Scholarly

Life Experiences are Important Factors of Making Stronger SOC (Sense of Coherence) on the Workers in Tsukuba Research Park City (TRPC)

Year: 2012 Volume: 6 Issue: 8 1989 - 1993 Pages

Abstract: Via a large scale cross-sectional study among Japanese white color workers, the authors aimed to elucidate: (1) the distributions of Sense of Coherence (SOC), which reflect stress coping abilities, (2) the distributions of Life experience; (3) and the association between SOC and Life experience. Anonymous self-administered questionnaires were sent to 15,891 in 2001 and 21,922 in 2011 employees at educational and research institutions in Tsukuba Research Park City. A total of 5,868 (36.9%) and 9,528 (43.5%) respectively workers completed and returned the questionnaire; 5,715 and 9,515 respectively workers without missing data were analyzed. SOC scale scores differed by gender, age, and other demographic features in both study years. Among the life experiences, workers who have got over parenting or management position were higher SOC scale scores adjusted by gender and age. The life experiences that workers have got over could develop their stronger SOC in their life course.

Differentiation of Gene Expression Profiles Data for Liver and Kidney of Pigs

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 7 348 - 351 Pages

Abstract: Using DNA microarrays the comparative analysis of a gene expression profiles is carried out in a liver and kidneys of pigs. The hypothesis of a cross hybridization of one probe with different cDNA sites of the same gene or different genes is checked up, and it is shown, that cross hybridization can be a source of essential errors at revealing of a key genes in organ-specific transcriptome. It is reveald that distinctions in profiles of a gene expression are well coordinated with function, morphology, biochemistry and histology of these organs.

Reducing the Short Circuit Levels in Kuwait Transmission Network (A Case Study)

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 5 1094 - 1098 Pages

Abstract: Preliminary studies on Kuwait high voltage transmission system show significant increase in the short circuit level at some of the grid substations and some generating stations. This increase results from the growth in the power transmission systems in size and complexity. New generating stations are expected to be added to the system within the next few years. This paper describes the study analysis performed to evaluate the available and potential solutions to control SC levels in Kuwait power system. It also presents a modified planning of the transmission network in order to fulfill this task.

Average Switching Thresholds and Average Throughput for Adaptive Modulation using Markov Model

Year: 2008 Volume: 2 Issue: 5 768 - 773 Pages

Authors:
Essam S. Altubaishi

Abstract: The motivation for adaptive modulation and coding is to adjust the method of transmission to ensure that the maximum efficiency is achieved over the link at all times. The receiver estimates the channel quality and reports it back to the transmitter. The transmitter then maps the reported quality into a link mode. This mapping however, is not a one-to-one mapping. In this paper we investigate a method for selecting the proper modulation scheme. This method can dynamically adapt the mapping of the Signal-to- Noise Ratio (SNR) into a link mode. It enables the use of the right modulation scheme irrespective of changes in the channel conditions by incorporating errors in the received data. We propose a Markov model for this method, and use it to derive the average switching thresholds and the average throughput. We show that the average throughput of this method outperforms the conventional threshold method.

Field Emission Properties of Multi-wall Carbon Nanotube Field Emitters using Graphite Tip by Electroporetic Deposition

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 2 122 - 124 Pages

Abstract: We fabricated multi-walled carbon nanotube (MCNT) emitters by an electroporetic deposition (EPD) method using a MCNT-sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) suspension. MCNT films were prepared on graphite tip using EPD. We observe field emission properties of MCNT film after heat treatment. Consequently, The MCNT film on graphite tip exhibit good electron emission current.

Catalytic Decomposition of Potassium Monopersulfate. The Kinetics

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 9 443 - 446 Pages

Abstract: Potassium monopersulfate has been decomposed in aqueous solution in the presence of Co(II). The process has been simulated by means of a mechanism based on elementary reactions. Rate constants have been taken from literature reports or, alternatively, assimilated to analogous reactions occurring in Fenton's chemistry. Several operating conditions have been successfully applied.

Closely Parametrical Model for an Electrical Arc Furnace

Year: 2008 Volume: 2 Issue: 4 535 - 539 Pages

Abstract: To maximise furnace production it-s necessary to optimise furnace control, with the objectives of achieving maximum power input into the melting process, minimum network distortion and power-off time, without compromise on quality and safety. This can be achieved with on the one hand by an appropriate electrode control and on the other hand by a minimum of AC transformer switching. Electrical arc is a stochastic process; witch is the principal cause of power quality problems, including voltages dips, harmonic distortion, unbalance loads and flicker. So it is difficult to make an appropriate model for an Electrical Arc Furnace (EAF). The factors that effect EAF operation are the melting or refining materials, melting stage, electrode position (arc length), electrode arm control and short circuit power of the feeder. So arc voltages, current and power are defined as a nonlinear function of the arc length. In this article we propose our own empirical function of the EAF and model, for the mean stages of the melting process, thanks to the measurements in the steel factory.

New EEM/BEM Hybrid Method for Electric Field Calculation in Cable Joints

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 7 791 - 796 Pages

Abstract: A power cable is widely used for power supply in power distributing networks and power transmission lines. Due to limitations in the production, delivery and setting up power cables, they are produced and delivered in several separate lengths. Cable itself, consists of two cable terminations and arbitrary number of cable joints, depending on the cable route length. Electrical stress control is needed to prevent a dielectric breakdown at the end of the insulation shield in both the air and cable insulation. Reliability of cable joint depends on its materials, design, installation and operating environment. The paper describes design and performance results for new modeled cable joints. Design concepts, based on numerical calculations, must be correct. An Equivalent Electrodes Method/Boundary Elements Method-hybrid approach that allows electromagnetic field calculations in multilayer dielectric media, including inhomogeneous regions, is presented.

Islam and Fertility Regulations

Year: 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 6 675 - 677 Pages

Authors:
Muhammad Hammad Lakhvi

Abstract: Islam has a general principle of increase in population. But the Muslims are equally obliged to take care of health, education and the provisions etc. for their offspring and wives in the best possible way. The Muslims would have to regulate and manage the number of children, if any situation affects their duties regarding their wives or children. Islam accomplishes permissibility of temporary blockade in human fertility if someone faces any problem regarding health of mother or children. During the life of the Holy Prophet (SAW), Azl (coitus interruptus) was the only way for temporary spacing between the children. In technologically developed environment, the same can be resort through some advanced methodology or instrument of temporary blockade. Solid grounds are available in Islam that the fertility rate should be managed if any of the aspect of human quality is being affected.

Zero Dimensional Simulation of Combustion Process of a DI Diesel Engine Fuelled With Biofuels

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 8 1564 - 1570 Pages

Abstract: A zero dimensional model has been used to investigate the combustion performance of a single cylinder direct injection diesel engine fueled by biofuels with options like supercharging and exhaust gas recirculation. The numerical simulation was performed at constant speed. The indicated pressure, temperature diagrams are plotted and compared for different fuels. The emissions of soot and nitrous oxide are computed with phenomenological models. The experimental work was also carried out with biodiesel (palm stearin methyl ester) diesel blends, ethanol diesel blends to validate simulation results with experimental results, and observed that the present model is successful in predicting the engine performance with biofuels.

Color Shift of Printing with Hybrid Halftone Images for Overlay Misalignment

Year: 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 5 888 - 892 Pages

Abstract: Color printing proceeds with multiple halftone separations overlay. Because of separation overlay misalignment in printing, the percentage of different primary color combination may vary and it will result in color shift. In traditional printing procedure with AM halftone, every separation has different screening angle to make the superposition pattern in a random style, which will reduce the color shift. To evaluate the color shift of printing with hybrid halftoning, we simulate printing procedure with halftone images overlay and calculate the color difference between expected color and color in different overlay misalignment configurations. The color difference for hybrid halftone and AM halftone is very close. So the color shift for hybrid halftone is acceptable with current color printing procedure.

Radiation Dose Distribution for Workers in South Korean Nuclear Power Plants

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 4 201 - 204 Pages

Abstract: A total of 33,680 nuclear power plants (NPPs) workers were monitored and recorded from 1990 to 2007. According to the record, the average individual radiation dose has been decreasing continually from it 3.20 mSv/man in 1990 to 1.12 mSv/man at the end of 2007. After the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) 60 recommendation was generalized in South Korea, no nuclear power plant workers received above 20 mSv radiation, and the numbers of relatively highly exposed workers have been decreasing continuously. The age distribution of radiation workers in nuclear power plants was composed of mainly 20-30- year-olds (83%) for 1990 ~ 1994 and 30-40-year-olds (75%) for 2003 ~ 2007. The difference in individual average dose by age was not significant. Most (77%) of NPP radiation exposures from 1990 to 2007 occurred mostly during the refueling period. With regard to exposure type, the majority of exposures were external exposures, representing 95% of the total exposures, while internal exposures represented only 5%. External effective dose was affected mainly by gamma radiation exposure, with an insignificant amount of neutron exposure. As for internal effective dose, tritium (3H) in the pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR) was the biggest cause of exposure.

Micro-Penetrator for Canadian Planetary Exploration

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 7 1195 - 1202 Pages

Abstract: Space exploration is a highly visible endeavour of humankind to seek profound answers to questions about the origins of our solar system, whether life exists beyond Earth, and how we could live on other worlds. Different platforms have been utilized in planetary exploration missions, such as orbiters, landers, rovers, and penetrators. Having low mass, good mechanical contact with the surface, ability to acquire high quality scientific subsurface data, and ability to be deployed in areas that may not be conducive to landers or rovers, Penetrators provide an alternative and complimentary solution that makes possible scientific exploration of hardly accessible sites (icy areas, gully sites, highlands etc.). The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has put space exploration as one of the pillars of its space program, and established ExCo program to prepare Canada for future international planetary exploration. ExCo sets surface mobility as its focus and priority, and invests mainly in the development of rovers because of Canada's niche space robotics technology. Meanwhile, CSA is also investigating how micro-penetrators can help Canada to fulfill its scientific objectives for planetary exploration. This paper presents a review of the micro-penetrator technologies, past missions, and lessons learned. It gives a detailed analysis of the technical challenges of micro-penetrators, such as high impact survivability, high precision guidance navigation and control, thermal protection, communications, and etc. Then, a Canadian perspective of a possible micro-penetrator mission is given, including Canadian scientific objectives and priorities, potential instruments, and flight opportunities.

Using Mean-Shift Tracking Algorithms for Real-Time Tracking of Moving Images on an Autonomous Vehicle Testbed Platform

Year: 2007 Volume: 1 Issue: 10 2953 - 2958 Pages

Abstract: This paper describes new computer vision algorithms that have been developed to track moving objects as part of a long-term study into the design of (semi-)autonomous vehicles. We present the results of a study to exploit variable kernels for tracking in video sequences. The basis of our work is the mean shift object-tracking algorithm; for a moving target, it is usual to define a rectangular target window in an initial frame, and then process the data within that window to separate the tracked object from the background by the mean shift segmentation algorithm. Rather than use the standard, Epanechnikov kernel, we have used a kernel weighted by the Chamfer distance transform to improve the accuracy of target representation and localization, minimising the distance between the two distributions in RGB color space using the Bhattacharyya coefficient. Experimental results show the improved tracking capability and versatility of the algorithm in comparison with results using the standard kernel. These algorithms are incorporated as part of a robot test-bed architecture which has been used to demonstrate their effectiveness.

Sorting Primitives and Genome Rearrangementin Bioinformatics: A Unified Perspective

Year: 2008 Volume: 2 Issue: 2 48 - 53 Pages

Abstract: Bioinformatics and computational biology involve the use of techniques including applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, chemistry, and biochemistry to solve biological problems usually on the molecular level. Research in computational biology often overlaps with systems biology. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and proteinprotein interactions, and the modeling of evolution. Various global rearrangements of permutations, such as reversals and transpositions,have recently become of interest because of their applications in computational molecular biology. A reversal is an operation that reverses the order of a substring of a permutation. A transposition is an operation that swaps two adjacent substrings of a permutation. The problem of determining the smallest number of reversals required to transform a given permutation into the identity permutation is called sorting by reversals. Similar problems can be defined for transpositions and other global rearrangements. In this work we perform a study about some genome rearrangement primitives. We show how a genome is modelled by a permutation, introduce some of the existing primitives and the lower and upper bounds on them. We then provide a comparison of the introduced primitives.

Adjustment of a PET Scanner for PEPT

Year: 2008 Volume: 2 Issue: 5 307 - 309 Pages

Authors:
Alireza Sadrmomtaz

Abstract: Positron emission particle tracking (PEPT) is a technique in which a single radioactive tracer particle can be accurately tracked as it moves. A limitation of PET is that in order to reconstruct a tomographic image it is necessary to acquire a large volume of data (millions of events), so it is difficult to study rapidly changing systems. By considering this fact, PEPT is a very fast process compared with PET. In PEPT detecting both photons defines a line and the annihilation is assumed to have occurred somewhere along this line. The location of the tracer can be determined to within a few mm from coincident detection of a small number of pairs of back-to-back gamma rays and using triangulation. This can be achieved many times per second and the track of a moving particle can be reliably followed. This technique was invented at the University of Birmingham [1]. The attempt in PEPT is not to form an image of the tracer particle but simply to determine its location with time. If this tracer is followed for a long enough period within a closed, circulating system it explores all possible types of motion. The application of PEPT to industrial process systems carried out at the University of Birmingham is categorized in two subjects: the behaviour of granular materials and viscous fluids. Granular materials are processed in industry for example in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, ceramics, food, polymers and PEPT has been used in a number of ways to study the behaviour of these systems [2]. PEPT allows the possibility of tracking a single particle within the bed [3]. Also PEPT has been used for studying systems such as: fluid flow, viscous fluids in mixers [4], using a neutrally-buoyant tracer particle [5].

The Experimental Measurement of the LiBr Concentration of a Solar Absorption Machine

Year: 2014 Volume: 8 Issue: 6 477 - 480 Pages

Abstract: The excessive consumption of fossil energies (electrical energy) during summer caused by the technological development involves more and more climate warming. In order to reduce the worst impact of gas emissions produced from classical air conditioning, heat driven solar absorption chiller is pretty promising; it consists on using solar as motive energy which is clean and environmentally friendly to provide cold. Solar absorption machine is composed by four components using Lithium Bromide /water as a refrigerating couple. LiBr- water is the most promising in chiller applications due to high safety, high volatility ratio, high affinity, high stability and its high latent heat. The lithium bromide solution is constitute by the salt lithium bromide which absorbs water under certain conditions of pressure and temperature however if the concentration of the solution is high in the absorption chillers; which exceed 70%, the solution will crystallize. The main aim of this article is to study the phenomena of the crystallization and to evaluate how the dependence between the electric conductivity and the concentration which should be controlled.

A novel Iterative Approach for Phase Noise Cancellation in Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) Systems

Year: 2007 Volume: 1 Issue: 2 152 - 155 Pages

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to emphasize and alleviate the effect of phase noise due to imperfect local oscillators on the performances of a Multi-Carrier CDMA system. After the cancellation of Common Phase Error (CPE), an iterative approach is introduced which iteratively estimates Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI) components in the frequency domain and cancels their contribution in the time domain. Simulation are conducted in order to investigate the achievable performances for several parameters, such as the spreading factor, the modulation order, the phase noise power and the transmission Signal-to-Noise Ratio.

Knowledge Management Model for Managing Knowledge among Related Organizations

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 2 114 - 117 Pages

Authors:
Mahboubeh Molaei

Abstract: Transferring information developed by other peoples is an ordinary event that happens during daily conversations, for example when employees sea each other in the organization, or when they are having lunch together, or attending a meeting, they use to talk about their experience, and discuss about their current projects, and talk about their successes over some specific problems. Despite the potential value of leveraging organizational memory and expertise by using OMS and ER, still small organizations haven-t been able to capitalize on its promised value. Each organization has its internal knowledge management system, in some of organizations the system face the lack of expert people to save their experience in the repository and in another hand on some other organizations there are lots of expert people but the organization doesn-t have the maximum use of their knowledge.

Bridging the Green-Value-Gap: A South African Approach

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 6 118 - 123 Pages

Authors:
E.J. Cilliers

Abstract: Green- spaces might be very attractive, but where are the economic benefits? What value do nature and landscape have for us? What difference will it make to jobs, health and the economic strength of areas struggling with deprivation and social problems? [1].There is a need to consider green spaces from a different perspective. Green planning is not just about flora and fauna, but also about planning for economic benefits [2]. It is worth trying to quantify the value of green spaces since nature and landscape are crucially important to our quality of life and sustainable development. The reality, however, is that urban development often takes place at the expense of green spaces. Urbanization is an ongoing process throughout the world; however, hyper-urbanization without environmental planning is destructive, not constructive [3]. Urban spaces are believed to be more valuable than other land uses, particular green areas, simply because of the market value connected to urban spaces. However, attractive landscapes can help raise the quality and value of the urban market even more. In order to reach these objectives of integrated planning, the Green-Value-Gap needs to be bridged. Economists have to understand the concept of Green-Planning and the spinoffs, and Environmentalists have to understand the importance of urban economic development and the benefits thereof to green planning. An interface between Environmental Management, Economic Development and sustainable Spatial Planning are needed to bridge the Green-Value-Gap.

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