Hybrid PV/diesel generator/batteries systems are applied for many off-grid homes overall the world. Most of the existing studies neglect the effect of loading level of diesel generators on the fuel ...consumption and/or system efficiency. In addition to, the existing experience of smart home load management isn’t considered in such recent off-grid system energy management research. Therefore, a new offline smart isolated home load scheduling scheme is proposed in this paper to suit developing countries homes characteristics. In this work, detailed models of smart homes sources and appliances are presented. Daily load scheduling scheme is proposed that consider users’ weekly and daily plans to satisfy home occupant’s desires. It also extends batteries lifetime by controlling charging/discharging processes. Diesel generator loading levels are optimized to minimize the total fuel consumption. The proposed scheme is applied on the well-known Mixed Integer Linear Programming MILP optimization technique to introduce a simple and cheap load scheduling scheme for such remote unsophisticated communities. The proposed scheme reduces the fuel consumption to 20% with relatively comfortable lifestyle for home users.
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•Hybrid PV/ two diesel generators/ battery system is sized.•An optimal load scheduling algorithm for isolated homes is proposed.•Sources & storage and loads are jointly optimized to minimize fuel consumption.•Different diesel generators efficiency/ loading levels are studied.•Detailed models of smart home sources/ appliances are presented.
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) inhabits of one of the most water-scarce regions in the world, once comprised ...small impoverished desert principalities. However, since the 1970s, the GCC has witnessed rapid population growth and economic development, brought on by sharp increases in oil revenues. Population growth coupled with increased urbanization, industrialization, and agricultural output has placed tremendous pressure on the region’s scarce groundwater resources. GCC countries are all using hundreds to thousands times more water than sustainable recharge would allow. Their water footprints, among the highest in the world, are sustained by unconventional sources of water such as desalination, wastewater reuse, and the import of “virtual” water via agricultural goods. This paper analyzes the current state of water in the GCC using a water–energy–food (WEF) nexus approach. The paper discusses various proposals for meeting future water needs in the GCC such as renewable energy-powered desalination and foreign direct investment in agricultural land and addresses the various tradeoffs involved.
Religious studies are a rich land for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The reason is that all religions have their instructions as written texts. In this paper, we apply NLP to Islamic Hadiths, ...which are the written traditions, sayings, actions, approvals, and discussions of the Prophet Muhammad, his companions, or his followers. A Hadith is composed of two parts: the chain of narrators (Sanad) and the content of the Hadith (Matn). A Hadith is transmitted from its author to a Hadith book author using a chain of narrators. The problem we solve focuses on the classification of Hadiths based on their origin of narration. This is important for several reasons. First, it helps determine the authenticity and reliability of the Hadiths. Second, it helps trace the chain of narration and identify the narrators involved in transmitting Hadiths. Finally, it helps understand the historical and cultural contexts in which Hadiths were transmitted, and the different levels of authority attributed to the narrators. To the best of our knowledge, and based on our literature review, this problem is not solved before using machine/deep learning approaches. To solve this classification problem, we created a novel Author-Based Hadith Classification Dataset (ABCD) collected from classical Hadiths’ books. The ABCD size is 29 K Hadiths and it contains unique 18 K narrators, with all their information. We applied machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) approaches. ML was applied on Sanad and Matn separately; then, we did the same with DL. The results revealed that ML performs better than DL using the Matn input data, with a 77% F1-score. DL performed better than ML using the Sanad input data, with a 92% F1-score. We used precision and recall alongside the F1-score; details of the results are explained at the end of the paper. We claim that the ABCD and the reported results will motivate the community to work in this new area. Our dataset and results will represent a baseline for further research on the same problem.
Historical texts are one of the main pillars for understanding current civilization and are used to reference different aspects. Hadiths are an example of one of the historical texts that should be ...securely preserved. Due to the expansion of the online resources, fabrications and alterations of fake Hadiths are easily feasible. Therefore, it has become more challenging to authenticate the online available Hadith contents and much harder to keep these authenticated results secure and unmanipulated. In this research, we are using the capabilities of the distributed blockchain technology to securely archive the Hadith and its level of authenticity in a blockchain. We selected a permissioned blockchain customized model in which the main entities approving the level of authenticity of the Hadith are well-established and specialized institutions in the main Islamic countries that can apply their own Hadith validation model. The proposed solution guarantees its integrity using the crowd wisdom represented in the selected nodes in the blockchain, which uses voting algorithms to decide the insertion of any new Hadiths into the database. This technique secures data integrity at any given time. If any organization’s credentials are compromised and used to update the data maliciously, 50% + 1 approval from the whole network nodes will be required. In case of any malicious or misguided information during the state of reaching consensus, the system will self-heal using practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT). We evaluated the proposed framework’s read/write performance and found it adequate for the operational requirements.
In conservation, trust and justice are increasingly recognized as both intrinsically valuable and critical for successful socioecological outcomes. However, the interdependence between these concepts ...has not been explored. The conservation trust literature provides examples of efforts to build trust between conservationists and local actors; yet, these interventions are often conceived to incentivize local cooperation within dominant paradigms. We argue that when trust building is promoted as a technical fix that does not plan in advance to address power asymmetries in conservation practice, inequities may inadvertently be re‐embedded. Therefore, we conceptualized a framework that joins trust, justice, and power so that critical analyses of conservation partnerships can be more effectively undertaken. We drew on environmental justice theory to better calibrate the trust literature for the historical‐political settings of conservation, especially in the Global South. Justice and trust share strong theoretical links where perceptions of justice shape a willingness to trust, and, equally, trust is a precondition for justice to be perceived. Different forms of trust connect to varied domains of justice and power in different ways, which mediates the outcomes of interventions. We applied our framework to case studies to explore how these interdependences play out in practice. Failure of agencies to attend to issues of maldistribution, misrecognition of cultural values and knowledge, and exclusion from participation strongly compromised trust. Moreover, the ways in which nature‐dependent communities and marginalized conservation workers are trusted, or the conditions under which they give trust, can lead to partnerships being perceived as just or unjust. Focusing on trust and justice can help identify power dynamics so they can be addressed more readily and create space for alternative understandings of partnerships.
Resumen
La confianza y la justicia cada vez son más reconocidas como valores intrínsecos y de suma importancia para los resultados socioecológicos exitosos en la conservación. Sin embargo, no se ha explorado la interdependencia entre estos conceptos. La literatura sobre la confianza de conservación proporciona ejemplos de esfuerzos por forjar confianza entre los conservacionistas y los actores locales; sin embargo, con frecuencia se concibe que estas intervenciones promueven la cooperación local dentro de paradigmas dominantes. Argumentamos que cuando se fomenta la formación de la confianza como un arreglo técnico que no planea por adelantado abordar las asimetrías de poder dentro de la práctica de la conservación, las desigualdades pueden ser reintroducidas involuntariamente. Por lo tanto, conceptualizamos un marco de trabajo que integra a la confianza, la justicia y el poder para emprender de manera más efectiva los análisis críticos de las colaboraciones de conservación. Partimos de la teoría de justicia ambiental para calibrar de mejor manera la literatura sobre la confianza para el contexto histórico‐político de la conservación, especialmente en el sur global. La justicia y la confianza comparten vínculos teóricos fuertes en donde las percepciones de la justicia dan forma a una voluntad por confiar, y de igual manera, la confianza es una precondición para que la justicia sea percibida. Las diferentes manifestaciones de la confianza se conectan de diferentes maneras con dominios variados de la justicia y el poder, lo que media los resultados de las intervenciones. Aplicamos nuestro marco de trabajo a algunos estudios de caso para explorar cómo estas interdependencias se desarrollan en la práctica. La incapacidad de las agencias para atender temas de mala distribución, los errores en el reconocimiento del conocimiento y los valores culturales y la exclusión en la participación pusieron en peligro a la confianza. Más allá, las maneras en las que se confía en, o las condiciones bajo las que otorgan confianza, las comunidades dependientes de la naturaleza y los trabajadores marginalizados de la conservación puede llevar a que las colaboraciones sean percibidas como justas o injustas. El enfoque sobre la confianza y la justicia puede ayudarnos a identificar las dinámicas de poder para que puedan abordarse más prontamente y crear espacio para el entendimiento alternativo de las colaboraciones.
【摘要】
人们正越来越多地认识到保护中信任和公正的内在价值, 及其对成功的社会生态结果的关键作用。然而, 这些概念之间的相互依赖关系尚未得到探索。关于保护信任的文献提供了保护者与当地行动者建立信任的案例;然而, 这些干预措施往往被认为是在主流范式下激励当地合作。我们认为, 当保护者将建立信任作为一种技术性解决方案进行推广, 但却没有事先计划解决保护实践中的权力不对等问题时, 可能会在无意中引入不公正。因此, 我们构建了一个框架来整合信任、公正和权力, 从而更有效地批判性分析保护中的伙伴关系。我们借鉴环境正义理论, 更好地确定了历史政治背景下关于保护信任的文献, 特别是在南半球。公正和信任在理论上有很强的联系, 即对公正的感知构成了信任的意愿, 而信任同样也是感知公正的前提条件。不同形式的信任以不同的方式与公正和权力的各个领域相联系, 影响着干预措施的结果。我们将该框架应用于案例研究, 以探讨这些相互依赖关系在实践中是如何发挥作用的。我们发现, 机构对分配不公问题的忽视、对文化价值及知识的错误认识, 以及对参与行动的排斥, 都严重损害了信任。此外, 依赖自然的社区及边缘化的保护工作者获得信任的方式, 或他们给予信任的条件, 决定了伙伴关系是否被视为公正的。关注信任和公正可以帮助识别权力的动态变化, 从而更好地解决这些问题, 并为对伙伴关系的另类理解创造空间。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】关键词
In the Indian Subcontinent, many commercial advertisements still use white children's images to promote their products and push forward the idea that Indian children need to become better versions of ...themselves, both physically and mentally. Such views are neither encouraged nor accepted in the western world. We argue that these ideas are not new and that they were introduced during the British Raj. We further argue that the hegemonic culture promulgated by the British colonial rulers is still prevalent in this postcolonial era and is being used by international and local manufacturers, intentionally or unintentionally, as part of their promotional activities for Indian consumers. Drawing from historical and contemporary evidence, we offer arguments to this claim and analysis of the workings of the hegemonic culture in producing such advertisements.
Nodule segmentation plays a vital role in the detection and diagnosis for lung cancer. Nevertheless, manual segmentation by radiologists can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. In recent years, ...deep learning methods have performed well on medical image segmentation. Generative adversarial networks (GAN) are often used for image generation. In this paper, GAN is introduced to perform image segmentation, and a network called Aggregation-U-net GAN (AUGAN) is proposed, which is applied to automatically segment nodules in chest computed tomography (CT) images. The generator, which is modified by combining U-net with deep aggregation, learns features of lung nodules and makes the segmentation close to the ground truth. We used a method called tissue augmentation that 300 patches from normal areas in chest CT scan of normal lungs were selected manually and superimposed over lesions. The final results showed that our approach is superior to others for nodule segmentation and its dice coefficient and hausdorff distance were significantly improved.
Background: Chronic suppurative otitis media is one of the common otological conditions in India for which patients seek advice from an otorhinolaryngologist. Various surgical modalities of treatment ...have been tried since ages, to eliminate the disease from middle ear cleft, with varying degrees of success rate. One such modality of treatment is myringoplasty. The aim of the present study was to assess the success rate of myringoplasty using temporalis fascia and to evaluate preoperative and postoperative hearing loss in patients with chronic suppurative otitis media.
Methods: Sixty adult cases of tympanic membrane perforation were included in the study. Myringoplasty was performed in all cases and hearing loss was compared both before and after surgery.
Results: Preoperatively 20 cases showed hearing loss at 16-25 dB, 26 cases at 26-40 dB, and 14 cases showed hearing loss at >40 dB. Graft uptake was successful in 50 patients (83.33%). Postoperatively definitive improvement of hearing was observed in 46 patients. The success rate of surgery in cases of dry ear with more than 6 months was 100%.
Conclusions: Outcome of myringoplasty does not depend on sex and site of perforation. Dry ear of duration greater than 6 months is a favourable prerequisite. Graft take up was impaired in cases of sclerotic mastoid and postoperative infection.
Background: For several years, the pathology of the biliary system has been the focus of prolonged study. Largely due to their surgical relevance and the simplicity with which they can be treated in ...cholecystectomies. While interest in extrahepatic bile ducts has been intensified, very rare studies have been performed on the Indian subcontinent. The anatomical differences of the extra-hepatic biliary area were defined in this study, as these variations are important throughout surgical techniques such as laparoscopic cholecystectomy, thus minimising post-operative difficulties. The objective is aim of the research was to observe anatomical differences in the extrahepatic biliary system in Indian cadaveric specimen samples. Subjects and Methods : Sample content consisted of 100 human cadavers of any sex that were dissected. Cadaver specimens from the dissection room were examined. Cadaver specimens were obtained from Mata Gujri Memorial Medical College, Kishanganj, Bihar, Department of Anatomy. By the traditional method of dissection, they were studied. Results: In the current study, the smallest gall bladder observed was around 25ml, while the largest gall bladder was around 120ml. On average, our study recorded around 50 ml of the gall bladder. Congenital anomalies of the gall bladder included Intrahepatic, Double, Bilobed and separate mesentery. Further, the pathological findings accounted for 20% of total cases and a solitary pathology involving carcinoma was noted. Conclusion: Anatomical variants of the extrahepatic biliary system are widespread and are important for surgeons to prevent injury as critical structures through surgical operations and increase surgical results by recognising them.
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