Abstract: This paper proposes an Interactive Chinese Character
Learning System (ICCLS) based on pictorial evolution as an
edutainment concept in computer-based learning of language. The
advantage of the language origination itself is taken as a learning
platform due to the complexity in Chinese language as compared to
other types of languages. Users especially children enjoy more by
utilize this learning system because they are able to memories the
Chinese Character easily and understand more of the origin of the
Chinese character under pleasurable learning environment, compares
to traditional approach which children need to rote learning Chinese
Character under un-pleasurable environment. Skeletonization is used
as the representation of Chinese character and object with an animated
pictograph evolution to facilitate the learning of the language. Shortest
skeleton path matching technique is employed for fast and accurate
matching in our implementation. User is required to either write a
word or draw a simple 2D object in the input panel and the matched
word and object will be displayed as well as the pictograph evolution
to instill learning. The target of computer-based learning system is for
pre-school children between 4 to 6 years old to learn Chinese
characters in a flexible and entertaining manner besides utilizing
visual and mind mapping strategy as learning methodology.
Abstract: The analytical prediction of the decay heat results
from the fast neutron fission of actinides was initiated under a project, 10-MAT1134-3, funded by king Abdulaziz City of Science
and Technology (KASCT), Long-Term Comprehensive National Plan for Science, Technology and Innovations, managed by a team
from King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Saudi Arabia, and
supervised by Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) has collaborated
with KAU's team to assist in the computational analysis. In this paper, the numerical solution of coupled linear differential equations
that describe the decays and buildups of minor fission product MFA, has been used to predict the total decay heat and its components from the fast neutron fission of 235U and 239Pu. The reliability of the present approach is illustrated via systematic
comparisons with the measurements reported by the University of
Tokyo, in YAYOI reactor.
Abstract: The scalar wave equation for a potential in a curved space time, i.e., the Laplace-Beltrami equation has been studied in this work. An action principle is used to derive a finite element algorithm for determining the modes of propagation inside a waveguide of arbitrary shape. Generalizing this idea, the Maxwell theory in a curved space time determines a set of linear partial differential equations for the four electromagnetic potentials given by the metric of space-time. Similar to the Einstein-s formulation of the field equations of gravitation, these equations are also derived from an action principle. In this paper, the expressions for the action functional of the electromagnetic field have been derived in the presence of gravitational field.
Abstract: The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is
one of the most widely used computational methods in
electromagnetic. This paper describes the design of two-dimensional
(2D) FDTD simulation software for transverse magnetic (TM)
polarization using Berenger's split-field perfectly matched layer
(PML) formulation. The software is developed using Matlab
programming language. Numerical examples validate the software.
Abstract: Sweet potato products are necessary for the provision
of essential nutrients in every household, regardless of their poverty
status. Their consumption appears to be highly influenced by socioeconomic
factors, such as malnutrition, food insecurity and
unemployment. Therefore, market availability is crucial for these
cultivars to resolve some of the socio-economic factors. The aim of
the study was to investigate market availability of sweet potato
cultivars in the North West Province. In this study, both qualitative
and quantitative research methodologies were used. Qualitative
methodology was used to explain the quantitative outcomes of the
variables. On the other hand, quantitative results were used to test the
hypothesis. The study used SPSS software to analyse the data. Crosstabulation
and Chi-square statistics were used to obtain the
descriptive and inferential analyses, respectively. The study found
that the Blesbok cultivar is dominating the markets of the North West
Province, with the Monate cultivar dominating in the Bojanala
Platinum (75%) and Dr Ruth Segomotsi Mompati (25%) districts. It
is also found that a unit increase in the supply of sweet potato
cultivars in both local and district municipal markets is accompanied
by a reduced demand of 28% and 33% at district and local markets,
respectively. All these results were found to be significant at p
Abstract: This paper looks into areas not covered by prominent
Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies.
Extensive paper review led to the identification of two issues, first
most of these methodologies almost neglect semantic web and
ontology. Second, as expected, each one has its strength and
weakness and may focus on some phases of the development
lifecycle but not all of the phases. The work presented here builds
extensions to a highly regarded AOSE methodology (MaSE) in order
to cover the areas that this methodology does not concentrate on. The
extensions include introducing an ontology stage for semantic
representation and integrating early requirement specification from a
methodology which mainly focuses on that. The integration involved
developing transformation rules (with the necessary handling of nonmatching
notions) between the two sets of representations and
building the software which automates the transformation. The
application of this integration on a case study is also presented in the
paper. The main flow of MaSE stages was changed to smoothly
accommodate the new additions.
Abstract: The prediction of long-term deformations of concrete and reinforced concrete structures has been a field of extensive research and several different creep models have been developed so far. Most of the models were developed for constant concrete stresses, thus, in case of varying stresses a specific superposition principle or time-integration, respectively, is necessary. Nowadays, when modeling concrete creep the engineering focus is rather on the application of sophisticated time-integration methods than choosing the more appropriate creep model. For this reason, this paper presents a method to quantify the uncertainties of creep prediction originating from the selection of creep models or from the time-integration methods. By adapting variance based global sensitivity analysis, a methodology is developed to quantify the influence of creep model selection or choice of time-integration method. Applying the developed method, general recommendations how to model creep behavior for varying stresses are given.
Abstract: The pollution of sediments sampled from the North
Port by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) was investigated.
Concentrations of PAHs estimated in the port sediments ranged from
199 to 2851.2 μg/kg dw. The highest concentration was found which
is closed to the Berth line, this locations affected by intensive
shipping activities and Land based runoff and they were dominated
by the high molecular weight PAHs (4–6- rings). Source
identification showed that PAHs originated mostly from the
pyrogenic source either from the combustion of fossil fuels, grass,
wood and coal (majority of the samples). Ecological Risk Assessment
on the port sediments presented that slightly adverse ecological
effects to biological community are expected to occur at the vicinity
of the stations 1 and 4. Thus PAHs are not considered as pollutants of
concern in the North Port.
Abstract: A healthcare monitoring system is presented in this
paper. This system is based on ultra-low power sensor nodes and a
personal server, which is based on hardware and software extensions
to a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)/Smartphone. The sensor node
collects data from the body of a patient and sends it to the personal
server where the data is processed, displayed and made ready to be
sent to a healthcare network, if necessary. The personal server
consists of a compact low power receiver module and equipped with
a Smartphone software. The receiver module takes less than 30 × 30
mm board size and consumes approximately 25 mA in active mode.
Abstract: This paper presents a new adaptive impedance control
strategy, based on Function Approximation Technique (FAT) to
compensate for unknown non-flat environment shape or time-varying
environment location. The target impedance in the force controllable
direction is modified by incorporating adaptive compensators and the
uncertainties are represented by FAT, allowing the update law to be
derived easily. The force error feedback is utilized in the estimation
and the accurate knowledge of the environment parameters are not
required by the algorithm. It is shown mathematically that the
stability of the controller is guaranteed based on Lyapunov theory.
Simulation results presented to demonstrate the validity of the
proposed controller.
Abstract: The institutions seek to improve their performance
and quality of service, so that their patients are satisfied. This
research project aims, conduct a time study program in the area of
gynecological surgery, to determine the current level of capacity and
optimize the programming time in order to adequately respond to
demand. The system is analyzed by waiting lines and uses the
simulation using ARENA to evaluate proposals for improvement and
optimization programming time each of the surgeries.
Abstract: Views on therapists- attraction have influenced the ethical and professional development of the mental health fields. Because the majority of therapist attraction literature (63.6%) has been conducted from a psychoanalytic standpoint, approaches to attraction from feminist perspectives have not been adequately developed. Considering the lack of a feminist voice regarding attraction, this article attempts to offer a feminist perspective on this issue. The purpose of this article is to offer a feminist perspective on the phenomenon of attraction in order to raise awareness about the importance of power inequalities, intersectionalities, contextual variables and the need for action in the field.
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm for object tracking in video sequence. In order to represent the object to be tracked, we propose a spatial color histogram model which encodes both the color distribution and spatial information. The object tracking from frame to frame is accomplished via center voting and back projection method. The center voting method has every pixel in the new frame to cast a vote on whereabouts the object center is. The back projection method segments the object from the background. The segmented foreground provides information on object size and orientation, omitting the need to estimate them separately. We do not put any assumption on camera motion; the proposed algorithm works equally well for object tracking in both static and moving camera videos.
Abstract: Processes of plant breeding, testing and licensing of new varieties, patent protection in seed production, relations in trade and protection of copyright are dependent on identification, differentiation and characterization of plant genotypes. Therefore, we focused our research on utilization of wheat storage proteins as genetic markers suitable not only for differentiation of individual genotypes, but also for identification and characterization of their considerable properties. We analyzed a collection of 102 genotypes of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), 41 genotypes of spelt wheat (Triticum spelta L.), and 35 genotypes of durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.), in this study. Our results show, that genotypes of bread wheat and durum wheat were homogenous and single line, but spelt wheat genotypes were heterogenous. We observed variability of HMW-GS composition according to environmental factors and level of breeding and predict technological quality on the basis of Glu-score calculation.
Abstract: Batteries and fuel cells contain a great potential to back up severe photovoltaic power fluctuations under inclement weather conditions. In this paper comparison between batteries and fuel cells is carried out in detail only for their PV power backup options, so their common attributes and different attributes is discussed. Then, the common and different attributes are compared; accordingly, the fuel cell is selected as the backup of Photovoltaic system. Finally, environmental evaluation of the selected hybrid plant was made in terms of plant-s land requirement and lifetime CO2 emissions, and then compared with that of the conventional fossilfuel power generating forms.
Abstract: Heterogeneity has to be taken into account when
integrating a set of existing information sources into a distributed
information system that are nowadays often based on Service-
Oriented Architectures (SOA). This is also particularly applicable to
distributed services such as event monitoring, which are useful in the
context of Event Driven Architectures (EDA) and Complex Event
Processing (CEP). Web services deal with this heterogeneity at a
technical level, also providing little support for event processing. Our
central thesis is that such a fully generic solution cannot provide
complete support for event monitoring; instead, source specific
semantics such as certain event types or support for certain event
monitoring techniques have to be taken into account. Our core result
is the design of a configurable event monitoring (Web) service that
allows us to trade genericity for the exploitation of source specific
characteristics. It thus delivers results for the areas of SOA, Web
services, CEP and EDA.
Abstract: Genetic Folding (GF) a new class of EA named as is
introduced for the first time. It is based on chromosomes composed
of floating genes structurally organized in a parent form and
separated by dots. Although, the genotype/phenotype system of GF
generates a kernel expression, which is the objective function of
superior classifier. In this work the question of the satisfying
mapping-s rules in evolving populations is addressed by analyzing
populations undergoing either Mercer-s or none Mercer-s rule. The
results presented here show that populations undergoing Mercer-s
rules improve practically models selection of Support Vector
Machine (SVM). The experiment is trained multi-classification
problem and tested on nonlinear Ionosphere dataset. The target of this
paper is to answer the question of evolving Mercer-s rule in SVM
addressed using either genetic folding satisfied kernel-s rules or not
applied to complicated domains and problems.
Abstract: In the frame of the European Union project entitled EU-Families and Adolescents Quit Tobacco (www.eufaqt.eu) focus group analysis has been carried out in Hungary to acquire qualitative information on attitudes towards smoking in groups of adolescents, parents and educators, respectively. It rendered to identify methods for smoking prevention/ intervention with family approach. The results explored the role of the family in smoking behaviour. Teachers do not feel responsibility in prevention or cessation of smoking. Adolescents are not aware of the addictive effect of the cigarette. Water pipe is popular among adolescent, therefore spreading of more information needed on the harmful effects of water pipe. We outlined the requirement for professionals to provide interventions. Partnership of EU-FAQT project has worked out antismoking interventions for adolescents and their families conducted by psychologists to ensure skill development to prevent and quit tobacco.
Abstract: Thin linear-elastic cylindrical circular shells having a
micro-periodic structure along two directions tangent to the shell
midsurface (biperiodic shells) are object of considerations. The aim
of this paper is twofold. First, we formulate an averaged nonasymptotic
model for the analysis of parametric vibrations or dynamical
stability of periodic shells under consideration, which has constant
coefficients and takes into account the effect of a cell size on the
overall shell behavior (a length-scale effect). This model is derived
employing the tolerance modeling procedure. Second we apply the
obtained model to derivation of frequency equation being a starting
point in the analysis of parametric vibrations. The effect of the microstructure
length oh this frequency equation is discussed.
Abstract: In this work we evaluate the possibility of predicting
the emotional state of a person based on the EEG. We investigate
the problem of classifying valence from EEG signals during
the presentation of affective pictures, utilizing the "frontal EEG
asymmetry" phenomenon. To distinguish positive and negative
emotions, we applied the Common Spatial Patterns algorithm.
In contrast to our expectations, the affective pictures did not
reliably elicit changes in frontal asymmetry. The classifying task
thereby becomes very hard as reflected by the poor classifier
performance. We suspect that the masking of the source of the
brain activity related to emotions, coming mostly from deeper
structures in the brain, and the insufficient emotional engagement
are among main reasons why it is difficult to predict the emotional
state of a person.