Addressing cultural, social and environmental sustainability in architecture. The approach of five contemporary Australian architects

Regionalist architecture offers a promising and conscientious response to the present scenario of growing trend toward cultural, social and technical globalization. It has a great potential to preserve local cultural identities, despite the spread of global culture, to define possible relationships between construction and natural, cultural, political, economic and social factors, to combine traditional approaches and technical skills creatively and to suggest a new role for designers, as active subjects in dialogue with the manufacturing sector. An exemplary regionalist approach to contemporary architecture is given by a niche of Australian architects sensitive to the relation between communities and technical skills, dwelling patterns and building techniques, who tend to reduce the environmental load of construction through the use of local resources, who adopt community design processes and combine tradition with creative innovation. Glenn Murcutt, Richard Leplastrier, Peter Stutchbury, Gregory Burgess and Troppo Architects, who, learning from Aboriginal people's sacred respect for the land, balance the tension between global needs and local expressions, by listening to people and place, preserving traditional lifestyle preferences and combining new technologies with historic building types

Advanced Regenerative Environmental Control and Life Support Systems: Air and Water Regeneration

Extended manned space missions will require regenerative life support techniques. Past manned missions used nonregenerative expendables, except for a molecular sieve based carbon dioxide removal system aboard Skylab. The resupply penalties associated with expendables becomes prohibitive as crew size and mission duration increase. The Space Station scheduled to be operational in the 1990's is based on a crew of four to sixteen and a resupply period of 90 days or greater. It will be the first major spacecraft to employ regenerable techniques for life support. The techniques to be used in the requirements for the space station are addressed

On-board aircraft oxygen generating system

Onboard oxygen generation equipment with minimal ground support equipment and applicable to spacecraft and submarine us

City form and well-being: what makes London neighborhoods good places to live?

What is the relationship between urban form and citizens’ well-being? In this paper, we propose a quantitative approach to help answer this question, inspired by theories developed within the fields of architecture and population health. The method extracts a rich set of metrics of urban form and well-being from openly accessible datasets. Using linear regression analysis, we identify a model which can explain 30% of the variance of well-being when applied to Greater London, UK. Outcomes of this research can inform the discussion on how to design cities which foster the wellbeing of their residents

A scalable method to quantify the relationship between urban form and socio-economic indexes

The world is undergoing a process of fast and unprecedented urbanisation. It is reported that by 2050 66% of the entire world population will live in cities. Although this phenomenon is generally considered beneficial, it is also causing housing crises and more inequality worldwide. In the past, the relationship between design features of cities and socio-economic levels of their residents has been investigated using both qualitative and quantitative methods. However, both sets of works had significant limitations as the former lacked generalizability and replicability, while the latter had a too narrow focus, since they tended to analyse single aspects of the urban environment rather than a more complex set of metrics. This might have been caused by the lack of data availability. Nowadays, though, larger and freely accessible repositories of data can be used for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a scalable method that delves deeper into the relationship between features of cities and socio-economics. The method uses openly accessible datasets to extract multiple metrics of urban form and then models the relationship between urban form and socio-economic levels through spatial regression analysis. We applied this method to the six major conurbations (i.e., London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, and Newcastle) of the United Kingdom (UK) and found that urban form could explain up to 70% of the variance of the English official socio-economic index, the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). In particular, results suggest that more deprived UK neighbourhoods are characterised by higher population density, larger portions of unbuilt land, more dead-end roads, and a more regular street pattern

Molecular portraits: the evolution of the concept of transcriptome-based cancer signatures.

Cancer results from dysregulation of multiple steps of gene expression programs. We review how transcriptome profiling has been widely explored for cancer classification and biomarker discovery but resulted in limited clinical impact. Therefore, we discuss alternative and complementary omics approaches

Control of Gene Expression by RNA Binding Protein Action on Alternative Translation Initiation Sites

Transcript levels do not faithfully predict protein levels, due to post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression mediated by RNA binding proteins (RBPs) and non-coding RNAs. We developed a multivariate linear regression model integrating RBP levels and predicted RBP-mRNA regulatory interactions from matched transcript and protein datasets. RBPs significantly improved the accuracy in predicting protein abundance of a portion of the total modeled mRNAs in three panels of tissues and cells and for different methods employed in the detection of mRNA and protein. The presence of upstream translation initiation sites (uTISs) at the mRNA 5’ untranslated regions was strongly associated with improvement in predictive accuracy. On the basis of these observations, we propose that the recently discovered widespread uTISs in the human genome can be a previously unappreciated substrate of translational control mediated by RBP

Management Accountant's Role and Functions in the Enterprise Resource Planning Environment - Author's Own Research into Enterprises in Poland

This article seeks to answer whether the implementation of an ERP system has an effect on the management accountant's tasks and functions, especially in the field of performance measurement and internal reporting. The ERP impacts on the controller's role in the organization will be evaluated using field studies on six enterprises owned by multinational corporations. The question that should be asked here is whether controller's functions and tasks will also be unaffected.Celem badania jest próba odpowiedzi na pytanie czy zastosowanie zintegrowanego systemu informatycznego w przedsiębiorstwie zmienia zadania i funkcje specjalisty do spraw rachunkowości zarządczej. Na podstawie studium przypadku sześciu przedsiębiorstw będących częścią koncernów międzynarodowych zostaje dokonana ocena wpływu zastosowania ERP na rolę kontrolera w organizacji. Autor odpowiada również na pytanie czy w funkcjach i zadaniach kontrolera nie zaobserwowane zostaną zmiany w związku z implementacją ERP

Social interactions or business transactions? What customer reviews disclose about Airbnb marketplace

Airbnb is one of the most successful examples of sharing economy marketplaces. With rapid and global market penetration, understanding its attractiveness and evolving growth opportunities is key to plan business decision making. There is an ongoing debate, for example, about whether Airbnb is a hospitality service that fosters social exchanges between hosts and guests, as the sharing economy manifesto originally stated, or whether it is (or is evolving into being) a purely business transaction platform, the way hotels have traditionally operated. To answer these questions, we propose a novel market analysis approach that exploits customers’ reviews. Key to the approach is a method that combines thematic analysis and machine learning to inductively develop a custom dictionary for guests’ reviews. Based on this dictionary, we then use quantitative linguistic analysis on a corpus of 3.2 million reviews collected in 6 different cities, and illustrate how to answer a variety of market research questions, at fine levels of temporal, thematic, user and spatial granularity, such as (i) how the business vs social dichotomy is evolving over the years, (ii) what exact words within such top-level categories are evolving, (iii) whether such trends vary across different user segments and (iv) in different neighbourhoods