Enhancing Student Housing Accessibility and Affordability: A Comprehensive Analysis of Private Accommodations at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura

The fundamental right to education drives students across the globe to seek higher education opportunities, often necessitating relocations within their own country or abroad. In the context of Sri Lanka, the higher education gross enrolment rate has steadily increased, currently standing at 19.8%. However, the capacity of the nation's universities to offer on-campus housing falls short in accommodating the surging student population. Consequently, there has been a growing demand for private student housing, met primarily by private housing providers. At the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, a significant proportion, approximately 60% of undergraduate students, face the challenge of lacking access to on-campus dormitory facilities, making private housing companies a potentially pivotal solution. However, a critical gap exists in the legal framework regulating student private housing, forcing students to seek accommodation in hotels.When selecting private housing, students take into account multifaceted factors including location, proximity to the educational institution, safety, amenities, and the degree of personal autonomy they can enjoy. This research endeavours to develop an invaluable decision-making tool to empower students in making informed choices regarding private accommodations. Given that a substantial portion of students originates from rural areas where daily commutes to the university are impractical, student housing assumes paramount significance in their pursuit of higher education. This research project advocates for institutional guidance in the selection of private housing, a move that would substantially benefit students grappling with the challenge of securing suitable accommodations within limited timeframes. The study's findings hold the potential to significantly improve the educational journey for aspiring students in Sri Lanka, thereby enhancing accessibility and equity in higher education

Distribution Substation Dynamic Reconfiguration and Reinforcement-Digital Twin Model

The proliferation of electric vehicles will increase demand and alter the load profiles on final distribution substations quicker than traditional reinforcement techniques can respond. As it is nontrivial to determine in advance, to street level granularity, where and when vehicles will charge, a more flexible approach to substation reinforcement is preferable to the existing rip-out-and-replace technique for an overloaded transformer. Distribution Substation Dynamic Reconfiguration (DSDR) combines reinforcement using parallel transformers with reconfiguration algorithms to flexibly operate the substation in the face of uncertain loading conditions, by dynamically switching transformers in and out of service. This paper presents a digital twin and a benchtop scale model of the DSDR substation for the development and evaluation of such algorithms, along with two algorithms for optimizing substation technical losses. Initial results show that on a single tested substation model, efficiency increased by 5.40% with Net-Zero Year 2050 load profiles versus traditional reinforcement

Sustainable Housing for Middle-Income Society in Sri Lanka

Housing is a fundamental human necessity and affects how society interacts with the environment. In the modern era, housing expansions all over the world have significantly increased the number of economic, social, and environmental issues. Making housing constructions in places that are quickly urbanizing more sustainable is a top objective for government agencies, business experts, and research organizations. Managing economic, environmental, and social sustainability factors is referred to as sustainable housing. Major natural resources used in the construction of housing include land, energy, water, and building materials. Minor natural resources used in the process include waste production and air and water pollution. In the community's fight for affordable housing, educated middle-income inhabitants are predicted to be the most susceptible group given expected living standards and monthly income-generating levels. The goals are to explain how the framework for evaluating laws was developed and proven to be valid in order to achieve sustainability in middle-income housing. In order to offer the essential background for developing an interim assessment framework for affordable and sustainable middle-income housing, the research begins by analyzing the current local assessment frameworks and regulations. To evaluate the interim assessment framework, a semi-structured questionnaire survey of business professionals and other stakeholders will serve as the foundation for the secondary study. This intermediate evaluation framework will receive the necessary fine-tuning and industry feedback through discussion and opinions. The interim framework must be transformed into a robust and progressive regulatory structure that enables future success in SH for the majority of middle-class citizens in the nation. The results will next be evaluated in light of Sri Lanka's existing regulatory framework for sustainable middle-income housing. © 2022 The Authors. Published by Department of Estate Management and Valuation, University of Sri Jayewardenepura   Keywords: Sustainable Housing, Middle-income Society, Housing Crisi

Measuring data similarity in population-based structural health monitoring using distance metrics

Population-based structural health monitoring (PBSHM) expands structural health monitoring (SHM) from a single structure to a group of structures, allowing inferences to be made within and between populations by transferring knowledge across them. Within the populations of interest, the similarity of structures, via their corresponding data, should be assessed to successfully implement PBSHM. This paper focusses on using distance metrics to assess similarity at the very start of the analysis chain, to discover information about a population for which there is little prior knowledge and before any analysis has taken place on individual structures. By doing so, it is possible to quickly and automatically identify abnormalities within the population, group similarly behaving structures together, and inform further decisions. The suitability of several candidate metrics that are not widely employed in SHM are tested using a number of commonly occurring feature behaviours, such as varying amplitudes and temporary mean shifts. The effect of data normalisation/standardisation on the metrics is also explored to identify interesting behaviours within the data. A case study is then presented where distance metrics are used to discover similarities and dissimilarities within temperature data from turbines in an offshore wind farm

Rhizoctonia in ameliorated and non-ameliorated soils

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Operationalizing iterative risk management under limited information: fiscal and economic risks due to natural disasters in Cambodia

Iterative risk management and risk-sensitive public investment planning are increasingly seen as essential elements of natural disaster resilience. This article assesses the disaster risk facing the hazard-prone Southeast Asian country of Cambodia and discusses its fiscal preparedness and need for proactive disaster risk management. The study provides a bottom-up assessment of flood and cyclone risks to public and private buildings including educational structures, health facilities, and housing and estimates the total direct economic damage to range from approximately USD 304 million for a 5-year return period event to USD 2.26 billion for 1000-year return period event. These estimates were further analyzed using the fiscal risk due to disasters, which indicates that Cambodia will likely face a resource gap whenever a hazard as large as that of a 28-year return period event strikes. Given the frequent occurrence of disasters and rapid accumulation of capital assets taking place, proactive risk reduction is highly advisable. But interviews with national policymakers also revealed that there are a number of barriers to effective risk reduction and management in Cambodia. The general lack of awareness regarding risk-based concepts and the limited availability of local risk information necessitate a continued and sustained effort to build iterative risk management in Cambodia

Performances of holiday climate index (HCI) for urban and beach destinations in Sri Lanka under changing climate

Climate change has had a significant impact on the tourism industry in many countries, leading to changes in policies and adaptations to attract more visitors. However, there are few studies on the effects of climate change on Sri Lanka’s tourism industry and income, despite its importance as a destination for tourists. A study was conducted to analyze the holiday climate index (HCI) for Sri Lanka’s urban and beach destinations to address this gap. The analysis covered historical years (2010–2018) and forecasted climatic scenarios (2021–2050 and 2071–2100), and the results were presented as colored maps to highlight the importance of HCI scores. Visual analysis showed some correlation between HCI scores and tourist arrivals, but the result of the overall correlation analysis was not significant. However, a country-specific correlation analysis revealed interesting findings, indicating that the changing climate can be considered among other factors that impact tourist arrivals. The research proposes that authorities assess the outcomes of the study and conduct further research to develop adaptive plans for Sri Lanka’s future tourism industry. The study also investigated potential scenarios for beach and urban destinations under two climate scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) for the near and far future, presenting the findings to tourism industry stakeholders for any necessary policy changes. As Sri Lanka expects more Chinese visitors in the future due to ongoing development projects, this study could be valuable for policymakers and industry stakeholders when adapting to changing climate and future tourist behavior. While more research is needed to fully understand the effects of climate change on Sri Lanka’s tourism industry, this study serves as a starting point for future investigations

Allele Frequency–Based and Polymorphism-Versus-Divergence Indices of Balancing Selection in a New Filtered Set of Polymorphic Genes in Plasmodium falciparum

Signatures of balancing selection operating on specific gene loci in endemic pathogens can identify candidate targets of naturally acquired immunity. In malaria parasites, several leading vaccine candidates convincingly show such signatures when subjected to several tests of neutrality, but the discovery of new targets affected by selection to a similar extent has been slow. A small minority of all genes are under such selection, as indicated by a recent study of 26 Plasmodium falciparum merozoite-stage genes that were not previously prioritized as vaccine candidates, of which only one (locus PF10_0348) showed a strong signature. Therefore, to focus discovery efforts on genes that are polymorphic, we scanned all available shotgun genome sequence data from laboratory lines of P. falciparum and chose six loci with more than five single nucleotide polymorphisms per kilobase (including PF10_0348) for in-depth frequency–based analyses in a Kenyan population (allele sample sizes >50 for each locus) and comparison of Hudson–Kreitman–Aguade (HKA) ratios of population diversity (π) to interspecific divergence (K) from the chimpanzee parasite Plasmodium reichenowi. Three of these (the msp3/6-like genes PF10_0348 and PF10_0355 and the surf4.1 gene PFD1160w) showed exceptionally high positive values of Tajima's D and Fu and Li's F indices and have the highest HKA ratios, indicating that they are under balancing selection and should be prioritized for studies of their protein products as candidate targets of immunity. Combined with earlier results, there is now strong evidence that high HKA ratio (as well as the frequency-independent ratio of Watterson's θ/K) is predictive of high values of Tajima's D. Thus, the former offers value for use in genome-wide screening when numbers of genome sequences within a species are low or in combination with Tajima's D as a 2D test on large population genomic samples