The influence of the Palestinian sociocultural values in shaping the vernacular architecture of Nablus city

Recently, environmental architecture and sustainable construction has been ranked on top of the worldâ s interests. Making use of natural resources helps in reducing energy consumption and costs associated with the operation of buildings. The current architectural approaches and designs in Palestine are far away from environmental concepts, copying and simulating abroad approaches, without taking into account the culture, climate, and inhabitant's needs. On the contrast, vernacular architecture has achieved environmental concepts and has given suitable approaches and samples - without any need to simulate or copy - which come from people and land. This paper discusses how the Palestinian socio-cultural context shaped the residential vernacular architecture in Palestine, taking the old city of Nablus as a case-study. The research concept depends on analysing and trying to understand the effect of the socio-cultural context on vernacular architecture and trying to reach some rules or understandings of how it works in order to reach a modern environmental dwelling that is suitable to this concept. The research method goes through analysing study cases from the traditional architecture models and the Nablus city is selected as a case study. This analytical and qualitative method can lead to deep understanding for how to benefit from vernacular architecture in Palestine in finding the future environmental residential construction. One of the main findings of this research is to set general and special rules for building sustainable buildings in Palestine from the socio-cultural point view, in order to be a reference for designers, stakeholders, ministry of planning, and municipalities.

Moradias sobredimensionadas dos anos 70‐90 na periferia de Braga: processo de transformação

According to the latest census (2011) covering the Portuguese housing stock, there is a considerable number of sub-occupied buildings and most of them were built before the first Portuguese Thermal Code (RCCTE). In view of the objectives of the European Union (20-20-20), it is necessary to contribute to the rehabilitation of existing buildings by promoting the densification of oversized houses, while complying with up-to-date comfort standards and codes. In this sense, this research is aimed to analyse this problem at the outskirts of Braga, by identifying the type-morphology of oversized buildings, assessing the degree of satisfaction and expectations of both owners and inhabitants and developing and testing a systematic design tool. Through the development of an intervention kit, wich systematizes and priorizes design strategies and solutions, the design team can have the necessary decision-making support tool to improve the spacial design of the building whilst considering energy efficency, sustainability and improvemente of interior environmental quality.

Multithreading RTOS processor design

Tese de Doutoramento Plano Doutoral em Engenharia Eletrónica e de Computadores.

Hybrid hypervisor partially deployed on FPGA

Tese de Doutoramento em Engenharia Eletrónica e Computadores.

Modelling and verifying smell-free architectures with the Archery language

Architectural (bad) smells are design decisions found in software architectures that degrade the ability of systems to evolve. This paper presents an approach to verify that a software architecture is smellfree using the Archery architectural description language. The language provides a core for modelling software architectures and an extension for specifying constraints. The approach consists in precisely specifying architectural smells as constraints, and then verifying that software architectures do not satisfy any of them. The constraint language is based on a propositional modal logic with recursion that includes: a converse operator for relations among architectural concepts, graded modalities for describing the cardinality in such relations, and nominals referencing architectural elements. Four architectural smells illustrate the approach.

The housing evolution of Braga between late antiquity and the early meddle ages

The study of the domestic architecture evolution in Late Antiquity performs a fairly recent research subject within Hispanic historiography and represents one of the most significant results emerging from urban archaeology that has uncovered a relevant and innovative group of data related with the occupation of cities with Roman foundation between the fourth and eight centuries. In Braga the excavations conducted since 1976 identified remains of several domus that have been the object of systematic research studies in the past decade.2 In reality, the vast majority of the city Late Antiquity occupation continued to privilege areas where the previous domus of High Empire foundation were located. They were object of important reforms between the late third/early fourth centuries in a time when Bracara Augusta was elevated to capital of the new Callaecia province and endured an important urban renovation.

Reducciones Jesuiticas en el Chaco, Noroeste y Sur Argentino. Emplazamiento Territorial. Desarrollo Urbano y Arquitectónico entre los siglos XVII y XVIII. Evolución, Funciones y Tipologías. Reductions in the Chaco, Argentine Northwest and South. Territorial emplazan. Architectural and Urban Development between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Evolution, Functions and Typologies.

Las reducciones jesuíticas en Argentina reconocen generalmente un único aporte en la región guaraní. Pero lo cierto es que una cantidad importante de reducciones, equivalente en número con las anteriormente mencionadas, se desarrollaron en el interior del país, fundamentalmente en las regiones del Chaco, noroeste y sur argentino. Muchas de ellas reconocen hoy su continuidad en centros urbanos y otras tan sólo, y en el mejor de los casos, en vestigios arqueológicos. Se propone el análisis de este conjunto desde las primeras incursiones en "misiones volantes" en el siglo XVII hasta la expulsión de los jesuitas en 1767. También se abordarán las modalidades y procesos generadores de centros reduccionales en estas regiones y sus interrelaciones territoriales. Además se pretende analizar sus funciones y morfologías originales, su evolución, traslados y posibles transformaciones posteriores, en las etapas previas al impacto originado ante la ausencia de la Compañía de Jesús. Los resultados incluirán la interpretación de los procesos formativos, con su diversidad de casos, en escalas regionales y locales, la recopilación de cartografía regional y urbana, y la determinación de series tipológicas de formas de trazados y organizaciones de tejidos, tanto en las demarcaciones de origen como en sus remodelaciones y ensanches cuando así correspondiere.

Software for Explicitly Parallel Memory-Centric Processor Architecture

Advances in computer memory technology justify research towards new and different views on computer organization. This paper proposes a novel memory-centric computing architecture with the goal to merge memory and processing elements in order to provide better conditions for parallelization and performance. The paper introduces the architectural concepts and afterwards shows the design and implementation of a corresponding assembler and simulator.

A new toad from western China, by Karl P. Schmidt and Ch'eng-chao Liu.

v.24:no.13(1940)

System analysis of a Peer-to-Peer Video-on-Demand architecture: Kangaroo

Architectural design and deployment of Peer-to-Peer Video-on-Demand (P2PVoD) systems which support VCR functionalities is attracting the interest of an increasing number of research groups within the scientific community; especially due to the intrinsic characteristics of such systems and the benefits that peers could provide at reducing the server load. This work focuses on the performance analysis of a P2P-VoD system considering user behaviors obtained from real traces together with other synthetic user patterns. The experiments performed show that it is feasible to achieve a performance close to the best possible. Future work will consider monitoring the physical characteristics of the network in order to improve the design of different aspects of a VoD system.