A sub-regional outlook of renewable energy potential: the case of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon

This paper addresses the current status and the potentials of renewable energy applications in the selected Middle East countries; Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The energy and environmental situations within these primary target areas reflect many similarities and share serious common problems. These include an almost total dependence on imported oil products as the primary energy source, rapidly growing populations that are escalating the demand for energy, and only rudimentary efforts currently underway to mitigate the greenhouse and other adverse environmental effects of energy utilization. Lebanon is highly urbanized compared to Syria and Jordan with much smaller area and has not been fully engaged in pilot projects for use of renewable energy. Applications of solar energy in that region have been growing since 1970. Solar water heating with support of policies in Jordan has achieved measurable market penetration. Lebanon and Syria have not made reasonable progress in solar applications due to subsidized electricity supply to the end user. The technical and economic feasibility of wind energy utilization in Lebanon has not been yet fully explored, while it has advanced with two operating wind farms in Jordan, and one pilot wind farm in Syria. Similarly, the transfer of biomass technology has been successful in Jordan while it remains at the assessment level in Lebanon and Syria coupled with small pilot projects

Orthogonal variability modeling to support multi-cloud application configuration

Cloud service providers benefit from a vast majority of customers due to variability and making profit from commonalities between the cloud services that they provide. Recently, application configuration dimensions has been increased dramatically due to multi-tenant, multi-device and multi-cloud paradigm. This challenges the configuration and customization of cloud-based software that are typically offered as a service due to the intrinsic variability. In this paper, we present a model-driven approach based on variability models originating from the software product line community to handle such multi-dimensional variability in the cloud. We exploit orthogonal variability models to systematically manage and create tenant-specific configuration and customizations. We also demonstrate how such variability models can be utilized to take into account the already deployed application parts to enable harmonized deployments for new tenants in a multi-cloud setting. The approach considers application functional and non-functional requirements to provide a set of valid multi-cloud configurations. We illustrate our approach through a case study

Tourist Shoppers’ Evaluation of Retail Service: A Study of Cross-Border versus International Outshoppers

This article extends the concept of customer perceived value (CPV) to the tourist outshopping context and explores the differences in antecedents and outcomes of CPV between cross-border and international outshoppers. A large-scale field survey in Hong Kong with cross-border outshoppers from mainland China and international shoppers from four Western countries (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States) shows that perceived product quality, risk, and value for money have a stronger effect on CPV for cross-border outshoppers, and employee service quality and lifestyle congruence for international outshoppers. CPV also has a stronger positive effect on satisfaction, word of mouth, and repeat purchase intentions for cross-border outshoppers, whereas satisfaction has a stronger positive impact on word of mouth and repeat purchase intentions for international outshoppers. We discuss the conceptual contribution and managerial implications of our findings for international retailers, researchers, and tourism organizations

Clothing insulation and temperature, layer and mass of clothing under comfortable environmental conditions

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between the microclimate temperature and clothing insulation (Icl) under comfortable environmental conditions. In total, 20 subjects (13 women, 7 men) took part in this study. Four environmental temperatures were chosen: 14??C (to represent March/April), 25??C (May/June), 29??C (July/August), and 23??C (September/October). Wind speed (0.14ms-1) and humidity (45%) were held constant. Clothing microclimate temperatures were measured at the chest (Tchest) and on the interscapular region (Tscapular). Clothing temperature of the innermost layer (Tinnermost) was measured on this layer 30 mm above the centre of the left breast. Subjects were free to choose the clothing that offered them thermal comfort under each environmental condition. We found the following results. 1) All clothing factors except the number of lower clothing layers (Llower), showed differences between the different environmental conditions (P<0.05). The ranges of Tchest were 31.6 to 33.5??C and 32.2 to 33.4??C in Tscapular. The range of Tinnermost was 28.6 to 32.0??C. The range of the upper clothing layers (Lupper) and total clothing mass (Mtotal) was 1.1 to 3.2 layers and 473 to 1659 g respectively. The range of Icl was 0.78 to 2.10 clo. 2) Post hoc analyses showed that analysis of Tinnermost produced the same results as for that of Icl. Likewise, the analysis of Lupper produced the same result as the analysis of the number of total layers (Ltotal) within an outfit. 3) Air temperature (ta) had positive relationships with Tchest and Tscapular and with Tinnermost but had inverse correlations with Icl, Mtotal, Lupper and Ltotal. Tchest, Tscapular, and Tinnermost increased as ta rose. 4) Icl had inverse relationships with Tchest and Tinnermost, but positive relationships with Mtotal, Lupper and Ltotal. Icl could be estimated by Mtotal, Lupper, and Tscapular using a multivariate linear regression model. 5) Lupper had positive relationships with Icl and Mtotal, but Llower did not. Subjects hardly changed Llower under environmental comfort conditions between March and October. This indicates that each of the Tchest, Mtotal, and Lupper was a factor in predicting Icl. Tinnermost might also be a more influential factor than the clothing microclimate temperature.open1

A dynamic inequality generation scheme for polynomial programming

Hierarchies of semidefinite programs have been used to approximate or even solve polynomial programs. This approach rapidly becomes computationally expensive and is often tractable only for problems of small size. In this paper, we propose a dynamic inequality generation scheme to generate valid polynomial inequalities for general polynomial programs. When used iteratively, this scheme improves the bounds without incurring an exponential growth in the size of the relaxation. As a result, the proposed scheme is in principle scalable to large general polynomial programming problems. When all the variables of the problem are non-negative or when all the variables are binary, the general algorithm is specialized to a more efficient algorithm. In the case of binary polynomial programs, we show special cases for which the proposed scheme converges to the global optimal solution. We also present several examples illustrating the computational behavior of the scheme and provide comparisons with Lasserre’s approach and, for the binary linear case, with the lift-and-project method of Balas, Ceria, and Cornuejols

An integrated view of theiInfluence of temperature, pressure, and humidity on the stability of trimorphic cysteamine hydrochloride

Understanding the phase behavior of pharmaceuticals is important for dosage form development and regulatory requirements, in particular after the incident with ritonavir. In the present paper, a comprehensive study of the solid-state phase behavior of cysteamine hydrochloride used in the treatment of nephropathic cystinosis and recently granted orphan designation by the European Commission is presented employing (high-pressure) calorimetry, water vapor sorption, and X-ray diffraction as a function of temperature. A new crystal form (I2/a, form III) has been discovered, and its structure has been solved by X-ray powder diffraction, while two other crystalline forms are already known. The relative thermodynamic stabilities of the commercial form I and of the newly discovered form III have been established; they possess an overall enantiotropic phase relationship, with form I stable at room temperature and form III stable above 37 degrees C. Its melting temperature was found at 67.3 +/- 0.5 degrees C. Cysteamine hydrochloride is hygroscopic and immediately forms a concentrated saturated solution in water with a surprisingly high concentration of 47.5 mol % above a relative humidity of 35%. No hydrate has been observed. A temperature composition phase diagram is presented that has been obtained with the unary pressure temperature phase diagram, measurements, and calculations. For development, form I would be the best form to use in any solid dosage form, which should be thoroughly protected against humidity.Postprint (author's final draft