Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone Project / There has been a nationwide movement which has promoted urban agriculture. The locale, seasonality, and methods of cultivation, have all entered the spotlight of public consciousness. While farmer’s markets, and co-ops may sometimes have limited accessibility with respect to cost another community gardens are branch of the urban agriculture movement which are highly accessible. The surge in popularity of community gardens came with the 2008 market crash, which created many foreclosures, and accordingly vacant lots. Where vacant lots are reclaimed by citizens, they create a sense of ownership within a community, they become physical manifestations of neighborhood rally cries, elbows rub, and community connections are made. With a relatively small amount of initial input, and continued care, there are tangible outputs, and literal fruits of labor. The popularity of these gardens extends to schools, and a whole branch of pedagogy which emphasizes place based learning. The benefits to these schools is tremendous; students are offered the opportunity to be academically engaged in a space other than the traditional classroom. Community gardens show the potential to create value from little input. With the benefit of a structured design process, there is potential to make school gardens learning space, in addition to growing space. The intent of this study is to explore the value created for these spaces by a formalized design process.

Eco-driving has acquired great importance in recent years because it is a way to reduce energy consumption that can be applied to any type of vehicle. However, for these rules to be applied requires a process of continuous learning and motivation. For this reason many eco-driving assistants have emerged. This paper presents Green Driving, a driver safety app for Android that detects inattentive driving behaviors and gives corresponding feedback to drivers, scoring their driving and alerting them in case their behaviors are unsafe.  It’s about changing a person’s driving behavior by providing some kind of advice to the driver.  I have worked on an algorithm that is meant to reduce the fuel consumption of users. The algorithm is deployed in an android application. This application “Green Driving” is aimed at users with cars. It is basically like an assistant, suggesting the user when he should make the right gear changes, when to increase/decrease speed and avoids hard braking and rapid acceleration and etc. It is in order to drive economically, ecologic and in turn save money and safety. This is a smart way of letting a user drive economically and ecologic since almost everyone has an Android smartphone now.

JAD (Joint Application Development) is a meeting-centered methodology used to address the problem of getting users involved in the systems development process. Industry has used the JAD approach to develop systems for over a decade, predominantly for in-house software applications. Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS) are networked software systems that support meetings through a variety of software tools. The combination of the two--JAD and EMS--creates Electronic JAD (E-JAD). A field study was conducted to investigate whether applying EMS to JAD benefits the systems development process. The field study compared five traditional JAD sessions to six E-JAD sessions. All E-JAD sessions made use of the University of Arizona GroupSystems EMS. All sessions involved actual software development efforts conducted in a half dozen organizations and were all held in a face-to-face setting. There was some evidence that the E-JAD approach was beneficial as compared to traditional JAD techniques on the variables of efficiency and equalizing participation and influence. Traditional JAD sessions showed benefits over E-JAD in handling conflicts (particularly in resolving conflicts) and in enforcing a higher degree of structure. Neither of the approaches dominated on all criteria, hence an examination of E-JAD's weaknesses identifies two key areas for improvement: fit of GroupSystems tools to tasks (with discussion of divergence and convergence), and greater involvement of the session facilitator. Other constructs analyzed and discussed are: completeness, creativity, satisfaction, IS-user bonding, user expectations, users' mental models, JAD costs, group size, and planning activities.

No description available.

In recent years, with the arrival of information era and the rapid development of the medical health system, there has been a trend for hospitals and medical care centers to record the patients’ medical record electronically rather than by means of old-fashioned paper-based method. It has indeed reduced the workload of medical workers and it simplifies the procedure within the medical system. It is worth mentioning that the growth of mobile medical care is beginning to catch up as a consequence of the incredible popularization of mobile networks and the broad use of mobile devices. A significant possibility is that in the coming years, mobile medical care applications will play a large part of the whole electronic medical care system. This project will mainly focus on presenting the process of developing an Android application of doctor’s end in the electronic healthcare system which makes it possible for doctors to retrieve data from their patients and diagnose them as well as setting up appointments using mobile devices. The development for the doctor’s end application will follow the waterfall development methodology. In this report the functions of the doctor’s end application will be introduced, and how these functions are realized will also be displayed in detail. After the implementation, the app will be tested on an Android device emulator and on real Android mobile devices in order to evaluate their performance. In addition, it will be tested by mobile phone specialists in relation to gathering feedback. Finally, a reasonable conclusion will be drawn with regards to this project including ethical issues.

No description available.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Master of Science / Department of Agronomy / J. Anita Dille / Variable-rate (VR) nitrogen (N) applications have the potential to improve efficiency of grain sorghum production. Field experiments were conducted in 2010 and 2011 in Stockton and Manhattan, KS. Four VR-N prescriptions were generated using various combinations of grid soil sampling data, soil electrical conductivity (EC) data, and yield maps, and were compared in the field with a uniform application based on a composite soil sample and whole field average yield goal. Soil EC data were used to create management zones that were individually soil sampled. Prescriptions were applied before planting and grain sorghum was harvested and recorded with a yield monitor in the fall. Grain sorghum yields responded to N at both sites with a higher response in 2010 due to more precipitation during the growing season. At Stockton in both years, greatest yields and returns were realized with prescription 4, a combination of management zone soil data and spatially-variable yield goal, while the smallest yields were realized with prescription 2 based on management zone soil data and field average yield goal. Prescription 5, which used grid-soil sampling and a spatially-variable yield goal, and prescription 2 resulted in the lowest returns in both years. At Manhattan in both years, greatest yields and returns were realized with prescription 3, combining a composite soil sample with spatially-variable yield goal. Prescription 5 was among the lowest returning treatments in both years. At Stockton, there was no correlation between yield and soil EC during the 2010 growing season, however there was a significant correlation between yield and shallow EC during the drier 2011 season. At Manhattan, yield was correlated to deep EC in 2010 and to shallow EC in 2011. Overall, increasing spatial intensity of data to develop the prescriptions did not necessarily result in an increased yield response to the application. Prescriptions that included a variable yield goal component tended to perform better across both sites and years.

This study looks at the usability of mobile Twitter applications running on Android and Blackberry operating systems. Usability is important for mobile Twitter applications, as 55% of active Twitter users access the social network service through their mobile devices. This study gathers empirical data that determines which mobile Twitter application is superior in terms of usability. The mobile Twitter applications evaluated and compared in this study are the official Twitter applications for Android and Blackberry and the third-party Twitter application: TweetCaster for Android and Blackberry. Data is gathered using the System Usability Scale and notes regarding time spent on tasks and the accuracy of task completion are kept, in order to measure satisfaction, efficiency, and effectiveness respectively. The findings of this study show that there is need for further studies and highlights further areas for improvement on mobile Twitter applications.

College campuses can be large, confusing, and intimidating for new students and visitors. Finding the campus may be easy using a GPS unit or Google Maps directions, but this is not the case when you are actually on the campus. There is no service that provides directional assistance for the campus itself. This thesis proposes a driver assistant application running on an Android platform that can direct drivers to different buildings and parking lots in the campus. The application's user interface lets the user select a user type, a campus, and a destination through use of drop down menus and buttons. Once the user submits the needed information, then the next portion of the application runs in the background. The app retrieves the Campus Map XML created by the mapping tool that was constructed for this project. The XML data containing all the map elements is then parsed and stored in a hierarchal data structure. The resulting objects are then used to construct a campus graph, on which an altered version of Dijkstra's Shortest Path algorithm is executed. When the path to the destination has been discovered, the campus map with the computed path overlaid is displayed on the user's device, showing the route to the desired destination. / by Iana Zankina. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.