Sustainable Construction in the Recession

Sustainability emerged as a public concern at a time when the construction industry was in boom. Government legislation and peer pressure led to the growing momentum in implementing sustainable development. However, as the world enters into recession, is there still room for sustainable construction? This paper investigates whether the drivers and barriers to sustainable construction have changed during the current recession. The research consists of a literature review into the subject and recent evidence of the industry’s reaction to the recession. In-depth interviews were conducted with construction professionals who represent a cross section of industry and project roles. The key findings reveal that 60 percent of respondents consider sustainable construction would continue to increase despite the recession, with the main drivers found to be increased legislation, customer demand and energy costs. Clients are found to be more likely to focus on passive design features over renewable energy technologies as a means of delivering sustainable construction in an economical way

Measurements of Nonsinglet Moments of the Nucleon Structure Functions and Comparison to Predictions from Lattice QCD for Q^{2}=4 GeV^{2}.

We present extractions of the nucleon nonsinglet moments utilizing new precision data on the deuteron F_{2} structure function at large Bjorken-x determined via the Rosenbluth separation technique at Jefferson Lab Experimental Hall C. These new data are combined with a complementary set of data on the proton previously measured in Hall C at similar kinematics and world datasets on the proton and deuteron at lower x measured at SLAC and CERN. The new Jefferson Lab data provide coverage of the upper third of the x range, crucial for precision determination of the higher moments. In contrast to previous extractions, these moments have been corrected for nuclear effects in the deuteron using a new global fit to the deuteron and proton data. The obtained experimental moments represent an order of magnitude improvement in precision over previous extractions using high x data. Moreover, recent exciting developments in lattice QCD calculations provide a first ever comparison of these new experimental results with calculations of moments carried out at the physical pion mass, as well as a new approach that first calculates the quark distributions directly before determining moments