Strategies for the Repair and Re-use of Unreinforced Masonry in Eastern Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings constitute a substantial percentage of existing structures across the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada. While some of these structures have remained in continuous use as residential structures, many of those built for non-residential purposes do not conform to contemporary building guidelines or design codes. They often have inadequate resistance to lateral loading due to low-intensity earthquakes or settlement. With progressive material deterioration over decades and a frequent lack of maintenance, retrofitting of these structures is often necessary for continued occupancy and adaptation for new uses. Many retrofit systems use steel and concrete to supplant existing masonry walls and create auxiliary or substitute loadbearing systems to handle both vertical and lateral loads. In such cases, masonry elements are retained for historic or aesthetic value, but they are largely superseded by a new structural frame. This approach is invasive, materially intensive and costly, and it is seldom suitable for most URM buildings, particularly the workaday (non-listed) buildings that are frequently taken out of use. By taking an alternative approach, the research here aims to repurpose existing masonry buildings that are unlikely to be preserved for architectural value alone. These anonymous structures account for a large quantity of the material and energy embodied in current building stocks, and extending their service life has substantial benefits from carbon emissions and urban regeneration to heritage and housing supply.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".