Abstract: The White Kwao (Pueraria mirifica), a potent phytoestrogenic medicinal plant, has long been use in Thailand as a traditional folkmedicine. However, no scientific information of the direct effect of White Kwao on the development of mammalian embryo was available. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of White Kwao extract on the in vitro development and implantation rate of mouse embryos. This study was designed into two experiments. In the first experiment, the two-cell stage mouse embryos were collected from the oviduct of superovulated mature female mice, and randomly cultured in three different media, the M16, M16 supplemented with 0.52μg esthinylestradiol-17β, and M16 supplemented with 10 mg/ml White Kwao extract. The culture was incubated in CO2 incubator at 37 oC . After the embryos were cultivated, the developments of embryos were observed every 24 hours for 5 days. The development rate of embryos from the two-cell stage to blastocyst stage in the media was with White Kwao was significantly higher (p
Abstract: This paper is concerned with the establishment of relationships among knowledge management (KM) criteria that will ensure an essential foundation to evaluate KM outcomes. The major issue under investigation is to assess the popularity of criteria within organizations and to establish a structure of criteria for measuring KM results. An empirical survey was conducted among Malaysian organizations to investigate KM criteria for measuring success of KM initiatives. Therefore, knowledge workers as the respondents were targeted to establish a structure of criteria for evaluating KM outcomes. An established structure of criteria based on the Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) is used to map criteria relationships inside organizations. This structure is portrayed to identify that how these set of criteria are related. This network schema should be investigated and implemented to promote innovation and improve enterprise performance. To the researchers, this survey has significant insights into relationship between KM programs and business success.
Abstract: Coriander is an annual and herbaceous plant, belong to
the apiaceae family. This plant is cultivated world widely. It is well
known for having medicinal properties. The aim of this experiment
was to study seed quality of species grown in Kermanshah
conditions. The experiment was carried out in research farm, Campus
of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Razi University, Kermanshah,
Iran. Coriander (local type) was grown in late spring May (5th and
20th) and Jun (4th and 19th), and plant density (10, 30, 50 and 70
plants m-2) in 2009. The experimental plots were laid out in a
factorial according to a randomized complete block design with three
replications. The fruits were harvest between 83.5 – 106.5 days after
sowing. The essential oil and oil content was extracted by Clevenger
and Soxhlet apparatuses, respectively. Results showed that delay at
planting date increased the oil content. Also, with the increase at
plant density was decreased oil content and essential oil.
Abstract: The primary objective of this study is to test whether
there is any difference in performance between funded and nonfunded
registered charity organizations. In this study, performance as
the dependent variable is measured using total donations. Using a
sample of 101 charity organizations registered with the Registry of
Society, analysis of variance (ANOVA) results indicate that there is a
difference in financial performance between funded and non-funded
charity organizations. The study provides empirical evidence to
resource providers and the policy makers in scrutinizing the decision
to disburse their funds and resources to these charity organizations.
Abstract: Various assisted reproductive techniques have been
developed and refined to obtain a large number of offspring from
genetically superior animals or obtain offspring from infertile (or
subfertile) animals. The embryo transfer is one assisted reproductive
technique developed well, aimed at increased productivity of selected
females, disease control, importation and exportation of livestock,
rapid screening of AI sires for genetically recessive characteristics,
treatment or circumvention of certain types of infertility. Embryo
transfer also is a useful research tool for evaluating fetal and maternal
interactions. This technique has been applied to nearly every species
of domestic animal and many species of wildlife and exotic animals,
including humans and non-human primates. The successful of
embryo transfers have been limited to within-animal, homologous
replacement of the embryos. There are several examples of
interspecific and intergeneric embryo transfers in which embryos
implanted but did not develop to term: sheep and goat, mouse and rat.
An immunological rejections and placental incompatibility between
the embryo and the surrogate mother appear to restrict interspecific
embryo transfer/interspecific pregnancy. Recently, preimplantation
embryo manipulation procedures have been applied, such as
technique of inner cell mass transfer. This technique will possible to
overcome the reproductive barrier interspecific embryo
transfer/interspecific pregnancy, if there is a protective mechanism
which prevents recognition of the foreign fetus by the mother of the
other species
Abstract: Voltage collapse is instability of heavily loaded electric
power systems that cause to declining voltages and blackout. Power
systems are predicated to become more heavily loaded in the future
decade as the demand for electric power rises while economic and
environmental concerns limit the construction of new transmission
and generation capacity. Heavily loaded power systems are closer to
their stability limits and voltage collapse blackouts will occur if
suitable monitoring and control measures are not taken. To control
transmission lines, it can be used from FACTS devices.
In this paper Harmony search algorithm (HSA) and Genetic
Algorithm (GA) have applied to determine optimal location of
FACTS devices in a power system to improve power system stability.
Three types of FACTS devices (TCPAT, UPFS, and SVC) have been
introduced. Bus under voltage has been solved by controlling reactive
power of shunt compensator. Also a combined series-shunt
compensators has been also used to control transmission power flow
and bus voltage simultaneously.
Different scenarios have been considered. First TCPAT, UPFS, and
SVC are placed solely in transmission lines and indices have been
calculated. Then two types of above controller try to improve
parameters randomly. The last scenario tries to make better voltage
stability index and losses by implementation of three types controller
simultaneously. These scenarios are executed on typical 34-bus test
system and yields efficiency in improvement of voltage profile and
reduction of power losses; it also may permit an increase in power
transfer capacity, maximum loading, and voltage stability margin.
Abstract: In this paper, quantitative evaluation of ultrasonic Cscan
images through estimation of their Fractal Dimension (FD) is
discussed. Necessary algorithm for evaluation of FD of any 2-D
digitized image is implemented by developing a computer code. For
the evaluation purpose several C-scan images of the Kevlar
composite impacted by high speed bullet and glass fibre composite
having flaw in the form of inclusion is used. This analysis
automatically differentiates a C-scan image showing distinct damage
zone, from an image that contains no such damage.
Abstract: In this paper, a semi-fragile watermarking scheme is proposed for color image authentication. In this particular scheme, the color image is first transformed from RGB to YST color space, suitable for watermarking the color media. Each channel is divided into 4×4 non-overlapping blocks and its each 2×2 sub-block is selected. The embedding space is created by setting the two LSBs of selected sub-block to zero, which will hold the authentication and recovery information. For verification of work authentication and parity bits denoted by 'a' & 'p' are computed for each 2×2 subblock. For recovery, intensity mean of each 2×2 sub-block is computed and encoded upto six to eight bits depending upon the channel selection. The size of sub-block is important for correct localization and fast computation. For watermark distribution 2DTorus Automorphism is implemented using a private key to have a secure mapping of blocks. The perceptibility of watermarked image is quite reasonable both subjectively and objectively. Our scheme is oblivious, correctly localizes the tampering and able to recovery the original work with probability of near one.
Abstract: This paper proposes an Interactive Chinese Character
Learning System (ICCLS) based on pictorial evolution as an
edutainment concept in computer-based learning of language. The
advantage of the language origination itself is taken as a learning
platform due to the complexity in Chinese language as compared to
other types of languages. Users especially children enjoy more by
utilize this learning system because they are able to memories the
Chinese Character easily and understand more of the origin of the
Chinese character under pleasurable learning environment, compares
to traditional approach which children need to rote learning Chinese
Character under un-pleasurable environment. Skeletonization is used
as the representation of Chinese character and object with an animated
pictograph evolution to facilitate the learning of the language. Shortest
skeleton path matching technique is employed for fast and accurate
matching in our implementation. User is required to either write a
word or draw a simple 2D object in the input panel and the matched
word and object will be displayed as well as the pictograph evolution
to instill learning. The target of computer-based learning system is for
pre-school children between 4 to 6 years old to learn Chinese
characters in a flexible and entertaining manner besides utilizing
visual and mind mapping strategy as learning methodology.
Abstract: This paper looks into areas not covered by prominent
Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies.
Extensive paper review led to the identification of two issues, first
most of these methodologies almost neglect semantic web and
ontology. Second, as expected, each one has its strength and
weakness and may focus on some phases of the development
lifecycle but not all of the phases. The work presented here builds
extensions to a highly regarded AOSE methodology (MaSE) in order
to cover the areas that this methodology does not concentrate on. The
extensions include introducing an ontology stage for semantic
representation and integrating early requirement specification from a
methodology which mainly focuses on that. The integration involved
developing transformation rules (with the necessary handling of nonmatching
notions) between the two sets of representations and
building the software which automates the transformation. The
application of this integration on a case study is also presented in the
paper. The main flow of MaSE stages was changed to smoothly
accommodate the new additions.
Abstract: The pollution of sediments sampled from the North
Port by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) was investigated.
Concentrations of PAHs estimated in the port sediments ranged from
199 to 2851.2 μg/kg dw. The highest concentration was found which
is closed to the Berth line, this locations affected by intensive
shipping activities and Land based runoff and they were dominated
by the high molecular weight PAHs (4–6- rings). Source
identification showed that PAHs originated mostly from the
pyrogenic source either from the combustion of fossil fuels, grass,
wood and coal (majority of the samples). Ecological Risk Assessment
on the port sediments presented that slightly adverse ecological
effects to biological community are expected to occur at the vicinity
of the stations 1 and 4. Thus PAHs are not considered as pollutants of
concern in the North Port.
Abstract: A new power regulator controller with multiple-access
PID compensator is proposed, which can achieve a minimum memory
requirement for fully table look-up. The proposed regulator controller
employs hysteresis comparators, an error process unit (EPU) for
voltage regulation, a multiple-access PID compensator and a lowpower-
consumption digital PWM (DPWM). Based on the multipleaccess
mechanism, the proposed controller can alleviate the penalty of
large amount of memory employed for fully table look-up based PID
compensator in the applications of power regulation. The proposed
controller has been validated with simulation results.
Abstract: Views on therapists- attraction have influenced the ethical and professional development of the mental health fields. Because the majority of therapist attraction literature (63.6%) has been conducted from a psychoanalytic standpoint, approaches to attraction from feminist perspectives have not been adequately developed. Considering the lack of a feminist voice regarding attraction, this article attempts to offer a feminist perspective on this issue. The purpose of this article is to offer a feminist perspective on the phenomenon of attraction in order to raise awareness about the importance of power inequalities, intersectionalities, contextual variables and the need for action in the field.
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm for object tracking in video sequence. In order to represent the object to be tracked, we propose a spatial color histogram model which encodes both the color distribution and spatial information. The object tracking from frame to frame is accomplished via center voting and back projection method. The center voting method has every pixel in the new frame to cast a vote on whereabouts the object center is. The back projection method segments the object from the background. The segmented foreground provides information on object size and orientation, omitting the need to estimate them separately. We do not put any assumption on camera motion; the proposed algorithm works equally well for object tracking in both static and moving camera videos.
Abstract: This paper presents an improved image segmentation
model with edge preserving regularization based on the
piecewise-smooth Mumford-Shah functional. A level set formulation
is considered for the Mumford-Shah functional minimization in
segmentation, and the corresponding partial difference equations are
solved by the backward Euler discretization. Aiming at encouraging
edge preserving regularization, a new edge indicator function is
introduced at level set frame. In which all the grid points which is used
to locate the level set curve are considered to avoid blurring the edges
and a nonlinear smooth constraint function as regularization term is
applied to smooth the image in the isophote direction instead of the
gradient direction. In implementation, some strategies such as a new
scheme for extension of u+ and u- computation of the grid points and
speedup of the convergence are studied to improve the efficacy of the
algorithm. The resulting algorithm has been implemented and
compared with the previous methods, and has been proved efficiently
by several cases.
Abstract: Genetic Folding (GF) a new class of EA named as is
introduced for the first time. It is based on chromosomes composed
of floating genes structurally organized in a parent form and
separated by dots. Although, the genotype/phenotype system of GF
generates a kernel expression, which is the objective function of
superior classifier. In this work the question of the satisfying
mapping-s rules in evolving populations is addressed by analyzing
populations undergoing either Mercer-s or none Mercer-s rule. The
results presented here show that populations undergoing Mercer-s
rules improve practically models selection of Support Vector
Machine (SVM). The experiment is trained multi-classification
problem and tested on nonlinear Ionosphere dataset. The target of this
paper is to answer the question of evolving Mercer-s rule in SVM
addressed using either genetic folding satisfied kernel-s rules or not
applied to complicated domains and problems.
Abstract: In the frame of the European Union project entitled EU-Families and Adolescents Quit Tobacco (www.eufaqt.eu) focus group analysis has been carried out in Hungary to acquire qualitative information on attitudes towards smoking in groups of adolescents, parents and educators, respectively. It rendered to identify methods for smoking prevention/ intervention with family approach. The results explored the role of the family in smoking behaviour. Teachers do not feel responsibility in prevention or cessation of smoking. Adolescents are not aware of the addictive effect of the cigarette. Water pipe is popular among adolescent, therefore spreading of more information needed on the harmful effects of water pipe. We outlined the requirement for professionals to provide interventions. Partnership of EU-FAQT project has worked out antismoking interventions for adolescents and their families conducted by psychologists to ensure skill development to prevent and quit tobacco.
Abstract: In this work we evaluate the possibility of predicting
the emotional state of a person based on the EEG. We investigate
the problem of classifying valence from EEG signals during
the presentation of affective pictures, utilizing the "frontal EEG
asymmetry" phenomenon. To distinguish positive and negative
emotions, we applied the Common Spatial Patterns algorithm.
In contrast to our expectations, the affective pictures did not
reliably elicit changes in frontal asymmetry. The classifying task
thereby becomes very hard as reflected by the poor classifier
performance. We suspect that the masking of the source of the
brain activity related to emotions, coming mostly from deeper
structures in the brain, and the insufficient emotional engagement
are among main reasons why it is difficult to predict the emotional
state of a person.
Abstract: Sarkhoon gas plant, located in south of Iran, has been installed to removal H2S contained in a high pressure natural gas stream. The solvent used for the H2S removal from gaseous stream is 34% by weight (wt%) Di-ethanol amine (DEA) solutions. Due to increasing concentration of heat stable salt (HSS) in solvent, corrosivity of amine solution had been increased. Reports indicated that there was corrosion on the shell of regeneration column. Because source formation of HSS was unknown, we decided to control the amount of HSS at the limit less than 3% wt amine solvent. Therefore, two small columns were filled by strong anionic base and carbon active, and then polluted amine was passed through beds. Finally a temporary amine recovery package on industrial scale was made based on laboratory’s results. From economical point of view we could save $700000 beside corrosion occurrence of the stripping column has been vigorously decreased.
Abstract: Interactive CAD systems have to allocate and
deallocate memory frequently. Frequent memory allocation and
deallocation can play a significant role in degrading application
performance. An application may use memory in a very specific way
and pay a performance penalty for functionality it does not need. We
could counter that by developing specialized memory managers.