Abstract: Experimental study was conducted to assess personal welding fumes exposure toward welders during an aluminum metal inert gas (MIG) process. The welding process was carried out by a welding machine attached to a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) workbench. A dummy welder was used to replicate welder during welding works and was attached with sampling pumps and filter cassettes for welding fumes sampling. Direct reading instruments to measure air velocity, humidity, temperature and particulate matter with diameter size 10µm or less (PM10) were located behind the dummy welder and parallel to the neck collar level to make sure the measured welding fumes exposure were not being influenced by other factors. Welding fumes exposure during standing and sitting position with and without the usage of local exhaust ventilation (LEV) was investigated. Welding fume samples were then digested and analyzed by using inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (ICP-MS) according to ASTM D7439-08 method. The results of the study showed the welding fume exposure during sitting was lower compared to standing position. LEV helped reduce aluminum and lead exposure to acceptable levels during standing position. However during sitting position reduction of exposure was smaller. It can be concluded that welder position and the correct positioning of LEV should be implemented for effective exposure reduction.
Abstract: Discrete search path planning in time-constrained uncertain environment relying upon imperfect sensors is known to be hard, and current problem-solving techniques proposed so far to compute near real-time efficient path plans are mainly bounded to provide a few move solutions. A new information-theoretic –based open-loop decision model explicitly incorporating false alarm sensor readings, to solve a single agent military logistics search-and-delivery path planning problem with anticipated feedback is presented. The decision model consists in minimizing expected entropy considering anticipated possible observation outcomes over a given time horizon. The model captures uncertainty associated with observation events for all possible scenarios. Entropy represents a measure of uncertainty about the searched target location. Feedback information resulting from possible sensor observations outcomes along the projected path plan is exploited to update anticipated unit target occupancy beliefs. For the first time, a compact belief update formulation is generalized to explicitly include false positive observation events that may occur during plan execution. A novel genetic algorithm is then proposed to efficiently solve search path planning, providing near-optimal solutions for practical realistic problem instances. Given the run-time performance of the algorithm, natural extension to a closed-loop environment to progressively integrate real visit outcomes on a rolling time horizon can be easily envisioned. Computational results show the value of the approach in comparison to alternate heuristics.
Abstract: An expressed sequence tag (EST) analysis provideus portions of expressed genes. We have constructed cDNA library and determined randomly sequences from cDNA library clones of T. molitor injected with acholeplasma lysate. We identified the homologous to a galectin gene. As the result of cloning and characterization of novel, we found that the protein has an open reading frame (ORF) of 495 bp, with 164 amino acid residues and molecular weight of 18.5 kDa. To characterize the role of novel Tm-galectin in immune system, we quantified the mRNA level of galectin at different times after treatment with immune elicitors. The galectin mRNA was up-regulated about 7-folds within 18 hrs. This suggests that Tm-galectin is a novel member of animal lectins, and has a role in the process of pathogen recognition. Our study would be helpful for the study on immune defense system and signaling cascade.
Abstract: Provision of optical devices without proper instruction
and training may cause frustration resulting in rejection or incorrect
use of the magnifiers. However training in the use of magnifiers
increases the cost of providing these devices. This study compared
the efficacy of providing instruction alone and instruction plus
training in the use of magnifiers. 24 participants randomly assigned
to two groups. 15 received instruction and training and 9 received
instruction only. Repeated measures of print size and reading speed
were performed at pre, post training and follow up. Print size
decreased in both groups between pre and post training maintained at
follow up. Reading speed increased in both groups over time with the
training group demonstrating more rapid improvement. Whilst
overall outcomes were similar, training decreased the time required
to increase reading speed supporting the use of training for increased
efficiency. A cost effective form of training is suggested.
Abstract: This paper presents a predictive model of sensor readings for mobile robot. The model predicts sensor readings for given time horizon based on current sensor readings and velocities of wheels assumed for this horizon. Similar models for such anticipation have been proposed in the literature. The novelty of the model presented in the paper comes from the fact that its structure takes into account physical phenomena and is not just a black box, for example a neural network. From this point of view it may be regarded as a semi-phenomenological model. The model is developed for the Khepera robot, but after certain modifications, it may be applied for any robot with distance sensors such as infrared or ultrasonic sensors.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a non-blind technique of
adding the watermark to the Fourier spectral components of audio
signal in a way such that the modified amplitude does not exceed the
maximum amplitude spread (MAS). This MAS is due to individual
Discrete fourier transform (DFT) coefficients in that particular frame,
which is derived from the Energy Spreading function given by
Schroeder. Using this technique one can store double the information
within a given frame length i.e. overriding the watermark on the
host of equal length with least perceptual distortion. The watermark
is uniformly floating on the DFT components of original signal.
This helps in detecting any intentional manipulations done on the
watermarked audio. Also, the scheme is found robust to various signal
processing attacks like presence of multiple watermarks, Additive
white gaussian noise (AWGN) and mp3 compression.
Abstract: Fluency is a skill that, unfortunately, many students
lack. This deficiency causes students to be frustrated with, and
overwhelmed by, the act of reading. However, research suggests that
the repeated reading method may help students to improve their
fluency. This study examines the effects of repeated readings on
student fluency. The study-s overarching question is: What effect do
increases in repeated reading have on reading fluency among middle
school students from diverse backgrounds? More specifically, the
authors examine whether repeated reading improves the fluency,
reading speed, reading-oriented self-esteem, and confidence of
students of diverse academic abilities, socio-economics statuses, and
racial and ethnic backgrounds. To examine these questions the
authors conducted a study using repeated reading strategies with a
sample of students from an urban, middle school in the southeastern
United States. We found that, on average, the use of repeated reading
strategies increased students- fluency, words per minute (wpm)
reading score, reading-oriented self-esteem, and confidence.
Abstract: Abai Kunanbayev (1845-1904) was a great Kazakh
poet, composer and philosopher. Abai's main contribution to Kazakh
culture and folklore lies in his poetry, which expresses great
nationalism and grew out of Kazakh folk culture. Before him, most
Kazakh poetry was oral, echoing the nomadic habits of the people of
the Kazakh steppes. We want to introduce to abroad our country, its
history, tradition and culture. We can introduce it only through
translations. Only by reading the Kazakh works can foreign people
know who are kazakhs, the style of their life, their thoughts and so
on. All information comes only through translation. The main
requirement to a good translation is that it should be natural or that it
should read as smoothly as the original. Literary translation should
be adequate, should follow the original to the fullest. Translators
have to be loyal to original text, they shouldn-t give the way to
liberty.
Abstract: An overview of the important aspects of managing
and controlling industrial effluent discharges to public sewers namely
sampling, characterization, quantification and legislative controls has
been presented. The findings have been validated by means of a case
study covering three industrial sectors namely, tanning, textile
finishing and food processing industries. Industrial effluents
discharges were found to be best monitored by systematic and
automatic sampling and quantified using water meter readings
corrected for evaporative and consumptive losses. Based on the
treatment processes employed in the public owned treatment works
and the chemical oxygen demand and biochemical oxygen demand
levels obtained, the effluent from all the three industrial sectors
studied were found to lie in the toxic zone. Thus, physico-chemical
treatment of these effluents is required to bring them into the
biodegradable zone. KL values (quoted to base e) were greater than
0.50 day-1 compared to 0.39 day-1 for typical municipality
wastewater.
Abstract: This research was to study on background and social
and cultural context of Kamchanoad community for sustainable
tourism management. All data was collected through in-depth
interview with village headmen, community committees, teacher,
monks, Kamchanoad forest field officers and respected senior citizen
above 60 years old in the community who have lived there for more
than 40 years. Altogether there were 30 participants for this research.
After analyzing the data, content from interview and discussion,
Kamchanoad has both high land and low land in the region as well as
swamps that are very capable of freshwater animals’ conservation.
Kamchanoad is also good for agriculture and animal farming. 80% of
Kamchanoad’s land are forest, freshwater and rice farms.
Kamchanoad was officially set up as community in 1994 as “Baan
Nonmuang”. Inhabitants in Kamchanoad make a living by farming
based on sufficiency economy. They have rice farm, eucalyptus farm,
cassava farm and rubber tree farm. Local people in Kamchanoad still
believe in the myth of Srisutto Naga. They are still religious and love
to preserve their traditional way of life. In order to understand how to
create successful tourism business in Kamchanoad, we have to study
closely on local culture and traditions. Outstanding event in
Kamchanoad is the worship of Grand Srisutto, which is on the fullmoon
day of 6th month or Visakhabucha Day. Other big events are
also celebration at the end of Buddhist lent, Naga firework, New
Year celebration, Boon Mahachart, Songkran, Buddhist Lent, Boon
Katin and Loy Kratong. Buddhism is the main religion in
Kamchanoad. The promotion of tourism in Kamchanoad is expected
to help spreading more income for this region. More infrastructures
will be provided for local people as well as funding for youth support
and people activities.
Abstract: A Reading Comprehend (RC) Platform has been
constructed and developed to facilitate children-s English reading
comprehension. Like a learning bridge, the RC Platform focuses on
the integration of rich media and picture-book texts. The study is to
examine the effects of the project within the RC Platform for children.
Two classes of fourth graders were selected from a public elementary
school in an urban area of central Taiwan. The findings taken from the
survey showed that the students demonstrated high interest in the RC
Platform. The students benefited greatly and enjoyed reading via the
technology-enhanced project within the RC Platform. This Platform is
a good reading bridge to enrich students- learning experiences and
enhance their performance in English reading comprehension.
Abstract: In the context of spectrum surveillance, a method to
recover the code of spread spectrum signal is presented, whereas the
receiver has no knowledge of the transmitter-s spreading sequence.
The approach is based on a genetic algorithm (GA), which is forced to
model the received signal. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are well known
for their robustness in solving complex optimization problems.
Experimental results show that the method provides a good
estimation, even when the signal power is below the noise power.
Abstract: Worm propagation profiles have significantly changed
since 2003-2004: sudden world outbreaks like Blaster or Slammer
have progressively disappeared and slower but stealthier worms
appeared since, most of them for botnets dissemination. Decreased
worm virulence results in more difficult detection.
In this paper, we describe a stealth worm propagation model
which has been extensively simulated and analysed on a huge virtual
network. The main features of this model is its ability to infect any
Internet-like network in a few seconds, whatever may be its size while
greatly limiting the reinfection attempt overhead of already infected
hosts. The main simulation results shows that the combinatorial
topology of routing may have a huge impact on the worm propagation
and thus some servers play a more essential and significant role than
others. The real-time capability to identify them may be essential to
greatly hinder worm propagation.
Abstract: This work presents a new approach of securing a
wireless network. The configuration is focused on securing &
Protecting wireless network traffic for a small network such as a
home or dorm room. The security Mechanism provided both
authentication, allowing only known authorized users access to the
wireless network, and encryption, preventing anyone from reading
the wireless traffic. The mentioned solution utilizes the open source
free S/WAN software which implements the Internet Protocol
Security –IPSEC. In addition to wireless components, wireless NIC
in PC and wireless access point needs a machine running Linux to act
as security gateway. While the current configuration assumes that the
wireless PC clients are running Linux, Windows XP/VISTA/7 based
machines equipped with VPN software which will allow to interface
with this configuration.
Abstract: This paper investigates the problem of spreading
sequence and receiver code synchronization techniques for satellite
based CDMA communications systems. The performance of CDMA
system depends on the autocorrelation and cross-correlation
properties of the used spreading sequences. In this paper we propose
the uses of chaotic Lu system to generate binary sequences for
spreading codes in a direct sequence spread CDMA system. To
minimize multiple access interference (MAI) we propose the use of
genetic algorithm for optimum selection of chaotic spreading
sequences. To solve the problem of transmitter-receiver
synchronization, we use the passivity controls. The concept of
semipassivity is defined to find simple conditions which ensure
boundedness of the solutions of coupled Lu systems. Numerical
results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed
approach.
Abstract: The angular distribution of Compton scattering of two
quanta originating in the annihilation of a positron with an electron
is investigated as a quantum key distribution (QKD) mechanism in
the gamma spectral range. The geometry of coincident Compton
scattering is observed on the two sides as a way to obtain partially
correlated readings on the quantum channel. We derive the noise
probability density function of a conceptually equivalent prepare
and measure quantum channel in order to evaluate the limits of the
concept in terms of the device secrecy capacity and estimate it at
roughly 1.9 bits per 1 000 annihilation events. The high error rate
is well above the tolerable error rates of the common reconciliation
protocols; therefore, the proposed key agreement protocol by public
discussion requires key reconciliation using classical error-correcting
codes. We constructed a prototype device based on the readily
available monolithic detectors in the least complex setup.
Abstract: Composite pins of rubber dust collected from tyre
retreading centres of trucks, cars and buses etc.and epoxy with
weight percentages of 10. 15, and 20 % of rubber (weight fractions of
9, 13 and 17 % respectively) have been prepared in house with the
help of a split wooden mould. The pins were tested in a pin-on-disc
wear monitor to determine the co-efficient of friction and weight
losses with varying speeds, loads and time. The wear volume and
wear rates have also been found out for all these three specimens.. It
is observed that all the specimens have exhibited very low coefficient
of friction and low wear rates under dry sliding condition. Out of the
above three samples tested, the specimen with 10 % rubber dust by
weight has shown lowest wear rates. However a peculiar result i.e
decreasing trend has been obtained with 20% reinforcement of rubber
in epoxy while rubbed against steel at varying speeds. This might
have occurred due to high surface finish of the disc and formation of
a thin transfer layer from the composite
Abstract: Overloading is a technique to accommodate more
number of users than the spreading factor N. This is a bandwidth
efficient scheme to increase the number users in a fixed bandwidth.
One of the efficient schemes to overload a CDMA system is to use
two sets of orthogonal signal waveforms (O/O). The first set is
assigned to the N users and the second set is assigned to the
additional M users. An iterative interference cancellation technique is
used to cancel interference between the two sets of users. In this
paper, the performance of an overloading scheme in which the first N
users are assigned Walsh-Hadamard orthogonal codes and extra users
are assigned the same WH codes but overlaid by a fixed (quasi) bent
sequence [11] is evaluated. This particular scheme is called Quasi-
Orthogonal Sequence (QOS) O/O scheme, which is a part of
cdma2000 standard [12] to provide overloading in the downlink
using single user detector. QOS scheme are balance O/O scheme,
where the correlation between any set-1 and set-2 users are
equalized. The allowable overload of this scheme is investigated in
the uplink on an AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels, so that the
uncoded performance with iterative multistage interference
cancellation detector remains close to the single user bound. It is
shown that this scheme provides 19% and 11% overloading with
SDIC technique for N= 16 and 64 respectively, with an SNR
degradation of less than 0.35 dB as compared to single user bound at
a BER of 0.00001. But on a Rayleigh fading channel, the channel
overloading is 45% (29 extra users) at a BER of 0.0005, with an SNR
degradation of about 1 dB as compared to single user performance
for N=64. This is a significant amount of channel overloading on a
Rayleigh fading channel.
Abstract: A Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) Processor is
capable of executing instructions from multiple threads in the same
cycle. SMT in fact was introduced as a powerful architecture to
superscalar to increase the throughput of the processor.
Simultaneous Multithreading is a technique that permits multiple
instructions from multiple independent applications or threads to
compete limited resources each cycle. While the fetch unit has been
identified as one of the major bottlenecks of SMT architecture, several
fetch schemes were proposed by prior works to enhance the fetching
efficiency and overall performance.
In this paper, we propose a novel fetch policy called queue situation
identifier (QSI) which counts some kind of long latency instructions of
each thread each cycle then properly selects which threads to fetch
next cycle. Simulation results show that in best case our fetch policy
can achieve 30% on speedup and also can reduce the data cache level 1
miss rate.
Abstract: This work aims to explore the factors that have an incidence in reading comprehension process, with different type of texts. In a recent study with 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade children, it was observed that reading comprehension of narrative texts was better than comprehension of expository texts. Nevertheless it seems that not only the type of text but also other textual factors would account for comprehension depending on the cognitive processing demands posed by the text. In order to explore this assumption, three narrative and three expository texts were elaborated with different degree of complexity. A group of 40 fourth grade Spanish-speaking children took part in the study. Children were asked to read the texts and answer orally three literal and three inferential questions for each text. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of children responses showed that children had difficulties in both, narrative and expository texts. The problem was to answer those questions that involved establishing complex relationships among information units that were present in the text or that should be activated from children’s previous knowledge to make an inference. Considering the data analysis, it could be concluded that there is some interaction between the type of text and the cognitive processing load of a specific text.