Development of an odor management plan for industrial stationary sources in an urban environment: A case study for Broward County, Florida

Objectionable odors remain at the top of air pollution complaints in urban areas such as Broward County that is subject to increasing residential and industrial developments. The odor complaints in Broward County escalated by 150 percent for the 2001 to 2004 period although the population increased by only 6 percent. It is estimated that in 2010 the population will increase to 2.5 million. Relying solely on enforcing the local odor ordinance is evidently not sufficient to manage the escalating odor complaint trends. An alternate approach similar to odor management plans (OMPs) that are successful in managing major malodor sources such as animal farms is required. ^ This study aims to develop and determine the feasibility of implementing a comprehensive odor management plan (COMP) for the entire Broward County. Unlike existing OMPs for single sources where the receptors (i.e. the complainants) are located beyond the boundary of the source, the COMP addresses a complex model of multiple sources and receptors coexisting within the boundary of the entire county. Each receptor is potentially subjected to malodor emissions from multiple sources within the county. Also, the quantity and quality of the source/receptor variables are continuously changing. ^ The results of this study show that it is feasible to develop a COMP that adopts a systematic procedure to: (1) Generate maps of existing odor complaint areas and malodor sources, (2) Identify potential odor sources (target sources) responsible for existing odor complaints, (3) Identify possible odor control strategies for target sources, (4) Determine the criteria for implementing odor control strategies, (5) Develop an odor complaint response protocol, and (6) Conduct odor impact analyses for new sources to prevent future odor related issues. Geographic Information System (GIS) is used to identify existing complaint areas. A COMP software that incorporates existing United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air dispersion software is developed to determine the target sources, predict the likelihood of new complaints, and conduct odor impact analysis. The odor response protocol requires pre-planning field investigations and conducting surveys to optimize the local agency available resources while protecting the citizen's welfare, as required by the Clean Air Act. ^

American Art Today: Night Paintings

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Art Museum at Florida International University. Essay by Barbara Dayer Gallati ; curated by Dahlia Morgan.

Using sonic enhancement to augment non-visual tabular navigation

More information is now readily available to computer users than at any time in human history; however, much of this information is often inaccessible to people with blindness or low-vision, for whom information must be presented non-visually. Currently, screen readers are able to verbalize on-screen text using text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis; however, much of this vocalization is inadequate for browsing the Internet. An auditory interface that incorporates auditory-spatial orientation was created and tested. For information that can be structured as a two-dimensional table, links can be semantically grouped as cells in a row within an auditory table, which provides a consistent structure for auditory navigation. An auditory display prototype was tested.^ Sixteen legally blind subjects participated in this research study. Results demonstrated that stereo panning was an effective technique for audio-spatially orienting non-visual navigation in a five-row, six-column HTML table as compared to a centered, stationary synthesized voice. These results were based on measuring the time- to-target (TTT), or the amount of time elapsed from the first prompting to the selection of each tabular link. Preliminary analysis of the TTT values recorded during the experiment showed that the populations did not conform to the ANOVA requirements of normality and equality of variances. Therefore, the data were transformed using the natural logarithm. The repeated-measures two-factor ANOVA results show that the logarithmically-transformed TTTs were significantly affected by the tonal variation method, F(1,15) = 6.194, p= 0.025. Similarly, the results show that the logarithmically transformed TTTs were marginally affected by the stereo spatialization method, F(1,15) = 4.240, p=0.057. The results show that the logarithmically transformed TTTs were not significantly affected by the interaction of both methods, F(1,15) = 1.381, p=0.258. These results suggest that some confusion may be caused in the subject when employing both of these methods simultaneously. The significant effect of tonal variation indicates that the effect is actually increasing the average TTT. In other words, the presence of preceding tones increases task completion time on average. The marginally-significant effect of stereo spatialization decreases the average log(TTT) from 2.405 to 2.264.^