Abstract: Virtual environments are a hot topic in academia and more importantly in courses offered via distance education. Today-s gaming generation view virtual worlds as strong social and interactive mediums for communicating and socializing. And while institutions of higher education are challenged with increasing enrollment while balancing budget cuts, offering effective courses via distance education become a valid option. Educators can utilize virtual worlds to offer students an enhanced learning environment which has the power to alleviate feelings of isolation through the promotion of communication, interaction, collaboration, teamwork, feedback, engagement and constructivists learning activities. This paper focuses on the use of virtual environments to facilitate interaction in distance education courses so as to produce positive learning outcomes for students. Furthermore, the instructional strategies were reviewed and discussed for use in virtual worlds to enhance learning within a social context.
Abstract: Accurate modeling of high speed RLC interconnects
has become a necessity to address signal integrity issues in current
VLSI design. To accurately model a dispersive system of interconnects
at higher frequencies; a full-wave analysis is required.
However, conventional circuit simulation of interconnects with full
wave models is extremely CPU expensive. We present an algorithm
for reducing large VLSI circuits to much smaller ones with similar
input-output behavior. A key feature of our method, called Frequency
Shift Technique, is that it is capable of reducing linear time-varying
systems. This enables it to capture frequency-translation and sampling
behavior, important in communication subsystems such as mixers,
RF components and switched-capacitor filters. Reduction is obtained
by projecting the original system described by linear differential
equations into a lower dimension. Experiments have been carried out
using Cadence Design Simulator cwhich indicates that the proposed
technique achieves more % reduction with less CPU time than the
other model order reduction techniques existing in literature. We
also present applications to RF circuit subsystems, obtaining size
reductions and evaluation speedups of orders of magnitude with
insignificant loss of accuracy.
Abstract: Strategic alliances generally mean the cooperation or
collaboration between firms which pursue for a synergy that each
member hopes the benefits from the alliances would be much more
than those from individual efforts. Past researches provide us
sufficient theories and considerations for alliance forming in liner
shipping market. This research reviews important academic journals
for the past decade regarding to the most important reasons to form the
alliances. We would explain the motive of alliances and details of
shipping cooperation in literature review.
The paper also empirically investigates the key service quality
requirements improved through alliances by using quality function
deployment (QFD). Moreover, the research investigates famous
shipping reports, shipping consultant websites and most recent
shipping publications to find out the executive-s viewpoint of several
leading carriers among top 20 to assess current shipping strategic
alliance on Asia/Europe route. These comments provide meaningful
managerial reasons to consider alliance formations and search if there
is any gap between the theories and industrial practice. Analysis of the
empirical investigation and top management-s perspective on current
market situation will contribute us some meaningful managerial
suggestions to evaluate these theories applied to current strategic
alliances.
Abstract: For a spatiotemporal database management system,
I/O cost of queries and other operations is an important performance
criterion. In order to optimize this cost, an intense research on
designing robust index structures has been done in the past decade.
With these major considerations, there are still other design issues
that deserve addressing due to their direct impact on the I/O cost.
Having said this, an efficient buffer management strategy plays a key
role on reducing redundant disk access. In this paper, we proposed an
efficient buffer strategy for a spatiotemporal database index
structure, specifically indexing objects moving over a network of
roads. The proposed strategy, namely MONPAR, is based on the data
type (i.e. spatiotemporal data) and the structure of the index
structure. For the purpose of an experimental evaluation, we set up a
simulation environment that counts the number of disk accesses
while executing a number of spatiotemporal range-queries over the
index. We reiterated simulations with query sets with different
distributions, such as uniform query distribution and skewed query
distribution. Based on the comparison of our strategy with wellknown
page-replacement techniques, like LRU-based and Prioritybased
buffers, we conclude that MONPAR behaves better than its
competitors for small and medium size buffers under all used query-distributions.
Abstract: The last two decades witnessed some advances in the development of an Arabic character recognition (CR) system. Arabic CR faces technical problems not encountered in any other language that make Arabic CR systems achieve relatively low accuracy and retards establishing them as market products. We propose the basic stages towards a system that attacks the problem of recognizing online Arabic cursive handwriting. Rule-based methods are used to perform simultaneous segmentation and recognition of word portions in an unconstrained cursively handwritten document using dynamic programming. The output of these stages is in the form of a ranked list of the possible decisions. A new technique for text line separation is also used.
Abstract: During the past several years, face recognition in video
has received significant attention. Not only the wide range of
commercial and law enforcement applications, but also the availability
of feasible technologies after several decades of research contributes
to the trend. Although current face recognition systems have reached a
certain level of maturity, their development is still limited by the
conditions brought about by many real applications. For example,
recognition images of video sequence acquired in an open
environment with changes in illumination and/or pose and/or facial
occlusion and/or low resolution of acquired image remains a largely
unsolved problem. In other words, current algorithms are yet to be
developed. This paper provides an up-to-date survey of video-based
face recognition research. To present a comprehensive survey, we
categorize existing video based recognition approaches and present
detailed descriptions of representative methods within each category.
In addition, relevant topics such as real time detection, real time
tracking for video, issues such as illumination, pose, 3D and low
resolution are covered.
Abstract: The ε4 allele of the ε2, ε3 and ε4 protein isoform polymorphism in the gene encoding apolipoprotein E (Apo E) has previously been associated with increased cardiac artery disease (CAD); therefore to investigate the significance of this polymorphism in pathogenesis of CAD in Iranian patients with stenosis and control subjects. To investigate the association between
Apo E polymorphism and coronary artery disease we performed a comparative case control study of the frequency of Apo E
polymorphism in One hundred CAD patients with stenosis who underwent coronary angiography (>50% stenosis) and 100 control subjects (
Abstract: In this paper, we present a cost-effective wireless
distributed load shedding system for non-emergency scenarios. In
power transformer locations where SCADA system cannot be used,
the proposed solution provides a reasonable alternative that combines
the use of microcontrollers and existing GSM infrastructure to send
early warning SMS messages to users advising them to proactively
reduce their power consumption before system capacity is reached
and systematic power shutdown takes place.
A novel communication protocol and message set have been
devised to handle the messaging between the transformer sites, where
the microcontrollers are located and where the measurements take
place, and the central processing site where the database server is
hosted. Moreover, the system sends warning messages to the endusers
mobile devices that are used as communication terminals. The
system has been implemented and tested via different experimental
results.
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to review and assess the
methodological issues and problems in marketing research, data and
knowledge mining in Turkey. As a summary, academic marketing
research publications in Turkey have significant problems. The most
vital problem seems to be related with modeling. Most of the
publications had major weaknesses in modeling. There were also,
serious problems regarding measurement and scaling, sampling and
analyses. Analyses myopia seems to be the most important problem
for young academia in Turkey. Another very important finding is the
lack of publications on data and knowledge mining in the academic
world.
Abstract: The exact gain shape profile of erbium doped fiber
amplifiers (EDFA`s) are depends on fiber length and Er3 ion
densities. This paper optimized several of erbium doped fiber
parameters to obtain high performance characteristic at pump
wavelengths of λp= 980 nm and λs= 1550 nm for three different
pump powers. The maximum gain obtained for pump powers (10, 30
and 50mw) is nearly (19, 30 and 33 dB) at optimizations. The
required numerical aperture NA to obtain maximum gain becomes
less when pump power increased. The amplifier gain is increase
when Er+3doped near the center of the fiber core. The simulation has
been done by using optisystem 5.0 software (CAD for Photonics, a
license product of a Canadian based company) at 2.5 Gbps.
Abstract: Today, design requirements are extending more and
more from electronic (analogue and digital) to multidiscipline design.
These current needs imply implementation of methodologies to make
the CAD product reliable in order to improve time to market, study
costs, reusability and reliability of the design process.
This paper proposes a high level design approach applied for the
characterization and the optimization of Switched-Current Sigma-
Delta Modulators. It uses the new hardware description language
VHDL-AMS to help the designers to optimize the characteristics of
the modulator at a high level with a considerably reduced CPU time
before passing to a transistor level characterization.
Abstract: Software development has experienced remarkable progress in the past decade. However, due to the rising complexity and magnitude of the project the development productivity has not been consistently improved. By analyzing the latest ISBSG data repository with 4106 projects, we discovered that software development productivity has actually undergone irregular variations between the years 1995 and 2005. Considering the factors significant to the productivity, we found its variations are primarily caused by the variations of average team size and the unbalanced uses of the less productive language 3GL.
Abstract: People detection from images has a variety of applications such as video surveillance and driver assistance system, but is still a challenging task and more difficult in crowded environments such as shopping malls in which occlusion of lower parts of human body often occurs. Lack of the full-body information requires more effective features than common features such as HOG. In this paper, new features are introduced that exploits global self-symmetry (GSS) characteristic in head-shoulder patterns. The features encode the similarity or difference of color histograms and oriented gradient histograms between two vertically symmetric blocks. The domain-specific features are rapid to compute from the integral images in Viola-Jones cascade-of-rejecters framework. The proposed features are evaluated with our own head-shoulder dataset that, in part, consists of a well-known INRIA pedestrian dataset. Experimental results show that the GSS features are effective in reduction of false alarmsmarginally and the gradient GSS features are preferred more often than the color GSS ones in the feature selection.
Abstract: Impurity metals such as manganese and cadmium
from high-tenor cobalt electrolyte solution were selectively removed
by solvent extraction method using Co-D2EHPA after converting the functional group of D2EHPA with Co2+ ions. The process parameters
such as pH, organic concentration, O/A ratio, kinetics etc. were
investigated and the experiments were conducted by batch tests in the laboratory bench scale. Results showed that a significant amount
of manganese and cadmium can be extracted using Co-D2EHPA for the optimum processing of cobalt electrolyte solution at equilibrium pH about 3.5. The McCabe-Thiele diagram, constructed from the
extraction studies showed that 100% impurities can be extracted through four stages for manganese and three stages for cadmium
using O/A ratio of 0.65 and 1.0, respectively. From the stripping study, it was found that 100% manganese and cadmium can be stripped from the loaded organic using 0.4 M H2SO4 in a single
contact. The loading capacity of Co-D2EHPA by manganese and cadmium were also investigated with different O/A ratio as well as
with number of stages of contact of aqueous and organic phases. Valuable information was obtained for the designing of an impurities
removal process for the production of pure cobalt with less trouble in the electrowinning circuit.
Abstract: In IETF RFC 2002, Mobile-IP was developed to
enable Laptobs to maintain Internet connectivity while moving
between subnets. However, the packet loss that comes from
switching subnets arises because network connectivity is lost while
the mobile host registers with the foreign agent and this encounters
large end-to-end packet delays. The criterion to initiate a simple and
fast full-duplex connection between the home agent and foreign
agent, to reduce the roaming duration, is a very important issue to be
considered by a work in this paper. State-transition Petri-Nets of the
modeling scenario-based CIA: communication inter-agents procedure
as an extension to the basic Mobile-IP registration process was
designed and manipulated to describe the system in discrete events.
The heuristic of configuration file during practical Setup session for
registration parameters, on Cisco platform Router-1760 using IOS
12.3 (15)T and TFTP server S/W is created. Finally, stand-alone
performance simulations from Simulink Matlab, within each subnet
and also between subnets, are illustrated for reporting better end-toend
packet delays. Results verified the effectiveness of our Mathcad
analytical manipulation and experimental implementation. It showed
lower values of end-to-end packet delay for Mobile-IP using CIA
procedure-based early registration. Furthermore, it reported packets
flow between subnets to improve losses between subnets.
Abstract: Careful design and selection of daylighting systems can greatly help in reducing not only artificial lighting use, but also decrease cooling energy consumption and, therefore, potential for downsizing air-conditioning systems. This paper aims to evaluate the energy performance of two types of top-light daylighting systems due to the integration of daylight together with artificial lighting in an existing examinaton hall in University Kebangsaan Malaysia, based on a hot and humid climate. Computer simulation models have been created for building case study (base case) and the two types of toplight daylighting designs for building energy performance evaluation using the VisualDOE 4.0 building energy simulation program. The finding revealed that daylighting through top-light systems is a very beneficial design strategy in reducing annual lighting energy consumption and the overall total annual energy consumption.
Abstract: The distance between two objects is an important
problem in CAGD, CAD and CG etc. It will be presented in this paper
that a simple and quick method to estimate the distance between a
point and a Bezier curve on a Bezier surface.
Abstract: The major source of allergy in home is the house dust
mite (Dematophagoides farina, Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus)
causing allergic symptom include atopic dermatitis, asthma, perennial
rhinitis and even infant death syndrome.
Control of this mite species is dependent on the use of chemical
methods such as fumigation treatments with methylene bromide,
spraying with organophosphates such as pirimiphos-methyl, or
treatments with repellents such as DEET and benzyl benzoate.
Although effective, their repeated use for decades has sometimes
resulted in development of resistance and fostered environmental and
human health concerns. Both decomposing animal parts and the
protein that surrounds mite fecal pellets cause mite allergy. So it is
more effective to repel than to kill them because allergen is not living
house dust mite but dead body or fecal particles of house dust mite.
It is important to find out natural repellent material against house
dust mite to control them and reduce the allergic reactions. Plants may
be an alternative source for dust mite control because they contain a
range of bioactive chemicals.
The research objectives of this paper were to verify the acaricidal
and repellent effects of cinnamon essential oil and to find out it-s most
effective concentrations. We could find that cinnamon bark essential
oil was very effective material to control the house dust mite.
Furthermore, it could reduce chemical resistance and danger for
human health.
Abstract: Contact centres have been exemplars of scientific management in the discipline of operations management for more than a decade now. With the movement of industries from a resource based economy to knowledge based economy businesses have started to realize the customer eccentricity being the key to sustainability amidst high velocity of the market. However, as technologies have converged and advanced, so have the contact centres. Contact Centres have redirected the supply chains and the concept of retailing is highly diminished due to over exaggeration of cost reduction strategies. In conditions of high environmental velocity together with services featuring considerable information intensity contact centres will require up to date and enlightened agents to satisfy the demands placed upon them by those requesting their services. In this paper we examine salient factors such as Power Distance, Knowledge structures and the dynamics of job specialisation and enlargement to suggest critical success factors in the domain of contact centres.
Abstract: The past decade has seen enormous growth in the amount of software produced. However, given the ever increasing complexity of the software being developed and the concomitant rise in the typical project size, managers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of issues that influence the productivity levels of the project teams involved. By analyzing the latest release of ISBSG data repository, we report on the factors found to significantly influence the productivity among which average team size and language type are the two most essential ones. Building on this we present an original model for evaluating the potential productivity during the project planning stage.