Parametric building development during early design stage

Objectives The objectives of this project were two-fold: • Assess the ease with which current architectural CAD systems supported the use ofparametric descriptions in defining building shape, engineering system performance and cost at the early stages of building design; • Assess the feasibility of implementing a software decision support system that allowed designers to trade-off the characteristics and configuration of various engineering systems to move towards a “global optimum” rather than considering each system in isolation and expecting humans to weigh up all of the costs and benefits. The first stage of the project consisted of using four different CAD systems to define building shells (envelopes) with different usages. These models were then exported into a shared database using the IFC information exchange specifications. The second stage involved the implementation of small computer programs that were able to estimate relevant system parameters based on performance requirements and the constraints imposed by the other systems. These are presented in a unified user interface that extracts the appropriate building shape parameters from the shared database Note that the term parametric in this context refers to the relationships among and between all elements of the building model - not just geometric associations - which will enable the desired coordination.

Sphingosine-1-phosphate mediates proliferation maintaining the multipotency of human adult bone marrow and adipose tissue-derived stem cells

High renewal and maintenance of multipotency of human adult stem cells (hSCs), are a prerequisite for experimental analysis as well as for potential clinical usages. The most widely used strategy for hSC culture and proliferation is using serum. However, serum is poorly defined and has a considerable degree of inter-batch variation, which makes it difficult for large-scale mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) expansion in homogeneous culture conditions. Moreover, it is often observed that cells grown in serum-containing media spontaneously differentiate into unknown and/or undesired phenotypes. Another way of maintaining hSC development is using cytokines and/or tissue-specific growth factors; this is a very expensive approach and can lead to early unwanted differentiation. In order to circumvent these issues, we investigated the role of sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P), in the growth and multipotency maintenance of human bone marrow and adipose tissue-derived MSCs. We show that S1P induces growth, and in combination with reduced serum, or with the growth factors FGF and platelet-derived growth factor-AB, S1P has an enhancing effect on growth. We also show that the MSCs cultured in S1P-supplemented media are able to maintain their differentiation potential for at least as long as that for cells grown in the usual serum-containing media. This is shown by the ability of cells grown in S1P-containing media to be able to undergo osteogenic as well as adipogenic differentiation. This is of interest, since S1P is a relatively inexpensive natural product, which can be obtained in homogeneous high-purity batches: this will minimize costs and potentially reduce the unwanted side effects observed with serum. Taken together, S1P is able to induce proliferation while maintaining the multipotency of different human stem cells, suggesting a potential for S1P in developing serum-free or serum-reduced defined medium for adult stem cell cultures.

User profiling based on folksonomy information in Web 2.0 for personalized recommender systems

Information overload has become a serious issue for web users. Personalisation can provide effective solutions to overcome this problem. Recommender systems are one popular personalisation tool to help users deal with this issue. As the base of personalisation, the accuracy and efficiency of web user profiling affects the performances of recommender systems and other personalisation systems greatly. In Web 2.0, the emerging user information provides new possible solutions to profile users. Folksonomy or tag information is a kind of typical Web 2.0 information. Folksonomy implies the users‘ topic interests and opinion information. It becomes another source of important user information to profile users and to make recommendations. However, since tags are arbitrary words given by users, folksonomy contains a lot of noise such as tag synonyms, semantic ambiguities and personal tags. Such noise makes it difficult to profile users accurately or to make quality recommendations. This thesis investigates the distinctive features and multiple relationships of folksonomy and explores novel approaches to solve the tag quality problem and profile users accurately. Harvesting the wisdom of crowds and experts, three new user profiling approaches are proposed: folksonomy based user profiling approach, taxonomy based user profiling approach, hybrid user profiling approach based on folksonomy and taxonomy. The proposed user profiling approaches are applied to recommender systems to improve their performances. Based on the generated user profiles, the user and item based collaborative filtering approaches, combined with the content filtering methods, are proposed to make recommendations. The proposed new user profiling and recommendation approaches have been evaluated through extensive experiments. The effectiveness evaluation experiments were conducted on two real world datasets collected from Amazon.com and CiteULike websites. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed user profiling and recommendation approaches outperform those related state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, this thesis proposes a parallel, scalable user profiling implementation approach based on advanced cloud computing techniques such as Hadoop, MapReduce and Cascading. The scalability evaluation experiments were conducted on a large scaled dataset collected from Del.icio.us website. This thesis contributes to effectively use the wisdom of crowds and expert to help users solve information overload issues through providing more accurate, effective and efficient user profiling and recommendation approaches. It also contributes to better usages of taxonomy information given by experts and folksonomy information contributed by users in Web 2.0.

Students' perceptions of the relevance of mathematics in engineering

In this paper, we report on the findings of an exploratory study into the experience of students as they learn first year engineering mathematics. Here we define engineering as the application of mathematics and sciences to the building and design of projects for the use of society (Kirschenman and Brenner 2010)d. Qualitative and quantitative data on students' views of the relevance of their mathematics study to their engineering studies and future careers in engineering was collected. The students described using a range of mathematics techniques (mathematics skills developed, mathematics concepts applied to engineering and skills developed relevant for engineering) for various usages (as a subject of study, a tool for other subjects or a tool for real world problems). We found a number of themes relating to the design of mathematics engineering curriculum emerged from the data. These included the relevance of mathematics within different engineering majors, the relevance of mathematics to future studies, the relevance of learning mathematical rigour, and the effectiveness of problem solving tasks in conveying the relevance of mathematics more effectively than other forms of assessment. We make recommendations for the design of engineering mathematics curriculum based on our findings.

designing creative clusters : some indicators

This paper explores how the design of creative clusters as a key strategy in promoting the urban creative economy has played out in Shanghai. Creative Clusters in Europe and North America context have emerged ‘organically’. They developed spontaneously in those cities which went through a period of post-industrial decline. Creative Industries grew up in these cities as part of a new urban economy in the wake of old manufacturing industries. Artists and creative entrepreneurs moved into vacant warehouses and factories and began the trend of ‘creative clusters’. Such clusters facilitate the transfer of tacit knowledge through informal learning, the efficient sourcing of skills and information, competition, collaboration and learning, inter-cluster trading and networking. This new urban phenomenon was soon targeted by local economic development policy in charge of re-generating and re-structuralizing industrial activities in cities. Rising interest from real estate and local economic development has led to more and more planned creative clusters. In the aim of catching up with the world’s creative cities, Shanghai has planned over 100 creative clusters since 2005. Along with these officially designed creative clusters, there are organically emerged creative clusters that are much smaller in scale and much more informal in terms of the management. And they emerged originally in old residential areas just outside the CBD and expand to include French concession the most sort after residential area at the edge of CBD. More recently, office buildings within CBD are made available for creative usages. From fringe to CBD, these organic creative clusters provide crucial evidences for the design of creative clusters. This paper will be organized in 2 parts. In the first part, I will present a case study of 8 ‘official’ clusters (title granted by local govenrment) in Shanghai through which I am hoping to develop some key indicators of the success/failure of creative clusters as well as link them with their physical, social and operational efficacies. In the second part, a variety of ‘alternative’ clusters (organicly formed clusters most of which are not recongnized by the government) supplies with us the possibilities of rethinking the so-called ‘cluster development strategy’ in terms of what kind of spaces are appropriate for use by clusters? Who should manage them and in what format? And ultimately what are their relationship with the rest of the city should be defined?

Enhancing women’s participation in Turkey through digital storytelling

This paper explores the process of introducing Digital Storytelling (DST) workshop practice to Turkey through a project called “Digital Stories from Amargi Women”, which was part of my Ph.D. research in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. In the resulting dissertation, I examined the potential of Digital Storytelling workshop practice as a means to promote agency and self-expression in a feminist activist organization (such as Amargi Women), focusing in particular on whether or not Digital Storytelling can be used as a change agent – as a tool for challenging the idea of a single public sphere in ways that make it more inclusive of women’s participation. In order to explore the issue in depth, my thesis engaged with feminist scholarship’s critiques of the public/private dichotomy, as well as the concept of gender. The conducted workshops, the resulting digital stories, and in-depth interviews were analyzed to seek connections between these topics and narrative identity. The results indicated that the participating women defined new activist usages for digital stories, as well as their overall activated networking habits in the DST workshop settings. Digital Stories from Amargi Women became the first Digital Storytelling project that aimed to enable women’s participation in Turkey through facilitating a co-creative environment where the participants could share their stories and learn digital skills that they could make use of after the workshops.

National testing from an Australian perspective

Introduction This book examines a pressing educational issue: the global phenomenon of national testing in schooling and its vernacular development in Australia. The Australian National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), introduced in 2008, involves annual census testing of students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in nearly all Australian schools. In a variety of ways, NAPLAN affects the lives of Australia’s 3.5 million school students and their families, as well as more than 350,000 school staff and many other stakeholders in education. This book is organised in relation to a simple question: What are the effects of national testing for systems, schools and individuals? Of course, this simple question requires complex answers. The chapters in this edited collection consider issues relating to national testing policy, the construction of the test, usages of the testing data and various effects of testing in systems, schools and classrooms. Each chapter examines an aspect of national testing in Australia using evidence drawn from research. The final chapter by the editors of this collection provides a broader reflection on this phenomenon and situates developments in testing globally...

Comparison of visual status of Iranian military and commercial drivers

Background There is no legal requirement for Iranian military truck drivers to undergo regular visual checkups as compared to commercial truck drivers. Objectives This study aimed to evaluate the impact of drivers’ visual checkups by comparing the visual function of Iranian military and commercial truck drivers. Patients and Methods In this comparative cross-sectional study, two hundred military and 200 commercial truck drivers were recruited and their Visual Acuity (VA), Visual Field (VF), color vision and Contrast Sensitivity (CS) were assessed and compared using the Snellen chart, confrontation screening method, D15 test and Pelli-Robson letter chart, respectively. A questionnaire regarding driving exposure and history of motor-vehicle crashes (MVCs) was also filled by drivers. Results were analyzed using an independent samples t-test, one-way ANOVA (assessing difference in number of MVCs across different age groups), chi-square test and Pearson correlation at statistical significance level of P < 0.05. Results Mean age was 41.6 ± 9.2 for the military truck drivers and 43.4 ± 10.9 for commercial truck drivers (P > 0.05). No significant difference between military and commercial drivers was found in terms of driving experience, number of MVCs, binocular VA, frequency of color vision defects and CS scores. In contrast, the last ocular examination was significantly earlier in military drivers than commercial drivers (P < 0.001). In addition, 4% of military drivers did not meet the national standards to drive as opposed to 2% of commercial drivers. There was a significant but weak correlation between binocular VA and age (r = 0.175, P < 0.001). However, CS showed a significantly moderate correlation with age (r = -0.488, P < 0.001). Conclusions The absence of legal requirement for regular eye examination in military drivers caused the incompetent drivers to be missed in contrast to commercial drivers. The need for scientific revision of VA standard for Iranian drivers is also discussed. The CS measurement in visual checkups of older drivers deserves to be investigated more thoroughly.