Abstract: The State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, will hold two important events in the nearby future. In 2014 it will have the final game of the Football World Cup, and in 2016 it will be holding the Olympic Games. Therefore, the public transportation system (mainly buses) is of a major concern to the Rio de Janeiro State authorities-. The main objective of this work is to compare the quality of service of the bus companies operating in the cities of ItaperunaandCampos, both cities situated in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The outcome of thiscomparison, based on the opinion of the bus users, has shownthemdispleased with the quality of the service provided by the bus companies operating in both cities. It is urgent the need to find possible practical alternatives to minimize the consequences of the main problems detected in this work. With these practical alternatives available, we will be able to offer to the Rio de Janeiro State authorities- suggestions about possible solutions to the main problems identified in this survey, as well as the time of implantation and costs of these solutions.
Abstract: Following the laser ablation studies leading to a
theory of nuclei confinement by a Debye layer mechanism, we
present here numerical evaluations for the known stable nuclei where
the Coulomb repulsion is included as a rather minor component
especially for lager nuclei. In this research paper the required
physical conditions for the formation and stability of nuclei
particularly endothermic nuclei with mass number greater than to
which is an open astrophysical question have been investigated.
Using the Debye layer mechanism, nuclear surface energy, Fermi
energy and coulomb repulsion energy it is possible to find conditions
under which the process of nucleation is permitted in early universe.
Our numerical calculations indicate that about 200 second after the
big bang at temperature of about 100 KeV and subrelativistic region
with nucleon density nearly equal to normal nuclear density namely,
10cm all endothermic and exothermic nuclei have been
formed.
Abstract: Alzheimer is known as the loss of mental functions
such as thinking, memory, and reasoning that is severe enough to
interfere with a person's daily functioning. The appearance of
Alzheimer Disease symptoms (AD) are resulted based on which part
of the brain has a variety of infection or damage. In this case, the
MRI is the best biomedical instrumentation can be ever used to
discover the AD existence. Therefore, this paper proposed a fusion
method to distinguish between the normal and (AD) MRIs. In this
combined method around 27 MRIs collected from Jordanian
Hospitals are analyzed based on the use of Low pass -morphological
filters to get the extracted statistical outputs through intensity
histogram to be employed by the descriptive box plot. Also, the
artificial neural network (ANN) is applied to test the performance of
this approach. Finally, the obtained result of t-test with confidence
accuracy (95%) has compared with classification accuracy of ANN
(100 %). The robust of the developed method can be considered
effectively to diagnose and determine the type of AD image.
Abstract: In the present research, two nutraceuticals made from
red grape and walnut that showed previously to improve kidney
dysfunction were incorporated separately into functional foods' bread
made from barley and rice bran. The functional foods were evaluated
in rats in which chronic renal failure was induced through feeding
diet rich in adenine and phosphate (APD). The evaluation based on
assessing kidney function, oxidative stress, inflammatory biomarkers
and body weight gain. Results showed induction of chronic kidney
failure reflected in significant increase in plasma urea, creatinine,
malondialdehyde, tumor necrosis factor- α and low density
lipoprotein cholesterol along with significant reduction of plasma
albumin, and total antioxidant and creatinine clearance and body
weight gain on feeding APD compared to control healthy group.
Feeding the functional foods produced amelioration in the different
biochemical parameters and body weight gain indicating
improvement in kidney function.
Abstract: In this paper the problem of face recognition under variable illumination conditions is considered. Most of the works in the literature exhibit good performance under strictly controlled acquisition conditions, but the performance drastically drop when changes in pose and illumination occur, so that recently number of approaches have been proposed to deal with such variability. The aim of this work is to introduce an efficient local appearance feature extraction method based steerable pyramid (SP) for face recognition. Local information is extracted from SP sub-bands using LBP(Local binary Pattern). The underlying statistics allow us to reduce the required amount of data to be stored. The experiments carried out on different face databases confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Abstract: Many corporations are seriously concerned about
security of networks and therefore, their network supervisors are still
reluctant to install WLANs. In this regards, the IEEE802.11i standard
was developed to address the security problems, even though the
mistrust of the wireless LAN technology is still existing. The thought
was that the best security solutions could be found in open standards
based technologies that can be delivered by Virtual Private
Networking (VPN) being used for long time without addressing any
security holes for the past few years. This work, addresses this issue
and presents a simulated wireless LAN of IEEE802.11g protocol, and
analyzes impact of integrating Virtual Private Network technology to
secure the flow of traffic between the client and the server within the
LAN, using OPNET WLAN utility. Two Wireless LAN scenarios
have been introduced and simulated. These are based on normal
extension to a wired network and VPN over extension to a wired
network. The results of the two scenarios are compared and indicate
the impact of improving performance, measured by response time
and load, of Virtual Private Network over wireless LAN.
Abstract: This paper proposes an architectural and graphical
user interface (GUI) design of a traditional Thai musical instrument
application for tablet computers for practicing “Ranaad Ek" which is
a trough-resonated keyboard percussion instrument. The application
provides percussion methods for a player as real as a physical
instrument. The application consists of two playing modes. The first
mode is free playing, a player can freely multi touches on wooden bar
to produce instrument sounds. The second mode is practicing mode
that guilds the player to follow percussions and rhythms of practice
songs. The application has achieved requirements and specifications.
Abstract: Renewable energy resources are inexhaustible, clean as compared with conventional resources. Also, it is used to supply regions with no grid, no telephone lines, and often with difficult accessibility by common transport. Satellite earth stations which located in remote areas are the most important application of renewable energy. Neural control is a branch of the general field of intelligent control, which is based on the concept of artificial intelligence. This paper presents the mathematical modeling of satellite earth station power system which is required for simulating the system.Aswan is selected to be the site under consideration because it is a rich region with solar energy. The complete power system is simulated using MATLAB–SIMULINK.An artificial neural network (ANN) based model has been developed for the optimum operation of earth station power system. An ANN is trained using a back propagation with Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm. The best validation performance is obtained for minimum mean square error. The regression between the network output and the corresponding target is equal to 96% which means a high accuracy. Neural network controller architecture gives satisfactory results with small number of neurons, hence better in terms of memory and time are required for NNC implementation. The results indicate that the proposed control unit using ANN can be successfully used for controlling the satellite earth station power system.
Abstract: Vernonia divergens Benth., commonly known as
“Insulin Plant” (Fam: Asteraceae) is a potent sugar killer. Locally the
leaves of the plant, boiled in water are successfully administered to a
large number of diabetic patients. The present study evaluates the
putative anti-diabetic ingredients, isolated from the in vivo and in
vitro grown plantlets of V. divergens for their antimicrobial and
anticancer activities. Sterilized explants of nodal segments were
cultured on MS (Musashige and Skoog, 1962) medium in presence of
different combinations of hormones. Multiple shoots along with
bunch of roots were regenerated at 1mg l-1 BAP and 0.5 mg l-1 NAA.
Micro-plantlets were separated and sub-cultured on the double
strength (2X) of the above combination of hormones leading to
increased length of roots and shoots. These plantlets were
successfully transferred to soil and survived well in nature. The
ethanol extract of plantlets from both in vivo & in vitro sources were
prepared in soxhlet extractor and then concentrated to dryness under
reduced pressure in rotary evaporator. Thus obtainedconcentrated
extracts showed significant inhibitory activity against gram
negative bacteria like Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas
aeruginosa but no inhibition was found against gram positive
bacteria. Further, these ethanol extracts were screened for in vitro
percentage cytotoxicity at different time periods (24 h, 48 h and 72 h)
of different dilutions. The in vivo plant extract inhibited the growth of
EAC mouse cell lines in the range of 65, 66, 78, and 88% at 100, 50,
25 & 12.5μg mL-1 but at 72 h of treatment. In case of the extract of in
vitro origin, the inhibition was found against EAC cell lines even at
48h. During spectrophotometric scanning, the extracts exhibited
different maxima (ʎ) - four peaks in in vitro extracts as against single
in in vivo preparation suggesting the possible change in the nature of
ingredients during micropropagation through tissue culture
techniques.
Abstract: A novel thermo-sensitive superabsorbent hydrogel
with salt- and pH-responsiveness properties was obtained by grafting
of mixtures of acrylic acid (AA) and N-isopropylacrylamide
(NIPAM) monomers onto kappa-carrageenan, kC, using ammonium
persulfate (APS) as a free radical initiator in the presence of
methylene bisacrylamide (MBA) as a crosslinker. Infrared
spectroscopy was carried out to confirm the chemical structure of the
hydrogel. Moreover, morphology of the samples was examined by
scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The effect of MBA
concentration and AA/NIPAM weight ratio on the water absorbency
capacity has been investigated. The swelling variations of hydrogels
were explained according to swelling theory based on the hydrogel
chemical structure. The hydrogels exhibited salt-sensitivity and
cation exchange properties. The temperature- and pH-reversibility
properties of the hydrogels make the intelligent polymers as good
candidates for considering as potential carriers for bioactive agents,
e.g. drugs.
Abstract: In this document we studied more in detail the Performances of the vertical handover in the networks WLAN, WiMAX, UMTS before studying of it the Procedure of Handoff Vertical, the whole buckled by simulations putting forward the performances of the handover in the heterogeneous networks. The goal of Vertical Handover is to carry out several accesses in real-time in the heterogeneous networks. This makes it possible a user to use several networks (such as WLAN UMTS andWiMAX) in parallel, and the system to commutate automatically at another basic station, without disconnecting itself, as if there were no cut and with little loss of data as possible.
Abstract: In this paper, an efficient local appearance feature
extraction method based the multi-resolution Curvelet transform is
proposed in order to further enhance the performance of the well
known Linear Discriminant Analysis(LDA) method when applied
to face recognition. Each face is described by a subset of band
filtered images containing block-based Curvelet coefficients. These
coefficients characterize the face texture and a set of simple statistical
measures allows us to form compact and meaningful feature vectors.
The proposed method is compared with some related feature extraction
methods such as Principal component analysis (PCA), as well
as Linear Discriminant Analysis LDA, and independent component
Analysis (ICA). Two different muti-resolution transforms, Wavelet
(DWT) and Contourlet, were also compared against the Block Based
Curvelet-LDA algorithm. Experimental results on ORL, YALE and
FERET face databases convince us that the proposed method provides
a better representation of the class information and obtains much
higher recognition accuracies.
Abstract: This paper presents Faults Forecasting System (FFS)
that utilizes statistical forecasting techniques in analyzing process
variables data in order to forecast faults occurrences. FFS is
proposing new idea in detecting faults. Current techniques used in
faults detection are based on analyzing the current status of the
system variables in order to check if the current status is fault or not.
FFS is using forecasting techniques to predict future timing for faults
before it happens. Proposed model is applying subset modeling
strategy and Bayesian approach in order to decrease dimensionality
of the process variables and improve faults forecasting accuracy. A
practical experiment, designed and implemented in Okayama
University, Japan, is implemented, and the comparison shows that
our proposed model is showing high forecasting accuracy and
BEFORE-TIME.
Abstract: Never has a revolution affected all aspects of
humanity as the communication revolution during the past two
decades. This revolution, with all its advances and utilities, swept the
world thus becoming an integral part of our lives, hence giving way
to emerging applications at the social, economic, political, and
educational levels. More specifically, such applications have changed
the delivery system through which learning is acquired by students.
Interaction with educators, accessibility to content, and creative
delivery options are but a few facets of the new learning experience
now being offered through the use of technology in the educational
field. With different success rates, third world countries have tried to
pace themselves with use of educational technology in advanced
parts of the world. One such country is the small rich-oil state of
Kuwait which has tried to adopt the e-educational model, however,
an evaluation of such trial is yet to be done. This study aimed to fill
the void of research conducted around that topic. The study explored
students' acceptance of incorporating communication technologies in
higher education in Kuwait. Students' responses to survey questions
presented an overview of the e-learning experience in this country,
and drew a framework through which implications and suggestions
for future research were discussed to better serve the advancement of
e-education in developing countries.
Abstract: The present paper reports the removal of Cd(II) and
Zn(II) ions using synthetic Zeolit NaA. The adsorption capacity of
the sorbent (Zeolite NaA) strongly depends on simultaneous or not
simultaneous (concurrent) presence of Cd(II) and Zn(II) in the
sorbate. When Cd(II) and Zn(II) are present simultaneously
(concurrently) in the sorbate, Zn(II) ions were sorbed at higher rate.
Equilibrium data fitted Langmuir, Freundlich and Tempkin isotherms
well. The applicability of the isotherm equation to describe the
adsorption process was judged by the correlation coefficients R2. The
Langmuir model yielded the best fit with R2 values equal to or higher
than 0.970, as compared to the Freundlich and Tempkin models. The
fact that 1/n values range from 0.322 to 0.755 indicates that the
adsorption of Cd(II) and Zn(II) ions from aqueous solutions also
favored by the Freundlich model.
Abstract: In this study the adsorption of Cu (II) ions from aqueous solutions on synthetic zeolite NaA was evaluated. The effect of solution temperature and the determination of the kinetic parameters of adsorption of Cu(II) from aqueous solution on zeolite NaA is important in understanding the adsorption mechanism. Variables of the system include adsorption time, temperature (293- 328K), initial solution concentration and pH for the system. The sorption kinetics of the copper ions were found to be strongly dependent on pH (the optimum pH 3-5), solute ion concentration and temperature (293 – 328 K). It was found, the pseudo-second-order model was the best choice among all the kinetic models to describe the adsorption behavior of Cu(II) onto ziolite NaA, suggesting that the adsorption mechanism might be a chemisorptions process The activation energy of adsorption (Ea) was determined as Cu(II) 13.5 kJ mol-1. The low value of Ea shows that Cu(II) adsorption process by zeolite NaA may be an activated chemical adsorption. The thermodynamic parameters (ΔG0, ΔH0, and ΔS0) were also determined from the temperature dependence. The results show that the process of adsorption Cu(II) is spontaneous and endothermic process and rise in temperature favors the adsorption.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a simple circuit for
Manchester decoding and without using any complicated or
programmable devices. This circuit can decode 90kbps of transmitted
encoded data; however, greater than this transmission rate can be
decoded if high speed devices were used. We also present a new
method for extracting the embedded clock from Manchester data in
order to use it for serial-to-parallel conversion. All of our
experimental measurements have been done using simulation.
Abstract: Analyse of locally manufactured Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) durability, used within lining systems at bottom of Municipal Solid Waste (landfill), is done in the present work. For this end, short and middle time creep behavior under tension of the analyzed material is carried out. The locally manufactured material is tested and compared to the European one (LDPE-CE). Both materials was tested in 03 various mediums: ambient and two aggressive (salty water and foam water), using three specimens in each case. A testing campaign is carried out using an especially designed and achieved testing bench. Moreover, characterisation tests were carried out to evaluate the medium effect on the mechanical properties of the tested material (LDPE). Furthermore, experimental results have been used to establish a law regression which can be used to predict creep behaviour of the analyzed material. As a result, the analyzed LDPE material has showed a good stability in different ambient and aggressive mediums; as well, locally manufactured LDPE seems more flexible, compared with the European one. This makes it more useful to the desired application.
Abstract: In the globalization context and competitiveness, the role of a university is further enhanced. University is no longer confined to traditional roles. Universities need to interact with others in order to be relevant and progressive. Symbiosis relationships between the university and industry are very significant because the relationship between those two can foster economic development of a nation. In a world of fast changing technology and competition, it is necessary for the university to collaborate with industry to combine efforts fostering the diffusion of knowledge, increasing research and development, patenting innovation and commercializing products. It has become increasingly accepted that the necessity of close university-industry interactions as a mean of national economic prosperity. Therefore, this paper is aim to examine the level of linkages in university-industry interactions to which promotes the regional economic growth and development. This paper will explore the formation of linkages between the Higher Education Institution (University Technology MARA) and industries located in the Klang Valley region of Malaysia. It will present the university-industry linkages with emphasis on the type of linkages existed, the benefits of having such linkages to promote regional economic development and finally the constraints that might impede the linkages and potentials to enhance the linkages towards economic growth and development.
Abstract: The effect of wheat flour extraction rates on flour
composition, farinographic characteristics and the quality of
sourdough naans was investigated. The results indicated that by
increasing the extraction rate, the amount of protein, fiber, fat and
ash increased, whereas moisture content decreased. Farinographic
characteristic like water absorption and dough development time
increased with an increase in flour extraction rate but the dough
stabilities and tolerance indices were reduced with an increase in
flour extraction rates. Titratable acidity for both sourdough and
sourdough naans also increased along with flour extraction rate. The
study showed that overall quality of sourdough naans were affected
by both flour extraction rate and starter culture used. Sensory
analysis of sourdough naans revealed that desirable extraction rate
for sourdough naan was 76%.