Abstract: Using finite element method (FEM), the elastic
new strain-concentration factor (SNCF) of cylindrical bars
with circumferential flat-bottom groove is studied. This new
SNCF has been defined under triaxial stress state. The
employed specimens have constant groove depth with net
section and gross diameters of 10.0 and 16.7 mm,
respectively. The length of flatness ao has been varied form
0.0 ~12.5 mm to study the elastic SNCF of this type of
geometrical irregularities. The results that the elastic new
SNCF rapidly drops from its elastic value of the groove with
ao = 0.0, i.e. circumferential U-notch, and reaches minimum
value at ao = 2 mm. After that the elastic new SNCF becomes
nearly constant with increasing flatness length (ao). The value
of tensile load at yielding at the groove root increases with
increasing ao. The current results show that severity of the
notch decreases with increasing flatness length ao.
Abstract: The realization of current-mode quadrature oscillators
using current controlled current conveyor transconductance
amplifiers (CCCCTAs) and grounded capacitors is presented. The
proposed oscillators can provide 2 sinusoidal output currents with 90º
phase difference. It is enabled non-interactive dual-current control for
both the condition of oscillation and the frequency of oscillation.
High output impedances of the configurations enable the circuit to be
cascaded without additional current buffers. The use of only
grounded capacitors is ideal for integration. The circuit performances
are depicted through PSpice simulations, they show good agreement
to theoretical anticipation.
Abstract: This paper discusses the use of explorative data
mining tools that allow the educator to explore new relationships
between reported learning experiences and actual activities,
even if there are multiple dimensions with a large number
of measured items. The underlying technology is based on
the so-called Compendium Platform for Reproducible Computing
(http://www.freestatistics.org) which was built on top the computational
R Framework (http://www.wessa.net).
Abstract: In this paper, the two-dimensional stagger grid
interface pressure (SGIP) model has been generalized and presented
into three-dimensional form. For this purpose, various models of
surface tension force for interfacial flows have been investigated and
compared with each other. The VOF method has been used for
tracking the interface. To show the ability of the SGIP model for
three-dimensional flows in comparison with other models, pressure
contours, maximum spurious velocities, norm spurious flow
velocities and pressure jump error for motionless drop of liquid and
bubble of gas are calculated using different models. It has been
pointed out that SGIP model in comparison with the CSF, CSS and
PCIL models produces the least maximum and norm spurious
velocities. Additionally, the new model produces more accurate
results in calculating the pressure jumps across the interface for
motionless drop of liquid and bubble of gas which is generated in
surface tension force.
Abstract: India is currently the second most populous nation in
the world with over 1.2 billion people, growing annually at the rate of
1.5%. It is experiencing a surge in energy demands, expected to grow
more than three to four times in 25 years. Most of the energy
requirements are currently satisfied by the import of fossil fuels –
coal, petroleum-based products and natural gas. Biofuels can satisfy
these energy needs in an environmentally benign and cost effective
manner while reducing dependence on import of fossil fuels, thus
providing National Energy Security. Among various forms of
bioenergy, bioethanol is one of the major options for India because of
availability of feed stock crops.
This paper presents an overview on bioethanol production and
technology, steps taken by the Indian government to facilitate and
bring about optimal development and utilization of indigenous
biomass feedstocks for production of this biofuel.
Abstract: Rapid process of urbanism development has increased
the demand for some infrastructures such as supplying potable water,
electricity network and transportation facilities and etc. Nonefficiency
of the existing system with parallel managements of urban
traffic management has increased the gap between supply and
demand of traffic facilities. A sustainable transport system requires
some activities more important than air pollution control, traffic or
fuel consumption reduction and the studies show that there is no
unique solution for solving complicated transportation problems and
solving such a problem needs a comprehensive, dynamic and reliable
mechanism. Sustainable transport management considers the effects
of transportation development on economic efficiency, environmental
issues, resources consumption, land use and social justice and helps
reduction of environmental effects, increase of transportation system
efficiency as well as improvement of social life and aims to enhance
efficiency, goods transportation, provide services with minimum
access problems that cannot be realized without reorganization of
strategies, policies and plans.
Abstract: Requirements are critical to system validation as they guide all subsequent stages of systems development. Inadequately specified requirements generate systems that require major revisions or cause system failure entirely. Use Cases have become the main vehicle for requirements capture in many current Object Oriented (OO) development methodologies, and a means for developers to communicate with different stakeholders. In this paper we present the results of a laboratory experiment that explored whether different types of use case format are equally effective in facilitating high knowledge user-s understanding. Results showed that the provision of diagrams along with the textual use case descriptions significantly improved user comprehension of system requirements in both familiar and unfamiliar application domains. However, when comparing groups that received models of textual description accompanied with diagrams of different level of details (simple and detailed) we found no significant difference in performance.
Abstract: Echocardiography imaging is one of the most common diagnostic tests that are widely used for assessing the abnormalities of the regional heart ventricle function. The main goal of the image enhancement task in 2D-echocardiography (2DE) is to solve two major anatomical structure problems; speckle noise and low quality. Therefore, speckle noise reduction is one of the important steps that used as a pre-processing to reduce the distortion effects in 2DE image segmentation. In this paper, we present the common filters that based on some form of low-pass spatial smoothing filters such as Mean, Gaussian, and Median. The Laplacian filter was used as a high-pass sharpening filter. A comparative analysis was presented to test the effectiveness of these filters after being applied to original 2DE images of 4-chamber and 2-chamber views. Three statistical quantity measures: root mean square error (RMSE), peak signal-to-ratio (PSNR) and signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) are used to evaluate the filter performance quantitatively on the output enhanced image.
Abstract: The National Agricultural Biotechnology Information
Center (NABIC) plays a leading role in the biotechnology information
database for agricultural plants in Korea. Since 2002, we have
concentrated on functional genomics of major crops, building an
integrated biotechnology database for agro-biotech information that
focuses on bioinformatics of major agricultural resources such as rice,
Chinese cabbage, and microorganisms. In the NABIC,
integration-based biotechnology database provides useful information
through a user-friendly web interface that allows analysis of genome
infrastructure, multiple plants, microbial resources, and living
modified organisms.
Abstract: Falling has been one of the major concerns and threats
to the independence of the elderly in their daily lives. With the
worldwide significant growth of the aging population, it is essential
to have a promising solution of fall detection which is able to operate
at high accuracy in real-time and supports large scale implementation
using multiple cameras. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a
highly promising tool to be used as a hardware accelerator in many
emerging embedded vision based system. Thus, it is the main
objective of this paper to present an FPGA-based solution of visual
based fall detection to meet stringent real-time requirements with
high accuracy. The hardware architecture of visual based fall
detection which utilizes the pixel locality to reduce memory accesses
is proposed. By exploiting the parallel and pipeline architecture of
FPGA, our hardware implementation of visual based fall detection
using FGPA is able to achieve a performance of 60fps for a series of
video analytical functions at VGA resolutions (640x480). The results
of this work show that FPGA has great potentials and impacts in
enabling large scale vision system in the future healthcare industry
due to its flexibility and scalability.
Abstract: A review of the literature found that Domestic
violence and child maltreatment co-occur in many families, the
purpose of this study attempts to emphasize the factors relating to
intra-family relationships (order point of view) on violence against
the children, For this purpose a survey technique on the sample size
amounted 200 students of governmental guidance schools of city of
Gilanegharb in country of Iran were considered. For measurement of
violence against the children (VAC) the CTS scaled has been used
.The results showed that children have experienced the violence more
than once during the last year. degree of order in family is high.
Explanation result indicated that the order variables in family
including collective thinking, empathy, communal co-circumstance
have significant effects on VAC.
Abstract: In this manuscript, a wavelet-based blind
watermarking scheme has been proposed as a means to provide
security to authenticity of a fingerprint. The information used for
identification or verification of a fingerprint mainly lies in its
minutiae. By robust watermarking of the minutiae in the fingerprint
image itself, the useful information can be extracted accurately even
if the fingerprint is severely degraded. The minutiae are converted in
a binary watermark and embedding these watermarks in the detail
regions increases the robustness of watermarking, at little to no
additional impact on image quality. It has been experimentally shown
that when the minutiae is embedded into wavelet detail coefficients
of a fingerprint image in spread spectrum fashion using a
pseudorandom sequence, the robustness is observed to have a
proportional response while perceptual invisibility has an inversely
proportional response to amplification factor “K". The DWT-based
technique has been found to be very robust against noises,
geometrical distortions filtering and JPEG compression attacks and is
also found to give remarkably better performance than DCT-based
technique in terms of correlation coefficient and number of erroneous
minutiae.
Abstract: Jordan exerts many efforts to nurture their academically gifted students in special schools since 2001. During
the past nine years of launching these schools, their learning and excellence environments were believed to be distinguished compared
to public schools. This study investigated the environments of gifted
students compared with other non-gifted, using a survey instrument
that measures the dimensions of family, peers, teachers, school- support, society, and resources –dimensions rooted deeply in supporting gifted education, learning, and achievement. A total
number of 109 were selected from excellence schools for
academically gifted students, and 119 non-gifted students were selected from public schools. Around 8.3% of the non-gifted students
reported that they “Never" received any support from their surrounding environments, 14.9% reported “Seldom" support, 23.7% reported “ Often" support, 26.0% reported “Frequent" support, and
32.8% reported “Very frequent" support. Where the gifted students reported more “Never" support than the non-gifted did with 11.3%,
“Seldom" support with 15.4%, “Often" support with 26.6%,
“Frequent" support with 29.0%, and reported “Very frequent" support less than the non-gifted students with 23.6%. Unexpectedly,
statistical differences were found between the two groups favoring
non-gifted students in perception of their surrounding environments
in specific dimensions, namely, school- support, teachers, and society. No statistical differences were found in the other dimensions
of the survey, namely, family, peers, and resources. As the
differences were found in teachers, school- support, and society, the
nurturing environments for the excellence schools need to be revised to adopt more creative teaching styles, rich school atmosphere and
infrastructures, interactive guiding for the students and their parents, promoting for the excellence environments, and re-build successful
identification models. Thus, families, schools, and society should
increase their cooperation, communication, and awareness of the
gifted supportive environments. However, more studies to investigate
other aspects of promoting academic giftedness and excellence are recommended.
Abstract: An immunomodulator bioproduct is prepared in a
batch bioprocess with a modified bacterium Pseudomonas
aeruginosa. The bioprocess is performed in 100 L Bioengineering
bioreactor with 42 L cultivation medium made of peptone, meat
extract and sodium chloride. The optimal bioprocess parameters were
determined: temperature – 37 0C, agitation speed - 300 rpm, aeration
rate – 40 L/min, pressure – 0.5 bar, Dow Corning Antifoam M-max.
4 % of the medium volume, duration - 6 hours. This kind of
bioprocesses are appreciated as difficult to control because their
dynamic behavior is highly nonlinear and time varying. The aim of
the paper is to present (by comparison) different models based on
experimental data.
The analysis criteria were modeling error and convergence rate.
The estimated values and the modeling analysis were done by using
the Table Curve 2D.
The preliminary conclusions indicate Andrews-s model with a
maximum specific growth rate of the bacterium in the range of
0.8 h-1.
Abstract: Housing is a basic human right. The provision of new
house shall be free from any defects, even for the defects that people
do normally considered as 'cosmetic defects'. This paper studies
about the building defects of newly completed house of 72 unit of
double-storey terraced located in Bangi, Selangor. The building
survey implemented using protocol 1 (visual inspection). As for new
house, the survey work is very stringent in determining the defects
condition and priority. Survey and reporting procedure is carried out
based on CSP1 Matrix that involved scoring system, photographs and
plan tagging. The analysis is done using Statistical Package for Social
Sciences (SPSS). The finding reveals that there are 2119 defects
recorded in 72 terraced houses. The cumulative score obtained was
27644 while the overall rating is 13.05. These results indicate that the
construction quality of the newly terraced houses is low and not up to
an acceptable standard as the new house should be.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a modified version of the
Constant Modulus Algorithm (CMA) tailored for blind Decision
Feedback Equalizer (DFE) of first order Markovian time varying
channels. The proposed NonStationary CMA (NSCMA) is designed
so that it explicitly takes into account the Markovian structure of
the channel nonstationarity. Hence, unlike the classical CMA, the
NSCMA is not blind with respect to the channel time variations.
This greatly helps the equalizer in the case of realistic channels, and
avoids frequent transmissions of training sequences.
This paper develops a theoretical analysis of the steady state
performance of the CMA and the NSCMA for DFEs within a time
varying context. Therefore, approximate expressions of the mean
square errors are derived. We prove that in the steady state, the
NSCMA exhibits better performance than the classical CMA. These
new results are confirmed by simulation.
Through an experimental study, we demonstrate that the Bit Error
Rate (BER) is reduced by the NSCMA-DFE, and the improvement
of the BER achieved by the NSCMA-DFE is as significant as the
channel time variations are severe.
Abstract: There is a real threat on the VIPs personal pages on
the Social Network Sites (SNS). The real threats to these pages is
violation of privacy and theft of identity through creating fake pages
that exploit their names and pictures to attract the victims and spread
of lies. In this paper, we propose a new secure architecture that
improves the trusting and finds an effective solution to reduce fake
pages and possibility of recognizing VIP pages on SNS. The
proposed architecture works as a third party that is added to
Facebook to provide the trust service to personal pages for VIPs.
Through this mechanism, it works to ensure the real identity of the
applicant through the electronic authentication of personal
information by storing this information within content of their
website. As a result, the significance of the proposed architecture is
that it secures and provides trust to the VIPs personal pages.
Furthermore, it can help to discover fake page, protect the privacy,
reduce crimes of personality-theft, and increase the sense of trust and
satisfaction by friends and admirers in interacting with SNS.
Abstract: An Optimal Power Flow based on Improved Particle
Swarm Optimization (OPF-IPSO) with Generator Capability Curve
Constraint is used by NN-OPF as a reference to get pattern of
generator scheduling. There are three stages in Designing NN-OPF.
The first stage is design of OPF-IPSO with generator capability curve
constraint. The second stage is clustering load to specific range and
calculating its index. The third stage is training NN-OPF using
constructive back propagation method. In training process total load
and load index used as input, and pattern of generator scheduling
used as output. Data used in this paper is power system of Java-Bali.
Software used in this simulation is MATLAB.
Abstract: Latvia is the fourth in the world by means of broadband internet speed. The total number of internet users in Latvia exceeds 70% of its population. The number of active mailboxes of the local internet e-mail service Inbox.lv accounts for 68% of the population and 97.6% of the total number of internet users. The Latvian portal Draugiem.lv is a phenomenon of social media, because 58.4 % of the population and 83.5% of internet users use it. A majority of Latvian company profiles are available on social networks, the most popular being Twitter.com. These and other parameters prove the fact consumers and companies are actively using the Internet.
However, after the authors in a number of studies analyzed how enterprises are employing the e-environment, namely, e-environment tools, they arrived to the conclusions that are not as flattering as the aforementioned statistics. There is an obvious contradiction between the statistical data and the actual studies. As a result, the authors have posed a question: Why are entrepreneurs resistant to e-tools? In order to answer this question, the authors have addressed the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The authors analyzed each phase and determined several factors affecting the use of e-environment, reaching the main conclusion that entrepreneurs do not have a sufficient level of e-literacy (digital literacy).
The authors employ well-established quantitative and qualitative methods of research: grouping, analysis, statistic method, factor analysis in SPSS 20 environment etc.
The theoretical and methodological background of the research is formed by, scientific researches and publications, that from the mass media and professional literature, statistical information from legal institutions as well as information collected by the author during the survey.
Abstract: The paper deals with the analysis of triggering
conditions and evolution processes of piping phenomena, in relation
to both mechanical and hydraulic aspects. In particular, the aim of
the study is to predict slope instabilities triggered by piping,
analysing the conditions necessary for a flow failure to occur. Really,
the mechanical effect involved in the loads redistribution around the
pipe is coupled to the drainage process arising from higher
permeability of the pipe. If after the pipe formation, the drainage
goes prevented for pipe clogging, the porewater pressure increase can
lead to the failure or even the liquefaction, with a subsequent flow
slide. To simulate the piping evolution and to verify relevant stability
conditions, a iterative coupled modelling approach has been pointed
out. As example, the proposed tool has been applied to the Stava
Valley disaster (July, 1985), demonstrating that piping might be one
of triggering phenomena of the tailings dams collapse.