Effect of Secondary Curvature on Mixing Characteristic within Constant Circular Tubes

In this study, numerical simulations on laminar flow in sinusoidal wavy shaped tubes were conducted for mean Reynolds number of 250, which is in the range of physiological flow-rate and investigated flow structures, pressure distribution and particle trajectories both in steady and periodic inflow conditions. For extensive comparisons, various wave lengths and amplitudes of sine function for geometry of tube models were employed. The results showed that small amplitude secondary curvature has significant influence on the nature of flow patterns and particle mixing mechanism. This implies that characterizing accurate geometry is essential in accurate predicting of in vivo hemodynamics and may motivate further study on any possibility of reflection of secondary flow on vascular remodeling and pathophysiology.

The Design of PIP Controller for a Thermal System with Large Time Delay

This paper will first describe predictor controllers when the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers are inactive for procedures that have large delay time (LDT) in transfer stage. Therefore in those states, the predictor controllers are better than the PID controllers, then compares three types of predictor controllers. The value of these controller-s parameters are obtained by trial and error method, so here an effort has been made to obtain these parameters by Ziegler-Nichols method. Eventually in this paper Ziegler-Nichols method has been described and finally, a PIP controller has been designed for a thermal system, which circulates hot air to keep the temperature of a chamber constant.

A User - Requirements Approach in Medical Devices Maintenance System Development: A Case Study from an Industry Perspective

This paper is a part of research, in which the way the biomedical engineers follow in their work is analyzed. The goal of this paper is to present a method for specification of user requirements in the medical devices maintenance process. Data Gathering Methods, Research Model Phases and Descriptive Analysis is presented. These technology and verification rules can be implemented in Medical devices maintenance management process to the maintenance process.

SeqWord Gene Island Sniffer: a Program to Study the Lateral Genetic Exchange among Bacteria

SeqWord Gene Island Sniffer, a new program for the identification of mobile genetic elements in sequences of bacterial chromosomes is presented. This program is based on the analysis of oligonucleotide usage variations in DNA sequences. 3,518 mobile genetic elements were identified in 637 bacterial genomes and further analyzed by sequence similarity and the functionality of encoded proteins. The results of this study are stored in an open database http://anjie.bi.up.ac.za/geidb/geidbhome. php). The developed computer program and the database provide the information valuable for further investigation of the distribution of mobile genetic elements and virulence factors among bacteria. The program is available for download at www.bi.up.ac.za/SeqWord/sniffer/index.html.

A Semi-Fragile Signature based Scheme for Ownership Identification and Color Image Authentication

In this paper, a novel scheme is proposed for ownership identification and authentication using color images by deploying Cryptography and Digital Watermarking as underlaying technologies. The former is used to compute the contents based hash and the latter to embed the watermark. The host image that will claim to be the rightful owner is first transformed from RGB to YST color space exclusively designed for watermarking based applications. Geometrically YS ÔèÑ T and T channel corresponds to the chrominance component of color image, therefore suitable for embedding the watermark. The T channel is divided into 4×4 nonoverlapping blocks. The size of block is important for enhanced localization, security and low computation. Each block along with ownership information is then deployed by SHA160, a one way hash function to compute the content based hash, which is always unique and resistant against birthday attack instead of using MD5 that may raise the condition i.e. H(m)=H(m'). The watermark payload varies from block to block and computed by the variance factorα . The quality of watermarked images is quite high both subjectively and objectively. Our scheme is blind, computationally fast and exactly locates the tampered region.

Data Mining on the Router Logs for Statistical Application Classification

With the advance of information technology in the new era the applications of Internet to access data resources has steadily increased and huge amount of data have become accessible in various forms. Obviously, the network providers and agencies, look after to prevent electronic attacks that may be harmful or may be related to terrorist applications. Thus, these have facilitated the authorities to under take a variety of methods to protect the special regions from harmful data. One of the most important approaches is to use firewall in the network facilities. The main objectives of firewalls are to stop the transfer of suspicious packets in several ways. However because of its blind packet stopping, high process power requirements and expensive prices some of the providers are reluctant to use the firewall. In this paper we proposed a method to find a discriminate function to distinguish between usual packets and harmful ones by the statistical processing on the network router logs. By discriminating these data, an administrator may take an approach action against the user. This method is very fast and can be used simply in adjacent with the Internet routers.

Welfare States vs. States of Resources: A Question of Governance

The present paper aims to present the significant role that the concept of governance can play in order to combine naturals resources as useful funding basis for the formation of a stable and effective welfare state model. The combination of those two different fields aims to represent the modern trends of our era as the means to solve the severe financial and economic issues caused mostly due to the malfunction of the welfare state and its public sector. European Union and Asian countries (especially China) are the main areas of interest since EU experiences a fiscal and economic crisis while China rules the area of the natural resources exploiting 97% of rare earths elements worldwide.

Using a Semantic Self-Organising Web Page-Ranking Mechanism for Public Administration and Education

In the proposed method for Web page-ranking, a novel theoretic model is introduced and tested by examples of order relationships among IP addresses. Ranking is induced using a convexity feature, which is learned according to these examples using a self-organizing procedure. We consider the problem of selforganizing learning from IP data to be represented by a semi-random convex polygon procedure, in which the vertices correspond to IP addresses. Based on recent developments in our regularization theory for convex polygons and corresponding Euclidean distance based methods for classification, we develop an algorithmic framework for learning ranking functions based on a Computational Geometric Theory. We show that our algorithm is generic, and present experimental results explaining the potential of our approach. In addition, we explain the generality of our approach by showing its possible use as a visualization tool for data obtained from diverse domains, such as Public Administration and Education.

A Functional Beverage: Lemonade

Fruits and vegetables are the essentials of a healthy diet, mainly because of their antioxidant properties contributing to disease blockage especially for some certain types of cancer. Being a favourite fruit, citrus are produced for economic and commercial purposes worldwide. Particularly, lemon fruit (Citrus limon L.), has an important place in export products of Turkey. Lemon has a great importance on human nutrition with regard to being a source of nutrients, flavonoids, vitamin C and minerals. It is used for food flavouring and pickling and also processed for lemonade. By processing citrus into fruit juices, consumption may increase and also become easier. Like many fruits and vegetables lemons are cheap and abundant during harvesting period, while they are quite expensive in other seasons. Lemon juice and concentrate production allows consumers to get benefits from lemon fruit in any time of the year. Lemonade is getting in to the focus of consumers’ attention preferring non-carbonated drinks. The demand of healthy, convenient functional foods affects consumer trends through innovative products. For this reason, lemonade could be enriched with different natural herb extracts such as ginger (Zingiber officinale), linden (Tilia cordata), and mint (Mentha piperita).

Analysing the Elementary Science and Technology Coursebook and Student Workbook in Terms of Constructivism

The curriculum of the primary school science course was redesigned on the basis of constructivism in 2005-2006 academic years, in Turkey. In this context, the name of this course has been changed as “Science and Technology"; and both content and course books, students workbooks for this course have been redesigned in light of constructivism. The aim of this study is to determine whether the Science and Technology course books and student work books for primary school 5th grade are appropriate for the constructivism by evaluating them in terms of the fundamental principles of constructivism. In this study, out of qualitative research methods, documentation technique (i.e. document analysis) is applied; while selecting samples, criterion-sampling is used out of purposeful sampling techniques. When the Science and Technology course book and workbook for the 5th grade in primary education are examined, it is seen that both books complete each other in certain areas. Consequently, it can be claimed that in spite of some inadequate and missing points in the course book and workbook of the primary school Science and Technology course for the 5th grade students, these books are attempted to be designed in terms of the principles of constructivism. To overcome the inadequacies in the books, it can be suggested to redesign them. In addition to them, not to ignore the technology dimension of the course, the activities that encourage the students to prepare projects using technology cycle should be included.

A Hybrid Approach for Selection of Relevant Features for Microarray Datasets

Developing an accurate classifier for high dimensional microarray datasets is a challenging task due to availability of small sample size. Therefore, it is important to determine a set of relevant genes that classify the data well. Traditionally, gene selection method often selects the top ranked genes according to their discriminatory power. Often these genes are correlated with each other resulting in redundancy. In this paper, we have proposed a hybrid method using feature ranking and wrapper method (Genetic Algorithm with multiclass SVM) to identify a set of relevant genes that classify the data more accurately. A new fitness function for genetic algorithm is defined that focuses on selecting the smallest set of genes that provides maximum accuracy. Experiments have been carried on four well-known datasets1. The proposed method provides better results in comparison to the results found in the literature in terms of both classification accuracy and number of genes selected.

X-ray Pulse Profiles of PSR J0538+2817

This paper reports our analysis of 163 ks observations of PSR J0538+2817 with the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE).The pulse profiles, detected up to 60 keV, show a single peak asin the case for radio frequency. The profile is well described by one Gaussians function with full width at half maximum (FWHM) 0.04794. We compared the difference of arrival time between radio and X-ray pulse profiles for the first time. It turns out that the phase of radio emits precede the X-ray by 8.7 ± 4.5 ms. Furthermore we obtained the pulse profiles in the energy ranges of 2.29-6.18 keV, 6.18-12.63 keV and 12.63-17.36 keV. The intensity of pulses decreases with the increasing energy range. We discuss the emission geometry in our work.

New Product Development Process on High-Tech Innovation Life Cycle

This work will provide a new perspective of exploring innovation thematic. It will reveal that radical and incremental innovations are complementary during the innovation life cycle and accomplished through distinct ways of developing new products. Each new product development process will be constructed according to the nature of each innovation and the state of the product development. This paper proposes the inclusion of the organizational function areas that influence new product's development on the new product development process.

Functionalization and Characterization of Carbon Nanotubes/ Polypropylene Nanocomposite

Chemical and physical functionalization of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) has been commonly practiced to achieve better dispersion of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in polymer matrix. This work describes various functionalization methods (acidtreatment, non-ionic surfactant treatment with TritonX-100), fabrication of MWCNT/PP nanocomposites via melt blending and characterization of mechanical properties. Microscopy analysis (FESEM, TEM, XPS) showed effective purification of MWCNTs under acid treatment, and better dispersion under both chemical and physical functionalization techniques combined, in their respective order. Tensile tests showed increase in tensile strength for the nanocomposites that contain MWCNTs up to 2 wt%. A decrease in tensile strength was seen in samples that contain 4 wt% of MWCNTs for both raw and Triton X-100 functionalized, signifying MWCNT degradation/rebundling at composition with higher content of MWCNTs. For the acid-treated MWCNTs, however, the tensile results showed slight improvement even at 4wt%, indicating effective dispersion of MWCNTs.

Emission Constrained Economic Dispatch for Hydrothermal Coordination

This paper presents an efficient emission constrained economic dispatch algorithm that deals with nonlinear cost function and constraints. It is then incorporated into the dynamic programming based hydrothermal coordination program. The program has been tested on a practical utility system having 32 thermal and 12 hydro generating units. Test results show that a slight increase in production cost causes a substantial reduction in emission.

Management of Multimedia Contents for Distributed e-Learning System

We have developed a distributed asynchronous Web based training system. In order to improve the scalability and robustness of this system, all contents and functions are realized on mobile agents. These agents are distributed to computers, and they can use a Peer to Peer network that modified Content-Addressable Network. In the proposed system, only text data can be included in a exercise. To make our proposed system more useful, the mechanism that it not only adapts to multimedia data but also it doesn-t influence the user-s learning even if the size of exercise becomes large is necessary.

Parallel Algorithm for Numerical Solution of Three-Dimensional Poisson Equation

In this paper developed and realized absolutely new algorithm for solving three-dimensional Poisson equation. This equation used in research of turbulent mixing, computational fluid dynamics, atmospheric front, and ocean flows and so on. Moreover in the view of rising productivity of difficult calculation there was applied the most up-to-date and the most effective parallel programming technology - MPI in combination with OpenMP direction, that allows to realize problems with very large data content. Resulted products can be used in solving of important applications and fundamental problems in mathematics and physics.

Consumption Habits of Low-Fat Plant Sterol-Enriched Yoghurt Enriched with Phytosterols

The increasing interest in plant sterol enriched foods is due to the fact that they reduce blood cholesterol concentrations without adverse side effects. In this context, enriched foods with phytosterols may be helpful in protecting population against atherosclerosis and cardiovascular diseases. The aim of the present work was to evaluate in a population of Viseu, Portugal, the consumption habits low-fat, plant sterol-enriched yoghurt. For this study, 577 inquiries were made and the sample was randomly selected for people shopping in various supermarkets. The preliminary results showed that the biggest consumers of these products were women aged 45 to 65 years old. Most of the people who claimed to buy these products consumed them once a day. Also, most of the consumers under antidyslipidemic therapeutics noticed positive effects on hypercholesterolemia.

Energy Based Temperature Profile for Heat Transfer Analysis of Concrete Section Exposed to Fire on One Side

For fire safety purposes, the fire resistance and the structural behavior of reinforced concrete members are assessed to satisfy specific fire performance criteria. The available prescribed provisions are based on standard fire load. Under various fire scenarios, engineers are in need of both heat transfer analysis and structural analysis. For heat transfer analysis, the study proposed a modified finite difference method to evaluate the temperature profile within a cross section. The research conducted is limited to concrete sections exposed to a fire on their one side. The method is based on the energy conservation principle and a pre-determined power function of the temperature profile. The power value of 2.7 is found to be a suitable value for concrete sections. The temperature profiles of the proposed method are only slightly deviate from those of the experiment, the FEM and the FDM for various fire loads such as ASTM E 119, ASTM 1529, BS EN 1991-1-2 and 550 oC. The proposed method is useful to avoid incontinence of the large matrix system of the typical finite difference method to solve the temperature profile. Furthermore, design engineers can simply apply the proposed method in regular spreadsheet software.

An Autonomous Collaborative Forecasting System Implementation – The First Step towards Successful CPFR System

In the past decade, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been regarded as an instrument for problem-solving and decision-making; indeed, they have already done with a substantial efficiency and effectiveness improvement in industries and businesses. In this paper, the Back-Propagation neural Networks (BPNs) will be modulated to demonstrate the performance of the collaborative forecasting (CF) function of a Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR®) system. CPFR functions the balance between the sufficient product supply and the necessary customer demand in a Supply and Demand Chain (SDC). Several classical standard BPN will be grouped, collaborated and exploited for the easy implementation of the proposed modular ANN framework based on the topology of a SDC. Each individual BPN is applied as a modular tool to perform the task of forecasting SKUs (Stock-Keeping Units) levels that are managed and supervised at a POS (point of sale), a wholesaler, and a manufacturer in an SDC. The proposed modular BPN-based CF system will be exemplified and experimentally verified using lots of datasets of the simulated SDC. The experimental results showed that a complex CF problem can be divided into a group of simpler sub-problems based on the single independent trading partners distributed over SDC, and its SKU forecasting accuracy was satisfied when the system forecasted values compared to the original simulated SDC data. The primary task of implementing an autonomous CF involves the study of supervised ANN learning methodology which aims at making “knowledgeable" decision for the best SKU sales plan and stocks management.