A review of net zero energy buildings in hot and humid climates: Experience learned from 34 case study buildings

Sustainable development in the building sector requires the integration of energy efficiency and renewable energy utilization in buildings. In recent years, the concept of net zero energy buildings (NZEBs) has become a potential plausible solution to improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption in buildings. To achieve an NZEB goal, building systems and design strategies must be integrated and optimized based on local climatic conditions. This paper provides a comprehensive review of NZEBs and their current development in hot and humid regions. Through investigating 34 NZEB cases around the world, this study summarized NZEB key design strategies, technology choices and energy performance. The study found that passive design and technologies such as daylighting and natural ventilation are often adopted for NZEBs in hot and humid climates, together with other energy efficient and renewable energy technologies. Most NZEB cases demonstrated site annual energy consumption intensity less than 100 kW-hours (kWh) per square meter of floor space, and some buildings even achieved “net-positive energy” (that is, they generate more energy locally than they consume). However, the analysis also shows that not all NZEBs are energy efficient buildings, and buildings with ample renewable energy adoption can still achieve NZEB status even with high energy use intensity. This paper provides in-depth case-study-driven analysis to evaluate NZEB energy performance and summarize best practices for high performance NZEBs. This review provides critical technical information as well as policy recommendations for net zero energy building development in hot and humid climates

Asking Survey Respondents about Reasons for Their Behavior: A Split Ballot Experiment in Ethiopia

When policymakers design programs and policies, they often want to understand why individuals engage in particular behaviors. Collecting survey data about respondents’ reasons for their behavior presents important challenges, and there is little methodological research on this topic. We conducted an experiment to investigate the best practices for asking questions about respondents’ reasons for their behavior. We embedded a split ballot experiment in a face-to-face survey of 608 entrepreneurs in Ethiopia. Respondents were asked questions about why they did not engage in three business practices (advertising, sharing product storage, and switching suppliers). When asked these questions, respondents were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: close-ended questions, open-ended questions with interviewer probing, and open-ended questions without probing. Respondents endorsed more responses when asked close-ended (versus open-ended) questions. Close-ended responses produced higher rates of socially undesirable responses and fewer “other” responses. Notably, probing had no effect on the number or types of responses given. Our results suggest some best practices for asking respondents questions about reasons for their behavior

Assessment of diastolic dysfunction by tissue Doppler echocardiography in patients with heart failure

published_or_final_versio

Distributed local broadcasting algorithms in the physical interference model

Given a set of sensor nodes V where each node wants to broadcast a message to all its neighbors that are within a certain broadcasting range, the local broadcasting problem is to schedule all these requests in as few timeslots as possible. In this paper, assuming the more realistic physical interference model and no knowledge of the topology, we present three distributed local broadcasting algorithms where the first one is for the asynchronized model and the other two are for the synchronized model. Under the asynchronized model, nodes may join the execution of the protocol at any time and do not have access to a global clock, for which we give a distributed randomized algorithm with approximation ratio O(log n).published_or_final_versionThe 2011 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems and Workshops (DCOSS), Barcelona, Spain, 27-29 June 2011. In Proceedings of DCOSS, 2011, p. 1-

Purpose in life: A brief review of the literature and its implications for school guidance programs

postprin

Histone Posttranslational Modifications of CD4+ T Cell in Autoimmune Diseases

published_or_final_versio