Energy-data Dashboards and Operators: Designing for Usability in New York City Schools

IBM, through its Smarter Cities program, working with the Building Performance Lab of the City University of New York (BPL-CUNY) and New York City (NYC) government, has developed an energy dashboard drawing upon the city’s database of information from the U.S. EPA EnergyStar Portfolio Manager and other sources, such as local weather stations, for the city’s 1,400 public schools. A unique aspect of the dashboard design process has been conscious integration with a training program for school operating (custodial) engineers. The dashboard is designed to easily display specific kinds of information that is emphasized in the training program, such as energy use breakdowns by source, end-use breakdowns, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, benchmarking, performance rating, normalized projections versus actuals, measurement tracking, local peer comparisons, forecasting and simulation. Information is used as the basis of practical projects to fulfill requirements for the national Building Operator Certification (level 1), addressing specific energy management and retro-commissioning learning objectives. Learning objectives and their relation to specific information types from the dashboard are described. The paper reports on this integration and initial experience with over 300 trainees in classroom, computer lab, and practical project application. Implications are developed for the appropriate use of information technology (IT) tools and analytics in providing insights and feedback for operators engaged in energy use reduction programs

Unmasked : towards a restoration discourse of female libertinism

This thesis attempts to deconstruct the Restoration double standard which linked male promiscuity to libertinism, and female promiscuity to prostitution. The emphasis is placed on assessing the sexual ideologies embedded in some of the literature of the period. The impact of socioeconomic status in shaping the contrasting identities of the libertine and the prostitute is also considered. In the first three chapters, the literary analysis is framed by brief portraits of historical libertine women. In the latter part of the thesis, consideration is given to the significance of a libertine identity as a model for female authorship during the Restoration, and a suggestion is made regarding the role of the female libertine in the development of early eighteenth-century notions of gender and class

Temporary Labour–Migration System and Long–term Residence Strategies in the United Arab Emirates

© 2019 The Authors. International Migration © 2019 IOM The United Arab Emirates’ migration system, the sponsorship–based kafala system, is defined as a temporary labour–migration regime. Although there are policies making permanent residence unattainable for virtually all migrants, it is still relevant to explore the temporality of migrations in the UAE. The purpose of this study is to investigate developments in migration, migration policies and population trends in the country, including trends that concern the duration of migrants’ stay. We also identify some of the major strategies used by migrants to prolong their sojourn in the UAE. It is maintained that the migrant stock has increased continuously in the last decades and that a large number of migrants devise strategies to continue their residence and remain in the country for years. The authors also identify and discuss migrants’ transition within and in-between regularity and irregularity, and analyse the reasons for utilizing different strategies over time

Innovative Control of Electric Heat in Multifamily Buildings

This paper describes the application of web-based wireless technology for control of electric heating in a large multifamily housing complex. The control system architecture and components are described. A web-based application enables remote monitoring of temperature, electric usage and control of peak demand through a temperature-based duty-cycling algorithm developed specifically for the application. Installed costs and energy savings are discussed. A 16% energy-use reduction was confirmed through the first heating season of operation. The response of occupants and management to changes in temperature regime has been a critical aspect of system start-up and commissioning

Operational Effectiveness in Use fo BAS

The effectiveness of BAS in controlling building systems is seen to reside in conjoint man machine function. In an emerging industry paradigm, data is extracted from the BAS and used for analytics that inform enhanced operations. This processing may include a mash up with data from other sources, such as energy meters. KPI metrics and Building ReTuning, an on going commissioning process, are suggested as important ways to guide operators in training and subsequent understanding and use of data intensive tools. Short case studies of work in progress on two CUNY campuses are provided

Seeing by Degrees: Programming Visualization From Sensor Networks

In order to create baseline conditions for building energy performance, make a setting adjustment or determine optimal operating parameters, it is often necessary to view a large series of history data from a building control and management system. However, viewing large amounts of data in tables and charts is not a useful procedure to find significant patterns and information for an energy team. A new approach at AEA adds a programming engineer to the normal energy analysis team who manages data and programs visualization tools to speed analysis. This paper addresses the potential effectiveness of such an addition to the typical building operations (optimization) project team. The programming engineer confronts issues in two directions. First is the nature of the data as it is captured and stored, which establishes various data processing steps that are necessary to produce an automated acquisition system to the server. For the second direction, the programming engineer must adapt to the needs of the project team: what kinds of questions are the building engineers asking, how does data need to be aggregated, and how can it best be visualized. The paper considers how, in order to produce useful data tools, the programming engineer is confronted with having to learn and appreciate the kinds of questions asked by other disciplines on the project team

The shape of intimacy: private space and the British social imagination, 1650-1770

"The Shape of Intimacy" explores the significance of a growing material culture of privacy to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literary history. In recent years, places such as the drawing room and coffee house have come to exemplify emergent norms of domestic and civil sociability. My project shifts our focus to less familiar spaces: the many variations of the closet, the period's quintessential private room, and the carriage, sometimes characterized as the closet's mobile counterpart. Closets and carriages, I argue, are not merely incidental settings in an increasingly quotidian literary landscape; rather, for many British writers of the period, they serve as vehicles for an array of charged and unstable extrafamilial encounters. Tracking the wide range of formal innovations and affective investigations associated with closets and carriages, my dissertation illuminates the double movement of the period's social imagination, which retreats into real and projected intimacies even as it reaches out into ever more expansive, abstract, and anonymous public realms.The first chapter studies the convention of naming printed collections after closets and cabinets. I argue that publishers invoked these elite, exclusive spaces to affirm the cultural capital of knowledge circulating faster and further than ever before, thereby shoring up an enduring paradigm of reading as voyeurism. Turning from printed closets to courtly ones, Chapter Two considers the slippery navigations of power and pleasure in Anthony Hamilton's Memoirs of Count de Gramont, suggesting that the orientalist flourishes in an intrigue set in a Restoration bathing closet -- an interior Charles II had redesigned in Ottoman fashion -- work to underscore the declining political stakes of homoerotic alliances. Chapter Three centers on Jonathan Swift's poem about the pair of privies he built on his friends' country estate. Composed a few decades before water closets would become the newest site of intra-domestic retreat, "Panegyric on the Dean" links the breakdown of communal values to the excretory solitude that seems a travesty of closet prayer. The final chapter contrasts carriage sociability in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey with earlier satirical scenes of awkwardness between strangers on the road. The vehicle called the Vis-a-vis is Sterne's figure for the possibility of intimate anonymity.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references