Is the public invited? Design, management and use of privately owned public spaces in New York City

Researchers in urban planning, urban design, landscape architecture and sociology often criticize the increasing privatization of public space in the US for limiting the diversity of uses and users. Privately owned public spaces in New York City have received this critique. However, careful empirical research, with onsite observations of specific spaces and interviews with building managers, architects and city officials, is still largely lacking. Nor have researchers systematically investigated the full range of design features and management regulations and practices that do, or do not, serve to exclude certain kinds of activities and occupants. This study does precisely that as well as examining the influence that city agencies have, or have not, exerted over the original design, redesign and management practices. In this research 24 fully enclosed, privately owned public spaces in Manhattan were studied. Preliminary field observations indicate that these 24 spaces vary significantly in their inclusiveness when the presence of homeless is used as an indicator of the latter. Subsequently information was collected through onsite observations, interviews with building managers, architects who were involved in the redesign of the spaces, and city officials in the Department of City Planning and archival sources (e.g., reports of City Planning Commission (CPC) and newspaper articles). The findings indicate that design and management influence the number and diversity of activities and occupants of the 24 indoor privately owned public spaces. Certain design features enhance the quality of the spaces and likely make the spaces inviting. Compared to design features, management practices seem to play a more critical role in determining the number and diversity of activities and occupants. The attitudes of building managers toward certain uses and how they perceive their bonus space(s) compared to traditional public spaces, such as parks, influence how they enforce the rules of conduct posted in the spaces. Consequently, some spaces possessing better environmental quality may be less inclusive than those whose managers are more tolerant of a diversity of uses. Findings indicate that a particular kind of interior privately owned public space — the cross-block atrium — is a good location for people to meet to pursue common interests, suggesting that this kind of place constitutes a new type of public space approximating a community center

GROUND REACTION FORCE OF ROTATIONAL SHOT PUT – CASE STUDY

The purpose of this study was to investigate the kinetic variables of two legs during rotational shot put. Three male rotational shot putters served as subjects. Two force platforms were synchronized to collect the data. The kinetic variables of right leg which had the trend of decrease with better performance were the maximal vertical force, rate of force development of maximal propulsive force, impulse of horizontal and vertical force during braking phase, total impulse of horizontal and vertical force. The kinetic variables of left leg which had the trend of increase with better performance were the total impulse of vertical and horizontal force. The smaller braking and greater propulsive time of the right leg, and the greater braking and vertical thrust of the left leg would helpful for better performances

ESTIMATION THE PREFERENCE OF ECOTOURISM FOR GAOMEI WETLAND IN TAIWAN

Gaomei Wetland is not only the biggest grassy coastal wetland, but also a wild‐animal protecting area, located on the west‐central coast of Taiwan.Wetlands are considered as one of the most important natural resource, which offer a lot of benefits for human and other creatures. However, it is believed that over-intensive recreational activities in Gaomei Wetland should be responsible for serious damages on natural environment and ecosystem. This study takes Gaomei wetland as an example, and aims to estimate its landscape and ecological services values through Choice experiment. The results of this research showed that Gaomei landscape’s economic value is $2.06 million (USD) per year, and$1.54 million (USD) for its value of ecological services. These findings can help to bring up the awareness of natural resource preservation, and hopefully to keep Gaomei Wetland substantial. The results also indicated that visitors with undergraduate degree or above were willing to pay $6.43 (USD) per year for entry fee to enjoy sunset scenery in Gaomei wetland

Environment Diversification with Multi-head Neural Network for Invariant Learning

Neural networks are often trained with empirical risk minimization; however, it has been shown that a shift between training and testing distributions can cause unpredictable performance degradation. On this issue, a research direction, invariant learning, has been proposed to extract invariant features insensitive to the distributional changes. This work proposes EDNIL, an invariant learning framework containing a multi-head neural network to absorb data biases. We show that this framework does not require prior knowledge about environments or strong assumptions about the pre-trained model. We also reveal that the proposed algorithm has theoretical connections to recent studies discussing properties of variant and invariant features. Finally, we demonstrate that models trained with EDNIL are empirically more robust against distributional shifts.Comment: In Proceedings of 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022

Post War Destruction and Construction in the U.S.: Shaping a New Landscape and Way of Life

After World War II, the U.S. embarked on a massive building initiative, creating housing where little or none had existed before outside of cities and tearing down existing housing in cites to replace it with new housing and commercial and cultural centers. Without the destruction of entire sections of cities wrought by the war in Europe, we created our own forms of destruction and (re)construction, significantly changing the landscape and, for many, the way of life

Purple urine bag syndrome in nursing homes: Ten elderly case reports and a literature review

Purple urine bag syndrome (PUBS) is a rare occurrence, in which the patient has a purple-colored urine bag following urinary catheterization for hours to days. Most of authors believe it is a mixture of indigo (blue) and indirubin (red) that becomes purple. Previous study showed that PUBS occurred predominantly in chronically catheterized, constipated women. We collected 10 elderly patients with PUBS in two nursing homes. The first two cases were identified by chart review in 1987 and 2003, and then later eight cases (42.1%) were collected among 19 urinary catheterized elderly in the period between January 2007 and June 2007. In the present report, PUBS probably can occur in any patients with the right elements, namely urinary tract infection (UTI) with bacteria possessing these enzymes, diet with enough tryptophan, and being catheterized. Associations with bed-bound state, Alzheimer’s, or dementia from other causes are reflections of the state of such patients who are at higher risk for UTI, and hence PUBS occurred. Although we presented PUBS as a harmless problem, prevention and control of the nosocomial catheter-associated UTIs (CAUTIs) has become very important in the new patient-centered medical era. Thus, we should decrease the duration of catheterization, improve catheter care, and deploy technological advances designed for prevention, especially in the elderly cared for in nursing homes

Concerted suppressive effects of carisbamate, an anti-epileptic alkyl-carbamate drug, on voltage-gated Na+ and hyperpolarization-activated cation currents

Carisbamate (CRS, RWJ-333369) is a new anti-seizure medication. It remains unclear whether and how CRS can perturb the magnitude and/or gating kinetics of membrane ionic currents, despite a few reports demonstrating its ability to suppress voltage-gated Na+ currents. In this study, we observed a set of whole-cell current recordings and found that CRS effectively suppressed the voltage-gated Na+ (INa) and hyperpolarization-activated cation currents (Ih) intrinsically in electrically excitable cells (GH3 cells). The effective IC50 values of CRS for the differential suppression of transient (INa(T)) and late INa (INa(L)) were 56.4 and 11.4 μM, respectively. However, CRS strongly decreased the strength (i.e., Δarea) of the nonlinear window component of INa (INa(W)), which was activated by a short ascending ramp voltage (Vramp); the subsequent addition of deltamethrin (DLT, 10 μM) counteracted the ability of CRS (100 μM, continuous exposure) to suppress INa(W). CRS strikingly decreased the decay time constant of INa(T) evoked during pulse train stimulation; however, the addition of telmisartan (10 μM) effectively attenuated the CRS (30 μM, continuous exposure)-mediated decrease in the decay time constant of the current. During continued exposure to deltamethrin (10 μM), known to be a pyrethroid insecticide, the addition of CRS resulted in differential suppression of the amplitudes of INa(T) and INa(L). The amplitude of Ih activated by a 2-s membrane hyperpolarization was diminished by CRS in a concentration-dependent manner, with an IC50 value of 38 μM. For Ih, CRS altered the steady-state I–V relationship and attenuated the strength of voltage-dependent hysteresis (Hys(V)) activated by an inverted isosceles-triangular Vramp. Moreover, the addition of oxaliplatin effectively reversed the CRS-mediated suppression of Hys(V). The predicted docking interaction between CRS and with a model of the hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channel or between CRS and the hNaV1.7 channel reflects the ability of CRS to bind to amino acid residues in HCN or hNaV1.7 channel via hydrogen bonds and hydrophobic interactions. These findings reveal the propensity of CRS to modify INa(T) and INa(L) differentially and to effectively suppress the magnitude of Ih. INa and Ih are thus potential targets of the actions of CRS in terms of modulating cellular excitability

Phase angle correlates with n-3 fatty acids and cholesterol in red cells of Nigerian children with sickle cell disease

OBJECTIVE: To determine the cholesterol content and fatty acid composition of red cell membrane phospholipids (PL) of children with sickle cell disease (SCD) and to correlate these levels with whole body phase angle that is related to the integrity and function of cell membranes. STUDY DESIGN: Blood samples were obtained from 69 children with SCD and 72 healthy age- and gender-matched controls in Nigeria for the determination of the cholesterol content and proportions of fatty acids in red cell PL. Bioelectrical impedance analysis was used to obtain resistance (R) and reactance (Xc) from which phase angle was calculated as arctan Xc/R. Cholesterol (normalized to lipid phosphorus) and the proportions of individual fatty acids were correlated with phase angle. RESULTS: The proportions of palmitic (p < 0.001), stearic acid (p = 0.003) and cholesterol (p < 0.001) were significantly higher in the red cells of children with SCD, whereas the proportions of arachidonic acid and docosahexaenoic acid were reduced (p = 0.03 and < 0.001, respectively) compared to controls. The phase angle was inversely correlated with the proportions of palmitic acid (p = 0.03) and oleic acid (p < 0.001) and cholesterol (p = 0.003). Three n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids-eicosapentaenoic acid, docosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid- were positively correlated with phase angle (p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The fatty acid composition and cholesterol content of tissue membranes in SCD correlate with the phase shift measured by bioelectrical impedance analysis. Phase angle measurements may provide a non-invasive method for monitoring interventions aimed at altering the lipid composition of membranes