Adverse health and environmental effects of household dust are derived from their chemical composition and properties. In this study, household, stairs and entryway dust (<20 μm) samples from homes located in urban, residential and residential near to industrial area in Greater Cairo during summer 2013 were collected to study their chemical composition, characterization and factors affecting th...

The particular symmetry of the random-phase-approximation (RPA) matrix has been utilized in the past to reduce the RPA eigenvalue problem into a symmetric-matrix problem of half the dimension. The condition of positive definiteness of at least one of the matrices A ± B has been imposed (where A and B are the submatrices of the RPA matrix) so that, e.g., its square root can be found by Cholesky ...

If the background universe is observed through a significant amount of diffusely distributed foreground dust, then studies at optical wavelengths may be severely biased. Previous studies investigating the effects of foreground dust on background sources assumed dust to be “compactly” distributed, ie. on scales comparable to the visible extent of normal galaxies. We show however that diffuse dus...

In recent years, the fuzzy linear regression (FLR) approach is widely applied in the quality function deployment (QFD) to identify the vague and inexact functional relationships between the customer requirements and the engineering characteristics on account of its advantages of objectiveness and reality. However, the h value, which is a vital parameter in the proceeding of the FLR model, is us...

We consider the problem Pcurve of minimizing ∫ ` 0 √ β 2 + |κ(s)|2ds for a planar curve having fixed initial and final positions and directions. Here κ is the curvature of the curve with free total length `. This problem comes from a 2D model of geometry of vision due to Petitot, Citti and Sarti. Here we will provide a general theory on cuspless sub-Riemannian geodesics within a sub-Riemannian ...

In this paper, I argue that the ultimate argument for Scientific Realism, also known as the No-Miracles Argument (NMA), ultimately fails as an abductive defence of Epistemic Scientific Realism (ESR), where (ESR) is the thesis that successful theories of mature sciences are approximately true. The NMA is supposed to be an Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) that purports to explain the succe...

A new model for damage evolution in polymer matrix composites is presented. The model is based on a combination of two constituent-level models an9 an interphase model. This approach reduces the number of empirical parameters ·since the two constituent level models are formulated for isotropic materials, namely fiber and matrix. Decomposition of the state variables down to the micro-scale is ac...

We present a general framework for the optimal control of driftless nonlinear systems defined by means of distributions of smooth vector fields that generate nilpotent Lie algebras. A smooth varying inner product on the planes of the distribution, yields the energy functional that allows to approach the optimal control problem as a sub-Riemannian geodesic problem. This class of systems is relev...

We consider the space of complete and separable metric spaces which are equipped with a probability measure. A notion of convergence is given based on the philosophy that a sequence of metric measure spaces converges if and only if all finite subspaces sampled from these spaces converge. This topology is metrized following Gromov’s idea of embedding two metric spaces isometrically into a common...

The complexity of Internet of Things (IoT) systems requires designers, operators, and users to understand both the structure and semantics embedded in the IoT architecture. A semantic IoT ontology must support a full understanding of system flows, services, and qualities (FSQ). In our research, we will discuss how sematic ontologies are currently utilized in IoT systems and how they could be ex...