A historical and social overview of the traditional houses: Riad in Fez medina and Hanok in Seoul

Some Korean and Moroccan institutions have taken essential steps to preserve the traditional houses: the Hanoks in Seoul and the Riads in Fez. Previous research on the development and rehabilitation of the traditional dwelling only includes interventions on the structural part and thermal characteristics of the traditional habitat and thus ignores the spatial configuration of the house and its transformation according to the practices and needs of today’s consumers. However, the newly developed structure and construction technology has not yet been developed and has not been activated in the market. In particular, it is causing a social debate about the authenticity of the traditional dwelling structure (Hanok and Riad). This research is to deal with the modernization process in which Hanoks and Riads are newly changing in the 21st century and will tackle the traditional dwelling about the spatial quality and social transition by using space syntax to rethink the spatial layout of the Riad and Hanok for a more flexible, durable, multi-functional space reflecting today’s lifestyle. The main problem would be to answer How to find the balance between the old and the new and how can architecture reflect the culture of a society

The bioclimatic features of traditional heritage architecture: Thermal comfort of the courtyard house in Morocco

The traditional courtyard house has been viewed as a complex regulating system that creates a microclimate that historically worked, and still works, in a passive way to provide acceptable thermal comfort in summer. The internal courtyard is generally described as a positive factor that can moderate extreme outdoor climatic conditions. However, some researchers have shown that the courtyard could become a negative factor from an energy efficiency point of view. For this purpose, this paper is based on a research study exploring the sustainable characteristics of Moroccan traditional housing and their climatic adaptation. The traditional courtyard house model in Rabat-Salé has been selected to analyze the bioclimatic strategies by applying the adaptive comfort approach. The work starts by using tools for climatic design, Mahoney’s tables, Givoni, and Szokolay bioclimatic charts to improve design strategies in terms of thermal comfort in both cities of Rabat and Salé. The results of the analysis are then compared with the characteristics of the Moroccan traditional courtyard houses, to verify if and how those strategies were applied. The important part of this paper concerns the analysis of the thermal behavior of the rooms surrounding the courtyard in the temperate and humid climate of Rabat-Salé. The simulation modeling of the courtyard house model in the medina of Rabat-Salé is carried out to analyze the effectiveness of different parameters to improve the indoor climate during summer and winter, including the façade orientation, the air infiltration, the surroundings, the ceiling height, the walls and roof/ceiling insulation and the shading devices. The findings reveal that Moroccan traditional courtyard houses can incorporate bioclimatic strategies to meet both thermal comfort and energy efficiency in different ways. In general, a strong correlation can be found between constructive and morphological features and climatic contexts

Emotional persistence in online chatting communities

How do users behave in online chatrooms, where they instantaneously read and write posts? We analyzed about 2.5 million posts covering various topics in Internet relay channels, and found that user activity patterns follow known power-law and stretched exponential distributions, indicating that online chat activity is not different from other forms of communication. Analysing the emotional expressions (positive, negative, neutral) of users, we revealed a remarkable persistence both for individual users and channels. I.e. despite their anonymity, users tend to follow social norms in repeated interactions in online chats, which results in a specific emotional "tone" of the channels. We provide an agent-based model of emotional interaction, which recovers qualitatively both the activity patterns in chatrooms and the emotional persistence of users and channels. While our assumptions about agent's emotional expressions are rooted in psychology, the model allows to test different hypothesis regarding their emotional impact in online communication.Comment: 34 pages, 4 main and 12 supplementary figure

Disclosure of Maternal HIV Status to Children: To Tell or Not To Tell . . . That Is the Question

HIV-infected mothers face the challenging decision of whether to disclose their serostatus to their children. From the perspective of both mother and child, we explored the process of disclosure, providing descriptive information and examining the relationships among disclosure, demographic variables, and child adjustment. Participants were 23 mothers and one of their noninfected children (9 to 16 years of age). Sixty-one percent of mothers disclosed. Consistent with previous research, disclosure was not related to child functioning. However, children sworn to secrecy demonstrated lower social competence and more externalizing problems. Differential disclosure, which occurred in one-third of the families, was associated with higher levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms. Finally, knowing more than mothers had themselves disclosed was related to child maladjustment across multiple domains. Clinical implications and the need for future research are considered

Positive words carry less information than negative words

We show that the frequency of word use is not only determined by the word length \cite{Zipf1935} and the average information content \cite{Piantadosi2011}, but also by its emotional content. We have analyzed three established lexica of affective word usage in English, German, and Spanish, to verify that these lexica have a neutral, unbiased, emotional content. Taking into account the frequency of word usage, we find that words with a positive emotional content are more frequently used. This lends support to Pollyanna hypothesis \cite{Boucher1969} that there should be a positive bias in human expression. We also find that negative words contain more information than positive words, as the informativeness of a word increases uniformly with its valence decrease. Our findings support earlier conjectures about (i) the relation between word frequency and information content, and (ii) the impact of positive emotions on communication and social links.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

Combination Forecasts of Bond and Stock Returns: An Asset Allocation Perspective

We investigate the out-of-sample forecasting ability of the HML, SMB, momentum, short-term and long-term reversal factors along with their size and value decompositions on U.S. bond and stock returns for a variety of horizons ranging from the short run (1 month) to the long run (2 years). Our findings suggest that these factors contain significantly more information for future bond and stock market returns than the typically employed financial variables. Combination of forecasts of the empirical factors turns out to be particularly successful, especially from an an asset allocation perspective. Similar findings pertain to the European and Japanese markets