Abstract: Bidding is a very important business function to find
latent contractors of construction projects. Moreover, bid markup is
one of the most important decisions for a bidder to gain a reasonable
profit. Since the bidding system is a complex adaptive system, bidding
agent need a learning process to get more valuable knowledge for a bid,
especially from past public bidding information. In this paper, we
proposed an iterative agent leaning model for bidders to make markup
decisions. A classifier for public bidding information named PIBS is
developed to make full use of history data for classifying new bidding
information. The simulation and experimental study is performed to
show the validity of the proposed classifier. Some factors that affect
the validity of PIBS are also analyzed at the end of this work.
Abstract: Laser Profiler (LP) data from aerial laser surveys have
been increasingly used as topographical inputs to numerical
simulations of flooding and inundation in river basins. LP data has
great potential for reproducing topography, but its effective usage has
not yet been fully established. In this study, flooding and inundation
are simulated numerically using LP data for the Jobaru River basin of
Japan’s Saga Plain. The analysis shows that the topography is
reproduced satisfactorily in the computational domain with urban and
agricultural areas requiring different grid sizes. A 2-D numerical
simulation shows that flood flow behavior changes as grid size is
varied.
Abstract: Understanding proteins functions is a major goal in
the post-genomic era. Proteins usually work in context of other
proteins and rarely function alone. Therefore, it is highly relevant to
study the interaction partners of a protein in order to understand its
function. Machine learning techniques have been widely applied to
predict protein-protein interactions. Kernel functions play an
important role for a successful machine learning technique. Choosing
the appropriate kernel function can lead to a better accuracy in a
binary classifier such as the support vector machines. In this paper,
we describe a Bayesian kernel for the support vector machine to
predict protein-protein interactions. The use of Bayesian kernel can
improve the classifier performance by incorporating the probability
characteristic of the available experimental protein-protein
interactions data that were compiled from different sources. In
addition, the probabilistic output from the Bayesian kernel can assist
biologists to conduct more research on the highly predicted
interactions. The results show that the accuracy of the classifier has
been improved using the Bayesian kernel compared to the standard
SVM kernels. These results imply that protein-protein interaction can
be predicted using Bayesian kernel with better accuracy compared to
the standard SVM kernels.
Abstract: Using a texture database, a statistical estimation of
spring-back was conducted in this study on the basis of statistical
analysis. Both spring-back in bending deformation and experimental
data related to the crystal orientation show significant dispersion.
Therefore, a probabilistic statistical approach was established for the
proper quantification of these values. Correlation was examined
among the parameters F(x) of spring-back, F(x) of the buildup fraction
to three orientations after 92° bending, and F(x) at an as-received part
on the basis of the three-parameter Weibull distribution. Consequent
spring-back estimation using a texture database yielded excellent
estimates compared with experimental values.
Abstract: This research aims to study employment trends in
printing industry for prepress support by Suan Sunandha University
Fund. The objectives of this research are to explain the trends of the
employment in Thai Printing Industry for prepress in Bangkok and
the description of different personnel that prepress entrepreneur need
and also the problems of employment.
The population of prepress entrepreneurs is about 100
organizations in the area of Bangkok. The questionnaires has been
taken and analyzed with SPSS program by using the average
percentage and standard deviation.
This research is multiple case studies. The conceptual framework
is developed on the basis of the open systems theory.
The research result show that
1. The most of prepress entrepreneur have trend to choose the
employee by any sex, the age 25-29 years old, bachelor degree
and have 1-2 years experience.
2. The most problems are the understanding in job,
communication/relation and the understanding in new
technology.
3. The trends aims to employment in 1-3 years have 57.8% for
prepress industry in Bangkok.
This research suggests that:
1. Thai printing industry for prepress in Bangkok need quality
employee that expert in printing technology.
2. Prepress entrepreneur should have agreement to development
with university for practice the employee.
3. Prepress entrepreneur should support personal to fulfill the
knowledge.
Abstract: One of the most common practices for strengthening
the reinforced concrete structures is the application of FRP (Fiber
Reinforce Plastic) sheets to increase the flexural and shear strengths
of the member. The elastic modulus of FRP is considerably higher
than that of concrete. This will result in debonding between the FRP
sheets and concrete surface. With conventional surface preparation of
concrete, the ultimate capacity of the FRP sheets can hardly be
achieved. New methods for preparation of the bonding surface have
shown improvements in reducing the premature debonding of FRP
sheets from concrete surface. The present experimental study focuses
on the application of grooving method to postpone debonding of the
FRP sheets attached to the side faces of concrete beams for shear
strengthening. Comparison has also been made with conventional
surface preparation method. This study clearly shows the efficiency
of grooving method compared to surface preparation method, in
preventing the debonding phenomenon and in increasing the load
carrying capacity of FRP.
Abstract: In recent years, the research in wireless sensor
network has increased steadily, and many studies were focusing on
reducing energy consumption of sensor nodes to extend their lifetimes.
In this paper, the issue of energy consumption is investigated and two
adaptive mechanisms are proposed to extend the network lifetime.
This study uses high-energy-first scheme to determine cluster heads
for data transmission. Thus, energy consumption in each cluster is
balanced and network lifetime can be extended. In addition, this study
uses cluster merging and dynamic routing mechanisms to further
reduce energy consumption during data transmission. The simulation
results show that the proposed method can effectively extend the
lifetime of wireless sensor network, and it is suitable for different base
station locations.
Abstract: In the present study, changes of morphology and
mechanical characteristics in the lumbar vertebrae of the
ovariectomised (OVX) rat were investigated. In previous researches,
there were many studies about morphology like volume fraction and
trabecular thickness based on Micro - Computed Tomography (Micro
- CT). However, detecting and tracking long-term changes in the
trabecular bone of the lumbar vertebrae for the OVX rat were few. For
this study, one female Sprague-Dawley rat was used: an OVX rat. The
4th Lumbar of the OVX rat was subjected to in-vivo micro-CT.
Detecting and tracking long-term changes could be investigated in the
trabecular bone of the lumbar vertebrae for an OVX rat using in-vivo
micro-CT. An OVX rat was scanned at week 0 (just before surgery), at
week 4, at week 8, week 16, week 22 and week 56 after surgery. Finite
element (FE) analysis was used to investigate mechanical
characteristics of the lumbar vertebrae for an OVX rat. When the OVX
rat (at week 56) was compared with the OVX rat (at week 0), volume
fraction was decreased by 80% and effective modulus was decreased
by 75%.
Abstract: An experimental and numerical study has been conducted to clarify heat transfer characteristics and effectiveness of a cross-flow heat exchanger employing staggered wing-shaped tubes at different angels of attack. The water-side Rew and the air-side Rea were at 5 x 102 and at from 1.8 x 103 to 9.7 x 103, respectively. The tubes arrangements were employed with various angles of attack θ1,2,3 from 0° to 330° at the considered Rea range. Correlation of Nu, St, as well as the heat transfer per unit pumping power (ε) in terms of Rea, design parameters for the studied bundle were presented. The temperature fields around the staggered wing-shaped tubes bundle were predicted by using commercial CFD FLUENT 6.3.26 software package. Results indicated that the heat transfer was increased by increasing the angle of attack from 0° to 45°, while the opposite was true for angles of attack from 135° to 180°. The best thermal performance and hence η of studied bundle was occurred at the lowest Rea and/or zero angle of attack. Comparisons between the experimental and numerical results of the present study and those, previously, obtained for similar available studies showed good agreements.
Abstract: The hospital and the health-care center of a
community, as a place for people-s life-care and health-care settings,
must provide more and better services for patients or residents. After
Establishing Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system -which is a
necessity- in the hospital, providing pervasive services is a further
step. Our objective in this paper is to use pervasive computing in a
case study of healthcare, based on EMR database that coordinates
application services over network to form a service environment for
medical and health-care. Our method also categorizes the hospital
spaces into 3 spaces: Public spaces, Private spaces and Isolated
spaces. Although, there are many projects about using pervasive
computing in healthcare, but all of them concentrate on the disease
recognition, designing smart cloths, or provide services only for
patient. The proposed method is implemented in a hospital. The
obtained results show that it is suitable for our purpose.
Abstract: Development of artificial neural network (ANN) for
prediction of aluminum workpieces' surface roughness in ultrasonicvibration
assisted turning (UAT) has been the subject of the present
study. Tool wear as the main cause of surface roughness was also
investigated. ANN was trained through experimental data obtained
on the basis of full factorial design of experiments. Various
influential machining parameters were taken into consideration. It
was illustrated that a multilayer perceptron neural network could
efficiently model the surface roughness as the response of the
network, with an error less than ten percent. The performance of the
trained network was verified by further experiments. The results of
UAT were compared with the results of conventional turning
experiments carried out with similar machining parameters except for
the vibration amplitude whence considerable reduction was observed
in the built-up edge and the surface roughness.
Abstract: There is increasing pressure on, and decline of
mopane woodlands due to increasing use and competition for
mopane resources in Zimbabwe in Namibia. Community management strategies, based largely on local knowledge are
evidently unable to cope. Research has generated potentially useful
information for mopane woodland management, but this information
has not been utilized. The work reported in this paper sought to add value to research work conducted on mopane woodlands by
developing effective community-based mopane woodland
management regimes that were based on both local and scientific
knowledge in Zimbabwe and Namibia. The conditions under which research findings were likely to be adopted for mopane woodland management by communities were investigated. The study was conducted at two sites each in Matobo and Omusati Districts in Zimbabwe and Namibia respectively. The mopane woodland
resources in the two study areas were assessed using scientific
ecological methods. A range of participatory methods was used to collect information on use of mopane woodland resources by communities, institutional arrangements governing access to and use
of these resources and to evaluate scientific knowledge for
applicability in local management regimes. Coppicing, thinning and
pollarding were the research generated management methods evaluated. Realities such as availability of woodland resources and
social roles and responsibilities influenced preferences for woodland
management interventions
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to study the analysis and testing for determining the torsional stiffness of the student formula-s space frame. From past study, the space frame for Chulalongkorn University Student Formula team used in 2011 TSAE Auto Challenge Student Formula in Thailand was designed by considering required mass and torsional stiffness based on the numerical method and experimental method. The numerical result was compared with the experimental results to verify the torsional stiffness of the space frame. It can be seen from the large error of torsional stiffness of 2011 frame that the experimental result can not verify by the numerical analysis due to the different between the numerical model and experimental setting. In this paper, the numerical analysis and experiment of the same 2011 frame model is performed by improving the model setting. The improvement of both numerical analysis and experiment are discussed to confirm that the models from both methods are same. After the frame was analyzed and tested, the results are compared to verify the torsional stiffness of the frame. It can be concluded that the improved analysis and experiments can used to verify the torsional stiffness of the space frame.
Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study on two most
popular control strategies for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor
(PMSM) drives: field-oriented control (FOC) and direct torque
control (DTC). The comparison is based on various criteria including
basic control characteristics, dynamic performance, and
implementation complexity. The study is done by simulation using
the Simulink Power System Blockset that allows a complete
representation of the power section (inverter and PMSM) and the
control system. The simulation and evaluation of both control
strategies are performed using actual parameters of Permanent
Magnet Synchronous Motor fed by an IGBT PWM inverter.
Abstract: Time delay in bilateral teleoperation system was
introduced as a sufficient reason to make the system unstable or
certainly degrade the system performance. In this paper, simulations
and experimental results of implementing p-like control scheme,
under different ranges of variable time delay, will be presented to
verify a certain criteria, which guarantee the system stability and
position tracking. The system consists of two Phantom premium 1.5A
devices. One of them acts as a master and the other acts as a slave.
The study includes deriving the Phantom kinematic and dynamic
model, establishing the link between the two Phantoms over
Simulink in Matlab, and verifying the stability criteria with
simulations and real experiments.
Abstract: In this study a neural network (NN) was proposed to
predict the sorption of binary mixture of copper-cobalt ions into
clinoptilolite as ion-exchanger. The configuration of the
backpropagation neural network giving the smallest mean square
error was three-layer NN with tangent sigmoid transfer function at
hidden layer with 10 neurons, linear transfer function at output layer
and Levenberg-Marquardt backpropagation training algorithm.
Experiments have been carried out in the batch reactor to obtain
equilibrium data of the individual sorption and the mixture of coppercobalt
ions. The obtained modeling results have shown that the used
of neural network has better adjusted the equilibrium data of the
binary system when compared with the conventional sorption
isotherm models.
Abstract: These This paper looks into frameworks which aim at
furthering the discussion of the role of regenerative design practices
in a city-s historic core and the tool of urban design to achieve urban
revitalization on the island of Cyprus. It also examines the region-s
demographic mix, the effectiveness of its governmental coordination
and the strategies of adaptive reuse and strategic investments in older
areas with existing infrastructure. The two main prongs of
investigation will consider the effect of the existing and proposed
changes in the physical infrastructure and fabric of the city, as well as
the catalytic effect of sustainable urban design practices. Through this
process, the work hopes to integrate the contained potential within
the existing historic core and the contributions and participation of
the migrant and immigrant populations to the local economy. It also
examines ways in which this coupling of factors can bring to the front
the positive effects of this combined effort on an otherwise sluggish
local redevelopment effort. The data for this study is being collected
and organized as part of ongoing urban design and development
student workshop efforts in urban planning and design education.
The work is presented in graphic form and includes data collected
from interviews with study area organizations and the community at
large. Planning work is also based on best practices initiated by the
staff of the Nicosia Master Plan task force, which coordinates holistic
planning efforts for the historic center of the city of Nicosia.
Abstract: Breastfeeding is an important concept in the maternal life of a woman. In this paper, we focus on exclusive breastfeeding. Exclusive breastfeeding is the feeding of a baby on no other milk apart from breast milk. This type of breastfeeding is very important during the first six months because it supports optimal growth and development during infancy and reduces the risk of obliterating diseases and problems. Moreover, in Mauritius, exclusive breastfeeding has decreased the incidence and/or severity of diarrhea, lower respiratory infection and urinary tract infection. In this paper, we give an overview of exclusive breastfeeding in Mauritius and the factors influencing it. We further analyze the local practices of exclusive breastfeeding using the Generalized Poisson regression model and the negative-binomial model since the data are over-dispersed.
Abstract: This paper discusses applications of a revolutionary
information technology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), in
the field of the history of cartography by examples, including
assessing accuracy of early maps, establishing a database of places
and historical administrative units in history, integrating early maps
in GIS or digital images, and analyzing social, political, and
economic information related to production of early maps. GIS
provides a new mean to evaluate the accuracy of early maps. Four
basic steps using GIS for this type of study are discussed. In addition,
several historical geographical information systems are introduced.
These include China Historical Geographic Information Systems
(CHGIS), the United States National Historical Geographic
Information System (NHGIS), and the Great Britain Historical
Geographical Information System. GIS also provides digital means to
display and analyze the spatial information on the early maps or to
layer them with modern spatial data. How GIS relational data
structure may be used to analyze social, political, and economic
information related to production of early maps is also discussed in
this paper. Through discussion on these examples, this paper reveals
value of GIS applications in this field.
Abstract: In this research saffron samples were prepared from
farms and sampling was done in four states contain : sampling from
fresh saffron of petal with forceps , sampling from fresh saffron of
petal by hands, sampling from dried sample by warm air in shadow,
sampling from dried sample which dried by dryer. Samples collected
and kept in sterile tubes and containers and carried to laboratory and
maintained until experiment. Microbial experiments were performed
to determine microbial load such as total count, Staphylococcus
aureus, coli form, E.coli, mold and yeast. Results showed that in
picking and drying stages the contamination amount increases in
saffron samples. There was a significant difference between the
microbial load of picked up saffron by forceps and by hands, and
also between dried saffron by warm air in shadow and by dryer.