City to Flood: A new urban planning model for urban adaptation to climate change induced flooding in Dunedin

<p>Currently 40% of the world’s human population lives within 100km of a coast. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicting that sea levels will rise between 0.52 and 0.98m by 2100, and with increasing climate change induced extreme weather events affecting urban settings, the ways in which people reside in coastal areas needs to be addressed. As water levels rise, both permanently through sea level rise, and temporarily through storm surge events, areas of high population in low lying areas will have to reconsider their typical housing and infrastructure design methods, and/or their lifestyles to address this more frequent or potentially permanent influx of water into towns and cities. Current methods of flood adaptive architecture often consider solutions at just the individual house or building scale, despite the clear need to be able to analyse and design with wider changing urban landscape conditions driving decision making. In response, this research investigates possible design strategies for adapting housing to climate change induced flooding, while enhancing the liveability of changing local community environments. This is investigated through a case study design-led research process, and is complimented by a survey of residents. The case study site is a flood prone suburb in the city of Dunedin on the east coast of the South Island in Aotearoa New Zealand. Key findings of the research point to the importance of employing not just a purely technical approach to flooding adaptive housing, but also to using a community-led approach to re-design to understand how people will react to, use, and adapt to repurposed built environments that respond to climate change. This reinforces the need to conceive flood adaptive housing at least at a street and neighbourhood scale, and preferably at a whole suburb landscape scale, rather that just as a single housing typology solution. The research concludes that combining flood adaptive housing with ecosystem-based adaptation solutions to climate change induced flooding could lead to a different, more ecology-integrated way of living for inhabitants of low lying coastal areas. This in turn is likely to have positive social and psychological benefits for inhabitants while increasing community resilience.</p>

City to Flood: A new urban planning model for urban adaptation to climate change induced flooding in Dunedin

<p>Currently 40% of the world’s human population lives within 100km of a coast. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicting that sea levels will rise between 0.52 and 0.98m by 2100, and with increasing climate change induced extreme weather events affecting urban settings, the ways in which people reside in coastal areas needs to be addressed. As water levels rise, both permanently through sea level rise, and temporarily through storm surge events, areas of high population in low lying areas will have to reconsider their typical housing and infrastructure design methods, and/or their lifestyles to address this more frequent or potentially permanent influx of water into towns and cities. Current methods of flood adaptive architecture often consider solutions at just the individual house or building scale, despite the clear need to be able to analyse and design with wider changing urban landscape conditions driving decision making. In response, this research investigates possible design strategies for adapting housing to climate change induced flooding, while enhancing the liveability of changing local community environments. This is investigated through a case study design-led research process, and is complimented by a survey of residents. The case study site is a flood prone suburb in the city of Dunedin on the east coast of the South Island in Aotearoa New Zealand. Key findings of the research point to the importance of employing not just a purely technical approach to flooding adaptive housing, but also to using a community-led approach to re-design to understand how people will react to, use, and adapt to repurposed built environments that respond to climate change. This reinforces the need to conceive flood adaptive housing at least at a street and neighbourhood scale, and preferably at a whole suburb landscape scale, rather that just as a single housing typology solution. The research concludes that combining flood adaptive housing with ecosystem-based adaptation solutions to climate change induced flooding could lead to a different, more ecology-integrated way of living for inhabitants of low lying coastal areas. This in turn is likely to have positive social and psychological benefits for inhabitants while increasing community resilience.</p>

Integration Environment Software Module for Accumulation and Exchange of Digital Medical Data

Introduction. The development of effective digital medicine tools is an intensive and complex process that requires the interdisciplinary efforts of a wide range of experts, from scientists and engineers to ethics experts and lawyers. Digital medicine products have great potential for improving medical measurement, diagnosis and treatment. One of the main challenges for the healthcare sector is to address the issue of fast, convenient and secure exchange of information about patients’ health. Service-oriented architectures of such products may accomplish many of the challenges facing healthcare systems. The purpose of the paper is to develop an information and software module ExchangeDMD to ensure the accumulation, storage and exchange of diagnostic medical data in accordance with modern medical information standards to maintain the interoperability function as one of the leading principles of digital medicine. Results. A special adaptive architecture of digital medicine infrastructure has been developed, which enables an integrated solution of data exchange between participants of providing medical services, which is carried out with the help of web services. The specifics of different types of medical information are analyzed and taken into account in accordance with the access regime for its processing. The module structure has been developed and implemented in software, which has three main levels: central virtual storage (virtual data center to implement certain functions), remote administration segment (technical support and administration network) and user segment (mobile devices and user-patient applications). Conclusions. The ExchangeDMD information and software module is designed to ensure the accumulation of patient data, integration between the various units within the system, as well as to ensure the management of this data by health care personnel. The ExchangeDMD module is built using the international standard HL7 CDA, which enables formalizing electronic medical records using RIM (information model links) to attract the necessary directories and classifiers when creating medical records and documents.

Sisyphus and Entropy; Adaptive Architecture in Flood Prone Nanjing

<p>This thesis attempts to rationalize two diverging practices in Architectural discourse, that of Western pedagogy and that of the ‘Other’. A disparity in approach to understanding architecture as a permanent object, can be noted in the dialogue between resilient architecture and temporary structure, this manifests itself in transient spaces and adaptive urban fabrics. The increased danger of flooding within China; with a particular emphasis on river infrastructure, posits an interesting position for new urban typologies and innovative floating solutions. Positioned on the expansive Yangtze River Delta, Nanjing encompasses a complex narrative of historical reverence and progressive tendencies, that encourage experimental approaches. The process and methodology within, seeks to provide an adaptable and affordable response to the recurring floodings, through in depth concise historical, cultural and philosophical analysis of the social, spiritual and architectural landscape within China as a whole as well as in specificity. These insights, juxtaposed with traditional western technique intends to produce an intricate and considered response to flood situations, with a particular focus on community generation and maintenance. Although Nanjing remains the central focus of the research, the concepts and practical results are intended to be abstracted and drawn into all cultures within Asia, primarily those with Buddhist and Taoist social structures. The proliferation of Feng Shui and the Metaphysical throughout the region provide a framework from which to expand. This network of social and cultural similarity allows for cross disciplinary and pan Asian approaches, noting the Japanese Metabolist Movement as a practical indication of socio-cultural influence on architectural theory.</p>

Sisyphus and Entropy; Adaptive Architecture in Flood Prone Nanjing

<p>This thesis attempts to rationalize two diverging practices in Architectural discourse, that of Western pedagogy and that of the ‘Other’. A disparity in approach to understanding architecture as a permanent object, can be noted in the dialogue between resilient architecture and temporary structure, this manifests itself in transient spaces and adaptive urban fabrics. The increased danger of flooding within China; with a particular emphasis on river infrastructure, posits an interesting position for new urban typologies and innovative floating solutions. Positioned on the expansive Yangtze River Delta, Nanjing encompasses a complex narrative of historical reverence and progressive tendencies, that encourage experimental approaches. The process and methodology within, seeks to provide an adaptable and affordable response to the recurring floodings, through in depth concise historical, cultural and philosophical analysis of the social, spiritual and architectural landscape within China as a whole as well as in specificity. These insights, juxtaposed with traditional western technique intends to produce an intricate and considered response to flood situations, with a particular focus on community generation and maintenance. Although Nanjing remains the central focus of the research, the concepts and practical results are intended to be abstracted and drawn into all cultures within Asia, primarily those with Buddhist and Taoist social structures. The proliferation of Feng Shui and the Metaphysical throughout the region provide a framework from which to expand. This network of social and cultural similarity allows for cross disciplinary and pan Asian approaches, noting the Japanese Metabolist Movement as a practical indication of socio-cultural influence on architectural theory.</p>

Genome-wide selection signatures reveal widespread synergistic effects of culture conditions and temperature stress in Drosophila melanogaster

Experimental evolution combined with whole-genome sequencing is a powerful approach to study the adaptive architecture of selected traits, in particular when replicated experimental populations evolving in opposite selective conditions (e.g. hot vs. cold temperature) are compared. Nevertheless, such comparisons could be affected by environmental effects shared between selective regimes (e.g. laboratory adaptation), which complicate the interpretation of selection signatures. Here, we used an experimental design, which takes advantage of the simplicity of selection signatures from founder populations with reduced variation, to study the fitness consequences of the laboratory environment (culture conditions) at two temperature regimes. After 20 generations of adaptation at 18°C and 29°C, strong genome-wide selection signatures were observed. About one third of the selection signatures can be either attributed to temperature effects, laboratory adaptation or the joint effects of both. The fitness consequences reflecting the combined effects of temperature and laboratory adaptation were more extreme in the hot environment for 83% of the affected genomic regions, fitting the pattern of larger expression differences between founders at 29°C. We propose that evolve and resequence (E&R) with reduced genetic variation allows to study genome-wide fitness consequences driven by the interaction of multiple environmental factors.

Nanotechnology-Based Sensitive Biosensors for COVID-19 Prediction Using Fuzzy Logic Control

Increasing the growth of big data, particularly in healthcare-Internet of Things (IoT) and biomedical classes, tends to help patients by identifying the disease early through methods for the analysis of medical data. Hence, nanotechnology-based IOT biosensors play a significant role in the medical field. Problem. However, the consistency continues to decrease where missing data occurs in such medical data from nanotechnology-based IOT biosensors. Furthermore, each region has its own special features, which further lowers the accuracy of prediction. The proposed model initially reconstructs lost or partial data in order to address the challenge of handling the medical data structures with incomplete data. Methods. An adaptive architecture is proposed to enhance the computing capabilities to predict the disease automatically. The medical databases are managed by unpredictable environments. This optimized paradigm for diagnosis produces the fuzzy, genetically categorized decision tree algorithm. This work uses a normalized classifier namely fuzzy-based decision tree (FDT) algorithm for classifying the data collected via nanotechnology-based IOT biosensors, and this helps in the identification of nondeterministic instances from unstructured datasets relating to the medical diagnosis. The FDT algorithm is further enhanced by using genetic algorithms for effective classification of instances. Finally, the proposed system uses two larger datasets to verify the predictive precision. In order to describe a fuzzy decision tree algorithm based upon the fitness function value, a modified decision classification rule is used. The structure and unstructured databases are configured for processing. Results and Conclusions. This evaluation of test patterns helps to track the efficiency of FDT with optimized rules during the training and testing stages. The proposed method is validated against nanotechnology-based IOT biosensors data in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F -measure. The results of the simulation show that the proposed method achieves a higher rate of accuracy than the other methods. Other metrics relating to the model with and without feature selection show an improved sensitivity, specificity, and F -measure rate than the existing methods.

Complex adaptive architecture of quantitative resistance erosion in a plant fungal pathogen

Plant pathogens often adapt to plant genetic resistance so characterization of the architecture under-lying such an adaptation is required to understand the adaptive potential of pathogen populations. Erosion of banana quantitative resistance to a major leaf disease caused by polygenic adaptation of the causal agent, the fungus Pseudocercospora fijiensis, was recently identified in the northern Caribbean region. Genome scan and quantitative genetics approaches were combined to investigate the adaptive architecture underlying this adaptation. Thirty-two genomic regions showing host se-lection footprints were identified by pool sequencing of isolates collected from seven plantation pairs of two cultivars with different levels of quantitative resistance. Individual sequencing and phenotyping of isolates from one pair revealed significant and variable levels of correlation be-tween haplotypes in 17 of these regions with a quantitative trait of pathogenicity (the diseased leaf area). The multilocus pattern of haplotypes detected in the 17 regions was found to be highly varia-ble across all the population pairs studied. These results suggest complex adaptive architecture un-derlying plant pathogen adaptation to quantitative resistance with a polygenic basis, redundancy, and a low level of parallel evolution between pathogen populations. Candidate genes involved in quantitative pathogenicity and host adaptation of P. fijiensis were highlighted in genomic regions combining annotation analysis with available biological data.