Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Ulaanbaatar city is the capital city of Mongolia. Presently more than 50 percent of the Mongolian population lives in Ulaanbaatar city, which comprises of 3% of the country’s land area. Water supply for Ulaanbaatar City is supplied solely from groundwater, which is a limited resource that exhibits slow replenishment. It has been recognized that the increasing water demand will eventually exceed the capacity of the known groundwater resources. Therefore, discovering and developing additional water sources or developing creative alternatives is an important challenge for the city. This challenge is especially critical given the anticipated impacts of climate change. Reuse of wastewater has been proposed as an alternative to reduce the overall water supply demand for the city. The first water reuse regulations in Mongolia were passed in 2018, so the institutional setting on water reuse considered to be very open. The goal of this project was to develop a systems approach to characterize the wastewater reuse and provide a basis for evaluating design alternatives that will reduce the use of groundwater resources. A system dynamics model was developed based on the Vensim modeling software to characterize the water use and wastewater budget for the City of Ulaanbaatar. This approach considered the potential role of wastewater reuse as an approach for maintaining a sustainable water supply. Water supply and wastewater generation were estimated for domestic and industrial use. The focus was on industrial reuse with consideration to the current economic and institutional settings of Mongolia. The model took into account the water requirements for various industries (including tannery, wool, food and beverage, soft beverage and alcohol, paper production and car wash, and thermal power). Two different models were generated to compare the systematic change when reuse is incorporated into the system, and linear growth was considered to provide the most appropriate predictions for future changes in water demand. The analysis and model results showed reuse options were likely limited for domestic supplies, but industrial reuse could provide a 4% reduction in total water demand and significant reductions in water use by power generation facilities.

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker recently examined a problem with understanding human cognition, particularly how the processes of biological evolution could explain the human ability to think abstractly, including the higher cognitive abilities for logic and math (hereafter, HCAs). Pinker credits the formulation of the problem of understanding human cognition and the evolutionary development of HCAs to the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace. Pinker states the following response to the question raised by Wallace: "…Nonetheless it is appropriate to engage the profound puzzle [Wallace] raised; namely, why do humans have the ability to pursue abstract intellectual feats such as science, mathematics, philosophy, and law, given that opportunities to exercise these talents did not exist in the foraging lifestyle in which humans evolved and would not have parlayed themselves into advantages in survival and reproduction even if they did?" Wallace claimed that while ancestral cognitive operations, such as those operations for perception and motor control, were the product of evolution, he disagreed with Charles Darwin’s view that HCAs are the product of evolution by natural selection. Wallace is not the only one to doubt that HCAs are the product of evolution. Contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel also rejects the view that HCAs are the product of evolution. Comparable to Wallace, although Nagel accepts that older operations of the brain, such as perception and motor control, are the product of evolution, Nagel denies that higher types of cognitive operations are the product of evolution. The aim of this dissertation is to argue that HCAs are the product of evolutionary processes, both natural selection and other mechanisms of change. The reason HCAs are the product of evolution is because HCAs are carried out by the neural reuse of older evolved brain regions. Neural reuse is the view that brain regions can be recruited for multiple cognitive uses. Ancestral brain regions, such as regions for perceptual and motor functions, can be reused for carrying out HCAs, such as language, logic, and math.

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Designers commonly use computer-based modeling and simulation methods to predict artifact behavior. Such predictions are central to engineering decision making. As such, determining how well they correspond to actual artifact behavior is a problem of critical importance. A significant aspect of this problem is determining whether the model used to generate the behavioral predictionsi.e., the behavioral modelreflects the relevant physical phenomena. The process of doing this is referred to as behavioral model validation. Prior works take an integrated approach to validation in which model creators and model users interact throughout the modeling and simulation process. Although effective for many problems, this type of approach is not appropriate for model reuse scenarios. Model validation requires knowledge about the model and its use. In model reuse scenarios, model creators and model users operate in independent processes with limited inter-process communication. The core challenge to behavioral model validation in this setting is that, in general, neither model creators nor model users possess the requisite knowledge to perform behavioral model validation. Presented in this thesis is a conceptual framework for validating reusable behavioral models in model reuse scenarios. This framework solves the problem of creator-user separation by defining specific validation responsibilities for each and an interface by which they communicate. This interface consists of a formal description of the models limitations and the domain over which these limitations are known to be true. The framework is illustrated through basic engineering examples.

In the era of continuing development of electrical and computer technology, product design grow more complex and diversified. Design reuse and effective design integration thus become important ways to increase design productivity. For example, In system-on-chip designs, reusable silicon intellectual properties include micro processors, digital signal processing units, memories, bus designs, general design libraries, application-specific design libraries, and software design libraries. It is thus an important subject to develop, integrate, and reuse design libraries provided by different designers. In this thesis, we developed software design for our post research of attribute composition graph capable of representing integration organizations of design libraries. It includes software designs of attribute composition graph schema representation and editing, incremental composition organization instantiation based on macro definitions in an attribute composition graph schema, and design composition solving from existing constraint solver packages. With these functionalities, designers can effectively construct organizations of design libraries for intended application designs, and perform design reuse in real designs.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 148-158). Also available in print.