A pleasant walking environment is a precondition for living in a sustainable city. Appropriate street design can increase quality and quantity of walking. However, the adequacy and quality of physical elements as the most significant components of street can seriously affect walkability in the streets. The objective of this study was to critically assess the walkability level in terms of physical elements of Mawlawi Street, a famous commercial street located in the city center of Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. The qualitative research based on interview with locals, direct observation and quantitative research via questionnaire with pedestrians were conducted in this study. First, site observation was carried out through PEDS (Pedestrian Environment Data Scan) audit tool and the taking of photographs in order to observe the streetscape features. In this regard, four criteria as environment, pedestrian facility, road attributes, walking environment, and subjective assessment were considered as well serving the purpose of providing a broad direction about streetscape features. Then, a 5 point Likert scale questionnaire with pedestrians was conducted to triangulate the findings from observation. Later on, the findings were validated through an interview with locals regarding their subjective ideas about those criteria. The study showed that inadequate and poor quality of street’s physical elements changed the street to an unsafe and uncomfortable environment for walking with weak and low level of street connectivity and accessibility for pedestrians.

Currently, home-based computing workspaces have developed substantially all over the world, especially in Malaysia. This growing trend attracts computer workers to run a business from their residential units. Hence, visual comfort needs to be considered in addition to thermal comfort for home workers in their residential working rooms. While such rooms are always occupied with furniture, the layout of the furniture may influence the indoor daylighting distribution. Several various furniture layouts can be arranged in a residential working room. However, to have better generalisation, this study focused on the impacts of mostly-used-furniture-layouts (MUFLs) on indoor daylighting performance in residential working rooms. The field measurement was conducted in a typically furnished room under a tropical sky to validate the results of the simulation software under different sky conditions. Then, daylight ratio (DR), as a quantitative daylighting variable, and the illuminance uniformity ratio (IUR), CIE glare index (CGI), and Guth visual comfort probability (GVCP), as qualitative daylighting variables, were analysed through simulation experiments. In conclusion, by changing the furniture layout, daylight uniformity recorded the highest fluctuations in the case room among all variables. While various furniture layouts, in a residential working room in the tropics, may even slightly reduce the extreme indoor daylight quantity, they can worsen the indoor daylight quality compared to an unfurnished space. The paper shows that furniture as an interior design parameter cannot help to improve tropical daylighting performance in a building.

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Nowadays, high-rise residential apartments (HRRA) are developing very fast in major urban areas in Malaysia. However, the layouts of these apartment units seem to be too typical and lacking certain contextual socio-environmental considerations. A residential unit accommodates more than just rooms. There are distinct spaces with various Use-Territories (UTs) inside every room created by furniture layout. During the design stage, usually less importance is given to UTs. In search of their impact, the objectives of this study were firstly to identify the most popular furniture with their approximate dimensions, secondly to find their location in terms of distance from window, and thirdly, to identify typologies of furniture layouts in terms of UTs. Based on a questionnaire survey distributed among 98 HRRA residents in the city of Johor Bahru, the conceptual furnished plans of studied rooms were drawn. That was followed by a qualitative categorization carried out to extract the typologies of mostly-used UTs. Four typologies for living room and six of that for bedroom were identified through comparative analysis. The study showed that the social behavior of occupants in terms of arranging UT may be against their indoor environmental condition of daylighting. The significance of the study lies in the fact that in a tropical country like Malaysia with abundance of daylight but associated with glare, thermal heat gain, and low air movement, social needs can bend the users' decisions to arrange pre-conceived convention of UTs in habitable rooms. Therefore, designing layouts or orienting habitable rooms should need more investigation.

<b>Background: </b>Earlier evidence on the association between dietary PUFAs and risk of diabetes has been conflicting.<b> </b><b></b> <p><b>Purpose:</b> To quantitatively summarize previous studies on the association between dietary LA intake, its biomarkers, and the risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in the general population.</p> <p><b>Data source:</b> PubMed/Medline, Scopus, and ISI Web of Science until 24 October 2020, and reference lists of all related articles, and key journals.</p> <p><b>Study selection: </b>Prospective cohort studies that examined the associations of LA with the risk of T2DM in adults.</p> <p><b>Data synthesis:</b> The inverse variance method was applied to calculate summary relative risk (RR) of LA intake and its biomarkers, and dose-response associations was modeled using restricted cubic splines. Twenty-three publications, covering a total of 31 prospective cohorts, were included; these studies included 297,685 participants (22,639 incident diabetes cases) with dietary intake assessment and 84,171 participants (18,458 incident diabetes cases) with biomarker measurements. High intake of LA was associated with a 6% lower risk of T2DM (summary relative risk (RR): 0.94, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.90, 0.99;<i> I²</i>=48.5%). In the dose-response analysis, each 5% increment in energy from LA intake was associated with a 10% lower risk of T2DM. There was also evidence of a linear association between LA intake and diabetes, with the lowest risk at highest intakes. The summary RR for diabetes per SD increment in LA concentrations in adipose tissue/blood compartments was 0.85 (95%CI: 0.80, 0.90; <i>I²</i>=66.2%). The certainty of the evidence was assessed as moderate.</p> <p><b>Limitation:</b> Observational design of studies included in the analyses.</p> <p><b>Conclusions:</b> We found that a high intake of dietary LA and elevated concentrations of LA in the body were both significantly associated with a lower risk of T2DM. These findings support dietary recommendations to consume dietary LA.</p>