Abstract: Company mergers and acquisitions reached their peak
in the twenty-first century. Mergers and acquisitions have become one
of the competitive strategies for external growth. In general, it is
believed that mergers and acquisitions can create synergies. However,
they require complete information technology system and service
integration, especially in the banking industry. Much of the research
has focused on performance evaluation, shareholder equity allocation,
or even the increase of company market value after the merger and
acquisition, whereas few scholars have focused on information system
integration post merger and acquisition. This study indicates the role
of information systems after a merger and acquisition, explaining the
benefits of information system integration using a merger and
acquisition case in the banking industry as an example. In addition, we
discuss factors that affect the performance of information system
integration, and utilize system dynamics to interpret the relationship
among factors that affect information system integration performance
in the banking industry after a merger and acquisition.
Abstract: The number of users supported in a DS-CDMA
cellular system is typically less than spreading factor (N), and the
system is said to be underloaded. Overloading is a technique to
accommodate more number of users than the spreading factor N. In
O/O overloading scheme, the first set is assigned to the N
synchronous users and the second set is assigned to the additional
synchronous users. An iterative multistage soft decision interference
cancellation (SDIC) receiver is used to remove high level of
interference between the two sets. Performance is evaluated in terms
of the maximum number acceptable users so that the system
performance is degraded slightly compared to the single user
performance at a specified BER. In this paper, the capacity of CDMA
based O/O overloading scheme is evaluated with SDIC receiver. It is
observed that O/O scheme using orthogonal Gold codes provides
25% channel overloading (N=64) for synchronous DS-CDMA
system on an AWGN channel in the uplink at a BER of 1e-5.For a
Rayleigh faded channel, the critical capacity is 40% at a BER of 5e-5
assuming synchronous users. But in practical systems, perfect chip
timing is very difficult to maintain in the uplink.. We have shown that
the overloading performance reduces to 11% for a timing
synchronization error of 0.02Tc for a BER of 1e-5.
Abstract: An effective approach for unbalanced three-phase
distribution power flow solutions is proposed in this paper. The
special topological characteristics of distribution networks have been
fully utilized to make the direct solution possible. Two matrices–the
bus-injection to branch-current matrix and the branch-current to busvoltage
matrix– and a simple matrix multiplication are used to
obtain power flow solutions. Due to the distinctive solution
techniques of the proposed method, the time-consuming LU
decomposition and forward/backward substitution of the Jacobian
matrix or admittance matrix required in the traditional power flow
methods are no longer necessary. Therefore, the proposed method is
robust and time-efficient. Test results demonstrate the validity of the
proposed method. The proposed method shows great potential to be
used in distribution automation applications.
Abstract: Frequently a group of people jointly decide and authorize
a specific person as a representative in some business/poitical
occasions, e.g., the board of a company authorizes the chief executive
officer to close a multi-billion acquisition deal. In this paper, an
integrated proxy multi-signature scheme that allows anonymously
vetoable delegation is proposed. This protocol integrates mechanisms
of private veto, distributed proxy key generation, secure transmission
of proxy key, and existentially unforgeable proxy multi-signature
scheme. First, a provably secure Guillou-Quisquater proxy signature
scheme is presented, then the “zero-sharing" protocol is extended
over a composite modulus multiplicative group, and finally the above
two are combined to realize the GQ proxy multi-signature with
anonymously vetoable delegation. As a proxy signature scheme, this
protocol protects both the original signers and the proxy signer.
The modular design allows simplified implementation with less
communication overheads and better computation performance than
a general secure multi-party protocol.
Abstract: Most fingerprint recognition techniques are based on minutiae matching and have been well studied. However, this technology still suffers from problems associated with the handling of poor quality impressions. One problem besetting fingerprint matching is distortion. Distortion changes both geometric position and orientation, and leads to difficulties in establishing a match among multiple impressions acquired from the same finger tip. Marking all the minutiae accurately as well as rejecting false minutiae is another issue still under research. Our work has combined many methods to build a minutia extractor and a minutia matcher. The combination of multiple methods comes from a wide investigation into research papers. Also some novel changes like segmentation using Morphological operations, improved thinning, false minutiae removal methods, minutia marking with special considering the triple branch counting, minutia unification by decomposing a branch into three terminations, and matching in the unified x-y coordinate system after a two-step transformation are used in the work.
Abstract: Ratio and regression type estimators have been used by previous authors to estimate a population mean for the principal variable from samples in which both auxiliary x and principal y variable data are available. However, missing data are a common problem in statistical analyses with real data. Ratio and regression type estimators have also been used for imputing values of missing y data. In this paper, six new ratio and regression type estimators are proposed for imputing values for any missing y data and estimating a population mean for y from samples with missing x and/or y data. A simulation study has been conducted to compare the six ratio and regression type estimators with a previous estimator of Rueda. Two population sizes N = 1,000 and 5,000 have been considered with sample sizes of 10% and 30% and with correlation coefficients between population variables X and Y of 0.5 and 0.8. In the simulations, 10 and 40 percent of sample y values and 10 and 40 percent of sample x values were randomly designated as missing. The new ratio and regression type estimators give similar mean absolute percentage errors that are smaller than the Rueda estimator for all cases. The new estimators give a large reduction in errors for the case of 40% missing y values and sampling fraction of 30%.
Abstract: A feature weighting and selection method is proposed
which uses the structure of a weightless neuron and exploits the
principles that govern the operation of Genetic Algorithms and
Evolution. Features are coded onto chromosomes in a novel way
which allows weighting information regarding the features to be
directly inferred from the gene values. The proposed method is
significant in that it addresses several problems concerned with
algorithms for feature selection and weighting as well as providing
significant advantages such as speed, simplicity and suitability for
real-time systems.
Abstract: In the globalized e-learning environment, students coming from different cultures and countries have different characteristics and require different support designed for their approaches to study and learning styles. This paper explores the ways in which cultural background influences students- approaches to study and learning styles. Participants in the study consisted of 131 eastern students and 54 western students from an Australian university. The students were tested using the Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ) for assessing their approaches to study and the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire (ILS) for assessing their learning styles. The results of the study led to a set of principles being proposed to guide personalization of e-learning system design on the basis of cultural differences.
Abstract: The present work is a numerical simulation of
nanofluids flow in a double pipe heat exchanger provided with
porous baffles. The hot nanofluid flows in the inner cylinder, whereas
the cold nanofluid circulates in the annular gap. The Darcy-
Brinkman-Forchheimer model is adopted to describe the flow in the
porous regions, and the governing equations with the appropriate
boundary conditions are solved by the finite volume method. The
results reveal that the addition of metallic nanoparticles enhances the
rate of heat transfer in comparison to conventional fluids but this
augmentation is accompanied by an increase in pressure drop. The
highest heat exchanger performances are obtained when
nanoparticles are added only to the cold fluid.
Abstract: In this paper, frequency offset (FO) estimation schemes
robust to the non-Gaussian noise environments are proposed for
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. First,
a maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation scheme in non-Gaussian
noise environments is proposed, and then, the complexity of the
ML estimation scheme is reduced by employing a reduced set of
candidate values. In numerical results, it is demonstrated that the
proposed schemes provide a significant performance improvement
over the conventional estimation scheme in non-Gaussian noise
environments while maintaining the performance similar to the
estimation performance in Gaussian noise environments.
Abstract: Recently, Jia et al. proposed a remote user authentication scheme using bilinear pairings and an Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC). However, the scheme is vulnerable to privileged insider attack at their proposed registration phase and to forgery attack at their proposed authentication phase. In addition, the scheme can be vulnerable to server spoofing attack because it does not provide mutual authentication between the user and the remote server. Therefore, this paper points out that the Jia et al. scheme is vulnerable to the above three attacks.
Abstract: The possibility of intrinsic electromagnetic fields
within living cells and their resonant self-interaction and interaction
with ambient electromagnetic fields is suggested on the basis of a
theoretical and experimental study. It is reported that intrinsic
electromagnetic fields are produced in the form of radio-frequency
and infra-red photons within atoms (which may be coupled or
uncoupled) in cellular structures, such as the cell cytoskeleton and
plasma membrane. A model is presented for the interaction of these
photons among themselves or with atoms under a dipole-dipole
coupling, induced by single-photon or two-photon processes. This
resonance is manifested by conspicuous field amplification and it is
argued that it is possible for these resonant photons to undergo
tunnelling in the form of evanescent waves to a short range (of a few
nanometers to micrometres). This effect, suggested as a resonant
photon tunnelling mechanism in this report, may enable these fields
to act as intracellular signal communication devices and as bridges
between macromolecules or cellular structures in the cell
cytoskeleton, organelles or membrane. A brief overview of an
experimental technique and a review of some preliminary results are
presented, in the detection of these fields produced in living cell
membranes under physiological conditions.
Abstract: The paper evaluates several hundred one-day-ahead
VaR forecasting models in the time period between the years 2004
and 2009 on data from six world stock indices - DJI, GSPC, IXIC,
FTSE, GDAXI and N225. The models model mean using the ARMA
processes with up to two lags and variance with one of GARCH,
EGARCH or TARCH processes with up to two lags. The models are
estimated on the data from the in-sample period and their forecasting
accuracy is evaluated on the out-of-sample data, which are more
volatile. The main aim of the paper is to test whether a model
estimated on data with lower volatility can be used in periods with
higher volatility. The evaluation is based on the conditional coverage
test and is performed on each stock index separately. The primary
result of the paper is that the volatility is best modelled using a
GARCH process and that an ARMA process pattern cannot be found
in analyzed time series.
Abstract: In this study, a mathematical model was proposed and
the accuracy of this model was assessed to predict the growth of
Pseudomonas aeruginosa and rhamnolipid production under nitrogen
limiting (sodium nitrate) fed-batch fermentation. All of the
parameters used in this model were achieved individually without
using any data from the literature.
The overall growth kinetic of the strain was evaluated using a
dual-parallel substrate Monod equation which was described by
several batch experimental data. Fed-batch data under different
glycerol (as the sole carbon source, C/N=10) concentrations and feed
flow rates were used to describe the proposed fed-batch model and
other parameters. In order to verify the accuracy of the proposed
model several verification experiments were performed in a vast
range of initial glycerol concentrations. While the results showed an
acceptable prediction for rhamnolipid production (less than 10%
error), in case of biomass prediction the errors were less than 23%. It
was also found that the rhamnolipid production by P. aeruginosa was
more sensitive at low glycerol concentrations.
Based on the findings of this work, it was concluded that the
proposed model could effectively be employed for rhamnolipid
production by this strain under fed-batch fermentation on up to 80 g l-
1 glycerol.
Abstract: We investigate properties of convective solutions of the
Boussinesq thermal convection in a moderately rotating spherical
shell allowing the inner and outer sphere rotation due to the viscous
torque of the fluid. The ratio of the inner and outer radii of the
spheres, the Prandtl number and the Taylor number are fixed to 0.4,
1 and 5002, respectively. The inertial moments of the inner and outer
spheres are fixed to about 0.22 and 100, respectively. The Rayleigh
number is varied from 2.6 × 104 to 3.4 × 104. In this parameter
range, convective solutions transit from equatorially symmetric quasiperiodic
ones to equatorially asymmetric chaotic ones as the Rayleigh
number is increased. The transition route in the system allowing
rotation of both the spheres is different from that in the co-rotating
system, which means the inner and outer spheres rotate with the
same constant angular velocity: the convective solutions transit as
equatorially symmetric quasi-periodic solution → equatorially symmetric
chaotic solution → equatorially asymmetric chaotic solution
in the system allowing both the spheres rotation, while equatorially
symmetric quasi-periodic solution → equatorially asymmetric quasiperiodic
solution → equatorially asymmetric chaotic solution in the
co-rotating system.
Abstract: This work addresses the problem of optimizing
completely batch water-using network with multiple contaminants
where the flow change caused by mass transfer is taken into
consideration for the first time. A mathematical technique for
optimizing water-using network is proposed based on
source-tank-sink superstructure. The task is to obtain the freshwater
usage, recycle assignments among water-using units, wastewater
discharge and a steady water-using network configuration by
following steps. Firstly, operating sequences of water-using units are
determined by time constraints. Next, superstructure is simplified by
eliminating the reuse and recycle from water-using units with
maximum concentration of key contaminants. Then, the non-linear
programming model is solved by GAMS (General Algebra Model
System) for minimum freshwater usage, maximum water recycle and
minimum wastewater discharge. Finally, numbers of operating periods
are calculated to acquire the steady network configuration. A case
study is solved to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach.
Abstract: Buildings are one of the valuable assets to provide
people with shelters for work, leisure and rest. After years of
attacks by weather, buildings will deteriorate which need proper
maintenance in order to fulfill the requirements and satisfaction of
the users. Poorly managed buildings not just give a negative image
to the city itself, but also pose potential risk hazards to the health
and safety of the general public. As a result, the management of
maintenance projects has played an important role in cities like
Hong Kong where the problem of urban decay has drawn much
attention. However, most research has focused on managing new
construction, and little research effort has been put on maintenance
projects. Given the short duration and more diversified nature of
work, repair and maintenance works are found to be more difficult
to monitor and regulate when compared with new works. Project
participants may face with problems in running maintenance
projects which should be investigated so that proper strategies can
be established. This paper aims to provide a thorough analysis on
the problems of running maintenance projects. A review of
literature on the characteristics of building maintenance projects
was firstly conducted, which forms a solid basis for the empirical
study. Results on the problems and difficulties of running
maintenance projects from the viewpoints of industry practitioners
will also be delivered with a view to formulating effective
strategies for managing maintenance projects successfully.
Abstract: Whilst there is growing evidence that activity across
the lifespan is beneficial for improved health, there are also many
changes involved with the aging process and subsequently the
potential for reduced indices of health. The nexus between all forms
of health, physical activity and aging is complex and has raised much
interest in recent times due to the realization that a multifaceted
approached is necessary in order to counteract a growing obesity
epidemic. By investigating age based trends within a population
adherring to competitive sport at older ages, further insight might be
gleaned to assist in understanding one of many factors influencing
this relationship. This study evaluated those sport psychological
constructs of health, physical fitness, mental health states, and social
dimension factors in sport that were associated with factors to
participate in sport and physical activity based on responses from the
2009 World Masters Games in Sydney. The sample consisted of
7846 athletes who competed at the games and who completed a 56
item sports participation survey using a 7-point Likert response (1 -
not important to 7 - very important). Questions focuses on factors
thought to promote participation, such as weight control, living
longer, improving mental health (self-esteem, mood states),
improving physical health and factors related to the athlete-s
competitive perspective. The most significant factors related to
participation with this cohort of masters athletes were the socializing
environment of sport, getting physically fit and improving
competitive personal best performances. Strategies to increase
participation in masters sport should focus on these factors as other
factors such as weight loss, improving mental health and living
longer were not identified as important determinates of sports
participation at the World Masters level.
Abstract: The aim of the study was to determine how different
ripening processes (traditional vs. industrial) influenced the
proteolysis in traditional Serbian dry-fermented sausage Petrovská
klobása. The obtained results indicated more intensive pH decline
(0.7 units after 9 days) in industrially ripened products (I), what had a
positive impact on drying process and proteolytic changes in these
samples. Thus, moisture content in I sausages was lower at each
sampling time, amounting 24.7% at the end of production period
(90 days). Likewise, the process of proteolysis was more pronounced
in I samples, resulting in higher contents of non-protein nitrogen
(NPN) and free amino acids nitrogen (FAAN), as well as in faster
and more intensive degradation of myosin (≈220 kDa), actin (≈45
kDa) and other polypeptides during processing. Consequently, the
appearance and accumulation of several protein fragments were
registered.
Abstract: Most of the drugs used for pharmaceutical purposes
are poorly water-soluble drugs. About 40% of all newly discovered
drugs are lipophilic and the numbers of lipophilic drugs seem to
increase more and more. Drug delivery systems such as
nanoparticles, micelles or liposomes are applied to improve their
solubility and thus their bioavailability. Besides various techniques of
solubilization, oil-in-water emulsions are often used to incorporate
lipophilic drugs into the oil phase. To stabilize emulsions surface
active substances (surfactants) are generally used. An alternative
method to avoid the application of surfactants was of great interest.
One possibility is to develop O/W-emulsion without any addition of
surface active agents or the so called “surfactant-free emulsion or
SFE”. The aim of this study was to develop and characterize SFE as a
drug carrier by varying the production conditions. Lidocaine base
was used as a model drug. The injection method was developed.
Effects of ultrasound as well as of temperature on the properties of
the emulsion were studied. Particle sizes and release were
determined. The long-term stability up to 30 days was performed.
The results showed that the surfactant-free O/W emulsions with
pharmaceutical oil as drug carrier can be produced.