s equation, Liapunov methods, bifurcations and manifolds, homoclinic bifurcation, and Melnikov’s method. The problems are of variable difficulty; some are routine questions, others are longer and expand on concepts discussed in Nonlinear Ordinary Differential Equations 4th Edition, and in most cases can be adapted for coursework or self-study. Both texts cover a wide variety of applications whilst keeping mathematical prequisites to a minimum making these an ideal resource for students and lecturers in engineering, mathematics and the sciences.

Folk events such as community dances are situations with many participants, a variety of social roles, and numerous overlapping and even contradictory meanings. A central problem in analyzing folk events is determining those elements of an event that are significant for its participants. Using historical studies, surveys, participant observation, and interviews with key informants, I present analytical descriptions of two related types of community dance, namely American Contra Dance and English Country Dance, as they are presently found in Seattle. Some descriptions and comparisons with Scandinavian dance, as well as contra and English dance elsewhere in the United States, are included. This section includes an analysis of the communicative characteristics of these events, focusing on the group as well as individual significance for their participants. Though I use community dances as primary examples, the approach I develop can be applied to other kinds of group folk events. The main concern is the many factors which need to be taken into account in deciphering complex folk events—those with many participants and several simultaneous or sequential activities—and in giving an account of their significance for participants.