Low-tech solution for Smart Cities – Optimization tool CityCalc for solar urban design

Designed as an easily applicable planning and evaluation tool, CityCalc has been developed to assess the energy performance of urban planning projects at early design stages. The tool supports the development of low-tech solutions for smart cities by means of optimising the use of renewable energy on site – including passive and active solar gains. Currently energy planning and assessment tools for early design stages do not take into account the mutual interactions of buildings such as shading and shadowing from adjoining structures as their focus is on the individual buildings. A great variety of tools for urban solar design exist nowadays, however they are not suitable for architects and early design stages (IEA SHC Task 41). In the future it will be of increasing importance to quantify the passive and active solar gains in order to fulfil ambitious legal and funding requirement and to implement future-oriented building concepts (e.g. passive house, zero energy, zero carbon or plus energy standards). The objective was therefore to develop an easily applicable energy planning and assessment tool for urban planning projects for the early design stages. The CityCalc tool focuses on energy efficiency - that is, the reduction of energy demand - with the best possible use of site-specific energy sources (gains from solar thermal and photovoltaic plants, wind energy, combined heat and power). In order to ensure a simple, user-friendly usability for architects, a three-dimensional geometry and data acquisition and an interface with energy calculation software is developed. CityCalc is developed for urban development planning, urban design competitions and urban densification. CityCalc can be used on the one hand by architects for optimizing the conceptual design phase and on the other hand, for the energy assessment of urban planning and architectural competitions. CityCalc combines the simplistic three-dimensional geometry input method of the freely available software SketchUp with proven evaluation algorithms of the energy performance certificate. In addition it refers to a variety of default values for details, which are not defined in detail at this stage of planning. With the assessment tool CityCalc it is possible to assess the potential of active and passive use of solar energy at a very early planning stage. For this purpose, the simplified three-dimensional input of the building and its surroundings in the free software SketchUp is required. CityCalc is available as a plugin for SketchUp. The developed planning and assessment tool has been tested and validated in selected planning competitions and early design projects. The tool and the experiences of the validation will be presented in this paper. Conclusions are a well-adjusted applicability for an early design stage. System boundaries of the assessment have to be shaped based on the available information as well as the flexible parameters of early design stages. Further aspects of smart cities have been identified to be included in future upgrades of the tool, such as: daylight comfort of indoor and outdoor areas, costs for supply and disposal especially energy supply, embodied energy in materials. The project has been funded by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (bmvit) within the research program ‘City of Tomorrow’ (Stadt der Zukunft)

901-5 Intravenous Amiodarone Restores Sinus Rhythm in Acute Myocardial Infarction Complicated with Atrial Fibrillation

The effectiveness and tolerance of intravenous (IV) amiodarone (Am) in atrialfibrillation (AF) complicated acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is not well studied. Thus, twenty patients (Pts) with AMI complicated with AF occurring within 30h (11.9 ± 10) of the onset of AMI symptoms were treated with IV administration of digitalis (d, 0.5mg and an additional 0.25mg later) followed by IV Am 300mg over 2h (starting 2h after the initial dose of d) and followed by 44mg/h for up to 3 days, if sinus rhythm (SR) was not restored. Intravenous d restored SR within 2h in 5/20pts. AF relapsed in 2 of them. Subsequent administration of Am for 2 h restored SR in the remaining 15/20pts and in the 2pts in whom AF had relapsed after the initial restoration of SR by d. Am restored SR within an average of 12.8 (range 0.5–56) h of infusion. Total dose of Am was 1922 ± 720mg in 4pts and 425 ± 241mg in the remaining 13. Am was well tolerated by all pts including 1 with cardiogenic shock assisted with the intraaortic balloon pump. In conclusion, IV Am administration ishighly effective in restoring sinusrhythm in AF complicating AMI and is well tolerated

A botanical demonstration of the potential of linking data using unique identifiers for people

Natural history collection data available digitally on the web have so far only made limited use of the potential of semantic links among themselves and with cross-disciplinary resources. In a pilot study, botanical collections of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) have therefore begun to semantically annotate their collection data, starting with data on people, and to link them via a central index system. As a result, it is now possible to query data on collectors across different collections and automatically link them to a variety of external resources. The system is being continuously developed and is already in production use in an international collection portal

Progress in authority management of people names for collections

The concept of building a network of relationships between entities, a knowledge graph, is one of the most effective methods to understand the relations between data. By organizing data, we facilitate the discovery of complex patterns not otherwise evident in the raw data. Each datum at the nodes of a knowledge graph needs a persistent identifier (PID) to reference it unambiguously. In the biodiversity knowledge graph, people are key elements (Page 2016). They collect and identify specimens, they publish, observe, work with each other and they name organisms. Yet biodiversity informatics has been slow to adopt PIDs for people and people are currently represented in collection management systems as text strings in various formats. These text strings often do not separate individuals within a collecting team and little biographical information is collected to disambiguate collectors. In March 2019 we organised an international workshop to find solutions to the problem of PIDs for people in collections with the aim of identifying people unambiguously across the world's natural history collections in all of their various roles. Stakeholders were represented from 11 countries, representing libraries, collections, publishers, developers and name registers. We want to identify people for many reasons. Cross-validation of information about a specimen with biographical information on the specimen can be used to clean data. Mapping specimens from individual collectors across multiple herbaria can geolocate specimens accurately. By linking literature to specimens through their authors and collectors we can create collaboration networks leading to a much better understanding of the scientific contribution of collectors and their institutions. For taxonomists, it will be easier to identify nomenclatural type and syntype material, essential for reliable typification. Overall, it will mean that geographically dispersed specimens can be treated much more like a single distributed infrastructure of specimens as is envisaged in the European Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections Infrastructure (DiSSCo). There are several person identifier systems in use. For example, the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) is a widely used system for published authors. The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), has broader scope and incorporates VIAF. The ORCID identifier system provides self-registration of living researchers. Also, Wikidata has identifiers of people, which have the advantage of being easy to add to and correct. There are also national systems, such as the French and German authority files, and considerable sharing of identifiers, particularly on Wikidata. This creates an integrated network of identifiers that could act as a brokerage system. Attendees agreed that no one identifier system should be recommended, however, some are more appropriate for particular circumstances. Some difficulties have still to be resolved to use those identifier schemes for biodiversity : 1) duplicate entries in the same identifier system; 2) handling collector teams and preserving the order of collectors; 3) how we integrate identifiers with standards such as Darwin Core, ABCD and in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility; and 4) many living and dead collectors are only known from their specimens and so they may not pass notability standards required by many authority systems. The participants of the workshop are now working on a number of fronts to make progress on the adoption of PIDs for people in collections. This includes extending pilots that have already been trialed, working with identifier systems to make them more suitable for specimen collectors and talking to service providers to encourage them to use ORCID iDs to identify their users. It was concluded that resolving the problem of person identifiers for collections is largely not a lack of a solution, but a need to implement solutions that already exist

Leisure-time physical activity, cardiorespiratory fitness and feelings of hopelessness in men

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) and cardiorespiratory fitness contribute to mental health. Hopelessness has been linked to impaired mental health, cardiovascular events and mortality. Previous studies have focused on physical exercise and depression. We examined the associations of LTPA and cardiorespiratory fitness with feelings of hopelessness.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this cross-sectional study leisure-time physical activity, maximal oxygen uptake (VO_2max), hopelessness and cardiovascular risk factors were assessed in a population-based cohort of 2428 men aged 42 – 60 years old at baseline.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Men feeling more hopeless about their future and reaching goals were less physically active, less fit and had a higher prevalence of many cardiovascular risk factors than men with lower levels of hopelessness. In a logistic regression model adjusted for age, smoking, alcohol consumption, cardiovascular disease and socioeconomic status, men engaging in less than 60 min/week of moderate-to-vigorous LTPA were 37% (95% CI 11 – 67%) more likely to feel hopeless than those engaging in at least 2.5 h/wk of LTPA. After further adjusting for elevated depressive symptoms the association of LTPA and hopelessness remained significant. VO_2maxwas also associated with hopelessness, but not after adjustment for depressive symptoms.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Moderate and vigorous LTPA and cardiorespiratory fitness were inversely associated with hopelessness in these middle-aged men. These findings suggest that physical inactivity and poor cardiorespiratory fitness is an important associate of hopelessness, a distinct element of low subjective well-being.</p