Correlation Analysis of Building Performance and Occupant’s Satisfaction via Post Occupancy Evaluation for Malaysia’s Public Buildings

The purpose of a building is to provide shelter for activities that carried out by the building users. The question is, does the facilities in the building perform well and appropriate to its use? The needs of occupants are affected by the building performance and on occupants’ evaluation of the buildings. Hence, Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is introduced to empower the occupants’ opinion as the benchmark of building performance evaluation. POE comprises as one of the technique that is used to evaluate whether a building meets the user’s requirement. The broad aim of this paper is to determine the correlation of public buildings and occupant’s satisfaction; in order to seek possible opportunities for government involvement (as the building owner) and the public (as the user) to evaluate the performance criteria. By using a proposed framework of POE, the study has revealed that 74% of the aspects in building performance are in high correlation with the occupants’ satisfaction. The study concludes that the application of POE is effective and beneficial to be used by the public sector in evaluating the performance of public buildings in Malaysia.Post occupancy evaluation; Public buildings; Building performance; occupants’ satisfaction; Correlation analysis

Cigarette smoke regulates the expression of TLR4 and IL-8 production by human macrophages

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are present on monocytes and alveolar macrophages that form the first line of defense against inhaled particles. The importance of those cells in the pathophysiology of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has well been documented. Cigarette smoke contains high concentration of oxidants which can stimulate immune cells to produce reactive oxygen species, cytokines and chemokines.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this study, we evaluated the effects of cigarette smoke medium (CSM) on TLR4 expression and interleukin (IL)-8 production by human macrophages investigating the involvement of ROS.</p> <p>Results and Discussion</p> <p>TLR4 surface expression was downregulated on short term exposure (1 h) of CSM. The downregulation could be explained by internalization of the TLR4 and the upregulation by an increase in TLR4 mRNA. IL-8 mRNA and protein were also increased by CSM. CSM stimulation increased intracellular ROS-production and decreased glutathione (GSH) levels. The modulation of TLR4 mRNA and surface receptors expression, IRAK activation, IκB-α degradation, IL-8 mRNA and protein, GSH depletion and ROS production were all prevented by antioxidants such as N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>TLR4 may be involved in the pathogenesis of lung emphysema and oxidative stress and seems to be a crucial contributor in lung inflammation.</p

Nano ZnO Catalyst for Chemical Recycling of Polyethylene terephthalate (PET)

This paper is focused firstly on production of monomers bis (2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate (BHET) and oligomers by using Nano zinc oxide with different particle size (55&94) nm with different weight ratio (0.05, 0.15 and 0.5) by using chemical recycling glass condenser at 190˚C. The second purpose is to study the effect of catalyst ratio, time of reaction and yield of products of the product. Elemental analysis for Carbon –Hydrogen and Nitrogen (CHN), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) have been investigated. Results indicated the catalytic activity was found to correlate with surface area; however, Nano ZnO (55) nm has shown an exceptional activity, still it is higher than Nano ZnO (94) nm in order to reduce the reaction time until 60 minutes instead of 7 hours without catalyst. The analysis of the thermograms has indicated the presence of various kinds of monomer, dimer and oligomers that are formed during the recycling; this is particularly evident due to new peaks indicating the formation of BHET monomer and oligomer of lower molecular masses

A Low-complexity Complex-valued Activation Function for Fast and Accurate Spectral Domain Convolutional Neural Network

Conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which are realized in spatial domain, exhibit high computational complexity. This results in high resource utilization and memory usage and makes them unsuitable for implementation in resource and energy-constrained embedded systems. A promising approach for low-complexity and high-speed solution is to apply CNN modeled in the spectral domain. One of the main challenges in this approach is the design of activation functions. Some of the proposed solutions perform activation functions in spatial domain, necessitating multiple and computationally expensive spatial-spectral domain switching. On the other hand, recent work on spectral activation functions resulted in very computationally intensive solutions. This paper proposes a complex-valued activation function for spectral domain CNNs that only transmits input values that have positive-valued real or imaginary component. This activation function is computationally inexpensive in both forward and backward propagation and provides sufficient nonlinearity that ensures high classification accuracy. We apply this complex-valued activation function in a LeNet-5 architecture and achieve an accuracy gain of up to 7% for MNIST and 6% for Fashion MNIST dataset, while providing up to 79% and 85% faster inference times, respectively, over state-of-the-art activation functions for spectral domain

Design and Construction of Liquid Level Measurement System

Industrial tank system play important role in industrial application such as in food processing, pharmaceutical industry, chemical industry, water purification system and many more. Today we can see a lot of varieties in different level measurement technologies on the market like ultrasonic level sensor, capacitance level sensor, microwave sensor, and others. One of the frequent used industrial tank systems is couple tank system. The main interest of the use PID is to ensure the supply of liquid is at constant rate. This paper will discuss on the system based on microcontroller unit design to measure and control liquid level accurately to improve the efficiency of motor pumping unit. To developed this system, ATMEGA32 starter kit board is use to control pumping unit (motor), continuous fluid level sensor to measure the liquid level with LED display circuit, and temperature sensor is used to measure the current temperature of liquid inside tank. The system software is written in C language, interrupt routines are used to record and deal with the time data to count the liquid level accurately. This system supposedly can measure the water level up to 25cm and work at 5V supply voltage range

RasGAP-Derived Fragment N Increases the Resistance of Beta Cells towards Apoptosis in NOD Mice and Delays the Progression from Mild to Overt Diabetes

The caspase-3-generated RasGAP N-terminal fragment (fragment N) inhibits apoptosis in a Ras-PI3K-Akt-dependent manner. Fragment N protects various cell types, including insulin-secreting cells, against different types of stresses. Whether fragment N exerts a protective role during the development of type 1 diabetes is however not known. Non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice represent a well-known model for spontaneous development of type 1 diabetes that shares similarities with the diseases encountered in humans. To assess the role of fragment N in type 1 diabetes development, a transgene encoding fragment N under the control of the rat insulin promoter (RIP) was back-crossed into the NOD background creating the NOD-RIPN strain. Despite a mosaic expression of fragment N in the beta cell population of NOD-RIPN mice, islets isolated from these mice were more resistant to apoptosis than control NOD islets. Islet lymphocytic infiltration and occurrence of a mild increase in glycemia developed with the same kinetics in both strains. However, the period of time separating the mild increase in glycemia and overt diabetes was significantly longer in NOD-RIPN mice compared to the control NOD mice. There was also a significant decrease in the number of apoptotic beta cells in situ at 16 weeks of age in the NOD-RIPN mice. Fragment N exerts therefore a protective effect on beta cells within the pro-diabetogenic NOD background and this prevents a fast progression from mild to overt diabetes

Thrombospondin-3 augments injury-induced cardiomyopathy by intracellular integrin inhibition and sarcolemmal instability.

Thrombospondins (Thbs) are a family of five secreted matricellular glycoproteins in vertebrates that broadly affect cell-matrix interaction. While Thbs4 is known to protect striated muscle from disease by enhancing sarcolemmal stability through increased integrin and dystroglycan attachment complexes, here we show that Thbs3 antithetically promotes sarcolemmal destabilization by reducing integrin function, augmenting disease-induced decompensation. Deletion of Thbs3 in mice enhances integrin membrane expression and membrane stability, protecting the heart from disease stimuli. Transgene-mediated overexpression of α7β1D integrin in the heart ameliorates the disease predisposing effects of Thbs3 by augmenting sarcolemmal stability. Mechanistically, we show that mutating Thbs3 to contain the conserved RGD integrin binding domain normally found in Thbs4 and Thbs5 now rescues the defective expression of integrins on the sarcolemma. Thus, Thbs proteins mediate the intracellular processing of integrin plasma membrane attachment complexes to regulate the dynamics of cellular remodeling and membrane stability