Abstract: Traffic congestion has become a major problem in
many countries. One of the main causes of traffic congestion is due
to road merges. Vehicles tend to move slower when they reach the
merging point. In this paper, an enhanced algorithm for traffic
simulation based on the fluid-dynamic algorithm and kinematic wave
theory is proposed. The enhanced algorithm is used to study traffic
congestion at a road merge. This paper also describes the
development of a dynamic traffic simulation tool which is used as a
scenario planning and to forecast traffic congestion level in a certain
time based on defined parameter values. The tool incorporates the
enhanced algorithm as well as the two original algorithms. Output
from the three above mentioned algorithms are measured in terms of
traffic queue length, travel time and the total number of vehicles
passing through the merging point. This paper also suggests an
efficient way of reducing traffic congestion at a road merge by
analyzing the traffic queue length and travel time.
Abstract: This study presents the improvement of thermal
performance of heat pipe using copper nanofluid with aqueous
solution of n-Butanol. The nanofluids kept in the suspension of
conventional fluids have the potential of superior heat transfer
capability than the conventional fluids due to their improved thermal
conductivity. In this work, the copper nanofluid which has a 40 nm
size with a concentration of 100 mg/lit is kept in the suspension of
the de-ionized (DI) water and an aqueous solution of n-Butanol and
these fluids are used as a working medium in the heat pipe. The study
discusses about the effect of heat pipe inclination, type of working
fluid and heat input on the thermal efficiency and thermal resistance.
The experimental results are evaluated in terms of its performance
metrics and are compared with that of DI water.
Abstract: This study was designed to formulate,
pharmaceutically evaluate a topical skin-care cream (w/o emulsion)
of Aloe Vera versus its vehicle (Base) as control and determine their
effects on Stratum Corneum (SC) water content and Transepidermal
water loss (TEWL). Base containing no extract and a Formulation
containing 3% concentrated extract of Aloe Vera was developed by
entrapping in the inner aqueous phase of w/o emulsion (cream).
Lemon oil was incorporated to improve the odor. Both the Base and
Formulation were stored at 8°C ±0.1°C (in refrigerator), 25°C±0.1°C,
40°C±0.1°C and 40°C± 0.1°C with 75% RH (in incubator) for a
period of 4 weeks to predict their stability. The evaluation parameters
consisted of color, smell, type of emulsion, phase separation,
electrical conductivity, centrifugation, liquefaction and pH. Both the
Base and Formulation were applied to the cheeks of 21 healthy
human volunteers for a period of 8 weeks Stratum corneum (SC)
water content and Transepidermal water loss (TEWL) were
monitored every week to measure any effect produced by these
topical creams. The expected organoleptic stability of creams was
achieved from 4 weeks in-vitro study period. Odor was disappeared
with the passage of time due to volatilization of lemon oil. Both the
Base and Formulation produced significant (p≤0.05) changes in
TEWL with respect to time. SC water content was significantly
(p≤0.05) increased by the Formulation while the Base has
insignificant (p 0.05) effects on SC water content. The newly
formulated cream of Aloe Vera, applied is suitable for improvement
and quantitative monitoring of skin hydration level (SC water
content/ moisturizing effects) and reducing TEWL in people with dry
skin.
Abstract: Size based filtration is one of the common methods
employed to isolate circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from whole
blood. It is well known that this method suffers from isolation
efficiency to purity tradeoff. However, this tradeoff is poorly
understood. In this paper, we present the design and manufacturing
of a special rectangular slit filter. The filter was designed to retain
maximal amounts of nucleated cells, while minimizing the pressure
on cells, thereby preserving their morphology. The key parameter,
namely, input pressure, was optimized to retain the maximal number
of tumor cells, whilst maximizing the depletion of normal blood cells
(red and white blood cells and platelets). Our results indicate that for
a slit geometry of 5 × 40 μm on a 13 mm circular membrane with a
fill factor of 21%, a pressure of 6.9 mBar yields the optimum for
maximizing isolation of MCF-7 and depletion of normal blood cells.
Abstract: The environment pollution with pesticides and heavy
metals is a recognized problem nowadays, with extension to the
global scale the tendency of amplification. Even with all the progress
in the environmental field, both in the emphasize of the effect of the
pollutants upon health, the linked studies environment-health are
insufficient, not only in Romania but all over the world also. We aim
to describe the particular situation in Romania regarding the
uncontrolled use of pesticides, to identify and evaluate the risk zones
for health and the environment in Romania, with the final goal of
designing adequate programs for reduction and control of the risk
sources. An exploratory study was conducted to determine the
magnitude of the pesticide use problem in a population living in
Saliste, a rural setting in Transylvania, Romania. The significant
stakeholders in Saliste region were interviewed and a sample from
the population living in Saliste area was selected to fill in a designed
questionnaire. All the selected participants declared that they used
pesticides in their activities for more than one purpose. They
declared they annually applied pesticides for a period of time
between 11 and 30 years, from 5 to 9 days per year on average,
mainly on crops situated at some distance from the houses but high
risk behavior was identified as the volunteers declared the use of
pesticides in the backyard gardens, near their homes, where children
were playing. The pesticide applicators did not have the necessary
knowledge about safety and exposure. The health data must be
correlated with exposure biomarkers in attempt to identify the
possible health effects of the pesticides exposure. Future plans
include educational campaigns to raise the awareness of the
population on the danger of uncontrolled use of pesticides.
Abstract: For Romania, the fulfilment of the obligations
undertaken as a member state of the European Union in accordance
with the Treaty of Accession requires the effective implementation of
sustainable development principles and practices, this being the only
reasonable development option, which adequately draws in on the
economic, social and environment resources. Achieving this
objective is based on a profound analysis of the realities in the
Romanian economy, which will reflect the existent situation and the
action directions for the future. The paper presents an analysis of the
Romanian economic performances compared to the EU economy,
based on the sustainable value (SV) model. The analysis highlighted
the considerable gap between Romania and the EU regarding the
sustainable capitalization of resources, the provided information
being useful to justify strategic development decisions at a micro and
macro levels.
Abstract: In this work, we propose a hybrid heuristic in order to
solve the Team Orienteering Problem (TOP). Given a set of points (or
customers), each with associated score (profit or benefit), and a team
that has a fixed number of members, the problem to solve is to visit a
subset of points in order to maximize the total collected score. Each
member performs a tour starting at the start point, visiting distinct
customers and the tour terminates at the arrival point. In addition,
each point is visited at most once, and the total time in each tour
cannot be greater than a given value. The proposed heuristic combines
beam search and a local optimization strategy. The algorithm was
tested on several sets of instances and encouraging results were
obtained.
Abstract: Existing ground movement surveillance technologies
at airports are subjected to limitations due to shadowing effects or
multiple reflections. Therefore, there is a strong demand for a new
sensing technology, which will be cost effective and will provide
detection of non-cooperative targets under any weather conditions.
This paper aims to present a new intelligent system, developed
within the framework of the EC-funded ISMAEL project, which is
based on a new magnetic sensing technology and provides detection,
tracking and automatic classification of targets moving on the airport
surface. The system is currently being installed at two European
airports. Initial experimental results under real airport traffic
demonstrate the great potential of the proposed system.
Abstract: 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.
Abstract: 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.
Abstract: 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.
Abstract: The concept of privacy, seen in connection to the consumer's private space and personalization, has recently gained a higher importance as a consequence of the increasing marketing efforts of the organizations based on the capturing, processing and usage of consumer-s personal data.Paper intends to provide a definition of the consumer-s private space based on the types of personal data the consumer is willing to disclose, to assess the attitude toward personalization and to identify the means preferred by consumers to control their personal data and defend their private space. Several implications generated through the definition of the consumer-s private space are identified and weighted from both the consumers- and organizations- perspectives.
Abstract: The calculation of buckling length factor (K) for steel
frames columns is a major and governing processes to determine the
dimensions steel frame columns cross sections during design. The
buckling length of steel frames columns has a direct effect on the cost
(weight) of using cross section. A new formula is required to
determine buckling length factor (K) by simplified way. In this
research a new formula for buckling length factor (K) was established
to determine by accurate method for a limited interval of columns
ends rigidity (GA, GB). The new formula can be used ease to
evaluate the buckling length factor without needing to complicated
equations or difficult charts.
Abstract: 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.
Abstract: 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.
Abstract: 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.
Abstract: In this paper, the criteria of Ψ-eventual stability have been established for generalized impulsive differential systems of multiple dependent variables. The sufficient conditions have been obtained using piecewise continuous Lyapunov function. An example is given to support our theoretical result.
Abstract: 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.
Abstract: 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.
Abstract: To evaluate genetic variation of wheat (Triticum aestivum) affected by heat and drought stress on eight Australian wheat genotypes that are parents of Doubled Haploid (HD) mapping populations at the vegetative stage, the water stress experiment was conducted at 65% field capacity in growth room. Heat stress experiment was conducted in the research field under irrigation over summer. Result show that water stress decreased dry shoot weight and RWC but increased osmolarity and means of Fv/Fm values in all varieties except for Krichauff. Krichauff and Kukri had the maximum RWC under drought stress. Trident variety was shown maximum WUE, osmolarity (610 mM/Kg), dry mater, quantum yield and Fv/Fm 0.815 under water stress condition. However, the recovery of quantum yield was apparent between 4 to 7 days after stress in all varieties. Nevertheless, increase in water stress after that lead to strong decrease in quantum yield. There was a genetic variation for leaf pigments content among varieties under heat stress. Heat stress decreased significantly the total chlorophyll content that measured by SPAD. Krichauff had maximum value of Anthocyanin content (2.978 A/g FW), chlorophyll a+b (2.001 mg/g FW) and chlorophyll a (1.502 mg/g FW). Maximum value of chlorophyll b (0.515 mg/g FW) and Carotenoids (0.234 mg/g FW) content belonged to Kukri. The quantum yield of all varieties decreased significantly, when the weather temperature increased from 28 ÔùªC to 36 ÔùªC during the 6 days. However, the recovery of quantum yield was apparent after 8th day in all varieties. The maximum decrease and recovery in quantum yield was observed in Krichauff. Drought and heat tolerant and moderately tolerant wheat genotypes were included Trident, Krichauff, Kukri and RAC875. Molineux, Berkut and Excalibur were clustered into most sensitive and moderately sensitive genotypes. Finally, the results show that there was a significantly genetic variation among the eight varieties that were studied under heat and water stress.