Development Engineering最新文献

{"title":"A cost-benefit analysis of livelihood, environmental and health benefits of a large scale water filter and cookstove distribution in Rwanda","authors":"Christina Barstow ,&nbsp;Randall Bluffstone ,&nbsp;Kyle Silon ,&nbsp;Karl Linden ,&nbsp;Evan Thomas","doi":"10.1016/j.deveng.2019.100043","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.deveng.2019.100043","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Public health interventions targeting contaminated drinking water and indoor air pollution may help to reduce two of the leading causes of death among children under 5 in Rwanda - diarrhea and pneumonia. These interventions also have the potential to provide economic benefits, including reduction in expenditures on fuelwood and time spent on fuelwood collection, environmental benefits through reductions in deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions, and additional economic benefits attributable to health impacts. We evaluate one such large scale intervention, the <em>Tubeho Neza</em> program in Western Rwanda using a cost-benefit analysis. This paper estimates monetized program benefits related to fuelwood savings, time savings, environmental and health benefits, which are then compared to the overall program cost, over a 5 year project year period. The total program cost is estimated at over $11.91 million, and total benefits at the means valued at over $66.67 million, for an estimated mean cost-benefit ratio of over 5.6. A sensitivity analysis of the major factors indicated a cost-benefit ratio range of approximately 1–16. The primary benefit identified is the environmental impact of woodfuel savings attributable to the improved cookstoves. This study estimates 118,000 tonnes of annual woodfuel savings in the Western Province may be attributable to the program in year 1, decreasing to 65,000 tonnes in year 5. These estimates suggest that this program may help to compensate for the government of Rwanda's projected regional woodfuel deficit of 106,000 tonnes per year by 2020. Overall, this study suggests that the <em>Tubeho Neza</em> program provides benefits in excess of the program costs.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":37901,"journal":{"name":"Development Engineering","volume":"4 ","pages":"Article 100043"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.deveng.2019.100043","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54238931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards a robust and affordable Automatic Weather Station","authors":"Mary Nsabagwa ,&nbsp;Maximus Byamukama ,&nbsp;Emmanuel Kondela ,&nbsp;Julianne Sansa Otim","doi":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.100040","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.100040","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The frequency and severity of extreme weather events have increased over the last 30 years, making predictability of weather a challenge. Weather extreme events often cause adverse impacts to lives and property. Thus, accurate and timely provision of weather data is becoming crucial to improve the skill of weather prediction and to strengthen resilience to the impacts of the adverse weather conditions. Uganda and many developing countries have challenges in acquiring accurate and timely weather data due to their sparse weather observation networks. The sparse weather observation networks are in part attributed to the high cost of acquiring an Automatic Weather Station (AWS) and limited funding to national meteorological services of the respective countries. The inability of developing countries to manufacture their own AWSs leads to high recurring costs accruing from importation and maintenance. In this study, we propose an AWS based on Wireless Sensor Networks. We plan to design three generations of the AWS prototype, the first being the subject of this paper. The purpose of this paper is therefore to evaluate the first-generation AWS prototype and to propose improvements for the second-generation, based on needs and requirements. Results from the AWS prototype data suggest improving non-functional requirements such as reliability, data accuracy, power consumption and data transmission in order to have an operational AWS. The non-functional requirements combined with cost reduction produces a robust and affordable AWS. Therefore, developing countries like Uganda will be able to acquire the AWSs in reasonable quantities, hence improvement in weather forecasts.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":37901,"journal":{"name":"Development Engineering","volume":"4 ","pages":"Article 100040"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.deveng.2018.100040","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54238893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Satellite-based tree cover mapping for forest conservation in the drylands of Sub Saharan Africa (SSA): Application to Burkina Faso gazetted forests","authors":"Guigonan Serge Adjognon ,&nbsp;Alexis Rivera-Ballesteros ,&nbsp;Daan van Soest","doi":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.100039","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.100039","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>While monitoring the effectiveness of forest conservation programs requires accurate data on (changes in) forest cover, many countries still lack the ability to map local forest inventory, especially in the drylands of Africa where forest areas are very sparsely covered. In this paper, we present a high resolution tree cover estimation of twelve gazetted forests in Burkina Faso using Random Forest-based supervised classification and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery sensed between March and April 2016. The methodology relies on ground truth sample points labeled manually over 10-m resolution images displaying a composite of near infrared (NIR), red and green bands extracted from Sentinel-2 multi-spectral satellite data to estimate tree cover with an average balanced accuracy rate of 80 percent. The output is a collection of rasters with binary values representing the combination of 10, and down-sampled 20 and 60-m bands indicating an estimate of the existence of trees or lack thereof, usable as a baseline for deforestation monitoring.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":37901,"journal":{"name":"Development Engineering","volume":"4 ","pages":"Article 100039"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.deveng.2018.100039","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54238880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hot diodes!: Dirt cheap cooking and electricity for the global poor?","authors":"Grace Gius ,&nbsp;Matthew Walker ,&nbsp;Andre Li ,&nbsp;Nicholas J. Adams ,&nbsp;Robert Van Buskirk ,&nbsp;Pete Schwartz","doi":"10.1016/j.deveng.2019.100044","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.deveng.2019.100044","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Direct DC Solar (DDS) electricity can inexpensively cook food and charge appliances. Insulating the cooking chamber allows the food to cook with a lower-power (less expensive) solar panel over a longer cooking time. We explain how using a chain of diodes instead of a <em>resistive</em> heater extracts more energy from a solar panel over a variety of solar intensities and also acts as a rough, inexpensive voltage regulator to charge batteries and power appliances. We show how a diode heater produces more heat from a solar panel than either a DDS resistive heater or a PWM/battery-connected resistive heater, averaged over a wide variety of solar intensities. The resulting cost of electricity is already cost competitive with biomass cooking in many areas. Benefits include inexpensive access to electricity as well as reductions in indoor air pollution, deforestation, and cost/burden of providing cooking fuel. With continued decrease in the price of solar panels, DDS will become ever more effective for bringing electricity and electrical cooking to the global poor.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":37901,"journal":{"name":"Development Engineering","volume":"4 ","pages":"Article 100044"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.deveng.2019.100044","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54238952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The feasibility of picture-based insurance (PBI): Smartphone pictures for affordable crop insurance","authors":"Francisco Ceballos ,&nbsp;Berber Kramer ,&nbsp;Miguel Robles","doi":"10.1016/j.deveng.2019.100042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.deveng.2019.100042","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Smallholder farmers are increasingly exposed to weather extremes but lack access to affordable insurance products for catastrophic crop damage. This paper analyzes the feasibility of Picture-Based Insurance (PBI) as a low-cost tool to improve coverage. PBI verifies insurance claims using smartphone pictures of insured plots, taken by farmers themselves, to minimize asymmetric information and costs of claims verification, while reducing basis risk compared to index-based insurance. A pilot implementation in the rice-wheat belt of India speaks to PBI being a feasible and valuable innovation to reduce downside basis risk in index insurance: nearly two-thirds of trained farmers took at least four pictures (roughly one per growth stage), which was considered sufficient for loss assessment; severe damage was visible from smartphone pictures in 71 percent of affected sites; and this was a significant improvement over alternative index-based products, which identified severe damage in at most 34 percent of affected sites.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":37901,"journal":{"name":"Development Engineering","volume":"4 ","pages":"Article 100042"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.deveng.2019.100042","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136513423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A trip to work: Estimation of origin and destination of commuting patterns in the main metropolitan regions of Haiti using CDR","authors":"Guilherme Augusto Zagatti ,&nbsp;Miguel Gonzalez ,&nbsp;Paolo Avner ,&nbsp;Nancy Lozano-Gracia ,&nbsp;Christopher J. Brooks ,&nbsp;Maximilian Albert ,&nbsp;Jonathan Gray ,&nbsp;Sarah Elizabeth Antos ,&nbsp;Priya Burci ,&nbsp;Elisabeth zu Erbach-Schoenberg ,&nbsp;Andrew J. Tatem ,&nbsp;Erik Wetter ,&nbsp;Linus Bengtsson","doi":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.03.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.03.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The rapid, unplanned urbanisation in Haiti creates a series of urban mobility challenges which can contribute to job market fragmentation and decrease the quality of life in the city. Data on population and job distributions, and on home-work commuting patterns in major urban centres are scarce. The most recent census took place in 2003 and events such as the 2010 earthquake have caused major redistributions of the population. In this data scarce context, our work takes advantage of nationwide de-identified Call Detail Records (CDR) from the main mobile operator in the country to investigate night and daytime populations densities and commuting patterns. We use a non-supervised learning algorithm to identify meaningful locations for individuals. These locations are then labelled according to a scoring criteria. The labelled locations are distributed in a grid with cells measuring 500 × 500 m in order to aggregate the individual level data and to create origin-destination matrices of weighted connections between home and work locations. The results suggest that labor markets are fragmented in Haiti. The two main urban centres, Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien suffer from low employment accessibility as measured by the percentage of the population that travels beyond their identified home cluster (1 km radius) during the day. The data from the origin-destination matrices suggest that only 42 and 40 percent of the population are considered to be commuters in Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien respectively.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":37901,"journal":{"name":"Development Engineering","volume":"3 ","pages":"Pages 133-165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.deveng.2018.03.002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54238766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Utilizing publicly available satellite data for urban research: Mapping built-up land cover and land use in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam","authors":"Ran Goldblatt ,&nbsp;Klaus Deininger ,&nbsp;Gordon Hanson","doi":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.03.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.03.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Urbanization is a fundamental trend of the past two centuries, shaping many dimensions of the modern world. To guide this phenomenon and support growth of cities that are competitive and sustainably provide needed services, there is a need for information on the extent and nature of urban land cover. However, measuring urbanization is challenging, especially in developing countries, which often lack the resources and infrastructure needed to produce reliable data. With the increased availability of remotely sensed data, new methods are available to map urban land. Yet, existing classification products vary in their definition of “urban” and typically characterize urbanization in a specific point (or points) in time. Emerging cloud based computational platforms now allow one to map land cover and land use (LC/LU) across space and time without being constrained to specific classification products. Here, we highlight the potential use of publicly available remotely sensed data for mapping changes in the built-up LC/LU in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in the period between 2000 and 2015. We perform a pixel-based supervised image classification procedure in Google Earth Engine (GEE), using two sources of reference data (administrative data and hand-labeled examples). By fusing publicly available optical and radar data as input to the classifier, we achieve accurate maps of built-up LC/LU in the province. In today's era of big data, an easily deployable method for accurate classification of built-up LC/LU has extensive applications across a wide range of disciplines and is essential for building the foundation for a sustainable human society.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":37901,"journal":{"name":"Development Engineering","volume":"3 ","pages":"Pages 83-99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.deveng.2018.03.001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54238732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Techno-economic feasibility of lighting protection of overhead transmission line with multi-chamber insulator arrestors","authors":"K.T.M.U. Hemapala ,&nbsp;O.V. Gnana Swathika ,&nbsp;K.P.R.D.S.K. Dharmadasa","doi":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.05.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.05.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The performance of transmission lines has a significant impact on reliability aspects of the power supply system of a country. The lightning back flashover effects are recognized as one of the major causes of transmission line outages. This paper focuses on studying the effect of Multi Chamber Insulator Arresters (MCIA) on lightning back flashover by transient modeling and subsequent simulation of a selected transmission line. Power System CAD (PSCAD) software program is utilized as the software tool for modeling and simulation of the 132 kV, Matugama-Kukule transmission line for this study. Simulation of the created transmission line model is carried out with and without MCIA to evaluate the improvements in lightning back flashover performance after installation of MCIAs in this transmission line. This analysis will contribute to improve the reliability of the Sri Lankan electrical power system.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":37901,"journal":{"name":"Development Engineering","volume":"3 ","pages":"Pages 100-116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.deveng.2018.05.003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54238800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A framework for detecting injected influence attacks on microblog websites using change detection techniques","authors":"Vishnu S. Pendyala,&nbsp;Yuhong Liu,&nbsp;Silvia M. Figueira","doi":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.08.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.08.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Presidential elections can impact world peace, global economics, and overall well-being. Recent news indicates that fraud on the Web has played a substantial role in elections, particularly in developing countries in South America and the public discourse, in general. To protect the trustworthiness of the Web, in this paper, we present a novel framework using statistical techniques to help detect veiled Web fraud attacks in Online Social Networks (OSN). Specific examples are used to demonstrate how some statistical techniques, such as the Kalman Filter and the modified CUSUM, can be applied to detect various attack scenarios. A hybrid data set, consisting of both real user tweets collected from Twitter and simulated fake tweets is constructed for testing purposes. The efficacy of the proposed framework has been verified by computing metrics, such as Precision, Recall, and Area Under the ROC curve. The algorithms achieved up to 99.9% accuracy in some scenarios and are over 80% accurate for most of the other scenarios.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":37901,"journal":{"name":"Development Engineering","volume":"3 ","pages":"Pages 218-233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.deveng.2018.08.002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54238866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Addressing technical barriers for reliable, safe removal of fluoride from drinking water using minimally processed bauxite ores","authors":"Heather L. Buckley ,&nbsp;Nusrat J. Molla ,&nbsp;Katya Cherukumilli ,&nbsp;Kathryn S. Boden ,&nbsp;Ashok J. Gadgil","doi":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.06.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.deveng.2018.06.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Throughout the developing world, over 200 million people drink groundwater containing fluoride concentrations surpassing the World Health Organization's maximum recommended contaminant level (WHO-MCL) of 1.5 mg F⁻/L, resulting in adverse health effects ranging from mottled tooth enamel to debilitating skeletal fluorosis.</p><p>Existing technologies to remove fluoride from water, such as reverse osmosis and filtration with activated alumina, are expensive and are not accessible for low-income communities. Our group and others have demonstrated that minimally-processed bauxite ores can remove fluoride to safe levels at a fraction of the cost of activated alumina. We report results from testing for some technical challenges that may arise in field deployment of this technology at large scale, particularly in a sufficiently robust manner for application in development contexts. Anticipating possible modes of failure and addressing these challenges in advance in the laboratory is particularly important for technologies for vulnerable communities where the opportunity to re-launch pilot projects is limited and small failures can keep solutions from the people that need them most.</p><p>This work addresses three potential technical barriers to reliable removal of fluoride from drinking water with bauxite ore from Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India. We evaluate competition from co-occurring ions, adsorption reversibility, and potability of the product water with regards to leaching of undesirable ions during treatment with various adsorbent materials including raw and thermally activated bauxite, and synthetic gibbsite (a simple model system). Under the conditions tested, the presence of phosphate significantly impacts fluoride adsorption capacity on all adsorbents. Sulfate impacts fluoride adsorption on gibbsite, but not on either bauxite adsorbent. Nitrate and silicate (as silicic acid), tested only with gibbsite, do not affect fluoride adsorption capacity. Both thermally activated bauxite and gibbsite show non-reversible adsorption of fluoride at a pH of 6. Raw bauxite leached arsenic and manganese in a TCLP leaching test at levels indicating the need for ongoing monitoring of treated water, but not precluding safe deployment of bauxite as a fluoride remediation technology. Understanding these phenomena is crucial to ensure field deployment over large diverse geographical areas with aquifers varying in groundwater composition, and for ensuring that the appropriate engineering processes are designed for field implementation of this innovation.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":37901,"journal":{"name":"Development Engineering","volume":"3 ","pages":"Pages 175-187"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.deveng.2018.06.002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36831165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}