DESIGNING RESILIENT ROOF SYSTEMS

Author(s):  
Thomas W. Hutchinson

Recent powerful climate storms in the USA have the government discussing the need for resilient buildings: Buildings that can withstand severe storms, provide life safety and be quickly repaired. A building’s roof is often the first line of defense in the changing climate conditions with its catastrophic natural disasters. The roof, if designed properly, can mitigate the impacts of these emergencies and allow a building to withstand and recover from the disruption caused. Resilience is increasingly being viewed as an important performance objective for governmental, educational, commercial and industrial construction. Interest in resiliency is high and is being actively discussed at all levels of the building industry: Governmental, Codes and Standards and Trade Organizations (ASTM, Resilient). This paper will review key resilient roof system elements that need to be considered by roof system designers: Best design and detail practices for roofing to achieve resiliency. The needed level of design and detailing will be reviewed. Recommendations to achieve resilient roof systems will be provided.

Author(s):  
Mali‘o Kodis ◽  
Marci Bortman ◽  
Sarah Newkirk

AbstractAs climate change accelerates the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, damage to public and private property is also increasing, putting exorbitant strain on governments and communities. Societies across the world are working to adapt to climate change, but climate adaptation is currently inadequate to meet the needs of the people left increasingly vulnerable and the places that risk being irreversibly changed or destroyed. One tactic of climate adaptation is strategic retreat, sometimes referred to as managed retreat. Strategic retreat is the process by which the government or another entity purchases (buys out) developed properties that are at risk of destruction or have been destroyed by natural disasters. The structure is most often demolished, and the land is placed under a permanent easement to prevent future development. What happens next is dependent on the entities involved in the buyouts, and can range from derelict, vacant lots to full restoration of ecosystems and their abilities to mitigate flood damage. Sometimes recreational amenities, such as trails or park infrastructure, are prioritized and funded as well. Conservation organizations can leverage their expertise in conservation planning, land acquisition and restoration, policy advocacy, and partnership development to improve the implementation of strategic retreat so that nature and people can thrive in the long term. In this policy paper, we review ways that conservation organizations have and can continue to engage in buyout processes to ensure positive outcomes for communities and nature. Conservation organizations must also evolve their approaches to climate adaptation to integrate equity and redress historical injustices in land use, and contribute towards improving strategic retreat for a more just and resilient future across disaster-prone communities. This work focuses on the context of disasters and climate adaptation in the USA, though many of the principles presented are applicable around the world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Amril Mutoi Siregar

Indonesia is a country located in the equator, which has beautiful natural. It has a mountainous constellation, beaches and wider oceans than land, so that Indonesia has extraordinary natural beauty assets compared to other countries. Behind the beauty of natural it turns out that it has many potential natural disasters in almost all provinces in Indonesia, in the form of landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, Mount Meletus and others. The problem is that the government must have accurate data to deal with disasters throughout the province, where disaster data can be in categories or groups of regions into very vulnerable, medium, and low disaster areas. It is often found when a disaster occurs, many found that the distribution of long-term assistance because the stock for disaster-prone areas is not well available. In the study, it will be proposed to group disaster-prone areas throughout the province in Indonesia using the k-means algorithm. The expected results can group all regions that are very prone to disasters. Thus, the results can be Province West java, central java very vulnerable categories, provinces Aceh, North Sumatera, West Sumatera, east Java and North Sulawesi in the medium category, provinces Bengkulu, Lampung, Riau Island, Babel, DIY, Bali, West Kalimantan, North Kalimantan, Central Sulawesi, West Sulawesi, Maluku, North Maluku, Papua, west Papua including of rare categories. With the results obtained in this study, the government can map disaster-prone areas as well as prepare emergency response assistance quickly. In order to reduce the death toll and it is important to improve the services of disaster victims. With accurate data can provide prompt and appropriate assistance for victims of natural disasters.


Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 757-767
Author(s):  
J. ELANCHEZHIAN ◽  
Dr. K. KALAICHELVI

Consumers’ interest in organic products is increasing globally. As IFOAM 2016 report, only 1.2 % of the land has been utilized in organic agriculture method. The overall organic market has achieved 89.7 billion $ in 2016 in that, & 48.4 a billion in sales accounted for the USA and German alone. Total registered organic producer in the worldwide is 2.7 million in that India is the leading country which has 835,200 organic producers. But many of them are a small farmer, and they had shared 1.49 million hectares only. The Government of India (GOI) and the state governments have taken several steps to improve the regulatory mechanism and frame several schemes to incentivize organic farming. 2017 December, Food Standards and Safety Authority of India (FSSAI) have recognized both the certification systems (NPOP and PGS-India) valid for organic food products. From these steps, GOI has tried to create confidence in the organic products, so that, domestic consumers and export countries can trust Indian organic products. But still, the organic sector in India suffered from some unique characteristic that is the absence of proper branding, package, consumer awareness, purchasing power, and supply chain issues (Agarwal, 2018).


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Anica Högner ◽  
Peter Thuss-Patience

Immune checkpoint inhibitors enrich the therapeutic landscape in oesophago-gastric carcinoma. With regard to oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC), the selective PD-1 (programmed cell death receptor 1)-inhibitor nivolumab improves disease-free survival in the adjuvant therapy setting (CHECKMATE-577). In first-line treatment, ESCC patients (pts) benefit in overall survival (OS) from the PD-1-inhibitor pembrolizumab in combination with chemotherapy (KEYNOTE-590). In the second-line setting, nivolumab (ATTRACTION-03) and pembrolizumab (KEYNOTE-181) demonstrate a benefit in OS compared with chemotherapy. These data resulted in the approval of nivolumab for the second-line treatment of advanced ESCC pts regardless of PD-L1 (programmed cell death ligand 1) status in Europe, Asia, and the USA, and pembrolizumab for pts with PD-L1 CPS (combined positivity score) ≥ 10 in Asia and the USA. Further approvals can be expected. In gastro-oesophageal junction and gastric cancer, the addition of nivolumab to chemotherapy in first-line treatment improves OS in pts with advanced disease with PD-L1 CPS ≥ 5 (CHECKMATE-649). Additionally, pembrolizumab was non-inferior to chemotherapy for OS in PD-L1 CPS ≥ 1 pts (KEYNOTE-062). In third-line treatment, nivolumab shows benefits in OS regardless of PD-L1 expression (ATTRACTION-02) with approval in Asia, and pembrolizumab prolonged the duration of response in PD-L1 positive pts (KEYNOTE-059) with approval in the USA. We discuss the recent results of the completed phase II and III clinical trials.


2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 607-624
Author(s):  
Christine Kim

This article evaluates the US ‘Monuments Men’ operations in Korea, focusing on wartime and postwar efforts undertaken by the government of the USA to preserve and restore artwork seized by Japan. The Asian initiative, conceived a year after the European model was established, likewise drew upon cultural, intellectual, and academic resources. Yet fundamental differences in personnel, perceptions of Korean cultural backwardness, prevailing imperialist attitudes, and Cold War sensibilities rendered a very different kind of project. Ultimately the ‘Monuments Men’ succeeded primarily in preserving the cultural patrimony of Japan, but it failed to recover any plundered objects from Korea, or the rest of Asia for that matter. Focusing on the US deliberations regarding repatriation of Korean looted art, this article lays bare both the US preoccupation with maintaining the national interests of its newest ally, and exposes an understanding of East Asian cultural hierarchy that privileged Japan’s artistic achievement and modern society above all.


2015 ◽  
Vol 725-726 ◽  
pp. 996-1001
Author(s):  
Galina Tokunova ◽  
Alexander Petrov

The increased role of knowledge in the economics, the growth of the role of education and innovations caused the necessity to revise the role of the basic subjects in the market (the government, business structures, universities) and mechanisms of their interaction. The primary importance is now being shifted towards such subjects of innovations as resource centers, innovative businesses, technological platforms, the clusters capable of exerting efficient influence upon the innovations process, which, in its turn, improves the competitive ability of particular spheres of business and entire national economics. This process also influenced the construction industry. The purpose of this research is to analyze the manifestation of the phenomenon of the knowledge-based economics in the construction sphere. The tasks of this research: firstly, to highlight the evolution of the scientific discipline “knowledge-based economics”; secondly, to analyze the efficiency of the phenomenon on the example of the USA, the EC and Russia; thirdly, to analyze the innovative process in the construction sphere; fourthly, to highlight the role of various institutional structures (resource centers, innovative businesses, technological platforms, clusters) for innovative activity in the construction sphere.


Author(s):  
Md. Razib Alam ◽  
Bonwoo Koo ◽  
Brian Paul Cozzarin

Abstract Our objective is to study Canada’s patenting activity over time in aggregate terms by destination country, by assignee and destination country, and by diversification by country of destination. We collect bibliographic patent data from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. We identify 19,957 matched Canada–US patents, 34,032 Canada-only patents, and 43,656 US-only patents from 1980 to 2014. Telecommunications dominates in terms of International Patent Classification technologies for US-only and Canada–US patents. At the firm level, the greatest number of matched Canada–US patents were granted in the field of telecommunications, at the university level in pharmaceuticals, at the government level in control and instrumentation technology, and at the individual level in civil engineering. We use entropy to quantify technological diversification and find that diversification indices decline over time for Canada and the USA; however, all US indices decline at a faster rate.


Author(s):  
V. Sautkina

The following article is devoted to the study of current state of national education and healthcare systems. The cost of services in these areas constantly increases, there for even developed countries are forced to make significant efforts in order to maintain earlier achieved results. Due to this reason countries entered into the period of constant reforms with the purpose of maintaining that high level of health and educational services for all segments of population with a constant reduction of its volume of financing. The legal aspects of these changes are requiring manifestation of the will of politicians in order to overcome the opposition of parties which are defending their interests. As an example, the main opponents of the healthcare reforms proposed by Barak Obama in the USA are Republicans who are concerned about a significant increase of a state control over the entire national insurance system. The author comes to the conclusion that only joint actions of the government and every segment of population might actually improve the quality of medical and educational services.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 86-107
Author(s):  
Alexander Merkulenko

Due to the new coronavirus pandemic, high alert regimes were introduced across the Russian Federation in spring 2020. These emergency regimes were established exclusively by the state bodies of the Russian Federation’s constituent units – federal authorities did not introduce their own emergency regimes. This decentralized strategy of fighting the pandemic was also introduced by the USA and Brazil. Their states, without the sanction of the federal government, and in the case of Brazil, ignoring its bans, set emergency restrictions similar to those in Russia. The legal regulation of emergency regimes existed before 2020, when constituent units of the federation (states) actively used their emergency powers. However, the regimes introduced during the fight against the pandemic were slightly different to previous ones. The restrictions on rights and freedoms within these regimes were so severe that not only their proportionality was questioned, but there were also doubts as to whether the regional level of the government had the authority to establish such strict restrictions. In addition, the pandemic exposed old problems and revealed new shortcomings in the legal regulation of emergency regimes: lack of control over the realization of the emergency regime by legislative (representative) authorities, and gaps in legislative regulation – notably in the establishment of possible restrictions and of a mechanism for scrutinizing their proportionality. All this raised questions about the proportionality of the established restrictions. The Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation resolved a very insignificant amount of the problems. While the United States and Brazil faced similar issues, the practice of scrutinizing implemented restrictions in these countries was more common. This article takes domestic and foreign experiences into account, while examining certain aspects of the establishment and the operation of regional emergency regimes.


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