RESPONSIVE URBANISM: Sustainable Development Strategies for Small Communities with an Inter-Cultural Focus

This essay explores the development of a landscape design method referred to as Responsive Urbanism, the intention of which is to reverse the negative effects of globalization currently reordering the physical and social fabric of small communities. Responsive Urbanism utilizes a landscape based framework and systems focus that emphasizes the following series of disciplines (1) ecological networks in the natural world, (2) fabric of the built environment, (3) dynamics between land and transportation, and (4) socially networked decision making. The method also integrates community design events and cross-cultural collaboration, and concludes with multi-scaled design development that makes ecological integrity and urban landscapes the centerpiece of creating revitalizing building forms and constructed landscapes. This design method, utilized in a pilot project that spanned two years and involved more than 60 students from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee (UWM) in Milwaukee, WI and the Technical University of Graz (TUG) in Graz, Austria, compared two communities of similar size and importance, the village of Mukwonago, Wisconsin in the United States and city of Radstadt, Austria. The project demonstrated that through structured analysis and disciplined project development communities can develop new tools to harness the increasing complexity, intensity, and global span of networks and realize the potentials of globalism’s universality, while simultaneously capturing the value of the singular and the local. A reordering of the physical and social fabric of community on a global scale is underway influencing the development of new design theories and methods to address the negative effects of this spatial transformation. In the last decade of the 20th century over 50% of the global population lived in urban settlements as compared to less than 3% at the end of the 19th century. Global urbanization has been described as the extension of capitalism and the advancement of a system of nation states as instruments of influence in the global marketplace. Although there are competing schools of thought about the reasons behind the increasing scale and pace of urbanization, significant agreement exists that patterns of finance linked to the increasing speed of transportation, communication and organizational technology are the major drivers transforming the physical landscape and global settlement patterns (Clark, 1997). While the emergence of “global cities” or global concentrations, linked to direct investments in core economies of developing nations, is taking place the spatial transformations observed in small communities within developed nations is more commonly that of dispersal and disruption. Two such small communities, one in the United States and the other in Austria, will demonstrate the challenges smaller settlements face when it comes to managing local economic pressures that have become intertwined with global networks. The same “trans-nationalization of production” that results in global brands and production patterns linked to global business structure is increasing the scale and pace of transformation as well as adding complexity to community building dynamics. The inability of small communities to make sense of these changeable, invisible and far reaching relationships is increasingly creating ecologically and urbanistically compromised building forms and landscapes. Responsive Urbanism posits that global and local dynamics can be understood through the alternative and inclusive framework of landscape, and demonstrated through visual argumentation (Waldheim, 2006). The method utilizes a systems focus and emphasizes the following series of disciplines: ecological networks in the natural world, fabric of the built environment, dynamics between land and transportation, and socially networked decision making. The method also integrates community design events and cross-cultural collaboration. Responsive Urbanism makes ecological integrity and urban landscapes visible through multi-scaled design development. Regional ecological corridors, local water and vegetation systems, and building scale energy and environmental strategies are depicted and integrated as essential components of each project. This process gives small communities tools to create new forms of urban spatiality (Sassen, 2003) that harness potentials of globalism’s universality, while simultaneously capturing the value of the singular and the local (Tzonis and Lefaivre, 2003). In this pilot project, two communities of similar size and importance have been compared, the city of Radstadt, Austria and the village of Mukwonago, Wisconsin in the USA. Both municipalities occupy a comparable position within their respective regions, and in their relationship to proximate urban agglomerations. Radstadt is located approximately 70 km/44 mi southeast from the provincial capital of Salzburg, which has a population of around 150,000 (210,000 metro. area). Mukwonago is situated around 60 km/38 mi southwest of Milwaukee, a city of approximately 600,000 (1.7 million metro. area). Radstadt is surrounded by five small communities and is conceived of a central recreation and nature zone; Mukwonago is also surrounded by five communities and has historically drawn recreation seekers from as far away as Chicago (145 km/90 mi) to visit its numerous woodlands and lakes

Sequence and Structural Differences between Enzyme and Nonenzyme Homologs

AbstractTo improve our understanding of the evolution of novel functions, we performed a sequence, structural, and functional analysis of homologous enzymes and nonenzymes of known three-dimensional structure. In most examples identified, the nonenzyme is derived from an ancestral catalytic precursor (as opposed to the reverse evolutionary scenario, nonenzyme to enzyme), and the active site pocket has been disrupted in some way, owing to the substitution of critical catalytic residues and/or steric interactions that impede substrate binding and catalysis. Pairwise sequence identity is typically insignificant, and almost one-half of the enzyme and nonenzyme pairs do not share any similarity in function. Heterooligomeric enzymes comprising homologous subunits in which one chain is catalytically inactive and enzyme polypeptides that contain internal catalytic and noncatalytic duplications of an ancient enzyme domain are also discussed

The Health and Well-being of Service User and Carer Educators: a Narrative Enquiry into the Impact of Involvement in Healthcare Education

Service user and carer involvement is increasing in health and social care educationas a result of UK policy directives and Professional Statutory and Regulatory Body requirements. The study aimed to elicit the accounts of service user and carer educators' experiences in practice-based healthcare education in the UK. The overall aim was to illustrate the impact this has had on their health and well-being. A narrative inquiry approach was adopted in order to give a clearer and stronger voice to service users and carers by making their experience the primary focus of enquiry.Narratives were collected from five service users and carers who had extensive experience of involvement in healthcare education. The individual narrative material obtained was distilled into key points following a naturalistic perspective, ensuring that the findings and final story were a re-presentation of the narrator's experience.Participating in the research enabled the service users and carers to articulate specifically how involvement had positively affected their health and well-being. An additional outcome included the personal artefacts that can be utilised in teaching and learning in order to bring the service user and carer voice to life.This study contributes to the emerging knowledge and understanding that service user and carer involvement in health education can be a truly collaborative, enriching experience,producing profound personal change, with improvements in health and well-being. Effective involvement is dependent upon appropriate support networks whereby service users and carers develop connections with staff and other service users and carers that result in a sense of belonging

Understanding enzyme function evolution from a computational perspective.

In this review, we will explore recent computational approaches to understand enzyme evolution from the perspective of protein structure, dynamics and promiscuity. We will present quantitative methods to measure the size of evolutionary steps within a structural domain, allowing the correlation between change in substrate and domain structure to be assessed, and giving insights into the evolvability of different domains in terms of the number, types and sizes of evolutionary steps observed. These approaches will help to understand the evolution of new catalytic and non-catalytic functionality in response to environmental demands, showing potential to guide de novoenzyme design and directed evolution experiments

Large-Scale Analysis Exploring Evolution of Catalytic Machineries and Mechanisms in Enzyme Superfamilies.

Enzymes, as biological catalysts, form the basis of all forms of life. How these proteins have evolved their functions remains a fundamental question in biology. Over 100 years of detailed biochemistry studies, combined with the large volumes of sequence and protein structural data now available, means that we are able to perform large-scale analyses to address this question. Using a range of computational tools and resources, we have compiled information on all experimentally annotated changes in enzyme function within 379 structurally defined protein domain superfamilies, linking the changes observed in functions during evolution to changes in reaction chemistry. Many superfamilies show changes in function at some level, although one function often dominates one superfamily. We use quantitative measures of changes in reaction chemistry to reveal the various types of chemical changes occurring during evolution and to exemplify these by detailed examples. Additionally, we use structural information of the enzymes active site to examine how different superfamilies have changed their catalytic machinery during evolution. Some superfamilies have changed the reactions they perform without changing catalytic machinery. In others, large changes of enzyme function, in terms of both overall chemistry and substrate specificity, have been brought about by significant changes in catalytic machinery. Interestingly, in some superfamilies, relatives perform similar functions but with different catalytic machineries. This analysis highlights characteristics of functional evolution across a wide range of superfamilies, providing insights that will be useful in predicting the function of uncharacterised sequences and the design of new synthetic enzymes

Lessons in theory of change: experiences from CCAFS

CGIAR is moving to a different model of doing science, and this needs to be well thought out and understood by centres, CRP researchers and partners. The focus can no longer be on research deliverables such as reports, trainings, crop varieties and decision support tools. We have learnt that the production of these deliverables doesn’t automatically lead to impact in terms of the wellbeing of smallholder famers, the end users of our research.This series of Climate Change and Social Learning (CCSL) briefs will focus on lessons learnt from the ongoing CCAFS experience with TOC. The objective is to share experiences in real time, and generate discussion that will help CCAFS and others improve their TOC, impact pathways and M+E

Does gender matter? A cross-national investigation of primary class-room discipline.

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupFewer than 15% of primary school teachers in both Germany and the UK are male. With the on-going international debate about educational performance highlighting the widening gender achievement gap between girl and boy pupils, the demand for more male teachers has become prevalent in educational discourse. Concerns have frequently been raised about the underachievement of boys, with claims that the lack of male ‘role models’ in schools has an adverse effect on boys’ academic motivation and engagement. Although previous research has examined ‘teaching’ as institutional talk, men’s linguistic behaviour in the classroom remains largely ignored, especially in regard to enacting discipline. Using empirical spoken data collected from four primary school classrooms in both the UK and in Germany, this paper examines the linguistic discipline strategies of eight male and eight female teachers using Interactional Sociolinguistics to address the question, does teacher gender matter?Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The diverse hot gas content and dynamics of optically similar low-mass elliptical galaxies

The presence of hot X-ray emitting gas is ubiquitous in massive early-type galaxies. However, much less is known about the content and physical status of the hot X-ray gas in low-mass ellipticals. In the present paper we study the X-ray gas content of four low-mass elliptical galaxies using archival Chandra X-ray observations. The sample galaxies, NGC821, NGC3379, NGC4278, and NGC4697, have approximately identical K-band luminosities, and hence stellar masses, yet their X-ray appearance is strikingly different. We conclude that the unresolved emission in NGC821 and NGC3379 is built up from a multitude of faint compact objects, such as coronally active binaries and cataclysmic variables. Despite the non-detection of X-ray gas, these galaxies may host low density, and hence low luminosity, X-ray gas components, which undergo a Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) driven outflow. We detect hot X-ray gas with a temperature of kT ~ 0.35 keV in NGC4278, the component of which has a steeper surface brightness distribution than the stellar light. Within the central 50 arcsec (~3.9 kpc) the estimated gas mass is ~3 x 10^7 M_sun, implying a gas mass fraction of ~0.06%. We demonstrate that the X-ray gas exhibits a bipolar morphology in the northeast-southwest direction, indicating that it may be outflowing from the galaxy. The mass and energy budget of the outflow can be maintained by evolved stars and SNe Ia, respectively. The X-ray gas in NGC4697 has an average temperature of kT ~ 0.3 keV, and a significantly broader distribution than the stellar light. The total gas mass within 90 arcsec (~5.1 kpc) is ~2.1 x 10^8 M_sun, hence the gas mass fraction is ~0.4%. Based on the distribution and physical parameters of the X-ray gas, we conclude that it is most likely in hydrostatic equilibrium, although a subsonic outflow may be present.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in Ap