Benchmarking energy performance of aquatic centres in Australia

Aquatic centres are popular recreational and sports facilities in Australia. An upsurge in the use of aquatic centres has seen such multipurpose indoor recreational facilities become focal points for community interaction. Around 1900 aquatic centres in Australia attract approximately 263 million visits per year, with 64% of Australians aged 15 and over participating there in physical activities for recreation or exercise. Aquatic centres accommodate a number of facilities such as swimming pools, gymnasiums, fitness centres, sports hall, cafés, crèche and offices which are distinct in their functional requirements. They have high-energy intensity and this presents a great challenge in terms of new construction and renovation. However, environmental design standards for aquatic centres have generally been overlooked due to the complex nature of these buildings. Currently there are no benchmark standards for aquatic centres in Australia, where as benchmarks for other building types such as offices, shopping centres, hotels and data centres are established leading to the development of national rating systems. This paper investigates the energy performance of aquatic centres in Victoria and discusses methodologies adopted to understand the inter-relationships between various factors that contribute to increased energy consumption in these buildings. The main aim is to identify the key factors contributing to high energy consumption of these buildings in order to develop new knowledge with respect to energy and indoor environmental quality

Role of marine macrophytes as feed for green turtle Chelonia mydas

This paper deals with the food and feeding habits of the green turtle Chelonia mydas caught incidentally in different fishing gears during 1998 – 2000 at Tuticorin and Pamban areas. The seaweeds and seagrasses observed in their gut contents are Gelidiella acerosa, Hypnea valentiae, Solieria robusta, Sargassum spp, Pocockiella variegata, Dictyota dichotoma,Halimeda macroloba, Caulerpa fergusonii, Ulva reticulata and Chaetomorpha sp (seaweeds), Halophila ovalis, Thalassia hemprichii and Cymodocea serrulata (seagrasses). The marine macrophytes play the major role in the survival of adult animals since they are purely herbivores

Size composition and morphometry of incidentally captured sea turtles at Vizhinjam, south-west coast of India

The paper deals with the size composition of incidentally captured sea turtles in different fishing gear

The StoreGate: a Data Model for the Atlas Software Architecture

The Atlas collaboration at CERN has adopted the Gaudi software architecture which belongs to the blackboard family: data objects produced by knowledge sources (e.g. reconstruction modules) are posted to a common in-memory data base from where other modules can access them and produce new data objects. The StoreGate has been designed, based on the Atlas requirements and the experience of other HENP systems such as Babar, CDF, CLEO, D0 and LHCB, to identify in a simple and efficient fashion (collections of) data objects based on their type and/or the modules which posted them to the Transient Data Store (the blackboard). The developer also has the freedom to use her preferred key class to uniquely identify a data object according to any other criterion. Besides this core functionality, the StoreGate provides the developers with a powerful interface to handle in a coherent fashion persistable references, object lifetimes, memory management and access control policy for the data objects in the Store. It also provides a Handle/Proxy mechanism to define and hide the cache fault mechanism: upon request, a missing Data Object can be transparently created and added to the Transient Store presumably retrieving it from a persistent data-base, or even reconstructing it on demand.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 4 pages, LaTeX, MOJT00

Marine Turtles of Gulf of Mannar, Tamil Nadu

Marine turtles have very long geologic history. They were common in the Cretaceous , 130 million years ago and their fossil record extends back atleast 200 million years. They lived together with dinosaurs and have survived the giant plesiosaurus and Ichthyosaurus

Defining and developing an energy retrofitting approach

This paper identifies the dilemma faced by the stakeholders of existing buildings in regards to a decision making process for energy retrofitting. This paper also identifies the missing stage viewed as the “integrity audit “which can lead to substantial savings in the area of building operation. The methodology is centered on identifying energy waste first, reducing the overall peak electrical demand and then retrofitting for energy-efficiency. A proposed “integrity audit” leads to the classification of three main energy culprits: the identification of waste, missed opportunities, and rescheduling the operation of equipment use. A case study indicating the financial advantages of applying this methodology for a commercial building are presented. The energy retrofitting strategy is divided into two main categories, namely building control improvements and building component implementation. The payback periods are often within months if not immediate

Gate-Level Simulation of Quantum Circuits

While thousands of experimental physicists and chemists are currently trying to build scalable quantum computers, it appears that simulation of quantum computation will be at least as critical as circuit simulation in classical VLSI design. However, since the work of Richard Feynman in the early 1980s little progress was made in practical quantum simulation. Most researchers focused on polynomial-time simulation of restricted types of quantum circuits that fall short of the full power of quantum computation. Simulating quantum computing devices and useful quantum algorithms on classical hardware now requires excessive computational resources, making many important simulation tasks infeasible. In this work we propose a new technique for gate-level simulation of quantum circuits which greatly reduces the difficulty and cost of such simulations. The proposed technique is implemented in a simulation tool called the Quantum Information Decision Diagram (QuIDD) and evaluated by simulating Grover's quantum search algorithm. The back-end of our package, QuIDD Pro, is based on Binary Decision Diagrams, well-known for their ability to efficiently represent many seemingly intractable combinatorial structures. This reliance on a well-established area of research allows us to take advantage of existing software for BDD manipulation and achieve unparalleled empirical results for quantum simulation

Green roofs in Melbourne - potential and practice

In Melbourne, green roofs are increasingly being included in the new and retrofitted buildings that claim to be &lsquo;sustainable&rsquo; or &lsquo;green&rsquo;. This enthusiasm follows overseas experience where a variety of benefits have been recorded; these include a reduction in heating and cooling loads. This benefit is of particular importance because of the urgent need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with air conditioning. What is the potential for such savings and to what extent are some of the existing green roofs likely to achieve these benefits? This paper begins with a review of the overseas experience to reduce conditioning loads, particularly cooling, in temperate climates. Some observations on the potential and practice of green roofs in Melbourne is then presented. The results of measurements of plant canopy, soil and hard surface temperatures on two green roofs in the Melbourne Central Business District are discussed and future on-going work is outlined.<br /