Abstract: The reproductive aging of women is a biological process which is expressed by the loss of ovarian function and therefore the loss of the possibility of procreation. The present work aims to evaluate the effect of menopause on sexual health of rural women and to examine the determinants of female sexuality after menopause. A survey was conducted among 527 women in the rural area of Marrakech. The average age of women was 51.92 ± 7.24 years. It appears from this study that sexual activity in menopausal women decreases with age, 20% of women had no sexual activity after menopause. 72% of respondents reported having sex by obligation, 71% of women say they are not satisfied with their sexuality, while 29 % are very satisfied. The most common sexual complaints are represented by the decreased libido (81%), vaginal dryness (54%), and pain (22,7%). Of the 511 women with sexual dysfunction, only 34 (6, 4%) consulted for this disorder. Many factors may influence sex include menopause and all the biological changes but also the roles of culture, social constructions and perception of sexuality after menopause are complicated.
Abstract: Thousands of masters athletes participate
quadrennially in the World Masters Games (WMG), yet this cohort
of athletes remains proportionately under-investigated. Due to a
growing global obesity pandemic in context of benefits of physical
activity across the lifespan, the prevalence of obesity in this unique
population was of particular interest. Data gathered on a sub-sample
of 535 football code athletes, aged 31-72 yrs ( =47.4, s =±7.1),
competing at the Sydney World Masters Games (2009) demonstrated
a significantly (p
Abstract: This interdisciplinary research aims to distinguish universal scale-free and field-like fundamental principles of selforganization observable across many disciplines like computer science, neuroscience, microbiology, social science, etc. Based on these universal principles we provide basic premises and postulates for designing holistic social simulation models. We also introduce pervasive information field (PIF) concept, which serves as a simulation media for contextual information storage, dynamic distribution and organization in social complex networks. PIF concept specifically is targeted for field-like uncoupled and indirect interactions among social agents capable of affecting and perceiving broadcasted contextual information. Proposed approach is expressive enough to represent contextual broadcasted information in a form locally accessible and immediately usable by network agents. This paper gives some prospective vision how system-s resources (tangible and intangible) could be simulated as oscillating processes immersed in the all pervasive information field.
Abstract: Signature amortization schemes have been introduced
for authenticating multicast streams, in which, a single signature is
amortized over several packets. The hash value of each packet is
computed, some hash values are appended to other packets, forming
what is known as hash chain. These schemes divide the stream into
blocks, each block is a number of packets, the signature packet in
these schemes is either the first or the last packet of the block.
Amortization schemes are efficient solutions in terms of computation
and communication overhead, specially in real-time environment.
The main effictive factor of amortization schemes is it-s hash chain
construction. Some studies show that signing the first packet of each
block reduces the receiver-s delay and prevents DoS attacks, other
studies show that signing the last packet reduces the sender-s delay.
To our knowledge, there is no studies that show which is better, to
sign the first or the last packet in terms of authentication probability
and resistance to packet loss.
In th is paper we will introduce another scheme for authenticating
multicast streams that is robust against packet loss, reduces the
overhead, and prevents the DoS attacks experienced by the receiver
in the same time. Our scheme-The Multiple Connected Chain signing
the First packet (MCF) is to append the hash values of specific
packets to other packets,then append some hashes to the signature
packet which is sent as the first packet in the block. This scheme
is aspecially efficient in terms of receiver-s delay. We discuss and
evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme against those that
sign the last packet of the block.
Abstract: Devices in a pervasive computing system (PCS) are characterized by their context-awareness. It permits them to provide proactively adapted services to the user and applications. To do so, context must be well understood and modeled in an appropriate form which enhance its sharing between devices and provide a high level of abstraction. The most interesting methods for modeling context are those based on ontology however the majority of the proposed methods fail in proposing a generic ontology for context which limit their usability and keep them specific to a particular domain. The adaptation task must be done automatically and without an explicit intervention of the user. Devices of a PCS must acquire some intelligence which permits them to sense the current context and trigger the appropriate service or provide a service in a better suitable form. In this paper we will propose a generic service ontology for context modeling and a context-aware service adaptation based on a service oriented definition of context.
Abstract: Email has become a fast and cheap means of online
communication. The main threat to email is Unsolicited Bulk Email
(UBE), commonly called spam email. The current work aims at
identification of unigrams in more than 2700 UBE that advertise
body-enhancement drugs. The identification is based on the
requirement that the unigram is neither present in dictionary, nor is a
slang term. The motives of the paper are many fold. This is an
attempt to analyze spamming behaviour and employment of wordmutation
technique. On the side-lines of the paper, we have
attempted to better understand the spam, the slang and their interplay.
The problem has been addressed by employing Tokenization
technique and Unigram BOW model. We found that the non-lexicon
words constitute nearly 66% of total number of lexis of corpus
whereas non-slang words constitute nearly 2.4% of non-lexicon
words. Further, non-lexicon non-slang unigrams composed of 2
lexicon words, form more than 71% of the total number of such
unigrams. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to
analyze usage of non-lexicon non-slang unigrams in any kind of
UBE.
Abstract: Synchronous cooperative systems (SCS) bring together users that are geographically distributed and connected through a network to carry out a task. Examples of SCS include Tele- Immersion and Tele-Conferences. In SCS, the coordination is the core of the system, and it has been defined as the act of managing interdependencies between activities performed to achieve a goal. Some of the main problems that SCS present deal with the management of constraints between simultaneous activities and the execution ordering of these activities. In order to resolve these problems, orderings based on Lamport-s happened-before relation have been used, namely, causal, Δ-causal, and causal-total orderings. They mainly differ in the degree of asynchronous execution allowed. One of the most important orderings is the causal order, which establishes that the events must be seen in the cause-effect order as they occur in the system. In this paper we show that for certain SCS (e.g. videoconferences, tele-immersion) where some degradation of the system is allowed, ensuring the causal order is still rigid, which can render negative affects to the system. In this paper, we illustrate how a more relaxed ordering, which we call Fuzzy Causal Order (FCO), is useful for such kind of systems by allowing a more asynchronous execution than the causal order. The benefit of the FCO is illustrated by applying it to a particular scenario of intermedia synchronization of an audio-conference system.
Abstract: Software Reusability is primary attribute of software
quality. There are metrics for identifying the quality of reusable
components but the function that makes use of these metrics to find
reusability of software components is still not clear. These metrics if
identified in the design phase or even in the coding phase can help us
to reduce the rework by improving quality of reuse of the component
and hence improve the productivity due to probabilistic increase in
the reuse level. In this paper, we have devised the framework of
metrics that uses McCabe-s Cyclometric Complexity Measure for
Complexity measurement, Regularity Metric, Halstead Software
Science Indicator for Volume indication, Reuse Frequency metric
and Coupling Metric values of the software component as input
attributes and calculated reusability of the software component. Here,
comparative analysis of the fuzzy, Neuro-fuzzy and Fuzzy-GA
approaches is performed to evaluate the reusability of software
components and Fuzzy-GA results outperform the other used
approaches. The developed reusability model has produced high
precision results as expected by the human experts.
Abstract: The most important subtype of non-Hodgkin-s
lymphoma is the Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma. Approximately
40% of the patients suffering from it respond well to therapy,
whereas the remainder needs a more aggressive treatment, in order to
better their chances of survival. Data Mining techniques have helped
to identify the class of the lymphoma in an efficient manner. Despite
that, thousands of genes should be processed to obtain the results.
This paper presents a comparison of the use of various attribute
selection methods aiming to reduce the number of genes to be
searched, looking for a more effective procedure as a whole.
Abstract: The picture of a perfect road construction site is the one that utilizes conventional vertical road signs and a flagman to optimize the traffic flow with minimum hazel to the public. Former research has been carried out by Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) and Ministry of Works to further enhance smoothness in traffic operations and particularly in safety issues within work zones. This paper highlights on hazardous zones in a certain road construction or road maintenance site. Most cases show that the flagman falls into high risk of fatal accidents within work zone. Various measures have been taken by both the authorities and contractors to overcome such miseries, yet it-s impossible to eliminate the usage of a flagman since it is considered the best practice. With the implementation of new technologies in automating the traffic flow in road construction site, it is possible to eliminate the usage of a flagman. The intelligent traffic light system is designed to solve problems which contribute hazardous at road construction site and to be inline with the road safety regulation which is taken into granted.
Abstract: It is well-known that in wireless local area networks,
authenticating nodes by their MAC addresses is not secure since it is
very easy for an attacker to learn one of the authorized addresses and
change his MAC address accordingly. In this paper, in order to
prevent MAC address spoofing attacks, we propose to use
dynamically changing MAC addresses and make each address usable
for only one session. The scheme we propose does not require any
change in 802.11 protocols and incurs only a small performance
overhead. One of the nice features of our new scheme is that no third
party can link different communication sessions of the same user by
monitoring MAC addresses therefore our scheme is preferable also
with respect to user privacy.
Abstract: The DNA microarray technology concurrently monitors the expression levels of thousands of genes during significant biological processes and across the related samples. The better understanding of functional genomics is obtained by extracting the patterns hidden in gene expression data. It is handled by clustering which reveals natural structures and identify interesting patterns in the underlying data. In the proposed work clustering gene expression data is done through an Advanced Nelder Mead (ANM) algorithm. Nelder Mead (NM) method is a method designed for optimization process. In Nelder Mead method, the vertices of a triangle are considered as the solutions. Many operations are performed on this triangle to obtain a better result. In the proposed work, the operations like reflection and expansion is eliminated and a new operation called spread-out is introduced. The spread-out operation will increase the global search area and thus provides a better result on optimization. The spread-out operation will give three points and the best among these three points will be used to replace the worst point. The experiment results are analyzed with optimization benchmark test functions and gene expression benchmark datasets. The results show that ANM outperforms NM in both benchmarks.
Abstract: Creation and maintenance of knowledge management
systems has been recognized as an important research area.
Consecutively lack of accurate results from knowledge management
systems limits the organization to apply their knowledge
management processes. This leads to a failure in getting the right
information to the right people at the right time thus followed by a
deficiency in decision making processes. An Intranet offers a
powerful tool for communication and collaboration, presenting data
and information, and the means that creates and shares knowledge,
all in one easily accessible place. This paper proposes an archetype
describing how a knowledge management system, with the support
of intranet capabilities, could very much increase the accuracy of
capturing, storing and retrieving knowledge based processes thereby
increasing the efficiency of the system. This system will expect a
critical mass of usage, by the users, for intranet to function as
knowledge management systems. This prototype would lead to a
design of an application that would impose creation and maintenance
of an effective knowledge management system through intranet. The
aim of this paper is to introduce an effective system to handle
capture, store and distribute knowledge management in a form that
may not lead to any failure which exists in most of the systems. The
methodology used in the system would require all the employees, in
the organization, to contribute the maximum to deliver the system to
a successful arena. The system is still in its initial mode and thereby
the authors are under the process to practically implement the ideas,
as mentioned in the system, to produce satisfactory results.
Abstract: Collaborative planning, forecasting and
replenishment (CPFR) coordinates the various supply chain
management activities including production and purchase planning,
demand forecasting and inventory replenishment between supply
chain trading partners. This study proposes a systematic way of
analyzing CPFR supporting factors using fuzzy cognitive map
(FCM) approach. FCMs have proven particularly useful for solving
problems in which a number of decision variables and
uncontrollable variables are causally interrelated. Hence the FCMs
of CPFR are created to show the relationships between the factors
that influence on effective implementation of CPFR in the supply
chain.
Abstract: Descriptive statistics was performed with the aim to achieve research objective of to investigate lecturers- usage of the mobile technology for teaching. A representative sample of 20 lecturers from the Faculty of Industrial Art & Design Technology of Universiti Industri Selangor (UNISEL), Malaysia was selected as the respondents. The result attested that lecturers fully accept the concept of mobility in learning and game play is appealing concept to support classroom learning. Subsequently, analogous experience on small size of keypad, screen resolution, and navigation could be the major problematic factors to students and affect their mobile learning process. Recommendation for future research is also presented.
Abstract: In this paper, we have presented a new multivariate fuzzy time series forecasting method. This method assumes mfactors with one main factor of interest. History of past three years is used for making new forecasts. This new method is applied in forecasting total number of car accidents in Belgium using four secondary factors. We also make comparison of our proposed method with existing methods of fuzzy time series forecasting. Experimentally, it is shown that our proposed method perform better than existing fuzzy time series forecasting methods. Practically, actuaries are interested in analysis of the patterns of causalities in road accidents. Thus using fuzzy time series, actuaries can define fuzzy premium and fuzzy underwriting of car insurance and life insurance for car insurance. National Institute of Statistics, Belgium provides region of risk classification for each road. Thus using this risk classification, we can predict premium rate and underwriting of insurance policy holders.
Abstract: This paper presents an algorithm based on the
wavelet decomposition, for feature extraction from the ECG signal
and recognition of three types of Ventricular Arrhythmias using
neural networks. A set of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)
coefficients, which contain the maximum information about the
arrhythmias, is selected from the wavelet decomposition. After that a
novel clustering algorithm based on nature inspired algorithm (Ant
Colony Optimization) is developed for classifying arrhythmia types.
The algorithm is applied on the ECG registrations from the MIT-BIH
arrhythmia and malignant ventricular arrhythmia databases. We
applied Daubechies 4 wavelet in our algorithm. The wavelet
decomposition enabled us to perform the task efficiently and
produced reliable results.
Abstract: Success is a European project that will implement several clean transport offers in three European cities and evaluate the environmental impacts. The goal of these measures is to improve urban mobility or the displacement of residents inside cities. For e.g. park and ride, electric vehicles, hybrid bus and bike sharing etc. A list of 28 criteria and 60 measures has been established for evaluation of these transport projects. The evaluation criteria can be grouped into: Transport, environment, social, economic and fuel consumption. This article proposes a decision support system based that encapsulates a hybrid approach based on fuzzy logic, multicriteria analysis and belief theory for the evaluation of impacts of urban mobility solutions. A web-based tool called DeSSIA (Decision Support System for Impacts Assessment) has been developed that treats complex data. The tool has several functionalities starting from data integration (import of data), evaluation of projects and finishes by graphical display of results. The tool development is based on the concept of MVC (Model, View, and Controller). The MVC is a conception model adapted to the creation of software's which impose separation between data, their treatment and presentation. Effort is laid on the ergonomic aspects of the application. It has codes compatible with the latest norms (XHTML, CSS) and has been validated by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The main ergonomic aspect focuses on the usability of the application, ease of learning and adoption. By the usage of technologies such as AJAX (XML and Java Script asynchrones), the application is more rapid and convivial. The positive points of our approach are that it treats heterogeneous data (qualitative, quantitative) from various information sources (human experts, survey, sensors, model etc.).
Abstract: Inferring the network structure from time series data
is a hard problem, especially if the time series is short and noisy.
DNA microarray is a technology allowing to monitor the mRNA
concentration of thousands of genes simultaneously that produces
data of these characteristics. In this study we try to investigate the
influence of the experimental design on the quality of the result.
More precisely, we investigate the influence of two different types of
random single gene perturbations on the inference of genetic networks
from time series data. To obtain an objective quality measure for
this influence we simulate gene expression values with a biologically
plausible model of a known network structure. Within this framework
we study the influence of single gene knock-outs in opposite to
linearly controlled expression for single genes on the quality of the
infered network structure.
Abstract: Many advanced Routing protocols for wireless sensor networks have been implemented for the effective routing of data. Energy awareness is an essential design issue and almost all of these routing protocols are considered as energy efficient and its ultimate objective is to maximize the whole network lifetime. However, the introductions of video and imaging sensors have posed additional challenges. Transmission of video and imaging data requires both energy and QoS aware routing in order to ensure efficient usage of the sensors and effective access to the gathered measurements. In this paper, the performance of the energy-aware QoS routing Protocol are analyzed in different performance metrics like average lifetime of a node, average delay per packet and network throughput. The parameters considered in this study are end-to-end delay, real time data generation/capture rates, packet drop probability and buffer size. The network throughput for realtime and non-realtime data was also has been analyzed. The simulation has been done in NS2 simulation environment and the simulation results were analyzed with respect to different metrics.