Abstract: The purpose of this study was to explore the learning
effects on dance domain in Arts Curriculum at junior and senior high
levels. A total of 1,366 students from 9th to 11th grade of different
areas from Taiwan were administered a self-designed dance
achievement test. Data were analyzed through descriptive analysis,
independent sample t test, one-way ANOVA and Post hoc comparison
analysis using Scheffé Test. The results showed (1) female students
Abstract: In recent years, everything is trending toward digitalization
and with the rapid development of the Internet technologies,
digital media needs to be transmitted conveniently over the network.
Attacks, misuse or unauthorized access of information is of great
concern today which makes the protection of documents through
digital media a priority problem. This urges us to devise new data
hiding techniques to protect and secure the data of vital significance.
In this respect, steganography often comes to the fore as a tool for
hiding information. Steganography is a process that involves hiding
a message in an appropriate carrier like image or audio. It is of
Greek origin and means "covered or hidden writing". The goal of
steganography is covert communication. Here the carrier can be sent
to a receiver without any one except the authenticated receiver only
knows existence of the information. Considerable amount of work
has been carried out by different researchers on steganography. In this
work the authors propose a novel Steganographic method for hiding
information within the spatial domain of the gray scale image. The
proposed approach works by selecting the embedding pixels using
some mathematical function and then finds the 8 neighborhood of
the each selected pixel and map each bit of the secret message in
each of the neighbor pixel coordinate position in a specified manner.
Before embedding a checking has been done to find out whether the
selected pixel or its neighbor lies at the boundary of the image or not.
This solution is independent of the nature of the data to be hidden
and produces a stego image with minimum degradation.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to determine the effect of
strategic management implementations on the institutionalization
levels. In this regard a field study has been made over 31 stone quarry
enterprises in cement producing sector in Konya by using survey
method. In this study, institutionalization levels of the enterprises
have been evaluated regarding three dimensions: professionalization,
management approach, participation in decisions and delegation of
authority. According to the results of the survey, there is a highly
positive and statistically significant relationship between the strategic
management implementations and institutionalization levels of the
enterprises. Additionally,-considering the results of regression
analysis made for establishing the relationship between strategic
management and institutionalization levels- it has been determined
that strategic management implementations of the enterprises can be
used as a variable to explain the institutionalization levels of them,
and also strategic management implementations of the enterprises
increase the institutionalization levels of them.
Abstract: The term Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) describes a collection of organizational and IT practices that help organizations establish flexible work models, visible knowledge-sharing practices, and higher levels of community participation. E2.0 parallels and builds on another term commonly being used in the industry – Web 2.0. E2.0 represents also new packaging for strategic collaboration and Knowledge Management (KM). Organizations rely on collaboration and KM initiatives to attain innovation, growth, productivity, and performance goals.
Abstract: The effects of enzyme action and heat pretreatment on oil extraction yield from sunflower kernels were analysed using hexane extraction with Soxhlet, and aqueous extraction with incubator shaker. Ground kernels of raw and heat treated kernels, each with and without Viscozyme treatment were used. Microscopic images of the kernels were taken to analyse the visible effects of each treatment on the cotyledon cell structure of the kernels. Heat pretreated kernels before both extraction processes produced enhanced oil extraction yields than the control, with steam explosion the most efficient. In hexane extraction, applying a combination of steam explosion and Viscozyme treatments to the kernels before the extraction gave the maximum oil extractable in 1 hour; while for aqueous extraction, raw kernels treated with Viscozyme gave the highest oil extraction yield. Remarkable cotyledon cell disruption was evident in kernels treated with Viscozyme; whereas steam explosion and conventional heat treated kernels had similar effects.
Abstract: This paper aims at presenting the biotechnology used
to obtain collagen-based gels from shark (Squalus acanthias) and brill
skin, marine fish growing in the Black Sea. Due to the structure of its
micro-fibres, collagen can be considered a nanomaterial; in order to
use collagen-based matrixes as biomaterial, rheological studies must
be performed first, to state whether they are stable or not. For the
triple-helix structure to remain stable within these gels at room or
human body temperature, they must be stabilized by reticulation.
Abstract: One of the determinants of a firm-s prosperity is the
customers- perceived service quality and satisfaction. While service
quality is wide in scope, and consists of various dimensions, there
may be differences in the relative importance of these dimensions in
affecting customers- overall satisfaction of service quality.
Identifying the relative rank of different dimensions of service quality
is very important in that it can help managers to find out which
service dimensions have a greater effect on customers- overall
satisfaction. Such an insight will consequently lead to more effective
resource allocation which will finally end in higher levels of
customer satisfaction. This issue –despite its criticality- has not
received enough attention so far. Therefore, using a sample of 240
bank customers in Iran, an artificial neural network is developed to
address this gap in the literature. As customers- evaluation of service
quality is a subjective process, artificial neural networks –as a brain
metaphor- may appear to have a potentiality to model such a
complicated process. Proposing a neural network which is able to
predict the customers- overall satisfaction of service quality with a
promising level of accuracy is the first contribution of this study. In
addition, prioritizing the service quality dimensions in affecting
customers- overall satisfaction –by using sensitivity analysis of
neural network- is the second important finding of this paper.
Abstract: The present study has been carried out with a view to calculate the coastal vulnerability index (CVI) to know the high and low sensitive areas and area of inundation due to future SLR. Both conventional and remotely sensed data were used and analyzed through the modelling technique. Out of the total study area, 8.26% is very high risk, 14.21% high, 9.36% medium, 22.46% low and 7.35% in the very low vulnerable category, due to costal components. Results of the inundation analysis indicate that 225.2 km² and 397 km² of the land area will be submerged by flooding at 1m and 10m inundation levels. The most severely affected sectors are expected to be the residential, industrial and recreational areas. As this coast is planned for future coastal developmental activities, measures such as industrializations, building regulation, urban growth planning and agriculture, development of an integrated coastal zone management, strict enforcement of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Act, monitoring of impacts and further research in this regard are recommended for the study area.
Abstract: The oil and gas industry has moved towards Load and
Resistance Factor Design through API RP2A - LRFD and the
recently published international standard, ISO-19902, for design of
fixed steel offshore structures. The ISO 19902 is intended to provide
a harmonized design practice that offers a balanced structural fitness
for the purpose, economy and safety. As part of an ongoing work, the
reliability analysis of tubular joints of the jacket structure has been
carried out to calibrate the load and resistance factors for the design
of offshore platforms in Malaysia, as proposed in the ISO.
Probabilistic models have been established for the load effects (wave,
wind and current) and the tubular joints strengths. In this study the
First Order Reliability Method (FORM), coded in MATLAB
Software has been employed to evaluate the reliability index of the
typical joints, designed using API RP2A - WSD and ISO 19902.
Abstract: Color constancy algorithms are generally based on the
simplified assumption about the spectral distribution or the reflection
attributes of the scene surface. However, in reality, these assumptions
are too restrictive. The methodology is proposed to extend existing
algorithm to applying color constancy locally to image patches rather
than globally to the entire images.
In this paper, a method based on low-level image features using
superpixels is proposed. Superpixel segmentation partition an image
into regions that are approximately uniform in size and shape. Instead
of using entire pixel set for estimating the illuminant, only superpixels
with the most valuable information are used. Based on large scale
experiments on real-world scenes, it can be derived that the estimation
is more accurate using superpixels than when using the entire image.
Abstract: As the trend of manufacturing is being dominated depending on services, products and processes are more and more related with sophisticated services. Thus, this research starts with the discussion about integration of the product, process, and service in the innovation process. In particular, this paper sets out some foundations for a theory of service innovation in the field of manufacturing, and proposes the dynamic model of service innovation related to product and process. Two dynamic models of service innovation are suggested to investigate major tendencies and dynamic variations during the innovation cycle: co-innovation and sequential innovation. To structure dynamic models of product, process, and service innovation, the innovation stages in which two models are mainly achieved are identified. The research would encourage manufacturers to formulate strategy and planning for service development with product and process.
Abstract: Subdivision is a method to create a smooth surface from a coarse mesh by subdividing the entire mesh. The conventional ways to compute and render surfaces are inconvenient both in terms of memory and computational time as the number of meshes will increase exponentially. An adaptive subdivision is the way to reduce the computational time and memory by subdividing only certain selected areas. In this paper, a new adaptive subdivision method for triangle meshes is introduced. This method defines a new adaptive subdivision rules by considering the properties of each triangle's neighbors and is embedded in a traditional Loop's subdivision. It prevents some undesirable side effects that appear in the conventional adaptive ways. Models that were subdivided by our method are compared with other adaptive subdivision methods
Abstract: The rheological properties, structure and potential synergistic interactions of whey proteins (1-6%) and inulin (20%) in mixed gels in the presence of CaCl2 was the aim of this study. Whey proteins have a strong influence on inulin gel formation. At low concentrations (2%) whey proteins did not impair in inulin gel formation. At higher concentration (4%) whey proteins impaired inulin gelation and inulin impaired the formation of a Ca2+-induced whey protein network. The presence of whey proteins at a level allowing for protein gel network formation (6%) significantly increased the rheological parameters values of the gels. SEM micrographs showed that whey protein structure was coated by inulin moieties which could make the mixed gels firmer. The protein surface hydrophobicity measurements did not exclude synergistic interactions between inulin and whey proteins, however. The use of an electrophoretic technique did not show any stable inulin-whey protein complexes.
Abstract: Glaucoma diagnosis involves extracting three features
of the fundus image; optic cup, optic disc and vernacular. Present
manual diagnosis is expensive, tedious and time consuming. A
number of researches have been conducted to automate this process.
However, the variability between the diagnostic capability of an
automated system and ophthalmologist has yet to be established. This
paper discusses the efficiency and variability between
ophthalmologist opinion and digital technique; threshold. The
efficiency and variability measures are based on image quality
grading; poor, satisfactory or good. The images are separated into
four channels; gray, red, green and blue. A scientific investigation
was conducted on three ophthalmologists who graded the images
based on the image quality. The images are threshold using multithresholding
and graded as done by the ophthalmologist. A
comparison of grade from the ophthalmologist and threshold is made.
The results show there is a small variability between result of
ophthalmologists and digital threshold.
Abstract: Although lots of experiments have been done in enhanced oil recovery, the number of experiments which consider the effects of local and global heterogeneity on efficiency of enhanced oil recovery based on the polymer-surfactant flooding is low and rarely done. In this research, we have done numerous experiments of water flooding and polymer-surfactant flooding on a five spot glass micromodel in different conditions such as different positions of layers. In these experiments, five different micromodels with three different pore structures are designed. Three models with different layer orientation, one homogenous model and one heterogeneous model are designed. In order to import the effect of heterogeneity of porous media, three types of pore structures are distributed accidentally and with equal ratio throughout heterogeneous micromodel network according to random normal distribution. The results show that maximum EOR recovery factor will happen in a situation where the layers are orthogonal to the path of mainstream and the minimum EOR recovery factor will happen in a situation where the model is heterogeneous. This experiments show that in polymer-surfactant flooding, with increase of angles of layers the EOR recovery factor will increase and this recovery factor is strongly affected by local heterogeneity around the injection zone.
Abstract: Knowing the geometrical object pose of products in manufacturing line before robot manipulation is required and less time consuming for overall shape measurement. In order to perform it, the information of shape representation and matching of objects is become required. Objects are compared with its descriptor that conceptually subtracted from each other to form scalar metric. When the metric value is smaller, the object is considered closed to each other. Rotating the object from static pose in some direction introduce the change of value in scalar metric value of boundary information after feature extraction of related object. In this paper, a proposal method for indexing technique for retrieval of 3D geometrical models based on similarity between boundaries shapes in order to measure 3D CAD object pose using object shape feature matching for Computer Aided Testing (CAT) system in production line is proposed. In experimental results shows the effectiveness of proposed method.
Abstract: To help the client to select a competent agent
construction enterprise (ACE), this study aims to investigate the
selection standards by using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process
(FAHP) and build an evaluation mathematical model with Grey
Relational Analysis (GRA). According to the outputs of literature
review, four orderly levels are established within the model, taking the
consideration of various agent construction models in practice. Then,
the process of applying FAHP and GRA is discussed in detailed.
Finally, through a case study, this paper illustrates how to apply these
methods in getting the weights of each standard and the final
assessment result.
Abstract: A dynamic stall-corrected Blade Element-Momentum algorithm based on a hybrid polar is validated through the comparison with Sandia experimental measurements on a 5-m diameter wind turbine of Troposkien shape. Different dynamic stall models are evaluated. The numerical predictions obtained using the extended aerodynamic coefficients provided by both Sheldal and Klimas and Raciti Castelli et al. are compared to experimental data, determining the potential of the hybrid database for the numerical prediction of vertical-axis wind turbine performances.
Abstract: In this paper, hybrid FDMA-TDMA access technique in a cooperative distributive fashion introducing and implementing a modified protocol introduced in [1] is analyzed termed as Power and Cooperation Diversity Gain Protocol (PCDGP). A wireless network consists of two users terminal , two relays and a destination terminal equipped with two antennas. The relays are operating in amplify-and-forward (AF) mode with a fixed gain. Two operating modes: cooperation-gain mode and powergain mode are exploited from source terminals to relays, as it is working in a best channel selection scheme. Vertical BLAST (Bell Laboratories Layered Space Time) or V-BLAST with minimum mean square error (MMSE) nulling is used at the relays to perfectly detect the joint signals from multiple source terminals. The performance is analyzed using binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation scheme and investigated over independent and identical (i.i.d) Rayleigh, Ricean-K and Nakagami-m fading environments. Subsequently, simulation results show that the proposed scheme can provide better signal quality of uplink users in a cooperative communication system using hybrid FDMATDMA technique.
Abstract: Fair share objective has been included into the goaloriented
parallel computer job scheduling policy recently. However,
the previous work only presented the overall scheduling performance.
Thus, the per-user performance of the policy is still lacking. In this
work, the details of per-user fair share performance under the
Tradeoff-fs(Tx:avgX) policy will be further evaluated. A basic fair
share priority backfill policy namely RelShare(1d) is also studied.
The performance of all policies is collected using an event-driven
simulator with three real job traces as input. The experimental results
show that the high demand users are usually benefited under most
policies because their jobs are large or they have a lot of jobs. In the
large job case, one job executed may result in over-share during that
period. In the other case, the jobs may be backfilled for
performances. However, the users with a mixture of jobs may suffer
because if the smaller jobs are executing the priority of the remaining
jobs from the same user will be lower. Further analysis does not show
any significant impact of users with a lot of jobs or users with a large
runtime approximation error.