Abstract: The purpose of this study was to find out the
effectiveness of neurological impress method and repeated reading
technique on reading fluency of children with learning disabilities.
Thirty primary four pupils in three public primary schools
participated in the study. There were two experimental groups and a
control. This research employed a 3 by 2 factorial matrix and the
participants were taught for one session. Two hypotheses were
formulated to guide the research. T-test was used to analyse the data
gathered, and data analysis revealed that pupils exposed to the two
treatment strategies had improvement in their reading fluency. It was
recommended that the two strategies used in the study can be used to
intervene in reading fluency problems in children with learning
disabilities.
Abstract: In this paper 2D Simulation of catalytic Fixed Bed Reactor in Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis of GTL technology has been performed utilizing computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Synthesis gas (a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) has been used as feedstock. The reactor was modeled and the model equations were solved employing finite volume method. The model was validated against the experimental data reported in literature. The comparison showed a good agreement between simulation results and the experimental data. In addition, the model was applied to predict the concentration contours of the reactants and products along the length of reactor.
Abstract: A vast array of biological materials, especially algae have received increasing attention for heavy metal removal. Algae have been proven to be cheaper, more effective for the removal of metallic elements in aqueous solutions. A fresh water algal strain was isolated from Zoo Lake, Johannesburg, South Africa and identified as Desmodesmus sp. This paper investigates the efficacy of Desmodesmus sp.in removing heavy metals contaminating the Wonderfonteinspruit Catchment Area (WCA) water bodies. The biosorption data fitted the pseudo-second order and Langmuir isotherm models. The Langmuir maximum uptakes gave the sequence: Mn2+>Ni2+>Fe2+. The best results for kinetic study was obtained in concentration 120 ppm for Fe3+ and Mn2+, whilst for Ni2+ was at 20 ppm, which is about the same concentrations found in contaminated water in the WCA (Fe3+115 ppm, Mn2+ 121 ppm and Ni2+ 26.5 ppm).
Abstract: A numerical study on the influence of forward-facing
cavity length upon forward-facing cavity and opposing jet combined
thermal protection system (TPS) cooling efficiency under hypersonic
flow is conducted, by means of which the flow field parameters, heat
flux distribution along the outer body surface are obtained. The
numerical simulation results are validated by experiments and the
cooling effect of the combined TPS with different cavity length is
analyzed. The numerical results show that the combined configuration
dose well in cooling the nose of the hypersonic vehicle. The deeper the
cavity is, the weaker the heat flux is. The recirculation region plays a
key role for the reduction of the aerodynamic heating.
Abstract: As there are also graph methods of circuit analysis in
addition to algebraic methods, it is, in theory, clearly possible to
carry out an analysis of a whole switched circuit in two-phase
switching exclusively by the graph method as well. This article deals
with two methods of full-graph solving of switched circuits: by
transformation graphs and by two-graphs. It deals with the circuit
switched capacitors and the switched current, too. All methods are
presented in an equally detailed steps to be able to compare.
Abstract: The effect of chemical treatment in CdCl2 on the
compositional changes and defect structures of potentially useful ZnS
solar cell thin films prepared by vacuum deposition method was
studied using the complementary Rutherford backscattering (RBS)
and Thermoluminesence (TL) techniques. A series of electron and
hole traps are found in the various as deposited samples studied.
After treatment, perturbation on the intensity is noted; mobile defect
states and charge conversion and/or transfer between defect states are
found.
Abstract: The present study has been conducted to characterize
the prophenoloxidase (PPO) system of the desert locust, Schistocerca
gregaria following injection of Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki (Bt).
The bulk of PPO system was associated with haemocytes and a little
amount was found in plasma. This system was activated by different
activators such as laminarin, lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and trypsin
suggesting that the stimulatory mechanism may involve an enzyme
cascade of one or more associated molecules. These activators did
not activate all the molecules of the cascade. Presence of
phenoloxidase activity (PO) coincides with the appearance of protein
band with molecular weight (MW) 70.154 KD (Kilo Dalton).
Abstract: An on-demand routing protocol for wireless ad hoc
networks is one that searches for and attempts to discover a route to
some destination node only when a sending node originates a data
packet addressed to that node. In order to avoid the need for such a
route discovery to be performed before each data packet is sent, such
routing protocols must cache routes previously discovered. This
paper presents an analysis of the effect of intelligent caching in a non
clustered network, using on-demand routing protocols in wireless ad
hoc networks. The analysis carried out is based on the Dynamic
Source Routing protocol (DSR), which operates entirely on-demand.
DSR uses the cache in every node to save the paths that are learnt
during route discovery procedure. In this implementation, caching
these paths only at intermediate nodes and using the paths from these
caches when required is tried. This technique helps in storing more
number of routes that are learnt without erasing the entries in the
cache, to store a new route that is learnt.
The simulation results on DSR have shown that this technique
drastically increases the available memory for caching the routes
discovered without affecting the performance of the DSR routing
protocol in any way, except for a small increase in end to end delay.
Abstract: Medical image registration is the key technology in image guided radiation therapy (IGRT) systems. On the basis of the previous work on our IGRT prototype with a biorthogonal x-ray imaging system, we described a method focused on the 2D/2D rigid-body registration using multiresolution pyramid based mutual information in this paper. Three key steps were involved in the method ： firstly, four 2D images were obtained including two x-ray projection images and two digital reconstructed radiographies（DRRs ） as the input for the registration ； Secondly, each pair of the corresponding x-ray image and DRR image were matched using multiresolution pyramid based mutual information under the ITK registration framework ； Thirdly, we got the final couch offset through a coordinate transformation by calculating the translations acquired from the two pairs of the images. A simulation example of a parotid gland tumor case and a clinical example of an anthropomorphic head phantom were employed in the verification tests. In addition, the influence of different CT slice thickness were tested. The simulation results showed that the positioning errors were 0.068±0.070, 0.072±0.098, 0.154±0.176mm along three axes which were lateral, longitudinal and vertical. The clinical test indicated that the positioning errors of the planned isocenter were 0.066, 0.07, 2.06mm on average with a CT slice thickness of 2.5mm. It can be concluded that our method with its verified accuracy and robustness can be effectively used in IGRT systems for patient setup.
Abstract: This study investigates the performance of radial basis function networks (RBFN) in forecasting the monthly CO2 emissions of an electric power utility. We also propose a method for input variable selection. This method is based on identifying the general relationships between groups of input candidates and the output. The effect that each input has on the forecasting error is examined by removing all inputs except the variable to be investigated from its group, calculating the networks parameter and performing the forecast. Finally, the new forecasting error is compared with the reference model. Eight input variables were identified as the most relevant, which is significantly less than our reference model with 30 input variables. The simulation results demonstrate that the model with the 8 inputs selected using the method introduced in this study performs as accurate as the reference model, while also being the most parsimonious.
Abstract: Alcohol and water extracts of Cymbopogon citratus
was investigated for anti-bacterial properties and phytochemical
constituents. The extract was screened against four gram-negative
bacteria Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas
aeruginosa, Proteus vulgaris) and two grampositive bacteria Bacillus
subtilis and Staphylococcus aureus at four different concentrations
(1:1, 1:5, 1:10 and 1:20) using disc diffusion method. The antibacterial
examination was by disc diffusion techniques, while the
photochemical constituents were investigated using standard
chemical methods. Results showed that the extracts inhibited the
growth of standard and local strains of the organisms used. The
treatments were significantly different (P = 0.05). The minimum
inhibitory concentration of the extracts against the tested
microorganisms ranged between 150mg/ml and 50mg/ml. The
alcohol extracts were found to be generally more effective than the
water extract. The photochemical analysis revealed the presence of
alkaloids and phenol but absence of cardiac and cyanogenic
glycosides. The presence of alkaloid and phenols were inferred as
being responsible for the anti-bacterial properties of the extracts.
Abstract: Software project effort estimation is frequently seen
as complex and expensive for individual software engineers.
Software production is in a crisis. It suffers from excessive costs.
Software production is often out of control. It has been suggested that
software production is out of control because we do not measure.
You cannot control what you cannot measure. During last decade, a
number of researches on cost estimation have been conducted. The
metric-set selection has a vital role in software cost estimation
studies; its importance has been ignored especially in neural network
based studies. In this study we have explored the reasons of those
disappointing results and implemented different neural network
models using augmented new metrics. The results obtained are
compared with previous studies using traditional metrics. To be able
to make comparisons, two types of data have been used. The first
part of the data is taken from the Constructive Cost Model
(COCOMO'81) which is commonly used in previous studies and the
second part is collected according to new metrics in a leading
international company in Turkey. The accuracy of the selected
metrics and the data samples are verified using statistical techniques.
The model presented here is based on Multi-Layer Perceptron
(MLP). Another difficulty associated with the cost estimation studies
is the fact that the data collection requires time and care. To make a
more thorough use of the samples collected, k-fold, cross validation
method is also implemented. It is concluded that, as long as an
accurate and quantifiable set of metrics are defined and measured
correctly, neural networks can be applied in software cost estimation
studies with success
Abstract: There are various overlay structures that provide
efficient and scalable solutions for point and range query in a peer-topeer
network. Overlay structure based on m-Binary Search Tree
(BST) is one such popular technique. It deals with the division of the
tree into different key intervals and then assigning the key intervals to
a BST. The popularity of the BST makes this overlay structure
vulnerable to different kinds of attacks. Here we present four such
possible attacks namely index poisoning attack, eclipse attack,
pollution attack and syn flooding attack. The functionality of BST is
affected by these attacks. We also provide different security
techniques that can be applied against these attacks.
Abstract: ''Cocktail party problem'' is well known as one of the human auditory abilities. We can recognize the specific sound that we want to listen by this ability even if a lot of undesirable sounds or noises are mixed. Blind source separation (BSS) based on independent component analysis (ICA) is one of the methods by which we can separate only a special signal from their mixed signals with simple hypothesis. In this paper, we propose an online approach for blind source separation using the sliding DFT and the time domain independent component analysis. The proposed method can reduce calculation complexity in comparison with conventional methods, and can be applied to parallel processing by using digital signal processors (DSPs) and so on. We evaluate this method and show its availability.
Abstract: Clustering is the process of subdividing an input data set into a desired number of subgroups so that members of the same subgroup are similar and members of different subgroups have diverse properties. Many heuristic algorithms have been applied to the clustering problem, which is known to be NP Hard. Genetic algorithms have been used in a wide variety of fields to perform clustering, however, the technique normally has a long running time in terms of input set size. This paper proposes an efficient genetic algorithm for clustering on very large data sets, especially on image data sets. The genetic algorithm uses the most time efficient techniques along with preprocessing of the input data set. We test our algorithm on both artificial and real image data sets, both of which are of large size. The experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the k-means algorithm in terms of running time as well as the quality of the clustering.
Abstract: On the basis of the linearized Phillips-Herffron model of a single-machine power system, a novel method for designing unified power flow controller (UPFC) based output feedback controller is presented. The design problem of output feedback controller for UPFC is formulated as an optimization problem according to with the time domain-based objective function which is solved by iteration particle swarm optimization (IPSO) that has a strong ability to find the most optimistic results. To ensure the robustness of the proposed damping controller, the design process takes into account a wide range of operating conditions and system configurations. The simulation results prove the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method in terms of a high performance power system. The simulation study shows that the designed controller by Iteration PSO performs better than Classical PSO in finding the solution.
Abstract: In this paper we present a novel approach for face image coding. The proposed method makes a use of the features of video encoders like motion prediction. At first encoder selects appropriate prototype from the database and warps it according to features of encoding face. Warped prototype is placed as first I frame. Encoding face is placed as second frame as P frame type. Information about features positions, color change, selected prototype and data flow of P frame will be sent to decoder. The condition is both encoder and decoder own the same database of prototypes. We have run experiment with H.264 video encoder and obtained results were compared to results achieved by JPEG and JPEG2000. Obtained results show that our approach is able to achieve 3 times lower bitrate and two times higher PSNR in comparison with JPEG. According to comparison with JPEG2000 the bitrate was very similar, but subjective quality achieved by proposed method is better.
Abstract: Robot manipulators are highly coupled nonlinear
systems, therefore real system and mathematical model of dynamics
used for control system design are not same. Hence, fine-tuning of
controller is always needed. For better tuning fast simulation speed
is desired. Since, Matlab incorporates LAPACK to increase the speed
and complexity of matrix computation, dynamics, forward and
inverse kinematics of PUMA 560 is modeled on Matlab/Simulink in
such a way that all operations are matrix based which give very less
simulation time. This paper compares PID parameter tuning using
Genetic Algorithm, Simulated Annealing, Generalized Pattern Search
(GPS) and Hybrid Search techniques. Controller performances for all
these methods are compared in terms of joint space ITSE and
cartesian space ISE for tracking circular and butterfly trajectories.
Disturbance signal is added to check robustness of controller. GAGPS
hybrid search technique is showing best results for tuning PID
controller parameters in terms of ITSE and robustness.
Abstract: Theexperiment was carried out with 2x5 male Merino
lambs raised under intensive conditions to investigate the effect of
dietary calcium soap of linseed oil on the color and fatty acid
composition of longissimusdorsi muscle. Control lambs fed a basal
diet and the experimental lambs consumed a diet supplemented with
3% calcium soap of linseed oil. The color values (L*, a*, b* a*/b*
and chroma) were not influenced by dietary treatment. The MUFA
proportion reduced, SFA and PUFA content did not alter. As
expected, the linolenic (C18:3 n3) and thusthe n-3 content
significantly improved by linseed supplement (0.47 and 0.81; 0.78
and 1.16 in control and in experimental samples, respectively). Other
n-3 and n-6 fatty acids had similar valuestocontrol samples. The n-
6/n-3 ratio was significantly narrower in the experimental group (6.31
vs. 9.38) but the P/S ratio did not differ betweenthe two groups.In
conclusion calcium soap of linseed oil seems to be a suitable
supplement form of n-3 fatty acids to improve the nutritive value of
lamb meat.
Abstract: Trace element speciation of an integrated soil
amendment matrix was studied with a modified BCR sequential
extraction procedure. The analysis included pseudo-total
concentration determinations according to USEPA 3051A and
relevant physicochemical properties by standardized methods. Based
on the results, the soil amendment matrix possessed neutralization
capacity comparable to commercial fertilizers. Additionally, the
pseudo-total concentrations of all trace elements included in the
Finnish regulation for agricultural fertilizers were lower than the
respective statutory limit values. According to chemical speciation,
the lability of trace elements increased in the following order: Hg <
Cr < Co < Cu < As < Zn < Ni < Pb < Cd < V < Mo < Ba. The
validity of the BCR approach as a tool for chemical speciation was
confirmed by the additional acid digestion phase. Recovery of trace
elements during the procedure assured the validity of the approach
and indicated good quality of the analytical work.