Evaluation on overheating risk of a typical Norwegian residential building under future extreme weather conditions

As the temperature in the summer period in Norway has been always moderate, little study on the indoor comfort of typical Norwegian residential buildings in summer seasons can be found. Heat waves have attacked Norway in recent years, including in 2018 and 2019. Zero energy buildings, even neighborhoods, have been a hot research topic in Norway. There is overheating risk in typical Norwegian residential buildings without cooling devices installed under these uncommon weather conditions, like the hot summers in 2018 and 2019. Three weather scenarios consisting of present-day weather data, 2050 weather data, and 2080 weather data are investigated in this study. The overheating risk of a typical Norwegian residential building is evaluated under these three weather scenarios. 72 scenarios are simulated in this study, including different orientations, window-to-wall ratios, and infiltration rates. Two different overheating evaluation criteria and guidelines, the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) and the CIBSE TM 59, are compared in this study

Spelling Errors Among Online Learners in the Moderated Discussion Board: A Case Study of Virtual University of Pakistan

The study investigates the errors among online learners and their probable causes in the Moderated Discussion Board (MDB) of Virtual University of Pakistan (VUP). The main objective of the MDB is to invite comments from students on a given topic; students place their comments within a given time limit and get graded accordingly. Misspelling is a natural and common phenomenon among the second language (L2) learners. However, due to the availability of spell check software options, misspellings should get minimized in online discussions. For the present study, the spelling mistakes committed by the graduate students of Business English (ENG201) course were analyzed. The findings demonstrated many types of spelling mistakes including inconsistent rules, ambiguous words, vowel substitutions, consonant substitutions, space inaccuracy, inflectional endings, double consonants, consonant omissions, vowel omissions, tense mistakes and letter reversals. Some of the causes explored were quick and direct typing on the interface, keyboard adjacency and not using the spell check software. The results revealed that major spelling mistakes were due to the lack of inappropriate guidance, insufficient practice and lack of adequate awareness about inflectional morphology. Some recommendations to improve spelling mistakes either on students end or through teaching techniques have been suggested at the end

Spelling Errors Among Online Learners in the Moderated Discussion Board: A Case Study of Virtual University of Pakistan

The study investigates the errors among online learners and their probable causes in the Moderated Discussion Board (MDB) of Virtual University of Pakistan (VUP). The main objective of the MDB is to invite comments from students on a given topic; students place their comments within a given time limit and get graded accordingly. Misspelling is a natural and common phenomenon among the second language (L2) learners. However, due to the availability of spell check software options, misspellings should get minimized in online discussions. For the present study, the spelling mistakes committed by the graduate students of Business English (ENG201) course were analyzed. The findings demonstrated many types of spelling mistakes including inconsistent rules, ambiguous words, vowel substitutions, consonant substitutions, space inaccuracy, inflectional endings, double consonants, consonant omissions, vowel omissions, tense mistakes and letter reversals. Some of the causes explored were quick and direct typing on the interface, keyboard adjacency and not using the spell check software. The results revealed that major spelling mistakes were due to the lack of inappropriate guidance, insufficient practice and lack of adequate awareness about inflectional morphology. Some recommendations to improve spelling mistakes either on students end or through teaching techniques have been suggested at the end

RESEARCH ON THE MOTION RESPONSE OF AQUACULTURE SHIP AND TANK SLOSHING UNDER ROLLING RESONANCE

The double-row and double-chamfered aquaculture tank is a special tank structure of the aquaculture ship. The tank sloshing of this structure is coupled with the hull motion, which has an important impact on the safety of the hull motion. In the present study, research on the tank sloshing and hull motion response of aquaculture ships was conducted based on the model seakeeping and tank sloshing tests in regular waves. The test results were compared with the numerical simulation results of solid loading without sloshing. The results showed that the numerical simulation of the pitch motion was consistent with the amplitude-frequency response curve of the experimental results. Under certain transverse wave conditions, a large discrepancy existed between the amplitude-frequency response curve of the heave motion by the numerical simulation and the test results, and the roll motion differed most from the experimental result. Severe roll resonance occurred when the wave length-ship length ratio was 0.6. The roll motion amplitude was increased by 183.2%. Therefore, compared with aquaculture ships without sloshing, the sloshing of the tank has little effect on the pitch but has a great impact on the roll and heave motions, with the most significant effect on the roll motion

Analysis of Motivation Level of L2 Learners in Enhancing Speaking Skill

The present study focuses on the second language (L2) learners’ motivation as a substantial factor for enhancing speaking skills at the graduate level. Motivation in L2 learning is a complex phenomenon that had gained the attention of researchers and theorists for many decades. Motivation to learn English as a second language have been described and categorized in several ways. However, the emerging trend of English language learning at a high rate calls forth to answer the question such as why learners are so ambitious to learn this language in the presence of a national language. Secondly, if they are learning the English language, what is the kind of motivation urging them to learn it. At the present scenario, the English language has become a compulsion in both academic and professional career of L2 learners; though, the L2 learners should be reinforced to speak in English inside and outside of the classroom. The hegemony of the English language cannot be refuted at any cost because it has been employed in the domains of power-administration, military, education, and commerce since the making of Pakistan. A random sample of hundred graduate students from University of Management and Technology and hundred from University of Education, Lahore were selected. The close-ended questionnaire was used and total numbers of items were 21. The data were analyzed quantitatively using the content analysis method which suggested that the majority of respondents agreed with the notion that learners motivate them to speak in the target language and they were well- known about the significance of English in Pakistan, despite the fact that English is used as a subject in the ESL context rather than as a language. At last, it can be ensured that the study might be utilized for both the L2 learners and in the same sociological conditions. The study ends with the suggestion that English language teaching curricula and teaching strategies should be designed keeping in view the type of motivation (instrumental motivation) which is driving the Pakistani learners

Meta-analysis of the relationship between interleukin-6 levels and the prognosis and severity of acute coronary syndrome

This study aimed to explore the relationship between plasma interleukin 6 (IL-6) levels, adverse cardiovascular events, and the severity of acute coronary syndrome (ACS). A literature review was performed of studies regarding IL-6 and ACS extracted from databases including EMBASE, Cqvip, MEDLINE, Web of Knowledge, PubMed, Cochrane Library, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, and Wanfang data. The Newcastle-Ottawa scale (NOS) was used to evaluate the quality of the literature. The literature was screened, its quality was evaluated, and relevant data were extracted for performing meta-analysis using RevMan software (version 5.3). A total of 524 studies were included in the initial survey. After several rounds of screening and analysis, six studies met the inclusion criteria and underwent meta-analysis using a fixed-effect model. Patients were divided into non-severe and severe groups based on the concentration of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein. Meta-analysis of the relationship between IL-6 and the severity of ACS showed that the plasma IL-6 level of patients in the severe group was significantly higher than that of patients in the non-severe group (p<0.00001). Additionally, patients with experience of major adverse cardiovascular events had significantly higher plasma IL-6 levels than did patients without experience of such events (p<0.00001). In summary, patients with ACS and high IL-6 levels tended to be in a critical condition, with a higher risk of adverse cardiovascular events and worse prognosis. Thus, IL-6 levels could indicate whether patients with ACS may have adverse cardiovascular events and determine the severity of ACS

Multi-Label Takagi-Sugeno-Kang Fuzzy System

Multi-label classification can effectively identify the relevant labels of an instance from a given set of labels. However,the modeling of the relationship between the features and the labels is critical to the classification performance. To this end, we propose a new multi-label classification method, called Multi-Label Takagi-Sugeno-Kang Fuzzy System (ML-TSK FS), to improve the classification performance. The structure of ML-TSK FS is designed using fuzzy rules to model the relationship between features and labels. The fuzzy system is trained by integrating fuzzy inference based multi-label correlation learning with multi-label regression loss. The proposed ML-TSK FS is evaluated experimentally on 12 benchmark multi-label datasets. 1 The results show that the performance of ML-TSK FS is competitive with existing methods in terms of various evaluation metrics, indicating that it is able to model the feature-label relationship effectively using fuzzy inference rules and enhances the classification performance.Comment: This work has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy System