Climate Change and the New Normal for Cardiorespiratory Disease

Climate change is already affecting the cardiorespiratory health of populations around the world, and these impacts are expected to increase. The present overview serves as a primer for respirologists who are concerned about how these profound environmental changes may affect their patients. The authors consider recent peer-reviewed literature with a focus on climate interactions with air pollution. They do not discuss in detail cardiorespiratory health effects for which the potential link to climate change is poorly understood. For example, pneumonia and influenza, which affect >500 million people per year, are not addressed, although clear seasonal variation suggests climate-related effects. Additionally, large global health impacts in low-resource countries, including migration precipitated by environmental change, are omitted. The major cardiorespiratory health impacts addressed are due to heat, air pollution and wildfires, shifts in allergens and infectious diseases along with respiratory impacts from flooding. Personal and societal choices about carbon use and fossil energy infrastructure should be informed by their impacts on health, and respirologists can play an important role in this discussion

Change blindness in a dynamic scene due to endogenous override of exogenous attentional cues

Change blindness is a failure to detect changes if the change occurs during a mask or distraction. Without distraction, it is assumed that the visual transients associated with the change will automatically capture attention (exogenous control) leading to detection. However, visual transients are a defining feature of naturalistic dynamic scenes. Are artificial distractions needed to hide changes to a dynamic scene? Do the temporal demands of the scene instead lead to greater endogenous control that may result in viewers missing a change in plain sight? In the present study we pitted endogenous and exogenous factors against each other during a card trick. Complete change blindness was demonstrated even when a salient highlight was inserted coincident with the change. These results indicate strong endogenous control of attention during dynamic scene viewing and its ability to override exogenous influences even when it is to the detriment of accurate scene representation

Mainely Gay, Vol.4, No.07 (July 1977)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/meg/1006/thumbnail.jp

Building Monitoring System and Preliminary Results for a Retrofitted Office Building

Existing commercial buildings in the United States consumed 18.42 quadrillion Btus of primary energy in 2008 which amounts to 18.4% of all energy consumed and 78% of all electricity in the United States (DOE 2011). The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (EIA 2011) shows a flat energy consumption profile between 1983 and 2003 indicating no real improvement in the aggregate commercial building stock. Buildings less than 100,000 square feet account for 65% of the commercial building floor space (EIA 2011). These buildings fall into three general categories: privately owned, state owned or federally owned and they can be either owner occupied or tenant occupied. According to a recent report, only 25 percent of small building owners plan to make energy efficiency improvements (IFMA 2009). The current state of the building retrofit market incorporates disparate modeling tools that generally do not take into account utility bills, are expensive to populate with data and provide a wide bandwidth of results. Equipment, subsystems, sensors and controls are designed as discrete solutions to narrow problems, and performance is more a matter of meeting individual rating standards than integrated building load profiles. Finally, the construction industry itself is structurally fragmented leading to suboptimal results. Given the preceding, one can only conclude deep energy efficiency retrofits of average existing buildings will be multifaceted and challenging. This paper will explore The Energy Efficient Buildings Hub (EEB Hub) commercial building testbed program designed to: provide researchers with detailed existing building level performance and indoor environmental quality data develop and/or validate existing and new building load models assess dynamic control systems examine current energy auditing practices and develop new strategic asset management practices validate building integrated technology performanc

Maine Gay Task Force Newsletter, Vol.3, No.11(November 1976)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/megtf/1019/thumbnail.jp

The global spatial distribution of economic activity:nature, history and the role of trade

We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometres. We first document that nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical geography attributes. A full set of country indicators only explains a further 10%. When we divide geographic characteristics into two groups, those primarily important for agriculture and those primarily important for trade, we find that the agriculture variables have relatively more explanatory power in countries that developed early and the trade variables have relatively more in countries that developed late, despite the fact that the latter group of countries are far more dependent on agriculture today. We explain this apparent puzzle in a model in which two technological shocks occur, one increasing agricultural productivity and the other decreasing transportation costs, and in which agglomeration economies lead to persistence in urban locations. In countries that developed early, structural transformation due to rising agricultural productivity began at a time when transport costs were still relatively high, so urban agglomerations were localized in agricultural regions. When transport costs fell, these local agglomerations persisted. In late developing countries, transport costs fell well before structural transformation. To exploit urban scale economies, manufacturing agglomerated in relatively few, often coastal, locations. With structural transformation, these initial coastal locations grew, without formation of more cities in the agricultural interior