Quantitive analysis of electric vehicle flexibility : a data-driven approach

The electric vehicle (EV) flexibility, indicates to what extent the charging load can be coordinated (i.e., to flatten the load curve or to utilize renewable energy resources). However, such flexibility is neither well analyzed nor effectively quantified in literature. In this paper we fill this gap and offer an extensive analysis of the flexibility characteristics of 390k EV charging sessions and propose measures to quantize their flexibility exploitation. Our contributions include: (1) characterization of the EV charging behavior by clustering the arrival and departure time combinations that leads to the identification of type of EV charging behavior, (2) in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the charging sessions in each behavioral cluster and investigation of the influence of weekdays and seasonal changes on those characteristics including arrival, sojourn and idle times, and (3) proposing measures and an algorithm to quantitatively analyze how much flexibility (in terms of duration and amount) is used at various times of a day, for two representative scenarios. Understanding the characteristics of that flexibility (e.g., amount, time and duration of availability) and when it is used (in terms of both duration and amount) helps to develop more realistic price and incentive schemes in DR algorithms to efficiently exploit the offered flexibility or to estimate when to stimulate additional flexibility. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

System-supported instructor feedback on the students’ design and prototyping processes in Fab Lab education context

Abstract. Fab Lab represents a unique concept in educational platforms where both teachers and students can get access to work on digital fabrication. Digital fabrication allows students to do creative tasks using different categorized software tools and technologies in the Fab Lab. Most of the time, students and instructors face challenges to compile a successful job through prototype designing and documentation in the proper way. Instructors have no opportunity to give feedback to the students’ prototyping and documentation through any dedicated application in the present Fab Lab. For evaluating digital fabrication, it isn’t easy to provide timely feedback in the traditional approaches. For this reason, the present thesis proposes a solution to the difficulty of giving timely feedback to the students based on their documentation and prototyping design which considers a reflection as an activity in Fab Lab. The solution based on several iterations of Fab Lab Oulu digital fabrication courses. This thesis presents means of Interaction and communication for both teachers and students using comment which helps students create a new and unique concept of prototype design through an application in Fab Lab. Based on the submission of students’ weekly prototypes, this application implements the questionnaires for evaluation. It focuses on the easy way to give proper feedback to the students in the Fab Lab education context. This task performed various functions for developing new techniques for giving feedback, such as an evaluation of students. In this thesis, we developed a new application named "Protobooth Oulu" for providing feedback to the students. This thesis represents a real demonstration that assigns different scaling such as, rating, Semantic Differential, and Likert scales for grading the projects and giving feedback to students by instructors, which is also helpful to make decisions. This scaling can compare the current and previous works and quantify the development of individual students’ works. This study also focuses on the various stages of prototyping and different satisfaction levels of the students. As a result, meaningful feedback comes from the educators, which is visible to both the instructors and the students. We also hope to develop new functions for education which are visual and fetch the data based on specific scaling in future. Adding more scaling helps educators give feedback very specifically on the students’ prototyping design, and excellent results will be accurate and can be predicted

Faktor-Faktor Lingkungan dan Perilaku yang Berhubungan dengan Kejadian Filariasis di Kabupaten Bangka Barat

Background : West Bangka district is one of the endemic areas of filariasis in Indonesia. In 2007, It was found about 36 chronic cases of filariasis. The high incidence of filariasis cases in West Bangka Regency was caused by many factors in the environment, such as swamp and ponds or hole in tin mining area which was flooded when raining or in rainy seasons. The aim of this research was to find out factors related to the filariasis incidence in West Bangk Regency. Method : It was an observational research using case control design. The subjects of this research was devided in two groups: cases and controls with 37 subjects of each group. The variables assessed in this research including physical factors (swamp / pool), Biological (water plants, fish/animal predators) for the environmental factors and education, job and income as socioecomic factor Behavioural factors were consisted of hanging out habit at night, wearing clothes to protect mosquitoes bite that might influenced the filariasis incidence in West Bangk Regency. The data were analyzed using multiple logistic regression at 5% level of significance. Result : The result of this research showed that there were seven variabels asrisk factors of filariasis incidence in West Bangka Regency,including: respondent's job with OR = 3,695, respondent's income level with OR = 4,2, the existence of swamp OR = 3,151, habit of using mosquito repellent with OR = 5,063, respondent's knowledge about filariasis OR = 4,259, respondent's knowledge about filariasis infection with OR =3,571 and respondent's knowledge about filariasis prevention OR= 3,73. Conclusion : Environmental and behavioural factor were related to filariasis incidence in West Bangka District. It was recommended to improve those factors by implementing health promotion intensively. Keyword : Filariasis, enviromental and behavioral factors, West Barat District

On the Independent Set Interdiction Problem

The purpose of the independent set interdiction problem in the weighted graph $G$ is to determine a set of vertices $R^*$ such that the weight of the maximum independent set in $G-R^*$ is minimized. We define an approximate solution for this problem. Then, an upper bound for the relative error of this problem is obtained. We show that the limit of the relative error of the independent set interdiction problem in some subclasses of the generalized Petersen graphs is zero as the number of vertices tends to infinity

English Translation of Iranian Local Cultural Patterns of “Isfahan Nameh”

The aim of this article is to investigate the translation of Persian cultural patterns of “Isfahan nameh” written by Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh and translated by W. Heston. After identifying the cultural patterns of the corpus the researchers compared, contrasted and classified them with their parallel translations based on Nord and Newmark models and then extracted the applied translation strategies, the result, considering the implicit patterns revealed that cultural equivalent and functional equivalent were the most frequent applied strategies and among the explicit cultural patterns, place, food, national and religious custom were used most and the ecology, leisure and political era used least. Testing the null hypothesis by applying chi-square, no significant difference was found between the percentages of the strategies used by the translator in translating the extracted cultural patterns of “Isfahan nameh” at the probability levels of 95% and 99%

Pregnancy influences the selection of appropriate reference genes in mouse tissue: Determination of appropriate reference genes for quantitative reverse transcription PCR studies in tissues from the female mouse reproductive axis.

Selecting stably expressed reference genes which are not affected by physiological or pathophysiological conditions is crucial for reliable quantification in gene expression studies. This study examined the expression stability of a panel of twelve reference genes in tissues from the female mouse reproductive axis and the uterus. Gene expression studies were carried out using reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). cDNA was synthesised from RNA extracted from hypothalami, pituitaries, ovaries and uteri of female mice at ages representing weaning, puberty and adulthood as well as pregnancy (13 ± 1 days post-coitus) (n = a minimum of 3 at each age and at pregnancy). The reference genes examined included 18 s, Actb, Atp5b, B2m, Canx, Cyc1, Eif4a2, Gapdh, Rpl13a, Sdha, Ubc and Ywhaz. The RT-qPCR raw data were imported into the qBASE+ software to analyse the expression stability using GeNorm. These data were also subsequently analysed using other software packages (Delta CT, Normfinder, BestKeeper). A comprehensive ranking was conducted considering all stability rankings generated from the different software analyses. B2m and Eif4a2 deviated from the acceptable range for amplification efficiency and therefore were excluded from the further analyses. The stability of the reference genes is influenced by the software used for the analysis with BestKeeper providing markedly different results than the other analyses. GeNorm analysis of tissues taken at different ages but not including pregnant animals, indicated that the expression of the reference genes is tissue specific with the most stable genes being: in the hypothalamus, Canx and Actb; in the pituitary, Sdha and Cyc1; in the ovary, 18s, Sdha and Ubc; and in the uterus, Ywhaz, Cyc1, Atp5b, 18s and Rpl13a. The optimal number of reference genes to be used was determined to be 2 in the first three tissues while in the uterus, the V-score generated by the GeNorm analysis was higher than 0.15 suggesting that 3 or more genes should be used for normalisation. Inclusion of tissues from pregnant mice changed the reference genes identified as being the most stable: Ubc and Sdha were the most stable genes in the hypothalamus, pituitary and the ovary. The addition of pregnant tissue had no effect on the stability of the genes in uterus (Ywhaz, Cyc1, Atp5b, 18s and Rpl13a). Identification of these stable reference genes will be of use to those interested in studying female fertility and researchers should be alert to the effects of pregnancy on reference gene stability. This study also signifies the importance of re-examining reference gene stability if the experimental conditions are changed, as shown with the introduction of pregnancy as a new factor in this research. [Abstract copyright: Crown Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Quantifying flexibility in EV charging as DR potential : analysis of two real-world data sets

The increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) presents both challenges and opportunities for the power grid, especially for distribution system operators (DSOs). The demand represented by EVs can be significant, but on the other hand, sojourn times of EVs could be longer than the time required to charge their batteries to the desired level (e.g., to cover the next trip). The latter observation means that the electrical load from EVs is characterized by a certain level of flexibility, which could be exploited for example in demand response (DR) approaches (e.g., to balance generation from renewable energy sources). This paper analyzes two data sets, one from a charging-at-home field trial in Flanders (about 8.5k charging sessions) and another from a large-scale EV public charging pole deployment in The Netherlands (more than 1M sessions). We rigorously analyze the collected data and quantify aforementioned flexibility: (1) we characterize the EV charging behavior by clustering the arrival and departure time combinations, identifying three behaviors (charging near home, charging near work, and park to charge), (2) we fit statistical models for the sojourn time, and flexibility (i.e., non-charging idle time) for each type of observed behavior, and (3) quantify the the potential of DR exploitation as the maximal load that could be achieved by coordinating EV charging for a given time of day t, continuously until t vertical bar Delt