Due to the current environmental situation, energy saving has become the leading drive in modern research. Although the residential houses in tropical climate do not use air conditioning to maintain thermal comfort in order to avoid use of electricity. As the thermal comfort is maintained by adequate envelope composition and natural ventilation, this paper shows that it is possible to determine...

Estimating sugarcane biomass is difficult to achieve when working with highly variable spatial distributions of growing conditions, like on Reunion Island. We used a dataset of in-farm fields with contrasted climatic conditions and farming practices to compare three methods of yield estimation based on remote sensing: (1) an empirical relationship method with a growing season-integrated Normali...

This paper presents the results of a research which took place at the University of NiceSophia Antipolis during the last four years and is now continued at the University of La Reunion. It particularly describes the architecture of an authoring system, EDDI, which aims at providing a basis for the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). The system is not general to any domain to teac...

This paper describes the use of a dynamical simulation model to evaluate various management policies in a two-stage production systems. Such a simulation-based evaluation is applied to the situation of GrandIlet (Reunion Island) where 51 pig farms must supply a collective treatment plant (CTP) with pig slurry. Based on actual data and stakeholders’ preferences, three policies are tested: a plan...

The evolution of complex signals may be favoured by hidden preferences or pre-existing sensory biases. Females of two species of grey treefrogs (Hyla chrysoscelis and Hyla versicolor) were tested with combinations of a conspecific advertisement call and acoustic appendages. Appendages consisted of aggressive calls and segments of advertisement calls from conspecific males and males of three oth...

This study introduces advertisement into the dynamic nonlinear duopoly model. It demonstrates three major findings. The first is that the model can be destabilized via either flip bifurcation or Hopf bifurcation, the second is that a half-pitchfork bifurcation of output occurs when the advertisement dynamics is periodic and the nonlinearity of the output dynamics becomes stronger, and the third...

This research studies TV commercial from cultural-conflict view point and tries to analyze mutual relation between parent-child generations. It applies signifier's method for reflecting TV commercials. Signifying qualitative method on the base of General signifies along with "first levels signifiers" and "Second level signifiers" obtained Symbolic displacement. This research shows TV commerci...

OBJECTIVES Quick service restaurant (QSR) television advertisements for children's meals were compared with adult advertisements from the same companies to assess whether self-regulatory pledges for food advertisements to children had been implemented. METHODS All nationally televised advertisements for the top 25 US QSR restaurants from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010 were obtained and viewed ...

As humans, we have a remarkable ability to perceive the world around us in minute detail purely from the light that is reflected off it – we can estimate material and metric properties of objects, localize people in images, describe what they are doing, and even identify them. Automatic methods for such detailed recognition of images are essential for most human-centric applications and large s...