Abstract: This study evaluated the use of raw or processed
Prosopis juliflora (Meskit) pods as a major ingredient in a formulated
ration to provide an alternative non-conventional concentrate for
livestock feeding in Oman. Dry Meskit pods were reduced to lengths
of 0.5- 1.0 cm to ensure thorough mixing into three diets. Meskit
pods were subjected to two types of treatments; roasting and soaking.
They were roasted at 150оC for 30 minutes using a locally-made
roasting device (40 kg barrel container rotated by electric motor and
heated by flame gas cooker). Chopped pods were soaked in tap water
for 24 hours and dried for 2 days under the sun with frequent turning.
The Meskit-pod-based diets (MPBD) were formulated and pelleted
from 500 g/kg ground Meskit pods, 240 g/kg wheat bran, 200 g/kg
barley grain, 50 g/kg local dried sardines and 10 g/kg of salt. Twenty
four 10 months-old intact Omani male lambs with average body
weight of 27.3 kg (± 0.5 kg) were used in a feeding trial for 84 days.
They were divided (on body weight basis) and allocated to four diet
combination groups. These were: Rhodes grass hay (RGH) plus a
general ruminant concentrate (GRC); RGH plus raw Meskit pods
(RMP) based concentrate; RGH plus roasted Meskit pods (ROMP)
based concentrate; RGH plus soaked Meskit pods (SMP) based
concentrate Daily feed intakes and bi-weekly body weights were
recorded. MPBD had higher contents of crude protein (CP), acid
detergent fibre (ADF) and neutral detergent fibre (NDF) than the
GRC. Animals fed various types of MPBD did not show signs of ill
health. There was a significant effect of feeding ROMP on the
performance of Omani sheep compared to RMP and SMP. The
ROMP fed animals had similar performance to those fed the GRC in
terms of feed intake, body weight gain and feed conversion ratio
(FCR).This study indicated that roasted Meskit pods based diet may
be used instead of the commercial concentrate for feeding Omani
sheep without adverse effects on performance. It offers a cheap
alternative source of protein and energy for feeding Omani sheep.
Also, it might help in solving the spread impact of Meskit trees,
maintain the ecosystem and helping in preserving the local tree
species.
Abstract: Qatar, a Gulf country highly dependent on its oil and
gas revenues – is looking to innovate, diversify, and ultimately reach
its aim of creating a knowledge economy to prepare for its post-oil
era. One area that the country is investing in is Contemporary Art,
and world renowned artists such as Damien Hirst and Richard Serra –
have been commissioned to design site-specific art for the public
spaces of the city of Doha as well as in more remote desert locations.
This research discusses the changing presence, role and context of
public art in Doha, both from a historical and cultural overview, and
the different forms and media as well as the typologies of urban and
public spaces in which the art is installed. It examines the process of
implementing site-specific artworks, looking at questions of scale,
history, social meaning and formal aesthetics. The methodologies
combine theoretical research on the understanding of public art and
its role and placement in public space, as well as empirical research
on contemporary public art projects in Doha, based on documentation
and interviews and as well as site and context analysis of the urban or
architectural spaces within which the art is situated. Surveys and
interviews – using social media - in different segments of the
contemporary Qatari society, including all nationalities and social
groups, are used to measure and qualify the impacts and effects on
the population.
Abstract: In this investigation, we have evaluated the effects of
arsenic trioxide on hepatic function in pregnant and lactating Swiss
albino mice and their suckling pups. Experiments were carried out on
female mice given 175 ppm As2O3 in their drinking water from the
14th day of pregnancy until day 14 after delivery. Our results showed
a significant decrease in plasma levels of total protein and albumin,
cholesterol and triglyceride in As2O3 treated mice and their pups. The
hyperbilirubinemia and the increased plasma total alkaline
phosphatase activity suggested the presence of cholestasis.
Transaminase activities as well as lactate deshydrogenase activity in
plasma, known as biomarkers of hepatocellular injury, were elevated
indicating hepatic cells’ damage after treatment with As2O3.
Exposure to arsenic led to an increase of liver thiobarbituric acid
reactive substances level along with a concomitant decrease in the
activities of superoxide dismutase, catalase and glutathione
peroxidase and in glutathione.
Abstract: Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has been widely
used as a non-invasive method to measure brain activity, but it is
corrupted by baseline drift noise. Here we present a method to measure
regional cerebral blood flow as a derivative of NIRS output. We
investigate whether, when listening to languages, blood flow can
reasonably localize and represent regional brain activity or not. The
prefrontal blood flow distribution pattern when advanced
second-language listeners listened to a second language (L2) was most
similar to that when listening to their first language (L1) among the
patterns of mean and standard deviation. In experiments with 25
healthy subjects, the maximum blood flow was localized to the left
BA46 of advanced listeners. The blood flow presented is robust to
baseline drift and stably localizes regional brain activity.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to perform experimental
modal analysis (EMA) of reinforced concrete (RC) square slabs.
EMA is the process of determining the modal parameters (Natural
Frequencies, damping factors, modal vectors) of a structure from a
set of frequency response functions FRFs (curve fitting). Although,
experimental modal analysis (or modal testing) has grown steadily in
popularity since the advent of the digital FFT spectrum analyzer in
the early 1970’s, studying all types of members and materials using
such method have not yet been well documented. Therefore, in this
work, experimental tests were conducted on RC square slab
specimens of dimensions 600mm x 600mmx 40mm. Experimental
analysis was based on freely supported boundary condition.
Moreover, impact testing as a fast and economical means of finding
the modes of vibration of a structure was used during the
experiments. In addition, Pico Scope 6 device and MATLAB
software were used to acquire data, analyze and plot Frequency
Response Function (FRF). The experimental natural frequencies
which were extracted from measurements exhibit good agreement
with analytical predictions. It is showed that EMA method can be
usefully employed to investigate the dynamic behavior of RC slabs.
Abstract: Cell volume, together with membrane potential and
intracellular hydrogen ion concentration, is an essential biophysical
parameter for normal cellular activity. Cell volumes can be altered by
osmotically active compounds and extracellular tonicity.
In this study, a simple mathematical model of osmotically induced
cell swelling and shrinking is presented. Emphasis is given to water
diffusion across the membrane. The mathematical description of the
cellular behavior consists in a system of coupled ordinary differential
equations. We compare experimental data of cell volume alterations
driven by differences in osmotic pressure with mathematical
simulations under hypotonic and hypertonic conditions. Implications
for a future model are also discussed.
Abstract: To achieve reliable welds with minimum distortion for
the fabrication of components in aerospace industry laser beam
welding is attempted. Laser welding can provide a significant benefit
for the welding of Titanium and Aluminium thin sheet alloys of its
precision and rapid processing capability. For laser welding, pulse
shape, energy, duration, repetition rate and peak power are the most
important parameters that influence directly the quality of welds. In
this experimental work for joining 1mm thick TI6AL4V and AA2024
alloy and JK600 Nd:YAG pulsed laser units used. The distortions at
different welding power and speed of titanium and aluminium thin
sheet alloys are investigated. Test results reveal that increase in
welding speed increases distortion in weldment
Abstract: Social Media (SM) is websites increasingly popular
and built to allow people to express themselves and to interact
socially with others. Most SMT are dominated by youth particularly
College students. The proliferation of popular social media tools,
which can accessed from any communication devices has become
pervasive in the lives of today’s student life. Connecting traditional
education to social media tools are a relatively new era and any
collaborative tool could be used for learning activities. This study
focuses (i) how the social media tools are useful for the learning
activities of the students of faculty of medicine in King Khalid
University (ii) whether the social media affects the collaborative
learning with interaction among students, among course instructor,
their engagement, perceived ease of use and perceived ease of
usefulness (TAM) (iii) overall, the students satisfy with this
collaborative learning through Social media.
Abstract: Although, arsenic trioxide has been the subject of
toxicological research, in vitro cytotoxicity and genotoxicity studies
using relevant cell models and uniform methodology are not well
elucidated. Hence, the aim of the present study was to evaluate the
cytotoxicity and genotoxicity induced by arsenic trioxide in human
keratinocytes (HaCaT) using the MTT [3-(4, 5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-
2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide] and alkaline single cell gel
electrophoresis (Comet) assays, respectively. Human keratinocytes
were treated with different doses of arsenic trioxide for 4 h prior to
cytogenetic assessment. Data obtained from the MTT assay indicated
that arsenic trioxide significantly reduced the viability of HaCaT cells
in a dose-dependent manner, showing an IC50 value of 34.18 ± 0.6
μM. Data generated from the comet assay also indicated a significant
dose-dependent increase in DNA damage in HaCaT cells associated
with arsenic trioxide exposure. We observed a significant increase in
comet tail length and tail moment, showing an evidence of arsenic
trioxide -induced genotoxic damage in HaCaT cells. This study
confirms that the comet assay is a sensitive and effective method to
detect DNA damage caused by arsenic.
Abstract: Generally the natural environment is made up of air,
water and soil. The release of emission of industrial waste into
anyone of the components of the environment causes pollution.
Industrial pollution significantly threatens the inherent right of
people, to the enjoyment of a safe and secure environment. The aim
of this paper is to assess the effect of environmental pollution and
health risks of residents living near Ewekoro cement factory. The
research made use of IKONOS imagery for Geographical
Information System (GIS) to buffer and extract buildings that are less
than 1km to the factory, within 1km to 5km and above 5km to the
factory. Also questionnaire was used to elicit information on the
socio-economic factors, effect of environmental pollution on
residents and measures adopted to control industrial pollution on the
residents. Findings show that most buildings that fall between less
than 1km and 1km to 5km to the factory have high health risk in the
study area. The study recommended total relocation for the residents
of the study area to reduce health risk problems.
Abstract: This paper presents small signal stability study carried
over the 140-Bus, 31-Machine, 5-Area MEPE system and validated
on free and open source software: PSAT. Well-established linearalgebra
analysis, eigenvalue analysis, is employed to determine the
small signal dynamic behavior of test system. The aspects of local
and interarea oscillations which may affect the operation and
behavior of power system are analyzed. Eigenvalue analysis is carried
out to investigate the small signal behavior of test system and the
participation factors have been determined to identify the
participation of the states in the variation of different mode shapes.
Also, the variations in oscillatory modes are presented to observe the
damping performance of the test system.
Abstract: Random epistemologies and hash tables have garnered
minimal interest from both security experts and experts in the last
several years. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with
the evaluation of expert systems. In our research, we discover how
flip-flop gates can be applied to the study of superpages. Though
such a hypothesis at first glance seems perverse, it is derived from
known results.
Abstract: For the treatment of acute and chronic lung diseases it is preferred to deliver medicaments by inhalation. The drug is delivered directly to tracheobronchial tree. This way allows the given medicament to get directly into the place of action and it makes rapid onset of action and maximum efficiency. The transport of aerosol particles in the particular part of the lung is influenced by their size, anatomy of the lungs, breathing pattern and airway resistance. This article deals with calculation of airway resistance in the lung model of Horsfield. It solves the problem of determination of the pressure losses in bifurcation and thus defines the pressure drop at a given location in the bronchial tree. The obtained data will be used as boundary conditions for transport of aerosol particles in a central part of bronchial tree realized by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach. The results obtained from CFD simulation will allow us to provide information on the required particle size and optimal inhalation technique for particle transport into particular part of the lung.
Abstract: Speech Segmentation is the measure of the change
point detection for partitioning an input speech signal into regions
each of which accords to only one speaker. In this paper, we apply
two features based on multi-scale product (MP) of the clean speech,
namely the spectral centroid of MP, and the zero crossings rate of
MP. We focus on multi-scale product analysis as an important tool
for segmentation extraction. The MP is based on making the product
of the speech wavelet transform coefficients (WTC). We have
estimated our method on the Keele database. The results show the
effectiveness of our method. It indicates that the two features can find
word boundaries, and extracted the segments of the clean speech.
Abstract: Arising problems of countries’ public finances, social
and demographic changes motivate scientific and policy debates on
public spending size, structure and efficiency in order to meet the
changing needs of society and business. The concept of sustainable
development poses new challenges for scientists and policy-makers
in the field of public finance. This paper focuses on the investigation
of the relationship between government expenditure and country’s
economic development in the context of sustainable development.
Empirical analysis focuses on the data of the European Union (except
Croatia and Luxemburg) countries. The study covers 2003 – 2012
years, using annual cross-sectional data. Summarizing the research
results, it can be stated that governments should pay more attention to
the needs that ensure sustainable development in the long-run when
formulating public expenditure policy, particularly in the field of
environment protection.
Abstract: Recently, universities are increasingly consuming
energy to support various activities. A large population of staff and
students in Malaysian universities has led to excessive energy
consumption which directly gives an impact to the environment. The
key question then ascended “How well is an energy management
(EM) been practiced in universities without taking the Critical
Success Factors (CSFs) into consideration to ensure the management
of university achieves the goals in reducing energy consumption.
Review on past literature is carried out to establish CSFs for EM best
practices. Thus, this paper highlighted the CSFs which have to be
focused on by management of university to successfully measure the
EM implementation and its performance. At the end of this paper, a
theoretical framework is developed for EM success factors towards
sustainable university.
Abstract: An experiment was conducted to determine the effect
of pollination on seed quality of rapeseed in Chitwan, Nepal during
2012-2013. The experiment was designed in Randomized Complete
Block with four replications and five treatments. The rapeseed plots
were caged with mosquito nets at 10% flowering except natural
pollination. Two-framed colonies of Apis mellifera L. and Apis
cerana F. were introduced separately for pollination, and control plot
caged without pollinators. The highest germination percent was
observed on Apis cerana F. pollinated plot seeds (90.50%
germination) followed by Apis mellifera L. pollinated plots (87.25 %)
and lowest on control plots (42.00% germination) seeds. Similarly,
seed test weight of Apis cerana F. pollinated plots (3.22 gm/ 1000
seed) and Apis mellifera L. pollinated plots (2.93 gm/1000 seed) were
and lowest on control plots (2.26 gm/ 1000 seed) recorded. Likewise,
oil content was recorded highest on pollinated by Apis cerana F.
(36.1%) followed by pollinated by Apis mellifera L. (35.4%) and
lowest on control plots (32.8%). This study clearly indicated
pollination increases the seed quality of rapeseed and therefore,
management of honeybee is necessary for producing higher quality of
rapeseed under Chitwan condition.
Abstract: The legends about “user-friendly” and “easy-to-use”
birotical tools (computer-related office tools) have been spreading
and misleading end-users. This approach has led us to the extremely
high number of incorrect documents, causing serious financial losses
in the creating, modifying, and retrieving processes. Our research
proved that there are at least two sources of this underachievement:
(1) The lack of the definition of the correctly edited, formatted
documents. Consequently, end-users do not know whether their
methods and results are correct or not. They are not aware of their
ignorance. They are so ignorant that their ignorance does not allow
them to realize their lack of knowledge. (2) The end-users’ problem
solving methods. We have found that in non-traditional programming
environments end-users apply, almost exclusively, surface approach
metacognitive methods to carry out their computer related activities,
which are proved less effective than deep approach methods.
Based on these findings we have developed deep approach
methods which are based on and adapted from traditional
programming languages. In this study, we focus on the most popular
type of birotical documents, the text based documents. We have
provided the definition of the correctly edited text, and based on this
definition, adapted the debugging method known in programming.
According to the method, before the realization of text editing, a
thorough debugging of already existing texts and the categorization
of errors are carried out. With this method in advance to real text
editing users learn the requirements of text based documents and also
of the correctly formatted text.
The method has been proved much more effective than the
previously applied surface approach methods. The advantages of the
method are that the real text handling requires much less human and
computer sources than clicking aimlessly in the GUI (Graphical User
Interface), and the data retrieval is much more effective than from
error-prone documents.
Abstract: Diffusion stills have been effective in water
desalination. The present work represents a model of the distillation
process by using vertical single-effect diffusion stills. A semianalytical
model has been developed to model the process. A
software computer code using Engineering Equation Solver EES
software has been developed to solve the equations of the developed
model. An experimental setup has been constructed, and used for the
validation of the model. The model is also validated against former
literature results. The results obtained from the present experimental
test rig, and the data from the literature, have been compared with the
results of the code to find its best range of validity. In addition, a
parametric analysis of the system has been developed using the
model to determine the effect of operating conditions on the system's
performance. The dominant parameters that affect the productivity of
the still are the hot plate temperature that ranges from (55- 90°C) and
feed flow rate in range of (0.00694-0.0211 kg/m2-s).
Abstract: PLA emerged as a promising polymer because of its
property as a compostable, biodegradable thermoplastic made from
renewable sources. PLA can be polymerized from monomers
(Lactide or Lactic acid) obtained by fermentation processes from
renewable sources such as corn starch or sugarcane. For PLA
synthesis, ring opening polymerization (ROP) of Lactide monomer is
one of the preferred methods. In the literature, the technique mainly
developed for ROP of PLA is based on metal/bimetallic catalyst (Sn,
Zn and Al) or other organic catalysts in suitable solvent. However,
the PLA synthesized using such catalysts may contain trace elements
of the catalyst which may cause toxicity. This work estimated the
usefulness and drawbacks of using different catalysts as well as effect
of alternative energies and future aspects for PLA production.