Background and approach to a definition of smart buildings

There is no possibility of finding a single reference about domotics in the first half of the 20th century. The best known authors and those who have documented this discipline, set its origin in the 1970’s, when the x-10 technology began to be used, but it was not until 1988 when Larousse Encyclopedia decided to include the definition of "Smart Building". Furthermore, even nowadays, there is not a single definition widely accepted, and for that reason, many other expressions, namely "Intelligent Buildings" "Domotics" "Digital Home" or "Home Automation" have appeared to describe the automated buildings and homes. The lack of a clear definition for "Smart Buildings" causes difficulty not only in the development of a common international framework to develop research in this field, but it also causes insecurity in the potential user of these buildings. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to propose a definition of the expression “Smart Buildings” that satisfactorily describes the meaning of this discipline. To achieve this aim, a thorough review of the origin of the term itself and the historical background before the emergence of the phenomenon of domotics was conducted, followed by a critical discussion of existing definitions of the term "Smart Buildings" and other similar terms. The extent of each definition has been analyzed, inaccuracies have been discarded and commonalities have been compared. Throughout the discussion, definitions that bring the term "Smart Buildings" near to disciplines such as computer science, robotics and also telecommunications have been found

The Use of bubble nasal CPAP in the management of IRDS -A Case report and literature review

A one hour old baby boy presented to the Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU) of the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital (ABUTH), Shika, Zaria, on account of respiratory distress noticed from birth. He was a product of supervised pregnancy, delivered at 37 weeks gestation via emergency caeserien section performed due to severe pre eclampsia and fetal distress. APGAR scores were 2 and 7 at one and five minutes respectively.He weighed 1850 grams and was found to be dusky, inactive, hypothermic(T = 35.50C) and in severe respiratory distress (SPO2 ranged between 60 % and 72 %). He was tachypnoeic with respiratory rate persistently above 80 cycles/ min, and had reduced air entry in the mid and lower zonesof the lungs bilaterally with wide spread coarse crepitations. A diagnosis of perinatal asphyxia was entertained with differential diagnoses of pulmonary hypoplasia, hyaline membrane disease and group B streptococcal (GBS) pneumonia. He had a full sepsis screen including chest radiograph and was commenced on supplemental oxygen via nasal cannula, antibiotics and other supportive measures. The patient howevercontinued to have laboured breathing and subsequently had an apnoeic attack. He was resuscitated and commenced on bubble nasal CPAP. He did remarkably well and was weaned off CPAP after a total of 60 hours. A repeat chest radiograph showed remarkable aeration of the lungs asagainst an earlier one which showed a reticulogranular (ground glass) appearance. Key words: Neonates, Respiratory distress, Bubble nCpap, Downesscor

Antimicrobial activity of Phoenix dactylifera (date palm) on some selected members of enterobacteriaceae

The use of medicinal plants in Africa for therapeutic purpose has been quite a common practice. However, most of these plants are used indiscriminately without proper knowledge of their chemical constituents, spectrum of activity, inhibitory or bactericidal concentrations. Moreover, the widespread and often indiscriminate use of antimicrobial drugs has resulted in resistance of microbes to specific antibiotic treatments. In view of this, the antibacterial activity of Phoenix dactylifera was determined using agar well diffusion method. A total of 2.43g and 2.12g of the methanolic extract from the original weight of 25g was recovered from the leaf and fruit of Phoenix dactylifera respectively. The leaf extracts showed greater antibacterial effects against Klebsiella pneumoniae with zones of inhibition measuring 34mm, 28mm, 26mm and 24mm at the concentrations of 40mg/ml, 30mg/ml, 20mg/ml and 10mg/ml while Salmonella typhi had zones of 20mm and 14 mm at 40mg/ml and 30mg/ml. However, the fruit extract inhibited the growth of all the test organisms at varying concentrations with the highest zone recorded against Salmonella typhi (38mm) at 40mg/ml. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) analysis also confirmed the antibacterial effect of these extracts. Phytochemical analysis also showed the presence of Saponins, Tannins, Alkaloids, Steroids, Phenols and Flavonoids. The findings of this research suggest that infection by members of Enterobacteriaceae can be treated using Phoenix dactylifera fruit and leaves as an alternative to conventional antibiotics.Keywords: Date Palm, Enterobacteriaceae, Salmonella, Phytochemica

The Influencing Factors of Access and Control Men and Women in Community Forest Resources Management

Tujuan penelitian ini yaitu mendeskripsikan profil aktivitas laki-laki dan perempuan pada kegiatan reproduktif, produktif dan sosial kemasyarakatan, mendeskripsikan profil akses dan kontrol laki-laki dan perempuan dalam pengelolaan sumberdaya hutan rakyat, membandingkan faktor-faktor yang berpengaruh terhadap akses dan kontrol laki-laki dan perempuan dalam pengelolaan sumberdaya hutan rakyat. Responden adalah petani rumah tangga dan buruh tani yang bekerja di hutan rakyat. Penelitian ini mengindikasikan bahwa dalam kegiatan reproduktif, perempuan pada rumahtangga buruh tani memiliki curahan waktu lebih tinggi daripada perempuan pada rumah tangga petani dan dalam kegiata produktif laki-laki pada rumahtangga buruh tani memiliki curahan waktu lebih tinggi daripada laki-laki pada rumahtangga petani. Faktor penguasaan lahan rumahtangga, keikutsertaan suami-istri dalam kegiatan kelompok dan pengetahuan lokal suami istri dalam budidaya tanaman di lahan hutan mempengaruhi akses kontrol pada rumahtangga petani terlebih pada laki-laki sedangkan pada rumahtangga buruh tani faktor-faktor tersebut tidak mempengaruhi akses dan kontrol atas sumberdaya dalam kegiatan pengelolaan hutan rakyat

Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Non-Tracking PV Systems in Scotland, UK

Solar energy is an important component of renewable energy resources. Solar tracking system is a suitable option that could be used in capturing both direct (beam) and diffuse radiation. To investigate the performance of tracking and non-tracking PV systems, solar angles were estimated based on solar geometry and combined with global and direct radiation measurement covering a year. Results showed that using horizontal fixed panels or tracking the sun about single axis was worst to boost the energy collection of the panels, while tracking the sun about two axes or using fixed but optimally tilted panels was found to be better and efficient. With an annual electricity of 67.3 and 66.3 kWh/h respectively and an improvement of 3.65 and 2.12%. This implies that fixed tilted panel will be suitable to be employed in the region with lower irradiance as Edinburgh

A novel model for solar radiation prediction

Energy for fulfilling basic community/individual needs has come to constitute the first article of expectation in all contemporary societies. The exploitation of renewables notably solar in electricity generation has brought relief to the fulfilment of energy demand especially among susceptible communities. In this paper yearly minimum solar radiation of Kano (12.05°N; 08.2°E; altitude 472.5 m; 3 air density 1.1705 kg/m3) for 46 years is used to generate a prediction model that fits the data using autoregressive moving average (ARMA) and a new model termed autoregressive moving average process (ARMAP). Comparison between the ARMA and ARMAP models showed a tremendous improve in the sum of square error reduction between the actual data and the forecasted data by 47%

Multiple sclerosis cortical and WM lesion segmentation at 3T MRI: a deep learning method based on FLAIR and MP2RAGE.

The presence of cortical lesions in multiple sclerosis patients has emerged as an important biomarker of the disease. They appear in the earliest stages of the illness and have been shown to correlate with the severity of clinical symptoms. However, cortical lesions are hardly visible in conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 3T, and thus their automated detection has been so far little explored. In this study, we propose a fully-convolutional deep learning approach, based on the 3D U-Net, for the automated segmentation of cortical and white matter lesions at 3T. For this purpose, we consider a clinically plausible MRI setting consisting of two MRI contrasts only: one conventional T2-weighted sequence (FLAIR), and one specialized T1-weighted sequence (MP2RAGE). We include 90 patients from two different centers with a total of 728 and 3856 gray and white matter lesions, respectively. We show that two reference methods developed for white matter lesion segmentation are inadequate to detect small cortical lesions, whereas our proposed framework is able to achieve a detection rate of 76% for both cortical and white matter lesions with a false positive rate of 29% in comparison to manual segmentation. Further results suggest that our framework generalizes well for both types of lesion in subjects acquired in two hospitals with different scanners

Accidental sulphuric acid poisoning in a newborn

A six hour old baby girl presented with shortness of breath and haematemesis five hours after accidental ingestion of sulfuric acid. We report the clinical presentation of corrosive ingestion in a neonate a rare and sparsely reported occurrence at such tender age.Key words: Acid ingestion, corrosives injuries, caustic substances, chemical ingestion, newborn