Abstract: This study retrospectively investigated the significance of whole body CT (WCT) for patients with sepsis. A medical chart review was retrospectively performed for all patients with systemic inflammatory response syndrome that were treated initially between April 2011 and March 2012. The subjects were divided into a WCT group that underwent WCT on arrival and a control group. Results of this study suggested that WCT for sepsis was useful for elderly patients whose chief complaint or physiological findings could not suggest the anatomical site of infection, to determine the infectious focus and indications/method for surgery, to diagnose the basic diseases associated with opportunistic infections and to evaluate complicated diseases
Abstract: The goal of this paper is to segment the countries
based on the value of export from Iran during 14 years ending at 2005. To measure the dissimilarity among export baskets of different countries, we define Dissimilarity Export Basket (DEB) function and
use this distance function in K-means algorithm. The DEB function
is defined based on the concepts of the association rules and the
value of export group-commodities. In this paper, clustering quality
function and clusters intraclass inertia are defined to, respectively,
calculate the optimum number of clusters and to compare the
functionality of DEB versus Euclidean distance. We have also study
the effects of importance weight in DEB function to improve
clustering quality. Lastly when segmentation is completed, a
designated RFM model is used to analyze the relative profitability of
each cluster.
Abstract: An induced graphoidal cover of a graph G is a collection ψ of (not necessarily open) paths in G such that every path in ψ has at least two vertices, every vertex of G is an internal vertex of at most one path in ψ, every edge of G is in exactly one path in ψ and every member of ψ is an induced cycle or an induced path. The minimum cardinality of an induced graphoidal cover of G is called the induced graphoidal covering number of G and is denoted by ηi(G) or ηi. Here we find induced graphoidal cover for some classes of graphs.
Abstract: Seasonal survey of freshwater snails in different water
courses in Egypt during two successive years included 13 snail
species. They represented by Biomphalaria alexandrina, Bulinus
truncatus, Physa acuta, Helisoma duryi, Lymnaea natalensis,
Planorbis pantries, Cleopatra bulimoides, Lanistes carinatus,
Bellamya unicolor, Melanoides tuberculata, Theodoxus niloticus,
Succinia cleopatra and Valvata nilotica. B. alexandrina was most
abundant during autumn and spring represented by 26and14
snails/site, respectively. B. truncatus was most abundant during
winter (7.7and3.6snails/site) of the two years, respectively. L.
natalensis was represented by 7snails/site in summer. The tolerance
of different snail species to the chemical elements was determined
seasonally and correlated to their abundance. In spring, autumn and
winter, B. alexandrina was significantly found to live under the
highest level of Pb, Cd,Cu, Na, K and Ca concentrations than the
other species (p
Abstract: “Dengue" is an African word meaning “bone
breaking" because it causes severe joint and muscle pain that feels
like bones are breaking. It is an infectious disease mainly transmitted
by female mosquito, Aedes aegypti, and causes four serotypes of
dengue viruses. In recent years, a dramatic increase in the dengue
fever confirmed cases around the equator-s belt has been reported.
Several conventional indices have been designed so far to monitor the
transmitting vector populations known as House Index (HI),
Container Index (CI), Breteau Index (BI). However, none of them
describes the adult mosquito population size which is important to
direct and guide comprehensive control strategy operations since
number of infected people has a direct relationship with the vector
density. Therefore, it is crucial to know the population size of the
transmitting vector in order to design a suitable and effective control
program. In this context, a study is carried out to report a new
statistical index, ABURAS Index, using Poisson distribution based
on the collection of vector population in Jeddah Governorate, Saudi Arabia.
Abstract: Location selection is one of the most important
decision making process which requires to consider several criteria
based on the mission and the strategy. This study-s object is to
provide a decision support model in order to help the bank selecting
the most appropriate location for a bank-s branch considering a case
study in Turkey. The object of the bank is to select the most
appropriate city for opening a branch among six alternatives in the
South-Eastern of Turkey. The model in this study was consisted of
five main criteria which are Demographic, Socio-Economic, Sectoral
Employment, Banking and Trade Potential and twenty one subcriteria
which represent the bank-s mission and strategy. Because of
the multi-criteria structure of the problem and the fuzziness in the
comparisons of the criteria, fuzzy AHP is used and for the ranking of
the alternatives, TOPSIS method is used.
Abstract: Power system state estimation is the process of
calculating a reliable estimate of the power system state vector
composed of bus voltages' angles and magnitudes from telemetered
measurements on the system. This estimate of the state vector
provides the description of the system necessary for the operation
and security monitoring. Many methods are described in the
literature for solving the state estimation problem, the most important
of which are the classical weighted least squares method and the nondeterministic
genetic based method; however both showed
drawbacks. In this paper a modified version of the genetic
algorithm power system state estimation is introduced, Sensitivity of
the proposed algorithm to genetic operators is discussed, the
algorithm is applied to case studies and finally it is compared with
the classical weighted least squares method formulation.
Abstract: In the present research, two nutraceuticals made from
red grape and walnut that showed previously to improve kidney
dysfunction were incorporated separately into functional foods' bread
made from barley and rice bran. The functional foods were evaluated
in rats in which chronic renal failure was induced through feeding
diet rich in adenine and phosphate (APD). The evaluation based on
assessing kidney function, oxidative stress, inflammatory biomarkers
and body weight gain. Results showed induction of chronic kidney
failure reflected in significant increase in plasma urea, creatinine,
malondialdehyde, tumor necrosis factor- α and low density
lipoprotein cholesterol along with significant reduction of plasma
albumin, and total antioxidant and creatinine clearance and body
weight gain on feeding APD compared to control healthy group.
Feeding the functional foods produced amelioration in the different
biochemical parameters and body weight gain indicating
improvement in kidney function.
Abstract: In our recent study, we have used ZnO nanoparticles assisted with UV light irradiation to investigate the photocatalytic degradation of Phenol Red (PR). The ZnO photocatalyst was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), specific surface area analysis (BET) and UVvisible spectroscopy. X-ray diffractometry result for the ZnO nanoparticles exhibit normal crystalline phase features. All observed peaks can be indexed to the pure hexagonal wurtzite crystal structures, with the space group of P63mc. There are no other impurities in the diffraction peak. In addition, TEM measurement shows that most of the nanoparticles are rod-like and spherical in shape and fairly monodispersed. A significant degradation of the PR was observed when the catalyst was added into the solution even without the UV light exposure. In addition, the photodegradation increases with the photocatalyst loading. The surface area of the ZnO nanomaterials from the BET measurement was 11.9 m2/g. Besides the photocatalyst loading, the effect of some parameters on the photodegradation efficiency such as initial PR concentration and pH were also studied.
Abstract: To compress, improve bit error performance and also enhance 2D images, a new scheme, called Iterative Cellular-Turbo System (IC-TS) is introduced. In IC-TS, the original image is partitioned into 2N quantization levels, where N is denoted as bit planes. Then each of the N-bit-plane is coded by Turbo encoder and transmitted over Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. At the receiver side, bit-planes are re-assembled taking into consideration of neighborhood relationship of pixels in 2-D images. Each of the noisy bit-plane values of the image is evaluated iteratively using IC-TS structure, which is composed of equalization block; Iterative Cellular Image Processing Algorithm (ICIPA) and Turbo decoder. In IC-TS, there is an iterative feedback link between ICIPA and Turbo decoder. ICIPA uses mean and standard deviation of estimated values of each pixel neighborhood. It has extra-ordinary satisfactory results of both Bit Error Rate (BER) and image enhancement performance for less than -1 dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) values, compared to traditional turbo coding scheme and 2-D filtering, applied separately. Also, compression can be achieved by using IC-TS systems. In compression, less memory storage is used and data rate is increased up to N-1 times by simply choosing any number of bit slices, sacrificing resolution. Hence, it is concluded that IC-TS system will be a compromising approach in 2-D image transmission, recovery of noisy signals and image compression.
Abstract: In this paper, we study on color transformation
method on website images for the color blind. The most common
category of color blindness is red-green color blindness which is
viewed as beige color. By transforming the colors of the images, the
color blind can improve their color visibility. They can have a better
view when browsing through the websites. To transform colors on
the website images, we study on two algorithms which are the
conversion techniques from RGB color space to HSV color space and
self-organizing color transformation. The comparative study focuses
on criteria based on the ease of use, quality, accuracy and efficiency.
The outcome of the study leads to enhancement of website images to
meet the color blinds- vision requirements in perceiving image
detailed.
Abstract: Transport and logistics are the lifeblood of societies.
There is a strong correlation between overall growth in economic
activity and growth of transport. The movement of people and goods
has the potential for creating wealth and prosperity, therefore the
state of transportation infrastructure and especially the condition of
road networks is often a governmental priority. The design, building
and maintenance of national roads constitute a substantial share of
government budgets. Taking into account the magnitude and
importance of these investments, the expedience, efficiency and
sustainability of these projects are of great public interest. This paper
provides an overview of supply chain management principles applied
to road construction. In addition, road construction performance
measurement systems and ICT solutions are discussed. Road
construction in Estonia is analyzed. The authors propose the
development of a national performance measurement system for road
construction.
Abstract: Documents retrieval in Information Retrieval
Systems (IRS) is generally about understanding of
information in the documents concern. The more the system
able to understand the contents of documents the more
effective will be the retrieval outcomes. But understanding of the
contents is a very complex task. Conventional IRS apply algorithms
that can only approximate the meaning of document contents through
keywords approach using vector space model. Keywords may be
unstemmed or stemmed. When keywords are stemmed and conflated
in retrieving process, we are a step forwards in applying semantic
technology in IRS. Word stemming is a process in morphological
analysis under natural language processing, before syntactic and
semantic analysis. We have developed algorithms for Malay and
Arabic and incorporated stemming in our experimental systems in
order to measure retrieval effectiveness. The results have shown that
the retrieval effectiveness has increased when stemming is used in
the systems.
Abstract: In this paper, the detection of a fault in the Global Positioning System (GPS) measurement is addressed. The class of faults considered is a bias in the GPS pseudorange measurements. This bias is modeled as an unknown constant. The fault could be the result of a receiver fault or signal fault such as multipath error. A bias bank is constructed based on set of possible fault hypotheses. Initially, there is equal probability of occurrence for any of the biases in the bank. Subsequently, as the measurements are processed, the probability of occurrence for each of the biases is sequentially updated. The fault with a probability approaching unity will be declared as the current fault in the GPS measurement. The residual formed from the GPS and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) measurements is used to update the probability of each fault. Results will be presented to show the performance of the presented algorithm.
Abstract: In literature, there are metrics for identifying the
quality of reusable components but the framework that makes use of
these metrics to precisely predict reusability of software components
is still need to be worked out. These reusability metrics if identified
in the design phase or even in the coding phase can help us to reduce
the rework by improving quality of reuse of the software component
and hence improve the productivity due to probabilistic increase in
the reuse level. As CK metric suit is most widely used metrics for
extraction of structural features of an object oriented (OO) software;
So, in this study, tuned CK metric suit i.e. WMC, DIT, NOC, CBO
and LCOM, is used to obtain the structural analysis of OO-based
software components. An algorithm has been proposed in which the
inputs can be given to K-Means Clustering system in form of
tuned values of the OO software component and decision tree is
formed for the 10-fold cross validation of data to evaluate the in
terms of linguistic reusability value of the component. The developed
reusability model has produced high precision results as desired.
Abstract: The main purpose of the study was to determine whether students- interpretation achievement differed with the use of various multimedia presentation types. Four groups of students, text only (T), audio only (A), text and audio (TA), text and image (TI), were arranged and they were presented the same story via different types of multimedia presentations. Inference achievement was measured by a critical thinking inference test. Higher mean scores for the TA group compared to the other three groups were found. Also when compared pairwise, interpretation achievement of the TA group differed significantly from scores of the T and TI groups. These differences were interpreted with the increased cognitive load. Increased cognitive load for the TA group may have invited students to put more effort into comprehending the text, thus resulting in better test scores. Findings of the study can be seen as a sign of the importance of learning situations and learning outcomes in multimedia-supported learning environments and may have practical benefits for instructional designers.
Abstract: Protective coatings that resist oxide scale growth and
decrease chromium evaporation are necessary to make stainless steel
interconnect materials for long-term durable operation of solid oxide
fuel cells (SOFCs). In this study a layer of cobalt was electroplated
on the surface of AISI 441 ferritic stainless steel which is used in
solid oxide fuel cells for interconnect applications. The oxidation
behavior of coated substrates was studied as a function of time at
operating conditions of SOFCs. Cyclic oxidation has been also tested
at 800ºC for 100 cycles. Cobalt coating during isothermal oxidation
caused to the oxide growth resistance by limiting the outward
diffusion of Cr cation and the inward diffusion of oxygen anion.
Results of cyclic oxidation exhibited that coated substrates
demonstrate an excellent resistance against the spallation and
cracking.
Abstract: Although automotive industry has brought different beneficiaries to human life, it is being pointed out as one of the major cause of global air pollution which resulted in climate change, smog, green house gases (GHGs), and human diseases by many reasons. Since auto industry is one of the largest consumers of fossil fuels, the realization of green innovations is becoming a crucial choice to meet the challenges towards sustainable development. Recently, many auto manufacturers have embarked on green technology initiatives to gain a competitive advantage in the global market; however, innovative manufacturing systems and technologies can enhance operational performance only if the human resource management is in place to elicit the motivation of the employees and develop their organizational expertise. No organization can perform at peak levels unless each employee is committed to the company goals and works as an effective team member. Strategic human resource practices are the primary means by which firms can shape the skills, attitudes, and behavior of individuals to align with the business strategic objectives. This study investigates on the comprehensive approach of multiple advanced technology innovations and human resource management at Toyota Motor Corporation as the market leader of full hybrid technology in the automotive industry. Then, HRM framework of the company is described and three sets of human resource practices that support the innovation-oriented HR system, presented. Finally, a conceptual framework for innovativeness in green technology in automotive industry by applying a deliberate strategic HR management system and knowledge management with the intervening factors of organizational culture, knowledge application and knowledge sharing is proposed.
Abstract: A two dimensional numerical simulation has been
performed for incompressible and compressible fluid flow through
microchannels in slip flow regime. The Navier-Stokes equations have
been solved in conjunction with Maxwell slip conditions for
modeling flow field associated with slip flow regime. The wall
roughness is simulated with triangular microelements distributed on
wall surfaces to study the effects of roughness on fluid flow. Various
Mach and Knudsen numbers are used to investigate the effects of
rarefaction as well as compressibility. It is found that rarefaction has
more significant effect on flow field in microchannels with higher
relative roughness. It is also found that compressibility has more
significant effects on Poiseuille number when relative roughness
increases. In addition, similar to incompressible models the increase
in average fRe is more significant at low Knudsen number flows but
the increase of Poiseuille number duo to relative roughness is sharper
for compressible models. The numerical results have also validated
with some available theoretical and experimental relations and good
agreements have been seen.
Abstract: Multicarrier transmission system such as Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising technique
for high bit rate transmission in wireless communication system.
OFDM is a spectrally efficient modulation technique that can achieve
high speed data transmission over multipath fading channels without
the need for powerful equalization techniques. However the price
paid for this high spectral efficiency and less intensive equalization
is low power efficiency. OFDM signals are very sensitive to nonlinear
effects due to the high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR),
which leads to the power inefficiency in the RF section of the
transmitter. This paper investigates the effect of PAPR reduction on
the performance parameter of multicarrier communication system.
Performance parameters considered are power consumption of Power
Amplifier (PA) and Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC), power amplifier
efficiency, SNR of DAC and BER performance of the system.
From our analysis it is found that irrespective of PAPR reduction
technique being employed, the power consumption of PA and DAC
reduces and power amplifier efficiency increases due to reduction in
PAPR. Moreover, it has been shown that for a given BER performance
the requirement of Input-Backoff (IBO) reduces with reduction in
PAPR.