IDEAhaus: A Comfortable Home for the UK’s Future Climate

IDEAhaus:
A Comfortable Home for the UK’s Future Climate

This paper describes the result of a project to develop climate adaptation design strategies funded by the UK’s Technology Strategy Board. The aim of the project was to look at the threats and opportunities presented by industrialised and lightweight housebuilding techniques in the light of predicted increases in flooding and overheating. This case study presents detailed concept designs for a future systemised housing product which can be Industrialised, Delightful, Efficient and Adaptable; an IDEAhaus.
Keywords: climate change adaptation, thermal comfort, passive cooling, flood residence, industrialised housing, mass customisation

Voyage(s) to Sarajevo: Jean-Luc Godard and the Image of War

This essay discusses Jean-Luc Godard’s artistic response to the Bosnian War (1992-95), and its representations in the Western mass media. For Godard, the reluctance of Europe’s advanced liberal democracies to intervene meaningfully in Bosnia – their insistence that 'humanitarianism' rather than protective intervention was the order of the day – was tantamount to supporting Serbian fascism, and – a fortiori – regressing to a policy of appeasement reminiscent of the days of the Munich Agreement. Although Godard's stance set him against some of his former compatriots on the left, speculating on his ideological motivations is beside the point. Rather, it is is in his filmmaking, in his vision of cinema, and how it relates to other histories of the image, that Godard’s sensibility can be most keenly felt and understood. As the essay points out, even his recent contribution to Jean-Michel Frodon's compilation film, Bridges of Sarajevo/Les ponts de Sarajevo (2014, 114 mn.), persists in posing questions about how the past continues to shape the present, and how Sarajevo and its contemporary history still delineates the identity of Europe. 

High-order harmonic generation from controlled plasma mirrors

Ultrashort, high contrast laser pulses when focused to high intensity and reflected from a steep solid density 'plasma mirror (PM)' contain coherent XUV radiation in the form of high-order harmonics. The emission can either be due to the relativistically driven oscillating PM (ROM) [1] or due to Coherent wake emission (CWE) [2]. Selective control over the mechanisms and the characteristics of these harmonics and understanding the physics is crucial for the development of intense attosecond light sources. © 2013 IEEE.

General Equal Treatment Act - in a European Perspective

This book provides a comprehensive treatise of the German General Equal Treatment Act, as adopted in 2006. It is edited by Dagmar Schiek and combines contributions by four other authors.

Characterizing Aquifer Heterogeneity Using Bacterial and Bacteriophage Tracers

Gravel aquifers act as important potable water sources in central western Europe yet they are subject to numerous contamination pressures. Compositional and textural heterogeneity makes protection zone delineation around groundwater supplies in these units challenging; artificial tracer testing aids characterization. This paper reappraises previous tracer test results in light of new geological and microbiological data. Comparative passive gradient testing, using a fluorescent solute (Uranine), virus (H40/1 bacteriophage), and comparably sized bacterial tracers Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas putida, was used to investigate a calcareous gravel aquifer’s ability to remove microbiological contaminants at a test site near Munich, Germany. Test results revealed E. coli relative recoveries could exceed those of H40/1 at monitoring wells 10 m and 20 m from an injection well by almost four times; P. putida recoveries varied by a factor of up to three between wells. Application of filtration theory suggested greater attenuation of H40/1 relative to similarly charged E. coli occurred due to differences in microorganism size, while estimated collision efficiencies appeared comparable. By contrast, more positively charged P. putida experienced greater attenuation at one monitoring point, while lower attenuation rates at the second location indicated the influence of geochemical heterogeneity. Test findings proved consistent with observations from nearby fresh outcrops that suggested thin open framework gravel beds dominated mass transport in the aquifer, while discrete intervals containing stained clasts reflect localized geochemical heterogeneity. Study results highlight the utility of reconciling outcrop observations with artificial tracer test responses, using microbiological tracers with well-defined properties, to characterize aquifer heterogeneity.

Acceleration-as-a-Service: Exploiting Virtualised GPUs for a Financial Application

How can GPU acceleration be obtained as a service in a cluster? This question has become increasingly significant due to the inefficiency of installing GPUs on all nodes of a cluster. The research reported in this paper is motivated to address the above question by employing rCUDA (remote CUDA), a framework that facilitates Acceleration-as-a-Service (AaaS), such that the nodes of a cluster can request the acceleration of a set of remote GPUs on demand. The rCUDA framework exploits virtualisation and ensures that multiple nodes can share the same GPU. In this paper we test the feasibility of the rCUDA framework on a real-world application employed in the financial risk industry that can benefit from AaaS in the production setting. The results confirm the feasibility of rCUDA and highlight that rCUDA achieves similar performance compared to CUDA, provides consistent results, and more importantly, allows for a single application to benefit from all the GPUs available in the cluster without loosing efficiency.

Emerging Technologies

This book, written when Walker was Visiting Professor at the Technical University Munich in 2011, describes his research on the effects of digital technology on architectural design and construction, and on the development of ‘digital craft’. The primary example given is The Swarm, a digitally designed and manufactured pavilion, produced with students while Walker was at TU Munich. It now stands outside the Bayerischen Architektenkammer (Bavarian Chamber of Architects) in Munich. Through such research-by-design, Walker asks larger questions: what can designers craft without a master craftsman’s skills, and how can craft skills be recovered through digital fabrication? Another example in the book is the Swoosh Pavilion, one of two public-space-scale architectural pavilion prototypes Walker developed between 2008 and 2009 at the Architectural Association (AA), using applied digital modelling and CNC techniques to investigate methods of teaching and testing digital processes through making. Swoosh (2008) and a second AA pavilion, Driftwood (2009), were discussed by Walker and Martin Self, his co-investigator, in ‘Fractal, bad hair, Swoosh and Driftwood pavilions of Intermediate Unit 2, 2006–2009’, published in the AD reader, Manufacturing the Bespoke (2012), which includes essays by well-known critics and designers such as Mathias Kohler and Michael Stacey. Both AA pavilions were sponsored by FinnForest Merk, Arup, HOK and Building Design Magazine, and were seen by large international audiences in Bedford Square, London during the 2008–9 ‘AA Projects Review’ shows. The book Making Pavilions (Walker and Self, AA Agenda No. 9, Architectural Association Press, 2011) also discusses their work over seven years of teaching at the Architectural Association. At the same time, Walker collaborated on a series of Serpentine pavilions, commissioned annually by the Serpentine Gallery, London, co-designing these experimental structures with internationally renowned architects Daniel Libeskind, Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito and Alvaro Siza.

Effective-fourth-order resonator based MASH bandpass sigma-delta modulators

Two novel effective-fourth-order (eighth-order) resonator based MASH (MultistAge noise SHaping) bandpass Σ-Δ modulators are introduced at the behavioural level and subsequently examined by simulations utilising the ALTA SPW environment. The considered bandpass configurations have in their loop filter a cascade of standard second-order resonator structures in order to achieve appropriate noise shaping. The quantisation noise in each stage is suppressed by feeding the error of each section into the input of the following stage. It is demonstrated in this paper that the quadruple effective-first-order cascade configuration has significantly better performance as well as conforming more closely with theory in comparison with the effective-second-order effective-second-order cascade. The superior performance of the former can be attributed to the cumulative effect of the multi-bit outputs as well as the presence of more notch filters.

Uma dramaturgia da viagem: registos de uma experiência [TheaterSpielhaus]: relatório de estágio

Mestrado Teatro, especialização em artes performativas, interpretação

A protocol guided by transpulmonary thermodilution and lactate levels for resuscitation of patients with severe burns.

Over-resuscitation is deleterious in many critically ill conditions, including major burns. For more than 15 years, several strategies to reduce fluid administration in burns during the initial resuscitation phase have been proposed, but no single or simple parameter has shown superiority. Fluid administration guided by invasive hemodynamic parameters usually resulted in over-resuscitation. As reported in the previous issue of Critical Care, Sánchez-Sánchez and colleagues analyzed the performance of a 'permissive hypovolemia' protocol guided by invasive hemodynamic parameters (PiCCO, Pulsion Medical Systems, Munich, Germany) and vital signs in a prospective cohort over a 3-year period. The authors' results confirm that resuscitation can be achieved with below-normal levels of preload but at the price of a fluid administration greater than predicted by the Parkland formula (2 to 4 mL/kg per% burn). The classic approach based on an adapted Parkland equation may still be the simplest until further studies identify the optimal bundle of resuscitation goals.