Designing a Rescue System for Earthquake-Stricken Area with the Aim of Facilitation and Accelerating Accessibilities (Case Study: City of Tehran)

Natural disasters, including earthquake, kill many people around the world every year. Society rescue actions, which start after the earthquake and are called LAST in abbreviation, include locating, access, stabilization and transportation. In the present article, we have studied the process of local accessibility to the injured and transporting them to health care centers. With regard the heavy traffic load due to earthquake, the destruction of connecting roads and bridges and the heavy debris in alleys and street, which put the lives of the injured and the people buried under the debris in danger, accelerating the rescue actions and facilitating the accessibilities are of great importance, obviously. Tehran, the capital of Iran, is among the crowded cities in the world and is the center of extensive economic, political, cultural and social activities. Tehran has a population of about 9.5 millions and because of the immigration of people from the surrounding cities. Furthermore, considering the fact that Tehran is located on two important and large faults, a 6 Richter magnitude earthquake in this city could lead to the greatest catastrophe during the entire human history. The present study is a kind of review and a major part of the required information for it, has been obtained from libraries all of the rescue vehicles around the world, including rescue helicopters, ambulances, fire fighting vehicles and rescue boats, and their applied technology, and also the robots specifically designed for the rescue system and the advantages and disadvantages of them, have been investigated. The studies show that there is a significant relationship between the rescue team-s arrival time at the incident zone and the number of saved people; so that, if the duration of burial under debris 30 minutes, the probability of survival is %99.3, after a day is %81, after 2days is %19 and after 5days is %7.4. The exiting transport systems all have some defects. If these defects are removed, more people could be saved each hour and the preparedness against natural disasters is increased. In this study, transport system has been designed for the rescue team and the injured; which could carry the rescue team to the incident zone and the injured to the health care centers. In addition, this system is able to fly in the air and move on the earth as well; so that the destruction of roads and the heavy traffic load could not prevent the rescue team from arriving early at the incident zone. The system also has the equipment required firebird for debris removing, optimum transport of the injured and first aid.

Polarization Modulation by free-Standing Asymmetric Hole Arrays

We theoretically demonstrate modulation of light polarization by a crossed rectangular hole array with asymmetric arm lengths. There are two waveguide modes that can modulate the x- and y- polarized incident waves independently. A specific structure is proposed to convert a left-hand incident wave to a right-hand outgoing wave by transmission.

Combined Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithm to Solve Optimization Problems

Combinatorial optimization problems arise in many scientific and practical applications. Therefore many researchers try to find or improve different methods to solve these problems with high quality results and in less time. Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Simulated Annealing (SA) have been used to solve optimization problems. Both GA and SA search a solution space throughout a sequence of iterative states. However, there are also significant differences between them. The GA mechanism is parallel on a set of solutions and exchanges information using the crossover operation. SA works on a single solution at a time. In this work SA and GA are combined using new technique in order to overcome the disadvantages' of both algorithms.

A New Iterative Method for Solving Nonlinear Equations

In this study, a new root-finding method for solving nonlinear equations is proposed. This method requires two starting values that do not necessarily bracketing a root. However, when the starting values are selected to be close to a root, the proposed method converges to the root quicker than the secant method. Another advantage over all iterative methods is that; the proposed method usually converges to two distinct roots when the given function has more than one root, that is, the odd iterations of this new technique converge to a root and the even iterations converge to another root. Some numerical examples, including a sine-polynomial equation, are solved by using the proposed method and compared with results obtained by the secant method; perfect agreements are found.

Recognition of Obstacles and Providing Different Guidelines and Promotion of Electronic Government in Iran

Electronic Government is one of the special concepts which has been performed successfully within recent decades. Electronic government is a digital, wall-free government with a virtual organization for presenting of online governmental services and further cooperation in different political/social activities. In order to have a successful implementation of electronic government strategy and benefiting from its complete potential and benefits and generally for establishment and applying of electronic government, it is necessary to have different infrastructures as the basics of electronic government with lack of which it is impossible to benefit from mentioned services. For this purpose, in this paper we have managed to recognize relevant obstacles for establishment of electronic government in Iran. All required data for recognition of obstacles were collected from statistical society of involved specialists of Ministry of Communications & Information Technology of Iran and Information Technology Organization of Tehran Municipality through questionnaire. Then by considering of five-point Likert scope and μ =3 as the index of relevant factors of proposed model, we could specify current obstacles against electronic government in Iran along with some guidelines and proposal in this regard. According to the results, mentioned obstacles for applying of electronic government in Iran are as follows: Technical & technological problems, Legal, judicial & safety problems, Economic problems and Humanistic Problems.

A Mixture Model of Two Different Distributions Approach to the Analysis of Heterogeneous Survival Data

In this paper we propose a mixture of two different distributions such as Exponential-Gamma, Exponential-Weibull and Gamma-Weibull to model heterogeneous survival data. Various properties of the proposed mixture of two different distributions are discussed. Maximum likelihood estimations of the parameters are obtained by using the EM algorithm. Illustrative example based on real data are also given.

Hybrid Feature and Adaptive Particle Filter for Robust Object Tracking

A hybrid feature based adaptive particle filter algorithm is presented for object tracking in real scenarios with static camera. The hybrid feature is combined by two effective features: the Grayscale Arranging Pairs (GAP) feature and the color histogram feature. The GAP feature has high discriminative ability even under conditions of severe illumination variation and dynamic background elements, while the color histogram feature has high reliability to identify the detected objects. The combination of two features covers the shortage of single feature. Furthermore, we adopt an updating target model so that some external problems such as visual angles can be overcame well. An automatic initialization algorithm is introduced which provides precise initial positions of objects. The experimental results show the good performance of the proposed method.

Exit Strategies from The Global Crisis

While the form of crises may change, their essence remains the same (such as a cycle of abundant liquidity, rapid credit growth, and a low-inflation environment followed by an asset-price bubble). The current market turbulence began in mid-2000s when the US economy shifted to imbalanced both internal and external macroeconomic positions. We see two key causes of these problems – loose US monetary policy in early 2000s and US government guarantees issued on the securities by government-sponsored enterprises what was further fueled by financial innovations such as structured credit products. We have discovered both negative and positive lessons deriving from this crisis and divided the negative lessons into three groups: financial products and valuation, processes and business models, and strategic issues. Moreover, we address key risk management lessons and exit strategies derived from the current crisis and recommend policies that should help diminish the negative impact of future potential crises.

Key Frames Extraction for Sign Language Video Analysis and Recognition

In this paper we proposed a method for finding video frames representing one sign in the finger alphabet. The method is based on determining hands location, segmentation and the use of standard video quality evaluation metrics. Metric calculation is performed only in regions of interest. Sliding mechanism for finding local extrema and adaptive threshold based on local averaging is used for key frames selection. The success rate is evaluated by recall, precision and F1 measure. The method effectiveness is compared with metrics applied to all frames. Proposed method is fast, effective and relatively easy to realize by simple input video preprocessing and subsequent use of tools designed for video quality measuring.

A New Algorithm to Stereo Correspondence Using Rank Transform and Morphology Based On Genetic Algorithm

This paper presents a novel algorithm of stereo correspondence with rank transform. In this algorithm we used the genetic algorithm to achieve the accurate disparity map. Genetic algorithms are efficient search methods based on principles of population genetic, i.e. mating, chromosome crossover, gene mutation, and natural selection. Finally morphology is employed to remove the errors and discontinuities.

SAF: A Substitution and Alignment Free Similarity Measure for Protein Sequences

The literature reports a large number of approaches for measuring the similarity between protein sequences. Most of these approaches estimate this similarity using alignment-based techniques that do not necessarily yield biologically plausible results, for two reasons. First, for the case of non-alignable (i.e., not yet definitively aligned and biologically approved) sequences such as multi-domain, circular permutation and tandem repeat protein sequences, alignment-based approaches do not succeed in producing biologically plausible results. This is due to the nature of the alignment, which is based on the matching of subsequences in equivalent positions, while non-alignable proteins often have similar and conserved domains in non-equivalent positions. Second, the alignment-based approaches lead to similarity measures that depend heavily on the parameters set by the user for the alignment (e.g., gap penalties and substitution matrices). For easily alignable protein sequences, it's possible to supply a suitable combination of input parameters that allows such an approach to yield biologically plausible results. However, for difficult-to-align protein sequences, supplying different combinations of input parameters yields different results. Such variable results create ambiguities and complicate the similarity measurement task. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper describes a novel and effective approach for measuring the similarity between protein sequences, called SAF for Substitution and Alignment Free. Without resorting either to the alignment of protein sequences or to substitution relations between amino acids, SAF is able to efficiently detect the significant subsequences that best represent the intrinsic properties of protein sequences, those underlying the chronological dependencies of structural features and biochemical activities of protein sequences. Moreover, by using a new efficient subsequence matching scheme, SAF more efficiently handles protein sequences that contain similar structural features with significant meaning in chronologically non-equivalent positions. To show the effectiveness of SAF, extensive experiments were performed on protein datasets from different databases, and the results were compared with those obtained by several mainstream algorithms.

Factors Adopting E-Travel Website: The Case of Indonesia

E-travel is travel agency-s companies employing internet and website as e-commerce context. This study presents numerous initial key factors of electronic travel model based on small travel agencies perspectives. Browsing previous studies related to website travel activities are conducted. Five small travel agencies in Indonesia has been deeply interviewed in case studies. The finding of this research is identifying numerous characteristics and dimension factors and travel website operations including ownermanager roles, business experiences, characteristically business, and technological aspects. This study is the preliminary research related to travel website adoption in Indonesia. The further study would be conducted in questionnaires of the quantitative research in Indonesia contexts as a developing country.

A Weighted Sum Technique for the Joint Optimization of Performance and Power Consumption in Data Centers

With data centers, end-users can realize the pervasiveness of services that will be one day the cornerstone of our lives. However, data centers are often classified as computing systems that consume the most amounts of power. To circumvent such a problem, we propose a self-adaptive weighted sum methodology that jointly optimizes the performance and power consumption of any given data center. Compared to traditional methodologies for multi-objective optimization problems, the proposed self-adaptive weighted sum technique does not rely on a systematical change of weights during the optimization procedure. The proposed technique is compared with the greedy and LR heuristics for large-scale problems, and the optimal solution for small-scale problems implemented in LINDO. the experimental results revealed that the proposed selfadaptive weighted sum technique outperforms both of the heuristics and projects a competitive performance compared to the optimal solution.

Optimal Route Policy in Air Traffic Control with Competing Airlines

This work proposes a novel market-based air traffic flow control model considering competitive airlines in air traffic network. In the flow model, an agent based framework for resources (link/time pair) pricing is described. Resource agent and auctioneer for groups of resources are also introduced to simulate the flow management in Air Traffic Control (ATC). Secondly, the distributed group pricing algorithm is introduced, which efficiently reflect the competitive nature of the airline industry. Resources in the system are grouped according to the degree of interaction, and each auctioneer adjust s the price of one group of resources respectively until the excess demand of resources becomes zero when the demand and supply of resources of the system changes. Numerical simulation results show the feasibility of solving the air traffic flow control problem using market mechanism and pricing algorithms on the air traffic network.

Effect of Scene Changing on Image Sequences Compression Using Zero Tree Coding

We study in this paper the effect of the scene changing on image sequences coding system using Embedded Zerotree Wavelet (EZW). The scene changing considered here is the full motion which may occurs. A special image sequence is generated where the scene changing occurs randomly. Two scenarios are considered: In the first scenario, the system must provide the reconstruction quality as best as possible by the management of the bit rate (BR) while the scene changing occurs. In the second scenario, the system must keep the bit rate as constant as possible by the management of the reconstruction quality. The first scenario may be motivated by the availability of a large band pass transmission channel where an increase of the bit rate may be possible to keep the reconstruction quality up to a given threshold. The second scenario may be concerned by the narrow band pass transmission channel where an increase of the bit rate is not possible. In this last case, applications for which the reconstruction quality is not a constraint may be considered. The simulations are performed with five scales wavelet decomposition using the 9/7-tap filter bank biorthogonal wavelet. The entropy coding is performed using a specific defined binary code book and EZW algorithm. Experimental results are presented and compared to LEAD H263 EVAL. It is shown that if the reconstruction quality is the constraint, the system increases the bit rate to obtain the required quality. In the case where the bit rate must be constant, the system is unable to provide the required quality if the scene change occurs; however, the system is able to improve the quality while the scene changing disappears.

Mining Genes Relations in Microarray Data Combined with Ontology in Colon Cancer Automated Diagnosis System

MATCH project [1] entitle the development of an automatic diagnosis system that aims to support treatment of colon cancer diseases by discovering mutations that occurs to tumour suppressor genes (TSGs) and contributes to the development of cancerous tumours. The constitution of the system is based on a) colon cancer clinical data and b) biological information that will be derived by data mining techniques from genomic and proteomic sources The core mining module will consist of the popular, well tested hybrid feature extraction methods, and new combined algorithms, designed especially for the project. Elements of rough sets, evolutionary computing, cluster analysis, self-organization maps and association rules will be used to discover the annotations between genes, and their influence on tumours [2]-[11]. The methods used to process the data have to address their high complexity, potential inconsistency and problems of dealing with the missing values. They must integrate all the useful information necessary to solve the expert's question. For this purpose, the system has to learn from data, or be able to interactively specify by a domain specialist, the part of the knowledge structure it needs to answer a given query. The program should also take into account the importance/rank of the particular parts of data it analyses, and adjusts the used algorithms accordingly.

GODYS-PC: a Software Package for Modeling,Simulating and Analyzing Dynamic Systems

In this paper, we introduce GODYS-PC software package for modeling, simulating and analyzing dynamic systems. To illustrate the use of GODYS-PC we present a few examples which concern modeling and simulating of engineering systems. In order to compare GODYS-PC with widely used in academia and industry Simulink®, the same examples are provided both in GODYS-PC and Simulink®.

Convection through Light Weight Timber Constructions with Mineral Wool

The major part of light weight timber constructions consists of insulation. Mineral wool is the most commonly used insulation due to its cost efficiency and easy handling. The fiber orientation and porosity of this insulation material enables flowthrough. The air flow resistance is low. If leakage occurs in the insulated bay section, the convective flow may cause energy losses and infiltration of the exterior wall with moisture and particles. In particular the infiltrated moisture may lead to thermal bridges and growth of health endangering mould and mildew. In order to prevent this problem, different numerical calculation models have been developed. All models developed so far have a potential for completion. The implementation of the flow-through properties of mineral wool insulation may help to improve the existing models. Assuming that the real pressure difference between interior and exterior surface is larger than the prescribed pressure difference in the standard test procedure for mineral wool ISO 9053 / EN 29053, measurements were performed using the measurement setup for research on convective moisture transfer “MSRCMT". These measurements show, that structural inhomogeneities of mineral wool effect the permeability only at higher pressure differences, as applied in MSRCMT. Additional microscopic investigations show, that the location of a leak within the construction has a crucial influence on the air flow-through and the infiltration rate. The results clearly indicate that the empirical values for the acoustic resistance of mineral wool should not be used for the calculation of convective transfer mechanisms.

Graphical Password Security Evaluation by Fuzzy AHP

In today's day and age, one of the important topics in information security is authentication. There are several alternatives to text-based authentication of which includes Graphical Password (GP) or Graphical User Authentication (GUA). These methods stems from the fact that humans recognized and remembers images better than alphanumerical text characters. This paper will focus on the security aspect of GP algorithms and what most researchers have been working on trying to define these security features and attributes. The goal of this study is to develop a fuzzy decision model that allows automatic selection of available GP algorithms by taking into considerations the subjective judgments of the decision makers who are more than 50 postgraduate students of computer science. The approach that is being proposed is based on the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) which determines the criteria weight as a linear formula.