A Social Citizen Dashboard for Participatory Urban Planning in Berlin: Prototype and Evaluation

Participatory urban planning enables citizens to make their voices heard in the urban planning process. The resulting measures are more likely to be accepted by the community. However, the parti-cipation process becomes more effortful and time-consuming. New approaches have been developed using digital technologies to facilitate citizen participation, such as topic modeling based on social media. Using Twitter data for the city of Berlin, we explore how social media and topic modeling can be used to classify and analyze citizen opinions. We develop a Social Citizen Dashboard allowing for a better understanding of changes in citizens’ priorities and incorporating constant cycles of feedback throughout planning phases. Evaluation interviews indicate the dashboard’s potential usefulness and implications as well as point to limitation in data quality and spur further research potentials

CASP1 variants influence subcellular caspase-1 localization, pyroptosome formation, pro-inflammatory cell death and macrophage deformability

CASP1 variants result in reduced enzymatic activity of procaspase-1 and impaired IL-1β release. Despite this, affected individuals can develop systemic autoinflammatory disease. These seemingly contradictory observations have only partially been explained by increased NF-κB activation through prolonged interaction of variant procaspase-1 with RIP2. To identify further disease underlying pathomechanisms, we established an in vitro model using shRNA-directed knock-down of procaspase-1 followed by viral transduction of human monocytes (THP-1) with plasmids encoding for wild-type procaspase-1, disease-associated CASP1 variants (p.L265S, p.R240Q) or a missense mutation in the active center of procaspase-1 (p.C285A). THP1-derived macrophages carrying CASP1 variants exhibited mutation-specific molecular alterations. We here provide in vitro evidence for abnormal pyroptosome formation (p.C285A, p.240Q, p.L265S), impaired nuclear (pro)caspase-1 localization (p.L265S), reduced pro-inflammatory cell death (p.C285A) and changes in macrophage deformability that may contribute to disease pathophysiology of patients with CASP1 variants. This offers previously unknown molecular pathomechanisms in patients with systemic autoinflammatory disease

Research data for a conference paper: Sensitivity analysis of building energy models due to the shading effect of surrounding buildings to support building renovation

Building energy simulation is an analytical process to help building owners and designers evaluate the energy performance of the building. Uncertainty in the building energy modelling influences the building renovation from two perspectives: 1) calculating as-built energy consumption, 2) analysing the energy performance of renovation alternatives. Energy models can enhance by incorporating contextual and surrounding data. To this aim, we conducted a systematic study to investigate the effect of surrounding buildings in different distances, heights, and directions in studying the as-built energy consumption of an example building. The research also investigates the impact of a specific surrounding building on the energy performance of three different renovation alternatives, namely the modification of windows, external walls, and roofs. The results demonstrate that a higher height to distance ratio of the surrounding buildings often causes a decrease in energy consumption. In addition, a surrounding building located in the south direction causes more effect on the energy result than other directions when the building is in the northern hemisphere. For renovation scenarios, if there is a specific building in the south of the building under renovation, the window modification leads to less energy consumption than other renovation scenarios. The paper discusses that for renovation projects, an initial examination of surrounding buildings before selecting the renovation alternative is crucial; since different placements of surrounding buildings can affect the performance of renovation scenarios differently, which can cause a variation in the cost of renovation

GIS-based ontology for surrounding buildings to support building renovation

This research focuses on developing an ontology for representing knowledge about the surrounding environment of a building in an urban context, considering the geo-spatial objects and processes such as built environment, vegetation, population and so on. The ontology can be useful to create a knowledge management system for different experts involved in the process of the building renovation, to extend the in-formation and stretch the domain from the individual building to the environment. Knowledge about what entities and attributes to select is captured based on literature and investigating the pilot demonstration sites. Such an ontology can help to structure the surrounding data to support processes in different stages of the renovation. The final goal is to support planners in decision making process namely in site planning and pre-data collection phase, energy modelling, comfort analysis and so on to control cost and quality. Moreover, it can be valuable in further studies of integrating data of various sources for construction purposes

Porosity determination of carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) in aviation applications using ultrasound without a back wall echo

The use of CFRP increased not only in the field of aviation structures. Also regarding lightweight construction in the automotive industry CFRP is moving forward. Porosity is one of the main quality parameters of CRFP. X-ray computer tomography (CT) is nowadays one of the standard reference techniques for quantitative imaging of porosity. However, CT sample size is limited if µm local resolution is required. For process control ultrasonic attenuation measurements are therefore prevalent, either in pulse-echo mode by evaluating the back wall echo amplitude, or in transmission mode. However other approaches are required, when only single sided access is given or when no back wall echo is detectable due to thickness of the component or due to damping effects in case of increased porosity. Every individual time-of-flight signal carries phase and frequency information in addition to the amplitude information. The phase and the frequency variation of the transmitted and backscattered ultrasonic signals can be correlated to the inner fibre and matrix structure of the material to be assessed and to additional material inhomogeneity like pores, cracks and delaminations. Within this presentation results based on phase and frequency analysis of ultrasonic A-scans when no back wall information is present will be discussed. X-ray computer tomography data were used for calibration of the ultrasound results. These results are based on the analysis and processing of ultrasonic A-scans acquired with commercial single element transducers and using conventional state-of-the-art ultrasonic hardware

Ibuprofen plasma concentration profile in deliberate ibuprofen overdose with circulatory depression treated with therapeutic plasma exchange: a case report

Background Inquiries relating to ibuprofen overdose have more than tripled in the last ten years in our poison control center. Although the vast majority of cases have a benign clinical course, there are few severe or even fatal cases present with refractory circulatory failure. Case presentation We describe a case of a 48 year-old male with suicidal mono-ingestion of approximately 72 g ibuprofen. Despite an initial rapid spontaneous drop in the total ibuprofen plasma concentration (IPC) from 550 to 275 mcg/mL within the first 5 h after admission, the patient developed a circulatory failure, refractory to aggressive fluid resuscitation and high doses of vasopressors. Due to ibuprofen’s favorable pharmacokinetics (>95% bound to albumin, low volume of distribution) and in the absence of specific therapeutic alternatives thereby avoiding escalating vasopressor doses, therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE) for extracorporeal elimination of ibuprofen was considered as a therapeutic rescue option. An improvement of hemodynamics with a significant reduction of vasopressors was observed with TPE-initiation. However, neither the observed IPC-profile nor a pharmacokinetic (PK) simulation provided evidence for a quantitative effective elimination of ibuprofen by TPE. Based on PK-modeling we calculated an overall ibuprofen half-life of 17.2 h for the entire observation period over 5 days. Conclusions To our knowledge this is the first report of a severe ibuprofen-mono intoxication treated with TPE and providing serial IPCs over a period of five days, indicating an estimated fivefold overall-elimination half-life of 17.2 h. Despite TPE clinically improved persistent hemodynamic instability, this procedure was neither consistent with the observed IPC-profile nor correlated with a meaningful quantitative elimination of ibuprofen