Lighting the way through the home: development of early braille literacy

Emergent braille literacy is the earliest phase of language development where children, from infancy, are exposed to 'direct, repeated and meaningful interactions with braille literacy materials and events' (Rex, Koenig, Wormsley, & Baker, 1995, p.10). Activities such as shared reading of tactile books, scribbling on the braille machine, joint engagement in nursery rhymes, songs and chants help infants acquire cognitive concepts and develop physical skills to engage in braille. The process leads to the early development of literacy concepts including speaking, listening,reading and writing, as a foundation for braille literacy (Drezek, 1999)

An innovative design and evaluation of a stratified hot water storage system - the Water Snake

The increase in energy prices and the demand to reduce carbon emission is attracting the attention to the implementation of diverse heating technologies such as heat pumps, solar energy, gas boilers, CHP and electric heaters. Heating applications for integrated technologies include district heating, domestic small scale applications and commercial large scale buildings. Thermal storage is likely to become key to energy efficient heating. A stratified hot water tank will play an important role in the integration of several heating technologies that operate efficiently at different level of temperatures with reduced implementation cost. This paper describes the concept and the assessment of the ‘Water Snake’, a novel low cost concept of a stratified hot water tank. The results show that the new concept could provide efficient stratification at a very low cost using this invention