How soon will Design Education be Able to Benefit from Computer Aided Design Systems?

I gave a paper recently to a conference organised by the Design Council in the Royal Institution on Computers and 3D product design education. That paper was entitled 'How soon will CAD be able to aid design education?' and I quote first from my conclusion to that paper.'Simple architectural type forms· have just become an economic reality on low cost systems. I don't think any system is useful to the designer until it is low cost and thus we have only just seen the beginning of the real potential for using computer aided design in the design field. Within the next two years we will see systems able to cope with complex sculptured forms on low cost systems and within a further two years we should see artificial intelligence techniques being able to involve the designer in a genuine dialogue about his design intentions and helping him as he goes. All these tools will, of course, be linked directly to the means of production and this will completely change the role of the designer and the role of the manufacturer and their relative interaction. This has profound implications for design education'. IAlthough it is perhaps unwise of me to make public prophecies about when new software features will be available I think on this occasion I got it right. By the end of 1986 we will see on the market really valuable design tools running on low cost microprocessor based systems. So in this article I will attempt to do two things. First to show what the most powerful of the existing low cost systems are already able to achieve in terms of programs which aid design education; and second to describe those characteristics which I think are still necessary in the new and complete systems which I am anticipating becoming available before the end of this year

Support for energy-oriented design in the Australian context

There is a need for decision support tools that integrate energy simulation into early design in the context of Australian practice. Despite the proliferation of simulation programs in the last decade, there are no ready-to-use applications that cater specifically for the Australian climate and regulations. Furthermore, the majority of existing tools focus on achieving interaction with the design domain through model-based interoperability, and largely overlook the issue of process integration. This paper proposes an energy-oriented design environment that both accommodates the Australian context and provides interactive and iterative information exchanges that facilitate feedback between domains. It then presents the structure for DEEPA, an openly customisable system that couples parametric modelling and energy simulation software as a means of developing a decision support tool to allow designers to rapidly and flexibly assess the performance of early design alternatives. Finally, it discusses the benefits of developing a dynamic and concurrent performance evaluation process that parallels the characteristics and relationships of the design process

An Investigation Of The Soils Within And Beneath The Middens Of Two Huron Villages

Soils from within and beneath several Huron middens were investigated. Five types of material were identified within these structures and were tentatively labeled charcoal, midden matrix, subsoil, grey ash and white ash. Chemical analyses of samples taken from these layers enabled a computer cluster analysis of these materials. If the clustering routine was halted when four groups had been identified it was found that the white ash and to some extent the subsoil samples were well defined, however, the grey ash and midden matrix samples were poorly defined suggesting a polygenetic origin for these materials. Charcoal samples were not clearly defined, as expected, since the chemical analyses utilized were not capable of detecting this almost inert material. When soil samples from beneath the middens were compared with soil samples taken from beyond the middens it was found that the samples from beneath the middens were enriched with exchangeable cations. In addition, alkaline constituents were sufficiently mobilized to alter pH values. The study ends with a number of archaeological considerations and some recommendations for future research

Closing the loop of design and analysis: Parametric modelling tools for early decision support

There is a growing need for parametric design software that communicates building performance feedback in early architectural exploration to support decision-making. This paper examines how the circuit of design and analysis process can be closed to provide active and concurrent feedback between architecture and services engineering domains. It presents the structure for an openly customisable design system that couples parametric modelling and energy analysis software to allow designers to assess the performance of early design iterations quickly. Finally, it discusses how user interactions with the system foster information exchanges that facilitate the sharing of design intelligence across disciplines

Rituximab with chemotherapy in children and adolescents with central nervous system and/or bone marrow-positive Burkitt lymphoma/leukaemia: a childrens oncology group report

pre-printApproximately 1 in 4 children and adolescents with de-novo mature and Burkitt lymphoma (BL) present with high-risk disease that is either mature B-cell leukaemia (bone marrow ≥ 25% blasts [BM]) and/or have central nervous system (CNS) involvement. Both the Berlin-Frankfurt- Münster (BFM) and French-American-British (FAB) international cooperative studies have unsuccessfully attempted to reduce the overall burden of chemotherapy in this high risk group of patients. In the FAB 96 study, a randomized attempt to reduce the dose of cytarabine during consolidation and eliminate three final cycles of maintenance was halted early due to inferior event-free survival (EFS) (Cairo, et al 2012, Cairo, et al concluded that reducing the infusion duration of methotrexate from 24 to 4 hours led to significantly inferior EFS in high risk (R3/R4) patients.(Woessmann, et al 2005) Subsets of children with BL, such as those with poor response to initial reduction, complex karyotypes, and those with combined BM and CNS disease, have a significantly worse prognosis (Cairo, et al 2012, Cairo, et al 2007, Poirel, et al 2009)