Abstract: Networking is important among students to achieve
better understanding. Social networking plays an important role in the
education. Realizing its huge potential, various organizations,
including institutions of higher learning have moved to the area of
social networks to interact with their students especially through
Facebook. Therefore, measuring the effectiveness of Facebook as a
learning tool has become an area of interest to academicians and
researchers. Therefore, this study tried to integrate and propose new
theoretical and empirical evidences by linking the western idea of
adopting Facebook as an alternative learning platform from a
Malaysian perspective. This study, thus, aimed to fill a gap by being
among the pioneering research that tries to study the effectiveness of
adopting Facebook as a learning platform across other cultural
settings, namely Malaysia. Structural equation modeling was
employed for data analysis and hypothesis testing. This study finding
has provided some insights that would likely affect students’
awareness towards using Facebook as an alternative learning
platform in the Malaysian higher learning institutions. At the end,
future direction is proposed.
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to develop a descriptive
profile of the adapted physical activity research using single subject
experimental designs. All research articles using single subject
experimental designs published in the journal of Adapted Physical
Activity Quarterly from 1984 to 2013 were employed as the data
source. Each of the articles was coded in a subcategory of seven
categories: (a) the size of sample; (b) the age of participants; (c) the
type of disabilities; (d) the type of data analysis; (e) the type of
designs, (f) the independent variable, and (g) the dependent variable.
Frequencies, percentages, and trend inspection were used to analyze
the data and develop a profile. The profile developed characterizes a
small portion of research articles used single subject designs, in
which most researchers used a small sample size, recruited children
as subjects, emphasized learning and behavior impairments, selected
visual inspection with descriptive statistics, preferred a multiple
baseline design, focused on effects of therapy, inclusion, and
strategy, and measured desired behaviors more often, with a
decreasing trend over years.
Abstract: The growth in the volume of text data such as books
and articles in libraries for centuries has imposed to establish
effective mechanisms to locate them. Early techniques such as
abstraction, indexing and the use of classification categories have
marked the birth of a new field of research called "Information
Retrieval". Information Retrieval (IR) can be defined as the task of
defining models and systems whose purpose is to facilitate access to
a set of documents in electronic form (corpus) to allow a user to find
the relevant ones for him, that is to say, the contents which matches
with the information needs of the user. This paper presents a new
semantic indexing approach of a documentary corpus. The indexing
process starts first by a term weighting phase to determine the
importance of these terms in the documents. Then the use of a
thesaurus like Wordnet allows moving to the conceptual level.
Each candidate concept is evaluated by determining its level of
representation of the document, that is to say, the importance of the
concept in relation to other concepts of the document. Finally, the
semantic index is constructed by attaching to each concept of the
ontology, the documents of the corpus in which these concepts are
found.
Abstract: In more complex systems, such as automotive
gearbox, a rigorous treatment of the data is necessary because there
are several moving parts (gears, bearings, shafts, etc.), and in this
way, there are several possible sources of errors and also noise. The
basic objective of this work is the detection of damage in automotive
gearbox. The detection methods used are the wavelet method, the
bispectrum; advanced filtering techniques (selective filtering) of
vibrational signals and mathematical morphology. Gearbox vibration
tests were performed (gearboxes in good condition and with defects)
of a production line of a large vehicle assembler. The vibration
signals are obtained using five accelerometers in different positions
of the sample. The results obtained using the kurtosis, bispectrum,
wavelet and mathematical morphology showed that it is possible to
identify the existence of defects in automotive gearboxes.
Abstract: The aim of this exploratory research is to understand
further how organisations can evaluate their activities, which
generate knowledge creation, to meet changing stakeholder
expectations. A Scale of Knowledge (SoK) Framework is proposed
which links knowledge management and organisational activities to
changing stakeholder expectations. The framework was informed by
the knowledge management literature, as well as empirical work
conducted via a single case study of a multi-site hospital organisation
in Saudi Arabia. Eight in-depth semi-structured interviews were
conducted with managers from across the organisation regarding
current and future stakeholder expectations, organisational
strategy/activities and knowledge management. Data were analysed
using thematic analysis and a hierarchical value map technique to
identify activities that can produce further knowledge and
consequently impact on how stakeholder expectations are met.
The SoK Framework developed may be useful to practitioners as
an analytical aid to determine if current organisational activities
produce organisational knowledge which helps them meet
(increasingly higher levels of) stakeholder expectations. The
limitations of the research and avenues for future development of the
proposed framework are discussed.
Abstract: High density electrical prospecting has been widely
used in groundwater investigation, civil engineering and
environmental survey. For efficient inversion, the forward modeling
routine, sensitivity calculation, and inversion algorithm must be
efficient. This paper attempts to provide a brief summary of the past
and ongoing developments of the method. It includes reviews of the
procedures used for data acquisition, processing and inversion of
electrical resistivity data based on compilation of academic literature.
In recent times there had been a significant evolution in field survey
designs and data inversion techniques for the resistivity method. In
general 2-D inversion for resistivity data is carried out using the
linearized least-square method with the local optimization technique
.Multi-electrode and multi-channel systems have made it possible to
conduct large 2-D, 3-D and even 4-D surveys efficiently to resolve
complex geological structures that were not possible with traditional
1-D surveys. 3-D surveys play an increasingly important role in very
complex areas where 2-D models suffer from artifacts due to off-line
structures. Continued developments in computation technology, as
well as fast data inversion techniques and software, have made it
possible to use optimization techniques to obtain model parameters to
a higher accuracy. A brief discussion on the limitations of the
electrical resistivity method has also been presented.
Abstract: Quick adoption of e-business and emerging influence
of “Electronic Word of Mouth e-WOM” communication on guests
made leading hotel brands successful examples of electronic guest
relationship management. Main reasons behind such success are well
established procedures in collection, analysis and usage of highly
valuable data available on the Internet, generated through some form
of e-GRM programme. E-GRM is more than just a technology
solution. It’s a system which balance respective guest demands, hotel
technological capabilities and organizational culture of employees,
discharging the universal approach in guest relations “same for all”.
The purpose of this research derives from the necessity of
determining the importance of monitoring and applying e-WOM
communication as one of the methods used in managing guest
relations. This paper analyses and compares different hotelier’s
opinions on e-WOM communication.
Abstract: Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to test
a hypothesized model explaining Malaysian hypermarket customers’
perceptions of brand trust (BT), customer perceived value (CPV) and
perceived service quality (PSQ) on building their brand loyalty
(CBL) and generating positive word-of-mouth communication
(WOM). Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data
from 374 Malaysian hypermarket customers from Mydin, Tesco,
Aeon Big and Giant in Kuala Lumpur, a metropolitan city of
Malaysia. The data strongly supported the model exhibiting that BT,
CPV and PSQ are prerequisite factors in building customer brand
loyalty, while PSQ has the strongest effect on prediction of customer
brand loyalty compared to other factors. Besides, the present study
suggests the effect of the aforementioned factors via customer brand
loyalty strongly contributes to generate positive word of mouth
communication.
Abstract: This paper adopts a two-stage data envelopment
analysis to explore the impacts of financial development and bank
operating scale on bank efficiencies. The sample comprises
unbalanced panel data of 32 Taiwanese listed domestic commercial
banks over the period 1998 to 2013. Empirical results show that pure
technical efficiency is positively related to financial development,
whereas the effect of financial development on scale efficiency is
insignificant. Enlargement of bank operating scale improves bank
efficiencies, but the efficiency gains are decreased gradually when the
scale increases. Increases in capital adequacy ratio and market power
of loans lead into a growth of bank efficiencies.
Abstract: With the growing of computer and network, digital
data can be spread to anywhere in the world quickly. In addition,
digital data can also be copied or tampered easily so that the security
issue becomes an important topic in the protection of digital data.
Digital watermark is a method to protect the ownership of digital data.
Embedding the watermark will influence the quality certainly. In this
paper, Vector Quantization (VQ) is used to embed the watermark into
the image to fulfill the goal of data hiding. This kind of watermarking
is invisible which means that the users will not conscious the existing
of embedded watermark even though the embedded image has tiny
difference compared to the original image. Meanwhile, VQ needs a lot
of computation burden so that we adopt a fast VQ encoding scheme by
partial distortion searching (PDS) and mean approximation scheme to
speed up the data hiding process.
The watermarks we hide to the image could be gray, bi-level and
color images. Texts are also can be regarded as watermark to embed.
In order to test the robustness of the system, we adopt Photoshop to
fulfill sharpen, cropping and altering to check if the extracted
watermark is still recognizable. Experimental results demonstrate that
the proposed system can resist the above three kinds of tampering in
general cases.
Abstract: Micro-electromechanical system (MEMS)
accelerometers and gyroscopes are suitable for the inertial navigation
system (INS) of many applications due to low price, small
dimensions and light weight. The main disadvantage in a comparison
with classic sensors is a worse long term stability. The estimation
accuracy is mostly affected by the time-dependent growth of inertial
sensor errors, especially the stochastic errors. In order to eliminate
negative effects of these random errors, they must be accurately
modeled. In this paper, the Allan variance technique will be used in
modeling the stochastic errors of the inertial sensors. By performing
a simple operation on the entire length of data, a characteristic curve
is obtained whose inspection provides a systematic characterization
of various random errors contained in the inertial-sensor output data.
Abstract: OPEN_EmoRec_II is an open multimodal corpus with
experimentally induced emotions. In the first half of the experiment,
emotions were induced with standardized picture material and in the
second half during a human-computer interaction (HCI), realized
with a wizard-of-oz design. The induced emotions are based on the
dimensional theory of emotions (valence, arousal and dominance).
These emotional sequences - recorded with multimodal data (facial
reactions, speech, audio and physiological reactions) during a
naturalistic-like HCI-environment one can improve classification
methods on a multimodal level.
This database is the result of an HCI-experiment, for which 30
subjects in total agreed to a publication of their data including the
video material for research purposes*. The now available open
corpus contains sensory signal of: video, audio, physiology (SCL,
respiration, BVP, EMG Corrugator supercilii, EMG Zygomaticus
Major) and facial reactions annotations.
Abstract: OPEN_EmoRec_II is an open multimodal corpus with
experimentally induced emotions. In the first half of the experiment,
emotions were induced with standardized picture material and in the
second half during a human-computer interaction (HCI), realized
with a wizard-of-oz design. The induced emotions are based on the
dimensional theory of emotions (valence, arousal and dominance).
These emotional sequences - recorded with multimodal data (facial
reactions, speech, audio and physiological reactions) during a
naturalistic-like HCI-environment one can improve classification
methods on a multimodal level.
This database is the result of an HCI-experiment, for which 30
subjects in total agreed to a publication of their data including the
video material for research purposes*. The now available open
corpus contains sensory signal of: video, audio, physiology (SCL,
respiration, BVP, EMG Corrugator supercilii, EMG Zygomaticus
Major) and facial reactions annotations.
Abstract: The aim of this research is to identify the key factors in shipping company’s port selection in order to providing their requirement. To identify and rank factors that play the main role in selecting port for providing the ship requirement, at the first step, data were collected via Semi-structured interviews, the aim was to generate knowledge on how shipping company select the port and suppliers for providing their needs. 37 port selection factors were chosen from the previous researches and field interviews and have been categorized into two groups of port's factor and the factors of services of suppliers companies. The current study adopts a questionnaire survey to the main shipping companies' operators in Iran. Their responses reveal that level of services of supplying companies and customs rules play the important role in selecting the ports. Our findings could affect decisions made by port authorities to consider that supporting the privet sections for ship chandelling business could have the best result in attracting ships.
Abstract: This study investigates the use of a time-series of
MODIS NDVI data to identify agricultural land cover change on an
annual time step (2007 - 2012) and characterize the trend. Following
an ISODATA classification of the MODIS imagery to selectively
mask areas not agriculture or semi-natural, NDVI signatures were
created to identify areas cereals and vineyards with the aid of
ancillary, pictometry and field sample data for 2010. The NDVI
signature curve and training samples were used to create a decision
tree model in WEKA 3.6.9 using decision tree classifier (J48)
algorithm; Model 1 including ISODATA classification and Model 2
not. These two models were then used to classify all data for the
study area for 2010, producing land cover maps with classification
accuracies of 77% and 80% for Model 1 and 2 respectively. Model 2
was subsequently used to create land cover classification and change
detection maps for all other years. Subtle changes and areas of
consistency (unchanged) were observed in the agricultural classes
and crop practices. Over the years as predicted by the land cover
classification. Forty one percent of the catchment comprised of
cereals with 35% possibly following a crop rotation system.
Vineyards largely remained constant with only one percent
conversion to vineyard from other land cover classes.
Abstract: Corrosion of concrete sewer pipes induced by
sulphuric acid attack is a recognised problem worldwide, which is not
only an attribute of countries with hot climate conditions as thought
before. The significance of this problem is by far only realised when
the pipe collapses causing surface flooding and other severe
consequences. To change the existing post-reactive attitude of
managing companies, easy to use and robust models are required to
be developed which currently lack reliable data to be correctly
calibrated. This paper focuses on laboratory experiments of
establishing concrete pipe corrosion rate by submerging samples in to
0.5pH sulphuric acid solution for 56 days under 10ºC, 20ºC and 30ºC
temperature regimes. The result showed that at very early stage of the
corrosion process the samples gained overall mass, at 30ºC the
corrosion progressed quicker than for other temperature regimes,
however with time the corrosion level for 10ºC and 20ºC regimes
tended towards those at 30ºC. Overall, at these conditions the
corrosion rates of 10 mm/year, 13,5 mm/year and 17 mm/year were
observed.
Abstract: This work is the first dowel in a rather wide research
activity in collaboration with Euro Mediterranean Center for Climate
Changes, aimed at introducing scalable approaches in Ocean
Circulation Models. We discuss designing and implementation of
a parallel algorithm for solving the Variational Data Assimilation
(DA) problem on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The algorithm
is based on the fully scalable 3DVar DA model, previously proposed
by the authors, which uses a Domain Decomposition approach
(we refer to this model as the DD-DA model). We proceed with
an incremental porting process consisting of 3 distinct stages:
requirements and source code analysis, incremental development of
CUDA kernels, testing and optimization. Experiments confirm the
theoretic performance analysis based on the so-called scale up factor
demonstrating that the DD-DA model can be suitably mapped on
GPU architectures.
Abstract: Roadway planning and design is a very complex
process involving five key phases before a project is completed;
planning, project development, final design, right-of-way, and
construction. The planning phase for a new roadway transportation
project is a very critical phase as it greatly affects all latter phases of
the project. A location study is usually performed during the
preliminary planning phase in a new roadway project. The objective
of the location study is to develop alignment alternatives that are cost
efficient considering land acquisition and construction costs. This
paper describes a methodology to develop optimal preliminary
roadway alignments utilizing spatial-data. Four optimization criteria
are taken into consideration; roadway length, land cost, land slope,
and environmental impacts. The basic concept of the methodology is
to convert the proposed project area into a grid, which represents the
search space for an optimal alignment. The aforementioned
optimization criteria are represented in each of the grid’s cells. A
spatial-data optimization technique is utilized to find the optimal
alignment in the search space based on the four optimization criteria.
Two case studies for new roadway projects in Duval County in the
State of Florida are presented to illustrate the methodology. The
optimization output alignments are compared to the proposed Florida
Department of Transportation (FDOT) alignments. The comparison is
based on right-of-way costs for the alignments. For both case studies,
the right-of-way costs for the developed optimal alignments were
found to be significantly lower than the FDOT alignments.
Abstract: An experimental and analytical research on shear
buckling of a comparably large polymer composite I-section is
presented. It is known that shear buckling load of a large span
composite beam is difficult to determine experimentally. In order to
sensitively detect shear buckling of the tested I-section, twenty strain
rosettes and eight displacement sensors were applied and attached on
the web and flange surfaces. The tested specimen was a pultruded
composite beam made of vinylester resin, E-glass, carbon fibers and
micro-fillers. Various coupon tests were performed before the shear
buckling test to obtain fundamental material properties of the Isection.
An asymmetric four-point bending loading scheme was
utilized for the shear test. The loading scheme resulted in a high shear
and almost zero moment condition at the center of the web panel. The
shear buckling load was successfully determined after analyzing the
obtained test data from strain rosettes and displacement sensors. An
analytical approach was also performed to verify the experimental
results and to support the discussed experimental program.
Abstract: In this paper, an analytical simplified method for
calculating elasto-plastic stresses strains of notched bodies subject to
non-proportional loading paths is discussed. The method was based
on the Neuber notch correction, which relates the incremental elastic
and elastic-plastic strain energy densities at the notch root and the
material constitutive relationship. The validity of the method was
presented by comparing computed results of the proposed model
against finite element numerical data of notched shaft. The
comparison showed that the model estimated notch-root elasto-plastic
stresses strains with good accuracy using linear-elastic stresses. The
prosed model provides more efficient and simple analysis method
preferable to expensive experimental component tests and more
complex and time consuming incremental non-linear FE analysis.
The model is particularly suitable to perform fatigue life and fatigue
damage estimates of notched components subjected to nonproportional
loading paths.