Abstract: The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)
and normalized difference moisture index (NDMI) derived from the
moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) have been
widely used to identify spatial information of drought condition. The
relationship between NDVI and NDMI has been analyzed using
Pearson correlation analysis and showed strong positive relationship.
The drought indices have detected drought conditions and identified
spatial extents of drought. A comparison between normal year and
drought year demonstrates that the amplitude analysis considered both
vegetation and moisture condition is an effective method to identify
drought condition. We proposed the amplitude analysis is useful for
quick spatial assessment of drought information at a regional scale.
Abstract: In this paper, we are concerned with the design and
its simulation studies of a modified extremum seeking control for
nonlinear systems. A standard extremum seeking control has a simple
structure, but it takes a long time to reach an optimal operating point.
We consider a modification of the standard extremum seeking control
which is aimed to reach the optimal operating point more speedily
than the standard one. In the modification, PD acceleration term
is added before an integrator making a principal control, so that it
enables the objects to be regulated to the optimal point smoothly. This
proposed method is applied to Monod and Williams-Otto models to
investigate its effectiveness. Numerical simulation results show that
this modified method can improve the time response to the optimal
operating point more speedily than the standard one.
Abstract: Aurein 1.2 is a 13-residue amphipathic peptide with antibacterial and anticancer activity. Aurein1.2 and its retro analog were synthesized to study the activity of the peptides in relation to their structure. The antibacterial test result showed the retro-analog is inactive. The secondary structural analysis by CD spectra indicated that both of the peptides at TFE/Water adopt alpha-helical conformation. MD simulation was performed on aurein 1.2 and retro-analog in water and TFE in order to analyse the factors that are involved in the activity difference between retro and the native peptide. The simulation results are discussed and validated in the light of experimental data from the CD experiment. Both of the peptides showed a relatively similar pattern for their hydrophobicity, hydrophilicity, solvent accessible surfaces, and solvent accessible hydrophobic surfaces. However, they showed different in directions of dipole moment of peptides. Also, Our results further indicate that the reversion of the amino acid sequence affects flexibility .The data also showed that factors causing structural rigidity may decrease the activity. Consequently, our finding suggests that in the case of sequence-reversed peptide strategy, one has to pay attention to the role of amino acid sequence order in making flexibility and role of dipole moment direction in peptide activity. KeywordsAntimicrobial peptides, retro, molecular dynamic, circular dichroism.
Abstract: The fine structure of supercavitation in the wake of a
symmetrical cylinder is studied with high-speed video cameras. The
flow is observed in a cavitation tunnel at the speed of 8m/sec when the
sidewall and the wake are partially filled with the massive cavitation
bubbles. The present experiment observed that a two-dimensional
ripple wave with a wave length of 0.3mm is propagated in a
downstream direction, and then abruptly increases to a thicker
three-dimensional layer. IR-photography recorded that the wakes
originated from the horseshoe vortexes alongside the cylinder. The
wake was developed to inside the dead water zone, which absorbed the
bubbly wake propelled from the separated vortices at the center of the
cylinder. A remote sensing classification technique (maximum most
likelihood) determined that the surface porosity was 0.2, and the mean
speed in the mixed wake was 7m/sec. To confirm the existence of
two-dimensional wave motions in the interface, the experiments were
conducted at a very low frequency, and showed similar gravity waves
in both the upper and lower interfaces.
Abstract: A new deployment of the multiple criteria decision
making (MCDM) techniques: the Simple Additive Weighting
(SAW), and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to
Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) for portfolio allocation, is demonstrated in
this paper. Rather than exclusive reference to mean and variance as in
the traditional mean-variance method, the criteria used in this
demonstration are the first four moments of the portfolio distribution.
Each asset is evaluated based on its marginal impacts to portfolio
higher moments that are characterized by trapezoidal fuzzy numbers.
Then centroid-based defuzzification is applied to convert fuzzy
numbers to the crisp numbers by which SAW and TOPSIS can be
deployed. Experimental results suggest the similar efficiency of these
MCDM approaches to selecting dominant assets for an optimal
portfolio under higher moments. The proposed approaches allow
investors flexibly adjust their risk preferences regarding higher
moments via different schemes adapting to various (from
conservative to risky) kinds of investors. The other significant
advantage is that, compared to the mean-variance analysis, the
portfolio weights obtained by SAW and TOPSIS are consistently
well-diversified.
Abstract: In this paper, at first we explain about negative
hypergeometric distribution and its properties. Then we use the w-function
and the Stein identity to give a result on the poisson
approximation to the negative hypergeometric distribution in terms of the total variation distance between the negative hypergeometric and
poisson distributions and its upper bound.
Abstract: In this paper, we give the generalized alternating twostage method in which the inner iterations are accomplished by a generalized alternating method. And we present convergence results of the method for solving nonsingular linear systems when the coefficient matrix of the linear system is a monotone matrix or an H-matrix.
Abstract: A person-to-person information sharing is easily realized
by P2P networks in which servers are not essential. Leakage
of information, which are caused by malicious accesses for P2P
networks, has become a new social issues. To prevent information
leakage, it is necessary to detect and block traffics of P2P software.
Since some P2P softwares can spoof port numbers, it is difficult to
detect the traffics sent from P2P softwares by using port numbers.
It is more difficult to devise effective countermeasures for detecting
the software because their protocol are not public.
In this paper, a discriminating method of network applications
based on communication characteristics of application messages
without port numbers is proposed. The proposed method is based
on an assumption that there can be some rules about time intervals
to transmit messages in application layer and the number of necessary
packets to send one message. By extracting the rule from network
traffic, the proposed method can discriminate applications without
port numbers.
Abstract: This research was conducted in the Pua Watershed whereas located in the Upper Nan River Basin in Nan province, Thailand. Nan River basin originated in Nan province that comprises of many tributary streams to produce as inflow to the Sirikit dam provided huge reservoir with the storage capacity of 9510 million cubic meters. The common problems of most watersheds were found i.e. shortage water supply for consumption and agriculture utilizations, deteriorate of water quality, flood and landslide including debris flow, and unstable of riverbank. The Pua Watershed is one of several small river basins that flow through the Nan River Basin. The watershed includes 404 km2 representing the Pua District, the Upper Nan Basin, or the whole Nan River Basin, of 61.5%, 18.2% or 1.2% respectively. The Pua River is a main stream producing all year streamflow supplying the Pua District and an inflow to the Upper Nan Basin. Its length approximately 56.3 kilometers with an average slope of the channel by 1.9% measured. A diversion weir namely Pua weir bound the plain and mountainous areas with a very steep slope of the riverbed to 2.9% and drainage area of 149 km2 as upstream watershed while a mild slope of the riverbed to 0.2% found in a river reach of 20.3 km downstream of this weir, which considered as a gauged basin. However, the major branch streams of the Pua River are ungauged catchments namely: Nam Kwang and Nam Koon with the drainage area of 86 and 35 km2 respectively. These upstream watersheds produce runoff through the 3-streams downstream of Pua weir, Jao weir, and Kang weir, with an averaged annual runoff of 578 million cubic meters. They were analyzed using both statistical data at Pua weir and simulated data resulted from the hydrologic modeling system (HEC–HMS) which applied for the remaining ungauged basins. Since the Kwang and Koon catchments were limited with lack of hydrological data included streamflow and rainfall. Therefore, the mathematical modeling: HEC-HMS with the Snyder-s hydrograph synthesized and transposed methods were applied for those areas using calibrated hydrological parameters from the upstream of Pua weir with continuously daily recorded of streamflow and rainfall data during 2008-2011. The results showed that the simulated daily streamflow and sum up as annual runoff in 2008, 2010, and 2011 were fitted with observed annual runoff at Pua weir using the simple linear regression with the satisfied correlation R2 of 0.64, 062, and 0.59, respectively. The sensitivity of simulation results were come from difficulty using calibrated parameters i.e. lag-time, coefficient of peak flow, initial losses, uniform loss rates, and missing some daily observed data. These calibrated parameters were used to apply for the other 2-ungauged catchments and downstream catchments simulated.
Abstract: The purpose of the research was to determine
effectiveness of habilitation of preschool children with cerebral palsy
in the process of pedagogical support of their families. The author
presents the study of psychology-pedagogical problems of families
with preschool children with cerebral palsy and the universal
program of pedagogical support of families. In the conclusion, the
author determines effectiveness of social adaptation of children with
cerebral palsy and their families.
Abstract: This paper presents a finite point method based on
directional derivatives for diffusion equation on 2D scattered points.
To discretize the diffusion operator at a given point, a six-point stencil
is derived by employing explicit numerical formulae of directional
derivatives, namely, for the point under consideration, only five
neighbor points are involved, the number of which is the smallest for
discretizing diffusion operator with first-order accuracy. A method for
selecting neighbor point set is proposed, which satisfies the solvability
condition of numerical derivatives. Some numerical examples are
performed to show the good performance of the proposed method.
Abstract: Multi-user interference (MUI) is the main reason of system deterioration in the Spectral Amplitude Coding Optical Code Division Multiple Access (SAC-OCDMA) system. MUI increases with the number of simultaneous users, resulting into higher probability bit rate and limits the maximum number of simultaneous users. On the other hand, Phase induced intensity noise (PIIN) problem which is originated from spontaneous emission of broad band source from MUI severely limits the system performance should be addressed as well. Since the MUI is caused by the interference of simultaneous users, reducing the MUI value as small as possible is desirable. In this paper, an extensive study for the system performance specified by MUI and PIIN reducing is examined. Vectors Combinatorial (VC) codes families are adopted as a signature sequence for the performance analysis and a comparison with reported codes is performed. The results show that, when the received power increases, the PIIN noise for all the codes increases linearly. The results also show that the effect of PIIN can be minimized by increasing the code weight leads to preserve adequate signal to noise ratio over bit error probability. A comparison study between the proposed code and the existing codes such as Modified frequency hopping (MFH), Modified Quadratic- Congruence (MQC) has been carried out.
Abstract: The self-organizing map (SOM) model is a well-known neural network model with wide spread of applications. The main characteristics of SOM are two-fold, namely dimension reduction and topology preservation. Using SOM, a high-dimensional data space will be mapped to some low-dimensional space. Meanwhile, the topological relations among data will be preserved. With such characteristics, the SOM was usually applied on data clustering and visualization tasks. However, the SOM has main disadvantage of the need to know the number and structure of neurons prior to training, which are difficult to be determined. Several schemes have been proposed to tackle such deficiency. Examples are growing/expandable SOM, hierarchical SOM, and growing hierarchical SOM. These schemes could dynamically expand the map, even generate hierarchical maps, during training. Encouraging results were reported. Basically, these schemes adapt the size and structure of the map according to the distribution of training data. That is, they are data-driven or dataoriented SOM schemes. In this work, a topic-oriented SOM scheme which is suitable for document clustering and organization will be developed. The proposed SOM will automatically adapt the number as well as the structure of the map according to identified topics. Unlike other data-oriented SOMs, our approach expands the map and generates the hierarchies both according to the topics and their characteristics of the neurons. The preliminary experiments give promising result and demonstrate the plausibility of the method.
Abstract: A new code for spectral-amplitude coding optical
code-division multiple-access system is proposed called Random
diagonal (RD) code. This code is constructed using code segment and
data segment. One of the important properties of this code is that the
cross correlation at data segment is always zero, which means that
Phase Intensity Induced Noise (PIIN) is reduced. For the performance
analysis, the effects of phase-induced intensity noise, shot noise, and
thermal noise are considered simultaneously. Bit-error rate (BER)
performance is compared with Hadamard and Modified Frequency
Hopping (MFH) codes. It is shown that the system using this new
code matrices not only suppress PIIN, but also allows larger number
of active users compare with other codes. Simulation results shown
that using point to point transmission with three encoded channels,
RD code has better BER performance than other codes, also its found
that at 0 dbm PIIN noise are 10-10 and 10-11 for RD and MFH
respectively.
Abstract: An adaptive spatial Gaussian mixture model is proposed for clustering based color image segmentation. A new clustering objective function which incorporates the spatial information is introduced in the Bayesian framework. The weighting parameter for controlling the importance of spatial information is made adaptive to the image content to augment the smoothness towards piecewisehomogeneous region and diminish the edge-blurring effect and hence the name adaptive spatial finite mixture model. The proposed approach is compared with the spatially variant finite mixture model for pixel labeling. The experimental results with synthetic and Berkeley dataset demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in improving the segmentation and it can be employed in different practical image content understanding applications.
Abstract: A way of achieving nanodimentional structural elements in high carbon steel by special kind of heat treatment and cold plastic deformation is being explored. This leads to increasing interlamellar spacing of ferrite-carbide mixture. Decreasing the interlamellar spacing with cooling temperature increasing is determined. Experiments confirm such interlamellar spacing with which high carbon steel demonstrates the highest treatment and hardening capability. Total deformation degree effect on interlamellar spacing value in a ferrite-carbide mixture is obtained. Mechanical experiments results show that high carbon steel after heat treatment and repetitive cold plastic deformation possesses high tensile strength and yield strength keeping good percentage elongation.
Abstract: Transcription factor p53 has a powerful tumor
suppressing function that is associated with many cancers. However,
p53 of the molecular weight was higher make the limitation across to
skin or cell membrane. Thymidine dinucleotide (pTT), an
oligonucleotide, can activate the p53 transcription factor. pTT is a
hydrophilic and negative charge oligonucleotide, which delivery in to
cell membrane need an appropriate carrier. The aim of this study was
to improve the bioavailability of the nucleotide fragment, thymidine
dinucleotide (pTT), using elasic liposome carriers to deliver the drug
into the skin. The study demonstrate that dioleoylphosphocholine
(DOPC) incorporated with sodium cholate at molar ratio 1:1 can
archived the particle size about 220 nm. This elastic liposome could
penetration through skin from stratum corneum to whole epidermis by
confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM). Moreover, we observed
the the slight increase in generation of p53 by western blot.
Abstract: This article describes Uruk, the virtual museum of
Iraq that we developed for visual exploration and retrieval of image
collections. The system largely exploits the loosely-structured
hierarchy of XML documents that provides a useful representation
method to store semi-structured or unstructured data, which does not
easily fit into existing database. The system offers users the
capability to mine and manage the XML-based image collections
through a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI). Typically, at an
interactive session with the system, the user can browse a visual
structural summary of the XML database in order to select interesting
elements. Using this intermediate result, queries combining structure
and textual references can be composed and presented to the system.
After query evaluation, the full set of answers is presented in a visual
and structured way.
Abstract: A chord of a simple polygon P is a line segment [xy]
that intersects the boundary of P only at both endpoints x and y. A
chord of P is called an interior chord provided the interior of [xy] lies
in the interior of P. P is weakly visible from [xy] if for every point v
in P there exists a point w in [xy] such that [vw] lies in P. In this
paper star-shaped, L-convex, and convex polygons are characterized
in terms of weak visibility properties from internal chords and starshaped
subsets of P. A new Krasnoselskii-type characterization of
isothetic star-shaped polygons is also presented.
Abstract: The steady-state operation of maintaining voltage
stability is done by switching various controllers scattered all over
the power network. When a contingency occurs, whether forced or
unforced, the dispatcher is to alleviate the problem in a minimum
time, cost, and effort. Persistent problem may lead to blackout. The
dispatcher is to have the appropriate switching of controllers in terms
of type, location, and size to remove the contingency and maintain
voltage stability. Wrong switching may worsen the problem and that
may lead to blackout. This work proposed and used a Fuzzy CMeans
Clustering (FCMC) to assist the dispatcher in the decision
making. The FCMC is used in the static voltage stability to map
instantaneously a contingency to a set of controllers where the types,
locations, and amount of switching are induced.