Abstract: n-CdO/p-Si heterojunction diode was fabricated using
sol-gel spin coating technique which is a low cost and easily scalable
method for preparing of semiconductor films. The structural and
morphological properties of CdO film were investigated. The X-ray
diffraction (XRD) spectra indicated that the film was of
polycrystalline nature. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM)
images indicate that the surface morphology CdO film consists of the
clusters formed with the coming together of the nanoparticles. The
electrical characterization of Au/n-CdO/p–Si/Al heterojunction diode
was investigated by current-voltage. The ideality factor of the diode
was found to be 3.02 for room temperature. The reverse current of
the diode strongly increased with illumination intensity of 100
mWcm-2 and the diode gave a maximum open circuit voltage Voc of
0.04 V and short-circuits current Isc of 9.92×10-9 A.
Abstract: The present research was focused to investigate the
role of investment in the course of economic growth with reference to
Pakistan. The study analyzed the role of the public and private
investment and impact of the political and macroeconomic
uncertainty on economic growth of Pakistan by using the vector
autoregressive approach (VAR). In long-run both public and private
investment showed a positive impact on economic growth but the
growth was largely driven by private investment as compared to
public investment. Government consumption expenditure, economic
uncertainty and political instability hampered the economic growth of
Pakistan. In short-run the private investment positively influences the
growth but there was negative and insignificant effect of the public
investment and government consumption expenditure on the growth.
There was a positive relationship found between economic
uncertainty (proxy for inflation) and GDP in short run.
Abstract: Palladium-catalyzed hydrodechlorination is a
promising alternative for the treatment of environmentally relevant
water bodies, such as groundwater, contaminated with chlorinated
organic compounds (COCs). In the aqueous phase
hydrodechlorination of COCs, Pd-based catalysts were found to have
a very high catalytic activity. However, the full utilization of the
catalyst-s potential is impeded by the sensitivity of the catalyst to
poisoning and deactivation induced by reduced sulfur compounds
(e.g. sulfides). Several regenerants have been tested before to recover
the performance of sulfide-fouled Pd catalyst. But these only
delivered partial success with respect to re-establishment of the
catalyst activity. In this study, the deactivation behaviour of
Pd/Al2O3 in the presence of sulfide was investigated. Subsequent to
total deactivation the catalyst was regenerated in the aqueous phase
using potassium permanganate. Under neutral pH condition,
oxidative regeneration with permanganate delivered a slow recovery
of catalyst activity. However, changing the pH of the bulk solution to
acidic resulted in the complete recovery of catalyst activity within a
regeneration time of about half an hour. These findings suggest the
superiority of permanganate as regenerant in re-activating Pd/Al2O3
by oxidizing Pd-bound sulfide.
Abstract: This study was conducted in order to determine the physical properties and stability of mayonnaise-like emulsions as affected by modified yam starches. Native yam starch was modified via pre-gelatinization and cross-linking phosphorylation procedures. The emulsions (50% oil dispersed phase) were prepared with 0.3% native potato, native yam, pre-gelatinized yam and cross-linking phosphorylation yam starches. The droplet size of surface weighted mean diameter was found to be significantly (p < 0.05) lower in the sample with cross-linking phosphorylation yam starch as compared to other samples. Moreover, the viscosity of the sample with pregelatinized yam starch was observed to be higher than that of other samples. The phase separation stability was low in the freshly prepared and stored (45 days, 5°C) emulsions containing native yam starch. This study thus generally suggested that modified yam starches were more suitable (i.e. better physical properties and stability) to be used as stabilizers in a similar system i.e. light mayonnaises, rather than a native yam starch.
Abstract: Compensating physiological motion in the context
of minimally invasive cardiac surgery has become an attractive
issue since it outperforms traditional cardiac procedures offering
remarkable benefits. Owing to space restrictions, computer vision
techniques have proven to be the most practical and suitable solution.
However, the lack of robustness and efficiency of existing methods
make physiological motion compensation an open and challenging
problem. This work focusses on increasing robustness and efficiency
via exploration of the classes of 1−and 2−regularized optimization,
emphasizing the use of explicit regularization. Both approaches are
based on natural features of the heart using intensity information.
Results pointed out the 1−regularized optimization class as the best
since it offered the shortest computational cost, the smallest average
error and it proved to work even under complex deformations.
Abstract: Erroneous computer entry problems [here: 'e'errors] in hospital labs threaten the patients-–health carers- relationship, undermining the health system credibility. Are e-errors random, and do lab professionals make them accidentally, or may they be traced through meaningful determinants? Theories on internal causality of mistakes compel to seek specific causal ascriptions of hospital lab eerrors instead of accepting some inescapability. Undeniably, 'To Err is Human'. But in view of rapid global health organizational changes, e-errors are too expensive to lack in-depth considerations. Yet, that efunction might supposedly be entrenched in the health carers- job description remains under dispute – at least for Hellenic labs, where e-use falls behind generalized(able) appreciation and application. In this study: i) an empirical basis of a truly high annual cost of e-errors at about €498,000.00 per rural Hellenic hospital was established, hence interest in exploring the issue was sufficiently substantiated; ii) a sample of 270 lab-expert nurses, technicians and doctors were assessed on several personality, burnout and e-error measures, and iii) the hypothesis that the Hardiness vs Alienation personality construct disposition explains resistance vs proclivity to e-errors was tested and verified: Hardiness operates as a resilience source in the encounter of high pressures experienced in the hospital lab, whereas its 'opposite', i.e., Alienation, functions as a predictor, not only of making e-errors, but also of leading to burn-out. Implications for apt interventions are discussed.
Abstract: With the rapid growth in business size, today's businesses orient towards electronic technologies. Amazon.com and e-bay.com are some of the major stakeholders in this regard. Unfortunately the enormous size and hugely unstructured data on the web, even for a single commodity, has become a cause of ambiguity for consumers. Extracting valuable information from such an everincreasing data is an extremely tedious task and is fast becoming critical towards the success of businesses. Web content mining can play a major role in solving these issues. It involves using efficient algorithmic techniques to search and retrieve the desired information from a seemingly impossible to search unstructured data on the Internet. Application of web content mining can be very encouraging in the areas of Customer Relations Modeling, billing records, logistics investigations, product cataloguing and quality management. In this paper we present a review of some very interesting, efficient yet implementable techniques from the field of web content mining and study their impact in the area specific to business user needs focusing both on the customer as well as the producer. The techniques we would be reviewing include, mining by developing a knowledge-base repository of the domain, iterative refinement of user queries for personalized search, using a graphbased approach for the development of a web-crawler and filtering information for personalized search using website captions. These techniques have been analyzed and compared on the basis of their execution time and relevance of the result they produced against a particular search.
Abstract: The p53 tumor suppressor gene plays two important
roles in genomic stability: blocking cell proliferation after DNA
damage until it has been repaired, and starting apoptosis if the
damage is too critical. Codon 72 exon4 polymorphism (Arg72Pro) of
the P53 gene has been implicated in cancer risk. Various studies have
been done to investigate the status of p53 at codon 72 for arginine
(Arg) and proline (Pro) alleles in different populations and also the
association of this codon 72 polymorphism with various tumors. Our
objective was to investigate the possible association between P53
Arg72Pro polymorphism and susceptibility to colorectal cancer
among Isfahan and Chaharmahal Va Bakhtiari (a part of south west
of Iran) population. We investigated the status of p53 at codon 72 for
Arg/Arg, Arg/Pro and Pro/Pro allele polymorphisms in blood
samples from 145 colorectal cancer patients and 140 controls by
Nested-PCR of p53 exon 4 and digestion with BstUI restriction
enzyme and the DNA fragments were then resolved by
electrophoresis in 2% agarose gel. The Pro allele was 279 bp, while
the Arg allele was restricted into two fragments of 160 and 119 bp.
Among the 145 colorectal cancer cases 49 cases (33.79%) were
homozygous for the Arg72 allele (Arg/Arg), 18 cases (12.41%) were
homozygous for the Pro72 allele (Pro/Pro) and 78 cases (53.8%)
found in heterozygous (Arg/Pro).
In conclusion, it can be said that p53Arg/Arg genotype may be
correlated with possible increased risk of this kind of cancers in south
west of Iran.
Abstract: This paper is aimed to study the roles of leadership and innovation in the development of local people based ecotourism
services. The survey is conducted in Candirejo village, Borobudur District, Magelang Regency. The study of a descriptive approach is employed to identify people's behavior in ecotourism services. The results showed that ecotourism services have developed and provided benefits to the people. The roles of leadership and innovation interact positively with a cooperative to organize an ecotourism services management. The leadership is able to identify substances, to do the vision and missions of environmental and cultural conservation. The innovation provides alternative development efforts and increases the added value of ecotourism. The cooperative management was able to support a process to realize the goals of ecotourism, to build participation and communication, and to perform organizational learning. The phenomenon of the leadership in the Candirejo ecotourism enriches the studies of the ecotourism management. During this time, the ecotourism management is always associated
with the standard management of national park. The ecotourism management of Candirejo is considered successful even outside the national park management.
Abstract: Intelligent Video-Surveillance (IVS) systems are
being more and more popular in security applications. The analysis
and recognition of abnormal behaviours in a video sequence has
gradually drawn the attention in the field of IVS, since it allows
filtering out a large number of useless information, which guarantees
the high efficiency in the security protection, and save a lot of human
and material resources. We present in this paper ADABeV, an
intelligent video-surveillance framework for event recognition in
crowded scene to detect the abnormal human behaviour. This
framework is attended to be able to achieve real-time alarming,
reducing the lags in traditional monitoring systems. This architecture
proposal addresses four main challenges: behaviour understanding in
crowded scenes, hard lighting conditions, multiple input kinds of
sensors and contextual-based adaptability to recognize the active
context of the scene.
Abstract: Search for a tertiary substructure that geometrically
matches the 3D pattern of the binding site of a well-studied protein provides a solution to predict protein functions. In our previous work,
a web server has been built to predict protein-ligand binding sites
based on automatically extracted templates. However, a drawback of such templates is that the web server was prone to resulting in many
false positive matches. In this study, we present a sequence-order constraint to reduce the false positive matches of using automatically
extracted templates to predict protein-ligand binding sites. The binding site predictor comprises i) an automatically constructed template library and ii) a local structure alignment algorithm for
querying the library. The sequence-order constraint is employed to
identify the inconsistency between the local regions of the query protein and the templates. Experimental results reveal that the sequence-order constraint can largely reduce the false positive matches and is effective for template-based binding site prediction.
Abstract: In a previously developed fast vortex method, the
diffusion of the vortex sheet induced at the solid wall by the no-slip
boundary conditions was modeled according to the approximation
solution of Koumoutsakos and converted into discrete blobs in the
vicinity of the wall. This scheme had been successfully applied to a
simulation of the flow induced with an impulsively initiated circular
cylinder. In this work, further modifications on this vortex method are
attempted, including replacing the approximation solution by the
boundary-element-method solution, incorporating a new algorithm for
handling the over-weak vortex blobs, and diffusing the vortex sheet
circulation in a new way suitable for high-curvature solid bodies. The
accuracy is thus largely improved. The predictions of lift and drag
coefficients for a uniform flow past a NASA airfoil agree well with the
existing literature.
Abstract: Out of all visual arts including: painting, sculpture,
graphics, photography, architecture, and others, architecture is by far
the most complex one, because the art category is only one of its
determinants. Architecture, to some extent includes other arts which
can significantly influence the shaping of an urban space (artistic
interventions). These arts largely shape the visual culture in
combination with other categories: film, TV, Internet, information
technologies that are "changing the world" etc. In the area of
architecture and urbanism, visual culture is achieved through the
aspects of visual spatial effects. In this context, a complex visual
deliberation about designing urban areas in order to contribute to the
urban visual culture, and with it restore the cultural identity of the
city, is becoming almost the primary concept of contemporary urban
and architectural practice. Research in this paper relate to the city of
Niksic and its place in the visual urban culture. We are looking at the
city’s existing visual effects and determining the directions of
transformability of its physical structure in order to achieve the visual
realization of an urban area and the renewal of cultural identity of a
modern city.
Abstract: In recent times there has been a growing interest in the
development of quasi-two-dimensional niobium pentoxide (Nb2O5)
as a semiconductor for the potential electronic applications such as
capacitors, filtration, dye-sensitised solar cells and gas sensing
platforms. Therefore once the purpose is established, Nb2O5 can be
prepared in a number of nano- and sub-micron-structural
morphologies that include rods, wires, belts and tubes. In this study
films of Nb2O5 were prepared on gold plated silicon substrate using
spin-coating technique and subsequently by mechanical exfoliation.
The reason this method was employed was to achieve layers of less
than 15nm in thickness. The sintering temperature of the specimen
was 800oC. The morphology and structural characteristics of the
films were analyzed by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), Raman
Spectroscopy, X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS).
Abstract: In this paper, a novel algorithm based on Ridgelet
Transform and support vector machine is proposed for human action
recognition. The Ridgelet transform is a directional multi-resolution
transform and it is more suitable for describing the human action by
performing its directional information to form spatial features
vectors. The dynamic transition between the spatial features is carried
out using both the Principal Component Analysis and clustering
algorithm K-means. First, the Principal Component Analysis is used
to reduce the dimensionality of the obtained vectors. Then, the kmeans
algorithm is then used to perform the obtained vectors to form
the spatio-temporal pattern, called set-of-labels, according to given
periodicity of human action. Finally, a Support Machine classifier is
used to discriminate between the different human actions. Different
tests are conducted on popular Datasets, such as Weizmann and
KTH. The obtained results show that the proposed method provides
more significant accuracy rate and it drives more robustness in very
challenging situations such as lighting changes, scaling and dynamic
environment
Abstract: In the paper the research of flat textile products for use
as electrodes was presented. Material-s resistance measurements were
carried out to determine the suitability of the textiles. Based on the received results of studies different types of textile electrodes were
designed. Textile electrodes tests were carried out on human
phantoms. The electro-conductive properties of human forearm
phantom were also described. Based on this results special electroconductive
hydrogels with electro-conductive particles were feasible. The hydrogel is an important element of the forearm-s phantom
model of a survey of electrodes for muscle electrostimulation. The
hydrogel is an equivalent human skin and tissue. The hydrogel should
have a permanence and recurrence of the electro-conductive properties.
Abstract: The Learning Management Systems present learning
environment which offers a collection of e-learning tools in a
package that allows a common interface and information sharing
among the tools. South East European University initial experience
in LMS was with the usage of the commercial LMS-ANGEL. After a
three year experience on ANGEL usage because of expenses that
were very high it was decided to develop our own software. As part
of the research project team for the in-house design and development
of the new LMS, we primarily had to select the features that would
cover our needs and also comply with the actual trends in the area of
software development, and then design and develop the system. In
this paper we present the process of LMS in-house development for
South East European University, its architecture, conception and
strengths with a special accent on the process of migration and
integration with other enterprise applications.
Abstract: Contemporary science and technologies largely widen
the gap between the spiritual and rational of the society. Industrial
and technological breakthroughs might radically affect most
processes in the society, thus losing the cultural heritage. The
thinkers recognized the dangers of the decadence in the first place. In
the present article the ways of preserving cultural heritage have been
investigated. Memory has always been a necessary condition for selfidentification,
- continuity is based on this. The authors have
supported the hypothesis that continuity and ethnic memory are the
very mechanisms that preserve cultural heritage. Such problemformulating
will facilitate another, new look at the material, spiritual
and arts spheres of the cultural heritage of numerous ethnic groups.
The fundamental works by major European and Kazakh scientists
have been taken as a basis for the research done.
Abstract: The essential oil of M. × piperita L. was formulated
into a topical gel. The prepared gel was characterized for its pH,
viscosity, spreadiblity, consistency and extrudiblity, while its stability
was evaluated under different temperature conditions. The prepared
M. × piperita oil gel was clear and transparent. The pH value of
developed gel was 6.6, while its viscosity was 1200 cP. Spreadability
and consistency of the M. × piperita oil gel was 10.7 g.cm/sec and 7
mm, respectively. The prepared gel showed good extrudiblity. During
the stability studies, no significant change in pH and viscosity as a
function of time for gel was observed, indicating stability of prepared
formulation. The gel developed in this study is expected to forward
the usage of M. × piperita essential towards commercial application.
Abstract: Sol-gel method has been used to fabricate
nanocomposite films on glass substrates composed halloysite clay
mineral and nanocrystalline TiO2. The methodology for the synthesis
involves a simple chemistry method utilized nonionic surfactant
molecule as pore directing agent along with the acetic acid-based solgel
route with the absence of water molecules. The thermal treatment
of composite films at 450oC ensures elimination of organic material
and lead to the formation of TiO2 nanoparticles onto the surface of
the halloysite nanotubes. Microscopy techniques and porosimetry
methods used in order to delineate the structural characteristics of the
materials. The nanocomposite films produced have no cracks and
active anatase crystal phase with small crystallite size were deposited
on halloysite nanotubes. The photocatalytic properties for the new
materials were examined for the decomposition of the Basic Blue 41
azo dye in solution. These, nanotechnology based composite films
show high efficiency for dye’s discoloration in spite of different
halloysite quantities and small amount of halloysite/TiO2 catalyst
immobilized onto glass substrates. Moreover, we examined the
modification of the halloysite/TiO2 films with silver particles in order
to improve the photocatalytic properties of the films. Indeed, the
presence of silver nanoparticles enhances the discoloration rate of the
Basic Blue 41 compared to the efficiencies obtained for unmodified
films.