Abstract: According to the majority and to stereotypes in a simple everyman religious processes in the world in general, and Kazakhstan in particular, have only negative trends. The main reason for the author's opinion is seen in the fact that the media in the pursuit of ratings and sensation, more inclined to highlight the negative aspects of events in the country and the world of processes forgetting or casually mentioning the positive initiatives and achievements. That is why the article is mainly revealed positive trends in mind that the problems of fanaticism, terrorism and the confrontation of society on various issues, a lot has been written and detailed. This article describes the stages in the development of relations between religion and state, as well as institutionalization, networking and assistance in the correct orientation of religious activities in the country.
Abstract: Image compression can improve the performance of
the digital systems by reducing time and cost in image storage
and transmission without significant reduction of the image quality.
Furthermore, the discrete cosine transform has emerged as the new
state-of-the art standard for image compression. In this paper, a
hybrid image compression technique based on reversible blockade
transform coding is proposed. The technique, implemented over
regions of interest (ROIs), is based on selection of the coefficients
that belong to different transforms, depending on the coefficients is
proposed. This method allows: (1) codification of multiple kernals
at various degrees of interest, (2) arbitrary shaped spectrum,and (3)
flexible adjustment of the compression quality of the image and the
background. No standard modification for JPEG2000 decoder was
required. The method was applied over different types of images.
Results show a better performance for the selected regions, when
image coding methods were employed for the whole set of images.
We believe that this method is an excellent tool for future image
compression research, mainly on images where image coding can
be of interest, such as the medical imaging modalities and several
multimedia applications. Finally VLSI implementation of proposed
method is shown. It is also shown that the kernal of Hartley and
Cosine transform gives the better performance than any other model.
Abstract: Because of the great advance in multimedia
technology, digital multimedia is vulnerable to malicious
manipulations. In this paper, a public key self-recovery block-based
video authentication technique is proposed which can not only
precisely localize the alteration detection but also recover the missing
data with high reliability. In the proposed block-based technique,
multiple description coding MDC is used to generate two codes (two
descriptions) for each block. Although one block code (one
description) is enough to rebuild the altered block, the altered block
is rebuilt with better quality by the two block descriptions. So using
MDC increases the ratability of recovering data. A block signature is
computed using a cryptographic hash function and a doubly linked
chain is utilized to embed the block signature copies and the block
descriptions into the LSBs of distant blocks and the block itself. The
doubly linked chain scheme gives the proposed technique the
capability to thwart vector quantization attacks. In our proposed
technique , anyone can check the authenticity of a given video using
the public key. The experimental results show that the proposed
technique is reliable for detecting, localizing and recovering the
alterations.
Abstract: The Taiwan government has started to promote the “Plain Landscape Afforestation and Greening Program" since 2002. A key task of the program was the payment for environmental services (PES), entitled the “Plain Landscape Afforestation Policy" (PLAP), which was certificated by the Executive Yuan on August 31, 2001 and enacted on January 1, 2002. According to the policy, it is estimated that the total area of afforestation will be 25,100 hectares by December 31, 2007. Until the end of 2007, the policy had been enacted for six years in total and the actual area of afforestation was 8,919.18 hectares. Among them, Taiwan Sugar Corporation (TSC) was accounted for 7,960 hectares (with 2,450.83 hectares as public service area) which occupied 86.22% of the total afforestation area; the private farmland promoted by local governments was accounted for 869.18 hectares which occupied 9.75% of the total afforestation area. Based on the above, we observe that most of the afforestation area in this policy is executed by TSC, and the achievement ratio by TSC is better than by others. It implies that the success of the PLAP is seriously related to the execution of TSC. The objective of this study is to analyze the relevant policy planning of TSC's participation in the PLAP, suggest complementary measures, and draw up effective adjustment mechanisms, so as to improve the effectiveness of executing the policy. Our main conclusions and suggestions are summarized as follows: 1. The main reason for TSC’s participation in the PLAP is based on their passive cooperation with the central government or company policy. Prior to TSC’s participation in the PLAP, their lands were mainly used for growing sugarcane. 2. The main factors of TSC's consideration on the selection of tree species are based on the suitability of land and species. The largest proportion of tree species is allocated to economic forests, and the lack of technical instruction was the main problem during afforestation. Moreover, the method of improving TSC’s future development in leisure agriculture and landscape business becomes a key topic. 3. TSC has developed short and long-term plans on participating in the PLAP for the future. However, there is no great willingness or incentive on budgeting for such detailed planning. 4. Most people from TSC interviewed consider the requirements on PLAP unreasonable. Among them, an unreasonable requirement on the number of trees accounted for the greatest proportion; furthermore, most interviewees suggested that the government should continue to provide incentives even after 20 years. 5. Since the government shares the same goals as TSC, there should be sufficient cooperation and communication that support the technical instruction and reduction of afforestation cost, which will also help to improve effectiveness of the policy.
Abstract: This paper investigates the application of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique for coordinated design of a Power System Stabilizer (PSS) and a Thyristor Controlled Series Compensator (TCSC)-based controller to enhance the power system stability. The design problem of PSS and TCSC-based controllers is formulated as a time domain based optimization problem. PSO algorithm is employed to search for optimal controller parameters. By minimizing the time-domain based objective function, in which the deviation in the oscillatory rotor speed of the generator is involved; stability performance of the system is improved. To compare the capability of PSS and TCSC-based controller, both are designed independently first and then in a coordinated manner for individual and coordinated application. The proposed controllers are tested on a weakly connected power system. The eigenvalue analysis and non-linear simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the coordinated design approach over individual design. The simulation results show that the proposed controllers are effective in damping low frequency oscillations resulting from various small disturbances like change in mechanical power input and reference voltage setting.
Abstract: This research is aimed to describe the application of robust regression and its advantages over the least square regression method in analyzing financial data. To do this, relationship between earning per share, book value of equity per share and share price as price model and earning per share, annual change of earning per share and return of stock as return model is discussed using both robust and least square regressions, and finally the outcomes are compared. Comparing the results from the robust regression and the least square regression shows that the former can provide the possibility of a better and more realistic analysis owing to eliminating or reducing the contribution of outliers and influential data. Therefore, robust regression is recommended for getting more precise results in financial data analysis.
Abstract: A novel idea presented in this paper is to combine
multihop routing with single-frequency networks (SFNs) for a
broadcasting scenario. An SFN is a set of multiple nodes that transmit
the same data simultaneously, resulting in transmitter macrodiversity.
Two of the most important performance factors of multihop
networks, node reachability and routing robustness, are analyzed.
Simulation results show that our proposed SFN-D routing algorithm
improves the node reachability by 37 percentage points as compared
to non-SFN multihop routing. It shows a diversity gain of 3.7 dB,
meaning that 3.7 dB lower transmission powers are required for the
same reachability. Even better results are possible for larger
networks. If an important node becomes inactive, this algorithm can
find new routes that a non-SFN scheme would not be able to find.
Thus, two of the major problems in multihopping are addressed;
achieving robust routing as well as improving node reachability or
reducing transmission power.
Abstract: The focus in this work is to assess which method
allows a better forecasting of malaria cases in Bujumbura ( Burundi)
when taking into account association between climatic factors and
the disease. For the period 1996-2007, real monthly data on both
malaria epidemiology and climate in Bujumbura are described and
analyzed. We propose a hierarchical approach to achieve our
objective. We first fit a Generalized Additive Model to malaria cases
to obtain an accurate predictor, which is then used to predict future
observations. Various well-known forecasting methods are compared
leading to different results. Based on in-sample mean average
percentage error (MAPE), the multiplicative exponential smoothing
state space model with multiplicative error and seasonality performed
better.
Abstract: Zirconium diamine and triamine complexes can possess biological activities. These complexes were synthesised via the reaction of equimolar quantities of 1,10-phenanthroline {NC3H3(C6H2)NC3H3} (L1) or 4-4-amino phenazone {ONC6H5(NH)CH(NH2} (L2) or diphenyl carbizon {HNNCO(NH)2(C6H5)} (L3) with a Zirconium Salt {ZrOCl2} in a 1:1 ratio to form complexes [{NC3H3(C6H2)NC3H3}ZrOCl2}] [ZrOCl2L1], [{(O2NC6H4(NH)(NH2)}ZrOCl2] [ZrOCl2L2] and [{HNNCO(NH)2(C6H5)ZrOCl2}] [ZrOCl2L3] respectively. They were characterised using Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) and UV-Visible spectroscopy. Also a variable temperature study of these complexes was completed, using UV-Visible spectroscopy to observe electronic transitions under temperature control. Also a DFT study was done on these complexes via the information from FT-IR and UV-Visible spectroscopy.
These complexes were found to show different inhibition to the growth of bacterial strains of Bacillus spp. & Klebsiella spp. & E. coli & Proteus spp. & Pseudomona spp. at different concentrations (0.001, 0.2 and 1M). For better understanding these complexes were examined by using a Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculation.
Abstract: A direct adaptive controller for a class of unknown nonlinear discrete-time systems is presented in this article. The proposed controller is constructed by fuzzy rules emulated network (FREN). With its simple structure, the human knowledge about the plant is transferred to be if-then rules for setting the network. These adjustable parameters inside FREN are tuned by the learning mechanism with time varying step size or learning rate. The variation of learning rate is introduced by main theorem to improve the system performance and stabilization. Furthermore, the boundary of adjustable parameters is guaranteed through the on-line learning and membership functions properties. The validation of the theoretical findings is represented by some illustrated examples.
Abstract: Consider a mass production of HDD arms where
hundreds of CNC machines are used to manufacturer the HDD arms.
According to an overwhelming number of machines and models of
arm, construction of separate control chart for monitoring each HDD
arm model by each machine is not feasible. This research proposed a
strategy to optimize the SPC management on shop floor. The
procedure started from identifying the clusters of the machine with
similar manufacturing performance using clustering technique. The
three way control chart ( I - MR - R ) is then applied to each
clustered group of machine. This proposed research has
advantageous to the manufacturer in terms of not only better
performance of the SPC but also the quality management paradigm.
Abstract: As a method of expanding a higher-order tensor data to tensor products of vectors we have proposed the Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion (3OTPE) that did similar expansion as Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD). In this paper we provide a computation algorithm to improve our previous method, in which SVD is applied to the matrix that constituted by the contraction of original tensor data and one of the expansion vector obtained. The residual of the improved method is smaller than the previous method, truncating the expanding tensor products to the same number of terms. Moreover, the residual is smaller than HOSVD when applying to color image data. It is able to be confirmed that the computing time of improved method is the same as the previous method and considerably better than HOSVD.
Abstract: AAM has been successfully applied to face alignment,
but its performance is very sensitive to initial values. In case the initial
values are a little far distant from the global optimum values, there
exists a pretty good possibility that AAM-based face alignment may
converge to a local minimum. In this paper, we propose a progressive
AAM-based face alignment algorithm which first finds the feature
parameter vector fitting the inner facial feature points of the face and
later localize the feature points of the whole face using the first
information. The proposed progressive AAM-based face alignment
algorithm utilizes the fact that the feature points of the inner part of the
face are less variant and less affected by the background surrounding
the face than those of the outer part (like the chin contour). The
proposed algorithm consists of two stages: modeling and relation
derivation stage and fitting stage. Modeling and relation derivation
stage first needs to construct two AAM models: the inner face AAM
model and the whole face AAM model and then derive relation matrix
between the inner face AAM parameter vector and the whole face
AAM model parameter vector. In the fitting stage, the proposed
algorithm aligns face progressively through two phases. In the first
phase, the proposed algorithm will find the feature parameter vector
fitting the inner facial AAM model into a new input face image, and
then in the second phase it localizes the whole facial feature points of
the new input face image based on the whole face AAM model using
the initial parameter vector estimated from using the inner feature
parameter vector obtained in the first phase and the relation matrix
obtained in the first stage. Through experiments, it is verified that the
proposed progressive AAM-based face alignment algorithm is more
robust with respect to pose, illumination, and face background than the
conventional basic AAM-based face alignment algorithm.
Abstract: In this study, the theoretical relationship between pressure and density was investigated on cylindrical hollow fuel briquettes produced of a mixture of fibrous biomass material using a screw press without any chemical binder. The fuel briquettes were made of biomass and other waste material such as spent coffee beans, mielie husks, saw dust and coal fines under pressures of 0.878-2.2 Mega Pascals (MPa). The material was densified into briquettes of outer diameter of 100mm, inner diameter of 35mm and 50mm long. It was observed that manual screw compression action produces briquettes of relatively low density as compared to the ones made using hydraulic compression action. The pressure and density relationship was obtained in the form of power law and compare well with other cylindrical solid briquettes made using hydraulic compression action. The produced briquettes have a dry density of 989 kg/m3 and contain 26.30% fixed carbon, 39.34% volatile matter, 10.9% moisture and 10.46% ash as per dry proximate analysis. The bomb calorimeter tests have shown the briquettes yielding a gross calorific value of 18.9MJ/kg.
Abstract: In this paper we present an efficient approach for the prediction of two sunspot-related time series, namely the Yearly Sunspot Number and the IR5 Index, that are commonly used for monitoring solar activity. The method is based on exploiting partially recurrent Elman networks and it can be divided into three main steps: the first one consists in a “de-rectification" of the time series under study in order to obtain a new time series whose appearance, similar to a sum of sinusoids, can be modelled by our neural networks much better than the original dataset. After that, we normalize the derectified data so that they have zero mean and unity standard deviation and, finally, train an Elman network with only one input, a recurrent hidden layer and one output using a back-propagation algorithm with variable learning rate and momentum. The achieved results have shown the efficiency of this approach that, although very simple, can perform better than most of the existing solar activity forecasting methods.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to test the “work values"
inventory developed by Tevruz and Turgut and to utilize the concept
in a model, which aims to create a greater understanding of the work
experience. In the study multiple effects of work values, work-value
congruence and work centrality on organizational citizenship
behavior are examined. In this respect, it is hypothesized that work
values and work-value congruence predict organizational citizenship
behavior through work centrality. Work-goal congruence test, Tevruz
and Turgut-s work values inventory are administered along with
Kanungo-s work centrality and Podsakoff et al.-s [47] organizational
citizenship behavior test to employees working in Turkish SME-s.
The study validated that Tevruz and Turgut-s work values inventory
and the work-value congruence test were reliable and could be used
for future research. The study revealed the mediating role of work
centrality only for the relationship of work values and the
responsibility dimension of citizenship behavior. Most important, this
study brought in an important concept, work-value congruence,
which enables a better understanding of work values and their
relation to various attitudinal variables.
Abstract: Image compression plays a vital role in today-s
communication. The limitation in allocated bandwidth leads to
slower communication. To exchange the rate of transmission in the
limited bandwidth the Image data must be compressed before
transmission. Basically there are two types of compressions, 1)
LOSSY compression and 2) LOSSLESS compression. Lossy
compression though gives more compression compared to lossless
compression; the accuracy in retrievation is less in case of lossy
compression as compared to lossless compression. JPEG, JPEG2000
image compression system follows huffman coding for image
compression. JPEG 2000 coding system use wavelet transform,
which decompose the image into different levels, where the
coefficient in each sub band are uncorrelated from coefficient of
other sub bands. Embedded Zero tree wavelet (EZW) coding exploits
the multi-resolution properties of the wavelet transform to give a
computationally simple algorithm with better performance compared
to existing wavelet transforms. For further improvement of
compression applications other coding methods were recently been
suggested. An ANN base approach is one such method. Artificial
Neural Network has been applied to many problems in image
processing and has demonstrated their superiority over classical
methods when dealing with noisy or incomplete data for image
compression applications. The performance analysis of different
images is proposed with an analysis of EZW coding system with
Error Backpropagation algorithm. The implementation and analysis
shows approximately 30% more accuracy in retrieved image
compare to the existing EZW coding system.
Abstract: Renewable energy systems are becoming a topic of
great interest and investment in the world. In recent years wind
power generation has experienced a very fast development in the
whole world. For planning and successful implementations of good
wind power plant projects, wind potential measurements are
required. In these projects, of great importance is the effective choice
of the micro location for wind potential measurements, installation of
the measurement station with the appropriate measuring equipment,
its maintenance and analysis of the gained data on wind potential
characteristics. In this paper, a wavelet transform has been applied to
analyze the wind speed data in the context of insight in the
characteristics of the wind and the selection of suitable locations that
could be the subject of a wind farm construction. This approach
shows that it can be a useful tool in investigation of wind potential.
Abstract: This paper presents an adaptive motion estimator
that can be dynamically reconfigured by the best algorithm
depending on the variation of the video nature during the lifetime
of an application under running. The 4 Step Search (4SS) and the
Gradient Search (GS) algorithms are integrated in the estimator in
order to be used in the case of rapid and slow video sequences
respectively. The Full Search Block Matching (FSBM) algorithm
has been also integrated in order to be used in the case of the
video sequences which are not real time oriented.
In order to efficiently reduce the computational cost while
achieving better visual quality with low cost power, the proposed
motion estimator is based on a Variable Block Size (VBS) scheme
that uses only the 16x16, 16x8, 8x16 and 8x8 modes.
Experimental results show that the adaptive motion estimator
allows better results in term of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio
(PSNR), computational cost, FPGA occupied area, and dissipated
power relatively to the most popular variable block size schemes
presented in the literature.
Abstract: Pattern matching is one of the fundamental applications in molecular biology. Searching DNA related data is a common activity for molecular biologists. In this paper we explore the applicability of a new pattern matching technique called Index based Forward Backward Multiple Pattern Matching algorithm(IFBMPM), for DNA Sequences. Our approach avoids unnecessary comparisons in the DNA Sequence due to this; the number of comparisons of the proposed algorithm is very less compared to other existing popular methods. The number of comparisons rapidly decreases and execution time decreases accordingly and shows better performance.