This case concerns an unusual suicidal plastic bag suffocation. An elderly white man was found dead and partially disrobed in his apartment lying supine on a sofa with a plastic bag closed by a rope over the head and the upper and lower extremities tightly tied with two other ropes, the end of both arranged into slipknots (self-rescue mechanism). Police investigations found no pornography in th...

CMHC then contracted with 10 consulting firms to gather data from apartment buildings across the country. Construction dates of the buildings range from 1920 to 1993.The buildings are from six to 26 storeys in height and from 3,345 m to 26,795 m in size, with a total of 27 to 400 suites per building. The buildings are located in the West Coast, Prairie, Central and Atlantic regions of the count...

This paper presents 1) a new mathematical model improved from a conventional model that calculates a number of facility from an area and a population in a town and, 2) by using this model, a method to evaluate the enrichment (in other words, convenience or enough) of facilities in the town where many high-rise apartments have been built (the area is hereinafter referred to as the high-rise apar...

The step away from a synchronized or cue-based brain-computer interface (BCI) and from laboratory conditions towards real world applications is very important and crucial in BCI research. This work shows that ten naive subjects can be trained in a synchronous paradigm within three sessions to navigate freely through a virtual apartment, whereby at every junction the subjects could decide by the...

Ubiquitous robotic systems present a number of interesting application areas for socially assistive robots that aim to improve quality of life. In particular the combination of smart home environments and relatively inexpensive robots can be a viable technological solutions for assisting elderly and persons with disability in their own home. Such services require an easy interface like spoken d...

Accurate information on urban building types plays a crucial role for urban development, planning, and management. In this paper, we apply Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) methods to extract buildings from Airborne Laser Scanner (ALS) data and investigate the possibility of classifying detected buildings into ―Residential/Small Buildings‖, ―Apartment Buildings‖, and ―Industrial and Factory Bu...

This pilot study investigates how considering accessibility could help to model prices of residential real estate more accurately. We introduce two novelties from the price modeling point of view (1) defining accessibility as travel time by public transport, in addition to geographic distance, and (2) considering dynamic points of interest from check-ins into social networks, in addition to fix...

This paper addresses the optimal design of residential ventilation systems in an apartment floor plan in Korea. The term “optimal design” refers to the selection of a ventilation method (mechanical, hybrid), type of heat recovery (total, sensible only), outdoor airflow rate, and the optimal sizing and location of supply diffusers/exhaust registers. Decision-making criteria include initial and o...

Embodied virtual reality faithfully renders users’ movements onto an avatar in a virtual 3D environment, supporting nuanced nonverbal behavior alongside verbal communication. To investigate communication behavior within this medium, we had 30 dyads complete two tasks using a shared visual workspace: negotiating an apartment layout and placing model furniture on an apartment floor plan. Dyads co...