Abstract: The Kowsar dam supply water for different usages
such as drinking, industrial, agricultural and aquaculture farms
usages and located next to the city of Dehdashat in Kohgiluye and
Boyerahmad province in southern Iran. There are some towns and
villages on the Kowsar dam watersheds, which Dehdasht and Choram
are the most important and populated cities in this area. The study
was undertaken to assess the status of water quality in the urban areas
of the Kowsar dam. A total of 28 water samples were collected from
6 stations on surface water and 1 station from groundwater on the
watershed of the Kowsar dam. All the samples were analyzed for Ni
concentration using standard procedures. The results were compared
with other national and international standards. Among the analyzed
samples, as the maximum value of Nickel (0.01 mg/L) was observed
on the station 2 at the autumn 2010, all the samples analyzed were
within the maximum admissible limits by the United States
Environmental Protection Agency, EU, WHO and the Iranian. In
general results of the present study have shown that a Ni mean value
of station No. 2 with 0.006 mg/L is higher than the other stations. Ni
level of all samples and stations have had normal values and this is an
indication of pollution potential and hazards because of human
activity and waste water of towns in the areas, which can effect on
human health implications in future. This research, therefore,
recommends the government and other responsible authorities to take
suitable improving measures in the Kowsar dam watersheds.
Abstract: In the normal operation conditions of a pico satellite,
conventional Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) gives sufficiently good
estimation results. However, if the measurements are not reliable
because of any kind of malfunction in the estimation system, UKF
gives inaccurate results and diverges by time. This study, introduces
Robust Unscented Kalman Filter (RUKF) algorithms with the filter
gain correction for the case of measurement malfunctions. By the use
of defined variables named as measurement noise scale factor, the
faulty measurements are taken into the consideration with a small
weight and the estimations are corrected without affecting the
characteristic of the accurate ones. Two different RUKF algorithms,
one with single scale factor and one with multiple scale factors, are
proposed and applied for the attitude estimation process of a pico
satellite. The results of these algorithms are compared for different
types of measurement faults in different estimation scenarios and
recommendations about their applications are given.
Abstract: The present paper discusses the selection of process
parameters for obtaining optimal nanocrystallites size in the CuOZrO2
catalyst. There are some parameters changing the inorganic
structure which have an influence on the role of hydrolysis and
condensation reaction. A statistical design test method is
implemented in order to optimize the experimental conditions of
CuO-ZrO2 nanoparticles preparation. This method is applied for the
experiments and L16 orthogonal array standard. The crystallites size
is considered as an index. This index will be used for the analysis in
the condition where the parameters vary. The effect of pH, H2O/
precursor molar ratio (R), time and temperature of calcination,
chelating agent and alcohol volume are particularity investigated
among all other parameters. In accordance with the results of
Taguchi, it is found that temperature has the greatest impact on the
particle size. The pH and H2O/ precursor molar ratio have low
influences as compared with temperature. The alcohol volume as
well as the time has almost no effect as compared with all other
parameters. Temperature also has an influence on the morphology
and amorphous structure of zirconia. The optimal conditions are
determined by using Taguchi method. The nanocatalyst is studied by
DTA-TG, XRD, EDS, SEM and TEM. The results of this research
indicate that it is possible to vary the structure, morphology and
properties of the sol-gel by controlling the above-mentioned
parameters.
Abstract: Self-organizing map (SOM) is a well known data
reduction technique used in data mining. It can reveal structure in
data sets through data visualization that is otherwise hard to detect
from raw data alone. However, interpretation through visual
inspection is prone to errors and can be very tedious. There are
several techniques for the automatic detection of clusters of code
vectors found by SOM, but they generally do not take into account
the distribution of code vectors; this may lead to unsatisfactory
clustering and poor definition of cluster boundaries, particularly
where the density of data points is low. In this paper, we propose the
use of an adaptive heuristic particle swarm optimization (PSO)
algorithm for finding cluster boundaries directly from the code
vectors obtained from SOM. The application of our method to
several standard data sets demonstrates its feasibility. PSO algorithm
utilizes a so-called U-matrix of SOM to determine cluster boundaries;
the results of this novel automatic method compare very favorably to
boundary detection through traditional algorithms namely k-means
and hierarchical based approach which are normally used to interpret
the output of SOM.
Abstract: In this paper, the bond strength of thermal spray
coatings in high speed shafts has been studied. The metallurgical and
mechanical studies has been made on the coated samples and shaft
using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM).
Abstract: Recently, it is found that telegraph equation is more suitable than ordinary diffusion equation in modelling reaction diffusion for such branches of sciences. In this paper, a numerical solution for the one-dimensional hyperbolic telegraph equation by using the collocation method using the septic splines is proposed. The scheme works in a similar fashion as finite difference methods. Test problems are used to validate our scheme by calculate L2-norm and L∞-norm. The accuracy of the presented method is demonstrated by two test problems. The numerical results are found to be in good agreement with the exact solutions.
Abstract: Very few studies have examined performance
implications of strategic alliance announcements in the information
technologies industry from a resource-based view. Furthermore, none
of these studies have investigated resource congruence and alliance
motive as potential sources of abnormal firm performance. This paper
extends upon current resource-based literature to discover and explore
linkages between these concepts and the practical performance of
strategic alliances. This study finds that strategic alliance
announcements have provided overall abnormal positive returns, and
that marketing alliances with marketing resource incongruence have
also contributed to significant firm performance.
Abstract: In this paper, the telegraph equation is solved numerically by cubic B-spline quasi-interpolation .We obtain the numerical scheme, by using the derivative of the quasi-interpolation to approximate the spatial derivative of the dependent variable and a low order forward difference to approximate the temporal derivative of the dependent variable. The advantage of the resulting scheme is that the algorithm is very simple so it is very easy to implement. The results of numerical experiments are presented, and are compared with analytical solutions by calculating errors L2 and L∞ norms to confirm the good accuracy of the presented scheme.
Abstract: Buildings are considered as significant part in the
cities, which plays main role in organization and arrangement of city
appearance, which is affects image of that building facades, as an
connective between inner and outer space, have a main role in city
image and they are classified as rich image and poor image by people
evaluation which related to visual architectural and urban elements in
building facades. the buildings in Karimi street , in Lahijan city
where, lies in north of Iran, contain the variety of building's facade
types which, have made a city image in Historical part of Lahijan
city, while reflected the Iranian cities identity. The study attempt to
identify the architectural and urban elements that impression the
image of building facades in historical area, based on public
evaluation. Quantitative method were used and the data was collected
through questionnaire survey, the result presented architectural style,
color, shape, and design evaluated by people as most important factor
which should be understate in future development. in fact, the rich
architectural style with strong design make strong city image as weak
design make poor city image.
Abstract: The notion of S-fuzzy left h-ideals in a hemiring is introduced and it's basic properties are investigated.We also study the homomorphic image and preimage of S-fuzzy left h-ideal of hemirings.Using a collection of left h-ideals of a hemiring, S-fuzzy left h-ideal of hemirings are established.The notion of a finite-valued S-fuzzy left h-ideal is introduced,and its characterization is given.S-fuzzy relations on hemirings are discussed.The notion of direct product and S-product are introduced and some properties of the direct product and S-product of S-fuzzy left h-ideal of hemiring are also discussed.
Abstract: In most of the popular implementation of Parallel GAs
the whole population is divided into a set of subpopulations, each
subpopulation executes GA independently and some individuals are
migrated at fixed intervals on a ring topology. In these studies,
the migrations usually occur 'synchronously' among subpopulations.
Therefore, CPUs are not used efficiently and the communication
do not occur efficiently either. A few studies tried asynchronous
migration but it is hard to implement and setting proper parameter
values is difficult.
The aim of our research is to develop a migration method which is
easy to implement, which is easy to set parameter values, and which
reduces communication traffic. In this paper, we propose a traffic
reduction method for the Asynchronous Parallel Distributed GA by
migration of elites only. This is a Server-Client model. Every client
executes GA on a subpopulation and sends an elite information to the
server. The server manages the elite information of each client and
the migrations occur according to the evolution of sub-population in
a client. This facilitates the reduction in communication traffic.
To evaluate our proposed model, we apply it to many function optimization
problems. We confirm that our proposed method performs
as well as current methods, the communication traffic is less, and
setting of the parameters are much easier.
Abstract: Many people regard food events as part of gastronomic tourism and important in enhancing visitors’ experiences. Realizing the importance and contribution of food events to a country’s economy, the Malaysia government is undertaking greater efforts to promote such tourism activities to international tourists. Among other food events, the Ramadan bazaar is a unique food culture event, which receives significant attention from the Malaysia Ministry of Tourism. This study reports the empirical investigation into the international tourists’ perceptions, attraction towards the Ramadan bazaar and willingness in disseminating the information. Using the Ramadan bazaar at Kampung Baru, Kuala Lumpur as the data collection setting, results revealed that the Ramadan bazaar attributes (food and beverages, events and culture) significantly influenced the international tourist attraction to such a bazaar. Their high level of experience and satisfaction positively influenced their willingness to disseminate information. The positive response among the international tourists indicates that the Ramadan bazaar as gastronomic tourism can be used in addition to other tourism products as a catalyst to generate and boost the local economy. The related authorities that are closely associated with the tourism industry therefore should not ignore this indicator but continue to take proactive action in promoting the gastronomic event as one of the major tourist attractions.
Abstract: Efficient handoff algorithms are a cost-effective way
of enhancing the capacity and QoS of cellular system. The higher
value of hysteresis effectively prevents unnecessary handoffs but
causes undesired cell dragging. This undesired cell dragging causes
interference or could lead to dropped calls in microcellular
environment. The problems are further exacerbated by the corner
effect phenomenon which causes the signal level to drop by 20-30 dB
in 10-20 meters. Thus, in order to maintain reliable communication
in a microcellular system new and better handoff algorithms must be
developed. A fuzzy based handoff algorithm is proposed in this paper
as a solution to this problem. Handoff on the basis of ratio of slopes
of normal signal loss to the actual signal loss is presented. The fuzzy
based solution is supported by comparing its results with the results
obtained in analytical solution.
Abstract: In this paper, the test purpose will be to assess
whether or not the accelerated model proposed by Eyring will be able
to translate results for the shape and scale parameters of an
underlying Weibull model, obtained under two accelerating using
conditions, to expected normal using condition results for these
parameters. The product being analyzed is a new type of insulate
fluid, and the accelerating factor is the voltage stresses applied to the
fluid at two different levels (30KV and 40KV). The normal operating
voltage is 25KV. In this case, it was possible to test the insulate fluid
at normal voltage using condition. Both results for the two
parameters of the Weibull model, obtained under normal using
condition and translated from accelerated using conditions to normal
conditions, will be compared to each other to assess the accuracy of
the Eyring model when the accelerating factor is only the voltage
stress.
Abstract: It is hard to percept the interaction process with machines when visual information is not available. In this paper, we have addressed this issue to provide interaction through visual techniques. Posture recognition is done for American Sign Language to recognize static alphabets and numbers. 3D information is exploited to obtain segmentation of hands and face using normal Gaussian distribution and depth information. Features for posture recognition are computed using statistical and geometrical properties which are translation, rotation and scale invariant. Hu-Moment as statistical features and; circularity and rectangularity as geometrical features are incorporated to build the feature vectors. These feature vectors are used to train SVM for classification that recognizes static alphabets and numbers. For the alphabets, curvature analysis is carried out to reduce the misclassifications. The experimental results show that proposed system recognizes posture symbols by achieving recognition rate of 98.65% and 98.6% for ASL alphabets and numbers respectively.
Abstract: This paper proposes an analytical method for the
dynamics of generating firms- alliance networks along with business
phases. Dynamics in network developments have previously been
discussed in the research areas of organizational strategy rather than in
the areas of regional cluster, where the static properties of the
networks are often discussed. The analytical method introduces the
concept of business phases into innovation processes and uses
relationships called prior experiences; this idea was developed in
organizational strategy to investigate the state of networks from the
viewpoints of tradeoffs between link stabilization and node
exploration. This paper also discusses the results of the analytical
method using five cases of the network developments of firms. The
idea of Embeddedness helps interpret the backgrounds of the
analytical results. The analytical method is useful for policymakers of
regional clusters to establish concrete evaluation targets and a
viewpoint for comparisons of policy programs.
Abstract: The purpose of this research is to compare the original
intra-oral digital dental radiograph images with images that are
enhanced using a combination of image processing algorithms. Intraoral
digital dental radiograph images are often noisy, blur edges and
low in contrast. A combination of sharpening and enhancement
method are used to overcome these problems. Three types of
proposed compound algorithms used are Sharp Adaptive Histogram
Equalization (SAHE), Sharp Median Adaptive Histogram
Equalization (SMAHE) and Sharp Contrast adaptive histogram
equalization (SCLAHE). This paper presents an initial study of the
perception of six dentists on the details of abnormal pathologies and
improvement of image quality in ten intra-oral radiographs. The
research focus on the detection of only three types of pathology
which is periapical radiolucency, widen periodontal ligament space
and loss of lamina dura. The overall result shows that SCLAHE-s
slightly improve the appearance of dental abnormalities- over the
original image and also outperform the other two proposed
compound algorithms.
Abstract: Oral health is particular important to the hospitalized
patients with chronic schizophrenia for an extreme high potential of the respiratory infections. Due to the degeneration of physical capability, patients of this kind typically fall dependent in the activity of daily living (ADL). A very high percentage of patients had dental
problems of which mostly could be easily avoid by easy regular tooth brushing. Purpose of the project is to develop a mechanism in helping the schizophrenia patients in rebuilding a tooth-cleaning habit. The
project observed and evaluated the tooth-cleaning behavior of 100
male patients in a psychiatric hospital, and found the majority of them
ignored such an activity in a three-month period of time. In the meantime, the primary care-givers were not aware or not convinced
the importance of such a need of dental hygiene, and thus few if any
tooth cleaning training or knowledge on dental hygiene were given to
the patients. The project then developed a program based on the numerous observations and discussions. The improvement program
included patients- group education, care-givers- training, and a
tool-kit for tooth-brush holding was erected. The project launched
with some incentive package. The outcomes were encouraging with
87% of the patients had rebuilt their tooth-brushing habits against
previous 22%, and the tooth cleaning kits were 100% kept against 22%
in the past. This project had significantly improved the oral health of
the patients. The project, included the procedure and the tool-kit
holder specific for this purpose, was a good examples for psychiatric
hospitals.
Abstract: Environment today is featured with aging population,
increasing prevalence of chronic disease and complex of medical
treatment. Safe use of pharmaceutics relied very much on the efforts
made by both the health- related organizations and as well as the
government agencies. As far as the specialization concern in providing
health services to the patients, the government actively issued and
implemented the divisions of medical treatment and pharmaceutical to
improve the quality of care and to reduce medication errors and ensure
public health. Pharmaceutical sub-sector policy has been implemented
for 13 years. This study attempts to explore the factors that affect the
patients- behavior intention of refilling a prescription from a NHIB
pharmacy. Samples were those patients refilling their prescriptions
with the case NHIB pharmacies. A self-administered questionnaire
was used to collect respondents- information while the patients or
family members visit the pharmacy for the refilling. 1,200
questionnaires were dispatched in 37 pharmacies that randomly
selected from Pingtung City, Dongkang, Chaozhou, Hengchun areas.
732 responses were gained with 604 valid samples for further analyses.
Results of data analyses indicated that respondents- attitude,
subjective norm, perceived behavior control and behavior intentions
toward refilling behavior varied from some demographic variables to
another. This research also suggested adding actual behavior, either by
a self-report or observed, into the research.
Abstract: In this paper, the two-dimensional stagger grid
interface pressure (SGIP) model has been generalized and presented
into three-dimensional form. For this purpose, various models of
surface tension force for interfacial flows have been investigated and
compared with each other. The VOF method has been used for
tracking the interface. To show the ability of the SGIP model for
three-dimensional flows in comparison with other models, pressure
contours, maximum spurious velocities, norm spurious flow
velocities and pressure jump error for motionless drop of liquid and
bubble of gas are calculated using different models. It has been
pointed out that SGIP model in comparison with the CSF, CSS and
PCIL models produces the least maximum and norm spurious
velocities. Additionally, the new model produces more accurate
results in calculating the pressure jumps across the interface for
motionless drop of liquid and bubble of gas which is generated in
surface tension force.