Teachers' views of their primary school classrooms

This article presents the views of 222 head teachers and classroom-based teachers about their experiences and perceptions of 193 specific classroom environments from 29 primary schools in 3 different areas in England, UK. One-to-one interviews were carried out focusing on teachers’ perceptions about their classrooms throughout the year. It was found that teachers’ views of their overall comfort were fairly high, despite widespread problems with overheating, stuffiness, glare and noise. Surprisingly, schools built in 1950s had the least negative feelings, while those since the 1990s to date had the highest. The teachers appear to be aware of the ‘hard’ aspects of the physical environment, but less conscious of the impact of ‘softer’ aspects, especially those with impact on the level of stimulation created

The distributed ASCI supercomputer project

The Distributed ASCI Supercomputer (DAS) is a homogeneous wide-area distributed system consisting of four cluster computers at different locations. DAS has been used for research on communication software, parallel languages and programming systems, schedulers, parallel applications, and distributed applications. The paper gives a preview of the most interesting research results obtained so far in the DAS project

Towards the reconstruction of the genome-scale metabolic model of Lactobacillus acidophilus La-14

Lactobacillus acidophilus is a probiotic lactic acid bacterium used in food and dietary supplements for many years. However, despite its importance for industrial development and recognized health-promoting effects, no genome-scale metabolic model has been reported. A GSM model for L. acidophilus La-14 was developed, accounting 494 genes and 783 reactions. A genome annotation was performed to identify the metabolic potential of the bacterium. The biomass composition was determined based on information available in literature and previously published models. The model was validated by comparing in silico simulations with experimental data, regarding the aerobic and anaerobic growth. The reconstruction of the metabolic model has confirmed the fastidious requirements of L. acidophilus for amino acids, fatty acids, and vitamins. This model can be used for a better understanding of the metabolism of this bacterium and identification of industrially desirable compounds.This study was performed under the scope of the project “BIODATA.PT – Portuguese Biological Data Network” (ref. LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-022231), funded by FCT/MCTES, through national funds of PIDDAC, Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER), Programa Operacional de Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI) and Programa Operacional Regional de Lisboa (Lisboa 2020).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Walking with Media: Towards a mixed reality pedagogy in university learning environments

Recently the fields of architecture, media studies, and education have begun to converge through the proliferation of mixed reality technologies and interfaces. This convergence is widely described as offering new opportunities for immersive, seamless, decentralised and environmentally distributed learning experiences. This chapter contributes to a growing body of research exploring the transformation of learning environments through distributed media networks, digital databases, and innovative pedagogical interventions. It develops a theoretical framework for researching the interconnections between the built environment, mixed reality technologies, and place-based learning experiences and pedagogies. The second part of the chapter focuses on the development of the CubeWalk network, which involved a series of site-specific architectural installations, digital interfaces, and pedagogical interventions on a university campus in NSW, Australia. Two case studies are presented which describe the co-design and evaluation of mixed reality tutorial walks across the university campus. Drawing together insights rendered through the case studies, the chapter offers a series of theoretical propositions for a ‘mixed reality pedagogy’ that is distributed across 21st century learning environments and media networks

Relational architectures and wearable space: Smart schools and the politics of ubiquitous sensation

This paper undertakes an analysis of the “smart school” as a building that both senses and manages bodies through sensory data. The authors argue that smart schools produce a situation of ubiquitous sensation, in which learning environments are continuously sensed, regulated, and controlled through complex sensory ecosystems and data infrastructures. This includes the consideration of ethical and political issues associated with the collection of biometric and environmental data in schools, and the implications for the design and operation of learning environments which are increasingly regulated through decentralised sensor networks. Working through a relational and adaptive theory of architecture, the authors explore ways of intervening in smart schools through the reconceptualization of sensor technologies as “atmospheric media” that operate within a distributed ecology of sensation that exceeds the limited bandwidth of the human senses. Drawing on recent projects in contemporary art, architecture, and interaction design, the authors discuss specific architectural interventions that foreground the atmospheric qualities and ethical problematics of sensor technologies in school buildings

Evaluation of a Mesh of Clos Wormhole Network

The pursuit of high connectivity in network design for multicomputers is often complicated by wiring constraints, resulting in a trade-off between efficiency and realizability. The Mesh of Clos topology addresses this trade-off by combining a multistage network with a mesh network. In this paper, a simulation study is presented in order to evaluate wormhole-routed Mesh of Clos communication networks. It is shown that this type of network can substantially reduce contention in comparison with flatter mesh networks. Furthermore, we found that increasing the number of flitbuffers on router devices does not necessarily lead to improved communication performance. For some application loads it may even result in a degradation of performance. 1. Introduction Distributed memory MIMD multicomputers play an important role in the continuing pursuit of improving computational power. Their message passing efficiency depends heavily on the process of transferring data from one node to another, com..

The Mermaid Architecture-workbench for Multicomputers

Cache hierarchy Bus Figure 3: The template architecture models. defines a bus component. It is a simple forwarding mechanism, carrying out arbitration upon multiple accesses. The parameters used to configure this component include buswidth, bus cycle-time and arbitration details. Changing the bus to a more complex structure, such as a multistage network, can be done without too much remodelling effort. In that case, only a new Pearl module needs to be written, replacing the bus component within the template model. Finally, the memory component simulates a simple DRAM memory. It is parameterized with memory size, memory refresh rate, and memory access latencies. 4.2 Multi-node communication model A node within the communication template model is constructed from an abstract processor, a router and multiple communication links. This setup is shown in Figure 3(b). The nodes are connected in a topology that reflects the physical interconnection scheme of the multicomputer, resulting in ..

Evaluation of LH*LH for a Multicomputer Architecture

. Scalable, distributed data structures can provide fast access to large volumes of data. In this paper, we present a simulation study in which the performance behaviour of one of these data structures, called LH*LH, is evaluated for a multicomputer architecture. Our experimental results demonstrate that the access-time to LH*LH can be very small and does not deteriorate for increasing data structure sizes. Furthermore, we also show that parallel access to the LH*LH data structure may speed up client applications. This speed-up is, however, shown to be constrained by a number of effects. 1 Introduction Modern database applications require fast access to large volumes of data. Sometimes the amount of data is so large than it cannot be efficiently stored or processed by a uniprocessor system. Therefore, a distributed data structure can be used that distributes the data over a number of processors within a parallel or distributed system. This is an attractive possibility because the achi..

Distributed Simulation Of Multicomputer Architectures With Mermaid

This paper describes the parallelization of the Mermaid multicomputer simulation environment. Due to our simulation methodology, this parallelization is reasonably straightforward as it does not require any measures to guarantee the causality within the simulated system. The resulting distributed simulator increases the simulation performance without any loss of simulation accuracy. Furthermore, the parallel simulation environment is also more scalable than its sequential counterpart with respect to the memory requirements. This gain in performance and scalability can be used for simulating larger target architectures and more realistic applications. Experiments with parallel Mermaid confirm that distributed simulation may lead to significant performance improvements compared to sequential simulation. In several cases, we even measured super-linear speedups. 1. INTRODUCTION In order to explore the design space of multicomputer architectures, we developed the Mermaid simulation environ..