Abstract: Phase equilibria of AZ91D Mg alloys for
nonflammable use, containing Ca and Y, were carried out by using
FactSage® and FTLite database, which revealed that solid solution
treatment could be performed at temperatures from 400 to 450oC.
Solid solution treatment of AZ91D Mg alloy without Ca and Y was
successfully conducted at 420oC and supersaturated microstructure
with all beta phase resolved into matrix was obtained. In the case of
AZ91D Mg alloy with some Ca and Y; however, a little amount of
intermetallic particles were observed after solid solution treatment.
After solid solution treatment, each alloy was annealed at temperatures
of 180 and 200oC for time intervals from 1 min to 48 hrs and hardness
of each condition was measured by micro-Vickers method. Peak aging
conditions were deduced as at the temperature of 200oC for 10 hrs.
Abstract: The ever increasing amount of solid waste (SW)
generated which is exacerbated by lack of proper waste management
system is of growing concern worldwide and in major cities in
developing countries due to its social, economic and environmental
implications. This study attempts to describe the aspects of solid
waste management (SWM) in Adama, one of the fast urbanizing
cities in Ethiopia, and highlights the challenges thereof. Data were
gathered through interview supplemented by field observation and
self-administered questionnaire. Then, the data were analyzed using
the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) software. In
addition, secondary data were gathered from documents. Findings
revealed that the current SWM practice couldn’t cope with the fast
urbanizing needs and the rapid population growth exhibited by the
city. Besides, major factors contributing to the inefficient system
were identified. The study would provide practical insights to
decision makers in developing a sustainable SWM system leading to
minimized risk in the city.
Abstract: In this paper the issue of dimensionality reduction is
investigated in finger vein recognition systems using kernel Principal
Component Analysis (KPCA). One aspect of KPCA is to find the
most appropriate kernel function on finger vein recognition as there
are several kernel functions which can be used within PCA-based
algorithms. In this paper, however, another side of PCA-based
algorithms -particularly KPCA- is investigated. The aspect of
dimension of feature vector in PCA-based algorithms is of
importance especially when it comes to the real-world applications
and usage of such algorithms. It means that a fixed dimension of
feature vector has to be set to reduce the dimension of the input and
output data and extract the features from them. Then a classifier is
performed to classify the data and make the final decision. We
analyze KPCA (Polynomial, Gaussian, and Laplacian) in details in
this paper and investigate the optimal feature extraction dimension in
finger vein recognition using KPCA.
Abstract: The purposes of this study were to design and find
users’ satisfaction after using the decision support system for tourism
northern part of Thailand, which can provide tourists touristic
information and plan their personal voyage. Such information can be
retrieved systematically based on personal budget and provinces. The
samples of this study were five experts and users 30 persons white
collars in Bangkok. This decision support system was designed via
ASP.NET. Its database was developed by using MySQL, for
administrators are able to effectively manage the database. The
application outcome revealed that the innovation works properly as
sought in objectives. Specialists and white collars in Bangkok have
evaluated the decision support system; the result was satisfactorily
positive.
Abstract: The high Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAR) in Filter
Bank Multicarrier with Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
(FBMC-OQAM) can significantly reduce power efficiency and
performance. In this paper, we address the problem of PAPR
reduction for FBMC-OQAM systems using Tone Reservation (TR)
technique. Due to the overlapping structure of FBMCOQAM signals,
directly applying TR schemes of OFDM systems to FBMC-OQAM
systems is not effective. We improve the tone reservation (TR)
technique by employing sliding window with Active Constellation
Extension for the PAPR reduction of FBMC-OQAM signals, called
sliding window tone reservation Active Constellation Extension
(SW-TRACE) technique. The proposed SW-TRACE technique uses
the peak reduction tones (PRTs) of several consecutive data
blocks to cancel the peaks of the FBMC-OQAM signal inside a
window, with dynamically extending outer constellation points in
active(data-carrying) channels, within margin-preserving constraints,
in order to minimize the peak magnitude. Analysis and simulation
results compared to the existing Tone Reservation (TR) technique for
FBMC/OQAM system. The proposed method SW-TRACE has better
PAPR performance and lower computational complexity.
Abstract: Biological conversion of biomass to methane has
received increasing attention in recent years. Grasses have been
explored for their potential anaerobic digestion to methane. In this
review, extensive literature data have been tabulated and classified.
The influences of several parameters on the potential of these
feedstocks to produce methane are presented. Lignocellulosic
biomass represents a mostly unused source for biogas and ethanol
production. Many factors, including lignin content, crystallinity of
cellulose, and particle size, limit the digestibility of the hemicellulose
and cellulose present in the lignocellulosic biomass. Pretreatments
have used to improve the digestibility of the lignocellulosic biomass.
Each pretreatment has its own effects on cellulose, hemicellulose and
lignin, the three main components of lignocellulosic biomass. Solidstate
anaerobic digestion (SS-AD) generally occurs at solid
concentrations higher than 15%. In contrast, liquid anaerobic
digestion (AD) handles feedstocks with solid concentrations between
0.5% and 15%. Animal manure, sewage sludge, and food waste are
generally treated by liquid AD, while organic fractions of municipal
solid waste (OFMSW) and lignocellulosic biomass such as crop
residues and energy crops can be processed through SS-AD. An
increase in operating temperature can improve both the biogas yield
and the production efficiency, other practices such as using AD
digestate or leachate as an inoculant or decreasing the solid content
may increase biogas yield but have negative impact on production
efficiency. Focus is placed on substrate pretreatment in anaerobic
digestion (AD) as a means of increasing biogas yields using today’s
diversified substrate sources.
Abstract: The emergence of the Semantic Web technology
increases day by day due to the rapid growth of multiple web pages.
Many standard formats are available to store the semantic web data.
The most popular format is the Resource Description Framework
(RDF). Querying large RDF graphs becomes a tedious procedure
with a vast increase in the amount of data. The problem of query
optimization becomes an issue in querying large RDF graphs.
Choosing the best query plan reduces the amount of query execution
time. To address this problem, nature inspired algorithms can be used
as an alternative to the traditional query optimization techniques. In
this research, the optimal query plan is generated by the proposed
SAPSO algorithm which is a hybrid of Simulated Annealing (SA)
and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms. The proposed
SAPSO algorithm has the ability to find the local optimistic result
and it avoids the problem of local minimum. Experiments were
performed on different datasets by changing the number of predicates
and the amount of data. The proposed algorithm gives improved
results compared to existing algorithms in terms of query execution
time.
Abstract: This study aims to examine the role of career
advancement and job security as predictors of employee commitment
to their organization. Data was collected from 580 frontline
employees attached to two departments of 29 luxury hotels in
Peninsular Malaysia. Statistical results using Partial Least Squares
technique provided support for the proposed hypotheses. In view of
the findings, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Abstract: High temperature deformation behavior of cast
Fe-20Cr-5Al alloy has been investigated in this study by performing
tensile and compression tests at temperatures from 1100 to 1200oC.
Rectangular ingots of which the dimensions were 300×300×100 in
millimeter were cast using vacuum induction melting. Phase
equilibrium was calculated using the FactSage®, thermodynamic
software and database. Tensile strength of cast Fe-20Cr-5Al alloy was
4 MPa at 1200oC. With temperature decreased, tensile strength
increased rapidly and reached up to 13 MPa at 1100oC. Elongation
also increased from 18 to 80% with temperature decreased from
1200oC to 1100oC. Microstructure observation revealed that M23C6
carbide was precipitated along the grain boundary and within the
matrix.
Abstract: This paper proposes a cooperative Alamouti space time
transmission scheme with low relay complexity for the cooperative
communication systems. In the proposed scheme, the source node
combines the data symbols to construct the Alamouti-coded form at
the destination node, while the conventional scheme performs the
corresponding operations at the relay nodes. In simulation results,
it is shown that the proposed scheme achieves the second order
cooperative diversity while maintaining the same bit error rate (BER)
performance as that of the conventional scheme.
Abstract: This paper analyzes innovation trends in South Korea
by means of the number of patent applications filed by residents and
nonresidents during the period 1965 to 2012. Making use of patent
data released by the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO), we search for the presence of multiple structural changes in
patent application series in this country. These changes may suggest
that firms’ innovative activity has been modified as a result of
implementing some science, technology and innovation (STI)
policies. Accordingly, the new regulations implemented in this
country in the last decades have influenced its innovative activity.
The question conducting this research is thus how STI policies in
South Korea have influenced its innovation activity. The results
confirm the existence of multiple structural changes in the series of
patent applications resulting from alternative STI policies
implemented during these years.
Abstract: Paper deals with analysis of strategic management
methods in non-profit making organization in the Czech Republic.
Strategic management represents an aggregate of methods and
approaches that can be applied for managing organizations - in this
article the organizations which associate owners and keepers of nonstate
forest properties. Authors use these methods of strategic
management: analysis of stakeholders, SWOT analysis and
questionnaire inquiries. The questionnaire was distributed
electronically via e-mail. In October 2013 we obtained data from a
total of 84 questionnaires. Based on the results the authors
recommend the using of confrontation strategy which improves the
competitiveness of non-profit making organizations.
Abstract: The objectives of this research were to study the
influencing factors that contributed to the success of e-collaborative
in e-commerce of B2C (Business to Customer) business in Bangkok,
Thailand. The influencing factors included organization, people,
information technology and the process of e-collaborative. A
questionnaire was used to collect data from 200 small e-commerce
businesses and the path analysis was utilized as the tool for data
analysis.
By using the path analysis, it was revealed that the factors
concerning with organization, people and information technology
played an influence on e-collaborative process and the success of ecollaborative,
whereas the process of e-collaborative factor
manipulated its success. The findings suggested that B2C ecommerce
business in Thailand should opt in improvement approach
in terms of managerial structure, leaderships, staff’s skills and
knowledge, and investment of information technology in order to
capacitate higher efficiency of e-collaborative process that would
result in profit and competitive advantage.
Abstract: ‘Steganalysis’ is one of the challenging and attractive interests for the researchers with the development of information hiding techniques. It is the procedure to detect the hidden information from the stego created by known steganographic algorithm. In this paper, a novel feature based image steganalysis technique is proposed. Various statistical moments have been used along with some similarity metric. The proposed steganalysis technique has been designed based on transformation in four wavelet domains, which include Haar, Daubechies, Symlets and Biorthogonal. Each domain is being subjected to various classifiers, namely K-nearest-neighbor, K* Classifier, Locally weighted learning, Naive Bayes classifier, Neural networks, Decision trees and Support vector machines. The experiments are performed on a large set of pictures which are available freely in image database. The system also predicts the different message length definitions.
Abstract: Second line antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimen is
used when patients fail their first line regimen. There are many
factors such as non-adherence, drug resistance as well as virological
and immunological failure that lead to second line highly active
antiretroviral therapy (HAART) regimen treatment failure. This study
was aimed at determining predictor factors to treatment failure with
second line HAART and analyzing median survival time.
An observational, retrospective study was conducted in Sungai
Buloh Hospital (HSB) to assess current status of HIV patients treated
with second line HAART regimen. Convenience sampling was used
and 104 patients were included based on the study’s inclusion and
exclusion criteria. Data was collected for six months i.e. from July
until December 2013. Data was then analysed using SPSS version 18.
Kaplan-Meier and Cox regression analyses were used to measure
median survival times and predictor factors for treatment failure.
The study population consisted mainly of male subjects, aged 30-
45 years, who were heterosexual, and had HIV infection for less than
6 years. The most common second line HAART regimen given was
lopinavir/ritonavir (LPV/r)-based combination. Kaplan-Meier
analysis showed that patients on LPV/r demonstrated longer median
survival times than patients on indinavir/ritonavir (IDV/r) based
combination (p
Abstract: Recently GPS data is used in a lot of studies to
automatically reconstruct travel patterns for trip survey. The aim is to
minimize the use of questionnaire surveys and travel diaries so as to
reduce their negative effects. In this paper data acquired from GPS and
accelerometer embedded in smart phones is utilized to predict the
mode of transportation used by the phone carrier. For prediction,
Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Adaptive boosting (AdaBoost)
are employed. Moreover a unique method to improve the prediction
results from these algorithms is also proposed. Results suggest that the
prediction accuracy of AdaBoost after improvement is relatively better
than the rest.
Abstract: The study examines the influence of marital status on
consumers of products and services using blogs as a source of
information. A pre-designed questionnaire was used to collect the
primary data from the respondents (experiences). Data were collected
from one hundred and eighty seven respondents residing in and
around the Emirates of Sharjah and Dubai of the United Arab
Emirates. The collected data was analyzed with the help of statistical
tools such as averages, percentages, factor analysis, Student’s t-test
and Structural Equation Modelling Technique.
Objectives of the study are to know the reasons how married and
unmarried or single consumers of products and services are
motivated to use blogs as a source of information, to know whether
the consumers of products and services irrespective of their marital
status share their views and experiences with other bloggers and to
know the respondents’ future intentions towards blogging.
The study revealed the following: Majority of the respondents
have the motivation to blog because they are willing to receive
comments on what they post about services, convenience of blogs to
search for information about services and products, by blogging
respondents share information on the symptoms of a disease/ disorder
that may be experienced by someone, helps to share information
about ready to cook mix products and are keen to spend more time
blogging in the future.
Abstract: In the present work, detailed analysis on flow characteristics of a pair of immiscible liquids through horizontal pipeline is simulated by using ANSYS FLUENT 6.2. Moderately viscous oil and water (viscosity ratio = 107, density ratio = 0.89 and interfacial tension = 0.024 N/m) have been taken as system fluids for the study. Volume of Fluid (VOF) method has been employed by assuming unsteady flow, immiscible liquid pair, constant liquid properties, and co-axial flow. Meshing has been done using GAMBIT. Quadrilateral mesh type has been chosen to account for the surface tension effect more accurately. From the grid independent study, we have selected 47037 number of mesh elements for the entire geometry. Simulation successfully predicts slug, stratified wavy, stratified mixed and annular flow, except dispersion of oil in water, and dispersion of water in oil. Simulation results are validated with horizontal literature data and good conformity is observed. Subsequently, we have simulated the hydrodynamics (viz., velocity profile, area average pressure across a cross section and volume fraction profile along the radius) of stratified wavy and annular flow at different phase velocities. The simulation results show that in the annular flow, total pressure of the mixture decreases with increase in oil velocity due to the fact that pipe cross section is completely wetted with water. Simulated oil volume fraction shows maximum at the centre in core annular flow, whereas, in stratified flow, maximum value appears at upper side of the pipeline. These results are in accord with the actual flow configuration. Our findings could be useful in designing pipeline for transportation of crude oil.
Abstract: An extensive amount of work has been done in data
clustering research under the unsupervised learning technique in Data
Mining during the past two decades. Moreover, several approaches
and methods have been emerged focusing on clustering diverse data
types, features of cluster models and similarity rates of clusters.
However, none of the single clustering algorithm exemplifies its best
nature in extracting efficient clusters. Consequently, in order to
rectify this issue, a new challenging technique called Cluster
Ensemble method was bloomed. This new approach tends to be the
alternative method for the cluster analysis problem. The main
objective of the Cluster Ensemble is to aggregate the diverse
clustering solutions in such a way to attain accuracy and also to
improve the eminence the individual clustering algorithms. Due to
the massive and rapid development of new methods in the globe of
data mining, it is highly mandatory to scrutinize a vital analysis of
existing techniques and the future novelty. This paper shows the
comparative analysis of different cluster ensemble methods along
with their methodologies and salient features. Henceforth this
unambiguous analysis will be very useful for the society of clustering
experts and also helps in deciding the most appropriate one to resolve
the problem in hand.
Abstract: This article deals with the perceived quality of regional products in the Moravian-Silesian region in the Czech Republic. Research was focused on finding out what do consumers perceive as a quality product and what characteristics make a quality product. The data were obtained by questionnaire survey andanalysed by IBM SPSS. From the thousands of respondents the representative sample of 719 for MS region was created based on demographic factors of gender, age, education and income. The research analysis disclosed that consumers in MS region are still price oriented and that the preference of quality over price does not depend on regional brand knowledge.