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Architecture as a discipline has the ability to absorb and become other disciplines, often blurring its own boundary. Architecture as a practice is a response to dynamic forces of our world and is embedded in everyday entanglements. Yachts present a unique opportunity to explore these characteristics of architecture. As a floating vessel meant to travel and spend a significant amount of time out at sea, the project is site-less and out of context to our physical built environment, allowing for opportunities to explore autonomy in the discipline. At the same time, it is entangled in human activity, engaging discourse of politics, economy, social status, climate change, and the future of our cities. Being able to work between autonomy and embedded-ness is a unique opportunity of building on the sea. The line between architect and naval architect is the shore line. This is clearly manifested in maps, where the water is often drawn as a flat plane. However, the tide and waters fluctuate constantly and in reality that line is not clear cut at all. This can also describe the line between architecture and naval architecture and that it fluctuates in a similar manner to the shore line in reality. I have focused my thesis on the exploration of this fluctuating and blurry line.

Biobanks and biobanking networks are involved in varying degrees in the collection, processing, storage, and dissemination of biological specimens. This review outlines the approaches that 16 of the largest biobanks and biobanking networks in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia have taken to collecting and distributing human research specimens and managing scientific initiatives while covering operating costs. Many are small operations that exist as either a single or a few freezers in a research laboratory, hospital clinical laboratory, or pathology suite. Larger academic and commercial biobanks operate to support large clinical and epidemiological studies. Operational and business models depend on the medical and research missions of their institutions and home countries. Some national biobanks operate with a centralized physical biobank that accepts samples from multiple locations. Others operate under a "federated" model where each institution maintains its own collections but agrees to list them on a central shared database. Some collections are "project-driven" meaning that specimens are collected and distributed to answer specific research questions. "General" collections are those that exist to establish a reference collection, that is, not to meet particular research goals but to be available to respond to multiple requests for an assortment of research uses. These individual and networked biobanking systems operate under a variety of business models, usually incorporating some form of partial cost recovery, while requiring at least partial public or government funding. Each has a well-defined biospecimen-access policy in place that specifies requirements that must be met—such as ethical clearance and the expertise to perform the proposed experiments—to obtain samples for research. The success of all of these biobanking models depends on a variety of factors including well-defined goals, a solid business plan, and specimen collections that are developed according to strict quality and operational ...

Roundabout in urban arterials are likely to block roads or generate long queues of vehicles due to the constant changes on urban dynamics near to the interception. Several alternatives to modify the flow pattern or geometry and infrastructure need to be study previously to propose a final design solution of roundabout with traffic issues. In this study, a review of three alternatives to improve the operational traffic are discussed; signalized intersection, turbo-roundabouts and overpass/underpass. In addition, the application of these alternatives is evaluated in a "classic" roundabout located at Tunja city that has a maximum of 3691 Veh/h counted and it is operated in saturated condition. Microsimulation is used from a calibrated model with volume counted, vehicle composition and speeds in the VISSIM software. Results show that signalize the roundabout does not improve the operational traffic (with a reduction on 38% of approach speed) and, the turbo-roundabouts are a mid-term solution that meet the traffic demand on 15 years with a progressively loss of service (with a mean approach speed of 6.4 Km/h at 15 years). The constructions of underpass and overpass show to be the only solution that increase four times the travel speed throw the roundabout and keep acceptable speed at the end of cyclic live of intersection (18.7 Km/h at 20 years).

CONTEXT: Vitamin D inadequacy is common in the adult population of the United States. Although the genetic determinants underlying vitamin D inadequacy have been studied in people of European ancestry, less is known about populations with Hispanic or African ancestry. OBJECTIVE: The Trans-Ethnic Evaluation of Vitamin D (TRANSCEN-D) genomewide association study (GWAS) consortium was assembled to replicate genetic associations with 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] concentrations from the Study of Underlying Genetic Determinants of Vitamin D and Highly Related Traits (SUNLIGHT) meta-analyses of European ancestry and to identify genetic variants related to vitamin D concentrations in African and Hispanic ancestries. DESIGN: Ancestry-specific (Hispanic and African) and transethnic (Hispanic, African, and European) meta-analyses were performed with Meta-Analysis Helper software (METAL). PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS: In total, 8541 African American and 3485 Hispanic American (from North America) participants from 12 cohorts and 16,124 European participants from SUNLIGHT were included in the study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Blood concentrations of 25(OH)D were measured for all participants. RESULTS: Ancestry-specific analyses in African and Hispanic Americans replicated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in GC (2 and 4 SNPs, respectively). An SNP (rs79666294) near the KIF4B gene was identified in the African American cohort. Transethnic evaluation replicated GC and DHCR7 region SNPs. Additionally, the transethnic analyses revealed SNPs rs719700 and rs1410656 near the ANO6/ARID2 and HTR2A genes, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Ancestry-specific and transethnic GWASs of 25(OH)D confirmed findings in GC and DHCR7 for African and Hispanic American samples and revealed findings near KIF4B, ANO6/ARID2, and HTR2A. The biological mechanisms that link these regions with 25(OH)D metabolism warrant further investigation.