Abstract: Cognizant of the fact that enterprise systems involve
organizational change and their implementation is over shadowed by a
high failure rate, it is argued that there is the need to focus attention on
employees- perceptions of such organizational change when
explaining adoption behavior of enterprise systems. For this purpose,
the research incorporates a conceptual constructo fattitude toward
change that captures views about the need for organizational change.
Centered on this conceptual construct, the research model includes
beliefs regarding the system and behavioral intention as its
consequences, and the personal characteristics of organizational
commitment and perceived personal competence as its antecedents.
Structural equation analysis using LISREL provides significant
support for the proposed relationships. Theoretical and practical
implications are discussed along with limitations.
Abstract: Both software applications and their development environment are becoming more and more distributed. This trend impacts not only the way software computes, but also how it looks. This article proposes a Human Computer Interface (HCI) template from three representative applications we have developed. These applications include a Multi-Agent System based software, a 3D Internet computer game with distributed game world logic, and a programming language environment used in constructing distributed neural network and its visualizations. HCI concepts that are common to these applications are described in abstract terms in the template. These include off-line presentation of global entities, entities inside a hierarchical namespace, communication and languages, reconfiguration of entity references in a graph, impersonation and access right, etc. We believe the metaphor that underlies an HCI concept as well as the relationships between a bunch of HCI concepts are crucial to the design of software systems and vice versa.
Abstract: As the world move to the accomplishment of Performance Based Engineering philosophies in seismic design of Civil Engineering structures, new seismic design provisions require Structural Engineers to perform both static and dynamic analysis for the design of structures. While Linear Equivalent Static Analysis is performed for regular buildings up to 90m height in zone I and II, Dynamic Analysis should be performed for regular and irregular buildings in zone IV and V. Dynamic Analysis can take the form of a dynamic Time History Analysis or a linear Response Spectrum Analysis. In present study, Multi-storey irregular buildings with 20 stories have been modeled using software packages ETABS and SAP 2000 v.15 for seismic zone V in India. This paper also deals with the effect of the variation of the building height on the structural response of the shear wall building. Dynamic responses of building under actual earthquakes, EL-CENTRO 1949 and CHI-CHI Taiwan 1999 have been investigated. This paper highlights the accuracy and exactness of Time History analysis in comparison with the most commonly adopted Response Spectrum Analysis and Equivalent Static Analysis.
Abstract: Studies of vocal communication in Sooty-headed
Bulbul were carried out from January to December 2011. Vocal
recordings and behavioral observations were made in their natural
habitats at some localities of Lampang, Thailand. After editing, cuts
of high quality recordings were analyzed with the help of Avisoft-
SASLab Pro (version 4.40) software. More than one thousand
element repertoires in five groups were found within two vocal
structures. The two structures were short sounds with single element
and phrases composed of elements, the frequency ranged from 1-10
kHz. Most phrases were composed of 2 to 5 elements that were often
dissimilar in structure, however, these phrases were not as complex
as song phrases. The elements and phrases were combined to form
many patterns. The species used ten types of calls; i.e. alert, alarm,
aggressive, begging, contact, courtship, distress, exciting, flying and
invitation. Alert and contact calls were used more frequently than
other calls. Aggressive, alarm and distress calls could be used for
interspecific communication among some other bird species in the
same habitats.
Abstract: Considering toxicity of heavy metals and their
accumulation in domestic wastes, immobilization of lead and
cadmium is envisaged inside glass-ceramics. We particularly
focused this work on calcium-rich phases embedded in a
glassy matrix.
Glass-ceramics were synthesized from glasses doped with
12 wt% and 16 wt% of PbO or CdO. They were observed and
analyzed by Electron MicroProbe Analysis (EMPA) and
Analytical Scanning Electron Microscopy (ASEM). Structural
characterization of the samples was performed by powder XRay
Diffraction.
Diopside crystals of CaMgSi2O6 composition are shown to
incorporate significant amounts of cadmium (up to 9 wt% of
CdO). Two new crystalline phases are observed with very
high Cd or Pb contents: about 40 wt% CdO for the cadmiumrich
phase and near 60 wt% PbO for the lead-rich phase. We
present complete chemical and structural characterization of
these phases. They represent a promising way for the
immobilization of toxic elements like Cd or Pb since glass
ceramics are known to propose a “double barrier" protection
(metal-rich crystals embedded in a glass matrix) against metal
release in the environment.
Abstract: Recent advancements in sensor technologies and
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have led to the
development of cost-effective healthcare devices which can be used
to monitor and analyse a person-s physiological parameters from
remote locations. These advancements provides a unique opportunity
to overcome current healthcare challenges of low quality service
provisioning, lack of easy accessibility to service varieties, high costs
of services and increasing population of the elderly experienced
globally. This paper reports on a prototype implementation of an
architecture that seamlessly integrates Wireless Body Area Network
(WBAN) with Web services (WS) to proactively collect
physiological data of remote patients to recommend diagnostic
services. Technologies based upon WBAN and WS can provide
ubiquitous accessibility to a variety of services by allowing
distributed healthcare resources to be massively reused to provide
cost-effective services without individuals physically moving to the
locations of those resources. In addition, these technologies can
reduce costs of healthcare services by allowing individuals to access
services to support their healthcare. The prototype uses WBAN body
sensors implemented on arduino fio platforms to be worn by the
patient and an android smart phone as a personal server. The
physiological data are collected and uploaded through GPRS/internet
to the Medical Health Server (MHS) to be analysed. The prototype
monitors the activities, location and physiological parameters such as
SpO2 and Heart Rate of the elderly and patients in rehabilitation.
Medical practitioners would have real time access to the uploaded
information through a web application.
Abstract: The artificial intelligent controller in power system
plays as most important rule for many applications such as system
operation and its control specially Load Frequency Controller (LFC).
The main objective of LFC is to keep the frequency and tie-line power
close to their decidable bounds in case of disturbance. In this paper,
parallel fuzzy PI adaptive with conventional PD technique for Load
Frequency Control system was proposed. PSO optimization method
used to optimize both of scale fuzzy PI and tuning of PD. Two equal
interconnected power system areas were used as a test system.
Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller
compared with different PID and classical fuzzy PI controllers in terms
of speed response and damping frequency.
Abstract: An application framework provides a reusable design
and implementation for a family of software systems. If the
framework contains defects, the defects will be passed on to the
applications developed from the framework. Framework defects are
hard to discover at the time the framework is instantiated. Therefore,
it is important to remove all defects before instantiating the
framework. In this paper, two measures for the adequacy of an
object-oriented system-based testing technique are introduced. The
measures assess the usefulness and uniqueness of the testing
technique. The two measures are applied to experimentally compare
the adequacy of two testing techniques introduced to test objectoriented
frameworks at the system level. The two considered testing
techniques are the New Framework Test Approach and Testing
Frameworks Through Hooks (TFTH). The techniques are also
compared analytically in terms of their coverage power of objectoriented
aspects. The comparison study results show that the TFTH
technique is better than the New Framework Test Approach in terms
of usefulness degree, uniqueness degree, and coverage power.
Abstract: Natural disasters, including earthquake, kill many people around the world every year. Society rescue actions, which start after the earthquake and are called LAST in abbreviation, include locating, access, stabilization and transportation. In the present article, we have studied the process of local accessibility to the injured and transporting them to health care centers. With regard the heavy traffic load due to earthquake, the destruction of connecting roads and bridges and the heavy debris in alleys and street, which put the lives of the injured and the people buried under the debris in danger, accelerating the rescue actions and facilitating the accessibilities are of great importance, obviously. Tehran, the capital of Iran, is among the crowded cities in the world and is the center of extensive economic, political, cultural and social activities. Tehran has a population of about 9.5 millions and because of the immigration of people from the surrounding cities. Furthermore, considering the fact that Tehran is located on two important and large faults, a 6 Richter magnitude earthquake in this city could lead to the greatest catastrophe during the entire human history. The present study is a kind of review and a major part of the required information for it, has been obtained from libraries all of the rescue vehicles around the world, including rescue helicopters, ambulances, fire fighting vehicles and rescue boats, and their applied technology, and also the robots specifically designed for the rescue system and the advantages and disadvantages of them, have been investigated. The studies show that there is a significant relationship between the rescue team-s arrival time at the incident zone and the number of saved people; so that, if the duration of burial under debris 30 minutes, the probability of survival is %99.3, after a day is %81, after 2days is %19 and after 5days is %7.4. The exiting transport systems all have some defects. If these defects are removed, more people could be saved each hour and the preparedness against natural disasters is increased. In this study, transport system has been designed for the rescue team and the injured; which could carry the rescue team to the incident zone and the injured to the health care centers. In addition, this system is able to fly in the air and move on the earth as well; so that the destruction of roads and the heavy traffic load could not prevent the rescue team from arriving early at the incident zone. The system also has the equipment required firebird for debris removing, optimum transport of the injured and first aid.
Abstract: While the form of crises may change, their essence
remains the same (such as a cycle of abundant liquidity, rapid credit
growth, and a low-inflation environment followed by an asset-price
bubble). The current market turbulence began in mid-2000s when the
US economy shifted to imbalanced both internal and external
macroeconomic positions. We see two key causes of these problems
– loose US monetary policy in early 2000s and US government
guarantees issued on the securities by government-sponsored
enterprises what was further fueled by financial innovations such as
structured credit products. We have discovered both negative and
positive lessons deriving from this crisis and divided the negative
lessons into three groups: financial products and valuation, processes
and business models, and strategic issues. Moreover, we address key
risk management lessons and exit strategies derived from the current
crisis and recommend policies that should help diminish the negative
impact of future potential crises.
Abstract: MATCH project [1] entitle the development of an
automatic diagnosis system that aims to support treatment of colon
cancer diseases by discovering mutations that occurs to tumour
suppressor genes (TSGs) and contributes to the development of
cancerous tumours. The constitution of the system is based on a)
colon cancer clinical data and b) biological information that will be
derived by data mining techniques from genomic and proteomic
sources The core mining module will consist of the popular, well
tested hybrid feature extraction methods, and new combined
algorithms, designed especially for the project. Elements of rough
sets, evolutionary computing, cluster analysis, self-organization maps
and association rules will be used to discover the annotations
between genes, and their influence on tumours [2]-[11].
The methods used to process the data have to address their high
complexity, potential inconsistency and problems of dealing with the
missing values. They must integrate all the useful information
necessary to solve the expert's question. For this purpose, the system
has to learn from data, or be able to interactively specify by a domain
specialist, the part of the knowledge structure it needs to answer a
given query. The program should also take into account the
importance/rank of the particular parts of data it analyses, and adjusts
the used algorithms accordingly.
Abstract: This paper reports the tensile fracture location
characterizations of dissimilar friction stir welds between 5754
aluminium alloy and C11000 copper. The welds were produced using
three shoulder diameter tools; namely, 15, 18 and 25 mm by varying
the process parameters. The rotational speeds considered were 600,
950 and 1200 rpm while the feed rates employed were 50, 150 and
300 mm/min to represent the low, medium and high settings
respectively. The tensile fracture locations were evaluated using the
optical microscope to identify the fracture locations and were
characterized. It was observed that 70% of the tensile samples failed
in the Thermo Mechanically Affected Zone (TMAZ) of copper at the
weld joints. Further evaluation of the fracture surfaces of the pulled
tensile samples revealed that welds with low Ultimate Tensile
Strength either have defects or intermetallics present at their joint
interfaces.
Abstract: We have developed a database for membrane protein functions, which has more than 3000 experimental data on functionally important amino acid residues in membrane proteins along with sequence, structure and literature information. Further, we have proposed different methods for identifying membrane proteins based on their functions: (i) discrimination of membrane transport proteins from other globular and membrane proteins and classifying them into channels/pores, electrochemical and active transporters, and (ii) β-signal for the insertion of mitochondrial β-barrel outer membrane proteins and potential targets. Our method showed an accuracy of 82% in discriminating transport proteins and 68% to classify them into three different transporters. In addition, we have identified a motif for targeting β-signal and potential candidates for mitochondrial β-barrel membrane proteins. Our methods can be used as effective tools for genome-wide annotations.
Abstract: In Algeria, some fruit trees produce fruits in free nature. Such trees are Celtis australis, Crataegus azarolus, Crataegus monogyna and Zizyphus lotus. In spite of their appreciable consumption, their nutritional value remains unknown. The objective of this study is the determination of sugars in the pulpe and almond of the above fruits. The biochemical analysis shows that these fruits present interesting contents of soluble sugars which confers significant caloric intakes to them. As well as significant fibres which give them therapeutic and industrial benefits? The analysis of the almonds shows that it contains considerable contents of sugars which enable them to be an energetic food.
Abstract: The usage of internet is rapidly increasing and the usage of mobile agent technology in internet environment has a great demand. The security issue one of main obstacles that restrict the mobile agent technology to spread. This paper proposes Secure-Image Mechanism (SIM) as a new mechanism to protect mobile agents against malicious hosts. . SIM aims to protect mobile agent by using the symmetric encryption and hash function in cryptography science. This mechanism can prevent the eavesdropping and alteration attacks. It assists the mobile agents to continue their journey normally incase attacks occurred.
Abstract: Bonding has become a routine procedure in several
dental specialties – from prosthodontics to conservative dentistry and
even orthodontics. In many of these fields it is important to be able to
investigate the bonded interfaces to assess their quality. All currently
employed investigative methods are invasive, meaning that samples
are destroyed in the testing procedure and cannot be used again. We
have investigated the interface between human enamel and bonded
ceramic brackets non-invasively, introducing a combination of new
investigative methods – optical coherence tomography (OCT),
fluorescence OCT and confocal microscopy (CM). Brackets were
conventionally bonded on conditioned buccal surfaces of teeth. The
bonding was assessed using these methods. Three dimensional
reconstructions of the detected material defects were developed using
manual and semi-automatic segmentation. The results clearly prove
that OCT, fluorescence OCT and CM are useful in orthodontic
bonding investigations.
Abstract: This study is designed to investigate errors emerged in written texts produced by 30 Turkish EFL learners with an explanatory, and thus, qualitative perspective. Erroneous language elements were identified by the researcher first and then their grammaticality and intelligibility were checked by five native speakers of English. The analysis of the data showed that it is difficult to claim that an error stems from only one single factor since different features of an error are triggered by different factors. Our findings revealed two different types of errors: those which stem from the interference of L1 with L2 and those which are developmental ones. The former type contains more global errors whereas the errors in latter type are more intelligible.
Abstract: Data mining uses a variety of techniques each of which is useful for some particular task. It is important to have a deep understanding of each technique and be able to perform sophisticated analysis. In this article we describe a tool built to simulate a variation of the Kohonen network to perform unsupervised clustering and support the entire data mining process up to results visualization. A graphical representation helps the user to find out a strategy to optmize classification by adding, moving or delete a neuron in order to change the number of classes. The tool is also able to automatically suggest a strategy for number of classes optimization.The tool is used to classify macroeconomic data that report the most developed countries? import and export. It is possible to classify the countries based on their economic behaviour and use an ad hoc tool to characterize the commercial behaviour of a country in a selected class from the analysis of positive and negative features that contribute to classes formation.
Abstract: EDF (Early Deadline First) algorithm is a very important scheduling algorithm for real- time systems . The EDF algorithm assigns priorities to each job according to their absolute deadlines and has good performance when the real-time system is not overloaded. When the real-time system is overloaded, many misdeadlines will be produced. But these misdeadlines are not uniformly distributed, which usually focus on some tasks. In this paper, we present an adaptive fuzzy control scheduling based on EDF algorithm. The improved algorithm can have a rectangular distribution of misdeadline ratios among all real-time tasks when the system is overloaded. To evaluate the effectiveness of the improved algorithm, we have done extensive simulation studies. The simulation results show that the new algorithm is superior to the old algorithm.
Abstract: In the recent past Learning Classifier Systems have
been successfully used for data mining. Learning Classifier System
(LCS) is basically a machine learning technique which combines
evolutionary computing, reinforcement learning, supervised or
unsupervised learning and heuristics to produce adaptive systems. A
LCS learns by interacting with an environment from which it
receives feedback in the form of numerical reward. Learning is
achieved by trying to maximize the amount of reward received. All
LCSs models more or less, comprise four main components; a finite
population of condition–action rules, called classifiers; the
performance component, which governs the interaction with the
environment; the credit assignment component, which distributes the
reward received from the environment to the classifiers accountable
for the rewards obtained; the discovery component, which is
responsible for discovering better rules and improving existing ones
through a genetic algorithm. The concatenate of the production rules
in the LCS form the genotype, and therefore the GA should operate
on a population of classifier systems. This approach is known as the
'Pittsburgh' Classifier Systems. Other LCS that perform their GA at
the rule level within a population are known as 'Mitchigan' Classifier
Systems. The most predominant representation of the discovered
knowledge is the standard production rules (PRs) in the form of IF P
THEN D. The PRs, however, are unable to handle exceptions and do
not exhibit variable precision. The Censored Production Rules
(CPRs), an extension of PRs, were proposed by Michalski and
Winston that exhibit variable precision and supports an efficient
mechanism for handling exceptions. A CPR is an augmented
production rule of the form: IF P THEN D UNLESS C, where
Censor C is an exception to the rule. Such rules are employed in
situations, in which conditional statement IF P THEN D holds
frequently and the assertion C holds rarely. By using a rule of this
type we are free to ignore the exception conditions, when the
resources needed to establish its presence are tight or there is simply
no information available as to whether it holds or not. Thus, the IF P
THEN D part of CPR expresses important information, while the
UNLESS C part acts only as a switch and changes the polarity of D
to ~D. In this paper Pittsburgh style LCSs approach is used for
automated discovery of CPRs. An appropriate encoding scheme is
suggested to represent a chromosome consisting of fixed size set of
CPRs. Suitable genetic operators are designed for the set of CPRs
and individual CPRs and also appropriate fitness function is proposed
that incorporates basic constraints on CPR. Experimental results are
presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed learning
classifier system.