Abstract: In order to enhance the knowledge of certain
phytochemical Algerian plants that are widely used in traditional
medicine and to exploit their therapeutic potential in modern
medicine, we have done a specific extraction of terpenes and
alkaloids from the leaves of Euphorbia granulata to evaluate the
antioxidant and antibacterial activity of this extracts. After the
extraction it was found that the terpene extract gave the highest yield
59.72% compared with alkaloids extracts.
The disc diffusion method was used to determine the antibacterial
activity against different bacterial strains: Escherichia coli
(ATCC25922), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (ATCC27853) and
Staphylococcus aureus (ATCC25923). All extracts have shown
inhibition of growth bacteria. The different zones of inhibition have
varied from (7 -10 mm) according to the concentrations of extract
used.
Testing the antiradical activity on DPPH-TLC plates indicated the
presence of substances that have potent anti-free radical. As against,
the BC-TLC revealed that only terpenes extract which was reacted
positively. These results can validate the importance of Euphorbia
granulata in traditional medicine.
Abstract: The free and forced in-plane vibrations of axially
moving plates are investigated in this work. The plate possesses an
internal damping of which the constitutive relation obeys the
Kelvin-Voigt model, and the excitations are arbitrarily distributed on
two opposite edges. First, the equations of motion and the boundary
conditions of the axially moving plate are derived. Then, the extended
Ritz method is used to obtain discretized system equations. Finally,
numerical results for the natural frequencies and the mode shapes of
the in-plane vibration and the in-plane response of the moving plate
subjected to arbitrary edge excitations are presented. It is observed that
the symmetry class of the mode shapes of the in-plane vibration
disperses gradually as the moving speed gets higher, and the u- and
v-components of the mode shapes belong to different symmetry class.
In addition, large response amplitudes having shapes similar to the
mode shapes of the plate can be excited by the edge excitations at the
resonant frequencies and with the same symmetry class of distribution
as the u-components.
Abstract: There has been gradual progress of late in construction projects, particularly in big-scale megaprojects. Due to the long-term construction period, however, with large-scale budget investment, lack of construction management technologies, and increase in the incomplete elements of project schedule management, a plan to conduct efficient operations and to ensure business safety is required. In particular, as the project management information system (PMIS) is meant for managing a single project centering on the construction phase, there is a limitation in the management of program-scale businesses like megaprojects. Thus, a program management information system (PgMIS) that includes program-level management technologies is needed to manage multiple projects. In this study, a support tool was developed for managing the cost and schedule information occurring in the construction phase, at the program level. In addition, a case study on the developed support tool was conducted to verify the usability of the system. With the use of the developed support tool program, construction managers can monitor the progress of the entire project and of the individual subprojects in real time.
Abstract: South Africa is facing a crisis with not being able to produce enough graduates in the scarce skills areas to sustain economic growth. The crisis is fuelled by a school system that does not produce enough potential students with Mathematics, Accounting and Science. Since the introduction of the new school curriculum in 2008, there is no longer an option to take pure maths on a standard grade level. Instead, only two mathematical subjects are offered: pure maths (which is on par with higher grade maths) and mathematical literacy. It is compulsory to take one or the other. As a result, lees student finishes Grade 12 with pure mathematics every year. This national problem needs urgent attention if South Africa is to make any headway in critical skills development as mathematics is a gateway to scarce skills professions. Higher education institutions initiated several initiatives in an attempt to address the above, including preparatory courses, bridging programmes and extended curricula with foundation provisions. In view of the above, and government policy directives to broaden access in the scarce skills areas to increase student throughput, foundation provision was introduced for Commerce and Information Technology programmes at the Vaal Triangle Campus (VTC) of North-West University (NWU) in 2010. Students enrolling for extended programmes do not comply with the minimum prerequisites for the normal programmes. The question then arises as to whether these programmes have the intended impact? This paper reports the results of a two year longitudinal study, tracking the first year academic achievement of the two cohorts of enrolments since 2010. The results provide valuable insight into the structuring of an extended programme and its potential impact.
Abstract: A CFD software was employed to analyze the
characteristics of the flat round porous aerostatic bearings. The effects
of gap between the bearing and the guide way and the porosity of the
porous material on the load capacity of the bearing were studied. The
adequacy of the simulation model and the approach was verified. From
the parametric study, it is found that the depth of the flow path does not
influence the load capacity of the bearing; the load capacity of the
bearing will decrease if the thickness of the porous material increases
or the porous material protrudes above the bearing housing; the
variation of the chamfer at the edge of the bearing does not affect the
bearing load capacity. For a bearing with an air gap of 5μm and a
porosity of 0.1, the average load capacity and the pressure distribution
of the bearing are nearly unchanged no matter the bearing moves at a
constant or a varying speed.
Abstract: This article is based on the technique which is called
Discrete Parameter Tracking (DPT). First introduced by A. A. Azab
[8] which is applicable for less order reference model. The order of
the reference model is (n-l) and n is the number of the adjustable
parameters in the physical plant.
The technique utilizes a modified gradient method [9] where the
knowledge of the exact order of the nonadaptive system is not
required, so, as to eliminate the identification problem. The
applicability of the mentioned technique (DPT) was examined
through the solution of several problems.
This article introduces the solution of a third order system with
three adjustable parameters, controlled according to second order
reference model. The adjustable parameters have great initial error
which represent condition.
Computer simulations for the solution and analysis are provided
to demonstrate the simplicity and feasibility of the technique.
Abstract: Availability and mobilization of revenue is the main
essential with which an economy is managed and run. While
planning or while making the budgets nations set revenue targets to
be achieved. But later when the accounts are closed the actual
collections of revenue through taxes or even the non-tax revenue
collection would invariably be different as compared to the initial
estimates and targets set to be achieved. This revenue-gap distorts the
whole system and the economy disturbing all the major macroeconomic
indicators. This study is aimed to find out short and long
term impact of revenue gap on budget deficit, debt burden and
economic growth on the economy of Pakistan. For this purpose the
study uses autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration
and error correction mechanism on three different models for the
period 1980 to 2009. The empirical results show that revenue gap has
a short and long run relationship with economic growth and budget
deficit. However, revenue gap has no impact on debt burden.
Abstract: An ontology is widely used in many kinds of applications as a knowledge representation tool for domain knowledge. However, even though an ontology schema is well prepared by domain experts, it is tedious and cost-intensive to add instances into the ontology. The most confident and trust-worthy way to add instances into the ontology is to gather instances from tables in the related Web pages. In automatic populating of instances, the primary task is to find the most proper concept among all possible concepts within the ontology for a given table. This paper proposes a novel method for this problem by defining the similarity between the table and the concept using the overlap of their properties. According to a series of experiments, the proposed method achieves 76.98% of accuracy. This implies that the proposed method is a plausible way for automatic ontology population from Web tables.
Abstract: In this paper a combined feature selection method is
proposed which takes advantages of sample domain filtering,
resampling and feature subset evaluation methods to reduce
dimensions of huge datasets and select reliable features. This method
utilizes both feature space and sample domain to improve the process
of feature selection and uses a combination of Chi squared with
Consistency attribute evaluation methods to seek reliable features.
This method consists of two phases. The first phase filters and
resamples the sample domain and the second phase adopts a hybrid
procedure to find the optimal feature space by applying Chi squared,
Consistency subset evaluation methods and genetic search.
Experiments on various sized datasets from UCI Repository of
Machine Learning databases show that the performance of five
classifiers (Naïve Bayes, Logistic, Multilayer Perceptron, Best First
Decision Tree and JRIP) improves simultaneously and the
classification error for these classifiers decreases considerably. The
experiments also show that this method outperforms other feature
selection methods.
Abstract: World has entered in 21st century. The technology of
computer graphics and digital cameras is prevalent. High resolution
display and printer are available. Therefore high resolution images
are needed in order to produce high quality display images and high
quality prints. However, since high resolution images are not usually
provided, there is a need to magnify the original images. One
common difficulty in the previous magnification techniques is that of
preserving details, i.e. edges and at the same time smoothing the data
for not introducing the spurious artefacts. A definitive solution to this
is still an open issue. In this paper an image magnification using
adaptive interpolation by pixel level data-dependent geometrical
shapes is proposed that tries to take into account information about
the edges (sharp luminance variations) and smoothness of the image.
It calculate threshold, classify interpolation region in the form of
geometrical shapes and then assign suitable values inside
interpolation region to the undefined pixels while preserving the
sharp luminance variations and smoothness at the same time.
The results of proposed technique has been compared qualitatively
and quantitatively with five other techniques. In which the qualitative
results show that the proposed method beats completely the Nearest
Neighbouring (NN), bilinear(BL) and bicubic(BC) interpolation. The
quantitative results are competitive and consistent with NN, BL, BC
and others.
Abstract: The essence of the 21st century is knowledge economy. Knowledge has become the key resource of economic growth and social development. Construction industry is no exception. Because of the characteristic of complexity, project manager can't depend only on information management. The only way to improve the level of construction project management is to set up a kind of effective knowledge accumulation mechanism. This paper first introduced the IFC standard and the concept of ontology. Then put forward the construction method of the architectural engineering domain ontology based on IFC. And finally build up the concepts, properties and the relationship between the concepts of the ontology. The deficiency of this paper is also pointed out.
Abstract: In Thailand, the practice of pre-hospital Emergency
Medical Service (EMS) in each area reveals the different growth
rates and effectiveness of the practices. Those can be found as the
diverse quality and quantity. To shorten the learning curve prior to
speed-up the practices in other areas, story telling and lessons learnt
from the effective practices are valued as meaningful knowledge. To
this paper, it was to ascertain the factors, lessons learnt and best
practices that have impact as contributing to the success of prehospital
EMS system. Those were formulized as model prior to
speedup the practice in other areas. To develop the model, Malcolm
Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), which is widely
recognized as a framework for organizational quality assessment and
improvement, was chosen as the discussion framework. Remarkably,
this study was based on the consideration of knowledge capture;
however it was not to complete the loop of knowledge activities.
Nevertheless, it was to highlight the recognition of knowledge
capture, which is the initiation of knowledge management.
Abstract: The paper studies implications between knowledge spillovers and technological innovation capability in the following three aspects: firstly, the paper debates on the effect of knowledge spillover on some perspectives of technological innovation ability; secondly, it discusses how different roles of knowledge spillover affect the technological innovation capability; finally, the paper creates the model of the factors of knowledge spillovers influencing to technological innovation capability. It concludes that knowledge spillovers affect all the main aspects of technological innovation ultimately to impact of technological innovation capabilities.
Abstract: When designing information systems that deal with
large amount of domain knowledge, system designers need to consider
ambiguities of labeling termsin domain vocabulary for navigating
users in the information space. The goal of this study is to develop a
methodology for system designers to label navigation items, taking
account of ambiguities stems from synonyms or polysemes of labeling
terms. In this paper, we propose a method for concept labeling based
on mappings between domain ontology andthesaurus, and report
results of an empirical evaluation.
Abstract: Clustering techniques have been used by many intelligent software agents to group similar access patterns of the Web users into high level themes which express users intentions and interests. However, such techniques have been mostly focusing on one salient feature of the Web document visited by the user, namely the extracted keywords. The major aim of these techniques is to come up with an optimal threshold for the number of keywords needed to produce more focused themes. In this paper we focus on both keyword and similarity thresholds to generate themes with concentrated themes, and hence build a more sound model of the user behavior. The purpose of this paper is two fold: use distance based clustering methods to recognize overall themes from the Proxy log file, and suggest an efficient cut off levels for the keyword and similarity thresholds which tend to produce more optimal clusters with better focus and efficient size.
Abstract: Despite the extensive use of eLearning systems, there
is no consensus on a standard framework for evaluating this kind of
quality system. Hence, there is only a minimum set of tools that can
supervise this judgment and gives information about the course
content value. This paper presents two kinds of quality set evaluation
indicators for eLearning courses based on the computational process
of three known metrics, the Euclidian, Hamming and Levenshtein
distances. The “distance" calculus is applied to standard evaluation
templates (i.e. the European Commission Programme procedures vs.
the AFNOR Z 76-001 Standard), determining a reference point in the
evaluation of the e-learning course quality vs. the optimal concept(s).
The case study, based on the results of project(s) developed in the
framework of the European Programme “Leonardo da Vinci", with
Romanian contractors, try to put into evidence the benefits of such a
method.
Abstract: Thailand-s health system is challenged by the rising
number of patients and decreasing ratio of medical
practitioners/patients, especially in rural areas. This may tempt
inexperienced GPs to rush through the process of anamnesis with the
risk of incorrect diagnosis. Patients have to travel far to the hospital
and wait for a long time presenting their case. Many patients try to
cure themselves with traditional Thai medicine. Many countries are
making use of the Internet for medical information gathering,
distribution and storage. Telemedicine applications are a relatively
new field of study in Thailand; the infrastructure of ICT had
hampered widespread use of the Internet for using medical
information. With recent improvements made health and technology
professionals can work out novel applications and systems to help
advance telemedicine for the benefit of the people. Here we explore
the use of telemedicine for people with health problems in rural areas
in Thailand and present a Telemedicine Diagnosis System for Rural
Thailand (TEDIST) for diagnosing certain conditions that people
with Internet access can use to establish contact with Community
Health Centers, e.g. by mobile phone. The system uses a Web-based
input method for individual patients- symptoms, which are taken by
an expert system for the analysis of conditions and appropriate
diseases. The analysis harnesses a knowledge base and a backward
chaining component to find out, which health professionals should be
presented with the case. Doctors have the opportunity to exchange
emails or chat with the patients they are responsible for or other
specialists. Patients- data are then stored in a Personal Health Record.
Abstract: The V-notches are most possible case for initiation of cracks in parts. The specifications of cracks on the tip of the notch will be influenced via opening angle, tip radius and depth of V-notch. In this study, the effects of V-notch-s opening angle on stress intensity factor and T-stress of crack on the notch has been investigated. The experiment has been done in different opening angles and various crack length in mode (I) loading using Photoelasticity method. The results illustrate that while angle increases in constant crack-s length, SIF and T-stress will decrease. Beside, the effect of V-notch angle in short crack is more than long crack. These V-notch affects are negligible by increasing the length of crack, and the crack-s behavior can be considered as a single-edge crack specimen. Finally, the results have been evaluated with numerical finite element analysis and good agreement was obvious.
Abstract: POS (also been called DGPS/IMU) technique can obtain the Exterior Orientation Elements of aerial photo, so the triangulation and DLG production using POS can save large numbers of ground control points (GCP), and this will improve the produce efficiency of DLG and reduce the cost of collecting GCP. This paper mainly research on POS technique in production of 1:10 000 scale DLG on GCP distribution. We designed 23 kinds of ground control points distribution schemes, using integrated sensor direction method to do the triangulation experiments, based on the results of triangulation, we produce a map with the scale of 1:10 000 and test its accuracy. This paper put forward appropriate GCP distributing schemes by experiments and research above, and made preparations for the application of POS technique on photogrammetry 4D data production.
Abstract: Firstly, this study briefly presents the current situation that there exists a vast gap between current Chinese and Japanese seismic design specification for bridge pile foundation in liquefiable and liquefaction-induced lateral spreading ground; The Chinese and Japanese seismic design method and technical detail for bridge pile foundation in liquefying and lateral spreading ground are described and compared systematically and comprehensively, the methods of determining coefficient of subgrade reaction and its reduction factor as well as the computing mode of the applied force on pile foundation due to liquefaction-induced lateral spreading soil in Japanese design specification are especially introduced. Subsequently, the comparison indicates that the content of Chinese seismic design specification for bridge pile foundation in liquefiable and liquefaction-induced lateral spreading ground, just presenting some qualitative items, is too general and lacks systematicness and maneuverability. Finally, some defects of seismic design specification in China are summarized, so the improvement and revision of specification in the field turns out to be imperative for China, some key problems of current Chinese specifications are generalized and the corresponding improvement suggestions are proposed.