Thai Prosody Problems with First Year Students

Thai language is difficult in all four language skills, especially reading. The first year students may have different abilities in reading, so a teacher is required to find out a student’s reading level so that the teacher can help and support them till they can develop and resolve each problem themselves. This research is aimed to study the prosody problem among Thai students and will be focused on first year Thai students in the second semester. A total of 58 students were involved in this study. Four obstacles were found: 1. Interpretation from what they read and write 2. Incorrectness Pronunciation of Prosody 3. Incorrectness in Rhythm of the Poem 4. Incorrectness of the Thai Poem Pronunciation

Influence of Deep Cold Rolling and Low Plasticity Burnishing on Surface Hardness and Surface Roughness of AISI 4140 Steel

Deep cold rolling (DCR) and low plasticity burnishing (LPB) process are cold working processes, which easily produce a smooth and work-hardened surface by plastic deformation of surface irregularities. The present study focuses on the surface roughness and surface hardness aspects of AISI 4140 work material, using fractional factorial design of experiments. The assessment of the surface integrity aspects on work material was done, in order to identify the predominant factors amongst the selected parameters. They were then categorized in order of significance followed by setting the levels of the factors for minimizing surface roughness and/or maximizing surface hardness. In the present work, the influence of main process parameters (force, feed rate, number of tool passes/overruns, initial roughness of the work piece, ball material, ball diameter and lubricant used) on the surface roughness and the hardness of AISI 4140 steel were studied for both LPB and DCR process and the results are compared. It was observed that by using LPB process surface hardness has been improved by 167% and in DCR process surface hardness has been improved by 442%. It was also found that the force, ball diameter, number of tool passes and initial roughness of the workpiece are the most pronounced parameters, which has a significant effect on the work piece-s surface during deep cold rolling and low plasticity burnishing process.

In Search of Robustness and Efficiency via l1− and l2− Regularized Optimization for Physiological Motion Compensation

Compensating physiological motion in the context of minimally invasive cardiac surgery has become an attractive issue since it outperforms traditional cardiac procedures offering remarkable benefits. Owing to space restrictions, computer vision techniques have proven to be the most practical and suitable solution. However, the lack of robustness and efficiency of existing methods make physiological motion compensation an open and challenging problem. This work focusses on increasing robustness and efficiency via exploration of the classes of 1−and 2−regularized optimization, emphasizing the use of explicit regularization. Both approaches are based on natural features of the heart using intensity information. Results pointed out the 1−regularized optimization class as the best since it offered the shortest computational cost, the smallest average error and it proved to work even under complex deformations.

A Review on Technology Forecasting Methods and Their Application Area

Technology changes have been acknowledged as a critical factor in determining competitiveness of organization. Under such environment, the right anticipation of technology change has been of huge importance in strategic planning. To monitor technology change, technology forecasting (TF) is frequently utilized. In academic perspective, TF has received great attention for a long time. However, few researches have been conducted to provide overview of the TF literature. Even though some studies deals with review of TF research, they generally focused on type and characteristics of various TF, so hardly provides information about patterns of TF research and which TF method is used in certain technology industry. Accordingly, this study profile developments in and patterns of scholarly research in TF over time. Also, this study investigates which technology industries have used certain TF method and identifies their relationships. This study will help in understanding TF research trend and their application area.

Environmental Inspection using WSANs Based on Multi-agent Coordination Method

In this paper, we focus on the problem of driving and herding a collection of autonomous actors to a given area. Then, a new method based on multi-agent coordination is proposed for solving the problem. In our proposed method, we assume that the environment is covered by sensors. When an event is occurred, sensors forward information to a sink node. Based on received information, the sink node will estimate the direction and the speed of movement of actors and announce the obtained value to the actors. The actors coordinate to reach the target location.

Thermal Performance Rating of Solar Water Heating Systems in ASEAN

Solar water heating (SWH) systems are gaining popularity in ASEAN in the midst of increasing number of affluent population in society and environmental concerns from seemingly unchanged reliance on fossil-based fuels. The penetration of these systems and technologies into ASEAN markets is a welcome development; however there is a need for the method of assessment of their thermal performances. This paper discusses the reasons for this need and a suitable method for thermal performance evaluation of SWH systems in ASEAN. The paper also calls on research to be focused on the establishment of reliable data to be entered into the performance rating software. The establishment of accredited solar systems testing facilities can help boost the competitiveness of ASEAN solar industry.

Design and Development of Architectural Model Darul Ridzuan Museum

This paper focuses on the 3D reconstruction of the architectural design of Darul Ridzuan Museum. It has concentrated on designing exterior part of the building according to colored digital photo of the real museum. Besides viewing the architecture, walkthroughs are generated for the user to control it in an easier way. User can travel through the museum to get the feel of the environment and to explore the design of the museum as a whole; both exterior and interior. The result has shown positive result in terms of realism, navigation, collision detection, suitability, usability and user-s acceptance. In brief, the 3D virtual museum has provided an alternative to present a real museum.

Evaluation of Haar Cascade Classifiers Designed for Face Detection

In the past years a lot of effort has been made in the field of face detection. The human face contains important features that can be used by vision-based automated systems in order to identify and recognize individuals. Face location, the primary step of the vision-based automated systems, finds the face area in the input image. An accurate location of the face is still a challenging task. Viola-Jones framework has been widely used by researchers in order to detect the location of faces and objects in a given image. Face detection classifiers are shared by public communities, such as OpenCV. An evaluation of these classifiers will help researchers to choose the best classifier for their particular need. This work focuses of the evaluation of face detection classifiers minding facial landmarks.

The Use of Recommender Systems in Decision Support–A Case Study on Used Car Dealers

This research focuses on the use of a recommender system in decision support by means of a used car dealer case study in Bangkok Metropolitan. The goal is to develop an effective used car purchasing system for dealers based on the above premise. The underlying principle rests on content-based recommendation from a set of usability surveys. A prototype was developed to conduct buyers- survey selected from 5 experts and 95 general public. The responses were analyzed to determine the mean and standard deviation of buyers- preference. The results revealed that both groups were in favor of using the proposed system to assist their buying decision. This indicates that the proposed system is meritorious to used car dealers.

Media and Information Literacy (MIL) for Thai Youths

The objectives of this study are to determine the role of media that influence the values, attitudes and behaviors of Thai youths. Analytical qualitative research techniques were used for this purpose. Data collection based techniques was used which were individual interviews and focus group discussions with journalists, sample of high school and university students, and parents. The results show that “Social Media" is still the most popular media for Thai youths. It is also still in the hands of the marketing business and it can motivate Thai youths to do so many things. The main reasons of media exposure are to find quality information that they want quickly, get satisfaction and can use social media to get more exciting and to build communities. They believe that the need for media and information literacy skills is defined as making judgments, personal integrity, training of family and the behavior of close friends.

Defining Programming Problems as Learning Objects

Standards for learning objects focus primarily on content presentation. They were already extended to support automatic evaluation but it is limited to exercises with a predefined set of answers. The existing standards lack the metadata required by specialized evaluators to handle types of exercises with an indefinite set of solutions. To address this issue existing learning object standards were extended to the particular requirements of a specialized domain. A definition of programming problems as learning objects, compatible both with Learning Management Systems and with systems performing automatic evaluation of programs, is presented in this paper. The proposed definition includes metadata that cannot be conveniently represented using existing standards, such as: the type of automatic evaluation; the requirements of the evaluation engine; and the roles of different assets - tests cases, program solutions, etc. The EduJudge project and its main services are also presented as a case study on the use of the proposed definition of programming problems as learning objects.

Mathematical Rescheduling Models for Railway Services

This paper presents the review of past studies concerning mathematical models for rescheduling passenger railway services, as part of delay management in the occurrence of railway disruption. Many past mathematical models highlighted were aimed at minimizing the service delays experienced by passengers during service disruptions. Integer programming (IP) and mixed-integer programming (MIP) models are critically discussed, focusing on the model approach, decision variables, sets and parameters. Some of them have been tested on real-life data of railway companies worldwide, while a few have been validated on fictive data. Based on selected literatures on train rescheduling, this paper is able to assist researchers in the model formulation by providing comprehensive analyses towards the model building. These analyses would be able to help in the development of new approaches in rescheduling strategies or perhaps to enhance the existing rescheduling models and make them more powerful or more applicable with shorter computing time.

Wedding in Thailand: Traditional and Business

This study is purely qualitative. The objectives of this study can be identified as two main factors: traditionally explanation and economically studying. The study of weddings, both in traditional beauty and the aggressively strong competitive in the wedding business market has limited population of the study only Thailand internal wedding consumers. Focus group with the new marriage couple and in-depth interview with fully experiences wedding businessman were used. Traditionally, Thai weddings are very various; therefore, the recent patterns were briefly concluded to be processes of traditional Thai wedding will be revealed and explained then give more details in the formal procedures.  Economically, weddings business are related to many types of businesses from catering business, hospitality and tourism business, pre-wedding photography, and the complete full-serviced wedding organizer for examples. The situations, changes and obstacles of the wedding related business will be discussed.

M2LGP: Mining Multiple Level Gradual Patterns

Gradual patterns have been studied for many years as they contain precious information. They have been integrated in many expert systems and rule-based systems, for instance to reason on knowledge such as “the greater the number of turns, the greater the number of car crashes”. In many cases, this knowledge has been considered as a rule “the greater the number of turns → the greater the number of car crashes” Historically, works have thus been focused on the representation of such rules, studying how implication could be defined, especially fuzzy implication. These rules were defined by experts who were in charge to describe the systems they were working on in order to turn them to operate automatically. More recently, approaches have been proposed in order to mine databases for automatically discovering such knowledge. Several approaches have been studied, the main scientific topics being: how to determine what is an relevant gradual pattern, and how to discover them as efficiently as possible (in terms of both memory and CPU usage). However, in some cases, end-users are not interested in raw level knowledge, and are rather interested in trends. Moreover, it may be the case that no relevant pattern can be discovered at a low level of granularity (e.g. city), whereas some can be discovered at a higher level (e.g. county). In this paper, we thus extend gradual pattern approaches in order to consider multiple level gradual patterns. For this purpose, we consider two aggregation policies, namely horizontal and vertical.

Analytical Study of Sedimentation Formation in Lined Canals using the SHARC Software- A Case Study of the Sabilli Canal in Dezful, Iran

Sediment formation and its transport along the river course is considered as important hydraulic consideration in river engineering. Their impact on the morphology of rivers on one hand and important considerations of which in the design and construction of the hydraulic structures on the other has attracted the attention of experts in arid and semi-arid regions. Under certain conditions where the momentum energy of the flow stream reaches a specific rate, the sediment materials start to be transported with the flow. This can usually be analyzed in two different categories of suspended and bed load materials. Sedimentation phenomenon along the waterways and the conveyance of vast volume of materials into the canal networks can potentially influence water abstraction in the intake structures. This can pose a serious threat to operational sustainability and water delivery performance in the canal networks. The situation is serious where ineffective watershed management (poor vegetation cover in the water basin) is the underlying cause of soil erosion which feeds the materials into the waterways that intern would necessitate comprehensive study. The present paper aims to present an analytical investigation of the sediment process in the waterways on one hand and estimation of the sediment load transport into the lined canals using the SHARC software on the other. For this reason, the paper focuses on the comparative analysis of the hydraulic behaviors of the Sabilli main canal that feeds the pumping station with that of the Western canal in the Greater Dezful region to identify effective factors in sedimentation and ways of mitigating their impact on water abstraction in the canal systems. The method involved use of observational data available in the Dezful Dastmashoon hydrometric station along a 6 km waterway of the Sabilli main canal using the SHARC software to estimate the suspended load concentration and bed load materials. Results showed the transport of a significant volume of sediment loads from the waterways into the canal system which is assumed to have arisen from the absence of stilling basin on one hand and the gravity flow on the other has caused serious challenges. This is contrary to what occurs in the Sabilli canal, where the design feature which incorporates a settling basin just before the pumping station is the major cause of reduced sediment load transport into the canal system.Results showed that modification of the present design features by constructing a settling basin just upstream of the western intake structure can considerably reduce the entry of sediment materials into the canal system. Not only this can result in the sustainability of the hydraulic structures but can also improve operational performance of water conveyance and distribution system, all of which are the pre-requisite to secure reliable and equitable water delivery regime for the command area.

Performance Determinants for Convenience Store Suppliers

This paper examines the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) usage, internal relationship, supplier-retailer relationship, logistics services and inventory management on convenience store suppliers- performance. Data was collected from 275 convenience store managers in Malaysia using a set of questionnaire. The multiple linear regression results indicate that inventory management, supplier-retailer relationship, logistics services and internal relationship are predictors of supplier performance as perceived by convenience store managers. However, ICT usage is not a predictor of supplier performance. The study focuses only on convenience stores and petrol station convenience stores and concentrates only on managers. The results provide insights to suppliers who serve convenience stores and possibly similar retail format on factors to consider in improving their service to retailers. The results also provide insights to government in its aspiration to improve business operations of convenience store to consider ways to enhance the adoption of ICT by retailers and suppliers.

Socio-Spatial Resilience Strategic Planning Through Understanding Strategic Perspectives on Tehran and Bath

Planning community has been long discussing emerging paradigms within the planning theory in the face of the changing conditions of the world order. The paradigm shift concept was introduced by Thomas Kuhn, in 1960, who claimed the necessity of shifting within scientific knowledge boundaries; and following him in 1970 Imre Loktas also gave priority to the emergence of multi-paradigm societies [24]. Multi-paradigm is changing our predetermined lifeworld through uncertainties. Those uncertainties are reflected in two sides, the first one is uncertainty as a concept of possibility and creativity in public sphere and the second one is uncertainty as a risk. Therefore, it is necessary to apply a resilience planning approach to be more dynamic in controlling uncertainties which have the potential to transfigure present time and space definitions. In this way, stability of system can be achieved. Uncertainty is not only an outcome of worldwide changes but also a place-specific issue, i.e. it changes from continent to continent, a country to country; a region to region. Therefore, applying strategic spatial planning with respect to resilience principle contributes to: control, grasp and internalize uncertainties through place-specific strategies. In today-s fast changing world, planning system should follow strategic spatial projects to control multi-paradigm societies with adaptability capacities. Here, we have selected two alternatives to demonstrate; these are; 1.Tehran (Iran) from the Middle East 2.Bath (United Kingdom) from Europe. The study elaborates uncertainties and particularities in their strategic spatial planning processes in a comparative manner. Through the comparison, the study aims at assessing place-specific priorities in strategic planning. The approach is to a two-way stream, where the case cities from the extreme end of the spectrum can learn from each other. The structure of this paper is to firstly compare semi-periphery (Tehran) and coreperiphery (Bath) cities, with the focus to reveal how they equip to face with uncertainties according to their geographical locations and local particularities. Secondly, the key message to address is “Each locality requires its own strategic planning approach to be resilient.--

Large-Deflection Analysis of Automotive Vehicle's Door Wiring Harness System Using Finite Element Method

A Vehicle-s door wireing harness arrangement structure is provided. In vehicle-s door wiring harness(W/H) system is more toward to arrange a passenger compartment than a hinge and a weatherstrip. This article gives some insight into the dimensioning process, with special focus on large deflection analysis of wiring harness(W/H) in vehicle-s door structures for durability problem. An Finite elements analysis for door wiring harness(W/H) are used for residual stresses and dimensional stability with bending flexible. Durability test data for slim test specimens were compared with the numerical predicted fatigue life for verification. The final lifing of the component combines the effects of these microstructural features with the complex stress state arising from the combined service loading and residual stresses.

State Dependent Riccati Equation Based Roll Autopilot for 122mm Artillery Rocket

State-dependent Riccati equation based controllers are becoming increasingly popular because of having attractive properties like optimality, stability and robustness. This paper focuses on the design of a roll autopilot for a fin stabilized and canard controlled 122mm artillery rocket using state-dependent Riccati equation technique. Initial spin is imparted to rocket during launch and it quickly decays due to straight tail fins. After the spin phase, the roll orientation of rocket is brought to zero with the canard deflection commands generated by the roll autopilot. Roll autopilot has been developed by considering uncoupled roll, pitch and yaw channels. The canard actuator is modeled as a second-order nonlinear system. Elements of the state weighing matrix for Riccati equation have been chosen to be state dependent to exploit the design flexibility offered by the Riccati equation technique. Simulation results under varying conditions of flight demonstrate the wide operating range of the proposed autopilot.

Toward a Model for Knowledge Development in Virtual Environments: Strategies for Student Ownership

This article discusses the concept of student ownership of knowledge and seeks to determine how to move students from knowledge acquisition to knowledge application and ultimately to knowledge generation in a virtual setting. Instructional strategies for fostering student engagement in a virtual environment are critical to the learner-s strategic ownership of the knowledge. A number of relevant theories that focus on learning, affect, needs and adult concerns are presented to provide a basis for exploring the transfer of knowledge from teacher to learner. A model under development is presented that combines the dimensions of knowledge approach, the teacher-student relationship with regards to knowledge authority and teaching approach to demonstrate the recursive and scaffolded design for creation of virtual learning environments.