Abstract: Access control is a critical security service in Wire- less
Sensor Networks (WSNs). To prevent malicious nodes from joining
the sensor network, access control is required. On one hand, WSN
must be able to authorize and grant users the right to access to the
network. On the other hand, WSN must organize data collected by
sensors in such a way that an unauthorized entity (the adversary)
cannot make arbitrary queries. This restricts the network access only
to eligible users and sensor nodes, while queries from outsiders will
not be answered or forwarded by nodes. In this paper we presentee
different access control schemes so as to ?nd out their objectives,
provision, communication complexity, limits, etc. Using the node
density parameter, we also provide a comparison of these proposed
access control algorithms based on the network topology which can
be flat or hierarchical.
Abstract: Problem Statement:Rapid technological developments of the 21st century have advanced our daily lives in various ways. Particularly in education, students frequently utilize technological resources to aid their homework and to access information. listen to radio or watch television (26.9 %) and e-mails (34.2 %) [26]. Not surprisingly, the increase in the use of technologies also resulted in an increase in the use of e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, mobile phones, mobile phone cameras and web sites by adolescents to bully peers. As cyber bullying occurs in the cyber space, lesser access to technologies would mean lesser cyber-harm. Therefore, the frequency of technology use is a significant predictor of cyber bullying and cyber victims. Cyber bullies try to harm the victim using various media. These tools include sending derogatory texts via mobile phones, sending threatening e-mails and forwarding confidential emails to everyone on the contacts list. Another way of cyber bullying is to set up a humiliating website and invite others to post comments. In other words, cyber bullies use e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, pagers, mobile texts and online voting tools to humiliate and frighten others and to create a sense of helplessness. No matter what type of bullying it is, it negatively affects its victims. Children who bully exhibit more emotional inhibition and attribute themselves more negative self-statements compared to non-bullies. Students whose families are not sympathetic and who receive lower emotional support are more prone to bully their peers. Bullies have authoritarian families and do not get along well with them. The family is the place where the children-s physical, social and psychological needs are satisfied and where their personalities develop. As the use of the internet became prevalent so did parents- restrictions on their children-s internet use. However, parents are unaware of the real harm. Studies that explain the relationship between parental attitudes and cyber bullying are scarce in literature. Thus, this study aims to investigate the relationship between cyber bullying and parental attitudes in the primary school. Purpose of Study: This study aimed to investigate the relationship between cyber bullying and parental attitudes. A second aim was to determine whether parental attitudes could predict cyber bullying and if so which variables could predict it significantly. Methods:The study had a cross-sectional and relational survey model. A demographics information form, questions about cyber bullying and a Parental Attitudes Inventory were conducted with a total of 346 students (189 females and 157 males) registered at various primary schools. Data was analysed by multiple regression analysis using the software package SPSS 16.
Abstract: Forming a legal culture among citizens is a
complicated and lengthy process, influencing all spheres of social
life. It includes promoting justice, learning rights and duties, the
introduction of juridical norms and knowledge, and also a process of
developing a system of legal acts and constitutional norms. Currently,
the evaluative and emotional influence of attempts to establish a legal
culture among the citizens of Kazakhstan is limited by real legal
practice. As a result, the values essential to a sound civil society are
absent from the consciousness of the Kazakh people who are thus, in
turn, not able to develop respect for these values. One of the
disadvantages of the modern Kazakh educational system is a
tendency to underrate the actual forces shaping the worldview of
Kazakh youths. The mass-media, which are going through a
personnel crisis, cannot provide society with the legal and political
information necessary to form the sort of legal culture required for a
true civil society.
Abstract: The Bayesian Optimization Algorithm (BOA) is an algorithm based on the estimation of distributions. It uses techniques from modeling data by Bayesian networks to estimating the joint distribution of promising solutions. To obtain the structure of Bayesian network, different search algorithms can be used. The key point that BOA addresses is whether the constructed Bayesian network could generate new and useful solutions (strings), which could lead the algorithm in the right direction to solve the problem. Undoubtedly, this ability is a crucial factor of the efficiency of BOA. Varied search algorithms can be used in BOA, but their performances are different. For choosing better ones, certain suitable method to present their ability difference is needed. In this paper, a greedy search algorithm and a stochastic search algorithm are used in BOA to solve certain optimization problem. A method using Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence to reflect their difference is described.
Abstract: In order to protect original data, watermarking is first consideration direction for digital information copyright. In addition, to achieve high quality image, the algorithm maybe can not run on embedded system because the computation is very complexity. However, almost nowadays algorithms need to build on consumer production because integrator circuit has a huge progress and cheap price. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm which efficient inserts watermarking on digital image and very easy to implement on digital signal processor. In further, we select a general and cheap digital signal processor which is made by analog device company to fit consumer application. The experimental results show that the image quality by watermarking insertion can achieve 46 dB can be accepted in human vision and can real-time execute on digital signal processor.
Abstract: Educating effective architect designers is an important
goal of architectural education. But what contributes to students-
performance, and to critical and creative thinking in architectural
design education? Besides teaching architecture students how to
understand logical arguments, eliminate the inadequate solutions and
focus on the correct ones, it is also crucial to teach students how to
focus on exploring ideas and the alternative solutions and seeking for
other right answers rather than one. This paper focuses on the
enhancing architectural design education and may provide
implications for enhancing teaching design.
Abstract: Eye localization is necessary for face recognition and
related application areas. Most of eye localization algorithms reported
so far still need to be improved about precision and computational
time for successful applications. In this paper, we propose an eye
location method based on multi-scale Gabor feature vectors, which is
more robust with respect to initial points. The eye localization based
on Gabor feature vectors first needs to constructs an Eye Model Bunch
for each eye (left or right eye) which consists of n Gabor jets and
average eye coordinates of each eyes obtained from n model face
images, and then tries to localize eyes in an incoming face image by
utilizing the fact that the true eye coordinates is most likely to be very
close to the position where the Gabor jet will have the best Gabor jet
similarity matching with a Gabor jet in the Eye Model Bunch. Similar
ideas have been already proposed in such as EBGM (Elastic Bunch
Graph Matching). However, the method used in EBGM is known to be
not robust with respect to initial values and may need extensive search
range for achieving the required performance, but extensive search
ranges will cause much more computational burden. In this paper, we
propose a multi-scale approach with a little increased computational
burden where one first tries to localize eyes based on Gabor feature
vectors in a coarse face image obtained from down sampling of the
original face image, and then localize eyes based on Gabor feature
vectors in the original resolution face image by using the eye
coordinates localized in the coarse scaled image as initial points.
Several experiments and comparisons with other eye localization
methods reported in the other papers show the efficiency of our
proposed method.
Abstract: In this paper, a new reversible watermarking method is presented that reduces the size of a stereoscopic image sequence while keeping its content visible. The proposed technique embeds the residuals of the right frames to the corresponding frames of the left sequence, halving the total capacity. The residual frames may result in after a disparity compensated procedure between the two video streams or by a joint motion and disparity compensation. The residuals are usually lossy compressed before embedding because of the limited embedding capacity of the left frames. The watermarked frames are visible at a high quality and at any instant the stereoscopic video may be recovered by an inverse process. In fact, the left frames may be exactly recovered whereas the right ones are slightly distorted as the residuals are not embedded intact. The employed embedding method reorders the left frame into an array of consecutive pixel pairs and embeds a number of bits according to their intensity difference. In this way, it hides a number of bits in intensity smooth areas and most of the data in textured areas where resulting distortions are less visible. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is quite effective.
Abstract: A preconditioned Jacobi (PJ) method is provided for solving fuzzy linear systems whose coefficient matrices are crisp Mmatrices and the right-hand side columns are arbitrary fuzzy number vectors. The iterative algorithm is given for the preconditioned Jacobi method. The convergence is analyzed with convergence theorems. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the procedure and show the effectiveness and efficiency of the method.
Abstract: In this paper, we argue that Design research is basic to countries- national productivity and competition agendas at the same time that vagaries of research training presents as one of the barriers faced by Design Higher Degree by Research students in engaging those agendas. We argue that, given industry requirements for research-trained recruits, students have the right to expect that research training will provide the foundations of a successful career on an academic or research pathway or a professional pathway, but that universities have yet to address problems in their provision of research training for Design doctoral students. We suggest that to facilitate this, rigorous research conducted on the provision of Doctoral programs in Design would serve to inform future activities in Design research in productive ways.
Abstract: In policy discourse of 1990s, more inclusive spaces
have been constructed for realizing full and meaningful participation
of common people in education. These participatory spaces provide
an alternative possibility for universalizing elementary education
against the backdrop of a history of entrenched forms of social and
economical exclusion; inequitable education provisions; and
shrinking role of the state in today-s neo-liberal times. Drawing on
case-studies of bottom-up approaches to school governance, the study
examines an array of innovative ways through which poor people
gained a sense of identity and agency by evolving indigenous
solutions to issues regarding schooling of their children. In the
process, state-s institutions and practices became more accountable
and responsive to educational concerns of the marginalized people.
The deliberative participation emerged as an active way of
experiencing deeper forms of empowerment and democracy than its
passive realization as mere bearers of citizen rights.
Abstract: ICA which is generally used for blind source separation
problem has been tested for feature extraction in Speech recognition
system to replace the phoneme based approach of MFCC. Applying
the Cepstral coefficients generated to ICA as preprocessing has
developed a new signal processing approach. This gives much better
results against MFCC and ICA separately, both for word and speaker
recognition. The mixing matrix A is different before and after MFCC
as expected. As Mel is a nonlinear scale. However, cepstrals
generated from Linear Predictive Coefficient being independent
prove to be the right candidate for ICA. Matlab is the tool used for
all comparisons. The database used is samples of ISOLET.
Abstract: Technology changes have been acknowledged as a
critical factor in determining competitiveness of organization. Under
such environment, the right anticipation of technology change has
been of huge importance in strategic planning. To monitor technology
change, technology forecasting (TF) is frequently utilized. In
academic perspective, TF has received great attention for a long time.
However, few researches have been conducted to provide overview of
the TF literature. Even though some studies deals with review of TF
research, they generally focused on type and characteristics of various
TF, so hardly provides information about patterns of TF research and
which TF method is used in certain technology industry. Accordingly,
this study profile developments in and patterns of scholarly research in
TF over time. Also, this study investigates which technology
industries have used certain TF method and identifies their
relationships. This study will help in understanding TF research trend
and their application area.
Abstract: In this paper we introduce three watermarking methods that can be used to count the number of times that a user has played some content. The proposed methods are tested with audio content in our experimental system using the most common signal processing attacks. The test results show that the watermarking methods used enable the watermark to be extracted under the most common attacks with a low bit error rate.
Abstract: Discrimination in employment has its wider social and
economic consequences other than mere violating a basic human
right. Discrimination involves treating people differently because of
certain grounds such as race, color, or sex, which results in the
impairment of equality of opportunity and treatment. As an essential
part of promoting decent work, combating discrimination through the
principle of non-discrimination has been established by the
International Labor Organization (ILO) through the Declaration on
Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work 1998. Considering
elimination of discrimination in employment as a core labor standard,
member states are expected to respect, promote and implement it to
their national laws and policies. Being a member state, Malaysia has
to position herself align with this international requirement. The
author discusses the related convention together with Malaysia-s
responses on the matter. At the closing stage, the prospect of
Malaysia is presumed taking into account of the current positions and
reports submitted to the ILO.
Abstract: In this paper, we derive some algebraic identities on
right and left neighbors R(F) and L(F) of an indefinite binary
quadratic form F = F(x, y) = ax2 + bxy + cy2 of discriminant
Δ = b2 -4ac. We prove that the proper cycle of F can be given by
using its consecutive left neighbors. Also we construct a connection
between right and left neighbors of F.
Abstract: This paper proposes a copyright protection scheme for color images using secret sharing and wavelet transform. The scheme contains two phases: the share image generation phase and the watermark retrieval phase. In the generation phase, the proposed scheme first converts the image into the YCbCr color space and creates a special sampling plane from the color space. Next, the scheme extracts the features from the sampling plane using the discrete wavelet transform. Then, the scheme employs the features and the watermark to generate a principal share image. In the retrieval phase, an expanded watermark is first reconstructed using the features of the suspect image and the principal share image. Next, the scheme reduces the additional noise to obtain the recovered watermark, which is then verified against the original watermark to examine the copyright. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can resist several attacks such as JPEG compression, blurring, sharpening, noise addition, and cropping. The accuracy rates are all higher than 97%.
Abstract: There are various approaches to implement quality
improvements. Organizations aim for a management standard which
is capable of providing customers with quality assurance on their
product/service via continuous process improvement. Carefully
planned steps are necessary to ensure the right quality improvement
methodology (QIM) and business operations are consistent, reliable
and truly meet the customers' needs. This paper traces the evolution
of QIM in Malaysia-s Information Technology (IT) industry in the
past, current and future; and highlights some of the thought of
researchers who contributed to the science and practice of quality,
and identifies leading methodologies in use today. Some of the
misconceptions and mistakes leading to quality system failures will
also be examined and discussed. This paper aims to provide a general
overview of different types of QIMs available for IT businesses in
maximizing business advantages, enhancing product quality,
improving process routines and increasing performance earnings.
Abstract: In this paper, a robust digital image watermarking
scheme for copyright protection applications using the singular value
decomposition (SVD) is proposed. In this scheme, an entropy
masking model has been applied on the host image for the texture
segmentation. Moreover, the local luminance and textures of the host
image are considered for watermark embedding procedure to
increase the robustness of the watermarking scheme. In contrast to all
existing SVD-based watermarking systems that have been designed
to embed visual watermarks, our system uses a pseudo-random
sequence as a watermark. We have tested the performance of our
method using a wide variety of image processing attacks on different
test images. A comparison is made between the results of our
proposed algorithm with those of a wavelet-based method to
demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm.
Abstract: Both software applications and their development environment are becoming more and more distributed. This trend impacts not only the way software computes, but also how it looks. This article proposes a Human Computer Interface (HCI) template from three representative applications we have developed. These applications include a Multi-Agent System based software, a 3D Internet computer game with distributed game world logic, and a programming language environment used in constructing distributed neural network and its visualizations. HCI concepts that are common to these applications are described in abstract terms in the template. These include off-line presentation of global entities, entities inside a hierarchical namespace, communication and languages, reconfiguration of entity references in a graph, impersonation and access right, etc. We believe the metaphor that underlies an HCI concept as well as the relationships between a bunch of HCI concepts are crucial to the design of software systems and vice versa.