Adaptive hospitality: identifying design strategies in the adaptive reuse of historic buildings as boutique hotels

Downtown revitalization has been at the forefront of many cities’ goals in the United States. Adaptive reuse of existing buildings is a crucial factor in this process by highlighting the uniqueness and identity of a place, maintaining the local sense of community, and differentiating it from the rest of the city. More and more historic structures are being adapted to boutique hotels in downtowns and becoming part of the main attraction of a city. The hospitality industry has recognized that there are a significant number of people that are looking for a different experience than traditional hotels can offer. Hotel chains and independent owners have turned to historic preservation and adaptive reuse to cover the needs of this market. Often the opportunities that adaptive reuse provides to a city are overlooked in favor of new structures, or if used there is no regard for the historic fabric of the building. The growing market of the boutique hotel industry and, the efforts to revitalize downtowns across the country, makes it necessary for a study that highlights the different possibilities in the creation of this type of hotel in a historic setting. This research focuses on identifying the different types of design strategies applied in the adaptive reuse of historic properties into boutique hotels. It also looks at how they provide the user experience associated with a historic-design boutique hotel and, how they incorporated the character-defining features into this design. The study examines the adaptive reuse of five historic-design boutique hotels in the state of North Carolina as case studies. Four successfully qualified for preservation tax credits. A database of historic-design boutique hotels in the state of North Carolina was created for this study, which had to comply with specific criteria to be eligible as samples. Archival research was then conducted using the Historic Preservation Tax Credit Applications to understand better what were the retained features and what changed. Site visits and a visual analysis were the final steps to understand the main reasons for change, the patterns found, and how they incorporated the boutique element

Outcomes of a peer assessment/feedback training program in an undergraduate sports medicine course

Peer assessment/feedback is clearly occurring in athletic training education programs. However, it remains unclear whether students would improve their ability to assess their peers and provide corrective feedback if they received formal training in how to do so. The purpose of this study was to determine the following: 1) if a peer assessment/feedback (PAF) training program affected the quality of feedback students provided to their peers and if feedback improves over time, 2) if students’ perceptions of and preferences for PAF changed over time and as a result of a PAF training program, and 3) if PAF training affected skill performance. Two sections of an introductory sports medicine class were used to examine the effects of a PAF training program and time on different aspects of PAF. The subjects had three sets of laboratory skills with two days of lab practice for each set. One section received the PAF training after the first set of labs (n = 33); the control section received not training (n = 36). Two groups of four students from each section were videotaped in order to observe the feedback they provided. Surveys were completed at the beginning of the semester and the end of the semester to examine perceptions and preferences of all subjects. The videotaped data analysis suggests that PAF training potentially shaped the consistency of descriptive feedback, use of strategic questioning, staying on task and the amount of reaffirming feedback provided. Findings also suggest that other factors shaped the peer feedback, such as baseline ability to provide quality feedback, difficulty of the skill and the number of errors performed while executing the skills. Some of the strategies discussed in the PAF training were used by the control groups even though they did not receive training. The training could be beneficial for all students to either reinforce what they already do or to teach new strategies. Subjects in the PAF training found it beneficial, which may improve the acceptance of feedback and their wiliness to provide feedback. The subjects, regardless of group, overwhelmingly had positive perceptions of the benefits of peer learning, benefits of PAF and the PAF process. Students preferred peers for the activities related to practicing and refining skills while preferring instructors for initial learning and grading. Preferences for PAF increased for six of the 11 items with no differences between the experimental and control groups. Finally, there were no significant differences in exam grades thus the PAF training did not affect skill performance

The coupled effects of mantle mixing and a water-dependent viscosity on the surface ocean

Water content plays a vital role in determining mantle rheology and thus mantle convection and plate tectonics. Most parameterised convection models predict that Earth initially underwent a period of rapid degassing and heating, followed by a slow and sustained period of regassing and cooling. However, these models assume water is instantaneously mixed and homogeneously distributed into the mantle. This is a limitation because the mixing time for water entering and leaving the mantle is a function of the Rayleigh number which varies dramatically with water content, temperature, and through time. Here we present an adapted parametrised model (Crowley et al., 2011) to include the coupled effects of the time scale of mixing with a water-dependent viscosity. We consider two mixing types: first, where the mixing time is constant throughout the model and second, where mixing time varies as a response to an evolving Rayleigh number. We find that, facilitated by the effects of water content in the melt region at mid-ocean ridges, a constant mixing time can induce long periods of degassing. The inclusion of a variable mixing time dependent on the Rayleigh number acts to limit the period of degassing and also results in more water being stored in the mantle and less at the surface than in both the constant and instantaneous mixing cases. Mixing time cannot be more than ∼2 billion years as large mixing times trap water in the mantle, leaving a dry surface. Even small changes in the surface ocean induced by mixing times on the order of 0.1 Gyrs can cause changes in the global-mean sea level on the order of 10's of metres. These changes in sea level could easily uncover topographic highs in the bathymetry, potentially aiding sub-aerial erosion a process thought to be important in early Earth evolution. Even in this relatively simple model, the inclusion of a mixing time between water entering and leaving the mantle creates a more dynamic water cycle

Thermal conductivity and thermal boundary resistance of nanostructures

International audienceWe present a fabrication process of low-cost superlattices and simulations related with the heat dissipation on them. The influence of the interfacial roughness on the thermal conductivity of semiconductor/semiconductor superlattices was studied by equilibrium and non-equilibrium molecular dynamics and on the Kapitza resistance of superlattice's interfaces by equilibrium molecular dynamics. The non-equilibrium method was the tool used for the prediction of the Kapitza resistance for a binary semiconductor/metal system. Physical explanations are provided for rationalizing the simulation results

Automated Nuclear Analysis of Leishmania major Telomeric Clusters Reveals Changes in Their Organization during the Parasite's Life Cycle

Parasite virulence genes are usually associated with telomeres. The clustering of the telomeres, together with their particular spatial distribution in the nucleus of human parasites such as Plasmodium falciparum and Trypanosoma brucei, has been suggested to play a role in facilitating ectopic recombination and in the emergence of new antigenic variants. Leishmania parasites, as well as other trypanosomes, have unusual gene expression characteristics, such as polycistronic and constitutive transcription of protein-coding genes. Leishmania subtelomeric regions are even more unique because unlike these regions in other trypanosomes they are devoid of virulence genes. Given these peculiarities of Leishmania, we sought to investigate how telomeres are organized in the nucleus of Leishmania major parasites at both the human and insect stages of their life cycle. We developed a new automated and precise method for identifying telomere position in the three-dimensional space of the nucleus, and we found that the telomeres are organized in clusters present in similar numbers in both the human and insect stages. While the number of clusters remained the same, their distribution differed between the two stages. The telomeric clusters were found more concentrated near the center of the nucleus in the human stage than in the insect stage suggesting reorganization during the parasite's differentiation process between the two hosts. These data provide the first 3D analysis of Leishmania telomere organization. The possible biological implications of these findings are discussed

Junín Virus Infection of Human Hematopoietic Progenitors Impairs In Vitro Proplatelet Formation and Platelet Release via a Bystander Effect Involving Type I IFN Signaling

Argentine hemorrhagic fever (AHF) is an endemo-epidemic disease caused by Junín virus (JUNV), a member of the arenaviridae family. Although a recently introduced live attenuated vaccine has proven to be effective, AHF remains a potentially lethal infection. Like in other viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHF), AHF patients present with fever and hemorrhagic complications. Although the causes of the bleeding are poorly understood, impaired hemostasis, endothelial cell dysfunction and low platelet counts have been described. Thrombocytopenia is a common feature in VHF syndromes, and it is a major sign for its diagnosis. However, the underlying pathogenic mechanism has not yet been elucidated. We hypothesized that thrombocytopenia results from a viral-triggered alteration of the megakaryo/thrombopoiesis process. Therefore, we evaluated the impact of JUNV on megakaryopoiesis using an in vitro model of human CD34+ cells stimulated with thrombopoietin. Our results showed that CD34+ cells are infected with JUNV in a restricted fashion. Infection was transferrin receptor 1 (TfR1)-dependent and the surface expression of TfR1 was higher in infected cultures, suggesting a novel arenaviral dissemination strategy in hematopoietic progenitor cells. Although proliferation, survival, and commitment in JUNV-infected cultures were normal, viral infection impaired thrombopoiesis by decreasing in vitro proplatelet formation, platelet release, and P-selectin externalization via a bystander effect. The decrease in platelet release was also TfR1-dependent, mimicked by poly(I:C), and type I interferon (IFN α/β) was implicated as a key paracrine mediator. Among the relevant molecules studied, only the transcription factor NF-E2 showed a moderate decrease in expression in megakaryocytes from either infected cultures or after type I IFN treatment. Moreover, type I IFN-treated megakaryocytes presented ultrastructural abnormalities resembling the reported thrombocytopenic NF-E2−/− mouse phenotype. Our study introduces a potential mechanism for thrombocytopenia in VHF and other diseases associated with increased bone marrow type I IFN levels

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe