'Good vibration' hand pumps boost Africa's water security (Response Included)

The simple up-and-down motion of hand pumps could help scientists secure a key water source for 200 million people in Africa.

Growing demand for groundwater is putting pressure on the resource while researchers struggle to accurately estimate the future supply.

But a team from Oxford University says that low-cost mobile sensors attached to pumps could solve the problem.

Their study shows that pump vibrations record the true depth of well water.

While fresh water from Africa's rivers and lakes is hugely important for people, it is dwarfed by the amount of groundwater available, estimated to be 100 times greater than the annual renewable fresh resource.

Groundwater lies in aquifers under the surface of the earth and is often extracted from wells by pumps. In many places these are simple devices, operated by hand.

In 2012 the Oxford research team started a trial in Kenya where hand pumps in 60 villages were fitted with data transmitters.

The idea was they would monitor the motion of the pump and the amount of water extracted on an hourly basis - if the pump wasn't working, a message was sent to a repair company and workers were dispatched to fix the problem.

The innovation cut the average repair time from over a month to less than three days.

Now the scientists have found another way to interpret the data from the accelerometers fitted to the pump handles.

They discovered that when the water is being drawn from a deep aquifer, it produces different vibrations than when the liquid comes from a shallow one.

"It's quite a simple and elegant solution to estimating groundwater and how it varies over time," co-author Dr Rob Hope from Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment told BBC News.

"In East Africa at the moment there's quite a severe drought, in South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and a lot of this might be dealt with earlier with these sorts of systems.

"If you can predict that groundwater levels are going down rapidly, rather than getting to problem and dealing, with it you can predict it much earlier on."

While the accelerometers and mobile data technology in the system is a fairly simple arrangement, the statistical analysis of the information is quite sophisticated.

Researchers took recordings of pumping lasting between 20 seconds and three minutes at different sites in Kenya and Oxford.

The scientists say the vibration value analysis is akin to the complex systems that monitor vibrations in aircraft.

"This project is a great example of using the latest developments in low-cost mobile sensors and machine learning," said lead author Dr David Clifton, associate professor of engineering science at Oxford.

"Working closely with development experts, we can help tackle water security, which is an issue of huge importance in the developing world."

There are now about 300 sensors installed across Kenya as an early warning system and some 15,000 people who are paying small premiums for rapid repairs. There has been very little damage or attempts to steal the technology in the communities in which they are installed, as people value the service.

The researchers believe the system can be rapidly scaled up and rolled out to other communities. With up to a million hand pumps dotted around Africa, they believe there is now a great opportunity to capture highly useful groundwater data.

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What is groundwater?

When water falls as rain or snow, much of it either flows into rivers or is used to provide moisture to plants and crops. What is left over trickles down to the layers of rock that sit beneath the soil.

And just like a giant sponge, this groundwater is held in the spaces between the rocks and in the tiny interconnected spaces between individual grains in a rock like sandstone.

These bodies of wet rock are referred to as aquifers. Groundwater does not sit still in the aquifer but is pushed and pulled by gravity and the weight of water above it.

The movement of the water through the aquifer removes many impurities and it is often cleaner than water on the surface.

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This "accidental infrastructure" could allow a network of hand pumps across the region to transmit data to the cloud to create a public dataset that would be widely used.

"Rather than just seeing these pumps as concrete and iron littered around Africa, these systems could be the little sentinels giving you this very valuable information," said Dr Hope,

"Mining companies, agriculture, institutional investors and communities could all benefit from this.

"I've been working in Africa for 15 years and I think it's one of the most exciting things that we've been working on and the results that we've had have been very promising."

Response

This article talks about how the 'Good vibration' hand pump is saving so many lives around Africa by providing a close water source. I experienced this first hand as I lived in a place called Namulanda (Uganda) and the first two years or so, we had no tap water. We used rain water that was clean or semi-clean water from a 'Good vibration' hand pump nearby when rain water from the tanks ran out. It was funny because you would see a line of native Ugandans and a random Asian in the middle. Water truly is the most important aspect in solving poverty in Africa as it provides sanitation, surplus of time (for jobs and other activities etc), and literally life (agriculture, just drinking water etc.) This article had no bias except for the fact of praising the British for helping out Africa with these pumps. They are doing a good job to be honest. Go water. 

Work Cited

McGrath, Matt. "'Good Vibration' Hand Pumps Boost Africa's Water Security." BBC News. BBC, 24 Feb. 2017. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. <http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39077761>.

Legal marijuana sales creating escalating damage to the environment (Response Included)

Marijuana sales have created an economic boom in U.S. states that have fully or partially relaxed their cannabis laws, but is the increased cultivation and sale of this crop also creating escalating environmental damage and a threat to public health?

In an opinion piece published by the journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Lancaster University in the U.K. have called on U.S. federal agencies to fund studies that will gather essential environmental data from the legal cultivation farms and facilities.

This information could then be used to help U.S. states minimize any environmental and public health damage caused by this burgeoning industry and aid legal marijuana growers in making their business environmentally sustainable.

State-by-state legalization is effectively creating a new industry in U.S., one that looks set to rival all but the largest of current businesses. In Colorado alone, sales revenues have reached $1 billion, roughly equal to that from grain farming in the state. By 2020 it is estimated that country-wide legal marijuana sales will generate more annual revenue than the National Football League.

But the article, titled "High Time to Assess the Environmental Impacts of Cannabis Cultivation" co-authored by William Vizuete, associate professor of environment sciences and engineering at UNC's Gillings School of Global Public health and Kirsti Ashworth, research fellow at Lancaster University's Lancaster Environment Centre say that this expanded cultivation carries with it serious environmental effects.

Their article points out that cannabis is an especially needy crop requiring high temperatures (25-30 °C for indoor operations), strong light, highly fertile soil and large volumes of water - around twice that of wine grapes. In addition, the authors state that the few available studies of marijuana cultivation have uncovered potentially significant environmental impacts due to excessive water and energy demands and local contamination of water, air, and soil.

For example, a study of illegal outdoor grow operations in northern California found that rates of water extraction from streams threatened aquatic ecosystems. High levels of growth nutrients, as well as pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, also found their way back into the local environment, further damaging aquatic wildlife.

Controlling the indoor growing environment requires considerable energy with power requirements estimated to be similar to that of Google's massive data centers. No significant data has been collected on the air pollution impacts on worker's public health inside these growing facilities or the degradation of outdoor air quality due to emissions produced by the industrial scale production of marijuana.

The authors emphasize, however, much of the data on marijuana cultivation to date has come from monitoring illegal cannabis growing operations.

Dr Ashworth of Lancaster Environment Centre said: "The illegal status of marijuana has prevented us from understanding the detrimental impacts that this industrial scale operation has on the environment and public health."

"This is an industry undergoing a historic transition, presenting an historic opportunity to be identified as a progressive, world-leading example of good practice and environmental stewardship."

The continued expansion of legalization by the states does offer significant opportunities for the US Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Institutes of Health (NIH, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to fund research into legal cannabis cultivation to protect the environment.

"Generating accurate data in all the areas we discussed offers significant potential to reduce energy consumption and environmental harm, protect public health and ultimately, improve cultivation methods," said Dr Vizuete . "There are also significant potential public health issues caused by emissions from the plants themselves rather than smoking it. These emissions cause both indoor and outdoor air pollution."

Response:

Short Summary is that Marijuana is not only detrimental for public health (if it's used as drugs) but is also ruining the environment. Marijuana apparently requires a lot of nutrients and water to supply its growth and that as we all learned in biology, ruins the top soil- eventually ruining the soil altogether. I think this is another good reason people should stop cultivating Marijuana. This article wasn't really biased but took the time to explain the significance of the damage this is causing. 

Work Cited:

"Legal Marijuana Sales Creating Escalating Damage to the Environment." Phys.org - News and Articles on Science and Technology. N.p., 21 Feb. 2017. Web. 21 Feb. 2017. <https://phys.org/news/2017-02-legal-marijuana-sales-escalating-environment.html>.

Why Do Chinese Restaurants Have Such Similar Names (Response Included)

Chinese restaurants are ubiquitous across America from big cities to suburban strip malls to dusty back roads, to highway gas stations. They are frequently the heart of small towns. They offer up a familiar menu of comfort food, but also similar-sounding names. And that’s no accident. Even though the majority of the 50,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States are not large chain franchises, family-owned mom-and-pop shops adhere to a tried and true gustatory tradition.

“Familiarity is one of their biggest selling points,” says Cedric Yeh, who as project head of the Sweet and Sour Initiative at the National Museum of American History, studies Chinese foodways (see artifacts below) and helped put together a 2011 exhibition on Chinese food in America at the museum.

Many Chinese restaurant names are chosen for their auspiciousness—out of the owners’ desire for success. They include words like golden, fortune, luck and garden. In Mandarin, garden is “yuan,” a homophone for money.

The word play, says Yeh, is usually lost on American diners. To Americans, some names may make no sense or translate in a funny way, says Yeh, whose parents had a Chinese restaurant named Jade Inn in Springfield, Massachusetts, when he was younger.

One of the words that means good fortune in Cantonese is spelled most unfortunately “fuk.” Restaurants incorporating that word have gotten lots of attention, especially in the social media era, says Yeh, who also serves as deputy chair of the division of Armed Forces History.

“I don’t think they ever stopped and thought about why that might attract attention,” says Yeh.

An online Chinese Restaurant Name Generator pokes playful fun at the stew of name possibilities, spitting out “Goose Oriental,” “Mandarin Wall,” “#1 Tso,” and “Fortune New Dynasty.” Auspicious, perhaps, but maybe not the catchiest.

But Chinese restaurant names are packed with significance to Chinese people. Take “Fragrant Harbor”—the name for Hong Kong, says Andrew Coe, a Brooklyn-based author of Chop Suey, A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States. Chinese people would understand that it’s a Hong Kong-style restaurant, he says.

Names—along with menus and decor—established by the first owner of a restaurant rarely change, even if the business changes hands multiple times, as they often do, Coe says. The Chinese restaurants follow a formula. “They believe in consistency and not scaring away the customers,” Coe says. If the name changes, it could mean a change in cuisine.

Most Chinese restaurants in America also get their menus, their décor and even their workers from a small group of distributors, most based in New York, although some are in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston, a city with a growing Chinese population, Coe says. 

Chinese restaurants—ones that also catered to Americans, and not just Chinese immigrants—didn’t start to proliferate until the late 19th century. The center of the Chinese food universe was New York City, where many Chinese ended up after fleeing racial violence in the American west. In the east, especially in the roiling immigrant stew that was New York City at the time, while anti-Chinese sentiment existed, it was no more virulent than the bigotry against other immigrants, Coe says.

Immigrants from Canton (the southern province that surrounds Hong Kong and now known as as Guangdong) opened most of the early U.S. restaurants. Cantonese influence continues to be strong, but with another wave of Chinese immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s, the cuisine and culture of Fujian province joined the American mix, along with dishes from Hunan, Sichuan, Taipei and Shanghai. And now, with growing numbers of Chinese students attending American universities, interesting regional influences are showing up in perhaps unexpected places like Pittsburgh, says Coe.

But the names all continue to be similar and say something to both American and Chinese diners, says Yeh. “You want to give the customer the idea that you’re coming to a Chinese restaurant,” he says. The restaurant also has to pitch itself as something more exotic than the Chinese place down the street, so it may become a little more fanciful with the name, he adds.

The Washington Post in 2016 analyzed the names of some 40,000 Chinese restaurants and determined that “restaurant,” “China,” and “Chinese” appeared together in about one-third of the names. “Express” was the next most popular word, with “Panda” running close behind, in part because there are more than 1,500 “Panda Express” restaurants, part of a chain.

“Wok,” “garden,” “house,” and “kitchen,” also were frequently used. “Golden” was the most-proffered color, and panda and dragon were the most well-used in the animals category.

The panda-China connection in restaurant names is a more recent thing, but both the dragon and phoenix are traditionally associated with Chinese culture and history, Coe says. “Imperial” also has deep connotations for Chinese people, evocative of its past. For restaurants, “it implies a kind of elevation of the food,” says Coe, but often, not much else might be a cut above. One of Coe’s favorite restaurants in Queens, “Main Street Imperial Chinese Gourmet,” has wonderful food, but is basically a hole in the wall, he says.

As far as Coe is concerned, the name is far less important than the food. “What most Americans seem to believe about Chinese food is that it should be cheap and not very exotic and served very quickly,” he says. They expect something a little sweet, greasy, not too spicy, no weird ingredients, and some deep-fried meat.

Cantonese food is delicate and light, with many steamed or boiled items. “It’s one of the great cuisines of the world,” says Coe.

But at restaurants that cater more to Americans, the food has been altered to fit those diners’ expectations “that it’s almost completely unrecognizable”—unlike the names.

Work Cited

Ault, Alicia. "Why Do Chinese Restaurants Have Such Similar Names?" Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution, n.d. Web. 07 Feb. 2017. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-do-chinese-restaurants-such-similar-names-180961996/>.

Response:

Well, before anything else, I want to say this article was enlightening and shed light on one of the biggest misunderstanding in my life. That is actually the only thing I can say. This article doesn't have a bias as it is informational of why Chinese Restaurants sound the same. Good article, good read.