Privacy, technology, and norms: the case of Smart Meters.

Norms shift and emerge in response to technological innovation. One such innovation is Smart Meters - components of Smart Grid energy systems capable of minute-to-minute transmission of consumer electricity use information. We integrate theory from sociological research on social norms and privacy to examine how privacy threats affect the demand for and expectations of norms that emerge in response to new technologies, using Smart Meters as a test case. Results from three vignette experiments suggest that increased threats to privacy created by Smart Meters are likely to provoke strong demand for and expectations of norms opposing the technology and that the strength of these normative rules is at least partly conditional on the context. Privacy concerns vary little with actors' demographic characteristics. These findings contribute to theoretical understanding of norm emergence and have practical implications for implementing privacy protections that effectively address concerns of electricity users.

Early Childcare and Education in a Post-Industrial Landscape: Inequalities in Proximity to Active and Relic Manufacturing in Metropolitan Providence, Rhode Island.

Children are uniquely vulnerable to environmental health risks associated with industrial contamination, and early childcare and education (ECE) facilities are important sites for potential exposure to environmental contaminants. Emerging research on historic urban industry has additionally demonstrated that urban environmental risk accumulates historically and spatially across urban landscapes. Accordingly, this study pairs cross-sectional data on licensed childcare facilities with longitudinal manufacturing site data in Providence, Rhode Island. We use these data to investigate the proximity of ECE facilities to active and relic manufacturing sites, controlling for a range of organizational- and tract-level characteristics. Results show that type of childcare facility (center-based vs. in-home) and language of instruction (Spanish vs. English) are important predictors of children's proximity to industrial lands, past and present. These findings indicate that Spanish-speaking children in Providence may experience a "double jeopardy" in the form of disproportionate legacy environmental hazards at ECE as well as at home-suggesting that the historical nature of urban industrial land use is an important mechanism of environmental inequality for young children.

Pathways for diversifying and enhancing science advocacy.

Science is under attack and scientists are becoming more involved in efforts to defend it. The rise in science advocacy raises important questions regarding how science mobilization can both defend science and promote its use for the public good while also including the communities that benefit from science. This article begins with a discussion of the relevance of science advocacy. It then reviews research pointing to how scientists can sustain, diversify, and increase the political impact of their mobilization. Scientists, we argue, can build and maintain politically impactful coalitions by engaging with and addressing social group differences and diversity instead of suppressing them. The article concludes with a reflection on how the study of science-related mobilization would benefit from further research.

Feature extraction and machine learning techniques for identifying historic urban environmental hazards: New methods to locate lost fossil fuel infrastructure in US cities.

U.S. cities contain unknown numbers of undocumented "manufactured gas" sites, legacies of an industry that dominated energy production during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. While many of these unidentified sites likely contain significant levels of highly toxic and biologically persistent contamination, locating them remains a significant challenge. We propose a new method to identify manufactured gas production, storage, and distribution infrastructure in bulk by applying feature extraction and machine learning techniques to digitized historic Sanborn fire insurance maps. Our approach, which relies on a two-part neural network to classify candidate map regions, increases the rate of site identification 20-fold compared to unaided visual coding.

Undone Science: Charting Social Movement and Civil Society Challenges to Research Agenda Setting.

"Undone science" refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politics of knowledge, wherein multiple and competing groups struggle over the construction and implementation of alternative research agendas. Overall, the study demonstrates the analytic potential of the concept of undone science to deepen understanding of the systematic nonproduction of knowledge in the institutional matrix of state, industry, and social movements that is characteristic of recent calls for a "new political sociology of science."

Automated data extraction from historical city directories: The rise and fall of mid-century gas stations in Providence, RI.

The location of defunct environmentally hazardous businesses like gas stations has many implications for modern American cities. To track down these locations, we present the directoreadr code (github.com/brown-ccv/directoreadr). Using scans of Polk city directories from Providence, RI, directoreadr extracts and parses business location data with a high degree of accuracy. The image processing pipeline ran without any human input for 94.4% of the pages we examined. For the remaining 5.6%, we processed them with some human input. Through hand-checking a sample of three years, we estimate that ~94.6% of historical gas stations are correctly identified and located, with historical street changes and non-standard address formats being the main drivers of errors. As an example use, we look at gas stations, finding that gas stations were most common early in the study period in 1936, beginning a sharp and steady decline around 1950. We are making the dataset produced by directoreadr publicly available. We hope it will be used to explore a range of important questions about socioeconomic patterns in Providence and cities like it during the transformations of the mid-1900s.

Evaluation and Management Strategies for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFASs) in Drinking Water Aquifers: Perspectives from Impacted U.S. Northeast Communities.

BACKGROUND: Multiple Northeast U.S. communities have discovered per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in drinking water aquifers in excess of health-based regulatory levels or advisories. Regional stakeholders (consultants, regulators, and others) need technical background and tools to mitigate risks associated with exposure to PFAS-affected groundwater. OBJECTIVES: The aim was to identify challenges faced by stakeholders to extend best practices to other regions experiencing PFAS releases and to establish a framework for research strategies and best management practices. METHODS AND APPROACH: Management challenges were identified during stakeholder engagement events connecting attendees with PFAS experts in focus areas, including fate/transport, toxicology, and regulation. Review of the literature provided perspective on challenges in all focus areas. Publicly available data were used to characterize sources of PFAS impacts in groundwater and conduct a geospatial case study of potential source locations relative to drinking water aquifers in Rhode Island. DISCUSSION: Challenges in managing PFAS impacts in drinking water arise from the large number of relevant PFASs, unconsolidated information regarding sources, and limited studies on some PFASs. In particular, there is still considerable uncertainty regarding human health impacts of PFASs. Frameworks sequentially evaluating exposure, persistence, and treatability can prioritize PFASs for evaluation of potential human health impacts. A regional case study illustrates how risk-based, geospatial methods can help address knowledge gaps regarding potential sources of PFASs in drinking water aquifers and evaluate risk of exposure. CONCLUSION: Lessons learned from stakeholder engagement can assist in developing strategies for management of PFASs in other regions. However, current management practices primarily target a subset of PFASs for which in-depth studies are available. Exposure to less-studied, co-occurring PFASs remains largely unaddressed. Frameworks leveraging the current state of science can be applied toward accelerating this process and reducing exposure to total PFASs in drinking water, even as research regarding health effects continues. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP2727.

Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession: The Case of Hazardous Industrial Site Accumulation.

This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analysis of hazardous industrial site accumulation in four U.S. cities, using a relational database that was assembled for more than 11,000 facilities that operated during the past half century--most of which remain unacknowledged in government reports. Results show how three iterative processes--hazardous industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment--intersect to produce successive socioenvironmental changes that are highly relevant to but often missed by research on urban growth machines, environmental inequality, and systemic risk.

A targeted health risk assessment following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon exposure in Vietnamese-American shrimp consumers.

BACKGROUND: The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 prompted concern about health risks among seafood consumers exposed to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) via consumption of contaminated seafood. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to conduct population-specific probabilistic health risk assessments based on consumption of locally harvested white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus) among Vietnamese Americans in southeast Louisiana. METHODS: We conducted a survey of Vietnamese Americans in southeast Louisiana to evaluate shrimp consumption, preparation methods, and body weight among shrimp consumers in the disaster-impacted region. We also collected and chemically analyzed locally harvested white shrimp for 81 individual PAHs. We combined the PAH levels (with accepted reference doses) found in the shrimp with the survey data to conduct Monte Carlo simulations for probabilistic noncancer health risk assessments. We also conducted probabilistic cancer risk assessments using relative potency factors (RPFs) to estimate cancer risks from the intake of PAHs from white shrimp. RESULTS: Monte Carlo simulations were used to generate hazard quotient distributions for noncancer health risks, reported as mean ± SD, for naphthalene (1.8 × 10-4 ± 3.3 × 10-4), fluorene (2.4 × 10-5 ± 3.3 × 10-5), anthracene (3.9 × 10-6 ± 5.4 × 10-6), pyrene (3.2 × 10-5 ± 4.3 × 10-5), and fluoranthene (1.8 × 10-4 ± 3.3 × 10-4). A cancer risk distribution, based on RPF-adjusted PAH intake, was also generated (2.4 × 10-7 ± 3.9 × 10-7). CONCLUSIONS: The risk assessment results show no acute health risks or excess cancer risk associated with consumption of shrimp containing the levels of PAHs detected in our study, even among frequent shrimp consumers.

Evaluation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons using analytical methods, toxicology, and risk assessment research: seafood safety after a petroleum spill as an example.

BACKGROUND: Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are abundant and widespread environmental chemicals. They are produced naturally and through man-made processes, and they are common in organic media, including petroleum. Several PAHs are toxic, and a subset exhibit carcinogenic activity. PAHs represent a range of chemical structures based on two or more benzene rings and, depending on their source, can exhibit a variety of side modifications resulting from oxygenation, nitrogenation, and alkylation. OBJECTIVES: Here we discuss the increasing ability of contemporary analytical methods to distinguish not only different chemical structures among PAHs but also their concentrations in environmental media. Using seafood contamination following the Deepwater Horizon accident as an example, we identify issues that are emerging in the PAH risk assessment process because of increasing analytical sensitivity for individual PAHs, and we describe the paucity of toxicological literature for many of these compounds. DISCUSSION: PAHs, including the large variety of chemically modified or substituted PAHs, are naturally occurring and may constitute health risks if human populations are exposed to hazardous levels. However, toxicity evaluations have not kept pace with modern analytic methods and their increased ability to detect substituted PAHs. Therefore, although it is possible to measure these compounds in seafood and other media, we do not have sufficient information on the potential toxicity of these compounds to incorporate them into human health risk assessments and characterizations. CONCLUSIONS: Future research efforts should strategically attempt to fill this toxicological knowledge gap so human health risk assessments of PAHs in environmental media or food can be better determined. This is especially important in the aftermath of petroleum spills.