Major Physical Features Research Articles

Assessment of Physical Attributes for Age-Appropriate Open Spaces within Gated Communities through two Case Studies at Madurai, Tamilnadu, India

With the increase in the recent pandemic conditions, the importance of closed community open spaces has gained a lot of importance in satisfying the need for public spaces within an urban fabric. Also, the real-estate trends have always publicised the presence of common public facilities within the gated communities, such as play parks, street furniture, temple, etc., an extreme luxury compared to any other residential facility available in the city. However, it is crucial to analyse its age appropriateness to understand whether these spaces can effectively engage users of varied age groups. Doing so will also result in a comprehensive conclusion to interpret activeness and safety. The study is performed within two planned mixed housing gated communities with multiple pockets of open spaces intended for recreation and leisure. This paper attempts to identify major physical and ambient features that commonly result in a more age-appropriate space. Since the findings are derived based on quantified subjectivity, the study includes a questionnaire survey, activity and behaviour mapping, and critical analysis of the physical setup. This study discusses various case-specific design decisions that can be employed to establish more inclusive open spaces within a gated community by analysing attributes such as zoning, proximity to allied activities, territoriality, and defensibility. Since the findings highlight the behavioural needs emerging due to the coexistence of demographic age ranges. This study would be beneficial for architects, landscape architects and urban designers to create age-appropriate open spaces.

Planktonic protist diversity across contrasting Subtropical and Subantarctic waters of the southwest Pacific

Planktonic protists are an essential component of marine pelagic ecosystems where they mediate important trophic and biogeochemical functions. Although these functions are largely influenced by their taxonomic affiliation, the composition and spatial variability of planktonic protist communities remain poorly characterized in vast areas of the ocean. Here, we investigated the diversity of these communities in contrasting oceanographic conditions of the southwest Pacific (33–58 °S) using DNA metabarcoding of the 18S rRNA gene. Seawater samples collected during twelve cruises (n = 482, 0–3100 m) conducted east of New Zealand were used to characterize protist communities in Subtropical (STW) and Subantarctic (SAW) surface water masses and the Subtropical Front (STF) that separates them. Diversity decreased with increasing latitude and increasing temperature but tended to be lowest in the STF. Sample ordination resulting from the abundance of amplicon single variants (ASVs) corresponded to the different water masses. Overall, Dinoflagellata (Syndiniales, 27%; Dinophyceae, 24% of standardized number of reads) dominated the euphotic zone followed by Chlorophyta (20%), but their relative abundance and composition at class and lower taxonomic levels varied consistently between water masses. Among Chlorophyta, several picoplanktonic algae species of the Mamiellophyceae class including Ostreococcus lucimarinus dominated in STW, while the Chloropicophyceae species Chloroparvula pacifica was most abundant in SAW. Bacillariophyta (5%), Prymnesiophyceae (5%), and Pelagophyceae (2%) classes were less abundant but showed analogous water mass specificity at class and finer taxonomic levels. Protist community composition in the STF had mixed characteristics and showed regional differences with the southern STF (50 °S) having more resemblance with subantarctic communities than the STF over the Chatham Rise region (42–44 °S). Below the euphotic zone, Syndiniales sequences (40%) dominated the dataset followed by Radiolaria (31%), Dinophyceae (14%) and other heterotrophic groups like Marine Stramenopiles and ciliates (1–1.5%). Among Radiolaria, several unidentified ASVs assigned to Spumellaria were most abundant, but showed significantly different distributions between STW and SAW highlighting the need to further investigate the taxonomy and ecology of this group. The present study represents a significant step forward towards characterizing protistan communities composition in relation to major physical oceanographic features in the southwest Pacific providing new insights about the biogeography and ecological preferences of different planktonic protist taxa from class to species and genotypic level.

Continuous beam-type model for the static analysis of arching masonry walls

This paper presents a model for the static analysis of one-way arching masonry walls subjected to out-of-plane loads. The model accounts for the deformability of the masonry units and the mortar joints and augments current models where the masonry units are considered as rigid. The formulation uses the principle of virtual work to derive the equilibrium equations. The wall is considered as a continuous array of beam-type members representing the masonry units and the mortar joints, which are modeled using geometrically nonlinear kinematics and nonlinear constitutive relations. The effect of the mechanical properties of the masonry materials on the response is investigated numerically. Insight regarding the out-of-plane capacity of the wall and the evolution of the in-plane arching thrust is gained, contributing to the understanding of the parameters that directly affect the global stability and ductility characteristics of arching masonry walls. The model is used to explore the relation between rigid and flexible modeling of the masonry units. An analytical procedure for the conversion between the two modeling approaches is formulated and examined over a range of block-to-mortar stiffness ratios. Altogether, the study provides a richer perspective on the response, identifies the major physical features affecting the behavior of arching walls, and sets a methodology for its quantitative evaluation.

Castles and the Biography of Place: Boundaries, Meeting Places and Mobility in the Sussex Landscape

ABSTRACT This paper explores the influence of antecedent landscapes on the placement of medieval castles in Sussex. It considers the relationship between castles and major physical features of the pre-Conquest landscape: territorial and administrative boundaries, meeting places, routeways, crossing points and ‘central’ places. After examining the ways in which these landscape elements helped shape the character of the ancient territory, it considers their conceptual and practical influence on the siting of the region’s medieval castles, with a particular focus on sites with their origins in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Using Bramber castle as a case study, through existing and new archaeological evidence, including recent analytical earthwork survey and scientific dating, the paper examines in detail the ways in which elements of the natural and cultural world were drawn into an evolving narrative of Norman elite authority. The conclusion is that castles were deliberately sited within much-occupied geographies as part of a deliberate policy aimed at constructing and reproducing claims to territory, power and place.

Numerical Models for Interactions of Ablating-Capillary Plasma With Air and Bulk-Loaded Liquid

The jet expansion behaviors of ablating-capillary plasma used in the liquid propellant electrothermal chemical gun were investigated. A pulsed power system was built up to drive the arc plasma generator by high-voltage discharge in polyethylene capillary. The temporal evolutions of the arc plasma jet in both open air and bulk-loaded liquid were analyzed with high-speed imaging and dynamic pressure measurements. The arc plasma jet exhibited rapid axial expansion and strongly turbulent mixing with the ambient fluids. Experiments conducted with different discharge voltages showed that the voltage had a significant effect on the axial expanding speed of the arc plasma jet. A 2-D magneto-hydrodynamic model, which consisted of several submodels, such as the capillary ablation model, the species ionization model, the high-temperature radiation model, and the turbulent model, was developed to describe the generation and evolution of arc plasma jet. Good agreements between calculations and experiments in the aspects of jet contours and pressure histories indicated that the current model had the capacity to capture the major physical features of the ablating-capillary arc plasma jet.

Critical outline of the major physical features used in environmental archaeology for the reconstruction of quaternary climate

Climates in themselves are naturally somewhat elusive. Attempts to reconstruct such can sometimes be quite challenging. Different fronts have been taken by various experts around the world to determine climatic variations over time. That of Quaternary is shallow in the perspective of time and ‘context’ and thus more exposed to the vulnerability of obliteration and evasiveness. However, the dogged efforts of palaeoclimatic and related studies environmentalists especially the environmental archaeologists provide good hindsight with which the reconstruction is driven to some levels of objectivity. The major physical features of achieving this are on the strength of environmental sustainability critically outlined here, with a view to maintaining the equilibrium of the understanding and extending the frontiers of our knowledge in this regard.

Walls, Waivers, and What We Don’t Know

Walls, Waivers, and What We Don’t Know Kenneth D. Madsen There is no shortage of studies and anecdotes about the lack of geographical knowledge in the U.S. In the case of the U.S.-Mexico border, however, it is not just the basics of states, capitals, and major physical features that should give us pause. Borders are in the news, and with a general lack of knowledge about the region, there is an imaginative and insidious othering that goes on to fill the gaps, perhaps akin to medieval maps where cartographers’ imaginations filled in the blank spaces (e.g. Van Duzer, 2013). This fundamental willingness to project the worst onto our borders and what lies beyond can be seen as an outgrowth of a greater devaluation of intellectual work in recent years. Border regions and the people who live there face many challenges, but lacking specific knowledge of details, political posturing flattens the nuances of those experiences. Negatives (drug smuggling, undocumented entries) are portrayed as something that must be addressed at all costs. Positives (low crime rates in border cities, immigrant contributions to the U.S.) are downplayed or ignored completely. Problems elsewhere (drug consumption, inability to agree on immigration reform, crime by migrants, integration) are projected onto the border as well. Geographic ignorance is not entirely to blame, however. From a policy perspective, the U.S. has deliberately handicapped itself by suppressing knowledge and the creation of knowledge. This is especially true in the realm of the environment. Despite legislation that mandates environmental studies and consideration of impacts and alternatives, and provides for public input, in the case of border barrier construction this information is frequently suppressed. Drawing on authority granted by the Real ID Act of 2005 expressly for this purpose (see Sundberg, 2015), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to date has waived forty-eight laws in eight different proclamations. These include “all federal, state, or other laws, regulations and legal requirements of, deriving from, or related to the subject of” those statutes (wording from the most recent waiver proclamation; Nielsen, 2018, p. 3,013). Some laws are waived for particular places, such as the Sikes Act (within and near the Barry Goldwater Range in Arizona) and the Wild Horse and Burro Act (in San Diego only), but other laws are waived more consistently. All eight waiver proclamations to date have included the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act. Among other frequently waived laws are the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, the Eagle Protection Act, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Each of these waived statutes has its own niche, but probably the most far-reaching for the present discussion is the National Environmental Protection Act, included in all eight waiver proclamations and the engine behind agency analyses designed to assist with informed government decision-making. Many of these laws have stood for decades, some for over fifty or a hundred years. Most were enacted after years of discussion and [End Page 262] development. Today, a single government official, the DHS secretary, is able to waive any law without public discussion or oversight. The waiver of laws for border barrier construction is also broadly interpreted, covering the provision of roads and other means of access, staging areas, upkeep, and other supporting elements (e.g. lighting, sensors, cameras, and watchtowers). Legal recourse to challenge these waivers is severely truncated, allowing no more than sixty days after promulgation to file in district court, with appeals allowed only on constitutional grounds directly to the Supreme Court. In practice, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been somewhat conservative geographically in its application of the waivers, proclaiming them only in areas where border barrier construction is imminent. Yet there are also no assurances that future interpretations of the waiver will continue to be limited in scope. Furthermore, there are no stated restrictions on how far away from the border the waivers apply and no specified limits to their duration. Just because laws are waived does not mean that CBP is entirely oblivious to environmental concerns. The agency developed its own alternative mechanisms for...

Identification of novel BCL11A variants in patients with epileptic encephalopathy: Expanding the phenotypic spectrum.

BCL11A encodes a zinc finger protein that is highly expressed in hematopoietic tissues and the brain, and that is known to function as a transcriptional repressor of fetal hemoglobin (HbF). Recently, de novo variants in BCL11A have been reported in individuals with intellectual disability syndrome without epilepsy. In this study, we performed whole-exome sequencing of 302 patients with epileptic encephalopathies (EEs), and identified 2 novel BCL11A variants, c.577delC (p.His193Metfs*3) and c.2351A>C (p.Lys784Thr). Both the patients shared major physical features characteristic of BCL11A-related intellectual disability syndrome, suggesting that characteristic physical features and the persistence of HbF should lead clinicians to suspect EEs caused by BCL11A pathogenic variants. Patient 1, with a frameshift variant, presented with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, which expands the phenotypic spectrum of BCL11A haploinsufficiency. Patient 2, with a p.Lys784Thr variant, presented with West syndrome followed by drug-resistant focal seizures and more severe developmental disability. These 2 newly described patients contribute to delineating the associated, yet uncertain phenotypic characteristics of BCL11A disease-causing variants.

Accurate and efficient computations of phase-changing flows in thermal vapor compressors

This paper focuses on the limitations of single-phase computations which have been widely applied to the numerical simulations of flow fields around thermal vapor compressors (TVCs), and provides computational improvements through multi-phase flow modeling and analysis. In order to capture the multi-phase flow physics accurately and provide reliable results, several numerical methods and models, including the shock-stable multi-phase AUSMPW+ scheme, phase-changing models, cell-by-cell adaptive mesh refinement technique, and the IAPWS-97 equation of states, are combined into a numerical solver. We then simulate various TVC systems and compare the computed system performance and local flow physics between the single- and multi-phase computations. Based on the computational results and comparisons, we examine phase-changing process and its influence on two major local physical features, namely shock-train region and shear layer.

GRAVITY-ANTIGRAVITY INTERPLAY ON Mpc SCALE

It is demonstrated that the major physical features of the local expansion flows of galaxies are due to antigravity domination in the dynamics of the systems.

Gravity-Antigravity Interplay in the Local Galaxy Flows

Abstract The major physical features of the local expansion flows of galaxies are found to be due to antigravity domination in their dynamics.

Crowdsourcing Vector Surveillance: Using Community Knowledge and Experiences to Predict Densities and Distribution of Outdoor-Biting Mosquitoes in Rural Tanzania.

Lack of reliable techniques for large-scale monitoring of disease-transmitting mosquitoes is a major public health challenge, especially where advanced geo-information systems are not regularly applicable. We tested an innovative crowd-sourcing approach, which relies simply on knowledge and experiences of residents to rapidly predict areas where disease-transmitting mosquitoes are most abundant. Guided by community-based resource persons, we mapped boundaries and major physical features in three rural Tanzanian villages. We then selected 60 community members, taught them basic map-reading skills, and offered them gridded maps of their own villages (grid size: 200m×200m) so they could identify locations where they believed mosquitoes were most abundant, by ranking the grids from one (highest density) to five (lowest density). The ranks were interpolated in ArcGIS-10 (ESRI-USA) using inverse distance weighting (IDW) method, and re-classified to depict areas people believed had high, medium and low mosquito densities. Finally, we used odor-baited mosquito traps to compare and verify actual outdoor mosquito densities in the same areas. We repeated this process for 12 months, each time with a different group of 60 residents. All entomological surveys depicted similar geographical stratification of mosquito densities in areas classified by community members as having high, medium and low vector abundance. These similarities were observed when all mosquito species were combined, and also when only malaria vectors were considered. Of the 12,412 mosquitoes caught, 60.9% (7,555) were from areas considered by community members as having high mosquito densities, 28% (3,470) from medium density areas, and 11.2% (1,387) from low density areas. This study provides evidence that we can rely on community knowledge and experiences to identify areas where mosquitoes are most abundant or least abundant, even without entomological surveys. This crowd-sourcing method could be further refined and validated to improve community-based planning of mosquito control operations at low-cost.

Charged analogue of well behaved neutral spheres: an algorithmic approach

We establish a systematic algorithmic approach that generates new classes of solutions to the Einstein-Maxwell system in static spherically symmetric spacetime from well known uncharged solutions. A particular case is shown to satisfy all major physical features of a realistic charged star including the standard point-wise energy conditions of normal matter. The solution matches smoothly with the exterior Reissner-Nordström metric at the pressure free interface. The study, which is reported for a particular choice of gravitational potential, encourages similar approaches to study electrification of well known physically realistic uncharged models.

IEEE 802.11ah: sub-1-GHz license-exempt operation for the internet of things

IEEE 802.11ah Task Group has been developing an amendment to the 802.11 standard to define sub-1-GHz license-exempt operation to support sensors and Internet of Things applications. This article presents an overview of major physical layer and MAC layer features of 802.11ah.

Study of Compact Radio Galaxies in the 7C II Field

26 radio galaxies in field II of the Cambridge 7C list which scintillate at 102 MHz are studied in detail to clarify the major physical and structural features of these extragalactic radio sources. The results are compared with data for scintillating quasars in the same field.

A class of exact strange quark star model

Static spherically symmetric space-time is studied to describe dense compact star with quark matter within the framework of MIT Bag Model. The system of Einstein’s field equations for anisotropic matter is expressed as a new system of differential equations using transformations and it is solved for a particular general form of gravitational potential with parameters. For a particular parameter, as an example, it is shown that the model satisfies all major physical features expected in a realistic star. The generated model also smoothly matches with the Schwarzschild exterior metric at the boundary of the star. It is shown that the generated solutions are useful to model strange quark stars.

Exact anisotropic sphere with polytropic equation of state

We study static spherically symmetric spacetime to describe compact objects with anisotropic matter distribution. We express the system of Einstein field equations as a new system of differential equations using a coordinate transformation, and then write the system in another form with polytropic equation of state and obtain two classes of exact models. The models satisfy all major physical features expected in a realistic star. For polytropic index n = 2, we obtain expressions for mass and density which are comparable with the reported experimental observations.

Theropithecus gelada distribution and variations related to taxonomy: history, challenges and implications for conservation

Despite the uniqueness and importance of Theropithecus in palaeontological studies, little is known about the geographical and taxonomic differentiation in this genus, now restricted to the Ethiopian Highlands. Traditionally, the single living species Theropithecus gelada (Rüppell 1835) has been considered to comprise two subspecies: the nominate T. g. gelada in the northern highlands, and T. g. obscurus Heuglin 1863, from latitude 12 degrees to 9 degrees N in the south. Both the distributions and the physical characters of these two subspecies are poorly defined, and even in recent major taxonomic revisions, the validity of T. g. obscurus has been questioned. The history of gelada taxonomy and museum collections is reviewed here, and results are compared with the biogeography and major physical features of the Ethiopian Highlands. It is concluded that major gaps exist in our knowledge of the differentiation and distributions of Theropithecus populations. Following this literature review, a series of priority regions for taxonomic research and conservation are identified. These include the gathering of data on (1) geladas inhabiting the Wollo Region, from where obscurus was originally described; (2) the identity of geladas of the Tigray Region northeast of the Tacazzé River, and their current conservation status; (3) the identity of the Shewa population, usually assigned to obscurus; and (4) the identity and current status of geladas found northeast and south of Lake Tana, including Gojjam.

Towards a United Theory of the Origin of the Earht's Major Physical Features

Towards a United Theory of the Origin of the Earht's Major Physical Features

A Quantitative Coarse-Grain Model for Lipid Bilayers

A simplified particle-based computer model for hydrated phospholipid bilayers has been developed and applied to quantitatively predict the major physical features of fluid-phase biomembranes. Compared with available coarse-grain methods, three novel aspects are introduced. First, the main electrostatic features of the system are incorporated explicitly via charges and dipoles. Second, water is accurately (yet efficiently) described, on an individual level, by the soft sticky dipole model. Third, hydrocarbon tails are modeled using the anisotropic Gay-Berne potential. Simulations are conducted by rigid-body molecular dynamics. Our technique proves 2 orders of magnitude less demanding of computational resources than traditional atomic-level methodology. Self-assembled bilayers quantitatively reproduce experimental observables such as electron density, compressibility moduli, dipole potential, lipid diffusion, and water permeability. The lateral pressure profile has been calculated, along with the elastic curvature constants of the Helfrich expression for the membrane bending energy; results are consistent with experimental estimates and atomic-level simulation data. Several of the results presented have been obtained for the first time using a coarse-grain method. Our model is also directly compatible with atomic-level force fields, allowing mixed systems to be simulated in a multiscale fashion.