Abstract: This paper aims to study the role and activities of the participants and the impact of activities created in the local area in order to sustainably develop the local areas. This study applied both qualitative and quantitative approaches presented in descriptive style; the data was collected via survey, observation and in-depth interviews with samples. The results illustrated five sorts of roles of participants of the Cicada Walking-street and four types of creative activities; recreation based, art based, cultural based, and live events. Integration of local characteristics, arts and cultures were presented creatively and interestingly. Participants are various. The roles of the participants found in the Cicada Market are group of the property and area management, entrepreneurs, leisure (entertaining persons), local people, and tourists. The good impacts on local communities are those in terms of economy, environmental friendly and local arts and cultures promoting. On the other hand, the traffic congestion, waste and the increasing of energy consumption are negative impacts from area development.
Abstract: This research paper is aimed to examine a relationship between the service marketing mix and customers’ frequency of use of service at Mercedes Benz Auto Repair Centres under Thonburi Group, Thailand. Based on 2,267 customers who used the service of Thonburi Group’s Auto Repair Centres as the population, the sampling of this research was a total of 340 samples, by use of Probability Sampling Technique. Systematic Random Sampling was applied by use of questionnaire in collecting the data at Thonburi Group’s Auto Repair Centres. Mean and Pearson’s basic statistical correlations were utilized in analyzing the data. The study discovered a medium level of customers’ perception towards product and service of Thonburi Group’s Auto Repair Centres, price, place or distribution channel and promotion. People who provided service were perceived also at a medium level, whereas the physical evidence and service process were perceived at a high level. Furthermore, there appeared a correlation between the physical evidence and service process, and customers’ frequency of use of automobile service per year.
Abstract: The objectives of this research paper was to study the influencing factors that contributed the willingness of consumers to purchase products online included quality of website, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, trust on online purchases, attitude towards online shopping and intentions to online purchases. The research was conducted in both quantitative and qualitative methods, by utilizing both questionnaire and in-depth interview. A questionnaire was used to collect data from 350 consumers who had online shopping experiences in Bangkok, Thailand. Statistics utilized in this research included descriptive statistics and path analysis.
The findings revealed that the factors concerning with quality of website, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness played an influence on trust in online shopping. Trust also played an influence on attitude towards online purchase, whereas trust and attitude towards online purchase manipulated the intention of online purchase.
Abstract: Using the technology acceptance model (TAM), this
study examined the external variables of technological complexity
(TC) to acquire a better understanding of the factors that influence the
acceptance of computer application courses by learners at Active
Aging Universities. After the learners in this study had completed a
27-hour Facebook course, 44 learners responded to a modified TAM
survey. Data were collected to examine the path relationships among
the variables that influence the acceptance of Facebook-mediated
community learning. The partial least squares (PLS) method was used
to test the measurement and the structural model. The study results
demonstrated that attitudes toward Facebook use directly influence
behavioral intentions (BI) with respect to Facebook use, evincing a
high prediction rate of 58.3%. In addition to the perceived usefulness
(PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) measures that are proposed in
the TAM, other external variables, such as TC, also indirectly
influence BI. These four variables can explain 88% of the variance in
BI and demonstrate a high level of predictive ability. Finally,
limitations of this investigation and implications for further research
are discussed.
Abstract: This paper proposes a new method to find the equations
of transformation matrix for the rotation angles of the two rotational
axes and the coordinates of the three linear axes of an orthogonal
multi-axis milling machine. This approach provides intuitive physical
meanings for rotation angles of multi-axis machines, which can be
used to evaluate the accuracy of the conversion from CL data to NC
data.
Abstract: The work delineates the threats of maladjustment of the capacity of rain canals, designed and built in the early 20th century, in connection to heavy rainfall, especially in summer. This is the cause of the so called 'urban floods.' It directly relates to fierce raise of paving in the cities. Resolving this problem requires a change in philosophy of draining the rainfall by wider use of retention, infiltration and usage of rainwater.
In systemic approach to managing the safety of urban drainage systems the risk, which is directly connected to safety failures, has been accepted as a measure. The risk level defines the probability of occurrence of losses greater than the ones forecast for a given time frame. The procedure of risk modelling, enabling its numeric analysis by using appropriate weights, is a significant issue in this paper.
Abstract: This research intended to develop the model of community management for sustainable utilization by investigating on 2 groups of population, the family heads and the community management team. The population of the former group consisted of family heads from 511 families in 12 areas to complete the questionnaires which were returned at 479 sets. The latter group consisted of the community management team of 12 areas with 1 representative from each area to give the interview. The questionnaires for the family heads consisted of 2 main parts; general information such as occupations, etc. in the form of checklist. The second part dealt with the data on self reliance community development based on 4P Framework, i.e., People (human resource) development, Place (area) development, Product (economic and income source) development, and Plan (community plan) development in the form of rating scales. Data in the 1st part were calculated to find frequency and percentage while those in the 2nd part were analyzed to find arithmetic mean and SD. Data from the 2nd group of population or the community management team were derived from focus group to find factors influencing successful management together with the in depth interview which were analyzed by descriptive statistics. The results showed that 479 family heads reported that the aspect on the implementation of community plan to self reliance community activities based on Sufficient Economy Philosophy and the 4P was at the average of 3.28 or moderate level. When considering in details, it was found that the 1st aspect was on the area development with the mean of 3.71 or high level followed by human resource development with the mean of 3.44 or moderate level, then, economic and source of income development with the mean of 3.09 or moderate level. The last aspect was community plan development with the mean of 2.89. The results from the small group discussion revealed some factors and guidelines for successful community management as follows: 1) on the People (human resource) development aspect, there was a project to support and develop community leaders. 2) On the aspect of Place (area) development, there was a development on conservative tourism areas. 3) On the aspect of Product (economic and source of income) development, the community leaders promoted the setting of occupational group, saving group, and product processing group. 4) On the aspect of Plan (community plan) development, there was a prioritization through public hearing.
Abstract: Historically, actuators’ redundancy was used to deal
with faults occurring suddenly in flight systems. This technique was
generally expensive, time consuming and involves increased weight
and space in the system. Therefore, nowadays, the on-line fault
diagnosis of actuators and accommodation plays a major role in the
design of avionic systems. These approaches, known as Fault
Tolerant Flight Control systems (FTFCs) are able to adapt to such
sudden faults while keeping avionics systems lighter and less
expensive. In this paper, a (FTFC) system based on the Geometric
Approach and a Reconfigurable Flight Control (RFC) are presented.
The Geometric approach is used for cosmic ray fault reconstruction,
while Sliding Mode Control (SMC) based on Lyapunov stability
theory is designed for the reconfiguration of the controller in order to
compensate the fault effect. Matlab®/Simulink® simulations are
performed to illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the
proposed flight control system against actuators’ faulty signal caused
by cosmic rays. The results demonstrate the successful real-time
implementation of the proposed FTFC system on a non-linear 6 DOF
aircraft model.
Abstract: Wetlands are one of the most important ecosystems on
Earth. Nevertheless, various challenges threaten these ecosystems
and disrupt their ecological character. Among these, the effects of
human-based threats are more devastating. Following mass
degradation of wetlands during 1970s, the Ramsar Convention on
Wetlands (Ramsar, Iran, 1971) was concluded to conserve wetlands
of international importance and prevent destruction and degradation
of such ecosystems through wise use of wetlands as a mean to
achieve sustainable development in all over the world. Therefore, in
this paper, efforts have been made to analyze threats to wetlands and
then investigate solutions in the framework of the Ramsar
Convention. Finally, in order to operate these mechanisms, this study
concludes that all states should in turn make their best effort to
improve and restore global wetlands through preservation of
environmental standards and close contribution and also through
taking joint measures with other states effectively.
Abstract: In this paper, Backstepping method is proposed to synchronize two fractional-order systems. The simulation results show that this method can effectively synchronize two chaotic systems.
Abstract: This paper presents the gain improvement of a sector antenna for mobile phone base station by using the new technique to enhance its gain for microstrip antenna (MSA) array without construction enlargement. The curved woodpile Electromagnetic Band Gap (EBG) has been utilized to improve the gain instead. The advantages of this proposed antenna are reducing the length of MSAs array but providing the higher gain and easy fabrication and installation. Moreover, it provides a fan-shaped radiation pattern, wide in the horizontal direction and relatively narrow in the vertical direction, which appropriate for mobile phone base station. The paper also presents the design procedures of a 1x8 MSAs array associated with U-shaped reflector for decreasing their back and side lobes. The fabricated curved woodpile EBG exhibits bandgap characteristics at 2.1 GHz and is utilized for realizing a resonant cavity of MSAs array. This idea has been verified by both the Computer Simulation Technology (CST) software and experimental results. As the results, the fabricated proposed antenna achieves a high gain of 20.3 dB and the half-power beam widths in the E- and H-plane of 36.8 and 8.7 degrees, respectively. Good qualitative agreement between measured and simulated results of the proposed antenna was obtained.
Abstract: This paper proposes the development and design of
double layer metamaterials based on electromagnetic band gap
(EBG) rods as a superstrate of a resonator antenna to enhance
required antenna characteristics for the mobile base station. The
metallic rod type metamaterial can partially reflect wave of a primary
radiator. The antenna was designed and analyzed by a simulation
result from CST Microwave Studio and designed technique could be
confirmed by a measurement results from prototype antenna that
agree with simulation results. The results indicate that the antenna
can also generate a dual polarization by using a 45˚ oriented curved
strip dipole located at the center of the reflector plane with double
layer superstrate. It can be used to simplify the feed system of an
antenna. The proposed antenna has a bandwidth covering the
frequency range of 1920 – 2200 MHz, the gain of the antenna
increases up to 14.06 dBi. In addition, an interesting sectoral 60˚
pattern is presented in horizontal plane.
Abstract: The paper presents actual benefits and drawbacks of a multidirectional autonomous hovercraft conceived with limited resources and designed for indoor exploration. Recent developments in the field have led to the apparition of very powerful automotive systems capable of very high calculation and exploration in complex unknown environments. They usually propose very complex algorithms, high precision/cost sensors and sometimes have heavy calculation consumption with complex data fusion. These systems are usually powerful but have a certain price, and the benefits may not be worth the cost, especially considering their hardware limitations and their power consumption. The present approach is to build a compromise between cost, power consumption and results preciseness.
Abstract: By running transactions under the SNAPSHOT isolation
we can achieve a good level of concurrency, specially in databases
with high-intensive read workloads. However, SNAPSHOT is not
immune to all the problems that arise from competing transactions
and therefore no serialization warranty exists. We propose in this
paper a technique to obtain data consistency with SNAPSHOT by using
some special triggers that we named DAEMON TRIGGERS. Besides
keeping the benefits of the SNAPSHOT isolation, the technique is
specially useful for those database systems that do not have an
isolation level that ensures serializability, like Firebird and Oracle. We
describe all the anomalies that might arise when using the SNAPSHOT
isolation and show how to preclude them with DAEMON TRIGGERS.
Based on the methodology presented here, it is also proposed the
creation of a new isolation level: DAEMON SNAPSHOT.
Abstract: This paper presents the design and implementation of a sliding-mod controller for tracking servo of optical disk drives. The tracking servo is majorly subject to two disturbance sources: radial run-out and shock. The lateral run-out disturbance is mostly repeatable, and a model of such disturbance is incorporated into the controller design to effectively compensate for it. Meanwhile, as a shock disturbance is usually non-repeatable and unpredictable, the sliding-mode controller is employed for its robustness to abrupt perturbations. As a result, a sliding-mode controller design based on the internal model principle is tailored for tracking servo of optical disk drives in order to deal with these two major disturbances. Experimental comparative studies are conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the specially designed controller.
Abstract: We have developed a polyimide based neural interface electrode to record nerve signals from the sciatic nerve of a rat. The neural interface electrode has a split-ring shape, with four protruding gold electrodes for recording, and two reference gold electrodes around the split-ring. The split-ring electrode can be opened up to encircle the sciatic nerve. The four electrodes can be bent to sit on top of the nerve and hold the device in position, while the split-ring frame remains flat. In comparison, while traditional cuff electrodes can only fit certain sizes of the nerve, the developed device can fit a variety of rat sciatic nerve dimensions from 0.6 mm to 1.0 mm, and adapt to the chronic changes in the nerve as the electrode tips are bendable. The electrochemical impedance spectroscopy measurement was conducted. The gold electrode impedance is on the order of 10 kΩ, showing excellent charge injection capacity to record neural signals.
Abstract: Unwanted side effects because of spectral aliasing and spectral imaging during signal processing would be the major concern over the sampling rate alteration. Multirate-multistage implementation of digital filter could come about a large computational saving than single rate filter suitable for sample rate conversion. This implementation can further improve through high-level architectural transformation in circuit level. Reallocating registers and relocating flip-flops across logic gates through retiming certainly a prominent sequential transformation technology, that optimize hardware circuits to achieve faster clocking speed without affecting the functionality. In this paper, we proposed an efficient compensated cascade Integrator comb (CIC) decimation filter structure that analyze the consequence of filter order variation which has a retimed FIR filter being compensator while using the cutset retiming technique and achieved an improvement in the passband droop by 14% to 39%, in computation time by 38.04%, 25.78%, 12.21%, 6.69% and 4.44% and reduction in path delay by 62.27%, 72%, 86.63%, 91.56% and 94.42% of 3, 6, 8, 12 and 24 order filter respectively than the non-retimed CIC compensation filter.
Abstract: An analysis of word semantics focusing on the invariance of advanced imagery in several pressing problems. Interest in the language of imagery is caused by the introduction, in the linguistics sphere, of a new paradigm, the center of which is the personality of the speaker (the subject of the language). Particularly noteworthy is the question of the place of the image when discussing the lexical, phraseological values and the relationship of imagery and metaphors. In part, the formation of a metaphor, as an interaction between two intellective entities, occurs at a cognitive level, and it is the category of the image, having cognitive roots, which aides in the correct interpretation of the results of this process on the lexical-semantic level.
Abstract: Soybean Natto powder was added to the burger in order to enhance the oxidative stability as well as decreases the microbial spoilage. The soybean bioactives compound (soybean Natto) as antioxidant and antimicrobial were added at level of 1, 2 and 3%. Chemical analysis and physical properties were affected by soybean Natto addition. All the tested soybean Natto additives showed strong antioxidant properties. The microbiological indicators were significantly (P < 0.05) affected by the addition of the soybean Natto. Decreasing trends of different extent were also observed in samples of the treatments for total viable counts, Coliform, Staphylococcus aureus, yeast and molds. Storage period was significantly (P < 0.05) affected on microbial counts in all samples Staphylococcus aureus were the most sensitive microbe followed by Coliform group of the sample containing soybean Natto. Sensory attributes were also performed, added soybean Natto exhibits beany flavor which was clear about samples of 3% soybean Natto.
Abstract: Technical analysis comprised by various technical indicators is a holistic way of representing price movement of stocks in the market. Various forms of indicators have evolved from the primitive ones in the past decades. There have been many attempts to introduce volume as a major determinant to determine strong patterns in market forecasting. The law of demand defines the relationship between the volume and price. Most of the traders are familiar with the volume game. Including the time dimension to the law of demand provides a different visualization to the theory. While attempting the same, it was found that there are different thresholds in the market for different companies. These thresholds have a significant influence on the price. This article is an attempt in determining the thresholds for companies using the three dimensional graphs for optimizing the portfolios. It also emphasizes on the magnitude of importance of volumes as a key factor for determining of predicting strong price movements, bullish and bearish markets. It uses a comprehensive data set of major companies which form a major chunk of the Indian automotive sector and are thus used as an illustration.