Abstract: The study was designed to evaluate the use of low
concentrations of separan flocculent (Less than 3 ppm) on
physicochemical properties of sugar cane juice. Colour, pH, purity,
turbidity, pol, brix, reducing sugars tannins and polyphenols of
crushed cane (green and burned) juice, mixed juice and clarified
juice were studied. The results showed that pol, brix, reducing sugar
and turbidity are higher in crushed cane juice. Clarified burned juice
had low turbidity, reducing sugars, pol and brix but had significantly
lower pH, purity and colour when compared to crushed juice.
Polyphenols of the crushed juice (1.19%) decreased significantly in
the clarified juice to 0.006%. Addition of separan at a concentration
of 0.015 ppm reduced significantly colour, polyphenols and tannins
and reducing sugar compared to the control.
Abstract: This study include the effect of strain and storage
period and their interaction on some quantitative and qualitative traits
and percentages of the egg components in the eggs collected at the
start of production (at age 24 weeks). Eggs were divided into three
storage periods (1, 7 and 14) days under refrigerator temperature (5-
7)0C. Fifty seven eggs obtained randomly from each strain including
Isa Brown and Lohman White. General Linear Model within
SAS programme was used to analyze the collected data
and correlations between the studied traits were calculated for each
strain.Average egg weight (EW), Haugh Unit (HU), yolk index (YI),
yolk % (HP), albumin % (AP) and yolk to albumin ratio (YAR) was
56.629 gm, 87.968 %, 0.493, 22.13%, 67.74% and 32.76
respectively. Egg produced from ISA Brown surpassed those
produced by Lohman White significantly (P
Abstract: Aggression is a behavior that cannot be approved by
the society. Vandalism which is aggression towards objects is an
action that tends to damage public or personal property. The
behaviors that are described as vandalism can often be observed in
the schools as well. According to Zwier and Vaughan (1)
previous research about the reasons of and precautionary measures
for vandalism in schools can be grouped in three tendency categories:
conservative, liberal and radical. In this context, the main aim of this
study is to discover which ideological tendency of the reasons of
school vandalism is adopted by the teachers and what are their
physical, environmental, school system and societal solutions for
vandalism. A total of 200 teachers participated in this study, and the
mean age was 34.20 years (SD = 6.54). The sample was made up of
109 females and 91 males. For the analysis of the data, SPSS 15.00,
frequency, percentage, and t-test were used. The research showed
that the teachers have tendencies in the order of conservative, liberal
and radical for the reasons of vandalism. The research also showed
that the teachers do not have any tendency for eliminating vandalism
physically and general solutions on the level of society; on the other
hand they mostly adopt a conservative tendency in terms of
precautions against vandalism in the school system. Second most,
they adopt the liberal tendency in terms of precautions against
vandalism in the school system. . It is observed that the findings of
this study are comparable to the existing literature on the subject.
Future studies should be conducted with multiple variants and
bigger sampling.
Abstract: Selecting the word translation from a set of target
language words, one that conveys the correct sense of source word
and makes more fluent target language output, is one of core
problems in machine translation. In this paper we compare the 3
methods of estimating word translation probabilities for selecting the
translation word in Thai – English Machine Translation. The 3
methods are (1) Method based on frequency of word translation, (2)
Method based on collocation of word translation, and (3) Method
based on Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. For evaluation
we used Thai – English parallel sentences generated by NECTEC.
The method based on EM algorithm is the best method in comparison
to the other methods and gives the satisfying results.
Abstract: The conjugate gradient optimization algorithm is combined with the modified back propagation algorithm to yield a computationally efficient algorithm for training multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks (CGFR/AG). The computational efficiency is enhanced by adaptively modifying initial search direction as described in the following steps: (1) Modification on standard back propagation algorithm by introducing a gain variation term in the activation function, (2) Calculation of the gradient descent of error with respect to the weights and gains values and (3) the determination of a new search direction by using information calculated in step (2). The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparing accuracy and computation time with the conjugate gradient algorithm used in MATLAB neural network toolbox. The results show that the computational efficiency of the proposed method was better than the standard conjugate gradient algorithm.
Abstract: This research seeks to investigate the frequency and
profitability of index arbitrage opportunities involving the SET50
futures, SET50 component stocks, and the ThaiDEX SET50 ETF
(ticker symbol: TDEX). In particular, the frequency and profit of
arbitrage are measured in the following three arbitrage tests: (1)
SET50 futures vs. ThaiDEX SET50 ETF, (2) SET50 futures vs.
SET50 component stocks, and (3) ThaiDEX SET50 ETF vs. SET50
component stocks are investigated. For tests (2) and (3), the problems
involve conic optimization and quadratic programming as subproblems.
This research is first to apply conic optimization and
quadratic programming techniques in the context of index arbitrage
and is first to investigate such index arbitrage in the Thai equity and
derivatives markets. Thus, the contribution of this study is twofold.
First, its results would help understand the contribution of the
derivatives securities to the efficiency of the Thai markets. Second,
the methodology employed in this study can be applied to other
geographical markets, with minor adjustments.
Abstract: The paper is included within the framework of a
complex research program, which was initiated from the hypothesis
arguing on the existence of a correlation between pineal indolic and
peptide hormones and the somatic development rhythm, including
thus the epithalamium-epiphysis complex involvement. At birds,
pineal gland contains a circadian oscillator, playing a main role in the
temporal organization of the cerebral functions. The secretion of
pineal indolic hormones is characterized by a high endogenous
rhythmic alternation, modulated by the light/darkness (L/D)
succession and by temperature as well. The research has been carried
out using 100 chicken broilers - “Ross" commercial hybrid,
randomly allocated in two experimental batches: Lc batch, reared
under a 12L/12D lighting schedule and Lexp batch, which was photic
pinealectomised through continuous exposition to light (150 lux, 24
hours, 56 days). Chemical and physical features of the meat issued
from breast fillet and thighs muscles have been studied, determining
the dry matter, proteins, fat, collagen, salt content and pH value, as
well. Besides the variations of meat chemical composition in relation
with lighting schedule, other parameters have been studied: live
weight dynamics, feed intake and somatic development degree. The
achieved results became significant since chickens have 7 days of
age, some variations of the studied parameters being registered,
revealing that the pineal gland physiologic activity, in relation with
the lighting schedule, could be interpreted through the monitoring of
the somatic development technological parameters, usually studied
within the chicken broilers rearing aviculture practice.
Abstract: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the
epidemiology of waterborne diarrhoeal among children aged 6-36
months old in Busia town, western Kenya. The study was carried out
between Feb. 2008 and Feb. 2010. Cases of diarrhoea reported in 385
households were linked to household water handling practices. A
mother with a child of 6-36 months old was also included in the
study. Diarrhoea prevalence among children 6-36 months was 16.7%
in Busia town, Bwamani (19.6%) and Mayenje (10.6%) clustered in
Mayenje sub-location reported the highest and the lowest prevalence
of diarrhoea. There was a positive correlation between the prevalence
of diarrhoea in children and the level of the mother-s education,
29.9% (n= 100). Diarrhoea cases decreased in range from 35.5% (n
=102) to 4.8% (n= 16), corresponding to increase in age from 6-35
months on average. In conclusion, prevalence of diarrhoea in
children of 6-36 months old was 16.7% in Busia town. This was
higher in children whose mother-s age was below 18 years and with
low level of education, the rate decreased with increase in age of
children. Prevalence of diarrhoea in children aged 6-36months in
households was higher in children aged 6-17 and 36 months and
whose mothers were less educated and fell between the ages of 18-24
years. The Influence of human activities at the main source of
drinking water on the prevalence of diarrhoea in these children was
insignificant.
Abstract: Extracting thematic (semantic) roles is one of the
major steps in representing text meaning. It refers to finding the
semantic relations between a predicate and syntactic constituents in a
sentence. In this paper we present a rule-based approach to extract
semantic roles from Persian sentences. The system exploits a twophase
architecture to (1) identify the arguments and (2) label them
for each predicate.
For the first phase we developed a rule based shallow parser to
chunk Persian sentences and for the second phase we developed a
knowledge-based system to assign 16 selected thematic roles to the
chunks. The experimental results of testing each phase are shown at
the end of the paper.
Abstract: In today-s competitive global business environment,
the concept of supply chain management (SCM) continues to become
increasingly market-oriented, shifting the primary driver of the value
chain from supply to demand. Recent recommendations encourage
researchers to focus investigations on the supply chain process
integration (SCPI) capabilities that integrate a focal firm with its
network of suppliers and business customers to create value for it.
However, theoretical and empirical researches pertaining to the
antecedents and consequences of a focal firm-s SCPI capabilities have
been limited and piecemeal. The purpose of this study is to investigate
the critical determinants and consequences of a focal firm-s SCPI
capabilities. We test our proposed research framework using a sample
of 139 sales managers of manufacturing industries in Taiwan, our
research findings show that (1) both perceived business customer-s
power and focal firm-s market-oriented culture positively influences a
focal firm-s SCPI capabilities, and (2) SCPI capabilities positively
influence a focal firm-s SCM performance, both operational and
strategic benefits. Implications for practitioners and researchers and
suggestions for future research are also addressed in this study.
Abstract: Bursa, since the establishment of the Ottoman Empire,
being on the important trade roads and having a capital accumulation
as a result of silk production, was one of the first cities of
modernization activities applied. Bursa maintained its importance
even during the Republican Period and became one of the most
important cities of the country and today is the fourth biggest and the
industrialized city in Turkey. Social, political, economical and
cultural changes occured with the reforms starting with the 1839
Edict of Tanzimat that aimed at modernizing the society and the
government and centralizing the political power began in the
Ottoman Empire. After the Tanzimat Reforms transformation of the
city changed and planning processes began in Bursa according to the
vision of Governors. The theresholds of the city are very important
data for a sustainable planning for the city planners. Main aim of this
study is to investigate the changes and transformations of the city
according to the changes in the socio-economical and cultural
properties for the city planners.
Abstract: Model mapping and transformation are important processes in high level system abstractions, and form the cornerstone of model-driven architecture (MDA) techniques. Considerable research in this field has devoted attention to static system abstraction, despite the fact that most systems are dynamic with high frequency changes in behavior. In this paper we provide an overview of work that has been done with regard to behavior model mapping and transformation, based on: (1) the completeness of the platform independent model (PIM); (2) semantics of behavioral models; (3) languages supporting behavior model transformation processes; and (4) an evaluation of model composition to effect the best approach to describing large systems with high complexity.
Abstract: Particulate matter (PM) in ambient air is responsible
for adverse health effects in adults and children. Relatively little is
known about the concentrations, sources and health effects of PM in
indoor air. A monitoring study was conducted in Ankara by three
campaigns in order to measure PM levels in indoor and outdoor
environments to identify and quantify associations between sources
and concentrations. Approximately 82 homes (1st campaign for 42,
2nd campaign for 12, and 3rd campaign for 28), three rooms (living
room, baby-s room and living room used as a baby-s room) and
outdoor ambient at each home were sampled with Grimm
Environmental Dust Monitoring (EDM) 107, during different
seasonal periods of 2011 and 2012. In this study, the relationship
between indoor and outdoor PM levels for particulate matter less than
10 micrometer (.m) (PM10), particulate matter less than 2.5.m
(PM2.5) and particulate matter less than 1.0.m (PM1) were
investigated. The mean concentration of PM10, PM2.5, and PM1.0 at
living room used as baby-s room is higher than living and baby-s
room (or bedroom) for three sampling campaigns. It is concluded that
the household activities and environmental conditions are very
important for PM concentrations in the indoor environments during
the sampling periods. The amount of smokers, being near a main
street and/or construction activities increased the PM concentration.
This study is based on the assessment the relationship between indoor
and outdoor PM levels and the household activities and
environmental conditions
Abstract: This paper describes the application of a model predictive controller to the problem of batch reactor temperature control. Although a great deal of work has been done to improve reactor throughput using batch sequence control, the control of the actual reactor temperature remains a difficult problem for many operators of these processes. Temperature control is important as many chemical reactions are sensitive to temperature for formation of desired products. This controller consist of two part (1) a nonlinear control method GLC (Global Linearizing Control) to create a linear model of system and (2) a Model predictive controller used to obtain optimal input control sequence. The temperature of reactor is tuned to track a predetermined temperature trajectory that applied to the batch reactor. To do so two input signals, electrical powers and the flow of coolant in the coil are used. Simulation results show that the proposed controller has a remarkable performance for tracking reference trajectory while at the same time it is robust against noise imposed to system output.
Abstract: Recently, the health of retired National Football
League players, particularly lineman has been investigated. A
number of studies have reported increased cardiometabolic risk,
premature cardiovascular disease and incidence of type 2 diabetes.
Rugby union players have somatotypes very similar to National
Football League players which suggests that rugby players may have
similar health risks. The International Golden Oldies World Rugby
Festival (GORF) provided a unique opportunity to investigate the
demographics of veteran rugby players. METHODOLOGIES: A
cross-sectional, observational study was completed using an online
web-based questionnaire that consisted of medical history and
physiological measures. Data analysis was completed using a one
sample t-test (50yrs) and Chi-square test. RESULTS:
A total of 216 veteran rugby competitors (response rate = 6.8%)
representing 10 countries, aged 35-72 yrs (mean 51.2, S.D. ±8.0),
participated in the online survey. As a group, the incidence of current
smokers was low at 8.8% (avg 72.4 cigs/wk) whilst the percentage
consuming alcohol was high (93.1% (avg 11.2 drinks/wk).
Competitors reported the following top six chronic
diseases/disorders; hypertension (18.6%), arthritis (OA/RA, 11.5%),
asthma (9.3%), hyperlipidemia (8.2%), diabetes (all types, 7.5%) and
gout (6%), there were significant differences between groups with
regard to cancer (all types) and migraines. When compared to the
Australian general population (Australian Bureau of Statistics data,
n=18,000), GORF competitors had a significantly lower incidence of
anxiety (p
Abstract: Increasing growth of information volume in the
internet causes an increasing need to develop new (semi)automatic
methods for retrieval of documents and ranking them according to
their relevance to the user query. In this paper, after a brief review
on ranking models, a new ontology based approach for ranking
HTML documents is proposed and evaluated in various
circumstances. Our approach is a combination of conceptual,
statistical and linguistic methods. This combination reserves the
precision of ranking without loosing the speed. Our approach
exploits natural language processing techniques for extracting
phrases and stemming words. Then an ontology based conceptual
method will be used to annotate documents and expand the query.
To expand a query the spread activation algorithm is improved so
that the expansion can be done in various aspects. The annotated
documents and the expanded query will be processed to compute
the relevance degree exploiting statistical methods. The outstanding
features of our approach are (1) combining conceptual, statistical
and linguistic features of documents, (2) expanding the query with
its related concepts before comparing to documents, (3) extracting
and using both words and phrases to compute relevance degree, (4)
improving the spread activation algorithm to do the expansion based
on weighted combination of different conceptual relationships and
(5) allowing variable document vector dimensions. A ranking
system called ORank is developed to implement and test the
proposed model. The test results will be included at the end of the
paper.
Abstract: Twenty seven tektites from the Wenchang area, Hainan
province (south China) and five tektites from the Khon Kaen area
(northeast Thailand) were analyzed for major and trace element
contents and Rb-Sr isotopic compositions. All the samples studied are
splash-form tektites. Tektites of this study are characterized by high
SiO2 contents ranging from 71.95 to 74.07 wt% which is consistent
with previously published analyses of Australasian tektites. The trace
element ratios Ba/Rb (avg. 3.89), Th/Sm (avg. 2.40), Sm/Sc (avg.
0.45), Th/Sc (avg. 0.99) and the rare earth elements (REE) contents of
tektites of this study are similar to the average upper continental crust.
Based on the chemical composition, it is suggested that tektites in this
study are derived from similar parental material and are similar to the
post-Archean upper crustal rocks. The major and trace element
abundances of tektites analyzed indicate that the parental material of
tektites may be a terrestrial sedimentary deposit. The tektites from the
Wenchang area, Hainan Island have high positive εSr(0)
values-ranging from 184.5~196.5 which indicate that the parental
material for these tektites have similar Sr isotopic compositions to old
terrestrial sedimentary rocks and they were not dominantly derived
from recent young sediments (such as soil or loess). Based on Rb-Sr
isotopic data, it has been suggested by Blum (1992) [1]that the
depositional age of sedimentary target materials is close to 170Ma
(Jurassic). According to the model suggested by Ho and Chen
(1996)[2], mixing calculations for various amounts and combinations
of target rocks have been carried out. We consider that the best fit for
tektites from the Wenchang area is a mixture of 47% shale, 23%
sandstone, 25% greywacke and 5% quartzite, and the other tektites
from Khon Kaen area is a mixture of 46% shale, 2% sandstone, 20%
greywacke and 32% quartzite.
Abstract: This study compared socio-economic status attainment between the Muslim and Santal couples in rural Bangladesh. For this we hypothesized that socio-economic status attainment (occupation, education and income) of the Muslim couples was higher than the Santal ones in rural Bangladesh. In order to examine the hypothesis 288 couples (145 couples for Muslim and 143 couples for Santal) selected by cluster random sampling from Kalna village, Bangladesh were individually interviewed with semistructured questionnaire method. The results of Pearson Chi-Squire test suggest that there were significant differences in socio-economic status attainment between the two communities- couples. In addition, Pearson correlation coefficients also suggest that there were significant associations between the socio-economic statuses attained by the two communities- couples in rural Bangladesh. Further crosscultural study should conduct on how inter-community relations in rural social structure of Bangladesh influence the differences among the couples- socio-economic status attainment
Abstract: This study aims to identify processes, current
situations, and issues of recycling systems for four home appliances,
namely, air conditioners, television receivers, refrigerators, and
washing machines, among e-wastes in China and Japan for
understanding and comparison of their characteristics. In accordance
with results of a literature search, review of information disclosed
online, and questionnaire survey conducted, conclusions of the study
boil down to:
(1)The results show that in Japan most of the home appliances
mentioned above have been collected through home appliance
recycling tickets, resulting in an issue of “requiring some effort" in
treatment and recycling stages, and most plants have contracted out
their e-waste recycling.
(2)It is found out that advantages of the recycling system in Japan
include easiness to monitor concrete data and thorough
environmental friendliness ensured while its disadvantages include
illegal dumping and export. It becomes apparent that advantages of
the recycling system in China include a high reuse rate, low
treatment cost, and fewer illegal dumping while its disadvantages
include less safe reused products, environmental pollution caused by
e-waste treatment, illegal import, and difficulty in obtaining data.
Abstract: As the latest advancement and trend in IT field, Green
& Smart IT has attracted more and more attentions from researchers.
This study focuses on the development of assessing tools which can be
used for evaluating Green & Smart IT level within an organization. In
order to achieve meaningful results, a comprehensive review of
relevant literature was performed in advance, then, Delphi survey and
other processes were also employed to develop the assessment tools
for Green & Smart IT level. Two rounds of Delphi questionnaire
survey were conducted with 20 IT experts in public sector. The results
reveal that the top five weighted KPIs to evaluate maturity of Green &
Smart IT were: (1) electronic execution of business process; (2)
shutdown of unused IT devices; (3) virtualization of severs; (4)
automation of constant temperature and humidity; and (5) introduction
of smart-work system. Finally, these tools were applied to case study
of a public research institute in Korea. The findings presented in this
study provide organizations with useful implications for the
introduction and promotion of Green & Smart IT in the future