This thesis examines how married couples bought and created a modern home for their families in suburban Glasgow between 1945-1975. New homeowners were on the cusp of the middle-classes, buying in a climate of renters. As they progressed through the family lifecycle women’s return to work meant they became more comfortably ensconced within the middle-classes. Engaged with a process of homemaking through consumption and labour, couples transformed their houses into homes that reflected themselves and their social status. The interior of the home was focused on as a site of social relations. Marriage in the suburbs was one of collaboration as each partner performed distinct gender roles. The idea of a shared home was investigated and the story of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ emerged from both testimony and contemporary literature. This thesis considers decision-making, labour and leisure to show the ways in which experiences of home were gendered. What emerged was that women’s work as everyday and mundane was overlooked and undervalued while husband’s extraordinary contributions in the form of DIY came to the fore. The impact of wider culture intruded upon the ‘private’ home as we see they ways in which the position of women in society influences their relationship to the home and their family. In the suburbs of post-war Glasgow women largely left the workforce to stay at home with their children. Mothers popped in and out of each other houses for tea and a blether, creating a homosocial network that was sociable and supportive unique to this time in their lives and to this historical context. Daily life was negotiated within the walls of the modern home. The inter-war suburbs of Glasgow needed modernising to post-war standards of modern living. ‘Modern’ was both an aesthetic and an engagement with new technologies within the house. Both middle and working-class practices for room use were found through the keeping of a ‘good’ or best room and the determination of couples to eat in their small kitchenettes. As couples updated their kitchen, the fitted kitchen revealed contemporary notions of modern décor, as kitchens became bright yellow with blue Formica worktops. The modern home was the evolution of existing ideas of modern combined with new standards of living. As Glasgow homeowners constructed their modern home what became evident was that this was a shared process and as a couple they placed their children central to all aspects of their lives to create not only a modern home, but that this was first and foremost a family home.

by T. L. Johnson ... [et al.]. / Bibliography: p. 106-108. / Cover title. NSF Grant 75-02562.

A field study of the feasibility and the performance of a sustainable drainage technique combined with a renewable energy device to provide heating in a domestic setting was carried out from March 2008 to November 2010 to acquire practical data about the system’s operation. Among all the sustainable drainage techniques, permeable pavement system (PPS) was selected to be applied in this project since this particular technique can be used for driveways and car-parking hard standings, but more specially they can be designed as a tanked system whereby an impermeable membrane is installed at the bottom of the tank in order to hold the rainwater collected as runoff from hard areas and roofs before releasing it in a controlled manner. The renewable energy device applied in this study is a ground source heat pump system (GSHP), which has been found in previous studies to provide a better performance when installed in wet conditions. Based on this, the PPS and the GSHP with horizontal ground heat exchanger (GHE) were integrated in a 350mm deep reservoir under ‘real life’ conditins. The combined system operated in heating mode in a family–sized, three bedrooms detached EcoHouse at the Building Research Establishment Innovation Park, Watford, UK. Monitoring the combined system included taking measurements of the temperature of the conditioned space, the ground around the PPS/GSHP system, and of the ambient air every 10 minutes. Assessing the performance of the PPS/GSHP system involved investigating the effect of extracting heat via the GHE on the ground temperature, the impact of the PPS/GSHP on the thermal profile of the air above the surface of the reservoir, and computing the PPS/GSHP coefficient of performance (CoP). The thesis includes information about the design of the PPS/GSHP system including the structure of the sub-base, types and size of the used aggregate and stone, the depth of the excavated reservoir amongst others, also the technical problems that materialized, largely due to the fact that the PPS/GSHP was installed and operating under real-life circumstances. Results obtained from the study provided evidence for the workability of the combined system in regards of stormwater management and of providing heat to the EcoHouse. However, monitoring the rainwater stored in the reservoir showed that, due to leakage, the top part of the buried coil was not covered with water. The monitoring also revealed that the rainwater surrounding parts of the coil was, in severe weather, frozen. Moreover, highly significant correlations (p<0.01) were calculated for the ambient air and the ground temperature relationships with the CoP. All of these factors resulted in a 1.8 coefficient of performance being obtained. This low figure was related to the shallow depth of the reservoir since it became clear that its ground temperature was greatly influenced by the ambient air temperature. The study also revealed that the evaporation process was prevented from occurring due to the Inbitex™ composite layer, as a result there was no significant effect on cooling the thermal profile of the air near the surface of the pavement. Furthermore, it was concluded that continuous heat extraction from the ground contributed to an underground temperature drop.

As technology becomes ever more pervasive, the challenges of home automation are increasingly apparent. Seamless home control, home monitoring and home programming by the end user have yet to enter the mainstream. This could be attributed to the challenge of developing a fully autonomous and extensible home system that can support devices and technologies of differing protocols and functionalities. In order to offer programming facilities to the user, the underlying rule system must be fully independent, allowing support for current and future devices. Additional challenges arise from the need to detect and handle conflicts that may arise among user rules and yield undesirable results. Non-technical individuals typically struggle when faced with a programming task. It is therefore vital to encourage and ease the process of programming the home. This thesis presents Homer, a home system that has been developed to support three key features of a home system: control, monitoring and programming. Homer supports any third-party hardware or software service that can expose its functionality through Java and conform to the Homer interface. Stand-alone end user interfaces can be written by developers to offer any of Homer's functionality. Where policies (i.e. rules) for the home are concerned, Homer offers a fully independent policy system. The thesis presents a custom policy language, Homeric, that has been designed specifically for writing home rules. The Homer policy system detects overlaps and conflicts among rules using constraint satisfaction and the effect on environment variables. The thesis also introduces the notion of perspectives to ease user interactivity. These have been integrated into Homer to accommodate the range of ways in which a user may think about different aspects and features of their home. These perspectives include location, device type, time and people-oriented points of view. Design guidelines are also discussed to aid end user programming of the home. The work presented in this thesis demonstrates a system that supports control, monitoring and programming of the home. Developers can quickly and easily add functionality to the home through components. Conflicts can be detected amongst rules within the home. Finally, design guidelines and a prototype interface have been developed to allow both technically minded and non-technical people to program their home.

Der Forschungsbericht "Studentisches Wohnen in Dresden 2012" enthält eine aktuelle Analyse des studentischen Wohnungsmarktes in Dresden. In der Studie werden die Angebots- und Nachfragestrukturen, die Wohnmobilität und Wohnbedingungen sowie die Markteinschätzungen aus Sicht der Studierenden analysiert. Auf Grundlage der Ergebnisse werden Handlungsempfehlungen für die Verbesserung des Angebots und der Wohnbedingungen Studierender in Dresden formuliert. Die Untersuchung basiert auf einem Methoden-Mix zu dem u.a. eine standardisierte Online-Befragung von 5.400 Dresdner Studierenden, leitfadengestützte Experteninterviews sowie Datenbankabfragen in Immobilienportalen zählen.:1 Einleitung 2 Studentisches Wohnen 3 Methodische Vorgehensweise 4 Studentisches Wohnen in Dresden 4.1 Entwicklung der Studierendenzahlen in Dresden 4.2 Anbieter studentischer Wohnformen in Dresden 4.3 Wohnstandortverhalten der Dresdner Studierenden 4.4 Wohnformen der Studierenden in Dresden 4.5 Ausstattung und Größe der Wohnungen Dresdner Studierender 4.6 Einkommen und Mietkosten Dresdner Studierender 4.7 Allgemeine Wohnzufriedenheit der Dresdner Studierenden 4.8 Studierende auf dem Dresdner Wohnungsmarkt 4.9 Wohnbedingungen Studierender in Dresden – Eine Zusammenfassung anhand der Wohnformen 5 Handlungsempfehlungen 6 Fazit Literaturverzeichnis

Der Forschungsbericht "Studentisches Wohnen in Dresden 2012" enthält eine aktuelle Analyse des studentischen Wohnungsmarktes in Dresden. In der Studie werden die Angebots- und Nachfragestrukturen, die Wohnmobilität und Wohnbedingungen sowie die Markteinschätzungen aus Sicht der Studierenden analysiert. Auf Grundlage der Ergebnisse werden Handlungsempfehlungen für die Verbesserung des Angebots und der Wohnbedingungen Studierender in Dresden formuliert. Die Untersuchung basiert auf einem Methoden-Mix zu dem u.a. eine standardisierte Online-Befragung von 5.400 Dresdner Studierenden, leitfadengestützte Experteninterviews sowie Datenbankabfragen in Immobilienportalen zählen.

Student Number : 9807768F - MSc (Med) research report - Faculty of Health Sciences / Fanconi anaemia (FA) is an autosomal recessive disorder characterised by aplastic anaemia (AA) and a high risk of developing acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). It is unknown whether heterozygote carriers are also predisposed to developing these disorders. The black South African population group is ideal for FA mutation screening because the presence of a founder mutation, FANCG 637-643, makes screening relatively straight forward. Three individuals with AML (115 screened) and one with AA (78 screened) were found to be heterozygous for the black South African founder mutation. From our data it seems unlikely that this mutation places heterozygous carriers of the mutation at high risk of developing AML or AA. Three children with AA out of 26 screened, were homozygous for the mutation. This finding reiterates the importance of screening all children with AA for FA. The frequency of certain congenital abnormalities in black South African FA patients was compared to patients described by other research groups. The frequencies of the abnormalities were similar to other FANCG cohorts described but significant differences to a group of FA patients from unspecified complementation groups were found. This difference could be because different complementation groups are associated more or less strongly with specific abnormalities. It was found previously that particular congenital abnormalities in FA patients are associated with a poor haematological outcome. We concluded that black South African FANCG patients have a high risk of early development of AA even though they do not have a high frequency of congenital abnormalities.

Le volet applicatif de cette thèse porte sur l'agencement d'un logement destiné à une personne en situation de handicap. L'agencement désigne le choix de la position, de la forme et des dimensions des pièces, des portes et des couloirs. L'agencement est généralement élaboré par un architecte, dans le respect d'un nombre si élevé de contraintes qu'il lui est difficile de parvenir qu'il parvienne à toutes les satisfaire : il y a d'abord des contraintes architecturales évidentes : non recouvrement des pièces, largeur suffisante des couloirs, accessibilité à tout point du lieu à partir de tout autre point, nécessité de placer certaines pièces sur des arrivées ou évacuations … Il y a ensuite les contraintes imposées par le handicap : largeur accrue des couloirs (déplacement en fauteuil), nécessité d'assurer un effort quotidien minimum (lutte contre le vieillissement), limitation des escaliers (asthme sévère), éloignement d'une pièce des murs mitoyens (surdité) .... Et il y a finalement les souhaits exprimés par le futur occupant, par exemple minimiser certains trajets, maximiser l’éloignement entre deux pièces ou imposer l’orientation d’une pièce. D’un point de vue formel, notre travail a consisté à développer d'une part des modèles mathématiques et des méthodes algorithmiques capables de gérer ces contraintes et d'autre part des prototypes logiciels opérationnels. Les méthodes élaborées relèvent de deux approches : l'optimisation d'un agencement conçu par l'architecte et la synthèse d'un agencement sans suggestion initiale de l'architecte. La synthèse d'un plan a été abordée comme un problème de type « bin-packing » (réputé NP-difficile) avec des contraintes additionnelles : les objets à placer - les pièces - ont des tailles variables et ils sont soumis à des contraintes fonctionnelles. La méthode de résolution s'appuie sur un premier modèle mathématique, qui prend la forme d’un programme quadratique (linéarisé par la suite) en variables mixtes. Elle a été appliquée avec succès pour placer les pièces d'un logement, pour les dimensionner, pour déterminer les couloirs assurant une complète accessibilité au logement et pour prendre en compte certaines contraintes imposées par le handicap du futur occupant. Un deuxième modèle mathématique a été élaboré pour le placement des portes et une heuristique a enfin été développée pour affecter l'espace occupé par les couloirs non indispensables aux pièces avoisinantes. La totalité de cette démarche a été programmée dans un prototype logiciel pleinement opérationnel. Le deuxième ensemble de contributions concerne l'optimisation d'un agencement existant. Cette optimisation a été conçue comme un processus itératif enchaînant évaluation et modification (amélioration) d'un agencement. Il est décliné de quatre manières : une métaheuristique de type « recuit simulé » et trois méthodes de type « recherche locale », qui explorent l’espace des solutions en utilisant des voisinages spécialement définis. Cette approche a d'une part permis d’appréhender le caractère multicritère de cette problématique et a d'autre part exigé la mise en œuvre de nombreux algorithmes géométriques. Ces travaux sont implantés dans un deuxième prototype logiciel. Ce projet a nécessité la participation à de nombreuses manifestations au-delà du domaine de l’informatique, nationales et régionales, scientifiques et non-scientifiques, organisées par différents organismes politiques et associatifs travaillant sur la problématique du handicap et de l’accessibilité, afin de bien appréhender les attentes du monde scientifique et socioprofessionnel. Cette phase prospective a été concrétisée par la rédaction de nombreux rapports qui ont alimentés la bibliographie du mémoire de thèse / At an application level, this thesis deals with the layout of an accommodation intended for a disabled person. Determining the layout means choosing the position, shape and dimensions of rooms, doors and corridors. It is usually an architect's job but the complexity is such that it is very unlikely that he succeeds in optimally fulfilling all the constraints: first, there are architectural constraints: no room overlapping, sufficient width for the corridors, accessibility to and from any point, mandatory positioning of some rooms on some areas (e.g. water supply and outlet) … Then, there are constraints imposed by disabilities: enlarged corridors (wheelchairs), mandatory daily amount of efforts (fight against aging), reducing the number of steps (severe asthma), moving a room away from shared walls (deafness)... Finally, there are the wishes expressed by the future occupant, such as minimizing some journeys, maximizing the distance between two rooms or fixing a room's orientation. From a formal point of view, our work has consisted, firstly, in developing mathematical models and algorithmic methods to deal with all these constraints and, secondly, in realizing software prototypes applying these concepts. The tools we propose aim either at optimizing a layout previously designed by an architect or at synthesising a layout without any initial suggestions from the architect. Synthesis has been tackled as bin-packing-type problem (known to be NP-hard) but with additional constraints: the objects to be placed (the rooms) have variable sizes and they are submitted to functional constraints. The resolution is based on a first, initially quadratic and then linearized, mixed integer mathematical model. It has been successfully applied to position and dimension the rooms of an accommodation, to determine corridors allowing a full accessibility to all the rooms and to take into account a number of constraints coming from the disabilities of the future occupant. A second mathematical model has been formulated for the positioning of the doors and, finally, a heuristic method has been designed to assign the space used by useless corridors to adjacent rooms. The whole process has been embedded in a fully operational software. The second set of contributions is about the optimization of an existing layout. This task has been tackled through an iterative process, looping on evaluation and modification (improvement) of an accommodation. It has been implemented in four different ways: a metaheuristic (simulated annealing) and three local-search-type methods, which traverse the solution space by using specific definitions of the neighbourhood. This approach has firstly underlined the multicriteria feature of our problem and, secondly, has required the development of many computational geometry algorithms. All this work is integrated in another functional prototype software. To understand the expectations of the scientific, social and professional worlds, this project has implied to take part to various manifestations which were national or regional, in the computer science domain or in others, scientific or non-scientific, organised by various political or non-political organisations working in the field of disabilities and accessibility. This phase has resulted in many reports which have directly fed into the bibliography of this thesis.