Abstract: The study describes chitosan membrane platform
modified with nanostructure pattern which using nanotechnology to
fabricate. The cell-substrate interaction between neuro-2a neuroblasts
cell lines and chitosan membrane (flat, nanostructure and
nanostructure pattern types) was investigated. The adhered
morphology of neuro-2a cells depends on the topography of chitosan
surface. We have found that neuro-2a showed different morphogenesis
when cells adhered on flat and nanostructure chitosan membrane. The
cell projected area of neuro-2a on flat chitosan membrane is larger
than on nanostructure chitosan membrane. In addition, neuro-2a cells
preferred to adhere on flat chitosan surface region than on
nanostructure chitosan membrane to immobilize and differentiation.
The experiment suggests surface topography can be used as a critical
mechanism to isolate group of neuro-2a to a particular rectangle area
on chitosan membrane. Our finding will provide a platform to take
patch clamp to record electrophysiological behavior about neurons in
vitro in the future.
Abstract: Construction of tunnels is connected with high
uncertainty in the field of costs, construction period, safety and
impact on surroundings. Risk management became therefore a
common part of tunnel projects, especially after a set of fatal
collapses occurred in 1990's. Such collapses are caused usually by
combination of factors that can be divided into three main groups, i.e.
unfavourable geological conditions, failures in the design and
planning or failures in the execution.
This paper suggests a procedure enabling quantification of the
excavation risk related to extraordinary accidents using FTA and
ETA tools. It will elaborate on a common process of risk analysis and
enable the transfer of information and experience between particular
tunnel construction projects. Further, it gives a guide for designers,
management and other participants, how to deal with risk of such
accidents and how to make qualified decisions based on a
probabilistic approach.
Abstract: We demonstrate through a sample application, Ebanking,
that the Web Service Modelling Language Ontology component
can be used as a very powerful object-oriented database design
language with logic capabilities. Its conceptual syntax allows the
definition of class hierarchies, and logic syntax allows the definition
of constraints in the database. Relations, which are available for
modelling relations of three or more concepts, can be connected to
logical expressions, allowing the implicit specification of database
content. Using a reasoning tool, logic queries can also be made
against the database in simulation mode.
Abstract: Traveling salesman problem (TSP) is hard to resolve
when the number of cities and routes become large. The frequency
graph is constructed to tackle the problem. A frequency graph
maintains the topological relationships of the original weighted graph.
The numbers on the edges are the frequencies of the edges emulated
from the local optimal Hamiltonian paths. The simplest kind of local
optimal Hamiltonian paths are computed based on the four vertices
and three lines inequality. The search algorithm is given to find the
optimal Hamiltonian circuit based on the frequency graph. The
experiments show that the method can find the optimal Hamiltonian
circuit within several trials.
Abstract: Today, biogenic magnetite nanoparticles among
magnetic nanoparticles have unique attracted attention because of
their magnetic characteristics and potential applications in various
fields such as therapeutic and diagnostic. A well known example of
these biogenic nanoparticles is magnetosomes of magnetotactic
bacteria. In this research, we used two different types of technique for
the isolation and purification of magnetosome nanoparticles from the
isolated magnetotactic bacterial cells, heat-alkaline treatment and
sonication. Also we evaluated pyrogen content and sterility of
synthesized the isolated individual magnetosome by the Limulus
Amoebocyte Lysate test and direct impedimetric method
respectively.
Abstract: The C3 plants are frequently suffering from exposure
to high temperature stress which limits the growth and yield of these
plants. This study seeks to clarify the physiological mechanisms of
heat tolerance in relation to oxidative stress in C3 species. Fifteen C3
species were exposed to prolonged moderately high temperature
stress 36/30°C for 40 days in a growth chamber. Chlorophyll
fluorescence (Fv/Fm) showed great difference among species at 40
days of the stress. The species showed decreases in Fv/Fm and
increases in malondialdehyde (MDA) content under stress condition
as well as negative correlation between Fv/Fm and MDA (r = -0.61*)
at 40 days of the stress. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) content before
and after stress in addition to its response under stress showed great
differences among species. The results suggest that the difference in
heat tolerance among C3 species is closely associated with the ability
to suppress oxidative damage but not with the content of reactive
oxygen species (ROS) which is regulated by complex network.
Abstract: If a possibility distribution and a probability distribution
are describing values x of one and the same system or process
x(t), can they relate to each other? Though in general the possibility
and probability distributions might be not connected at all, we
can assume that in some particular cases there is an association linked
them.
In the presented paper, we consider distributions of bloodstream
concentrations of physiologically active substances and propose that
the probability to observe a concentration x of a substance X can be
produced from the possibility of the event X = x .
The proposed assumptions and resulted theoretical distributions
are tested against the data obtained from various panel studies of the
bloodstream concentrations of the different physiologically active
substances in patients and healthy adults as well.
Abstract: The principal objective of a water treatment plant is to
produce water that satisfies a set of drinking water quality standards
at a reasonable price to the consumers. The gravel-bed flocculator
provide a simple and inexpensive design for flocculation in small
water treatment plants (less than 5000 m3/day capacity). The packed
bed of gravel provides ideal conditions for the formation of compact
settleable flocs because of continuous recontact provided by the
sinuous flow of water through the interstices formed by the gravel.
The field data which were obtained from the operation of the
water supply treatment unit cover the physical, chemical and
biological water qualities of the raw and settled water as obtained by
the operation of the treatment unit. The experiments were carried out
with the aim of assessing the efficiency of the gravel filter in
removing the turbidity, pathogenic bacteria, from the raw water. The
water treatment plant, which was constructed for the treatment of
river water, was in principle a rapid sand filter.
The results show that the average value of the turbidity level of
the settled water was 4.83 NTU with a standard deviation of turbidity
2.893 NTU. This indicated that the removal efficiency of the
sedimentation tank (gravel filter) was about 67.8 %. for pH values
fluctuated between 7.75 and 8.15, indicating the alkaline nature of
the raw water of the river Shatt Al-Hilla, as expected. Raw water pH
is depressed slightly following alum coagulation. The pH of the
settled water ranged from 7.75 to a maximum of 8.05.
The bacteriological tests which were carried out on the water
samples were: total coliform test, E-coli test, and the plate count test.
In each test the procedure used was as outlined in the Standard
Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater (APHA,
AWWA, and WPCF, 1985). The gravel filter exhibit a low
performance in removing bacterial load. The percentage bacterial
removal, which is maximum for total plate count (19%) and
minimum for total coliform (16.82%).
Abstract: The importance of inter-organizational system (IOS)
has been increasingly recognized by organizations. However, IOS
adoption has proved to be difficult and, at this stage, why this is so is
not fully uncovered. In practice, benefits have often remained
concentrated, primarily accruing to the dominant party, resulting in
low rates of adoption and usage, and often culminating in the failure
of the IOS. The main research question is why organizations initiate
or join IOS and what factors influence their adoption and use levels.
This paper reviews the literature on IOS adoption and proposes a
theoretical framework in order to identify the critical factors to
capture a complete picture of IOS adoption. With our proposed
critical factors, we are able to investigate their relative contributions
to IOS adoption decisions. We obtain findings that suggested that
there are five groups of factors that significantly affect the adoption
and use decision of IOS in the Supply Chain Management (SCM)
context: 1) interorganizational context, 2) organizational context, 3)
technological context, 4) perceived costs, and 5) perceived benefits.
Abstract: This article stands in the context of rural communities
in Brazil, where, like many others emerging countries, the
overwhelming increasing markets and the overcrowded cities are
leaving behind informal settlements based on obsolete agricultural
economies and techniques. The pilot project for the community of
Goiabeira reflects the attempt to imagine a development model that
privileges the actual improvement of living conditions, the education
and training, the social inclusion and participation of the dwellers of
rural communities. Through the inclusion of operative public space,
the aim is for them to become self-sustaining, encouraging the use of
local resources for appropriate architectural, ecological and energy
technologies and devices, that are efficient, affordable and foster
community participation, in the respect of the surrounding
environment.
Abstract: It is believed that DNA damaging toxic metabolites contributes to the development of different pathological conditions. To prevent harmful influence of toxic agents, cells developed number of protecting mechanisms, such as enzymatic reaction of detoxification of reactive metabolites and repair of DNA damage. The aim of the study was to examine the association between polymorphism of GSTT1/GSTM1 and XRCC1/3 genes and coronary artery disease (CAD) incidence. To examine a polymorphism of these genes in CAD susceptibility in patients and controls, PCR based genotyping assay was performed. For GST genes, frequency of GSTM1 null genotype among CAD affected group was significantly increased than in control group (P0.1). We found that neither XRCC1 Arg399Gln nor XRCC3 Thr241Met were associated with CAD risk. Obtained data suggests that GSTM1 null genotype carriers are more susceptible to CAD development.
Abstract: Possible advantages of technology in educational
context required the defining boundaries of formal and informal
learning. Increasing opportunity to ubiquitous learning by
technological support has revealed a question of how to discover
the potential of individuals in the spontaneous environments such as
social networks. This seems to be related with the question of what
purposes in social networks have been being used? Social networks
provide various advantages in educational context as collaboration,
knowledge sharing, common interests, active participation and
reflective thinking. As a consequence of these, the purpose of this
study is composed of proposing a new model that could determine
factors which effect adoption of social network applications for usage
in educational context. While developing a model proposal, the
existing adoption and diffusion models have been reviewed and they
are thought to be suitable on handling an original perspective instead
of using completely other diffusion or acceptance models because of
different natures of education from other organizations. In the
proposed model; social factors, perceived ease of use, perceived
usefulness and innovativeness are determined four direct constructs
that effect adoption process. Facilitating conditions, image,
subjective norms and community identity are incorporated to model
as antecedents of these direct four constructs.
Abstract: Pairwise testing, which requires that every
combination of valid values of each pair of system factors be covered
by at lease one test case, plays an important role in software testing
since many faults are caused by unexpected 2-way interactions among
system factors. Although meta-heuristic strategies like simulated
annealing can generally discover smaller pairwise test suite, they may
cost more time to perform search, compared with greedy algorithms.
We propose a new method, improved Extremal Optimization (EO)
based on the Bak-Sneppen (BS) model of biological evolution, for
constructing pairwise test suites and define fitness function according
to the requirement of improved EO. Experimental results show that
improved EO gives similar size of resulting pairwise test suite and
yields an 85% reduction in solution time over SA.
Abstract: Recent advancements in sensor technologies and
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have led to the
development of cost-effective healthcare devices which can be used
to monitor and analyse a person-s physiological parameters from
remote locations. These advancements provides a unique opportunity
to overcome current healthcare challenges of low quality service
provisioning, lack of easy accessibility to service varieties, high costs
of services and increasing population of the elderly experienced
globally. This paper reports on a prototype implementation of an
architecture that seamlessly integrates Wireless Body Area Network
(WBAN) with Web services (WS) to proactively collect
physiological data of remote patients to recommend diagnostic
services. Technologies based upon WBAN and WS can provide
ubiquitous accessibility to a variety of services by allowing
distributed healthcare resources to be massively reused to provide
cost-effective services without individuals physically moving to the
locations of those resources. In addition, these technologies can
reduce costs of healthcare services by allowing individuals to access
services to support their healthcare. The prototype uses WBAN body
sensors implemented on arduino fio platforms to be worn by the
patient and an android smart phone as a personal server. The
physiological data are collected and uploaded through GPRS/internet
to the Medical Health Server (MHS) to be analysed. The prototype
monitors the activities, location and physiological parameters such as
SpO2 and Heart Rate of the elderly and patients in rehabilitation.
Medical practitioners would have real time access to the uploaded
information through a web application.
Abstract: Electronic Government is one of the special concepts
which has been performed successfully within recent decades.
Electronic government is a digital, wall-free government with a
virtual organization for presenting of online governmental services
and further cooperation in different political/social activities. In order
to have a successful implementation of electronic government
strategy and benefiting from its complete potential and benefits and
generally for establishment and applying of electronic government, it
is necessary to have different infrastructures as the basics of
electronic government with lack of which it is impossible to benefit
from mentioned services. For this purpose, in this paper we have
managed to recognize relevant obstacles for establishment of
electronic government in Iran. All required data for recognition of
obstacles were collected from statistical society of involved
specialists of Ministry of Communications & Information
Technology of Iran and Information Technology Organization of
Tehran Municipality through questionnaire. Then by considering of
five-point Likert scope and μ =3 as the index of relevant factors of
proposed model, we could specify current obstacles against
electronic government in Iran along with some guidelines and
proposal in this regard. According to the results, mentioned obstacles
for applying of electronic government in Iran are as follows:
Technical & technological problems, Legal, judicial & safety
problems, Economic problems and Humanistic Problems.
Abstract: The literature reports a large number of approaches for
measuring the similarity between protein sequences. Most of these
approaches estimate this similarity using alignment-based techniques
that do not necessarily yield biologically plausible results, for two
reasons.
First, for the case of non-alignable (i.e., not yet definitively aligned
and biologically approved) sequences such as multi-domain, circular
permutation and tandem repeat protein sequences, alignment-based
approaches do not succeed in producing biologically plausible results.
This is due to the nature of the alignment, which is based on the
matching of subsequences in equivalent positions, while non-alignable
proteins often have similar and conserved domains in non-equivalent
positions.
Second, the alignment-based approaches lead to similarity measures
that depend heavily on the parameters set by the user for the alignment
(e.g., gap penalties and substitution matrices). For easily alignable
protein sequences, it's possible to supply a suitable combination of
input parameters that allows such an approach to yield biologically
plausible results. However, for difficult-to-align protein sequences,
supplying different combinations of input parameters yields different
results. Such variable results create ambiguities and complicate the
similarity measurement task.
To overcome these drawbacks, this paper describes a novel and
effective approach for measuring the similarity between protein
sequences, called SAF for Substitution and Alignment Free. Without
resorting either to the alignment of protein sequences or to substitution
relations between amino acids, SAF is able to efficiently detect the
significant subsequences that best represent the intrinsic properties of
protein sequences, those underlying the chronological dependencies of
structural features and biochemical activities of protein sequences.
Moreover, by using a new efficient subsequence matching scheme,
SAF more efficiently handles protein sequences that contain similar
structural features with significant meaning in chronologically
non-equivalent positions. To show the effectiveness of SAF, extensive
experiments were performed on protein datasets from different
databases, and the results were compared with those obtained by
several mainstream algorithms.
Abstract: E-travel is travel agency-s companies employing internet and website as e-commerce context. This study presents numerous initial key factors of electronic travel model based on small travel agencies perspectives. Browsing previous studies related to website travel activities are conducted. Five small travel agencies in Indonesia has been deeply interviewed in case studies. The finding of this research is identifying numerous characteristics and dimension factors and travel website operations including ownermanager roles, business experiences, characteristically business, and technological aspects. This study is the preliminary research related to travel website adoption in Indonesia. The further study would be conducted in questionnaires of the quantitative research in Indonesia contexts as a developing country.
Abstract: MATCH project [1] entitle the development of an
automatic diagnosis system that aims to support treatment of colon
cancer diseases by discovering mutations that occurs to tumour
suppressor genes (TSGs) and contributes to the development of
cancerous tumours. The constitution of the system is based on a)
colon cancer clinical data and b) biological information that will be
derived by data mining techniques from genomic and proteomic
sources The core mining module will consist of the popular, well
tested hybrid feature extraction methods, and new combined
algorithms, designed especially for the project. Elements of rough
sets, evolutionary computing, cluster analysis, self-organization maps
and association rules will be used to discover the annotations
between genes, and their influence on tumours [2]-[11].
The methods used to process the data have to address their high
complexity, potential inconsistency and problems of dealing with the
missing values. They must integrate all the useful information
necessary to solve the expert's question. For this purpose, the system
has to learn from data, or be able to interactively specify by a domain
specialist, the part of the knowledge structure it needs to answer a
given query. The program should also take into account the
importance/rank of the particular parts of data it analyses, and adjusts
the used algorithms accordingly.
Abstract: The methanolic extracts from seeds of tamarind
(Tamarindus indica) was prepared by Soxhlet apparatus extraction
and evaluated for total phenolic content by Folin-Ciocalteu method.
Then, methanolic extract was screened biological activities (In vitro)
for anti-melanogenic activity by tyrosinase inhibition test, antiinflammation
activity by cyclooxygenase 1 (COX-1) and
cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) inhibition test, and cytotoxic screening
test with Vero cells. The results showed that total phenolic content,
which contained in extract, was contained 27.72 mg of gallic acid
equivalent per g of dry weight. The ability to inhibit tyrosinase
enzyme, which exerted by Tamarind seed extracts (1 mg/ml) was
52.13 ± 0.42 %. The extract was not possessed inhibitory effect to
COX-1 and COX-2 enzymes and cytotoxic effect to Vero cells. The
finding is concludes that tested seed extract was possessed
antimelanogenic activity with non-toxic effects. However, there was
not exhibited anti-inflammatory activity. Further studies include the
use of advance biological models to confirm this biological activity,
as well as, the isolation and characterization of the purified
compounds that it was contained.
Abstract: As part of national epidemiological survey on bovine
viral diarrhea virus (BVDV), a total of 274 dejecta samples were
collected from 14 cattle farms in 8 areas of Xinjiang Uygur
Autonomous Region in northwestern China. Total RNA was extracted
from each sample, and 5--untranslated region (UTR) of BVDV
genome was amplified by using two-step reverse
transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). The PCR products
were subsequently sequenced to study the genetic variations of BVDV
in these areas. Among the 274 samples, 33 samples were found
virus-positive. According to sequence analysis of the PCR products,
the 33 samples could be arranged into 16 groups. All the sequences,
however, were highly conserved with BVDV Osloss strains. The virus
possessed theses sequences belonged to BVDV-1b subtype by
phylogenetic analysis. Based on these data, we established a typing
tree for BVDV in these areas. Our results suggested that BVDV-1b
was a predominant subgenotype in northwestern China and no
correlation between the genetic and geographical distances could be
observed above the farm level.