Energy flexibility and resiliency analysis of old and new single family buildings in Nordic climate

Climate change and energy crises are the two challenges faced by societies. To address these issues, buildings have to be both flexible and resilient. The aim of this paper is to simulate and compare the performance of two types of a single-family house, i.e. an old building (1970) and a new building (2000), integrated with and without photovoltaic (PV) for the two objectives of energy flexibility and energy resilience in the cold climate of Finland. Depending on the PV size, it is found that the old building has a flexibility factor of up to 84% and the new building has 17% and the energy cost reduced. For resilience, the PV made the old building robustness period 15 h and the new building 32 h. With the PV, the amplitude of the buildings failure is lower and the recovery speed is faster. To meet future sustainability and resilience goals, energy resilience and flexibility for different types of buildings have to be studied together, which are impacted by both the characteristics of the bulding’s thermal mass and the onsite energy generation

Energy Flexibility and towards Resilience in New and Old Residential Houses in Cold Climates: A Techno-Economic Analysis

One of the main sectors that contribute to climate change is the buildings sector. While nearly zero-energy buildings are becoming a new norm in many countries in the world, research is advancing towards energy flexibility and resilience to reach energy efficiency and sustainability goals. Combining the energy flexibility and energy resilience concept is rare. In this article, we aim to investigate the effect of energy efficiency in a new single-family building on the energy flexibility potential and resilience characteristics and compare these with those for an old building in the cold climate of Finland. These two objectives are dependent on the buildings’ respective thermal mass. The heat demands of the two buildings are compared. Their technical and economic performance are calculated to compare their flexibility and resilience characteristics. Dynamic simulation software is used to model the buildings. The results show that the old building has better flexibility and higher energy cost savings when including the energy conservation activation strategy. In the old building, savings can be around EUR 400 and flexibility factor can be around 24–52% depending on the activation duration and strategy. The new building, due to higher efficiency, may not provide higher energy cost savings, and the energy conservation activation strategy is better. In the new building, savings can be around EUR 70 and the flexibility factor reaches around 7–14% depending on the activation duration and strategy. The shifting efficiency of the new house is better compared to that of the old house due to its higher storage capacity. For energy resilience, the new building is shown to be better during power outages. The new building can be habitable for 17 h, while the old building can provide the same conditions for 3 h only. Therefore, it is essential to consider both energy flexibility and resilience as this can impact performance during the energy crisis.<br/

THE IMPACT OF MUTUAL FUND’S CHARACTERISTICS ON MANAGEMENT EXPENSES – EVIDENCE FROM PAKISTANI MUTUAL FUND INDUSTRY

Mutual funds were investigated and studied with primaryfocus on the performance of funds in Pakistan. However, a key feature i.e. management expense ratio of mutual funds has not been analyzed in detail in Pakistan. The study reviewed various factors/elements which impact on the management expense ratio(MER) of mutual funds including the life of the fund, asset size, objective of the fund and the fund family. The study examines the impact of these factors along with their relationship on the cost associated with the funds. The conclusion is that all stated factors except fund family have a significant impact on the MER

Security and Privacy Issues in IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) is a global network of physical and virtual ‘things’ connected to the internet. Each object has unique ID which is used for identification. IoT is the emerging technology which will change the way we interact with devices. In future almost every electronic device will be a smart device which can compute and communicate with hand-held and other infrastructure devices. As most of the devices may be battery operated, due to less processing power the security and privacy is a major issue in IoT. Authentication, Identification and device heterogeneity are the major security and privacy concerns in IoT. Major challenges include integration, scalability, ethics communication mechanism, business models and surveillance. In this paper major issues related to security and privacy of IoT are focused

Who Can Work and Study from Home in Pakistan: Evidence from a 2018-19 Nationwide Household Survey

In this article, we examine the feasibility of working and studying from home in Pakistan. We take advantage of the recently released 2018–19 Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) Survey. PSLM is a nationally representative household survey with extensive information on employment outcomes, children’s educational attainment, as well as internet and computer access and prior usage information. Modifying Dingel and Neiman [2020]’s approach, we define the feasibility of jobs that can be done from home based on the percentage of tasks that can be switched online and accounting for internet accessibility. We also investigate the possibilities for students to study from home via TV or internet. We find that only 10% of jobs in Pakistan can be done from home; however, megacities have much higher rates and rural areas have lower rates. In addition, many of Pakistan’s male workers are in low-skill, low-paying service industries and cannot work from home, while occupations with a higher female employment share have a relatively higher work-from-home share despite lower percentage of prior internet use. Our results also highlight the homeschooling challenges Pakistan’s students face given the low rates of television and internet access. The government’s outreach effort through the new Teleschool TV channel could help alleviate pre-existing gender inequalities in access to education

An Empirical study on adoption of Agile Project Management Methodology and its effect on Project Success with moderating role of Organizational Culture

Purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of agile project management methodology on project success, as well as the role organizational support as moderator between agile project management methodology and project success. The data for this study has been collected from Telecommunication Services Provider Industry of Pakistan. Total sample size of 197 professionals was recorded. A questionnaire was distributed among the participants via hard copy and internet survey websites. Using collected data, we tested the effect of agile project management methodology on project success and further examined the moderating effect of organizational support between agile project management methodology and project success. The examination included Pearson’s correlation coefficient as well as regression using IBM SPSS Statistics Version 20. Results indicated that project management methodology has a strong correlation with project success and this correlation is not moderated by organizational support. The research findings have practical implications both in organization and project manager’s perspectives. Our research was limited to specific geographic area due to time and cost constraints. Future researchers may opt to conduct the study in other geographic areas of Pakistan and different industry including additional and different moderating variables