Development of a full scale experimental and simulation tool for environmental control system optimisation and fault detection

This paper documents the installation of a fast jet military aircraft Environmental Control System (ECS) ground test facility. The system used in this case is a bleed-air driven two-wheel bootstrap cycle with low pressure water extraction. The facility allows the ECS to be run at conditions similar to those in the aircraft during ground operation. Data from the rig is presented and used to validate a 1-D thermodynamic model. The relationships between aircraft altitude and speed against ECS Coefficient of Performance and system heat rejection are presented, seamlessly utilising both experimental and modelled data. Furthermore, a scenario depicting a ram air blockage in the secondary heat exchanger demonstrates the system’s ability to mask faults. The physical system is used for component-level analysis, whilst the model extends this to system-level. General attributes of the system operation are discussed

Data-Driven Decision Making: Teachers\u27 Use of Data in the Classroom

Data-driven decision making has become an important educational issue in the United States, primarily because of federal and state emphasis on school accountability and achievement. Data use has been highlighted as a key factor in monitoring student progress and informing decision making at various levels of the education system. Federal and state policies require educators to use data to inform decision making and the assumption is that educators already know how to analyze, interpret, and use data to make informed decisions. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of classroom teachers\u27 engagement in data-driven decision making practices at the micro level. Four research questions guided this investigation: (a) Why and how do select classroom elementary teachers choose specific data to inform their practice?; (b) How are data being used by these teachers to make instructional decisions?; (c) In relation to data use, what practices support instruction? What areas do these teachers seem to struggle with?; (d) What accounts for the variations in this select group of elementary teachers\u27 ability to use and make decisions around data within and across schools? A qualitative case study/cross case analysis design was employed to study classroom teachers at two elementary schools in San Diego County. Interviews, classroom observations, and documents were used to compare and contrast findings within and across cases. The findings suggest that: (a) Teachers used a variety of data in different ways and for different purposes; (b) There were variations in teachers\u27 capacities to engage in data-driven practices; (c) Contextual and cultural differences as well as differences in teachers\u27 perspectives concerning autonomy and ownership of their work may have accounted for differences in teachers\u27 capacities to use data. The findings from this research study have implications for district and school leaders who are intent on improving data use and promoting a culture of continuous learning

Childhood Obesity Interventions in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago: A Qualitative Study Exploring Government Policies and Their Implementation by Health Practitioners

Because of the rising prevalence of childhood obesity and overweight in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and the observation that efforts to address the problem were showing disappointing results, this study seeks to explore the experiences and views of policymakers, health practitioners, and parents of overweight and obese children, in order to inform leaders and policy makers regarding the current interventions. Method A qualitative research case study methodology is the research design used, which, with my research questions, I considered would best uncover knowledge and provide perspectives that would provide an increased understanding of the issues arising from the current interventions being used to deal with the problem. -- Results: Analysis of documents and coding of the interviews data resulted in five themes, which when analyzed, generated the following policy interventions that are currently available for school-aged children, 6-11 years old in Trinidad and Tobago. They are (a) BMI screening at entrance to primary school age 5-6; and again at age 9-11, (b) the availability of Healthy Me camps, (c) The Schools Caravans service, (d) The option to be registered in an obesity prevention program in a Community Assessment Unit (CAU), and (e) The government driven policy regarding school meals. Results Analysis of documents and coding of the interviews data resulted in five themes, which when analyzed, generated the following policy interventions that are currently available for school-aged children, 6-11 years old in Trinidad and Tobago. They are (a) BMI screening at entrance to primary school age 5-6; and again at age 9-11, (b) the availability of Healthy Me camps, (c) The Schools Caravans service, (d) The option to be registered in an obesity prevention program in a Community Assessment Unit (CAU), and (e) The government driven policy regarding school meals. Conclusion This study is a unique perspective in the literature on the experience of the initiatives pursued in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago to address the problem and highlights the need for increased activity on the part of leaders to effect improvement. Hence, other studies may wish to probe further into determining ways and means leaders may use to construct the financial, clinical and other factors that must be engaged to enhance impact

Reducing the loss of information through annealing text distortion

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Granados, A. ;Cebrian, M. ; Camacho, D. ; de Borja Rodriguez, F. "Reducing the Loss of Information through Annealing Text Distortion". IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. 23, no. 7 pp. 1090 - 1102, July 2011Compression distances have been widely used in knowledge discovery and data mining. They are parameter-free, widely applicable, and very effective in several domains. However, little has been done to interpret their results or to explain their behavior. In this paper, we take a step toward understanding compression distances by performing an experimental evaluation of the impact of several kinds of information distortion on compression-based text clustering. We show how progressively removing words in such a way that the complexity of a document is slowly reduced helps the compression-based text clustering and improves its accuracy. In fact, we show how the nondistorted text clustering can be improved by means of annealing text distortion. The experimental results shown in this paper are consistent using different data sets, and different compression algorithms belonging to the most important compression families: Lempel-Ziv, Statistical and Block-Sorting.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under TIN2010-19872 and TIN2010-19607 projects

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework