Climate change and its impacts on older adults’ health in Kazakhstan

There has been growing concern over climate change and its impacts on many aspects of human society, particularly on health. Climate change may affect health in a wide range of forms: increased floods and droughts, increased frequency and intensity of heat waves, changes in the distribution of vector-borne diseases and effects on the risk of disasters and malnutrition (Haines et al 2006b). So far, little is known about climate change and its impact on older adults' health in Central Asia, particularly in Khazakhstan, where a downturn of life expectancy, has been prevalent. The objective of this paper is to examine the impacts of climate change on older adults’ health in Kazakhstan. Based on the literature review and empirical evidence, this study concludes that climate change largely affects older adults’ health in Kazakhstan. This study emphasizes that older adults are becoming increasingly aware of the climate-change risks and its impacts on human health. Older adults are matured human capital of any society and can be utilized to address the climate-related health consequences in the twenty-first century. It is hoped that the findings of this study will have enormous policy implications

The Impact of Interference on GNSS Receiver Observables – A Running Digital Sum Based Simple Jammer Detector

A GNSS-based navigation system relies on externally received information via a space-based Radio Frequency (RF) link. This poses susceptibility to RF Interference (RFI) and may initiate failure states ranging from degraded navigation accuracy to a complete signal loss condition. To guarantee the integrity of the received GNSS signal, the receiver should either be able to function in the presence of RFI without generating misleading information (i.e., offering a navigation solution within an accuracy limit), or the receiver must detect RFI so that some other means could be used as a countermeasure in order to ensure robust and accurate navigation. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to identify an interference occurrence and not to confuse it with other signal conditions, for example, indoor or deep urban canyon, both of which have somewhat similar impact on the navigation performance. Hence, in this paper, the objective is to investigate the effect of interference on different GNSS receiver observables in two different environments: i. an interference scenario with an inexpensive car jammer, and ii. an outdoor-indoor scenario without any intentional interference. The investigated observables include the Automatic Gain Control (AGC) measurements, the digitized IF (Intermediate Frequency) signal levels, the Delay Locked Loop and the Phase Locked Loop discriminator variances, and the Carrier-to-noise density ratio (C/N0) measurements. The behavioral pattern of these receiver observables is perceived in these two different scenarios in order to comprehend which of those observables would be able to separate an interference situation from an indoor scenario, since in both the cases, the resulting positioning accuracy and/or availability are affected somewhat similarly. A new Running Digital Sum (RDS) -based interference detection method is also proposed herein that can be used as an alternate to AGC-based interference detection. It is shown in this paper that it is not at all wise to consider certain receiver observables for interference detection (i.e., C/N0); rather it is beneficial to utilize certain specific observables, such as the RDS of raw digitized signal levels or the AGC-based observables that can uniquely identify a critical malicious interference occurrence

Solid waste management in urban Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, urban local governments, i.e. city corporations, municipalities are formally responsible for urban waste management. The conservancy department, as an administrative organ of the corporation/municipality, has the responsibility for solid waste management (SWM). In this short paper, an attempt has been made to shed some light on how the conservancy departments of both Dhaka (herein after called DCC) and Chittagong city corporations (herein after called CCC) operate in practice, and therefore also to understand why there is a discrepancy between the ideals and realities. The scope of the paper is limited only to discuss the SWM system of both DCC and CCC and the author collected data and information used here during his fieldwork in June- August 2000

Bearing Strength of Untightened Double-Shear Bolted Connections in Cold-Formed Steel Construction

This paper presents the experimental investigation of cold-formed steel double-shear bolted connections where both the bolt head and the nut are not in contact with the outer sheets. The inner sheet of each specimen is not constrained from out-of-plane distortion or bulging downstream of the bolt, and fails in bearing. Based on a series of tests involving specimens having bolt diameters ranging from 12 to 16 mm and sheet thicknesses ranging from 1.5 to 3.0 mm, it has been found that the absence of out-of-plane constraint in untightened bolted connections leads to much lower bearing capacities than predicted by the specification’s bearing strength equation. The effect is more pronounced for thinner sheets. An interesting finding is that the threaded bolt specimens had higher bearing capacities than the corresponding ones with shank bolts. It appears that the bolt threads provided some out-of-plane constraint to the connected sheet

Analysis of Multipath Mitigation Techniques with Land Mobile Satellite Channel Model

Multipath is undesirable for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, since the reception of multipath can create a significant distortion to the shape of the correlation function leading to an error in the receivers’ position estimate. Many multipath mitigation techniques exist in the literature to deal with the multipath propagation problem in the context of GNSS. The multipath studies in the literature are often based on optimistic assumptions, for example, assuming a static two-path channel or a fading channel with a Rayleigh or a Nakagami distribution. But, in reality, there are a lot of channel modeling issues, for example, satellite-to-user geometry, variable number of paths, variable path delays and gains, Non Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) path condition, receiver movements, etc. that are kept out of consideration when analyzing the performance of these techniques. Therefore, this is of utmost importance to analyze the performance of different multipath mitigation techniques in some realistic measurement-based channel models, for example, the Land Multipath is undesirable for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, since the reception of multipath can create a significant distortion to the shape of the correlation function leading to an error in the receivers’ position estimate. Many multipath mitigation techniques exist in the literature to deal with the multipath propagation problem in the context of GNSS. The multipath studies in the literature are often based on optimistic assumptions, for example, assuming a static two-path channel or a fading channel with a Rayleigh or a Nakagami distribution. But, in reality, there are a lot of channel modeling issues, for example, satellite-to-user geometry, variable number of paths, variable path delays and gains, Non Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) path condition, receiver movements, etc. that are kept out of consideration when analyzing the performance of these techniques. Therefore, this is of utmost importance to analyze the performance of different multipath mitigation techniques in some realistic measurement-based channel models, for example, the Land Mobile Satellite (LMS) channel model [1]-[4], developed at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The DLR LMS channel model is widely used for simulating the positioning accuracy of mobile satellite navigation receivers in urban outdoor scenarios. The main objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive analysis of some of the most promising techniques with the DLR LMS channel model in varying multipath scenarios. Four multipath mitigation techniques are chosen herein for performance comparison, namely, the narrow Early-Minus-Late (nEML), the High Resolution Correlator, the C/N0-based two stage delay tracking technique, and the Reduced Search Space Maximum Likelihood (RSSML) delay estimator. The first two techniques are the most popular and traditional ones used in nowadays GNSS receivers, whereas the later two techniques are comparatively new and are advanced techniques, recently proposed by the authors. In addition, the implementation of the RSSML is optimized here for a narrow-bandwidth receiver configuration in the sense that it now requires a significantly less number of correlators and memory than its original implementation. The simulation results show that the reduced-complexity RSSML achieves the best multipath mitigation performance in moderate-to-good carrier-to-noise density ratio with the DLR LMS channel model in varying multipath scenarios

Diethyl 6H,12H-5,11-methano­dibenzo[b,f][1,5]diazo­cine-1,7-dicarboxyl­ate

In the mol­ecule of the title compound, C21H22N2O4, the 1,7-diethyl ester analogue of Tröger’s base, the dihedral angle between the two benzene rings is 93.16 (3)°; the mol­ecule is C 2 symmetric

Multipath Mitigation Techniques for Satellite-Based Positioning Applications

This chapter addressed the challenges encountered by a GNSS signal due to multipath propagation. A wide range of correlation-based multipath mitigation techniques were discussed and the performance of some of these techniques were evaluated in terms of running average error and root-mean-square error. Among the analyzed multipath mitigation techniques, RSSML, in general, achieved the best multipath mitigation performance in moderate-to-high C/N0 scenarios (for example, 30 dB-Hz and onwards). The other techniques, such as PT(Diff2) and HRC showed good multipath mitigation performance only in high C/N0 scenarios (for example, 40 dB-Hz and onwards). The other new technique SBME offered slightly better multipath mitigation performance to the well-known nEML DLL at the cost of an additional correlator. However, as the GNSS research area is fast evolving with many potential applications, it remains a challenging topic for future research to investigate the feasibility of these multipath mitigation techniques with the multitude of signal modulations, spreading codes, and spectrum placements that are (or are to be) proposed.publishedVersionPeer reviewe