Thermal comfort and energy performance of public rental housing under typical and near-extreme weather conditions in Hong Kong

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Building performance evaluation is crucial for sustainable urban developments. In high-density cities, occupants suffer from poor living conditions due to building overheating, especially during increasingly frequent near-extreme summer conditions caused by climate change. To represent this situation, the summer reference year weather data was employed for building simulations using DesignBuilder. This study aims to evaluate the thermal comfort and energy consumption of four typical public rental housing (PRH) building types in Hong Kong. For free-running flats, results show generally higher air temperatures in the oldest PRH type (Slab) with a compact linear building form and the most sensitive response to outdoor temperature changes for another older PRH type (Trident) with a Y-shaped design, possibly owing to its high wall conductivity. Occupants in all building types experience a ???10% increase in the proportion of discomfort hours when compared to results for typical summer conditions, but overheating is the most severe in Slab type PRH. Following an initial assessment of the cooling energy usage, a simple sensitivity test was conducted to explore the potential energy savings by various passive design strategies, including shading and reducing the exposed cooled space. A cross-shaped building form also appears to be more energy efficient. These findings, complemented by further parametric analyses, may prove useful when designing buildings for climate change

Acute renal impairment in coronavirus-associated severe acute respiratory syndrome

Acute renal impairment in coronavirus-associated severe acute respiratory syndrome.BackgroundSevere acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a newly emerged infection from a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV). Apart from fever and respiratory complications, acute renal impairment has been observed in some patients with SARS. Herein, we describe the clinical, pathologic, and laboratory features of the acute renal impairment complicating this new viral infection.MethodsWe conducted a retrospective analysis of the plasma creatinine concentration and other clinical parameters of the 536 SARS patients with normal plasma creatinine at first clinical presentation, admitted to two regional hospitals following a major outbreak in Hong Kong in March 2003. Kidney tissues from seven other patients with postmortem examinations were studied by light microscopy and electron microscopy.ResultsAmong these 536 patients with SARS, 36 (6.7%) developed acute renal impairment occurring at a median duration of 20 days (range 5–48 days) after the onset of viral infection despite a normal plasma creatinine level at first clinical presentation. The acute renal impairment reflected the different prerenal and renal factors that exerted renal insult occurring in the context of multiorgan failure. Eventually, 33 SARS patients (91.7%) with acute renal impairment died. The mortality rate was significantly higher among patients with SARS and acute renal impairment compared with those with SARS and no renal impairment (91.7% vs. 8.8%) (P < 0.0001). Renal tissues revealed predominantly acute tubular necrosis with no evidence of glomerular pathology. The adjusted relative risk of mortality associated with the development of acute renal impairment was 4.057 (P < 0.001). By multivariate analysis, acute respiratory distress syndrome and age were the most significant independent risk factors predicting the development of acute renal impairment in SARS.ConclusionAcute renal impairment is uncommon in SARS but carries a high mortality. The acute renal impairment is likely to be related to multi-organ failure rather than the kidney tropism of the virus. The development of acute renal impairment is an important negative prognostic indicator for survival with SARS

Chondroitin sulfates in the developing rat hindbrain confine commissural projections of vestibular nuclear neurons.

BACKGROUND: Establishing correct neuronal circuitry is crucial to proper function of the vertebrate nervous system. The abundance of chondroitin sulfate (CS) proteoglycans in embryonic neural environments suggests that matrix proteoglycans regulate axonal projections when fiber tracts have not yet formed. Among the early-born neurons, the vestibular nucleus (VN) neurons initiate commissural projections soon after generation at E12.5 and reach the contralateral target by E15.5 in the rat hindbrain. We therefore exploited 24-hour cultures (1 day in vitro (DIV)) of the rat embryos and chondroitinase ABC treatment of the hindbrain matrix to reveal the role of CS moieties in axonal initiation and projection in the early hindbrain. RESULTS: DiI tracing from the VN at E12.5(+1 DIV) showed contralaterally projecting fibers assuming fascicles that hardly reached the midline in the controls. In the enzyme-treated embryos, the majority of fibers were unfasciculated as they crossed the midline at 90°. At E13.5(+1 DIV), the commissural projections formed fascicles and crossed the midline in the controls. Enzyme treatment apparently did not affect the pioneer axons that had advanced as thick fascicles normal to the midline and beyond, towards the contralateral VN. Later projections, however, traversed the enzyme-treated matrix as unfasciculated fibers, deviated from the normal course crossing the midline at various angles and extending beyond the contralateral VN. This suggests that CSs also limit the course of the later projections, which otherwise would be attracted to alternative targets. CONCLUSIONS: CS moieties in the early hindbrain therefore control the course and fasciculation of axonal projections and the timing of axonal arrival at the target.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Multiple Block-Size Search Algorithm for Fast Block Motion Estimation

Abstract-Although variable block-size motion estimation provides significant video quality and coding efficiency improvement, it requires much higher computational complexity compared with fixed block size motion estimation. The reason is that the current motion estimation algorithms are mainly designed for fixed block size. Current variable block-size motion estimation implementation simply applies these existing motion estimation algorithms independently for different block sizes to find the best block size and the corresponding motion vector. Substantial computation is wasted because distortion data reuse among motion searches of different block sizes is not considered. In this paper, a motion estimation algorithm intrinsically designed for variable block-size video coding is presented. The proposed multiple block-size search (MBSS) algorithm unifies the motion searches for different block sizes into a single searching process instead of independently performing the search for each block size. In this unified search, the suboptimal motion vectors for different block sizes are used to determine the next search steps. Its prediction quality is comparable with that obtained by performing motion search for different block sizes independently while the computational load is substantially reduced. Experimental results show that the prediction quality of MBSS is similar to full search. Block matching, motion estimation, video coding, search pattern, directional search

Automatic 2D-to-3D video conversion technique based on depth-from-motion and color segmentation

Most of the TV manufacturers have released 3DTVs in the summer of 2010 using shutter-glasses technology. 3D video applications are becoming popular in our daily life, especially at home entertainment. Although more and more 3D movies are being made, 3D video contents are still not rich enough to satisfy the future 3D video market. There is a rising demand on new techniques for automatically converting 2D video content to stereoscopic 3D video displays. In this paper, an automatic monoscopic video to stereoscopic 3D video conversion scheme is presented using block-based depth from motion estimation and color segmentation for depth map enhancement. The color based region segmentation provides good region boundary information, which is used to fuse with block-based depth map for eliminating the staircase effect and assigning good depth value in each segmented region. The experimental results show that this scheme can achieve relatively high quality 3D stereoscopic video output. ? 2010 IEEE.EI

The Moderating Effect of Different Types of Internet Use on the Relationship between Transitional Aging Changes and Self-esteem of Older Adults

This study investigates the moderating effect of different types of Internet use regarding the relationship between three transitional aging changes and self-esteem of older adults. The current paper is still in progress; this is a research-in-progress paper. An aging population increases government expenditures and family responsibilities, thus drawing more attention from the academic community. Recent research posits that self-esteem tends to decline in individuals from the ages around 50-65 due to role loss, social loss, and dissatisfaction resulting from unaccomplished life goals. To address this issue, previous studies considered that the general use of the Internet may help to enhance self-esteem among older adults. To fill this research gap, the present study proposes that the cultural use of the Internet could moderate role loss of older adults, while social use of the Internet could mitigate social loss. Furthermore, economic use could moderate the dissatisfaction of unfulfilled life goals. Regarding various theoretical contributions, this is the first study to apply different types of Internet use, so as to investigate its moderating effect concerning the relationship between transitional aging changes and self-esteem. Findings of the present study can also help shed light on interventions for the caregiver in both community centers and the domestic environment to moderate the decline of self-esteem among older adults. The data will be collected through surveys distributed to District Elderly Community Centers (DECCs) in Hong Kong. Multiple regression analysis will then be utilized to test the moderating effect of each type of Internet use

Chemical characterization of a new carbohydrate metabolite in the vitreous of Black Moor goldfish by liquid chromatography-electrospray mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance

Abstract. Our recent report has described the occurrence of a remarkably high amount of an unknown compound with light absorption maximum at 290 nm in the aqueous humor of Black Moor goldfish. The absorption maximum is shifted to 270 nm in 0.01% trifluroacetic acid. The concentration of this compound was very low in the eye of common goldfish and was absent in ocular fluids or serum of mammalian species. This compound was isolated by chromatography on a carbohydrate column eluted by 10 mM ammonium phosphate followed by chromatography on a Delta PAK C18 column eluted by acetonitrile-watertrifluoroacetic acid. The ion size of the unknown compound determined by electrospray for protonated and deprotonated ions are m/z 205 and 203, respectively. The protonated ion was fragmented to m/z 187, 169, 157 and 141 as the cone voltage increased. The data from mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy indicate the chemical structure of a carbohydrate with 7 carbons containing a lactone ring