Scholarly

Increasing the Efficiency of Rake Receivers for Ultra-Wideband Applications

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 7 1442 - 1446 Pages

Abstract: In diversity rich environments, such as in Ultra- Wideband (UWB) applications, the a priori determination of the number of strong diversity branches is difficult, because of the considerably large number of diversity paths, which are characterized by a variety of power delay profiles (PDPs). Several Rake implementations have been proposed in the past, in order to reduce the number of the estimated and combined paths. To this aim, we introduce two adaptive Rake receivers, which combine a subset of the resolvable paths considering simultaneously the quality of both the total combining output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the individual SNR of each path. These schemes achieve better adaptation to channel conditions compared to other known receivers, without further increasing the complexity. Their performance is evaluated in different practical UWB channels, whose models are based on extensive propagation measurements. The proposed receivers compromise between the power consumption, complexity and performance gain for the additional paths, resulting in important savings in power and computational resources.

Pesticides Use in Rural Settings in Romania

Year: 2008 Volume: 2 Issue: 8 929 - 931 Pages

Abstract: The environment pollution with pesticides and heavy metals is a recognized problem nowadays, with extension to the global scale the tendency of amplification. Even with all the progress in the environmental field, both in the emphasize of the effect of the pollutants upon health, the linked studies environment-health are insufficient, not only in Romania but all over the world also. We aim to describe the particular situation in Romania regarding the uncontrolled use of pesticides, to identify and evaluate the risk zones for health and the environment in Romania, with the final goal of designing adequate programs for reduction and control of the risk sources. An exploratory study was conducted to determine the magnitude of the pesticide use problem in a population living in Saliste, a rural setting in Transylvania, Romania. The significant stakeholders in Saliste region were interviewed and a sample from the population living in Saliste area was selected to fill in a designed questionnaire. All the selected participants declared that they used pesticides in their activities for more than one purpose. They declared they annually applied pesticides for a period of time between 11 and 30 years, from 5 to 9 days per year on average, mainly on crops situated at some distance from the houses but high risk behavior was identified as the volunteers declared the use of pesticides in the backyard gardens, near their homes, where children were playing. The pesticide applicators did not have the necessary knowledge about safety and exposure. The health data must be correlated with exposure biomarkers in attempt to identify the possible health effects of the pesticides exposure. Future plans include educational campaigns to raise the awareness of the population on the danger of uncontrolled use of pesticides.

Ribeirinhos: A Sustainability Assessment of Housing Typologies in the Amazon Region

Year: 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 6 1169 - 1176 Pages

Abstract: The 20th century has brought much development to the practice of Architecture worldwide, and technology has bridged inhabitation limits in many regions of the world with high levels of comfort and conveniences, most times at high costs to the environment. Throughout the globe, the tropical countries are being urbanized at an unprecedented rate and housing has become a major issue worldwide, in light of increased demand and lack of appropriate infra-structure and planning. Buildings and urban spaces designed in tropical cities have mainly adopted external concepts that in most cases do not fit the needs of the inhabitants living in such harsh climatic environment, and when they do, do so at high financial, environmental and cultural costs. Traditional architectural practices can provide valuable understanding on how self-reliance and autonomy of construction can be reinforced in rural-urban tropical environments. From traditional housing knowledge, it is possible to derive lessons for the development of new construction materials that are affordable, environmentally friendly, culturally acceptable and accesible to all.Specifically to the urban context, such solutions are of outmost importance, given the needs to a more democratic society, where access to housing is considered high in the agenda for development. Traditional or rural constructions are also ongoing through extensive changes eventhough they have mostly adopted climate-responsive building practices relying on local resources (with minimum embodied energy) and energy (for comfort and quality of life). It is important to note that many of these buildings can actually be called zero-energy, and hold potential answers to enable transition from high energy, high cost, low comfort urban habitations to zero/low energy habitations with high quality urban livelihood. Increasing access to modern urban lifestyels have also an effect on the aspirations from people in terms of performance, comfort and convenience in terms of their housing and the way it is produced and used. These aspirations are resulting in transitions from localresource dependent habitations- to non-local resource based highenergy urban style habitations. And such transitions are resulting in the habitations becoming increasingly unsuited to the local climatic conditions with increasing discomfort, ill-health, and increased CO2 emissions and local environmental disruption. This research studies one specific transition group in the context of 'water communities' in tropical-equatorial regions: Ribeirinhos housing typology (Amazonas, Brazil). The paper presents the results of a qualitative sustainability assessment of the housing typologies under transition, found at the Ribeirinhos communities.

An Efficient Graph Query Algorithm Based on Important Vertices and Decision Features

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 11 2650 - 2657 Pages

Abstract: Graph has become increasingly important in modeling complicated structures and schemaless data such as proteins, chemical compounds, and XML documents. Given a graph query, it is desirable to retrieve graphs quickly from a large database via graph-based indices. Different from the existing methods, our approach, called VFM (Vertex to Frequent Feature Mapping), makes use of vertices and decision features as the basic indexing feature. VFM constructs two mappings between vertices and frequent features to answer graph queries. The VFM approach not only provides an elegant solution to the graph indexing problem, but also demonstrates how database indexing and query processing can benefit from data mining, especially frequent pattern mining. The results show that the proposed method not only avoids the enumeration method of getting subgraphs of query graph, but also effectively reduces the subgraph isomorphism tests between the query graph and graphs in candidate answer set in verification stage.

Removal of Volatile Organic Compounds from Contaminated Surfactant Solution using Co-Curren Vacuum Stripping

Year: 2012 Volume: 6 Issue: 4 207 - 211 Pages

Abstract: There has been a growing interest in utilizing surfactants in remediation processes to separate the hydrophobic volatile organic compounds (HVOCs) from aqueous solution. One attractive process is cloud point extraction (CPE), which utilizes nonionic surfactants as a separating agent. Since the surfactant cost is a key determination of the economic viability of the process, it is important that the surfactants are recycled and reused. This work aims to study the performance of the co-current vacuum stripping using a packed column for HVOCs removal from contaminated surfactant solution. Six types HVOCs are selected as contaminants. The studied surfactant is the branched secondary alcohol ethoxylates (AEs), Tergitol TMN-6 (C14H30O2). The volatility and the solubility of HVOCs in surfactant system are determined in terms of an apparent Henry’s law constant and a solubilization constant, respectively. Moreover, the HVOCs removal efficiency of vacuum stripping column is assessed in terms of percentage of HVOCs removal and the overall liquid phase volumetric mass transfer coefficient. The apparent Henry’s law constant of benzenz , toluene, and ethyl benzene were 7.00×10-5, 5.38×10-5, 3.35× 10-5 respectively. The solubilization constant of benzene, toluene, and ethyl benzene were 1.71, 2.68, 7.54 respectively. The HVOCs removal for all solute were around 90 percent.

Betel Nut Beauty in Taiwan: Chinese Tourists- Perspective

Year: 2013 Volume: 7 Issue: 2 400 - 402 Pages

Abstract: Tourists- eyes will often be attracted by the unique phenomenon of the roadsides: betel nut beauties (pronounced as binlang xishi in Mandarin), if they drive on the roads of Taiwan. Sitting in the neon-lit glass stalls with attractive dress on the roadsides, betel nut beauties usually sell betel nuts to the passing truckers or car drivers with much of their efforts. Moreover, in order to attract peoples- eyesight and increase the sales volume, the young girls are in skimpy clothing to promote betel nuts or beverages to their customers. Therefore, when the Chinese tourists come to Taiwan, to see the unique betel nut beauty phenomenon has become one of their greatly interested things or even a “must see". This paper describes betel but beauties in Taiwan, explained why the Chinese tourists like to see them in Taiwan and proposed propositions for examination.

The Characteristics of Thai Movies and Factors Contributing to Becoming Widely Known in International Markets

Year: 2012 Volume: 6 Issue: 10 2612 - 2617 Pages

Authors:
Tanyatorn Panyasopon

Abstract: Many Thai movies have been very popular domestically and internationally. Some movies were box office hits and receiving awards. However, there has not yet been research about how Thai movies can sell in international markets The objectives of the research were 1) To analyze the characteristics of Thai movies that can sell to world audiences; 2) To investigate the factors making Thai movies into foreign markets. Thai film professionals were interviewed. Their ideas were analyzed to find out what factors contributing to Thai movies widely seen in worldwide markets. Nine foreign audiences were also interviewed to reveal what characteristics of Thai movies would be well accepted by the markets. The results showed that major characteristics of Thai movies proving successful worldwide were cultural and exotic Thai movies, outstanding genres, well-known actors, music and songs. Factors contributing to global market were marketing, qualities of Thai movies, and financial support from the government.

Natural Ventilation as a Design Strategy for Energy Saving

Year: 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 11 363 - 368 Pages

Authors:
Zahra Ghiabaklou

Abstract: Ventilation is a fundamental requirement for occupant health and indoor air quality in buildings. Natural ventilation can be used as a design strategy in free-running buildings to: • Renew indoor air with fresh outside air and lower room temperatures at times when the outdoor air is cooler. • Promote air flow to cool down the building structure (structural cooling). • Promote occupant physiological cooling processes (comfort cooling). This paper focuses on ways in which ventilation can provide the mechanism for heat dissipation and cooling of the building structure..It also discusses use of ventilation as a means of increasing air movement to improve comfort when indoor air temperatures are too high. The main influencing factors and design considerations and quantitative guidelines to help meet the design objectives are also discussed.

Convergence of a One-step Iteration Scheme for Quasi-asymptotically Nonexpansive Mappings

Year: 2012 Volume: 6 Issue: 3 305 - 307 Pages

Authors:
Safeer Hussain Khan

Abstract: In this paper, we use a one-step iteration scheme to approximate common fixed points of two quasi-asymptotically nonexpansive mappings. We prove weak and strong convergence theorems in a uniformly convex Banach space. Our results generalize the corresponding results of Yao and Chen [15] to a wider class of mappings while extend those of Khan, Abbas and Khan [4] to an improved one-step iteration scheme without any condition and improve upon many others in the literature.

Analysis of Social Network Using Clever Ant Colony Metaphor

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 5 1382 - 1386 Pages

Abstract: A social network is a set of people or organization or other social entities connected by some form of relationships. Analysis of social network broadly elaborates visual and mathematical representation of that relationship. Web can also be considered as a social network. This paper presents an innovative approach to analyze a social network using a variant of existing ant colony optimization algorithm called as Clever Ant Colony Metaphor. Experiments are performed and interesting findings and observations have been inferred based on the proposed model.

Ultrasonic Evaluation of Bone Callus Growth in a Rabbit Tibial Distraction Model

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 9 543 - 550 Pages

Abstract: Ultrasound is useful in demonstrating bone mineral density of regenerating osseous tissue as well as structural alterations. A proposed ultrasound method, which included ultrasonography and acoustic parameters measurement, was employed to evaluate its efficacy in monitoring the bone callus changes in a rabbit tibial distraction osteogenesis (DO) model. The findings demonstrated that ultrasonographic images depicted characteristic changes of the bone callus, typical of histology findings, during the distraction phase. Follow-up acoustic parameters measurement of the bone callus, including speed of sound, reflection and attenuation, showed significant linear changes over time during the distraction phase. The acoustic parameters obtained during the distraction phase also showed moderate to strong correlation with consolidated bone callus density and micro-architecture measured by micro-computed tomography at the end of the consolidation phase. The results support the preferred use of ultrasound imaging in the early monitoring of bone callus changes during DO treatment.

Experimental Parallel Architecture for Rendering 3D Model into MPEG-4 Format

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 2 413 - 415 Pages

Abstract: This paper will present the initial findings of a research into distributed computer rendering. The goal of the research is to create a distributed computer system capable of rendering a 3D model into an MPEG-4 stream. This paper outlines the initial design, software architecture and hardware setup for the system. Distributed computing means designing and implementing programs that run on two or more interconnected computing systems. Distributed computing is often used to speed up the rendering of graphical imaging. Distributed computing systems are used to generate images for movies, games and simulations. A topic of interest is the application of distributed computing to the MPEG-4 standard. During the course of the research, a distributed system will be created that can render a 3D model into an MPEG-4 stream. It is expected that applying distributed computing principals will speed up rendering, thus improving the usefulness and efficiency of the MPEG-4 standard

Automatic Inspection of Percussion Caps by Means of Combined 2D and 3D Machine Vision Techniques

Year: 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 4 364 - 369 Pages

Abstract: The exhaustive quality control is becoming more and more important when commercializing competitive products in the world's globalized market. Taken this affirmation as an undeniable truth, it becomes critical in certain sector markets that need to offer the highest restrictions in quality terms. One of these examples is the percussion cap mass production, a critical element assembled in firearm ammunition. These elements, built in great quantities at a very high speed, must achieve a minimum tolerance deviation in their fabrication, due to their vital importance in firing the piece of ammunition where they are built in. This paper outlines a machine vision development for the 100% inspection of percussion caps obtaining data from 2D and 3D simultaneous images. The acquisition speed and precision of these images from a metallic reflective piece as a percussion cap, the accuracy of the measures taken from these images and the multiple fabrication errors detected make the main findings of this work.

The Effect of Breaststroke Swimming Exercise to Increase the Value of Peak Expiratory Flow

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 5 644 - 646 Pages

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of breaststroke swimming exercise to improving the peak expiratory flow. Methode: This study used 17 students of men aged 19-21 years, APE values measured before and after the study. Style swimming workout done in accordance with a program that has been made. Result: Value of peak expiratory flow in male students obtained on average before exercise (530 ± 15 811) liters / min and after doing the exercises (540.59 ± 17 092) liters / minute. Paired ttest showed t = -6.446 and p = 0.000, which means there are differences in peak expiratory flow values before and after exercise swimming breaststroke. Conclusion: The conclusion is the breaststroke swimming exercise can be improving of peak expiratory flow.

Computer Models of the Vestibular Head Tilt Response, and Their Relationship to EVestG and Meniere's Disease

Year: 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 5 218 - 231 Pages

Abstract: This paper attempts to explain response components of Electrovestibulography (EVestG) using a computer simulation of a three-canal model of the vestibular system. EVestG is a potentially new diagnostic method for Meniere's disease. EVestG is a variant of Electrocochleography (ECOG), which has been used as a standard method for diagnosing Meniere's disease - it can be used to measure the SP/AP ratio, where an SP/AP ratio greater than 0.4-0.5 is indicative of Meniere-s Disease. In EVestG, an applied head tilt replaces the acoustic stimulus of ECOG. The EVestG output is also an SP/AP type plot, where SP is the summing potential, and AP is the action potential amplitude. AP is thought of as being proportional to the size of a population of afferents in an excitatory neural firing state. A simulation of the fluid volume displacement in the vestibular labyrinth in response to various types of head tilts (ipsilateral, backwards and horizontal rotation) was performed, and a simple neural model based on these simulations developed. The simple neural model shows that the change in firing rate of the utricle is much larger in magnitude than the change in firing rates of all three semi-circular canals following a head tilt (except in a horizontal rotation). The data suggests that the change in utricular firing rate is a minimum 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than changes in firing rates of the canals during ipsilateral/backward tilts. Based on these results, the neural response recorded by the electrode in our EVestG recordings is expected to be dominated by the utricle in ipsilateral/backward tilts (It is important to note that the effect of the saccule and efferent signals were not taken into account in this model). If the utricle response dominates the EVestG recordings as the modeling results suggest, then EVestG has the potential to diagnose utricular hair cell damage due to a viral infection (which has been cited as one possible cause of Meniere's Disease).

Innovation Knowledge and Capability, Work Efficiency of Accountants and the Success of SME Registered in Nakorn Pathom Province

Year: 2014 Volume: 8 Issue: 9 2913 - 2916 Pages

Abstract: The objectives of this research were to compare the success of SME registered in Nakorn Pathom Province divided in personal data also to study the relations between the innovation knowledge and capability and the success of SME registered in Nakorn Pathom Province and to study the relations between the work efficiency and the success of SME registered in Nakorn Pathom Province. A questionnaire was utilized as a tool to collect data. Statistics utilized in this research included frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, and multiple regression analysis. Data were analyzed by using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.The findings revealed that the majority of respondents were male with the age between 25-34 years old, hold undergraduate degree, married and stay together. The average income of respondents was between 10,001-20,000 baht. It also found that in terms of innovation knowledge and capability, there were two variables had an influence on the amount of innovation knowledge and capability, innovation evaluation which were physical characteristic and innovation process.

Residual Stresses in Thermally Sprayed Gas Turbine Components

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 6 1088 - 1090 Pages

Abstract: In this paper, the residual stress of thermal spray coatings in gas turbine component by curvature method has been studied. The samples and shaft were coated by hard WC-12Co cermets using high velocity oxy fuel (HVOF) after preparation in same conditions. The curvature of coated samples was measured by using of coordinate measurement machine (CMM). The metallurgical and Tribological studies has been made on the coated shaft using optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM)

Review of Scouring on Integral Bridge and its Possible Protection

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 6 284 - 286 Pages

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to summarize the following protection of scouring countermeasures by using Bentonite-Enhanced Sand (BES) mixtures. The concept of underground improvement is being used in this study to reduce the void of the sand. The sand bentonite mixture was used to bond the ground soil conditions surrounding the pile of integral bridge. The right composition of sand bentonite mixture was proposed based on previous findings. The swelling effect of bentonite also was investigated to ensure there is no adverse impact to the structure of the integral bridge. ScourScour, another name for severe erosion, occurs when the erosive capacity of water resulting from natural and manmade events exceeds the ability of earth materials to resist its effects. According to AASHTO LRFD Specifications (Section C3.7.5), scour is the most common reason for the collapse of highway bridges in the United States

Determination of Sensitive Transmission Lines Due to the Effect of Protection System Hidden Failure in a Critical System Cascading Collapse

Year: 2013 Volume: 7 Issue: 5 530 - 535 Pages

Abstract: Protection system hidden failures have been identified as one of the main causes of system cascading collapse resulting to power system instability. In this paper, a systematic approach is presented in order to identify the probability of a system cascading collapse by taking into consideration the effect of protection system hidden failure. This includes the accurate calculation of the probability of hidden failure as it will provide significant impinge on the findings of the probability of system cascading collapse. The probability of a system cascading collapse is then used to identify the initial tripping of sensitive transmission lines which will contribute to a critical system cascading collapse. Based on the results obtained from this study, it is important to decide on the accurate value of the hidden failure probability as it will affect the probability of a system cascading collapse.

Consistency Model and Synchronization Primitives in SDSMS

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 2 405 - 408 Pages

Abstract: This paper is on the general discussion of memory consistency model like Strict Consistency, Sequential Consistency, Processor Consistency, Weak Consistency etc. Then the techniques for implementing distributed shared memory Systems and Synchronization Primitives in Software Distributed Shared Memory Systems are discussed. The analysis involves the performance measurement of the protocol concerned that is Multiple Writer Protocol. Each protocol has pros and cons. So, the problems that are associated with each protocol is discussed and other related things are explored.

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