Abstract: The proposed Multimedia Pronunciation Learning
Management System (MPLMS) in this study is a technology with
profound potential for inducing improvement in pronunciation
learning. The MPLMS optimizes the digitised phonetic symbols with
the integration of text, sound and mouth movement video. The
components are designed and developed in an online management
system which turns the web to a dynamic user-centric collection of
consistent and timely information for quality sustainable learning.
The aim of this study is to design and develop the MPLMS which
serves as an innovative tool to improve English pronunciation. This
paper discusses the iterative methodology and the three-phase Alessi
and Trollip model in the development of MPLMS. To align with the
flexibility of the development of educational software, the iterative
approach comprises plan, design, develop, evaluate and implement is
followed. To ensure the instructional appropriateness of MPLMS, the
instructional system design (ISD) model of Alessi and Trollip serves
as a platform to guide the important instructional factors and process.
It is expected that the results of future empirical research will support
the efficacy of MPLMS and its place as the premier pronunciation
learning system.
Abstract: We study bifurcation structure of the zonal jet flow the
streamfunction of which is expressed by a single spherical harmonics
on a rotating sphere. In the non-rotating case, we find that a steady
traveling wave solution arises from the zonal jet flow through Hopf
bifurcation. As the Reynolds number increases, several traveling
solutions arise only through the pitchfork bifurcations and at high
Reynolds number the bifurcating solutions become Hopf unstable. In
the rotating case, on the other hand, under the stabilizing effect of
rotation, as the absolute value of rotation rate increases, the number
of the bifurcating solutions arising from the zonal jet flow decreases
monotonically. We also carry out time integration to study unsteady
solutions at high Reynolds number and find that in the non-rotating
case the unsteady solutions are chaotic, while not in the rotating cases
calculated. This result reflects the general tendency that the rotation
stabilizes nonlinear solutions of Navier-Stokes equations.
Abstract: Energy consumption rate during the cooling process
of industrial glass tempering process is considerably high. In this
experimental study the effect of dimensionless jet to jet distance
(S/D) and jet to plate distance (H/D) on the cooling time have been
investigated. In the experiments 4 mm thick glass samples have been
used. Cooling unit consists of 16 mutually placed seamless aluminum
nozzles of 8 mm in diameter and 80 mm in length. Nozzles were in
staggered arrangement. Experiments were conducted with circular
jets for H/D values between 1 and 10, and for S/D values between 2
and 10. During the experiments Reynolds number has been kept
constant at 30000. Experimental results showed that the longest
cooling time with 87 seconds has been observed in the experiments
for S/D=10 and H/D=10 values, while the shortest cooling time with
42.5 seconds has been measured in the experiments for S/D=2 and
H/D=4 values.
Abstract: Utilization of diverse germplasm is needed to enhance
the genetic diversity of cultivars. The objective of this study was to
evaluate the genetic relationships of 98 alfalfa germplasm accessions
using morphological traits and SSR markers. From the 98 tested
populations, 81 were locals originating in Europe, 17 were introduced
from USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Three primers
generated 67 polymorphic bands. The average polymorphic
information content (PIC) was very high (> 0.90) over all three used
primer combinations. Cluster analysis using Unweighted Pair Group
Method with Arithmetic Means (UPGMA) and Jaccard´s coefficient
grouped the accessions into 2 major clusters with 4 sub-clusters with
no correlation between genetic and morphological diversity. The SSR
analysis clearly indicated that even with three polymorphic primers,
reliable estimation of genetic diversity could be obtained.
Abstract: Limited infrastructure development on peats and
organic soils is a serious geotechnical issues common to many
countries of the world especially Malaysia which distributed 1.5 mill
ha of those problematic soil. These soils have high water content and
organic content which exhibit different mechanical properties and
may also change chemically and biologically with time. Constructing
structures on peaty ground involves the risk of ground failure and
extreme settlement. Nowdays, much efforts need to be done in
making peatlands usable for construction due to increased landuse.
Deep mixing method employing cement as binders, is generally used
as measure again peaty/ organic ground failure problem. Where the
technique is widely adopted because it can improved ground
considerably in a short period of time. An understanding of
geotechnical properties as shear strength, stiffness and compressibility
behavior of these soils was requires before continues construction on
it. Therefore, 1- 1.5 meter peat soil sample from states of Johor and
an organic soil from Melaka, Malaysia were investigated. Cement
were added to the soil in the pre-mixing stage with water cement ratio
at range 3.5,7,14,140 for peats and 5,10,30 for organic soils,
essentially to modify the original soil textures and properties. The
mixtures which in slurry form will pour to polyvinyl chloride (pvc)
tube and cured at room temperature 250C for 7,14 and 28 days.
Laboratory experiments were conducted including unconfined
compressive strength and bender element , to monitor the improved
strength and stiffness of the 'stabilised mixed soils'. In between,
scanning electron miscroscopic (SEM) were observations to
investigate changes in microstructures of stabilised soils and to
evaluated hardening effect of a peat and organic soils stabilised
cement. This preliminary effort indicated that pre-mixing peat and
organic soils contributes in gaining soil strength while help the
engineers to establish a new method for those problematic ground
improvement in further practical and long term applications.
Abstract: Monitoring of microbial flora in aquacultured sea bream, in relation to the physicochemical parameters of the rearing seawater, ended to a model describing the influence of the last to the quality of the fisheries. Fishes were sampled during eight months from four aqua farms in Western Greece and analyzed for psychrotrophic, H2S producing bacteria, Salmonella sp., heterotrophic plate count (PCA), with simultaneous physical evaluation. Temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity, TDS, salinity, NO3 - and NH4 + ions were recorded. Temperature, dissolved oxygen and conductivity were correlated, respectively, to PCA, Pseudomonas sp. and Shewanella sp. counts. These parameters were the inputs of the model, which was driving, as outputs, to the prediction of PCA, Vibrio sp., Pseudomonas sp. and Shewanella sp. counts, and fish microbiological quality. The present study provides, for the first time, a ready-to-use predictive model of fisheries hygiene, leading to an effective management system for the optimization of aquaculture fisheries quality.
Abstract: Most of the well known methods for generating
Gaussian variables require at least one standard uniform distributed
value, for each Gaussian variable generated. The length of the
random number generator therefore, limits the number of
independent Gaussian distributed variables that can be generated
meanwhile the statistical solution of complex systems requires a
large number of random numbers for their statistical analysis. We
propose an alternative simple method of generating almost infinite
number of Gaussian distributed variables using a limited number of
standard uniform distributed random numbers.
Abstract: The business strategy of any company wanting to be
competitive on the market should be designed around the concept of
intangibles, with an increasingly decisive role in knowledge transfer
of the biggest corporations. Advancing the research in these areas,
this study integrates the two approaches, emphasizing the
relationships between the components of intellectual capital and
corporate social responsibility. The three dimensions of intellectual
capital in terms of sustainability requirements are debated. The paper
introduces the concept of sustainable intellectual capital and debates
it within an assessment model designed on the base of key
performance indicators. The results refer to the assessment of
possible ways for including the information on intellectual capital
and corporate responsibility within the corporate strategy. The
conclusions enhance the need for companies to be ready to support
the integration of this type of information the knowledge transfer
process, in order to develop competitive advantage on the market.
Abstract: Mushrooms are a group of fleshy macroscopic fungi.
They have been valued throughout the world as both edible and
medicine. They are highly nutritious with good amount of quality
proteins, vitamins and minerals. An edible mushroom, Calocybe
indica was selected to validate its nutritional and medicinal
properties. Since tissue damage in hyperglycemia has been related to
oxidative stress, we evaluated the enzymatic and non-enzymatic
antioxidant status in the serum, liver and kidney since they are the
target organs in diabetic complications. From the results, increased
oxidative stress and decreased antioxidants might be related to the
causation of diabetes mellitus. The treatment in the diabetic rats with
the Calocybe indica showed an increase in the antioxidant system
and decrease in the production of free radicals. The mushrooms
which contain antioxidant phytochemicals has potential free radical
scavenging capacity and hence can induce the antioxidant system in
the body significantly reduces the generated free radicals thereby
maintaining the normal levels of the antioxidants
Abstract: Disposal of health-care waste (HCW) is considered as
an important environmental problem especially in large cities.
Multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques are apt to deal
with quantitative and qualitative considerations of the health-care
waste management (HCWM) problems. This research proposes a
fuzzy multi-criteria group decision making approach with a multilevel
hierarchical structure including qualitative as well as
quantitative performance attributes for evaluating HCW disposal
alternatives for Istanbul. Using the entropy weighting method,
objective weights as well as subjective weights are taken into account
to determine the importance weighting of quantitative performance
attributes. The results obtained using the proposed methodology are
thoroughly analyzed.
Abstract: Increasing growth of information volume in the
internet causes an increasing need to develop new (semi)automatic
methods for retrieval of documents and ranking them according to
their relevance to the user query. In this paper, after a brief review
on ranking models, a new ontology based approach for ranking
HTML documents is proposed and evaluated in various
circumstances. Our approach is a combination of conceptual,
statistical and linguistic methods. This combination reserves the
precision of ranking without loosing the speed. Our approach
exploits natural language processing techniques for extracting
phrases and stemming words. Then an ontology based conceptual
method will be used to annotate documents and expand the query.
To expand a query the spread activation algorithm is improved so
that the expansion can be done in various aspects. The annotated
documents and the expanded query will be processed to compute
the relevance degree exploiting statistical methods. The outstanding
features of our approach are (1) combining conceptual, statistical
and linguistic features of documents, (2) expanding the query with
its related concepts before comparing to documents, (3) extracting
and using both words and phrases to compute relevance degree, (4)
improving the spread activation algorithm to do the expansion based
on weighted combination of different conceptual relationships and
(5) allowing variable document vector dimensions. A ranking
system called ORank is developed to implement and test the
proposed model. The test results will be included at the end of the
paper.
Abstract: Conventional approaches in the implementation of logic programming applications on embedded systems are solely of software nature. As a consequence, a compiler is needed that transforms the initial declarative logic program to its equivalent procedural one, to be programmed to the microprocessor. This approach increases the complexity of the final implementation and reduces the overall system's performance. On the contrary, presenting hardware implementations which are only capable of supporting logic programs prevents their use in applications where logic programs need to be intertwined with traditional procedural ones, for a specific application. We exploit HW/SW codesign methods to present a microprocessor, capable of supporting hybrid applications using both programming approaches. We take advantage of the close relationship between attribute grammar (AG) evaluation and knowledge engineering methods to present a programmable hardware parser that performs logic derivations and combine it with an extension of a conventional RISC microprocessor that performs the unification process to report the success or failure of those derivations. The extended RISC microprocessor is still capable of executing conventional procedural programs, thus hybrid applications can be implemented. The presented implementation is programmable, supports the execution of hybrid applications, increases the performance of logic derivations (experimental analysis yields an approximate 1000% increase in performance) and reduces the complexity of the final implemented code. The proposed hardware design is supported by a proposed extended C-language called C-AG.
Abstract: Global climate change has become the preeminent
threat to human security in the 21st century. From mitigation perspective, this study aims to evaluate the performance of biogas
renewable project under clean development mechanism activities
(namely Korat-Waste-to-Energy) in Thailand and to assess local perceptions towards the significance of climate change mitigation and
sustainability of such project in their community. Questionnaire was
developed based on the national sustainable development criteria and
was distributed among systematically selected households within
project boundaries (n=260). Majority of the respondents strongly agreed with the reduction of odor problems (81%) and air pollution
(76%). However, they were unsure about greenhouse gas reduction from such project and ignorant about the key issues of climate change. A lesson learned suggested that there is a need to further
investigate the possible socio-psychological barriers may significantly shape public perception and understandings of climate
change in the local context.
Abstract: The purpose of this research is to study motivation
factors and also to study factors relation to job performance to
compare motivation factors under the personal factor classification
such as gender, age, income, educational level, marital status, and
working duration; and to study the relationship between Motivation
Factors and Job Performance with job satisfactions. The sample
groups utilized in this research were 400 Suan Sunandha Rajabhat
University employees. This research is a quantitative research using
questionnaires as research instrument. The statistics applied for data
analysis including percentage, mean, and standard deviation. In
addition, the difference analysis was conducted by t value computing,
one-way analysis of variance and Pearson’s correlation coefficient
computing. The findings of the study results were as follows the
findings showed that the aspects of job promotion and salary were at
the moderate levels. Additionally, the findings also showed that the
motivations that affected the revenue branch chiefs’ job performance
were job security, job accomplishment, policy and management, job
promotion, and interpersonal relation.
Abstract: Repeated observation of a given area over time yields
potential for many forms of change detection analysis. These
repeated observations are confounded in terms of radiometric
consistency due to changes in sensor calibration over time,
differences in illumination, observation angles and variation in
atmospheric effects.
This paper demonstrates applicability of an empirical relative
radiometric normalization method to a set of multitemporal cloudy
images acquired by Resourcesat1 LISS III sensor. Objective of this
study is to detect and remove cloud cover and normalize an image
radiometrically. Cloud detection is achieved by using Average
Brightness Threshold (ABT) algorithm. The detected cloud is
removed and replaced with data from another images of the same
area. After cloud removal, the proposed normalization method is
applied to reduce the radiometric influence caused by non surface
factors. This process identifies landscape elements whose reflectance
values are nearly constant over time, i.e. the subset of non-changing
pixels are identified using frequency based correlation technique. The
quality of radiometric normalization is statistically assessed by R2
value and mean square error (MSE) between each pair of analogous
band.
Abstract: In the present work, the effective moisture diffusivity
and activation energy were calculated using an infinite series solution
of Fick-s diffusion equation. The results showed that increasing
drying temperature accelerated the drying process. All drying
experiments had only falling rate period. The average effective
moisture diffusivity values varied from 2.807x10-10 to 6.977x10-10m2
s_1 over the temperature and velocity range. The temperature
dependence of the effective moisture diffusivity for the thin layer
drying of the ginger slices was satisfactorily described by an
Arrhenius-type relationship with activation energy values of 19.313-
22.722 kJ.mol-1 within 40–70 °C and 0.8-3 ms-1 temperature range.
Abstract: The process of wafer fabrication is arguably the most
technologically complex and capital intensive stage in semiconductor
manufacturing. This large-scale discrete-event process is highly reentrant,
and involves hundreds of machines, restrictions, and
processing steps. Therefore, production control of wafer fabrication
facilities (fab), specifically scheduling, is one of the most challenging
problems that this industry faces. Dispatching rules have been
extensively applied to the scheduling problems in semiconductor
manufacturing. Moreover, lot release policies are commonly used in
this manufacturing setting to further improve the performance of such
systems and reduce its inherent variability. In this work, simulation is
used in the scheduling of re-entrant flow shop manufacturing systems
with an application in semiconductor wafer fabrication; where, a
simulation model has been developed for the Intel Five-Machine Six
Step Mini-Fab using the ExtendTM simulation environment. The
Mini-Fab has been selected as it captures the challenges involved in
scheduling the highly re-entrant semiconductor manufacturing lines.
A number of scenarios have been developed and have been used to
evaluate the effect of different dispatching rules and lot release
policies on the selected performance measures. Results of simulation
showed that the performance of the Mini-Fab can be drastically
improved using a combination of dispatching rules and lot release
policy.
Abstract: This paper proposes a method that discovers sequential patterns corresponding to user-s interests from sequential data. This method expresses the interests as constraint patterns. The constraint patterns can define relationships among attributes of the items composing the data. The method recursively decomposes the constraint patterns into constraint subpatterns. The method evaluates the constraint subpatterns in order to efficiently discover sequential patterns satisfying the constraint patterns. Also, this paper applies the method to the sequential data composed of stock price indexes and verifies its effectiveness through comparing it with a method without using the constraint patterns.
Abstract: Software and applications are subjected to serious and damaging security threats, these threats are increasing as a result of increased number of potential vulnerabilities. Security testing is an indispensable process to validate software security requirements and to identify security related vulnerabilities. In this paper we analyze and compare different available vulnerabilities testing techniques based on a pre defined criteria using analytical hierarchy process (AHP). We have selected five testing techniques which includes Source code analysis, Fault code injection, Robustness, Stress and Penetration testing techniques. These testing techniques have been evaluated against five criteria which include cost, thoroughness, Ease of use, effectiveness and efficiency. The outcome of the study is helpful for researchers, testers and developers to understand effectiveness of each technique in its respective domain. Also the study helps to compare the inner working of testing techniques against a selected criterion to achieve optimum testing results.
Abstract: Supplier selection, in real situation, is affected by
several qualitative and quantitative factors and is one of the most
important activities of purchasing department. Since at the time of
evaluating suppliers against the criteria or factors, decision makers
(DMS) do not have precise, exact and complete information, supplier
selection becomes more difficult. In this case, Grey theory helps us
to deal with this problem of uncertainty. Here, we apply Technique
for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS)
method to evaluate and select the best supplier by using interval
fuzzy numbers. Through this article, we compare TOPSIS with some
other approaches and afterward demonstrate that the concept of
TOPSIS is very important for ranking and selecting right supplier.