Missed that news? It was not a real storm, but it might as well have been.

Philadelphia Water Department employees turned on a fire hydrant on West Girard Avenue for three hours, enough to fill up two longish ditches with 35,000 gallons of water - an experimental simulation of 3.5 inches of rain. Then they watched it disappear.

The ditches are rain gardens, brimming with grasses, flowers, and monitoring equipment, and they are part of an underground revolution.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of a consent agreement signed with state environmental regulators, and the city says it has met its target of keeping more than 600 million gallons of rain out of the aging sewer system each year.

It has done so with hundreds of water-absorbing "tools": plant-studded green roofs, parking lots made of permeable pavement, stormwater trenches, and rain gardens such as the two on West Girard.

The reason for the ambitious program? As in many older communities, most of the city is served by combined sewer systems, meaning that rainwater is directed into the same pipes that carry the flow from showers, sinks, and toilets.

That is OK in dry weather, but with any amount of significant rainfall, the combined stream of sewage and rainwater starts to overflow into creeks and rivers, running afoul of the federal Clean Water Act.

Some cities have opted to comply with the law by building giant underground tanks to hold stormwater temporarily before sending it off to sewage treatment plants. Philadelphia proposed, instead, to soak as much rain as possible into the ground, the way nature intended, said Christopher S. Crockett, a deputy commissioner for the water department.

"Instead of creating expressways for the stormwater to get into our system, we're trying to create little traffic jams for the stormwater to stay on the site and get into the ground," Crockett said.

But the job is less than 10 percent completed.

The city says it has exceeded its five-year pledge to "green" 744 acres, defined as acreage where the various rain gardens and other infiltration tools can absorb at least one inch of rain.

In the next five years, the agreement calls for the city to triple that amount. And by 2036, the target is 9,564 acres - the equivalent of keeping nearly eight billion gallons out of the sewer system each year. Even then, there would still be occasional sewage overflows.

How much is eight billion gallons? Imagine a giant tank covering JFK Plaza. That amount of liquid would fill such a tank more than a mile high.

Still, the water already being kept out the sewers, conservatively estimated at 600 million gallons a year, is more than a drop in the bucket. That amount would still fill an imaginary JFK Plaza tank more than 500 feet high.

"It's one of the largest-scale implementations of greened acres that we've seen in the nation," said Jon Capacasa, director of the water protection division for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's mid-Atlantic region.

Collecting data

The water department has water-pressure sensors deployed at dozens of sites to see how well it works. And at a handful of spots, scientists are busy gathering more detailed data.

At the West Girard location, among others, Villanova University researchers are measuring near-surface water pressure, temperature, humidity, and other indicators.

Readings are captured every five minutes, and Cara Albright, who is working on her doctorate in water resources engineering, comes by periodically to download it onto her laptop. Water-pressure readings are translated into rates of flow.

"We basically try to measure everything that's coming into the site and everything that's leaving the site," she said.

The gardens are planted with purple coneflower, black-eyed Susan, Shenandoah switchgrass, and other hardy species, said Chris Bergerson, a water resources engineer for the city water department.

"They have to be able to withstand periods of drought, and they have to be able to survive when inundated," he said.

Elsewhere, Swarthmore College is leading an effort to measure underground water pressure at various levels down to seven feet below the surface, in order to calculate how much water is getting to the water table. Measurements are taken beneath "greened" sites as well as under regular patches of grass.

Philadelphia as role model

It is too soon to report hard numbers, but the differences between greened and un-greened sites appear "dramatic," said team member Claire Welty, a groundwater hydrologist and engineering professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

"The whole country is looking to Philadelphia to see how to do it," she said.

Crockett said it also is too soon to see measurable improvements in the four water bodies into which the combined sewers discharge their flow: the Delaware River and Schuylkill, and the Cobbs and Tacony Creeks.

But the end result will be cleaner water as well as more natural, stable flow rates.

Currently, a heavy rain takes the Tacony from ankle-deep to more than 6 feet deep in some places, Crockett said. That leads to flooding and erosion, and it wreaks havoc on wildlife.

The benefits go beyond clean water, Crockett said. The added greenery keeps the city cooler in the summer, along with absorbing greenhouse gases that can contribute to climate change. Then there is the improved quality of life when a vacant lot is turned into an inviting urban oasis, he said.

It is not cheap, with an estimated long-term price tag of more than $2 billion. Some of that comes from business owners, who now pay sewer bills based in part on the amount of impervious cover on their sites - rather than the old method based strictly on water usage. Rates have soared for some.

The water department says the alternative to the green approach, building large underground holding tanks, would cost even more.

And such tanks likely would be built with outside labor, whereas the weeding, drain-clearing, and other maintenance required for the green approach is done by hiring city residents.

"You're really getting many, many benefits in one," said the EPA's Capacasa.

The tally of green installations changes from week to week, at www.phillywatersheds.org, but is well into the hundreds - some built by the city, others by private landowners.

That is because for all development on sites measuring more than 15,000 square feet, the builder is required to install enough rain gardens, green roofs, and the like to handle the first 1.5 inches of runoff.

Expect to see much more in the coming years. When a real tropical storm hits, rain gardens such as the one on West Girard will be ready.

tavril@phillynews.com

215-854-2430

@TomAvril1

Workshop Overview

Computer Science PhD Dissertation Defense

Learning Representations and Modeling Temporal Signals:
Symbolic Approximation, Deep Learning, Optimization and Beyond

Zhiguang Wang

1:00pm Tuesday, 31 May 2016, ITE 325, UMBC

Most real-world data has a temporal component, whether it is measurements of natural or man-made phenomena. Specifically, complex, high-dimensional and noisy temporal data are often difficult to model because the intrinsic temporal/topographic structures are highly non-linear, which makes the learning and optimization procedure more complicated. This talk will cover three correlated but self-contained topics to address the problem of representation learning in time series, deep learning optimization, and unsupervised feature learning.

First, I will show how to incorporate ideas from symbolic approximation with simple NLP techniques to represent and model temporal signals. To improve the symbolic approximation to model signals as words, we build a time-delay embedding vector (AKA skip gram) to extract the dependencies at different time scales, which yields state-of-the-art classification performance with a bag-of-patterns and vector space model. A non-parametric pooling/weighting scheme is proposed to extend the methods to multivariate signals

Second, I will show how to encode signals as images to learn and analyze them with deep learning methods. The Gramian Angular Field (GAF) and Markov Transition Field (MTF), as two novel approaches to encode both multi-scale spatial correlation and first order Markov dynamics of the temporal signals as images, are proposed. These visual representations are proved to work well in both visualizations by humans and pattern recognition using deep learning approaches. This work yields state-of-the-art algorithms for temporal data classification and imputation.

Finally, deep learning in image recognition (e.g. pictures or GAF/MTF images) involves high-dimensional non-convex optimization. Such optimization is generally intractable. However, I show how to use a set of exponential form based error estimators (NRAE/NAAE) and learning approaches (Adaptive Training) to attack the non-convex optimization problems in training deep neural networks. Both in theory and practice, they are able to achieve optimality on accuracy and robustness against outliers/noise. They provide another perspective to address the non-convex optimization problem (especially saddle points) in deep learning.

Committee: Tim Oates (Chair), Matt Schmill (Miner & Kasch), Hamed Pirsiavash, Yun Peng, Kostas Kalpakis

Image: Marc Olano during the opening of the 3D Scanning Room at UMBC. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

CSEE professor Marc Olano talked at TEDx Towson on how technology has changed how we think about reality. “New technology has started blurring the lines between the real and the virtual,” he said at the May 5 event.  He focused on how new 3D technologies have evolved and used examples including 3D graphics, virtual reality, video games and 3D printers. Professor Olano ended his talk pointing out that while he had not mentioned science fiction, “I can feel the world of holodecks and replicators on the horizon.”  Read more about his TEDx talk at UMBC News and watch it on YouTube.

Microsoft Student Partners (MSPs) are student technology leaders, empowered to build Microsoft communities on their campus and share their deep knowledge and passion for technology with their fellow classmates.  See here for more information. Apply by 15 July 2016.

 A blog post and reflection by staff member Daniel Willey

The following post contains mentions of rape and sexual assault. Hyperlinks marked with * indicate that the article contains detailed accounts of assault in some form.

This past April during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, the Women’s Center hosted an program called “What About the Men?” The event was held on during Monday free hour, and it was billed as “a multimedia discussion on masculinity, sexual assault, and male survivors.*”

I wanted to talk about how societal ideas about masculinity (like sexual prowess, social dominance, financial stability, risk-taking, and the “Man Card”) create an environment that encourages — or is at least passively complicit in — sexual violence against women, and isolates and invalidates male survivors of sexual violence.

And nobody came.

Okay, not nobody. Jess and Megan and Shira were there, and four community members stopped in to see what was happening. We actually had a really great discussion and I’m glad those people were there to have that important conversation. But I want to talk about the people that weren’t there. I want to talk about showing up and speaking out for male survivors. I want to talk about accountability, masculinity, and how sexual assault is everyone’s problem.

So, let’s go back a bit and talk about masculinity.

The Man Box is an activity we do in Rebuilding Manhood to get everyone thinking about hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity is basically society’s idea of what a man ‘should’ be and do. It’s an idea we all agree to and go along with, whether we agree with it or completely conform to it or not. Inside the Man Box, participants write words or phrases that fit within this dominant idea of masculinity, including: trucks, steak, beer, sports, outdoors, strong, confident, protector, power, leader, man up, boys don’t cry, don’t show emotion, wears the pants, provide for your family, sex with women, good at sex, and good at math and science.

Mito and Dan go over the Man Box

On the outside of the box are words and phrases used for men who step outside the limitations of the Man Box. When we do this activity, everyone is hesitant to write the words on the outside. Once a brave soul (or sometimes the facilitator) writes the first swear word, we see “bitch” “pussy” “gay” “fag” “pansy” “whipped” appear around the outside of the Man Box. The words outside the Man Box keep men trapped within the box. They are the consequences of not living up to the expectations set forth by all of us.

I talk about the Man Box because when it comes to conversations about men’s violence against women, the most common response is, “Not all men are like that.” To quote Tony Porter*, “There’s not a lot of men [perpetrating violence], but there is a lot of violence. So what is it that allows these men to do what they do in the presence of all these good men?” The answer is the Man Box.

It’s up to men to help other men get out of the man box and to discourage violent behavior. To not speak up and actively work to support women and a healthier concept of masculinity is to be complicit in the violence. It can be hard because laughing at rape joke or giving your friend the thumbs up and a condom as he guides a drunk person upstairs is part of the fee for staying in the man box. But if you’re not willing to pay the price of losing your man card to prevent rape or assault, you are part of the problem. When you say “Not All Men,” you’re giving all men a pass to say “that’s not my problem.” It is your problem.

When very few people showed interest in the What About The Men event, not only did it show how many people think sexual violence is not their problem, but it also became an example of a problem I hoped to address in the event: People don’t support male survivors in the same way as other survivors because we have a false image who and what a survivor is.

Now, let’s be real and admit survivors aren’t really supported at all. Even the “perfect victim” (i.e. a straight woman who wasn’t drunk, was dressed conservatively, didn’t know the person, didn’t consent to something else, etc etc) won’t get the support they deserve. But to society, a sexual assault survivor represents vulnerability and violation — something hegemonic masculinity just isn’t — and therefore it is totally unfathomable that a man could be survivor. At most, we can maybe comprehend boys being victimized at a young age, but not adult men. When I was doing research for the event, I found that most of the resources (like support groups and even interviews with psychologists specializing in the field) were targeted for male survivors of childhood sexual assault. None of them addressed sexual assault as an adult, and often they focused on the young age at which the assault occurred in to reassure survivors that they could still be men.

So, what? Men who experience sexual assault as an adult are no longer men? Were they never men to begin with? Are they gay now? Does sexual assault just not happen to men? No, of course not. But because we see men as always wanting sex, as powerful and strong and dominant, we can’t imagine men as survivors unless it was during childhood. We also can’t imagine that sexual assault can be perpetrated by women, but in a recent study 46% of male survivors reported a female perpetrator. Maybe we can wrap our heads around a male perpetrator, but a woman*? No way. He’s supposed to like it*.

Toxic ideas like this leave male survivors feeling isolated. Many feel like they can’t talk about it. Many don’t know they can claim words like “assault” “victim” “survivor” or “rape” to describe their experience. And if men can’t talk about rape, male survivors have nobody to speak up and say “Hey. It happened to me, too.”

We called this event “What About The Men” (if you click on just one link from this whole blog, it should be this one) because every time we or anyone else does anything about sexual assault, someone goes “Hey, men get raped too!” They’re totally right, but usually these people are using male survivors as a way to derail conversations about men as perpetrators. They’re not focusing on how toxic masculinity ignores and reprimands male survivors. They just want to absolve toxic masculinity of its responsibility for sexual violence against all genders. I wanted to use that time and space to really address that question: What About the Men?

We all need to show up more for male survivors. As much as I am upset with our community for not stepping up to be accountable for sexual assault and support male survivors, we at the Women’s Center need to be accountable too. This is the first event we’ve hosted with the focus of male survivors in the last five years, and possibly the only one ever. This is a feminist issue because the power structures of patriarchy and rape culture will continue to put men in positions of power and dominance, whether they use it against others or have it used against them. We all need to do better.

If you’re interested in more issues related to masculinity or are in search of a safe space to talk about masculinity, keep an eye out for Rebuilding Manhood and other Women’s Center programming. If you need to talk one-on-one with someone who can provide a safe and affirming environment, schedule a meeting with Jess or Megan or stop by the Women’s Center, or contact the Voices Against Violence coordinator. 

More online resources:

For Gay or Bisexual Men

Commonly Asked Questions