Abstract: Arsenic in the sediments of the ash lagoons of the coal-fired power plant in Pagbilao, Quezon Province in the Philippines was sequentially extracted to determine its potential for leaching to the groundwater and the adjacent marine environment. Results show that 89% of the As is bound to the quasi-crystalline Fe/Mn oxides and hydroxide matrix in the sediments, whereas, the adsorbed and exchangeable As hosted by the clay minerals, representing those that are easiest to release from the sediment matrix, is below 10% of the acid leachable As. These As in these sediment matrices represent the possible maximum amount of As that can be released and supplied to the groundwater and the adjacent marine environment. Of the 89% reducible As, up to 4% is associated with the easily reducible variety, whereas, the rest is more strongly bonded by the moderately reducible variety. Based on the long-term As content of the lagoon water, the average desorption rate of As is calculated to be very low -- 0.3-0.5% on the average and 0.6% on the maximum. This indicates that As is well-fixed by its sediment matrices in the ash lagoon, attenuating the influx of As into the adjacent groundwater and marine environments.
Abstract: Over last two decades, due to hostilities of environment
over the internet the concerns about confidentiality of information
have increased at phenomenal rate. Therefore to safeguard the information
from attacks, number of data/information hiding methods have
evolved mostly in spatial and transformation domain.In spatial domain
data hiding techniques,the information is embedded directly on
the image plane itself. In transform domain data hiding techniques the
image is first changed from spatial domain to some other domain and
then the secret information is embedded so that the secret information
remains more secure from any attack. Information hiding algorithms
in time domain or spatial domain have high capacity and relatively
lower robustness. In contrast, the algorithms in transform domain,
such as DCT, DWT have certain robustness against some multimedia
processing.In this work the authors propose a novel steganographic
method for hiding information in the transform domain of the gray
scale image.The proposed approach works by converting the gray
level image in transform domain using discrete integer wavelet
technique through lifting scheme.This approach performs a 2-D
lifting wavelet decomposition through Haar lifted wavelet of the cover
image and computes the approximation coefficients matrix CA and
detail coefficients matrices CH, CV, and CD.Next step is to apply the
PMM technique in those coefficients to form the stego image. The
aim of this paper is to propose a high-capacity image steganography
technique that uses pixel mapping method in integer wavelet domain
with acceptable levels of imperceptibility and distortion in the cover
image and high level of overall security. This solution is independent
of the nature of the data to be hidden and produces a stego image
with minimum degradation.
Abstract: Cognitive Dissonance can be conceived both as a concept related to the tendency to avoid internal contradictions in certain situations, and as a higher order theory about information processing in the human mind. In the last decades, this last sense has been strongly surpassed by the former, as nearly all experiment on the matter discuss cognitive dissonance as an output of motivational contradictions. In that sense, the question remains: is cognitive dissonance a process intrinsically associated with the way that the mind processes information, or is it caused by such specific contradictions? Objective: To evaluate the effects of cognitive dissonance in the absence of rewards or any mechanisms to manipulate motivation. Method: To solve this question, we introduce a new task, the hypothetical social arrays paradigm, which was applied to 50 undergraduate students. Results: Our findings support the perspective that the human mind shows a tendency to avoid internal dissonance even when there are no rewards or punishment involved. Moreover, our findings also suggest that this principle works outside the conscious level.
Abstract: The surface water used in this study was collected from the Chao Praya River at the lower part at the Nonthaburi bridge. It was collected and used throughout the experiment. TOC (also known as DOC) in the range between 2.5 to 5.6 mg/l were investigated in this experiment. The use of conventional treatment methods such as FeCl3 and PAC showed that TOC removal was 65% using FeCl3 and 78% using PAC (powder activated carbon). The advanced oxidation process alone showed only 35% removal of TOC. Coupling advanced oxidation with a small amount of PAC (0.05g/L) increased efficiency by upto 55%. The combined BAC with advanced oxidation process and small amount of PAC demonstrated the highest efficiency of up to 95% of TOC removal and lower sludge production compared with other methods.
Abstract: In developing countries located in monsoon areas like
Thailand where rainwater is currently of no value for urban dwellers
due to easily access to piped water supply at each household, studies
in rainwater harvesting for domestic use are of low interest. However
it is needed to undertake research to find out appropriate rainwater
harvesting systems particularly for small urban communities that are
recently developed from a full rural structure to urban context. As a
matter of fact, in such transitional period, relying on only common
water resources is risky. With some specific economic settings, land
use patterns, and historical and cultural context that dominate
perceptions of water users in the study area, the level of service in
this study may certainly be different from megacities or cities located
in industrial zone. The overviews of some available technologies and
background of rainwater harvesting including alternate resource are
included in this paper. Among other sources of water supply, ground
water use as the water resource of Thailand and also in the study area.
Abstract: Water quality is a subject of ongoing concern.
Deterioration of water quality has initiated serious management
efforts in many countries. This study endeavors to automatically
classify water quality. The water quality classes are evaluated using 6
factor indices. These factors are pH value (pH), Dissolved Oxygen
(DO), Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), Nitrate Nitrogen
(NO3N), Ammonia Nitrogen (NH3N) and Total Coliform (TColiform).
The methodology involves applying data mining
techniques using multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network
models. The data consisted of 11 sites of canals in Dusit district in
Bangkok, Thailand. The data is obtained from the Department of
Drainage and Sewerage Bangkok Metropolitan Administration
during 2007-2011. The results of multilayer perceptron neural
network exhibit a high accuracy multilayer perception rate at 96.52%
in classifying the water quality of Dusit district canal in Bangkok
Subsequently, this encouraging result could be applied with plan and
management source of water quality.
Abstract: Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is a relatively new swarm intelligence technique for clustering. It produces higher
quality clusters compared to other population-based algorithms but with poor energy efficiency, cluster quality consistency and typically slower in convergence speed. Inspired by energy saving foraging behavior of natural honey bees this paper presents a Quality and Quantity Aware Artificial Bee Colony (Q2ABC) algorithm to improve quality of cluster identification, energy efficiency and convergence speed of the original ABC. To evaluate the performance of Q2ABC algorithm, experiments were conducted on a suite of ten benchmark UCI datasets. The results demonstrate Q2ABC outperformed ABC and K-means algorithm in the quality of clusters delivered.
Abstract: Misalignment and unbalance are the major concerns
in rotating machinery. When the power supply to any rotating system
is cutoff, the system begins to lose the momentum gained during
sustained operation and finally comes to rest. The exact time period
from when the power is cutoff until the rotor comes to rest is called
Coast Down Time. The CDTs for different shaft cutoff speeds were
recorded at various misalignment and unbalance conditions. The
CDT reduction percentages were calculated for each fault and there
is a specific correlation between the CDT reduction percentage and
the severity of the fault. In this paper, radial basis network, a new
generation of artificial neural networks, has been successfully
incorporated for the prediction of CDT for misalignment and
unbalance conditions. Radial basis network has been found to be
successful in the prediction of CDT for mechanical faults in rotating
machinery.
Abstract: The objectives of this study are to determine the
effects of soil cover type on characteristics of leachates generated
from landfill lysimeters. Four lysimeters with diameter and height
of 0.15 and 3.00 m, respectively, were prepared. Three lysimeters
were filled with municipal waste and three different cover soil types
i.e. sandy loam soil, silty loam soil and clay soil while another
lysimeter was filled solely with municipal waste. The study was
conducted in the rainy season. Leachate quantities were measured
every day and leachate characteristics were determined once a week.
The cumulative leachate quantity from the lysimeter filled solely
with municipal waste was found to be around 27% higher than the
lysimeters using cover soils. There were no any differences of the
cumulative leachate amounts generated from the lysimeters using
three types of soils. The comparison of the total mass of pollutants
generated from all lysimeters showed that the lysimeter filled solely
with municipal waste generated the maximum quantities of
pollutants. Among the lysimeters using different types of soils, the
lysimeter using sandy loam soil generated the lowest amount of most
of pollutants, compared with the lysimeters using silty loam and clay
soils. It can be concluded that in term of pollutant attenuation in the
leachate, a sandy loam is the most suitable soil to be used as a cover
soil in the landfill.
Abstract: The scattering effect of light in fog improves the
difficulty in visibility thus introducing disturbances in transport
facilities in urban or industrial areas causing fatal accidents or public
harassments, therefore, developing an enhanced fog vision system
with radio wave to improvise the way outs of these severe problems
is really a big challenge for researchers. Series of experimental
studies already been done and more are in progress to know the
weather effect on radio frequencies for different ranges. According to
Rayleigh scattering Law, the propagating wavelength should be
greater than the diameter of the particle present in the penetrating
medium. Direct wave RF signal thus have high chance of failure to
work in such weather for detection of any object. Therefore an
extensive study was required to find suitable region in the RF band
that can help us in detecting objects with proper shape. This paper
produces some results on object detection using 912 MHz band with
successful detection of the persistence of any object coming under the
trajectory of a vehicle navigating in indoor and outdoor environment.
The developed images are finally transformed to video signal to
enable continuous monitoring.
Abstract: Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is one of machine
learning algorithms for problem solving and learning that caught a lot
of attention over the last few years. In general, CBR is composed of
four main phases: retrieve the most similar case or cases, reuse the
case to solve the problem, revise or adapt the proposed solution, and
retain the learned cases before returning them to the case base for
learning purpose. Unfortunately, in many cases, this retain process
causes the uncontrolled case base growth. The problem affects
competence and performance of CBR systems. This paper proposes
competence-based maintenance method based on deletion policy
strategy for CBR. There are three main steps in this method. Step 1,
formulate problems. Step 2, determine coverage and reachability set
based on coverage value. Step 3, reduce case base size. The results
obtained show that this proposed method performs better than the
existing methods currently discussed in literature.
Abstract: In this paper, we proposed a method to classify each
type of natural rock texture. Our goal is to classify 26 classes of rock
textures. First, we extract five features of each class by using
principle component analysis combining with the use of applied
spatial frequency measurement. Next, the effective node number of
neural network was tested. We used the most effective neural
network in classification process. The results from this system yield
quite high in recognition rate. It is shown that high recognition rate
can be achieved in separation of 26 stone classes.
Abstract: Let G be a graph of order n. The second stage adjacency matrix of G is the symmetric n × n matrix for which the ijth entry is 1 if the vertices vi and vj are of distance two; otherwise 0. The sum of the absolute values of this second stage adjacency matrix is called the second stage energy of G. In this paper we investigate a few properties and determine some upper bounds for the largest eigenvalue.
Abstract: The present paper represent the efforts undertaken for
the development of an semi-automatic robot that may be used for
various post-disaster rescue operation planning and their subsequent
execution using one-way communication of video and data from the
robot to the controller and controller to the robot respectively.
Wireless communication has been used for the purpose so that the
robot may access the unapproachable places easily without any
difficulties. It is expected that the information obtained from the
robot would be of definite help to the rescue team for better planning
and execution of their operations.
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: Nowadays, the increase of human population every
year results in increasing of water usage and demand. Saen Saep
canal is important canal in Bangkok. The main objective of this study
is using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model to estimate the
Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) on data from 11 sampling sites.
The data is obtained from the Department of Drainage and Sewerage,
Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, during 2007-2011. The
twelve parameters of water quality are used as the input of the
models. These water quality indices affect the COD. The
experimental results indicate that the ANN model provides a high
correlation coefficient (R=0.89).
Abstract: The possibility of radionuclides-related contamination
of lands at agricultural holdings defines the necessity to apply special
protective measures in plant growing. The aim of researches is to
elucidate the influence of polymers applying on biological migration
of man-made anthropogenic radionuclides 90Sr and 137Cs in the
system water - soil – plant. The tests are being carried out under field
conditions with and without application of polymers in root-inhabited
media in more radioecological tension zone (with the radius of 7 km
from the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant). The polymers on the base
of K+, Caµ, KµCaµ ions were tested. Productivity of pepper
depending on the presence and type of polymer material, content of
artificial radionuclides in waters, soil and plant material has been
determined. The character of different polymers influence on the
artificial radionuclides migration and accumulation in the system
water-soil-plant and accumulation in the plants has been cleared up.
Abstract: In this paper, an improvement of PDLZW implementation
with a new dictionary updating technique is proposed. A
unique dictionary is partitioned into hierarchical variable word-width
dictionaries. This allows us to search through dictionaries in parallel.
Moreover, the barrel shifter is adopted for loading a new input string
into the shift register in order to achieve a faster speed. However,
the original PDLZW uses a simple FIFO update strategy, which is
not efficient. Therefore, a new window based updating technique
is implemented to better classify the difference in how often each
particular address in the window is referred. The freezing policy
is applied to the address most often referred, which would not be
updated until all the other addresses in the window have the same
priority. This guarantees that the more often referred addresses would
not be updated until their time comes. This updating policy leads
to an improvement on the compression efficiency of the proposed
algorithm while still keep the architecture low complexity and easy
to implement.
Abstract: This paper presents a heuristic approach to solve the Generalized Assignment Problem (GAP) which is NP-hard. It is worth mentioning that many researches used to develop algorithms for identifying the redundant constraints and variables in linear programming model. Some of the algorithms are presented using intercept matrix of the constraints to identify redundant constraints and variables prior to the start of the solution process. Here a new heuristic approach based on the dominance property of the intercept matrix to find optimal or near optimal solution of the GAP is proposed. In this heuristic, redundant variables of the GAP are identified by applying the dominance property of the intercept matrix repeatedly. This heuristic approach is tested for 90 benchmark problems of sizes upto 4000, taken from OR-library and the results are compared with optimum solutions. Computational complexity is proved to be O(mn2) of solving GAP using this approach. The performance of our heuristic is compared with the best state-ofthe- art heuristic algorithms with respect to both the quality of the solutions. The encouraging results especially for relatively large size test problems indicate that this heuristic approach can successfully be used for finding good solutions for highly constrained NP-hard problems.
Abstract: Induction machine models used for steady-state and
transient analysis require machine parameters that are usually
considered design parameters or data. The knowledge of induction
machine parameters is very important for Indirect Field Oriented
Control (IFOC). A mismatched set of parameters will degrade the
response of speed and torque control. This paper presents an
improvement approach on rotor time constant adaptation in IFOC for
Induction Machines (IM). Our approach tends to improve the
estimation accuracy of the fundamental model for flux estimation.
Based on the reduced order of the IM model, the rotor fluxes and
rotor time constant are estimated using only the stator currents and
voltages. This reduced order model offers many advantages for real
time identification parameters of the IM.