February 16, 2024: North Shore Medical Center abruptly closes neo-natal, labor and delivery units
United States National Institute of Health Gene Map
“In 1970, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published a famous book, The Population Bomb, in which he described a disastrous future for humanity:
‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.’
That prediction turned out to be very wrong, and in this interview American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt tells how we are in fact heading toward the opposite problem: not enough people. For decades now, many countries have been unable to sustain a #population replacement birth rate, including in Western Europe, South Korea, Japan, and, most ominously, China. The societal and social impacts of this phenomenon are vast. We discuss those with Eberstadt as well as some strategies to avoid them.”
Out take [35:22]:
“…All right this gets us right to the heart of of your essay and of the matter quoting you yet again the single best predictor for National fertility rates happens to be wanted family size as reported by women now you note there are polls that ask women how many children they’d like and you know that this doesn’t correlate perfectly with birth rates but it’s the best indicator in one sense this is a reassuring even heartening finding it highlights the agency at the very heart of our Humanity…
[“You’re talking about free will there people choosing their family size but if we permit the non-material realm of life to figure into our inquiry we may conclude that proposals to revive the American birth rate through subsidies vastly underestimate the challenge the challenge May ultimately prove to be civilizational in nature”]
okay so I look at first of all that hits like a two by four — civilizational in nature — and on the one hand I think to myself wait a minute aren’t we all supposed to be delighted that in this modern world women are in a position to participate in the workforce they’re in a position to choose more carefully more explicitly more intentionally the number of children they’d like to have aren’t we supposed to believe that that’s a wonderful thing and that releasing that many women to the workforce should increase the dynamism and growth of our [economy]…and all that…good, good, good…”
At least twice a year, and during performances with flame effects, public safety departments in colleges and universities have an elevated concern about campus citizen safety, and the safety of the host community, when fireworks are used for celebration. We find very rigorous prohibitions against the use of fireworks, weapons and explosives on campus. Education and enforcement usually falls on facility and operation campus safety units.
That much said, we follow development, but do not advocate in NFPA 1123 Code for Fireworks Display, because it lies among a grouping of titles that set the standard of care for many college and university public safety departments that sometimes need to craft prohibitions with consideration for the business purposes of entertainment and celebration in education facilities. NFPA 1123 is not a long document — only 22 pages of core text — but it contains a few basic considerations for display site selection, clearances and permitting that campus public safety departments will coordinate with the host community. It references NFPA 1126, Standard for the Use of Pyrotechnics Before a Proximate Audience and NFPA 160 Standard for the Use of Flame Effects Before an Audience.
Something to keep an eye on. The home page for this code is linked below:
NFPA 1123 Code for Fireworks Display
For a sense of the technical discussions, transcripts of two developmental stages are linked below:
Public comment on 2026 Edition proposed revisions is receivable until May 30, 2024.
We maintain this title on our periodic Prometheus colloquium. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting.
Issue: [16-134]
Category: Public Safety
Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Jack Janveja, Richard Robben
More
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International Building Code: Group A Model Building Codes: 2024/2025/2026 Development Cycle
Safety and sustainability for any facility begins with an understanding of who shall occupy the built environment and how. University settings, with mixed-use phenomenon arising spontaneously and temporarily, often present challenges. Educational communities are a convergent settings for families; day care facilities among them. First principles regarding occupancy classifications for day care facilities appear in Section 308 of the International Building Code, Institutional Group I; linked below:
Section 308 | International Building Code
The ICC Institutional Group I-4 classification includes buildings and structures occupied by more than five persons of any age who received custodial care for fewer than 24 hours per day by persons other than parents or guardian, relatives by blood, marriage or adoption, and in a place other than the home of the person cared far. This group includes both adult and child day care.
We maintain focus on child day care. Many educational communities operate child day care enterprises for both academic study and/or as auxiliary (university employee benefit) enterprises.
Each of the International Code Council code development groups fetch back to a shared understanding of the nature of the facility; character of its occupants and prospective usage patterns.
The Group B developmental cycle ended in December 2019. The 2021 revision of the International Building code is in production now, though likely slowed down because of the pandemic. Ahead of the formal, market release of the Group B tranche of titles, you can sample the safety concepts in play during this revision with an examination of the documents linked below:
2019 GROUP B PROPOSED CHANGES TO THE I-CODES ALBUQUERQUE COMMITTEE ACTION HEARINGS
2019 REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ACTION HEARINGS ON THE 2018 EDITIONS OF THE GROUP B INTERNATIONAL CODES
Search on the terms “day care” and “daycare” to get a sample of the prevailing concepts; use of such facilities as storm shelters, for example.
We encourage our safety and sustainability colleagues to participate directly in the ICC Code Development process. We slice horizontally through the disciplinary silos (“incumbent verticals”) created by hundreds of consensus product developers every week and we can say, upon considerable authority that the ICC consensus product development environment is one of the best in the world. Privately developed standards (for use by public agencies) is a far better way to discover and promulgate leading practice than originating technical specifics from legislative bodies. CLICK HERE to get started. Contact Kimberly Paarlberg (kpaarlberg@iccsafe.org) for more information.
There are competitor consensus products in this space — Chapter 18 Day-Care Occupancies in NFPA 5000 Building Construction and Safety Code, for example; a title we maintain the standing agenda of our Model Building Code teleconferences. It is developed from a different pool of expertise under a different due process regime. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
Issue: [18-166]
Category: Architectural, Healthcare Facilities, Facility Asset Management
Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Jim Harvey, Richard Robben
Several names for this occupancy class:
Robert A. M. Stern is an American architect, educator, and author known for his contributions to the field of architecture, urbanism, and design. Stern has been particularly influential in shaping the aesthetics of educational campuses through his architectural practice and academic involvement. Here are some key aspects of his approach to the aesthetics of educational campuses that attract philanthropic legacies:
“The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer
than those offered by today’s mass living habits.”
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn
History of Western Civilization Told Through the Acoustics of its Worship Spaces
We will spend most of our time this week preparing responses to the actions taken by technical committees at the April meetings; with our abiding interest in the proposals that affect the physical character of education settlements (K-12 schools, colleges and universities, university-affiliated research and clinical delivery networks).
The largest share of safety and sustainability concepts relevant to our SAFER-SIMPLER-LOWER COST-LONGER LASTING priorities appear in ICC’s Group A tranche of titles. Comments on Committee Actions taken on the April meetings in Atlanta will be received until July 8th — including own proposals for performance-based building interior power chain design.
We will use the transcripts linked in the Group A Model Codes link below
The language “code writers and vote getters”* use to perform their work can be confounding and supports the assertion that some safety and sustainability concepts can only be understood by experienced practitioners in context. It takes decades to fully understand the ebb and flow of ideas. That is one of the reasons we host daily colloquia — in addition to the obligation to respect intellectual property rights of standards setting organizations; a great deal of content is unstable and provisional. Unstable and provisional is the nature of leading practice discovery and promulgation.
As a point of origin for most safety and sustainability concepts for sport occupancies among US-based standards setting organizations we start with the most widely referenced building code bibliography in the United States:
2024 International Building Code: Chapter 3 Occupancy Classification and Use
Education communities have buildings, pathways and infrastructure in all of the groups identified in this chapter. We use the term “sport” to describe recreational and competitive athletic activity for all age groups. Some concepts span across all three groupings. Note the following:
Structural support for sport lighting
Sport arena lighting allowances
Television broadcast lighting requirements
Temporary special event structures
Athletic equipment hazard classification
Plumbing in arenas
Bleachers
Access
Use of arenas for disaster management
…And so on…
Today we pick through the transcripts of the 2021 ICC Code Development Cycle (Group A)
2021 REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ACTION HEARINGS ON THE 2021 EDITIONS OF THE GROUP A INTERNATIONAL CODES
Keep in mind that the Group A titles are near the end of their development cycle (CLICK HERE). Next up, Hearings on the Group A tranche in September. We will post the link to the webcast.
We maintain sport facility literature on the standing agenda of our periodic Sport colloquium when we pull together specifics relevant to the safety and sustainability agenda of the final fiduciary in education communities — typically the tax payer or family. There are many, many more technologies that figure into these spaces; getting occupancy classification is the best place to start since it informs the way all other standards setting organizations develop their literature. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting.
ARCHIVE:
2021/2022 ICC CODE DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE
2018 GROUP A PUBLIC COMMENT AGENDA | OCTOBER 24 – 31, 2018 | RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
2019 GROUP B PROPOSED CHANGES TO THE I-CODES ALBUQUERQUE COMMITTEE ACTION HEARINGS
2019 REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ACTION HEARINGS ON THE 2018 EDITIONS OF THE GROUP B INTERNATIONAL CODES
*A term of art we use to distinguish stakeholders who are effective in gathering data and persuading technical committees to improve consensus products. The most influential voices tend to have an elevated hourly consulting rate. The expertise of “code writers and vote-getters” is distinct from the expertise processes and administration. The private standards domain in most nations is top-heavy with administration.
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwB pic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
— USPTO (@uspto) July 13, 2023
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