Is public space still possible? : lessons from City Hall Plaza ideas competition

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-102).In Autumn, 1994, the City of Boston, in partnership with the Boston Society of Architects and the Building Owners and Managers Association, sponsored the Revitalizing City Hall Plaza Ideas Competition. The Competition sought ideas from design professionals and lay people for ways to popularize and invigorate City Hall Plaza. The program espoused by Mayor Menino was simple: "We must create an atmosphere that will more easily link the public to an open and accessible City Hall, and provide a meeting place for Boston's diverse community." This Competition represents two aspects of thought regarding public space; one specific and one general. Specifically, the effort to revitalize City Hall Plaza is consistent with long-standing desires to create or retain a high level of activity and stability in the Government Center vicinity. In focusing attention on the condition of the existing Plaza, this Competition continues a tradition of seeking a strong anchor for downtown Boston, maintaining an urban vitality and richness, and creating an image bespeaking Boston's regional and national prominence. Generally, the Competition created avenues for discussions of the nature and role of public space. From 190 Competition entries it is possible to determine categories that reflect two different approaches to the design and consideration of public space. One is the Morphological approach, in which considerations of the physical form of the space and the urban fabric are primary. The other is the Programmatic approach, which stresses activities and programmed attractions independently of physical form. Using these entries and categories as data, a comparison of the categories is made which suggests that the Morphological approach is more appropriate for effecting long-term legibility and structure to a city. However, the salient characteristics of the Programmatic cannot be overlooked, especially in a modern economy. Therefore, it is ultimately concluded that the vitality of a city is best served when the immediacy of the Programmatic is appropriately housed in the permanence of the Morphological. To achieve this is to retain a vision of purposes for cities and their spaces beyond mere functionality, which speaks to the aspirations for community and humanness that have historically informed the creation of public space.by Timothy C. Hurley.M.S

A National Survey of the arrangements managed-care plans make with physicians

Abstract Background. Despite the growth of managed care in the United States, there is little information about the arrangements managed-care plans make with physicians. Methods. In 1994 we surveyed by telephone 138 managed-care plans that were selected from 20 metropolitan areas nationwide. Of the 108 plans that responded, 29 were group-model or staff-model health maintenance organizations (HMOs), 50 were network or independentpractice–association (IPA) HMOs, and 29 were preferred-provider organizations (PPOs). Results. Respondents from all three types of plan said they emphasized careful selection of physicians, although the group or staff HMOs tended to have more demanding requirements, such as board certification or eligibility. Sixty-one percent of the plans responded that physicians’ previous patterns of costs or utilization of resources had little influence on their selection; 26 percent said these factors had a moderate influence; and 13 percent said they had a large influence. Some risk sharing with physicians was typical in the HMOs but rare in the PPOs. Fiftysix percent of the network or IPA HMOs used capitation as the predominant method of paying primary care physicians, as compared with 34 percent of the group or staff HMOs and 7 percent of the PPOs. More than half the HMOs reported adjusting payments according to utilization or cost patterns, patient complaints, and measures of the quality of care. Ninety-two percent of the network or IPA HMOs and 61 percent of the group or staff HMOs required their patients to select a primary care physician, who was responsible for most referrals to specialists. About three quarters of the HMOs and 31 percent of the PPOs reported using studies of the outcomes of medical care as part of their quality-improvement programs. Conclusions. Managed-care plans, particularly HMOs, have complex systems for selecting, paying, and monitoring their physicians. Hybrid forms are common, and the differences between group or staff HMOs and network or IPA HMOs are less extensive than is commonly assumed. (N Engl J Med 1995;333:1678-83.

Hard Burst Emission from the Soft Gamma Repeater SGR 1900+14

We present evidence for burst emission from SGR 1900+14 with a power-law high energy spectrum extending beyond 500 keV. Unlike previous detections of high energy photons during bursts from SGRs, these emissions are not associated with high-luminosity burst intervals. Not only is the emission hard, but the spectra are better fit by Band's GRB function rather than by the traditional optically-thin thermal bremsstrahlung model. We find that the spectral evolution within these hard events obeys a hardness/intensity anti-correlation. Temporally, these events are distinct from typical SGR burst emissions in that they are longer (~ 1 s) and have relatively smooth profiles. Despite a difference in peak luminosity of > 1E+11 between these bursts from SGR 1900+14 and cosmological GRBs, there are striking temporal and spectral similarities between the two kinds of bursts, aside from spectral evolution. We outline an interpretation of these events in the context of the magnetar model.Comment: 11 pages (text and figures), submitted to ApJ Letters, corrected erroneous hardness ratio

Emissions of CO 2 , CO, NO x , HC, PM, HFC-134a, N 2 O and CH 4 from the global light duty vehicle fleet

Abstract Vehicle

GRB 110709A, 111117A and 120107A: Faint high-energy gamma-ray photon emission from Fermi/LAT observations and demographic implications

Launched on June 11, 2008, the LAT instrument onboard the $Fermi$ Gamma-ray Space Telescope has provided a rare opportunity to study high energy photon emission from gamma-ray bursts. Although the majority of such events (27) have been iden tified by the Fermi LAT Collaboration, four were uncovered by using more sensiti ve statistical techniques (Akerlof et al 2010, Akerlof et al 2011, Zheng et al 2 012). In this paper, we continue our earlier work by finding three more GRBs ass ociated with high energy photon emission, GRB 110709A, 111117A and 120107A. To s ystematize our matched filter approach, a pipeline has been developed to identif y these objects in near real time. GRB 120107A is the first product of this anal ysis procedure. Despite the reduced threshold for identification, the number of GRB events has not increased significantly. This relative dearth of events with low photon number prompted a study of the apparent photon number distribution. W e find an extremely good fit to a simple power-law with an exponent of -1.8 $\pm$ 0.3 for the differential distribution. As might be expected, there is a substa ntial correlation between the number of lower energy photons detected by the GBM and the number observed by the LAT. Thus, high energy photon emission is associ ated with some but not all of the brighter GBM events. Deeper studies of the pro perties of the small population of high energy emitting bursts may eventually yi eld a better understanding of these entire phenomena.Comment: accepted to Ap