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- Member of: Phoenix Regional Heat and Air Quality Knowledge Repository
- Member of: Pannabecker, Virginia
Urban Heat Island (UHI) has significant impacts on the buildings energy consumption and outdoor air quality (OAQ). Various approaches, including observation and simulation techniques, have been proposed to understand the causes of UHI formation and to find the corresponding mitigation strategies. However, the causes of UHI are not the same in different climates or city features. Thus, general conclusion cannot be made based on limited monitoring data.
With recent progress in computational tools, simulation methods have been used to study UHI. These approaches, however, are also not able to cover all the phenomena that simultaneously contribute to the formation of UHI. The shortcomings are mostly attributed to the weakness of the theories and computational cost.
This paper presents a review of the techniques used to study UHI. The abilities and limitations of each approach for the investigation of UHI mitigation and prediction are discussed. Treatment of important parameters including latent, sensible, storage, and anthropogenic heat in addition to treatment of radiation, effect of trees and pond, and boundary condition to simulate UHI is also presented. Finally, this paper discusses the application of integration approach as a future opportunity.
This study investigates the impact of urban form and landscaping type on the mid-afternoon microclimate in semi-arid Phoenix, Arizona. The goal is to find effective urban form and design strategies to ameliorate temperatures during the summer months. We simulated near-ground air temperatures for typical residential neighborhoods in Phoenix using the three-dimensional microclimate model ENVI-met. The model was validated using weather observations from the North Desert Village (NDV) landscape experiment, located on the Arizona State University's Polytechnic campus. The NDV is an ideal site to determine the model's input parameters, since it is a controlled environment recreating three prevailing residential landscape types in the Phoenix metropolitan area (mesic, oasis, and xeric).
After validation, we designed five neighborhoods with different urban forms that represent a realistic cross-section of typical residential neighborhoods in Phoenix. The scenarios follow the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification scheme after Stewart and Oke. We then combined the neighborhoods with three landscape designs and, using ENVI-met, simulated microclimate conditions for these neighborhoods for a typical summer day. Results were analyzed in terms of mid-afternoon air temperature distribution and variation, ventilation, surface temperatures, and shading. Findings show that advection is important for the distribution of within-design temperatures and that spatial differences in cooling are strongly related to solar radiation and local shading patterns. In mid-afternoon, dense urban forms can create local cool islands. Our approach suggests that the LCZ concept is useful for planning and design purposes.
Methods: "a student's education is only as valuable as the information that a student has access to" Matt Cooper (president of the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students, 2012). Evidence-based practice is no longer a new concept in health professions or education, but its integration into allied health higher education curricula and its inclusion by health professionals in everyday, lifelong practice still presents challenges. One challenge is affordable access to research study findings and data, and to resources that index such information. A librarian from a public, research-1 university will draw from experiences and practices at her institution, and from a review of such at similar institutions. She will present methods to promote: use of open access and open educational resources, greater participation in these movements, and curriculum-related applications.
Results: This flipped presentation will include an overview of top overall and health sciences-related open access and open educational resources: how to find them and suggestions for evaluation criteria. It will also include options to promote and use Creative Commons search and licensing for discovering and sharing materials licensed for others to use, reuse, and adapt. Methods for promoting open access and open educational resources in higher educational and other settings will follow, with a final overview of newly expanding options for do-it-yourself and open science initiatives including opportunities for involvement in health research and innovation.
Conclusions: Join us, and bring your laptop, tablet, or mobile device! This presentation will be a "flipped presentation," with a brief (ten-to-fifteen minutes) voice-over PowerPoint presentation sent out ahead of time. The in-person session will offer a hands-on approach with opportunities to delve into using one or more major sources of open access or open educational resources to discover resources to recommend for supporting curricula, professional development, or training. You will also have a chance to collaborate with colleagues and explore ideas for promotional events and materials to build awareness of open access and open education initiatives. Leave with first-hand knowledge of new resources and an action plan for an event to promote these important initiatives within your community.
Methods: Facilitating open access publishing, best practices in literature reviews, scholarly research writing, clinical research data management, preservation, and accessibility: all of these are areas that librarians are working to support in many institutions. In this paper, two librarians from two research-1 universities provide a brief review of relevant literature. They follow with lessons learned and best practices identified during experiences as part of graduate student or faculty learning and working groups. These include: participation in a clinical research evaluation course; being a coauthor during writing, submitting, and revising of a scholarly peer-reviewed article, and negotiating copyright terms with an academic publisher; and participating in a faculty writing group for mutual motivation and constructive commentary on in-process writing projects.
Results: In this observational and participative study, the authors found that by taking advantage of opportunities to join groups in their research communities, they expanded their own skill sets while also expanding their contextual understanding of researcher support needs, including faculty, instructors, researchers, and graduate students. Through physical and online participation in learning, training, and working spaces along with their constituent communities, the authors built strong connections and mutual understanding. By being present (online or in-person) when questions occurred, they increased opportunities to provide in-context support for literature review searching techniques; citation management tools; copyright, journal selection, and publishing questions; and data management planning.
Conclusions: Each profession, discipline, and employment has its learning communities, informal or time-specific subgroups that come about as needed or for required trainings. Learning communities are where those in a given discipline or employment explore tasks in a collaborative setting and learn together, developing new skills and mastery through practice with peer and expert feedback. Such communities might take the form of a course on clinical research, an informal writing group, a seminar series, or even a cross-department event-planning group. By joining such groups, librarians can build on common experiences to form stronger relationships with their communities, gaining two critical benefits: (1) opportunities to provide research and information expertise in context and (2) greater recognition as part of the community and of what librarians do and their areas of expertise.
As a Health Sciences Librarian at a large public research university, requests for one off library sessions, or online how-to support, to teach evidence-based practice (EBP) research skills are common. Having mastered brief 'hands-on' activities to practice skills learned, I was ready to branch out, and so were some faculty with whom I work, especially in the fields of Nutrition, Exercise, and Wellness. For Spring 2013 I worked with faculty to try pre-class time assignments followed by participatory, hands-on, student reporting (flipped) class sessions on:
1. Finding the source of research reported in health news articles.
2. Identifying high level EBP research studies on a nutrition topic.
3. Exploring career and research tools in Kinesiology.
This session will include a brief overview of each case study with discussion opportunities.
Objectives: This pilot study analyzes citation patterns of international health (IH) research. The authors hypothesize that researchers use journal articles more than other resources as other public health literature mapping projects have shown. This study's objective is to identify key journals in IH and unique or common citation patterns in IH in comparison to areas like infectious disease or environmental health.
Methods: The authors selected research articles published in January 2013 issues of four IH journals: Bulletin of the World Health Organization (BWHO), Health Policy and Planning (HPP), Lancet Infectious Diseases (LID), and the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition (JHPN). The criteria for journal selection were based on Core Public Health Journals Project version 2.0, Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and Scopus. Data were collected by compiling all citations used by research articles. In addition to journals, books, and other published sources, this study identifies cited sources of gray literature in IH and the extent to which Internet sources are used in formal IH research. With open data trends in mind, this study looks for the citation of data sets.
Results: Out of 1,246 total citations, 817 (66%) were journal articles, 210 (17%) were miscellaneous, 205 (16%) were books/monographs, and 14 (1%) were government documents. The most highly cited journal titles were Lancet (86 citations) and BWHO (33 citations). Two journals that the authors expected to have high citations, but did not, were Lancet: Infectious Disease and American Journal of Public Health. The poster will also include:
1. Cited journals by subject.
2. Publication date of citations.
3. Examination of the miscellaneous category for data set citations.
Conclusions: Journal articles remain the most highly cited source type for public health research, seconded by gray literature and web resources; then monographs and United States government documents. Gray literature and web resources represent information provided by governments throughout the world, including 5 examples of government data sets. Compared to previous public health journal studies with journal article citation close to 90%, this study shows a lower percentage of journal articles (66%) relative to other source types. While recent articles are cited most, cited journal articles greatly range in age at citation. This study also showed lower citations of typically highly cited public health journal titles and major medical journals. There is a need for older journals. Librarians may want to focus on clinical journals that are relevant to their programs. Citation of data sets does not seem common yet, but this is something to monitor regarding public health data sources. Future studies could look at whether availability of global online government sources and online translation tools may be resulting in greater use of multiple language sources.
As health information professionals we are familiar with specialized resources such as PubMed and CINAHL but less familiar with general freely available tools such as Google, Google Scholar, and other open Google tools. We wondered:
1. What Google tools are Health Sciences Researchers and Healthcare Professionals using, and how are they using them?
2. How effective are Google and/or Google Scholar for literature searching?
3. What other research is needed in this area?
Methods
We searched for: ‘Google’ across five health sciences and health sciences related databases (CINAHL, Cochrane, PsycInfo, PubMed, Web of Science) and in Google Scholar (*For Google Scholar we searched: health AND google). We reviewed the first 100 citations from each database and selected results that: 1) Mentioned use of a Google tool, or 2) Discussed the effectiveness of Google or Google Scholar in scholarly literature searching. Out of the second group, we selected and read the 10 most relevant articles discussing the effectiveness of Google and/or Google Scholar for literature searching. We tried out recommended best practices to search for topics we had previously searched only in subject specific databases.
Results
Health Sciences Researchers and Healthcare Professionals use many Google tools for a variety of purposes. Each tool was used in different ways by authors writing in the Health Sciences (see pie charts and examples in poster). Regarding literature searching the poster includes Google Scholar content sources, Top Search Strategies for Google Scholar, and Considerations for using Google Scholar for literature searching.
Conclusions
Health Science researchers use a variety of Google tools to gather and manipulate data, and to visualize and disseminate results. Health care professionals use Google tools to facilitate interventions and for interactive educational materials. For Literature searching our results encourage using Google Scholar to complement subject specific databases. Its unique content makes it a valuable resource for finding additional documents.
OUTCOMES:
Determine badging issues and types that are best for confirming competencies
Explore the use of badging programs across various educational settings including online, hybrid, and traditional
Learn about issues and options from a real-life implementation of a badging program