211,178 research outputs found
A Social-Centred Gamification Approach to Improve Household Water Use Efficiency
The research community is showing a growing interest in gamification and there are works showing the usefulness of gamification in different problem domains. Recently, a special interest has been given to the gamification design on systems addressing natural resource consumption issues such as to encourage efficient household water consumption. Despite the potential benefits, the gamification design method for such system is not conclusive. In this paper, we proposed a social-centred gamification approach to improve household water use efficiency. The approach firstly identified the water use related social network activities based upon existing popular social network activities. The approach then gamified each identified activity in terms of traditional instruments for improving water use efficiency and gamification rewards. The approach also used a set of indicators to explicitly detect and monitor both online social network activities and offline water use activities. With this approach the gamification effectiveness can be better traced and evaluated.ISS-EWATUS, Integrated Support System for Efficient Water Usage and Resources Management, FP7 project (grant no. 619228), funded by the European Communit
Enhancement of synthetic jets by means of an integrated valve-less pump Part II. Numerical and experimental studies
The paper studies the performance of the new fluid jet actuator based on the novel principle of the generation of fluid jet, which has been presented in [Z. Travnicek, A.I. Fedorchenko, A.-B. Wang, Enhancement of synthetic jets by means of an integrated valve-less fluid pump. Part I. Design of the actuator, Sens. Actuators A, 120 (2005) 232-240]. The fluid jet actuator consists of a synthetic jet actuator and a valve-less pump. The resulting periodical fluid jet is intrinsically non-zero-net-mass-flux, in contrast to the traditional synthetic jet. The numerical results have been compared with the laboratory experiments comprising phase-locked smoke visualization and time-mean velocity measurements. The results have confirmed the satisfactory performance of the actuator
Radiative decays of the strange-bottom mesons
In this article, we assume that the strange-bottom mesons are the
conventional mesons, and calculate the electromagnetic coupling
constants , , and using the light-cone QCD sum rules. Then
we study the radiative decays , ,
and , and observe that the
widths are rather narrow. We can search for the strange-bottom
mesons in the invariant and mass distributions in the
strong decays or in the invariant and mass
distributions in the radiative decays.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, revised versio
Analysis of the vertex with the light-cone QCD sum rules
In this article, we analyze the vertex with the light-cone QCD
sum rules. The strong coupling constant is an important
parameter in evaluating the charmonium absorption cross sections in searching
for the quark-gluon plasmas. Our numerical value for the is
consistent with the prediction of the effective SU(4) symmetry and vector meson
dominance theory.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, revised versio
The calibratrion of dopplergrams and magnetograms at BBSO
The calibration procedure for the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) videomagnetograph in which the radial velocity of the sidereal rotation of the Sun is used as a calibrator is described. One of the key points of the procedure is to eliminate the effects of the Earth's motion relative to the Sun and the temperature instability of the birefringent filter by tuning the bandpass of the birefringent filter. The other is to make the light level of the direct image of the videomagnetograph the same both in Doppler and in Zeeman modes in order to reduce the errors introduced by imperfect linearity of the transfer curve of the camera tube. Some practical problems of calibration are discussed for further improvement
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