Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine gas transport
behavior of mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) combined with
porous particles. Main existing models are categorized in two main
groups; two-phase (ideal contact) and three-phase (non-ideal contact).
A new coefficient, J, was obtained to express equations for estimating
effect of the particle porosity in two-phase and three-phase models.
Modified models evaluates with existing models and experimental
data using Matlab software. Comparison of gas permeability of
proposed modified models with existing models in different MMMs
shows a better prediction of gas permeability in MMMs.
Abstract: Spam is any unwanted electronic message or material
in any form posted too many people. As the world is growing as
global world, social networking sites play an important role in
making world global providing people from different parts of the
world a platform to meet and express their views. Among different
social networking sites Facebook become the leading one. With
increase in usage different users start abusive use of Facebook by
posting or creating ways to post spam. This paper highlights the
potential spam types nowadays Facebook users’ faces. This paper
also provide the reason how user become victim to spam attack. A
methodology is proposed in the end discusses how to handle different
types of spam.
Abstract: Karst term is the determiner of a variety of areas or
landforms and unique perspectives that have been formed in result of
the of the ingredients dissolution of rocks constituter by natural
waters. Shiraz area with an area of 5322km2 is located in the simple
folded belt in the southern part of Zagros Mountain of Fars, and is
surrounded with Limestone Mountains (Asmari formation). Shiraz
area is located in Calcareous areas. The infrastructure of this city is
lime and absorbing wells that the city can influence the Limestone
dissolution and those accelerate its rate and increase the cavitation
below the surface. Dasht-e Arjan is a graben, which has been created
as the result of activity of two normal faults in its east and west sides.
It is a complete sample of Karst plains (Polje) which has been created
with the help of tectonic forces (fault) and dissolution process of
water in Asmari limestone formation. It is located 60km. off south
west of Shiraz (on Kazeroon-Shiraz road). In 1971, UNESCO has
recognized this plain as a reserve of biosphere. It is considered as one
of the world’s most beautiful geological phenomena, so that most of
the world’s geologists are interested in visiting this place. The
purpose of this paper is to identify and introduce landscapes of Karst
features shiraz city and Dasht-e Arjan including Karst dissolution
features (Lapiez, Karst springs, dolines, caves, underground caves,
ponors, and Karst valleys), anticlines and synclines, and Arjan Lake.
Abstract: In this study, data loss tolerance of Support Vector Machines (SVM) based activity recognition model and multi activity classification performance when data are received over a lossy wireless sensor network is examined. Initially, the classification algorithm we use is evaluated in terms of resilience to random data loss with 3D acceleration sensor data for sitting, lying, walking and standing actions. The results show that the proposed classification method can recognize these activities successfully despite high data loss. Secondly, the effect of differentiated quality of service performance on activity recognition success is measured with activity data acquired from a multi hop wireless sensor network, which introduces high data loss. The effect of number of nodes on the reliability and multi activity classification success is demonstrated in simulation environment. To the best of our knowledge, the effect of data loss in a wireless sensor network on activity detection success rate of an SVM based classification algorithm has not been studied before.
Abstract: Given a graph G. A cycle of G is a sequence of
vertices of G such that the first and the last vertices are the same.
A hamiltonian cycle of G is a cycle containing all vertices of G.
The graph G is k-ordered (resp. k-ordered hamiltonian) if for any
sequence of k distinct vertices of G, there exists a cycle (resp.
hamiltonian cycle) in G containing these k vertices in the specified
order. Obviously, any cycle in a graph is 1-ordered, 2-ordered and 3-
ordered. Thus the study of any graph being k-ordered (resp. k-ordered
hamiltonian) always starts with k = 4. Most studies about this topic
work on graphs with no real applications. To our knowledge, the
chordal ring families were the first one utilized as the underlying
topology in interconnection networks and shown to be 4-ordered.
Furthermore, based on our computer experimental results, it was
conjectured that some of them are 4-ordered hamiltonian. In this
paper, we intend to give some possible directions in proving the
conjecture.
Abstract: Replacement of plastics used in the food industry
seems to be a serious issue to overcome mainly the environmental
problems in recent years. This study investigates the hydrophilicity
and permeability properties of starch biopolymer which ethylene
vinyl alcohol (EVOH) (0-10%) and nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC)
(1-15%) were used to enhance its properties. Starch -EVOH
nanocomposites were prepared by casting method in different
formulations. NCC production by acid hydrolysis was confirmed by
scanning electron microscopy. Solubility, water vapor permeability,
water vapor transmission rate and moisture absorbance were
measured on each of the nanocomposites. The results were analyzed
by SAS software. The lowest moisture absorbance was measured in
pure starch nanocomposite containing 8% NCC. The lowest
permeability to water vapor belongs to starch nanocomposite
containing 8% NCC and the sample containing 7.8% EVOH and 13%
NCC. Also the lowest solubility was observed in the composite
contains the highest amount of EVOH. Applied Process resulted in
production of bio films which have good resistance to water vapor
permeability and solubility in water. The use of NCC and EVOH
leads to reduced moisture absorbance property of the biofilms.
Abstract: This paper proposed a silicon controller rectifier (SCR)
based ESD protection device to protect low voltage ESD for integrated
circuit. The proposed ESD protection device has low trigger voltage
and high holding voltage compared with conventional SCR-based
ESD protection devices. The proposed ESD protection circuit is
verified and compared by TCAD simulation. This paper verified
effective low voltage ESD characteristics with low trigger voltage of
5.79V and high holding voltage of 3.5V through optimization
depending on design variables (D1, D2, D3 and D4).
Abstract: Examining existing experimental results for shallow
rigid foundations subjected to vertical centric load (N), accompanied
or not with a bending moment (M), two main non-linear mechanisms
governing the cyclic response of the soil-foundation system can be
distinguished: foundation uplift and soil yielding. A soil-foundation
failure limit, is defined as a domain of resistance in the two
dimensional (2D) load space (N, M) inside of which lie all the
admissible combinations of loads; these latter correspond to a pure
elastic, non-linear elastic or plastic behavior of the soil-foundation
system, while the points lying on the failure limit correspond to a
combination of loads leading to a failure of the soil-foundation
system. In this study, the proposed resistance domain is constructed
analytically based on mechanics. Original elastic limit, uplift
initiation limit and iso-uplift limits are constructed inside this
domain. These limits give a prediction of the mechanisms activated
for each combination of loads applied to the foundation. A
comparison of the proposed failure limit with experimental tests
existing in the literature shows interesting results. Also, the
developed uplift initiation limit and iso-uplift curves are confronted
with others already proposed in the literature and widely used due to
the absence of other alternatives, and remarkable differences are
noted, showing evident errors in the past proposals and relevant
accuracy for those given in the present work.
Abstract: Locating Radio Controlled (RC) devices using their
unintended emissions has a great interest considering security
concerns. Weak nature of these emissions requires near field
localization approach since it is hard to detect these signals in far
field region of array. Instead of only angle estimation, near field
localization also requires range estimation of the source which makes
this method more complicated than far field models. Challenges of
locating such devices in a near field region and real time environment
are analyzed in this paper. An ESPRIT like near field localization
scheme is utilized for both angle and range estimation. 1-D search
with symmetric subarrays is provided. Two 7 element uniform linear
antenna arrays (ULA) are employed for locating RC source.
Experiment results of location estimation for one unintended emitting
walkie-talkie for different positions are given.
Abstract: In situ modified cyclohexanone-formaldehyde resins
were prepared by addition of alendronic acid during resin
preparation. Clay nanocomposites in ketonic resins were achieved by
adding clay into the flask at the beginning of the resin preparation.
The prepared resins were used for the synthesis of fire resistant
polyurethanes foam. Both phosphorous containing modifier
compound alendronic acid and nanoclay increases fire resistance of
the cyclohexanone-formaldehyde resin thus polyurethane produced
from these resins. The effect of the concentrations of alendronic acid
and clay on the fire resistance and physical properties of
polyurethanes was studied.
Abstract: Testing the first year students of Informatics at the
University of Debrecen revealed that students start their tertiary
studies in programming with a low level of programming knowledge
and algorithmic skills. The possible reasons which lead the students
to this very unfortunate result were examined. The results of the test
were compared to the students’ results in the school leaving exams
and to their self-assessment values. It was found that there is only a
slight connection between the students’ results in the test and in the
school leaving exams, especially at intermediate level. Beyond this,
the school leaving exams do not seem to enable students to evaluate
their own abilities.
Abstract: An exploration of the related literature reveals that all
instruction methods aim at training autonomous learners. After the
turn of second language pedagogy toward learner-oriented strategies,
learners’ needs were more focused. Yet; the historical, social and
political aspects of learning were still neglected. The present study
investigates the notion of autonomous learning and explains its
various facets from a pedagogical point of view. Furthermore;
different elements, fields and scopes of autonomous learning will be
explored. After exploring different aspects of autonomy, it is
postulated that liberatory autonomy is highlighted since it not only
covers social autonomy but also reveals learners’ capabilities and
human potentials. It is also recommended that learners consider
different elements of autonomy such as motivation, knowledge,
confidence, and skills.
Abstract: In-memory database systems are becoming popular
due to the availability and affordability of sufficiently large RAM and
processors in modern high-end servers with the capacity to manage
large in-memory database transactions. While fast and reliable inmemory
systems are still being developed to overcome cache misses,
CPU/IO bottlenecks and distributed transaction costs, disk-based data
stores still serve as the primary persistence. In addition, with the
recent growth in multi-tenancy cloud applications and associated
security concerns, many organisations consider the trade-offs and
continue to require fast and reliable transaction processing of diskbased
database systems as an available choice. For these
organizations, the only way of increasing throughput is by improving
the performance of disk-based concurrency control. This warrants a
hybrid database system with the ability to selectively apply an
enhanced disk-based data management within the context of inmemory
systems that would help improve overall throughput.
The general view is that in-memory systems substantially
outperform disk-based systems. We question this assumption and
examine how a modified variation of access invariance that we call
enhanced memory access, (EMA) can be used to allow very high
levels of concurrency in the pre-fetching of data in disk-based
systems. We demonstrate how this prefetching in disk-based systems
can yield close to in-memory performance, which paves the way for
improved hybrid database systems. This paper proposes a novel EMA
technique and presents a comparative study between disk-based EMA
systems and in-memory systems running on hardware configurations
of equivalent power in terms of the number of processors and their
speeds. The results of the experiments conducted clearly substantiate
that when used in conjunction with all concurrency control
mechanisms, EMA can increase the throughput of disk-based systems
to levels quite close to those achieved by in-memory system. The
promising results of this work show that enhanced disk-based
systems facilitate in improving hybrid data management within the
broader context of in-memory systems.
Abstract: In this study, we propose a novel technique for acoustic
echo suppression (AES) during speech recognition under barge-in
conditions. Conventional AES methods based on spectral subtraction
apply fixed weights to the estimated echo path transfer function
(EPTF) at the current signal segment and to the EPTF estimated until
the previous time interval. However, the effects of echo path changes
should be considered for eliminating the undesired echoes. We
describe a new approach that adaptively updates weight parameters in
response to abrupt changes in the acoustic environment due to
background noises or double-talk. Furthermore, we devised a voice
activity detector and an initial time-delay estimator for barge-in speech
recognition in communication networks. The initial time delay is
estimated using log-spectral distance measure, as well as
cross-correlation coefficients. The experimental results show that the
developed techniques can be successfully applied in barge-in speech
recognition systems.
Abstract: Food as perishable goods represents a specific and
sensitive part in the supply chain theory, since changing physical or
chemical characteristics considerably influence the approach to stock
management. The most delicate phase of this process is
transportation, where it becomes difficult to ensure the stable
conditions which limit deterioration, since the value of the
deterioration rate could be easily influenced by the mode of
transportation. The fuzzy definition of variables allows one to take
these variations into account. Furthermore, an appropriate choice of
the defuzzification method permits one to adapt results to real
conditions as far as possible. In this article those methods which take
into account the relationship between the deterioration rate of
perishable goods and transportation by ship will be applied with the
aim of (a) minimizing the total cost function, defined as the sum of
the ordering cost, holding cost, disposing cost and transportation
costs, and (b) improving the supply chain sustainability by reducing
environmental impact and waste disposal costs.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine the possible
link between employee and customer satisfaction. The service
provided by employees, help to build a good relationship with
customers and can help at increasing their loyalty. Published data for
job satisfaction and indicators of customer services of banks were
gathered from relevant published works which included data from
five different countries. The scores of customers and employees
satisfaction of the different published works were transformed and
normalized to the scale of 1 to 100. The data were analyzed and a
regression analysis of the two parameters was used to describe the
link between employee’s satisfaction and customer’s satisfaction.
Assuming that employee satisfaction has a significant influence on
customer’s service and the resulting customer satisfaction, the
reviewed data indicate that employee’s satisfaction contributes
significantly on the level of customer satisfaction in the Banking
sector. There was a significant correlation between the two
parameters (Pearson correlation R2=0.52 P
Abstract: Web-based Cognitive Writing Instruction (WeCWI)’s
contribution towards language development can be divided into
linguistic and non-linguistic perspectives. In linguistic perspective,
WeCWI focuses on the literacy and language discoveries, while the
cognitive and psychological discoveries are the hubs in non-linguistic
perspective. In linguistic perspective, WeCWI draws attention to free
reading and enterprises, which are supported by the language
acquisition theories. Besides, the adoption of process genre approach
as a hybrid guided writing approach fosters literacy development.
Literacy and language developments are interconnected in the
communication process; hence, WeCWI encourages meaningful
discussion based on the interactionist theory that involves input,
negotiation, output, and interactional feedback. Rooted in the elearning
interaction-based model, WeCWI promotes online
discussion via synchronous and asynchronous communications,
which allows interactions happened among the learners, instructor,
and digital content. In non-linguistic perspective, WeCWI highlights
on the contribution of reading, discussion, and writing towards
cognitive development. Based on the inquiry models, learners’
critical thinking is fostered during information exploration process
through interaction and questioning. Lastly, to lower writing anxiety,
WeCWI develops the instructional tool with supportive features to
facilitate the writing process. To bring a positive user experience to
the learner, WeCWI aims to create the instructional tool with
different interface designs based on two different types of perceptual
learning style.
Abstract: Higher order ΔΣ Modulator (DSM) is basically an
unstable system. The approximate conditions for stability cannot be
used for the design of a DSM for industrial applications where risk is
involved. The existing second order, single stage, single bit, unity
feedback gain , discrete DSM cannot be used for the normalized full
range (-1 to +1) of an input signal since the DSM becomes unstable
when the input signal is above ±0.55. The stability is also not
guaranteed for input signals of amplitude less than ±0.55. In the
present paper, the above mentioned second order DSM is modified
with input signal dependent forward path gain. The proposed DSM is
suitable for industrial applications where one needs the digital
representation of the analog input signal, during each sampling
period. The proposed DSM can operate almost for the full range of
input signals (-0.95 to +0.95) without causing instability, assuming
that the second integrator output should not exceed the circuit supply
voltage, ±15 Volts.
Abstract: In this paper we describe the Levenvberg-Marquardt
(LM) algorithm for identification and equalization of CDMA
signals received by an antenna array in communication channels.
The synthesis explains the digital separation and equalization of
signals after propagation through multipath generating intersymbol
interference (ISI). Exploiting discrete data transmitted and three
diversities induced at the reception, the problem can be composed
by the Block Component Decomposition (BCD) of a tensor of
order 3 which is a new tensor decomposition generalizing the
PARAFAC decomposition. We optimize the BCD decomposition by
Levenvberg-Marquardt method gives encouraging results compared to
classical alternating least squares algorithm (ALS). In the equalization
part, we use the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) to perform
the presented method. The simulation results using the LM algorithm
are important.
Abstract: Cost of governance in Nigeria has become a challenge
to development and concern to practitioners and scholars alike in the
field of business and social science research. In the 2010 national
budget of NGN4.6 trillion or USD28.75billion for instance, only a
pantry sum of NGN1.8trillion or USD11.15billion was earmarked for
capital expenditure. Similarly, in 2013, out of a total national budget
of NGN4.92trillion or USD30.75billion, only the sum of
NGN1.50trllion or USD9.38billion was voted for capital expenditure.
Therefore, based on the data sourced from the Nigerian Office of
Statistics, Central bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin as well as from
the United Nations Development Programme, this study examined
the causes of high cost of governance in Nigeria. It found out that the
high cost of governance in the country is in the interest of the ruling
class, arising from their unethical behaviour – corrupt practices and
the poor management of public resources. As a result, the study
recommends the need to intensify the war against corruption and
mismanagement of public resources by government officials as
possible solution to overcome the high cost of governance in Nigeria.
This could be achieved by strengthening the constitutional powers of
the various anti-corruption agencies in the area of arrest, investigation
and prosecution of offenders without the interference of the executive
arm of government either at the local, state or federal level.