Search

What caused the failure of the last vital cultural, educational, and spiritual institution in Vox Populi Texas, a freedom colony in Colorado County, Texas? Why were established balloon framing construction methods consistently compromised during the construction phases? Was this an example of faith over function? The wall failure which ultimately led to the abandonment of the South Point Baptist Church was investigated as part of a study of construction phasing and related compromises to the structural capacity of the structure in the context of balloon framing practices of the time from 1850 to 1920. This investigation was made possible by third-party theft/harvesting of interior sheathing and flooring which has exposed the improvisational wall and floor framing. Archival research on Vox Populi and the South Point Baptist Church was conducted at the Nesbitt Memorial Library, Columbus Texas. Digital models of the church construction phases were developed, and framing detail models constructed of key structural conditions to understand their modification and their possible role in the failure of the South wall which ultimately lead to the church’s abandonment and subsequent fall to ruin between 2011 and 2020. The use of an improvisational method of balloon framing was likely provoked by resource shortages at the time of the initial construction, likely 1900, and was compromised by later construction phases where the first phase (of 4 phases) meeting hall construction had its lateral resistance compromised to a point where the structure was no longer capable of transferring wind load from the roof and wall to the foundations. The resulting displacement of the South wall and subsequent openings in the roof and floor resulted in a deterioration of the roof, wall, and floor at the juncture of the phase 1 meeting hall and phase 3 rostrum additions. The required structural repair exceeded the capability of the congregation resulting in the abandonment of the South Point Baptist church in 2012. Demolition/harvesting of interior surfaces, the bell, and cornerstones by parties unknown began in 2016, has since stopped and the building stands precariously, some 136 years after its post-emancipation organization.

IntroductionGiven the different life histories and movement behaviors of diverse species, reconciling conservation measures to benefit all species is a critical concern for landscape conservation planning. Understanding land cover composition and finding multispecies movement routes across heterogeneous landscapes are crucial to maintaining many target species. The primary objectives of this study were to determine the optimal environment in Florida that promotes multispecies connectivity in landscapes increasingly threatened by rapid suburban development and to enhance methods for delineating the state’s ecological networks.MethodsPotential functional connectivity of the focal species with statewide distributions and are considered priorities because of the historical and current threats to their population viability, such as the Florida black bear (Ursus americanus floridanus), Florida panther (Puma concolor coryi), eastern indigo snake (Drymarchon couperi), and southern fox squirrel (Sciurus niger niger), were modeled using Linkage Mapper, Omniscape, and resistant kernels. We combined quantiles from each method for a single species combination approach to leverage the results from the three models for planning purposes. Subsequently, we integrated the results into a novel multiple species, multi-model connectivity mapping approach. Following the corridor analysis, a comparison was made between multispecies connectivity maps, current managed conservation lands, and the main priority areas for the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a previously developed planning network of natural hubs and corridors. Finally, we used the spatial prioritization software Zonation to identify areas of conservation priority, while also illustrating the impacts of infrastructure (built infrastructure, roadways, mining, and future development 2040 and 2070 projections) and threats from human activity (landscape fragmentation, recreation, pollution, contamination, and clean-up sites).ResultsThe study identified priority areas for all four species, with a particular focus on areas not currently protected. The connectivity models showed significant overlap with current managed conservation lands and the main priority areas for the Florida Wildlife Corridor. Pinchpoint areas or bottlenecks were identified as needing fine-scale incorporation into spatial planning. Using the spatial prioritization software Zonation, we identified areas of conservation priority and illustrated the impacts of infrastructure and threats.DiscussionThe results indicate that species-relevant connectivity models incorporating a group of focal species with both complementary and opposing habitat requirements can better inform biodiversity conservation and landscape design decisions. This multi-model approach provides a robust framework for identifying and prioritizing areas for conservation, particularly in landscapes facing rapid suburban development. Integrating multispecies connectivity models into conservation planning can enhance the effectiveness of ecological networks and contribute to the long-term viability of diverse species in Florida.

IntroductionDuring emergencies, breastfeeding protects infants by providing essential nutrients, food security, comfort, and protection and is a priority lifesaving intervention. On February 24, 2022, the war in Ukraine escalated, creating a humanitarian catastrophe. The war has resulted in death, injuries, and mass internal displacement of over 5 million people. A further 8.2 million people have taken refuge in neighboring countries, including Poland. Among those impacted are infants and young children and their mothers. We conducted a study to explore the infant feeding challenges and needs of Ukrainian women affected by the war.MethodsWe conducted a qualitative descriptive study involving in-depth interviews (IDIs) with 75 war-affected Ukrainian mothers who had at least one infant aged less than 12 months at the time of the interview. Eligible mothers were either (1) living as Ukrainian refugees in Poland, having crossed the border from Ukraine on or after February 24, 2022, when the war started (n = 30) or (2) living in Ukraine as internally displaced persons or as residents in the community (n = 45). All interviews were audio-recorded (either transcribed or had responses summarized as expanded notes) and analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis using a two-step rapid analysis process.ResultsParticipants in Ukraine who wanted to initiate breastfeeding right after birth faced opposition from healthcare workers at maternity hospitals. Ukrainian refugees who gave birth in Poland faced language barriers when seeking breastfeeding support. Half of the participants in Ukraine received commercial milk formula (CMF) donations even if they said they did not need them. Most respondents stated that breastfeeding information and support were urgently needed.ConclusionOur data suggests that healthcare workers in Ukrainian maternity hospitals require additional training and motivation on delivering breastfeeding support. In addition, lactation consultants in maternity ward are needed in Ukraine, and interpretation support is needed for refugees to overcome language barriers. There is a need to control the indiscriminate donations of commercial milk formula and to ensure that complementary foods and commercial milk formula are available to those that need it. This study confirms the need for actions to ensure infant and young child feeding (IYCF) support is provided during emergencies.

Objectives To investigate the association of reported legal performance enhancing substance (PES) use and consideration of banned PES use among sport-specialised and non-sport-specialised young athletes.Methods and design Cross-sectional study of 1049 young athletes enrolled in an injury prevention programme from 2013 to 2020. We used logistic regression modelling to determine the independent association between sports specialisation. We reported (1) legal PES use and (2) consideration of banned PES use after adjusting for the effects of gender, age, having a relative as a coach, unrestricted internet access, use of a weight training regimen, and weeknight hours of sleep.Results The final cohort consisted of 946 athletes with a mean age of 14. 56% were female, and 80% were sport-specialised athletes. 14% reported legal PES use, and 3% reported consideration of banned PES use. No difference was found between sport-specialised athletes who reported legal PES use (OR=1.4; 95% CI 0.81 to 2.43; p=0.23) or consideration of banned PES use (OR=3.2; 95% CI 0.78 to 14.92; p=0.1) compared with non-sport-specialised athletes. Reported legal PES use was more common among athletes who were male, older, used weight training, and slept less. Reported consideration of banned PES use was more common among male and older athletes.Conclusions PES use is not independently associated with sport specialisation in young athletes. Athlete sex, age, training, and sleep patterns are important factors for young athletes to consider in PES use.

Post-traumatic headache (PTH) is a challenging clinical condition to identify and treat as it integrates multiple subjectively defined symptoms with underlying physiological processes. The precise mechanisms underlying PTH are unclear, and it remains to be understood how to integrate the patient experience with underlying biology when attempting to classify persons with PTH, particularly in the pediatric setting where patient self-report may be highly variable. The objective of this investigation was to evaluate the use of different machine learning (ML) classifiers to differentiate pediatric and young adult subjects with PTH from healthy controls using behavioral data from self-report questionnaires that reflect concussion symptoms, mental health, pain experience of the participants, and structural brain imaging from cortical and sub-cortical locations. Behavioral data, alongside brain imaging, survived data reduction methods and both contributed toward final models. Behavioral data that contributed towards the final model included both the child and parent perspective of the pain-experience. Brain imaging features produced two unique clusters that reflect regions that were previously found in mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and PTH. Affinity-based propagation analysis demonstrated that behavioral data remained independent relative to neuroimaging data that suggest there is a role for both behavioral and brain imaging data when attempting to classify children with PTH.

It would be hard to assert that one can understand an entire building by looking at a part so small as a piece of ornament, but after constructing through drawing, a number of these pieces of ornament, and doing the same for Sullivan’s late commissions, I believe that it can now be asserted that Sullivan was designing buildings that were architectural ornament at a large scale. Sullivan’s belief in his own creative will, fueled by the power of nature, learned from the lectures of Asa Grey, the poetry of Whitman, the drama of Richard Wagner’s music Nietzsche’s “Übermensch,” Goethe’s “Urpflanze” and his utopian ideal of Chicago seems to have been the key to the visceral power of his architectural ornamental that can only be described as fantastic and a career achievement. But Sullivan went farther than the design of ornament according to the formal methods documented his last publication, “A System of Architectural Ornament according to Man’s Powers.” Most of his last series of architectural commissions show evidence that he was attempting to construct whole buildings according to the same formal methods used in making the ornament. This paper will present an overview of Sullivan’s principles of ornament and the primary ornament types he employed across his fifty-year career, and will focus on the medallion type of ornament and its role in the development of Sullivan’s commissions following his break from Dankmar Adler in 1895 and its pivotal role during his last period of practice, 1907- 1919 in transforming inert buildings into vibrant containers of human energy

Background: No study to date has thoroughly examined US Huntington disease (HD) care delivery in a variety of clinic settings by HD specialists and non-specialists. Objective: To obtain a clearer understanding of current care structure and delivery of care through a survey of representative US physicians treating HD patients. Methods: We designed and fielded a survey of 40 closed-ended evaluative items and one open-ended item to a sample of 339 US practices. Unique to this survey was the inclusion of non-specialists. Results: Responses were received from 156 practices (overall response rate 46.02 %), with 52.6 % from academic sites, 35.3 % from private practices, and 12.2 % from the VA. More than half (63.5 %) of the practice leads were movement disorder trained or Directors of HDSA Centers of Excellence and 58.3 % had an HD or multidisciplinary care clinic. However, 48.7 % of the practices saw 1–25 HD patients, 28.2 % saw 26–100 HD patients, and 23.1 % served over 100 HD patients annually. Most practices (>69 %) reported having difficulty providing social work, genetic counseling, care coordination and psychologists/psychiatrists. Increased HD practice size was associated with higher rates of pre-visit screenings, care navigator/care coordinators, routine monitoring of weight, and provision of genetic counseling by genetic counselors. Conclusions: Not surprisingly, we found that HD care was inconsistently applied across the US. Practices led by neurologists trained in movement disorders, and higher HD volume practices, tended to be better equipped to provide multi-disciplinary staffing and procedures as compared to those with fewer numbers of HD patients.

The term “Starchitect” seems to have originated in the 1940’s to describe a “film star who has designed a house” but of late has been understood as an architect who has risen to celebrity status in the general culture. Louis Sullivan, like Daniel Burnham, might have been considered a “starchitect.” Starchitects are frequently associated with a unique style or approach to architecture and all who work for them, adopt this style as their own as a matter of employment. Frank Lloyd Wright was one of these architects, working under and in the idiom of Louis Sullivan for six years, learning to draw and develop motifs in the style of Louis Sullivan. Frank Lloyd Wright’s firing by Louis Sullivan in 1893 and his rapidly growing family set him on an urgent course to seek his own voice. The bootleg houses, designed outside the contract terms Wright had with Adler and Sullivan caused the separation, likely fueled by both Sullivan and Wright’s ego, which left Wright alone, separated from his “Lieber Meister” or “Beloved Master.” These early houses by Wright were adaptations of various styles popular in the times, Neo-Colonial for Blossom, Victorian for Parker and Gale, each, as Wright explained were not “radical” because “I could not follow up on them.” Wright, like many young architects, had not yet codified his ideas and strategies for activating space and form. How does one undertake the search for one’s language of these architectural essentials? Does one randomly pursue a course of trial and error casting about through images that capture one’s attention? Do we restrict our voice to that which has already been voiced in history? Wright’s agenda would have included the merging of space and enclosure with site and nature structured as he understood it from Sullivan’s Ornament. While the houses that followed Wright’s departure from Sullivan lack the formal coherence of the skillfully adapted “Bootleg” houses, these transitional houses constitute important markers of Wright’s practice-based research towards finding a harmonious relation between plan and section, space and mass, a structure for form and space. Practice based design research is essential to architects and architecture and can offer students and new practitioners a strategy to accelerate their own growth. Frank Lloyd Wright’s hundreds of houses offer a unique glimpse into the development of an expression of beliefs in form and space. This paper will present a timeline and study of Wright’s earliest, sometimes awkward steps, and propose that it is an ornamental structure, learned by Wright at the desk of Sullivan, was the catalytic force that freed Wright from historicism and set him on a path of clear principle that would deeply influence the works that have made him a Master.

Background In patients with hemodynamically stable blunt splenic injury (BSI), there is no consensus on whether quantity of hemoperitoneum (HP) is a predictor for intervention with splenic artery embolization (SAE) or failing nonoperative management (fNOM). We sought to analyze whether the quantity of HP was associated with need for intervention.Methods This retrospective cohort study included adult trauma patients with hemodynamically stable BSI admitted to six trauma centers between 2014 and 2016. Quantity of HP was defined as small (perisplenic blood or blood in Morrison’s pouch), moderate (blood in one or both pericolic gutters), or large (additional finding of free blood in the pelvis). Multivariate logistic regression was performed to identify predictors of intervention with SAE or fNOM versus successful observation.Results There were 360 patients: hemoperitoneum was noted in 214 (59%) patients, of which the quantity was small in 92 (43%), moderate in 76 (35.5%), and large in 46 (21.5%). Definitive management was as follows: 272 (76%) were observed and 88 (24%) had intervention (83 SAE, 5 fNOM). The rate of intervention was univariately associated with quantity of HP, even after stratification by American Association for the Surgery of Trauma (AAST) grade. After adjustment, larger quantities of HP significantly increased odds of intervention (p=0.01). Compared with no HP, the odds of intervention were significantly increased for moderate HP (OR=3.51 (1.49 to 8.26)) and large HP (OR=2.89 (1.03 to 8.06)), with similar odds for small HP (OR=1.21 (0.46 to 2.76)). Other independent predictors of intervention were higher AAST grade, older age, and presence of splenic vascular injury.Conclusion Greater quantity of HP was associated with increased odds of intervention, with no difference in risk for moderate versus large HP. These findings suggest quantity of HP should be incorporated in the management algorithm of BSI as a consideration for angiography and/or embolization to maximize splenic preservation and reduce the risk of splenic rupture.Level of evidence III, retrospective epidemiological study.

Social investment has been the leit motif for the development of a range of social service provisions in Aotearoa/New Zealand for the last decade. It involves a particular approach, using data to target decisions and inform directions for such key areas as social security, care and protection of children and delivery of social services. There are serious questions about the statistical base which informs the approach and the implications for disadvantaged, marginalised and targeted populations, while poverty is neglected, sidelined and/or treated as resulting from individual failure. The Aotearoa/New Zealand model of social investment represents a significant departure from needs based, equity informed welfare provision.

The English Garden City Movement, advocated by Ebenezer Howard and the associated town designs by Raymond Unwin were some of the earliest reactions to the environmental degradation and placelessness of the European Industrial City circa 1900. John Nolen (1869 - 1937) was one of the earliest American adopters of the Garden City ideals. Over the course of his career, Nolen designed fifty-five new towns and subdivisions across the United States. Most of these plans had elements that were adapted from Sir Raymond Unwin’s principles and spatial conditions to fit the unique cultural landscape of the emerging American middle class. Place-making was one of the central goals of the Garden City. Places, at multiple scales, town, neighborhood, and street distinguished the Garden City from the monotonous and chaotic landscape of most cities. A unique characteristic of the planned communities and subdivisions by Nolen is that they demonstrate the potential of integrating landscape architecture, architecture and planning principles to construct an underlying infrastructure of place-anchors, to guide place-making during build-out phases, even when build-out occurred decades later. Plans designed by Nolen’s firm after 1920 characteristically included strong formal elements, central greens, axial boulevards and a hierarchy of spatial conditions extending from the town center to the thoughtful termination of a residential street. These post-1920 plans showed what I am calling “place anchors” that established landmarks at the scale of neighborhood, district, and town. This paper will present a comparative study of the “as designed” and “as built” conditions of two projects designed in the early 1920’s and “built-out” in the competitive post-depression economy of the late 1930’s. The projects, in Mariemont, Ohio and at Windsor Farms, Virginia, are the result of John Nolen’s unique transformation of Garden City principles to fit the landscape of the emerging American suburb.

Offshore windfarms provide renewable energy, but activities during the construction phase can affect marine mammals. To understand how the construction of an offshore windfarm in the Maryland Wind Energy Area (WEA) off Maryland, USA, might impact harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena), it is essential to determine their poorly understood year-round distribution. Although habitat-based models can help predict the occurrence of species in areas with limited or no sampling, they require validation to determine the accuracy of the predictions. Incorporating more than 18 months of harbour porpoise detection data from passive acoustic monitoring, generalized auto-regressive moving average and generalized additive models were used to investigate harbour porpoise occurrence within and around the Maryland WEA in relation to temporal and environmental variables. Acoustic detection metrics were compared to habitat-based density estimates derived from aerial and boat-based sightings to validate the model predictions. Harbour porpoises occurred significantly more frequently during January to May, and foraged significantly more often in the evenings to early mornings at sites within and outside the Maryland WEA. Harbour porpoise occurrence peaked at sea surface temperatures of 5°C and chlorophyll a concentrations of 4.5 to 7.4 mg m-3. The acoustic detections were significantly correlated with the predicted densities, except at the most inshore site. This study provides insight into previously unknown fine-scale spatial and temporal patterns in distribution of harbour porpoises offshore of Maryland. The results can be used to help inform future monitoring and mitigate the impacts of windfarm construction and other human activities.