Abstract: Outsourcing, a management practice strongly
consolidated within the area of Information Systems, is currently
going through a stage of unstoppable growth. This paper makes a
proposal about the main reasons which may lead firms to adopt
Information Systems Outsourcing. It will equally analyse the
potential risks that IS clients are likely to face. An additional
objective is to assess these reasons and risks in the case of large
Spanish firms, while simultaneously examining their evolution over
time.
Abstract: This study describes the preparation of a novel proton
conducting membranes based on bacterial cellulose (BC) modified by
grafting of 2-acrylamido-2-methyl-1 -propanesulfonic acid (AMPS)
through UV-induced graft polymerization. These AMPS-g-BC
membranes have been characterized by various techniques including
FTIR, SEM and TGA, to find their successful grafting of AMPS on
BC, surface morphology and thermal stability, respectively. Physical
properties of AMPS-g-BC membranes have been assessed in terms of
Lamda value( λ ), ion exchange capacity(IEC) and proton
conductivity. The relationship between degree of grafting and AMPS
concentration used for grafting has been determined by weight gain
method. An optimum proton conductivity equal to 2.89x10-2 S cm-1
and IEC value equal to 1.79 mmol g-1 have been obtained when 20
wt% AMPS concentration is used for grafting (i.e. the corresponding
membrane is notated as AMPS20-g-BC).
Abstract: ZnO-SnO2 i.e. Zinc-Tin-Oxide (ZTO) thin films were
deposited on glass substrate with varying concentrations (ZnO:SnO2
- 100:0, 90:10, 70:30 and 50:50 wt.%) at room temperature by flash
evaporation technique. These deposited ZTO film were annealed at
450 0C in vacuum. These films were characterized to study the effect
of annealing on the structural, electrical, and optical properties.
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) and Scanning electron microscopy
(SEM) images manifest the surface morphology of these ZTO thin
films. The apparent growth of surface features revealed the formation
of nanostructure ZTO thin films. The small value of surface
roughness (root mean square RRMS) ensures the usefulness in
optical coatings. The sheet resistance was also found to be decreased
for both types of films with increasing concentration of SnO2. The
optical transmittance found to be decreased however blue shift has
been observed after annealing.
Abstract: Two different superhydrophobic surfaces were
elaborated and their oil repellency behavior was evaluated using
several liquid with different surface tension. A silicone rubber/SiO2
nanocomposite coated (A) on aluminum substrate by “spin-coating"
and the sample B was an anodized aluminum surface covered by
Teflon-like coating. A high static contact angle about ∼162° was
measured for two prepared surfaces on which the water droplet rolloff.
Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed the presence of
micro/nanostructures for both sample A and B similar to that of lotus
leaf.
However the sample A presented significantly different behaviour
of wettability against the low surface tension liquid. Sample A has
been wetted totally by oil (dodecan) droplet while sample B showed
oleophobic behaviour. Oleophobic property of Teflon like coating
can be contributed to the presence of CF2 and CF3 functional group
which was shown by XPS analysis.
Abstract: This paper tries to study the effect of geosynthetic inclusion on the improvement of the load-settlement characters of two layered soil. In addition, the effect of geogrid and geotextile in reduction of the required thickness of subbase layer in unpaved roads is studied. Considering the vast application of bearing ratio tests in road construction projects, this test is used in present investigation. Bearing ratio tests were performed on two layered soil including a granular soil layer at the top (as the subbase layer) and a weak clayey soil placed at the bottom (as the subgrade layer). These tests were performed for different conditions including unreinforced and reinforced by geogrid and geotextile and three thicknesses for top layer soil (subbase layer). In the reinforced condition the reinforcing element was placed on the interface of the top granular layer and the beneath clayey layer to study the separation effect of geosynthetics. In all tests the soils (both granular and clayey soil layers) were compacted according to optimum water content. At the end, the diagrams were plotted and were compared with each other. Furthermore, a comparison between geogrids and geotextiles behaviors on two layer soil is done in this paper. The results show an increase in compression strength of reinforced specimen in comparison with unreinforced soil sample. The effect of geosynthetic inclusion reduces by increasing the subbase thickness. In addition it was found that geogrids have more desirable behavior rather than geotextiles due to interlocking with the subbase layer aggregates.
Abstract: The study investigates the mixing performance of
electrokinetically-driven power-law fluids in a microchannel
containing patterned trapezoid blocks. The effects of the geometry
parameters of the patterned trapezoid blocks and the flow behavior
index in the power-law model on the mixing efficiency within the
microchannel are explored. The results show that the mixing efficiency
can be improved by increasing the width of the blocks and extending
the length of upper surface of the blocks. In addition, the results show
that the mixing efficiency increases with an increasing flow behavior
index. Furthermore, it is shown that a heterogeneous patterning of the
zeta potential on the upper surfaces of the trapezoid blocks prompts
the formation of local flow recirculations, and therefore improves the
mixing efficiency. Consequently, it is shown that the mixing
performance improves with an increasing magnitude of the
heterogeneous surface zeta potential.
Abstract: The evaluation and measurement of human body
dimensions are achieved by physical anthropometry. This research
was conducted in view of the importance of anthropometric indices
of the face in forensic medicine, surgery, and medical imaging. The
main goal of this research is to optimization of facial feature point by
establishing a mathematical relationship among facial features and
used optimize feature points for age classification. Since selected
facial feature points are located to the area of mouth, nose, eyes and
eyebrow on facial images, all desire facial feature points are extracted
accurately. According this proposes method; sixteen Euclidean
distances are calculated from the eighteen selected facial feature
points vertically as well as horizontally. The mathematical
relationships among horizontal and vertical distances are established.
Moreover, it is also discovered that distances of the facial feature
follows a constant ratio due to age progression. The distances
between the specified features points increase with respect the age
progression of a human from his or her childhood but the ratio of the
distances does not change (d = 1 .618 ) . Finally, according to the
proposed mathematical relationship four independent feature
distances related to eight feature points are selected from sixteen
distances and eighteen feature point-s respectively. These four feature
distances are used for classification of age using Support Vector
Machine (SVM)-Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm
and shown around 96 % accuracy. Experiment result shows the
proposed system is effective and accurate for age classification.
Abstract: The nickel and gold nanoclusters as supported
catalysts were analyzed by XAS, XRD and XPS in order to
determine their local, global and electronic structure. The present
study has pointed out a strong deformation of the local structure of
the metal, due to its interaction with oxide supports. The average
particle size, the mean squares of the microstrain, the particle size
distribution and microstrain functions of the supported Ni and Au
catalysts were determined by XRD method using Generalized Fermi
Function for the X-ray line profiles approximation. Based on EXAFS
analysis we consider that the local structure of the investigated
systems is strongly distorted concerning the atomic number pairs.
Metal-support interaction is confirmed by the shape changes of the
probability densities of electron transitions: Ni K edge (1s →
continuum and 2p), Au LIII-edge (2p3/2 → continuum, 6s, 6d5/2 and
6d3/2). XPS investigations confirm the metal-support interaction at
their interface.
Abstract: Wetting characteristics of reactive (Sn–0.7Cu solder)
and non– reactive (castor oil) wetting of liquids on Cu and Ag plated
Al substrates have been investigated. Solder spreading exhibited
capillary, gravity and viscous regimes. Oils did not exhibit noticeable
spreading regimes. Solder alloy showed better wettability on Ag
coated Al substrate compared to Cu plating. In the case of castor oil,
Cu coated Al substrate exhibited good wettability as compared to Ag
coated Al substrates. The difference in wettability during reactive
wetting of solder and non–reactive wetting of oils is attributed to the
change in the surface energies of Al substrates brought about by the
formation of intermetallic compounds (IMCs).
Abstract: Xanthan gum is one of the major commercial
biopolymers. Due to its excellent rheological properties xanthan gum
is used in many applications, mainly in food industry. Commercial
production of xanthan gum uses glucose as the carbon substrate;
consequently the price of xanthan production is high. One of the
ways to decrease xanthan price, is using cheaper substrate like
agricultural wastes. Iran is one of the biggest date producer countries.
However approximately 50% of date production is wasted annually.
The goal of this study is to produce xanthan gum from waste date
using Xanthomonas campestris PTCC1473 by submerged
fermentation. In this study the effect of three variables including
phosphor and nitrogen amount and agitation rate in three levels using
response surface methodology (RSM) has been studied. Results
achieved from statistical analysis Design Expert 7.0.0 software
showed that xanthan increased with increasing level of phosphor.
Low level of nitrogen leaded to higher xanthan production. Xanthan
amount, increasing agitation had positive influence. The statistical
model identified the optimum conditions nitrogen amount=3.15g/l,
phosphor amount=5.03 g/l and agitation=394.8 rpm for xanthan. To
model validation, experiments in optimum conditions for xanthan
gum were carried out. The mean of result for xanthan was 6.72±0.26.
The result was closed to the predicted value by using RSM.
Abstract: Identity verification of authentic persons by their multiview faces is a real valued problem in machine vision. Multiview faces are having difficulties due to non-linear representation in the feature space. This paper illustrates the usability of the generalization of LDA in the form of canonical covariate for face recognition to multiview faces. In the proposed work, the Gabor filter bank is used to extract facial features that characterized by spatial frequency, spatial locality and orientation. Gabor face representation captures substantial amount of variations of the face instances that often occurs due to illumination, pose and facial expression changes. Convolution of Gabor filter bank to face images of rotated profile views produce Gabor faces with high dimensional features vectors. Canonical covariate is then used to Gabor faces to reduce the high dimensional feature spaces into low dimensional subspaces. Finally, support vector machines are trained with canonical sub-spaces that contain reduced set of features and perform recognition task. The proposed system is evaluated with UMIST face database. The experiment results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed system with high recognition rates.
Abstract: The objectif of the present work is to determinate the
potential of the solar parabolic trough collector (PTC) for use in the
design of a solar thermal power plant in Algeria. The study is based
on a mathematical modeling of the PTC. Heat balance has been
established respectively on the heat transfer fluid (HTF), the absorber
tube and the glass envelop using the principle of energy conservation
at each surface of the HCE cross-sectionn. The modified Euler
method is used to solve the obtained differential equations. At first
the results for typical days of two seasons the thermal behavior of the
HTF, the absorber and the envelope are obtained. Then to determine
the thermal performances of the heat transfer fluid, different oils are
considered and their temperature and heat gain evolutions compared.
Abstract: This research paper deals with the implementation of face recognition using neural network (recognition classifier) on low-resolution images. The proposed system contains two parts, preprocessing and face classification. The preprocessing part converts original images into blurry image using average filter and equalizes the histogram of those image (lighting normalization). The bi-cubic interpolation function is applied onto equalized image to get resized image. The resized image is actually low-resolution image providing faster processing for training and testing. The preprocessed image becomes the input to neural network classifier, which uses back-propagation algorithm to recognize the familiar faces. The crux of proposed algorithm is its beauty to use single neural network as classifier, which produces straightforward approach towards face recognition. The single neural network consists of three layers with Log sigmoid, Hyperbolic tangent sigmoid and Linear transfer function respectively. The training function, which is incorporated in our work, is Gradient descent with momentum (adaptive learning rate) back propagation. The proposed algorithm was trained on ORL (Olivetti Research Laboratory) database with 5 training images. The empirical results provide the accuracy of 94.50%, 93.00% and 90.25% for 20, 30 and 40 subjects respectively, with time delay of 0.0934 sec per image.
Abstract: Because of increasing demands for security in today-s
society and also due to paying much more attention to machine
vision, biometric researches, pattern recognition and data retrieval in
color images, face detection has got more application. In this article
we present a scientific approach for modeling human skin color, and
also offer an algorithm that tries to detect faces within color images
by combination of skin features and determined threshold in the
model. Proposed model is based on statistical data in different color
spaces. Offered algorithm, using some specified color threshold, first,
divides image pixels into two groups: skin pixel group and non-skin
pixel group and then based on some geometric features of face
decides which area belongs to face.
Two main results that we received from this research are as follow:
first, proposed model can be applied easily on different databases and
color spaces to establish proper threshold. Second, our algorithm can
adapt itself with runtime condition and its results demonstrate
desirable progress in comparison with similar cases.
Abstract: End milling process is one of the common metal
cutting operations used for machining parts in manufacturing
industry. It is usually performed at the final stage in manufacturing a
product and surface roughness of the produced job plays an
important role. In general, the surface roughness affects wear
resistance, ductility, tensile, fatigue strength, etc., for machined parts
and cannot be neglected in design. In the present work an
experimental investigation of end milling of aluminium alloy with
carbide tool is carried out and the effect of different cutting
parameters on the response are studied with three-dimensional
surface plots. An artificial neural network (ANN) is used to establish
the relationship between the surface roughness and the input cutting
parameters (i.e., spindle speed, feed, and depth of cut). The Matlab
ANN toolbox works on feed forward back propagation algorithm is
used for modeling purpose. 3-12-1 network structure having
minimum average prediction error found as best network architecture
for predicting surface roughness value. The network predicts surface
roughness for unseen data and found that the result/prediction is
better. For desired surface finish of the component to be produced
there are many different combination of cutting parameters are
available. The optimum cutting parameter for obtaining desired
surface finish, to maximize tool life is predicted. The methodology is
demonstrated, number of problems are solved and algorithm is coded
in Matlab®.
Abstract: This study was aimed to explain the influence of surface roughness of the drawbead on non-symmetry deep drawing cold rolled steel sheet to improve the drawability of cold rolled steel sheet. The variables used in this study included semi-circle drawbead with 3 levels of surface roughness which are 6.127 mm Ra, 0.963 mm Ra and 0.152 mm Ra and cold rolled steel sheet according to 3 grades of the JIS standards which are SPCC, SPCE and SPCD with the thickness of 1.0 mm and the blankholder force which is 50% of the drawing force and the depth of 50 mm. According to the test results, when there was the increase in the surface roughness of drawbead, there would be the increase in deep drawing force, especially the SPCC cold rolled steel sheet. This is similar to the increase in the equivalent strain and the wall thickness distribution when the surface roughness of the drawbead increased. It could be concluded that the surface roughness of drawbead has an influence on deep drawing cold rolled steel sheet, especially the drawing force, the equivalent strain and the wall thickness distribution.
Abstract: There are two types of drought as conceptual drought
and operational drought. The three parameters as the beginning, the
end and the degree of severity of the drought can be identifying in
operational drought by average precipitation in the whole region. One
of the methods classified to measure drought is Reconnaissance
Drought Index (RDI). Evapotranspiration is calculated using
Penman-Monteith method by analyzing thirty nine years prolong
climatic data. The evapotranspiration is then utilized in RDI to
classify normalized and standardized RDI. These RDI classifications
led to what kind of drought faced in Bhavnagar region on 12 month
time scale basis. The comparison between actual drought conditions
and RDI method used to find out drought are also illustrated. It can
be concluded that the index results of drought in a particular year are
same in both methods but having different index values where as
severity remain same.
Abstract: A four element prototype phased array surface probe
has been designed and constructed to improve clinical human
prostate spectroscopic data. The probe consists of two pairs of
adjacent rectangular coils with an optimum overlap to reduce the
mutual inductance. The two pairs are positioned on the anterior and
the posterior pelvic region and two couples of varactors at the input
of each coil undertake the procedures of tuning and matching. The
probe switches off and on automatically during the consecutive
phases of the MR experiment with the use of an analog switch that is
triggered by a microcontroller. Experimental tests that were carried
out resulted in high levels of tuning accuracy. Also, the switching
mechanism functions properly for various applied loads and pulse
sequence characteristics, producing only 10 μs of latency.
Abstract: Oxygen and carbon isotopes records of multi-species planktonic, benthic foraminifera and bulk carbonate sample from Central Java Indonesia demonstrate that warm sea surface temperature occurred during the Miocene. Planktonic δ18O values from this study consistently lighter (-4 to -3 ‰PDB) than previous studies that indicate sea surface temperature during Miocene in this area was warm than tropical/equatorial localities. A surprising decrease of oxygen isotopic composition was recorded at ±14 Ma where the maximum of δ18O values is -4.87 ‰PDB for Orbulina universa, -5.02 ‰PDB for Globigerinoides sacculifer and -4.30 ‰PDB for Globoquadrina dehiscens, this event we predict as Middle Miocene Optimum. Warming of sea surface temperature we interpret as related to the development of Western Pacific Warm Pool where warm water from Pacific Ocean through the Indonesian seaway appears to remain during Miocene. Our result also show increasing suddenly of oxygen isotope values of planktic, benthic and bulk carbonate sample from ± 12 Ma, the increasing cooled surface water relatively high degree with Late Miocene global cooling climate or we predict that due to closing of Indonesian Gateway.
Abstract: The request for a sustainable development challenges
both managers and consumers to rethink habitual practices and
activities. While consumers are challenged to develop sustainable
consumption patterns, companies are asked to establish managerial
systems and structures considering economical, ecological, and social
issues. As this is in particular true for housing associations, this paper
aims first, at providing an understanding of sustainability strategy in
residential trade and industry (RTI) by identifying relevant facets of
this construct and second, at conceptually analyzing the impact of
sustainability strategy in RTI on operational efficiency and
performance of municipal housing companies. The author develops a
model of sustainability strategy in RTI and its effects and further,
sheds light in priorities for future research.