Abstract: Locating the critical slip surface with the minimum factor of safety for a rock slope is a difficult problem. In recent years, some modern global optimization methods have been developed with success in treating various types of problems, but very few of such methods have been applied to rock mechanical problems. In this paper, use of hybrid model based on artificial immune system and cellular learning automata is proposed. The results show that the algorithm is an effective and efficient optimization method with a high level of confidence rate.
Abstract: Functionalities and control behavior are both primary
requirements in design of a complex system. Automata theory plays
an important role in modeling behavior of a system. Z is an ideal
notation which is used for describing state space of a system and then
defining operations over it. Consequently, an integration of automata
and Z will be an effective tool for increasing modeling power for a
complex system. Further, nondeterministic finite automata (NFA)
may have different implementations and therefore it is needed to
verify the transformation from diagrams to a code. If we describe
formal specification of an NFA before implementing it, then
confidence over transformation can be increased. In this paper, we
have given a procedure for integrating NFA and Z. Complement of a
special type of NFA is defined. Then union of two NFAs is
formalized after defining their complements. Finally, formal
construction of intersection of NFAs is described. The specification
of this relationship is analyzed and validated using Z/EVES tool.
Abstract: Mobile payments have been deployed by businesses for more than a decade. Customers use mobile payments if they trust in this relatively new payment method, have a belief and confidence in, as well as reliance on its services and applications. Despite its potential, the current literature shows that there is lack of customer trust in B2C mobile payments, and a lack of studies that determine the factors that influence their trust in these payments; which make these factors yet to be understood, especially in the Middle East region. Thus, this study aims to explore the factors that influence customer trust in mobile payments. The empirical data for this explorative study was collected by establishing four focus group sessions in the UAE. The results indicate that the explored significant factors can be classified into five main groups: customer characteristics, environmental (social and cultural) influences, provider characteristics, mobile-device characteristics, and perceived risks.
Abstract: In order to study the influence of different methods of controlling weeds such as mechanical weeding and mechanical weeder efficiency analysis in mechanical cultivation conditions, in farming year of 2011 an experiment was done in a farm in coupling and development of technology center in Haraz,Iran. The treatments consisted of (I) control treatment: where no weeding was done, (II) use of mechanical weeding without engine and (III) power mechanical weeding. Results showed that experimental treatments had significantly different effects (p=0.05) on yield traits and number of filled grains per panicle, while treatments had the significant effects on grain weight and dry weight of weeds in the first, second and third weeding methods at 1% of confidence level. Treatment (II) had its most significant effect on number of filled grains per panicle and yield performance standpoint, which was 3705.97 kg ha-1 in its highest peak. Treatment (III) was ranked as second influential with 3559.8 kg ha-1. In addition, under (I) treatments, 2364.73 kg ha-1 of yield produced. The minimum dry weights of weeds in all weeding methods were related to the treatment (II), (III) and (I), respectively. The correlation coefficient analysis showed that total yield had a significant positive correlation with the panicle grain yield per plant (r= 0.55*) and the number of grains per panicle-1 (r= 0.57*) and the number of filled grains (r= 0.63*). Total rice yield also had negative correlation of r= -0. 64* with weed dry weight at second weed sampling time (17 DAT). The weed dry weight at third and fourth sampling times (24 and 40 DAT) had negative correlations of -0.65** and r=-0.61* with rice yield, respectively.
Abstract: The purposes of this research were to study the citizen
participation in preventing illegal drugs in one of a poor and small
community of Bangkok, Thailand and to compare the level of
participation and concern of illegal drugs problem by using
demographic variables. This paper drew upon data collected from a
local citizens survey conducted in Bangkok, Thailand during summer
of 2012. A total of 200 respondents were elicited as data input for,
and one way ANOVA test. The findings revealed that the overall
citizen participation was in the level of medium. The mean score
showed that benefit from the program was ranked as the highest and
the decision to participate was ranked as second while the follow-up
of the program was ranked as the lowest.
In terms of the difference in demographic such as gender, age,
level of education, income, and year of residency, the hypothesis
testing’s result disclosed that there were no difference in their level
of participation. However, difference in occupation showed a
difference in their level of participation and concern which was
significant at the 0.05 confidence level.
Abstract: Regression testing is a maintenance activity applied to
modified software to provide confidence that the changed parts are
correct and that the unchanged parts have not been adversely affected
by the modifications. Regression test selection techniques reduce the
cost of regression testing, by selecting a subset of an existing test
suite to use in retesting modified programs. This paper presents the
first general regression-test-selection technique, which based on code
and allows selecting test cases for any programs written in any
programming language. Then it handles incomplete program. We
also describe RTSDiff, a regression-test-selection system that
implements the proposed technique. The results of the empirical
studied that performed in four programming languages java, C#, Cµ
and Visual basic show that the efficiency and effective in reducing
the size of test suit.
Abstract: Zero inflated Strict Arcsine model is a newly developed model which is found to be appropriate in modeling overdispersed count data. In this study, maximum likelihood estimation method is used in estimating the parameters for zero inflated strict arcsine model. Bootstrapping is then employed to compute the confidence intervals for the estimated parameters.
Abstract: Complaints today have the ability to retain
customer loyalty using state of the art systems and strategies
in customer relationship management to analyze and respond
to a plethora of customer perception. The Majority of
companies are not aware of the beneficiary utilization of
customer complaints for the sake of quality improvements.
Also, some companies have problems determining how
resolution of complaints can be profitable. In this study, we
will define the problems and ascertain the importance of
customer management system on the companies. Furthermore,
we will determine the impact of such a system on efficiency,
confidence, profitability and customer complaints. Eventually,
we will develop methods and address the issues. In this paper,
we used an open-ended questionnaire and distributed that to
30 randomly chosen respondents which were the passengers in
an airport. We also define three hypotheses for our study and
we will validate each of them. Then using frequency, Chi-
Square and quality control method we optimized the size of
customers- negative feedback and improved the process of
customer retention.
Abstract: The aim of this study was to compare the
sensitometric properties of commonly used radiographic films
processed with chemical solutions in different workload hospitals.
The effect of different processing conditions on induced densities on
radiologic films was investigated. Two accessible double emulsions
Fuji and Kodak films were exposed with 11-step wedge and
processed with Champion and CPAC processing solutions. The
mentioned films provided in both workloads centers, high and low.
Our findings displays that the speed and contrast of Kodak filmscreen
in both work load (high and low) is higher than Fuji filmscreen
for both processing solutions. However there was significant
differences in films contrast for both workloads when CPAC solution
had been used (p=0.000 and 0.028). The results showed base plus
fog density for Kodak film was lower than Fuji. Generally Champion
processing solution caused more speed and contrast for investigated
films in different conditions and there was significant differences in
95% confidence level between two used processing solutions
(p=0.01). Low base plus fog density for Kodak films provide more
visibility and accuracy and higher contrast results in using lower
exposure factors to obtain better quality in resulting radiographs. In
this study we found an economic advantages since Champion
solution and Kodak film are used while it makes lower patient dose.
Thus, in a radiologic facility any change in film processor/processing
cycle or chemistry should be carefully investigated before
radiological procedures of patients are acquired.
Abstract: This paper is to clarify the relationship of individual investor types, risk tolerance and herding bias. The questionnaire survey investigation is conducted to collect 389 valid and voluntary individual investors and to examine how the risk tolerance plays as a mediator between four types of personality and herding bias. Based on featuring BB&K model and reviewing the prior literature of psychology, a linear structural model are constructed and further used to evaluate the path of herding formation through the analysis of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results showed that more impetuous investors would be prone to herding bias directly, but rather exhibit higher risk tolerance. However, risk tolerance would fully mediate between the level of confidence (i.e., confident or anxious) and herding bias, but not mediate between the method of action (careful or impetuous) for individual investors.
Abstract: B2E portals represent a new class of web-based
information technologies which many organisations are introducing
in recent years to stay in touch with their distributed workforces and
enable them to perform value added activities for organisations.
However, actual usage of these emerging systems (measured using
suitable instruments) has not been reported in the contemporary
scholarly literature. We argue that many of the instruments to
measure usage of various types of IT-enabled information systems
are not directly applicable for B2E portals because they were
developed for the context of traditional mainframe and PC-based
information systems. It is therefore important to develop a new
instrument for web-based portal technologies aimed at employees. In
this article, we report on the development and initial qualitative
evaluation of an instrument that seeks to operationaise a set of
independent factors affecting the usage of portals by employees. The
proposed instrument is useful to IT/e-commerce researchers and
practitioners alike as it enhances their confidence in predicting
employee usage of portals in organisations.
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: Recent widespread use of information and
communication technology has greatly changed information security
risks that businesses and institutions encounter. Along with this
situation, in order to ensure security and have confidence in electronic
trading, it has become important for organizations to take competent
information security measures to provide international confidence that
sensitive information is secure. Against this backdrop, the approach to
information security checking has come to an important issue, which
is believed to be common to all countries. The purpose of this paper is
to introduce the new system of information security checking program
in Korea and to propose synthetic information security
countermeasures under domestic circumstances in order to protect
physical equipment, security management and technology, and the
operation of security check for securing services on ISP(Internet
Service Provider), IDC(Internet Data Center), and
e-commerce(shopping malls, etc.)
Abstract: Sequential mining methods efficiently discover all frequent sequential patterns included in sequential data. These methods use the support, which is the previous criterion that satisfies the Apriori property, to evaluate the frequency. However, the discovered patterns do not always correspond to the interests of analysts, because the patterns are common and the analysts cannot get new knowledge from the patterns. The paper proposes a new criterion, namely, the sequential interestingness, to discover sequential patterns that are more attractive for the analysts. The paper shows that the criterion satisfies the Apriori property and how the criterion is related to the support. Also, the paper proposes an efficient sequential mining method based on the proposed criterion. Lastly, the paper shows the effectiveness of the proposed method by applying the method to two kinds of sequential data.
Abstract: Oxidative stress is considered to be the cause for onset
and the progression of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and
complications including neuropathy. It is a deleterious process that
can be an important mediator of damage to cell structures: protein,
lipids and DNA. Data suggest that in patients with diabetes and
diabetic neuropathy DNA repair is impaired, which prevents effective
removal of lesions. Objective: The aim of our study was to evaluate
the association of the hOGG1 (326 Ser/Cys) and XRCC1 (194
Arg/Trp, 399 Arg/Gln) gene polymorphisms whose protein is
involved in the BER pathway with DNA repair efficiency in patients
with diabetes type 2 and diabetic neuropathy compared to the healthy
subjects. Genotypes were determined by PCR-RFLP analysis in 385
subjects, including 117 with type 2 diabetes, 56 with diabetic
neuropathy and 212 with normal glucose metabolism. The
polymorphisms studied include codon 326 of hOGG1 and 194, 399
of XRCC1 in the base excision repair (BER) genes. Comet assay was
carried out using peripheral blood lymphocytes from the patients and
controls. This test enabled the evaluation of DNA damage in cells
exposed to hydrogen peroxide alone and in the combination with the
endonuclease III (Nth). The results of the analysis of polymorphism
were statistically examination by calculating the odds ratio (OR) and
their 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) using the ¤ç2-tests. Our data
indicate that patients with diabetes mellitus type 2 (including those
with neuropathy) had higher frequencies of the XRCC1 399Arg/Gln
polymorphism in homozygote (GG) (OR: 1.85 [95% CI: 1.07-3.22],
P=0.3) and also increased frequency of 399Gln (G) allele (OR: 1.38
[95% CI: 1.03-1.83], P=0.3). No relation to other polymorphisms
with increased risk of diabetes or diabetic neuropathy. In T2DM
patients complicated by neuropathy, there was less efficient repair of
oxidative DNA damage induced by hydrogen peroxide in both the
presence and absence of the Nth enzyme. The results of our study
suggest that the XRCC1 399 Arg/Gln polymorphism is a significant
risk factor of T2DM in Polish population. Obtained data suggest a
decreased efficiency of DNA repair in cells from patients with
diabetes and neuropathy may be associated with oxidative stress.
Additionally, patients with neuropathy are characterized by even
greater sensitivity to oxidative damage than patients with diabetes,
which suggests participation of free radicals in the pathogenesis of
neuropathy.
Abstract: This paper reports on an effort to address the issue of
inequality in girls- and women-s access to science, engineering and
technology (SET) education and careers through raising awareness on
SET among secondary school girls in South Africa. Girls participated
in hands-on high-tech rapid prototyping environment of a fabrication
laboratory that was aimed at stimulating creativity and innovation as
part of a Fab Kids initiative. The Fab Kids intervention is about
creating a SET pipeline as part of the Young Engineers and Scientists
of Africa Initiative.The methodology was based on a real world
situation and a hands-on approach. In the process, participants
acquired a number of skills including computer-aided design,
research skills, communication skills, teamwork skills, technical
drawing skills, writing skills and problem-solving skills. Exposure to
technology enhanced the girls- confidence in being able to handle
technology-related tasks.
Abstract: In this paper some procedures for building confidence intervals for the reliability in stress-strength models are discussed and empirically compared. The particular case of a bivariate normal setup is considered. The confidence intervals suggested are obtained employing approximations or asymptotic properties of maximum likelihood estimators. The coverage and the precision of these intervals are empirically checked through a simulation study. An application to real paired data is also provided.
Abstract: There are three main ways of categorizing capital in banking operations: accounting, regulatory and economic capital. However, the 2008-2009 global crisis has shown that none of these categories adequately reflects the real risks of bank operations, especially in light of the failures Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers or Northern Rock. This paper deals with the economic capital allocation of global banks. In theory, economic capital should reflect the real risks of a bank and should be publicly available. Yet, as discovered during the global financial crisis, even when economic capital information was publicly disclosed, the underlying assumptions rendered the information useless. Specifically, some global banks that reported relatively high levels of economic capital before the crisis went bankrupt or had to be bailed-out by their government. And, only 15 out of 50 global banks reported their economic capital during the 2007-2010 period. In this paper, we analyze the changes in reported bank economic capital disclosure during this period. We conclude that relative shares of credit and business risks increased in 2010 compared to 2007, while both operational and market risks decreased their shares on the total economic capital of top-rated global banks. Generally speaking, higher levels of disclosure and transparency of bank operations are required to obtain more confidence from stakeholders. Moreover, additional risks such as liquidity risks should be included in these disclosures.
Abstract: While service quality is acceptably most valued in the tourism industry, the issue of safety and security plays a key role in sustaining the industry success. Such an issue has been part of Thailand-s tourism development and promotion for several years. Evidently, the Tourist Police Department was set up for this purpose. Its main responsibility is to deal with international tourists- safety and confidence in travelling within Thai territory. However, to strengthen the tourism safety of the country, it is important to better understand international tourists- safety concerns about Thailand. This article seeks to compare international tourists- safety needs and Thai tourist polices- perception towards the tourists- safety concern to determine what measure should be taken to assure the tourist of Thailand-s secure environment. Through the employment of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches, the tourism safety need of international tourists from Europe, North America and Asia was excavated, how Thai tourist polices and local polices perceived the international tourist-s safety concern was investigated, and opinion and experiences about how the police deal with international tourists- problems in eight touristic areas were also explored. A comparative result reveals a certain degrees of differences in international tourists- safety needs and Thai polices- perception towards their needs. The tourism safety prevention and protection measure and practice are also suggested.
Abstract: The aim of this study was to compare the effects
of an altitude training camp on heart rate variability and
performance in elite triathletes. Ten athletes completed 20 days of live-high, train-low training at 1650m. Athletes
underwent pre and post 800-m swim time trials at sea-level, and two heart rate variability tests at 1650m on the first and
last day of the training camp. Based on their time trial results,
athletes were divided into responders and non-responders. Relative to the non-responders, the responders sympathetic-toparasympathetic
ratio decreased substantially after 20 days of altitude training (-0.68 ± 1.08 and -1.2 ± 0.96, mean ± 90%
confidence interval for supine and standing respectively). In
addition, sympathetic activity while standing was also
substantially lower post-altitude in the responders compared to the non-responders (-1869 ± 4764 ms2). Results indicate that
responders demonstrated a change to more vagal
predominance compared to non-responders.