Abstract: Quick adoption of e-business and emerging influence
of “Electronic Word of Mouth e-WOM” communication on guests
made leading hotel brands successful examples of electronic guest
relationship management. Main reasons behind such success are well
established procedures in collection, analysis and usage of highly
valuable data available on the Internet, generated through some form
of e-GRM programme. E-GRM is more than just a technology
solution. It’s a system which balance respective guest demands, hotel
technological capabilities and organizational culture of employees,
discharging the universal approach in guest relations “same for all”.
The purpose of this research derives from the necessity of
determining the importance of monitoring and applying e-WOM
communication as one of the methods used in managing guest
relations. This paper analyses and compares different hotelier’s
opinions on e-WOM communication.
Abstract: In this work, two fermentations at different
temperatures (25 and 30ºC), with cell recycling, were accomplished
to produce ethanol, using a mix of commercial substrates, xylose
(70%) and glucose (30%), as organic source for Scheffersomyces
stipitis. Five consecutive fermentations of 80 g L-1 (1º, 2º and 3º
recycles), 96 g L-1 (4º recycle) and 120 g L-1 (5º recycle)reduced
sugars led to a final maximum ethanol concentration of 17.2 and 34.5
g L-1, at 25 and 30ºC, respectively. Glucose was the preferred
substrate; moreover xylose startup degradation was initiated after a
remaining glucose presence in the medium. Results showed that yeast
acid treatment, performed before each cycle, provided improvements
on cell viability, accompanied by ethanol productivity of 2.16 g L-1 h-
1 at 30ºC. A maximum 36% of xylose was retained in the
fermentation medium and after five-cycle fermentation an ethanol
yield of 0.43 g ethanol/g sugars was observed. S. stipitis fermentation
capacity and tolerance showed better results at 30ºC with 83.4% of
theoretical yield referenced on initial biomass.
Abstract: The article represents the results of clinical researches
of composite herbal medicinal product based on essential oils of
Sedum plants growing in Kazakhstan in commercial reserves at the
territory of Kazakhstan. The results of comparative analysis are
represented in obstetric-gynecologic practice during combined
therapy for postnatal complications, inflammatory infiltrates in the
area of surgical wounds including wounds after caesarean section.
Abstract: The article represents the results of research of
antitumor activity of different structural types of plant flavonoids
extracted by authors from Polygonum L. plants in commercial
reserves at the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan. For the first
time ever the results comparative research of antitumor activity of
plant flavonoids of different structural groups and their synthetic
derivatives have been represented. The results of determination of
toxicity of flavonoids in single parenteral infusion conditions have
been represented. Experimental substantiation of possible
mechanisms of antiproliferative and cytotoxic action of flavonoids
has been suggested. The perspectives of usage of plant flavonoids as
medications and creation of effective dosage forms of antitumor
medicines on their basis have been substantiated.
Abstract: An efficient remanufacturing network lead to an
efficient design of sustainable manufacturing enterprise. In
remanufacturing network, products are collected from the customer
zone, disassembled and remanufactured at a suitable remanufacturing
facility. In this respect, another issue to consider is how the returned
product to be remanufactured, in other words, what is the best layout
for such facility. In order to achieve a sustainable manufacturing
system, Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) designs are highly
recommended, CMSs combine high throughput rates of line layouts
with the flexibility offered by functional layouts (job shop).
Introducing the CMS while designing a remanufacturing network will
benefit the utilization of such a network. This paper presents and
analyzes a comprehensive mathematical model for the design of
Dynamic Cellular Remanufacturing Systems (DCRSs). In this paper,
the proposed model is the first one to date that considers CMS and
remanufacturing system simultaneously. The proposed DCRS model
considers several manufacturing attributes such as multi period
production planning, dynamic system reconfiguration, duplicate
machines, machine capacity, available time for workers, worker
assignments, and machine procurement, where the demand is totally
satisfied from a returned product. A numerical example is presented
to illustrate the proposed model.
Abstract: Hypersonic flows around spatial vehicles during their reentry phase in planetary atmospheres are characterized by intense aerothermodynamics phenomena. The aim of this work is to analyze high temperature flows around an axisymmetric blunt body taking into account chemical and vibrational non-equilibrium for air mixture species and the no slip condition at the wall. For this purpose, the Navier-Stokes equations system is resolved by the finite volume methodology to determine the flow parameters around the axisymmetric blunt body especially at the stagnation point and in the boundary layer along the wall of the blunt body. The code allows the capture of shock wave before a blunt body placed in hypersonic free stream. The numerical technique uses the Flux Vector Splitting method of Van Leer. CFL coefficient and mesh size level are selected to ensure the numerical convergence.
Abstract: Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to test
a hypothesized model explaining Malaysian hypermarket customers’
perceptions of brand trust (BT), customer perceived value (CPV) and
perceived service quality (PSQ) on building their brand loyalty
(CBL) and generating positive word-of-mouth communication
(WOM). Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data
from 374 Malaysian hypermarket customers from Mydin, Tesco,
Aeon Big and Giant in Kuala Lumpur, a metropolitan city of
Malaysia. The data strongly supported the model exhibiting that BT,
CPV and PSQ are prerequisite factors in building customer brand
loyalty, while PSQ has the strongest effect on prediction of customer
brand loyalty compared to other factors. Besides, the present study
suggests the effect of the aforementioned factors via customer brand
loyalty strongly contributes to generate positive word of mouth
communication.
Abstract: This paper presents the development of a robot car
that can track the motion of an object by detecting its color through
an Android device. The employed computer vision algorithm uses the
OpenCV library, which is embedded into an Android application of a
smartphone, for manipulating the captured image of the object. The
captured image of the object is subjected to color conversion and is
transformed to a binary image for further processing after color
filtering. The desired object is clearly determined after removing
pixel noise by applying image morphology operations and contour
definition. Finally, the area and the center of the object are
determined so that object’s motion to be tracked. The smartphone
application has been placed on a robot car and transmits by Bluetooth
to an Arduino assembly the motion directives so that to follow
objects of a specified color. The experimental evaluation of the
proposed algorithm shows reliable color detection and smooth
tracking characteristics.
Abstract: The development of adaptive user interfaces (UI)
presents for a long time an important research area in which
researcher attempt to call upon the full resources and skills of several
disciplines, The adaptive UI community holds a thorough knowledge
regarding the adaptation of UIs with users and with contexts of use.
Several solutions, models, formalisms, techniques and mechanisms
were proposed to develop adaptive UI. In this paper, we propose an
approach based on the fuzzy set theory for modeling the concept of
the appropriateness of different solutions of UI adaptation with
different situations for which interactive systems have to adapt their
UIs.
Abstract: This paper adopts a two-stage data envelopment
analysis to explore the impacts of financial development and bank
operating scale on bank efficiencies. The sample comprises
unbalanced panel data of 32 Taiwanese listed domestic commercial
banks over the period 1998 to 2013. Empirical results show that pure
technical efficiency is positively related to financial development,
whereas the effect of financial development on scale efficiency is
insignificant. Enlargement of bank operating scale improves bank
efficiencies, but the efficiency gains are decreased gradually when the
scale increases. Increases in capital adequacy ratio and market power
of loans lead into a growth of bank efficiencies.
Abstract: In the present study, the kinetics of thermal
degradation of a phenolic and lignin reinforced phenolic foams, and
the lignin used as reinforcement were studied and the activation
energies of their degradation processes were obtained by a DAEM
model. The average values for five heating rates of the mean
activation energies obtained were: 99.1, 128.2, and 144.0 kJ.mol-1 for
the phenolic foam; 109.5, 113.3, and 153.0 kJ.mol-1 for the lignin
reinforcement; and 82.1, 106.9, and 124.4 kJ.mol-1 for the lignin
reinforced phenolic foam. The standard deviation ranges calculated
for each sample were 1.27-8.85, 2.22-12.82, and 3.17-8.11 kJ.mol-1
for the phenolic foam, lignin and the reinforced foam, respectively.
The DAEM model showed low mean square errors (
Abstract: The effect of additional magnesium oxide (MgO) was
investigated by using the tungsten oxide supported on silica catalyst
(WOx/SiO2) physically mixed with MgO in a weight ratio 1:1. The
both fresh and spent catalysts were characterized by FT-Raman
spectrometer, UV-Vis spectrometer, X-Ray diffraction (XRD) and
temperature programmed oxidation (TPO). The results indicated that
the additional MgO could enhance the conversion of trans-2-butene
due to isomerization reaction. However, adding MgO would increase
the amount of coke deposit on the WOx/SiO2 catalyst. The TPO
profile presented two peaks when the WOx/SiO2 catalyst was
physically mixed with MgO. The further peak was suggested that
came from coke precursor could be produced by isomerization
reaction of undesired product. Then, the occurred coke precursor
could deposit and form coke on the acid catalyst.
Abstract: Failure of typical seismic frames has been found by
plastic hinge occurring on beams section near column faces. On the
other hand, the seismic capacity of the frames can be enhanced if the
plastic hinges of the beams are shifted away from the column faces.
This paper presents detailing of reinforcements in the interior beam–
column connections aiming to relocate the plastic hinge of reinforced
concrete and precast concrete frames. Four specimens were tested
under quasi-static cyclic load including two monolithic specimens
and two precast specimens. For one monolithic specimen, typical
seismic reinforcement was provided and considered as a reference
specimen named M1. The other reinforced concrete frame M2
contained additional intermediate steel in the connection area
compared with the specimen M1. For the precast specimens,
embedded T-section steels in joint were provided, with and without
diagonal bars in the connection area for specimen P1 and P2,
respectively. The test results indicated the ductile failure with beam
flexural failure in monolithic specimen M1 and the intermediate steel
increased strength and improved joint performance of specimen M2.
For the precast specimens, cracks generated at the end of the steel
inserts. However, slipping of reinforcing steel lapped in top of the
beams was seen before yielding of the main bars leading to the brittle
failure. The diagonal bars in precast specimens P2 improved the
connection stiffness and the energy dissipation capacity.
Abstract: With the growing of computer and network, digital
data can be spread to anywhere in the world quickly. In addition,
digital data can also be copied or tampered easily so that the security
issue becomes an important topic in the protection of digital data.
Digital watermark is a method to protect the ownership of digital data.
Embedding the watermark will influence the quality certainly. In this
paper, Vector Quantization (VQ) is used to embed the watermark into
the image to fulfill the goal of data hiding. This kind of watermarking
is invisible which means that the users will not conscious the existing
of embedded watermark even though the embedded image has tiny
difference compared to the original image. Meanwhile, VQ needs a lot
of computation burden so that we adopt a fast VQ encoding scheme by
partial distortion searching (PDS) and mean approximation scheme to
speed up the data hiding process.
The watermarks we hide to the image could be gray, bi-level and
color images. Texts are also can be regarded as watermark to embed.
In order to test the robustness of the system, we adopt Photoshop to
fulfill sharpen, cropping and altering to check if the extracted
watermark is still recognizable. Experimental results demonstrate that
the proposed system can resist the above three kinds of tampering in
general cases.
Abstract: Micro-electromechanical system (MEMS)
accelerometers and gyroscopes are suitable for the inertial navigation
system (INS) of many applications due to low price, small
dimensions and light weight. The main disadvantage in a comparison
with classic sensors is a worse long term stability. The estimation
accuracy is mostly affected by the time-dependent growth of inertial
sensor errors, especially the stochastic errors. In order to eliminate
negative effects of these random errors, they must be accurately
modeled. In this paper, the Allan variance technique will be used in
modeling the stochastic errors of the inertial sensors. By performing
a simple operation on the entire length of data, a characteristic curve
is obtained whose inspection provides a systematic characterization
of various random errors contained in the inertial-sensor output data.
Abstract: OPEN_EmoRec_II is an open multimodal corpus with
experimentally induced emotions. In the first half of the experiment,
emotions were induced with standardized picture material and in the
second half during a human-computer interaction (HCI), realized
with a wizard-of-oz design. The induced emotions are based on the
dimensional theory of emotions (valence, arousal and dominance).
These emotional sequences - recorded with multimodal data (facial
reactions, speech, audio and physiological reactions) during a
naturalistic-like HCI-environment one can improve classification
methods on a multimodal level.
This database is the result of an HCI-experiment, for which 30
subjects in total agreed to a publication of their data including the
video material for research purposes*. The now available open
corpus contains sensory signal of: video, audio, physiology (SCL,
respiration, BVP, EMG Corrugator supercilii, EMG Zygomaticus
Major) and facial reactions annotations.
Abstract: OPEN_EmoRec_II is an open multimodal corpus with
experimentally induced emotions. In the first half of the experiment,
emotions were induced with standardized picture material and in the
second half during a human-computer interaction (HCI), realized
with a wizard-of-oz design. The induced emotions are based on the
dimensional theory of emotions (valence, arousal and dominance).
These emotional sequences - recorded with multimodal data (facial
reactions, speech, audio and physiological reactions) during a
naturalistic-like HCI-environment one can improve classification
methods on a multimodal level.
This database is the result of an HCI-experiment, for which 30
subjects in total agreed to a publication of their data including the
video material for research purposes*. The now available open
corpus contains sensory signal of: video, audio, physiology (SCL,
respiration, BVP, EMG Corrugator supercilii, EMG Zygomaticus
Major) and facial reactions annotations.
Abstract: Heat transfer of leaves is a crucial factor in optimal
operation of metabolic functions in plants. In order to quantify this
phenomenon in different leaves and investigate the influence of leaf
shape on heat transfer, natural convection for pine, orange and olive
leaves was simulated as representatives of different groups of leaf
shapes. CFD techniques were used in this simulation with the
purpose to calculate heat transfer of leaves in similar environmental
conditions. The problem was simulated for steady state and threedimensional
conditions. From obtained results, it was concluded that
heat fluxes of all three different leaves are almost identical, however,
total rate of heat transfer have highest and lowest values for orange
leaves, and pine leaves, respectively.
Abstract: This work assesses the cortical and the sub-cortical
neural activity recorded from rodents using entropy and mutual
information based approaches to study how hypothermia affects neural
activity. By applying the multi-scale entropy and Shannon entropy, we
quantify the degree of the regularity embedded in the cortical and
sub-cortical neurons and characterize the dependency of entropy of
these regions on temperature. We study also the degree of the mutual
information on thalamocortical pathway depending on temperature.
The latter is most likely an indicator of coupling between these highly
connected structures in response to temperature manipulation leading
to arousal after global cerebral ischemia.
Abstract: Ibeno, Nigeria hosts the operational base of Mobil
Producing Nigeria Unlimited (MPNU), a subsidiary of ExxonMobil
and the current highest oil & condensate producer in Nigeria. Besides
MPNU, other oil companies operate onshore, on the continental shelf
and deep offshore of the Atlantic Ocean in Ibeno, Nigeria. This study
was designed to delineate oil polluted sites in Ibeno, Nigeria using
geophysical methods of electrical resistivity (ER) and ground
penetrating radar (GPR). Results obtained revealed that there have
been hydrocarbon contaminations of this environment by past crude
oil spills as observed from high resistivity values and GPR profiles
which clearly show the distribution, thickness and lateral extent of
hydrocarbon contamination as represented on the radargram reflector
tones. Contaminations were of varying degrees, ranging from slight
to high, indicating levels of substantial attenuation of crude oil
contamination over time. Moreover, the display of relatively lower
resistivities of locations outside the impacted areas compared to
resistivity values within the impacted areas and the 3-D Cartesian
images of oil contaminant plume depicted by red, light brown and
magenta for high, low and very low oil impacted areas, respectively
confirmed significant recent pollution of the study area with crude
oil.