Abstract: The increasing demand for sufficient and clean
energy forces industrial and service companies to align their strategies towards efficient consumption. This trend refers also to the
residential building sector. There, large amounts of energy consumption are caused by house and facility heating. Many of the
operated hot water heating systems lack hydraulic balanced working
conditions for heat distribution and –transmission and lead to
inefficient heating. Through hydraulic balancing of heating systems,
significant energy savings for primary and secondary energy can be
achieved. This paper addresses the use of KNX-technology (Smart
Buildings) in residential buildings to ensure a dynamic adaption of
hydraulic system's performance, in order to increase the heating
system's efficiency. In this paper, the procedure of heating system
segmentation into hydraulically independent units (meshes) is
presented. Within these meshes, the heating valve are addressed and
controlled by a central facility server. Feasibility criteria towards
such drivers will be named. The dynamic hydraulic balance is
achieved by positioning these valves according to heating loads, that
are generated from the temperature settings in the corresponding
rooms. The energetic advantages of single room heating control
procedures, based on the application FacilityManager, is presented.
Abstract: With the advance of information technology in the
new era the applications of Internet to access data resources has
steadily increased and huge amount of data have become accessible
in various forms. Obviously, the network providers and agencies,
look after to prevent electronic attacks that may be harmful or may
be related to terrorist applications. Thus, these have facilitated the
authorities to under take a variety of methods to protect the special
regions from harmful data. One of the most important approaches is
to use firewall in the network facilities. The main objectives of
firewalls are to stop the transfer of suspicious packets in several
ways. However because of its blind packet stopping, high process
power requirements and expensive prices some of the providers are
reluctant to use the firewall. In this paper we 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.
By discriminating these data, an administrator may take an approach
action against the user. This method is very fast and can be used
simply in adjacent with the Internet routers.
Abstract: Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) has been
proposed to provide reliable transport of real-time communications.
Due to its attractive features, such as multi-streaming and multihoming,
the SCTP is often expected to be an alternative protocol
for TCP and UDP. In the original SCTP standard, the secondary path
is mainly regarded as a redundancy. Recently, most of researches
have focused on extending the SCTP to enable a host to send its
packets to a destination over multiple paths simultaneously. In order
to transfer packets concurrently over the multiple paths, the SCTP
should be well designed to avoid unnecessary fast retransmission
and the mis-estimation of congestion window size through the paths.
Therefore, we propose an Enhanced Cooperative ACK SCTP (ECASCTP)
to improve the path recovery efficiency of multi-homed host
which is under concurrent multiple transfer mode. We evaluated the
performance of our proposed scheme using ns-2 simulation in terms
of cwnd variation, path recovery time, and goodput. Our scheme
provides better performance in lossy and path asymmetric networks.
Abstract: The present paper aims to present the significant role that the concept of governance can play in order to combine naturals resources as useful funding basis for the formation of a stable and effective welfare state model. The combination of those two different fields aims to represent the modern trends of our era as the means to solve the severe financial and economic issues caused mostly due to the malfunction of the welfare state and its public sector. European Union and Asian countries (especially China) are the main areas of interest since EU experiences a fiscal and economic crisis while China rules the area of the natural resources exploiting 97% of rare earths elements worldwide.
Abstract: The present microfluidic study is emphasizing the flow behavior within a Y shape micro-bifurcation in two similar flow configurations. We report here a numerical and experimental investigation on the velocity profiles evolution and secondary flows, manifested at different Reynolds numbers (Re) and for two different boundary conditions. The experiments are performed using special designed setup based on optical microscopic devices. With this setup, direct visualizations and quantitative measurements of the path-lines are obtained. A Micro-PIV measurement system is used to obtain velocity profiles distributions in a spatial evolution in the main flows domains. The experimental data is compared with numerical simulations performed with commercial computational code FLUENT in a 3D geometry with the same dimensions as the experimental one. The numerical flow patterns are found to be in good agreement with the experimental manifestations.
Abstract: Leptospirosis occurs worldwide (except the
poles of the earth), urban and rural areas, developed and
developing countries, especially in Thailand. It can be
transmitted to the human by rats through direct and indirect
ways. Human can be infected by either touching the infected rats
or contacting with water, soil containing urine from the infected
rats through skin, eyes and nose. The data of the people who
are infected with this disease indicates that most of the
patients are adults. The transmission of this disease is studied
through mathematical model. The population is separated into human
and rat. The human is divided into two classes, namely juvenile
and adult. The model equation is constructed for each class. The
standard dynamical modeling method is then used for
analyzing the behaviours of solutions. In addition, the
conditions of the parameters for the disease free and endemic
states are obtained. Numerical solutions are shown to support the
theoretical predictions. The results of this study guide the way to
decrease the disease outbreak.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of
perceived social support and stress on the coping capability and level
of depression of foreign and local students in Malaysia. Using
convenience sampling, 200 students from three universities in
Selangor, Malaysia participated in the study. The results of this study
revealed that there was a significant relationship between perceived
social support and coping capability. It is also found that there is a
negative relationship between coping capability and depression.
Further, stress and depression are positively related whereas stress
and coping capability are negatively related. Lastly, there is no
significant difference for the stress level and coping capability
amongst local and foreign students.
Abstract: A new dual-fluid concept was studied that could eventually find application for cold-gas propulsion for small space satellites or other constant flow applications. In basic form, the concept uses two different refrigerant working fluids, each having a different saturation vapor pressure. The higher vapor pressure refrigerant remains in the saturation phase and is used to pressurize the lower saturation vapor pressure fluid (the propellant) which remains in the compressed liquid phase. A demonstration thruster concept based on this principle was designed and built to study its operating characteristics. An automotive-type electronic fuel injector was used to meter and deliver the propellant. Ejected propellant mass and momentum were measured for several combinations of refrigerants and hydrocarbon fluids. The thruster has the advantage of delivering relatively large total impulse at low tank pressure within a small volume.
Abstract: Today, the working areas put forward the administration of change. In order to provide this; it is required from the organizations to be creative. Professional creativity in offices depends on an environment that enables the development of the organization only after the individual or collective exertions within the organization. By providing this environment, the organization will gain efficiency, productivity, and work pleasure. In order to bring up the workforce appropriate to the related expectations, the professional creativity of the office management and secretarial profession candidates should be evaluated, education programs appropriate to this and related directly with the service quality should be prepared and the future of this profession should be directed. The aim of this study is to ensure the attention to improve the prepared education program as well as the creative thoughts and their applications, when carrying out an office management and secretarial training. 144 students took place in this research and a questionnaire of 48 questions was carried out.
Abstract: The human head representations usually are based on
the morphological – structural components of a real model. Over the
time became more and more necessary to achieve full virtual models
that comply very rigorous with the specifications of the human
anatomy. Still, making and using a model perfectly fitted with the
real anatomy is a difficult task, because it requires large hardware
resources and significant times for processing. That is why it is
necessary to choose the best compromise solution, which keeps the
right balance between the details perfection and the resources
consumption, in order to obtain facial animations with real-time
rendering. We will present here the way in which we achieved such a
3D system that we intend to use as a base point in order to create
facial animations with real-time rendering, used in medicine to find
and to identify different types of pathologies.
Abstract: In the present investigation, H13 tool steel has been
deposited on copper alloy substrate using both CO2 and diode laser.
A detailed parametric analysis has been carried out in order to find
out optimum processing zone for coating defect free H13 tool steel
on copper alloy substrate. Followed by parametric optimization, the
microstructure and microhardness of the deposited clads have been
evaluated. SEM micrographs revealed dendritic microstructure in
both clads. However, the microhardness of CO2 laser deposited clad
was much higher compared to diode laser deposited clad.
Abstract: This paper addresses the development of an intelligent vision system for human-robot interaction. The two novel contributions of this paper are 1) Detection of human faces and 2) Localizing the eye. The method is based on visual attributes of human skin colors and geometrical analysis of face skeleton. This paper introduces a spatial domain filtering method named ?Fuzzily skewed filter' which incorporates Fuzzy rules for deciding the gray level of pixels in the image in their neighborhoods and takes advantages of both the median and averaging filters. The effectiveness of the method has been justified over implementing the eye tracking commands to an entertainment robot, named ''AIBO''.
Abstract: This paper aims to initiate an analytical account of the
issues of compliance with economy condition for incentive pay
system application in an enterprise. Economy is considered one of the
conditions for effective incentive pay system application another
condition being the achievement of desired efficiency level of the
incentive pay system application. Bonus pay system is discussed as
an example.
Abstract: Perceptions of quality from both designers and users
perspective have now stretched beyond the traditional usability,
incorporating abstract and subjective concepts. This has led to a shift
in human computer interaction research communities- focus; a shift
that focuses on achieving user experience (UX) by not only fulfilling
conventional usability needs but also those that go beyond them. The
term UX, although widely spread and given significant importance,
lacks consensus in its unified definition. In this paper, we survey
various UX definitions and modeling frameworks and examine them
as the foundation for proposing a UX evolution lifecycle framework
for understanding UX in detail. In the proposed framework we identify
the building blocks of UX and discuss how UX evolves in various
phases. The framework can be used as a tool to understand experience
requirements and evaluate them, resulting in better UX design and
hence improved user satisfaction.
Abstract: Covering-based rough sets is an extension of rough
sets and it is based on a covering instead of a partition of the
universe. Therefore it is more powerful in describing some practical
problems than rough sets. However, by extending the rough sets,
covering-based rough sets can increase the roughness of each model
in recognizing objects. How to obtain better approximations from
the models of a covering-based rough sets is an important issue.
In this paper, two concepts, determinate elements and indeterminate
elements in a universe, are proposed and given precise definitions
respectively. This research makes a reasonable refinement of the
covering-element from a new viewpoint. And the refinement may
generate better approximations of covering-based rough sets models.
To prove the theory above, it is applied to eight major coveringbased
rough sets models which are adapted from other literature.
The result is, in all these models, the lower approximation increases
effectively. Correspondingly, in all models, the upper approximation
decreases with exceptions of two models in some special situations.
Therefore, the roughness of recognizing objects is reduced. This
research provides a new approach to the study and application of
covering-based rough sets.
Abstract: Blind signatures enable users to obtain valid signatures for a message without revealing its content to the signer. This paper presents a new blind signature scheme, i.e. identity-based blind signature scheme with message recovery. Due to the message recovery property, the new scheme requires less bandwidth than the identitybased blind signatures with similar constructions. The scheme is based on modified Weil/Tate pairings over elliptic curves, and thus requires smaller key sizes for the same level of security compared to previous approaches not utilizing bilinear pairings. Security and efficiency analysis for the scheme is provided in this paper.
Abstract: In the proposed method for Web page-ranking, a
novel theoretic model is introduced and tested by examples of order
relationships among IP addresses. Ranking is induced using a
convexity feature, which is learned according to these examples
using a self-organizing procedure. We consider the problem of selforganizing
learning from IP data to be represented by a semi-random
convex polygon procedure, in which the vertices correspond to IP
addresses. Based on recent developments in our regularization
theory for convex polygons and corresponding Euclidean distance
based methods for classification, we develop an algorithmic
framework for learning ranking functions based on a Computational
Geometric Theory. We show that our algorithm is generic, and
present experimental results explaining the potential of our approach.
In addition, we explain the generality of our approach by showing its
possible use as a visualization tool for data obtained from diverse
domains, such as Public Administration and Education.
Abstract: With the intention of screening for heavy metal
tolerance, a number of bacteria were isolated and characterized from
a pristine soil. Two Gram positive isolates were identified as
Paenibacillus sp. and Bacillus thuringeinsis. Tolerance of Cd2+, Cu2+
and Zn2+ by these bacteria was studied and found that both bacteria
were highly sensitive to Cu2+ compared to other two metals. Both
bacteria showed the same pattern of metal tolerance in the order Zn+
> Cd2+ > Cu2+. When the metal tolerance in both bacteria was
compared, Paenibacillus sp. showed the highest sensitivity to Cu2+
where as B. thuringiensis showed highest sensitivity to Cd2+ and Zn2+
.These findings revealed the potential of Paenibacillus sp. in
developing a biosensor to detect Cu2+ in environmental samples.
Abstract: Photoselective plastic films with thermic properties
are now available so that greenhouses clad with such plastics exhibit
a higher degree of “Greenhouse Effect” with a consequent increase in
night time temperature. In this study, we investigate the potential
benefits of a range of thermic plastic films used as greenhouse cover
materials on the vegetative and reproductive growth and development
of Iceberg lettuce (Lactuca sativa L). Transplants were grown under
thermic films and destructively harvested 4, 5, and 6 weeks after
transplanting. Thermic films can increase night temperatures up to 2
⁰C reducing the wide fluctuation in greenhouse temperature during
winter compared to the standard commercial film and consequently
increased the yield (leaf number, fresh weight, and dry weight) of
lettuce plants. Lettuce plants grown under Clear film respond to cold
stress by the accumulation of secondary products (phenolics, and
flavonoids).
Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of International
Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption on the frequency of
earnings managements towards small positive profits. We focus on
two emerging markets IFRS adopters: South Africa and Turkey.
We tested our logistic regression using appropriate panelestimation
techniques over a sample of 330 South African and 210
Turkish firm-year observations over the period 2002-2008. Our
results document that mandatory adoption of IFRS is not associated
with a reduction in earnings management towards small positive
profits in emerging markets. These results contradict most of the
previous findings of the studies conducted in developed countries.
Based on the legal system factor, we compare the intensity of
earnings management between a code law country (Turkey) and a
common law country (South Africa) over the pre and post-adoption
periods. Our findings show that the frequency of such earnings
management practice increases significantly for the code law
country.