Exploring the Significance of Mecca Sacred Mosque Global Location

In traditional Islamic cities, the great mosque lies in the middle as the main landmark of the city. It is stated in the Qur\u27an that the Ka\u27ba (Mecca sacred mosque) was the first house that was built in Mecca city for humanity to worship Allah. Therefore, Mecca is the holiest city of Islam, and the goal of the annual Muslim hajj (pilgrimage). The objective of the present study is to explore the significance of sacred mosque of Mecca global location on dry land by using accurate measurements and Satellite programs.The results of the study illustrate that the sacred mosque of Mecca equally distances away from the following locations:1) The farthest borders edges of Africa and Europe as well, 2) The nearest borders of the new world continents along with a part of Asia which meeting the Northern borders of North America at the Bering Sea, 3) The farthest borders of the new world continents that represent the outer edges of the dry land, 4) Finally, the Ka\u27ba is equally distant from the geographical centers of the new world continents

Comparative Study Between Three Courtyards of Traditional Houses in Islamic Cairo

Direct solar radiation is considered the most important climatic element, which has direct and indirectinfluences on designing buildings and open spaces. In hot arid regions, like Cairo, the main aim is to reduce theheat load in summer, and to maximize it in winter. The aim of the present comparative study is to determine the shaded area and the quantity of direct solar radiation (on 21 June & 21 December) fall on walls, floors and openings of three courtyards in traditional Islamic houses in old Cairo. For this purpose a network of three traditional courtyards houses has been selected in old Islamic Cairo. The first is Zaynab Khatun house (built1468AD), the second is Gamal Al-Din Al-Dahaby (built 1637AD), and the third is Es-Sinnari house (built 1794AD)

Data center resilience assessment : storage, networking and security.

Data centers (DC) are the core of the national cyber infrastructure. With the incredible growth of critical data volumes in financial institutions, government organizations, and global companies, data centers are becoming larger and more distributed posing more challenges for operational continuity in the presence of experienced cyber attackers and occasional natural disasters. The main objective of this research work is to present a new methodology for data center resilience assessment, this methodology consists of: • Define Data center resilience requirements. • Devise a high level metric for data center resilience. • Design and develop a tool to validate and the metric. Since computer networks are an important component in the data center architecture, this research work was extended to investigate computer network resilience enhancement opportunities within the area of routing protocols, redundancy, and server load to minimize the network down time and increase the time period of resisting attacks. Data center resilience assessment is a complex process as it involves several aspects such as: policies for emergencies, recovery plans, variation in data center operational roles, hosted/processed data types and data center architectures. However, in this dissertation, storage, networking and security are emphasized. The need for resilience assessment emerged due to the gap in existing reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) measures. Resilience as an evaluation metric leads to better proactive perspective in system design and management. The proposed Data center resilience assessment portal (DC-RAP) is designed to easily integrate various operational scenarios. DC-RAP features a user friendly interface to assess the resilience in terms of performance analysis and speed recovery by collecting the following information: time to detect attacks, time to resist, time to fail and recovery time. Several set of experiments were performed, results obtained from investigating the impact of routing protocols, server load balancing algorithms on network resilience, showed that using particular routing protocol or server load balancing algorithm can enhance network resilience level in terms of minimizing the downtime and ensure speed recovery. Also experimental results for investigating the use social network analysis (SNA) for identifying important router in computer network showed that the SNA was successful in identifying important routers. This important router list can be used to redundant those routers to ensure high level of resilience. Finally, experimental results for testing and validating the data center resilience assessment methodology using the DC-RAP showed the ability of the methodology quantify data center resilience in terms of providing steady performance, minimal recovery time and maximum resistance-attacks time. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: • A methodology for evaluation data center resilience has been developed. • Implemented a Data Center Resilience Assessment Portal (D$-RAP) for resilience evaluations. • Investigated the usage of Social Network Analysis to Improve the computer network resilience

Influence of Landscape Elements on Visual Design Elements in Order to Enhance the Visual Quality of Urban Spaces

Visual quality of urban spaces is an important component in the process of research and development of the physical structure of the built environment. It establishes a comfortable and satisfying experience for the community. A good visual image of urban space will lead to positive perceptions and meanings stimulating the community to produce a good reaction to its urban space. The purpose of this study is to extract the most effective landscape elements that affect the visual quality which contribute designers to make better decisions for designing urban spaces. From this point of view the paper aims to identify the landscape elements and the visual design element that enhance the visual quality of urban spaces. Then the paper will rank the most effective landscape elements according to their influence on the visual design elements from the experts (urban designer and architects) point of view to reach the main objective of the paper which is to create a prospected framework for the urban designer and architects to help them in future decisions in designing landscape elements that promote the visual quality of urban spaces

Influence of Landscape Elements on Visual Design Elements in Order to Enhance the Visual Quality of Urban Spaces

Visual quality of urban spaces is an important component in the process of research and development of the physical structure of the built environment. It establishes a comfortable and satisfying experience for the community. A good visual image of urban space will lead to positive perceptions and meanings stimulating the community to produce a good reaction to its urban space. The purpose of this study is to extract the most effective landscape elements that affect the visual quality which contribute designers to make better decisions for designing urban spaces. From this point of view the paper aims to identify the landscape elements and the visual design element that enhance the visual quality of urban spaces. Then the paper will rank the most effective landscape elements according to their influence on the visual design elements from the experts (urban designer and architects) point of view to reach the main objective of the paper which is to create a prospected framework for the urban designer and architects to help them in future decisions in designing landscape elements that promote the visual quality of urban spaces

Study of the Potential of a Local Geoid Model for Extracting the Orthometric Heights from GPS Measurements in Topographic Works

Due to the rapid development and expansion of geodetic applications, the determination of orthometric heights in an accurate manner is considered as one of the most required conditions to carry out such projects. Obtaining orthometric heights using traditional methods of levelling is time and cost consuming. Hence, investigating other techniques that provide the same accuracy, as leveling methods, but requiring less time and cost is very gainful. Recently, satellite positioning techniques and their applications are being used increasingly in geodetic projects. So, it is interesting to study the efficiency of such techniques for obtaining orthometric heights. GPS methods provide highly accurate measurement of ellipsoidal heights. However, the conversion of ellipsoid heights to orthometric heights may be achieved using geoid models. The objective of this research is to study the efficiency of using a local geoid model as an alternative method to obtain orthometric heights from GPS measurements. This paper proposes a methodology to generate such local geoid models. Then, the results of using the generated local geoid model for Jeddah city in Saudi Arabia are presented. These results indicate that the difference among estimated undulations values from the local geoid model and undulations values calculated from leveling techniques ranges from 1.8 cm to -1.1 cm. with a maximum standard deviation of 56 mm. These results confirm that the creation of a local geoid model is an effective method that gives the required accuracy for topographic works. Keywords: GPS/Levelling method, Local geoid model, Krigging method