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1. Risk as a process: a history informed hazard planning approach applied to the 2018 post-fire debris flows, Montecito, California

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2023.1183324  

   Serra-Llobet, A; Radke, J; Kondolf, GM; Gurrola, L; Rogers, JD; Lindbergh, S; Douvinet, J (July 2023, Frontiers in environmental science)

   Garcia-Ayllon_Veintimilla, Salvador (Ed.)

   Historical information about floods is not commonly used in the US to inform land use planning decisions. Rather, the current approach to managing floods is based on static maps derived from computer simulations of the area inundated by floods of specified return intervals. These maps provide some information about flood hazard, but they do not reflect the underlying processes involved in creating a flood disaster, which typically include increased exposure due to building on flood-prone land, nor do they account for the greater hazard resulting from wildfire. We developed and applied an approach to analyze how exposure has evolved in flood hazard zones in Montecito, California, an area devastated by post-fire debris flows in January 2018. By combining historical flood records of the past 200 years, human development records of the past 100 years, and geomorphological understanding of debris flow generation processes, this approach allows us to look at risk as a dynamic process influenced by physical and human factors, instead of a static map. Results show that floods after fires, in particular debris flows and debris laden floods, are very common in Montecito (15 events in the last 200 years), and that despite policies discouraging developments in hazard areas, developments in hazard zones have increased substantially since Montecito joined the National Flood Insurance Program in 1979.We also highlight the limitation of using conventional Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs) to manage land use in alluvial fan areas such as Montecito. The knowledge produced in this project can help Montecito residents better understand how they came to be vulnerable to floods and identify action they are taking now that might increase or reduce their vulnerability to the next big flood. This science-history-centric approach to understand hazard and exposure evolution using geographic information systems (GIS) and historical records, is generalizable to other communities seeking to better understand the nature of the hazard they are exposed to and some of the root causes of their vulnerabilities, in other words, both the natural and social processes producing disasters. 

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2. The Effects of Concussion Can Be Long-Lasting

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frym2020.00057  

   Alexandrea Kilgore-Gomez, Hector Arciniega (April 2020, Frontiers for young minds)

   null (Ed.)

   Have you ever felt “groggy” after hitting your head? We are learning more about how important it is to protect your brain from injuries, such as concussion. Concussion is also called mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). After an mTBI, most people think patients recover within a few weeks. We noticed that some college students who had had an mTBI were struggling to remember information for a few seconds. This ability is called working memory and we need it for most thinking jobs, like remembering the name of someone you just met, or what you wanted to get from the fridge. In our experiments, we tested different groups of students to see if they could remember things for 1 s, like the color of squares. Participants with a history of mTBI (on average, more than 4 years after injury) performed worse than students without a history of mTBI. The take-home message is that there can be lasting effects of mTBI, even years after it happens. 

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3. Speculating on land, property and peri/urban futures: A conjunctural approach to intra-metropolitan comparison

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221081642  

   Leitner, Helga; Sheppard, Eric (April 2022, Urban Studies)

   This article explores a conjunctural approach to comparison as a means to capture the complexity of the processes shaping metropolitan land transformations in a city of the global South, comparing the co-implicated actions of developers and local residents across central and peri-urban Jabodetabek. A conjunctural approach shares with some other forms of comparison the ambition to build new theories and challenge existing knowledge. Rather than controlling for the characteristics of units of analysis as in conventional comparison, a conjunctural approach attends to the broader spatio-temporal conjuncture. It involves highlighting unexpected or overlooked starting points for comparison, attending to inter-place, inter-scalar and inter-temporal relationalities in order to identify shared general tendencies as well as particularities and to chart their mutual constitution. Grounding this comparison iteratively puts local knowledge and observations in conversation with already existing theories. Deploying these principles in a socio-spatial intra-metropolitan comparison, we show that economic speculation on land and property is complexly entangled with actors’ socio-cultural speculations, as they seek also to realise aspirations for distinct peri/urban futures. Economic speculation deepens already existing inequalities in wealth and power differentials between and among developers and kampung residents. The erasure of informal settlements and displacement of their residents is supplemented by the ability of other kampungs and select residents to take advantage of spillover opportunities from the formal developments built on former kampung land. Distinct central city and peri-urban landscapes are emerging, shaped by differences in the social ecology of land and local governance and planning regimes. 

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4. How Do Student Perceptions of Engineers and Engineering as a Career Relate to Their Self-Efficacy, Career Expectations, and Grittiness?

   Morris, Melissa Lynn; Dygert, Joseph; Hensel, Robin A. (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   This complete research paper examines the connection between student beliefs about engineering as a profession, as well as the perceptions of their family and friends, to their reported self-efficacy, career expectations, and grittiness. The student responses examined were obtained from non-calculus ready engineering students at a large land grant institution in the Mid-Atlantic region. The students participated in a well-established program focused on cohort formation, mentorship, professional skill development, and fostering a sense of inclusion and belonging in engineering. The program, consisting of a one-week pre-fall bridge experience and two common courses, was founded in 2012 and has been operating with National Science Foundation (NSF) S-STEM funding since 2016. Students who received S-STEM funded scholarships are required to participate in focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and complete LAESE, MSLQ, and GRIT questionnaires each semester. The researchers applied qualitative coding methods to evaluate student responses from focus groups and one-one-one interviews which were conducted from 2017 to 2019. Questions examined in this paper include: 1) How would you describe an engineer? 2) Please describe what you think an engineer does on a daily basis. 3) What do you think your friends/family think of engineering? 4) What skills or characteristics do you think good engineers have? 5) What types of careers do you believe are filled by degree holding engineers? Student responses on the aforementioned questions were related to the self-efficacy, career expectation, and grit values obtained from the LAESE, MSLQ, and GRIT instruments. The nature of this longitudinal study allows the evolution of student responses to also be examined as they matriculate through their education. Additional analysis was performed to identify themes and numerical trends associated with student populations such as, underrepresented minorities, females, and first-generation college students. Results of this research are presented in an effort to further highlight the importance of exposure to STEM fields during an individual’s K-12 education, and express how student perceptions, self-efficacy, GRIT, and career expectations evolve over their undergraduate education. 

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5. Surveys find "two kinds" of public knowledge about polar regions

   Hamilton, Lawrence C. (November 2020, Witness the Arctic)

   null (Ed.)

   How much does the US public know about polar regions? Researchers exploring this topic have occasionally mixed factual questions in among the more typical opinion queries on general-public surveys. A recent article in the Journal of Geoscience Education (Hamilton 2020) describes a key finding from these surveys: there are "two kinds" of polar knowledge. One kind is evoked by questions like this: Which of the following three statements do you think is more accurate? Over the past few years, the ice on the Arctic Ocean in late summer... - Covers less area than it did 30 years ago (correct) - Declined but then recovered to about the same area it had 30 years ago - Covers more area than it did 30 years ago The declining area of late-summer Arctic sea ice, tracked by satellites over the past 40 years, is a basic and widely reported scientific fact. On surveys, however, many people do not recognize this fact, but answer instead based on their opinion about global warming. Similar results occur if we ask whether, in recent decades, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have increased: again, many people give answers contrary to science, but reflecting instead their beliefs or political identity. Although these questions involve important and well-established facts, survey responses defy simple interpretation as indicators of knowledge. 

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