Inhabit the Change: Circular Design & Lot

To solve the problems associated with precarious contemporary housing, it is essential to intervene with structural housing reform. Therefore, it is necessary to start from semantics and read space on the one hand, as a moment where history, traditions and culture meet; on the other hand, as a key to overcome obstacles and general obsolescence.The state of the art includes: repetition of self-built and unregulated low-quality typologies, high migration rate, and socio-economic changes; the consequences are: low-quality buildings, overcrowded or uninhabited urban centers, obsolete spatiality. Today, the challenge is to design in a short time and with high qualitative standards, without giving in to hypertechnology but finding a balancing strategy. It is a matter of anticipating what cannot be expected, and responding to the multitude of ever-changing needs inherent to an atypical user.“Inhabiting” in this perspective must be increasingly “smart and sustainable”. This is done through interactive design, which increasingly uses digitized services and connects objects and people. The goal is to move towards DfD, «Design for Disassembly», through “change” as a paradigm, and the solution is in our homes.

Genetic diversity in two threatened species of guitarfish (Elasmobranchii: Rhinobatidae) from the Brazilian and Argentinian coasts: an alert for conservation

The guitarfishes Pseudobatos horkelii and Pseudobatos percellens meet the criteria for threatened status as Critically Endangered (CR) and Endangered (EN), respectively. Both species occur in the Southern Atlantic Ocean. Considering the lack of data on the genetic structure of these species, the present study evaluated the genetic variability and population structure of the P. horkelii and P. percellens in the southern region of Brazil and the northern coast of Argentina, based on sequences of mitochondrial DNA, Control Region (D-loop). Samples of P. horkelii (n = 135) were analyzed in six localities situated in Northern Argentina, along the Brazilian states’ coast. The mean of nucleotide diversity was 0.0053, the ΦST was 0.4277 and demographic analysis of P. horkelii suggests the existence of stability of the populations, with D = 0.9929, FS = 2.0155, SSD = 0.0817, R = 0.2153. In P. percellens (n = 101) were analyzed from six Brazilian localities along the coast of Santa Catarina, Paraná, and São Paulo. The mean nucleotide diversity was 0.0014 and ΦST value of 0.2921, the demographic analysis indicates a high migration rate of P. percellens among the localities evaluated, with D = 0.5222, FS = 0.3528, SSD = 0.01785, R = 0.3890.

The Influence of Remittances on Education and Health Outcomes: an Analysis for South Asian Countries

Remittances all over the world play significant role in improving the standard of living of the people in general. Broadly it is difficult to analyze all the characteristics of life standards and, usually researcher look at the educational or health indicators, which are the major concerns of every household. In this study, we also explored the effect of international remittances on educational and health indicators for selected South Asian countries. Our findings show that remittances play a vital role in enhancing health attainment for instance, escalating life expectancy, slashing infant mortality and fertility rate. The Two-Stage Least Square (2SLS) technique has been applied. Upshots of our study suggest that flow of remittances is one of the significant sources for economic development. It is viewed that high migration rate effect only health variables but a little improvement has been observed for educational attainment in South Asian region

Ten year follow-up of pyrocarbon implants for proximal interphalangeal joint replacement

Results of anatomical resurfacing of the proximal interphalangeal joint using pyrocarbon implants showed reasonable clinical results with a high radiographic migration rate. The aim was to investigate the subjective, clinical, and radiographic results 10 years following surgery, and to compare them with our 2-year follow-up data. We re-evaluated 12 patients with 15 proximal interphalangeal implants on average 9.7 years after surgery. Pain significantly improved from 7.6 on a visual analogue scale pre-operatively to 1.4 at 2 years, and to 0.7 at the final follow-up. The mean total range of motion in all replaced joints was 36° pre-operatively and 39° at the 2-year follow-up, but had decreased significantly to 29° at 10 years. We saw one implant migration in addition to the eight migrated implants we already found 2 years after surgery. The moderate clinical results, combined with the high migration rate, mean that we no longer use this kind of implant.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Many of the dropouts from our study were due to the inherent high migration rate among the families. As stated in the paper, an attempt was made to trace these families by writing to all 50 state health departments who answered but did not report deaths among study infants. Admittedly the statistical appraisal of our figures is compromised by the dropouts. However, the fact that there were no additional deaths reported to us would confirm the trend in favor of the GG group. The disproportionate loss of babies in the two groups, as explained in the paper, was accounted for by painful injections. This reaction was undoubtedly greater in the infants receiving the placebo as determined once the code was broken.