NOHO2: North Hollywood Transit-Oriented Development

As population in California continues to grow, the demand for high-density housing alongside alternative transportation in communities across the U.S. has been steadily increasing. North Hollywood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, is one such community. This transit-oriented development (TOD) proposal capitalizes on the existing assets of the community while introducing new elements that meet local and regional demand and enhance the harmony of the public

The use of willingness to pay experiments : estimating demand for piped water connections in Sri Lanka

The authors show how willingness to pay surveys can be used to gauge household demand for improved network water and sanitation services. They do this by presenting a case-study from Sri Lanka, where they surveyed approximately 1,800 households in 2003. Using multivariate regression, they show that a complex combination of factors drives demand for service improvements. While poverty and costs are found to be key determinants of demand, the authors also find that location, self-provision, and perceptions matter as well, and that subsets of these factors matter differently for subsamples of the population. To evaluate the policy implications of the demand analysis, they use the model to estimate uptake rates of improved service under various scenarios-demand in subgroups, the institutional decision to rely on private sector provision, and various financial incentives targeted to the poor. The simulations show that in this particular environment in Sri Lanka, demand for piped water services is low, and that it is unlikely that under the present circumstances the goal of nearly universal piped water coverage is going to be achieved. Policy instruments, such as subsidization of connection fees, could be used to increase demand for piped water, but it is unclear whether the benefits of the use of such policies would outweigh the costs.Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water Use,Small Area Estimation Poverty Mapping,Urban Water Supply and Sanitation

In the Projects: Rebuilding Social Housing in New York City

There is a shrinking stock of all types of affordable housing, resulting in the inflation of rent across all demographics. The rise in rent makes housing detrimentally unaffordable for people with extremely low incomes. Mayor Bill de Blasio also recognizes that there is an affordable housing crisis, promising to build over 200,000 units of affordable housing in the next ten years. However, his plan applies to new and privately-owned construction, not the massive public stock that the city already owns. The state of disrepair of public housing combined with generally underutilized sites in 1950’s projects makes the public portion of the affordable housing stock particularly opportunistic for future development. Our project will redevelop an existing public housing site to higher standards of building performance, density, and public programs. We will devise a development strategy for the reconstruction of our site, as well as a site strategy to meet the overall needs of the neighborhoods. We will use a faster-than-traditional construction methodology in order to not displace existing tenants for an extended period of time. Public housing can be efficient, strategic, and integral to the culture of the neighborhood

Angiogenesis and Its Role in the Tumour Microenvironment: A Target for Cancer Therapy

The process of angiogenesis refers to the growth of new blood vessels from existing ones. Tumours can produce factors in the micro-environment which act on blood vessels to promote angiogenesis. It is therefore considered to be fundamental in tumour progression and metastatic dissemination. This neovascularization can be regulated by numerous endogenous factors in the tumour micro-environment. As a result, anti-angiogenic therapies have been developed in the hope of targeting this process to reduce tumour growth and progression. However, only a proportion of patients respond to therapy, indicating the presence of treatment resistance in some. In this chapter, we aim to highlight the process of angiogenesis and to review pivotal evidence for the use of anti-angiogenic therapies thus far (alone and in combination with other agents). Finally, we will illustrate recent evidence for the discovery of biomarkers for anti-angiogenic therapies and potential mechanisms of resistance to such agents

Unpackaging demand for water service quality : evidence from conjoint surveys in Sri Lanka

In the early 2000s, the Government of Sri Lanka considered engaging private sector operators to manage water and sewerage services in two separate service areas: one in the town of Negombo (north of Colombo), and one stretching along the coastal strip (south from Colombo) from the towns of Kalutara to Galle. Since then, the government has abandoned the idea of setting up a public-private partnership in these two areas. This paper is part of a series of investigations to determine how these pilot private sector transactions (forming part of the overall water sector reform strategy) could be designed in such a manner that they would benefit the poor. The authors describe the results of a conjoint survey evaluating the factors that drive customer demand for alternative water supply and sanitation services in Sri Lanka. They show how conjoint surveys can be used to unpackage household demand for attributes of urban services and improve the design of infrastructure policies. They present conjoint surveys as a tool for field experiments and a source of valuable empirical data. In the study of three coastal towns in southwestern Sri Lanka the conjoint survey allows the authors to compare household preferences for four water supply attributes-price, quantity, safety, and reliability. They examine subpopulations of different income levels to determine if demand is heterogeneous. The case study suggests that households care about service quality (not just price). In general, the authors find that households have diverse preferences in terms of quantity, safety, and service options, but not with regard to hours of supply. In particular, they find that the poor have lower ability to trade off income for services, a finding that has significant equity implications in terms of allocating scarce public services and achieving universal water access.Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Water and Industry,Economic Theory&Research,Water Use,Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions

Numerical modelling of heat transfer and experimental validation in Powder-Bed Fusion with the Virtual Domain Approximation

Among metal additive manufacturing technologies, powder-bed fusion features very thin layers and rapid solidification rates, leading to long build jobs and a highly localized process. Many efforts are being devoted to accelerate simulation times for practical industrial applications. The new approach suggested here, the virtual domain approximation, is a physics-based rationale for spatial reduction of the domain in the thermal finite-element analysis at the part scale. Computational experiments address, among others, validation against a large physical experiment of 17.5 $\mathrm{[cm^3]}$ of deposited volume in 647 layers. For fast and automatic parameter estimation at such level of complexity, a high-performance computing framework is employed. It couples FEMPAR-AM, a specialized parallel finite-element software, with Dakota, for the parametric exploration. Compared to previous state-of-the-art, this formulation provides higher accuracy at the same computational cost. This sets the path to a fully virtualized model, considering an upwards-moving domain covering the last printed layers

Myosin IIA-mediated forces regulate multicellular integrity during vascular sprouting

Angiogenic sprouting is a critical process involved in vascular network formation within tissues. During sprouting, tip cells and ensuing stalk cells migrate collectively into the extracellular matrix while preserving cell-cell junctions, forming patent structures that support blood flow. Although several signaling pathways have been identified as controlling sprouting, it remains unclear to what extent this process is mechanoregulated. To address this question, we investigated the role of cellular contractility in sprout morphogenesis, using a biomimetic model of angiogenesis. Three-dimensional maps of mechanical deformations generated by sprouts revealed that mainly leader cells, not stalk cells, exert contractile forces on the surrounding matrix. Surprisingly, inhibiting cellular contractility with blebbistatin did not affect the extent of cellular invasion but resulted in cell-cell dissociation primarily between tip and stalk cells. Closer examination of cell-cell junctions revealed that blebbistatin impaired adherens-junction organization, particularly between tip and stalk cells. Using CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing, we further identified NMIIA as the major isoform responsible for regulating multicellularity and cell contractility during sprouting. Together, these studies reveal a critical role for NMIIA-mediated contractile forces in maintaining multicellularity during sprouting and highlight the central role of forces in regulating cell-cell adhesions during collective motility.R01 EB000262 - NIBIB NIH HHS; R01 HL115553 - NHLBI NIH HHSPublished versio

AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions

This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual actions in 430 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and time, resulting in 1.58M action labels with multiple labels per person occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person; (3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips; (4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse annotations for composite actions in short video clips. We will release the dataset publicly. AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories. While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results on AVA are low at 15.6% mAP, underscoring the need for developing new approaches for video understanding.Comment: To appear in CVPR 2018. Check dataset page https://research.google.com/ava/ for detail