Effect of Magnetic Field on the Biological Clock through the Radical Pair Mechanism

There is an ongoing controversy in the literature related to the biological effects of weak, low frequency electromagnetic fields. The physical arguments and interpretation of the experimental evidence are inconsistent, where some physical arguments and experimental demonstrations tend to reject the likelihood of any effect of the fields at extremely low level. The problem arises of explaining, how the low-energy influences of weak magnetic fields can compete with the thermal and electrical noise of cells at normal temperature using the theoretical studies. The magnetoreception in animals involve radical pair mechanism. The same mechanism has been shown to be involved in the circadian rhythm synchronization in mammals. These reactions can be influenced by the weak magnetic fields. Hence, it is postulated the biological clock can be affected by weak magnetic fields and these disruptions to the rhythm can cause adverse biological effects. In this paper, likelihood of altering the biological clock via the radical pair mechanism is analyzed to simplify these studies of controversy.

A Fuzzy Implementation for Optimization of Storage Locations in an Industrial AS/RS

Warehousing is commonly used in factories for the storage of products until delivery of orders. As the amount of products stored increases it becomes tedious to be carried out manually. In recent years, the manual storing has converted into fully or partially computer controlled systems, also known as Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (AS/RS). This paper discusses an ASRS system, which was designed such that the best storage location for the products is determined by utilizing a fuzzy control system. The design maintains the records of the products to be/already in store and the storage/retrieval times along with the availability status of the storage locations. This paper discusses on the maintenance of the above mentioned records and the utilization of the concept of fuzzy logic in order to determine the optimum storage location for the products. The paper will further discuss on the dynamic splitting and merging of the storage locations depending on the product sizes.

Some Characterizations of Isotropic Curves In the Euclidean Space

The curves, of which the square of the distance between the two points equal to zero, are called minimal or isotropic curves [4]. In this work, first, necessary and sufficient conditions to be a Pseudo Helix, which is a special case of such curves, are presented. Thereafter, it is proven that an isotropic curve-s position vector and pseudo curvature satisfy a vector differential equation of fourth order. Additionally, In view of solution of mentioned equation, position vector of pseudo helices is obtained.

PAPR Reduction Method for OFDM Signalby Using Dummy Sub-carriers

One of the disadvantages of using OFDM is the larger peak to averaged power ratio (PAPR) in its time domain signal. The larger PAPR signal would course the fatal degradation of bit error rate performance (BER) due to the inter-modulation noise in the nonlinear channel. This paper proposes an improved DSI (Dummy Sequence Insertion) method, which can achieve the better PAPR and BER performances. The feature of proposed method is to optimize the phase of each dummy sub-carrier so as to reduce the PAPR performance by changing all predetermined phase coefficients in the time domain signal, which is calculated for data sub-carriers and dummy sub-carriers separately. To achieve the better PAPR performance, this paper also proposes to employ the time-frequency domain swapping algorithm for fine adjustment of phase coefficient of the dummy subcarriers, which can achieve the less complexity of processing and achieves the better PAPR and BER performances than those for the conventional DSI method. This paper presents various computer simulation results to verify the effectiveness of proposed method as comparing with the conventional methods in the non-linear channel.

The Roles of Community Based Telecenters in Bridging the Digital Divide in Rural Malaysia

Malaysia is aggressive in promoting the usage of ICT to its mass population through the support by the government policies and programs targeting the general population. However, with the uneven distribution of the basic telecommunication infrastructure between the urban and rural area, cost for being “interconnected" that is considered high among the poorer rural population and the lack of local contents that suit the rural population needs or lifestyles, it is still a challenge for Malaysia to achieve its Vision 2020 Agenda moving the nation towards an information society by the year 2020. Among the existing programs that have been carried out by the government to encourage the usage of ICT by the rural population is “Kedaikom", a community telecenter with the general aim is to engage the community to get exposed and to use the ICT, encouraging the diffusion of the ICT technology to the rural population. The research investigated by using a questionnaire survey of how Kedaikom, as a community telecenter could play a role in encouraging the rural or underserved community to use the ICT. The result from the survey has proven that the community telecenter could bridge the digital divide between the underserved rural population and the well-accessed urban population in Malaysia. More of the rural population, especially from the younger generation and those with higher educational background are using the community telecenter to be connected to the ICT.

Impact of MAC Layer on the Performance of Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks is an autonomous system of mobile nodes connected by multi-hop wireless links without centralized infrastructure support. As mobile communication gains popularity, the need for suitable ad hoc routing protocols will continue to grow. Efficient dynamic routing is an important research challenge in such a network. Bandwidth constrained mobile devices use on-demand approach in their routing protocols because of its effectiveness and efficiency. Many researchers have conducted numerous simulations for comparing the performance of these protocols under varying conditions and constraints. Most of them are not aware of MAC Protocols, which will impact the relative performance of routing protocols considered in different network scenarios. In this paper we investigate the choice of MAC protocols affects the relative performance of ad hoc routing protocols under different scenarios. We have evaluated the performance of these protocols using NS2 simulations. Our results show that the performance of routing protocols of ad hoc networks will suffer when run over different MAC Layer protocols.

Study and Evaluation of Added Stresses under Foundation due to Adjacent Structure

Added stresses due to adjacent structure should be considered in foundation design and stress control in soil under the structure. This case is considered less than other cases in design and calculation whereas stresses in implementation are greater than analytical stress. Structure load are transmitted to earth by foundation and role of foundation is propagation of load on the continuous and half extreme soil. This act cause that, present stresses lessen to allowable strength of soil. Some researchers such as Boussinesq and westergaurd by using of some assumption studied on this issue, theorically. Target of this paper is study and evaluation of added stresses under structure due to adjacent structure. For this purpose, by using of assumption, theoric relation and numeral methods, effects of adjacent structure with 4 to 10 storeys on the main structure with 4 storeys are studied and effect of parameters and sensitivity of them are evaluated.

An Approach to Adaptive Load Balancing for RFID Middlewares

Recently, there have been an increasing interest in RFID system and RFID systems have been applied to various applications. Load balancing is a fundamental technique for providing scalability of systems by moving workload from overloaded nodes to under-loaded nodes. This paper presents an approach to adaptive load balancing for RFID middlewares. Workloads of RFID middlewares can have a considerable variation according to the location of the connected RFID readers and can abruptly change at a particular instance. The proposed approach considers those characteristics of RFID middle- wares to provide an efficient load balancing.

Oncogene Identification using Filter based Approaches between Various Cancer Types in Lung

Lung cancer accounts for the most cancer related deaths for men as well as for women. The identification of cancer associated genes and the related pathways are essential to provide an important possibility in the prevention of many types of cancer. In this work two filter approaches, namely the information gain and the biomarker identifier (BMI) are used for the identification of different types of small-cell and non-small-cell lung cancer. A new method to determine the BMI thresholds is proposed to prioritize genes (i.e., primary, secondary and tertiary) using a k-means clustering approach. Sets of key genes were identified that can be found in several pathways. It turned out that the modified BMI is well suited for microarray data and therefore BMI is proposed as a powerful tool for the search for new and so far undiscovered genes related to cancer.

A Dynamic Hybrid Option Pricing Model by Genetic Algorithm and Black- Scholes Model

Unlike this study focused extensively on trading behavior of option market, those researches were just taken their attention to model-driven option pricing. For example, Black-Scholes (B-S) model is one of the most famous option pricing models. However, the arguments of B-S model are previously mentioned by some pricing models reviewing. This paper following suggests the importance of the dynamic character for option pricing, which is also the reason why using the genetic algorithm (GA). Because of its natural selection and species evolution, this study proposed a hybrid model, the Genetic-BS model which combining GA and B-S to estimate the price more accurate. As for the final experiments, the result shows that the output estimated price with lower MAE value than the calculated price by either B-S model or its enhanced one, Gram-Charlier garch (G-C garch) model. Finally, this work would conclude that the Genetic-BS pricing model is exactly practical.

Utilizing Ontologies Using Ontology Editor for Creating Initial Unified Modeling Language (UML)Object Model

One of object oriented software developing problem is the difficulty of searching the appropriate and suitable objects for starting the system. In this work, ontologies appear in the part of supporting the object discovering in the initial of object oriented software developing. There are many researches try to demonstrate that there is a great potential between object model and ontologies. Constructing ontology from object model is called ontology engineering can be done; On the other hand, this research is aiming to support the idea of building object model from ontology is also promising and practical. Ontology classes are available online in any specific areas, which can be searched by semantic search engine. There are also many helping tools to do so; one of them which are used in this research is Protégé ontology editor and Visual Paradigm. To put them together give a great outcome. This research will be shown how it works efficiently with the real case study by using ontology classes in travel/tourism domain area. It needs to combine classes, properties, and relationships from more than two ontologies in order to generate the object model. In this paper presents a simple methodology framework which explains the process of discovering objects. The results show that this framework has great value while there is possible for expansion. Reusing of existing ontologies offers a much cheaper alternative than building new ones from scratch. More ontologies are becoming available on the web, and online ontologies libraries for storing and indexing ontologies are increasing in number and demand. Semantic and Ontologies search engines have also started to appear, to facilitate search and retrieval of online ontologies.

Improving Packet Latency of Video Sensor Networks

Video sensor networks operate on stringent requirements of latency. Packets have a deadline within which they have to be delivered. Violation of the deadline causes a packet to be treated as lost and the loss of packets ultimately affects the quality of the application. Network latency is typically a function of many interacting components. In this paper, we propose ways of reducing the forwarding latency of a packet at intermediate nodes. The forwarding latency is caused by a combination of processing delay and queueing delay. The former is incurred in order to determine the next hop in dynamic routing. We show that unless link failures in a very specific and unlikely pattern, a vast majority of these lookups are redundant. To counter this we propose source routing as the routing strategy. However, source routing suffers from issues related to scalability and being impervious to network dynamics. We propose solutions to counter these and show that source routing is definitely a viable option in practical sized video networks. We also propose a fast and fair packet scheduling algorithm that reduces queueing delay at the nodes. We support our claims through extensive simulation on realistic topologies with practical traffic loads and failure patterns.

Identifying Key Success Factor For Supply Chain Management System in the Semiconductor Industry - A Focus Group Approach

Developing a supply chain management (SCM) system is costly, but important. However, because of its complicated nature, not many of such projects are considered successful. Few research publications directly relate to key success factors (KSFs) for implementing a SCM system. Motivated by the above, this research proposes a hierarchy of KSFs for SCM system implementation in the semiconductor industry by using a two-step approach. First, the literature review indicates the initial hierarchy. The second step includes a focus group approach to finalize the proposed KSF hierarchy by extracting valuable experiences from executives and managers that actively participated in a project, which successfully establish a seamless SCM integration between the world's largest semiconductor foundry manufacturing company and the world's largest assembly and testing company. Future project executives may refer the resulting KSF hierarchy as a checklist for SCM system implementation in semiconductor or related industries.

Projective Synchronization of a Class of Fractional-Order Chaotic Systems

This paper at first presents approximate analytical solutions for systems of fractional differential equations using the differential transform method. The application of differential transform method, developed for differential equations of integer order, is extended to derive approximate analytical solutions of systems of fractional differential equations. The solutions of our model equations are calculated in the form of convergent series with easily computable components. After that a drive-response synchronization method with linear output error feedback is presented for “generalized projective synchronization" for a class of fractional-order chaotic systems via a scalar transmitted signal. Genesio_Tesi and Duffing systems are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed synchronization method.

Finding Approximate Tandem Repeats with the Burrows-Wheeler Transform

Approximate tandem repeats in a genomic sequence are two or more contiguous, similar copies of a pattern of nucleotides. They are used in DNA mapping, studying molecular evolution mechanisms, forensic analysis and research in diagnosis of inherited diseases. All their functions are still investigated and not well defined, but increasing biological databases together with tools for identification of these repeats may lead to discovery of their specific role or correlation with particular features. This paper presents a new approach for finding approximate tandem repeats in a given sequence, where the similarity between consecutive repeats is measured using the Hamming distance. It is an enhancement of a method for finding exact tandem repeats in DNA sequences based on the Burrows- Wheeler transform.

Stabilization of the Lorenz Chaotic Equations by Fuzzy Controller

In this paper, a fuzzy controller is designed for stabilization of the Lorenz chaotic equations. A simple Mamdani inference method is used for this purpose. This method is very simple and applicable for complex chaotic systems and it can be implemented easily. The stability of close loop system is investigated by the Lyapunov stabilization criterion. A Lyapunov function is introduced and the global stability is proven. Finally, the effectiveness of this method is illustrated by simulation results and it is shown that the performance of the system is improved.

Memristor: The Missing Circuit Element and its Application

Memristor is also known as the fourth fundamental passive circuit element. When current flows in one direction through the device, the electrical resistance increases and when current flows in the opposite direction, the resistance decreases. When the current is stopped, the component retains the last resistance that it had, and when the flow of charge starts again, the resistance of the circuit will be what it was when it was last active. It behaves as a nonlinear resistor with memory. Recently memristors have generated wide research interest and have found many applications. In this paper we survey the various applications of memristors which include non volatile memory, nanoelectronic memories, computer logic, neuromorphic computer architectures low power remote sensing applications, crossbar latches as transistor replacements, analog computations and switches.

On the Verification of Power Nap Associated with Stage 2 Sleep and Its Application

One of the most important causes of accidents is driver fatigue. To reduce the accidental rate, the driver needs a quick nap when feeling sleepy. Hence, searching for the minimum time period of nap is a very challenging problem. The purpose of this paper is twofold, i.e. to investigate the possible fastest time period for nap and its relationship with stage 2 sleep, and to develop an automatic stage 2 sleep detection and alarm device. The experiment for this investigation is designed with 21 subjects. It yields the result that waking up the subjects after getting into stage 2 sleep for 3-5 minutes can efficiently reduce the sleepiness. Furthermore, the automatic stage 2 sleep detection and alarm device yields the real-time detection accuracy of approximately 85% which is comparable with the commercial sleep lab system.

Framework and System for Supplier Scouting Enabling Web-based Collaboration

Nowadays, many manufacturing companies try to reinforce their competitiveness or find a breakthrough by considering collaboration. In Korea, more than 900 manufacturing companies are using web-based collaboration systems developed by the government-led project, referred to as i-Manufacturing. The system supports some similar functions of Product Data Management (PDM) as well as Project Management System (PMS). A web-based collaboration system provides many useful functions for collaborative works. This system, however, does not support new linking services between buyers and suppliers. Therefore, in order to find new collaborative partners, this paper proposes a framework which creates new connections between buyers and suppliers facilitating their collaboration, referred to as Excellent Manufacturer Scouting System (EMSS). EMSS plays a role as a bridge between overseas buyers and suppliers. As a part of study on EMSS, we also propose an evaluation method of manufacturability of potential partners with six main factors. Based on the results of evaluation, buyers may get a good guideline to choose their new partners before getting into negotiation processes with them.

Choice of Exchange Rate Regimes: Case of Ex-Yugoslavia Countries

There are little subjects in macroeconomics that are so widely discussed, but at the same time controversial and without a clear solution such as the choice of exchange rate regime. National authorities need to take into consideration numerous fundamentals, trying to fulfil goals of economic growth, low and stable inflation and international stability. This paper focuses on the countries of ex- Yugoslavia and their exchange rate history as independent states. We follow the development of the regimes in 6 countries during the transition through the financial crisis of the second part of the 2000s to the prospects of their final goal: full membership in the European Union. Main question is to what extent has the exchange regime contributed to their economic success, considering other objective factors.