Abstract: Web-based technologies have created numerous
opportunities for electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication.
There are many factors that affect customer adoption and decisionmaking
process. However, only a few researches focus on some
factors such as the membership time of forum and propensity to trust.
Using a discrete-time event simulation to simulate a diffusion model
along with a consumer decision model, the study shows the effect of
each factor on adoption of opinions on on-line discussion forum. The
purpose of this study is to examine the effect of factor affecting
information adoption and decision making process. The model is
constructed to test quantitative aspects of each factor. The simulation
study shows the membership time and the propensity to trust has an
effect on information adoption and purchasing decision. The result of
simulation shows that the longer the membership time in the
communities and the higher propensity to trust could lead to the
higher demand rates because consumers find it easier and faster to
trust the person in the community and then adopt the eWOM. Other
implications for both researchers and practitioners are provided.
Abstract: Previous the 3D model texture generation from multi-view images and mapping algorithms has issues in the texture chart generation which are the self-intersection and the concentration of the texture in texture space. Also we may suffer from some problems due to the occluded areas, such as inside parts of thighs. In this paper we propose a texture mapping technique for 3D models using multi-view images on the GPU. We do texture mapping directly on the GPU fragment shader per pixel without generation of the texture map. And we solve for the occluded area using the 3D model depth information. Our method needs more calculation on the GPU than previous works, but it has shown real-time performance and previously mentioned problems do not occur.
Abstract: This research work is aimed at speech recognition
using scaly neural networks. A small vocabulary of 11 words were
established first, these words are “word, file, open, print, exit, edit,
cut, copy, paste, doc1, doc2". These chosen words involved with
executing some computer functions such as opening a file, print
certain text document, cutting, copying, pasting, editing and exit.
It introduced to the computer then subjected to feature extraction
process using LPC (linear prediction coefficients). These features are
used as input to an artificial neural network in speaker dependent
mode. Half of the words are used for training the artificial neural
network and the other half are used for testing the system; those are
used for information retrieval.
The system components are consist of three parts, speech
processing and feature extraction, training and testing by using neural
networks and information retrieval.
The retrieve process proved to be 79.5-88% successful, which is
quite acceptable, considering the variation to surrounding, state of
the person, and the microphone type.
Abstract: In ad hoc networks, the main issue about designing of protocols is quality of service, so that in wireless sensor networks the main constraint in designing protocols is limited energy of sensors. In fact, protocols which minimize the power consumption in sensors are more considered in wireless sensor networks. One approach of reducing energy consumption in wireless sensor networks is to reduce the number of packages that are transmitted in network. The technique of collecting data that combines related data and prevent transmission of additional packages in network can be effective in the reducing of transmitted packages- number. According to this fact that information processing consumes less power than information transmitting, Data Aggregation has great importance and because of this fact this technique is used in many protocols [5]. One of the Data Aggregation techniques is to use Data Aggregation tree. But finding one optimum Data Aggregation tree to collect data in networks with one sink is a NP-hard problem. In the Data Aggregation technique, related information packages are combined in intermediate nodes and form one package. So the number of packages which are transmitted in network reduces and therefore, less energy will be consumed that at last results in improvement of longevity of network. Heuristic methods are used in order to solve the NP-hard problem that one of these optimization methods is to solve Simulated Annealing problems. In this article, we will propose new method in order to build data collection tree in wireless sensor networks by using Simulated Annealing algorithm and we will evaluate its efficiency whit Genetic Algorithm.
Abstract: Nevertheless the widespread application of finite
mixture models in segmentation, finite mixture model selection is
still an important issue. In fact, the selection of an adequate number
of segments is a key issue in deriving latent segments structures and
it is desirable that the selection criteria used for this end are effective.
In order to select among several information criteria, which may
support the selection of the correct number of segments we conduct a
simulation study. In particular, this study is intended to determine
which information criteria are more appropriate for mixture model
selection when considering data sets with only categorical
segmentation base variables. The generation of mixtures of
multinomial data supports the proposed analysis. As a result, we
establish a relationship between the level of measurement of
segmentation variables and some (eleven) information criteria-s
performance. The criterion AIC3 shows better performance (it
indicates the correct number of the simulated segments- structure
more often) when referring to mixtures of multinomial segmentation
base variables.
Abstract: It well recognized that one feature that makes a
successful company is its ability to successfully align its business goals with its information communication technologies platform.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems contribute to achieve better performance by integrating various business functions and
providing support for information flows. However, the technological
systems complexity is known to prevent the business users to exploit in an efficient way the Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP).
This paper aims to investigate the role of training in improving the
usage of ERP systems. To this end, we have designed an instrument
survey to employees of a Norwegian multinational global provider of
technology solutions. Based on the analysis of collected data, we have delineated a training model that could be high relevance for
both researchers and practitioners as a step towards a better
understanding of ERP system implementation.
Abstract: Urban disaster risks and vulnerabilities are great problems for Turkey. The annual loss of life and property through disaster in the world-s major metropolitan areas is increasing. Urban concentrations of the poor and less-informed in environmentally fragile locations suffer the impact of disaster disproportionately. Gecekondu (squatter) developments will compound the inherent risks associated with high-density environments, in appropriate technologies, and inadequate infrastructure. On the other hand, there are many geological disadvantages such as sitting on top of active tectonic plate boundaries, and why having avalanche, flood, and landslide and drought prone areas in Turkey. However, this natural formation is inevitable; the only way to survive in such a harsh geography is to be aware of importance of these natural events and to take political and physical measures. The main aim of this research is to bring up the magnitude of natural hazard risks in Izmir built-up zone, not being taken into consideration adequately. Because the dimensions of the peril are not taken seriously enough, the natural hazard risks, which are commonly well known, are not considered important or they are being forgotten after some time passes. Within this research, the magnitude of natural hazard risks for Izmir is being presented in the scope of concrete and local researches over Izmir risky areas.
Abstract: Secure electronic payment system is presented in this
paper. This electronic payment system is to be secure for clients such
as customers and shop owners. The security architecture of the
system is designed by RC5 encryption / decryption algorithm. This
eliminates the fraud that occurs today with stolen credit card
numbers. The symmetric key cryptosystem RC5 can protect
conventional transaction data such as account numbers, amount and
other information. This process can be done electronically using RC5
encryption / decryption program written by Microsoft Visual Basic
6.0. There is no danger of any data sent within the system being
intercepted, and replaced. The alternative is to use the existing
network, and to encrypt all data transmissions. The system with
encryption is acceptably secure, but that the level of encryption has
to be stepped up, as computing power increases. Results In order to
be secure the system the communication between modules is
encrypted using symmetric key cryptosystem RC5. The system will
use simple user name, password, user ID, user type and cipher
authentication mechanism for identification, when the user first
enters the system. It is the most common method of authentication in
most computer system.
Abstract: In this study, a synthetic pathway was created by
assembling genes from Clostridium butyricum and Escherichia coli
in different combinations. Among the genes were dhaB1 and dhaB2
from C. butyricum VPI1718 coding for glycerol dehydratase (GDHt)
and its activator (GDHtAc), respectively, involved in the conversion
of glycerol to 3-hydroxypropionaldehyde (3-HPA). The yqhD gene
from E.coli BL21 was also included which codes for an NADPHdependent
1,3-propanediol oxidoreductase isoenzyme (PDORI)
reducing 3-HPA to 1,3-propanediol (1,3-PD). Molecular modeling
analysis indicated that the conformation of fusion protein of YQHD
and DHAB1 was favorable for direct molecular channeling of the
intermediate 3-HPA. According to the simulation results, the yqhD
and dhaB1 gene were assembled in the upstream of dhaB2 to express
a fusion protein, yielding the recombinant strain E. coliBL21
(DE3)//pET22b+::yqhD-dhaB1_dhaB2 (strain BP41Y3). Strain
BP41Y3 gave 10-fold higher 1,3-PD concentration than E. coliBL21
(DE3)//pET22b+::yqhD-dhaB1_dhaB2 (strain BP31Y2) expressing
the recombinant enzymes simultaneously but in a non-fusion mode.
This is the first report using a gene fusion approach to enhance the
biological conversion of glycerol to the value added compound 1,3-
PD.
Abstract: Sub-prime mortgage crisis which began in the US is
regarded as the most economic crisis since the Great Depression in the
early 20th century. Especially, hidden problems on efficient operation
of a business were disclosed at a time and many financial institutions
went bankrupt and filed for court receivership. The collapses of
physical market lead to bankruptcy of manufacturing and construction
businesses. This study is to analyze dynamic efficiency of construction
businesses during the five years at the turn of the global financial
crisis. By discovering the trend and stability of efficiency of a
construction business, this study-s objective is to improve
management efficiency of a construction business in the
ever-changing construction market. Variables were selected by
analyzing corporate information on top 20 construction businesses in
Korea and analyzed for static efficiency in 2008 and dynamic
efficiency between 2006 and 2010. Unlike other studies, this study
succeeded in deducing efficiency trend and stability of a construction
business for five years by using the DEA/Window model. Using the
analysis result, efficient and inefficient companies could be figured
out. In addition, relative efficiency among DMU was measured by
comparing the relationship between input and output variables of
construction businesses. This study can be used as a literature to
improve management efficiency for companies with low efficiency
based on efficiency analysis of construction businesses.
Abstract: “Web of Trust" is one of the recognized goals for
Web 2.0. It aims to make it possible for the people to take
responsibility for what they publish on the web, including
organizations, businesses and individual users. These objectives,
among others, drive most of the technologies and protocols recently
standardized by the governing bodies. One of the great advantages of
Web infrastructure is decentralization of publication. The primary
motivation behind Web 2.0 is to assist the people to add contents for
Collective Intelligence (CI) while providing mechanisms to link
content with people for evaluations and accountability of
information. Such structure of contents will interconnect users and
contents so that users can use contents to find participants and vice
versa. This paper proposes conceptual information storage and
linking model, based on decentralized information structure, that
links contents and people together. The model uses FOAF, Atom,
RDF and RDFS and can be used as a blueprint to develop Web 2.0
applications for any e-domain. However, primary target for this
paper is online trust evaluation domain. The proposed model targets
to assist the individuals to establish “Web of Trust" in online trust
domain.
Abstract: Participation in sporting activities can lead to injury.
Sport injuries have been widely studied in many sports including the
more extreme categories of aquatic board sports. Kitesurfing is a
relatively new water surface action sport, and has not yet been
widely studied in terms of injuries and stress on the body. The aim of
this study was to get information about which injuries that are most
common among kitesurfing participants, where they occur, and their
causes. Injuries were studied using an international open web
questionnaire (n=206).
The results showed that many respondents reported injuries, in
total 251 injuries to knee (24%), ankle (17%), trunk (16%) and
shoulders (10%), often sustained while doing jumps and tricks
(40%). Among the reported injuries were joint injuries (n=101),
muscle/tendon damages (n=47), wounds and cuts (n=36) and bone
fractures (n=28). Also environmental factors and equipment can
influence the risk of injury, or the extent of injury in a hazardous
situation. Conclusively, the information from this retrospective study
supports earlier studies in terms of prevalence and site of injuries.
Suggestively, this information should be used for to build a
foundation of knowledge about the sport for development of
applications for physical training and product development.
Abstract: In general, image-based 3D scenes can now be found in many popular vision systems, computer games and virtual reality tours. So, It is important to segment ROI (region of interest) from input scenes as a preprocessing step for geometric stricture detection in 3D scene. In this paper, we propose a method for segmenting ROI based on tensor voting and Dirichlet process mixture model. In particular, to estimate geometric structure information for 3D scene from a single outdoor image, we apply the tensor voting and Dirichlet process mixture model to a image segmentation. The tensor voting is used based on the fact that homogeneous region in an image are usually close together on a smooth region and therefore the tokens corresponding to centers of these regions have high saliency values. The proposed approach is a novel nonparametric Bayesian segmentation method using Gaussian Dirichlet process mixture model to automatically segment various natural scenes. Finally, our method can label regions of the input image into coarse categories: “ground", “sky", and “vertical" for 3D application. The experimental results show that our method successfully segments coarse regions in many complex natural scene images for 3D.
Abstract: The purpose of this article applies the monthly final
energy yield and failure data of 202 PV systems installed in Taiwan to
analyze the PV operational performance and system availability. This
data is collected by Industrial Technology Research Institute through
manual records. Bad data detection and failure data estimation
approaches are proposed to guarantee the quality of the received
information. The performance ratio value and system availability are
then calculated and compared with those of other countries. It is
indicated that the average performance ratio of Taiwan-s PV systems
is 0.74 and the availability is 95.7%. These results are similar with
those of Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Japan.
Abstract: This paper shows a simple and effective approach to
the design and implementation of Industrial Information Systems
(IIS) oriented to control the characteristics of each individual product manufactured in a production line and also their manufacturing conditions. The particular products considered in this work are large steel strips that are coiled just after their manufacturing. However, the approach is directly applicable to coiled strips in other industries, like
paper, textile, aluminum, etc. These IIS provide very detailed information of each manufactured product, which complement the general information managed by the ERP system of the production line. In spite of the high importance of this type of IIS to guarantee and improve the quality of the products manufactured in many industries, there are very few works about them in the technical literature. For this reason, this paper represents an important contribution to the development of this type of IIS, providing guidelines for their design, implementation and exploitation.
Abstract: We have devised a thermal carpet cloak theoretically
and implemented in silicon using layered metamaterial. The layered
metamaterial is composed of single crystalline silicon and its phononic
crystal. The design is based on a coordinate transformation. We
demonstrate the result with numerical simulation. Great cloaking
performance is achieved as a thermal insulator is well hidden under the
thermal carpet cloak. We also show that the thermal carpet cloak can
even the temperature on irregular surface. Using thermal carpet cloak
to manipulate the heat conduction is effective because of its low
complexity.
Abstract: This paper introduces a tool that is being developed for the expression of information security policy controls that govern electronic healthcare records. By reference to published findings, the paper introduces the theory behind the use of knowledge management for automatic and consistent security policy assertion using the formalism called the Secutype; the development of the tool and functionality is discussed; some examples of Secutypes generated by the tool are provided; proposed integration with existing medical record systems is described. The paper is concluded with a section on further work and critique of the work achieved to date.
Abstract: Flows over a harmonically oscillating NACA 0012
airfoil are simulated here using a two-dimensional, unsteady,
incompressibleNavier-Stokes solver.Both pure-plunging and
pitching-plunging combined oscillations are considered at a Reynolds
number of 5000. Special attention is paid to the vortex shedding and
interaction mechanism of the motions. For all the simulations
presented here, the reduced frequency (k) is fixed at a value of 2.5
and plunging amplitude (h) is selected to be in the range of 0.2-0.5.
The simulation results show that the interaction mechanism between
the leading and trailing edge vortices has a decisive effect on the
values of the resulting thrust and propulsive efficiency.
Abstract: the research was conducted using the self report of
shoplifters who apprehended in the supermarket while stealing. 943
shoplifters in three years were interviewed right after the stealing act
and before calling the police. The aim of the study is to know the
shoplifting characteristics in Saudi Arabia, including the trait of
shoplifters and the situation of the supermarkets where the stealing
takes place. The analysis based on the written information about each
thief as the documentary research method. Descriptive statistics as
well as some inferential statistics were employed. The result shows
that there are differences between genders, age groups, occupations,
time of the day, days of the week, months, way of stealing, individual
or group of thieves and other supermarket situations in the type of
items stolen, total price and the count of items. The result and the
recommendation will serve as a guide for retailers where, when and
who to look at to prevent shoplifting.
Abstract: Traditionally, terror groups have been formed by ideologically aligned actors who perceive a lack of options for achieving political or social change. However, terrorist attacks have been increasingly carried out by small groups of actors or lone individuals who may be only ideologically affiliated with larger, formal terrorist organizations. The formation of these groups represents the inverse of traditional organizational growth, whereby structural de-evolution within issue-based organizations leads to the formation of small, independent terror cells. Ideological franchising – the bypassing of formal affiliation to the “parent" organization – represents the de-evolution of traditional concepts of organizational structure in favor of an organic, independent, and focused unit. Traditional definitions of dark networks that are issue-based include focus on an identified goal, commitment to achieving this goal through unrestrained actions, and selection of symbolic targets. The next step in the de-evolution of small dark networks is the miniorganization, consisting of only a handful of actors working toward a common, violent goal. Information-sharing through social media platforms, coupled with civil liberties of democratic nations, provide the communication systems, access to information, and freedom of movement necessary for small dark networks to flourish without the aid of a parent organization. As attacks such as the 7/7 bombings demonstrate the effectiveness of small dark networks, terrorist actors will feel increasingly comfortable aligning with an ideology only, without formally organizing. The natural result of this de-evolving organization is the single actor event, where an individual seems to subscribe to a larger organization-s violent ideology with little or no formal ties.