A study on intelligent building models

Mathematical models devoted to different aspects of building studies and brought about a significant shift in the way we view buildings. From this background a new definition of building has emerged known as intelligent building that requires integration of a variety of computer-based complex systems. Research relevant to intelligent continues to grow at a much faster pace. This paper is a review of different mathematical models described in literature, which make use of different mathematical methodologies, and are intended for intelligent building studies without complex mathematical details. Models are discussed under a wide classification. Mathematical abstract level of the applied models is detailed and integrated with its literature. The goal of this paper is to present a comprehensive account of the achievements and status of mathematical models in intelligent building research. and to suggest future directions in models.

Visual practices and the objects of design

Recent interest in material objects - the things of everyday interaction - has led to articulations of their role in the literature on organizational knowledge and learning. What is missing is a sense of how the use of these 'things' is patterned across both industrial settings and time. This research addresses this gap with a particular emphasis on visual materials. Practices are analysed in two contrasting design settings: a capital goods manufacturer and an architectural firm. Materials are observed to be treated both as frozen, and hence unavailable for change; and as fluid, open and dynamic. In each setting temporal patterns of unfreezing and refreezing are associated with the different types of materials used. The research suggests that these differing patterns or rhythms of visual practice are important in the evolution of knowledge and in structuring social relations for delivery. Hence, to improve their performance practitioners should not only consider the types of media they use, but also reflect on the pace and style of their interactions.

Community mix, affordable housing and metropolitan planning strategy in Melbourne

Income segregation across Melbourne’s residential communities is widening, and at a pace faster than in some other Australian cities. The widening gap between Melbourne’s rich and poor communities raises fears about concentrations of poverty and social exclusion, particularly if the geography of these communities is such that they and their residents are increasingly isolated from urban services and employment centres. Social exclusion in our metropolitan areas and the government responses to it are commonly thought to be the proper domain of social and economic policy. The role of urban planning is typically neglected, yet it helps shape the economic opportunities available to communities in its attempts to influence the geographical location of urban services, infrastructure and jobs. Under the current metropolitan strategy ‘Melbourne 2030’ urban services and transport infrastructure are to be concentrated within Principal Activity Centres spread throughout the metropolitan area and it is the intention that lower-income households should have ready access to these activity centres. However, the Victorian state government has few housing policy instruments to achieve this goal and there are fears that community mix may suffer as house prices and rents are bid up in the vicinity of Principal Activity Centres, and lower-income households are displaced. But are these fears justified by the changing geography of house prices in the metropolitan region? This is the key research question addressed in this paper which examines whether the Victorian practice of placing reliance on the market to deliver affordable housing, while intervening to promote a more compact pattern of urban settlement, is effective.

Change & flexibility: the role of serviced office space in corporate real estate portfolios and office markets

With the increasing pace of change, organisations have sought new real estate solutions which provide greater flexibility. What appears to be required is not flexibility for all uses but appropriate flexibility for the volatile, risky and temporal part of a business. This is the essence of the idea behind the split between the core and periphery portfolio. The serviced office has emerged to fill the need for absolute flexibility. This market is very diverse in terms of the product, services and target market. It has grown and gained credibility with occupiers and more recently with the property investment market. Occupiers similarly use this space in a variety of ways. Some solely occupy serviced space while others use it to complement their more permanent space. It therefore appears that the market is fulfilling the role of providing periphery space for at least some of the occupiers. In all instances the key to this space is a focus on financial and tenurial flexibility which is not provided by other types of business space offered.

Building the foundations for a market-oriented planning system in Bulgaria

Planning is highly conditioned by the relationships between the market, state and politics. This becomes particularly clear in looking at the changes taking place in the countries of the former Communist block as they attempt to establish a new set of relationships. The old power structures have been dislodged and old laws discarded. This paper examines the situation in Bulgaria and explores the preconditions for setting up a new planning system there. The first section outlines the political changes since 1989 and shows how political instability has effected the pace of change. The establishment of a market in land and property is a second precondition for the planning system there and moves in this direction are presented, including restitution policies. Finally the issues raised by the early attempts towards a new planning system are discussed. This paper is the first of a series looking at the countries of Eastern Europe and the author would welcome comments from others working in this field.

Information and Communications for Engineers

Information and its communication is one of the most important areas in the modern world, and its developments are advancing at an ever increasing pace. To be able to assess and evaluate the importance of these developments, an understanding of the basic principles behind them is essential for the student of engineering. This book presents these principles in a coherent and understandable manner while at the same time ensuring that the arguments are based on sound scientific theory.

Detection and attribution of climate change: a regional perspective

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report, published in 2007 came to a more confident assessment of the causes of global temperature change than previous reports and concluded that ‘it is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent except Antarctica.’ Since then, warming over Antarctica has also been attributed to human influence, and further evidence has accumulated attributing a much wider range of climate changes to human activities. Such changes are broadly consistent with theoretical understanding, and climate model simulations, of how the planet is expected to respond. This paper reviews this evidence from a regional perspective to reflect a growing interest in understanding the regional effects of climate change, which can differ markedly across the globe. We set out the methodological basis for detection and attribution and discuss the spatial scales on which it is possible to make robust attribution statements. We review the evidence showing significant human-induced changes in regional temperatures, and for the effects of external forcings on changes in the hydrological cycle, the cryosphere, circulation changes, oceanic changes, and changes in extremes. We then discuss future challenges for the science of attribution. To better assess the pace of change, and to understand more about the regional changes to which societies need to adapt, we will need to refine our understanding of the effects of external forcing and internal variability

Computationally efficient induction of classification rules with the PMCRI and J-PMCRI frameworks

In order to gain knowledge from large databases, scalable data mining technologies are needed. Data are captured on a large scale and thus databases are increasing at a fast pace. This leads to the utilisation of parallel computing technologies in order to cope with large amounts of data. In the area of classification rule induction, parallelisation of classification rules has focused on the divide and conquer approach, also known as the Top Down Induction of Decision Trees (TDIDT). An alternative approach to classification rule induction is separate and conquer which has only recently been in the focus of parallelisation. This work introduces and evaluates empirically a framework for the parallel induction of classification rules, generated by members of the Prism family of algorithms. All members of the Prism family of algorithms follow the separate and conquer approach.

The maximum rate of mammal evolution

How fast can a mammal evolve from the size of a mouse to the size of an elephant? Achieving such a large transformation calls for major biological reorganization. Thus, the speed at which this occurs has important implications for extensive faunal changes, including adaptive radiations and recovery from mass extinctions. To quantify the pace of large-scale evolution we developed a metric, clade maximum rate, which represents the maximum evolutionary rate of a trait within a clade. We applied this metric to body mass evolution in mammals over the last 70 million years, during which multiple large evolutionary transitions occurred in oceans and on continents and islands. Our computations suggest that it took a minimum of 1.6, 5.1, and 10 million generations for terrestrial mammal mass to increase 100-, and 1,000-, and 5,000- fold, respectively. Values for whales were down to half the length (i.e., 1.1, 3, and 5 million generations), perhaps due to the reduced mechanical constraints of living in an aquatic environment. When differences in generation time are considered, we find an exponential increase in maximum mammal body mass during the 35 million years following the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event. Our results also indicate a basic asymmetry in macroevolution: very large decreases (such as extreme insular dwarfism) can happen at more than 10 times the rate of increases. Our findings allow more rigorous comparisons of microevolutionary and macroevolutionary patterns and processes. Keywords: haldanes, biological time, scaling, pedomorphosis

Progress in the genetics of common obesity and type 2 diabetes

The prevalence of obesity and diabetes, which are heritable traits that arise from the interactions of multiple genes and lifestyle factors, continues to rise worldwide, causing serious health problems and imposing a substantial economic burden on societies. For the past 15 years, candidate gene and genome-wide linkage studies have been the main genetic epidemiological approaches to identify genetic loci for obesity and diabetes, yet progress has been slow and success limited. The genome-wide association approach, which has become available in recent years, has dramatically changed the pace of gene discoveries. Genome-wide association is a hypothesis-generating approach that aims to identify new loci associated with the disease or trait of interest. So far, three waves of large-scale genome-wide association studies have identified 19 loci for common obesity and 18 for common type 2 diabetes. Although the combined contribution of these loci to the variation in obesity and diabetes risk is small and their predictive value is typically low, these recently identified loci are set to substantially improve our insights into the pathophysiology of obesity and diabetes. This will require integration of genetic epidemiological methods with functional genomics and proteomics. However, the use of these novel insights for genetic screening and personalised treatment lies some way off in the future.

Indicators to monitor protected area sustainability: the INNOVA indicator handbook

The Mediterranean is an important eco-region, however, it suffers from the lack of common procedures for the management and monitoring of its protected areas sustainability. The INNOVA project addresses this issue by developing a procedure namely PASEMP as well as tools which can assist Protected Areas Managers and responsible authorities to develop and implement a monitoring strategy for their areas. This handbook is proposed as a flexible tool, or a reference text which should be used in combination with the PASEMP guidelines to identify indicators, but also contains guidance on how to implement and report the monitoring strategy results.

EISCAT observations of unusual flows in the morning sector associated with weak substorm activity

A discussion is given of plasma flows in the dawn and nightside high-latitude ionospheric regions during substorms occurring on a contracted auroral oval, as observed using the EISCAT CP-4-A experiment. Supporting data from the PACE radar, Greenland magnetometer chain, SAMNET magnetometers and geostationary satellites are compared to the EISCAT observations. On 4 October 1989 a weak substorm with initial expansion phase onset signatures at 0030 UT, resulted in the convection reversal boundary observed by EISCAT (at \sim0415 MLT) contracting rapidly poleward, causing a band of elevated ionospheric ion temperatures and a localised plasma density depletion. This polar cap contraction event is shown to be associated with various substorm signatures; Pi2 pulsations at mid-latitudes, magnetic bays in the midnight sector and particle injections at geosynchronous orbit. A similar event was observed on the following day around 0230 UT (\sim0515 MLT) with the unusual and significant difference that two convection reversals were observed, both contracting poleward. We show that this feature is not an ionospheric signature of two active reconnection neutral lines as predicted by the near-Earth neutral model before the plasmoid is “pinched off”, and present two alternative explanations in terms of (1) viscous and lobe circulation cells and (2) polar cap contraction during northward IMF. The voltage associated with the anti-sunward flow between the reversals reaches a maximum of 13 kV during the substorm expansion phase. This suggests it to be associated with the polar cap contraction and caused by the reconnection of open flux in the geomagnetic tail which has mimicked “viscous-like” momentum transfer across the magnetopause.