Abstract: Although women have merit in their jobs, they still
are located very few in the top management in many sectors. There
are many causes of such situation. Such a situation creates obstacles;
especially invisible ones are called “glass ceiling syndrome”. Also,
studies which handle this subject in academic community are very
few. The aim of this research is to reach the results about glass
ceiling obstacles in terms of female teaching staff (academics)
working in higher education institutions. To this end, our study was
performed on female academics working at Selcuk University, Konya
/ Turkey. Our study's main aim can be expressed as to determine
whether there are glass ceiling obstacles for female academics
working at the higher education institution in question, to measure
their glass ceiling perceptions and, thus, to identify what the glass
ceiling barrier components for them to promotion to senior
management positions are.
Abstract: It is well-known that in wireless local area networks,
authenticating nodes by their MAC addresses is not secure since it is
very easy for an attacker to learn one of the authorized addresses and
change his MAC address accordingly. In this paper, in order to
prevent MAC address spoofing attacks, we propose to use
dynamically changing MAC addresses and make each address usable
for only one session. The scheme we propose does not require any
change in 802.11 protocols and incurs only a small performance
overhead. One of the nice features of our new scheme is that no third
party can link different communication sessions of the same user by
monitoring MAC addresses therefore our scheme is preferable also
with respect to user privacy.
Abstract: Current proposals for E-passport or ID-Card is similar to a regular passport with the addition of tiny contactless integrated circuit (computer chip) inserted in the back cover, which will act as a secure storage device of the same data visually displayed on the photo page of the passport. In addition, it will include a digital photograph that will enable biometric comparison, through the use of facial recognition technology at international borders. Moreover, the e-passport will have a new interface, incorporating additional antifraud and security features. However, its problems are reliability, security and privacy. Privacy is a serious issue since there is no encryption between the readers and the E-passport. However, security issues such as authentication, data protection and control techniques cannot be embedded in one process. In this paper, design and prototype implementation of an improved E-passport reader is presented. The passport holder is authenticated online by using GSM network. The GSM network is the main interface between identification center and the e-passport reader. The communication data is protected between server and e-passport reader by using AES to encrypt data for protection will transferring through GSM network. Performance measurements indicate a 19% improvement in encryption cycles versus previously reported results.
Abstract: Motion sensors have been commonly used as a valuable component in mechatronic systems, however, many mechatronic designs and applications that need motion sensors cost enormous amount of money, especially high-tech systems. Design of a software for communication protocol between data acquisition card and motion sensor is another issue that has to be solved. This study presents how to design a low cost motion data acquisition setup consisting of MPU 6050 motion sensor (gyro and accelerometer in 3 axes) and Arduino Mega2560 microcontroller. Design parameters are calibration of the sensor, identification and communication between sensor and data acquisition card, interpretation of data collected by the sensor.
Abstract: This study aims to assess the potential of solar energy technology for improving access to water and hence the livelihood strategies of rural communities in Baja California Sur, Mexico. It focuses on livestock ranches and photovoltaic water-pumptechnology as well as other water extraction methods. The methodology used are the Sustainable Livelihoods and the Appropriate Technology approaches. A household survey was applied in June of 2006 to 32 ranches in the municipality, of which 22 used PV pumps; and semi-structured interviews were conducted. Findings indicate that solar pumps have in fact helped people improve their quality of life by allowing them to pursue a different livelihood strategy and that improved access to water -not necessarily as more water but as less effort to extract and collect it- does not automatically imply overexploitation of the resource; consumption is based on basic needs as well as on storage and pumping capacity. Justification for such systems lies in the avoidance of logistical problems associated to fossil fuels, PV pumps proved to be the most beneficial when substituting gasoline or diesel equipment but of dubious advantage if intended to replace wind or gravity systems. Solar water pumping technology-s main obstacle to dissemination are high investment and repairs costs and it is therefore not suitable for all cases even when insolation rates and water availability are adequate. In cases where affordability is not an obstacle it has become an important asset that contributes –by means of reduced expenses, less effort and saved time- to the improvement of livestock, the main livelihood provider for these ranches.
Abstract: Creation and maintenance of knowledge management
systems has been recognized as an important research area.
Consecutively lack of accurate results from knowledge management
systems limits the organization to apply their knowledge
management processes. This leads to a failure in getting the right
information to the right people at the right time thus followed by a
deficiency in decision making processes. An Intranet offers a
powerful tool for communication and collaboration, presenting data
and information, and the means that creates and shares knowledge,
all in one easily accessible place. This paper proposes an archetype
describing how a knowledge management system, with the support
of intranet capabilities, could very much increase the accuracy of
capturing, storing and retrieving knowledge based processes thereby
increasing the efficiency of the system. This system will expect a
critical mass of usage, by the users, for intranet to function as
knowledge management systems. This prototype would lead to a
design of an application that would impose creation and maintenance
of an effective knowledge management system through intranet. The
aim of this paper is to introduce an effective system to handle
capture, store and distribute knowledge management in a form that
may not lead to any failure which exists in most of the systems. The
methodology used in the system would require all the employees, in
the organization, to contribute the maximum to deliver the system to
a successful arena. The system is still in its initial mode and thereby
the authors are under the process to practically implement the ideas,
as mentioned in the system, to produce satisfactory results.
Abstract: This research is aimed at studying the nature of
problems and demands of the training for community leaders in the
upper northeastern region of Thailand. Population and group
samplings are based on 360 community leaders in the region who
have experienced prior training from the Udonthani Rajabhat
University. Stratified random samplings have been drawn upon 186
participants. The research tools is questionnaires. The frequency,
percentage and standard deviation are employed in data analysis. The
findings indicate that most of community leaders are males and
senior adults. The problems in training are associated with the
inconveniences of long-distance travelling to training locations,
inadequacy of learning centers and training sites and high training
costs. The demand of training is basically motivated by a desire for
self-development in modern knowledge in keeping up-to-date with
the changing world and the need for technological application and
facilitation in shortening the distance to training locations and in
limiting expensive training costs.
Abstract: Public procurement is one of the most
important areas in the public sector that introduces a possibility for a
corruption. Due to the volume of the funds that are
allocated through this institution (in the EU countries it is between 10
– 15% of GDP), it has very serious implications for the efficiency of
public expenditures and the overall economic efficiency as
well. Indicators that are usually used for the measurement of the
corruption (such as Corruption Perceptions Index - CPI) show that
the worst situation is in the post-communist countries
and Mediterranean countries.
The presented paper uses the Czech Republic as an example of a
post-communist country and analyses the factors which influence
the scope of corruption in public procurement. Moreover, the
paper discusses indicators that could point at the public procurement
market inefficiency. The presented results show that post-communist
states use the institute of public contracts significantly more than the
old member countries of the continental Europe. It has a very
important implication because it gives more space for corruption.
Furthermore, it appears that the inefficient functioning of public
procurement market is clearly manifested in the low number of bids,
low level of market transparency and an ineffective control
system. Some of the observed indicators are statistically significantly
correlated with the CPI.
Abstract: This paper proposes the use of metrics in design space exploration that highlight where in the structure of the model and at what point in the behaviour, prevention is needed against transient faults. Previous approaches to tackle transient faults focused on recovery after detection. Almost no research has been directed towards preventive measures. But in real-time systems, hard deadlines are performance requirements that absolutely must be met and a missed deadline constitutes an erroneous action and a possible system failure. This paper proposes the use of metrics to assess the system design to flag where transient faults may have significant impact. These tools then allow the design to be changed to minimize that impact, and they also flag where particular design techniques – such as coding of communications or memories – need to be applied in later stages of design.
Abstract: Motivated by the recent work of Herbert, Hayen, Macaskill and Walter [Interval estimation for the difference of two independent variances. Communications in Statistics, Simulation and Computation, 40: 744-758, 2011.], we investigate, in this paper, new confidence intervals for the difference between two normal population variances based on the generalized confidence interval of Weerahandi [Generalized Confidence Intervals. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 88(423): 899-905, 1993.] and the closed form method of variance estimation of Zou, Huo and Taleban [Simple confidence intervals for lognormal means and their differences with environmental applications. Environmetrics 20: 172-180, 2009]. Monte Carlo simulation results indicate that our proposed confidence intervals give a better coverage probability than that of the existing confidence interval. Also two new confidence intervals perform similarly based on their coverage probabilities and their average length widths.
Abstract: Mycophenolic acid (MPA) is a secondary metabolite
produced by Penicillium brevicompactum, which has antibiotic and
immunosuppressive properties. In this study, the first, mycophenolic
acid was produced in a fermentation process by Penicillium
brevicompactum MUCL 19011 in shake flask using a base medium.
The maximum MPA production, product yield and productivity of
process were 1.379 g/L, 18.6 mg/g glucose and 4.9 mg/L. h,
respectively. Also the glucose consumption, biomass and MPA
production profiles were investigated during batch cultivation.
Obtained results showed that MPA production starts approximately
after 180 hours and reaches to a maximum at 280 h. In the next step,
the effects of some various concentrations of enzymatically
hydrolyzed casein on MPA production were evaluated. Maximum
MPA production, product yield and productivity as 3.63 g/L, 49
mg/g glucose and 12.96 mg/L.h, respectively were obtained with
using 30 g/L enzymatically hydrolyzed casein in culture medium.
These values show an enhanced MPA production, product yield and
process productivity pr as 116.8%, 132.8% and 163.2%, respectively.
Abstract: Attack graph is an integral part of modeling the
overview of network security. System administrators use attack graphs to determine how vulnerable their systems are and to determine
what security measures to deploy to defend their systems. Previous methods on AGG(attack graphs generation) are aiming at
the whole network, which makes the process of AGG complex and
non-scalable. In this paper, we propose a new approach which is
simple and scalable to AGG by decomposing the whole network into atomic domains. Each atomic domain represents a host with a specific privilege. Then the process for AGG is achieved by communications
among all the atomic domains. Our approach simplifies the process
of design for the whole network, and can gives the attack graphs including each attack path for each host, and when the network changes we just carry on the operations of corresponding atomic
domains which makes the process of AGG scalable.
Abstract: Ants are fascinating creatures that demonstrate the
ability to find food and bring it back to their nest. Their ability as a
colony, to find paths to food sources has inspired the development of
algorithms known as Ant Colony Systems (ACS). The principle of
cooperation forms the backbone of such algorithms, commonly used
to find solutions to problems such as the Traveling Salesman
Problem (TSP). Ants communicate to each other through chemical
substances called pheromones. Modeling individual ants- ability to
manipulate this substance can help an ACS find the best solution.
This paper introduces a Dynamic Ant Colony System with threelevel
updates (DACS3) that enhance an existing ACS. Experiments
were conducted to observe single ant behavior in a colony of
Malaysian House Red Ants. Such behavior was incorporated into the
DACS3 algorithm. We benchmark the performance of DACS3 versus
DACS on TSP instances ranging from 14 to 100 cities. The result
shows that the DACS3 algorithm can achieve shorter distance in
most cases and also performs considerably faster than DACS.
Abstract: The performance of ground to deep space optical
communication systems is degraded by distortion of the beam as it
propagates through the turbulent atmosphere. Turbulence causes
fluctuations in the intensity of the received signal which ultimately
affects the acquisition time required to acquire and locate the spaceborne
target using narrow laser beam. In this paper, performance of
free-space optical (FSO) communication system in atmospheric
turbulence has been analyzed in terms of acquisition time for
coherent and non-coherent modulation schemes. Numerical results
presented in graphical and tabular forms show that the acquisition
time increases with the increase in turbulence level. This is true for
both schemes. The BPSK has lowest acquisition time among all
schemes. In non-coherent schemes, M-PPM performs better than the
other schemes. With the increase in M, acquisition time becomes
lower, but at the cost of increase in system complexity.
Abstract: This paper proposes a model of adding relations between
members of the same level in a pyramid organization structure
which is a complete K-ary tree such that the communication of
information between every member in the organization becomes the
most efficient. When edges between one node and every other node
with the same depth N in a complete K-ary tree of height H are
added, an optimal depth N* = H is obtained by minimizing the total
path length which is the sum of lengths of shortest paths between
every pair of all nodes.
Abstract: Voice Over IP (VoIP) is a technology that could pass
the voice traffic and data packet form over an IP network. Network
can be used for intranet or Internet. Phone calls using VoIP has
advantages in terms of cheaper cost of PSTN phone to more than
half, because the cost is calculated by the cost of the global nature of
the Internet. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol
at the application layer which serves to establish, modify, and
terminate a multimedia session involving one or more users. This SIP
signaling has SIP message in text form that is used for session
management by the SIP components, such as User Agent, Registrar,
Redirect Server, and Proxy Server. To build a SIP communication is
required SIP Express Router (SER) to be able to receive SIP
messages, for handling the basic functions of SIP messages.
Problems occur when the NAT through which affects the voice
communication will be blocked starting from the sound that is not
sent or one side of the sound are sent (half duplex). How that could
be used to penetrate NAT is to use a given mediaproxy random RTP
port to penetrate NAT.
Abstract: The increase popularity of multimedia application especially in image processing places a great demand on efficient data storage and transmission techniques. Network communication such as wireless network can easily be intercepted and cause of confidential information leaked. Unfortunately, conventional compression and encryption methods are too slow; it is impossible to carry out real time secure image processing. In this research, Embedded Zerotree Wavelet (EZW) encoder which specially designs for wavelet compression is examined. With this algorithm, three methods are proposed to reduce the processing time, space and security protection that will be secured enough to protect the data.
Abstract: Recently, most digital systems are designed as GALS (Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous) systems. Several architectures have been proposed as bus architectures for a GALS system : shared bus, segmented bus, ring bus, and so on. In this study, we propose a ring segmented bus architecture which is a combination of segmented bus and ring bus architecture with the aim of throughput enhancement. In a segmented bus architecture, segments are connected in series. By connecting the segments at the end of the bus and constructing the ring bus, it becomes possible to allocate a channel of the bus bidirectionally. The bus channel is allocated to the shortest path between segments. We consider a metastable operation caused by asynchronous communication between segments and a burst transfer between segments. According to the result of simulation, it is shown that the GALS system designed by the proposed method has the desired operations.
Abstract: Power line channel is proposed as an alternative for broadband data transmission especially in developing countries like Tanzania [1]. However the channel is affected by stochastic attenuation and deep notches which can lead to the limitation of channel capacity and achievable data rate. Various studies have characterized the channel without giving exactly the maximum performance and limitation in data transfer rate may be this is due to complexity of channel modeling being used. In this paper the channel performance of medium voltage, low voltage and indoor power line channel is presented. In the investigations orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with phase shift keying (PSK) as carrier modulation schemes is considered, for indoor, medium and low voltage channels with typical ten branches and also Golay coding is applied for medium voltage channel. From channels, frequency response deep notches are observed in various frequencies which can lead to reduce the achievable data rate. However, is observed that data rate up to 240Mbps is realized for a signal to noise ratio of about 50dB for indoor and low voltage channels, however for medium voltage a typical link with ten branches is affected by strong multipath and coding is required for feasible broadband data transfer.
Abstract: A multi-agent type robot for disaster response in calamity scene is proposed in this paper. The proposed grouped rescue robots can perform cooperative reconnaissance and surveillance to achieve a given rescue mission. The multi-agent rescue of dual set robot consists of one master set and three slave units. The research for this rescue robot system is going to detect at harmful environment where human is unreachable, such as the building is infected with virus or the factory has hazardous liquid in effluent. As a dual set robot, with Bluetooth and communication network, the master set can connect with slave units and send information back to computer by wireless and monitor. Therefore, rescuer can be informed the real-time information in a calamity area. Furthermore, each slave robot is able to obstacle avoidance by ultrasonic sensors, and encodes distance and location by compass. The master robot can integrate every devices information to increase the efficiency of prospected and research unknown area.