Ribeirinhos: A Sustainability Assessment of Housing Typologies in the Amazon Region

The 20th century has brought much development to the practice of Architecture worldwide, and technology has bridged inhabitation limits in many regions of the world with high levels of comfort and conveniences, most times at high costs to the environment. Throughout the globe, the tropical countries are being urbanized at an unprecedented rate and housing has become a major issue worldwide, in light of increased demand and lack of appropriate infra-structure and planning. Buildings and urban spaces designed in tropical cities have mainly adopted external concepts that in most cases do not fit the needs of the inhabitants living in such harsh climatic environment, and when they do, do so at high financial, environmental and cultural costs. Traditional architectural practices can provide valuable understanding on how self-reliance and autonomy of construction can be reinforced in rural-urban tropical environments. From traditional housing knowledge, it is possible to derive lessons for the development of new construction materials that are affordable, environmentally friendly, culturally acceptable and accesible to all.Specifically to the urban context, such solutions are of outmost importance, given the needs to a more democratic society, where access to housing is considered high in the agenda for development. Traditional or rural constructions are also ongoing through extensive changes eventhough they have mostly adopted climate-responsive building practices relying on local resources (with minimum embodied energy) and energy (for comfort and quality of life). It is important to note that many of these buildings can actually be called zero-energy, and hold potential answers to enable transition from high energy, high cost, low comfort urban habitations to zero/low energy habitations with high quality urban livelihood. Increasing access to modern urban lifestyels have also an effect on the aspirations from people in terms of performance, comfort and convenience in terms of their housing and the way it is produced and used. These aspirations are resulting in transitions from localresource dependent habitations- to non-local resource based highenergy urban style habitations. And such transitions are resulting in the habitations becoming increasingly unsuited to the local climatic conditions with increasing discomfort, ill-health, and increased CO2 emissions and local environmental disruption. This research studies one specific transition group in the context of 'water communities' in tropical-equatorial regions: Ribeirinhos housing typology (Amazonas, Brazil). The paper presents the results of a qualitative sustainability assessment of the housing typologies under transition, found at the Ribeirinhos communities.

An Efficient Graph Query Algorithm Based on Important Vertices and Decision Features

Graph has become increasingly important in modeling complicated structures and schemaless data such as proteins, chemical compounds, and XML documents. Given a graph query, it is desirable to retrieve graphs quickly from a large database via graph-based indices. Different from the existing methods, our approach, called VFM (Vertex to Frequent Feature Mapping), makes use of vertices and decision features as the basic indexing feature. VFM constructs two mappings between vertices and frequent features to answer graph queries. The VFM approach not only provides an elegant solution to the graph indexing problem, but also demonstrates how database indexing and query processing can benefit from data mining, especially frequent pattern mining. The results show that the proposed method not only avoids the enumeration method of getting subgraphs of query graph, but also effectively reduces the subgraph isomorphism tests between the query graph and graphs in candidate answer set in verification stage.

Real-time Tracking in Image Sequences based-on Parameters Updating with Temporal and Spatial Neighborhoods Mixture Gaussian Model

Gaussian mixture background model is widely used in moving target detection of the image sequences. However, traditional Gaussian mixture background model usually considers the time continuity of the pixels, and establishes background through statistical distribution of pixels without taking into account the pixels- spatial similarity, which will cause noise, imperfection and other problems. This paper proposes a new Gaussian mixture modeling approach, which combines the color and gradient of the spatial information, and integrates the spatial information of the pixel sequences to establish Gaussian mixture background. The experimental results show that the movement background can be extracted accurately and efficiently, and the algorithm is more robust, and can work in real time in tracking applications.

Plastic Flow through Taper Dies: A Threedimensional Analysis

The plastic flow of metal in the extrusion process is an important factor in controlling the mechanical properties of the extruded products. It is, however, difficult to predict the metal flow in three dimensional extrusions of sections due to the involvement of re-entrant corners. The present study is to find an upper bound solution for the extrusion of triangular sectioned through taper dies from round sectioned billet. A discontinuous kinematically admissible velocity field (KAVF) is proposed. From the proposed KAVF, the upper bound solution on non-dimensional extrusion pressure is determined with respect to the chosen process parameters. The theoretical results are compared with experimental results to check the validity of the proposed velocity field. An extrusion setup is designed and fabricated for the said purpose, and all extrusions are carried out using circular billets. Experiments are carried out with commercially available lead at room temperature.

Opportunistic Routing with Secure Coded Wireless Multicast Using MAS Approach

Many Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications necessitate secure multicast services for the purpose of broadcasting delay sensitive data like video files and live telecast at fixed time-slot. This work provides a novel method to deal with end-to-end delay and drop rate of packets. Opportunistic Routing chooses a link based on the maximum probability of packet delivery ratio. Null Key Generation helps in authenticating packets to the receiver. Markov Decision Process based Adaptive Scheduling algorithm determines the time slot for packet transmission. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol ensures better performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and normalized routing overhead.

Finding an Optimized Discriminate Function for Internet Application Recognition

Everyday the usages of the Internet increase and simply a world of the data become accessible. Network providers do not want to let the provided services to be used in harmful or terrorist affairs, so they used a variety of methods to protect the special regions from the harmful data. One of the most important methods is supposed to be the firewall. Firewall stops the transfer of such packets through several ways, but in some cases they do not use firewall because of its blind packet stopping, high process power needed and expensive prices. Here we have proposed a method to find a discriminate function to distinguish between usual packets and harmful ones by the statistical processing on the network router logs. So an administrator can alarm to the user. This method is very fast and can be used simply in adjacent with the Internet routers.

Molar Excess Volumes and Excess Isentropic Compressibilities of Ternary Mixtures Containing 2-Pyrrolidinone

Molar excess Volumes, VE ijk and speeds of sound , uijk of 2-pyrrolidinone (i) + benzene or toluene (j) + ethanol (k) ternary mixture have been measured as a function of composition at 308.15 K. The observed speeds of sound data have been utilized to determine excess isentropic compressiblities, ( E S κ )ijk of ternary (i + j + k) mixtures. Molar excess volumes, VE ijk and excess isentropic compressibilities, ( E S κ )ijk data have fitted to the Redlich-Kister equation to calculate ternary adjustable parameters and standard deviations. The Moelywn-Huggins concept (Huggins in Polymer 12: 389-399, 1971) of connectivity between the surfaces of the constituents of binary mixtures has been extended to ternary mixtures (using the concept of a connectivity parameter of third degree of molecules, 3ξ , which inturn depends on its topology) to obtain an expression that describes well the measured VE ijk and ( E S κ )ijk data.

Experimental and Statistical Study of Nonlinear Effect of Carbon Nanotube on Mechanical Properties of Polypropylene Composites

In this study concept of experimental design is successfully applied for the determination of optimum condition to produce PP/SWCNT (Polypropylene/Single wall carbon nanotube) nanocomposite. Central composite design as one of experimental design techniques is employed for the optimization and statistical determination of the significant factors influencing on the tensile modulus and yield stress as mechanical properties of this nanocomposite. The significant factors are SWCNT weight fraction and acid treatment time for functionalizing the nanoparticles. Optimum conditions are in 0.7 % of SWCNT weight fraction and 210 min as acid treatment time for 1112.75 ± 28 MPa as maximum tensile modulus and in 216 min and 0.65 % as acid treatment time and SWCNT weight fraction respectively for 40.26 ± 0.3 MPa as maximum yield stress. Also after setting new experiments for test these optimum conditions, found excelent agreement with predicted values.

A New Method for Image Classification Based on Multi-level Neural Networks

In this paper, we propose a supervised method for color image classification based on a multilevel sigmoidal neural network (MSNN) model. In this method, images are classified into five categories, i.e., “Car", “Building", “Mountain", “Farm" and “Coast". This classification is performed without any segmentation processes. To verify the learning capabilities of the proposed method, we compare our MSNN model with the traditional Sigmoidal Neural Network (SNN) model. Results of comparison have shown that the MSNN model performs better than the traditional SNN model in the context of training run time and classification rate. Both color moments and multi-level wavelets decomposition technique are used to extract features from images. The proposed method has been tested on a variety of real and synthetic images.

Betel Nut Beauty in Taiwan: Chinese Tourists- Perspective

Tourists- eyes will often be attracted by the unique phenomenon of the roadsides: betel nut beauties (pronounced as binlang xishi in Mandarin), if they drive on the roads of Taiwan. Sitting in the neon-lit glass stalls with attractive dress on the roadsides, betel nut beauties usually sell betel nuts to the passing truckers or car drivers with much of their efforts. Moreover, in order to attract peoples- eyesight and increase the sales volume, the young girls are in skimpy clothing to promote betel nuts or beverages to their customers. Therefore, when the Chinese tourists come to Taiwan, to see the unique betel nut beauty phenomenon has become one of their greatly interested things or even a “must see". This paper describes betel but beauties in Taiwan, explained why the Chinese tourists like to see them in Taiwan and proposed propositions for examination.

Comparative Study of Virtual Sickness between a Single-screen and Three-screen from Parallax Affect

Virtual environment induces simulator sickness effect for some users. The purpose of this research is to compare the simulation sickness relative with parallax affect in one-screen and three-screen HoloStageTM system, measured by Simulation Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ). The results show the subjects tested in three-screen has less sickness than one-screen and effect from the Oculomotor (O) more than from the Disorientation (D) and more than from the Nausea (N) or represented in O>D>N.

Receding Horizon Filtering for Mobile Robot Systems with Cross-Correlated Sensor Noises

This paper reports on a receding horizon filtering for mobile robot systems with cross-correlated sensor noises and uncertainties. Also, the effect of uncertain parameters in the state of the tracking error model performance is considered. A distributed fusion receding horizon filter is proposed. The distributed fusion filtering algorithm represents the optimal linear combination of the local filters under the minimum mean square error criterion. The derivation of the error cross-covariances between the local receding horizon filters is the key of this paper. Simulation results of the tracking mobile robot-s motion demonstrate high accuracy and computational efficiency of the distributed fusion receding horizon filter.

The Conditioning Effect on Celebrity Multiple Endorsements

This research adapts experimental design to investigate the effect of conditioning or not and pre-exposure or not on brand attitude, so it is a 2×2=4 factorial design. The results show that the brand attitude of conditioning group is significantly higher than that of unconditioning group. The brand attitude with pre-exposure is significantly higher than that without pre-exposure. Conditioning or not and pre-exposure or not have significant interaction. No matter the celebrity is pre-exposure or not, the brand attitude is higher under conditioning process.

Design of Genetic-Algorithm Based Robust Power System Stabilizer

This paper presents a systematic approach for the design of power system stabilizer using genetic algorithm and investigates the robustness of the GA based PSS. The proposed approach employs GA search for optimal setting of PSS parameters. The performance of the proposed GPSS under small and large disturbances, loading conditions and system parameters is tested. The eigenvalue analysis and nonlinear simulation results show the effectiveness of the GPSS to damp out the system oscillations. It is found tat the dynamic performance with the GPSS shows improved results, over conventionally tuned PSS over a wide range of operating conditions.

Development of a Semantic Wiki-based Feature Library for the Extraction of Manufacturing Feature and Manufacturing Information

A manufacturing feature can be defined simply as a geometric shape and its manufacturing information to create the shape. In a feature-based process planning system, feature library that consists of pre-defined manufacturing features and the manufacturing information to create the shape of the features, plays an important role in the extraction of manufacturing features with their proper manufacturing information. However, to manage the manufacturing information flexibly, it is important to build a feature library that can be easily modified. In this paper, the implementation of Semantic Wiki for the development of the feature library is proposed.

Identification of Regulatory Mechanism of Orthostatic Response

En bloc assumes modeling all phases of the orthostatic test with the only one mathematical model, which allows the complex parametric view of orthostatic response. The work presents the implementation of a mathematical model for processing of the measurements of systolic, diastolic blood pressure and heart rate performed on volunteers during orthostatic test. The original assumption of model hypothesis that every postural change means only one Stressor, did not complying with the measurements of physiological circulation factor-time profiles. Results of the identification support the hypothesis that second postural change of orthostatic test causes induced Stressors, with the observation of a physiological regulation mechanism. Maximal demonstrations are on the heart rate and diastolic blood pressure-time profile, minimal are for the measurements of the systolic blood pressure. Presented study gives a new view on orthostatic test with impact on clinical practice.

Investigation of New Method to Achieve Well Dispersed Multiwall Carbon Nanotubes Reinforced Al Matrix Composites

Nanostructured materials have attracted many researchers due to their outstanding mechanical and physical properties. For example, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) or carbon nanofibres (CNFs) are considered to be attractive reinforcement materials for light weight and high strength metal matrix composites. These composites are being projected for use in structural applications for their high specific strength as well as functional materials for their exciting thermal and electrical characteristics. The critical issues of CNT-reinforced MMCs include processing techniques, nanotube dispersion, interface, strengthening mechanisms and mechanical properties. One of the major obstacles to the effective use of carbon nanotubes as reinforcements in metal matrix composites is their agglomeration and poor distribution/dispersion within the metallic matrix. In order to tap into the advantages of the properties of CNTs (or CNFs) in composites, the high dispersion of CNTs (or CNFs) and strong interfacial bonding are the key issues which are still challenging. Processing techniques used for synthesis of the composites have been studied with an objective to achieve homogeneous distribution of carbon nanotubes in the matrix. Modified mechanical alloying (ball milling) techniques have emerged as promising routes for the fabrication of carbon nanotube (CNT) reinforced metal matrix composites. In order to obtain a homogeneous product, good control of the milling process, in particular control of the ball movement, is essential. The control of the ball motion during the milling leads to a reduction in grinding energy and a more homogeneous product. Also, the critical inner diameter of the milling container at a particular rotational speed can be calculated. In the present work, we use conventional and modified mechanical alloying to generate a homogenous distribution of 2 wt. % CNT within Al powders. 99% purity Aluminium powder (Acros, 200mesh) was used along with two different types of multiwall carbon nanotube (MWCNTs) having different aspect ratios to produce Al-CNT composites. The composite powders were processed into bulk material by compaction, and sintering using a cylindrical compaction and tube furnace. Field Emission Scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), X-Ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy and Vickers macro hardness tester were used to evaluate CNT dispersion, powder morphology, CNT damage, phase analysis, mechanical properties and crystal size determination. Despite the success of ball milling in dispersing CNTs in Al powder, it is often accompanied with considerable strain hardening of the Al powder, which may have implications on the final properties of the composite. The results show that particle size and morphology vary with milling time. Also, by using the mixing process and sonication before mechanical alloying and modified ball mill, dispersion of the CNTs in Al matrix improves.

A New Analytical Approach to Reconstruct Residual Stresses Due to Turning Process

A thin layer on the component surface can be found with high tensile residual stresses, due to turning operations, which can dangerously affect the fatigue performance of the component. In this paper an analytical approach is presented to reconstruct the residual stress field from a limited incomplete set of measurements. Airy stress function is used as the primary unknown to directly solve the equilibrium equations and satisfying the boundary conditions. In this new method there exists the flexibility to impose the physical conditions that govern the behavior of residual stress to achieve a meaningful complete stress field. The analysis is also coupled to a least squares approximation and a regularization method to provide stability of the inverse problem. The power of this new method is then demonstrated by analyzing some experimental measurements and achieving a good agreement between the model prediction and the results obtained from residual stress measurement.

Augmented Reality Interaction System in 3D Environment

It is important to give input information without other device in AR system. One solution is using hand for augmented reality application. Many researchers have proposed different solutions for hand interface in augmented reality. Analyze Histogram and connecting factor is can be example for that. Various Direction searching is one of robust way to recognition hand but it takes too much calculating time. And background should be distinguished with skin color. This paper proposes a hand tracking method to control the 3D object in augmented reality using depth device and skin color. Also in this work discussed relationship between several markers, which is based on relationship between camera and marker. One marker used for displaying virtual object and three markers for detecting hand gesture and manipulating the virtual object.

Image Modeling Using Gibbs-Markov Random Field and Support Vector Machines Algorithm

This paper introduces a novel approach to estimate the clique potentials of Gibbs Markov random field (GMRF) models using the Support Vector Machines (SVM) algorithm and the Mean Field (MF) theory. The proposed approach is based on modeling the potential function associated with each clique shape of the GMRF model as a Gaussian-shaped kernel. In turn, the energy function of the GMRF will be in the form of a weighted sum of Gaussian kernels. This formulation of the GMRF model urges the use of the SVM with the Mean Field theory applied for its learning for estimating the energy function. The approach has been tested on synthetic texture images and is shown to provide satisfactory results in retrieving the synthesizing parameters.