Abstract: The goal of this paper is to segment the countries
based on the value of export from Iran during 14 years ending at 2005. To measure the dissimilarity among export baskets of different countries, we define Dissimilarity Export Basket (DEB) function and
use this distance function in K-means algorithm. The DEB function
is defined based on the concepts of the association rules and the
value of export group-commodities. In this paper, clustering quality
function and clusters intraclass inertia are defined to, respectively,
calculate the optimum number of clusters and to compare the
functionality of DEB versus Euclidean distance. We have also study
the effects of importance weight in DEB function to improve
clustering quality. Lastly when segmentation is completed, a
designated RFM model is used to analyze the relative profitability of
each cluster.
Abstract: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) viewpoint have challenged the traditional perception to understand corporations position. Production- and managerial-centred views are expanding towards reference group-centred policies. Consequently, the significance of new kind of knowledge has emerged. In addition to management of the organisation, the idea of CSR emphasises the importance to recognise the value-expectations of operational environment. It is know that management is often well-aware of corporate social responsibilities, but it is less clear how well these high level goals are understood in practical product design and development work. In this study, the apprehension above proved to be real to some degree. While management was very aware of CSR it was less familiar to designers. The outcome shows that it is essential to raise ethical values and issues higher in corporate communication, if it is wished that they materialize also in products.
Abstract: Location selection is one of the most important
decision making process which requires to consider several criteria
based on the mission and the strategy. This study-s object is to
provide a decision support model in order to help the bank selecting
the most appropriate location for a bank-s branch considering a case
study in Turkey. The object of the bank is to select the most
appropriate city for opening a branch among six alternatives in the
South-Eastern of Turkey. The model in this study was consisted of
five main criteria which are Demographic, Socio-Economic, Sectoral
Employment, Banking and Trade Potential and twenty one subcriteria
which represent the bank-s mission and strategy. Because of
the multi-criteria structure of the problem and the fuzziness in the
comparisons of the criteria, fuzzy AHP is used and for the ranking of
the alternatives, TOPSIS method is used.
Abstract: Transport and logistics are the lifeblood of societies.
There is a strong correlation between overall growth in economic
activity and growth of transport. The movement of people and goods
has the potential for creating wealth and prosperity, therefore the
state of transportation infrastructure and especially the condition of
road networks is often a governmental priority. The design, building
and maintenance of national roads constitute a substantial share of
government budgets. Taking into account the magnitude and
importance of these investments, the expedience, efficiency and
sustainability of these projects are of great public interest. This paper
provides an overview of supply chain management principles applied
to road construction. In addition, road construction performance
measurement systems and ICT solutions are discussed. Road
construction in Estonia is analyzed. The authors propose the
development of a national performance measurement system for road
construction.
Abstract: A two dimensional numerical simulation has been
performed for incompressible and compressible fluid flow through
microchannels in slip flow regime. The Navier-Stokes equations have
been solved in conjunction with Maxwell slip conditions for
modeling flow field associated with slip flow regime. The wall
roughness is simulated with triangular microelements distributed on
wall surfaces to study the effects of roughness on fluid flow. Various
Mach and Knudsen numbers are used to investigate the effects of
rarefaction as well as compressibility. It is found that rarefaction has
more significant effect on flow field in microchannels with higher
relative roughness. It is also found that compressibility has more
significant effects on Poiseuille number when relative roughness
increases. In addition, similar to incompressible models the increase
in average fRe is more significant at low Knudsen number flows but
the increase of Poiseuille number duo to relative roughness is sharper
for compressible models. The numerical results have also validated
with some available theoretical and experimental relations and good
agreements have been seen.
Abstract: This study examines the effect of Islamic Corporate
Social Responsibility disclosure and on corporate reputation as well
as performance. These relationships are examined based on content
analysis of of annual reports of 17 Islamic banks in Malaysia for
2008, 2009 and 2010. Results of this study provide evidence that
CSR activities communicated in corporate annual reports are
significantly positively related with corporate reputation as well as
firm performance. These results indicate that CSR activities and
disclosure from Islamic perspectives are equally important business
strategies in creating continuous superior performance for
organisations. In addition, it also highlights that organisations need to
develop a stakeholder orientation particularly in an environment of
increasing pressure from jurisdictions dominated by Islamic
stakeholders on organisations engaging in Islamic products to
increase their social responsibilities from the Islamic perspectives.
Abstract: Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) is considered the most complex combining technique as it requires channel coefficients estimation. It results in the lowest bit error rate (BER) compared to all other combining techniques. However the BER starts to deteriorate as errors are introduced in the channel coefficients estimation. A novel combining technique, termed Generalized Maximal Ratio Combining (GMRC) with a polynomial kernel, yields an identical BER as MRC with perfect channel estimation and a lower BER in the presence of channel estimation errors. We show that GMRC outperforms the optimal MRC scheme in general and we hereinafter introduce it to the scientific community as a new “supraoptimal" algorithm. Since diversity combining is especially effective in small femto- and pico-cells, internet-associated wireless peripheral systems are to benefit most from GMRC. As a result, many spinoff applications can be made to IP-based 4th generation networks.
Abstract: This paper presents the design, fabrication and
evaluation of magneto-rheological damper. Semi-active control
devices have received significant attention in recent years because
they offer the adaptability of active control devices without requiring
the associated large power sources. Magneto-Rheological (MR)
dampers are semi- active control devices that use MR fluids to
produce controllable dampers. They potentially offer highly reliable
operation and can be viewed as fail-safe in that they become passive
dampers if the control hardware malfunction. The advantage of MR
dampers over conventional dampers are that they are simple in
construction, compromise between high frequency isolation and
natural frequency isolation, they offer semi-active control, use very
little power, have very quick response, has few moving parts, have a
relax tolerances and direct interfacing with electronics. Magneto-
Rheological (MR) fluids are Controllable fluids belonging to the
class of active materials that have the unique ability to change
dynamic yield stress when acted upon by an electric or magnetic
field, while maintaining viscosity relatively constant. This property
can be utilized in MR damper where the damping force is changed by
changing the rheological properties of the fluid magnetically. MR
fluids have a dynamic yield stress over Electro-Rheological fluids
(ER) and a broader operational temperature range. The objective of
this papert was to study the application of an MR damper to vibration
control, design the vibration damper using MR fluids, test and
evaluate its performance. In this paper the Rheology and the theory
behind MR fluids and their use on vibration control were studied.
Then a MR vibration damper suitable for vehicle suspension was
designed and fabricated using the MR fluid. The MR damper was
tested using a dynamic test rig and the results were obtained in the
form of force vs velocity and the force vs displacement plots. The
results were encouraging and greatly inspire further research on the
topic.
Abstract: Universities have an important role in social education in many aspects. In terms of creating awareness and convincing public about social issues, universities take a leading position for public. The best way to provide public support for social education is to develop public communication campaigns. The aim of this study is to present a public communication model which will be guided in social education practices. The study titled “Importance of public communication campaigns and art activities in Social Education “is based on the following topics: Effects of public communication campaigns on social education, Public relations techniques for education, communication strategies, Steps of public relations campaigns in social education, making persuasive messages for public communication campaigns, developing artistic messages and organizing art activities in social education. In addition to these topics, media planning for social education, forming a team as campaign managers, dialogues with opinion leaders in education and preparing creative communication models for social education will be taken into consideration. This study also aims to criticize social education Case studies in Turkey. At the same time, some communicative methods and principles will be given in the light of communication campaigns within the context of this notice.
Abstract: Nowadays, new home appliances and office appliances
have been developed that communicate with users through the
Internet, for remote monitor and remote control. However, developments
and sales of these new appliances are just started, then,
many products in our houses and offices do not have these useful
functions. In few years, we add these new functions to the outlet,
it means multifunctional electrical power socket plug adapter. The
outlet measure power consumption of connecting appliances, and it
can switch power supply to connecting appliances, too. Using this
outlet, power supply of old appliances can be control and monitor.
And we developed the interface system using web browser to operate
it from users[1]. But, this system need to set up LAN cables between
outlets and so on. It is not convenience that cables around rooms. In
this paper, we develop the system that use wireless mobile ad hoc
network instead of wired LAN to communicate with the outlets.
Abstract: COPD is characterized by loss of elastic fibers from
small airways and alveolar walls, with the decrease in elastin
increasing with disease severity. It is unclear why there is a lack of
repair of elastic fibers. We have examined fibroblasts cultured from
lung tissue from normal and COPD subjects to determine if the
secretory profile explains lack of tissue repair. In this study,
fibroblasts were cultured from lung parenchyma of bronchial
carcinoma patients with varying degrees of COPD; controls
(non-COPD, n=5), mild COPD (GOLD 1, n=5) and moderate-severe
COPD (GOLD 2-3, n=12). Measurements were made of proliferation,
senescence-associated beta-galactosidase-1, mRNA expression of
IL-6, IL-8, MMP-1, tropoelastin and versican, and protein levels for
IL-6, IL-8, PGE2, tropoelastin, insoluble elastin, and versican. It was
found that GOLD 2-3 fibroblasts proliferated more slowly (p
Abstract: During recent years, the traditional learning
approaches have undergone fundamental changes due to the
emergence of new technologies such as multimedia, hypermedia and
telecommunication. E-learning is a modern world phenomenon that
has come into existence in the information age and in a knowledgebased
society. E-learning has developed significantly within a short
period of time. Thus it is of a great significant to secure information,
allow a confident access and prevent unauthorized accesses. Making
use of individuals- physiologic or behavioral (biometric) properties is
a confident method to make the information secure. Among the
biometrics, fingerprint is more acceptable and most countries use it as
an efficient methods of identification. This article provides a new
method to compare the fingerprint comparison by pattern recognition
and image processing techniques. To verify fingerprint, the shortest
distance method is used together with perceptronic multilayer neural
network functioning based on minutiae. This method is highly
accurate in the extraction of minutiae and it accelerates comparisons
due to elimination of false minutiae and is more reliable compared
with methods that merely use directional images.
Abstract: Oxidative stress is considered to be the cause for onset
and the progression of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and
complications including neuropathy. It is a deleterious process that
can be an important mediator of damage to cell structures: protein,
lipids and DNA. Data suggest that in patients with diabetes and
diabetic neuropathy DNA repair is impaired, which prevents effective
removal of lesions. Objective: The aim of our study was to evaluate
the association of the hOGG1 (326 Ser/Cys) and XRCC1 (194
Arg/Trp, 399 Arg/Gln) gene polymorphisms whose protein is
involved in the BER pathway with DNA repair efficiency in patients
with diabetes type 2 and diabetic neuropathy compared to the healthy
subjects. Genotypes were determined by PCR-RFLP analysis in 385
subjects, including 117 with type 2 diabetes, 56 with diabetic
neuropathy and 212 with normal glucose metabolism. The
polymorphisms studied include codon 326 of hOGG1 and 194, 399
of XRCC1 in the base excision repair (BER) genes. Comet assay was
carried out using peripheral blood lymphocytes from the patients and
controls. This test enabled the evaluation of DNA damage in cells
exposed to hydrogen peroxide alone and in the combination with the
endonuclease III (Nth). The results of the analysis of polymorphism
were statistically examination by calculating the odds ratio (OR) and
their 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) using the ¤ç2-tests. Our data
indicate that patients with diabetes mellitus type 2 (including those
with neuropathy) had higher frequencies of the XRCC1 399Arg/Gln
polymorphism in homozygote (GG) (OR: 1.85 [95% CI: 1.07-3.22],
P=0.3) and also increased frequency of 399Gln (G) allele (OR: 1.38
[95% CI: 1.03-1.83], P=0.3). No relation to other polymorphisms
with increased risk of diabetes or diabetic neuropathy. In T2DM
patients complicated by neuropathy, there was less efficient repair of
oxidative DNA damage induced by hydrogen peroxide in both the
presence and absence of the Nth enzyme. The results of our study
suggest that the XRCC1 399 Arg/Gln polymorphism is a significant
risk factor of T2DM in Polish population. Obtained data suggest a
decreased efficiency of DNA repair in cells from patients with
diabetes and neuropathy may be associated with oxidative stress.
Additionally, patients with neuropathy are characterized by even
greater sensitivity to oxidative damage than patients with diabetes,
which suggests participation of free radicals in the pathogenesis of
neuropathy.
Abstract: The use of new technologies such internet (e-mail, chat
rooms) and cell phones has steeply increased in recent years.
Especially among children and young people, use of technological
tools and equipments is widespread. Although many teachers and
administrators now recognize the problem of school bullying, few are
aware that students are being harassed through electronic
communication. Referred to as electronic bullying, cyber bullying, or
online social cruelty, this phenomenon includes bullying through email,
instant messaging, in a chat room, on a website, or through
digital messages or images sent to a cell phone. Cyber bullying is
defined as causing deliberate/intentional harm to others using internet
or other digital technologies. It has a quantitative research design nd
uses relational survey as its method. The participants consisted of
300 secondary school students in the city of Konya, Turkey. 195
(64.8%) participants were female and 105 (35.2%) were male. 39
(13%) students were at grade 1, 187 (62.1%) were at grade 2 and 74
(24.6%) were at grade 3. The “Cyber Bullying Question List"
developed by Ar─▒cak (2009) was given to students. Following
questions about demographics, a functional definition of cyber
bullying was provided. In order to specify students- human values,
“Human Values Scale (HVS)" developed by Dilmaç (2007) for
secondary school students was administered. The scale consists of 42
items in six dimensions. Data analysis was conducted by the primary
investigator of the study using SPSS 14.00 statistical analysis
software. Descriptive statistics were calculated for the analysis of
students- cyber bullying behaviour and simple regression analysis was
conducted in order to test whether each value in the scale could
explain cyber bullying behaviour.
Abstract: In this work, the primary compressive strength
components of human femur trabecular bone are qualitatively
assessed using image processing and wavelet analysis. The Primary
Compressive (PC) component in planar radiographic femur trabecular
images (N=50) is delineated by semi-automatic image processing
procedure. Auto threshold binarization algorithm is employed to
recognize the presence of mineralization in the digitized images. The
qualitative parameters such as apparent mineralization and total area
associated with the PC region are derived for normal and abnormal
images.The two-dimensional discrete wavelet transforms are utilized
to obtain appropriate features that quantify texture changes in medical
images .The normal and abnormal samples of the human femur are
comprehensively analyzed using Harr wavelet.The six statistical
parameters such as mean, median, mode, standard deviation, mean
absolute deviation and median absolute deviation are derived at level
4 decomposition for both approximation and horizontal wavelet
coefficients. The correlation coefficient of various wavelet derived
parameters with normal and abnormal for both approximated and
horizontal coefficients are estimated. It is seen that in almost all cases
the abnormal show higher degree of correlation than normals. Further
the parameters derived from approximation coefficient show more
correlation than those derived from the horizontal coefficients. The
parameters mean and median computed at the output of level 4 Harr
wavelet channel was found to be a useful predictor to delineate the
normal and the abnormal groups.
Abstract: Yeast cells live in a constantly changing environment that requires the continuous adaptation of their genomic program in order to sustain their homeostasis, survive and proliferate. Due to the advancement of high throughput technologies, there is currently a large amount of data such as gene expression, gene deletion and protein-protein interactions for S. Cerevisiae under various environmental conditions. Mining these datasets requires efficient computational methods capable of integrating different types of data, identifying inter-relations between different components and inferring functional groups or 'modules' that shape intracellular processes. This study uses computational methods to delineate some of the mechanisms used by yeast cells to respond to environmental changes. The GRAM algorithm is first used to integrate gene expression data and ChIP-chip data in order to find modules of coexpressed and co-regulated genes as well as the transcription factors (TFs) that regulate these modules. Since transcription factors are themselves transcriptionally regulated, a three-layer regulatory cascade consisting of the TF-regulators, the TFs and the regulated modules is subsequently considered. This three-layer cascade is then modeled quantitatively using artificial neural networks (ANNs) where the input layer corresponds to the expression of the up-stream transcription factors (TF-regulators) and the output layer corresponds to the expression of genes within each module. This work shows that (a) the expression of at least 33 genes over time and for different stress conditions is well predicted by the expression of the top layer transcription factors, including cases in which the effect of up-stream regulators is shifted in time and (b) identifies at least 6 novel regulatory interactions that were not previously associated with stress-induced changes in gene expression. These findings suggest that the combination of gene expression and protein-DNA interaction data with artificial neural networks can successfully model biological pathways and capture quantitative dependencies between distant regulators and downstream genes.
Abstract: The 2008 Candlelight Protests of Korea was very
significant to portray the political environment among the South
Korean youth. Many challenges and new advanced technologies have
driven the youth community to be engaged in the political arena that
has shifted them from traditional Korean youth to a very greater
community. Due to historical perspective with the people of North
Korea, the young generation has embraced different view of ethnic
nationalism. This study examines the youth involvement in politics in
line with their level of acceptance the practice of democracy. The
increase usage of new media has shown great results in the survey
results whereby the youth used as a platform to gain political
information and brought higher degree of their sociopolitical interests
among them. Furthermore, the rise of nationalism and patriotism will
be discussed in this paper to the dynamism of the political approaches
used by the Korea government
Abstract: The purpose of present paper was to investigate
perceptions of Korean secondary school students about social issues
related to biological sciences. Twenty issues were selected based on
topics of articles in the newspaper from 2005 to 2010. The issues were
categorized into biotechnology, health-disease and environment
domains. Subjects were 541 high school students (male 253 and
female 288). On the survey, students were asked to answer on 5-point
Lickert scales how they thought of the effect of biological phenomena
or events related to biological issues on the individual life and the
society. They perceived that the biological issues would be more
effectible on the society than on the individual life. Female students
had a little more perceptions than males.
Abstract: This paper gives an overview of the mapping
mechanism of SEAM-a methodology for the automatic generation of
knowledge models and its mapping onto Java codes. It discusses the
rules that will be used to map the different components in the
knowledge model automatically onto Java classes, properties and
methods. The aim of developing this mechanism is to help in the
creation of a prototype which will be used to validate the knowledge
model which has been generated automatically. It will also help to
link the modeling phase with the implementation phase as existing
knowledge engineering methodologies do not provide for proper
guidelines for the transition from the knowledge modeling phase to
development phase. This will decrease the development overheads
associated to the development of Knowledge Based Systems.
Abstract: Since water resources of desert Naein City are very
limited, a approach which saves water resources and meanwhile
meets the needs of the greenspace for water is to use city-s sewage
wastewater. Proper treatment of Naein-s sewage up to the standards
required for green space uses may solve some of the problems of
green space development of the city. The present paper closely
examines available statistics and information associated with city-s
sewage system, and determines complementary stages of sewage
treatment facilities of the city. In the present paper, population, per
capita water use, and required discharge for various greenspace
pieces including different plants are calculated. Moreover, in order to
facilitate the application of water resources, a Crude water
distribution network apart from drinking water distribution network is
designed, and a plan for mixing municipal wells- water with sewage
wastewater in proposed mixing tanks is suggested. Hence, following
greenspace irrigation reform and complementary plan, per capita
greenspace of the city will be increased from current amount of 13.2
square meters to 32 square meters.