She Said, He Said: Denise Scott Brown and Kenneth Frampton on Popular Taste

During the post-war period, the nature of ‘the people’ and popular culture was a matter of intense interest to the disciplines of architecture and urban design. These issues stand behind a debate between Denise Scott Brown and Kenneth Frampton in the December 1971 issue of Casabella. The disagreement between Frampton and Scott Brown concerns three issues: the nature of ‘the people’, the character of popular culture, and the role of architects in relation to popular culture. Underlying this last issue is the question of popular taste: whether a debased devolution from that of the educated and cultured classes, or an embodiment of its own intrinsic principles.   Scott Brown defines the people in terms of a set of ‘subcultures’, diverse groups of persons with relatively uniform sets of behaviours, values, attitudes, and preferences, coexisting together in society. She terms the emerging post-war urban environments ‘the popular landscape’ and claims that the symbolic additions made to homes constitute a source of information about popular values, attitudes, and preferences. Frampton refers to the people in terms such as ‘the constrained masses’, popular culture as ‘engineered fantasies of mass taste’, and the urban landscape as ‘the alienated environment’ of ‘deculturated forms’, a ‘repressed consensus’ of ‘mid-cult kitsch’. The two also disagree about the role of the architect; Frampton is concerned about the loss of a connection of form to content and the reinforcement of alienation and conformity involved in the contemporary approaches to urban design; Scott Brown recommends helping ‘the people’ to ‘live in houses and cities the way they want to live’

Advances in Mass Spectrometers for Flyby Space Missions for the Analysis of Biosignatures and Other Complex Molecules

Spacecraft flybys provide access to the chemical composition of the gaseous envelope of the planetary object. Typical relative encounter velocities range from km/s to tens of km/s in flybys. For speeds exceeding about 5 km/s, modern mass spectrometers analyzing the rapidly encountering gas suffer from intrinsic hypervelocity impact-induced fragmentation processes causing ambiguous results when analyzing complex molecules. In this case, instruments use an antechamber, inside which the incoming species collide many times with the chamber wall. These collisions cause the desired deceleration and thermalization of the gas molecules. However, these collisions also dissociate molecular bonds, thus fragmenting the molecules, and possibly forming new ones precluding scientists from inferring the actual chemical composition of the sampled gas. We developed a novel time-of-flight mass spectrometer that handles relative encounter velocities of up to 20 km/s omitting an antechamber and its related fragmentation. It analyzes the complete mass range of m/z 1 to 1000 at an instance. This innovation leads to unambiguous analysis of complex (organic) molecules. Applied to Enceladus, Europa or Io, it will provide reliable chemical composition datasets for exploration of the Solar System to determine its status, origin and evolution

CubeSatTOF: Planetary Atmospheres Analyzed with a 1U High-Performance Time-Of-Flight Mass Spectrometer

This paper presents design and performance of a miniature time-of-flight mass spectrometer of 1U size for a CubeSat platform for quantitative chemical composition analysis of thin atmospheres. The atmospheres of solar system bodies harbor key information to answer questions about its origin and evolution, night-side transport, satellite drag including seasonal variation of it, chemical sputtering of satellites, and even the feasibility of earthquake forecast system has been suggested. Highly sensitive chemical analyses with our mass spectrometer will allow to obtain insight into atmospheric processes. We designed a compact multipurpose instrument. Its applicationis discussed for two mission concepts, namely orbiting Earth in a terrestrial swarm configuration or descending through the atmosphere of a planetary object during a flyby. Our measurements demonstrate that the instrument has mass range of about m/z 1 – 300 and a mass resolution so that the heavy noble gases such as krypton and xenon can be quantified in situ. Thanks to its ion optical performance, the CubeSatTOF instrument serves as a baseline technology for future analysis of both the terrestrial and extraterrestrial exospheres

Wood dynamics in headwater streams of the Colorado Rocky Mountains

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Ocular penetration of caspofungin in a rabbit uveitis model

Background: Little is known about the ocular penetration of echinocandin antifungals. We studied the ocular distribution of systemically administered caspofungin in a rabbit uveitis model. Methods: Caspofungin (1mg/kg per day) was given intravenously to rabbits as a single dose or as repeated daily doses on 7days starting 24h after induction of unilateral uveitis by intravitreal endotoxin injection. Caspofungin concentrations were determined by high-performance liquid chromatography in the cornea, aqueous humor, vitreous humor, and serum 4, 8, 16, and 24h after administration of a single dose and 24h after the last of seven doses. Results: The mean caspofungin concentration in the aqueous of the inflamed eye 4 and 8h after single-dose administration was 1.30 ± 0.39μg/ml and 1.12 ± 0.34μg/ml, respectively. Drug concentrations decreased to 0.24 ± 0.09μg/ml at 16h and 0.26 ± 0.14μg/ml at 24h. In the vitreous of inflamed eyes drug levels were undetectable at all time points. No drug was found in the aqueous of inflamed eyes 24h after the last of seven repeated doses, and the vitreous only contained trace amounts. In the corneas of inflamed eyes concentrations reached 1.64 ± 0.48μg/g at 4h, peaked at 2.16 ± 1.14μg/g at 8h, and declined to 1.87 ± 0.52μg/g and 1.49 ± 0.48μg/g at 16and 24h, respectively. After repeated dosing, corneal concentrations of caspofungin were 0.8 and 1.0μg/g and below the limit of detection in two of four animals. In non-inflamed eyes no drug was detectable in the aqueous and vitreous humor, and the corneas at any time point. Conclusions: In our model, caspofungin reached therapeutically relevant levels in the aqueous and cornea but not in the vitreous humor of inflamed eyes. Intraocular drug deposition was critically dependent on a disrupted blood-eye barrier. These findings suggest a limited role for caspofungin in the treatment of fungal endophthalmiti

Management of large wood in streams of Colorado's Front Range: a risk analysis based on physical, biological, and social factors

March 2017.Includes bibliographical references.Instream and floodplain wood can provide many benefits to river ecosystems, but can also create risks to inhabitants, infrastructure, property, and recreational users in the river corridor. In this report we outline a decision process for managing large wood, and particularly for assessing the relative benefits and risks associated with individual wood pieces and with accumulations of wood. This process can be applied at varying levels of effort, from a relatively cursory visual assessment to more detailed numerical modeling. Decisions of whether to retain, remove, or modify wood in a channel or on a floodplain are highly dependent on the specific context: the same piece of wood might require removal in a highly urbanized setting, for example, but provide sufficient benefits to justify retention in a natural area. Our intent is that the decision process outlined here can be used by individuals with diverse technical backgrounds and in a range of urban to natural river reaches

Modeling Global Warming Scenarios in Greenback Cutthroat Trout (\u3cem\u3eOncorhynchus Clarki Stomias\u3c/em\u3e) Streams: Implications for Species Recovery

Changes in global climate may exacerbate other anthropogenic stressors, accelerating the decline in distribution and abundance of rare species throughout the world. We examined the potential effects of a warming climate on the greenback cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki stomias), a resident salmonid that inhabits headwater streams of the central Rocky Mountains. Greenbacks are outcompeted at lower elevations by nonnative species of trout and currently are restricted to upper-elevation habitats where barriers to upstream migration by nonnatives are or have been established. We used likelihood-based techniques and information theoretics to select models predicting stream temperature changes for 10 streams where greenback cutthroat trout have been translocated. These models showed high variability among responses by different streams, indicating the usefulness of a stream-specific approach. We used these models to project changes in stream temperatures based on 2°C and 4°C warming of average air temperatures. In these warming scenarios, spawning is predicted to begin from 2 to 3.3 weeks earlier than would be expected under baseline conditions. Of the 10 streams used in this assessment, 5 currently have less than a 50% chance of translocation success. Warming increased the probability of translocation success in these 5 streams by 11.2% and 21.8% in the 2 scenarios, respectively. Assuming barriers to upstream migration by nonnative competitors maintain their integrity, we conclude that an overall habitat improvement results because greenbacks have been restricted through competition with nonnatives to suboptimal habitats, which are generally too cold to be highly productive

Ecological integrity and western water management: a Colorado perspective

Sept. 1995.Includes bibliographical references

The LMS-GT instrument – a new perspective for quantification with the LIMS-TOF measurement technique

In this contribution we present the design and first measurement results obtained with a new highperformance laser ablation and ionisation (LIMS) mass spectrometer for solid sample analysis named “LMS-GT”, combining high mass- and high spatial resolving powers. The instrument consists of a fs-laser ablation ion source coupled to a time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometer that provides measurements with a mass resolution (m/Dm) of 10 000 at full width half max and more over a wide mass range. This resolution enables the separation of the most important isobaric interferences between clusters, molecules and multiple charged ions. Thereby it enables significant improvements of the quantitative analysis of complex samples with the LIMS-TOF technique. The instrument performance is demonstrated by analysis of measurements conducted on various NIST standard reference materials (SRMs). Using these samples we determined detection limits in the ppm range and below, and relative sensitivity coefficients (RSCs), in the range between 0.1 and 10

Groundwater declines are linked to changes in Great Plains stream fish assemblages

Groundwater pumping for agriculture is a major driver causing declines of global freshwater ecosystems, yet the ecological consequences for stream fish assemblages are rarely quantified. We combined retrospective (1950–2010) and prospective (2011–2060) modeling approaches within a multiscale framework to predict change in Great Plains stream fish assemblages associated with groundwater pumping from the United States High Plains Aquifer. We modeled the relationship between the length of stream receiving water from the High Plains Aquifer and the occurrence of fishes characteristic of small and large streams in the western Great Plains at a regional scale and for six subwatersheds nested within the region. Water development at the regional scale was associated with construction of 154 barriers that fragment stream habitats, increased depth to groundwater and loss of 558 km of stream, and transformation of fish assemblage structure from dominance by large-stream to small-stream fishes. Scaling down to subwatersheds revealed consistent transformations in fish assemblage structure among western subwatersheds with increasing depths to groundwater. Although transformations occurred in the absence of barriers, barriers along mainstem rivers isolate depauperate western fish assemblages from relatively intact eastern fish assemblages. Projections to 2060 indicate loss of an additional 286 km of stream across the region, as well as continued replacement of largestream fishes by small-stream fishes where groundwater pumping has increased depth to groundwater. Our work illustrates the shrinking of streams and homogenization of Great Plains stream fish assemblages related to groundwater pumping, and we predict similar transformations worldwide where local and regional aquifer depletions occur