AN EVALUATION OF VISUAL PRIVACY LEVEL IN RESIDENTIAL UNIT'S LAYOUTS IN KHARTOUM, SUDAN

Visual privacy is one of the vital aspects of Islamic house designs. This paper aimed to analyze the level of visual privacy in the layout of different residential apartment unit samples in Khartoum, Sudan based on Islamic values and Sudanese culture and how modern apartment unit designs respond to these needs. Models included four units from courtyard-villas and two units from apartment buildings. The architectural layout plans, spatial relation, functions, and space zoning were applied to assess the level of visual privacy of each unit. Findings showed that the courtyard-villas had a higher degree of privacy and cultural values, reflecting more of the Sudanese lifestyle than the apartment units, even though the design of the apartment units pays more attention to the nuclear family privacy. This study would assist designers in enhancing the visual privacy in apartment unit layouts by highlighting factors that diminish or enhance the visual privacy level to create appropriate designs for Sudanese Muslims and Muslims in general.

¿Favorece a las Mujeres Víctimas la Exención del Deber de Declarar? Estado de la Cuestión en España

The purpose of this work is to consider whether the exemption from the duty to declare that is contemplated in the Spanish legal system for some cases favors or, on the contrary, harms female victims. To do this, we will start from the hypothesis of committing crimes within family privacy, as it is particularly difficult to prove. We will combine, in our work, a logical-deductive methodology with an empirical-inductive one. The methodological procedures used will consist of a jurisprudential analysis of the most recent and relevant judicial pronouncements, a doctrinal examination of the matter and an analysis, necessary, of the set of current criminal procedural regulations. We will have to expose as results of our investigation how the evidentiary activity is notably complicated when the only witness to the facts invokes his right not to testify due to the aforementioned links. In this way, it is not only really complex to get the process to continue its course, but to allow the accused, in the legitimate exercise of his right to due process, to contradict said testimony.

The Space of Intimacy as The Most Important Islamic Cultural Value in Traditional Iranian Architecture

This study aims to carry out a critical reading of individual spaces of traditional Iranian houses. Through recourse to expert opinion, seven traditional houses in Iran have been chosen. A deductive content analysis is used to assess space syntaxes by way of three steps: preparation, organization, and the final report. In the preparation step, the individual and family territory in Iranian culture is defined. In the organization phase, territories are classified by reviewing plans, maps, and making visual observations. Finally, conclusions are reached on the situation of privacy and individuality in the houses. It is suggested that family privacy is the main function of traditional Iranian houses. Despite the fact that spaces could be used as personal and individual territories, in practice this is not so, and individualism and individual values have been forgotten. Individuality is not considered as valuable in the sense of one who needs his/her own territory; rather, this is determined in relation with other people. Keywords: Mahram Territories, Personal Spaces, Space Syntax, Territoriality, Traditional Iranian House

Developing an Innovative System of Open and Flexible, Patient-Family-Centered, Virtual Visiting in ICU During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Collaboration of Staff, Patients, Families, and Technology Companies

Few challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic strike at the very core of our humanity as the inability of family to sit at the bedside of their loved ones when battling for their lives in the ICU. Virtual visiting is one tool to help deal with this challenge. When introducing virtual visiting into our ICU, we identified 5 criteria for a sustainable system that aligned with patient-family-centered care: virtual visiting needed to (1) simulate open and flexible visiting; (2) be able to accommodate differences in family size, dynamics, and cultural practices; (3) utilize a video conferencing platform that is private and secure; (4) be easy to use and not require special teams to facilitate meetings; and (5) not increase the workload of ICU staff. There is a growing body of literature demonstrating a global movement toward virtual visiting in ICU, however there are no publications that describe a system which meet all 5 of our criteria. Importantly, there are no papers describing systems of virtual visiting which mimic open and flexible family presence at the bedside. We were unable to find any off-the-shelf video conferencing platforms that met all our criteria. To come up with a solution, a multidisciplinary team of ICU staff partnered with healthcare technology adoption consultants and two technology companies to develop an innovative system called HowRU. HowRU uses the video conferencing platform Webex with the integration of some newly designed software that automates many of the laborious and complex processes. HowRU is a cloud based, supported, and simplified system that closely simulates open and flexible visiting while ensuring patient and family privacy, dignity, and security. We have demonstrated the transferability of HowRU by implanting it into a second ICU. HowRU is now commercially available internationally. We hope HowRU will improve patient-family-centered care in ICU.

Forgotten Personal Territories in the Traditional Iranian House: A Critical Reading

This study aims to investigate the critical reading individual areas on traditional Iranian house. The method of this research is a deductive content analysis. This research has done in three steps; preparation, organization and final report or conclusion. First, in the preparation stage, the individual and family territory in Iranian culture is defined. In organization phase, by reviewing plans, maps and visual observations of Iranian houses, individual and family territories is classified. And in the last steps, a conclusion from the situation of privacy and individuality in Iranian house is explained. It seems that family privacy has been the main function of traditional Iranian houses. Despite the spaces which could be as a personal and individuality territories, they didn’t get this functions and individualism and individual values have been forgotten. Accordingly, individuality is not considered as a valuable being who needs his/her own territory, but his/her role is determined in relation to other people and values like veil, purity, cooperation and humility are given importance.

The Implementation of The Open-Plan Concept In The Muslim Residential

Muslims have to live based on Islamic values that include domestic activity in the dwelling. However, currently, people’s paradigm shifts towards modernism and also impacts the house’s preference. Architecturally, this condition is a challenge for the architect as there is a contradiction between Islamic and modern housing. One of the different principles is the closure in the Islamic dwelling and the exposure in the open-plan practice of modern residents. This research suggests how to practice the open-plan concept in Muslim residential without ignoring Islamic house principles. The research method is descriptive qualitative which the primary data is obtained through the literature review. The open-plan concept is analyzed through the principles of Islamic dwelling. The finding shows that a semi-public area of Islamic houses such as a living room or a dining room can implement the open-plan concept. The house resident uses these rooms without providing physical and visual access to non-mahram relatives, thus maintaining family privacy. The practice implications are increasing natural lighting and natural air, flexible space occupancy, and strengthening family bonding.Abstrak: Muslim harus menjalani kehidupan berdasarkan ajaran Islam, termasuk kegiatan domestik di hunian. Namun, saat ini paradigma masyarakat berubah ke arah modern dan berdampak pada preferensi hunian. Secara arsitektur, kondisi ini merupakan tantangan bagi arsitek karena terdapat kontradiksi antara hunian Islami dan modern. Salah satu perbedaan prinsipnya adalah aspek privasi pada rumah Islami dan keterbukaan dalam bentuk open-plan di hunian modern. Penelitian ini menyarankan bagaimana menerapkan konsep open-plan pada hunian Muslim tanpa mengabaikan prinsip-prinsip rumah Islami. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah deskriptif kualitatif dimana data primer diperoleh melalui studi literatur. Konsep open-plan dianalisa dari perspektif prinsip hunian Islami. Hasil temuan mengindikasikan konsep open-plan hanya dapat diterapkan pada area semi-publik di hunian Islami seperti ruang keluarga dan ruang makan. Hal ini dikarenakan ruang-ruang ini hanya digunakan oleh penghuni rumah tanpa menyediakan akses fisik dan visual pada tamu/kerabat non-mahram sehingga tetap menjaga privasi keluarga. Dampak penerapan konsep ini pada zona semi-publik adalah meningkatnya cahaya alami dan sirkulasi udara pada area tersebut, fleksibilitas penggunaan ruang, dan menguatkan ikatan antar anggota keluarga.

Narrating homes in process: Everyday politics of migrant childhoods

This article considers participation by migrant children in home-making as a practice of everyday politics, which is both agentic and interdependent. It highlights the contested and fluid nature of the concept of ‘home’, and the multiple resources involved in its constitution. It focuses on one child’s meaning-making work in the context of idealised notions of home foregrounding the nuclear family, privacy and fixity. It argues that his narratives, intersected by those of his mother, tactically re-territorialise an institutional site by constructing belongings through relationships, encounters and movements.

Housing Workers’ Evaluations of Residential Environmental Quality in South Korean Welfare Housing for Low-Income, Single-Parent Families

This study evaluates the spatial conditions of the residential environment in welfare housing built for low-income, single-parent (LISP) families in South Korea to reveal the significant residential environmental (RE) design criteria concerning housing quality and family well-being. The primary data were analyzed by surveying 30 housing directors from 29 welfare residences, in conjunction with facility visits and interviews. The survey data were supplemented by interviewing 11 stakeholders, including government institute officials, project architects, and former residents who exited the program. A statistical analysis examined the RE quality in relation to building and resident features. Most respondents reported insufficient physical quality, specifically due to inappropriate units in size and number; poor indoor noise control; and substandard unit rooms, children’s rooms, and outdoor spaces. Furthermore, adequate rooms, family privacy, and a pleasant indoor environment (i.e., noise barrier, thermal comfort) were the most critical spatial design criteria. Particularly, the aforementioned housing environmental attributes were found to be different depending on a building’s construction year and type, householder type and age, and children’s age. Practical and methodological implications and future research directions are discussed to elevate the housing quality and sustainable well-being in welfare housing.

Adversary for Social Good: Protecting Familial Privacy through Joint Adversarial Attacks

Social media has been widely used among billions of people with dramatical participation of new users every day. Among them, social networks maintain the basic social characters and host huge amount of personal data. While protecting user sensitive data is obvious and demanding, information leakage due to adversarial attacks is somehow unavoidable, yet hard to detect. For example, implicit social relation such as family information may be simply exposed by network structure and hosted face images through off-the-shelf graph neural networks (GNN), which will be empirically proved in this paper. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel adversarial attack algorithm for social good. First, we start from conventional visual family understanding problem, and demonstrate that familial information can easily be exposed to attackers by connecting sneak shots to social networks. Second, to protect family privacy on social networks, we propose a novel adversarial attack algorithm that produces both adversarial features and graph under a given budget. Specifically, both features on the node and edges between nodes will be perturbed gradually such that the probe images and its family information can not be identified correctly through conventional GNN. Extensive experiments on a popular visual social dataset have demonstrated that our defense strategy can significantly mitigate the impacts of family information leakage.