Case studies in web sustainability

At the moment organisations often make significant investments in producing Web-based material, often funded through public money, for example from JISC. But what happens when some of those organisations are closed or there is no longer any money or resources to host the site? We are seeing cuts in funding or changes in governmental policy, which is resulting in the closure of some of these organisations. What happens to those Web resources when the organisations are no longer in existence? Public money has often been used to develop these resources - from that perspective it would be a shame to lose them. Moreover, the resources might be needed or someone may actually want to take over the maintenance of the site at a later date. How do we make these sites more sustainable? Is there any way we can move sites to somewhere that is free to host the Web pages, and can be left there or modified when needed? JISC previously funded three projects to look at this area through a programme called Sustaining ‘at risk’ online resources [1]. One of these projects, which ran at The University of Northampton, looked into ‘rescuing’ one of the recently closed East Midlands Universities Association’s online resources. This resource, called East Midlands Knowledge Network (EMKN), lists many of the knowledge transfer activities of 10 of the East Midlands universities. The project looked at options on how to migrate the site to a free hosting option to make it make it more sustainable even when it is no longer available on the original host’s servers. This article looks at this work as a case study on Web sustainability and also included a case study of another project where Web sustainability was centra

Junkbots

The School of Science and Technology at the University of Northampton have been working with local schools to create robots made from junk and also to use robots programmed by the students to perform simple rubbish clearing exercises. This is an initiative by the University to introduce environmental sustainability, engineering and computing to students in school

Editorial

An introduction to this re-launch edition of the journal by the new members of the editorial tea

Greenfoot in problem solving and artificial intelligence

Greenfoot is an interactive environment based around Java that enables two-dimensional graphical games and simulations to be set-up relatively simply. Currently maintained by the University of Kent, UK and La Trobe University, Australia, it provides a piece of free software (under a GPL licence), multiplatform and is multiplatform. In this paper its use within the teaching of problem-solving and artificial intelligence will be considered. Three case studies of it use will be considered: · Exercises in developing problem solving within a problem-solving and programming module. · Greenfoot for a problem solving assignment within a problem-solving and programming module. · Use of greenfoot within a module on artificial intelligence

Sub 1GHz M2M communications standardization: The advancement in white space utilization for enhancing the energy efficiency

Energy efficiency of machine to machine (M2M) communications terminals is one of the major design goals of M2M networks, resulting from anticipated over 50 billion M2M communications devices to be deployed into the networks by 2020 [1]. The stakeholders in the M2M communications have observed that it will be environmental and economic catastrophic to deploy M2M communications devices without solving the energy inefficiencies associated with wireless devices that are expected to be used for M2M communications. In view of the aforementioned energy challenge, sub 1GHz spectra have provided enormous opportunities that can be energy efficient, cost effective and coverage efficiency which can be utilized for M2M communications. This work will evaluate the energy efficiency benefits of optimized Sub 1GHz spectra for M2M communications

A predefined channel coefficients library for vehicle-to-vehicle communications

It is noticeable that most of VANETs communications tests are assessed through simulation. In a majority of simulation results, the physical layer is often affected by an apparent lack of realism. Therefore, vehicular channel model has become a critical issue in the field of intelligent transport systems (ITS). To overcome the lack of realism problem, a more robust channel model is needed to reflect the reality. This paper provides an open access, predefined channel coefficients library. The library is based on 2x2 and 4x4 Multiple – Input – Multiple – Output (MIMO) systems in V2V communications, using a spatial channel model extended SCME which will help to reduce the overall simulation time. In addition, it provides a more realistic channel model for V2V communications; considering: over ranges of speeds, distances, multipath signals, sub-path signals, different angle of arrivals, different angle departures, no line of sight and line of sight. An intensive evaluation process has taken place to validate the library and acceptance results are produced. Having an open access predefined library, enables the researcher at relevant communities to test and evaluate several complicated vehicular communications scenarios in a wider manners with less time and efforts

Neural nets

Use of robots to teach neural network