Medical student views of and responses to expectations of professionalism

Funding this study is part of the corresponding author's (EAS) doctoral programme of research funded by the University of Aberdeen, and supervised by EH and JC. Acknowledgements we thank all the students who took part in this project, and Professor Rona Patey, the Director of the Institute of Education for Medical and Dental Sciences, University of Aberdeen, for her support of this project.Peer reviewedPostprin

A Study of the influence of mass media advertising on architectural taste and imagination, with special reference to communicating the meanings of architecture

Architecture is a medium of communication. It communicates emotive meanings to observers as it is fundamentally an Art. The form and shaping are the key elements through which architecture can be communicated. The form can be further divided into; scale, proportion and spatial composition, where as shaping includes colour, texture, elements such as fenestration etc. From the eighteenth century onwards, the role of the designer in the process of meaning formation has often been seen in terms of the model of communication. The designer is compared to a speaker who has something to say, the building is conceived as a statement and the clients, users and interpreters (collectively observers) are regarded as constituting an audience. The full appreciation and evaluation of quality and success of a design depends on an understanding of its meaning and the way in which perceptual variables are used to achieve and communicate it. It seems that, subject of meaning and its communication in architecture should begin to receive considerable attention as it was neglected for long time period. It is true to state that the interest of meaning formation has continued and indeed grown since then, but less attention was paid to communicate those meanings. As a result, people tend to assign meanings to those which influenced by several factors. Growth of mass communication since the late 1940's has been influencing people in many ways both consciously and subconsciously, mean directly and indirectly. These images are printed, painted, photographed and stenciled in an animated or still form. Considered as shared by many these visual and auditory images have become a set of common signs or symbols to which we can readily relate. Their power derives from materialistic and commercial purpose

Dependencies among environmental performance indicators for buildings and their implications

Environmental performance rating schemes such as LEED allocate separate indicator scores for various criteria (or aspects). The overall environmental performance score is obtained by summing these separate scores. However, no mention is made regarding any dependencies among aspect indicators. In this study, possible influences, including their degree (‘strong’, ‘moderate’, and ‘none’) and direction (positive, negative) were identified among the seven aspects covering the sustainability of the building site (i.e. Site domain) in an environmental performance assessment scheme for buildings. These judgements were corroborated by the correlation coefficients corresponding to scores for those aspects achieved by 10 buildings. First and higher order influences were accounted for through a matrix-based scheme, which revealed aspects that were influencing others or being influenced by them. The degree of influencing other aspects was found to be inversely proportional to that of being influenced by them. The aspect weights, obtained by querying experts, appeared to be independent of their degree of influence. The negative dependencies in this Site domain gave rise to constraints on combinations of aspect scores and the maximum environmental performance score achievable. The score levels that would maximize this overall score were obtained through an optimization exercise; this generated some possible planning strategies

Sustainability rating systems for buildings : comparisons and correlations

The issue of subjectivity in assigning weights for the domains and aspects in sustainability rating systems has not received much attention, and is hence explored in this study. A survey carried out among building construction sector professionals in a particular national context sought relative weights for various domains and aspects. Both direct ranking and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methods were used. Reasonable agreement, with some differences, was found among architects, engineers and quantity surveyors on the relative weights for the six domains of Site, Energy efficiency, Water efficiency, Materials, Indoor environmental quality and Waste & Pollution; and also for the aspects. The overall domain weights were compared with those assigned in eight other rating systems, originating from eight different countries. While the Sri Lankan survey assigned the highest weight for the Site domain (with Energy efficiency a close second), in most other systems the Energy efficiency domain was top ranked. Relevant national indicators were chosen for 3 of the 6 domains, and the values of these indicators for the 9 countries were compared with the varying weights for the corresponding domains in the rating systems originating from those countries. Good correlation was found between the indicators and the weights

Identifying vulnerability to blast loading using grounded theory

A blast event lies within the social system and involves people. Hence vulnerability to blast loading can be considered a socio-technical or "soft" system, where our ability to model and hence predict bounds on behaviour is poor. Even where the "hard" part of the system is concerned (i.e. structural response), blast loading is difficult to idealize and its effects cannot be fully predicted. Often the greatest injury is caused by non-structural elements acting as "missiles". For all the above reasons, the analysis of vulnerability to blast loading must be grounded in past experience

Sustainability in (Mega)Project Management—A Business Case for Project Sustainability

Sustainability in a 3P framework is becoming a key driver in megaproject feasibility assessment according to International Financial Institutions. Currently, in several cases, sustainability is still used as a fair topic to talk about by CEOs and presidents ofCompanies and Institutionswithout a concrete plan to implement it.This paper aims to explore the strategies for a real implementation of 3P sustainability in projects and megaprojects, integrating the three pillars of sustainability into a cohesive whole to make it works not only at year-end speeches to shareholders, but also to fruitfully include sustainability into the strategy of organizations