Abstract: Integrins are a large family of multidomain α/β cell
signaling receptors. Some integrins contain an additional inserted I
domain, whose earliest expression appears to be with the chordates,
since they are observed in the urochordates Ciona intestinalis (vase
tunicate) and Halocynthia roretzi (sea pineapple), but not in integrins
of earlier diverging species. The domain-s presence is viewed as a
hallmark of integrins of higher metazoans, however in vertebrates,
there are clearly three structurally-different classes: integrins without
I domains, and two groups of integrins with I domains but separable
by the presence or absence of an additional αC helix. For example,
the αI domains in collagen-binding integrins from Osteichthyes
(bony fish) and all higher vertebrates contain the specific αC helix,
whereas the αI domains in non-collagen binding integrins from
vertebrates and the αI domains from earlier diverging urochordate
integrins, i.e. tunicates, do not. Unfortunately, within the early
chordates, there is an evolutionary gap due to extinctions between the
tunicates and cartilaginous fish. This, coupled with a knowledge gap
due to the lack of complete genomic data from surviving species,
means that the origin of collagen-binding αC-containing αI domains
remains unknown. Here, we analyzed two available genomes from
Callorhinchus milii (ghost shark/elephant shark; Chondrichthyes –
cartilaginous fish) and Petromyzon marinus (sea lamprey;
Agnathostomata), and several available Expression Sequence Tags
from two Chondrichthyes species: Raja erinacea (little skate) and
Squalus acanthias (dogfish shark); and Eptatretus burgeri (inshore
hagfish; Agnathostomata), which evolutionary reside between the
urochordates and osteichthyes. In P. marinus, we observed several
fragments coding for the αC-containing αI domain, allowing us to
shed more light on the evolution of the collagen-binding integrins.
Abstract: Continuously variable transmission (CVT) is a type of
automatic transmission that can change the gear ratio to any arbitrary
setting within the limits. The most common type of CVT operates on
a pulley system that allows an infinite variability between highest and
lowest gears with no discrete steps. However, the current CVT
system with hydraulic actuation method suffers from the power loss.
It needs continuous force for the pulley to clamp the belt and hold the
torque resulting in large amount of energy consumption. This study
focused on the development of an electromechanical actuated control
CVT to eliminate the problem that faced by the existing CVT. It is
conducted with several steps; computing and selecting the
appropriate sizing for stroke length, lead screw system and etc. From
the visual observation it was found that the CVT system of this
research is satisfactory.
Abstract: The increase popularity of multimedia application especially in image processing places a great demand on efficient data storage and transmission techniques. Network communication such as wireless network can easily be intercepted and cause of confidential information leaked. Unfortunately, conventional compression and encryption methods are too slow; it is impossible to carry out real time secure image processing. In this research, Embedded Zerotree Wavelet (EZW) encoder which specially designs for wavelet compression is examined. With this algorithm, three methods are proposed to reduce the processing time, space and security protection that will be secured enough to protect the data.
Abstract: The technique of k-anonymization has been proposed to obfuscate private data through associating it with at least k identities. This paper investigates the basic tabular structures that
underline the notion of k-anonymization using cell suppression.
These structures are studied under idealized conditions to identify the
essential features of the k-anonymization notion. We optimize data kanonymization
through requiring a minimum number of anonymized
values that are balanced over all columns and rows. We study the
relationship between the sizes of the anonymized tables, the value k, and the number of attributes. This study has a theoretical value through contributing to develop a mathematical foundation of the kanonymization
concept. Its practical significance is still to be
investigated.
Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of lubrication on
the quantity of heat emission of two spur gear. System with and
without lubrication effected on the quantity of heat induced on the
gear box (oil - bearings – gears). Both of lubrication and speed of
motor are affected on the performance of gears. Research investigated
the lubrication on the system with and without loading as well as the
wear of gears and bearing's conditions. Gear box investigated
includes the motor, pump, two spur gears, two shafts; speed change
used pulleys and belts. Load used equal one weight ones of gear.
Lubrication mechanism used jet system (upper and lower jet). Gear
box we used system of jet lubrication is perpendicular direction of
the contact line between two teeth. Results appeared in this work that
the lubrication is the vital parameter which is affected on the
performance and durability of gears and bearings. In macroscopic
observation, we noted that damage of bearings happened during the
absence of lubrication as well as abrasive of wear of teeth. Higher
speed of motor without lubrication increased the noise, but in the
presence of lubrication was decreased.
Abstract: A novel biomass composite inspired from wood porous
structure was manufactured by impregnating vinyl monomer into
wood cellular structure under vacuum conditions, and initiating the
monomer for in situ polymerization through a thermal treatment. The
vacuum condition was studied, and the mechanical properties of the
composite were also tested. SEM observation shows that polymer
generated in the wood porous structure, and strongly interacted with
wood matrix; and the polymer content increased with vacuum value
increasing. FTIR indicates that polymer grafted onto wood matrix,
resulting chemical complex between them. The rate of monomer
loading increased with increasing vacuum value and time, accordance
with rate of polymer loading. The compression strength and modulus
of elasticity linearly increased with the increasing rate of polymer
loading. Results indicate that the novel biomass composite possesses
good mechanical properties capable of applying in the fields of
construction, traffic and so forth.
Abstract: The aim of this work is to present a multi-objective optimization method to find maximum efficiency kinematics for a flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. We restrained our study to rectangular wings with the same profile along the span and to harmonic dihedral motion. It is assumed that the birdlike aerial vehicle (whose span and surface area were fixed respectively to 1m and 0.15m2) is in horizontal mechanically balanced motion at fixed speed. We used two flight physics models to describe the vehicle aerodynamic performances, namely DeLaurier-s model, which has been used in many studies dealing with flapping wings, and the model proposed by Dae-Kwan et al. Then, a constrained multi-objective optimization of the propulsive efficiency is performed using a recent evolutionary multi-objective algorithm called є-MOEA. Firstly, we show that feasible solutions (i.e. solutions that fulfil the imposed constraints) can be obtained using Dae-Kwan et al.-s model. Secondly, we highlight that a single objective optimization approach (weighted sum method for example) can also give optimal solutions as good as the multi-objective one which nevertheless offers the advantage of directly generating the set of the best trade-offs. Finally, we show that the DeLaurier-s model does not yield feasible solutions.
Abstract: The medical data statistical analysis often requires the
using of some special techniques, because of the particularities of
these data. The principal components analysis and the data clustering
are two statistical methods for data mining very useful in the medical
field, the first one as a method to decrease the number of studied
parameters, and the second one as a method to analyze the
connections between diagnosis and the data about the patient-s
condition. In this paper we investigate the implications obtained from
a specific data analysis technique: the data clustering preceded by a
selection of the most relevant parameters, made using the principal
components analysis. Our assumption was that, using the principal
components analysis before data clustering - in order to select and to
classify only the most relevant parameters – the accuracy of
clustering is improved, but the practical results showed the opposite
fact: the clustering accuracy decreases, with a percentage
approximately equal with the percentage of information loss reported
by the principal components analysis.
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to propose a model designed to achieve Total Knowledge Transfer in the public health sector. The Total Knowledge Transfer Model integrated four essential organizational factors which have been under examined in totality in the literature. The research design was inductive in nature and used a case study for accomplishing the research objectives. The researcher investigated the factors that created a base to design a framework for total knowledge transfer in the public health sector. The results of this study are drawn from a fairly large sample in only two hospitals. A further research can be conducted to cover more responses from a wider health sector. The Total Knowledge Transfer Model is essential to improve the transfer and application of total common health knowledge.
Abstract: Motion capture devices have been utilized in
producing several contents, such as movies and video games. However,
since motion capture devices are expensive and inconvenient to use,
motions segmented from captured data was recycled and synthesized
to utilize it in another contents, but the motions were generally
segmented by contents producers in manual. Therefore, automatic
motion segmentation is recently getting a lot of attentions. Previous
approaches are divided into on-line and off-line, where on-line
approaches segment motions based on similarities between
neighboring frames and off-line approaches segment motions by
capturing the global characteristics in feature space. In this paper, we
propose a graph-based high-level motion segmentation method. Since
high-level motions consist of several repeated frames within temporal
distances, we consider all similarities among all frames within the
temporal distance. This is achieved by constructing a graph, where
each vertex represents a frame and the edges between the frames are
weighted by their similarity. Then, normalized cuts algorithm is used
to partition the constructed graph into several sub-graphs by globally
finding minimum cuts. In the experiments, the results using the
proposed method showed better performance than PCA-based method
in on-line and GMM-based method in off-line, as the proposed method
globally segment motions from the graph constructed based
similarities between neighboring frames as well as similarities among
all frames within temporal distances.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a matrix game-theoretic cross-layer optimization formulation to maximize the network lifetime in wireless ad hoc networks with network coding. To this end, we introduce a cross-layer formulation of general NUM (network utility maximization) that accommodates routing, scheduling, and stream control from different layers in the coded networks. Specifically, for the scheduling problem and then the objective function involved, we develop a matrix game with the strategy sets of the players corresponding to hyperlinks and transmission modes, and design the payoffs specific to the lifetime. In particular, with the inherit merit that matrix game can be solved with linear programming, our cross-layer programming formulation can benefit from both game-based and NUM-based approaches at the same time by cooperating the programming model for the matrix game with that for the other layers in a consistent framework. Finally, our numerical example demonstrates its performance results on a well-known wireless butterfly network to verify the cross-layer optimization scheme.
Abstract: A high-performance Monte Carlo simulation, which
simultaneously takes diffusion-controlled and chain-length-dependent
bimolecular termination reactions into account, is developed to
simulate atom transfer radical copolymerization of styrene and nbutyl
acrylate. As expected, increasing initial feed fraction of styrene
raises the fraction of styrene-styrene dyads (fAA) and reduces that of
n-butyl acrylate dyads (fBB). The trend of variation in randomness
parameter (fAB) during the copolymerization also varies significantly.
Also, there is a drift in copolymer heterogeneity and the highest drift
occurs in the initial feeds containing lower percentages of styrene, i.e.
20% and 5%.
Abstract: Heavy metal transfer in soil profiles is a major
environmental concern because even slow transport through the soil
may eventually lead to deterioration of groundwater quality. The use
of sewage sludge and effluents from wastewater treatment plants for
irrigation of agricultural lands is on the rise particularly in peri-urban
area of developing countries. In this study soil samples under sludge
application and wastewater irrigation were studied and soil samples
were collected in the soil profiles from the surface to 100 cm in
depth. For this purpose, three plots were made in a treatment plant in
south of Tehran-Iran. First plot was irrigated just with effluent from
wastewater treatment plant, second plot with simulated heavy metals
concentration equal 50 years irrigation and in third plot sewage
sludge and effluent was used. Trace metals concentration (Cd, Cu)
were determined for soil samples. The results indicate movement of
metals was observed, but the most concentration of metals was found
in topsoil samples. The most of Cadmium concentration was
measured in the topsoil of plot 3, 4.5mg/kg and Maximum cadmium
movement was observed in 0-20 cm. The most concentration of
copper was 27.76mg/kg, and maximum percolation in 0-20 cm.
Metals (Cd, Cu) were measured in leached water. Preferential flow
and metal complexation with soluble organic apparently allow
leaching of heavy metals.
Abstract: FAQ system can make user find answer to the problem that puzzles them. But now the research on Chinese FAQ system is still on the theoretical stage. This paper presents an approach to semantic inference for FAQ mining. To enhance the efficiency, a small pool of the candidate question-answering pairs retrieved from the system for the follow-up work according to the concept of the agriculture domain extracted from user input .Input queries or questions are converted into four parts, the question word segment (QWS), the verb segment (VS), the concept of agricultural areas segment (CS), the auxiliary segment (AS). A semantic matching method is presented to estimate the similarity between the semantic segments of the query and the questions in the pool of the candidate. A thesaurus constructed from the HowNet, a Chinese knowledge base, is adopted for word similarity measure in the matcher. The questions are classified into eleven intension categories using predefined question stemming keywords. For FAQ mining, given a query, the question part and answer part in an FAQ question-answer pair is matched with the input query, respectively. Finally, the probabilities estimated from these two parts are integrated and used to choose the most likely answer for the input query. These approaches are experimented on an agriculture FAQ system. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach outperformed the FAQ-Finder system in agriculture FAQ retrieval.
Abstract: This paper deals with infinite time horizon fuzzy Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) models for deteriorating items with
stock dependent demand rate and nonlinear holding costs by taking deterioration rate θ0 as a triangular fuzzy number (θ0 −δ 1, θ0, θ0 +δ 2), where 1 2 0 0
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a method for detecting
circular shapes with subpixel accuracy. First, the geometric properties
of circles have been used to find the diameters as well as the
circumference pixels. The center and radius are then estimated by the
circumference pixels. Both synthetic and real images have been tested
by the proposed method. The experimental results show that the new
method is efficient.
Abstract: Due to the constant increase in the volume of information available to applications in fields varying from medical diagnosis to web search engines, accurate support of similarity becomes an important task. This is also the case of spam filtering techniques where the similarities between the known and incoming messages are the fundaments of making the spam/not spam decision. We present a novel approach to filtering based solely on layout, whose goal is not only to correctly identify spam, but also warn about major emerging threats. We propose a mathematical formulation of the email message layout and based on it we elaborate an algorithm to separate different types of emails and find the new, numerically relevant spam types.
Abstract: Microplasma welding is a less expensive alternative to
laser welding in dental technology. The aim of the study was to
highlight discontinuities present in the microplasma welded joints of
dental base metal alloys by visual analysis. Five base metal alloys
designated for fixed prostheses manufacture were selected for the
experiments. Using these plates, preliminary tests were conducted by
microplasma welding in butt joint configuration, without filler
material, bilaterally and with filler material, proper for each base
metal. Macroscopic visual inspection was performed to assess
carefully the irregularities in the welds. Electron microscopy allowed
detection of discontinuities that are not visible to the eye and
revealing details regarding location, trajectory, morphology and size
of discontinuities. Supplementing visual control with microscopic
analysis allows to detect small discontinuities, which escapes the
macroscopic control and to make a detailed study of the weld.
Abstract: The African Great Lakes Region refers to the zone
around lakes Victoria, Tanganyika, Albert, Edward, Kivu, and
Malawi. The main source of electricity in this region is hydropower
whose systems are generally characterized by relatively weak,
isolated power schemes, poor maintenance and technical deficiencies
with limited electricity infrastructures. Most of the hydro sources are
rain fed, and as such there is normally a deficiency of water during
the dry seasons and extended droughts. In such calamities fossil fuels
sources, in particular petroleum products and natural gas, are
normally used to rescue the situation but apart from them being nonrenewable,
they also release huge amount of green house gases to our
environment which in turn accelerates the global warming that has at
present reached an amazing stage. Wind power is ample, renewable,
widely distributed, clean, and free energy source that does not
consume or pollute water. Wind generated electricity is one of the
most practical and commercially viable option for grid quality and
utility scale electricity production. However, the main shortcoming
associated with electric wind power generation is fluctuation in its
output both in space and time. Before making a decision to establish
a wind park at a site, the wind speed features there should therefore
be known thoroughly as well as local demand or transmission
capacity. The main objective of this paper is to utilise monthly
average wind speed data collected from one prospective site within
the African Great Lakes Region to demonstrate that the available
wind power there is high enough to generate electricity. The mean
monthly values were calculated from records gathered on hourly
basis for a period of 5 years (2001 to 2005) from a site in Tanzania.
The documentations that were collected at a height of 2 m were
projected to a height of 50 m which is the standard hub height of
wind turbines. The overall monthly average wind speed was found to
be 12.11 m/s whereas June to November was established to be the
windy season as the wind speed during the session is above the
overall monthly wind speed. The available wind power density
corresponding to the overall mean monthly wind speed was evaluated
to be 1072 W/m2, a potential that is worthwhile harvesting for the
purpose of electric generation.
Abstract: Diesel Engines emit complex mixtures of inorganic
and organic compounds in the form of both solid and vapour phase
particles. Most of the particulates released are ultrafine nanoparticles
which are detrimental to human health and can easily enter the body
by respiration. The emissions standards on particulate matter release
from diesel engines are constantly upgraded within the European
Union and with future regulations based on the particles numbers
released instead of merely mass, the need for effective aftertreatment
devices will increase. Standard particulate filters in the form of wall
flow filters can have problems with high soot accumulation,
producing a large exhaust backpressure. A potential solution would
be to combine the standard filter with a flow through filter to reduce
the load on the wall flow filter. In this paper soot particle trapping has
been simulated in different continuous flow filters of monolithic
structure including the use of promoters, at laminar flow conditions.
An Euler Lagrange model, the discrete phase model in Ansys used
with user defined functions for forces acting on particles. A method
to quickly screen trapping of 5 nm and 10 nm particles in different
catalysts designs with tracers was also developed.
Simulations of square duct monoliths with promoters show that the
strength of the vortices produced are not enough to give a high
amount of particle deposition on the catalyst walls. The smallest
particles in the simulations, 5 and 10 nm particles were trapped to a
higher extent, than larger particles up to 1000 nm, in all studied
geometries with the predominant deposition mechanism being
Brownian diffusion. The comparison of the different filters designed
with a wall flow filter does show that the options for altering a design
of a flow through filter, without imposing a too large pressure drop
penalty are good.