ARDUINO Tutor: An Intelligent Tutoring System for Training on ARDUINO

This paper aims at helping trainees to overcome the difficulties they face when dealing with Arduino platform by describing the design of a desktop based intelligent tutoring system. The main idea of this system is a systematic introduction into the concept of Arduino platform. The system shows the circuit boards of Arduino that can be purchased at low cost or assembled from freely-available plans; and an open-source development environment and library for writing code to control the board topic of Arduino platform. The system is adaptive with the trainee’s individual progress. The system functions as a special tutor who deals with trainees according to their levels and skills. Evaluation of the system has been applied on professional and unprofessional trainees in this field and the results were good

ADSORPTION OF ANTIBIOTICS BY VERMICULITE

The occurrence of residual antibiotics in the environment has been a worldwide issue and warrants the development of inexpensive yet effective methods for antibiotics removal from contaminated water. In this thesis work, the adsorption of four antibiotics, namely chlorotetracycline (CTC), oxytetracycline (OTC), ofloxacin (OFL), and enrofloxacin (ENR), onto natural vermiculite has been studied using batch (static) and column (dynamic) adsorption techniques. The Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models were initially used to explain the adsorption processes. The separation factor (RL) values derived from the Langmuir model and the 1/n values derived from Freundlich model in the present investigation were less than one, indicating that the adsorption of the antibiotics onto vermiculite is favorable. A slightly more sophisticated Langmuir-Freundlich was also used to obtain the maximum adsorption capacity since the Langmuir model significantly underestimated the capacity. The maximum adsorption capacities obtained from the column experiments for CTC, OTC, OFL and ENR are approximately 0.79, 1.2, 1.9 and 1.0 mg/g respectively, 10-20% of those obtained from the batch equilibrium experiments (8.1, 7.1, 10.3, and 6.6 mg/g for CTC, OTC, OFL and ENR respectively). This difference could be attributed to the kinetic limitations during column experiments. Results indicate that the low-cost adsorbent vermiculite can be used as an economically viable adsorbent for the removal of selected antibiotics (CTC, OTC OFL and ENR) from contaminated water

The Effect of Sorbitol and Mannitol Supplementation at Casing on the Productive characteristics of Agaricus bisporus Mushroom

This study is aimed at investigating the effect of supplementing 1, 3 and 5% of Sorbitol and Mannitol at casing on the productive characteristics of the mushroom Agaricus bisporus. The results revealed a significant increase in the total production and biological efficiency of Agaricus bisporus mushroom .Treatment 1% Sorbitol mushroom recorded the highest production (1286, 90 g/bag) compared with 798.5 g/bag for the control group and 745 g/bag for the Mannitol 1% mushroom (p<0.05).Besides, the biological efficiency was increased from 53.23% to 85.79% with the same supplement. None of the Mannitol supplemented treatment surpassed that of the control group for both traits. However Mannitol 1% recorded significantly higher values when compared with other Mannitol treatments for the total yield and biological efficiency .Sorbitol and Mannitol1% treatments showed significantly the higher values for fruiting body number and the lowest fruit body weight (80, 40 and 16.25 and 17.74, numbers and grams, respectively). Most of the yield occurred on the first break. The full growth compost supplemented with 1% Sorbitol tended to have a more synchronous maturation for the second break in fewer days when mushrooms were harvested. Earliness (days from casing ) for Sorbitol, Mannitol 1% treatments and the control group mushroom  was reported  to be 18 days which differ significantly as  compared with all other  treatments(p<0.05). Keywords: Agaricus bisporus, Sorbitol and Mannitol, Casing layer

Towards a Cloud Native Big Data Platform using MiCADO

In the big data era, creating self-managing scalable platforms for running big data applications is a fundamental task. Such self-managing and self-healing platforms involve a proper reaction to hardware (e.g., cluster nodes) and software (e.g., big data tools) failures, besides a dynamic resizing of the allocated resources based on overload and underload situations and scaling policies. The distributed and stateful nature of big data platforms (e.g., Hadoop-based cluster) makes the management of these platforms a challenging task. This paper aims to design and implement a scalable cloud native Hadoop-based big data platform using MiCADO, an open-source, and a highly customisable multi-cloud orchestration and auto-scaling framework for Docker containers, orchestrated by Kubernetes. The proposed MiCADO-based big data platform automates the deployment and enables an automatic horizontal scaling (in and out) of the underlying cloud infrastructure. The empirical evaluation of the MiCADO-based big data platform demonstrates how easy, efficient, and fast it is to deploy and undeploy Hadoop clusters of different sizes. Additionally, it shows how the platform can automatically be scaled based on user-defined policies (such as CPU-based scaling)

Science Gateways with Embedded Ontology-based E-learning Support

Science gateways are widely utilised in a range of scientific disciplines to provide user-friendly access to complex distributed computing infrastructures. The traditional approach in science gateway development is to concentrate on this simplified resource access and provide scientists with a graphical user interface to conduct their experiments and visualise the results. However, as user communities behind these gateways are growing and opening their doors to less experienced scientists or even to the general public as “citizen scientists”, there is an emerging need to extend these gateways with training and learning support capabilities. This paper describes a novel approach showing how science gateways can be extended with embedded e-learning support using an ontology-based learning environment called Knowledge Repository Exchange and Learning (KREL). The paper also presents a prototype implementation of a science gateway for analysing earthquake data and demonstrates how the KREL can extend this gateway with ontology-based embedded e-learning support

Transparent Glass-Ceramics Produced by Sol-Gel: A Suitable Alternative for Photonic Materials

Transparent glass-ceramics have shown interesting optical properties for several photonic applications. In particular, compositions based on oxide glass matrices with fluoride crystals embedded inside, known as oxyfluoride glass-ceramics, have gained increasing interest in the last few decades. Melt-quenching is still the most used method to prepare these materials but sol-gel has been indicated as a suitable alternative. Many papers have been published since the end of the 1990s, when these materials were prepared by sol-gel for the first time, thus a review of the achievements obtained so far is necessary. In the first part of this paper, a review of transparent sol-gel glass-ceramics is made focusing mainly on oxyfluoride compositions. Many interesting optical results have been obtained but very little innovation of synthesis and processing is found with respect to pioneering papers published 20 years ago. In the second part we describe the improvements in synthesis and processing obtained by the authors during the last five years. The main achievements are the preparation of oxyfluoride glass-ceramics with a much higher fluoride crystal fraction, at least double that reported up to now, and the first synthesis of NaGdF4 glass-ceramics. Moreover, a new SiO2 precursor was introduced in the synthesis, allowing for a reduction in the treatment temperature and favoring hydroxyl group removal. Interesting optical properties demonstrated the incorporation of dopant ions in the fluoride crystals, thus obtaining crystal-like spectra along with higher efficiencies with respect to xerogels, and hence demonstrating that these materials are a suitable alternative for photonic applications.This work was supported by MINECO under projects MAT2013-48246-C2-1-P, MAT2013-48246-C2-2-P, and MAT2017-87035-C2-1-P/-2-P (AEI/FEDER, UE) and Basque Country Government IT-943-16 and PPG17/07. The authors are grateful for access to the Spanish Beamline (SpLine) at the ESRF facilities in Grenoble to perform experiments MA-3350 and 25-01-1014. Jose Joaquin Velazquez also acknowledges MINECO for Grant FPDI-2013-16895

The effect of color light and stocking density on some traits of broiler carcasses

This study was designed to investigate the effects of color light and stocking density on some traits of broilers carcass. A total of 675 Ross 308 one-day-old broiler chicks were used in this study. The chicks were exposed to white light (WL) as a control. While, the treatment light was Red light (RL), Blue light (BL), Green light (GL), and Blue – Green mix light (BGL) (produced by light-emitting diode system, LED), were applied for 24 hours daily in separated rooms. The birds were randomly housed into 9 wooden sealed pens of 1m2 in three replicates for each density 12, 15 and 18 birds/m2 in the room. The results showed that the carcass weight and dressing and breast muscle percentages were significantly increased) P0.05) in the diameter of the breast muscle fibers in broilers reared under different color lights and densities. In addition, no interaction has been found between light color and stocking density on carcass traits of broilers within all experimental groups

BEARING CAPACITY OF SHALLOW FOOTING ON SOFT CLAY IMPROVED BY COMPACTED FLY ASH

Low bearing capacity of weak soil under shallow footings represents one of construction problems. Kaolin with water content converges to liquid limit used to represent the weak soil under shallow footing prototype. On the other hand, fly ash, which can be defined as undesirable industrial waste material, was used to improve the bearing capacity of the soft soil considered in this research. The soft soil was prepared in steel box (36×36×25) cm and shallow square footing prototype (6×6) cm were used .Group of physical and chemical tests were conducted on kaolin and fly ash. The soft soil was improved by a bed of compacted fly ash placed under the footing with dimensions equal to that of footing but with different depth ratios. The results show that there is a noticeable improvement in the behavior of footing when improved by compacted fly ash. The improvement showed a decrease in settlement and increase in bearing capacity. The improvement ratio in bearing capacity was calculated by comparing the ultimate bearing capacity value when testing the kaolin alone with its value of kaolin improved with compacted fly ash at the same value of eccentricity. It is important to note that eccentricity values were chosen according to the rule of middle third of footing base(i.e.,e≤B/6). The improvement ratio was about (130%) in average value, that represent a good ratio of improvemen

BEARING CAPACITY OF SQUARE FOOTING ON GEOGRID-REINFORCED LOOSE SAND TO RESIST ECCENTRIC LOAD

This research presents and discuss the results of experimental investigation carried out on geogrids model to study the behavior of geogrid in the loose sandy soil. The effect of location eccentricity, depth of first layer of reinforcement, vertical spacing, number and type of reinforcement layers have been investigated. The results indicated that the percentage of bearing improvement a bout (22 %) at number of reinforced layers N=1 and about (47.5%) at number of reinforced layers N=2 for different Eccentricity values when depth ratio and vertical spacing between layers are (0.5B and 0.75B) respectively

EXPERIMENTAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE BEHAVIOR OF A PILED RAFT FOUNDATION

The piled raft is a geotechnical composite construction consisting of three elements: piles, raft and soil. In the design of piled rafts, the load shared between the piles and the raft, and the piles are used up to a load level that can be of the same order of magnitude as the bearing capacity of a comparable single pile or even greater. Therefore, the piled raft foundation allows reduction of settlements in a very economic way as compared to traditional foundation concepts. This paper presents experimental study to investigate the behavior of piled raft system in sandy soil. A small scale “prototype” model was tested in a sand box with load applied to the system through a compression machine. The settlement was measured at the center of the raft, strain gages were used to measure the strains and calculate the total load carried by piles. Four configurations of piles (2x1, 3x1, 2x2 and 3x2) were tested in the laboratory, in addition to rafts with different sizes. The effects of pile length, pile diameter, and raft thickness on the load carrying capacity of the piled raft system are included in the load-settlement presentation. It was found that the percentage of the load carried by piles to the total applied load of the groups (2x1, 3x1, 2x2, 3x2) with raft thickness of 5 mm, pile diameter of 9 mm, and pile length of 200 mm was 28% , 38% , 56% , 79% , respectively. The percent of the load carried by piles increases with the increase of number of piles