Abstract: A real-time tracking system was built to track performers on an interactive stage. Using an ordinary, up to date, desktop workstation, the performers- silhouette was segmented from the background and parameterized by calculating the normalized central image moments. In the stage system, the silhouette moments were then sent to a parallel workstation, which used them to generate corresponding 3D virtual geometry and projected the generated graphic back onto the stage.
Abstract: Genetic Zone Routing Protocol (GZRP) is a new
hybrid routing protocol for MANETs which is an extension of ZRP
by using Genetic Algorithm (GA). GZRP uses GA on IERP and BRP
parts of ZRP to provide a limited set of alternative routes to the
destination in order to load balance the network and robustness
during node/link failure during the route discovery process. GZRP is
studied for its performance compared to ZRP in many folds like
scalability for packet delivery and proved with improved results. This
paper presents the results of the effect of load balancing on GZRP.
The results show that GZRP outperforms ZRP while balancing the
load.
Abstract: In recent years, rehabilitation has been the subject of extensive research due to increased spending on building work and repair of built works. In all cases, it is absolutely essential to carry out methods of strengthening or repair of structural elements, and that following an inspection analysis and methodology of a correct diagnosis. The reinforced concrete columns are important elements in building structures. They support the vertical loads and provide bracing against the horizontal loads. This research about the behavior of reinforced concrete rectangular columns, rehabilitated by concrete liner, confinement FRP fabric, steel liner or cage formed by metal corners. It allows comparing the contributions of different processes used perspective section resistance elements rehabilitated compared to that is not reinforced or repaired. The different results obtained revealed a considerable gain in bearing capacity failure of reinforced sections cladding concrete, metal bracket, steel plates and a slight improvement to the section reinforced with fabric FRP. The use of FRP does not affect the weight of the structures, but the use of different techniques cladding increases the weight of elements rehabilitated and therefore the weight of the building which requires resizing foundations.
Abstract: Energy intensity(energy consumption intensity) is a
global index which computes the required energy for producing a
specific value of goods and services in each country. It is computed
in terms of initial energy supply or final energy consumption. In this
study (research) Divisia method is used to decompose energy
consumption and energy intensity. This method decomposes
consumption and energy intensity to production effects, structural
and net intensity and could be done as time series or two-periodical.
This study analytically investigates consumption changes and energy
intensity on economical sectors of Iran and more specific on road
transportation(rail road and road).Our results show that the
contribution of structural effect (change in economical activities
combination) is very low and the effect of net energy consumption
has the higher contribution in consumption changes and energy
intensity. In other words, the high consumption of energy is due to
Intensity of energy consumption and is not to structural effect of
transportation sector.
Abstract: In this work, we incorporated a quartic bond potential
into a coarse-grained bead-spring model to study lubricant adsorption
on a solid surface as well as depletion instability. The surface tension
density and the number density profiles were examined to verify the
solid-liquid and liquid-vapor interfaces during heat treatment. It was
found that both the liquid-vapor interfacial thickness and the
solid-vapor separation increase with the temperatureT* when T*is
below the phase transition temperature Tc
*. At high temperatures
(T*>Tc
*), the solid-vapor separation decreases gradually as the
temperature increases. In addition, we evaluated the lubricant weight
and bond loss profiles at different temperatures. It was observed that
the lubricant desorption is favored over decomposition and is the main
cause of the lubricant failure at the head disk interface in our
simulations.
Abstract: The purpose of the study reported here was designing Information Dissemination System (IDS) based E-learning in agricultural of Iran. A questionnaire was developed to designing Information Dissemination System. The questionnaire was distributed to 96 extension agents who work for Management of Extension and Farming System of Khuzestan province of Iran. Data collected were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Appropriate statistical procedures for description (frequencies, percent, means, and standard deviations) were used. In this study there was a significant relationship between the age , IT skill and knowledge, years of extension work, the extend of information seeking motivation, level of job satisfaction and level of education with use of information technology by extension agent. According to extension agents five factors were ranked respectively as five top essential items to designing Information Dissemination System (IDS) based E-learning in agricultural of Iran. These factors include: 1) Establish communication between farmers, coordinators (extension agents), agricultural experts, research centers, and community by information technology. 2) The communication between all should be mutual. 3) The information must be based farmers need. 4) Internet used as a facility to transfer the advanced agricultural information to the farming community. 5) Farmers can be illiterate and speak a local and they are not expected to use the system directly. Knowledge produced by the agricultural scientist must be transformed in to computer understandable presentation. To designing Information Dissemination System, electronic communication, in the agricultural society and rural areas must be developed. This communication must be mutual between all factors.
Abstract: In nature, electromagnetic fields always appear like
atmosphere static electric field, the earth's static magnetic field and
the wide-rang frequency electromagnetic field caused by lightening.
However, besides natural electromagnetic fields (EMF), today human
beings are mostly exposed to artificial electromagnetic fields due to
technology progress and outspread use of electrical devices. To
evaluate nuisance of EMF, it is necessary to know field intensity for
every frequency which appears and compare it with allowed values.
Low frequency EMF-s around transmission and distribution lines are
time-varying quasi-static electromagnetic fields which have
conservative component of low frequency electrical field caused by
charges and eddy component of low frequency magnetic field caused
by currents. Displacement current or field delay are negligible, so
energy flow in quasi-static EMF involves diffusion, analog like heat
transfer. Electrical and magnetic field can be analyzed separately.
This paper analysis the numerical calculations in ELF-400 software
of EMF in distribution substation in shopping center. Analyzing the
results it is possible to specify locations exposed to the fields and
give useful suggestion to eliminate electromagnetic effect or reduce it
on acceptable level within the non-ionizing radiation norms and
norms of protection from EMF.
Abstract: Until recently, energy security and climate change
were considered separate issues to be dealt with by policymakers.
The two issues are now converging, challenging the security and
climate communities to develop a better understanding of how to deal
with both issues simultaneously. Although Egypt is not a major
contributor to the world's total GHG emissions, it is particularly
vulnerable to the potential effects of global climate change such as
rising sea levels and changed patterns of rainfall in the Nile Basin.
Climate change is a major threat to sustainable growth and
development in Egypt, and the achievement of the Millennium
Development Goals. Egypt-s capacity to respond to the challenges of
climate instability will be expanded by improving overall resilience,
integrating climate change goals into sustainable development
strategies, increasing the use of modern energy systems with reduced
carbon intensity, and strengthening international initiatives. This
study seeks to establish a framework for considering the complex and
evolving links between energy security and climate change,
applicable to Egypt.
Abstract: Morgan-s refinement calculus (MRC) is one of the
well-known methods allowing the formality presented in the program
specification to be continued all the way to code. On the other hand,
Object-Z (OZ) is an extension of Z adding support for classes and
objects. There are a number of methods for obtaining code from OZ
specifications that can be categorized into refinement and animation
methods. As far as we know, only one refinement method exists
which refines OZ specifications into code. However, this method
does not have fine-grained refinement rules and thus cannot be
automated. On the other hand, existing animation methods do not
present mapping rules formally and do not support the mapping of
several important constructs of OZ, such as all cases of operation
expressions and most of constructs in global paragraph. In this paper,
with the aim of providing an automatic path from OZ specifications
to code, we propose an approach to map OZ specifications into their
counterparts in MRC in order to use fine-grained refinement rules of
MRC. In this way, having counterparts of our specifications in MRC,
we can refine them into code automatically using MRC tools such as
RED. Other advantages of our work pertain to proposing mapping
rules formally, supporting the mapping of all important constructs of
Object-Z, and considering dynamic instantiation of objects while OZ
itself does not cover this facility.
Abstract: Modern applications realized onto FPGAs exhibit high connectivity demands. Throughout this paper we study the routing constraints of Virtex devices and we propose a systematic methodology for designing a novel general-purpose interconnection network targeting to reconfigurable architectures. This network consists of multiple segment wires and SB patterns, appropriately selected and assigned across the device. The goal of our proposed methodology is to maximize the hardware utilization of fabricated routing resources. The derived interconnection scheme is integrated on a Virtex style FPGA. This device is characterized both for its high-performance, as well as for its low-energy requirements. Due to this, the design criterion that guides our architecture selections was the minimal Energy×Delay Product (EDP). The methodology is fully-supported by three new software tools, which belong to MEANDER Design Framework. Using a typical set of MCNC benchmarks, extensive comparison study in terms of several critical parameters proves the effectiveness of the derived interconnection network. More specifically, we achieve average Energy×Delay Product reduction by 63%, performance increase by 26%, reduction in leakage power by 21%, reduction in total energy consumption by 11%, at the expense of increase of channel width by 20%.
Abstract: In this paper our aim is to explore the construction of schoolgirl femininities, drawing on the results of an ethnographic study conducted in a high school in Ankara, Turkey. In this case study which tries to explore the complexities of gender discourses, we were initially motivated by the questions that have been put forward by critical and feminist literature on education which emphasize the necessarily conflicting and partial nature of both reproduction and resistance and the importance of gendered power relations in the school context. Drawing on this paradigm our research tries to address to a more specific question: how are multiple schoolgirl femininities constructed within the context of gendered school culture, and especially in relation to hegemonic masculinity? Our study reveals that the general framework of multiple femininities is engendered by a tension between two inter-related positions. The first one is different strategies of accommodation and resistance to the gender-related problems of education. The second one is the school experience of girls which is conditioned by their differential position vis-à-vis the masculine resistance culture that is dominant in the school.
Abstract: In digital signal processing it is important to
approximate multi-dimensional data by the method called rank
reduction, in which we reduce the rank of multi-dimensional data from
higher to lower. For 2-dimennsional data, singular value
decomposition (SVD) is one of the most known rank reduction
techniques. Additional, outer product expansion expanded from SVD
was proposed and implemented for multi-dimensional data, which has
been widely applied to image processing and pattern recognition.
However, the multi-dimensional outer product expansion has behavior
of great computation complex and has not orthogonally between the
expansion terms. Therefore we have proposed an alterative method,
Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion short for 3-OTPE.
3-OTPE uses the power method instead of nonlinear optimization
method for decreasing at computing time. At the same time the group
of B. D. Lathauwer proposed Higher-Order SVD (HOSVD) that is
also developed with SVD extensions for multi-dimensional data.
3-OTPE and HOSVD are similarly on the rank reduction of
multi-dimensional data. Using these two methods we can obtain
computation results respectively, some ones are the same while some
ones are slight different. In this paper, we compare 3-OTPE to
HOSVD in accuracy of calculation and computing time of resolution,
and clarify the difference between these two methods.
Abstract: The development of shape and size of a crack in a
pressure vessel under uniaxial and biaxial loadings is important in
fitness-for-service evaluations such as leak-before-break. In this
work finite element modelling was used to evaluate the mean stress
and the J-integral around a front of a surface-breaking crack. A
procedure on the basis of ductile tearing resistance curves of high and
low constrained fracture mechanics geometries was developed to
estimate the amount of ductile crack extension for surface-breaking
cracks and to show the evolution of the initial crack shape. The
results showed non-uniform constraint levels and crack driving forces
around the crack front at large deformation levels. It was also shown
that initially semi-elliptical surface cracks under biaxial load
developed higher constraint levels around the crack front than in
uniaxial tension. However similar crack shapes were observed with
more extensions associated with cracks under biaxial loading.
Abstract: The weight constrained shortest path problem
(WCSPP) is one of most several known basic problems in
combinatorial optimization. Because of its importance in many areas
of applications such as computer science, engineering and operations
research, many researchers have extensively studied the WCSPP.
This paper mainly concentrates on the reduction of total search space
for finding WCSP using some existing Genetic Algorithm (GA). For
this purpose, some controlled schemes of genetic operators are
adopted on list chromosome representation. This approach gives a
near optimum solution with smaller elapsed generation than classical
GA technique. From further analysis on the matter, a new
generalized schema theorem is also developed from the philosophy
of Holland-s theorem.
Abstract: Advent enhancements in the field of computing have
increased massive use of web based electronic documents. Current
Copyright protection laws are inadequate to prove the ownership for
electronic documents and do not provide strong features against
copying and manipulating information from the web. This has
opened many channels for securing information and significant
evolutions have been made in the area of information security.
Digital Watermarking has developed into a very dynamic area of
research and has addressed challenging issues for digital content.
Watermarking can be visible (logos or signatures) and invisible
(encoding and decoding). Many visible watermarking techniques
have been studied for text documents but there are very few for web
based text. XML files are used to trade information on the internet
and contain important information. In this paper, two invisible
watermarking techniques using Synonyms and Acronyms are
proposed for XML files to prove the intellectual ownership and to
achieve the security. Analysis is made for different attacks and
amount of capacity to be embedded in the XML file is also noticed.
A comparative analysis for capacity is also made for both methods.
The system has been implemented using C# language and all tests are
made practically to get the results.
Abstract: Subjective loneliness describes people who feel a
disagreeable or unacceptable lack of meaningful social relationships,
both at the quantitative and qualitative level. The studies to be
presented tested an Italian 18-items self-report loneliness measure,
that included items adapted from scales previously developed,
namely a short version of the UCLA (Russell, Peplau and Cutrona,
1980), and the 11-items Loneliness scale by De Jong-Gierveld &
Kamphuis (JGLS; 1985). The studies aimed at testing the developed
scale and at verifying whether loneliness is better conceptualized as a
unidimensional (so-called 'general loneliness') or a bidimensional
construct, namely comprising the distinct facets of social and
emotional loneliness. The loneliness questionnaire included 2 singleitem
criterion measures of sad mood, and social contact, and asked
participants to supply information on a number of socio-demographic
variables. Factorial analyses of responses obtained in two
preliminary studies, with 59 and 143 Italian participants respectively,
showed good factor loadings and subscale reliability and confirmed
that perceived loneliness has clearly two components, a social and an
emotional one, the latter measured by two subscales, a 7-item
'general' loneliness subscale derived from UCLA, and a 6–item
'emotional' scale included in the JGLS. Results further showed that
type and amount of loneliness are related, negatively, to frequency of
social contacts, and, positively, to sad mood. In a third study data
were obtained from a nation-wide sample of 9.097 Italian subjects,
12 to about 70 year-olds, who filled the test on-line, on the Italian
web site of a large-audience magazine, Focus. The results again
confirmed the reliability of the component subscales, namely social,
emotional, and 'general' loneliness, and showed that they were
highly correlated with each other, especially the latter two.
Loneliness scores were significantly predicted by sex, age, education
level, sad mood and social contact, and, less so, by other variables –
e.g., geographical area and profession. The scale validity was
confirmed by the results of a fourth study, with elderly men and
women (N 105) living at home or in residential care units. The three
subscales were significantly related, among others, to depression, and
to various measures of the extension of, and satisfaction with, social
contacts with relatives and friends. Finally, a fifth study with 315
career-starters showed that social and emotional loneliness correlate
with life satisfaction, and with measures of emotional intelligence.
Altogether the results showed a good validity and reliability in the
tested samples of the entire scale, and of its components.
Abstract: The use of externally bonded Carbon Fiber
Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) reinforcement has proven to be an
effective technique to strengthen steel structures. An experimental
study on CFRP bonded steel plate with double strap joint has been
conducted and specimens are tested under tensile loadings. An
empirical model has been developed using stress-based approach to
predict ultimate capacity of the CFRP bonded steel structure. The
results from the model are comparable with the experimental result
with a reasonable accuracy.
Abstract: the article analyzes the development prospects of
education system in Kazakhstan. Education is among key sources of
culture and social mobility. Modern education must become civic
which means availability of high quality education to all people
irrespective of their racial, ethnic, religious, social, gender and any
other differences. Socially focused nature of modernization of
Kazakhstan-s society is predicated upon formation of a civic
education model in the future. Kazakhstan-s education system
undergoes intensive reforms first of all intended to achieve
international education standards and integration into the global
educational and information space.
Abstract: The proper assessment of interaxial distance and
convergence control are important factors in stereoscopic imaging
technology to make an efficient 3D image. To control interaxial
distance and convergence for efficient 3D shooting, horizontal 3D
camera rig is designed using some hardware components like 'LM
Guide', 'Goniometer' and 'Rotation Stage'. The horizontal 3D camera
rig system can be properly aligned by moving the two cameras
horizontally in same or opposite directions, by adjusting the camera
angle and finally considering horizontal swing as well as vertical
swing. In this paper, the relationship between interaxial distance and
convergence angle control are discussed and intensive experiments are
performed in order to demonstrate an easy and effective 3D shooting.
Abstract: In this study an extensive experimental research is
carried out to develop a better understanding of the effects of Piano Key (PK) weir geometry on weir flow threshold submergence.
Experiments were conducted in a 12 m long, 0.4 m wide and 0.7 m deep rectangular glass wall flume. The main objectives were to
investigate the effect of the PK weir geometries including the weir
length, weir height, inlet-outlet key widths, upstream and
downstream apex overhangs, and slopped floors on threshold submergence and study the hydraulic flow characteristics. From the
experimental results, a practical formula is proposed to evaluate the flow threshold submergence over PK weirs.