Photovoltaic design integration at Battery Park City, New York

This paper is a study of the photovoltaic (PV) systems in the buildings’ design of the Battery Park City (BPC) residential development, in New York. The BPC development is the first in the US to mandate, through the 2000 Battery Park City Authority guidelines, the use of PV as renewable energy generation system in its individual buildings. The scope of this study is to show how PV is integrated in the BPC buildings’ design process, and what can be learned for future PV applications. The study draws directly from the design decision making sources, investigating on the concerns and suggestions of the BPC architects, PV installers and real estate developers. It attempts to contrast a theoretical approach that sees PV as a technology to domesticate in architecture and bring, through grounded research, PV industry closer to the architectural design process. The findings of the study suggest that while stringent environmental mandates help, in the short term, to kick-start the use of PV systems in buildings, it is the recognition of the PV’s primary role as energy provider, its assimilation in the building industry, and its use in a less confining building program that allows for its evolution in architecture

Símbolos, imágenes, rituales: el lenguaje simbólico del poder en la Europa del Antiguo Régimen

Una de las características más sobresalientes del Antiguo Régimen fue la gran trascendencia de los símbolos y rituales para la afirmación y la reproducción de las estructuras de poder, jerarquías y valores sociales. El siguiente artículo presentará una visión general de la investigación reciente sobre el tema de la comunicación simbólica. Concentrándose primero en los conceptos teóricos, se abordará después tres campos historiográficos ejemplares, a saber, la historia de la Corte, de la ciudad y de las relaciones internacionales, áreas en las que se ha empleado el enfoque de la comunicación simbólica con mucho éxito en los últimos años. En todos estos campos los actos simbólicos no eran un mero reflejo de las estructuras políticas y sociales, sino que constituían un código comunicativo mediante el cual los actores contemporáneos negociaban sus pretensiones de poder.-------One of the most striking characteristics of the Ancient Régime was the great importance of symbols and rituals for the affirmation and reproduction of power structures, hierarchies and social values. Concentrating on the theoretical concepts at stake, this article presents a general outline of recent investigation on symbolic communication through three different historiographical fields: the history of the court, the city, and international relations. I argue that within all of these historiographical fields, the approach of symbolic communication has recently been applied with good results. Foremost among the achievements was the postulization that symbolic acts were not only a mere reflection of political and social structure, but can be considered as a communicative code which allowed the contemporary actors to negotiate their pretensions of power

The Effects of Certain and Uncertain Incentives on Effort and Knowledge Accuracy

In many situations, incentives exist to acquire knowledge and make correct political decisions. We conduct an experiment that contributes to a small but growing literature on incentives and political knowledge, testing the effect of certain and uncertain incentives on knowledge. Our experiment builds on the basic theoretical point that acquiring and using information is costly, and incentives for accurate answers will lead respondents to expend greater effort on the task and be more likely to answer knowledge questions correctly. We test the effect of certain and uncertain incentives and find that both increase effort and accuracy relative to the control condition of no incentives for accuracy. Holding constant the expected benefit of knowledge, we do not observe behavioral differences associated with the probability of earning an incentive for knowledge accuracy. These results suggest that measures of subject performance in knowledge tasks are contingent on the incentives they face. Therefore, to ensure the validity of experimental tasks and the related behavioral measures, we need to ensure a correspondence between the context we are trying to learn about and our experimental design

Multi-Layer RF Tissue Phantoms for Mimicking a Human Core

This work presents the design recipe, fabrication process and characterization of tissue-simulating materials, configured as a physical model to mimic the electrical and some physical properties of an abdominal cavity. The complete three-layer design is called the human core model (HCM) see Fig. 1. To our knowledge, presented is the first hybrid skin-muscle phantom developed to mimic the electrical properties of the intervening tissue layers of an abdominal cavity within the frequency band of 1 GHz - 2 GHz, a band of interest for human body sensing due to its deep detection depth

Bulk evidence for single-gap s-wave superconductivity in the intercalated graphite superconductor C6_6Yb

We report measurements of the in-plane electrical resistivity $\rho$ and the thermal conductivity $\kappa$ of the intercalated graphite superconductor C$_6$Yb to temperatures as low as $T_c$/100. When a field is applied along the c-axis, the residual electronic linear term $\kappa_0/T$ evolves in an exponential manner for $H_{c1} < H < H_{c2}$. This activated behaviour establishes the order parameter as unambiguously s-wave, and rules out the possibility of multi-gap or unconventional superconductivity in this system.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figs, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Correction to “Intraseasonal variability near 10°N in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean”

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research 112 (2007): C03011, doi:10.1029/2007JC004135

The Use of Classroom Walk-Through Observations as a Strategy for Improving Teaching and Learning: Teacher Perspective

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of classroom walk-through observations and their effect on Communication Arts and Mathematics Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) scores, summer school placement, discipline referrals, and retention. This study was conducted in three Midwestern Middle Schools. This study focused on classroom walk-through observations. If the principal increased the number of classroom walk-through observations, would it have an impact on Communication Arts and Mathematics MAP scores, summer school placement, discipline referrals and retention? This study will attempt to determine if classroom walk-through observations had an impact on Communication Arts MAP scores, Mathematics MAP scores, Summer School placement, discipline referrals and retention. The data from this study was from the school years 2005-2006, 2006-2007, and 2007-2008. Classroom walk-through observations began in the ABC School District in the year 2006. The ABC School District used a walk-through form that is very detailed. The findings showed that yes, there was a decrease in discipline referrals, summer school placement, and retention, and there was an increase in student achievement in regards to Communication Art MAP test scores and Mathematics MAP test scores. It cannot be concluded that the classroom walk-through observations are the reason for the increase in student achievement. When educators look at the changes that education has gone through over the last twenty years, the focus is on the growth of the students and how the changes have impacted their student achievement. Classroom walk-through observations are one of the many changes that have occurred in education. Can brief classroom observations regarding best practices have a positive impact on student achievement and school climate? There is not one single thing that is a fix for the problems that are occurring in the educational realm, but by examining different key points, educators can decipher which programs are working and which ones are not working. A possibility exists that the statistical data cannot provide the desired information

Moored surface buoy observations of the diurnal warm layer

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2013. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 118 (2013): 4553–4569, doi:10.1002/jgrc.20360.An extensive data set is used to examine the dynamics of diurnal warming in the upper ocean. The data set comprises more than 4700 days of measurements at five sites in the tropics and subtropics, obtained from surface moorings equipped to make comprehensive meteorological, incoming solar and infrared radiation, and high-resolution subsurface temperature (and, in some cases, velocity) measurements. The observations, which include surface warmings of up to 3.4°C, are compared with a selection of existing models of the diurnal warm layer (DWL). A simple one-layer physical model is shown to give a reasonable estimate of both the magnitude of diurnal surface warming (model-observation correlation 0.88) and the structure and temporal evolution of the DWL. Novel observations of velocity shear obtained during 346 days at one site, incorporating high-resolution (1 m) upper ocean (5–15 m) acoustic Doppler current profile measurements, are also shown to be in reasonable agreement with estimates from the physical model (daily maximum shear model-observation correlation 0.77). Physics-based improvements to the one-layer model (incorporation of rotation and freshwater terms) are discussed, though they do not provide significant improvements against the observations reported here. The simplicity and limitations of the physical model are used to discuss DWL dynamics. The physical model is shown to give better model performance under the range of forcing conditions experienced across the five sites than the more empirical models.J.P. was supported for part of this work by a graduate exchange studentship from the Graduate School of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. J.T.F. was supported by NSF OCE Award 0745508, the Charles D. Hollister Fund for Assistant Scientist Support, and the John E. and Anne W. Sawyer Endowed Fund in Special Support of Scientific Staff. R.A.W. was supported by the Office of Naval Research for the deployment of the Arabian Sea surface mooring, and by the NOAA Climate Program and Climate Observation Division for the deployment of the PACS and Stratus surface moorings. J.T.F. was supported under a cooperative program between WHOI and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST; Awards USA00001, USA00002, and KSA00011) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the deployment of the KAUST surface moorings.2014-03-1