Revitalization: Creating new architecture from remnants

While it may seem appropriate to overlook the old for the new, is it possible to sustain our ecosystem in this manner? The choices we make impact our environment and those within it. Instead of relying on the novelty of the new, we should look to our inadequacies to give us greater opportunities. For we can achieve this through revitalization. By using revitalization, we have the opportunity to imbue something with new life and vitality. Revitalization in architecture can serve as a means to stabilize and perform for the greatest benefit to our ecosystem. We should look to revitalization in architecture as part of any design solution. It is our responsibility to imbue a decaying community with the chance at a new beginning. It is our responsibility to examine the existing framework of our cities as a solution to our design challenges. This is the design doctrine that we explored in our senior capstone projects. One approach to revitalization is an integrated urban remodeling concept that meets the complex needs of an area. Another approach is to shift the associated function of inoperative infrastructure into a commodity for community and ecosystem. Another approach explores the unification of modernity and historic memento to elicit the resurgence of the architecture’s potential. These approaches showed that revitalization is a viable part of architectural design

Community Brought Together

Community Brought Together Ethan Conkin, Jacob Abbott, Tyemirlan Murat Shahnaz Aly Architectural Science A community is a small or large social unit (a group of living things) that has something in common, such as norms, religion, values, or identity. Communities often share a sense of place that is situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms. Are we hiding behind selfies and negative social media behavior instead of promoting human interaction and kindness? “For the past decade community has been slowly disappearing. Are we too busy for community, trying to earn and spending our time on electronic devices? In San Jose, California, our neighborhood coffee shops and independent bookstores have been replaced by franchises and online merchants. Mission City Coffee Roasting, a meeting place for students, artists, and writers and site for weekend folk concerts, is gone now, replaced by another Starbucks, and there is only one independent bookstore left in San Jose. Have we become too busy for community? With our days filled with electronic gadgets, longer work hours and commutes, few of us know our neighbors, which can be unhealthy and unsafe.” - Diane Dreher Ph.D. It’s time to put down the cell phone, scrolling through our social media accounts and get to know the community around us. Through the built environment, communities can come together face to face and learn about each other. Our research focused on the interactions of communities in environments such as community centers and religious gathering spaces. The diverse population of Bowling Green, Kentucky gave us the opportunity to apply our findings about community interaction. Our designs took gathering spaces and transformed them into environments suitable for today’s community; making the use of technology beneficial instead of destructive

Missed opportunities in surveillance and screening systems to detect developmental delay: A developing country perspective

The future of human societies depends on children being able to achieve their optimal physical and psychological development. Developmental delay is failure to acquire age-appropriate functionality. It may involve one or more streams of development. Responsive parenting has potential to promote better development. Primary health physicians are in the best arrangement to provide this assistance as they can monitor child\u27s development longitudinally and understand the child\u27s developmental trajectory better. Current strategy employed by majority of primary-care providers to monitor the trajectory is termed \u27developmental surveillance\u27. It is a flexible, continuous process whereby knowledgeable professionals perform skilled observations of children during the provision of health care . Age-appropriate developmental checklists are also used to record milestones as part of surveillance. Both, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the British Joint Working Party on Child Health Services, recommend developmental surveillance by physicians as a method of identification of developmental delays. Developmental screening, however, improves the accuracy of identifying children with delay, compared with surveillance. Primary health physicians should consider using developmental screening tools that are standardized, reliable, valid and practical in the office setting, be familiar with screening techniques which should be incorporated into ongoing care, and keep abreast of current literature. Pakistan, as a developing country, needs specific strategies to ensure that we seize all the chances to detect this delay at an earlier age and introduce intervention, in order to lessen the burden of the disability on child, family and society. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V

Revisiting the Building Design Attributes and Indoor Radon: A Survey of 36 Homes in the Commonwealth of Kentucky

Radon is an odorless radioactive gas that exists in the soil underneath buildings in areas that is rich in Radium and Uranium. It seeps from the soil and accumulates in the indoor environment. In 2009, radon gas has been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as being carcinogenic to humans. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), indoor radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking in the United States. EPA recommends homeowners mitigate their houses against radon if the indoor radon concentration exceeds 4 pCi/L. Building new healthy homes while developing affordable building renovation strategies is one of the key solutions to mitigate the impacts of such environmental hazards. This research explores the relationship between building design attributes and radon gas in areas prone to higher concentrations of indoor radon. 36 homes with different age, design features, and construction materials were tested in Bowling green Kentucky, an area classified as zone 1 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Zone 1 is defined by the EPA as an area where the predicted indoor radon average is greater than 4 pCi/L. The survey also collected data about the architectural design, construction materials, structure systems, HVAC systems, and building envelope design of each house that participated in the study. The purpose is to feedback to the construction industry with potential improvements to help with the current indoor radon mitigation efforts. The results open the doors for further research needed to enhance the current building design and construction methods in areas prone to a higher concentration of indoor radon

Natural Design and the Transformation of Human Industry

For most of our history, the human response to the living earth, to particular places, has expressed the same flowering of diversity. As a society, human beings have become isolated and detached from nature. Does this fault not lie in our own design? We create physical barriers that separate us from the world, and consequently, we have removed ourselves from the natural environment. Bearing the unique human ability to imagine and create, we are responsible for tailoring future architecture as not just shelter, but elegant responses to locality, and breathing structures of art. Human industry and habitations can be designed to celebrate interdependence with other living systems. Designs can transform in the marketplace, in the human community, and in the natural world. “Through the daily experience of the designed environment, we learn detachment… As nature has receded from our daily lives, it has receded from our ethics. - Sim Van der Ryn. The urbanization of our world has created a distance between humans and our natural environment. As a result, there has been research that highlights the several health issues such as obesity, ADHD, and a sharp decline in creativity that affects us humans. Despite the amount of urban design and industry environment, humans still have an innate connection to the natural world, that tenacious desire to fuse architecture with nature. The surrounding environment came as the largest inspiration for our project, drawing ideas from nature’s functions, forms, and structures. Our research focused on discovering a deeper connection between the natural world and architectural design. In the resort projects undertaken around the world, we were able to apply that connection by designing sustainable spaces that integrated well into their surroundings. Our design incorporates natural elements in modern architecture which created an interaction between humans and nature through external senses

The Beauty of Community

AS488 Professor Shahnaz Aly Architectural Science Department Ogden College of Science and Engineering Western Kentucky University Savannah Whitt Olivia Coffey Sam Lynch The Beauty of Community The purpose of this research was to show that architecture can create a sense of community. Our projects are located in small towns and provide residents a place to gather and connect with one another. We introduced a rock-climbing gym to an outdoorsy community in Utah, created an animal sanctuary in a rural town in Kentucky, and provided a refuge for children in Belize. Our common goal was to fulfill the need for community in a small town. In creating spaces where people could gather, we took into consideration the importance of sustainable features. Our buildings were designed to avoid negative impact on the environment and incorporated recycled materials, solar energy, and gray water systems. We had a common objective of making the surrounding environment better than it initially was, and it was successful. Along with a sustainable approach, our designs are welcoming and inviting through the use of simplistic but contemporary forms and materials. We integrated natural lighting by using floor to ceiling windows as well as skylights. Along with natural lighting to create a modern design, a neutral palette of colors with an occasional splash of color formed an integral part of the design solution. We wanted our designs to conform with their surroundings and bring an essence of unity to their overall environment. Overall, we were successful in creating a space for the community to gather. The designs will be incredibly beneficial to their environments in both sustainability and human connection, exemplifying what it is to feel connected

International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortiu (INICC) report, data summary of 43 countries for 2007-2012. Device-associated module

We report the results of an International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium (INICC) surveillance study from January 2007-December 2012 in 503 intensive care units (ICUs) in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. During the 6-year study using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) U.S. National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) definitions for device-associated health care–associated infection (DA-HAI), we collected prospective data from 605,310 patients hospitalized in the INICC's ICUs for an aggregate of 3,338,396 days. Although device utilization in the INICC's ICUs was similar to that reported from ICUs in the U.S. in the CDC's NHSN, rates of device-associated nosocomial infection were higher in the ICUs of the INICC hospitals: the pooled rate of central line–associated bloodstream infection in the INICC's ICUs, 4.9 per 1,000 central line days, is nearly 5-fold higher than the 0.9 per 1,000 central line days reported from comparable U.S. ICUs. The overall rate of ventilator-associated pneumonia was also higher (16.8 vs 1.1 per 1,000 ventilator days) as was the rate of catheter-associated urinary tract infection (5.5 vs 1.3 per 1,000 catheter days). Frequencies of resistance of Pseudomonas isolates to amikacin (42.8% vs 10%) and imipenem (42.4% vs 26.1%) and Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates to ceftazidime (71.2% vs 28.8%) and imipenem (19.6% vs 12.8%) were also higher in the INICC's ICUs compared with the ICUs of the CDC's NHSN

Characteristics and outcomes of COVID-19 patients admitted to hospital with and without respiratory symptoms

Background: COVID-19 is primarily known as a respiratory illness; however, many patients present to hospital without respiratory symptoms. The association between non-respiratory presentations of COVID-19 and outcomes remains unclear. We investigated risk factors and clinical outcomes in patients with no respiratory symptoms (NRS) and respiratory symptoms (RS) at hospital admission. Methods: This study describes clinical features, physiological parameters, and outcomes of hospitalised COVID-19 patients, stratified by the presence or absence of respiratory symptoms at hospital admission. RS patients had one or more of: cough, shortness of breath, sore throat, runny nose or wheezing; while NRS patients did not. Results: Of 178,640 patients in the study, 86.4 % presented with RS, while 13.6 % had NRS. NRS patients were older (median age: NRS: 74 vs RS: 65) and less likely to be admitted to the ICU (NRS: 36.7 % vs RS: 37.5 %). NRS patients had a higher crude in-hospital case-fatality ratio (NRS 41.1 % vs. RS 32.0 %), but a lower risk of death after adjusting for confounders (HR 0.88 [0.83-0.93]). Conclusion: Approximately one in seven COVID-19 patients presented at hospital admission without respiratory symptoms. These patients were older, had lower ICU admission rates, and had a lower risk of in-hospital mortality after adjusting for confounders