Abstract: ZnO nanocrystals with mean diameter size 14 nm
have been prepared by precipitation method, and examined as
photocatalyst for the UV-induced degradation of insecticide diazinon
as deputy of organic pollutant in aqueous solution. The effects of
various parameters, such as illumination time, the amount of
photocatalyst, initial pH values and initial concentration of
insecticide on the photocatalytic degradation diazinon were
investigated to find desired conditions. In this case, the desired
parameters were also tested for the treatment of real water containing
the insecticide. Photodegradation efficiency of diazinon was
compared between commercial and prepared ZnO nanocrystals. The
results indicated that UV/ZnO process applying prepared
nanocrystalline ZnO offered electrical energy efficiency and
quantum yield better than commercial ZnO. The present study, on the
base of Langmuir-Hinshelwood mechanism, illustrated a pseudo
first-order kinetic model with rate constant of surface reaction equal
to 0.209 mg l-1 min-1 and adsorption equilibrium constant of 0.124 l
mg-1.
Abstract: Under the limitation of investment budget, a utility
company is required to maximize the utilization of their existing
assets during their life cycle satisfying both engineering and financial
requirements. However, utility does not have knowledge about the
status of each asset in the portfolio neither in terms of technical nor
financial values. This paper presents a knowledge based model for
the utility companies in order to make an optimal decision on power
transformer with their utilization. CommonKADS methodology, a
structured development for knowledge and expertise representation,
is utilized for designing and developing knowledge based model. A
case study of One MVA power transformer of Nepal Electricity
Authority is presented. The results show that the reusable knowledge
can be categorized, modeled and utilized within the utility company
using the proposed methodologies. Moreover, the results depict that
utility company can achieve both engineering and financial benefits
from its utilization.
Abstract: The growing interest in the issue of intangible assets not only in the scientific community but also in some professional bodies internationally can be explained by several points of view. From the business perspective, enterprises are increasingly motivated by external and internal forces to measure and proactively manage their intangibles. With respect to the issue of intangibles, goodwill has been debated in many countries throughout the world. Despite the numerous efforts and the existence of international accounting standards there is not yet a common accepted accounting treatment for goodwill. This study attempts on the one hand to impress the accounting treatment of goodwill internationally, on the other hand analyses the major subjects in relation to the accounting treatment of goodwill in Greece, since 2005, year where the international accounting standards have been in use for the Greek listed companies. The results indicate that the accounting treatment for the goodwill in Greece, despite the effort for accounting harmonization in Europe from 2005, sustains many differences especially for the no listed companies.
Abstract: This paper focuses on issues of engagement by staff in professional development related to the delivery of e-learning. The paper reports on findings drawn from a New Zealand research project which is producing a sector-wide framework for professional development in tertiary e-learning. The research findings indicate that staff engaged in e-learning in tertiary institutions is not making the most effective use of the professional development opportunities available to them; rather they seem to gain their knowledge and support from a variety of informal means. This is despite an emphasis on the provision of professional development opportunities by both Government Policies and Institutions themselves. The conclusion drawn from the findings is that institutional approaches to professional development for e-learning do not yet fully reflect the demands and constraints that working in a digital context impose.
Abstract: Waste management is now a global concern due to its
high environmental impact on climate change. Because of generating
huge amount of waste through our daily activities, managing waste in
an efficient way has become more important than ever. Alternative
Waste Technology (AWT), a new category of waste treatment
technology has been developed for energy recovery in recent years to
address this issue. AWT describes a technology that redirects waste
away from landfill, recovers more useable resources from the waste
flow and reduces the impact on the surroundings. Australia is one of
the largest producers of waste per-capita. A number of AWTs are
using in Australia to produce energy from waste. Presently, it is vital
to identify an appropriate AWT to establish a sustainable waste
management system in Australia. Identification of an appropriate
AWT through Multi-criteria analysis (MCA) of four AWTs by using
five key decision making criteria is presented and discussed in this
paper.
Abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate the pregnancy
outcomes of teenage mothers at DanKhunThot hospital, Nakhon
Ratchasima, Thailand. A retrospective descriptive study was
conducted in 573 of teenage pregnant from charts reviewed from 1st
October 2010-31st March, 2012. Data were analyzed by frequency
distribution, mean and Standard Deviation.
The results shown several problems and negatives outcomes of
pregnancy in teenager such as not attended prenatal care, Low birth
weight infants, death fetus in utero and other complications. The
results of this study can be utilized in the development of prenatal,
perinatal and post natal care services, especially in DanKhunthot
Hospital contexts. Moreover, the results were present to the District
Health Care committees in order to enhance health care service
system for teenage pregnancy of DanKhunthot District in further.
Abstract: An emotional speech recognition system for the
applications on smart phones was proposed in this study to combine
with 3G mobile communications and social networks to provide users
and their groups with more interaction and care. This study developed
a mechanism using the support vector machines (SVM) to recognize
the emotions of speech such as happiness, anger, sadness and normal.
The mechanism uses a hierarchical classifier to adjust the weights of
acoustic features and divides various parameters into the categories of
energy and frequency for training. In this study, 28 commonly used
acoustic features including pitch and volume were proposed for
training. In addition, a time-frequency parameter obtained by
continuous wavelet transforms was also used to identify the accent and
intonation in a sentence during the recognition process. The Berlin
Database of Emotional Speech was used by dividing the speech into
male and female data sets for training. According to the experimental
results, the accuracies of male and female test sets were increased by
4.6% and 5.2% respectively after using the time-frequency parameter
for classifying happy and angry emotions. For the classification of all
emotions, the average accuracy, including male and female data, was
63.5% for the test set and 90.9% for the whole data set.
Abstract: This paper presents the modeling of a MEMS based accelerometer in order to detect the presence of a wheel flat in the railway vehicle. A haversine wheel flat is assigned to one wheel of a 5 DOF pitch plane vehicle model, which is coupled to a 3 layer track model. Based on the simulated acceleration response obtained from the vehicle-track model, an accelerometer is designed that meets all the requirements to detect the presence of a wheel flat. The proposed accelerometer can survive in a dynamic shocking environment with acceleration up to ±150g. The parameters of the accelerometer are calculated in order to achieve the required specifications using lumped element approximation and the results are used for initial design layout. A finite element analysis code (COMSOL) is used to perform simulations of the accelerometer under various operating conditions and to determine the optimum configuration. The simulated results are found within about 2% of the calculated values, which indicates the validity of lumped element approach. The stability of the accelerometer is also determined in the desired range of operation including the condition under shock.
Abstract: Despite various methods that exist in software risk management, software projects have a high rate of failure. When complexity and size of the projects are increased, managing software development becomes more difficult. In these projects the need for more analysis and risk assessment is vital. In this paper, a classification for software risks is specified. Then relations between these risks using risk tree structure are presented. Analysis and assessment of these risks are done using probabilistic calculations. This analysis helps qualitative and quantitative assessment of risk of failure. Moreover it can help software risk management process. This classification and risk tree structure can apply to some software tools.
Abstract: Dexamethasone (Dex) is a synthetic glucocorticoid
that is used in therapy. However prolonged treatments with high
doses are often required. This causes side effects that interfere with
the activity of several endocrine systems, including the gonadotropic
axis.
The aim of our study is to determine the effect of Dex on testicular
function in prepubertal Wistar rats.
Newborn Wistar rats are submitted to intraperitoneal injection of
Dex (1μg of Dex dissolved in NaCl 0.9% / 5g bw) for 20 days and
then sacrificed at the age of 40days. A control group received NaCl
0.9%. The rat is weighed daily. The plasmatic levels of testosterone,
LH and FSH were measured by radioimmunoassay. A histomorphometric
study was performed on sections of testis.
Treated groups showed a significant decrease in body weight (p
Abstract: The Chichiawan stream in the Wulin catchment in
Taiwan is the natural habitat of Formosan landlocked salmon. Human
and agriculture activities gradually worsen water quality and impact
the fish habitat negatively. To protect and manage Formosan
landlocked salmon habitat, it is important to understand a variety
land-uses affect on the watershed responses to storms. This study
discusses watershed responses to the dry-day before a storm event and
a variety of land-uses in the Wulin catchment. Under the land-use
planning in the Wulin catchment, the peak flows during typhoon
events do not have noticeable difference. However, the nutrient
exports can be highly reduced under the strategies of restraining
agriculture activities. Due to the higher affinity of P for soil than that
of N, the exports of TN from overall Wuling catchment were much
greater than Ortho-P. Agriculture mainly centralized in subbasin A,
which is the important source of nutrients in nonpoint source discharge.
The subbasin A supplied about 26% of the TN and 32% of the Ortho-P
discharge in 2004, despite the fact it only covers 19% area of the
Wuling catchment. The subbasin analysis displayed that the
agricultural subbasin A exports higher nutrients per unit area than
other forest subbasins. Additionally, the agricultural subbasin A
contributed a higher percentage to total Ortho-P exports compares to
TN. The results of subbasin analysis might imply the transport of
Ortho-P was similar to the particulate matter which was mainly
influenced by the runoff and affected by the desorption from soil
particles while the TN (dominated as nitrate-N) was mainly influenced
by base-flow.
Abstract: This paper considers the control of the longitudinal
flight dynamics of an F-16 aircraft. The primary design objective
is model-following of the pitch rate q, which is the preferred
system for aircraft approach and landing. Regulation of the aircraft
velocity V (or the Mach-hold autopilot) is also considered, but
as a secondary objective. The problem is challenging because the
system is nonlinear, and also non-affine in the input. A sliding
mode controller is designed for the pitch rate, that exploits the
modal decomposition of the linearized dynamics into its short-period
and phugoid approximations. The inherent robustness of the SMC
design provides a convenient way to design controllers without gain
scheduling, with a steady-state response that is comparable to that
of a conventional polynomial based gain-scheduled approach with
integral control, but with improved transient performance. Integral
action is introduced in the sliding mode design using the recently
developed technique of “conditional integrators", and it is shown that
robust regulation is achieved with asymptotically constant exogenous
signals, without degrading the transient response. Through extensive
simulation on the nonlinear multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
longitudinal model of the F-16 aircraft, it is shown that the conditional
integrator design outperforms the one based on the conventional linear
control, without requiring any scheduling.
Abstract: India-s North-Eastern part, comprising of seven states, is a lowly developed, tribal population dominated region in India. Inspite of the common Mongoloid origin and lifestyle of majority of the population residing here, sharp differences exist in the status of their socio-economic development. The present paper, through a state-wise analysis, makes an attempt to find out the extent of this disparity, especially on the socio-economic front. It illustrates the situations prevailing in health, education, economic and social cohesion sector. Discussion on the implications of such disparity on social stability finds that the causes of frequent insurgency activities, that have been penetrating the region for a long time, thereby creating communal conflicts, can be traced in the economic deprivation and disparity. In the last section, the paper makes policy prescription and suggests how by taking care of disparity and deprivation both poverty and the problem of communal conflicts can be controlled.
Abstract: This paper present an efficient and reliable technique of optimization which combined fuel cost economic optimization and emission dispatch using the Sigmoid Decreasing Inertia Weight Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO) to reduce the cost of fuel and pollutants resulting from fuel combustion by keeping the output of generators, bus voltages, shunt capacitors and transformer tap settings within the security boundary. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been demonstrated on IEEE 30-bus system with six generating units. The results clearly show that the proposed algorithm gives better and faster speed convergence then linearly decreasing inertia weight.
Abstract: In this work, we present an automatic vehicle detection
system for airborne videos using combined features. We propose a
pixel-wise classification method for vehicle detection using Dynamic
Bayesian Networks. In spite of performing pixel-wise classification,
relations among neighboring pixels in a region are preserved in the
feature extraction process. The main novelty of the detection scheme is
that the extracted combined features comprise not only pixel-level
information but also region-level information. Afterwards, tracking is
performed on the detected vehicles. Tracking is performed using
efficient Kalman filter with dynamic particle sampling. Experiments
were conducted on a wide variety of airborne videos. We do not
assume prior information of camera heights, orientation, and target
object sizes in the proposed framework. The results demonstrate
flexibility and good generalization abilities of the proposed method on
a challenging dataset.
Abstract: The paper presents a modelling methodology for
small scale multi-source renewable energy systems. Using historical
site-specific weather data, the relationships of cost, availability and
energy form are visualised as a function of the sizing of photovoltaic
arrays, wind turbines, and battery capacity. The specific dependency
of each site on its own particular weather patterns show that unique
solutions exist for each site. It is shown that in certain cases the
capital component cost can be halved if the desired theoretical
demand availability is reduced from 100% to 99%.
Abstract: Walking as a type of non-motorized transportation has
various social, economical and environmental privileges. Also, today
different aspects of sustainable development have been emphasized
and promotion of sustainable transportation modes has been
considered according to this approach. Therefore, the objective of
this research is exploring the circumstance of relationship between
walking and sustainable urban transportation.For writing this article,
the most important resources related to the traits of walking have
been surveyed via a documentary method and after explaining the
concept of sustainable transportation and its indicators, benefiting
from the viewpoints of transportation experts of Tehran, as the capital
and greatest city of Iran, different modes of urban transportation have
been compared in proportion to each criterion and to each other and
have been analyzed according to AHP method. The results of this
study indicate that walking is the most sustainable mode of inner city
transportation.
Abstract: This paper presents an improvement method of
the multiple pitch estimation algorithm using comb filters.
Conventionally the pitch was estimated by using parallel
-connected comb filters method (PCF). However, PCF has
problems which often fail in the pitch estimation when there is
the fundamental frequency of higher tone near harmonics of
lower tone. Therefore the estimation is assigned to a wrong
note when shared frequencies happen. This issue often occurs
in estimating octave 3 or more. Proposed method, for solving
the problem, estimates the pitch with every harmonic instead of
every octave. As a result, our method reaches the accuracy of
more than 80%.
Abstract: Recent evidences on liquidity and valuation of securities in the capital markets clearly show the importance of stock market liquidity and valuation of firms. In this paper, relationship between transparency, liquidity, and valuation is studied by using data obtained from 70 companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during2003-2012. In this study, discriminatory earnings management, as a sign of lack of transparency and Tobin's Q, was used as the criteria of valuation. The results indicate that there is a significant and reversed relationship between earnings management and liquidity. On the other hand, there is a relationship between liquidity and transparency.The results also indicate a significant relationship between transparency and valuation. Transparency has an indirect effect on firm valuation alone or through the liquidity channel. Although the effect of transparency on the value of a firm was reduced by adding the variable of liquidity, the cumulative effect of transparency and liquidity increased.
Abstract: In this paper, some common gearboxes vibration analysis methods and condition monitoring systems are explained. In addition, an experimental gearbox vibration analysis is discussed through a critical case history for a mixer gearbox related to Iran oil industry. The case history also consists of gear manufacturing (machining) recommendations, lubrication condition of gearbox and machinery maintenance activities that caused reduction in noise and vibration of the gearbox. Besides some of the recent patents and innovations in gearboxes, lubrication and vibration monitoring systems explained. Finally micro pitting and surface fatigue in pinion and bevel of mentioned horizontal to vertical gearbox discussed in details.