Download or read book Vibrant and Healthy Kids written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-12-27 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children are the foundation of the United States, and supporting them is a key component of building a successful future. However, millions of children face health inequities that compromise their development, well-being, and long-term outcomes, despite substantial scientific evidence about how those adversities contribute to poor health. Advancements in neurobiological and socio-behavioral science show that critical biological systems develop in the prenatal through early childhood periods, and neurobiological development is extremely responsive to environmental influences during these stages. Consequently, social, economic, cultural, and environmental factors significantly affect a child's health ecosystem and ability to thrive throughout adulthood. Vibrant and Healthy Kids: Aligning Science, Practice, and Policy to Advance Health Equity builds upon and updates research from Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity (2017) and From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (2000). This report provides a brief overview of stressors that affect childhood development and health, a framework for applying current brain and development science to the real world, a roadmap for implementing tailored interventions, and recommendations about improving systems to better align with our understanding of the significant impact of health equity.
Download or read book U S Airport Infrastructure Funding and Financing written by Benjamin M. Miller and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passenger air travel is at an all-time high, and airports are investing in the infrastructure needed to meet demand. This report contains a comprehensive review of the role of the federal government in airport infrastructure funding and financing.
Download or read book Transportation Decision Making written by Kumares C. Sinha and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering text provides a holistic approach to decisionmaking in transportation project development and programming, whichcan help transportation professionals to optimize their investmentchoices. The authors present a proven set of methodologies forevaluating transportation projects that ensures that all costs andimpacts are taken into consideration. The text's logical organization gets readers started with asolid foundation in basic principles and then progressively buildson that foundation. Topics covered include: Developing performance measures for evaluation, estimatingtravel demand, and costing transportation projects Performing an economic efficiency evaluation that accounts forsuch factors as travel time, safety, and vehicle operatingcosts Evaluating a project's impact on economic development and landuse as well as its impact on society and culture Assessing a project's environmental impact, including airquality, noise, ecology, water resources, and aesthetics Evaluating alternative projects on the basis of multipleperformance criteria Programming transportation investments so that resources can beoptimally allocated to meet facility-specific and system-widegoals Each chapter begins with basic definitions and concepts followedby a methodology for impact assessment. Relevant legislation isdiscussed and available software for performing evaluations ispresented. At the end of each chapter, readers are providedresources for detailed investigation of particular topics. Theseinclude Internet sites and publications of international anddomestic agencies and research institutions. The authors alsoprovide a companion Web site that offers updates, data foranalysis, and case histories of project evaluation and decisionmaking. Given that billions of dollars are spent each year ontransportation systems in the United States alone, and that thereis a need for thorough and rational evaluation and decision makingfor cost-effective system preservation and improvement, this textshould be on the desks of all transportation planners, engineers,and educators. With exercises in every chapter, this text is anideal coursebook for the subject of transportation systems analysisand evaluation.
Download or read book The United Nations World Water Development Report 2020 written by UNESCO and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-27 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2020 edition of the WWDR, titled Water and Climate Change illustrates the critical linkages between water and climate change in the context of the broader sustainable development agenda. Supported by examples from across the world, it describes both the challenges and opportunities created by climate change, and provides potential responses – in terms of adaptation, mitigation and improved resilience – that can be undertaken by enhancing water resources management, attenuating water-related risks, and improving access to water supply and sanitation services for all in a sustainable manner. It addresses the interrelations between water, people, environment and economics in a changing climate, demonstrating how climate change can be a positive catalyst for improved water management, governance and financing to achieve a sustainable and prosperous world for all. The report provides a fact-based, water-focused contribution to the knowledge base on climate change. It is complementary to existing scientific assessments and designed to support international political frameworks, with the goals of helping the water community tackle the challenges of climate change, and informing the climate change community about the opportunities that improved water management offers in terms of adaptation and mitigation.
Download or read book The Science and Practice of Resilience written by Igor Linkov and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive view on resilience based upon state-of-the-science theories and methodological applications that resilience may fill. Specifically, this text provides a compendium of knowledge on the theory, methods, and practice of resilience across a variety of country and case contexts, and demonstrates how a resilience-based approach can help further improved infrastructure, vibrant societies, and sustainable environments and ecologies, among many others. Resilience is a term with thousands of years of history. Only recently has resilience been applied to the management of complex interconnected systems, yet its impact as a governing philosophy and an engineering practice has been pronounced. Colloquially, resilience has been used as a synonym for ‘bouncing back’. Philosophically and methodologically, however, it is much more. In a world defined by interconnected and interdependent systems such as water, food, energy, transportation, and the internet, a sudden and unexpected disruption to one critical system can lead to significant challenges for many others. The Science and Practice of Resilience is beneficial for those seeking to gain a rich knowledge of the resilience world, as well as for practitioners looking for methods and tools by which resilience may be applied in real-world contexts.
Download or read book The Potato Crop written by Hugo Campos and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book provides a fresh, updated and science-based perspective on the current status and prospects of the diverse array of topics related to the potato, and was written by distinguished scientists with hands-on global experience in research aspects related to potato. The potato is the third most important global food crop in terms of consumption. Being the only vegetatively propagated species among the world’s main five staple crops creates both issues and opportunities for the potato: on the one hand, this constrains the speed of its geographic expansion and its options for international commercialization and distribution when compared with commodity crops such as maize, wheat or rice. On the other, it provides an effective insulation against speculation and unforeseen spikes in commodity prices, since the potato does not represent a good traded on global markets. These two factors highlight the underappreciated and underrated role of the potato as a dependable nutrition security crop, one that can mitigate turmoil in world food supply and demand and political instability in some developing countries. Increasingly, the global role of the potato has expanded from a profitable crop in developing countries to a crop providing income and nutrition security in developing ones. This book will appeal to academics and students of crop sciences, but also policy makers and other stakeholders involved in the potato and its contribution to humankind’s food security.
Download or read book A Research Review of Interventions to Increase the Persistence and Resilience of Coral Reefs written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-04-05 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coral reef declines have been recorded for all major tropical ocean basins since the 1980s, averaging approximately 30-50% reductions in reef cover globally. These losses are a result of numerous problems, including habitat destruction, pollution, overfishing, disease, and climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions and the associated increases in ocean temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have been implicated in increased reports of coral bleaching, disease outbreaks, and ocean acidification (OA). For the hundreds of millions of people who depend on reefs for food or livelihoods, the thousands of communities that depend on reefs for wave protection, the people whose cultural practices are tied to reef resources, and the many economies that depend on reefs for fisheries or tourism, the health and maintenance of this major global ecosystem is crucial. A growing body of research on coral physiology, ecology, molecular biology, and responses to stress has revealed potential tools to increase coral resilience. Some of this knowledge is poised to provide practical interventions in the short-term, whereas other discoveries are poised to facilitate research that may later open the doors to additional interventions. A Research Review of Interventions to Increase the Persistence and Resilience of Coral Reefs reviews the state of science on genetic, ecological, and environmental interventions meant to enhance the persistence and resilience of coral reefs. The complex nature of corals and their associated microbiome lends itself to a wide range of possible approaches. This first report provides a summary of currently available information on the range of interventions present in the scientific literature and provides a basis for the forthcoming final report.
Download or read book The United Nations world water development report 2019 written by WWAP and published by UNESCO Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Access to water and sanitation is internationally recognized human right. Yet more than t wo billion people lack even the most basic of services. The latest United Nations World Water Development Report, Leaving No One Behind, explores the symptoms of exclusion and investigates ways to overcome inequalities.
Download or read book Intelligence Management in the Americas written by Russell G. Russell G. Swenson and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology, Intelligence Management in the Americas, brings together the perspectives of 22 authors from across the Americas. They outline and assess the status and promise of intelligence oversight legislation and actions, and develop various arguments for preserving the best aspects of intelligence autonomy.
Download or read book Lateral Flow Immunoassay written by Raphael Wong and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-12-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Due to the simplicity, relative accuracy, fast result reporting, and user-friendliness of lateral flow immunoassay, its use has undergone tremendous growth in the diagnostic industry in the last few years. Such technology has been utilized widely and includes pregnancy and woman's health determination, cardiac and emergency conditions monitoring and testing, infectious disease including Flu screening, cancer marker screening, and drugs abuse testing. This book covers the scope of utilization, the principle of the technology, the patent concerns, information on the development and production of the test device and specific applications will be of interest to the diagnostic industry and the general scientific community.
Download or read book Making Monitoring and Evaluation Systems Work written by Marelize G ergens and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This manual explains the skills and steps for making a monitoring and evaluation system that functions well, organizing the people, processes and partnershipsso that they collect and use good information that can be used by decision makers and other stakeholders.
Download or read book Lawfare written by Orde F. Kittrie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lawfare, author Orde Kittrie's draws on his experiences as a lawfare practitioner, US State Department attorney, and international law scholar in analyzing the theory and practice of the strategic leveraging of law as an increasingly powerful and effective weapon in the current global security landscape. Lawfare incorporates case studies of recent offensive and defensive lawfare by the United States, Iran, China, and by both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and includes dozens of examples of how lawfare has thus been waged and defended against. Kittrie notes that since private attorneys can play important and decisive roles in their nations' national security plans through their expertise in areas like financial law, maritime insurance law, cyber law, and telecommunications law, the full scope of lawfare's impact and possibilities are just starting to be understood.
Download or read book Explainable AI Interpreting Explaining and Visualizing Deep Learning written by Wojciech Samek and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of “intelligent” systems that can take decisions and perform autonomously might lead to faster and more consistent decisions. A limiting factor for a broader adoption of AI technology is the inherent risks that come with giving up human control and oversight to “intelligent” machines. For sensitive tasks involving critical infrastructures and affecting human well-being or health, it is crucial to limit the possibility of improper, non-robust and unsafe decisions and actions. Before deploying an AI system, we see a strong need to validate its behavior, and thus establish guarantees that it will continue to perform as expected when deployed in a real-world environment. In pursuit of that objective, ways for humans to verify the agreement between the AI decision structure and their own ground-truth knowledge have been explored. Explainable AI (XAI) has developed as a subfield of AI, focused on exposing complex AI models to humans in a systematic and interpretable manner. The 22 chapters included in this book provide a timely snapshot of algorithms, theory, and applications of interpretable and explainable AI and AI techniques that have been proposed recently reflecting the current discourse in this field and providing directions of future development. The book is organized in six parts: towards AI transparency; methods for interpreting AI systems; explaining the decisions of AI systems; evaluating interpretability and explanations; applications of explainable AI; and software for explainable AI.
Download or read book Ethnic Groups and Boundaries written by Fredrik Barth and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 1998-03-11 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When originally published in Norway, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries marked the transition to a new era of ethnic studies. Today this much-cited classic is regarded as the seminal volume from which stems much current anthropological thinking about ethnicity. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries opens with Barths invaluable thirty-page essay that introduces students to important theoretical issues in the analysis of ethnic groups. Following is a collection of seven essaysthe results of a symposium involving a small group of Scandinavian social anthropologistsintended to illustrate the application of Barths analytical viewpoints to different sides of the problems of polyethnic organization in various ethnographic areas, including Norway, Sudan, Ethiopia, Mexico, Afghanistan, and Laos.
Download or read book Opportunities and Challenges for Applied Demography in the 21st Century written by Nazrul Hoque and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-01-13 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applied demography continues its rapid pace of evolution in concert with the emerging trends of the 21st century. One significant area of change is the extension of applied demography beyond the United States; this book includes material dealing with applied demography in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and Mexico. Opportunities and Challenges for Applied Demography in the 21st Century presents a score of selected papers from the second post-2000 national conference on Applied Demography, held in San Antonio, Texas, in January, 2010, under the sponsorship of the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research at The University of Texas at San Antonio. Coverage includes the assembly of data by government agencies, with a focus on issues facing the United States; demographic issues associated with globalization; business demography and health demography, as well as a section examining methodological advances in the areas of estimation and projection.
Download or read book Violent Borders written by Reece Jones and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging analysis of the refugee crisis explores how borders are formed, policed—and used to inflict violence on the poor. “In an era of terrorism, global inequality, and rising political tension over migration, Jones argues that tight border controls make the world worse, not better.” —Boston Globe Forty thousand people have died trying to cross between countries in the past decade, and yet international borders only continue to harden. The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union; the United States elected a president who campaigned on building a wall; while elsewhere, the popularity of right-wing antimigrant nationalist political parties is surging. Reece Jones argues that the West has helped bring about the deaths of countless migrants, as states attempt to contain populations and limit access to resources and opportunities. “We may live in an era of globalization,” he writes, “but much of the world is increasingly focused on limiting the free movement of people.” In Violent Borders, Jones crosses the migrant trails of the world, documenting the billions of dollars spent on border security projects and the dire consequences for countless millions. While the poor are restricted by the lottery of birth to slum dwellings in the ailing decolonized world, the wealthy travel without constraint, exploiting pools of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. With the growth of borders and resource enclosures, the deaths of migrants in search of a better life are intimately connected to climate change, environmental degradation, and the growth of global wealth inequality.
Download or read book Guanxi Social Capital and School Choice in China written by Ji Ruan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the use of guanxi (Chinese personal connections) in everyday urban life: in particular, how and why people develop different types of social capital in their guanxi networks and the role of guanxi in school choice. Guanxi takes on a special significance in Chinese societies, and is widely-discussed and intensely-studied phenomenon today. In recent years in China, the phenomenon of parents using guanxi to acquire school places for their children has been frequently reported by the media, against the background of the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on corruption. From a sociological perspective, this book reveals how and why parents manage to do so. Ritual capital refers to an individual's ability to use ritual to benefit and gain resources from guanxi.
