Museums and Children: A Design Guide

The goals of this applied research project were to identify important issues and related design implications through the study of children\u27s museums. Research methods included case studies, literature reviews, and interviews with national experts. The analysis generated design principles applicable to many museum types and similar environments such as zoos, aquaria and visitor\u27s centers. This project was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.https://dc.uwm.edu/caupr_mono/1017/thumbnail.jp

Mainstreaming the Handicapped: A Design Guide

A design guide for mainstreaming handicapped children in educational facilities. Based on a user-oriented programming process and existing research literature, 18 design principles are advanced for helping physically disabled and mildly retarded children cope with school facilities. Design principles suggest the important characteristics of environments hypothesized to promote children\u27s interaction, positive self-image, confidence, accessibility and academic development.https://dc.uwm.edu/caupr_mono/1030/thumbnail.jp

Oblivious Rounding and the Integrality Gap

The following paradigm is often used for handling NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. One first formulates the problem as an integer program, then one relaxes it to a linear program (LP, or more generally, a convex program), then one solves the LP relaxation in polynomial time, and finally one rounds the optimal LP solution, obtaining a feasible solution to the original problem. Many of the commonly used rounding schemes (such as randomized rounding, threshold rounding and others) are "oblivious" in the sense that the rounding is performed based on the LP solution alone, disregarding the objective function. The goal of our work is to better understand in which cases oblivious rounding suffices in order to obtain approximation ratios that match the integrality gap of the underlying LP. Our study is information theoretic - the rounding is restricted to be oblivious but not restricted to run in polynomial time. In this information theoretic setting we characterize the approximation ratio achievable by oblivious rounding. It turns out to equal the integrality gap of the underlying LP on a problem that is the closure of the original combinatorial optimization problem. We apply our findings to the study of the approximation ratios obtainable by oblivious rounding for the maximum welfare problem, showing that when valuation functions are submodular oblivious rounding can match the integrality gap of the configuration LP (though we do not know what this integrality gap is), but when valuation functions are gross substitutes oblivious rounding cannot match the integrality gap (which is 1)

The Organization of Lexicons: a Cross-Linguistic Analysis of Monosyllabic Words

Lexicons utilize a fraction of licit structures. Different theories predict either that lexicons prioritize contrastiveness or structural economy. Study 1 finds that the monosyllabic lexicon of Mandarin is no more distinctive than a randomly sampled baseline using the phonological inventory. Study 2 finds that the lexicons of Mandarin and American English have fewer phonotactically complex words than the random baseline: Words tend not to have multiple low-probability components. This suggests that phonological constraints can have superadditive penalties for combined violations, consistent with e.g. Albright (ms.)

Case Studies of Child Play Areas and Child Support Facilities

Results of a post-occupancy evaluation of child care centers and outdoor play environments. This report covers 50 children\u27s environments around the U.S. and Canada, and is based on the results of facility inventories, observations of spatial behavior, and interviews with staff, parents, designers and children. Developed under a multiple year grant from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, this study received a Citation for Applied Research from Progressive Architecture in 1979. Reprinted in 1983, 1985.https://dc.uwm.edu/caupr_mono/1029/thumbnail.jp

Programming and Design for Dementia: Development of a 50 Person Residential Environment

The monograph describes an applied research project whose goals are: 1) to extend understanding of optimal micro-environmental design for people with dementia; 2) to present a systematic process for the planning, programming and design of environments for people with dementia; and 3) to illustrate this by the planning, programming and design of a model 50-person residential facility. Sponsored by Helen Daniel Bader, Milwaukee.https://dc.uwm.edu/caupr_mono/1014/thumbnail.jp

Improving the Law Office: Principles for Design

This report describes an applied research, translation and design application project. Information about the law offices was gathered and transformed into fifteen critical design principles. The format and approach leading to design principles creates powerful descriptions of the organizational and individual needs that will affect law office facility design. Seventeen different solutions to a program for a 267 person Chicago law firm are used to illustrate the application of the design principles.https://dc.uwm.edu/caupr_mono/1002/thumbnail.jp

Recommendations for Child Play Areas

Design guide for the planning, programming and design of children\u27s outdoor play environments. Includes 75 patterns for a range of children\u27s play areas imbedded in a tiered park system and in conjunction with recreation, community and educational facilities. Based on current research information. Received an Award for Applied Research in 1980 from Progressive Architecture. Reprinted 1983, with new photographs in 1985, 1988, and in 1991. Highly illustrated.https://dc.uwm.edu/caupr_mono/1033/thumbnail.jp

The stability of segmental properties across genre and corpus types in low-resource languages

Are written corpora useful for phonological research? Word frequency lists for low-resource languages have become ubiquitous in recent years (Scannell, 2007). For many languages there is direct correspondence between their written forms and their alphabets, but it is not clear whether written corpora can adequately represent language use. We use 15 low-resource languages and compare several information-theoretic properties across three corpus types. We show that despite differences in origin and genre, estimates in one corpus are highly correlated with estimates in other corpora

Water Harvesting and Soil Water Retention Practices for Forage Production in Degraded Areas in Arid Lands of Mexico

The area under arid conditions in Mexico is greater than 50%. This area faces a high risk due to environmental effects. The soil degradation in arid, semi‐arid, and dry sub‐humid areas is of multi‐causal nature, among which climatic and anthropogenic factors stand out. At least, three distinct elements with different effects may be considered: recurrent droughts in short periods, long‐term climate fluctuations, and degradation of soils by human activities. These threaten the productivity and sustainability of ecosystems and agro‐ecosystems. Thus, it is needed to maintain a constant exploration of new and more appropriate technologies that promote the efficient use of natural resources, in a framework of greater sustainability. Many of these technologies are focused toward better management of water and soil resources in production systems. Water management is oriented with rainwater harvesting, efficient irrigation systems, as well as soil moisture retention techniques, and the use of plant species tolerant to water stress. Planting of native species and using soil improvers of edaphic moisture retention can enhance reclamation (recovery) of degraded soils. The aim of this chapter is to show and discuss some experimental results using the above technologies applied to rangelands with degraded soils in dry lands