Abstract: In this work, we present a comparison between two
techniques of image compression. In the first case, the image is
divided in blocks which are collected according to zig-zag scan. In
the second one, we apply the Fast Cosine Transform to the image,
and then the transformed image is divided in blocks which are
collected according to zig-zag scan too. Later, in both cases, the
Karhunen-Loève transform is applied to mentioned blocks. On the
other hand, we present three new metrics based on eigenvalues for a
better comparative evaluation of the techniques. Simulations show
that the combined version is the best, with minor Mean Absolute
Error (MAE) and Mean Squared Error (MSE), higher Peak Signal to
Noise Ratio (PSNR) and better image quality. Finally, new technique
was far superior to JPEG and JPEG2000.
Abstract: In this paper, a few chattering-free Sliding Mode Controllers (SMC) are proposed to stabilize an Active Magnetic Bearing (AMB) system with gyroscopic effect that is proportional to the rotor speed. The improved switching terms of the controller inherited from the saturation-type function and boundary layer control technique is shown to be able to achieve bounded and asymptotic stability, respectively, while the chattering effect in the input is attenuated. This is proven to be advantageous for AMB system since minimization of chattering results in optimized control effort. The performance of each controller is demonstrated via result of simulation in which the measurement of the total consumed energy and maximum control magnitude of each controller illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.
Abstract: Service-oriented systems have become popular and
presented many advantages in develop and maintain process. The
coupling is the most important attribute of services when they are
integrated into a system. In this paper, we propose a suite of metrics
to evaluate service-s quality according to its ability of coupling. We
use the coupling metrics to measure the maintainability, reliability,
testability, and reusability of services. Our proposed metrics are
operated in run-time which bring more exact results.
Abstract: The paper presents the results of the European EIE
project “Realising the potential for small scale renewable energy
sources in the home – Kyotointhehome". The project's global aim is
to inform and educate teachers, students and their families so that
they can realise the need and can assess the potential for energy
efficiency (EE) measures and renewable energy sources (RES) in
their homes. The project resources were translated and trialled by 16
partners in 10 European countries.
A web-based methodology which will enable families to assess
how RES can be incorporated into energy efficient homes was
accomplished. The web application “KYOTOINHOME" will help
the citizens to identify what they can do to help their community
meet the Kyoto target for greenhouse gas reductions and prevent
global warming. This application provides useful information on how
the citizens can use renewable energy sources in their home to
provide space heating and cooling, hot water and electricity. A
methodology for assessing heat loss in a dwelling and application of
heat pump system was elaborated and will be implemented this year.
For schools, we developed a set of practical activities concerned with
preventing climate change through using renewable energy sources.
Complementary resources will also developed in the Romanian
research project “Romania Contribution to the European Targets
Regarding the Development of Renewable Energy Sources" -
PROMES.
Abstract: This study was conducted in order to determine the physical properties and stability of mayonnaise-like emulsions as affected by modified yam starches. Native yam starch was modified via pre-gelatinization and cross-linking phosphorylation procedures. The emulsions (50% oil dispersed phase) were prepared with 0.3% native potato, native yam, pre-gelatinized yam and cross-linking phosphorylation yam starches. The droplet size of surface weighted mean diameter was found to be significantly (p < 0.05) lower in the sample with cross-linking phosphorylation yam starch as compared to other samples. Moreover, the viscosity of the sample with pregelatinized yam starch was observed to be higher than that of other samples. The phase separation stability was low in the freshly prepared and stored (45 days, 5°C) emulsions containing native yam starch. This study thus generally suggested that modified yam starches were more suitable (i.e. better physical properties and stability) to be used as stabilizers in a similar system i.e. light mayonnaises, rather than a native yam starch.
Abstract: In modern era, the biggest challenge facing the
software industry is the upcoming of new technologies. So, the
software engineers are gearing up themselves to meet and manage
change in large software system. Also they find it difficult to deal
with software cognitive complexities. In the last few years many
metrics were proposed to measure the cognitive complexity of
software. This paper aims at a comprehensive survey of the metric of
software cognitive complexity. Some classic and efficient software
cognitive complexity metrics, such as Class Complexity (CC),
Weighted Class Complexity (WCC), Extended Weighted Class
Complexity (EWCC), Class Complexity due to Inheritance (CCI) and
Average Complexity of a program due to Inheritance (ACI), are
discussed and analyzed. The comparison and the relationship of these
metrics of software complexity are also presented.
Abstract: Saturated hydraulic conductivity of Soil is an
important property in processes involving water and solute flow in
soils. Saturated hydraulic conductivity of soil is difficult to measure
and can be highly variable, requiring a large number of replicate
samples. In this study, 60 sets of soil samples were collected at
Saqhez region of Kurdistan province-IRAN. The statistics such as
Correlation Coefficient (R), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean
Bias Error (MBE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) were used to
evaluation the multiple linear regression models varied with number
of dataset. In this study the multiple linear regression models were
evaluated when only percentage of sand, silt, and clay content (SSC)
were used as inputs, and when SSC and bulk density, Bd, (SSC+Bd)
were used as inputs. The R, RMSE, MBE and MAE values of the 50
dataset for method (SSC), were calculated 0.925, 15.29, -1.03 and
12.51 and for method (SSC+Bd), were calculated 0.927, 15.28,-1.11
and 12.92, respectively, for relationship obtained from multiple
linear regressions on data. Also the R, RMSE, MBE and MAE values
of the 10 dataset for method (SSC), were calculated 0.725, 19.62, -
9.87 and 18.91 and for method (SSC+Bd), were calculated 0.618,
24.69, -17.37 and 22.16, respectively, which shows when number of
dataset increase, precision of estimated saturated hydraulic
conductivity, increases.
Abstract: The objective of this research is to study principal
component analysis for classification of 67 soil samples collected from
different agricultural areas in the western part of Thailand. Six soil
properties were measured on the soil samples and are used as original
variables. Principal component analysis is applied to reduce the
number of original variables. A model based on the first two
principal components accounts for 72.24% of total variance. Score
plots of first two principal components were used to map with
agricultural areas divided into horticulture, field crops and wetland.
The results showed some relationships between soil properties and
agricultural areas. PCA was shown to be a useful tool for agricultural
areas classification based on soil properties.
Abstract: Deprivation indices are widely used in public health
study. These indices are also referred as the index of inequalities or
disadvantage. Even though, there are many indices that have been
built before, it is believed to be less appropriate to use the existing
indices to be applied in other countries or areas which had different
socio-economic conditions and different geographical characteristics.
The objective of this study is to construct the index based on the
geographical and socio-economic factors in Peninsular Malaysia
which is defined as the weighted household-based deprivation index.
This study has employed the variables based on household items,
household facilities, school attendance and education level obtained
from Malaysia 2000 census report. The factor analysis is used to
extract the latent variables from indicators, or reducing the
observable variable into smaller amount of components or factor.
Based on the factor analysis, two extracted factors were selected,
known as Basic Household Amenities and Middle-Class Household
Item factor. It is observed that the district with a lower index values
are located in the less developed states like Kelantan, Terengganu
and Kedah. Meanwhile, the areas with high index values are located
in developed states such as Pulau Pinang, W.P. Kuala Lumpur and
Selangor.
Abstract: This paper is based on a study conducted in 2006 to assess the impact of computer usage on health of National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) staff. NIMR being a research Institute, most of its staff spend substantial part of their working time on computers. There was notion among NIMR staff on possible prolonged computer usage health hazards. Hence, a study was conducted to establish facts and possible mitigation measures. A total of 144 NIMR staff were involved in the study of whom 63.2% were males and 36.8% females aged between 20 and 59 years. All staff cadres were included in the sample. The functions performed by Institute staff using computers includes; data management, proposal development and report writing, research activities, secretarial duties, accounting and administrative duties, on-line information retrieval and online communication through e-mail services. The interviewed staff had been using computers for 1-8 hours a day and for a period ranging from 1 to 20 years. The study has indicated ergonomic hazards for a significant proportion of interviewees (63%) of various kinds ranging from backache to eyesight related problems. The authors highlighted major issues which are substantially applicable in preventing occurrences of computer related problems and they urged NIMR Management and/or the government of Tanzania opts to adapt their practicability.
Abstract: Gasoline Octane Number is the standard measure of
the anti-knock properties of a motor in platforming processes, that is
one of the important unit operations for oil refineries and can be
determined with online measurement or use CFR (Cooperative Fuel
Research) engines. Online measurements of the Octane number can
be done using direct octane number analyzers, that it is too
expensive, so we have to find feasible analyzer, like ANFIS
estimators.
ANFIS is the systems that neural network incorporated in fuzzy
systems, using data automatically by learning algorithms of NNs.
ANFIS constructs an input-output mapping based both on human
knowledge and on generated input-output data pairs.
In this research, 31 industrial data sets are used (21 data for training
and the rest of the data used for generalization). Results show that,
according to this simulation, hybrid method training algorithm in
ANFIS has good agreements between industrial data and simulated
results.
Abstract: Sedimentation in reservoirs and the corresponding
loss of storage capacity is one of the most serious problems in dam
engineering. Pressurized flushing, a way to remove sediments from the reservoir, is flushing under a pressurized flow condition and
nearly constant water level. Pressurized flushing has only local
effects around the outlet. Sediment in the vicinity of the outlet openings is scoured and a funnel shaped crater is created. In this study, the temporal development of flushing cone under various
hydraulic conditions was studied experimentally. Time variations of
parameters such as maximum length and width of flushing and also
depth of scouring cone was measured. Results indicated that an
increase in flow velocity (and consequently in Froude number)
established new hydraulically conditions for flushing mechanism and
so a sudden growth was observed in the amount of sediment released
and also scouring dimenssions. In addition, a set of nondimensional
relationships were identified for temporal variations of flushing scour
dimenssions, which can eventuallt be used to estimate the development of flushing cone.
Abstract: One-way functions are functions that are easy to
compute but hard to invert. Their existence is an open conjecture; it
would imply the existence of intractable problems (i.e. NP-problems
which are not in the P complexity class).
If true, the existence of one-way functions would have an impact
on the theoretical framework of physics, in particularly, quantum
mechanics. Such aspect of one-way functions has never been shown
before.
In the present work, we put forward the following.
We can calculate the microscopic state (say, the particle spin in the
z direction) of a macroscopic system (a measuring apparatus
registering the particle z-spin) by the system macroscopic state (the
apparatus output); let us call this association the function F. The
question is: can we compute the function F in the inverse direction?
In other words, can we compute the macroscopic state of the system
through its microscopic state (the preimage F -1)?
In the paper, we assume that the function F is a one-way function.
The assumption implies that at the macroscopic level the Schrödinger
equation becomes unfeasible to compute. This unfeasibility plays a
role of limit of the validity of the linear Schrödinger equation.
Abstract: Two freshwater fishes, Rasbora sumatrana
(Cyprinidae) and Poecilia reticulata (guppy) (Poeciliidae) were
exposed for a four-day period in the laboratory condition to a range
of copper (Cu) and cadmium (Cd) concentrations. Mortality was
assessed and median lethal concentrations (LC50) were calculated.
LC50 increased with decrease in mean exposure times for both metals.
For R. sumatrana, LC50s for 24, 48, 72 and 96 hours for Cu were
54.2, 30.3, 18.9 and 5.6 μg/L and for Cd 1440.2, 459.3, 392.3 and
101.6 μg/L respectively. For P. reticulata, LC50s for 24, 48, 72 and
96 hours for Cu were 348.9, 145.4, 61.3 and 37.9 μg/L and for Cd
8205.6, 2827.1, 405.8 and 168.1 μg/L, respectively. Results indicated
that the Cu was more toxic than Cd to both fishes (Cu>Cd) and R.
sumatrana was more sensitive than P. reticulata to the metals.
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: Public administration institutions in cooperation with
politicians are not the sole policy decision makers in full meaning
any longer. Meanwhile, a special role, namely steering the decision
making process, could be delegated to them.
Despite the wide scientific discussion on different aspects what
has direct impact on policy creation, there is a lack of holistic
practical managerial advice, which could integrate infrastructure of
policy decision making with intellectual capital and with
interconnection of partnership. The proposed harmonized decision
making model of process, people and partnership entitled by
acronym HM-3P is analyzed as a framework for implementation of
public administration steering role seeking the coherent social
involvement in policy decision making.
Abstract: In this paper, a clustering algorithm named KHarmonic
means (KHM) was employed in the training of Radial
Basis Function Networks (RBFNs). KHM organized the data in
clusters and determined the centres of the basis function. The popular
clustering algorithms, namely K-means (KM) and Fuzzy c-means
(FCM), are highly dependent on the initial identification of elements
that represent the cluster well. In KHM, the problem can be avoided.
This leads to improvement in the classification performance when
compared to other clustering algorithms. A comparison of the
classification accuracy was performed between KM, FCM and KHM.
The classification performance is based on the benchmark data sets:
Iris Plant, Diabetes and Breast Cancer. RBFN training with the KHM
algorithm shows better accuracy in classification problem.
Abstract: In the traditional theory of non-uniform torsion the
axial displacement field is expressed as the product of the unit twist
angle and the warping function. The first one, variable along the
beam axis, is obtained by a global congruence condition; the second
one, instead, defined over the cross-section, is determined by solving
a Neumann problem associated to the Laplace equation, as well as for
the uniform torsion problem.
So, as in the classical theory the warping function doesn-t punctually
satisfy the first indefinite equilibrium equation, the principal aim of
this work is to develop a new theory for non-uniform torsion of
beams with axial symmetric cross-section, fully restrained on both
ends and loaded by a constant torque, that permits to punctually
satisfy the previous equation, by means of a trigonometric expansion
of the axial displacement and unit twist angle functions.
Furthermore, as the classical theory is generally applied with good
results to the global and local analysis of ship structures, two beams
having the first one an open profile, the second one a closed section,
have been analyzed, in order to compare the two theories.
Abstract: This research focuses on the use of a recommender
system in decision support by means of a used car dealer case study
in Bangkok Metropolitan. The goal is to develop an effective used car
purchasing system for dealers based on the above premise. The
underlying principle rests on content-based recommendation from a
set of usability surveys. A prototype was developed to conduct
buyers- survey selected from 5 experts and 95 general public. The
responses were analyzed to determine the mean and standard
deviation of buyers- preference. The results revealed that both groups
were in favor of using the proposed system to assist their buying
decision. This indicates that the proposed system is meritorious to
used car dealers.
Abstract: In the present study, position estimation of switched reluctance motor (SRM) has been achieved on the basis of the artificial neural networks (ANNs). The ANNs can estimate the rotor position without using an extra rotor position sensor by measuring the phase flux linkages and phase currents. Flux linkage-phase current-rotor position data set and supervised backpropagation learning algorithm are used in training of the ANN based position estimator. A 4-phase SRM have been used to verify the accuracy and feasibility of the proposed position estimator. Simulation results show that the proposed position estimator gives precise and accurate position estimations for both under the low and high level reference speeds of the SRM