Abstract: This study was conducted in Malaysia to discover how
meaning and appreciation were construed among 35 Form Five
students. Panofsky-s theory was employed to discover the levels of
reasoning among students when various types of posters were
displayed. The independent variables used were posters that carried
explicit and implicit meanings; the moderating variable was students-
visual literacy levels while the dependent variable was the implicit
interpretation level. One-way ANOVA was applied for the data
analysis. The data showed that before students were exposed to
Panofsky-s theory, there were differences in thinking between boys,
who did not think abstractly or implicit in comparison to girls. The
study showed that students- visual literacy in posters depended on the
use of visual texts and illustration. This paper discuss further on
posters with text only have a tendency to be too abstract as opposed
to posters with visuals plus text.
Abstract: A stack with a small critical temperature gradient is
desirable for a standing wave thermoacoustic engine to obtain a low
onset temperature difference (the minimum temperature difference to
start engine-s self-oscillation). The viscous and heat relaxation loss in
the stack determines the critical temperature gradient. In this work, a
dimensionless critical temperature gradient factor is obtained based
on the linear thermoacoustic theory. It is indicated that the
impedance determines the proportion between the viscous loss, heat
relaxation losses and the power production from the heat energy. It
reveals the effects of the channel dimensions, geometrical
configuration and the local acoustic impedance on the critical
temperature gradient in stacks. The numerical analysis shows that
there exists a possible optimum combination of these parameters
which leads to the lowest critical temperature gradient. Furthermore,
several different geometries have been tested and compared
numerically.
Abstract: Service innovations are central concerns in fast
changing environment. Due to the fitness in customer demands and
advances in information technologies (IT) in service management, an
expanded conceptualization of e-service innovation is required.
Specially, innovation practices have become increasingly more
challenging, driving managers to employ a different open innovation
model to maintain competitive advantages. At the same time, firms
need to interact with external and internal customers in innovative
environments, like the open innovation networks, to co-create values.
Based on these issues, an important conceptual framework of e-service
innovation is developed. This paper aims to examine the contributing
factors on e-service innovation and firm performance, including
financial and non-financial aspects. The study concludes by showing
how e-service innovation will play a significant role in growing the
overall values of the firm. The discussion and conclusion will lead to a
stronger understanding of e-service innovation and co-creating values
with customers within open innovation networks.
Abstract: Understanding how airborne pathogens are
transported through hospital wards is essential for determining the
infection risk to patients and healthcare workers. This study utilizes
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations to explore
possible pathogen transport within a six-bed partitioned Nightingalestyle
hospital ward.
Grid independence of a ward model was addressed using the Grid
Convergence Index (GCI) from solutions obtained using three fullystructured
grids. Pathogens were simulated using source terms in
conjunction with a scalar transport equation and a RANS turbulence
model. Errors were found to be less than 4% in the calculation of air
velocities but an average of 13% was seen in the scalar field.
A parametric study of variations in the pathogen release point
illustrated that its distribution is strongly influenced by the local
velocity field and the degree of air mixing present.
Abstract: This paper discusses the causal explanation capability
of QRIOM, a tool aimed at supporting learning of organic chemistry
reactions. The development of the tool is based on the hybrid use of
Qualitative Reasoning (QR) technique and Qualitative Process
Theory (QPT) ontology. Our simulation combines symbolic,
qualitative description of relations with quantity analysis to generate
causal graphs. The pedagogy embedded in the simulator is to both
simulate and explain organic reactions. Qualitative reasoning through
a causal chain will be presented to explain the overall changes made
on the substrate; from initial substrate until the production of final
outputs. Several uses of the QPT modeling constructs in supporting
behavioral and causal explanation during run-time will also be
demonstrated. Explaining organic reactions through causal graph
trace can help improve the reasoning ability of learners in that their
conceptual understanding of the subject is nurtured.
Abstract: Cu-mesoporous TiO2 is developed for removal acid
odor cooperated with ozone assistance and online- regeneration
system with/without UV irradiation (all weather) in study. The results
showed that Cu-mesoporous TiO2 present the desirable adsorption
efficiency of acid odor without UV irradiation, due to the larger
surface area, pore sizeand the additional absorption ability provided by
Cu. In the photocatalysis process, the material structure also benefits
Cu-mesoporous TiO2 to perform the more outstanding efficiency on
degrading acid odor. Cu also postponed the recombination of
electron-hole pairs excited from TiO2 to enhance photodegradation
ability. Cu-mesoporous TiO2 could gain the conspicuous increase on
photocatalysis ability from ozone assistance, but without any benefit
on adsorption. In addition, the online regeneration procedure could
process the used Cu-mesoporous TiO2 to reinstate the adsorption
ability and maintain the photodegradtion performance, depended on
scrubbing, desorping acid odor and reducing Cu to metal state.
Abstract: This research paper is based upon the simulation of
gradient of mathematical functions and scalar fields using MATLAB.
Scalar fields, their gradient, contours and mesh/surfaces are
simulated using different related MATLAB tools and commands for
convenient presentation and understanding. Different mathematical
functions and scalar fields are examined here by taking their
gradient, visualizing results in 3D with different color shadings and
using other necessary relevant commands. In this way the outputs of
required functions help us to analyze and understand in a better way
as compared to just theoretical study of gradient.
Abstract: Consumer behaviour analysis represents an important
field of study in marketing. Particularly strategy development for
marketing and communications will be more focused and effective
when marketers have an understanding of the motivations, behaviour
and psychology of consumers. While materialism has been found to
be one of the important elements in consumer behaviour, compulsive
consumption represents another aspect that has recently attracted
more attention. This is because of the growing prevalence of
dysfunctional buying that has raised concern in consumer societies.
Present studies and analyses on origins and motivations of
compulsive buying have mainly focused on either individual factors
or groups of related factors and hence a need for a holistic view
exists. This paper provides a comprehensive perspective on
compulsive consumption and establishes relevant propositions
keeping the family life cycle stages as a reference for the incidence of
chronic consumer states and their influence on compulsive
consumption.
Abstract: Pipeline infrastructures normally represent high cost of investment and the pipeline must be free from risks that could cause environmental hazard and potential threats to personnel safety. Pipeline integrity such monitoring and management become very crucial to provide unimpeded transportation and avoiding unnecessary production deferment. Thus proper cleaning and inspection is the key to safe and reliable pipeline operation and plays an important role in pipeline integrity management program and has become a standard industry procedure. In view of this, understanding the motion (dynamic behavior), prediction and control of the PIG speed is important in executing pigging operation as it offers significant benefits, such as estimating PIG arrival time at receiving station, planning for suitable pigging operation, and improves efficiency of pigging tasks. The objective of this paper is to review recent developments in speed control system of pipeline PIGs. The review carried out would serve as an industrial application in a form of quick reference of recent developments in pipeline PIG speed control system, and further initiate others to add-in/update the list in the future leading to knowledge based data, and would attract active interest of others to share their view points.
Abstract: The present work was conducted for the synthesis of
nano size zerovalent iron (nZVI) and hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI))
removal as a highly toxic pollutant by using this nanoparticles. Batch
experiments were performed to investigate the effects of Cr(VI),
nZVI concentration, pH of solution and contact time variation on
the removal efficiency of Cr(VI). nZVI was synthesized by
reduction of ferric chloride using sodium borohydrid. SEM and
XRD examinations applied for determination of particle size and
characterization of produced nanoparticles. The results showed that
the removal efficiency decreased with Cr(VI) concentration and pH
of solution and increased with adsorbent dosage and contact time.
The Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models were used for the
adsorption equilibrium data and the Langmuir isotherm model was
well fitted. Nanoparticle ZVI presented an outstanding ability to
remove Cr(VI) due to high surface area, low particle size and high
inherent activity.
Abstract: Computer modeling has played a unique role in
understanding electrocardiography. Modeling and simulating cardiac
action potential propagation is suitable for studying normal and
pathological cardiac activation. This paper presents a 2-D Cellular
Automata model for simulating action potential propagation in
cardiac tissue. We demonstrate a novel algorithm in order to use
minimum neighbors. This algorithm uses the summation of the
excitability attributes of excited neighboring cells. We try to
eliminate flat edges in the result patterns by inserting probability to
the model. We also preserve the real shape of action potential by
using linear curve fitting of one well known electrophysiological
model.
Abstract: To provide a better understanding of fair share policies supported by current production schedulers and their impact on scheduling performance, A relative fair share policy supported in four well-known production job schedulers is evaluated in this study. The experimental results show that fair share indeed reduces heavy-demand users from dominating the system resources. However, the detailed per-user performance analysis show that some types of users may suffer unfairness under fair share, possibly due to priority mechanisms used by the current production schedulers. These users typically are not heavy-demands users but they have mixture of jobs that do not spread out.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to provide a better
understanding of the implementation of Project Management
practices by UiTM contractors to ensure project success. A
questionnaire survey was administered to 120 UiTM contractors in
Malaysia. The purpose of this method was to gather information on
the contractors- project background and project management skills. It
was found that all of the contractors had basic knowledge and
understanding of project management skills. It is suggested that a
reasonable project plan and an appropriate organizational structure
are influential factors for project success. It is recommended that the
contractors need to have an effective program of work and up to date
information system are emphasized.
Abstract: This paper presents an ESN-based Arabic phoneme
recognition system trained with supervised, forced and combined
supervised/forced supervised learning algorithms. Mel-Frequency
Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCCs) and Linear Predictive Code (LPC)
techniques are used and compared as the input feature extraction
technique. The system is evaluated using 6 speakers from the King
Abdulaziz Arabic Phonetics Database (KAPD) for Saudi Arabia
dialectic and 34 speakers from the Center for Spoken Language
Understanding (CSLU2002) database of speakers with different
dialectics from 12 Arabic countries. Results for the KAPD and
CSLU2002 Arabic databases show phoneme recognition
performances of 72.31% and 38.20% respectively.
Abstract: Brassinosteroids (BRs) regulate cell elongation,
vascular differentiation, senescence, and stress responses. BRs signal
through the BES1/BZR1 family of transcription factors, which
regulate hundreds of target genes involved in this pathway. In this
research a comprehensive genome-wide analysis was carried out in
BES1/BZR1 gene family in Arabidopsis thaliana, Cucumis sativus,
Vitis vinifera, Glycin max and Brachypodium distachyon.
Specifications of the desired sequences, dot plot and hydropathy plot
were analyzed in the protein and genome sequences of five plant
species. The maximum amino acid length was attributed to protein
sequence Brdic3g with 374aa and the minimum amino acid length
was attributed to protein sequence Gm7g with 163aa. The maximum
Instability index was attributed to protein sequence AT1G19350
equal with 79.99 and the minimum Instability index was attributed to
protein sequence Gm5g equal with 33.22. Aliphatic index of these
protein sequences ranged from 47.82 to 78.79 in Arabidopsis
thaliana, 49.91 to 57.50 in Vitis vinifera, 55.09 to 82.43 in Glycin
max, 54.09 to 54.28 in Brachypodium distachyon 55.36 to 56.83 in
Cucumis sativus. Overall, data obtained from our investigation
contributes a better understanding of the complexity of the
BES1/BZR1 gene family and provides the first step towards directing
future experimental designs to perform systematic analysis of the
functions of the BES1/BZR1 gene family.
Abstract: In this paper we present the deep study about the Bio-
Medical Images and tag it with some basic extracting features (e.g.
color, pixel value etc). The classification is done by using a nearest
neighbor classifier with various distance measures as well as the
automatic combination of classifier results. This process selects a
subset of relevant features from a group of features of the image. It
also helps to acquire better understanding about the image by
describing which the important features are. The accuracy can be
improved by increasing the number of features selected. Various
types of classifications were evolved for the medical images like
Support Vector Machine (SVM) which is used for classifying the
Bacterial types. Ant Colony Optimization method is used for optimal
results. It has high approximation capability and much faster
convergence, Texture feature extraction method based on Gabor
wavelets etc..
Abstract: Biologically human brain processes information in both unimodal and multimodal approaches. In fact, information is progressively abstracted and seamlessly fused. Subsequently, the fusion of multimodal inputs allows a holistic understanding of a problem. The proliferation of technology has exponentially produced various sources of data, which could be likened to being the state of multimodality in human brain. Therefore, this is an inspiration to develop a methodology for exploring multimodal data and further identifying multi-view patterns. Specifically, we propose a brain inspired conceptual model that allows exploration and identification of patterns at different levels of granularity, different types of hierarchies and different types of modalities. A structurally adaptive neural network is deployed to implement the proposed model. Furthermore, the acquisition of multi-view patterns with the proposed model is demonstrated and discussed with some experimental results.
Abstract: The understanding of the system level of biological behavior and phenomenon variously needs some elements such as gene sequence, protein structure, gene functions and metabolic pathways. Challenging problems are representing, learning and reasoning about these biochemical reactions, gene and protein structure, genotype and relation between the phenotype, and expression system on those interactions. The goal of our work is to understand the behaviors of the interactions networks and to model their evolution in time and in space. We propose in this study an ontological meta-model for the knowledge representation of the genetic regulatory networks. Ontology in artificial intelligence means the fundamental categories and relations that provide a framework for knowledge models. Domain ontology's are now commonly used to enable heterogeneous information resources, such as knowledge-based systems, to communicate with each other. The interest of our model is to represent the spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal knowledge. We validated our propositions in the genetic regulatory network of the Aarbidosis thaliana flower
Abstract: The most influential programming paradigm today
is object oriented (OO) programming and it is widely used in
education and industry. Recognizing the importance of equipping
students with OO knowledge and skills, it is not surprising that most
Computer Science degree programs offer OO-related courses. How
do we assess whether the students have acquired the right objectoriented
skills after they have completed their OO courses? What are
object oriented skills? Currently none of the current assessment
techniques would be able to provide this answer. Traditional forms of
OO programming assessment provide a ways for assigning numerical
scores to determine letter grades. But this rarely reveals information
about how students actually understand OO concept. It appears
reasonable that a better understanding of how to define and assess
OO skills is needed by developing a criterion referenced model. It is
even critical in the context of Malaysia where there is currently a
growing concern over the level of competency of Malaysian IT
graduates in object oriented programming. This paper discussed the
approach used to develop the criterion-referenced assessment model.
The model can serve as a guideline when conducting OO
programming assessment as mentioned. The proposed model is
derived by using Goal Questions Metrics methodology, which helps
formulate the metrics of interest. It concluded with a few suggestions
for further study.
Abstract: The evaluation of conversational agents or chatterbots question answering systems is a major research area that needs much attention. Before the rise of domain-oriented conversational agents based on natural language understanding and reasoning, evaluation is never a problem as information retrieval-based metrics are readily available for use. However, when chatterbots began to become more domain specific, evaluation becomes a real issue. This is especially true when understanding and reasoning is required to cater for a wider variety of questions and at the same time to achieve high quality responses. This paper discusses the inappropriateness of the existing measures for response quality evaluation and the call for new standard measures and related considerations are brought forward. As a short-term solution for evaluating response quality of conversational agents, and to demonstrate the challenges in evaluating systems of different nature, this research proposes a blackbox approach using observation, classification scheme and a scoring mechanism to assess and rank three example systems, AnswerBus, START and AINI.