Background Air quality monitoring in brick kilns indicates very high concentrations of airborne particulate matter. Air pollution from brick kilns poses an enhanced threat to the environment and to human health. Objective To evaluate airborne particulate matter concentration and health status of brick kiln workers. Method A cross-sectional comparative study was conducted in the Kathmandu valley...

Chinese Fuzhuan brick-tea is a unique microbial fermented tea characterized by a period of fungal growth during its manufacturing process. The aim of the present study was to characterize, both physicochemically and microbiologically, traditional industrial production processes of Fuzhuan brick-tea. Fermenting tea samples were collected from the largest manufacturer. Physicochemical analyses sh...

This paper presents a new perspective of the impact of information and collaboration technology (IT) on the work place and space. The study is at the intersection of the and new ways people behave in communicative events using the affordances of IT augmented spaces and content, i.e., interaction. The study proposes two hypotheses. Brick & Bits & Interaction Hypothesis: If we understanding the t...

This paper presents a novel background model for video surveillance—Spatio-Temporal Patch based Background Modeling (STPBM). We use spatio-temporal patches, called bricks, to characterize both the appearance and motion information. Our method is based on the observation that all the background bricks at a given location under all possible lighting conditions lie in a low dimensional background ...

We report a small advance on a question raised by Robertson, Schweitzer, andWagon in [RSW02]. They constructed a genus-13 polyhedron built from bricks without corners, and asked whether every genus-0 such polyhedron must have a corner. A brick is a parallelopiped, and a corner is a brick of degree three or less in the brick graph. We describe a genus-3 polyhedron built from bricks with no corne...

An Euler brick is a cuboid with integer side dimensions such that the face diagonals are integers. Already in 1740, families of Euler bricks have been found. Euler himself constructed more families. If the space diagonal of an Euler brick is an integer too, an Euler brick is called a perfect Euler brick. Nobody has found one. There might be none. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining sport to go ...

The work presents a practical investigation on the degree of efflorescence on different types of bricks available in Bangladesh. A relationship between the type of brick and degree of efflorescence is observed. The study is performed on five different types of samples. For this purpose the general procedure for a brick production is followed by making two samples of customized brick from two di...

We describe an improvisational companion based on the concept of harmonic bricks, as articulated by Cork and others. Our companion is software that can play background for, and trade melodies with, a human soloist. While exhibiting creativity itself, its greater purpose is to improve creativity of its user. Bricks, originally intended for memorization of chord progressions, are used here as a s...