The Measurement of Latvian and Russian Ethnic Attitudes, Using Evaluative Priming Task and Self-Report Methods

The purposes of researches - to estimate implicit ethnic attitudes by direct and indirect methods, to determine the accordance of two types measuring, to investigate influence of task type used in an experiment, on the results of measuring, as well as to determine a presence or communication between recent episodic events and chronologic correlations of ethnic attitudes. Method of the implicit measuring - an evaluative priming (EPT) carried out with the use of different SOA intervals, explicit methods of research are G.Soldatova-s types of ethnic identity, G.Soldatova-s index of tolerance, E.Bogardus scale of social distance. During five stages of researches received results open some aspects of implicit measuring, its correlation with the results of self-reports on different SOA intervals, connection of implicit measuring with emotional valence of episodic events of participants and other indexes, presenting a contribution to the decision of implicit measuring application problem for study of different social constructs

A Pipelined FSBM Hardware Architecture for HTDV-H.26x

In MPEG and H.26x standards, to eliminate the temporal redundancy we use motion estimation. Given that the motion estimation stage is very complex in terms of computational effort, a hardware implementation on a re-configurable circuit is crucial for the requirements of different real time multimedia applications. In this paper, we present hardware architecture for motion estimation based on "Full Search Block Matching" (FSBM) algorithm. This architecture presents minimum latency, maximum throughput, full utilization of hardware resources such as embedded memory blocks, and combining both pipelining and parallel processing techniques. Our design is described in VHDL language, verified by simulation and implemented in a Stratix II EP2S130F1020C4 FPGA circuit. The experiment result show that the optimum operating clock frequency of the proposed design is 89MHz which achieves 160M pixels/sec.

Plasma Density Distribution in Asymmetric Geometry Capacitive Coupled Plasma Discharge System

In this work, we used the single Langmuir probe to measure the plasma density distribution in an geometrically asymmetric capacitive coupled plasma discharge system. Because of the frame structure of powered electrode, the plasma density was not homogeneous in the discharge volume. It was higher under the frame, but lower in the centre. Finite element simulation results showed a good agreement with the experiment results. To increase the electron density in the central volume and improve the homogeneity of the plasma, we added an auxiliary electrode, powered by DC voltage, in the simulation geometry. The simulation results showed that the auxiliary electrode could alter the potential distribution and improve the density homogeneity effectively.

Sample-Weighted Fuzzy Clustering with Regularizations

Although there have been many researches in cluster analysis to consider on feature weights, little effort is made on sample weights. Recently, Yu et al. (2011) considered a probability distribution over a data set to represent its sample weights and then proposed sample-weighted clustering algorithms. In this paper, we give a sample-weighted version of generalized fuzzy clustering regularization (GFCR), called the sample-weighted GFCR (SW-GFCR). Some experiments are considered. These experimental results and comparisons demonstrate that the proposed SW-GFCR is more effective than the most clustering algorithms.

Salient Points Reduction for Content-Based Image Retrieval

Salient points are frequently used to represent local properties of the image in content-based image retrieval. In this paper, we present a reduction algorithm that extracts the local most salient points such that they not only give a satisfying representation of an image, but also make the image retrieval process efficiently. This algorithm recursively reduces the continuous point set by their corresponding saliency values under a top-down approach. The resulting salient points are evaluated with an image retrieval system using Hausdoff distance. In this experiment, it shows that our method is robust and the extracted salient points provide better retrieval performance comparing with other point detectors.

Effect of White Kwao Extract (Pueraria mirifica) on in vitro Development and Implantation Rate of Mouse Embryo

The White Kwao (Pueraria mirifica), a potent phytoestrogenic medicinal plant, has long been use in Thailand as a traditional folkmedicine. However, no scientific information of the direct effect of White Kwao on the development of mammalian embryo was available. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of White Kwao extract on the in vitro development and implantation rate of mouse embryos. This study was designed into two experiments. In the first experiment, the two-cell stage mouse embryos were collected from the oviduct of superovulated mature female mice, and randomly cultured in three different media, the M16, M16 supplemented with 0.52μg esthinylestradiol-17β, and M16 supplemented with 10 mg/ml White Kwao extract. The culture was incubated in CO2 incubator at 37 oC . After the embryos were cultivated, the developments of embryos were observed every 24 hours for 5 days. The development rate of embryos from the two-cell stage to blastocyst stage in the media was with White Kwao was significantly higher (p

An Experimental Study on Behavior of Transverse Connection Appropriate for Modular Girder Bridge

This study is to evaluate the behavior of integral and segmental specimens through static and cyclic tests. Integral specimens were made with the same size to be compared with segmental specimens that were made by connected precast members. To evaluate its bending performance and serviceability, 1 integral and 3 segmental specimens were tested under static load. And 1 integral and 2 segmental specimens were tested under cyclic load, respectively. Different load ranges were considered in the cyclic tests to evaluate the safety and serviceability. The test results showed that under static loading, segmental specimens had about 94% of the integral specimen's maximum moment, averagely. Under cyclic loading, the segmental specimens showed that had enough safety in the range of higher than service load and enough serviceability. In conclusion, the maximum crack width (0.16mm) satisfied the allowable crack width (0.30mm) in the range of service load.

Effects of Late Sowing on Quality of Coriander (Coriandrum sativum L.)

Coriander is an annual and herbaceous plant, belong to the apiaceae family. This plant is cultivated world widely. It is well known for having medicinal properties. The aim of this experiment was to study seed quality of species grown in Kermanshah conditions. The experiment was carried out in research farm, Campus of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran. Coriander (local type) was grown in late spring May (5th and 20th) and Jun (4th and 19th), and plant density (10, 30, 50 and 70 plants m-2) in 2009. The experimental plots were laid out in a factorial according to a randomized complete block design with three replications. The fruits were harvest between 83.5 – 106.5 days after sowing. The essential oil and oil content was extracted by Clevenger and Soxhlet apparatuses, respectively. Results showed that delay at planting date increased the oil content. Also, with the increase at plant density was decreased oil content and essential oil.

The Projection Methods for Computing the Pseudospectra of Large Scale Matrices

The projection methods, usually viewed as the methods for computing eigenvalues, can also be used to estimate pseudospectra. This paper proposes a kind of projection methods for computing the pseudospectra of large scale matrices, including orthogonalization projection method and oblique projection method respectively. This possibility may be of practical importance in applications involving large scale highly nonnormal matrices. Numerical algorithms are given and some numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency of the new algorithms.

Removal of Copper and Zinc Ions onto Biomodified Palm Shell Activated Carbon

commercially produced in Malaysia granular palm shell activated carbon (PSAC) was biomodified with bacterial biomass (Bacillus subtilis) to produce a hybrid biosorbent of higher efficiency. The obtained biosorbent was evaluated in terms of adsorption capacity to remove copper and zinc metal ions from aqueous solutions. The adsorption capacity was evaluated in batch adsorption experiments where concentrations of metal ions varied from 20 to 350 mg/L. A range of pH from 3 to 6 of aqueous solutions containing metal ions was tested. Langmuir adsorption model was used to interpret the experimental data. Comparison of the adsorption data of the biomodified and original palm shell activated carbon showed higher uptake of metal ions by the hybrid biosorbent. A trend in metal ions uptake increase with the increase in the solution-s pH was observed. The surface characterization data indicated a decrease in the total surface area for the hybrid biosorbent; however the uptake of copper and zinc by it was at least equal to the original PSAC at pH 4 and 5. The highest capacity of the hybrid biosorbent was observed at pH 5 and comprised 22 mg/g and 19 mg/g for copper and zinc, respectively. The adsorption capacity at the lowest pH of 3 was significantly low. The experimental results facilitated identification of potential factors influencing the adsorption of copper and zinc onto biomodified and original palm shell activated carbon.

The Effect of Complementary Irrigation in Different Growth Stages on Yield, Qualitative and Quantitative Indices of the Two Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) Cultivars in Mazandaran

In most wheat growing moderate regions and especially in the north of Iran climate, is affected grain filling by several physical and abiotic stresses. In this region, grain filling often occurs when temperatures are increasing and moisture supply is decreasing. The experiment was designed in RCBD with split plot arrangements with four replications. Four irrigation treatments included (I0) no irrigation (check); (I1) one irrigation (50 mm) at heading stage; (I2) two irrigation (100 mm) at heading and anthesis stage; and (I3) three irrigation (150 mm) at heading, anthesis and early grain filling growth stage, two wheat cultivars (Milan and Shanghai) were cultured in the experiment. Totally raining was 453 mm during the growth season. The result indicated that biological yield, grain yield and harvest index were significantly affected by irrigation levels. I3 treatment produced more tillers number in m2, fertile tillers number in m2, harvest index and biological yield. Milan produced more tillers number in m2, fertile tillers in m2, while Shanghai produced heavier tillers and grain 1000 weight. Plant height was significant in wheat varieties while were not statistically significant in irrigation levels. Milan produced more grain yield, harvest index and biological yield. Grain yield shown that I1, I2, and I3 produced increasing of 5228 (21%), 5460 (27%) and 5670 (29%) kg ha-1, respectively. There was an interaction of irrigation and cultivar on grain yields. In the absence of the irrigation reduced grain 1000 weight from 45 to 40 g. No irrigation reduced soil moisture extraction during the grain filling stage. Current assimilation as a source of carbon for grain filling depends on the light intercepting viable green surfaces of the plant after anthesis that due to natural senescence and the effect of various stresses. At the same time the demand by the growing grain is increasing. It is concluded from research work that wheat crop irrigated Milan cultivar could increase the grain yield in comparison with Shanghai cultivar. Although, the grain yield of Shanghai under irrigation was slightly lower than Milan. This grain yield also was related to weather condition, sowing date, plant density and location conditions and management of fertilizers, because there was not significant difference in biological and straw yield. The best result was produced by I1 treatment. I2 and I3 treatments were not significantly difference with I1 treatment. Grain yield of I1 indicated that wheat is under soil moisture deficiency. Therefore, I1 irrigation was better than I0.

Analysis of DNA Microarray Data using Association Rules: A Selective Study

DNA microarrays allow the measurement of expression levels for a large number of genes, perhaps all genes of an organism, within a number of different experimental samples. It is very much important to extract biologically meaningful information from this huge amount of expression data to know the current state of the cell because most cellular processes are regulated by changes in gene expression. Association rule mining techniques are helpful to find association relationship between genes. Numerous association rule mining algorithms have been developed to analyze and associate this huge amount of gene expression data. This paper focuses on some of the popular association rule mining algorithms developed to analyze gene expression data.

Mamdani Model based Adaptive Neural Fuzzy Inference System and its Application

Hybrid algorithm is the hot issue in Computational Intelligence (CI) study. From in-depth discussion on Simulation Mechanism Based (SMB) classification method and composite patterns, this paper presents the Mamdani model based Adaptive Neural Fuzzy Inference System (M-ANFIS) and weight updating formula in consideration with qualitative representation of inference consequent parts in fuzzy neural networks. M-ANFIS model adopts Mamdani fuzzy inference system which has advantages in consequent part. Experiment results of applying M-ANFIS to evaluate traffic Level of service show that M-ANFIS, as a new hybrid algorithm in computational intelligence, has great advantages in non-linear modeling, membership functions in consequent parts, scale of training data and amount of adjusted parameters.

Genetic Folding: Analyzing the Mercer-s Kernels Effect in Support Vector Machine using Genetic Folding

Genetic Folding (GF) a new class of EA named as is introduced for the first time. It is based on chromosomes composed of floating genes structurally organized in a parent form and separated by dots. Although, the genotype/phenotype system of GF generates a kernel expression, which is the objective function of superior classifier. In this work the question of the satisfying mapping-s rules in evolving populations is addressed by analyzing populations undergoing either Mercer-s or none Mercer-s rule. The results presented here show that populations undergoing Mercer-s rules improve practically models selection of Support Vector Machine (SVM). The experiment is trained multi-classification problem and tested on nonlinear Ionosphere dataset. The target of this paper is to answer the question of evolving Mercer-s rule in SVM addressed using either genetic folding satisfied kernel-s rules or not applied to complicated domains and problems.

3D Face Recognition Using Modified PCA Methods

In this paper we present an approach for 3D face recognition based on extracting principal components of range images by utilizing modified PCA methods namely 2DPCA and bidirectional 2DPCA also known as (2D) 2 PCA.A preprocessing stage was implemented on the images to smooth them using median and Gaussian filtering. In the normalization stage we locate the nose tip to lay it at the center of images then crop each image to a standard size of 100*100. In the face recognition stage we extract the principal component of each image using both 2DPCA and (2D) 2 PCA. Finally, we use Euclidean distance to measure the minimum distance between a given test image to the training images in the database. We also compare the result of using both methods. The best result achieved by experiments on a public face database shows that 83.3 percent is the rate of face recognition for a random facial expression.

Emission of Volatile Organic Compounds from the Residential Combustion of Pyrenean Oak and Black Poplar

Smoke from domestic wood burning has been identified as a major contributor to air pollution, motivating detailed emission measurements under controlled conditions. A series of experiments was performed to characterise the emissions from wood combustion in a fireplace and in a woodstove of two common species of trees grown in Spain: Pyrenean oak (Quercus pyrenaica) and black poplar (Populus nigra). Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the exhaust emissions were collected in Tedlar bags, re-sampled in sorbent tubes and analysed by thermal desorption-gas chromatography-flame ionisation detection. Pyrenean oak presented substantially higher emissions in the woodstove than in the fireplace, for the majority of compounds. The opposite was observed for poplar. Among the 45 identified species, benzene and benzenerelated compounds represent the most abundant group, followed by oxygenated VOCs and aliphatics. Emission factors obtained in this study are generally of the same order than those reported for residential experiments in the USA.

FCA-based Conceptual Knowledge Discovery in Folksonomy

The tagging data of (users, tags and resources) constitutes a folksonomy that is the user-driven and bottom-up approach to organizing and classifying information on the Web. Tagging data stored in the folksonomy include a lot of very useful information and knowledge. However, appropriate approach for analyzing tagging data and discovering hidden knowledge from them still remains one of the main problems on the folksonomy mining researches. In this paper, we have proposed a folksonomy data mining approach based on FCA for discovering hidden knowledge easily from folksonomy. Also we have demonstrated how our proposed approach can be applied in the collaborative tagging system through our experiment. Our proposed approach can be applied to some interesting areas such as social network analysis, semantic web mining and so on.

Fast Facial Feature Extraction and Matching with Artificial Face Models

Facial features are frequently used to represent local properties of a human face image in computer vision applications. In this paper, we present a fast algorithm that can extract the facial features online such that they can give a satisfying representation of a face image. It includes one step for a coarse detection of each facial feature by AdaBoost and another one to increase the accuracy of the found points by Active Shape Models (ASM) in the regions of interest. The resulted facial features are evaluated by matching with artificial face models in the applications of physiognomy. The distance measure between the features and those in the fate models from the database is carried out by means of the Hausdorff distance. In the experiment, the proposed method shows the efficient performance in facial feature extractions and online system of physiognomy.

Computer Aided Design of Reshaping Process of Circular Pipes into Square Pipes

Square pipes (pipes with square cross sections) are being used for various industrial objectives, such as machine structure components and housing/building elements. The utilization of them is extending rapidly and widely. Hence, the out-put of those pipes is increasing and new application fields are continually developing. Due to various demands in recent time, the products have to satisfy difficult specifications with high accuracy in dimensions. The reshaping process design of pipes with square cross sections; however, is performed by trial and error and based on expert-s experience. In this paper, a computer-aided simulation is developed based on the 2-D elastic-plastic method with consideration of the shear deformation to analyze the reshaping process. Effect of various parameters such as diameter of the circular pipe and mechanical properties of metal on product dimension and quality can be evaluated by using this simulation. Moreover, design of reshaping process include determination of shrinkage of cross section, necessary number of stands, radius of rolls and height of pipe at each stand, are investigated. Further, it is shown that there are good agreements between the results of the design method and the experimental results.

Simulation and Validation of Spur Gear Heated by Induction using 3d Model

This paper presents the study of hardness profile of spur gear heated by induction heating process in function of the machine parameters, such as the power (kW), the heating time (s) and the generator frequency (kHz). The global work is realized by 3D finite-element simulation applied to the process by coupling and resolving the electromagnetic field and the heat transfer problems, and it was performed in three distinguished steps. First, a Comsol 3D model was built using an adequate formulation and taking into account the material properties and the machine parameters. Second, the convergence study was conducted to optimize the mesh. Then, the surface temperatures and the case depths were deeply analyzed in function of the initial current density and the heating time in medium frequency (MF) and high frequency (HF) heating modes and the edge effect were studied. Finally, the simulations results are validated using experimental tests.