Optimization of courtyards design factors in the hot humid climate: energy and thermal assessment / Abdul Basit Ali Ahmed Almhafdy

Courtyards are regarded as a microclimate modifier, and their application has become popular in various forms of public buildings. This thesis reviews design factors of courtyards in hospitals in Malaysia, and assesses the resulting thermal performance of the courtyard space and energy performance of the attached built volume. The study took a sequential approach whereby knowledge gained from each phase of research,served to inform the direction for the next phase of the study. It began with the initialinquiry on what are the courtyard characteristics applied in hospitals in Malaysia. Data were gathered through field survey, followed by a typology analysis involving 34 courtyards in 19 government hospitals. The survey revealed extensive use of OEnclosure Courtyard (OEC) and U-Enclosure Courtyard (UEC), and that although the spaces inside the surveyed courtyards appeared as appealing, activities inside these courtyards were rather limited. This led to the next research inquiry on the thermal condition inside the courtyard and the adjacent rooms / built volumes. A field measurement was conducted on a case study hospital, where the thermal condition in the OEC and UEC were collected, analysed and compared

Tall Buildings in Urban Context: Planning Indicators for Tall Buildings in the Urban Context

تعتبر الابنية العالية من مميزات المدن العالمية، اذ تعبر عن قوتها الاقتصادية وتعطيها رمزية تميزها على الصعيد المحلي والعالمي، اذ تخلق الابنية العالية مدن مستدامة وجاذبة للعيش والعمل ومزدهرة إذا ما خططت وصممت بشكل جيد، اذ يصل تاثيرها على السياق المجاور لها وفي بعض الاحيان على المدينة ككل، لذلك كان لابد من دراسة المؤشرات التخطيطية للابنية العالية في السياق الحضري. على وفق ذلك اعتمد البحث كمحور عام مفهوم الابنية العالية في السياق الحضري ، وقد تعددت الجوانب التخطيطية للابنية العالية بصورة عامة مع تنوع وتعدد التوجهات المعاصرة, واهتم البحث بالابنية العالية المفردة في السياق الحضري كمحور خاص, اذ تم استعراض العديد من الدراسات بهدف تحديد الفجوة المعرفية التي ادت الى بروز عدة مشاكل بحثية من حيث تعدد وتنوع الجوانب التخطيطية, , وبذلك تبلورت مشكلة البحث التي ركزت على اكثر النواحي نقصاً في الدراسات السابقة والمتمثلة قصور المعرفة المنظمة الشاملة للمؤشرات التخطيطية الخاصة بعلاقة الابنية العالية المفردة مع السياق الحضري وبما يرتبط بالواقع المحلي, وبذلك تحدد هدف البحث بطرح المعرفة الشاملة الاكثر تنظيماً  ووضوحاً للمؤشرات التخطيطية للابنية العالية المفردة في السياق الحضري وبما يرتبط بالواقع المحلي على وجه الخصوص, وقد استوجب تحقيق هذا الهدف اعتماد منهج تحليلي وصفي للدراسات والتجارب التطبيقية المرتبطة بالموضوع ضمن هيكل تسلسل بخطوات اساسية للبحث, تمثلت الخطوة الاولى ببناء اطار نظري شامل يعرف الابنية العالية المفردة في السياق الحضري , و تبلور في مفردتين اساسية هي: مقومات الابنية العالية, الجوانب التخطيطية للابنية العالية في السياق الحضري . وركزت الخطوة الثانية على تطبيق مفردات الإطار النظري على نماذج منتخبة من المشاريع المحلية، ومن ثم تحليل نتائج الدراسة العملية ومناقشتها، ليتم بعدها طرح الاستنتاجات النهائية.The tall buildings play an important role in giving a distinctive image for the city. It is one of the most important features of the big cities, as it enhances its value and reflects its urban economic and technological development, as well as the city's image for the local and the international levels. If they have been designed and planned well in its urban context. The tall buildings contribute to create a vibrant, prosperous, sustainable and attractive city for living and working, farther more optimize the energy and land use, providing public spaces, streets and spaces of social interaction as well as employing high technology, especially in infrastructure. The research adopted the tall buildings in the urban context as a general concept. The multiple contemporary trends of planning considerations for tall buildings in the urban context and the lack of a comprehensive picture resulted the special concept of the search "Tall buildings in the urban context ". Which was done by reviewing several international, Arabic and local studies for identifying the knowledge gap that led to the emergence of a research problem in terms of the multiplicity and diversity of planning aspects. Most of the international studies indicated them in general and selective, while the thesis was implicit and unclear in the Arab studies, and there were lack in local studies. The research problem, which focused on the most critical aspects of the previous studies, was characterized by the lack of comprehensive knowledge of the planning and designing indicators of the tall buildings relationship with the urban context and the local reality. For that objective goal of the research determined to provide the most comprehensive and clear knowledge of the planning and designing indicators of tall buildings in the urban context and in particular the local reality. The achievement of this goal necessitated the adoption of a descriptive analytical approach to the relevant studies and practical experiments within the structure of a sequence of basic steps for research. The first step was to construct a comprehensive theoretical framework that defines tall buildings in urban context. That resulted three aspects: general analytical aspects of tall buildings, planning considerations for tall buildings in the urban context، the second step focused on applying the concepts of the theoretical framework to selected models of local projects and analyzed them then discussion the results of the practical study, after that presenting the conclusions of the application within the local reality

Optimum Solutions of Systems of Differential Equations via Best Proximity Points in b-Metric Spaces

This paper deals with the existence of an optimum solution of a system of ordinary differential equations via the best proximity points. In order to obtain the optimum solution, we have developed the best proximity point results for generalized multivalued contractions of b-metric spaces. Examples are given to illustrate the main results and to show that the new results are the proper generalization of some existing results in the literature.This study is supported financially by the Basque Government through Grant IT1207-19

Association of chronic viral hepatitis with ABO blood groups and rhesus (Rh) factor

Background: Chronic viral hepatitis includes hepatitis B and hepatitis C and is responsible for causing the deaths of millions of people all across the world each year. Although there are small studies in literature about association between ABO blood groups and chronic viral hepatitis, only few studies found relation between them. The objective of this case control study is to establish a relation between the host factors and these viral infections.Methods: This is a case control study on patients diagnosed with CVHB and CVHC. The study was conducted on 508 patients reported to Nishtar Hospital, Multan and Sheikh Zayd Hospital, Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan.709 healthy blood donors were selected as a control group from Nishtar Hospital blood bank during December 2016 and December 2017.The results were subjected to SPSS v.20 for analysis using the chi square test. The patients and blood donors were also asked about certain demographic factors like age, sex and blood transfusions.Results: Among CVHB patients,173(100%), the distribution of blood groups was following: Group A, 38 (21.96%), B, 57 (32.94%), AB, 11 (6.35%), O, 67 (38.72%). 158 (91.32%) were Rh positive and 15 (8.67%) Rh negative. In CVHC patients, 335 (100%), the distribution was following: Group A, 69 (20.59%), B, 123 (36.71%), AB, 24 (7.16%), O, 119 (35.52%). 303 (90.44%) were Rh positive while 32 (9.55%) were Rh negative. In healthy blood donors, 167 (23.55%) were group A, 225 (31.73%) group B, 41(5.78%) group AB, 276 (38.92%) group O.632 (89.13%) were Rh positive and 77 (10.86%) Rh negative.Conclusions: There was no significant difference between blood groups(p>0.5) and Rh(p>0.5) with chronic viral hepatitis. However, it was also observed that the infections of HCV increase among (26-45) years old patients while the HBV infections increase with progression of age. Association of chronic viral hepatitis infection with blood group types needs more studies to get more knowledge about this aspect

Outsourcing and Organizational Performance in Banking Sector of Punjab, Pakistan

Organizations are more competitive these days .To maintain competitive position, Firms are developing new strategies and introducing new techniques. Outsourcing is widely recommended technique for this purpose. Outsourcing, support functions is a common practice in organizations so that the management can focus on its core functions. Outsourcing helps organization’s to improve their performance. This paper explores the impact of outsourcing on organizational performance in banking sector of Punjab, Pakistan. Key words outsourcing, organizational performance, banking, Pakista

Detection and Localization of Firearm Carriers in Complex Scenes for Improved Safety Measures

Detecting firearms and accurately localizing individuals carrying them in images or videos is of paramount importance in security, surveillance, and content customization. However, this task presents significant challenges in complex environments due to clutter and the diverse shapes of firearms. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that leverages human-firearm interaction information, which provides valuable clues for localizing firearm carriers. Our approach incorporates an attention mechanism that effectively distinguishes humans and firearms from the background by focusing on relevant areas. Additionally, we introduce a saliency-driven locality-preserving constraint to learn essential features while preserving foreground information in the input image. By combining these components, our approach achieves exceptional results on a newly proposed dataset. To handle inputs of varying sizes, we pass paired human-firearm instances with attention masks as channels through a deep network for feature computation, utilizing an adaptive average pooling layer. We extensively evaluate our approach against existing methods in human-object interaction detection and achieve significant results (AP=77.8\%) compared to the baseline approach (AP=63.1\%). This demonstrates the effectiveness of leveraging attention mechanisms and saliency-driven locality preservation for accurate human-firearm interaction detection. Our findings contribute to advancing the fields of security and surveillance, enabling more efficient firearm localization and identification in diverse scenarios.Comment: This paper is accepted in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social System

Suzuki-type fixed point theorem for fuzzy mappings in ordered metric spaces

In this paper, a Suzuki-type fixed fuzzy point result for fuzzy mappings in complete ordered metric spaces is obtained. As an application, we establish the existence of coincidence fuzzy points and common fixed fuzzy points for a hybrid pair of a single-valued self-mapping and a fuzzy mapping. An example is also provided to support the main result presented herein.The authors are thankful to the referees for their critical remarks which helped to improve the presentation of this paper.All authors read and approved the final manuscript.http://www.fixedpointtheoryandapplications.com/content/2013/1/9am201

Fixed fuzzy points of generalized Geraghty type fuzzy mappings on complete metric spaces

Generalized Geraghty type fuzzy mappings on complete metric spaces are introduced and a xed point theorem that generalizes some recent comparable results for fuzzy mappings in contemporary literature is obtained. Example is provided to show the validity of obtained results over comparable classical results for fuzzy mappings in xed point theory. As an application, existence of coincidence fuzzy points and common xed fuzzy points for hybrid pair of single valued self mapping and a fuzzy mapping is also established.http://ijfs.usb.ac.iram2016Mathematics and Applied Mathematic