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COVID-19 epidemic, country lockdown, online learning, Malaysia, Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering, and TK1-9971

The COVID-19 pandemic has struck the world and forced countries to go into lockdown including education sector. Students have been staying in hostels or houses, unable to go to university campuses. This situation has left university administrators no choice, but to have an online learning channel. Malaysian universities in particular have gone through many challenges to bring their online learning system up and ready to resume education process. However, students have found themselves caught in this situation (pure online learning) with no plan or readiness. Literature reviews showed that students encountered some challenges that could not be easily resolved. This study explored the challenges encountered by students of a government-linked university. This university is one of the largest in Malaysia with over 10 campuses across the country. This study collected 284 valid answers. The findings show that respondents lacked full readiness in this situation physically, environmentally, and psychologically with some differences in perspectives according to their gender, age, and residing state. Respondents were concerned about the implications of lockdown on their performance. The findings of this study indicate that a sudden switch to a pure online alternative creates considerable challenges to students who have no plans to be physically apart from classes. The findings also indicate that the current blended learning process which uses online learning as a support mechanism for face-to-face learning has faced a considerable challenge to replace it, particularly with unprepared students.

Reliability engineering, Electric power system, Optimal design, Block (data storage), Photovoltaic system, Engineering, business.industry, business, Sizing, Demand load, Power (physics), Graphical user interface, and Simulation

By the trend of utilizing photovoltaic (PV) systems, especially standalone PV system, in Palestine, the design of such system was carried out mostly using an intuitive method. Putting the intuitive method under the spot reveals a lot of its weaknesses regarding the over or under design results. However, many methods and algorithms were proposed to overcome the drawbacks of the intuitive method. Throughout this paper, we will introduce an algorithm to find the optimal design in terms of size of PV panels and battery block. The new method is mainly based on numerical basis and deals with hourly data of global radiation, demand load and ambient temperature. The proposed method has proved, as demonstrated next, its effectiveness to have results much better than the intuitive one. Such results enable the system to be either less cost system or more suitable and stable one in terms of deficit power. It has proved also the accurate prediction of the system's performance that is hourly performance of system attitude. To utilize the proposed method for stand-alone systems sizing, the method was fostered by Graphical User Interface. Which enables others to use it in order to get more effective results than intuitive method.

SIMPLE (military communications protocol), Mobile development, Computer network, business.industry, business, Application framework, Routing (electronic design automation), Disaster risk reduction, Computer science, Arc (geometry), and Mobile telephony

In disaster situations communication and power infrastructure could be damaged, disrupting their associated services. This could delay relief efforts and cost more lives. In situations where connections are damaged and unreliable, peer-to-peer (P2P) and delay-tolerant networking (DTN) technologies can help provide alternative communication modes particularly in support of rescue and relief operations. Combining the benefits of the store-and-forward capability of DTN and the data propagation techniques of Wi-Fi Direct, we have created a flexible framework called ARC which allows users to create applications that could meet their specific requirements, particularly those in support of emergency communications. To demonstrate our framework, we created a simple application using ARC, and used this application to evaluate its DTN and Wi-Fi Direct group recovery capabilities.

Computer science, Risk management, business.industry, business, Risk analysis (business), Actuarial science, Financial risk management, IT risk management, Enterprise risk management, IT risk, Risk management plan, and Risk factor (computing)

Risk Management is one of the key cares of any organization strategic management. Referring to all the activities on-going in the organizations, risks are brought in for accomplishing the activities and their targets beneficially in all portfolios. Proper benefit of risk management is finding risks and their solutions. The result from a good risk management would be the maximization of the organization's value, it will also improve the chances of success than failure with risk assessing. Almost all risk reduction activities acquire cost of all probably applicable activities typically far overcomes the resources available. Hence there is the need to cleverly pick from among those activities to achieve at a cost-effective selection. In this paper we will suggest Strategic Risk Reduction (SRR) technique for producing optimal risk reduction strategies; we will reduce risk exposure for expected income by allowing several countermeasures per risk rather than one countermeasure per risk as previous work did.

Network security, business.industry, business, World Wide Web, Virtualization, computer.software_genre, computer, Humanities, Server, Computer science, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, computer.internet_protocol, Upload, Distributed data store, Service (systems architecture), Hypermedia, law.invention, and law

Sustainable management of large amounts of research data is gaining in importance for research projects all over the world. The European project DARIAH aims to address this topic for the arts and humanities community. The DARIAH Bit Preservation, as a part of an archiving system for the arts and humanities, allows for a high performance, sustainable, and distributed storage of research data as basis of virtual research environments. A great challenge in designing such a service is to provide a standardized, consistent yet easy-to-use API for accessing the data that remains stable even if backend technology changes over time. As a solution, this paper presents the RESTful API of the DARIAH Bit Preservation which includes an administrative extension, and which is secured by an Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) based on SAML. An exemplary implementation illustrates that the API offers distributed access by usage of the HTTP protocol and is able to handle a high number of files. Data transfer rates of up to 45 MB/s were achieved for uploading large files in the local network.