By Wändi Bruine de Bruin
Food insecurity among adults age 65 and older is a growing public policy concern in European countries, but the extent of the problem and the related financial stressors are unclear. The purpose of this paper is to measure the percent of food insecure individuals in a targeted sample of financially fragile older adults, and to identify associated financial stressors and socio-economic characteristics. This exploratory study is based on an online survey of 1,059 older adults experiencing financial hardship. Participants were recruited through commercial consumer panels in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. The proportion of financially fragile older adults reporting food insecurity ranged from 24% in the British sample, 29% in the German sample, and 35% in the Dutch sample. We identified financial stressors that contributed to food insecurity in each country sample. Having more financial stressors increased the risk of food insecurity, which was similar in each country. Within and across country samples, food insecurity is associated with financial stressors. Insights for policy makers, consumer advocates, and social services point to the value of integrating financial and food-related support services, the potential for cross-country collaboration, and efforts that take into account the particular financial circumstances of older adults.
By Burçin Becerik-Gerber et al.
Building and Environment
2022
This paper seeks to address ten questions that explore the burgeoning field of Human-Building Interaction (HBI), an interdisciplinary field that represents the next frontier in convergent research and innovation to enable the dynamic interplay of human and building interactional intelligence. The field of HBI builds on several existing efforts in historically separate research fields/communities and aims to understand how buildings affect human outcomes and experiences, as well as how humans interact with, adapt to, and affect the built environment and its systems, to support buildings that can learn, enable adaptation, and evolve at different scales to improve the quality-of-life of its users while optimizing resource usage and service availability. Questions were developed by a diverse group of researchers with backgrounds in design, engineering, computer science, social science, and health science. Answers to these questions draw conclusions from what has been achieved to date as reported in the available literature and establish a foundation for future HBI research. This paper aims to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations in HBI research to change the way people interact with and perceive technology within the context of buildings and inform the design, construction, and operation of next-generation, intelligent built environments. In doing so, HBI research can realize a myriad of benefits for human users, including improved productivity, health, cognition, convenience, and comfort, all of which are essential to societal well-being.
By Mahta Moghaddam et al.
Environmental Research
2022
Organic matter (OM) content and a shallow water table are two key variables that govern the physical properties of the subsurface within the active layer of arctic soils underlain by permafrost, where the majority of biogeochemical activities take place. A detailed understanding of the soil moisture and OM profile behavior over short vertical distances through the active layer is needed to adequately model the subsurface physical processes. To observe and characterize the profiles of soil properties in the active layer, we conducted detailed soil sampling at five sites along Dalton Highway on Alaska’s North Slope. These data were used to derive a generalized logistics function to characterize the total OM and water saturation fraction behavior through the profile. Furthermore, a new pedotransfer function was developed to estimate the soil bulk density and porosity—information that is largely missing from existing soil datasets—within each layer, solely from the soil texture (organic and mineral properties). Given the currently sparse soil database of the Alaskan Arctic, these profile models can be highly beneficial for radar remote sensing models to study active layer dynamics.
By Mahta Moghaddam et al.
Forecasting the values of essential climate variables like land surface temperature and soil moisture can play a paramount role in understanding and predicting the impact of climate change. This work concerns the development of a deep learning model for analyzing and predicting spatial time series, considering both satellite derived and model-based data assimilation processes. To that end, we propose the Embedded Temporal Convolutional Network (E-TCN) architecture, which integrates three different networks, namely an encoder network, a temporal convolutional network, and a decoder network. The model accepts as input satellite or assimilation model derived values, such as land surface temperature and soil moisture, with monthly periodicity, going back more than fifteen years. We use our model and compare its results with the state-of-the-art model for spatiotemporal data, the ConvLSTM model. To quantify performance, we explore different cases of spatial resolution, spatial region extension, number of training examples and prediction windows, among others. The proposed approach achieves better performance in terms of prediction accuracy, while using a smaller number of parameters compared to the ConvLSTM model. Although we focus on two specific environmental variables, the method can be readily applied to other variables of interest.
By Paul S. Adler et al.
Journal of Management Inquiry
2022
COVID-19 is the most immediate of several crises we face as human beings: crises that expose deeply-rooted matters of social injustice in our societies. Management scholars have not been encouraged to address the role that business, as we conduct it and consider it as scholars, has played in creating the crises and fostering the injustices our crises are laying bare. Contributors to this article draw attention to the way that the pandemic has highlighted long-standing examples of injustice, from inequality to racism, gender, and social discrimination through environmental injustice to migratory workers and modern slaves. They consider the fact that few management scholars have raised their voices in protest, at least partly because of the ideological underpinnings of the discipline, and the fact these need to be challenged.
By Mahta Moghaddam et al.
Small Satellite Conference
2022
The NASA Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission consists of a constellation of eight microsatellites launched on 15 December 2016 into a common circular orbit at ~525 km altitude and 35 deg inclination. Each observatory carries a four channel bistatic radar receiver to measure GPS signals scattered by the Earth surface. Over ocean, near-surface wind speed, air-sea latent and sensible heat flux, and ocean microplastic concentration are derived from the measurements. Over land, near-surface soil moisture and inland water bodies extent are derived. The measurements penetrate through all levels of precipitation and most vegetation due to the 19 cm wavelength of GPS L1 signals. The sampling produced by the constellation makes possible the reliable detection of short time scale weather events such as flood inundation dynamics immediately after a tropical cyclone landfall and rapid soil moisture dry down immediately after major precipitation events. The sun-asynchronous nature of the CYGNSS orbit also supports full sampling of the diurnal cycle of hydrological dynamics within a short period of time. Summaries are presented of engineering and science highlights of the CYGNSS mission, with particular emphasis on those aspects most directly enabled by the use of a constellation of SmallSats.
By Mahta Moghaddam et al.
Water Resources Research
2022
Surface organic carbon content and soil moisture (SM) represent first-order controls on permafrost thaw and vulnerability, yet remain challenging to map accurately. Here we explored the links between surface organic soil properties and SM dynamics in the Alaska North Slope through data analysis and process-based modeling. Our analysis, based on in situ SM and brightness temperature data from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, indicated that the SM drydown process in Arctic tundra is closely related to surface soil organic carbon (SOC) properties. More rapid drydown was generally observed in areas with high SOC concentration (SOCC) or low bulk density. The drydown timescale derived from the SMAP polarization ratio (PR) was significantly correlated with SoilGrids surface (0–5 cm) SOCC data (R = −0.54 ∼ −0.68, p < 0.01) at regional scale. To understand the process, we used a coupled permafrost hydrology and microwave emission model to simulate changes in the L-band PR during the thaw season. The model accounts for the variations in organic soil hydraulic and dielectric properties with SOC content and decomposition state. Model sensitivity runs showed larger L-band PR decreases during the early thaw season in soils with higher SOCC consistent with the above analysis, whereby highly organic soils (SOCC > 34.8%) drain water more easily with a larger amount of water discharged or lost (through evapotranspiration) relative to soils with less carbon concentration (SOCC < 17.4%). Our findings indicate that satellite L-band observations are sensitive to tundra SM and carbon properties, and may provide critical constraints on predictions of Arctic permafrost thaw and vulnerability.
By Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Lila Rabinovich, Kate Weber, Marianna Babboni, Monica Dean, Lance Ignon
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other institutions communicate about climate change to diverse audiences without a background in climate science, including the general public. The effectiveness of these communications depends in part on how well the presented terminology is understood. In qualitative interviews, we examined how US residents interpreted key terms drawn from IPCC reports, including tipping point, unprecedented transition, carbon neutral, carbon dioxide removal, adaptation, mitigation, sustainable development, and abrupt change. We recruited twenty participants with diverse views on climate change from a nationally representative sample. We identified common themes and misunderstandings. Overall, 88% of the themes arose by the tenth interview, and no new themes arose after the seventeenth interview. Mitigation, carbon neutral, and unprecedented transition were perceived as the most difficult to understand. Adaptation and abrupt change were perceived as the easiest to understand. However, even if a term appeared to be understood, participants were not always clear about how it applied to climate change. Participants tended to draw on their mental models of non-climate contexts where terms had different meanings. Reading the terms in the context of sentences taken from communication materials was not always helpful due to the use of complex language. Based on participants’ interpretations and the science communication literature, we provide suggestions for communicating about each term. Generally, recommendations are to simplify wording, make links to climate change explicit, and describe underlying processes. Our findings are relevant to climate change communications by the IPCC and other institutions.
