Household Energy Use in New Zealand: the Changing Role of Televisions

Energy efficiency plays a major role in policies to mitigate climate change and to secure future energy supply. Understanding energy use behaviour and appliance energy use is vital to policy design. The drivers of energy use in household sector are complex. Households use energy for comfort, health and entertainment in contrast to, the uses of energy for making a profit in industrial and commercial sectors. As a part of this study a model was developed identifying the major drivers of household energy use. Household income and behaviour, house size, appliance technology and appliance energy efficiency are few factors that can influence household energy consumption patterns. Many OECD countries have managed to restrain traditional household energy end-uses such as space and water heating. However, IEA studies have indicated energy used by information, communication and entertainment appliances continue to increase. Television energy use was chosen for this study because it is widely used and operates together with many other associated appliances. This analysis draws from the New Zealand Television Energy Usage and Purchasing Survey to understand the current trends and patterns of television usage. The survey suggests television and associated appliance ownership and usage is increasing. Analysis draws from the survey to quantify TV energy use in New Zealand. This study illustrates how household behaviour, technology and size affects household energy use. The survey also demonstrate how households associate energy use with environmental impact. Some OECD data on household energy was used to analyse and contrast New Zealand’s patterns in a wider context

AWPP: A New Scheme for Wireless Access Control Proportional to Traffic Priority and Rate

Cutting-edge wireless networking approaches are required to efficiently differentiate traffic and handle it according to its special characteristics. The current Medium Access Control (MAC) scheme which is expected to be sufficiently supported by well-known networking vendors comes from the IEEE 802.11e workgroup. The standardized solution is the Hybrid Coordination Function (HCF), that includes the mandatory Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol and the optional Hybrid Control Channel Access (HCCA) protocol. These two protocols greatly differ in nature and they both have significant limitations. The objective of this work is the development of a high-performance MAC scheme for wireless networks, capable of providing predictable Quality of Service (QoS) via an efficient traffic differentiation algorithm in proportion to the traffic priority and generation rate. The proposed Adaptive Weighted and Prioritized Polling (AWPP) protocol is analyzed, and its superior deterministic operation is revealed

Isolation and fine mapping of Rps6: An intermediate host resistance gene in barley to wheat stripe rust

A plant may be considered a nonhost of a pathogen if all known genotypes of a plant species are resistant to all known isolates of a pathogen species. However, if a small number of genotypes are susceptible to some known isolates of a pathogen species this plant maybe considered an intermediate host. Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is an intermediate host for Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst), the causal agent of wheat stripe rust. We wanted to understand the genetic architecture underlying resistance to Pst and to determine whether any overlap exists with resistance to the host pathogen, Puccinia striiformis f. sp. hordei (Psh). We mapped Pst resistance to chromosome 7H and show that host and intermediate host resistance is genetically uncoupled. Therefore, we designate this resistance locus Rps6. We used phenotypic and genotypic selection on F2:3 families to isolate Rps6 and fine mapped the locus to a 0.1 cM region. Anchoring of the Rps6 locus to the barley physical map placed the region on two adjacent fingerprinted contigs. Efforts are now underway to sequence the minimal tiling path and to delimit the physical region harbouring Rps6. This will facilitate additional marker development and permit identification of candidate genes in the region

Content-aware packet scheduling strategy for medical ultrasound videos over LTE wireless networks

In parallel to the advancements in communication technologies, telemedicine research has continually adapted to develop various healthcare applications. The latest wireless technology Long-Term Evolution(LTE) is being increasingly deployed across developed countries and rapidly adopted by developing countries. In this paper, a content-aware packet scheduling approach for medical ultrasound videos is proposed. The contribution of this work is introducing a utility function based on the temporal complexity of the video frames. The utility function is used with four schedulers to prioritise the video packets based on their temporal complexity and type of frame (e.g. I frame). The results show that the utility function improves the packet delay performance obtained in our simulation when compared with content-unaware approach. Further, gain in average PSNR and SSIM are also observed in the received video quality. Research on content-aware packet scheduling for telemedicine applications over advanced wireless networks is limited and our work contributes towards addressing this research gap

Effects of hospital facilities on patient outcomes after cancer surgery: an international, prospective, observational study

Background Early death after cancer surgery is higher in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) compared with in high-income countries, yet the impact of facility characteristics on early postoperative outcomes is unknown. The aim of this study was to examine the association between hospital infrastructure, resource availability, and processes on early outcomes after cancer surgery worldwide.Methods A multimethods analysis was performed as part of the GlobalSurg 3 study-a multicentre, international, prospective cohort study of patients who had surgery for breast, colorectal, or gastric cancer. The primary outcomes were 30-day mortality and 30-day major complication rates. Potentially beneficial hospital facilities were identified by variable selection to select those associated with 30-day mortality. Adjusted outcomes were determined using generalised estimating equations to account for patient characteristics and country-income group, with population stratification by hospital.Findings Between April 1, 2018, and April 23, 2019, facility-level data were collected for 9685 patients across 238 hospitals in 66 countries (91 hospitals in 20 high-income countries; 57 hospitals in 19 upper-middle-income countries; and 90 hospitals in 27 low-income to lower-middle-income countries). The availability of five hospital facilities was inversely associated with mortality: ultrasound, CT scanner, critical care unit, opioid analgesia, and oncologist. After adjustment for case-mix and country income group, hospitals with three or fewer of these facilities (62 hospitals, 1294 patients) had higher mortality compared with those with four or five (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 3.85 [95% CI 2.58-5.75]; p<0.0001), with excess mortality predominantly explained by a limited capacity to rescue following the development of major complications (63.0% vs 82.7%; OR 0.35 [0.23-0.53]; p<0.0001). Across LMICs, improvements in hospital facilities would prevent one to three deaths for every 100 patients undergoing surgery for cancer.Interpretation Hospitals with higher levels of infrastructure and resources have better outcomes after cancer surgery, independent of country income. Without urgent strengthening of hospital infrastructure and resources, the reductions in cancer-associated mortality associated with improved access will not be realised

BIOLOGICAL AND MOLECULAR CHARACTERIZATION OF DAHLIA MOSAIC CAULIMOVIRUS By

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my major advisor, Dr. Hanu Pappu, for the tremendous support, guidance, encouragement and most of all the numerous opportunities that he made available to me during the time I spent working with him. Dr. Pappu has been an exceptional mentor who has been a constant source of inspiration to me. I would also like to thank Dr. Patricia Okubara, Dr. Ken Eastwell and Dr. Gary Chastagner for their advice, guidance and helpful discussions throughout my tenure. I wish to extend my gratitude to Keri Druffel, who taught me numerous techniques in the laboratory and for all the work she did that made my work so much easier. A special thanks to Robert Brueggeman for technical assistance. I am also grateful to the faculty and staff of the Department of Plant Pathology for all the help and support during my graduate studies at Washington State University. A special thank you to Dr. Tim Murray, for arranging departmental financial support and for giving me the opportunity to serve as a teaching assistant. I would also like to thank the Samuel and Patricia Smith Endowment for Dahlia Virus Research, created by the American Dahlia Society for the financial support for this study. Thank you to all my friends in Pullman for their friendship and support. I am very much indebted to my parents for their constant support, love and encouragement. This achievement would not have been possible without their assistance, especially after the birth of my son. Last but not least a heartfelt thank you to my husband Shantanu for his love, encouragement and patience, throughout my graduate program. Finally, to my son Adheesh for putting a smile on my face even on the toughest day