Abstract: In order to evaluate the Effects of dual inoculation of
Azotobacter and Mycorrhiza with Nitrogen and Phosphorus levels on
yield and yield components of spring safflower, this study was
carried out in field of Farahan university in Markazi province in
2007. A factorial in a randomized complete block design with three
replications was used inoculation of Azotobacter (with inoculation
and without inoculation) and Mycorrhiza (with inoculation and
without inoculation ) with Nitrogen and Phosphorus levels [F0= N0+
P0 (kg.ha-1), F1= N50+ P25(kg.ha-1), F2= N100+ P50(kg.ha-1) and
F3= N150+ P75 (kg.ha-1)] on spring safflower (cultivar IL-111). In
this study characteristics such as: Harvest index, Hectolitre weight,
Root dry weight, Seed yield, Mycorrhizal Colonization Root,
Number of days to maturity were assessed. Results indicated that
treatment (A0M1F3) with grain yield (1556 kg.ha-1) and treatment
(A0M1F0) with grain yield (918 kg.ha-1) were significantly superior
to the other treatments and according to calculated, inoculation seeds
in plantig date with Azotobacter and Mycorrhiza to cause increase
grain yield about 5/38 percentage. we can by inoculation safflower
seeds with Azotobacter and Mycorrhiza too easily at the time sowing
date. The purpose of this research, study and evaluation the role of
biological fixation N and P, to provide for feeds plants.
Abstract: The experimental results on combustion of rice husk
in a conical fluidized bed combustor (referred to as the conical FBC)
using silica sand as the bed material are presented in this paper. The
effects of excess combustion air and combustor loading as well as the
sand bed height on the combustion pattern in FBC were investigated.
Temperatures and gas concentrations (CO and NO) along over the
combustor height as well as in the flue gas downstream from the ash
collecting cyclone were measured. The results showed that the axial
temperature profiles in FBC were explicitly affected by the
combustor loading whereas the excess air and bed height were found
to have minor influences on the temperature pattern. Meanwhile, the
combustor loading and the excess air significantly affected the axial
CO and NO concentration profiles; however, these profiles were
almost independent of the bed height. The combustion and thermal
efficiencies for this FBC were quantified for different operating
conditions.
Abstract: In wireless networks, bandwidth is scare resource and it is essential to utilize it effectively. This paper analyses effects of using different bandwidth management techniques on the network performances of the Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) that use hybrid load balancing scheme. In particular, we study three bandwidth management schemes, namely Complete Sharing (CS), Complete Partitioning (CP), and Partial Sharing (PS). Performances of these schemes are evaluated by simulation experiments in term of percentage of network association blocking. Our results show that the CS scheme can provide relatively low blocking percentage in various network traffic scenarios whereas the PS scheme can enhance quality of services of the multimedia traffic with rather small expenses on the blocking percentage of the best effort traffic.
Abstract: Website plays a significant role in success of an e-business. It is the main start point of any organization and corporation for its customers, so it's important to customize and design it according to the visitors' preferences. Also, websites are a place to introduce services of an organization and highlight new service to the visitors and audiences. In this paper, we will use web usage mining techniques, as a new field of research in data mining and knowledge discovery, in an Iranian government website. Using the results, a framework for web content layour is proposed. An agent is designed to dynamically update and improve web links locations and layout. Then, we will explain how it is used to directly enable top managers of the organization to influence on the arrangement of web contents and also to enhance customization of web site navigation due to online users' behaviors.
Abstract: Temperature, humidity and precipitation in an area,
are parameters proved influential in the climate of that area, and one
should recognize them so that he can determine the climate of that
area. Climate changes are of primary importance in climatology, and
in recent years, have been of great concern to researchers and even
politicians and organizations, for they can play an important role in
social, political and economic activities. Even though the real cause
of climate changes or their stability is not yet fully recognized, they
are a matter of concern to researchers and their importance for
countries has prompted them to investigate climate changes in
different levels, especially in regional, national and continental level.
This issue has less been investigated in our country. However, in
recent years, there have been some researches and conferences on
climate changes. This study is also in line with such researches and
tries to investigate and analyze the trends of climate changes
(temperature and precipitation) in Sefid-roud (the name of a river)
basin. Three parameters of mean annual precipitation, temperature,
and maximum and minimum temperatures in 36 synoptic and
climatology stations in a statistical period of 49 years (1956-2005) in
the stations of Sefid-roud basin were analyzed by Mann-Kendall test.
The results obtained by data analysis show that climate changes are
short term and have a trend. The analysis of mean temperature
revealed that changes have a significantly rising trend, besides the
precipitation has a significantly falling trend.
Abstract: The production of biodiesel from crude palm oil with
a homogeneous base catalyst is unlikely owing to considerable
formation of soap. Free fatty acids (FFA) in crude palm oil need to
be reduced, e.g. by esterification. This study investigated the activity
of sulfated zirconia calcined at various temperatures for esterification
of FFA in crude palm oil to biodiesel. It was found that under a
proper reaction condition, sulfated zirconia well catalyzes
esterification. FFA content can be reduced to an acceptable value for
typical biodiesel production with a homogeneous base catalyst.
Crystallinity and sulfate attachment of sulfated zirconia depend on
calcination temperature during the catalyst preparation. Too low
temperature of calcination gives amorphous sulfated zirconia which
has low activity for esterification of FFA. In contrast, very high
temperature of calcination removes sulfate group, consequently,
conversion of FFA is reduced. The appropriate temperature range of
calcination is 550-650 oC.
Abstract: Deflocculation and gel characterization were
investigated for three different composition of porcelain slips at
specific gravity 1.8. The suspensions were dispersed with sodium
silicate (Na2SiO3) in under-deflocculated slips and fully deflocculated
slips. The rheology characterization of slips was conducted by the
deflocculation curves and the gel curves. The results showed that
decreasing the amount of the ball clay composition in the slips
consumed less dosages of the dispersants. The under-deflocculated
slips tended to have a gelation rate faster than the fully deflocculated
slips.
Abstract: With the advent of new technologies, factors related to
mental health in e-workspaces are taken into consideration more than
ever. Studies have revealed that one of the factors affecting the
productivity of employees in an organization is occupational stress.
Another influential factor is quality of work life which is important in
the improvement of work environment conditions and organizational
efficiency. In order to uncover the quality of work life level and to
investigate the impact of occupational stress on quality of work life
among information technology employees in Iran, a cross-sectional
study design was applied and data were gathered using a
questionnaire validated by a group of experts. The results of the study
showed that information technology staffs have average level of both
occupational stress and quality of work life. Furthermore, it was
found that occupational stress has a negative impact on quality of
work life. In addition, the same results were observed for role
ambiguity, role conflict, role under-load, work-pace, work
repetitiveness and tension toward quality of work life. No significant
relation was found between role overload and quality of work life.
Finally, directions for future research are proposed and discussed.
Abstract: In this paper we are interested in classification problems
with a performance constraint on error probability. In such
problems if the constraint cannot be satisfied, then a rejection option
is introduced. For binary labelled classification, a number of SVM
based methods with rejection option have been proposed over the
past few years. All of these methods use two thresholds on the SVM
output. However, in previous works, we have shown on synthetic data
that using thresholds on the output of the optimal SVM may lead to
poor results for classification tasks with performance constraint. In
this paper a new method for supervised classification with rejection
option is proposed. It consists in two different classifiers jointly
optimized to minimize the rejection probability subject to a given
constraint on error rate. This method uses a new kernel based linear
learning machine that we have recently presented. This learning
machine is characterized by its simplicity and high training speed
which makes the simultaneous optimization of the two classifiers
computationally reasonable. The proposed classification method with
rejection option is compared to a SVM based rejection method
proposed in recent literature. Experiments show the superiority of
the proposed method.
Abstract: the effects of refining and alkaline chemicals on potential of recycling bleached chemical pulp of bagasse were investigated in this study. Recycling was done until three times. Handsheet properties such as, apparent density, light scattering coefficient, tear index, burst index, breaking length, and fold number according to TAPPI standard were measured. Water retention value also was used to considering the treatments during recycling. Refining enhanced the strength of recycled pulp by increasing fiber flexibility and swelling ability, whereas by applying chemical treatment didn't observe any improvement. The morphology of recycled fiber was considered with scanning electron microscopy (SEM).
Abstract: With the popularity of the multi-core and many-core architectures there is a great requirement for software frameworks which can support parallel programming methodologies. In this paper we introduce an Eclipse toolkit, JConqurr which is easy to use and provides robust support for flexible parallel progrmaming. JConqurr is a multi-core and many-core programming toolkit for Java which is capable of providing support for common parallel programming patterns which include task, data, divide and conquer and pipeline parallelism. The toolkit uses an annotation and a directive mechanism to convert the sequential code into parallel code. In addition to that we have proposed a novel mechanism to achieve the parallelism using graphical processing units (GPU). Experiments with common parallelizable algorithms have shown that our toolkit can be easily and efficiently used to convert sequential code to parallel code and significant performance gains can be achieved.
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to investigate a new
approach based on the idea of pictograms for food portion size. This
approach adopts the model of the United States Pharmacopeia- Drug
Information (USP-DI). The representation of each food portion size
composed of three parts: frame, the connotation of dietary portion
sizes and layout. To investigate users- comprehension based on this
approach, two experiments were conducted, included 122 Taiwanese
people, 60 male and 62 female with ages between 16 and 64 (divided
into age groups of 16-30, 31-45 and 46-64). In Experiment 1, the mean
correcting rate of the understanding level of food items is 48.54%
(S.D.= 95.08) and the mean response time 2.89sec (S.D.=2.14). The
difference on the correct rates for different age groups is significant
(P*=0.00
Abstract: In order to achieve effective management, the professional and individual characteristics and qualifications of school principals and their system-oriented perception is very important. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct regular comprehensive studies into the profiles of school principals. The purpose of this study is to determine the perceptions of primary school principals about their working conditions and to present their professional profiles. The questionnaire was distributed to 1475 respondents and 1428 valid questionnaires were evaluated. The results of the research were discussed and compared to other similar studies.Keywordseducation, education management, primary school principal, principals profiles
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel hybrid algorithm for feature selection based on a binary ant colony and SVM. The final subset selection is attained through the elimination of the features that produce noise or, are strictly correlated with other already selected features. Our algorithm can improve classification accuracy with a small and appropriate feature subset. Proposed algorithm is easily implemented and because of use of a simple filter in that, its computational complexity is very low. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through a real Rotary Cement kiln dataset. The results show that our algorithm outperforms existing algorithms.
Abstract: Aggressive scaling of MOS devices requires use of ultra-thin gate oxides to maintain a reasonable short channel effect and to take the advantage of higher density, high speed, lower cost etc. Such thin oxides give rise to high electric fields, resulting in considerable gate tunneling current through gate oxide in nano regime. Consequently, accurate analysis of gate tunneling current is very important especially in context of low power application. In this paper, a simple and efficient analytical model has been developed for channel and source/drain overlap region gate tunneling current through ultra thin gate oxide n-channel MOSFET with inevitable deep submicron effect (DSME).The results obtained have been verified with simulated and reported experimental results for the purpose of validation. It is shown that the calculated tunnel current is well fitted to the measured one over the entire oxide thickness range. The proposed model is suitable enough to be used in circuit simulator due to its simplicity. It is observed that neglecting deep sub-micron effect may lead to large error in the calculated gate tunneling current. It is found that temperature has almost negligible effect on gate tunneling current. It is also reported that gate tunneling current reduces with the increase of gate oxide thickness. The impact of source/drain overlap length is also assessed on gate tunneling current.
Abstract: The growing health hazardous impact of arsenic (As)
contamination in environment is the impetus of the present
investigation. Application of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) for the
removal of toxic and heavy metals from water has been reported.
This study was performed in order to isolate and characterize the Asresistant
LAB from mud and sludge samples for using as efficient As
uptaking probiotic. Isolation of As-resistant LAB colonies was
performed by spread plate technique using bromocresol purple
impregnated-MRS (BP-MRS) agar media provided with As @ 50
μg/ml. Isolated LAB were employed for probiotic characterization
process, acid and bile tolerance, lactic acid production, antibacterial
activity and antibiotic tolerance assays. After As-resistant and
removal characterizations, the LAB were identified using 16S rDNA
sequencing. A total of 103 isolates were identified as As-resistant
strains of LAB. The survival of 6 strains (As99-1, As100-2, As101-3,
As102-4, As105-7, and As112-9) was found after passing through the
sequential probiotic characterizations. Resistant pattern pronounced
hollow zones at As concentration >2000 μg/ml in As99-1, As100-2,
and As101-3 LAB strains, whereas it was found at ~1000 μg/ml in
rest 3 strains. Among 6 strains, the As uptake efficiency of As102-4
(0.006 μg/h/mg wet weight of cell) was higher (17 – 209%)
compared to remaining LAB. 16S rDNA sequencing data of 3 (As99-
1, As100-2, and As101-3) and 3 (As102-4, As105-7, and As112-9)
LAB strains clearly showed 97 to 99% (340 bp) homology to
Pediococcus dextrinicus and Pediococcus acidilactici, respectively.
Though, there was no correlation between the metal resistant and
removal efficiency of LAB examined but identified elevated As
removing LAB would probably be a potential As uptaking probiotic
agent. Since present experiment concerned with only As removal
from pure water, As removal and removal mechanism in natural
condition of intestinal milieu should be assessed in future studies.
Abstract: Harmonic pollution and low power factor in power
systems caused by power converters have been of great concern. To
overcome these problems several converter topologies using
advanced semiconductor devices and control schemes have been
proposed. This investigation is to identify a low cost, small size,
efficient and reliable ac to dc converter to meet the input performance
index of UPS. The performance of single phase and three phase ac to
dc converter along with various control techniques are studied and
compared. The half bridge converter topology with linear current
control is identified as most suitable. It is simple, energy efficient
because of single switch power loss and transformer-less operation of
UPS. The results are validated practically using a prototype built
using IGBT and analog controller. The performance for both single
and three-phase system is verified. Digital implementation of closed
loop control achieves higher reliability. Its cost largely depends on
chosen bit precision. The minimal bit precision for optimum
converter performance is identified as 16-bit with fixed-point
operation. From the investigation and practical implementation it is
concluded that half bridge ac – dc converter along with digital linear
controller meets the performance index of UPS for single and three
phase systems.
Abstract: Chikungunya virus (CHICKV) is an arboviruses belonging to family Tagoviridae and is transmitted to human through by mosquito (Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus) bite. A large outbreak of chikungunya has been reported in India between 2006 and 2007, along with several other countries from South-East Asia and for the first time in Europe. It was for the first time that the CHICKV outbreak has been reported with mortality from Reunion Island and increased mortality from Asian countries. CHICKV affects all age groups, and currently there are no specific drugs or vaccine to cure the disease. The need of antiviral agents for the treatment of CHICKV infection and the success of virtual screening against many therapeutically valuable targets led us to carry out the structure based drug design against Chikungunya nSP2 protease (PDB: 3TRK). Highthroughput virtual screening of publicly available databases, ZINC12 and BindingDB, has been carried out using the Openeye tools and Schrodinger LLC software packages. Openeye Filter program has been used to filter the database and the filtered outputs were docked using HTVS protocol implemented in GLIDE package of Schrodinger LLC. The top HITS were further used for enriching the similar molecules from the database through vROCS; a shape based screening protocol implemented in Openeye. The approach adopted has provided different scaffolds as HITS against CHICKV protease. Three scaffolds: Indole, Pyrazole and Sulphone derivatives were selected based on the docking score and synthetic feasibility. Derivatives of Pyrazole were synthesized and submitted for antiviral screening against CHICKV.
Abstract: Pre-germinated parboiled brown rice or Khao hang (in Thai) is paddy which undergoing the processes of soaking, steaming, drying and dehusking to obtain the edible form for consumption. The objectives of this research were to study the kinetic of pre-germinated parboiled brown rice drying using fluidization technique and to study the properties of pre-germinated parboiled brown rice after drying. The dryings were performed at the different temperatures of 110, 120 and 130 oC at the bed depth of 2 cm with the air velocity of 1.98 m/s. The results found that the higher drying temperature led to the faster moisture reduction. After drying until the moisture content of pre-germinated parboiled brown rice was lower than 14%wet basis, samples were taken to determine various qualities such as percentage of head rice and L* a* b* color values. The shade drying was used as a control. The results found that the higher drying temperature resulted in the decrease of head rice percentage. For the color assessment, the trend of L* and a* values was increased with the drying temperature, while the b* value was not significantly difference (p › 0.05) by drying temperatures. However, the b value of drying by fluidized bed dryer was higher than the control.
Abstract: Lately management strategy that put Industrial Design (ID) in its core is recognized more important, as technology and price alone cannot differentiate a product. The needs to shorten the time to develop a product also shorten the development period of ID, and it necessitates the ID process management. This research analyzes the status of integration process of ID and Engineering Design (ED) of office equipment that requires the collaboration of ID and ED to clarify the issues for the efficiency of the development and to propose solutions.