Abstract: Residential block construction of big cities in China
began in the 1950s, and four models had far-reaching influence on
modern residential block in its development process, including unit
compound and residential district in 1950s to 1980s, and gated
community and open community in 1990s to now. Based on analysis
of the four models’ fabric, the article takes residential blocks in
Hangzhou west area as an example and carries on the studies from
urban structure level and block spacial level, mainly including urban
road network, land use, community function, road organization, public
space and building fabric. At last, the article puts forward “Semi-open
Sub-community” strategy to improve the current fabric.
Abstract: Most of the existing video streaming protocols
provide video services without considering security aspects in
decentralized mobile ad-hoc networks. The security policies adapted
to the currently existing non-streaming protocols, do not comply with
the live video streaming protocols resulting in considerable
vulnerability, high bandwidth consumption and unreliability which
cause severe security threats, low bandwidth and error prone
transmission respectively in video streaming applications. Therefore
a synergized methodology is required to reduce vulnerability and
bandwidth consumption, and enhance reliability in the video
streaming applications in MANET. To ensure the security measures
with reduced bandwidth consumption and improve reliability of the
video streaming applications, a Secure Low-bandwidth Video
Streaming through Reliable Multipath Propagation (SLVRMP)
protocol architecture has been proposed by incorporating the two
algorithms namely Secure Low-bandwidth Video Streaming
Algorithm and Reliable Secure Multipath Propagation Algorithm
using Layered Video Coding in non-overlapping zone routing
network topology. The performances of the proposed system are
compared to those of the other existing secure multipath protocols
Sec-MR, SPREAD using NS 2.34 and the simulation results show
that the performances of the proposed system get considerably
improved.
Abstract: High Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) are suggested
today as essential for the cognitive development of students and as
preparing them for real life skills. Teachers are encouraged to use
HOTS activities in the classroom to help their students develop
higher order skills and deep thinking. So it is essential to prepare preservice
teachers to write and use HOTS activities for their students.
This paper describes a model for integrating HOTS activities with
GeoGebra in pre-service teachers’ preparation. This model describes
four aspects of HOTS activities and working with them: activity
components, preparation procedure, strategies and processes used in
writing a HOTS activity and types of the HOTS activities. In
addition, the paper describes the pre-service teachers' difficulties in
preparing and working with HOTS activities, as well as their
perceptions regarding the use of these activities and GeoGebra in the
mathematics classroom. The paper also describes the contribution of
a HOTS activity to pupils' learning of mathematics, where this HOTS
activity was prepared and taught by one pre-service teacher.
Abstract: Typical load-bearing biological materials like bone,
mineralized tendon and shell, are biocomposites made from both
organic (collagen) and inorganic (biomineral) materials. This
amazing class of materials with intrinsic internally designed
hierarchical structures show superior mechanical properties with
regard to their weak components from which they are formed.
Extensive investigations concentrating on static loading conditions
have been done to study the biological materials failure. However,
most of the damage and failure mechanisms in load-bearing
biological materials will occur whenever their structures are exposed
to dynamic loading conditions. The main question needed to be
answered here is: What is the relation between the layout and
architecture of the load-bearing biological materials and their
dynamic behavior? In this work, a staggered model has been
developed based on the structure of natural materials at nanoscale and
Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has been used to study the dynamic
behavior of the structure of load-bearing biological materials to
answer why the staggered arrangement has been selected by nature to
make the nanocomposite structure of most of the biological materials.
The results showed that the staggered structures will efficiently
attenuate the stress wave rather than the layered structure.
Furthermore, such staggered architecture is effectively in charge of
utilizing the capacity of the biostructure to resist both normal and
shear loads. In this work, the geometrical parameters of the model
like the thickness and aspect ratio of the mineral inclusions selected
from the typical range of the experimentally observed feature sizes
and layout dimensions of the biological materials such as bone and
mineralized tendon. Furthermore, the numerical results validated with
existing theoretical solutions. Findings of the present work emphasize
on the significant effects of dynamic behavior on the natural
evolution of load-bearing biological materials and can help scientists
to design bioinspired materials in the laboratories.
Abstract: Multiple User Interference (MUI) considers the
primary problem in Optical Code-Division Multiple Access
(OCDMA), which resulting from the overlapping among the users. In
this article we aim to mitigate this problem by studying an
interference cancellation scheme called successive interference
cancellation (SIC) scheme. This scheme will be tested on two
different detection schemes, spectral amplitude coding (SAC) and
direct detection systems (DS), using partial modified prime (PMP) as
the signature codes. It was found that SIC scheme based on both SAC
and DS methods had a potential to suppress the intensity noise, that is
to say it can mitigate MUI noise. Furthermore, SIC/DS scheme
showed much lower bit error rate (BER) performance relative to
SIC/SAC scheme for different magnitude of effective power. Hence,
many more users can be supported by SIC/DS receiver system.
Abstract: In recent years, fire accidents have been steadily
increased and the amount of property damage caused by the accidents
has gradually raised. Damaging building structure, fire incidents bring
about not only such property damage but also strength degradation and
member deformation. As a result, the building structure undermines its
structural ability. Examining the degradation and the deformation is
very important because reusing the building is more economical than
reconstruction. Therefore, engineers need to investigate the strength
degradation and member deformation well, and make sure that they
apply right rehabilitation methods. This study aims at evaluating
deformation characteristics of fire damaged and rehabilitated normal
strength concrete beams through both experiments and finite element
analyses. For the experiments, control beams, fire damaged beams and
rehabilitated beams are tested to examine deformation characteristics.
Ten test beam specimens with compressive strength of 21MPa are
fabricated and main test variables are selected as cover thickness of
40mm and 50mm and fire exposure time of 1 hour or 2 hours. After
heating, fire damaged beams are air-recurred for 2 months and
rehabilitated beams are repaired with polymeric cement mortar after
being removed the fire damaged concrete cover. All beam specimens
are tested under four points loading. FE analyses are executed to
investigate the effects of main parameters applied to experimental
study. Test results show that both maximum load and stiffness of the
rehabilitated beams are higher than those of the fire damaged beams.
In addition, predicted structural behaviors from the analyses also show
good rehabilitation effect and the predicted load-deflection curves are
similar to the experimental results. For the further, the proposed
analytical method can be used to predict deformation characteristics of
fire damaged and rehabilitated concrete beams without suffering from
time and cost consuming of experimental process.
Abstract: This research aims to identify traditional Mon cuisines
as well as gather and classify traditional cuisines of Mon
communities in Bangkok. The studying of this research is used by
methodology of the quantitative research. Using the questionnaire as
the method in collecting information from sampling totally amount of
450 persons analyzed via frequency, percentage and mean value. The
results showed that a variety of traditional Mon cuisines of Bangkok
could split into 6 categories of meat diet with 54 items and 6
categories of desserts with 19 items.
Abstract: This contribution presents a friction estimator for
industrial purposes which identifies Coulomb friction in a steering
system. The estimator only needs a few, usually known, steering
system parameters. Friction occurs on almost every mechanical
system and has a negative influence on high-precision position
control. This is demonstrated on a steering angle controller for highly
automated driving. In this steering system the friction induces limit
cycles which cause oscillating vehicle movement when the vehicle
follows a given reference trajectory. When compensating the friction
with the introduced estimator, limit cycles can be suppressed. This
is demonstrated by measurements in a series vehicle.
Abstract: Taiwanese composer Kuo Chih-Yuan (1921-2013)
studied composition at Tokyo University of the Arts and was
influenced by the musical nationalism prevailing in Japan at the time.
Determined to create world-class contemporary works to represent
Taiwan, he created music with elements of traditional Taiwanese
music in ways that had not been done before. The aims of this study
were to examine the traditional elements used in Kuo Chih-Yuan’s
Variations and Fugue on an Ancient Taiwanese Music (1972), and
how an understanding of these elements might guide pianists to
interpret a more proper performance of his work was also presented
in this study.
Abstract: The design of high pressure water jet based polishing
equipment and its fabrication conducted in this study is reported
herein, together with some preliminary test results for assessing its
applicability for HMA surface polishing. This study also provides
preliminary findings concerning the test variables, such as the
rotational speed, the water jet pressure, the abrasive agent used, and
the impact angel that were experimentally investigated in this study. The preliminary findings based on four trial tests (two on large
slab specimens and two on small size gyratory compacted
specimens), however, indicate that both friction and texture values
tend to increase with the polishing durations for two combinations of
pressure and rotation speed of the rotary deck. It seems that the more
polishing action the specimen is subjected to; the aggregate edges are
created such that the surface texture values are increased with the
accompanied increase in friction values. It may be of interest (but
which is outside the scope of this study) to investigate if the similar
trend exist for HMA prepared with aggregate source that is sand and
gravel.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the English
version and a Malay translation of the 21-item Learner Awareness
Questionnaire for its application to assess student learning in higher
education. The Learner Awareness Questionnaire, originally written
in English, is a quantitative measure of how and why students learn.
The questionnaire gives an indication of the process and motives to
learn using four scales: survival, establishing stability, approval and
loving to learn. Data in the present study came from 680 university
students enrolled in various programmes in Malaysia. The Malay
version of the questionnaire supported a similar four factor structure
and internal consistency to the English version. The four factors of
the Malay version also showed moderate to strong correlations with
those of the English versions. The results suggest that the Malay
version of the questionnaire is similar to the English version.
However, further refinement to the questions is needed to strengthen
the correlations between the two questionnaires.
Abstract: DNA Barcode provides good sources of needed
information to classify living species. The classification problem has
to be supported with reliable methods and algorithms. To analyze
species regions or entire genomes, it becomes necessary to use the
similarity sequence methods. A large set of sequences can be
simultaneously compared using Multiple Sequence Alignment which
is known to be NP-complete. However, all the used methods are still
computationally very expensive and require significant computational
infrastructure. Our goal is to build predictive models that are highly
accurate and interpretable. In fact, our method permits to avoid the
complex problem of form and structure in different classes of
organisms. The empirical data and their classification performances
are compared with other methods. Evenly, in this study, we present
our system which is consisted of three phases. The first one, is called
transformation, is composed of three sub steps; Electron-Ion
Interaction Pseudopotential (EIIP) for the codification of DNA
Barcodes, Fourier Transform and Power Spectrum Signal Processing.
Moreover, the second phase step is an approximation; it is
empowered by the use of Multi Library Wavelet Neural Networks
(MLWNN). Finally, the third one, is called the classification of DNA
Barcodes, is realized by applying the algorithm of hierarchical
classification.
Abstract: In this study, to clarify the effectiveness of an
aluminum/chromium/tungsten-based-coated tool for cutting sintered
steel, tool wear was experimentally investigated. The sintered steel
was turned with the (Al60,Cr25,W15)N-, (Al60,Cr25,W15)(C,N)- and
(Al64,Cr28,W8)(C,N)-coated cemented carbide tools according to the
physical vapor deposition (PVD) method. Moreover, the tool wear of
the aluminum/chromium/tungsten-based-coated item was compared
with that of the (Al,Cr)N coated tool. Furthermore, to clarify the tool
wear mechanism of the aluminum/chromium/tungsten-coating film for
cutting sintered steel, Scanning Electron Microscope observation and
Energy Dispersive x-ray Spectroscopy mapping analysis were
conducted on the abraded surface. The following results were
obtained: (1) The wear progress of the (Al64,Cr28,W8)(C,N)-coated
tool was the slowest among that of the five coated tools. (2) Adding
carbon (C) to the aluminum/chromium/tungsten-based-coating film
was effective for improving the wear-resistance. (3) The main wear
mechanism of the (Al60,Cr25,W15)N-, the (Al60,Cr25,W15)(C,N)-
and the (Al64,Cr28,W8)(C,N)-coating films was abrasive wear.
Abstract: The economic use and ease of construction of profiled
deck composite slab is marred with the complex and un-economic
strength verification required for the serviceability and general safety
considerations. Beside these, albeit factors such as shear span length,
deck geometries and mechanical frictions greatly influence the
longitudinal shear strength, that determines the ultimate strength of
profiled deck composite slab, and number of methods available for its
determination; partial shear and slope-intercept are the two methods
according to Euro-code 4 provision. However, the complexity
associated with shear behavior of profiled deck composite slab, the
use of these methods in determining the load carrying capacities of
such slab yields different and conflicting values. This couple with the
time and cost constraint associated with the strength verification is a
source of concern that draws more attentions nowadays, the issue is
critical. Treating some of these known shear strength influencing
factors as random variables, the load carrying capacity violation of
profiled deck composite slab from the use of the two-methods
defined according to Euro-code 4 are determined using reliability
approach, and comparatively studied. The study reveals safety values
from the use of m-k method shows good standing compared with that
from the partial shear method.
Abstract: The aim of the present study is to detect the chaotic
behavior in monetary economic relevant dynamical system. The
study employs three different forms of Taylor rules: current, forward,
and backward looking. The result suggests the existence of the
chaotic behavior in all three systems. In addition, the results strongly
represent that using expectations in policy rule especially rational
expectation hypothesis can increase complexity of the system and
leads to more chaotic behavior.
Abstract: This paper describes a new approach which can be
used to interpret the experimental creep deformation data obtained
from miniaturized thin plate bending specimen test to the
corresponding uniaxial data based on an inversed application of the
reference stress method. The geometry of the thin plate is fully
defined by the span of the support, l, the width, b, and the thickness,
d. Firstly, analytical solutions for the steady-state, load-line creep
deformation rate of the thin plates for a Norton’s power law under
plane stress (b→0) and plane strain (b→∞) conditions were obtained,
from which it can be seen that the load-line deformation rate of the
thin plate under plane-stress conditions is much higher than that
under the plane-strain conditions. Since analytical solution is not
available for the plates with random b-values, finite element (FE)
analyses are used to obtain the solutions. Based on the FE results
obtained for various b/l ratios and creep exponent, n, as well as the
analytical solutions under plane stress and plane strain conditions, an
approximate, numerical solutions for the deformation rate are
obtained by curve fitting. Using these solutions, a reference stress
method is utilised to establish the conversion relationships between
the applied load and the equivalent uniaxial stress and between the
creep deformations of thin plate and the equivalent uniaxial creep
strains. Finally, the accuracy of the empirical solution was assessed
by using a set of “theoretical” experimental data.
Abstract: In the cooperative transmission scheme, both the
cellular system and broadcasting system are composed. Two cellular
base stations (CBSs) communicating with a user in the cell edge use
cooperative transmission scheme in the conventional scheme. In the
case that the distance between two CBSs and the user is distant, the
conventional scheme does not guarantee the quality of the
communication because the channel condition is bad. Therefore, if the
distance between CBSs and a user is distant, the performance of the
conventional scheme is decreased. Also, the bad channel condition has
bad effects on the performance. The proposed scheme uses two relays
to communicate well with CBSs when the channel condition between
CBSs and the user is poor. Using the relay in the high attenuation
environment can obtain both advantages of the high bit error rate
(BER) and throughput performance.
Abstract: Steepest descent method is a simple gradient method
for optimization. This method has a slow convergence in heading to
the optimal solution, which occurs because of the zigzag form of the
steps. Barzilai and Borwein modified this algorithm so that it
performs well for problems with large dimensions. Barzilai and
Borwein method results have sparked a lot of research on the method
of steepest descent, including alternate minimization gradient method
and Yuan method. Inspired by previous works, we modified the step
size of the steepest descent method. We then compare the
modification results against the Barzilai and Borwein method,
alternate minimization gradient method and Yuan method for
quadratic function cases in terms of the iterations number and the
running time. The average results indicate that the steepest descent
method with the new step sizes provide good results for small
dimensions and able to compete with the results of Barzilai and
Borwein method and the alternate minimization gradient method for
large dimensions. The new step sizes have faster convergence
compared to the other methods, especially for cases with large
dimensions.
Abstract: Accurate forecasting of fresh produce demand is one
the challenges faced by Small Medium Enterprise (SME)
wholesalers. This paper is an attempt to understand the cause for the
high level of variability such as weather, holidays etc., in demand of
SME wholesalers. Therefore, understanding the significance of
unidentified factors may improve the forecasting accuracy. This
paper presents the current literature on the factors used to predict
demand and the existing forecasting techniques of short shelf life
products. It then investigates a variety of internal and external
possible factors, some of which is not used by other researchers in the
demand prediction process. The results presented in this paper are
further analysed using a number of techniques to minimize noise in
the data. For the analysis past sales data (January 2009 to May 2014)
from a UK based SME wholesaler is used and the results presented
are limited to product ‘Milk’ focused on café’s in derby. The
correlation analysis is done to check the dependencies of variability
factor on the actual demand. Further PCA analysis is done to
understand the significance of factors identified using correlation.
The PCA results suggest that the cloud cover, weather summary and
temperature are the most significant factors that can be used in
forecasting the demand. The correlation of the above three factors
increased relative to monthly and becomes more stable compared to
the weekly and daily demand.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a four-step ortho-rectification
procedure for real-time geo-referencing of video data from a low-cost
UAV equipped with a multi-sensor system. The basic procedures for
the real-time ortho-rectification are: (1) decompilation of the video
stream into individual frames; (2) establishing the interior camera
orientation parameters; (3) determining the relative orientation
parameters for each video frame with respect to each other; (4)
finding the absolute orientation parameters, using a self-calibration
bundle and adjustment with the aid of a mathematical model. Each
ortho-rectified video frame is then mosaicked together to produce a
mosaic image of the test area, which is then merged with a well
referenced existing digital map for the purpose of geo-referencing
and aerial surveillance. A test field located in Abuja, Nigeria was
used to evaluate our method. Video and telemetry data were collected
for about fifteen minutes, and they were processed using the four-step
ortho-rectification procedure. The results demonstrated that the
geometric measurement of the control field from ortho-images is
more accurate when compared with those from original perspective
images when used to pin point the exact location of targets on the
video imagery acquired by the UAV. The 2-D planimetric accuracy
when compared with the 6 control points measured by a GPS receiver
is between 3 to 5 metres.