Abstract: Mung bean starches were subjected to heat-moisture treatment (HMT) by different moisture contents (15%, 20%, 25%, 30% and 35%) at 120Ôäâ for 12h. The impact on the yields of resistant starch (RS), microstructure, physicochemical and functional properties was investigated. Compared to native starch, the RS content of heat-moisture treated starches increased significantly. The RS level of HMT-20 was the highest of all the starches. Birefringence was displayed clear at the center of native starch. For HMT starches, pronounced birefringence was exhibited on the periphery of starch granules; however, birefringence disappeared at the centre of some starch granules. The shape of HMT starches hadn-t been changed and the integrity of starch granules was preserved for all the conditions. Concavity could be observed on HMT starches under scanning electronic microscopy. After HMT, apparent amylose contents were increased and starch macromolecule was degraded in comparison with those of native starch. There was a reduction in swelling power on HMT starches, but the solubility of HMT starches was higher than that of native starch. Both of native and HMT starches showed A-type X-ray diffraction pattern. Furthermore, there is a higher intensity at the peak of 15.0 and 22.9 Å than those of native starch.
Abstract: The importance of low power consumption is widely
acknowledged due to the increasing use of portable devices, which
require minimizing the consumption of energy. Energy dissipation is
heavily dependent on the software used in the system. Applying
design patterns in object-oriented designs is a common practice
nowadays. In this paper we analyze six design patterns and explore
the effect of them on energy consumption and performance.
Abstract: The PAX6, a transcription factor, is essential for the morphogenesis of the eyes, brain, pituitary and pancreatic islets. In rodents, the loss of Pax6 function leads to central nervous system defects, anophthalmia, and nasal hypoplasia. The haplo-insufficiency of Pax6 causes microphthalmia, aggression and other behavioral abnormalities. It is also required in brain patterning and neuronal plasticity. In human, heterozygous mutation of Pax6 causes loss of iris [aniridia], mental retardation and glucose intolerance. The 3- deletion in Pax6 leads to autism and aniridia. The phenotypes are variable in peneterance and expressivity. However, mechanism of function and interaction of PAX6 with other proteins during development and associated disease are not clear. It is intended to explore interactors of PAX6 to elucidated biology of PAX6 function in the tissues where it is expressed and also in the central regulatory pathway. This report describes In-silico approaches to explore interacting proteins of PAX6. The models show several possible proteins interacting with PAX6 like MITF, SIX3, SOX2, SOX3, IPO13, TRIM, and OGT. Since the Pax6 is a critical transcriptional regulator and master control gene of eye and brain development it might be interacting with other protein involved in morphogenesis [TGIF, TGF, Ras etc]. It is also presumed that matricelluar proteins [SPARC, thrombospondin-1 and osteonectin etc] are likely to interact during transport and processing of PAX6 and are somewhere its cascade. The proteins involved in cell survival and cell proliferation can also not be ignored.
Abstract: An application framework provides a reusable design
and implementation for a family of software systems. If the
framework contains defects, the defects will be passed on to the
applications developed from the framework. Framework defects are
hard to discover at the time the framework is instantiated. Therefore,
it is important to remove all defects before instantiating the
framework. In this paper, two measures for the adequacy of an
object-oriented system-based testing technique are introduced. The
measures assess the usefulness and uniqueness of the testing
technique. The two measures are applied to experimentally compare
the adequacy of two testing techniques introduced to test objectoriented
frameworks at the system level. The two considered testing
techniques are the New Framework Test Approach and Testing
Frameworks Through Hooks (TFTH). The techniques are also
compared analytically in terms of their coverage power of objectoriented
aspects. The comparison study results show that the TFTH
technique is better than the New Framework Test Approach in terms
of usefulness degree, uniqueness degree, and coverage power.
Abstract: Gas turbine air inlet cooling is a useful method for
increasing output for regions where significant power demand and
highest electricity prices occur during the warm months. Inlet air
cooling increases the power output by taking advantage of the gas
turbine-s feature of higher mass flow rate when the compressor inlet
temperature decreases. Different methods are available for reducing
gas turbine inlet temperature. There are two basic systems currently
available for inlet cooling. The first and most cost-effective system is
evaporative cooling. Evaporative coolers make use of the evaporation
of water to reduce the gas turbine-s inlet air temperature. The second
system employs various ways to chill the inlet air. In this method, the
cooling medium flows through a heat exchanger located in the inlet
duct to remove heat from the inlet air. However, the evaporative
cooling is limited by wet-bulb temperature while the chilling can cool
the inlet air to temperatures that are lower than the wet bulb
temperature. In the present work, a thermodynamic model of a gas
turbine is built to calculate heat rate, power output and thermal
efficiency at different inlet air temperature conditions. Computational
results are compared with ISO conditions herein called "base-case".
Therefore, the two cooling methods are implemented and solved for
different inlet conditions (inlet temperature and relative humidity).
Evaporative cooler and absorption chiller systems results show that
when the ambient temperature is extremely high with low relative
humidity (requiring a large temperature reduction) the chiller is the
more suitable cooling solution. The net increment in the power output
as a function of the temperature decrease for each cooling method is
also obtained.
Abstract: In recent years, tuned mass damper (TMD) control systems for civil engineering structures have attracted considerable attention. This paper emphasizes on the application of particle swarm application (PSO) to design and optimize the parameters of the TMD control scheme for achieving the best results in the reduction of the building response under earthquake excitations. The Integral of the Time multiplied Absolute value of the Error (ITAE) based on relative displacement of all floors in the building is taken as a performance index of the optimization criterion. The problem of robustly TMD controller design is formatted as an optimization problem based on the ITAE performance index to be solved using the PSO technique which has a story ability to find the most optimistic results. An 11- story realistic building, located in the city of Rasht, Iran is considered as a test system to demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed method. The results analysis through the time-domain simulation and some performance indices reveals that the designed PSO based TMD controller has an excellent capability in reduction of the seismically excited example building.
Abstract: Natural disasters, including earthquake, kill many people around the world every year. Society rescue actions, which start after the earthquake and are called LAST in abbreviation, include locating, access, stabilization and transportation. In the present article, we have studied the process of local accessibility to the injured and transporting them to health care centers. With regard the heavy traffic load due to earthquake, the destruction of connecting roads and bridges and the heavy debris in alleys and street, which put the lives of the injured and the people buried under the debris in danger, accelerating the rescue actions and facilitating the accessibilities are of great importance, obviously. Tehran, the capital of Iran, is among the crowded cities in the world and is the center of extensive economic, political, cultural and social activities. Tehran has a population of about 9.5 millions and because of the immigration of people from the surrounding cities. Furthermore, considering the fact that Tehran is located on two important and large faults, a 6 Richter magnitude earthquake in this city could lead to the greatest catastrophe during the entire human history. The present study is a kind of review and a major part of the required information for it, has been obtained from libraries all of the rescue vehicles around the world, including rescue helicopters, ambulances, fire fighting vehicles and rescue boats, and their applied technology, and also the robots specifically designed for the rescue system and the advantages and disadvantages of them, have been investigated. The studies show that there is a significant relationship between the rescue team-s arrival time at the incident zone and the number of saved people; so that, if the duration of burial under debris 30 minutes, the probability of survival is %99.3, after a day is %81, after 2days is %19 and after 5days is %7.4. The exiting transport systems all have some defects. If these defects are removed, more people could be saved each hour and the preparedness against natural disasters is increased. In this study, transport system has been designed for the rescue team and the injured; which could carry the rescue team to the incident zone and the injured to the health care centers. In addition, this system is able to fly in the air and move on the earth as well; so that the destruction of roads and the heavy traffic load could not prevent the rescue team from arriving early at the incident zone. The system also has the equipment required firebird for debris removing, optimum transport of the injured and first aid.
Abstract: In this study, a new root-finding method for solving nonlinear equations is proposed. This method requires two starting values that do not necessarily bracketing a root. However, when the starting values are selected to be close to a root, the proposed method converges to the root quicker than the secant method. Another advantage over all iterative methods is that; the proposed method usually converges to two distinct roots when the given function has more than one root, that is, the odd iterations of this new technique converge to a root and the even iterations converge to another root. Some numerical examples, including a sine-polynomial equation, are solved by using the proposed method and compared with results obtained by the secant method; perfect agreements are found.
Abstract: A hybrid feature based adaptive particle filter algorithm is presented for object tracking in real scenarios with static camera.
The hybrid feature is combined by two effective features: the Grayscale Arranging Pairs (GAP) feature and the color histogram feature. The GAP feature has high discriminative ability even under conditions of severe illumination variation and dynamic background
elements, while the color histogram feature has high reliability to identify the detected objects. The combination of two features covers the shortage of single feature. Furthermore, we adopt an updating
target model so that some external problems such as visual angles can be overcame well. An automatic initialization algorithm is introduced which provides precise initial positions of objects. The experimental
results show the good performance of the proposed method.
Abstract: In this paper we proposed a method for finding video
frames representing one sign in the finger alphabet. The method is
based on determining hands location, segmentation and the use of
standard video quality evaluation metrics. Metric calculation is
performed only in regions of interest. Sliding mechanism for finding
local extrema and adaptive threshold based on local averaging is used
for key frames selection. The success rate is evaluated by recall,
precision and F1 measure. The method effectiveness is compared
with metrics applied to all frames. Proposed method is fast, effective
and relatively easy to realize by simple input video preprocessing
and subsequent use of tools designed for video quality measuring.
Abstract: The literature reports a large number of approaches for
measuring the similarity between protein sequences. Most of these
approaches estimate this similarity using alignment-based techniques
that do not necessarily yield biologically plausible results, for two
reasons.
First, for the case of non-alignable (i.e., not yet definitively aligned
and biologically approved) sequences such as multi-domain, circular
permutation and tandem repeat protein sequences, alignment-based
approaches do not succeed in producing biologically plausible results.
This is due to the nature of the alignment, which is based on the
matching of subsequences in equivalent positions, while non-alignable
proteins often have similar and conserved domains in non-equivalent
positions.
Second, the alignment-based approaches lead to similarity measures
that depend heavily on the parameters set by the user for the alignment
(e.g., gap penalties and substitution matrices). For easily alignable
protein sequences, it's possible to supply a suitable combination of
input parameters that allows such an approach to yield biologically
plausible results. However, for difficult-to-align protein sequences,
supplying different combinations of input parameters yields different
results. Such variable results create ambiguities and complicate the
similarity measurement task.
To overcome these drawbacks, this paper describes a novel and
effective approach for measuring the similarity between protein
sequences, called SAF for Substitution and Alignment Free. Without
resorting either to the alignment of protein sequences or to substitution
relations between amino acids, SAF is able to efficiently detect the
significant subsequences that best represent the intrinsic properties of
protein sequences, those underlying the chronological dependencies of
structural features and biochemical activities of protein sequences.
Moreover, by using a new efficient subsequence matching scheme,
SAF more efficiently handles protein sequences that contain similar
structural features with significant meaning in chronologically
non-equivalent positions. To show the effectiveness of SAF, extensive
experiments were performed on protein datasets from different
databases, and the results were compared with those obtained by
several mainstream algorithms.
Abstract: We study in this paper the effect of the scene
changing on image sequences coding system using Embedded
Zerotree Wavelet (EZW). The scene changing considered here is the
full motion which may occurs. A special image sequence is generated
where the scene changing occurs randomly. Two scenarios are
considered: In the first scenario, the system must provide the
reconstruction quality as best as possible by the management of the
bit rate (BR) while the scene changing occurs. In the second scenario,
the system must keep the bit rate as constant as possible by the
management of the reconstruction quality. The first scenario may be
motivated by the availability of a large band pass transmission
channel where an increase of the bit rate may be possible to keep the
reconstruction quality up to a given threshold. The second scenario
may be concerned by the narrow band pass transmission channel
where an increase of the bit rate is not possible. In this last case,
applications for which the reconstruction quality is not a constraint
may be considered. The simulations are performed with five scales
wavelet decomposition using the 9/7-tap filter bank biorthogonal
wavelet. The entropy coding is performed using a specific defined
binary code book and EZW algorithm. Experimental results are
presented and compared to LEAD H263 EVAL. It is shown that if
the reconstruction quality is the constraint, the system increases the
bit rate to obtain the required quality. In the case where the bit rate
must be constant, the system is unable to provide the required quality
if the scene change occurs; however, the system is able to improve
the quality while the scene changing disappears.
Abstract: The major part of light weight timber constructions
consists of insulation. Mineral wool is the most commonly used
insulation due to its cost efficiency and easy handling. The fiber
orientation and porosity of this insulation material enables flowthrough.
The air flow resistance is low. If leakage occurs in the
insulated bay section, the convective flow may cause energy losses
and infiltration of the exterior wall with moisture and particles. In
particular the infiltrated moisture may lead to thermal bridges and
growth of health endangering mould and mildew. In order to prevent
this problem, different numerical calculation models have been
developed. All models developed so far have a potential for
completion. The implementation of the flow-through properties of
mineral wool insulation may help to improve the existing models.
Assuming that the real pressure difference between interior and
exterior surface is larger than the prescribed pressure difference in the
standard test procedure for mineral wool ISO 9053 / EN 29053,
measurements were performed using the measurement setup for
research on convective moisture transfer “MSRCMT".
These measurements show, that structural inhomogeneities of
mineral wool effect the permeability only at higher pressure
differences, as applied in MSRCMT. Additional microscopic
investigations show, that the location of a leak within the
construction has a crucial influence on the air flow-through and the
infiltration rate. The results clearly indicate that the empirical values
for the acoustic resistance of mineral wool should not be used for the
calculation of convective transfer mechanisms.
Abstract: Literature reveals that many investors rely on technical trading rules when making investment decisions. If stock markets are efficient, one cannot achieve superior results by using these trading rules. However, if market inefficiencies are present, profitable opportunities may arise. The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of technical trading rules in 34 emerging stock markets. The performance of the rules is evaluated by utilizing White-s Reality Check and the Superior Predictive Ability test of Hansen, along with an adjustment for transaction costs. These tests are able to evaluate whether the best model performs better than a buy-and-hold benchmark. Further, they provide an answer to data snooping problems, which is essential to obtain unbiased outcomes. Based on our results we conclude that technical trading rules are not able to outperform a naïve buy-and-hold benchmark on a consistent basis. However, we do find significant trading rule profits in 4 of the 34 investigated markets. We also present evidence that technical analysis is more profitable in crisis situations. Nevertheless, this result is relatively weak.
Abstract: This paper reports the tensile fracture location
characterizations of dissimilar friction stir welds between 5754
aluminium alloy and C11000 copper. The welds were produced using
three shoulder diameter tools; namely, 15, 18 and 25 mm by varying
the process parameters. The rotational speeds considered were 600,
950 and 1200 rpm while the feed rates employed were 50, 150 and
300 mm/min to represent the low, medium and high settings
respectively. The tensile fracture locations were evaluated using the
optical microscope to identify the fracture locations and were
characterized. It was observed that 70% of the tensile samples failed
in the Thermo Mechanically Affected Zone (TMAZ) of copper at the
weld joints. Further evaluation of the fracture surfaces of the pulled
tensile samples revealed that welds with low Ultimate Tensile
Strength either have defects or intermetallics present at their joint
interfaces.
Abstract: We have developed a database for membrane protein functions, which has more than 3000 experimental data on functionally important amino acid residues in membrane proteins along with sequence, structure and literature information. Further, we have proposed different methods for identifying membrane proteins based on their functions: (i) discrimination of membrane transport proteins from other globular and membrane proteins and classifying them into channels/pores, electrochemical and active transporters, and (ii) β-signal for the insertion of mitochondrial β-barrel outer membrane proteins and potential targets. Our method showed an accuracy of 82% in discriminating transport proteins and 68% to classify them into three different transporters. In addition, we have identified a motif for targeting β-signal and potential candidates for mitochondrial β-barrel membrane proteins. Our methods can be used as effective tools for genome-wide annotations.
Abstract: The methanolic extracts from seeds of tamarind
(Tamarindus indica) was prepared by Soxhlet apparatus extraction
and evaluated for total phenolic content by Folin-Ciocalteu method.
Then, methanolic extract was screened biological activities (In vitro)
for anti-melanogenic activity by tyrosinase inhibition test, antiinflammation
activity by cyclooxygenase 1 (COX-1) and
cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) inhibition test, and cytotoxic screening
test with Vero cells. The results showed that total phenolic content,
which contained in extract, was contained 27.72 mg of gallic acid
equivalent per g of dry weight. The ability to inhibit tyrosinase
enzyme, which exerted by Tamarind seed extracts (1 mg/ml) was
52.13 ± 0.42 %. The extract was not possessed inhibitory effect to
COX-1 and COX-2 enzymes and cytotoxic effect to Vero cells. The
finding is concludes that tested seed extract was possessed
antimelanogenic activity with non-toxic effects. However, there was
not exhibited anti-inflammatory activity. Further studies include the
use of advance biological models to confirm this biological activity,
as well as, the isolation and characterization of the purified
compounds that it was contained.
Abstract: In the area where the high quality water is not
available, unconventional water sources are used to irrigate.
Household leachate is one of the sources which are used in dry and
semi dry areas in order to water the barer trees and plants. It meets
the plants needs and also has some effects on the soil, but at the same
time it might cause some problems as well. This study in order to
evaluate the effect of using Compost leachate on the density of soil
iron in form of a statistical pattern called ''Split Plot'' by using two
main treatments, one subsidiary treatment and three repetitions of the
pattern in a three month period. The main N treatments include:
irrigation using well water as a blank treatments and the main I
treatments include: irrigation using leachate and well water
concurrently. Some subsidiary treatments were DI (Drop Irrigation)
and SDI (Sub Drop Irrigation). Then in the established plots, 36
biannual pine and cypress shrubs were randomly grown. Two months
later the treatment begins. The results revealed that there was a
significant variation between the main treatment and the instance
regarding pH decline in the soil which was related to the amount of
leachate injected into the soil. After some time and using leachate the
pH level fell, as much as 0.46 and also increased due to the great
amounts of leachate. The underneath drop irrigation ends in better
results than sub drop irrigation since it keeps the soil texture fixed.
Abstract: Palestinian cities face the challenges of land scarcity,
high population growth rates, rapid urbanization, uneven
development and territorial fragmentation. Due to geopolitical
constrains and the absence of an effective Palestinian planning
institution, urban development in Palestinian cities has not followed
any discernable planning scheme. This has led to a number of
internal contradictions in the structure of cities, and adversely
affected land use, the provision of urban services, and the quality of
the living environment.
This paper explores these challenges, and the potential that exists
for introducing a more sustainable urban development pattern in
Palestinian cities. It assesses alternative development approaches
with a particular focus on sustainable development, promoting ecodevelopment
imperatives, limiting random urbanization, and meeting
present and future challenges, including fulfilling the needs of the
people and conserving the scarce land and limited natural resources.
This paper concludes by offering conceptual proposals and guidelines
for promoting sustainable physical development in Palestinian cities.
Abstract: Using logarithmic mean Divisia decomposition technique, this paper analyzes the change in industrial energy intensity of Fujian Province in China, based on data sets of added value and energy consumption for 35 selected industrial sub-sectors from 1999 to 2009. The change in industrial energy intensity is decomposed into intensity effect and structure effect. Results show that the industrial energy intensity of Fujian Province has achieved a reduction of 51% over the past ten years. The structural change, a shift in the mix of industrial sub-sectors, made overwhelming contribution to the reduction. The impact of energy efficiency’s improvement was relatively small. However, the aggregate industrial energy intensity was very sensitive to both the changes in energy intensity and in production share of energy-intensive sub-sectors, such as production and supply of electric power, steam and hot water. Pathway to reduce industrial energy intensity for energy conservation in Fujian Province is proposed in the end.