Fungal growth in damp or water-damaged buildings worldwide is an increasing problem, which has adverse effects on both the occupants and the buildings. Air sampling alone in moldy buildings does not reveal the full diversity of fungal species growing on building materials. One aim of this study was to estimate the qualitative and quantitative diversity of fungi growing on damp or water-damaged ...

The more technology advances, the more there seems to be a basic human yearning to return to nature. This is reflected in a growing number of designers, architects, and artists who are turning to nature’s example to model uses of new technology. San Francisco architect Charles Lee does just that. Lee is a designer, artist, and researcher with the group Bios Design Collective, a group that works...

gradual increase of the earth's surface temperature can cause many significant changes on the climate of our planet. this problem is progressively increasing. one of the main reasons for this phenomenon is the absorption of the sun's energy and lack of proper reflection of emissions due to man-made activities, one of which is the increase in black surfaces. in this descriptive and cross-section...

The development of LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system makes the acquisition of 3D surface information more convenient and immediate than other geomatics technologies. However, the 3D coordinates of the surface features, such as the corners, edges and planes of buildings, cannot be obtained directly from the LIDAR data because of its blind characteristics. How to detect the feature locat...

LIDAR data contains plenty of height information, while vector maps preserve accurate building boundaries. From the viewpoint of data fusion, we integrate LIDAR data and large-scale vector maps to perform building modeling. The proposed scheme comprises six major steps: (1) preprocessing of LIDAR data and vector maps, (2) extraction of point clouds that belong to a building, (3) construction of...

Advanced stack-ventilated buildings have the potential to consume much less energy for space conditioning than typical mechanically ventilated or air-conditioned buildings. This paper describes how environmental design considerations in general, and ventilation considerations in particular, shape the architecture of advanced naturally ventilated (ANV) buildings. The attributes of simple and adv...

Tits buildings ∆Q(G) of linear algebraic groups G defined over the field of rational numbers Q have played an important role in understanding partial compactifications of symmetric spaces and compactifications of locally symmetric spaces, cohomological properties of arithmetic subgroups and S-arithmetic subgroups of G(Q). Curve complexes C(Sg,n) of surfaces Sg,n were introduced to parametrize b...

There is currently high interest in developing automated methods to assist the updating of map databases. This study presents methods for automatic detection of buildings and changes in buildings from airborne laser scanner and digital aerial image data and shows the potential usefulness of the methods with thorough experiments in a 5 km 2 suburban study area. 96% of buildings larger than 60 m ...

Estimation of the dynamic characteristics of buildings is a key issue in seismic design technology. Since 1957, the Building Research Institute (BRI), Japan, has been operating a network to monitor strong motion in buildings. In this study, dynamic characteristics of 25 actual buildings in the BRI network were estimated by using strong motion records. Acceleration records from two sensors respe...

An approach and strategy for automatic detection of buildings from aerial images using combined image analysis and interpretation techniques is described in this paper. It is undertaken in several steps. A dense DSM is obtained by stereo image matching and then the results of multi-band classification, the DSM, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) are used to reveal preliminary bui...