Exploring potentialities of energy-connected buildings: Performance assessment of an innovative low-exergy design concept for a building heating supply system

Abstract Low exergy building systems generate new possibilities for the design of high performance buildings, especially when the design of a new building is considered as part of a district where the relationship between buildings are optimized to minimize the dispersion of energy in the environment and maximize the recovery of waste energy. We present an innovative design concept and the performance assessment of the heating system of the new Embodied Computation Laboratory at Princeton University. The system is demonstrated to be able to match the heat demand without need for backup systems

The process of recovery of people with mental illness: The perspectives of patients, family members and care providers: Part 1

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>It is a qualitative design study that examines points of divergence and convergence in the perspectives on recovery of 36 participants or 12 triads. Each triad comprising a patient, a family member/friend, a care provider and documents the procedural, analytic of triangulating perspectives as a means of understanding the recovery process which is illustrated by four case studies. Variations are considered as they relate to individual characteristics, type of participant (patient, family, member/friend and care provider), and mental illness. This paper which is part of a larger study and is based on a qualitative research design documents the process of recovery of people with mental illness: Developing a Model of Recovery in Mental Health: A middle range theory.</p> <p><b>Methods</b></p> <p>Data were collected in field notes through semi-structured interviews based on three interview guides (one for patients, one for family members/friends, and one for caregivers). Cross analysis and triangulation methods were used to analyse the areas of convergence and divergence on the recovery process of all triads.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In general, with the 36 participants united in 12 triads, two themes emerge from the cross-analysis process or triangulation of data sources (12 triads analysis in 12 cases studies). Two themes emerge from the analysis process of the content of 36 interviews with participants: (1) <it>Revealing dynamic context</it>, situating patients in their dynamic context; and (2) <it>Relationship issues in a recovery process</it>, furthering our understanding of such issues. We provide four case studies examples (among 12 cases studies) to illustrate the variations in the way recovery is perceived, interpreted and expressed in relation to the different contexts of interaction.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The perspectives of the three participants (patients, family members/friends and care providers) suggest that recovery depends on constructing meaning around mental illness experiences and that the process is based on each person's dynamic context (e.g., social network, relationship), life experiences and other social determinants (e.g., symptoms, environment). The findings of this study add to existing knowledge about the determinants of the recovery of persons suffering with a mental illness and significant other utilizing public mental health services in Montreal, Canada.</p

The effects of coffee ingestion on the acute testosterone response to exercise

Abstract This study investigated the effects of coffee ingestion (COF) on serum testosterone responses to exercise in recreationally weight-trained males. Subjects ingested either 12 ounces of 6mg/kg caffeinated coffee (COF), decaffeinated coffee (DEC), or water (PLA) one hour prior to exercise in a randomized, within-subject, crossover design. The exercise session consisted of 21 minutes of high intensity interval cycling (alternating intensities corresponding to two minutes at power outputs associated with 2.0 mmol/L lactate and 4.0 mmol/L lactate) followed by resistance exercise (7 exercises, 3 sets of 10 repetitions, 65% 1RM, 1-minute rest periods). Subjects also completed repetitions to fatigue tests and soreness scales to determine muscle recovery 24 hours following the exercise. T was elevated immediately and 30-minutes post-exercise by 20.5% and 14.3% respectively (p0.05). No relationships were observed between T and any proxy of recovery, suggesting that adopting high testosterone strategies may not always improve quality of subsequent exercise bouts. The duration of T elevation indicates that this protocol is beneficial to creating a long-lasting anabolic environment. While past literature suggests caffeine may enhance T post-exercise, data from the current study suggest that augmented T response is not evident following caffeine supplementation via coffee

A Pattern Language for High-Performance Computing Resilience

High-performance computing systems (HPC) provide powerful capabilities for modeling, simulation, and data analytics for a broad class of computational problems. They enable extreme performance of the order of quadrillion floating-point arithmetic calculations per second by aggregating the power of millions of compute, memory, networking and storage components. With the rapidly growing scale and complexity of HPC systems for achieving even greater performance, ensuring their reliable operation in the face of system degradations and failures is a critical challenge. System fault events often lead the scientific applications to produce incorrect results, or may even cause their untimely termination. The sheer number of components in modern extreme-scale HPC systems and the complex interactions and dependencies among the hardware and software components, the applications, and the physical environment makes the design of practical solutions that support fault resilience a complex undertaking. To manage this complexity, we developed a methodology for designing HPC resilience solutions using design patterns. We codified the well-known techniques for handling faults, errors and failures that have been devised, applied and improved upon over the past three decades in the form of design patterns. In this paper, we present a pattern language to enable a structured approach to the development of HPC resilience solutions. The pattern language reveals the relations among the resilience patterns and provides the means to explore alternative techniques for handling a specific fault model that may have different efficiency and complexity characteristics. Using the pattern language enables the design and implementation of comprehensive resilience solutions as a set of interconnected resilience patterns that can be instantiated across layers of the system stack.Comment: Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Pattern Languages of Program

Screening of energy efficient technologies for industrial buildings' retrofit

This chapter discusses screening of energy efficient technologies for industrial buildings' retrofit

An architecture-based dependability modeling framework using AADL

For efficiency reasons, the software system designers' will is to use an integrated set of methods and tools to describe specifications and designs, and also to perform analyses such as dependability, schedulability and performance. AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language) has proved to be efficient for software architecture modeling. In addition, AADL was designed to accommodate several types of analyses. This paper presents an iterative dependency-driven approach for dependability modeling using AADL. It is illustrated on a small example. This approach is part of a complete framework that allows the generation of dependability analysis and evaluation models from AADL models to support the analysis of software and system architectures, in critical application domains