Abstract: In this study, attempt has been made to investigate the
relationship specifically the causal relation between fund unit prices
of Islamic equity unit trust fund which measure by fund NAV and the
selected macro-economic variables of Malaysian economy by using
VECM causality test and Granger causality test. Monthly data has
been used from Jan, 2006 to Dec, 2012 for all the variables. The
findings of the study showed that industrial production index,
political election and financial crisis are the only variables having
unidirectional causal relationship with fund unit price. However the
global oil price is having bidirectional causality with fund NAV.
Thus, it is concluded that the equity unit trust fund industry in
Malaysia is an inefficient market with respect to the industrial
production index, global oil prices, political election and financial
crisis. However the market is approaching towards informational
efficiency at least with respect to four macroeconomic variables,
treasury bill rate, money supply, foreign exchange rate, and
corruption index.
Abstract: This paper provides a comparative study on the
performances of standard PID and adaptive PID controllers tested on
travel angle of a 3-Degree-of-Freedom (3-DOF) Quanser bench-top
helicopter. Quanser, a well-known manufacturer of educational
bench-top helicopter has developed Proportional Integration
Derivative (PID) controller with Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR)
for all travel, pitch and yaw angle of the bench-top helicopter. The
performance of the PID controller is relatively good; however, its
performance could also be improved if the controller is combined
with adaptive element. The objective of this research is to design
adaptive PID controller and then compare the performances of the
adaptive PID with the standard PID. The controller design and test is
focused on travel angle control only. Adaptive method used in this
project is self-tuning controller, which controller’s parameters are
updated online. Two adaptive algorithms those are pole-placement
and deadbeat have been chosen as the method to achieve optimal
controller’s parameters. Performance comparisons have shown that
the adaptive (deadbeat) PID controller has produced more desirable
performance compared to standard PID and adaptive (poleplacement).
The adaptive (deadbeat) PID controller attained very fast
settling time (5 seconds) and very small percentage of overshoot (5%
to 7.5%) for 10° to 30° step change of travel angle.
Abstract: This paper presents observations on the early
supervised internships in Psychology, currently called basic
internships in Brazil, and its importance in professional training. The
work is an experience report and focuses on the Professional training,
illustrated by the reality of a Brazilian institution, used as a case
study. It was developed from the authors' experience as academic
supervisors of this kind of practice throughout this undergraduate
course, combined with aspects investigated in the post-doctoral
research of one of them. Theoretical references on the subject and
related national legislation are analyzed, as well as reports of students
who experienced at least one semester of this type of practice,
articulated to the observations of the authors. The results demonstrate
the importance of the early supervised internships as a way of
creating opportunities for the students of a first contact with the
professional reality and the practice of psychologists in different
fields of insertion, preparing them for further experiments that require
more involvement in activities of training and practices in
Psychology.
Abstract: The investigation on wind turbine degradation was
carried out using the nacelle wind data. The three Vestas V80-2MW
wind turbines of Sungsan wind farm in Jeju Island, South Korea were
selected for this work. The SCADA data of the wind farm for five
years were analyzed to draw power curve of the turbines. It is assumed
that the wind distribution is the Rayleigh distribution to calculate the
normalized capacity factor based on the drawn power curve of the
three wind turbines for each year. The result showed that the reduction
of power output from the three wind turbines occurred every year and
the normalized capacity factor decreased to 0.12%/year on average.
Abstract: The extermination and proper disposal of
pharmaceutical wastes from expired and unused medications remains
a disputable issue due to their specific nature and characteristics.
Even though the hazards from these wastes are already well known in
terms of environment and human health, people still treat them as
usual wastes. At a national level, in many countries the management
of pharmaceutical and medical wastes has been one of the main
objectives in order to protect people’s health and the environment.
Even though many legal regulations exist in this respect, there has not
been a single law that would clearly explain the procedures of
returning medicines, ways of selection, treatment and extermination
of pharmaceutical wastes. This paper aims at analyzing the practices
of pharmaceutical waste management and treatment in some
European countries as well as a review of the legislation and official
guidelines in managing these kinds of wastes and protecting the
environment and human health. A suitable treatment and
management of expired medications and other similar wastes would
be in the interest of public health in the first place, as well as in the
interest of healthcare institutions and other bodies engaged in
environment protection.
Abstract: Corrosion inhibitors are widely used in concrete
industry to reduce the corrosion rate of steel rebar which is present in
contact with aggressive environments. The present work aims to
using Zamzam water from well located within the Masjid al-Haram
in Mecca, Saudi Arabia 20 m (66 ft) east of the Kaaba, the holiest
place in Islam as corrosion inhibitor for steel in rain water and
simulated acid rain. The effect of Zamzam water was investigated by
electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and Potentiodynamic
polarization techniques in Department of Civil Engineering - IUT
Saint-Nazaire, Nantes University, France. Zamzam water is
considered to be one of the most important steel corrosion inhibitor
which is frequently used in different industrial applications. Results
showed that zamzam water gave a very good inhibition for steel
corrosion in rain water and simulated acid rain.
Abstract: The paper follows a discourse on computer-assisted
language learning. We examine problems of foreign language
teaching and learning and introduce a metamodel that can be used to
define learning models of language grammar structures in order to
support teacher/student interaction. Special attention is paid to the
concept of a virtual language lab. Our approach to language
education assumes to encourage learners to experiment with a
language and to learn by discovering patterns of grammatically
correct structures created and managed by a language expert.
Abstract: An active slat is developed to increase the lift and delay
the separation for a DU96-W180 airfoil. The active slat is a fixed slat
that can be closed, fully opened or intermittently opened by a rotating
vane depending on the need. Experimental results show that the active
slat has reduced the mean pressure and increased the mean velocity
on the suction side of the airfoil for all positive angles of attack,
indicating an increase of lift. The experimental data and numerical
simulations also show that the direction of actuator vane rotation can
influence the mixing of the flow streams on the suction side and
hence influence the aerodynamic performance.
Abstract: To evaluate the factors which predetermine the
coronary artery disease in patients having positive Exercise Tolerance
Test (ETT) that is treadmill results and coronary artery findings. This
descriptive study was conducted at Department of Cardiology,
Ibrahim Cardiac Hospital & Research Institute, Dhaka, Bangladesh
from 1st January, 2014 to 31st August, 2014. All patients who had
done ETT (treadmill) for chest pain diagnosis were studied. One
hundred and four patients underwent coronary angiogram after
positive treadmill result. Patients were divided into two groups
depending upon the angiographic findings, i.e. true positive and false
positive. Positive treadmill test patients who have coronary artery
involvement these are called true positive and who have no
involvement they are called false positive group. Both groups were
compared with each other. Out of 104 patients, 81 (77.9%) patients
had true positive ETT and 23 (22.1%) patients had false positive
ETT. The mean age of patients in positive ETT was 53.46± 8.06
years and male mean age was 53.63±8.36 years and female was
52.87±7.0 years. Sixty nine (85.19%) male patients and twelve
(14.81%) female patients had true positive ETT, whereas 15
(65.21%) males and 8 (34.79%) females had false positive ETT, this
was statistically significant (p
Abstract: Frequency stability of microgrids under islanded
operation attracts particular attention recently. A new cooperative
frequency control strategy based on centralized multi-agent system
(CMAS) is proposed in this study. Based on this strategy, agents sent
data and furthermore each component has its own to center operating
decisions (MGCC).After deciding on the information, they are
returned. Frequency control strategies include primary and secondary
frequency control and disposal of multi-stage load in which this study
will also provide a method and algorithm for load shedding. This
could also be a big problem for the performance of micro-grid in
times of disaster. The simulation results show the promising
performance of the proposed structure of the controller based on
multi agent systems.
Abstract: Two tragic tsunamis that devastated the west coast of
Sumatra Island, Indonesia in 2004 and North East Japan in 2011 had
damaged bridges to various extents. Tsunamis have resulted in the
catastrophic deterioration of infrastructures i.e. coastal structures,
utilities and transportation facilities. A bridge structure performs vital
roles to enable people to perform activities related to their daily needs
and for development. A damaged bridge needs to be repaired
expeditiously. In order to understand the effects of tsunami forces on
bridges, experimental tests are carried out to measure the
characteristics of hydrodynamic force at various wave heights.
Coastal bridge models designed at a 1:40 scale are used in a 24.0 m
long hydraulic flume with a cross section of 1.5 m by 2.0 m. The
horizontal forces and uplift forces in all cases show that forces
increase nonlinearly with increasing wave amplitude.
Abstract: Marine Protected Areas can benefit from nature based
tourism, monitoring environmental impacts and also become target
for human presence. From more than 3 million tourists visiting
Cozumel Island every year, an average of 2,8 million arrive by cruise
ship, and 41% are estimated to have motivation for water activities.
The destination is relying so much on the tourism activity, that scuba
diving and snorkeling in the National Park Reef of Cozumel sustain
the major economic activity. In order to achieve the sustainable
development indicator designed for regional environmental
development, the PNAC offers a training course to tourism providers
to access the protected area. This way, the update of the last 5 years
of such training is directed to diving staff, boat crew and
professionals, making them able to assist in managing the natural
resource. Moreover, the case study is an example to be used for
raising awareness among tourists visiting protected areas.
Abstract: This paper is drawn from a wider study of the
management of gender, age and disability diversity in the banking
sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), which aims to develop
a framework for diversity management (DM) in this sector. The
paper focuses on the management of disability diversity. The purpose
of the paper is to assist in understanding disability DM in the banking
sector in KSA and to make suggestions for its enhancement. Hence, it
contributes to filling a research gap, as there is a dearth of literature
on disability DM, in KSA in general, and in the banking sector
specifically.
Discrimination against people with disabilities is a social issue that
has not been entirely overcome in any society. However, in KSA,
Islam informs almost every aspect of daily life including work, and
Islam is against discrimination. Hence, in KSA, there are regulations
to accommodate people with disabilities; however, employers are still
free not to hire job applicants with disabilities specifically because of
their condition. Indeed, disabled people are almost entirely absent
from the labour market.
There are 12 Saudi-owned or part-Saudi-owned banks in KSA and
two managers from each of these were interviewed, making a total of
24. The interviews aimed to investigate empirically the understanding
of managers in the banking sector in KSA of diversity management,
including disability DM, in the banking sector. The interview data
were analysed using thematic analysis. Two interviewees stated that
banks used the employment of people with disabilities to enhance
their corporate image, while five expressed the opinion that disabled
employees could contribute to the bank provided they did not have to
deal with customers face-to-face. Nine of the interviewees perceived
that disabled employees could be of value to the bank for their own
sake, not only in ‘behind the scenes’ roles. Another two interviewees
mentioned that employing disabled people could be part of the bank’s
community service programme and one thought it would be part of
the bank’s Saudisation efforts. The remaining five interviewees did
not know how disabled people could contribute to the bank.
The findings show that disability DM in the banking sector in
KSA is a relatively new concept, and is not yet well understood. In
the light of the findings, in order to achieve the purpose of the paper,
the following suggestions were made for the enhancement of
disability DM in the banking sector in KSA. A change in attitudes
towards disabled people is necessary. Such a change in the workplace
can only be achieved if a top-down approach is taken to the
integration of disabled people. Hence, it is suggested that
management and employees follow a course in disability awareness.
Further, a diversity officer in the HR department could enhance the
integration of disabled people into the banking workforce. It is also
suggested that greater government support is required through closely
monitored and enforced anti-discrimination legislation. Moreover,
flexible working arrangements such as part-time work would
facilitate the employment of disabled people and benefit other groups
of employees.
Abstract: This experimental study aims at studying the
conversion of macro-algae into bioethanol under several steps of
procedure: preparation, pre-treatment, fermentation, and distillation.
The main objective of this work was to investigate the role of buffer’s
type as a stabiliser of pH level and fermentation time on the yield of
ethanol. For this purpose, experiments were carried out on biomass
macro-algae to de-couple the pre-treatment and fermentation
processes from those associated with distillation process. β-
glucosidase was used as cellulose decomposer during hydrolysis step
and yeast was used during fermentation process. The species of
macro-algae utilised as energy feedstock was Ulva lactuca and it was
harvested from southern coast of Central of Java Island – Indonesia.
Experiments were conducted in a simple fermenter over a different
buffer: citrate buffer and acetic buffer, and over a range of
fermentation times between 5 to 20 days. The ethanol production was
found to be significantly affected by both variables. The optimum
time of fermentation was 10 days with citrate buffer; result in
0.88458% of ethanol, and the ethanol content after distillation
process was shown 0.985015%.
Abstract: Metallic foams have good potential for lightweight
structures for impact and blast mitigation. Therefore it is important to
find out the optimized foam structure (i.e. cell size, shape, relative
density, and distribution) to maximise energy absorption. In this
paper, quasistatic compression and microstructural characterization
of closed-cell aluminium foams of different pore size and cell
distributions have been carried out. We present results for two
different aluminium metal foams of density 0.49-0.51 g/cc and 0.31-
0.34 g/cc respectively that have been tested in quasi-static
compression. The influence of cell geometry and cell topology on
quasistatic compression behaviour has been investigated using optical
microscope and computed tomography (micro-CT) analysis. It is
shown that the deformation is not uniform in the structure and
collapse begins at the weakest point.
Abstract: The most important part of modern lean low NOx combustors is a premixer where swirlers are often used for intensification of mixing processes and further formation of required flow pattern in combustor liner. Swirling flow leads to formation of complex eddy structures causing flow perturbations. It is able to cause combustion instability. Therefore, at design phase, it is necessary to pay great attention to aerodynamics of premixers. Analysis based on unsteady CFD modeling of swirling flow in production combustor swirler showed presence of large number of different eddy structures that can be conditionally divided into three types relative to its location of origin and a propagation path. Further, features of each eddy type were subsequently defined. Comparison of calculated and experimental pressure fluctuations spectrums verified correctness of computations.
Abstract: Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) E-commerce has been
growing at a very high speed in recent years. Since identical or
nearly-same kinds of products compete one another by relying on
keyword search in C2C E-commerce, some sellers describe their
products with spam keywords that are popular but are not related to
their products. Though such products get more chances to be retrieved
and selected by consumers than those without spam keywords,
the spam keywords mislead the consumers and waste their time.
This problem has been reported in many commercial services like
ebay and taobao, but there have been little research to solve this
problem. As a solution to this problem, this paper proposes a method
to classify whether keywords of a product are spam or not. The
proposed method assumes that a keyword for a given product is
more reliable if the keyword is observed commonly in specifications
of products which are the same or the same kind as the given
product. This is because that a hierarchical category of a product
in general determined precisely by a seller of the product and so is
the specification of the product. Since higher layers of the hierarchical
category represent more general kinds of products, a reliable degree
is differently determined according to the layers. Hence, reliable
degrees from different layers of a hierarchical category become
features for keywords and they are used together with features only
from specifications for classification of the keywords. Support Vector
Machines are adopted as a basic classifier using the features, since
it is powerful, and widely used in many classification tasks. In
the experiments, the proposed method is evaluated with a golden
standard dataset from Yi-han-wang, a Chinese C2C E-commerce,
and is compared with a baseline method that does not consider
the hierarchical category. The experimental results show that the
proposed method outperforms the baseline in F1-measure, which
proves that spam keywords are effectively identified by a hierarchical
category in C2C E-commerce.
Abstract: Azadirachta excelsa or locally known as sentang are
frequently used as a traditional medicine by diabetes patients in
Malaysia. However, less attention has been given to their toxicity
effect. Thus, the study is an attempt to examine the protective effect
of A. excelsa on the pancreas and to determine possible toxicity
mediated by the extract. Diabetes was induced experimentally in rats
by high-fat-diet for 16 weeks followed by intraperitoneal injection of
streptozotocin at dosage of 35 mg/kg of body weight. Declination of
the fasting blood glucose level was observed after continuous
administration of A. excelsa for 14 days twice daily. This is due to the
refining structure of the pancreas. However, surprisingly, the plant
extract reduced the leukocytes, erythrocytes, hemoglobin, MCHC and
lymphocytes. In addition, the rat treated with the plant extract
exhibited increment in AST and eosinocytes level. Overall, the
finding shows that A. excelsa possesses antidiabetic activity by
improving the structure of pancreatic islet of Langerhans but
involved in ameliorating of hematology and biochemical parameters.
Abstract: We used high-precision Global Positioning System
(GPS) to geodetically constrain the motion of stations in the
Darjiling-Sikkim Himalayan (DSH) wedge and examine the
deformation at the Indian-Tibetan plate boundary using IGS
(International GPS Service) fiducial stations. High-precision GPS
based displacement and velocity field was measured in the DSH
between 1997 and 2009. To obtain additional insight north of the
Indo-Tibetan border and in the Darjiling-Sikkim-Tibet (DaSiT)
wedge, published velocities from four stations J037, XIGA, J029 and
YADO were also included in the analysis. India-fixed velocities or
the back-slip was computed relative to the pole of rotation of the
Indian Plate (Latitude 52.97 ± 0.22º, Longitude - 0.30 ± 3.76º, and
Angular Velocity 0.500 ± 0.008º/ Myr) in the DaSiT wedge.
Dislocation modelling was carried out with the back-slip to model the
best possible solution of a finite rectangular dislocation or the
causative fault based on dislocation theory that produced the
observed back-slip using a forward modelling approach. To find the
best possible solution, three different models were attempted. First,
slip along a single thrust fault, then two thrust faults and in finally,
three thrust faults were modelled to simulate the back-slip in the
DaSiT wedge. The three-fault case bests the measured displacements
and is taken as the best possible solution.
Abstract: This study investigates the effect of moisture
conditioning on the Indirect Tensile Strength (ITS) of asphalt
concrete. As a first step, cylindrical samples of 100 mm diameter and
50 mm thick were prepared using a Superpave gyratory compactor.
Next, the samples were conditioned using Moisture Induced
Susceptibility Test (MIST) device at different numbers of moisture
conditioning cycles. In the MIST device, samples are subjected water
pressure through the sample pores cyclically. The MIST conditioned
samples were tested for ITS. Results show that the ITS does not
change significantly with MIST conditioning at the specific pressure
and cycles adopted in this study.