Abstract: The extraction of meaningful information from image
could be an alternative method for time series analysis. In this paper,
we propose a graphical analysis of time series grouped into table
with adjusted colour scale for numerical values. The advantages of
this method are also discussed. The proposed method is easy to
understand and is flexible to implement the standard methods of
pattern recognition and verification, especially for noisy
environmental data.
Abstract: This paper present an effective method to accurately reconstruct and measure the 3D curve edges of small industrial parts based on stereo vision. To effectively fit the curve of the measured parts using a series of line segments in the images, a strategy from coarse to fine is employed based on multi-scale curve fitting. After reconstructing the 3D curve of a hole through a curved surface, its axis is adjusted so that it is parallel to the Z axis with least squares error and the dimensions of the hole can be calculated on the XY plane easily. Experimental results show that the presented method can accurately measure the dimensions of round holes through a curved surface.
Abstract: Recently studies in area of supply chain network
(SCN) have focused on the disruption issues in distribution systems.
Also this paper extends the previous literature by providing a new biobjective
model for cost minimization of designing a three echelon
SCN across normal and failure scenarios with considering multi
capacity option for manufacturers and distribution centers. Moreover,
in order to solve the problem by means of LINGO software, novel
model will be reformulated through a branch of LP-Metric method
called Min-Max approach.
Abstract: The thermal, epithermal and fast fluxes were
calculated for three irradiation channels at Egypt Second Research
Reactor (ETRR-2) using CITVAP code. The validity of the
calculations was verified by experimental measurements. There are
some deviations between measurements and calculations. This is due
to approximations in the calculation models used, homogenization of
regions, condensation of energy groups and uncertainty in nuclear
data used. Neutron flux data for the three irradiation channels are
now available. This would enable predicting the irradiation
conditions needed for future radioisotope production.
Abstract: In this study we investigate silica nanoparticle (SiO2- NP) effects on the structure and phase properties of supported lipid monolayers and bilayers, coupling surface pressure measurements, fluorescence microscopy and atomic force microscopy. SiO2-NPs typically in size range of 10nm to 100 nm in diameter are tested. Our results suggest first that lipid molecules organization depends to their nature. Secondly, lipid molecules in the vinicity of big aggregates nanoparticles organize in liquid condensed phase whereas small aggregates are localized in both fluid liquid-expanded (LE) and liquid-condenced (LC). We demonstrated also by atomic force microscopy that by measuring friction forces it is possible to get information as if nanoparticle aggregates are recovered or not by lipid monolayers and bilayers.
Abstract: Chronic diseases prevailed along with economic
growth as well as life style changed in recent years in Taiwan.
According to the governmental statistics, hypertension related disease
is the tenth of death causes with 1,816 died directly from hypertension
in 2010. There were more death causes amongst the top ten had been
proofed that having strong association with the hypertension, such as
heart diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes. Hypertension or
High blood pressure is one of the major indicators for chronic diseases,
and was generally perceived as the major causes of mortality. The
literature generally suggested that regular physical exercise was
helpful to prevent the occurrence or to ease the progress of a
hypertension. This paper reported the process and outcomes in
detailed of an improvement project of physical exercise intervention
specific for hypertension patients. Physical information were
measured before and after the project to obtain information such as
weight, waistline, cholesterol (HD & LD), blood examination, as well
as self-perceived health status. The intervention project involved a
six-week exercise program, of which contained three times a week, 30
minutes of tutored physical exercise intervention. The project had
achieved several gains in changing the subjects- behavior in terms of
many important biophysical indexes. Around 20% of the participants
had significantly improved their cholesterols, BMI, and changed
unhealthy behaviors. Results from the project were encouraging, and
would be good reference for other samples.
Abstract: Sedimentation is a hydraulic phenomenon that is
emerging as a serious challenge in river engineering. When the flow
reaches a certain state that gather potential energy, it shifts the
sediment load along channel bed. The transport of such materials can
be in the form of suspended and bed loads. The movement of these
along the river course and channels and the ways in which this could
influence the water intakes is considered as the major challenges for
sustainable O&M of hydraulic structures. This could be very serious
in arid and semi-arid regions like Iran, where inappropriate watershed
management could lead to shifting a great deal of sediments into the
reservoirs and irrigation systems. This paper aims to investigate
sedimentation in the Western Canal of Dez Diversion Weir in Iran,
identifying factors which influence the process and provide ways in
which to mitigate its detrimental effects by using the SHARC
Software.
For the purpose of this paper, data from the Dezful water authority
and Dezful Hydrometric Station pertinent to a river course of about 6
Km were used.
Results estimated sand and silt bed loads concentrations to be 193
ppm and 827ppm respectively. Given the available data on average
annual bed loads and average suspended sediment loads of 165ppm
and 837ppm, there was a significant statistical difference (16%)
between the sand grains, whereas no significant difference (1.2%)
was find in the silt grain sizes. One explanation for such finding
being that along the 6 Km river course there was considerable
meandering effects which explains recent shift in the hydraulic
behavior along the stream course under investigation. The sand
concentration in downstream relative to present state of the canal
showed a steep descending curve. Sediment trapping on the other
hand indicated a steep ascending curve. These occurred because the
diversion weir was not considered in the simulation model.
Abstract: The electromagnetic imaging of inhomogeneous
dielectric cylinders buried in a slab medium by transverse electric
(TE) wave illumination is investigated. Dielectric cylinders of
unknown permittivities are buried in second space and scattered a
group of unrelated waves incident from first space where the scattered
field is recorded. By proper arrangement of the various unrelated
incident fields, the difficulties of ill-posedness and nonlinearity are
circumvented, and the permittivity distribution can be reconstructed
through simple matrix operations. The algorithm is based on the
moment method and the unrelated illumination method. Numerical
results are given to demonstrate the capability of the inverse
algorithm. Good reconstruction is obtained even in the presence of
additive Gaussian random noise in measured data. In addition, the
effect of noise on the reconstruction result is also investigated.
Abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate the correlation
between Facebook involvement and internet addiction. We sampled
577 university students in Taiwan and administered a survey of
Facebook usage, Facebook involvement scale (FIS), and internet
addiction scale. The FIS comprises three factors (salience, emotional
support, and amusement). Results showed that the Facebook
involvement scale had good reliability and validity. The correlation
between Facebook involvement and internet addiction was measured
at .395. This means that a higher degree of Facebook involvement
indicates a greater degree of psychological dependency on the internet,
and a greater propensity towards social withdrawal and other negative
psychological consequences associated with internet addiction.
Besides, the correlations between three factors of FIS (salience,
emotional support, and amusement) and internet addiction ranged
from .313-372, indicating that these neither of these factors (salience,
emotional support, and amusement) is more effective than the others in
predicting internet dependency.
Abstract: Although agriculture is an important part of the world
economy, accounting in agriculture still has many shortcomings. The
adoption of IAS 41 “Agriculture” has tried to improve this situation
and increase the comparability of financial statements of entities in
the agricultural sector. Although controversial, IAS 41 is the first
step of a consistent transition to fair value assessment in the
agricultural sector. The objective of our work is the analysis of IAS
41 and current accounting agricultural situation in Romania.
Accounting regulations in Romania are in accordance with European
directives and, in many respects, converged with IFRS referential.
Provisions of IAS 41, however, are not reflected directly in
Romanian regulations. With the increase of forest land transactions,
it is expected that recognition and measurement of biological assets
under IAS 41 to become a necessity.
Abstract: This paper presents a methodology towards the emulation of the electrical power consumption of the RF device during the cellular phone/handset transmission mode using the LTE technology. The emulation methodology takes the physical environmental variables and the logical interface between the baseband and the RF system as inputs to compute the emulated power dissipation of the RF device. The emulated power, in between the measured points corresponding to the discrete values of the logical interface parameters is computed as a polynomial interpolation using polynomial basis functions. The evaluation of polynomial and spline curve fitting models showed a respective divergence (test error) of 8% and 0.02% from the physically measured power consumption. The precisions of the instruments used for the physical measurements have been modeled as intervals. We have been able to model the power consumption of the RF device operating at 5MHz using homotopy between 2 continuous power consumptions of the RF device operating at the bandwidths 3MHz and 10MHz.
Abstract: Electromyography (EMG) signal processing has been investigated remarkably regarding various applications such as in rehabilitation systems. Specifically, wavelet transform has served as a powerful technique to scrutinize EMG signals since wavelet transform is consistent with the nature of EMG as a non-stationary signal. In this paper, the efficiency of wavelet transform in surface EMG feature extraction is investigated from four levels of wavelet decomposition and a comparative study between different mother wavelets had been done. To recognize the best function and level of wavelet analysis, two evaluation criteria, scatter plot and RES index are recruited. Hereupon, four wavelet families, namely, Daubechies, Coiflets, Symlets and Biorthogonal are studied in wavelet decomposition stage. Consequently, the results show that only features from first and second level of wavelet decomposition yields good performance and some functions of various wavelet families can lead to an improvement in separability class of different hand movements.
Abstract: This study proposes a materials procurement contracts
model to which the zero-cost collar option is applied for heading price
fluctuation risks in construction.The material contract model based on
the collar option that consists of the call option striking zone of the
construction company(the buyer) following the materials price
increase andthe put option striking zone of the material vendor(the
supplier) following a materials price decrease. This study first
determined the call option strike price Xc of the construction company
by a simple approach: it uses the predicted profit at the project starting
point and then determines the strike price of put option Xp that has an
identical option value, which completes the zero-cost material
contract.The analysis results indicate that the cost saving of the
construction company increased as Xc decreased. This was because the
critical level of the steel materials price increasewas set at a low level.
However, as Xc decreased, Xpof a put option that had an identical
option value gradually increased. Cost saving increased as Xc
decreased. However, as Xp gradually increased, the risk of loss from a
construction company increased as the steel materials price decreased.
Meanwhile, cost saving did not occur for the construction company,
because of volatility. This result originated in the zero-cost features of
the two-way contract of the collar option. In the case of the regular
one-way option, the transaction cost had to be subtracted from the cost
saving. The transaction cost originated from an option value that
fluctuated with the volatility. That is, the cost saving of the one-way
option was affected by the volatility. Meanwhile, even though the
collar option with zero transaction cost cut the connection between
volatility and cost saving, there was a risk of exercising the put option.
Abstract: Almost all universities include some form of assignment in their courses. The assignments are either carried out in either in groups or individually. To effectively manage these submitted assignments, a well-designed assignment submission system is needed, hence the need for an online assignment submission system to facilitate the distribution, and collection of assignments on due dates. The objective of such system is to facilitate interaction of lecturers and students for assessment and grading purposes. The aim of this study was to create a web based online assignment submission system for University of Mauritius. The system was created to eliminate the traditional process of giving an assignment and collecting the answers for the assignment. Lecturers can also create automated assessment to assess the students online. Moreover, the online submission system consists of an automatic mailing system which acts as a reminder for students about the deadlines of the posted assignments. System was tested to measure its acceptance rate among both student and lecturers.
Abstract: In this paper, a new approach for target recognition based on the Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm of Huang etal. [11] and the energy tracking operator of Teager [13]-[14] is introduced. The conjunction of these two methods is called Teager-Huang analysis. This approach is well suited for nonstationary signals analysis. The impulse response (IR) of target is first band pass filtered into subsignals (components) called Intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) with well defined Instantaneous frequency (IF) and Instantaneous amplitude (IA). Each IMF is a zero-mean AM-FM component. In second step, the energy of each IMF is tracked using the Teager energy operator (TEO). IF and IA, useful to describe the time-varying characteristics of the signal, are estimated using the Energy separation algorithm (ESA) algorithm of Maragos et al .[16]-[17]. In third step, a set of features such as skewness and kurtosis are extracted from the IF, IA and IMF energy functions. The Teager-Huang analysis is tested on set of synthetic IRs of Sonar targets with different physical characteristics (density, velocity, shape,? ). PCA is first applied to features to discriminate between manufactured and natural targets. The manufactured patterns are classified into spheres and cylinders. One hundred percent of correct recognition is achieved with twenty three echoes where sixteen IRs, used for training, are free noise and seven IRs, used for testing phase, are corrupted with white Gaussian noise.
Abstract: It is important problems to increase the detection rates
and reduce false positive rates in Intrusion Detection System (IDS).
Although preventative techniques such as access control and
authentication attempt to prevent intruders, these can fail, and as a
second line of defence, intrusion detection has been introduced. Rare
events are events that occur very infrequently, detection of rare
events is a common problem in many domains. In this paper we
propose an intrusion detection method that combines Rough set and
Fuzzy Clustering. Rough set has to decrease the amount of data and
get rid of redundancy. Fuzzy c-means clustering allow objects to
belong to several clusters simultaneously, with different degrees of
membership. Our approach allows us to recognize not only known
attacks but also to detect suspicious activity that may be the result of
a new, unknown attack. The experimental results on Knowledge
Discovery and Data Mining-(KDDCup 1999) Dataset show that the
method is efficient and practical for intrusion detection systems.
Abstract: In the past many uneconomic solutions for limitation
and interruption of short-circuit currents in low power applications
have been introduced, especially polymer switch based on the
positive temperature coefficient of resistance (PCTR) concept.
However there are many limitations in the active material, which
consists of conductive fillers. This paper presents a significantly
improved and simplified approach that replaces the existing current
limiters with faster switching elements. Its elegance lies in the
remarkable simplicity and low-cost processes of producing the device
using polyaniline (PANI) doped with methane-sulfonic acid (MSA).
Samples characterized as lying in the metallic and critical regimes of
metal insulator transition have been studied by means of electrical
performance in the voltage range from 1V to 5 V under different
environmental conditions. Moisture presence is shown to increase the
resistivity and also improved its current limiting performance.
Additionally, the device has also been studied for electrical resistivity
in the temperature range 77 K-300 K. The temperature dependence of
the electrical conductivity gives evidence for a transport mechanism
based on variable range hopping in three dimensions.
Abstract: This paper applies fuzzy AHP to evaluate the service
quality of online auction. Service quality is a composition of various
criteria. Among them many intangible attributes are difficult to
measure. This characteristic introduces the obstacles for respondents
on reply in the survey. So as to overcome this problem, we invite
fuzzy set theory into the measurement of performance and use AHP in
obtaining criteria. We found the most concerned dimension of service
quality is Transaction Safety Mechanism and the least is Charge Item.
Other criteria such as information security, accuracy and information
are too vital.
Abstract: The CMLP building was developed to be a model for
sustainability with strategies to reduce water, energy and pollution,
and to provide a healthy environment for the building occupants. The
aim of this paper is to investigate the environmental effects of energy
used by this building. A LCA (life cycle analysis) was led to measure
the real environmental effects produced by the use of energy. The
impact categories most affected by the energy use were found to be
the human health effects, as well as ecotoxicity. Natural gas
extraction, uranium milling for nuclear energy production, and the
blasting for mining and infrastructure construction are the processes
contributing the most to emissions in the human health effect. Data
comparing LCA results of CMLP building with a conventional
building results showed that energy used by the CMLP building has
less damage for the environment and human health than a
conventional building.
Abstract: In recent years, the use of vector variance as a
measure of multivariate variability has received much attention in
wide range of statistics. This paper deals with a more economic
measure of multivariate variability, defined as vector variance minus
all duplication elements. For high dimensional data, this will increase
the computational efficiency almost 50 % compared to the original
vector variance. Its sampling distribution will be investigated to make
its applications possible.