Abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of blood viscosity on the radial pulse wave. For this, we obtained the radial pulse wave of 15 males with abnormal high hematocrit level and 47 males with normal hematocrit level at the age of thirties and forties. Various variables of the radial pulse wave between two groups were analyzed and compared by Student's T test. There are significant differences in several variables about height, time and area of the pulse wave. The first peak of the radial pulse wave was higher in abnormal high hematocrit group, but the third peak was higher and longer in normal hematocrit group. Our results suggest that the radial pulse wave can be used for diagnosis of high blood viscosity and more clinical application.
Abstract: Self-propelled forage harvesters in the 850
horsepower range were tested over three years for fuel consumption,
throughput and quality of chop for corn silage. Cut length had a
significant effect on fuel consumption, throughput and some aspects
of chop quality. Measure cut length was often different than
theoretical length of cut. Where cut length was equivalent fuel
consumption and throughput were equivalent across brands.
Shortening cut length from 17 to 11mm increases fuel consumption
53 percent measured as Mg of silage harvested per gallon of fuel used
and a 42 percent decrease in capacity as tons of fresh material per
hour run time.
Abstract: In this research sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3) was introduced to generate carbon dioxide gas (CO2) to the existing nitrogen gas (N2) of elastomeric foam, to lower thermal conductivity (K). Various loadings of NaHCO3 (0 to 60 phr) were added into the azodicarbonamide (AZC)-containing compound and its properties were then determined. Two vulcanization methods, i.e., hot air and infrared (IR), were employed and compared in this study. Results revealed that compound viscosity tended to increase slightly with increasing NaHCO3 content but cure time was delayed. The effect of NaHCO3 content on thermal conductivity depended on the vulcanization method. For hot air method, the thermal conductivity was insignificantly changed with increasing NaHCO3 up to 40 phr whereas it tended to decrease gradually for IR method. At higher NaHCO3 content (60 phr), unexpected increase of thermal conductivity was observed. The water absorption was also determined and foam structures were then used to explain the results.
Abstract: In this paper, a Cooperative Multi-robot for Carrying
Targets (CMCT) algorithm is proposed. The multi-robot team
consists of three robots, one is a supervisor and the others are
workers for carrying boxes in a store of 100×100 m2. Each robot has
a self recharging mechanism. The CMCT minimizes robot-s worked
time for carrying many boxes during day by working in parallel. That
is, the supervisor detects the required variables in the same time
another robots work with previous variables. It works with
straightforward mechanical models by using simple cosine laws. It
detects the robot-s shortest path for reaching the target position
avoiding obstacles by using a proposed CMCT path planning
(CMCT-PP) algorithm. It prevents the collision between robots
during moving. The robots interact in an ad hoc wireless network.
Simulation results show that the proposed system that consists of
CMCT algorithm and its accomplished CMCT-PP algorithm
achieves a high improvement in time and distance while performing
the required tasks over the already existed algorithms.
Abstract: As the world move to the accomplishment of Performance Based Engineering philosophies in seismic design of Civil Engineering structures, new seismic design provisions require Structural Engineers to perform both static and dynamic analysis for the design of structures. While Linear Equivalent Static Analysis is performed for regular buildings up to 90m height in zone I and II, Dynamic Analysis should be performed for regular and irregular buildings in zone IV and V. Dynamic Analysis can take the form of a dynamic Time History Analysis or a linear Response Spectrum Analysis. In present study, Multi-storey irregular buildings with 20 stories have been modeled using software packages ETABS and SAP 2000 v.15 for seismic zone V in India. This paper also deals with the effect of the variation of the building height on the structural response of the shear wall building. Dynamic responses of building under actual earthquakes, EL-CENTRO 1949 and CHI-CHI Taiwan 1999 have been investigated. This paper highlights the accuracy and exactness of Time History analysis in comparison with the most commonly adopted Response Spectrum Analysis and Equivalent Static Analysis.
Abstract: Studies of vocal communication in Sooty-headed
Bulbul were carried out from January to December 2011. Vocal
recordings and behavioral observations were made in their natural
habitats at some localities of Lampang, Thailand. After editing, cuts
of high quality recordings were analyzed with the help of Avisoft-
SASLab Pro (version 4.40) software. More than one thousand
element repertoires in five groups were found within two vocal
structures. The two structures were short sounds with single element
and phrases composed of elements, the frequency ranged from 1-10
kHz. Most phrases were composed of 2 to 5 elements that were often
dissimilar in structure, however, these phrases were not as complex
as song phrases. The elements and phrases were combined to form
many patterns. The species used ten types of calls; i.e. alert, alarm,
aggressive, begging, contact, courtship, distress, exciting, flying and
invitation. Alert and contact calls were used more frequently than
other calls. Aggressive, alarm and distress calls could be used for
interspecific communication among some other bird species in the
same habitats.
Abstract: The artificial intelligent controller in power system
plays as most important rule for many applications such as system
operation and its control specially Load Frequency Controller (LFC).
The main objective of LFC is to keep the frequency and tie-line power
close to their decidable bounds in case of disturbance. In this paper,
parallel fuzzy PI adaptive with conventional PD technique for Load
Frequency Control system was proposed. PSO optimization method
used to optimize both of scale fuzzy PI and tuning of PD. Two equal
interconnected power system areas were used as a test system.
Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller
compared with different PID and classical fuzzy PI controllers in terms
of speed response and damping frequency.
Abstract: The importance of low power consumption is widely
acknowledged due to the increasing use of portable devices, which
require minimizing the consumption of energy. Energy dissipation is
heavily dependent on the software used in the system. Applying
design patterns in object-oriented designs is a common practice
nowadays. In this paper we analyze six design patterns and explore
the effect of them on energy consumption and performance.
Abstract: Combinatorial optimization problems arise in many scientific and practical applications. Therefore many researchers try to find or improve different methods to solve these problems with high quality results and in less time. Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Simulated Annealing (SA) have been used to solve optimization problems. Both GA and SA search a solution space throughout a sequence of iterative states. However, there are also significant differences between them. The GA mechanism is parallel on a set of solutions and exchanges information using the crossover operation. SA works on a single solution at a time. In this work SA and GA are combined using new technique in order to overcome the disadvantages' of both algorithms.
Abstract: A hybrid feature based adaptive particle filter algorithm is presented for object tracking in real scenarios with static camera.
The hybrid feature is combined by two effective features: the Grayscale Arranging Pairs (GAP) feature and the color histogram feature. The GAP feature has high discriminative ability even under conditions of severe illumination variation and dynamic background
elements, while the color histogram feature has high reliability to identify the detected objects. The combination of two features covers the shortage of single feature. Furthermore, we adopt an updating
target model so that some external problems such as visual angles can be overcame well. An automatic initialization algorithm is introduced which provides precise initial positions of objects. The experimental
results show the good performance of the proposed method.
Abstract: The literature reports a large number of approaches for
measuring the similarity between protein sequences. Most of these
approaches estimate this similarity using alignment-based techniques
that do not necessarily yield biologically plausible results, for two
reasons.
First, for the case of non-alignable (i.e., not yet definitively aligned
and biologically approved) sequences such as multi-domain, circular
permutation and tandem repeat protein sequences, alignment-based
approaches do not succeed in producing biologically plausible results.
This is due to the nature of the alignment, which is based on the
matching of subsequences in equivalent positions, while non-alignable
proteins often have similar and conserved domains in non-equivalent
positions.
Second, the alignment-based approaches lead to similarity measures
that depend heavily on the parameters set by the user for the alignment
(e.g., gap penalties and substitution matrices). For easily alignable
protein sequences, it's possible to supply a suitable combination of
input parameters that allows such an approach to yield biologically
plausible results. However, for difficult-to-align protein sequences,
supplying different combinations of input parameters yields different
results. Such variable results create ambiguities and complicate the
similarity measurement task.
To overcome these drawbacks, this paper describes a novel and
effective approach for measuring the similarity between protein
sequences, called SAF for Substitution and Alignment Free. Without
resorting either to the alignment of protein sequences or to substitution
relations between amino acids, SAF is able to efficiently detect the
significant subsequences that best represent the intrinsic properties of
protein sequences, those underlying the chronological dependencies of
structural features and biochemical activities of protein sequences.
Moreover, by using a new efficient subsequence matching scheme,
SAF more efficiently handles protein sequences that contain similar
structural features with significant meaning in chronologically
non-equivalent positions. To show the effectiveness of SAF, extensive
experiments were performed on protein datasets from different
databases, and the results were compared with those obtained by
several mainstream algorithms.
Abstract: With data centers, end-users can realize the pervasiveness of services that will be one day the cornerstone of our lives. However, data centers are often classified as computing systems that consume the most amounts of power. To circumvent such a problem, we propose a self-adaptive weighted sum methodology that jointly optimizes the performance and power consumption of any given data center. Compared to traditional methodologies for multi-objective optimization problems, the proposed self-adaptive weighted sum technique does not rely on a systematical change of weights during the optimization procedure. The proposed technique is compared with the greedy and LR heuristics for large-scale problems, and the optimal solution for small-scale problems implemented in LINDO. the experimental results revealed that the proposed selfadaptive weighted sum technique outperforms both of the heuristics and projects a competitive performance compared to the optimal solution.
Abstract: We study in this paper the effect of the scene
changing on image sequences coding system using Embedded
Zerotree Wavelet (EZW). The scene changing considered here is the
full motion which may occurs. A special image sequence is generated
where the scene changing occurs randomly. Two scenarios are
considered: In the first scenario, the system must provide the
reconstruction quality as best as possible by the management of the
bit rate (BR) while the scene changing occurs. In the second scenario,
the system must keep the bit rate as constant as possible by the
management of the reconstruction quality. The first scenario may be
motivated by the availability of a large band pass transmission
channel where an increase of the bit rate may be possible to keep the
reconstruction quality up to a given threshold. The second scenario
may be concerned by the narrow band pass transmission channel
where an increase of the bit rate is not possible. In this last case,
applications for which the reconstruction quality is not a constraint
may be considered. The simulations are performed with five scales
wavelet decomposition using the 9/7-tap filter bank biorthogonal
wavelet. The entropy coding is performed using a specific defined
binary code book and EZW algorithm. Experimental results are
presented and compared to LEAD H263 EVAL. It is shown that if
the reconstruction quality is the constraint, the system increases the
bit rate to obtain the required quality. In the case where the bit rate
must be constant, the system is unable to provide the required quality
if the scene change occurs; however, the system is able to improve
the quality while the scene changing disappears.
Abstract: This paper reports the tensile fracture location
characterizations of dissimilar friction stir welds between 5754
aluminium alloy and C11000 copper. The welds were produced using
three shoulder diameter tools; namely, 15, 18 and 25 mm by varying
the process parameters. The rotational speeds considered were 600,
950 and 1200 rpm while the feed rates employed were 50, 150 and
300 mm/min to represent the low, medium and high settings
respectively. The tensile fracture locations were evaluated using the
optical microscope to identify the fracture locations and were
characterized. It was observed that 70% of the tensile samples failed
in the Thermo Mechanically Affected Zone (TMAZ) of copper at the
weld joints. Further evaluation of the fracture surfaces of the pulled
tensile samples revealed that welds with low Ultimate Tensile
Strength either have defects or intermetallics present at their joint
interfaces.
Abstract: The methanolic extracts from seeds of tamarind
(Tamarindus indica) was prepared by Soxhlet apparatus extraction
and evaluated for total phenolic content by Folin-Ciocalteu method.
Then, methanolic extract was screened biological activities (In vitro)
for anti-melanogenic activity by tyrosinase inhibition test, antiinflammation
activity by cyclooxygenase 1 (COX-1) and
cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) inhibition test, and cytotoxic screening
test with Vero cells. The results showed that total phenolic content,
which contained in extract, was contained 27.72 mg of gallic acid
equivalent per g of dry weight. The ability to inhibit tyrosinase
enzyme, which exerted by Tamarind seed extracts (1 mg/ml) was
52.13 ± 0.42 %. The extract was not possessed inhibitory effect to
COX-1 and COX-2 enzymes and cytotoxic effect to Vero cells. The
finding is concludes that tested seed extract was possessed
antimelanogenic activity with non-toxic effects. However, there was
not exhibited anti-inflammatory activity. Further studies include the
use of advance biological models to confirm this biological activity,
as well as, the isolation and characterization of the purified
compounds that it was contained.
Abstract: In the area where the high quality water is not
available, unconventional water sources are used to irrigate.
Household leachate is one of the sources which are used in dry and
semi dry areas in order to water the barer trees and plants. It meets
the plants needs and also has some effects on the soil, but at the same
time it might cause some problems as well. This study in order to
evaluate the effect of using Compost leachate on the density of soil
iron in form of a statistical pattern called ''Split Plot'' by using two
main treatments, one subsidiary treatment and three repetitions of the
pattern in a three month period. The main N treatments include:
irrigation using well water as a blank treatments and the main I
treatments include: irrigation using leachate and well water
concurrently. Some subsidiary treatments were DI (Drop Irrigation)
and SDI (Sub Drop Irrigation). Then in the established plots, 36
biannual pine and cypress shrubs were randomly grown. Two months
later the treatment begins. The results revealed that there was a
significant variation between the main treatment and the instance
regarding pH decline in the soil which was related to the amount of
leachate injected into the soil. After some time and using leachate the
pH level fell, as much as 0.46 and also increased due to the great
amounts of leachate. The underneath drop irrigation ends in better
results than sub drop irrigation since it keeps the soil texture fixed.
Abstract: Palestinian cities face the challenges of land scarcity,
high population growth rates, rapid urbanization, uneven
development and territorial fragmentation. Due to geopolitical
constrains and the absence of an effective Palestinian planning
institution, urban development in Palestinian cities has not followed
any discernable planning scheme. This has led to a number of
internal contradictions in the structure of cities, and adversely
affected land use, the provision of urban services, and the quality of
the living environment.
This paper explores these challenges, and the potential that exists
for introducing a more sustainable urban development pattern in
Palestinian cities. It assesses alternative development approaches
with a particular focus on sustainable development, promoting ecodevelopment
imperatives, limiting random urbanization, and meeting
present and future challenges, including fulfilling the needs of the
people and conserving the scarce land and limited natural resources.
This paper concludes by offering conceptual proposals and guidelines
for promoting sustainable physical development in Palestinian cities.
Abstract: To learn about China-s future energy demand, this paper first proposed GM(1,1) model group based on recursive solutions of parameters estimation, setting up a general solving-algorithm of the model group. This method avoided the problems occurred on the past researches that remodeling, loss of information and large amount of calculation. This paper established respectively all-data-GM(1,1), metabolic GM(1,1) and new information GM (1,1)model according to the historical data of energy consumption in China in the year 2005-2010 and the added data of 2011, then modeling, simulating and comparison of accuracies we got the optimal models and to predict. Results showed that the total energy demand of China will be 37.2221 billion tons of equivalent coal in 2012 and 39.7973 billion tons of equivalent coal in 2013, which are as the same as the overall planning of energy demand in The 12th Five-Year Plan.
Abstract: Decomposition processes take place in landfill
generate leachates that can be categorized mainly of acetogenic and
methanogenic in nature. BOD:COD ratio computed in this study for a
landfill site over a 3 years duration revealed as a good indicator to
identify acetogenic leachate from methanogenic leachate. Correlation
relationships to predict pollutant level taking into consideration of
climatic condition are derived.
Abstract: This study is designed to investigate errors emerged in written texts produced by 30 Turkish EFL learners with an explanatory, and thus, qualitative perspective. Erroneous language elements were identified by the researcher first and then their grammaticality and intelligibility were checked by five native speakers of English. The analysis of the data showed that it is difficult to claim that an error stems from only one single factor since different features of an error are triggered by different factors. Our findings revealed two different types of errors: those which stem from the interference of L1 with L2 and those which are developmental ones. The former type contains more global errors whereas the errors in latter type are more intelligible.