Does indoor environmental quality affect students' performance?

There is little knowledge on if and how indoor environmental quality influences students’ attendance and productivity. However, this issue has been of growing interest the recent years in the scientific community and results are showing that student learning performance is significantly affected by indoor environmental quality factors. In the present study the learning performance is examined through numerical test scores achieved by primary school students in their classrooms. The assessment of indoor environmental quality parameters such as thermal, visual, acoustic and air quality and the evaluation of Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) symptoms was conducted through questionnaires handed out to the same sample of students. Main objective of this paper is to investigate whether the degradation of the indoor environmental quality can impact the overall performance of students

An efficient H.264 VLSI advanced video encoder

Video technology evolution has boosted the need for the H.264/AVC encoder with real-time performance. In order to meet such need the present paper presents a VLSI H.264/AVC encoder architecture and the relevant details on design and implementation of the specific modules. The encoder design complies with the reference software encoder of the standard and follows the baseline profile level 3.0. The encoder constitutes an IP-core and/or stand-alone solution targeting to low area applications. The architecture achieves maximum throughput of 30 frames/sec with frame size 1024x768. Results and performance measurements of the entire encoder have been validated on FPGA and VLSI .18 mu m