Abstract: The myocardium is composed of specialized muscle
which relies mainly on fatty acid and sugar metabolism and it is
widely contribute to the heart functioning. The changes of the cardiac
energy-producing system during heart failure have been proved using
autoradiography techniques. This study focused on evaluating sugar
and fatty acid metabolism in myocardium as cardiac energy getting
system using heart-accumulated radiopharmaceuticals. Two sets of
autoradiographs of heart cross sections of Lewis male rats were
analyzed and the time- accumulation curve obtained with use of the
MATLAB image processing software to evaluate fatty acid and sugar
metabolic functions.
Abstract: Job satisfaction and motivation have been given an
important attention in psychology because they are seen as main
instruments in maintaining organizational growth and development;
they are also used to accomplish organizational aims and objectives.
However, it has been observed that some institutions failed in
motivating and stimulating their workers; in contrast, workers may be
motivated but not satisfied with the job and failed to perform
efficiently and effectively. It is hoped that the study of this nature
would be of significance value to all stakeholders in education
specifically, lecturers in higher institutions in Nigeria. Also, it is
hoped that the findings of this study will enhance lecturers’
effectiveness and performance in discharging their duties. In the light
of the above statements, this study investigated whether job
satisfaction and motivation predict lecturers’ effectiveness in Nigeria
Police Academy, Wudil, Kano State. Correlational research method
was adopted for the study, while purposive sampling technique was
used to choose the institution and the sampled lectures (70). Simple
random sampling technique was used to select one hundred cadets
across the academy. Two instruments were used to elicit information
from both lecturers and cadets. These were job satisfaction and
motivation; and lecturers’ effectiveness Questionnaires. The
instruments were subjected to pilot testing and found to have
reliability coefficient of 0.69 and 0.71 respectively. The results of the
study revealed that there was a significance relationship among job
satisfaction, motivation and lecturers effectiveness in Nigeria Police
Academy. There was a significance relationship between job
satisfaction and lecturers’ effectiveness in Nigeria Police Academy
the cal r is 0.21 while the crt r is 0.19. at p
Abstract: Over the past few decades, manufacturing has evolved
from a more labor-intensive set of mechanical processes to a
sophisticated set of information based technology processes. With the
existence of various advanced manufacturing technologies (AMTs),
more and more functions or jobs are performed by these machines
instead of human labour. This study was undertaken in order to
research the extent of AMTs adoption in manufacturing companies in
Kenya. In order to investigate a survey was conducted via
questionnaires that were sent to 183 selected AMT manufacturing
companies in Kenya. 92 companies responded positively. All the
surveyed companies were found to have a measure of investment in
at least two of the 14 types of AMTs investigated. In general the
company surveyed showed that the level of AMT adoption in Kenya
is very low with investments levels at a mean of 2.057 and
integration levels at a mean of 1.639 in a scale of 1-5.
Abstract: Present empirical paper investigates the relationship
between FDI and economic growth by 10 selected industries in 10
Central and Eastern European countries from the period 1995 to
2012. Different estimation approaches were used to explore the
connection between FDI and economic growth, for example OLS,
RE, FE with and without time dummies. Obtained empirical results
leads to some main consequences: First, the Central and East
European countries (CEEC) attracted foreign direct investment,
which raised the productivity of industries they entered in. It should
be concluded that the linkage between FDI and output growth by
industries is positive and significant enough to suggest that foreign
firm’s participation enhanced the productivity of the industries they
occupied. There had been an endogeneity problem in the regression
and fixed effects estimation approach was used which partially
corrected the regression analysis in order to make the results less
biased. Second, it should be stressed that the results show that time
has an important role in making FDI operational for enhancing output
growth by industries via total factor productivity. Third, R&D
positively affected economic growth and at the same time, it should
take some time for research and development to influence economic
growth. Fourth, the general trends masked crucial differences at the
country level: over the last 20 years, the analysis of the tables and
figures at the country level show that the main recipients of FDI of
the 11 Central and Eastern European countries were Hungary, Poland
and the Czech Republic. The main reason was that these countries
had more open door policies for attracting the FDI. Fifth, according
to the graphical analysis, while Hungary had the highest FDI inflow
in this region, it was not reflected in the GDP growth as much as in
other Central and Eastern European countries.
Abstract: The goal of this paper is to specify factors influencing
the profitability of selected banks. Next, a model will be created to
help establish variables that have a demonstrable influence on the
development of the selected banks' profitability ratios. Czech banks
and their international parent companies were selected for analyzing
profitability. Banks categorized as large banks (according to the
Czech National Bank's system, which ranks banks according to
balance sheet total) were selected to represent the Czech banks. Two
ratios, the return on assets ratio (ROA) and the return on equity ratio
(ROE) are used to assess bank profitability. Six endogenous and four
external indicators were selected from among other factors that
influence bank profitability. The data analyzed were for 2001–2013.
First, correlation analysis, which was supposed to eliminate
correlated values, was conducted. A large number of correlated
values were established on the basis of this analysis. The strongly
correlated values were omitted. Despite this, the subsequent
regression analysis of profitability for the individual banks that were
selected did not confirm that the selected variables influenced their
profitability. The studied factors' influence on bank profitability was
demonstrated only for Ceskoslovenska Obchodni Banka and Société
Générale using regression analysis. For Československa Obchodni
Banka, it was demonstrated that inflation level and the amount of the
central bank's interest rate influenced the return on assets ratio and
that capital adequacy and market concentration influenced the return
on equity ratio for Société Générale.
Abstract: Sentiment analysis means to classify a given review
document into positive or negative polar document. Sentiment
analysis research has been increased tremendously in recent times
due to its large number of applications in the industry and academia.
Sentiment analysis models can be used to determine the opinion of
the user towards any entity or product. E-commerce companies can
use sentiment analysis model to improve their products on the basis
of users’ opinion. In this paper, we propose a new One-class Support
Vector Machine (One-class SVM) based sentiment analysis model
for movie review documents. In the proposed approach, we initially
extract features from one class of documents, and further test the
given documents with the one-class SVM model if a given new test
document lies in the model or it is an outlier. Experimental results
show the effectiveness of the proposed sentiment analysis model.
Abstract: We present probabilistic multinomial Dirichlet
classification model for multidimensional data and Gaussian process
priors. Here, we have considered efficient computational method that
can be used to obtain the approximate posteriors for latent variables
and parameters needed to define the multiclass Gaussian process
classification model. We first investigated the process of inducing a
posterior distribution for various parameters and latent function by
using the variational Bayesian approximations and important sampling
method, and next we derived a predictive distribution of latent
function needed to classify new samples. The proposed model is
applied to classify the synthetic multivariate dataset in order to verify
the performance of our model. Experiment result shows that our model
is more accurate than the other approximation methods.
Abstract: This paper introduces an effective method of
segmenting Korean text (place names in Korean) from a Korean road
sign image. A Korean advanced directional road sign is composed of
several types of visual information such as arrows, place names in
Korean and English, and route numbers. Automatic classification of
the visual information and extraction of Korean place names from the
road sign images make it possible to avoid a lot of manual inputs to a
database system for management of road signs nationwide. We
propose a series of problem-specific heuristics that correctly segments
Korean place names, which is the most crucial information, from the
other information by leaving out non-text information effectively. The
experimental results with a dataset of 368 road sign images show 96%
of the detection rate per Korean place name and 84% per road sign
image.
Abstract: This paper introduces a signal monitoring program
developed with a view to helping electrical engineering students get
familiar with sensors with digital output. Because the output of digital
sensors cannot be simply monitored by a measuring instrument such as
an oscilloscope, students tend to have a hard time dealing with digital
sensors. The monitoring program runs on a PC and communicates with
an MCU that reads the output of digital sensors via an asynchronous
communication interface. Receiving the sensor data from the MCU,
the monitoring program shows time and/or frequency domain plots of
the data in real time. In addition, the monitoring program provides a
serial terminal that enables the user to exchange text information with
the MCU while the received data is plotted. The user can easily
observe the output of digital sensors and configure the digital sensors
in real time, which helps students who do not have enough experiences
with digital sensors. Though the monitoring program was programmed
in the Matlab programming language, it runs without the Matlab since
it was compiled as a standalone executable.
Abstract: Password authentication is one of the widely used
methods to achieve authentication for legal users of computers and
defense against attackers. There are many different ways to
authenticate users of a system and there are many password cracking
methods also developed. This paper proposes how best password
cracking can be performed on a CPU-GPGPU based system. The
main objective of this work is to project how quickly a password can
be cracked with some knowledge about the computer security and
password cracking if sufficient security is not incorporated to the
system.
Abstract: Thermoacoustic refrigerator is a cooling device which
uses the acoustic waves to produce the cooling effect. The aim of this
paper is to explore the experimental and numerical feasibility of a
standing-wave thermoacoustic refrigerator. The effects of the stack
length, position of stack and operating frequency on the cooling
performance are carried out. The circular pore stacks are tested under
the atmospheric pressure. A low-cost loudspeaker is used as an
acoustic driver. The results show that the location of stack installed in
resonator tube has a greater effect on the cooling performance, than
the stack length and operating frequency, respectively. The
temperature difference across the ends of stack can be generated up
to 13.7°C, and the temperature of cold-end is dropped down by 5.3°C
from the ambient temperature.
Abstract: Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is an essential
component of an organisation’s strategic procedures, which requires
attention of several factors to envisage a range of long-term outcomes
to support strategic project portfolio decisions. To evaluate overall
efficiency at the portfolio level, it is essential to identify the
functionality of specific projects as well as to aggregate those
findings in a mathematically meaningful manner that indicates the
strategic significance of the associated projects at a number of levels
of abstraction. PPM success is directly associated with the quality of
decisions made and poor judgment increases portfolio costs. Hence,
various Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques have
been designed and employed to support the decision-making
functions. This paper reviews possible options to enhance the
decision-making outcomes in organisational portfolio management
processes using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) both from
academic and practical perspectives and will examine the usability,
certainty and quality of the technique. The results of the study will
also provide insight into the technical risk associated with current
decision-making model to underpin initiative tracking and strategic
portfolio management.
Abstract: A seizure prediction method is proposed by extracting
global features using phase correlation between adjacent epochs for
detecting relative changes and local features using fluctuation/
deviation within an epoch for determining fine changes of different
EEG signals. A classifier and a regularization technique are applied
for the reduction of false alarms and improvement of the overall
prediction accuracy. The experiments show that the proposed method
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and provides high prediction
accuracy (i.e., 97.70%) with low false alarm using EEG signals in
different brain locations from a benchmark data set.
Abstract: The purpose of the study is to investigate the level of
intrinsic motivation of trainers after attending a Continuous
Professional Development Course (CPD) organized by Institute of
Teacher Training Malaysia titled, “Transformation of Teaching and
Learning the Fun Way”. This study employed a survey whereby 96
teacher trainers were given Situational Intrinsic Motivational Scale
(SIMS) Instruments. Confirmatory factor analysis was carried out to
get the validity of this instrument in local setting. Data were analyzed
with SPSS for descriptive statistic. Semi- structured interviews were
also administrated to collect qualitative data on participants’
experiences after participating in the two-day fun-filled program. The
findings showed that the participants’ level of intrinsic motivation
showed higher mean than the amotivation. The results revealed that
the intrinsic motivation mean is 19.0 followed by Identified
regulation with a mean of 17.4, external regulation 9.7 and
amotivation 6.9. The interview data also revealed that the participants
were motivated after attending this training program. It can be
concluded that this program, which was organized by Institute of
Teacher Training Malaysia, was able to enhance participants’ level of
motivation. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as a multidimensional
approach to motivation was utilized. Therefore, teacher trainers may
have more success using the “The fun way approach” in conducting
training program in future.
Abstract: In this paper, a robust fault detection and isolation
(FDI) scheme is developed to monitor a multivariable nonlinear
chemical process called the Chylla-Haase polymerization reactor,
when it is under the cascade PI control. The scheme employs a radial
basis function neural network (RBFNN) in an independent mode to
model the process dynamics, and using the weighted sum-squared
prediction error as the residual. The Recursive Orthogonal Least
Squares algorithm (ROLS) is employed to train the model to
overcome the training difficulty of the independent mode of the
network. Then, another RBFNN is used as a fault classifier to isolate
faults from different features involved in the residual vector. Several
actuator and sensor faults are simulated in a nonlinear simulation of
the reactor in Simulink. The scheme is used to detect and isolate the
faults on-line. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the
scheme even the process is subjected to disturbances and
uncertainties including significant changes in the monomer feed rate,
fouling factor, impurity factor, ambient temperature, and
measurement noise. The simulation results are presented to illustrate
the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.
Abstract: Durian skin is a newly explores natural fibre
potentially reinforced polyolefin for diverse applications. In this
work, investigation on the effect of coupling agent, maleic anhydride
polypropylene (MAPP) on the mechanical, morphological, and
thermal properties of polypropylene (PP) reinforced with durian skin
fibre (DSF) was conducted. The presence of 30 wt% DSF
significantly reduced the tensile strength of PP-DSF composite.
Interestingly, even though the same trend goes to PP-DSF with the
presence of MAPP, the reduction is only about 4% relative to
unreinforced PP and 18% higher than PP-DSF without MAPP
(untreated composite or UTC). The used of MAPP in treated
composite (TC) also increased the tensile modulus, flexural
properties and degradation temperature. The enhanced mechanical
properties are consistent with good interfacial interaction as
evidenced under scanning electron microscopy.
Abstract: The goal of this paper is to identify the main
differences in the way men and women perceive TV ads. This paper
is based on a research project conducted partly as a review of relevant
papers, which deals with gender influence on the cognitive process
and postmodern perception of advertising. In addition to that,
qualitative research was conducted by means of interviews and
structured questionnaires. Furthermore, data acquired from the
research were used to evaluate our objectives and hypotheses. The
goal of this paper is to compare women's and men's perception of
advertisement. Although women are able to perceive more details
than men, men are more susceptible to sexual appeals in advertising.
Significant differences were also found in the perception of sexual
appeals in the context of gender.
Abstract: Concurrent planning of project scheduling and
material ordering has been increasingly addressed within last decades
as an approach to improve the project execution costs. Therefore, we
have taken the problem into consideration in this paper, aiming to
maximize schedules quality robustness, in addition to minimize the
relevant costs. In this regard, a bi-objective mathematical model is
developed to formulate the problem. Moreover, it is possible to
utilize the all-unit discount for materials purchasing. The problem is
then solved by the E-constraint method, and the Pareto front is
obtained for a variety of robustness values. The applicability and
efficiency of the proposed model is tested by different numerical
instances, finally.
Abstract: Political participation involves voluntary and
deliberate efforts by the members of a political system to determine
the kinds of political institution and individuals that will govern them
and equally influence the mobilization and allocation of the available
societal resources. Over the years, youths in Nigeria participate
actively in political party rallies and voting to elect their leaders and
representatives in governance. This paper examines categories and
nature of participation in politics as well as factors that drive youths
into politics in Sokoto State. A survey conducted, through focus
group discussions, interviews and questionnaire, in the six sampled
Local Government of Sokoto State identifies three category of
political participation; namely, active, moderate and apathetic
participation. The findings reveal that 63.57% of respondents are
apathetic to politics in the State and unemployed youth constitutes
34.74% of the entire responses. The paper establishes that lack of
attainment of need (63.22%) is one of the reasons that make youths
engage into participatory activities that encourage political thuggery
and manipulation of electoral outcomes. The paper recommends that
youths should be engaged into positive rational participatory
activities that ensure inclusiveness and promotion of good
governance in Nigeria. It is hoped that this will enlighten youths and
policy implementers on the constructive strategies in controlling
youths’ negative participation in politics in Nigeria.
Abstract: Global economy today is full of sophistication. All
over the world, business and marketing practices are undergoing
unprecedented transformation. In realization of this fact, the federal
government of Nigeria has put in place a robust transformation
agenda in order to put Nigeria in a better position to be a competitive
player and in the process transform all sectors of its economy. New
technologies, especially the Internet, are the driving force behind this
transformation. However, technology has inadvertently affected the
way businesses are done thus necessitating the acquisition of new
skills. In developing countries like Nigeria, citizens are still battling
with effective application of those technologies. Obviously, students
of business education need to acquire relevant business knowledge to
be able to transit into the world of work on graduation from school
and compete favorably in the labor market. Therefore, effective
utilization of social media by both teachers and students can help
extensively in empowering students with the needed skills. Social
media which is a group of Internet-based applications built on the
ideological foundations of Web 2.0, that allow the creation and
exchange of user generated content, and if incorporated into the
classroom experience may be the needed answer to unemployment
and poverty in Nigeria as beneficiaries can easily connect with
existing and potential enterprises and customers, engage with them
and reinforce mutual business benefits. Challenges and benefits of
social media use in education in Nigeria universities were revealed in
this study.