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A Sustainable Solution to the Housing Crisis?: Examining ADU Development Trends in Northampton, MA
No full textThe purpose of this project is to examine current Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) development trends in Northampton, Massachusetts, to understand if they could be a sustainable solution to the region’s housing crisis. Northampton has a high demand for housing and low affordability, with new builds insufficiently addressing the holistic social, environmental, and economic factors of sustainability. The city aims to increase ADU growth to address the housing crisis while achieving its sustainability goals. To assess whether the city was successfully achieving this with ADUs, we identified ADUs constructed in Northampton, researched potential barriers to ADU development, and analyzed how these barriers might affect Northampton. We then developed strategic recommendations for the city. We took a mixed methods approach. This included reviewing Northampton building permits to create a dataset about the quantity and style of constructed ADUs, mapping using ArcGIS to visualize physical and socioeconomic patterns of ADU placement, a literature review to understand successful ADU implementation strategies from other cities, an analysis of Northampton zoning and energy codes as they relate to ADUs, and interviews with our stakeholders and a local ADU construction firm, Backyard ADUs. Our primary findings were that current ADUs in Northampton—especially attached ADUs built as infill—provide a number of sustainability advantages, but that limited financing options, complexities in the zoning and energy codes, and socioeconomic factors are barriers to further development. We created a set of five recommendations that target specific barriers to building ADUs in Northampton. These recommendations are to detail the process of building an ADU in a holistic how-to-guide for homeowners, update Northampton zoning code to remove the parking minimums for units under 900 square feet, create public pre-approved ADU designs that comply with Northampton’s city goals, consolidate data into a singular system to monitor and manage ADU construction, and for future projects to focus on financing or parking minimums
Black Prison Intellectuals: Writings from the Long Nineteenth Century
No full textHow early Black prison writing shaped Black intellectual movements In this book, Andrea Stone recovers critical, understudied writings from early archives to call into question the idea that the Black prison intellectual movement began in the twentieth century. In fact, nearly two centuries before Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver, Black prisoners were serving as thought leaders and contributing to political movements. By illuminating their pathbreaking voices, Stone shows that prison writing from this era was a foundational part of Black American intellectualism. Grounding her work in a history of the disproportionately high incarceration of Black Americans, Stone traces the arc of Black prison writing from 1795 to 1901. She analyzes gallows literature, court records, newspaper coverage, and parole request letters, arguing that parole requests represent an undervalued, vital literary genre. Most of the writers featured in this book were effectively treated as enemies of the state, leading Stone to a question that continues to resonate in America today: what is the distinction between criminal and enemy, and how are those categories intertwined with Blackness in the United States Black Prison Intellectuals sheds light on the roots of issues like structural racism and mass incarceration. Looking at an important literary tradition that contributed to the Black American intellectual movement, this book helps readers better understand the present as a moment in the long journey toward a racially just society. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. — Provided by publisher.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/eng_books/1025/thumbnail.jp
Town and Gown Climate Futures: Uniting the Climate Resilience Efforts of Northampton and Smith College
No full textAs climate risks only increase and institutions start planning how to adapt and mitigate, the strength of local and regional climate resilience systems is where the focus must be. The collaboration of HEI’s and the community they are within on their collective climate futures is an imperative step towards advancing the strength of these systems. Our goal is to remedy the disconnect between Northampton city and Smith College’s climate resilience planning by determining what strategic areas of synergy there are between their climate resilience planning priorities. Our research team will accomplish this goal over the three months by determining the current climate resilience status and concerns for Smith and Northampton respectively by applying a climate resilience assessment framework to the two communities as well as using spatial mapping to understand the distribution of pressures and resources. Since both communities are currently going through planning processes, accomplishing this goal will provide the timely groundwork and dialogue from which Smith and Northampton future planners can strategize on building towards their joint climate future. To determine their current climate resilience status and priorities, we used Smith and Northampton’s past planning reports as well as spoke to stakeholders on the priorities from the current planning processes. We also use spatial mapping to visualize the projected climate changes and current resilience resources. Our key findings are that Smith and Northampton’s current climate resilience have areas of improvement and have dimensions ideal for collective synergy. This signifies the potential of a collective climate resilience planning process to provide substantive growth opportunities in this collective climate future. We recommend that a diverse team develops a specific climate resilience plan as part of the climate justice plan and intertwines emergency planning. We recommend that Northampton leverage educational partnerships through a formalized channel
Hα Variability of AB Aur b with the Hubble Space Telescope: Probing the Nature of a Protoplanet Candidate with Accretion Light Echoes
Full text linkGiant planets generate accretion luminosity as they form. Much of this energy is radiated in strong Hα line emission, which has motivated direct imaging surveys at optical wavelengths to search for accreting protoplanets. However, compact disk structures can mimic accreting planets by scattering emission from the host star. This can complicate the interpretation of Hα point sources, especially if the host star itself is accreting. We describe an approach to distinguish accreting protoplanets from scattered-light disk features using “accretion light echoes.” This method relies on variable Hα emission from a stochastically accreting host star to search for a delayed brightness correlation with a candidate protoplanet. We apply this method to the candidate protoplanet AB Aur b with a dedicated Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 program designed to sequentially sample the host star and the candidate planet in Hα while accounting for the light travel time delay and orbital geometry of the source within the protoplanetary disk. Across five epochs spanning 14 months, AB Aur b is over 20 times more variable than its host star; AB Aur’s Hα emission changes by 15% while AB Aur b varies by 330%. These brightness changes are not correlated, which rules out unobstructed scattered starlight from the host star as the only source of AB Aur b’s Hα emission and is consistent with tracing emission from an independently accreting protoplanet, inner disk shadowing effects, or a physically evolving compact disk structure. More broadly, accretion light echoes offer a novel tool to explore the nature of protoplanet candidates with well-timed observations of the host star prior to deep imaging in Hα
Toward A Simplified Framework for Sequential Character Recognition
Full text linkThis paper proposes a novel approach to handwritten charac- ter recognition using convolutional non-recurrent deep neural networks. Such a network can run in parallel at every point of a document, offer- ing potential advantages in speed over recurrent approaches. The net- work’s output feeds into a beam search optimization for final decoding. Preliminary quantitative results show that the framework can achieve bootstrap training from labeled word images. It provides an alternative to sequential models that rely on connectionist temporal classification for alignment
Dies Legibiles V
Full text linkWelcome to the fifth volume of Dies Legibiles!
As always, I was blown away this year by the superb work undergraduate students submitted to this journal, some first forays into medieval studies and others final projects before pursuing a graduate degree in the field. If the submissions to Dies Legibiles are any indication, the next generation of medievalists are thinking deeply about the past, about which histories have been neglected, and about what those histories reveal about the present moment
Breaking Confirmatory Spells by Implementing Research- Integrated CUREs
Full text linkDifferences in economic and social growth and academic equity, experi ences, and opportunities have left an achievement gap in STEM for underprivileged students. Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) have attempted to answer these inequalities by leveling the playing field or by offering course-based research opportunities with minimal requirements for background knowledge. When we ask novel questions, more students get the experience of performing research, which lowers thresholds to pursue research and increases participation. Although the learning outcomes have been largely positive, there is a concern that many CUREs are still too scaffolded. In contrast, I propose to develop exploratory, hypothesis-driven CUREs that are integrated into ongoing research (riCURE). By using the opportunities created by the Tiny Earth CURE as a start, I designed exploratory courses that allow for interdiscipli nary hypothesis development, yielding both improved educational outcomes as well as ongoing research dividends
A Review of Research and Practices on Teaching Data Visualizations for Blind and Visually Impaired Students
Full text linkAround 36 million people in the world are blind and an additional 217 million have moderate to severe vision impairment. In higher education, four percent of 54,204 undergraduates who participated in the 2022 American College Health Association survey reported to be blind or have low vision. Those students frequently do not have access to data visualizations we generally teach and use in postsecondary statistics and data science classes. The design of those visualizations is premised on implicit assumptions about the user’s visual ability. Making data visualizations accessible to blind and visually impaired (BVI) people would help improve equity in higher education and benefit them with data driven reasoning and communication. The Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report lists creating and interpreting graphical displays as one of the nine central goals for introductory statistics. We, as statistics and data science educators, researchers, or practitioners, should practice how to design accessible data visualizations, teach and use them in a way that is inclusive to the BVI community. This short article is a review of research and practices on teaching data visualizations for BVI students. I collected resources from related email threads in the Isolated Statisticians email list server and published articles over time. While this article pays particular attention to the BVI community, I acknowledge that other types of disabilities such as cognitive and motor disabilities may affect access to data visualizations as well
A Critical Appraisal of the Evidence on Racial Disproportionality in Special Education
Full text linkThis essay provides a two-pronged critical assessment of a subset of the literature on racial disproportionality in special education: that which aims to estimate racial disparities among otherwise similar children. This body of research has shown that Black students are less likely than comparable White students to receive special education, and has been interpreted by many to mean that current policies meant to reduce Black over-representation may be exacerbating inequality. Our essay argues that this subset of research has fundamental limitations in its covariate adjustment practices and its data quality, making “under-representation” findings questionable. We argue that caution and further study are needed for an accurate understanding of the nature of racial disproportionality in special education
The Contributions of Language and Inhibitory Control to False Belief Reasoning Over Time
Full text linkIntroduction: The role of language in false belief reasoning has been much debated for twenty-five years or more, especially the relative contributions of general language development, complement syntax, vocabulary, and executive function. However, the empirical studies so far have fallen short, in that they generally have too few participants for adequate statistical modeling; they do not include control variables; or they are cross-sectional rather than longitudinal, making inferences about causal direction much more tenuous.
Methods: The present study considers the role of these different variables in the development of false belief reasoning over several months of testing, with 258 children aged three to five years. The children are also from under-resourced communities, broadening the populations that generally contribute such data.
Results: A cross-sectional and a longitudinal regression analysis reveals the contribution of each variable to the children’s success on the false belief measures. Finally, a structural equation model tests the relative contribution of the different potential factors over time, how they interact, and change. The model is an excellent fit to the data. Inhibitory control, complement comprehension and vocabulary all have effects on false belief reasoning at the first time point (T1). However, at T3, the major proximal contribution is the child’s comprehension of complements, though the longitudinal pathways of vocabulary and inhibitory control also pave the way.
Discussion: Our data confirm the specific contribution of complement syntax but also makes clear, as do training studies, that a certain amount of preparedness in vocabulary and in executive function skills is also necessary