Abstract: A kind of behavior model for discrete sampling and hold amplifier with charge transmission is analyzed. The transfer function and behavior features are based on the main AC responses of operation amplifier. The result used in pipelined and sigma-delta ADC shows the exact of model of sampling and hold amplifier, and the non-ideal factors are taken into account.
Abstract: This paper presents a rule-based text- to- speech
(TTS) Synthesis System for Standard Malay, namely SMaTTS. The
proposed system using sinusoidal method and some pre- recorded
wave files in generating speech for the system. The use of phone
database significantly decreases the amount of computer memory
space used, thus making the system very light and embeddable. The
overall system was comprised of two phases the Natural Language
Processing (NLP) that consisted of the high-level processing of text
analysis, phonetic analysis, text normalization and morphophonemic
module. The module was designed specially for SM to overcome
few problems in defining the rules for SM orthography system before
it can be passed to the DSP module. The second phase is the Digital
Signal Processing (DSP) which operated on the low-level process of
the speech waveform generation. A developed an intelligible and
adequately natural sounding formant-based speech synthesis system
with a light and user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) is
introduced. A Standard Malay Language (SM) phoneme set and an
inclusive set of phone database have been constructed carefully for
this phone-based speech synthesizer. By applying the generative
phonology, a comprehensive letter-to-sound (LTS) rules and a
pronunciation lexicon have been invented for SMaTTS. As for the
evaluation tests, a set of Diagnostic Rhyme Test (DRT) word list was
compiled and several experiments have been performed to evaluate
the quality of the synthesized speech by analyzing the Mean Opinion
Score (MOS) obtained. The overall performance of the system as
well as the room for improvements was thoroughly discussed.
Abstract: Word sense disambiguation is one of the most important open problems in natural language processing applications such as information retrieval and machine translation. Many approach strategies can be employed to resolve word ambiguity with a reasonable degree of accuracy. These strategies are: knowledgebased, corpus-based, and hybrid-based. This paper pays attention to the corpus-based strategy that employs an unsupervised learning method for disambiguation. We report our investigation of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), an information retrieval technique and unsupervised learning, to the task of Thai noun and verbal word sense disambiguation. The Latent Semantic Indexing has been shown to be efficient and effective for Information Retrieval. For the purposes of this research, we report experiments on two Thai polysemous words, namely /hua4/ and /kep1/ that are used as a representative of Thai nouns and verbs respectively. The results of these experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and indicate the potential of applying vector-based distributional information measures to semantic disambiguation.
Abstract: An application framework provides a reusable design
and implementation for a family of software systems. Application
developers extend the framework to build their particular
applications using hooks. Hooks are the places identified to show
how to use and customize the framework. Hooks define the
Framework Interface Classes (FICs) and the specifications of their
methods. As part of the development life cycle, it is required to test
the implementations of the FICs. Building a testing model to express
the behavior of a class is an essential step for the generation of the
class-based test cases. The testing model has to be consistent with the
specifications provided for the hooks. State-based models consisting
of states and transitions are testing models well suited to objectoriented
software. Typically, hand-construction of a state-based
model of a class behavior is expensive, error-prone, and may result in
constructing an inconsistent model with the specifications of the class
methods, which misleads verification results. In this paper, a
technique is introduced to automatically synthesize a state-based
testing model for FICs using the specifications provided for the
hooks. A tool that supports the proposed technique is introduced.
Abstract: The productivity of software development is one of the major concerns for project managers. Given the increasing complexity of the software being developed and the concomitant rise in the typical project size, the productivity has not consistently improved. By analyzing the latest release of ISBSG data repository with 4106 projects ever developed, we report on the factors found to significantly influence productivity, and present an original model for the estimation of productivity during project design. We further illustrate that software development productivity has experienced irregular variations between the years 1995 and 2005. Considering the factors significant to productivity, we found its variations are primarily caused by the variations of average team size for the development and the unbalanced use of the less productive development language 3GL.
Abstract: The use of sewage sludge and effluents from
wastewater treatment plants for irrigation of agricultural lands is on
the rise particularly in peri-urban areas of developing countries.
The reuse of nutrients and organic matter in treated wastewater
and sewage sludge via land application is a desirable goal. However,
trace or heavy metals present in sludge pose the risk of human or
phytotoxicity from land application. Long-term use of sewage
sludge, heavy metals can accumulate to phytotoxic levels and results
in reduced plants growth and/or enhanced metal concentrations in
plants, which consumed by animals then enter the food chain. In this
research, the amount of heavy metals was measured in plants
irrigated with wastewater and sludge application. For this purpose,
three pilots were made in a Shush treatment plant in south of Tehran.
Three plants species, spinach, lettuce and radish were selected and
planted in the pilots.First pilot was irrigated just with wastewater of
treatment plant and second pilot was irrigated with wastewater and
sludge application .Third pilot was irrigated with simulated heavy
metals solution equal 50 years of irrigation. The results indicate that
the average of amount of heavy metals Pb, Cd in three plant species
in first pilot were lower than permissible limits .In second pilot,
Cadmium accumulations are high in three species plants and more
than the standard limits. Concentration of Cd , Pb have exceed their
permitted limits in plants in third pilot . It was concluded that the use
of wastewater and sludge application in agricultural lands enriched
soils with heavy metals to concentrations that may pose potential
environmental and health risks in the long-term.
Abstract: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of preexercise glycerol hyperhydration on endurance performance in a heat chamber designed to simulate the World Championship Distance (WCD) duathlon (10km run, 40km ride, 5 km run). Duathlons are often performed in hot and humid conditions and as a result hydration is a major issue. Glycerol enhances the body’s capacity for fluid retention by inducing hyperhydration, which is theorized to improve thermoregulatory and cardiovascular responses, and thereby improve performance. Six well-trained athletes completed the testing protocol in a heat chamber at the La Trobe University Exercise Physiology Laboratory. Each testing session was approximately 4.5 hours in duration (2 hours of pre-exercise glycerol hyper-hydration followed by approximately 2.5 hours of exercise). The results showed an increased water retention pre-exercise and an improved overall performance of 2.04% was achieved by subjects ingesting the glycerol solution.
Abstract: Al-Murabahah is an Islamic financing facility used in
asset financing, the profit rate of the contract is determined by
components which are also being used in the conventional banking.
Such are cost of fund, overhead cost, risk premium cost and bank-s
profit margin. At the same time, the profit rate determined by Islamic
banking system also refers to Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) in
London as a benchmark. This practice has risen arguments among
Muslim scholars in term of its validity of the contract; whether the
contract maintains the Shariah compliance or not. This paper aims to
explore the view of Shariah towards the above components practiced
by Islamic Banking in determining the profit rate of al-murabahah
asset financing in Malaysia. This is a comparative research which
applied the views of Muslim scholars from all major mazahibs in
Islamic jurisprudence and examined the practices by Islamic banks in
Malaysia for the above components. The study found that the shariah
accepts all the components with conditions. The cost of fund is
accepted as a portion of al-mudarabah-s profit, the overhead cost is
accepted as a cost of product, risk premium cost consist of business
risk and mitigation risk are accepted through the concept of alta-awun
and bank-s profit margin is accepted as a right of bank after
venturing in risky investment.
Abstract: This paper reports a new application of material accounting techniques to characterise and quantify material stocks and flows at the “neighbourhood" scale. The study area is the main campus of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The system boundary is defined by the urban structural unit (USU), a typological construct devised to facilitate assessment of the metabolism of urban systems. A streamlined material flow analysis (MFA) was applied to quantify the stocks and flows of key construction materials within the campus USU over time, drawing on empirical data from a major campus development project. The results are reviewed to assess the efficacy of the method in supporting urban environmental evaluation and design practice, for example to facilitate estimation of significant impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions. It is concluded that linking a service (in this case, teaching students) enabled by a given product (university buildings) to the amount of materials used in creating that product offers a potential way to reduce the environmental impact of that service, through more efficient use of materials.
Abstract: The intention of this lessons is to assess the probability
of optical coherence tomography (OCT) for biometric recognition.
The OCT is the foundation on an optical signal acquisition and
processing method and has the micrometer-resolution. In this study,
we used the porcine skin for verifying the abovementioned means. The
porcine tissue was sound acknowledged for structural and
immunohistochemical similarity with human skin, so it could be
suitable for pre-clinical trial as investigational specimen. For this
reason, it was tattooed by the tattoo machine with the tattoo-pigment.
We detected the pattern of the tattooed skin by the OCT according to
needle speed. The result was consistent with the histology images.
This result showed that the OCT was effective to examine the tattooed
skin section noninvasively. It might be available to identify
morphological changes inside the skin.
Abstract: This paper describes a combined mathematicalgraphical
approach for optimum tool path planning in order to
improve machining efficiency. A methodology has been used that
stabilizes machining operations by adjusting material removal rate in
pocket milling operations while keeping cutting forces within limits.
This increases the life of cutting tool and reduces the risk of tool
breakage, machining vibration, and chatter. Case studies reveal the
fact that application of this approach could result in a slight increase
of machining time, however, a considerable reduction of tooling cost,
machining vibration, noise and chatter can be achieved in addition to
producing a better surface finish.
Abstract: FACTS devices are used to control the power flow, to
increase the transmission capacity and to optimize the stability of the
power system. One of the most widely used FACTS devices is
Unified Power Flow Controller (UPFC). The controller used in the
control mechanism has a significantly effects on controlling of the
power flow and enhancing the system stability of UPFC. According
to this, the capability of UPFC is observed by using different control
mechanisms based on P, PI, PID and fuzzy logic controllers (FLC) in
this study. FLC was developed by taking consideration of Takagi-
Sugeno inference system in the decision process and Sugeno-s
weighted average method in the defuzzification process. Case studies
with different operating conditions are applied to prove the ability of
UPFC on controlling the power flow and the effectiveness of
controllers on the performance of UPFC. PSCAD/EMTDC program
is used to create the FLC and to simulate UPFC model.
Abstract: Innovational development of regions in Russia is generally faced with the essential influence from federal and local authorities. The organization of effective mechanism of innovation development (and self-development) is impossible without establishment of defined institutional conditions in the analyzed field. Creative utilization of scientific concepts and information should merge, giving rise to continuing innovation and advanced production. The paper presents an analysis of institutional conditions in the field of creation and development of innovation activity infrastructure and transferring of knowledge and skills between different economic agents in Russia. Knowledge is mainly privately owned, developed through R&D investments and incorporated into technology or a product. Innovation infrastructure is a strong concentration mechanism of advanced facilities, which are mainly located inside large agglomerations or city-regions in order to benefit from scale effects in both input markets (human capital, private financial capital) and output markets (higher education services, research services). The empirical results of the paper show that in the presence of more efficient innovation and knowledge transfer and transcoding system and of a more open attitude of economic agents towards innovation, the innovation and knowledge capacity of regional economy is much higher.
Abstract: The static stability analysis of stiffened functionally
graded cylindrical shells by isotropic rings and stringers subjected to
axial compression is presented in this paper. The Young's modulus of
the shell is taken to be function of the thickness coordinate. The
fundamental relations, the equilibrium and stability equations are
derived using the Sander's assumption. Resulting equations are
employed to obtain the closed-form solution for the critical axial
loads. The effects of material properties, geometric size and different
material coefficient on the critical axial loads are examined. The
analytical results are compared and validated using the finite element
model.
Abstract: In recent years, though, the concept of fit has been
now in widespread used in strategic management research, it is in its
infancy for applying fit concept to service innovation issue. Therefore,
drawing on the concept of fit, this present research proposed an
innovation service fit model within service innovation, market
orientation, marketing strategy, and IT adoption are coexisted. The
perspective of fit as covariation will be employed to test the hypothesis
and identify the effects of fit. We contend that the fit among these four
factors will contribution to business performance. Finally, according
to the empirical data collected from manufacturing, service, and
financial industry in Taiwan, meaningful findings and conclusions
will be proposed and discussed.
Abstract: Researchers have long had trouble in measurement of
Exchangeable Sodium Ratio (ESR) at salt-affected soils. this
parameter are often determined using laborious and time consuming
laboratory tests, but it may be more appropriate and economical to
develop a method which uses a more simple soil salinity index. The
aim of this study was to determine the relationship between
exchangeable sodium ratio (ESR) and sodium adsorption ratio (SAR)
in some salt-affected soils of Khuzestan plain. To this purpose, two
experimental areas (S1, S2) of Khuzestan province-IRAN were
selected and four treatments with three replications by series of
double rings were applied. The treatments were included 25cm,
50cm, 75cm and 100cm water application. The statistical results of
the study indicated that in order to predict soil ESR based on soil
SAR the linear regression model ESR=0.2048+0.0066 SAR
(R2=0.53) & ESR=0.0564+0.0171 SAR (R2=0.76) can be
recommended in Pilot S1 and S2 respectively.
Abstract: The present work is concerned with the free
convective two dimensional flow and heat transfer, in isotropic fluid
filled porous rectangular enclosure with differentially heated walls for
steady state incompressible flow have been investigated for non-
Darcy flow model. Effects of Darcy number (0.0001 £Da£ 10),
Rayleigh number (10 £Ra£ 5000), and aspect ratio (0.25 £AR£ 4), for
a range of porosity (0.4 £e£ 0.9) with and without moving lower wall
have been studied. The cavity was insulated at the lower and upper
surfaces. The right and left heated surfaces allows convective
transport through the porous medium, generating a thermal
stratification and flow circulations. It was found that the Darcy
number, Rayleigh number, aspect ratio, and porosity considerably
influenced characteristics of flow and heat transfer mechanisms. The
results obtained are discussed in terms of the Nusselt number,
vectors, contours, and isotherms.
Abstract: The present report describes the characteristics of
damages and behavior of reinforced concrete buildings during the
tsunami action. The discussion is based on the field damage survey in
selected cities located on the coast of the zone affected by the Great
East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. This earthquake is the most
powerful know earthquake that has hit Japan with a magnitude 9.0 and
with epicenter located at 129 km of Sendai city (off the coast). The
earthquake triggered a destructive tsunami with run up height of up to
40 meters that mainly affect cities located on the Pacific Ocean coast of
the Tohoku region (north-east region of Japan). Reinforced concrete
buildings in general resist the tsunami without collapse however the
non-structural elements like panels and ceilings were severely
damaged. The analysis of damages has permitted to understand the
behavior of RC buildings under tsunami attack, and has also permitted
to establish recommendations for their use to take refuge from tsunami
in places where natural topography makes impossible to reach hilltops
or other safer places.
Abstract: This paper presents the experimental results on
ageing deterioration of silicone rubber outdoor polymer insulator
under salt water dip wheel test based on IEC 62217. In order to comparison effect of chemical contents, silicone rubber outdoor
polymer insulators having same configuration and leakage distant
from two manufactures were tested together continuously 30,000 test cycles. Many discharge activities were observed in during the test.
After 30,000 test cycles, in spite of same configuration, differences in
degree of surface aging were observed. Physical analysis such as
decreasing in hydrophobicity and increasing in hardness
measurement were measured on two-type tested specimen surface in order to confirm degree of surface ageing. Furthermore, chemical
analysis by ATR-FTIR to diagnose the chemical change of tested
specimen surface was conducted to confirm the physical analysis results.
Abstract: Recently many research has been conducted to
retrieve pertinent parameters and adequate models for automatic
music genre classification. In this paper, two measures based upon
information theory concepts are investigated for mapping the features
space to decision space. A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is used
as a baseline and reference system. Various strategies are proposed
for training and testing sessions with matched or mismatched
conditions, long training and long testing, long training and short
testing. For all experiments, the file sections used for testing are
never been used during training. With matched conditions all
examined measures yield the best and similar scores (almost 100%).
With mismatched conditions, the proposed measures yield better
scores than the GMM baseline system, especially for the short testing
case. It is also observed that the average discrimination information
measure is most appropriate for music category classifications and on
the other hand the divergence measure is more suitable for music
subcategory classifications.