ESCAPE ROUTE DESIGNS AND SPECIFICATIONS FOR OFFICE BUILDINGS - “CCIAT” BUILDING AS A CASE STUDY

Many office buildings encounter various problems with their fire safety evacuation designs. The Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture Tripoli - North Lebanon (CCIAT) is considered the only modern office building in its context that lacks fire escape elements and emergency plans. This paper presents an analysis and proposals for an optimal evacuation scenario for the case of the CCIAT building, and develop solutions for similar office buildings. The problem is interpreted with reference to the positions of existing staircases and lifts and their connectivity with occupants’ offices and other facilities on the floors, in order to provide a comprehensive scenario for a fire escape safety design in the building. This paper relies on the Lebanese Building Regulations to evaluate the case of the CCIAT’s fire safety, along with the simulation software Pathfinder 2018 to evaluate the evacuation process of the existing design and the proposed solutions

ENHANCING UNDERGRADUATE ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION (SCALE 1 TO 1 DESIGN - BUILD METHOD)

On 1997, the board of RIBA – Royal Institute of Britch Architects – highly recommended “experimental learning” or “learning by doing” methods in design studio teaching in architecture as a “practicum”. (Wallis, 2005) Although practicum is the task of learning architecture as practice, most of practicum teaching applications in architectural education are either in postgraduate level or in extra curriculum activities. Based on international studies on Design-Build educations, teaching experience and observation of fresh graduates and junior architects, there is still a shortage between design and execution in undergraduate education level, students faces many problems during project implementation phase in reality due to the lack of experience. However, most of the construction sheets provided the needed execution data for installation phase; the 1 to 1 scale imagination was missing in those sheets. As for undergraduate level, in architecture career it is highly recommended to avoid this inability by encouraging the students to build big scale projects during the education process and increase their practical skills more in such projects in order to prepare students for practice. This paper focuses on evaluating the experiment of Design-Build education method in undergraduate level, which was done at faculty of Architecture-Design And Built Environment at Beirut Arab University- Tripoli campus. The method of “Design – Build” was applied in undergraduate core courses; Execution Design I (ARCH 333), Execution Design II (ARCH 334) and Digital Design & Fabrication Course (ARCH468). During the education of these courses, the students gained a construction experience in scale 1 to 1, which in turn gave them the ability of using manual and digital building skills practically. The evaluation of this experiment was based on instructors ’ observations, analysis, final semester jury members, grading results and students’ survey that lead to give guidelines and recommendations in order to develop this educational method for future applications

Geochemical Fractionation of Trace Elements between Calcite and Dolomite Fractions Separated from Their Mixture in Some Egyptian Dolomitic Limestone Rocks

Abstract: The present work is an attempt to separate calcite and dolomite fractions from dolomitic limestone samples. Fifty recognized dolomitic limestone samples were selected from several localities to cover most types of the Egyptian dolomitic limestone varieties. A series of experiments was carried out to determine the best conditions for the dissolution of calcite only and hence the chemical separation of calcite from dolomite in the dolomitic limestone samples. Calcite and dolomite were quantitatively differentiated from dolomitic limestone rocks by a method based on the quantitative dissolution of calcite in pH 4 buffer solution. The remaining dolomite is then dissolved in 1 N-HCl. The trace elements (Fe, Mn, Cd, Co, Ni, Zn, Pb, Sr & Ba) concentrations in both calcite and dolomite fractions were determined to through light on their distribution. Fe, Mn and Ni show a similar distribution being present in great amount in dolomite fraction than calcite fraction. Sr and Ba also are present to a great extent in dolomite fraction than calcite fraction. Cd, Co, Zn and Pb show distinctly different behavior to that of other elements, they rarely exceed 20 ppm in both calcite and dolomite fraction

Correlating novel variable and conserved motifs in the Hemagglutinin protein with significant biological functions

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Variations in the influenza Hemagglutinin protein contributes to antigenic drift resulting in decreased efficiency of seasonal influenza vaccines and escape from host immune response. We performed an in silico study to determine characteristics of novel variable and conserved motifs in the Hemagglutinin protein from previously reported H3N2 strains isolated from Hong Kong from 1968–1999 to predict viral motifs involved in significant biological functions.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>14 MEME blocks were generated and comparative analysis of the MEME blocks identified blocks 1, 2, 3 and 7 to correlate with several biological functions. Analysis of the different Hemagglutinin sequences elucidated that the single block 7 has the highest frequency of amino acid substitution and the highest number of co-mutating pairs. MEME 2 showed intermediate variability and MEME 1 was the most conserved. Interestingly, MEME blocks 2 and 7 had the highest incidence of potential post-translational modifications sites including phosphorylation sites, ASN glycosylation motifs and N-myristylation sites. Similarly, these 2 blocks overlap with previously identified antigenic sites and receptor binding sites.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our study identifies motifs in the Hemagglutinin protein with different amino acid substitution frequencies over a 31 years period, and derives relevant functional characteristics by correlation of these motifs with potential post-translational modifications sites, antigenic and receptor binding sites.</p

A systematic review of the safety of topical therapies for atopic dermatitis

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75613/1/j.1365-2133.2006.07538.x.pd

A year of genomic surveillance reveals how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic unfolded in Africa

[Figure: see text]

A year of genomic surveillance reveals how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic unfolded in Africa.

The progression of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic in Africa has so far been heterogeneous, and the full impact is not yet well understood. In this study, we describe the genomic epidemiology using a dataset of 8746 genomes from 33 African countries and two overseas territories. We show that the epidemics in most countries were initiated by importations predominantly from Europe, which diminished after the early introduction of international travel restrictions. As the pandemic progressed, ongoing transmission in many countries and increasing mobility led to the emergence and spread within the continent of many variants of concern and interest, such as B.1.351, B.1.525, A.23.1, and C.1.1. Although distorted by low sampling numbers and blind spots, the findings highlight that Africa must not be left behind in the global pandemic response, otherwise it could become a source for new variants