Athens 1833-1979 : the dynamics of urban growth

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1980.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.Includes bibliographical references (p. 266-270).His thesis deals with the urban development of the city of Athens since its foundation as the capital of the newborn Greek State (1833) , until our days. The study focuses on two particular characteristics that dominate the form of the city: laissez-faire development and adhocist shaping, as they rise out of coinciding intentions and aspirations among the people involved in city making and individuals. Under the above assumption, we traced specific interactions or counteractions among social classes and groups, planning services, land speculation, building sector, and professionals--as they have affected the legislative framework , master plans' proposals or planning guidelines, and the specific physical structure of the city (main street layouts and lines, areas of the city, patterns of land subdivision, housing typologies), during the different historical stages of urban growth. We further try to analyze the present status of the above social and spatial relationships as a product of the historical process, and we use the outcome of this analysis to criticize the on going discussion "Athens 2000" , thereby connecting the thesis to the present- day problems of urban development . We approach the historical development of Athens by focussing on specific cases, that are characteristic of four major time spans, which marked t he course of city shaping. These four periods refer to: the foundation of Athens as capital of the new- born Greeks state and its first Master Plan, (1833); the prevalence of land speculation and unplanned growth (1880); the refugees' settlement and the resulting urban agglomeration (1920s); and the formation of the contemporary metropolitan area. In the light of the above historical examination we analyze the present situation, which, we believe , is representing a new potential threshold to the development of the city. After a long time of inaction, planning comes to challenge the laissez - faire status quo of city making. Our conclusions are concerned with the dynamics of the new developing trends, calling for a control over the city environment, versus the moment of resistance or inertias of the inherited practices.by Dimitris Loukopoulos and Polyxeni Kosmaki-Loukopoulos.M.Arch

The effect of prolonged administration of hydroxyurea on morbidity and mortality in adult patients with sickle cell syndromes: results of a 17-year, single-center trial

The aim of this prospective study was to evaluate the long-term efficacy and safety of hydroxyurea (HU) in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD). Thirty-four patients with sickle cell anemia (hemoglobin S [HbS]/HbS), 131 with HbS/␤ 0 -thal, and 165 with HbS/␤ ؉ -thal participated in this trial. HU was administered to 131 patients, whereas 199 patients were conventionally treated. The median follow-up period was 8 years for HU patients and 5 years for non-HU patients. HU produced a dramatic reduction in the frequency of severe painful crises, transfusion requirements, hospital admissions, and incidence of acute chest syndrome. The probability of 10-year survival was 86% and 65% for HU and non-HU patients, respectively (P ‫؍‬ .001), although HU patients had more severe forms of SCD. The 10-year probability of survival for HbS/ HbS, HbS/␤ 0 -thal, and HbS/IVSI-110 patients was 100%, 87%, and 82%, respectively, for HU patients and 10%, 54%, and 66%, for non-HU patients. The multivariate analysis showed that fetal hemoglobin values at baseline and percentage change of lactate dehydrogenase between baseline and 6 months were independently predicted for survival in the HU group. These results highlight the beneficial effect of HU, which seems to modify the natural history of SCD and raise the issue of expanding its use in all SCD patients. (Blood

Thalassemia: a dreadful disease turned to a chronic condition

Thalassemia is a disease with many challenging aspects. It is caused by a variety of interesting molecular mechanisms, has a complicated pathophysiology, constitutes a multifaceted medical problem with pain and misery for the patients and unhappiness for their families, creates several diagnostic and therapeutic questions for their physicians, and has a huge social and economic impact across the countries where it occurs in high frequencies..

Prevention of the hemoglobinopathies

The inherited hemoglobin disorders not only cause suffering and unhappiness to the patients but they also absorb a large part of resources and human effort in several countries which harbor the deleterious genes. Numbers are frightening! Africa, with several millions patients with sickle cell anemia; India with millions of patients with sickle cell disease and thalassemia, South East Asia with more millions of patients with hemoglobin E and a- or b-thalassemia. The offered treatment is suboptimal or nil and, and, in several places, patients are dying at infancy not only because of their hemoglobinopathy but mainly because of infections and malaria; in this way, nature took care of her own faults and eliminated them before they enter productive life..

Milestones in the history of thalassemia and sickle cell disease

The inherited hemoglobin disorders are a challenging topic for many reasons; they are caused by a variety of interesting molecular mechanisms, have a complicated pathophysiology, they constitute a multifaceted medical problem with pain and misery for the patients and unhappiness for their families, create several diagnostic and therapeutic questions, and they have a huge social and economic impact across the countries where they occur in high frequencies

An Overview of Data Replication on the Internet

The proliferation of the Internet is leading to high expectation on the fast turnaround time. Clients abandoning their connections due to excessive downloading delays translates directly to profit losses. Hence, minimizing the latency perceived by end-users has become the primary performance objective compared to more traditional issues, such as server utilization. The two promising techniques to improve the Internet responsiveness are caching and replication. In this paper we present an overview of recent research in replication. We begin by arguing on the important role of replication in decreasing client perceived response time and proceed by illustrating the main topics that affect its successful deployment on the Internet. We analyze and characterize existing research, providing taxonomies and classifications whenever possible. Our discussion reveals several open problems and research directions.

Adaptive schemes for distributed web caching www.elsevier.com/locate/jpdc

In distributed web caching architectures, institutional proxies take advantage of their neighbors ’ contents in order to reduce the number of requests forwarded to the server. Intuitively, the maximum benefit from this cooperation is expected when the proxies that exhibit similar requests are grouped together. The current practice is to follow a static and manual configuration of neighbors. Such an approach has a number of drawbacks: (i) static allocation may not determine the best neighbors, especially if global knowledge of the participating proxies is not available, (ii) a manual allocation places significant administrative burden, (iii) static schemes are insensitive to changes in access patterns, and (iv) they cannot deal with the introduction of new, potentially useful, proxies. In this paper, we propose a set of algorithms that allow proxies to independently explore the network for better neighbors and continuously update their configuration in an adaptive fashion. The simulation experiments illustrate that dynamic neighbor reconfiguration leads to significantly higher hit ratios compared to the static approach. Although some researchers in the past have recognized the need for adaptive caching, to the best of our knowledge this is the first study to propose concrete algorithms and evaluate their efficacy