Abstract: Polymer-like organic thin films were deposited on both
aluminum alloy type 6061 and glass substrates at room temperature by
Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) methodusing
benzene and hexamethyldisiloxane (HMDSO) as precursor materials.
The surface and physical properties of plasma-polymerized organic
thin films were investigated at different r.f. powers. The effects of
benzene/argon ratio on the properties of plasma polymerized benzene
films were also investigated. It is found that using benzene alone
results in a non-coherent and non-adherent powdery deposited
material. The chemical structure and surface properties of the asgrown
plasma polymerized thin films were analyzed on glass
substrates with FTIR and contact angle measurements. FTIR spectra
of benzene deposited film indicated that the benzene rings are
preserved when increasing benzene ratio and/or decreasing r.f.
powers. FTIR spectra of HMDSO deposited films indicated an
increase of the hydrogen concentration and a decrease of the oxygen
concentration with the increase of r.f. power. The contact angle (θ) of
the films prepared from benzene was found to increase by about 43%
as benzene ratio increases from 10% to 20%. θ was then found to
decrease to the original value (51°) when the benzene ratio increases
to 100%. The contact angle, θ, for both benzene and HMDSO
deposited films were found to increase with r.f. power. This signifies
that the plasma polymerized organic films have substantially low
surface energy as the r.f power increases. The corrosion resistance of
aluminum alloy substrate both bare and covered with plasma
polymerized thin films was carried out by potentiodynamic
polarization measurements in standard 3.5 wt. % NaCl solution at
room temperature. The results indicate that the benzene and HMDSO
deposited films are suitable for protection of the aluminum substrate
against corrosion. The changes in the processing parameters seem to
have a strong influence on the film protective ability. Surface
roughness of films deposited on aluminum alloy substrate was
investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The SEM
images indicate that the surface roughness of benzene deposited films
increase with decreasing the benzene ratio. SEM images of benzene
and HMDSO deposited films indicate that the surface roughness
decreases with increasing r.f. power. Studying the above parameters
indicate that the films produced are suitable for specific practical
applications.
Abstract: A new approach to promote the generalization ability
of neural networks is presented. It is based on the point of view of
fuzzy theory. This approach is implemented through shrinking or
magnifying the input vector, thereby reducing the difference between
training set and testing set. It is called “shrinking-magnifying
approach" (SMA). At the same time, a new algorithm; α-algorithm is
presented to find out the appropriate shrinking-magnifying-factor
(SMF) α and obtain better generalization ability of neural networks.
Quite a few simulation experiments serve to study the effect of SMA
and α-algorithm. The experiment results are discussed in detail, and
the function principle of SMA is analyzed in theory. The results of
experiments and analyses show that the new approach is not only
simpler and easier, but also is very effective to many neural networks
and many classification problems. In our experiments, the proportions
promoting the generalization ability of neural networks have even
reached 90%.
Abstract: The carbon based coils with the nanometer scale have
the 3 dimension helix geometry. We synthesized the carbon nano-coils
by the use of chemical vapor deposition technique with iron and tin as
the catalysts. The fabricated coils have the external diameter of
ranging few hundred nm to few thousand nm. The Scanning
Electro-Microscope (SEM) and Tunneling Electro-Microscope has
shown detail images of the coil-s structure. The fabrication of the
carbon nano-coils can be grown on the metal and non-metal substrates,
such as the stainless steel and silicon substrates. Besides growth on the
flat substrate; they also can be grown on the stainless steel wires. After
the synthesis of the coils, the mechanical and electro-mechanical
property is measured. The experimental results were reported.
Abstract: Due to its geographical location, Iran is considered one of the earthquake-prone areas where the best way to decrease earthquake effects is supposed to be strengthening the buildings. Even though, one idea suggests that the use of adobe in constructing buildings be prohibited for its weak function especially in earthquake-prone areas, however, regarding ecological considerations, sustainability and other local skills, another idea pays special attention to adobe as one of the construction technologies which is popular among people. From the architectural and technological point of view, as strong sustainable building construction materials, compressed adobe construction materials make most of the construction in urban or rural areas ranging from small to big industrial buildings used to replace common earth blocks in traditional systems and strengthen traditional adobe buildings especially against earthquake. Mentioning efficient construction using compressed adobe system as a reliable replacement for traditional soil construction materials , this article focuses on the experiences of India in the fields of sustainable development of compressed adobe systems in the form of system in which the compressed soil is combined with cement, load bearing building with brick/solid concrete block system, brick system using rat trap bond, metal system with adobe infill and finally emphasizes on the use of these systems in the earthquake-struck city of Bam in Iran.
Abstract: The hidden-point bar method is useful in many
surveying applications. The method involves determining the
coordinates of a hidden point as a function of horizontal and vertical
angles measured to three fixed points on the bar. Using these
measurements, the procedure involves calculating the slant angles,
the distances from the station to the fixed points, the coordinates of
the fixed points, and then the coordinates of the hidden point. The
propagation of the measurement errors in this complex process has
not been fully investigated in the literature. This paper evaluates the
effect of the bar geometry on the position accuracy of the hidden
point which depends on the measurement errors of the horizontal and
vertical angles. The results are used to establish some guidelines
regarding the inclination angle of the bar and the location of the
observed points that provide the best accuracy.
Abstract: This study examines the use of the persuasive strategy
of deixis and personalization in advertising slogans. This rhetorical/
stylistic and linguistic strategy has been found to be widely used in
advertising slogans for over a century. A total of five hundred
advertising slogans of multinational companies in both product and
service sectors were obtained. The analysis reveals the 3 main
components of this strategy as being deictic words, absolute
uniqueness and personal pronouns. The percentage and mean of the
use of the 3 components are tabulated. The findings show that
advertisers have used this persuasive strategy in creative ways to
persuade consumers to buy their products and services.
Abstract: Performing High Voltage (HV) tasks with a multi craft
work force create a special set of safety circumstances. This paper
aims to present vital information relating to when it is acceptable to
use a single or a two-layer soil structure. Also it discusses the
implication of the high voltage infrastructure on the earth grid and the
safety of this implication under a single or a two-layer soil structure.
A multiple case study is investigated to show the importance of using
the right soil resistivity structure during the earthing system design.
Abstract: The usual correctness condition for a schedule of
concurrent database transactions is some form of serializability of
the transactions. For general forms, the problem of deciding whether
a schedule is serializable is NP-complete. In those cases other approaches
to proving correctness, using proof rules that allow the steps
of the proof of serializability to be guided manually, are desirable.
Such an approach is possible in the case of conflict serializability
which is proved algebraically by deriving serial schedules using
commutativity of non-conflicting operations. However, conflict serializability
can be an unnecessarily strong form of serializability restricting
concurrency and thereby reducing performance. In practice,
weaker, more general, forms of serializability for extended models of
transactions are used. Currently, there are no known methods using
proof rules for proving those general forms of serializability. In this
paper, we define serializability for an extended model of partitioned
transactions, which we show to be as expressive as serializability
for general partitioned transactions. An algebraic method for proving
general serializability is obtained by giving an initial-algebra specification
of serializable schedules of concurrent transactions in the
model. This demonstrates that it is possible to conduct algebraic
proofs of correctness of concurrent transactions in general cases.
Abstract: The frontal area in the brain is known to be involved in
behavioral judgement. Because a Kanji character can be discriminated
visually and linguistically from other characters, in Kanji character
discrimination, we hypothesized that frontal event-related potential
(ERP) waveforms reflect two discrimination processes in separate
time periods: one based on visual analysis and the other based
on lexcical access. To examine this hypothesis, we recorded ERPs
while performing a Kanji lexical decision task. In this task, either a
known Kanji character, an unknown Kanji character or a symbol was
presented and the subject had to report if the presented character was
a known Kanji character for the subject or not. The same response
was required for unknown Kanji trials and symbol trials. As a preprocessing
of signals, we examined the performance of a method
using independent component analysis for artifact rejection and found
it was effective. Therefore we used it. In the ERP results, there
were two time periods in which the frontal ERP wavefoms were
significantly different betweeen the unknown Kanji trials and the
symbol trials: around 170ms and around 300ms after stimulus onset.
This result supported our hypothesis. In addition, the result suggests
that Kanji character lexical access may be fully completed by around
260ms after stimulus onset.
Abstract: Soursop (Anona muricata) is one of the underutilized tropical fruits containing nutrients, particularly dietary fibre and antioxidant properties that are beneficial to human health. This objective of this study is to investigate the feasibility of matured soursop pulp flour (SPF) to be substituted with high-protein wheat flour in bread. Bread formulation was substituted with different levels of SPF (0%, 5%, 10% and 15%). The effect on physicochemical properties and sensory attributes were evaluated. Higher substitution level of SPF resulted in significantly higher (p
Abstract: This paper proposes a bi-objective model for the
facility location problem under a congestion system. The idea of the
model is motivated by applications of locating servers in bank
automated teller machines (ATMS), communication networks, and so
on. This model can be specifically considered for situations in which
fixed service facilities are congested by stochastic demand within
queueing framework. We formulate this model with two perspectives
simultaneously: (i) customers and (ii) service provider. The
objectives of the model are to minimize (i) the total expected
travelling and waiting time and (ii) the average facility idle-time.
This model represents a mixed-integer nonlinear programming
problem which belongs to the class of NP-hard problems. In addition,
to solve the model, two metaheuristic algorithms including nondominated
sorting genetic algorithms (NSGA-II) and non-dominated
ranking genetic algorithms (NRGA) are proposed. Besides, to
evaluate the performance of the two algorithms some numerical
examples are produced and analyzed with some metrics to determine
which algorithm works better.
Abstract: Software maintenance is extremely important activity in software development life cycle. It involves a lot of human efforts, cost and time. Software maintenance may be further subdivided into different activities such as fault prediction, fault detection, fault prevention, fault correction etc. This topic has gained substantial attention due to sophisticated and complex applications, commercial hardware, clustered architecture and artificial intelligence. In this paper we surveyed the work done in the field of software maintenance. Software fault prediction has been studied in context of fault prone modules, self healing systems, developer information, maintenance models etc. Still a lot of things like modeling and weightage of impact of different kind of faults in the various types of software systems need to be explored in the field of fault severity.
Abstract: Time series models have been used to make predictions of academic enrollments, weather, road accident, casualties and stock prices, etc. Based on the concepts of quartile regression models, we have developed a simple time variant quantile based fuzzy time series forecasting method. The proposed method bases the forecast using prediction of future trend of the data. In place of actual quantiles of the data at each point, we have converted the statistical concept into fuzzy concept by using fuzzy quantiles using fuzzy membership function ensemble. We have given a fuzzy metric to use the trend forecast and calculate the future value. The proposed model is applied for TAIFEX forecasting. It is shown that proposed method work best as compared to other models when compared with respect to model complexity and forecasting accuracy.
Abstract: To reduce accidents in the industry, WSNs(Wireless Sensor
networks)- sensor data is used. WSNs- sensor data has the persistence and
continuity. therefore, we design and exploit the buffer management system that
has the persistence and continuity to avoid and delivery data conflicts. To
develop modules, we use the multi buffers and design the buffer management
modules that transfer sensor data through the context-aware methods.
Abstract: Novel polystrene-bound Schiff bases and their Pt(IV)
complexes have been prepared from condensation reaction of
polystyrene-A-NH2 with 2-hydroxybenzaldehyde and 5-fluoro-3-
bromo-2-hydroxybenzaldehyde. The structures of Pt(IV) complexes
with polystyrene including Schiff bases have been determined by
elemental analyses, magnetic susceptibility, IR, 1H-NMR, UV-vis,
TG/DTA and AAS. The antibacterial and antifungal activities of the
synthesized compounds have been studied by the well-diffusion
method against some selected microorganisms: (Bacillus cereus spp.,
Listeria monocytogenes 4b, Micrococcus luteus, Staphylococcus
aureus, Staphylococcus epidermis, Brucella abortus, Escherichia
coli, Pseudomonas putida spp., Shigella dysenteria type 10,
Salmonella typhi H).
Abstract: Currently, many types of no-reversible compressed
sound source, represented by MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer-3) are
popular in the world and they are widely used to make the music file
size smaller. The sound data created in this way has less information as
compared to pre-compressed data. The objective of this study is by
analyzing EEG to determine if people can recognize such difference as
differences in sound. A measurement system that can measure and
analyze EEG when a subject listens to music were experimentally
developed. And ten subjects were studied with this system. In this
experiment, a WAVE formatted music data and a MP3 compressed
music data that is made from the WAVE formatted data were
prepared. Each subject was made to hear these music sources at the
same volume. From the results of this experiment, clear differences
were confirmed between two wound sources.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new hybrid learning model for stock market indices prediction by adding a passive congregation term to the standard hybrid model comprising Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) with Genetic Algorithm (GA) operators in training Neural Networks (NN). This new passive congregation term is based on the cooperation between different particles in determining new positions rather than depending on the particles selfish thinking without considering other particles positions, thus it enables PSO to perform both the local and global search instead of only doing the local search. Experiment study carried out on the most famous European stock market indices in both long term and short term prediction shows significantly the influence of the passive congregation term in improving the prediction accuracy compared to standard hybrid model.
Abstract: Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and modern data mining techniques are applied to identify style markers in midi music for stylometric analysis and author attribution. Over 100 attributes are extracted from a library of 2830 songs then mined using supervised learning data mining techniques. Two attributes are identified that provide high informational gain. These attributes are then used as style markers to predict authorship. Using these style markers the authors are able to correctly distinguish songs written by the Beatles from those that were not with a precision and accuracy of over 98 per cent. The identification of these style markers as well as the architecture for this research provides a foundation for future research in musical stylometry.
Abstract: High level and high velocity flood flows are
potentially harmful to bridge piers as evidenced in many toppled
piers, and among them the single-column piers were considered as
the most vulnerable. The flood flow characteristic parameters
including drag coefficient, scouring and vortex shedding are built into
a pier-flood interaction model to investigate structural safety against
flood hazards considering the effects of local scouring, hydrodynamic
forces, and vortex induced resonance vibrations. By extracting the
pier-flood simulation results embedded in a neural networks code,
two cases of pier toppling occurred in typhoon days were reexamined:
(1) a bridge overcome by flash flood near a mountain side;
(2) a bridge washed off in flood across a wide channel near the
estuary. The modeling procedures and simulations are capable of
identifying the probable causes for the tumbled bridge piers during
heavy floods, which include the excessive pier bending moments and
resonance in structural vibrations.
Abstract: The conventional GA combined with a local search
algorithm, such as the 2-OPT, forms a hybrid genetic algorithm(HGA)
for the traveling salesman problem (TSP). However, the geometric
properties which are problem specific knowledge can be used to
improve the search process of the HGA. Some tour segments (edges)
of TSPs are fine while some maybe too long to appear in a short tour.
This knowledge could constrain GAs to work out with fine tour
segments without considering long tour segments as often.
Consequently, a new algorithm is proposed, called intelligent-OPT
hybrid genetic algorithm (IOHGA), to improve the GA and the 2-OPT
algorithm in order to reduce the search time for the optimal solution.
Based on the geometric properties, all the tour segments are assigned
2-level priorities to distinguish between good and bad genes. A
simulation study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the
IOHGA. The experimental results indicate that in general the IOHGA
could obtain near-optimal solutions with less time and better accuracy
than the hybrid genetic algorithm with simulated annealing algorithm
(HGA(SA)).