Morning with Cows

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Morning with Cows

February 16, 2025
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Statement of Net Position | ($1.3B)*

Milk

Agriculture

General Specifications for Dairy Plants Approved for USDA Inspection and Grading Service

Food Science & Technology / University of California Davis

 


*The UCD Financial Statements — the simple balance sheet showing assets and liabilities — is not easy to find in it crazily overproduced Finance and Business web page.   Perhaps the apparent $1.3B operating loss has since been remediated.  The loss may be absorbed into the larger University of California University System which consists of 23 colleges and universities.

Cultural Resource Properties

February 16, 2025
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University of Chicago

 

 

Books cannot be killed by fire.  People die, but books never die

No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever

— Franklin Roosevelt

 

Many education communities build and maintain cultural resource properties whose safety and sustainability objectives are informed by local adaptations of consensus products developed by the International Code Council (ICC) and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).   We need to understand the ICC and NFPA product suites as a pair.   For most real assets in the education industry  they move “roughly” in tandem even though they are produced by different organizations for a different set of customers.  Sometimes the out-of-step condition between NFPA and ICC permits subject matter experts on technical committees to make the best possible decisions regarding the safety and sustainability agenda of the interest group they represent; but not always.

Occupancy classification is always a first consideration and both the NFPA and the ICC have a claim to some part of this occupancy concept*.   In the ICC suite we find code requirements for many “cultural places of worship” tracking in the following sections of the International Building Code (IBC):

Section 303 Assembly Group A-3

Section 305 Educational Group E

Section 308 Institutional Group I

Note that Sections 305 and 308 recognize the accessory and multi-functional nature of occupancy types in the education industry – i.e child care and adult care function can marge and be an accessory to a place of worship.  The general rule in the IBC is that accessory religious educational rooms and religious auditoriums with occupant loads of less than 100 per room or space are not considered separate occupancies.    Other standards developers are guided by this rule.

"The only thing you absolutely have to know is the location of the library" - Albert Einstein

Close coupled to the IBC for this occupancy class is NFPA 909 Code for the Protection of Cultural Resource Properties – Museums, Libraries, and Places of WorshipFrom the document prospectus:

This code describes principles and practices of protection for cultural resource properties (including, but not limited to, museums, libraries, and places of worship), their contents, and collections, against conditions or physical situations with the potential to cause damage or loss.

• This code covers ongoing operations and rehabilitation and acknowledges the need to preserve culturally significant and character-defining building features and sensitive, often irreplaceable, collections and to provide continuity of operations.

• Principles and practices for life safety in cultural resource properties are outside the scope of this code. Where this code includes provisions for maintaining means of egress and controlling occupant load, it is to facilitate the evacuation of items of cultural significance, allow access for damage limitation teams in an emergency, and prevent damage to collections through overcrowding or as an unintended consequence of an emergency evacuation.

• Library and museum collections that are privately owned and not open to the public shall not be required to meet the requirements of this code.

"The only thing you absolutely have to know is the location of the library" - Albert Einstein

Since we are hard upon release of the 2021 Edition of NFPA 909 let us take a backward look at the current (2017) version of NFPA 909 Code for the Protection of Cultural Resource Properties – Museums, Libraries, and Places of Worship.  Chapter 14 covers “Museums, Libraries and their Collections”.   Chapter 15 covers “Places of Worship”

Free Access Edition NFPA 909

The 2025 Edition is now open for public input.  Let us pick through proposals for the 2021 Edition to inform our approach to its improvement by referencing the technical committee transcripts linked below:

Public Input Report: January 12, 2023

N.B. We find committee response (accepted in principle) to Standards Michigan proposal to articulate conditions in which places of worship and libraries are used as community disaster relief support facilities.  We consider this a modest “code win”.

Circling back to the ICC suite we find elevated interest in hardening community owned facilities to tornadoes, hurricane and floods and other storm related risk in the structural engineering chapters of the International Building Code.

NFPA 909: Code for the Protection of Cultural Resource Properties – Museums, Libraries, and Places of Worship | 2021 Edition

Leadership and facility managers for enterprises of this type are encouraged to contribute obtain their own (free) NFPA public participation account in order to directly participate in the 2025 revision of NFPA 909 by logging in here: https://www.nfpa.org/login.

Public consultation on the First Draft of the 2025 Edition closes January 4, 2024.

This document is also a standing item on our periodic Prometheus, Lively and Fine Arts teleconference.  See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.

Issue: [15-258]

Category: Fire Safety, Public Safety

Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Josh Elvove, Joe DeRosier

*See NFPA 101 Life Safety Code

Labeling of Hazardous Art Materials Act

Property Loss Prevention


LEARN MORE:

Guidelines for the Security of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Other Special Collections, Association of College & Research Libraries, American Library Association, 50 East Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2795.

“A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections,” Malaro, Marie, second edition 1998

“Risk and Insurance Management Manual for Libraries,” Mary Breighner and William Payton, edited by Jeanne Drewes, ALA 2005 ISBN 0-8389-8325-1.

Wisconsin Historic Building Code, Madison, WI:Wisconsin Administrative Code.

 

International Property Maintenance Code

February 16, 2025
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In most jurisdictions the standard of care for operation and maintenance of education facilities is discovered and promulgated by a “fabric” of consensus products developed by a kind of “shadow government” created by a network of non-profit publishers; among them the International Code Council.  The ICC has one of the most dynamic catalogs in the construction industry and today we drill into the the International Property Maintenance Code which completed another revision cycle in 2021.   Operation and maintenance of education facilities is the (much larger) part of #TotalCostofOwnership of the real assets of a school district, college or university.  Public access to most recent revision to the IPMC is linked below:

 2021 International Property Maintenance Code

The transcript of public comment on the 2021 revision provides insight into the back-and-forth among the technical committee experts:

2021 IPMC Group A Public Comment Agenda

Note the concern for swimming pools, radon, light, ventilation and occupancy limits.

The ICC Group A tranche of titles will undergo another cyclic revision starting in 2023.  Since so much of the ICC catalog underlies occupancy safety for education, healthcare and nearly all other aspects of the built environment we track the action on a near-daily basis.  You may join any of our daily colloquia, shown on our CALENDAR, or interact directly with the ICC with the link below:

 cdpACCESS

2024/2025/2026 ICC CODE DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE

The ICC catalog is regarded as the most authoritative for education facility management.  We maintain the IPMC on the standing agenda of our Hammurabi and Interiors colloquia.  See our CALENDAR for the next colloquium; open to everyone.

 

Meeting Point

Issue: [Various]

Category: Architectural, Facility Asset Management, Space Planning

Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Jack Janveja, Richard Robben, Jerry Schulte

More


 

What Is A Standard Drink?

February 15, 2025
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“It’s a fine line between Saturday night

and Sunday morning” – Jimmy Buffett

 

“Rather a bottle in front of me

than a frontal lobotomy” — Some guy

 

Many people are surprised to learn what counts as a “drink”. The amount of liquid in your glass, can, or bottle does not necessarily match up to how much alcohol is actually in your drink.  Even before the United States federal government withdrew from regulating alcohol, the conversation, and degree of agreement and  attitude, remains remarkably regionally specific:

Missouri University of Science & Technology: What is a Standard Drink?

University of South Alabama: What is a Standard Drink?

Stanford University Office of Alcohol Policy and Education

Other nations serve alcohol to students on campus in university owned facilities.

Maynooth University Student Union County Kildare


College students create the ultimate hangover cure


Beer Pong Robot

February 15, 2025
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— 1895 Banjo Paterson

 

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabongUnder the shade of a Coolibah treeAnd he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled“You’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me”
Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing MatildaYou’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with meAnd he sang as he stowed that jumbuck in his tucker bag“You’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me”
….

 

MTRX5700: Experimental Robotics

Fish and Chips and the British Working Class

February 14, 2025
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“Fish and Chips” | Fred Laidler (1918–1988)

Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870-1930

Fish and chips was in many ways the pioneer fast-food industry.  It became an essential component of working-class diet and popular culture in parts of London, and over wide areas of industrial midland and northern England and southern Scotland, in the early decades of the twentieth century…I propose to argue that the fish and chip trade was not only important enough in itself to justify sustained historical analysis, but also that it provides a useful vantage point for examining important changes in British society more generally.”

— John Walken, 1998, Journal of Social History


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