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Building commissioning (Cx) is a process for assuring efficient building operations that can be applied to new construction and existing buildings, resulting in energy and non-energy benefits. Quantifying the benefits of commissioning is challenging, but a 2009 study of 643 commercial buildings provided a solid initial data set to which we added 839 additional buildings for a significantly expanded and updated meta-analysis representing 34.7 million square meters (373 million square feet) of floor area. Since 2009 the commissioning industry has continued to grow, driven by building codes, utility programs, and rising awareness of commissioning benefits. In parallel, building controls have become more sophisticated, and analytics software has emerged to assist with commissioning. We find that delivery mechanism and market segment are key determinants of outcomes, although significant and cost-effective savings are found across the spectrum. Median primary energy savings for Cx projects in existing buildings ranged from 5 percent for those conducted under utility programs, 9 percent for monitoring-based commissioning utility programs (i.e., augmented with submetering and diagnostics), and 14 percent for Cx projects outside of utility programs. Across all project types, median savings ranged from 3 percent for the lodging market segment to 16 percent for public order and safety facilities. Outcomes did not vary significantly by building size or by market segment. Energy savings are rarely estimated for new construction commissioning. We found that the median costs of Cx were lower for the 2018 sample than for the 2009 sample—$2.85 per square meter ($0.26 per square foot) for existing buildings (a 33 percent reduction) and $8.78 per square meter ($0.82 per square foot) for new construction (a reduction of almost 50 percent). The median simple payback time for existing buildings was 1.7 years, with a 25th–75th percentile range of 0.8–3.5 years. This article summarizes these and other key findings, and discusses how the 2018 data reflects shifts in commissioning practice and outcomes.

Current theories about the significance of annotations in literary studies are based primarily on assumptions developed in print culture about verbal texts. In these textual theories, the text is typically present, authorized, and centralized as the ideal text for an ideal reader, and to annotate is to add authorized comments in a sociotechnical system that includes publication, dissemination, and reception. To audiate is to imagine a song that's not playing. In music learning theory, audiation is based on the concept that the musician learns to play music by developing their own musical aptitude, her individual interpretation of a musical score based on her particular experience of the music. This short article introduces audiation as an alternate theoretical framing for articulating the significance of personal literary annotations. Comparing commentary on psalms in the Middle Ages to IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) web annotations, we use the concept of audiation to situate annotations within literary study in terms of a more capacious understanding of the individual's interpretation of text and of the reading experience as part of an unauthorized, distributed, and decentralized system. By bringing together theories and technologies of annotation with sound, we offer the concept of audiated annotations as a means to re-evaluate modes of access, discovery, and analysis of cultural objects in digital sound studies. This short article introduces audiation as an alternate theoretical framing for articulating the significance of personal literary annotations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]