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The physical and degradation properties of polylactic (PLA)/thermoplastic starch (TPS) blends after TPS modification with citric acid (CA) were investigated. The interfacial adhesion between the PLA and TPS was expected to improve, thus enhancing the physical properties of the PLA/TPS blends. The tensile strength and Young's modulus for PLA/TPS blends at (60/40) and (40/60) blends ratio were found to increase after modification with CA. On the other hand, the elongation at break of the (60/40) blend decreased, while elongation at break of the (40/60) blend increased. Meanwhile, an additional peak at 1721 cm -1 was detected by the FTIR spectroscopic analysis, which indicated that the TPS had chemically interacted with the CA. The biodegradability properties of PLA/TPS blends were also improved after treatment with CA. The deterioration of PLA/TPS blends was attributed to the incorporation of CA; O2 from the soil was attracted to the PLA/TPS blends, thus speeding up the degradation process of the blends.

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Abstract. Alterations on the land surfaces, which are attributed by human activities, especially in cities, cause many implications to the ecosystem. The increase of buildings in cities is reflecting the growth of human activities resulted in a significant temperature increase and warmer pattern in the urban area than the surrounding countryside. The phenomenon defined as urban heat island. This study investigates the application and efficiency of the green roof as an approach to mitigate urban heat island and reducing indoor temperature in a building. Two types of roof models, which consist of vegetative roof and non-vegetative roof, were built to investigate the efficiency of vegetated roof in reducing indoor temperature compared to the non-vegetated roof. The outdoor and indoor temperature and humidity of each roof model were monitored by using RH520 Thermo Hygrometer. The data was collected for three times in a week for 9 weeks at 9:00am to 5:00pm. It was found that the indoor average temperature data for vegetative roof could be reduced 2.4 C from the outdoor average temperature and 0.8 C for non-vegetative roof. The difference of temperature reduction for vegetative roof was greater than the nonvegetative roof, thus indicate that green roof was highly efficient in reducing indoor temperature and mitigate urban heat island impact.

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This paper provides a structured review of a design model of a computerized personal decision aid that is intended for youth, named as YouthPDA Design Model. The proposed design model was examined by experts in related areas to ensure the appropriateness of the proposed components and elements, relevancy of the terminologies used, logic of the flow, usability, and practicality of the design model towards development of YouthPDA application. Seven experts from related areas were involved in the evaluation. Discussions on the findings obtained from the expert review are included in this paper. Finally, a revised design model of YouthPDA is proposed as main guidance to develop YouthPDA application.

Difficulty in finding the destination around a campus is a common problem faced by students, staffs and visitors of a university. Outdated signboards, confusing building architecture and layout, and bad weathers are just some of the hindrance to find location for people who are unfamiliar with the campus area. To solve the probl em, virtual campus tour is chosen because it can also be embedded into a university website, or use as a stand - alone app. The virtual campus tour app can help users in visualizing their journey around campus because it was developed using collections of pa noramic video footage, which allows user to watch in 360 - degree view of selected campus area. Administrative building, academic blocks and residential college are some of the destinations included in the tour. A heuristic evaluation of system usability was conducted with five university lecturers who have vast experience in the computer science field . The purpose is to identify usability problems in the user interface of the app, by judging its compliance with standard usability principles. Comments from ex perts were used to make refinement before it could be further tested with potential users.