Building distributed heterogeneous smart phone Java applications an evaluation from a development perspective

The advances in mobile phone technology have enabled such devices to be programmed to run general-purpose applications using a special edition of the Java programming language. Java is designed to be a heterogeneous programming language targeting different platforms. Such ability when coupled with the provision of high-speed mobile Internet access would open the door for a new breed of distributed mobile applications. This paper explores the capabilities and limitations of this technology and addresses the considerations that must be taken when designing and developing such distributed applications. Our findings are verified by building a test client-server system where the clients in this system are mobile phones behaving as active processing elements not just mere service requesters

Risk analysis factors of the emission in transportation a case study - Dubai taxi

Increasing number of traditional vehicles threaten the economical development, pollutes our air and creating environmental hazards. Urban areas in UAE are currently facing growing traffic congestion by rising air pollution as a result of vast growth of population and consequently number of vehicles in the last twenty years. The spotlight of this study is to identify the critical risk factors that can be used to assess the impact of transportation emission on overall environmental risk. In this study risk analysis factors in transportation system focuses on Dubai Taxi fleet as a case study. The most critical emission levels are from; Carbon monoxide (CO), Nitrogen oxide (NOx) and Hydrocarbons (HC), which will be analyzed. The objective is to develop a sustainable transportation planning will help to solve this problem. The approach is based on a comprehensive assessment to address the negative effect of the vehicles on the environment at different period of times. The research considers different solution for the pollution problem by using a proposed model to evaluate and test its effectiveness within the international standard of air emission regardless of the vehicles or population growth in the future

De-Icing Soil Impacts, Spring 2020

De-Icing Impacts on the Danforth Campus, Spring 2020. Poster and presentation on de-icing impacts on Danforth Campus, Washington University in St. Louis, Sustainability Exchange, Spring 2020. Faculty Mentor: Dr. Avni Solank

Comparison of diesel emission experiments in view of the environment: a case study at Dubai

Because of the nature of the diesel engine combustion process, such engines produce more toxic emissions, more visible smoke and odour than gasoline engines. This has led to an increasing concern about the possible effects of diesel emissions on the environment and human health. This study examines emissions form two experimental diesel powered vehicles pilot schemes at a Dubai municipality; an inspection and maintenance experiment and a diesel particulate filter experiment. Comparing the two experiments with a baseline vehicle, the results indicate that after the inspection and maintenance experiment, a significant reduction in emissions was achieved in carbon monoxide (300%), nitrogen oxides (500%) and hydrocarbons (88%). The implementation of a diesel particulate filter lead to even better emission reductions but at a higher cost, with hydrocarbon emissions decreasing by 150%, carbon monoxide by 500% and nitrogen oxides by 700%. The results are promising for both experiments for future investigation

Towards developing distributed heterogeneous mobile phone applications

The advances in the mobile phone technology have enabled such devices to be programmed to run general-purpose applications using a special mobile edition of the Java programming language.Java is designed to be a heterogeneous programming language targeting different platforms.Such ability when coupled with the provision of high-speed mobile Internet access would open the door for a new breed of distributed mobile applications.This paper explores the limitations of this technology and addresses the consideration that must be taken when designing and developing such applications

Geometrical Design Errors in Duhok Intersections by Driver Behavior

في حالات عديده وعندما يتأكد سائقو المركبات من عدم وجود نظام مراقبه مروري، يميل البعض الى اختصار زمن ومسافة مساراتهم عبر التقاطعات. يشجع هذا التصرف عندما يعاني التصميم الهندسي للتقاطع من الاخطاء او عندما يصعب التصميم وحاله الطريق من سلوك الاتجاه الصحيح. وقد يكون تصميم الطريق مربكا للسائق لكي يميز وجهته الصحيحة. في هذه الدراسة تم اختيار وملاحظه موقعين يمتازان بكثره الاخطاء المرورية. أحد الموقعين هو دوره تقع ضمن الحرم الجامعي في جامعه دهوك. الأخر هو تقاطع يقع خارج البوابة الشرقية الرئيسية لجامعه دهوك. في كلا الموقعين كان التصميم الهندسي مربكا ويشجع على ارتكاب الاخطاء المرورية. كان التقاطع الدائري في الجامعة بعيدا عن التصميم الصحيح. شجع هذا التصميم القيادة بالاتجاه الخطأ وكان سببا في وقوع بعض الحوادث المرورية. كانت نسبه القيادة بالاتجاه الخطأ في احد المقتربات تصل الى (%32) في وقت الذروة. تم تقليل هذه النسبة الى (%6) بعد نصب جزيرة تقسيم وسطيه مؤقته. كانت نسبه القيادة بالاتجاه المعاكس في المقترب الثاني (%15) ولم يتوفر علاجا مناسبا لهذه الحالة. كانت نسبة القيادة بالاتحاد الخاطئ تصل الى (%56) في اتجاه المرور الخارج من بوابه الجامعة باتجاه الطريق الرئيسي في وقت الذروة. تم تقليل هذه النسبة الى (%14) عند نصب اشاره دلاله على الاتجاه. تم تقليل هذه النسبة الى (%9) عند الاستعانة برجل مرور يقف عند التقاطع.In many situations, drivers if certain of the absence traffic monitoring system tend to shorten their driving paths and travel time across intersections. This behavior will be encouraged if the geometrical design suffers from mistakes, or the geometrical design and road conditions make it harder for drivers to follow the correct routes. Sometimes the intersection arrangement is confusing for the driver to distinguish the right from the wrong track. In this study, two sites with large number of driving mistakes were noticed. One site is a roundabout within the university of Duhok campus. The other is the intersection just outside the University of Duhok eastern main gate. At both sites, the geometry is very confusing and encourage driving mistakes. The university roundabout which was the first site investigated, was not properly designed encouraging wrong side driving. Many traffic accidents took place at this roundabout.  Wrong side driving reaches 32 % at peak hour in one approach.  This was reduced to 6% when temporary divisional island was installed. The other approach has a 15% wrong side driving and no remedy could be done to it. At the intersection near the university gate, wrong side driving reaches 56% of the traffic emerging from the main gate at peak hour. This was reduced to 14% when drivers are guided through direction sign. This percentage was reduced further to 9% with standing policeman

Risk Analysis Factors of the Emission in Transportation A Case Study-Dubai Taxi

ABSTRACT Increasing number of traditional vehicles threaten the economical development, pollutes our air and creating environmental hazards. Urban areas in UAE are currently facing growing traffic congestion by rising air pollution as a result of vast growth of population and consequently number of vehicles in the last twenty years. The spotlight of this study is to identify the critical risk factors that can be used to assess the impact of transportation emission on overall environmental risk. In this study risk analysis factors in transportation system focuses on Dubai Taxi fleet as a case study. The most critical emission levels are from; Carbon monoxide (CO), Nitrogen oxide (NOx) and Hydrocarbons (HC), which will be analyzed. The objective is to develop a sustainable transportation planning will help to solve this problem. The approach is based on a comprehensive assessment to address the negative effect of the vehicles on the environment at different period of times. The research considers different solution for the pollution problem by using a proposed model to evaluate and test its effectiveness within the international standard of air emission regardless of the vehicles or population growth in the future

Understanding Human Mobility Patterns in a Developing Country Using Mobile Phone Data

This study demonstrates the use of mobile phone data to derive country-wide mobility patterns. We identified significant locations of users such as home, work, and other based on a combined measure of frequency, duration, time, and day of mobile phone interactions. Consecutive mobile phone records of users are used to identify stay and pass-by locations. A stay location is where users spend a significant amount of their time measured through their mobile phone usage. Trips are constructed for each user between two consecutive stay locations in a day and then categorized by purpose and time of the day. Three measures of entropy are used to further understand the regularity of user’s spatiotemporal mobility patterns. The results show that user’s in a high entropy cluster has high percentage of non-home based trips (77%), and user’s in a low entropy cluster has high percentage of commuting trips (49%), indicating high regularity. A set of doubly constrained trip distribution models is estimated. To measure travel cost, the concept of a centroid point that assumes the origins and destinations of all trips are concentrated at an arbitrary location such as the centroid of a zone is replaced by multiple origins and destinations represented by cell tower locations. Note that a cell tower location can only be used as trips origin/destination location when a stay is detected. The travel cost measured between cell tower locations has resulted in shorter trip distances and the model estimation shows less sensitivity to the distance-decay effect

In Vitro Evolution of Allergy Vaccine Candidates, with Maintained Structure, but Reduced B Cell and T Cell Activation Capacity

Allergy and asthma to cat (Felis domesticus) affects about 10% of the population in affluent countries. Immediate allergic symptoms are primarily mediated via IgE antibodies binding to B cell epitopes, whereas late phase inflammatory reactions are mediated via activated T cell recognition of allergen-specific T cell epitopes. Allergen-specific immunotherapy relieves symptoms and is the only treatment inducing a long-lasting protection by induction of protective immune responses. The aim of this study was to produce an allergy vaccine designed with the combined features of attenuated T cell activation, reduced anaphylactic properties, retained molecular integrity and induction of efficient IgE blocking IgG antibodies for safer and efficacious treatment of patients with allergy and asthma to cat. The template gene coding for rFel d 1 was used to introduce random mutations, which was subsequently expressed in large phage libraries. Despite accumulated mutations by up to 7 rounds of iterative error-prone PCR and biopanning, surface topology and structure was essentially maintained using IgE-antibodies from cat allergic patients for phage enrichment. Four candidates were isolated, displaying similar or lower IgE binding, reduced anaphylactic activity as measured by their capacity to induce basophil degranulation and, importantly, a significantly lower T cell reactivity in lymphoproliferative assays compared to the original rFel d 1. In addition, all mutants showed ability to induce blocking antibodies in immunized mice.The approach presented here provides a straightforward procedure to generate a novel type of allergy vaccines for safer and efficacious treatment of allergic patients

K-variant BCHE and pesticide exposure: Gene-environment interactions in a case-control study of Parkinson's disease in Egypt

Pesticide exposure is associated with increased risk of Parkinson's disease (PD). We investigated in Egypt whether common variants in genes involved in pesticide detoxification or transport might modify the risk of PD evoked by pesticide exposure. We recruited 416 PD patients and 445 controls. Information on environmental factors was collected by questionnaire-based structured interviews. Candidate single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 15 pesticide-related genes were genotyped. We analyzed the influence of environmental factors and SNPs as well as the interaction of pesticide exposure and SNPs on the risk of PD. The risk of PD was reduced by coffee consumption [OR = 0.63, 95% CI: 0.43-0.90, P = 0.013] and increased by pesticide exposure [OR = 7.09, 95% CI: 1.12-44.01, P = 0.036]. The SNP rs1126680 in the butyrylcholinesterase gene BCHE reduced the risk of PD irrespective of pesticide exposure [OR = 0.38, 95% CI: 0.20-0.70, P = 0.002]. The SNP rs1803274, defining K-variant BCHE, interacted significantly with pesticide exposure (P = 0.007) and increased the risk of PD only in pesticide-exposed individuals [OR = 2.49, 95% CI: 1.50-4.19, P = 0.0005]. The K-variant BCHE reduces serum activity of butyrylcholinesterase, a known bioscavenger for pesticides. Individuals with K-variant BCHE appear to have an increased risk for PD when exposed to pesticides