East Village Housing: New York City

The intent of this thesis is to develop low-rise, high density urban housing which will provide its occupants wth the basic amenities of light, air, and green space, while reconstructing and extending the fabric of New York City into an area of the East Village

East Village Housing New York City

The intent of this thesis is to develop low-rise, high density urban housing which will provide its occupants with the basic amenities of light, air, and green space, while reconstructing and extending the fabric of New York City into an area of the East Village.There exists in the East Village, as in other areas of Manhattan, an uneasy relationship between the low-scale rowhouses and tenements [...] and the monolithic architecture of the superblock housing developments of the 1950s. These rowhouses and tenements [...] provided few amenities for its inhabitants.The proposed development would investigate new housing prototypes for a mixed-income community, that on a alrger scale, would tie this ambiguous area of Manhattan back into the grid of the city.Innovative housing design should work within an existnig urban as wall as social context. Flexible dwelling units which allow various responses to the changing household structure of contemporary society will be considered. Since it is both impractical and unrealistic to assume that the existing developments will all be destroyed to facilitate redevelopment, one goal of this thesis will be to integrate these building into the new housing development

Intersubject Variability of Risk from Perchlorate in Community Water Supplies

This article is a brief review and summary of the estimated incremental risks (increases in hazard quotient or decreases in thyroid uptake of iodine) to pregnant women (and hence their fetuses) associated with perchlorate exposure in community water supplies (CWSs). The analysis draws on the recent health effects review published in 2005 by the National Research Council (NRC). We focus on the potential level of risk borne by the NRC-identified most sensitive subpopulation (pregnant women and hence their fetuses). Other members of the population should be at a level of risk below that calculated here, and so protection of the sensitive subpopulation would protect the general public health. The analysis examines the intersubject distribution of risks to this sensitive subpopulation at various potential drinking water concentrations of perchlorate and also draws on estimates of the national occurrence of perchlorate in U.S. CWSs to estimate the variability of risks under defined regulatory scenarios. Results suggest that maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) of up to 24.5 μg/L should pose little or no incremental risk to the large majority of individuals in the most sensitive subpopulations exposed in the United States at current levels of perchlorate in water. The protectiveness of an MCL of 24.5 μg/L depends, however, on whether the study subjects in the health effects data used here may be assumed to have been exposed to background (non-drinking water) contributions of perchlorate

Neighborhood in Transition: An Analysis of Factors Influencing Property Value Change in the McKinley Neighborhood.

Sponsored by Neighborhood Planning for Community Revitalization, Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota

Valuing Potential Groundwater Protection Benefits

This paper explores the implications of endogenous risk for the economic value of preventing groundwater contamination. We consider the analytical implications of endogenous risk for five key building blocks frequently used to structure studies of groundwater valuation: The probability and the location of contamination, the exposed population, risk perceptions, and Intertemporal issues

Blood on the Cross: The 'Crucifixus Dolorosus' and Violence in Italian Medieval Art

Blood on the Cross investigates contemporary perceptions of the violent imagery of crucifixi dolorosi in Italy. Crucifixi dolorosi are life-sized wood crucifixes that present the painfully stretched and contorted, often startlingly bloody body of Christ. They proliferated across Europe in the late thirteenth century, particularly in Germany’s Rhine region and across Italy. Deriving from no clear artistic predecessor, the Italian crucifixi dolorosi have been labeled foreign, resulting in their persistent marginalization from the history of Italian medieval art. Previous scholarship generally sought out the origins of the image type, most often cited as Cologne. My dissertation takes a different approach by investigating the previously unexplored questions of how these objects functioned and were perceived by contemporary viewers. Arguing that the crucifixi dolorosi were a visual means of making late-medieval theological concepts, especially scholastic concepts of vision and beauty, accessible to ordinary viewers, it studies the Italian crucifixes as objects in their own right. My dissertation investigates the crucifixes at their points of intersection with contemporary devotional, scientific, and theological concern. Through their striking imagery, the crucifixi dolorosi called on beholders to regard them as loci of contact with the Divine and as instruments to aid in the devotional quest to imitate Christ. They compelled viewers to confront the limitations of visual representation and facilitated the ascent from physical to spiritual seeing. Such imagery encouraged the contemplation of Christ’s sacrifice, of his deformity on the cross and his true beauty – salvation. My study indicates the need to reevaluate the standard scholarly narrative of the history of Italian medieval art. Challenging the perception that the portrayal of wounds and suffering was characteristic of the North while the beautiful alone prevailed south of the Alps, I demonstrate that the deformed appearance of these crucifixes engaged with local devotional needs, as well as contemporary debates about the role and status of the image and the Eucharist. Blood on the Cross therefore returns the Italian crucifixi dolorosi to their local contexts and provides a deeper understanding of how late-medieval Italians intended their images to work. Adviser: Herbert Kessler; Second Reader: Felipe Pereda

Spicules and the effect of rigid rods on enclosing membrane tubes

Membrane tubes (spicules) arise in cells, or artificial membranes, in the nonlinear deformation regime due to, e.g. the growth of microtubules, actin filaments or sickle hemoglobin fibers towards a membrane. We calculate the axial force exerted by the cylindrical membrane tube, and its average radius, by taking into account steric interactions between the fluctuating membrane and the enclosed rod. The force required to confine a fluctuating membrane near the surface of the enclosed rod diverges as the separation approaches zero. This results in a smooth crossover of the axial force between a square root and a linear dependence on the membrane tension as the tension increases and the tube radius shrinks. This crossover can occur at the most physiologically relevant membrane tensions. Our work may be important in (i) interpreting experiments in which axial force is related to the tube radius or membrane tension (ii) dynamical theories for biopolymer growth in narrow tubes where these fluctuation effects control the tube radius.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur

Differential segregation in a cell-cell contact interface: the dynamics of the immunological synapse

Receptor-ligand couples in the cell-cell contact interface between a T cell and an antigen-presenting cell form distinct geometric patterns and undergo spatial rearrangement within the contact interface. Spatial segregation of the antigen and adhesion receptors occurs within seconds of contact, central aggregation of the antigen receptor then occurring over 1-5 min. This structure, called the immunological synapse, is becoming a paradigm for localized signaling. However, the mechanisms driving its formation, in particular spatial segregation, are currently not understood. With a reaction diffusion model incorporating thermodynamics, elasticity, and reaction kinetics, we examine the hypothesis that differing bond lengths (extracellular domain size) is the driving force behind molecular segregation. We derive two key conditions necessary for segregation: a thermodynamic criterion on the effective bond elasticity and a requirement for the seeding/nucleation of domains. Domains have a minimum length scale and will only spontaneously coalesce/aggregate if the contact area is small or the membrane relaxation distance large. Otherwise, differential attachment of receptors to the cytoskeleton is required for central aggregation. Our analysis indicates that differential bond lengths have a significant effect on synapse dynamics, i.e., there is a significant contribution to the free energy of the interaction, suggesting that segregation by differential bond length is important in cell-cell contact interfaces and the immunological synapse