Performance of unreinforced masonry buildings against natural disasters – review study

Un-Reinforced Masonry (URM) buildings are popular due to their durability, low cost, construction easiness and architectural character, need of less skilled labour, eco-friendly and use of locally available materials such as ashlar or rubble, adobe and brick. URM buildings have a higher probability of failing under natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and storm surges, floods, cyclones and landslides. In Sri Lanka, landslides and floods have frequently occurred. Massive tsunami adversely affected the people in 2004 and its effect to islands on the Indian Ocean has been continued since December, 2004. Minor earthquakes have come off recently with experiences of only wall cracks. Besides, it is believed there is a defused plate boundary in the making some 500 km south of the southern tip of Sri Lanka as the cause of these tremors or minor quakes. Investigation on performance of URM buildings against these natural disasters is increasingly important. In this review study an attempt was made to summarize types of damages on URM structures caused by natural disasters, different kind of retrofitting methods for URM structures to be seismic resistant. Common failure mechanisms for URM structures consist of separation of walls at corners, diagonal cracking in walls, separation of roofing from walls, vertical cracking in walls, out-of-plane wall failure, in-plane failure, shear cracks and de-lamination. These damages on a wall lead to diminish the service life of building. Simple technologies with low cost to strengthen the existing structures and damaged structures to resist dynamic loads are also discussed in this paper

A Computerized System to Solve Difficulties in Finding Medicines under the Medicine Shortages in Sri Lanka

Due to ongoing financial crisis in Sri Lanka, patients are starting to suffer from medicine shortages at an increasing rate. Patients are having to go to multiple pharmacies to find certain medicines which could result in health complications. Although e-pharmacy platforms provide the functionality to order medicines by uploading the prescription sheet, they do not provide alternatives on where to find the medicines that are not available in the pharmacy. This research introduces a new functionality to provide patients suggestion on where exactly to find missing medicines. This is found through checking the stock availability of the medicine in other pharmacies in sorted order with respect to the delivery location of the patient taken via Google map API to make the process much more efficient and practical. This is achieved by implementing a global identifier for each medicine where all pharmacies keep the records of the medicines in reference to the defined global identifier of that medicine. In addition to that, the system allows patients to view all the pharmacies nearest to their delivery location and give the freedom to place orders to whichever pharmacy they prefer. If a medicine is not available in the pharmacy which the order was placed for, the system will give suggestions to the patient on where exactly to buy the medicine

Nonextensivity in Geological Faults?

Geological fault systems, as the San Andreas fault (SAF) in USA, constitute typical examples of self-organizing systems in nature. In this paper, we have considered some geophysical properties of the SAF system to test the viability of the nonextensive models for earthquakes developed in [Phys. Rev. E {\bf 73}, 026102, 2006]. To this end, we have used 6188 earthquakes events ranging in the magnitude interval $2 < m < 8$ that were taken from the Network Earthquake International Center catalogs (NEIC, 2004-2006) and the Bulletin of the International Seismological Centre (ISC, 1964-2003). For values of the Tsallis nonextensive parameter $q \simeq 1.68$, it is shown that the energy distribution function deduced in above reference provides an excellent fit to the NEIC and ISC SAF data.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, standard LaTeX fil

Development of an Online Hotel Reservation System in Sri Lanka using Cutting-Edge Technologies

The hotel management system is an important aspect of contemporary hotel life since it assures the hotel's correct operation, making it efficient and enabling the opportunity to reserve a room online. It contains information on the rooms and the hotel as a whole for the staff and administration. This technology eliminates the majority of the paperwork, making it a must-have tool for any modern hotel. The present reservation system is analyzed and improved. The purpose of this paper is to offer a thorough examination of the system. Make an effort to enhance the existing condition in the hotel management industry. In addition, a modest prototype built using cutting-edge technologies MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, and Node.js (MERN stack) will be discussed. This will showcase how the system would operate from the client and administrator sides. The MERN stack is an excellent choice for hotels wishing to develop high-quality web applications. In fact, this stack enables the rapid development of online applications and software in addition to leveraging high-performance and customized technologies. The mentioned system was shown to be significantly more affordable, an open-source program with superior performance, and UI rendering by using these technologies. In addition to assessing the value of an online reservation system for Sri Lanka's hotel industry, this paper will examine how the environment's components should be set up, integrated, and built, as well as how the requirements, design, construction, and test phases of the application development lifecycle should be combined to create an overall system and how a developer would actually go about creating applications that would be used in practical situations

REFLEXÕES ACERCA DOS DIREITOS DOS INDÍGENAS E DAS POPULAÇÕES TRADICIONAIS DA AMAZÔNIA

A História e a Geografia da humanidade, nas quais se refletem a trajetória do tempo e da espacialidade/territorialidade, foram e são construídas de uma forma não linear com muitos embates e lutas, cujos resultados na maioria das vezes apontam para uma narrativa ou uma metanarrativa que refletem o ponto de vista dos vencedores. O Brasil, país de herança colonizadora e  expansionista, apresenta como resultado as contradições políticas, sociais, econômicas e espaciais/territoriais cristalizadas e que permanecem nos dias atuais, ainda que muito recentemente tenha procurado dar visibilidade aos excluídos, tanto da cidade quanto aqueles que habitam o campo – zona rural. A Amazônia, integrante desse processo da modernidade, não fica alheia a tais acontecimentos, ainda que apresente internamente suas próprias contradições e conflitos, sendo que por ser uma das últimas fronteiras econômicas apresenta uma dinamicidade que diretamente propicia uma série de ressignificações nos modos de vida e nas identidades dos categorizados pelo conhecimento científico como povos tradicionais – e que neste trabalho nos referiremos a eles como povos amazônicos, sejam ribeirinhos, indígenas, extrativistas ou pequenos agricultores, em decorrência da maneira de vivenciar suas territorialidades/espacialidades. O fato é que cada um desses povos, é tratado aqui como sendo formado por humanos e não como conceitos científicos ou objetos que se encontram numa grande encruzilhada entre a permanência e a mudança, entre o novo e o antigo, entre o “arcaico” e a modernidade. O artigo em si busca discutir o protagonismo dos povos amazônicos enquanto pessoas que buscam e reivindicam seus direitos na realidade enfrentada no seu cotidiano; assim esboçamos um recorte temporal a partir dos anos 1980 com o processo de abertura democrática do país, anos em que surgiram inúmeros movimentos de reinvindicação de direitos desses povos, até mesmo como compreensão da dívida social histórica a eles devida.Palavras Chave: Povos Amazônicos; Invisibilidade e Identidade; Modos de vida; Territorialidades.REFLECTIONS ON THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS AND TRADITIONAL  POPULATIONS OF THE AMAZONAbstractThe History and Geography of mankind, that reflect the trajectory of time and spatiality/territoriality, were and are constructed in a non-linear form with many clashes, fights and whose results most often point to a narrative or a metanarrative that reflects the point of view of the winners. Brazil, as a country of colonizing and expansionist heritage, presents as a result political, social, economic and territorial/spatial crystallized contradictions which remain in the present day, though very recently it has sought to give visibility to the excluded people, both those who live in city and rural area. The Amazon, as part of this process of modernity, is not unrelated to such events, although presents internally their own contradictions and conflicts, with and because is one of the last economic borders presents a dynamic that directly promotes a series of re meanings in the ways of life and identities of the categorized by scientific knowledge as traditional people - in this work we will refer to them as] Amazonian people, whether they be riparian, indigenous, extractives communities or small farmers , due to how they use to living their territorialities/spatiality‟s. The fact is that each of these people here is considered as formed by humans and not as categories and/or scientific concepts and/or objects that are in a great crossroads between permanence and change, between old and new, between the "archaic" and the modernity. The article itself seeks to discuss the leading role of the Amazonia people, while people who seek and claim their rights vis-à-vis the reality that is placed in their daily life; so we outlined a timeframe from the ‟80 years through the process of democratic openness in the country, years during which emerged numerous claims of rights movements of these people, even as understanding of the historical social debt owe it to them.Key Words: Amazonian Peoples; Invisibility and Identity; Ways of life; Territorialities

Predição De Classes De Solo Por Mineração De Dados Em área Da Bacia Sedimentar Do São Francisco

The objective of this work was to evaluate different strategies for the prediction of soil class distribution on digital soil maps of areas without reference data, in the sedimentary basin of San Francisco, in the north of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The strategies included: Taxonomic generalization, training by field observations, training set expansion, and the use of different data mining algorithms. Four matrices were developed, differentiated by the volume of data for machine learning and by soil taxonomic levels to be predicted. The performance of the machine learning algorithms-Random Forest, J48, and MLP-, associated with discretization, class balancing, variable selection, and expansion of the training set was evaluated. Class balancing, variable discretization by equal frequencies, and the Random Forest algorithm showed the best performances. The representativeness extension of field observations, that assumes a larger training area, brought no predictive gain. Soil taxonomic generalization to the suborder level reduces the fragmentation of mapped polygons and improves the accuracy of digital soil maps. When generated by training on in situ soil observations at the mapping area, digital soil maps are as accurate as those trained on preexistent maps.5191396140

Impactos ambientais do manejo agroecológico da caatinga no Rio Grande do Norte.

O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar os impactos ambientais do manejo agroecológico da caatinga, em unidades de produção familiar no Rio Grande do Norte, pelo método Ambitec de produção animal - dimensão ambiental, desenvolvido pela Embrapa Meio Ambiente. Foram avaliadas sete unidades de produção familiar, em quatro projetos de assentamentos de reforma agrária do Município de Apodi, RN. Os dados para o levantamento foram obtidos por meio de questionários aplicados aos representantes das unidades produtivas familiares, que atribuíram, a cada variável estudada, um valor que representou a alteração proporcionada pela implementação da tecnologia. Após a inserção dos coeficientes de alteração de cada variável dos indicadores por unidade de produção, o coeficiente de impacto foi automaticamente calculado por meio da planilha Ambitec. O manejo agroecológico da caatinga resultou num impacto ambiental positivo, e suas maiores contribuições foram relacionadas aos efeitos positivos dos seguintes indicadores: capacidade produtiva do solo, uso de insumos materiais, qualidade do produto e diminuição da emissão de poluentes à atmosfera. Dois indicadores geraram efeitos negativos: o uso de energia e o uso de recursos naturais. Pela superioridade dos benefícios gerados, o manejo agroecológico da caatinga é uma inovação tecnológica geradora de impactos ambientais positivos

Antimicrobial Activity of the Extract of Stem Bark of Diplotropis Ferruginea Benth

This is the first report about the antibacterial activity of Diplotropis ferruginea Benth. In this study, the ethanol extract of D. ferruginea was tested for its antimicrobial activity against strains gram-positive and gram-negative. In order to determine the minimal inhibitory concentration, assays were carried out by micro dilution method. The extract was screened for antimicrobial activity, and it showed antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Avaliação da presença de coliformes, bolores e leveduras em amostras de mel orgânico de abelhas africanizadas das ilhas do alto rio Paraná.

O presente trabalho foi desenvolvido para caracterizar a microbiota do mel produzido nas ilhas Floresta e Laranjeira do alto rio Paraná, na região de Porto Brasílio, Paraná (PR). O mel foi coletado diretamente das melgueiras das colônias avaliadas, em três apiários distribuídos nas ilhas Floresta e Laranjeira. O período de coleta das amostras de mel foi de novembro de 2005 a fevereiro de 2006, perfazendo o total de 24 amostras de mel orgânico produzido por abelhas Apis mellifera africanizadas. Seguindo o método das normas internacionais da Compendium of Methods for the Microbiology Examination of Foods, os parâmetros analisados foram: presença de coliformes a 35°C e 45°C e quantificação de bolores e leveduras. Verificou-se que todas as amostras apresentaram-se em conformidade com o Regulamento Técnico MERCOSUL de Identidade e Qualidade do Mel (MERCOSUL/GMC/RES no 15/94). As amostras analisadas indicaram excelente qualidade microbiológica para o mel orgânico