This report presents a study of the effect of reusing experience in the Hazards and Operability Analysis method (HazOp method) with regards to how the effectiveness of the method is affected. The study was conducted by first creating a software tool for experience reuse in HazOp, then testing that tool in a student experiment in which the participants used the tool when conducting a HazOp. During the experiment it was found that students using the tool found 21% more hazards in the system under study than their counterparts. After conducting the experiment it was found that there was a 94% certainty that this improvement was not due to random effects.

Detroit is just one example of a post-industrial city that has been struggling with the decline of the American industrial economy. In the past 100 years, Detroit city has gone from one of the largest and most promising cities in the world to a widely vacant, run down, and crippled metropolis. A shell of its former self, Detroit has become the poster child for all the problems that many North American cities experience, including: pollution, crime, urban sprawl, suburban flight and struggling education systems. Among others, these deterrents have driven Detroit residents from their homes and left the City largely abandoned. Since the mid 1950s the population has fallen from 1,900,000 to 713,000 in 2010. Enrolment in Detroit public schools has fallen from approximately 300,000 in 1966 to 52,000 in 2012. Today there are an estimated 40 square miles of vacant land and more still with abandoned buildings plaguing the landscape. This thesis asks the question of how best to utilize abandoned public schools as an asset for the neighbourhoods of Detroit. Once symbols of hope and prosperity these vacant schools located in the heart of many struggling neighbourhoods, now serve as a reminder of the disparity and blight that plagues Detroit. The adaptive reuse of abandoned schools as community driven educational centres, with a focus on urban agriculture, can lead the way towards self-sufficient neighbourhoods that allow residents to challenge the social and economic paradigm that is Detroit. The subject of this thesis concerns the transforming of burdens in a blighted city into the assets needed to improve the quality of life for distressed citizens. This thesis argues that this is possible by formulating an architectural response utilizing existing abandoned schools and vacant land to nurture a growing Urban Agriculture initiative that has the potential to play a role in the rebuilding of city neighbourhoods.

The primary area of study for this thesis is the adaptive reuse of the remaining industrial buildings on Chaudire and Albert Islands in Ottawa, Canada. The recently closed paper mills and the obsolete infrastructure from the bygone lumber industry have the opportunity to be reintegrated with the core area of the nations capital. New uses are introduced to the buildings by material activators which engage spatial and programmatic opportunities of building adaptation. The activators include stair cores, classroom blocks, shoring trusses, glass box windows, and a theatre box. The program that they introduce includes office space, residencies for artists and crafts people, a theatre, galleries, a fabrication shop, and a lap pool. The architectural interventions transform the site into a new commercial and cultural enclave within the capital region, and preserve certain heritage characteristics of the existing buildings architecture.

Québec’s historical attachment to Roman Catholicism is visible: there is still a great amount of church buildings throughout the province. However, changing attitudes in Québec (as in other regions around the world) are leading to a chronic desertion of spaces of worship. Conceived as the heart of a community, churches constitute imposing presences in the built and social fabrics of the neighbourhoods they serve. In today’s context, this status is shifting, and communities are now striving to somehow re-engage with the churches they have abandoned. However, the sacred nature of these buildings often frames a specific way of looking at them, which can limit a potentially innovative reuse. Given this situation, how can a church be granted anew its status as a public space in a plural environment, thus preserving some of the exceptional qualities of its architecture? Looking at the case of the abandoned Roman Catholic church Très Saint-Nom-de-Jésus in Montréal, this thesis challenges the current approaches to church preservation by converting the building into a bathing space. Characteristic elements of church typology, such as the quality of light and the ritual, are preserved and revised in a contemporary manner, opening the building to a more diverse society. This strategy of valuing intangible elements of church architecture leads to a proposal that demonstrates the responsiveness of this typology and offers ways in which it can regain its role as a space for the public in an increasingly multicultural community, thus challenging the traditional look, both conservationist and the larger public, at a church.

The adaptive reuse of secular buildings as churches signals a return to the fundamental belief that architecture is not necessary for Christian worship. Following are the stories and photographs of fifteen churches in the Greater Toronto Area where congregations worship inside buildings designed for non-religious purposes. These photographs document the utilitarian architecture of secular buildings as a backdrop to the act of worship and fellowship that have become the sole embodiment and expression of faith. While the stories behind these churches testify to the adaptability of Christian worship and the power of faith and community during times of economic struggle, they also ask us to reconsider our role as architects in the relationship between architecture and faith.

The adaptive reuse of secular buildings as churches signals a return to the fundamental belief that architecture is not necessary for Christian worship. Following are the stories and photographs of fifteen churches in the Greater Toronto Area where congregations worship inside buildings designed for non-religious purposes. These photographs document the utilitarian architecture of secular buildings as a backdrop to the act of worship and fellowship that have become the sole embodiment and expression of faith. While the stories behind these churches testify to the adaptability of Christian worship and the power of faith and community during times of economic struggle, they also ask us to reconsider our role as architects in the relationship between architecture and faith.

Knowledge is power, and in business, an essential part in creating a competitive edge. Throughout history, the acquisition and reuse of knowledge has always been the key to success. Today, the systems and infrastructure for knowledge reuse are in place and very effective, but we must abandon the reliance on technology to answer all our remaining needs in this area. Computer databases are only as good as the individuals who enter the data. It's time to refocus on the human, natures own mechanism, which holds in it, perhaps the most powerful and vast of all database systems, the brain. We must nurture, guide, encourage, and train it to fulfill its own amazing potential. The theme of this research is to explore Markus¡¦ (2001) nascent theory of knowledge reuse, which focuses on the greater importance of the system, rather than the individual. This research focuses on the individual, and a conceptual framework is developed for future empirical research. Within this framework, there are seven factors: characteristics of knowledge producers and re-users, the role of human intermediaries, social presence, knowledge quality, document quality, and organization factors all of which affect the intention of knowledge reuse. There are four human factors which stand at the forefront of improving knowledge reuse today: 1. The knowledge provider who can express tacit knowledge in the most explicit manner; 2. The intermediary who can not only grasp the importance contained within the source material, but anticipate how best to format it so it will be useful to a wide variety of re-users; 3. The level of feedback from re-user, and the willingness of providers and intermediaries to accept this feedback, and adapt to the ever-changing needs of the re-user; and 4. Social presence enhances the ability to obtain tacit knowledge and has a positive affect for strong intention of reuse.

We question about multihop gets better performance than single hop in wireless networks. In this paper we design a new and simple multihop transmission model called PESR, performance enhancement of IEEE 802.11 by spatial reuse. We elect an intermediate node which between a source-destination pair for forwarding packets to become multihop instead of directly transmission from the source to the destination. By this way, we will have more links at the one time, the channel utilization should be grown and we will get better system performance. However, there is much overhead we have not considered. We will discuss the detail about overhead in coming sections. In fact, the results of simulation show that the performance is not present very well. And we wonder if the multihop in wireless networks is a pretty good idea.

Thesis (M.S.)--California Polytechnic State University, 2009. / Title from PDF title page; viewed on February 2, 2010. Major professor: Michael M. Cirovic, Ph.D. "Presented to the faculty of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo." "In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree [of] Master of Science in Electrical Engineering." "November 2009." Includes bibliographical references (p. 28).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2006. / Thesis submitted to the Division of Science and Engineering. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 148-163)