Daylight availability and sky luminance distributions vary spatially and temporally depending on geography, weather, and other local conditions. Substantial amount of data is accumulated from long term measurements in various parts of the world (Kitler et al. 1992) through sky scanners. These devices (such as the Krochmann sky scanner) typically measure luminance at 145 points. The accumulated ...

Evaporation is one of the largest water losses from most of the dam lakes in Iran. Estimating the evaporation rate enables us to apply the proper evaporation mitigation technologies. In this study, the feasibility of different evaporation estimation methods was studied to find an optimum method with a fair tradeoff between cost and accuracy. The optimum method may vary depending on the climate....

Environmental matters are more complicated. Sustainability of environment requires an integrated approach to decisions making, planning, and management. Therefore, there is a need for a professional and systematic environmental management approach to reducing the consumption of resources. This approach is generally lacking in most universities, and therefore achievement of sustainability become...

Near-infrared photometry and spectroscopy is obtained for a heterogeneous sample of nearby white dwarfs with possible excess flux as identified primarily in the Two Micron All Sky Survey. Among the sample of 43 stars are a number of white dwarfs that are either metal-rich, magnetic, or binary suspects. With a few notable exceptions in four (or possibly five) distinct categories, the newly obtai...

Causal models defined in terms of structural equations have proved to be quite a powerful way of representing knowledge regarding causality. However, a number of authors have given examples that seem to show that the Halpern-Pearl (HP) definition of causality (Halpern & Pearl 2005) gives intuitively unreasonable answers. Here it is shown that, for each of these examples, we can give two stories...

The extinction laws at 7μm and 15μm are derived for more than 120 sightlines in the inner Galactic plane based on the ISOGAL survey data and the near-infrared data from DENIS and 2MASS. The tracers are the ISOGAL point sources with [7]-[15]<0.4 which are RGB tip stars or early AGB stars with moderate mass loss. They have well-defined intrinsic color indices (J-Ks)0, (Ks-[7])0 and (Ks-[15])0. By...