Environmental performance of Abuja’s low-income housing : understanding the current state to inform future refinement

In times of global ecological challenges, understanding building performance to improve occupants’ comfort is becoming the norm in various climatic zones and locales. Any performance evaluation should account for occupants’ demands for thermal and visual comfort. However, seeking to analyse the impact of design on the two aspects of comfort simultaneously can be complicated especially when a series of parametric changes with varying impacts on either is necessary. In the Nigerian context, assessing the environmental behaviour of existing residential properties to inform future refinement is becoming far more critical due to the vulnerability of the region to the changing climate, the ongoing issue with the energy supply and the housing shortage. The method adapted in this paper following previous research can be useful for the coinciding evaluation of the thermal environment and visual comfort. The environmental behaviour of two of Abuja’s common housing types, in their current state and with the addition of multiple shading elements was assessed using such methodological procedures to examine their suitability for performing a comprehensive analysis. The paper discusses the simplicity of the graphical representation utilised in displaying the changes in the cases’ behaviour following the alteration. It also provides an insight into their current performance. KEYWORDS: Housing, Comfort, Methodology, Nigeri

Evaluation Of Antibiotics Prescribing Pattern In Government Hospitals Of Yemen Republic

Kajian penggunaan ubat adalah penting dalam menentukan status penggunaan ubat dalam sesuatu negara. Drug utilization study is important in establishing the status of drug use in a particular country

Remodelling façade design for improving daylighting and the thermal environment in Abuja’s low-income housing

The housing typologies that were developed as part of Abuja’s master plan over 30 years ago are still in use today as prototypes for low-income housing developments. The value of the local climate received only cursory consideration in the early developments; as the process was mainly focused on the delivery of units needed to accommodate those involved in the construction of the city. More detailed records of the climate have become available since the mid-1990s. Yet, despite the availability of such data and the global interest in eco-friendly architecture, energy use per household has increased in Abuja over the last two decades. Nigeria is already struggling to meet its current energy demands; therefore, it is important to examine whether improvements made to future housing design can assist in reducing their energy use. This paper evaluates the performance of four of Abuja’s common housing types and examines the impact of changing their fenestration design on occupants’ comfort, using validated simulation. Assessing the performance of the buildings in their existing state revealed clear overheating problems and excessive natural lighting. However, the investigation indicated a 4-6% reduction in the frequency of thermal discomfort and a 4-29% reduction in visual discomfort by adjusting the orientation of the facades. Integrating external shading components can also reduce thermal and visual discomfort by up to 4% and 29%, respectively

EFFECT OF BODY SHAPE ON THE AERODYNAMICS OF PROJECTILES AT SUPERSONIC SPEEDS

An investigation has been made to predict the effects of forebody and afterbody shapes on the aerodynamic characteristics of several projectile bodies at supersonic speeds using analytical methods combined with semi-empirical design curves. The considered projectile bodies had a length-to-diameter ratio of 6.67 and included three variations of forebody shape and three variations of afterbody shape. The results, which are verified by comparison with available experimental data, indicated that the lowest drag was achieved with a cone-cylinder at the considered Mach number range. It is also shown that the drag can be reduced by boattailing the afterbody. The centre-of-pressure assumed a slightly rearward location for the ogive-cylinder configuration when compared to the configuration with boattailed afterbody where it was the most forward. With the exception of the boattailed afterbody, all the bodies indicated inherent static stability above Mach number 2 for a centre-of-gravity location at about 40% from the body nose

Re-gripping analysis based on implementation of slip-detection device for robotic hand model

To develop an intelligent robotic hand, diverse approaches have been applied, including optimum gripping force and slippage analysis. In this study, a robotic hand was modeled with tactile pressure sensors. The slip detection sensor, which is represented as a rotary encoder device, was employed to indicate the slip situation features, distance and velocity. Empirical findings imply that the correlation between the distance that an object has slipped and the required re-gripping force was developed to be availed as an automatic feedback algorithm. The slippage events were revealed and analyzed to perform the control system mechanism of the re-gripping mission

Empirical analysis of rough set categorical clustering techniques based on rough purity and value set

Clustering a set of objects into homogeneous groups is a fundamental operation in data mining. Recently, attention has been put on categorical data clustering, where data objects are made up of non-numerical attributes. The implementation of several existing categorical clustering techniques is challenging as some are unable to handle uncertainty and others have stability issues. In the process of dealing with categorical data and handling uncertainty, the rough set theory has become well-established mechanism in a wide variety of applications including databases. The recent techniques such as Information-Theoretic Dependency Roughness (ITDR), Maximum Dependency Attribute (MDA) and Maximum Significance Attribute (MSA) outperformed their predecessor approaches like Bi-Clustering (BC), Total Roughness (TR), Min-Min Roughness (MMR), and standard-deviation roughness (SDR). This work explores the limitations and issues of ITDR, MDA and MSA techniques on data sets where these techniques fails to select or faces difficulty in selecting their best clustering attribute. Accordingly, two alternative techniques named Rough Purity Approach (RPA) and Maximum Value Attribute (MVA) are proposed. The novelty of both proposed approaches is that, the RPA presents a new uncertainty definition based on purity of rough relational data base whereas, the MVA unlike other rough set theory techniques uses the domain knowledge such as value set combined with number of clusters (NoC). To show the significance, mathematical and theoretical basis for proposed approaches, several propositions are illustrated. Moreover, the recent rough categorical techniques like MDA, MSA, ITDR and classical clustering technique like simple K-mean are used for comparison and the results are presented in tabular and graphical forms. For experiments, data sets from previously utilized research cases, a real supply base management (SBM) data set and UCI repository are utilized. The results reveal significant improvement by proposed techniques for categorical clustering in terms of purity (21%), entropy (9%), accuracy (16%), rough accuracy (11%), iterations (99%) and time (93%). vi

Investigation of piezoresistive sensor for robotic gripping operations

Various types of tactile pressure sensors in robotic grasping operations have been effectively implemented in robotic hand fields. Some useful approaches of these tactile sensors are briefly discussed in this study based on their robotic hand applications. A robotic hand model is also designed to employ the tactile sensors that have recorded the information that is collected through the physical interaction between the pressure sensors and the object. This study has practically investigated the response of the piezoresistive pressure sensor during the object gripping operations in different weights. Empirical results have proven that the piezoresistive pressure sensor is the proper technique that can be implemented in robotic hand applications. The correlation between the input force and the output volt has been experimentally derived to achieve the efficient gripping operation

AutoScor: An Automated System for Essay Questions Scoring

The automated scoring or evaluation for written student responses have been, and are still a highly interesting topic for both education and natural language processing, NLP, researchers alike. With the obvious motivation of the difficulties teachers face when marking or correcting open essay questions; the development of automatic scoring methods have recently received much attention. In this paper, we developed and compared number of NLP techniques that accomplish this task. The baseline for this study is based on a vector space model, VSM. Where after normalisation, the baseline-system represents each essay by a vector, and subsequently calculates its score using the cosine similarity between it and the vector of the model answer. This baseline is then compared with the improved model, which takes the document structure into account. To evaluate our system, we used real essays that submitted for computer science course. Each essay was independently scored by two teachers, which we used as our gold standard. The systems’ scoring was then compared to both teachers. A high emphasis was added to the evaluation when the two human assessors are in agreement. The systems’ results show a high and promising performance

Reproductive and Productive Performance of Iraqi Buffaloes as Influenced by Pre-Mating and Pre-Calving Concentrate Supplementation

The objective of the present study was to investigate the influence of pre-mating and pre-calving concentrate supplementation of Iraqi buffaloes on some of the reproductive (estrus, mating, pregnancy and calving rates) and productive (daily milk yield and calves birth weight) traits. This study was carried out in 4 Iraqi South-central governorates using 596 pre-mating and 628 pregnant buffaloes (during the last two months of gestation). Pre-mating buffaloes were divided randomly into 496 concentrate-supplemented buffaloes (Flushing) and 100 control ones. Additionally, pregnant buffaloes were also divided into 528 concentrate- supplemented buffaloes (Steaming up) and 100 controls. Each buffalo within the flushing and steaming up groups were fed daily on 7 Kg of concentrate diet (13% crude protein and 1.70 Mcal of net energy) for 60 days. The control buffaloes were nourished only on low-quality roughages of the area and wheat bran. Higher estrus (+15%, P<0.01), pregnancy (+23.8%, P<0.05) and calving rates (+30.8%, P<0.01) were observed in concentrate-supplemented buffaloes as compared with controls. An obvious increase in (P<0.05) calving rate (+14.7%), daily milk yield (+44.8%) and calf birth weight (+25.6%) were noted in steaming up buffaloes in comparison with control buffaloes. Results indicated that improvement in feeding schedule of Iraqi buffaloes during pre-mating and late gestation periods enhanced the reproductive performance and increased milk production of subsequent lactation and calf birth weight. These improvements increased owner income ($174=209,000 Iraqi dinar /buffalo) from the sale of meat and milk

Cuckoo Search Algorithm Based Feature Selection in Image Retrieval System

Efficiency an d retrieval time are very important issues in any content-based image retrieval system. In this study, an efficient image retrieval system was introduced depending on several features extracted from the database images, namely color moment (Mean, Standard Deviation), GLCM, and DWT( only LL-sub band). To increase the retrieval speed, Cuckoo search algorithm was used to select the important positions that contain full power features from the (LL-sub band). On using the Cuckoo search algorithm, only (50) important positions were chosen out of the total (24576) positions within (LL- sub band). These positions were stored for later use when entering a query image. Thus, the time taken to retrieve images was greatly reduced and this process also increased the efficiency of the system due to the fact that the selected positions gave the lowest distance measures between the query images and the similar images when evaluated using Manhattan distance measure. Two effectual performance measures (precision &amp; recall) were used to calculate the accuracy of the system. The findings proved the system efficiency when compared to other previous works. Keywords: CBIR, Color Moment, GLCM, DWT, Cuckoo Search algorithm, Manhattan measure DOI: 10.7176/JEP/10-15-08 Publication date:May 31st 201