With and Without Walls: The Southern California Institute of Architecture and a New School of Los Angeles Architects in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) was created with the premise that in providing freedom through self-study, it would be possible to produce both architects and architecture. Founded in 1972, after separating from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly) amidst feelings of bureaucratic and ideological oppression, SCI-Arc was self-described as a school “without walls.” From an academic context with roots in the profession, the interests of the faculty straddled social pragmatism as well as formal invention that balanced design techniques and aesthetic sensibilities. Ray Kappe, a Los Angeles-based architect and professor, proposed the formation of SCI-Arc and was the school’s first director. The style that emerged under Kappe’s directorship evoked fusion, which positioned the school with methods to develop ideas for developmental progress. Without offering tenure, SCI-Arc’s faculty, which varied consistently, created a flexible curriculum that became a tactic to promote personal directions for discourse, providing students, and the architects who taught there, a platform to respond to a postmodern architectural climate. SCI-Arc’s institutional culture adjusted over time, and it increasingly relied on the versatility of the institutional framework to forge its pedagogy. The trajectory of SCI-Arc from the early 1970s to the late 1980s revealed not only how an alternative approach to education impacted architectural production with an emerging Los Angeles architectural culture but also occurring more generally in the period, in a shift from the idealism of the 1960s to the neoliberalism of the 1990s.PhDArchitectureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133239/1/bnsmth_1.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133239/2/bnsmth_2.pd

Prevalence, aetiology and maintenance of poor psychological morbidity following a minor road traffic accident: A prospective longitudinal study

The current study aimed to investigate the prevalence, aetiology and maintenance of poor psychological morbidity following a minor road traffic accident (RTA). A prospective longitudinal research design was employed and participants completed assessments within one month of their RTA and three months later. It was anticipated that, in accordance with published empirical evidence, participants would report clinically significant levels of anxiety, depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Informed by recent cognitive conceptualisations of PTSD (e.g. Ehlers and Clark, 2000; Brewin et al., 1996) it was hypothesised that a number of psychological factors would predict and maintain PTSD. It was found that in this sample of minor-RTA victims clinically significant levels of anxiety, depression and PTSD were present. Further examination revealed that PTSD could be significantly predicted by a number of independent variables. Anxiety sensitivity, immediate post-traumatic reaction and peri-traumatic dissociation were all found to predict PTSD. Negative interpretation of symptoms, rumination and thought suppression (taken together) were found to heavily mediate the relationships of all these predictive factors with follow-up PTSD. These maintenance factors were the only variables to independently and significantly predict follow-up PTSD. The results reinforce the importance of both negative attribution and avoidant coping in the persistence of PTSD and a number of clinical and theoretical implications are discussed

Reduced-order PCA models for chemical reacting flows

pre-printOne of the most challenging aspects of turbulent combustion research is the development of reduced-order combustion models which can accurately reproduce the physics of the real system. The identification and utilization of the low dimensional manifolds in these system is paramount to understand and develop robust models which can account for turbulence-chemistry interactions. Recently, principal components analysis (PCA) has been given notable attention in its analysis of reacting systems, and its potential in reducing the number of dimensions with minimum reconstruction error. The present work provides a methodology which has the ability of exploiting the information obtained from PCA. Two formulations of the approach are shown: Manifold Generated from PCA (MG-PCA), based on a global analysis, and Manifold Generated from Local PCA (MG-L-PCA), based on performing the PCA analysis locally. The models are created using the co-variance matrix of a data-set which is representative of the system of interest. The reduced models are then used as a predictive tool for the reacting system of interest by transporting only a subset of the original state-space variables on the computational grid and using the PCA basis to reconstruct the non-transported variables. The present study first looks into the optimal selection of the subset of transported variables and analyzes the effect of this selection on the approximation of the state space and chemical species source terms. Then, a demonstration of various a posteriori cases is presented

Duloxetine in the management of chronic musculoskeletal pain

Chronic musculoskeletal pain is among the most frequent painful complaints that healthcare providers address. The bulk of these complaints are chronic low back pain and chronic osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis in the United States. It is a chronic degenerative disorder characterized by a loss of cartilage, and occurs most often in older persons. The management of osteoarthritis and chronic low back pain may involve both nonpharmacologic (eg, weight loss, resistive and aerobic exercise, patient education, cognitive behavioral therapy) and pharmacologic approaches. Older adults with severe osteoarthritis pain are more likely to take analgesics than those with less severe pain. The pharmacologic approaches to painful osteoarthritis remain controversial, but may include topical as well as oral nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs, acetaminophen, duloxetine, and opioids. The role of duloxetine for musculoskeletal conditions is still evolving

Decomposing complete equipartite graphs into short odd cycles

In this paper we examine the problem of decomposing the lexicographic product of a cycle with an empty graph into cycles of uniform length. We determine necessary and sufficient conditions for a solution to this problem when the cycles are of odd length. We apply this result to find necessary and sufficient conditions to decompose a complete equipartite graph into cycles of uniform length, in the case that the length is both odd and shot relative to the number of parts

Experimental observations of dynamic critical phenomena in a lipid membrane

Near a critical point, the time scale of thermally-induced fluctuations diverges in a manner determined by the dynamic universality class. Experiments have verified predicted 3D dynamic critical exponents in many systems, but similar experiments in 2D have been lacking for the case of conserved order parameter. Here we analyze time-dependent correlation functions of a quasi-2D lipid bilayer in water to show that its critical dynamics agree with a recently predicted universality class. In particular, the effective dynamic exponent $z_{\text{eff}}$ crosses over from $\sim 2$ to $\sim 3$ as the correlation length of fluctuations exceeds a hydrodynamic length set by the membrane and bulk viscosities.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures and 2 additional pages of supplemen