A survey of research and scientific services in East Africa, 1947-56

This "Survey of Research and Scientific Services in East Arica 1947-1956" has been prepared by Dr. E. B. Worthington, who held the post of Scientific Secretary in the Office of the Chief Secretary to the East African Governor's Conference and subsequently in the Administrator's Office of the East Mrica High Commission during the period January, 1947-May, 1951. Dr. Worthington is now Secretary General of the Scientific Council for, Arica South of the Sahara

Predicting the performance of an office under climate change: A study of metrics, sensitivity and zonal resolution

Climate change is expected to have significant impact on the future thermal performance of buildings. Building simulation and sensitivity analysis can be employed to predict these impacts, guiding interventions to adapt buildings to future conditions. This article explores the use of simulation to study the impact of climate change on a theoretical office building in the UK, employing a probabilistic approach. The work studies (1) appropriate performance metrics and underlying modelling assumptions, (2) sensitivity of computational results to identify key design parameters and (3) the impact of zonal resolution. The conclusions highlight the importance of assumptions in the field of electricity conversion factors, proper management of internal heat gains, and the need to use an appropriately detailed zonal resolution. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The role of adaptive thermal comfort in the prediction of the thermal performance of a modern mixed-mode office building in the UK under climate change

Climate change is becoming a serious issue for the construction industry, since the time scales at which climate change takes place can be expected to show a true impact on the thermal performance of buildings and HVAC systems. In predicting this future building performance by means of building simulation, the underlying assumptions regarding thermal comfort conditions and the related heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) control set points become important. This article studies the thermal performance of a reference office building with mixedmode ventilation in the UK, using static and adaptive thermal approaches, for a series of time horizons (2020, 2050 and 2080). Results demonstrate the importance of the implementation of adaptive thermal comfort models, and underpin the case for its use in climate change impact studies. Adaptive thermal comfort can also be used by building designers to make buildings more resilient towards change. © 2010 International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA).

Long Distance Wireless Networking for Site - Office Data Communications

Effective data communications between the project site and decision making office can be critical for the success of a construction project. It allows convenient access to centrally stored information and allows centrally located decision makers to remotely monitor the site and collect data in real-time. However, high bandwidth, flexible data communication networks, such as wired local area networks, can often be time-consuming and costly to deploy for such purposes especially when project sites (dams, highways, etc.) are located in rural, undeveloped areas where networking infrastructure is not available. In such construction sites, wireless networking could reliably link the construction site and the decision-making office. This paper presents a case study on long-distance, site – office wireless data communications. The purpose was to investigate the capability of wireless technology in exchanging construction data in a fast and efficient manner and in allowing site personnel to interact and share knowledge and data with the office staff. This study took place at the University of Michigan’s campus where performance, reliability, and cost/benefit tests were performed. The indoor and outdoor tests performed demonstrated the suitability of this technology for office-site data communications and exposed the need for more research to further improve the reliability and data handling of this technology.

降雨条件下碎石土滑坡稳定性研究

Debris Landslide is one of the types of landslides with the widest distribution, largest quantity, and the closest relationship with engineering construction. It is also one of the most important types of landslides that can cause disaster. This kind of landslide often occurs in the loose slopes which are made up of loose congeries formed by earth filling, residual soil, slope wash, dilapidation, landslide or full weathered material of hard rock. Rainfall is always the chief inducing factor of debris Landslide. Therefore, to research stability of debris Landslide during rainfall not only has important theoretical significance for understanding developing law and deformation and failure mechanism of debris landslide, but also has important practical significance for investigating, appraising, forecasting, preventing and controlling debris landslides. This thesis systematically summarized the relationships between rainfall and landslide, the method to survey water table in the landslides, the deformation and failure mechanism of debris landslide, and the progress in the stability analysis of landslides based on the analyses of data collected widely at home and abroad. The problems in the study of the stability of debris landslide during rainfall was reviewed and discussed. Due to the complicated geological conditions and the random rainfall conditions, the research on the landslides' stability must be based on engineering geological qualitative analysis. Through the collection of the data about the Panxi region and the Three Gorges Reservoir region, the author systematically summarized the engineering geological conditions, hydro-geological condition, distribution characteristics of stress field in the slope, physical and mechanical properties and hydro-mechanical properties of debris. In the viewpoint of dynamics of soil water and hydromechanics, physical process of rainfall to supply groundwater of debris landslides can be divided into two phases, i.e. non-saturated steady infiltrating phase and saturated unsteady supplying phase. The former can be described by mathematical model of surface water infiltration while the latter can be described by equivalent continuous medium model of groundwater seepage. With regard to specific hydrological geology system, we can obtain the dynamic variation law of water content, water table, landslide stability of rock and soil mass, along with quantity and duration of rainfall after the boundary condition on hydrological geology has been ascertained. This is a new way to study the response law of groundwater in the landslides during rainfall. After wet face of rock and soil mass connects with ground water table, the raising of water table will occur due to the supply of rainfall. Then interaction between ground water and rock and soil mass will occur, such as the action of physics, water, chemistry and mechanics, which caused the decrease of shearing strength of sliding zone. According to the action of groundwater on rock and soil mass, a concise mechanical model of debris landslide’s deformation was established during rainfall. The static equilibrium condition of landslide mass system was achieved according to the concise mechanical model, and then the typical deformation and failure process and failure mode of debris landslide during rainfall were discussed. In this thesis, the former limiting equilibrium slice method was modified and improved based on shearing strength theory of , a stability analysis program of debris landslide was established and developed taking account of the saturated-unsaturated seepage, by introducing the shearing strength theory of unsaturated soil mass made by (1978). The program has reasonable data storage and simple interface and is easy to operate, and can be perfectly used to carry out sensitivity analysis of influencing factors of landslides' stability, integrated with the program of Office Excel. The design of drainage engineering are always bases on empirical methods and is short of effective quantitative analysis and appraise, therefore, the conception of critical water table of debris landslide was put forward. For debris landslides with different kinds of slide face in the engineering practice, a program to search the critical water table of debris landslide was developed based on native groundwater table. And groundwater table in the slope should be declined below the critical water table in the drainage works, so the program can be directly used to guide drainage works in the debris landslide. Taking the slope deformation body in the back of former factory building of Muli Shawan hydroelectric power station as an example, a systematic and detailed research on debris landslides' stability during rainfall was researched systematically, the relationship among quantity of rainfall, water table and stability of slope was established, the debris landslides' stability in process of rainfall from dynamic viewpoint was analyzed and researched.

Functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation by a robot scientist

King R. D., Whelan, K. E., Jones, F. M., Reiser, P. G. K., Bryant, C. H., Muggleton, S., Kell, D. B. and Oliver, S. G. (2004) Functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation by a robot scientist. Nature 427 (6971) p247-252

An ontology for a Robot Scientist

Soldatova, L., Clare, A., Sparkes, A. and King, R. D. (2006) An ontology for a robot scientist. Bioinformatics 2006 22: 464-471