Abstract: Grasslands of Iran are encountered with a vast
desertification and destruction. Some legumes are plants of forage
importance with high palatability. Studied legumes in this project are
Onobrychis, Medicago sativa (alfalfa) and Trifolium repens. Seeds
were cultivated in research field of Kaboutarabad (33 km East of
Isfahan, Iran) with an average 80 mm. annual rainfall. Plants were
cultivated in a split plot design with 3 replicate and two water
treatments (weekly irrigation, and under stress with same amount per
15 days interval). Water entrance to each plots were measured by
Partial flow. This project lasted 20 weeks. Destructive samplings
(1m2 each time) were done weekly. At each sampling plants were
gathered and weighed separately for each vegetative parts. An Area
Meter (Vista) was used to measure root surface and leaf area. Total
shoot and root fresh and dry weight, leaf area index and soil coverage
were evaluated too. Dry weight was achieved in 750c oven after 24
hours. Statgraphic and Harvard Graphic software were used to
formulate and demonstrate the parameters curves due to time. Our
results show that Trifolium repens has affected 60 % and Medicago
sativa 18% by water stress. Onobrychis total fresh weight was
reduced 45%. Dry weight or Biomass in alfalfa is not so affected by
water shortage. This means that in alfalfa fields we can decrease the
irrigation amount and have some how same amount of Biomass.
Onobrychis show a drastic decrease in Biomass. The increases in
total dry matter due to time in studied plants are formulated. For
Trifolium repens if removal or cattle entrance to meadows do not
occurred at perfect time, it will decrease the palatability and water
content of the shoots. Water stress in a short period could develop the
root system in Trifolium repens, but if it last more than this other
ecological and soil factors will affect the growth of this plant. Low
level of soil water is not so important for studied legume forges. But
water shortage affect palatability and water content of aerial parts.
Leaf area due to time in studied legumes is formulated. In fact leaf
area is decreased by shortage in available water. Higher leaf area
means higher forage and biomass production. Medicago and
Onobrychis reach to the maximum leaf area sooner than Trifolium
and are able to produce an optimum soil cover and inhibit the
transpiration of soil water of meadows. Correlation of root surface to
Total biomass in studied plants is formulated. Medicago under water
stress show a 40% decrease in crown cover while at optimum
condition this amount reach to 100%. In order to produce forage in
areas without soil erosion Medicago is the best choice even with a
shortage in water resources. It is tried to represent the growth
simulation of three famous Forage Legumes. By growth simulation
farmers and range managers could better decide to choose best plant
adapted to water availability without designing different time and
labor consuming field experiments.
Abstract: Creative design requires new approaches to assessment
in vocational and technological education. To date, there has been little
discussion on instruments used to evaluate dies produced by students
in vocational and technological education. Developing a generic
instrument has been very difficult due to the diversity of creative
domains, the specificity of content, and the subjectivity involved in
judgment. This paper presents an instrument for measuring the
creativity in the design of products by expanding the Consensual
Assessment Technique (CAT). The content-based scale was evaluated
for content validity by 5 experts. The scale comprises 5 criteria:
originality; practicability; precision; aesthetics; and exchangeability.
Nine experts were invited to evaluate the dies produced by 38 college
students who enrolled in a Product Design and Development course.
To further explore the degree of rater agreement, inter-rater reliability
was calculated for each dimension using Kendall's coefficient of
concordance test. The inter-judge reliability scores achieved
significance, with coefficients ranging from 0.53 to 0.71.
Abstract: Biometrics, which refers to identifying an individual
based on his or her physiological or behavioral characteristics, has
the capability to reliably distinguish between an authorized person
and an imposter. Signature verification systems can be categorized as
offline (static) and online (dynamic). This paper presents a neural
network based recognition of offline handwritten signatures system
that is trained with low-resolution scanned signature images.
Abstract: Recent environmental turbulence including financial
crisis, intensified competitive forces, rapid technological change and
high market turbulence have dramatically changed the current
business climate. The managers firms have to plan and decide what
the best approaches that best fit their firms in order to pursue superior
performance. This research aims to examine the influence of strategic
reasoning and top level managers- individual characteristics on the
effectiveness of organizational improvisation and firm performance.
Given the lack of studies on these relationships in the previous
literature, there is significant contribution to the body of knowledge
as well as for managerial practices. 128 responses from top
management of technology-based companies in Malaysia were used
as a sample. Three hypotheses were examined and the findings
confirm that (a) there is no relationship between intuitive reasoning
and organizational improvisation but there is a link between rational
reasoning and organizational improvisation, (b) top level managers-
individual characteristics as a whole affect organizational
improvisation; and (c) organizational improvisation positively affects
firm performance. The theoretical and managerial implications were
discussed in the conclusions.
Abstract: The paper deals with the development of portable aerosol concentrator and its application for the determination of nitrites and nitrates. The device enables the continuous trapping of pollutants in the air. An extensive literature search has been elaborated which aims at the development of samplers and the possibilities of their application in the continuous determination of volatile organic compounds. The practical part of the paper is focused on the development of the portable aerosol concentrator. The device using the Aerosol Enrichment Unit has been experimentally verified and subsequently realized. It operates on the principle of equilibrium accumulation of pollutants from the gaseous phase using absorption liquid polydisperse aerosol. The device has been applied for monitoring nitrites and nitrates in the air. The chemiluminescence detector was used for detection; the achieved detection limit for nitrites was 28 ng/m3 and for nitrates 78 ng/m3.
Abstract: In this paper we introduce an effective ECG compression algorithm based on two dimensional multiwavelet transform. Multiwavelets offer simultaneous orthogonality, symmetry and short support, which is not possible with scalar two-channel wavelet systems. These features are known to be important in signal processing. Thus multiwavelet offers the possibility of superior performance for image processing applications. The SPIHT algorithm has achieved notable success in still image coding. We suggested applying SPIHT algorithm to 2-D multiwavelet transform of2-D arranged ECG signals. Experiments on selected records of ECG from MIT-BIH arrhythmia database revealed that the proposed algorithm is significantly more efficient in comparison with previously proposed ECG compression schemes.
Abstract: We propose a phenomenological model for the
process of polymer desorption. In so doing, we omit the usual
theoretical approach of incorporating a fictitious viscoelastic
stress term into the flux equation. As a result, we obtain a
model that captures the essence of the phenomenon of trapping
skinning, while preserving the integrity of the experimentally
verified Fickian law for diffusion. An appropriate asymptotic
analysis is carried out, and a parameter is introduced to represent
the speed of the desorption front. Numerical simulations are
performed to illustrate the desorption dynamics of the model.
Recommendations are made for future modifications of the
model, and provisions are made for the inclusion of experimentally
determined frontal speeds.
Abstract: The porous silicon (PS), formed from the anodization
of a p+ type substrate silicon, consists of a network organized in a
pseudo-column as structure of multiple side ramifications. Structural
micro-topology can be interpreted as the fraction of the interconnected
solid phase contributing to thermal transport. The
reduction of dimensions of silicon of each nanocristallite during the
oxidation induced a reduction in thermal conductivity. Integration of
thermal sensors in the Microsystems silicon requires an effective
insulation of the sensor element. Indeed, the low thermal conductivity
of PS consists in a very promising way in the fabrication of integrated
thermal Microsystems.In this work we are interesting in the
measurements of thermal conductivity (on the surface and in depth)
of PS by the micro-Raman spectroscopy. The thermal conductivity is
studied according to the parameters of anodization (initial doping and
current density. We also, determine porosity of samples by
spectroellipsometry.
Abstract: Email has become a fast and cheap means of online
communication. The main threat to email is Unsolicited Bulk Email
(UBE), commonly called spam email. The current work aims at
identification of unigrams in more than 2700 UBE that advertise
body-enhancement drugs. The identification is based on the
requirement that the unigram is neither present in dictionary, nor is a
slang term. The motives of the paper are many fold. This is an
attempt to analyze spamming behaviour and employment of wordmutation
technique. On the side-lines of the paper, we have
attempted to better understand the spam, the slang and their interplay.
The problem has been addressed by employing Tokenization
technique and Unigram BOW model. We found that the non-lexicon
words constitute nearly 66% of total number of lexis of corpus
whereas non-slang words constitute nearly 2.4% of non-lexicon
words. Further, non-lexicon non-slang unigrams composed of 2
lexicon words, form more than 71% of the total number of such
unigrams. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to
analyze usage of non-lexicon non-slang unigrams in any kind of
UBE.
Abstract: This paper proposes a stroke extraction method for use in off-line signature verification. After giving a brief overview of the current ongoing researches an algorithm is introduced for detecting and following strokes in static images of signatures. Problems like the handling of junctions and variations in line width and line intensity are discussed in detail. Results are validated by both using an existing on-line signature database and by employing image registration methods.
Abstract: In this paper, we investigated the characteristic of a
clinical dataseton the feature selection and classification
measurements which deal with missing values problem.And also
posed the appropriated techniques to achieve the aim of the activity;
in this research aims to find features that have high effect to mortality
and mortality time frame. We quantify the complexity of a clinical
dataset. According to the complexity of the dataset, we proposed the
data mining processto cope their complexity; missing values, high
dimensionality, and the prediction problem by using the methods of
missing value replacement, feature selection, and classification.The
experimental results will extend to develop the prediction model for
cardiology.
Abstract: Experimental investigation of heat transfer and
friction factor characteristics of circular tube fitted with 300 right-left helical screw inserts with 100 mm spacer of different twist ratio has
been presented for laminar and turbulent flow.. The experimental data obtained were compared with those obtained from plain tube
published data. The heat transfer coefficient enhancement for 300 RL
inserts with 100 mm spacer is quite comparable with for 300 R-L
inserts. Performance evaluation analysis has been made and found
that the performance ratio increases with increasing Reynolds number
and decreasing twist ration with the maximum for the twist ratio 2.93.
Also, the performance ratio of more than one indicates that the type
of twist inserts can be used effectively for heat transfer augmentation.
Abstract: Text categorization is the problem of classifying text
documents into a set of predefined classes. After a preprocessing
step, the documents are typically represented as large sparse vectors.
When training classifiers on large collections of documents, both the
time and memory restrictions can be quite prohibitive. This justifies
the application of feature selection methods to reduce the
dimensionality of the document-representation vector. In this paper,
we present three feature selection methods: Information Gain,
Support Vector Machine feature selection called (SVM_FS) and
Genetic Algorithm with SVM (called GA_SVM). We show that the
best results were obtained with GA_SVM method for a relatively
small dimension of the feature vector.
Abstract: This paper present lease agreement regulations in
selected European countries. The lease agreement has a long history
and now is one of the main ways to manage agricultural lands in
Europe. The analysis of individual regulations, which has been done,
indicates that this agreement is very important to build social
relations in agriculture and society. This article provides an analysis
of the legal regulations concerning the lease in France, Spain,
Switzerland, Ukraine and Italy. Article is example of study of the
legal regulations and can be used for legal changes in individual
countries.
Abstract: Knowledge sharing culture contributes to a positive
working environment. Currently, there is no platform for the Faculty
of Industrial Information Technology (FIIT), Unisel academic staff to
share knowledge among them. As it is done manually, the sharing
process is through common meeting or by any offline discussions.
There is no repository for future retrieval. However, with open
source solution the development of knowledge based application may
reduce the cost tremendously. In this paper we discuss about the
domain on which this knowledge portal is being developed and also
the deployment of open source tools such as JOOMLA, PHP
programming language and MySQL. This knowledge portal is
evidence that open source tools also reliable in developing
knowledge based portal. These recommendations will be useful to
the open source community to produce more open source products in
future.
Abstract: In this paper, an automatic system of diagnosis was
developed to detect and locate in real time the defects of the wound
rotor asynchronous machine associated to electronic converter. For
this purpose, we have treated the signals of the measured parameters
(current and speed) to use them firstly, as indicating variables of the
machine defects under study and, secondly, as inputs to the Artificial
Neuron Network (ANN) for their classification in order to detect the
defect type in progress. Once a defect is detected, the interpretation
system of information will give the type of the defect and its place of
appearance.
Abstract: In the present study the efficiency of Big Bang-Big
Crunch (BB-BC) algorithm is investigated in discrete structural
design optimization. It is shown that a standard version of the BB-BC
algorithm is sometimes unable to produce reasonable solutions to
problems from discrete structural design optimization. Two
reformulations of the algorithm, which are referred to as modified
BB-BC (MBB-BC) and exponential BB-BC (EBB-BC), are
introduced to enhance the capability of the standard algorithm in
locating good solutions for steel truss and frame type structures,
respectively. The performances of the proposed algorithms are
experimented and compared to its standard version as well as some
other algorithms over several practical design examples. In these
examples, steel structures are sized for minimum weight subject to
stress, stability and displacement limitations according to the
provisions of AISC-ASD.
Abstract: Particle damping is a technique to reduce the
structural vibrations by means of placing small metallic particles
inside a cavity that is attached to the structure at location of high
vibration amplitudes. In this paper, we have presented an analytical
model to simulate the particle damping of two dimensional transient
vibrations in structure operating under high centrifugal loads. The
simulation results show that this technique remains effective as long
as the ratio of the dynamic acceleration of the structure to the applied
centrifugal load is more than 0.1. Particle damping increases with the
increase of particle to structure mass ratio. However, unlike to the
case of particle damping in the absence of centrifugal loads where
the damping efficiency strongly depends upon the size of the cavity,
here this dependence becomes very weak. Despite the simplicity of
the model, the simulation results are considerably in good agreement
with the very scarce experimental data available in the literature for
particle damping under centrifugal loads.
Abstract: Fine-grained data replication over the Internet allows duplication of frequently accessed data objects, as opposed to entire sites, to certain locations so as to improve the performance of largescale content distribution systems. In a distributed system, agents representing their sites try to maximize their own benefit since they are driven by different goals such as to minimize their communication costs, latency, etc. In this paper, we will use game theoretical techniques and in particular auctions to identify a bidding mechanism that encapsulates the selfishness of the agents, while having a controlling hand over them. In essence, the proposed game theory based mechanism is the study of what happens when independent agents act selfishly and how to control them to maximize the overall performance. A bidding mechanism asks how one can design systems so that agents- selfish behavior results in the desired system-wide goals. Experimental results reveal that this mechanism provides excellent solution quality, while maintaining fast execution time. The comparisons are recorded against some well known techniques such as greedy, branch and bound, game theoretical auctions and genetic algorithms.
Abstract: An adaptive dynamic cerebellar model articulation
controller (DCMAC) neural network used for solving the prediction
and identification problem is proposed in this paper. The proposed
DCMAC has superior capability to the conventional cerebellar model
articulation controller (CMAC) neural network in efficient learning
mechanism, guaranteed system stability and dynamic response. The
recurrent network is embedded in the DCMAC by adding feedback
connections in the association memory space so that the DCMAC
captures the dynamic response, where the feedback units act as
memory elements. The dynamic gradient descent method is adopted to
adjust DCMAC parameters on-line. Moreover, the analytical method
based on a Lyapunov function is proposed to determine the
learning-rates of DCMAC so that the variable optimal learning-rates
are derived to achieve most rapid convergence of identifying error.
Finally, the adaptive DCMAC is applied in two computer simulations.
Simulation results show that accurate identifying response and
superior dynamic performance can be obtained because of the
powerful on-line learning capability of the proposed DCMAC.