Identifying indicators of sustainable development using the global sustainability quadrant approach

Advances in information technology and global data availability have opened the door for assessments of sustainable development at a truly macro scale. It is now fairly easy to conduct a study of sustainability using the entire planet as the unit of analysis; this is precisely what this work set out to accomplish. The study began by examining some of the best known composite indicator frameworks developed to measure sustainability at the country level today. Most of these were found to value human development factors and a clean local environment, but to gravely overlook consumption of (remote) resources in relation to nature’s capacity to renew them, a basic requirement for a sustainable state. Thus, a new measuring standard is proposed, based on the Global Sustainability Quadrant approach. In a two‐dimensional plot of nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) vs. their Ecological Footprint (EF) per capita, the Sustainability Quadrant is defined by the area where both dimensions satisfy the minimum conditions of sustainable development: an HDI score above 0.8 (considered ‘high’ human development), and an EF below the fair Earth‐share of 2.063 global hectares per person. After developing methods to identify those countries that are closest to the Quadrant in the present‐day and, most importantly, those that are moving towards it over time, the study tackled the question: what indicators of performance set these countries apart? To answer this, an analysis of raw data, covering a wide array of environmental, social, economic, and governance performance metrics, was undertaken. The analysis used country rank lists for each individual metric and compared them, using the Pearson Product Moment Correlation function, to the rank lists generated by the proximity/movement relative to the Quadrant measuring methods. The analysis yielded a list of metrics which are, with a high degree of statistical significance, associated with proximity to – and movement towards – the Quadrant; most notably: Favorable for sustainable development: use of contraception, high life expectancy, high literacy rate, and urbanization. Unfavorable for sustainable development: high GDP per capita, high language diversity, high energy consumption, and high meat consumption. A momentary gain, but a burden in the long‐run: high carbon footprint and debt. These results could serve as a solid stepping stone for the development of more reliable composite index frameworks for assessing countries’ sustainability.

ALTERNATING CURRENT DIELECTROPHORETIC MANIPULATION OF ERYTHROCYTES IN MEDICAL MICRODEVICE TECHNOLOGY

Medical microdevices have gained popularity in the past few decades because they allow the medical laboratory to be taken out into the field and for disease diagnostics to happen with a smaller sample volume, at a lower cost and much faster. Blood is the human body's most readily available and informative diagnostic fluid because of the wealth of information it provides about the body's general health including enzymatic, proteomic and immunological states. The purpose of this project is to optimize operating conditions and study ABO-Rh erythrocytes dielectrophoretic responses to alternating current electric signals. The end goal of this project is the creation of a relatively inexpensive microfluidic device, which can be used for the ABO-Rh typing of a blood sample. This dissertation presents results showing how blood samples of a known ABO- Rh blood type exhibit differing behavior to the same electrical stimulus based on their blood type. The first panel of donors and experiments, presented in Chapter 4 occurred when a sample of known blood type was injected into a microdevice with a T-shaped electrode configuration and the erythorcytes were found to rupture at a rate specific to their ABO-Rh blood type. The second set of experiments, presented in Chapter 5, were originally published in Electrophoresis in 20111. Novel in this work was the discovery that treatment of human erythrocytes with β-galactosidase successfully removed ABO surface antigens such that native A and B blood no longer agglutinated with the proper antibodies. This work was performed in a medium of conductivity 0.9S/m which is close to the measured conductivity of pooled plasma (~1.1S/m). The ability to perform dielectrophoresis experiments at physiological conductivities conditions is advantageous for future portable devices because the device/instrument would not need to store dilution buffers. The final results of this project, presented in Chapter 6, explore the entire dielectrophoretic spectra of the ABO-Rh erythrocytes including the cross-over frequency and the magnitudes of the positive or negative dielectrophoretic response. These were completed at lower medium conductivities of 0.1S/m and 0.01-0.04S/m. These results show that by using the sweep function built into the Agilent alternating current generator it is possible to explore how a single group of blood cells will react to rapid changes in frequency and will provide the user with curve that can be matched the theoretical dielectrophoretic response curves. As a whole this project shows that it is possible to distinguish human erythrocytes by their ABO-Rh blood type via three different dielectrophoretic methods. This work builds on the foundation of that it is possible to distinguish healthy from infected cells2-7, similar cell types1,7-14 and other work regarding the dielectrophoresis of human erythrocytes1,10,11. This work has implications in both medical diagnostics and future dielectrophoretic work because it has shown that ABO-Rh blood type is now a factor, which must be identified when working with a human blood sample. It also shows that the creation of a microfluidic device that subjects human erythrocytes to a dielectrophoretic impulse and then exports an ABO-Rh blood type is a near future possibility.

A mobile image enhancement technology for visually impaired

In this thesis, an image enhancement application is developed for low-vision patients when they use iPhones to see images/watch videos. The thesis has two contributions. The first contribution is the new image enhancement algorithm which combines human vision features. The new image enhancement algorithm is modified from a wavelet transform based image enhancement algorithm developed by Dr. Jinshan Tang. Different from the original algorithm, the new image enhancement algorithm combines human visual feature into the algorithm and thus can make the new algorithm more effective. Experimental simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has better visual results than the algorithm without combining visual features. The second contribution of this thesis is the development of a mobile image enhancement application. In this application, users with low-vision can see clearer images on an iPhone which is installed with the application I have developed.