Conservation in an Islamic context a case study of Makkah

The Holy Qu’ rān contains many injunctions for Muslims to respect and conserve the natural environment but few address the built environment. Habitat at the time of the Prophet (PBOH) was in the vernacular and relatively impermanent. The first habitat was the cave, the second the tent and then simple flat roofed buildings of post and lintel construction made of mud and rubble. Later buildings were not indigenous but reflected the architectural styles and techniques of Muslim pilgrims from beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Permanent exotic buildings were later erected as reminders of holy places and events. This work advances a case to restore and preserve historic and religious sites in Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Makkah is the destination for millions of Muslim pilgrims who annually pay homage to Allah during the occasions of Hajj, Ramadan and Umra. The tranquillity and peaceful ambience that one associates with the holiest of Islamic experiences have, over the years, given way to jostling crowds of people who must be expediently housed, fed, transported, and protected. Due to the lack of planning and the insensitive but profitable development of the city, Makkah is in grave danger of becoming a bustling metropolis instead of a sanctuary where pilgrims gather to perform their religious rites and reaffirm their dedication to Allah. The author calls for professional planning and international cooperation to guide future development for this expanding and sensitive area. The author's ideas are grounded in practical and aesthetic study, therefore, the political, environmental and economic issues are examined in relationship to religious, historic and artistic values. The author makes proposals for a future Makkah that would provide pilgrims with the physical comforts, security, and serene environment they deserve—without destroying the city they came to visit. The author discusses preservation and conservation in the western world and the need for their acceptance in Muslim countries, the former being an aesthetic and intellectual concept sustained by law and the latter being the prescribed free expression of the individual unhindered by material considerations. Both worlds are rapidly being overwhelmed by materialism, but body, mind and spirit combine in making us aware of our surroundings and the way in what we see around us has come into being

ON SOME RESULTS OF NUMBER THEORETIC TRANSFORM (NTT) -PERIODIC SIGNAL

The interest givento the application of Number Theoretic Transforms (NTT’s)to digital signal processing has not ceasegrow. These transformations are used to improve convolutions, where arithmetic operations give a modulo an integerresIn order to understand the domain of the NTT, we have to show their powerful properties and exploit them in diffeapplications such as in signal processing

The effect of dietary supplementation on fatigue and recovery after resistance exercise in females

Resistance exercise has been a popular form of muscle strength development for sport participants. This type of exercise activates a wide variety of physiological mechanisms involved with the exercising of muscle. The aim of this thesis was to investigate responses to dietary supplementation on muscular strength and biochemical indices to resistance exercise in female subjects. Firstly, to determine the reliability of the isometric test designed, and the number of trials required to-obtain reproducible measurements of maximum voluntary isometric force and rate of force development. Secondly, to establish heavy resistance exercise volume and intensity to produce a fatigue effect of a 40% reduction in measured force variables. Thirdly, to determine the optimal recovery period required to overcome the effect of fatigue responses to heavy resistance exercise after ingesting carbohydrate supplement (CHO). Finally, to determine the effect of creatine supplementation (Cr) on fatigue and recovery responses after resistance exercise in female subjects. Study one (1. A): The objective of study one was to quantify for female subjects, maximum voluntary isometric contractions (MVC) and rate of force development (RFD) and to evaluate the repeatability (between-days) of measurements. The data showed a small systemic bias between days for both, right and left leg and showed good reliability between days for MVC (range 5.4% to 11.5%), (9.55% to 36.3%) and (5.8% to 11.4%) for both legs, right leg and left leg, respectively. The LOA for RFD showed good reliability between days for all conditions (range 0.1% to 7.4%). It was concluded that the average of 3 trials between days is satisfactory for the repeatability of MVC and RFD. Study one (1. B) This second part of study one was to determine if there was a fatiguing effect of the testing protocol and also to establish the fatigue effect of the heavy resistance exercise. The same subjects were used as in study IA, but with the fatigue effects of an exercise trial between sessions 2 and 3. Subjects performed three sets of six different resistance exercises involving the lower body at an intensity corresponding to 60% of 1- RM (8-10 repetitions). The LOA for MVC was 0.6%, 13.7%, and 6.7%, for both legs, right leg and left leg respectively, and for RFD was 0.3%, 4.4%, and 5.3% for both legs. It was concluded that using both legs for studying the MVC was more reliable than using one leg for within-day and between-days force measurements. Study 2: The objective of study two was to establish the heavy resistance exercise volume and intensity to produce a fatigue effect of a 40% reduction in measured force variables and to establish the fatigue and recovery responses over a 48 hour period. Subjects were familiarised with the same testing procedures as in the pilot study 1B. All subjects performed three sets of six different exercises (lying leg curls, dumbbell lunges, barbell squats, leg extensions, straight leg deadlift, leg presses) at an intensity corresponding to 70% of 1-RM (8-10 repetitions). Measurements were obtained after 2h, 24h and 48h recovery for MVC and RFD. A significant main effect was found for time on MVC and RFD for both legs and the dominant leg (P 0.05). Indicating that the fatigue protocol did not induce muscle damage the GH data showed a significant mean effect of time and conditions (P<0.05), conforming an hormonal response to exercise. It was concluded that oral creatine supplementation enhances recovery following a resistance exercise challenge with a suggestion of a super-compensation at 48 hours. In summary, the procedure of resistance exercise was used in the four experimental studies and nutritional supplementation (CHO and Cr) significantly reduced the decline in maximal peak force and enhanced recovery following resistance exercise. It was concluded that the recovery from heavy resistance exercise in female appears to be aided by dietary supplementation producing an increase in the recovery of both maximal voluntary contraction force and rate of force development

The Challenge of Detection and Diagnosis of Fugacious Hardware Faults in VLSI Designs

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38789-0_7Current integration scales are increasing the number and types of faults that embedded systems must face. Traditional approaches focus on dealing with those transient and permanent faults that impact the state or output of systems, whereas little research has targeted those faults being logically, electrically or temporally masked -which we have named fugacious. A fast detection and precise diagnosis of faults occurrence, even if the provided service is unaffected, could be of invaluable help to determine, for instance, that systems are currently under the influence of environmental disturbances like radiation, suffering from wear-out, or being affected by an intermittent fault. Upon detection, systems may react to adapt the deployed fault tolerance mechanisms to the diagnosed problem. This paper explores these ideas evaluating challenges and requirements involved, and provides an outline of potential techniques to be applied.This work has been funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy ARENES project (TIN2012-38308-C02-01)Espinosa García, J.; Andrés Martínez, DD.; Ruiz, JC.; Gil, P. (2013). The Challenge of Detection and Diagnosis of Fugacious Hardware Faults in VLSI Designs. En Dependable Computing. Springer. 76-87. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38789-0_7S7687Narayanan, V., Xie, Y.: Reliability concerns in embedded systems design. IEEE Computer 1(39), 118–120 (2006)Hannius, O., Karlsson, J.: Impact of soft errors in a jet engine controller. In: Ortmeier, F., Daniel, P. (eds.) SAFECOMP 2012. LNCS, vol. 7612, pp. 223–234. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)Borkar, S.: Designing reliable systems from unreliable components: the challenges of transistor variability and degradation. IEEE Micro 25(6), 10–16 (2005)JEDEC: Measurement and reporting of alpha particle and terrestrial cosmic ray-induced soft errors in semiconductor devices. JEDEC Standard JESD89A. JEDEC (2006)Gracia-Moran, J., Gil-Tomas, D., Saiz-Adalid, L.J., Baraza, J.C., Gil-Vicente, P.J.: Experimental validation of a fault tolerant microcomputer system against intermittent faults. In: DSN, pp. 413–418 (2010)Constantinescu, C.: Intermittent faults and effects on reliability of integrated circuits. In: Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, pp. 370–374. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2008)Avizienis, A., Laprie, J.C., Randell, B., Landwehr, C.: Basic concepts and taxonomy of dependable and secure computing. IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. 1, 11–33 (2004)Johnson, C., Holloway, C.: The dangers of failure masking in fault-tolerant software: Aspects of a recent in-flight upset event. In: 2007 2nd Institution of Engineering and Technology International Conference on System Safety, pp. 60–65 (October 2007)Bolchini, C., Salice, F., Sciuto, D.: Fault analysis for networks with concurrent error detection. IEEE Des. Test 15(4), 66–74 (1998)Goessel, M., Ocheretny, V., Sogomonyan, E., Marienfeld, D.: New Methods of Concurrent Checking (Frontiers in Electronic Testing), 1st edn. Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated (2008)Iyer, R.K., Rossetti, D.J.: A statistical load dependency model for cpu errors at slac. In: Twenty-Fifth International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing, ‘Highlights from Twenty-Five Years’, p. 373 (June 1995)Dodd, P.E., Shaneyfelt, M.R., Felix, J.A., Schwank, J.R.: Production and propagation of single-event transients in high-speed digital logic ics. IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science 51, 3278–3284 (2004)Nightingale, E.B., Douceur, J.R., Orgovan, V.: Cycles, cells and platters: an empirical analysisof hardware failures on a million consumer pcs. In: Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Computer Systems, EuroSys 2011, pp. 343–356. ACM, New York (2011)Kimseng, K., Hoit, M., Tiwari, N., Pecht, M.: Physics-of-failure assessment of a cruise control module. Microelectronics Reliability 39(10), 1423–1444 (1999)Savir, J.: Detection of single intermittent faults in sequential circuits. IEEE Trans. Comput. 29(7), 673–678 (1980)Correcher, A., Garcia, E., Morant, F., Quiles, E., Rodriguez, L.: Intermittent failure dynamics characterization. IEEE Transactions on Reliability 61(3), 649–658 (2012)Sorensen, B., Kelly, G., Sajecki, A., Sorensen, P.: An analyzer for detecting intermittent faults in electronic devices. In: AUTOTESTCON 1994. IEEE Systems Readiness Technology Conference. ‘Cost Effective Support Into the Next Century’, Conference Proceedings, pp. 417–421 (September 1994)Sosnowski, J.: Transient fault tolerance in digital systems. IEEE Micro 14(1), 24–35 (1994)Bondavalli, A., Chiaradonna, S., Di Giandomenico, F., Grandoni, F.: Threshold-based mechanisms to discriminate transient from intermittent faults. IEEE Trans. Comput. 49(3), 230–245 (2000)Rashid, L., Pattabiraman, K., Gopalakrishnan, S.: Intermittent hardware errors and recovery: modelling and evaluation. In: International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems, QEST (2012)Touba, N.A., McCluskey, E.J.: Logic synthesis of multilevel circuits with concurrent error detection. IEEE Trans. CAD 16(7), 783–789 (1997)Nicolaidis, M., Manich, S., Figueras, J.: Achieving fault secureness in parity prediction arithmetic operators: General conditions and implementations. In: Proceedings of the 1996 European conference on Design and Test, EDTC 1996, pp. 186–193. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (1996)Ko, S.B., Lo, J.C.: Efficient realization of parity prediction functions in fpgas. J. Electron. Test. 20(5), 489–499 (2004)D’Angelo, S., Sechi, G.R., Metra, C.: Transient and permanent fault diagnosis for fpga-based tmr systems. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Defect and Fault-Tolerance in VLSI Systems, DFT 1999, pp. 330–338. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (1999)Kim, C.: Detection and location of intermittent faults by monitoring carrier signal channel behavior of electrical interconnection system. In: Electric Ship Technologies Symposium, ESTS 2009, pp. 449–455. IEEE (April 2009

Gendered Representations of Male and Female Social Actors in Iranian Educational Materials

This research investigates the representations of gendered social actors within the subversionary discourse of equal educational opportunities for males and females in Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) books. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the theoretical framework, the authors blend van Leeuwen’s (Texts and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis, Routledge, London, 2003) ‘Social Actor Network Model’ and Sunderland’s (Gendered discourses, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, 2004) ‘Gendered Discourses Model’ in order to examine the depictions of male and female social actors within this gendered discourse. The gendered discourse of equal opportunities was buttressed by such representations within a tight perspective in proportion to gender ideologies prevailing in Iran. Resorting to CDA, we can claim that resistance against such gendered discourse in Iranian EFL textbooks militates against such gender norms. These representations of male and female social actors in school books are indicative of an all-encompassing education, reinforcing that the discourse of equal opportunities is yet to be realized in the education system of Iran

ADAPTIVE FUZZY-SLIDING MODE CONTROLLER FOR A HELICOPTER-LIKE TWIN ROTOR MIMO SYSTEM

This paper addresses the attitude control problem for a twin rotor unmanned helicopter driven by DC motors. The control objective is to have the helicopter attitude, i.e., pitch and yaw angles, track specified angles. From the considered dynamics of the plant, it is observed that the main difficulty of the control problem is due to the existing nonlinear coupling effects between the two perpendicular rotors. Hence, an adaptive control approach based on the fuzzy-sliding mode controller is developed to solve the problem. In the controller design, firstly, the twin rotor multiple-input multiple-output system (TRMS) is decoupled into two single-input–single-output systems, and the cross couplings can be considered as disturbances to each other. Then, a fuzzy-sliding mode controller is designed for each of them. The stability of the overall closed-loop system is proven to be asymptotically stable based on the Lyapunov theorem. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed control scheme, computer simulations is shown

iii An Improved Method for Register File Verification By

The author would like to thank Professor David Pan for providing his expertise and guidance and Professor Nur Touba for giving his valuable feedback throughout this masters report process. In addition the author would like to thank his various managers and co-workers at IBM who provided much needed support and inspiration throughout his master’s school process