Using Disaster Surveys to Model Business Interruption

Business interruption after disasters is an important metric for community resilience planning because has both economic and social consequences. Each additional day that a business is nonoperational further compounds lost revenue, wages, and lack of access to goods and services needed for recovery. Therefore, the use of surveys has grown in the literature as a way to capture the diverse information needed for modeling business disaster outcomes. However, variable inclusion and measurement can vary widely across studies, and there is a lack of guidance on how to structure surveys most effectively to facilitate this effort. This study fills these gaps through an analysis of variable choice, variable measurement, and measurement timing using data from an interdisciplinary field study in Lumberton, North Carolina after 2016 Hurricane Matthew. We found that empirical business interruption models can be improved significantly by using a comprehensive set of utility and damage variables; integrating damage information based on damage states for building, contents, and machinery; and capturing recovery-time dynamics by using business downtime and utility outage durations, rather than binary measurements. The results suggest that making these relatively small changes to survey design in future studies can yield large returns in empirical business models for community resilience research

Inomhusmiljön i olika pedagogiska verksamheter.

Sammanfattning Vi har gjort en kvalitativ inspirerad fallstudie i två olika pedagogiska verksamheter ­ Reggio Emilia inspirerad förskola samt traditionell förskola. Syftet med arbetet har varit att jämföra förskollärares syn på inomhusmiljön och dess betydelse för barns lärande, samt att beskriva dessa miljöer. Våra forskningsfrågor är: Hur ser förskollärare på inomhusmiljön och dess betydelse för barns lärande? Är det någon skillnad på inomhusmiljön mellan förskolor med olik pedagogisk profil ­ mellan Reggio Emilia inspirerad förskola och traditionell förskola? Studien är gjord i sex olika verksamheter, som är belägna på västkusten i Sverige. Undersökningsgruppen består av sex förskollärare, varav tre i traditionella förskolor, två i Reggio Emilia inspirerade förskolor och en i en förskola med influenser från Reggio Emilia. För att ge forskningen en större spännvidd har vi använt oss av flera olika kvalitativa metoder, bland annat observationer, intervjuer och videofilmning. När vi observerat inomhusmiljöerna har vi valt att lägga fokus på lokalernas utformning, utbudet av material och hur det är placerat. Det vi har fått ut av studien är att det finns likheter i inomhusmiljön mellan förskolorna men också väsentliga skillnader, som att den traditionella förskolan är mer hemlik medan den Reggio Emilia inspirerade är mer institutionell. Synen på tillgängligheten av lek- och skapande material är lika men den faktiska placeringen skiljer sig åt mellan verksamheterna

Further delineation of a recognizable type of syndromic short stature caused by biallelic SEMA3A loss-of-function variants

The semaphorin protein family is a diverse set of extracellular signaling proteins that perform fundamental roles in the development and operation of numerous biological systems, notably the nervous, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, endocrine, and reproductive systems. Recently, recessive loss-of-function (LoF) variants in SEMA3A (semaphorin 3A) have been shown to result in a recognizable syndrome characterized by short stature, skeletal abnormalities, congenital heart defects, and variable additional anomalies. Here, we describe the clinical and molecular characterization of a female patient presenting with skeletal dysplasia, hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (HH), and anosmia who harbors a nonsense variant c.1633C\u3eT (p.Arg555*) and a deletion of exons 15, 16, and 17 in SEMA3A in the compound heterozygous state. These variants were identified through next-generation sequencing analysis of a panel of 26 genes known to be associated with HH/Kallmann syndrome. Our findings further substantiate the notion that biallelic LoF SEMA3A variants cause a syndromic form of short stature and expand the phenotypic spectrum associated with this condition to include features of Kallmann syndrome

Iron Atom Exchange between Hematite and Aqueous Fe(II)

Aqueous Fe­(II) has been shown to exchange with structural Fe­(III) in goethite without any significant phase transformation. It remains unclear, however, whether aqueous Fe­(II) undergoes similar exchange reactions with structural Fe­(III) in hematite, a ubiquitous iron oxide mineral. Here, we use an enriched ⁵⁷Fe tracer to show that aqueous Fe­(II) exchanges with structural Fe­(III) in hematite at room temperature, and that the amount of exchange is influenced by particle size, pH, and Fe­(II) concentration. Reaction of 80 nm-hematite (27 m² g^–1) with aqueous Fe­(II) at pH 7.0 for 30 days results in ∼5% of its structural Fe­(III) atoms exchanging with Fe­(II) in solution, which equates to about one surface iron layer. Smaller, 50 nm-hematite particles (54 m² g^–1) undergo about 25% exchange (∼3× surface iron) with aqueous Fe­(II), demonstrating that structural Fe­(III) in hematite is accessible to the fluid in the presence of Fe­(II). The extent of exchange in hematite increases with pH up to 7.5 and then begins to decrease as the pH progresses to 8.0, likely due to surface site saturation by sorbed Fe­(II). Similarly, when we vary the initial amount of added Fe­(II), we observe decreasing amounts of exchange when aqueous Fe­(II) is increased beyond surface saturation. This work shows that Fe­(II) can catalyze iron atom exchange between bulk hematite and aqueous Fe­(II), despite hematite being the most thermodynamically stable iron oxide