Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning for a superinsulated solar house

Buildings consume about 70% of all electricity in the United States. There are many ways to reduce the energy consumption of a building and specifically a residential building. The Solar Decathlon competition promoted by the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory force twenty university teams to find as many ways as possible to reduce energy consumption of a small house. For UIUC???s 2009 Solar Decathlon entry, the house was designed to be a certified Passive House, a way of designing a building to use 90% less energy for heating and cooling. The major path to certification is through superinsulation and supersealing of the building. This makes the heating and cooling loads small, requiring a novel HVAC system to provide heating, cooling and ventilation. From the simulated week of occupancy during the competition, where UIUC placed second out of twenty teams, the performance of the HVAC system is analyzed. Using a variable capacity compressor, saved UIUC???s Solar Decathlon entry 6.75 kWh or 24.32% electrical energy compared to a fixed capacity compressor. The HVAC system, in conjunction with the excellent thermal envelope, helped lead the team to a close second place finish in comfort zone, the measure of the HVAC system performance. In addition, the energy conservation measures of the HVAC system helped secure a second place finish in energy balance. The excellent performance of the HVAC system does not come at a price premium as it is less expensive than a comparable typical central air heat pump. All these benefits helped to define a house made up of many excellent technologies and practices

Systematic study of the jet fragmentation function for inclusive jet-production in p+p collisions at sqrt{s}=200 GeV in STAR

Jet fragmentation functions measured in e^+e^- and p+\bar{p} experiments are well-described on an inclusive hadron level by QCD-based calculations. Fragmentation is expected to be modified by the presence of a strongly interacting medium, but full theoretical description of this modification must still be developed. It has recently been suggested that particle-identified fragmentation functions may provide additional insight into the processes underlying jet quenching. To assess the applicability of QCD-based fragmentation calculations to RHIC data, and to provide a baseline with which to compare fragmentation function measurements in heavy ion collisions, we present the first measurements of charged hadron and particle-identified fragmentation functions of jets reconstructed via a midpoint-cone algorithm from p+p collisions at 200 GeV in STAR. We study the dependence on jet cone-size and jet-energy, and compare the results to PYTHIA simulations based on the Modified Leading Log Approximation (MLLA).Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, proceedings of Hard Probes 2008 conferenc

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and productivity of schizophrenia trials: an ecological study

The 5000 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group's database affords an opportunity to research for variables related to the differences between nations of their output of schizophrenia trials. Ecological study – investigating the relationship between four economic/demographic variables and number of schizophrenia RCTs per country. The variable with closest correlation was used to predict the expected number of studies. GDP closely correlated with schizophrenia trial output, with 76% of the total variation about the Y explained by the regression line (r = 0.87, 95% CI 0.79 to 0.92, r2 = 0.76). Many countries have a strong tradition of schizophrenia trials, exceeding their predicted output. All nations with no identified trial output had GDPs that predicted zero trial activity. Several nations with relatively small GDPs are, nevertheless, highly productive of trials. Some wealthy countries seem either not to have produced the expected number of randomised trials or not to have disseminated them to the English-speaking world. This hypothesis-generating study could not investigate causal relationships, but suggests, that for those seeking all relevant studies, expending effort searching the scientific literature of Germany, Italy, France, Brazil and Japan may be a good investment

Large-scale structure of brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) populations in England: effects on rodenticide resistance

The brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) is a relatively recent (<300 years) addition to the British fauna, but by association with negative impacts on public health, animal health and agriculture, it is regarded as one of the most important vertebrate pest species. Anticoagulant rodenticides were introduced for brown rat control in the 1950s and are widely used for rat control in the UK, but long-standing resistance has been linked to control failures in some regions. One thus far ignored aspect of resistance biology is the population structure of the brown rat. This paper investigates the role population structure has on the development of anticoagulant resistance. Using mitochondrial and microsatellite DNA, we examined 186 individuals (from 15 counties in England and one location in Wales near the Wales–England border) to investigate the population structure of rural brown rat populations. We also examined individual rats for variations of the VKORC1 gene previously associated with resistance to anticoagulant rodenticides. We show that the populations were structured to some degree, but that this was only apparent in the microsatellite data and not the mtDNA data. We discuss various reasons why this is the case. We show that the population as a whole appears not to be at equilibrium. The relative lack of diversity in the mtDNA sequences examined can be explained by founder effects and a subsequent spatial expansion of a species introduced to the UK relatively recently. We found there was a geographical distribution of resistance mutations, and relatively low rate of gene flow between populations, which has implications for the development and management of anticoagulant resistance

TSGL A Thread Safe Graphics Library for Visualizing Parallelism

AbstractMulticore processors are now the standard CPU architecture, and multithreaded parallel programs are needed to take full advantage of such CPUs. New tools are needed to help students learn how to design and build such parallel programs. In this paper, we present the thread-safe graphics library (TSGL), a new C++11 library that allows different threads to draw to a shared Canvas, which is updated in approximate real-time. Using TSGL, instructors and students can create visualizations that illustrate multithreaded behavior. We present three multithreaded applications that illustrate the use of TSGL to help students see and understand how an application is using parallelism to speed up its computation

Development of a Supermarket Prototype Building Model

The U.S. Department of Energy supports the development of commercial building energy codes and standards by participating in industry reviews, update processes, and providing technical analyses to support both published model codes and potential changes. In support of ANSI/ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.1 and the International Energy Conservation Code, 16 commercial prototype building models were developed that cover 80% of the commercial building floor area in the United States for new construction, including both commercial buildings and mid- to high-rise residential buildings, across all U.S. climate zones. However, the current set of commercial prototype building models does not include a supermarket building type, which is one of major building types defined in the Energy Information Administration’s Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey. As part of an ongoing effort to expand the current Commercial Building Prototype Model suite, this paper presents the procedure used to develop the prototype supermarket building model based on multiple studies as well as a previously developed reference building model. The final set of prototype models includes 68 models for different vintages of ASHRAE Standard 90.1 (i.e., 2004, 2007, 2010, and 2013) and for 17 ASHRAE climate zones

Innovating Pedagogy 2015: Open University Innovation Report 4

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fourth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. We proposed a long list of new educational terms, theories, and practices. We then pared these down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice, particularly in post-school education. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in an approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation

Creative music therapy for long-term neurodevelopment in extremely preterm infants: Results of a feasibility trial

AIM: We tested the feasibility of a future randomised clinical trial (RCT) in which Creative Music Therapy (CMT), a family-integrating individualised approach in neonatal care, could improve neurodevelopment in extremely preterm infants (EPTs). METHODS: In this feasibility trial, 12 EPTs received CMT, while the remaining 19 received standard neonatal care. Socio-demographic data and perinatal complications were compared between groups as risk factors. Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development at 2-year follow-up (FU2) and KABC-II-Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children at 5-year follow-up (FU5) were analysed using the Mann-Whitney U-tests. RESULTS: Twenty-seven (87.1%) and 18 (58.1%) EPTs attended the FU2 and FU5 examination, respectively. The rate of neurodevelopmental risk factors at birth of the two groups was quite similar. While there was no difference in the FU2 outcomes between groups, there were higher values in the CMT group's Fluid-Crystallised Index of the KABC-II. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate neither a beneficial nor a detrimental effect of CMT on neurodevelopment at 2 years but a trend of improved cognitive outcomes at 5 years more similar to cognitive scores of term-born infants than of standard treatment EPTs. The findings favour an RCT but must be interpreted cautiously due to the reduced sample size and non-randomised design

Frustration-induced diffusive scattering anomaly and dimension change in FeGe2\rm FeGe_2

Magnetic frustration, arising from the competition of exchange interactions, has received great attention because of its relevance to exotic quantum phenomena in materials. In the current work, we report an unusual checkerboard-shaped scattering anomaly in $\rm FeGe_2$, far from the known incommensurate magnetic satellite peaks, for the first time by inelastic neutron scattering. More surprisingly, such phenomenon appears as spin dynamics at low temperature, but it becomes prominent above N\'eel transition as elastic scattering. A new model Hamiltonian that includes an intraplane next-nearest neighbor was proposed and attributes such anomaly to the near-perfect magnetic frustration and the emergence of unexpected two-dimensional magnetic order in the quasi-one-dimensional $\rm FeGe_2$.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figure