Economic Returns of Using Brewery`s Spent Grain in Animal Feed

UK breweries generate extensive by products in the form of spent grain, slurry and yeast. Much of the spent grain is produced by large breweries and processed in bulk for animal feed. Spent brewery grains contain up to 20% protein dry weight and up to 60% fiber and are useful additions to animal feed. Bulk processing is economic and allows spent grain to be sold so providing an income to the brewery. A proportion of spent grain, however, is produced by small local breweries and is more variably distributed to farms or other users using intermittent collection methods. Such use is much less economic and may incur losses if not carefully assessed for transport costs. This study reports an economic returns of using wet brewery spent grain (WBSG) in animal feed using the Co-product Optimizer Decision Evaluator model (Cattle CODE) developed by the University of Nebraska to predict performance and economic returns when byproducts are fed to finishing cattle. The results indicated that distance from brewery to farm had a significantly greater effect on the economics of use of small brewery spent grain and that alternative uses than cattle feed may be important to develop.

The Experiences of South-African High-School Girls in a Fab Lab Environment

This paper reports on an effort to address the issue of inequality in girls- and women-s access to science, engineering and technology (SET) education and careers through raising awareness on SET among secondary school girls in South Africa. Girls participated in hands-on high-tech rapid prototyping environment of a fabrication laboratory that was aimed at stimulating creativity and innovation as part of a Fab Kids initiative. The Fab Kids intervention is about creating a SET pipeline as part of the Young Engineers and Scientists of Africa Initiative.The methodology was based on a real world situation and a hands-on approach. In the process, participants acquired a number of skills including computer-aided design, research skills, communication skills, teamwork skills, technical drawing skills, writing skills and problem-solving skills. Exposure to technology enhanced the girls- confidence in being able to handle technology-related tasks.

DCBOR: A Density Clustering Based on Outlier Removal

Data clustering is an important data exploration technique with many applications in data mining. We present an enhanced version of the well known single link clustering algorithm. We will refer to this algorithm as DCBOR. The proposed algorithm alleviates the chain effect by removing the outliers from the given dataset. So this algorithm provides outlier detection and data clustering simultaneously. This algorithm does not need to update the distance matrix, since the algorithm depends on merging the most k-nearest objects in one step and the cluster continues grow as long as possible under specified condition. So the algorithm consists of two phases; at the first phase, it removes the outliers from the input dataset. At the second phase, it performs the clustering process. This algorithm discovers clusters of different shapes, sizes, densities and requires only one input parameter; this parameter represents a threshold for outlier points. The value of the input parameter is ranging from 0 to 1. The algorithm supports the user in determining an appropriate value for it. We have tested this algorithm on different datasets contain outlier and connecting clusters by chain of density points, and the algorithm discovers the correct clusters. The results of our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of DCBOR.

Computational Networks for Knowledge Representation

In the artificial intelligence field, knowledge representation and reasoning are important areas for intelligent systems, especially knowledge base systems and expert systems. Knowledge representation Methods has an important role in designing the systems. There have been many models for knowledge such as semantic networks, conceptual graphs, and neural networks. These models are useful tools to design intelligent systems. However, they are not suitable to represent knowledge in the domains of reality applications. In this paper, new models for knowledge representation called computational networks will be presented. They have been used in designing some knowledge base systems in education for solving problems such as the system that supports studying knowledge and solving analytic geometry problems, the program for studying and solving problems in Plane Geometry, the program for solving problems about alternating current in physics.

A Critical Review of the Adequacy of EIA Reports-Evidence from Pakistan

The preparation of good-quality Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) reports contribute to enhancing overall effectiveness of EIA. This component of the EIA process becomes more important in situation where public participation is weak and there is lack of expertise on the part of the competent authority. In Pakistan, EIA became mandatory for every project likely to cause adverse environmental impacts from July 1994. The competent authority also formulated guidelines for preparation and review of EIA reports in 1997. However, EIA is yet to prove as a successful decision support tool to help in environmental protection. One of the several reasons of this ineffectiveness is the generally poor quality of EIA reports. This paper critically reviews EIA reports of some randomly selected projects. Interviews of EIA consultants, project proponents and concerned government officials have also been conducted to underpin the root causes of poor quality of EIA reports. The analysis reveals several inadequacies particularly in areas relating to identification, evaluation and mitigation of key impacts and consideration of alternatives. The paper identifies some opportunities and suggests measures for improving the quality of EIA reports and hence making EIA an effective tool to help in environmental protection.

A Study on the Cloud Simulation with a Network Topology Generator

CloudSim is a useful tool to simulate the cloud environment. It shows the service availability, the power consumption, and the network traffic of services on the cloud environment. Moreover, it supports to calculate a network communication delay through a network topology data easily. CloudSim allows inputting a file of topology data, but it does not provide any generating process. Thus, it needs the file of topology data generated from some other tools. The BRITE is typical network topology generator. Also, it supports various type of topology generating algorithms. If CloudSim can include the BRITE, network simulation for clouds is easier than existing version. This paper shows the potential of connection between BRITE and CloudSim. Also, it proposes the direction to link between them.

Replacing Fibre Reinforced Concrete with Bitumen Asphalt in Airports

Concrete pavement has superior durability and longer structural life than asphalt pavement. Concrete pavement requires less maintenance compared to asphalt pavement which requires maintenance and major rehabilitation. Use of the concrete pavement has been grown over the past decade in developing countries. Fibre reinforced concrete (FRC) has been successfully used in design of concrete pavement in past decade. In this research, the effect of fibre volume fraction in modulus of rupture, load-deflection, equivalent flexural strength (fe,3) and the equivalent flexural strength ratio (Re,3) has been used in different fibre volume fraction. Crimped-type flat steel fibre of size 50 x 2.0 x 0.6 mm was used with 1.0%, 1.5% and 2.0% volume fraction. Beam specimens of size 500 x 100 x 100 mm were used for flexural as well as with JCI method for analysis flexural toughness, equivalent flexural strength. It was obtained as the 2% fibre volume fractions; reduce 45% of the concrete pavement thickness.

Morphology and Risk Factors for Blunt Aortic Trauma in Car Accidents - An Autopsy Study

Background: Blunt aortic trauma (BAT) includes various morphological changes that occur during deceleration, acceleration and/or body compression in traffic accidents. The various forms of BAT, from limited laceration of the intima to complete transection of the aorta, depends on the force acting on the vessel wall and the tolerance of the aorta to injury. The force depends on the change in velocity, the dynamics of the accident and of the seating position in the car. Tolerance to aortic injury depends on the anatomy, histological structure and pathomorphological alterations due to aging or disease of the aortic wall. An overview of the literature and medical documentation reveals that different terms are used to describe certain forms of BAT, which can lead to misinterpretation of findings or diagnoses. We therefore, propose a classification that would enable uniform systematic screening of all forms of BAT. We have classified BAT into three morphologycal types: TYPE I (intramural), TYPE II (transmural) and TYPE III (multiple) aortic ruptures with appropriate subtypes. Methods: All car accident casualties examined at the Institute of Forensic Medicine from 2001 to 2009 were included in this retrospective study. Autopsy reports were used to determine the occurrence of each morphological type of BAT in deceased drivers, front seat passengers and other passengers in cars and to define the morphology of BAT in relation to the accident dynamics and the age of the fatalities. Results: A total of 391 fatalities in car accidents were included in the study. TYPE I, TYPE II and TYPE III BAT were observed in 10,9%, 55,6% and 33,5%, respectively. The incidence of BAT in drivers, front seat and other passengers was 36,7%, 43,1% and 28,6%, respectively. In frontal collisions, the incidence of BAT was 32,7%, in lateral collisions 54,2%, and in other traffic accidents 29,3%. The average age of fatalities with BAT was 42,8 years and of those without BAT 39,1 years. Conclusion: Identification and early recognition of the risk factors of BAT following a traffic accident is crucial for successful treatment of patients with BAT. Front seat passengers over 50 years of age who have been injured in a lateral collision are the most at risk of BAT.

Revised PLWAP Tree with Non-frequent Items for Mining Sequential Pattern

Sequential pattern mining is a challenging task in data mining area with large applications. One among those applications is mining patterns from weblog. Recent times, weblog is highly dynamic and some of them may become absolute over time. In addition, users may frequently change the threshold value during the data mining process until acquiring required output or mining interesting rules. Some of the recently proposed algorithms for mining weblog, build the tree with two scans and always consume large time and space. In this paper, we build Revised PLWAP with Non-frequent Items (RePLNI-tree) with single scan for all items. While mining sequential patterns, the links related to the nonfrequent items are not considered. Hence, it is not required to delete or maintain the information of nodes while revising the tree for mining updated transactions. The algorithm supports both incremental and interactive mining. It is not required to re-compute the patterns each time, while weblog is updated or minimum support changed. The performance of the proposed tree is better, even the size of incremental database is more than 50% of existing one. For evaluation purpose, we have used the benchmark weblog dataset and found that the performance of proposed tree is encouraging compared to some of the recently proposed approaches.

Pipelined Control-Path Effects on Area and Performance of a Wormhole-Switched Network-on-Chip

This paper presents design trade-off and performance impacts of the amount of pipeline phase of control path signals in a wormhole-switched network-on-chip (NoC). The numbers of the pipeline phase of the control path vary between two- and one-cycle pipeline phase. The control paths consist of the routing request paths for output selection and the arbitration paths for input selection. Data communications between on-chip routers are implemented synchronously and for quality of service, the inter-router data transports are controlled by using a link-level congestion control to avoid lose of data because of an overflow. The trade-off between the area (logic cell area) and the performance (bandwidth gain) of two proposed NoC router microarchitectures are presented in this paper. The performance evaluation is made by using a traffic scenario with different number of workloads under 2D mesh NoC topology using a static routing algorithm. By using a 130-nm CMOS standard-cell technology, our NoC routers can be clocked at 1 GHz, resulting in a high speed network link and high router bandwidth capacity of about 320 Gbit/s. Based on our experiments, the amount of control path pipeline stages gives more significant impact on the NoC performance than the impact on the logic area of the NoC router.

Detection, Tracking and Classification of Vehicles and Aircraft based on Magnetic Sensing Technology

Existing ground movement surveillance technologies at airports are subjected to limitations due to shadowing effects or multiple reflections. Therefore, there is a strong demand for a new sensing technology, which will be cost effective and will provide detection of non-cooperative targets under any weather conditions. This paper aims to present a new intelligent system, developed within the framework of the EC-funded ISMAEL project, which is based on a new magnetic sensing technology and provides detection, tracking and automatic classification of targets moving on the airport surface. The system is currently being installed at two European airports. Initial experimental results under real airport traffic demonstrate the great potential of the proposed system.

Receding Horizon Filtering for Mobile Robot Systems with Cross-Correlated Sensor Noises

This paper reports on a receding horizon filtering for mobile robot systems with cross-correlated sensor noises and uncertainties. Also, the effect of uncertain parameters in the state of the tracking error model performance is considered. A distributed fusion receding horizon filter is proposed. The distributed fusion filtering algorithm represents the optimal linear combination of the local filters under the minimum mean square error criterion. The derivation of the error cross-covariances between the local receding horizon filters is the key of this paper. Simulation results of the tracking mobile robot-s motion demonstrate high accuracy and computational efficiency of the distributed fusion receding horizon filter.

Using Simulation for Prediction of Units Movements in Case of Communication Failure

Command and Control (C2) system and its interfacethe Common Operational Picture (COP) are main means that supports commander in its decision making process. COP contains information about friendly and enemy unit positions. The friendly position is gathered via tactical network. In the case of tactical network failure the information about units are not available. The tactical simulator can be used as a tool that is capable to predict movements of units in respect of terrain features. Article deals with an experiment that was based on Czech C2 system that is in the case of connectivity lost fed by VR Forces simulator. Article analyzes maximum time interval in which the position created by simulator is still usable and truthful for commander in real time.

A Grid-based Neural Network Framework for Multimodal Biometrics

Recent scientific investigations indicate that multimodal biometrics overcome the technical limitations of unimodal biometrics, making them ideally suited for everyday life applications that require a reliable authentication system. However, for a successful adoption of multimodal biometrics, such systems would require large heterogeneous datasets with complex multimodal fusion and privacy schemes spanning various distributed environments. From experimental investigations of current multimodal systems, this paper reports the various issues related to speed, error-recovery and privacy that impede the diffusion of such systems in real-life. This calls for a robust mechanism that caters to the desired real-time performance, robust fusion schemes, interoperability and adaptable privacy policies. The main objective of this paper is to present a framework that addresses the abovementioned issues by leveraging on the heterogeneous resource sharing capacities of Grid services and the efficient machine learning capabilities of artificial neural networks (ANN). Hence, this paper proposes a Grid-based neural network framework for adopting multimodal biometrics with the view of overcoming the barriers of performance, privacy and risk issues that are associated with shared heterogeneous multimodal data centres. The framework combines the concept of Grid services for reliable brokering and privacy policy management of shared biometric resources along with a momentum back propagation ANN (MBPANN) model of machine learning for efficient multimodal fusion and authentication schemes. Real-life applications would be able to adopt the proposed framework to cater to the varying business requirements and user privacies for a successful diffusion of multimodal biometrics in various day-to-day transactions.

A 3D Virtual Navigation System Integrating User Positioning and Pre-Download Mechanism

This paper takes the actual scene of Aletheia University campus – the Class 2 national monument, the first educational institute in northern Taiwan as an example, to present a 3D virtual navigation system which supports user positioning and pre-download mechanism. The proposed system was designed based on the principle of Voronoi Diagra) to divide the virtual scenes and its multimedia information, which combining outdoor GPS positioning and the indoor RFID location detecting function. When users carry mobile equipments such as notebook computer, UMPC, EeePC...etc., walking around the actual scenes of indoor and outdoor areas of campus, this system can automatically detect the moving path of users and pre-download the needed data so that users will have a smooth and seamless navigation without waiting.

A Water Reuse System in Wetland Paddy Supports the Growing Industrial Water Needs

A water reuse system in wetland paddy was simulated to supply water for industrial in this paper. A two-tank model was employed to represent the return flow of the wetland paddy.Historical data were performed for parameter estimation and model verification. With parameters estimated from the data, the model was then used to simulate a reasonable return flow rate from the wetland paddy. The simulation results show that the return flow ratio was 11.56% in the first crop season and 35.66% in the second crop season individually; the difference may result from the heavy rainfall in the second crop season. Under the existent pond with surplus active capacity, the water reuse ratio was 17.14%, and the water supplementary ratio was 21.56%. However, the pattern of rainfall, the active capacity of the pond, and the rate of water treatment limit the volume of reuse water. Increasing the irrigation water, dredging the depth of pond before rainy season and enlarging the scale of module are help to develop water reuse system to support for the industrial water use around wetland paddy.

Critical Issues Affecting the Engagement by Staff in Professional Development for E-Learning: Findings from a Research Project within the Context of a National Tertiary Education Sector

This paper focuses on issues of engagement by staff in professional development related to the delivery of e-learning. The paper reports on findings drawn from a New Zealand research project which is producing a sector-wide framework for professional development in tertiary e-learning. The research findings indicate that staff engaged in e-learning in tertiary institutions is not making the most effective use of the professional development opportunities available to them; rather they seem to gain their knowledge and support from a variety of informal means. This is despite an emphasis on the provision of professional development opportunities by both Government Policies and Institutions themselves. The conclusion drawn from the findings is that institutional approaches to professional development for e-learning do not yet fully reflect the demands and constraints that working in a digital context impose.

Study of Unsteady Swirling Flow in a Hydrodynamic Vortex Chamber

The paper reports on the results of experimental and numerical study of nonstationary swirling flow in an isothermal model of vortex burner. It has been identified that main source of the instability is related to a precessing vortex core (PVC) phenomenon. The PVC induced flow pulsation characteristics such as precession frequency and its variation as a function of flowrate and swirl number have been explored making use of acoustic probes. Additionally pressure transducers were used to measure the pressure drops on the working chamber and across the vortex flow. The experiments have been included also the mean velocity measurements making use of a laser-Doppler anemometry. The features of instantaneous flowfield generated by the PVC were analyzed employing a commercial CFD code (Star-CCM+) based on Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) approach. Validity of the numerical code has been checked by comparison calculated flowfield data with the obtained experimental results. It has been confirmed particularly that the CFD code applied correctly reproduces the flow features.

NEAR: Visualizing Information Relations in Multimedia Repository A•VI•RE

This paper describes the NEAR (Navigating Exhibitions, Annotations and Resources) panel, a novel interactive visualization technique designed to help people navigate and interpret groups of resources, exhibitions and annotations by revealing hidden relations such as similarities and references. NEAR is implemented on A•VI•RE, an extended online information repository. A•VI•RE supports a semi-structured collection of exhibitions containing various resources and annotations. Users are encouraged to contribute, share, annotate and interpret resources in the system by building their own exhibitions and annotations. However, it is hard to navigate smoothly and efficiently in A•VI•RE because of its high capacity and complexity. We present a visual panel that implements new navigation and communication approaches that support discovery of implied relations. By quickly scanning and interacting with NEAR, users can see not only implied relations but also potential connections among different data elements. NEAR was tested by several users in the A•VI•RE system and shown to be a supportive navigation tool. In the paper, we further analyze the design, report the evaluation and consider its usage in other applications.

A Modification of Wireless and Internet Technologies for Logistics- Analysis

This research is designed for helping a WAPbased mobile phone-s user in order to analyze of logistics in the traffic area by applying and designing the accessible processes from mobile user to server databases. The research-s design comprises Mysql 4.1.8-nt database system for being the server which there are three sub-databases, traffic light – times of intersections in periods of the day, distances on the road of area-blocks where are divided from the main sample-area and speeds of sample vehicles (motorcycle, personal car and truck) in periods of the day. For interconnections between the server and user, PHP is used to calculate distances and travelling times from the beginning point to destination, meanwhile XHTML applied for receiving, sending and displaying data from PHP to user-s mobile. In this research, the main sample-area is focused at the Huakwang-Ratchada-s area, Bangkok, Thailand where usually the congested point and 6.25 km2 surrounding area which are split into 25 blocks, 0.25 km2 for each. For simulating the results, the designed server-database and all communicating models of this research have been uploaded to www.utccengineering.com/m4tg and used the mobile phone which supports WAP 2.0 XHTML/HTML multimode browser for observing values and displayed pictures. According to simulated results, user can check the route-s pictures from the requiring point to destination along with analyzed consuming times when sample vehicles travel in various periods of the day.