Abstract: Web services provide significant new benefits for SOAbased
applications, but they also expose significant new security
risks. There are huge number of WS security standards and
processes. At present, there is still a lack of a comprehensive
approach which offers a methodical development in the construction
of secure WS-based SOA. Thus, the main objective of this paper is
to address this needs, presenting a comprehensive method for Web
Services Security guaranty in SOA. The proposed method defines
three stages, Initial Security Analysis, Architectural Security
Guaranty and WS Security Standards Identification. These facilitate,
respectively, the definition and analysis of WS-specific security
requirements, the development of a WS-based security architecture
and the identification of the related WS security standards that the
security architecture must articulate in order to implement the
security services.
Abstract: Lately there has been a significant boost of interest in
music digital libraries, which constitute an attractive area of research
and development due to their inherent interesting issues and
challenging technical problems, solutions to which will be highly
appreciated by enthusiastic end-users. We present here a DL that we
have developed to support users in their quest for classical music
pieces within a particular collection of 18,000+ audio recordings.
To cope with the early DL model limitations, we have used a refined
socio-semantic and contextual model that allows rich bibliographic
content description, along with semantic annotations, reviewing,
rating, knowledge sharing etc. The multi-layered service model
allows incorporation of local and distributed information,
construction of rich hypermedia documents, expressing the complex
relationships between various objects and multi-dimensional spaces,
agents, actors, services, communities, scenarios etc., and facilitates
collaborative activities to offer to individual users the needed
collections and services.
Abstract: Religion revival including Islam in Kazakhstan represents reaction, first of all on internal social and political change, events after disintegration of the USSR. Process of revival of Kazakhstan Islam was accompanied as positive, so by negative tendencies. Old mosques were restored, were under construction new, Islamic schools and high schools were created, was widely studied religious the dogmatic person, the corresponding literature was published, expanded contacts with foreign Muslim brothers in the faith, the centers of the Arab-Muslim culture extended. At the same time in Kazakhstan, there are religious-political parties and movements, pursuing radical goals down to change the spiritual and cultural identity of Muslims of Kazakhstan by the forcible introduction of non-traditional religious and political, ethnic and cultural values.
Abstract: This work presents a low-cost and eco-friendly
building material named Agrostone panel. Africa-s urban population
is growing at an annual rate of 2.8% and 62% of its population will
live in urban areas by 2050. As a consequence, many of the least
urbanized and least developed African countries- will face serious
challenges in providing affordable housing to the urban dwellers.
Since the cost of building materials accounts for the largest
proportion of the overall construction cost, innovating low-cost
building material is vital. Agrostone panel is used in housing projects
in Ethiopia. It uses raw materials of agricultural/industrial wastes
and/or natural minerals as a filler, magnesium-based chemicals as a
binder and fiberglass as reinforcement. Agrostone panel reduces the
cost of wall construction by 50% compared with the conventional
building materials. The pros and cons of Agrostone panel as well as
the use of other waste materials as a raw material to make the panel
more sustainable, low-cost and better properties are discussed.
Abstract: We review a knowledge extractor model in
constructing 3G Killer Applications. The success of 3G is essential
for Government as it became part of Telecommunications National
Strategy. The 3G wireless technologies may reach larger area and
increase country-s ICT penetration. In order to understand future
customers needs, the operators require proper information
(knowledge) lying inside. Our work approached future customers as
complex system where the complex knowledge may expose regular
behavior. The hidden information from 3G future customers is
revealed by using fractal-based questionnaires. Afterward, further
statistical analysis is used to match the results with operator-s
strategic plan. The developments of 3G applications also consider its
saturation time and further improvement of the application.
Abstract: This is a cross-cultural study that determines South
African multinational enterprises (MNEs) entry strategies as they
invest in Africa. An integrated theoretical framework comprising the
transaction cost theory, Uppsala model, eclectic paradigm and the
distance framework was adopted. A sample of 40 South African
MNEs with 415 existing FDI entries in Africa was drawn. Using an
ordered logistic regression model, the impact of culture on the choice
of degree of control by South African MNEs in Africa was
determined. Cultural distance was one of significant factors that
influenced South African MNEs- choice of degree of control.
Furthermore, South African MNEs are risk averse in all countries in
Africa but minimize the risks differently across sectors. Service
sectors chooses to own their subsidiaries 100% and avoid dealing
with the locals while manufacturing, resources and construction
choose to have a local partner to share the risk.
Abstract: Self-compacting concrete (SCC), a new kind of high
performance concrete (HPC) have been first developed in Japan in
1986. The development of SCC has made casting of dense
reinforcement and mass concrete convenient, has minimized noise.
Fresh self-compacting concrete (SCC) flows into formwork and
around obstructions under its own weight to fill it completely and
self-compact (without any need for vibration), without any
segregation and blocking. The elimination of the need for
compaction leads to better quality concrete and substantial
improvement of working conditions. SCC mixes generally have a
much higher content of fine fillers, including cement, and produce
excessively high compressive strength concrete, which restricts its
field of application to special concrete only. To use SCC mixes in
general concrete construction practice, requires low cost materials to
make inexpensive concrete.
Rice husk ash (RHA) has been used as a highly reactive
pozzolanic material to improve the microstructure of the interfacial
transition zone (ITZ) between the cement paste and the aggregate in
self compacting concrete. Mechanical experiments of RHA blended
Portland cement concretes revealed that in addition to the pozzolanic
reactivity of RHA (chemical aspect), the particle grading (physical
aspect) of cement and RHA mixtures also exerted significant
influences on the blending efficiency.
The scope of this research was to determine the usefulness of Rice
husk ash (RHA) in the development of economical self compacting
concrete (SCC). The cost of materials will be decreased by reducing
the cement content by using waste material like rice husk ash instead
of.
This paper presents a study on the development of Mechanical
properties up to 180 days of self compacting and ordinary concretes
with rice-husk ash (RHA), from a rice paddy milling industry in
Rasht (Iran). Two different replacement percentages of cement by
RHA, 10%, and 20%, and two different water/cementicious material
ratios (0.40 and 0.35), were used for both of self compacting and
normal concrete specimens. The results are compared with those of
the self compacting concrete without RHA, with compressive,
flexural strength and modulus of elasticity. It is concluded that RHA
provides a positive effect on the Mechanical properties at age after
60 days.
Base of the result self compacting concrete specimens have higher
value than normal concrete specimens in all test except modulus of
elasticity. Also specimens with 20% replacement of cement by RHA
have the best performance.
Abstract: Recently, as the scale of construction projects has
increases, more ground excavation for foundations is carried out than ever before. Consequently, damage to underground ducts (gas, water/sewage or oil pipelines, communication cables or power cable ducts) or superannuated pipelines frequently cause serious accidents
resulting in damage to life and property. (In Korea, the total length of city water pipelines was approximately 2,000 km as of the end of 2009.) In addition, large amounts of damage caused by fractures, water
and gas leakage caused by superannuation or damage to underground
ducts in construction has been reported. Therefore, a system is required to precisely detect defects and deterioration in underground
pipelines and the locations of such defects, for timely and accurate
maintenance or replacement of the ducts. In this study, a system was
developed which can locate underground structures (gas and water
pipelines, power cable ducts, etc.) in 3D-coordinates and monitor the
degree and position of defects using an Inertial Measurement Unit
(IMU) sensing technique. The system can prevent damage to underground ducts and superannuated pipelines during construction,
and provide reliable data for maintenance. The utility of the IMU sensing technique used in aircraft and ships in civil applications was
verified.
Abstract: The quality of Ribbed Smoked Sheets
(RSS) primarily based on color, dryness, and the presence or
absence of fungus and bubbles. This quality is strongly
influenced by the drying and fumigation process namely
smoking process. Smoking that is held in high temperature
long time will result scorched dark brown sheets, whereas if
the temperature is too low or slow drying rate would resulted
in less mature sheets and growth of fungus. Therefore need to
find the time and temperature for optimum quality of sheets.
Enhance, unmonitored heat and mass transfer during smoking
process lead to high losses of energy balance. This research
aims to generate simple empirical mathematical model
describing the effect of smoking time and temperature to RSS
quality of color, water content, fungus and bubbles. The
second goal of study was to analyze energy balance during
smoking process. Experimental study was conducted by
measuring temperature, residence time and quality parameters
of 16 sheets sample in smoking rooms. Data for energy
consumption balance such as mass of fuel wood, mass of
sheets being smoked, construction temperature, ambient
temperature and relative humidity were taken directly along
the smoking process. It was found that mathematical model
correlating smoking temperature and time with color is Color
= -169 - 0.184 T4 - 0.193 T3 - 0.160 0.405 T1 + T2 + 0.388 t1
+3.11 t2 + 3.92t3 + 0.215 t4 with R square 50.8% and with
moisture is Moisture = -1.40-0.00123 T4 + 0.00032 T3 +
0.00260 T2 - 0.00292 T1 - 0.0105 t1 + 0.0290 t2 + 0.0452 t3
+ 0.00061 t4 with R square of 49.9%. Smoking room energy
analysis found useful energy was 27.8%. The energy stored in
the material construction 7.3%. Lost of energy in conversion
of wood combustion, ventilation and others were 16.6%. The
energy flowed out through the contact of material construction
with the ambient air was found to be the highest contribution
to energy losses, it reached 48.3%.
Abstract: Construction projects generally take place in
uncontrolled and dynamic environments where construction waste is
a serious environmental problem in many large cities. The total
amount of waste and carbon dioxide emissions from transportation
vehicles are still out of control due to increasing construction
projects, massive urban development projects and the lack of
effective tools for minimizing adverse environmental impacts in
construction. This research is about utilization of the integrated
applications of automated advanced tracking and data storage
technologies in the area of environmental management to monitor
and control adverse environmental impacts such as construction
waste and carbon dioxide emissions. Radio Frequency Identification
(RFID) integrated with the Global Position System (GPS) provides
an opportunity to uniquely identify materials, components, and
equipments and to locate and track them using minimal or no worker
input. The transmission of data to the central database will be carried
out with the help of Global System for Mobile Communications
(GSM).
Abstract: Sandwich panels are widely used in the construction
industry for their ease of assembly, light weight and efficient thermal
performance. They are composed of two RC thin outer layers
separated by an insulating inner layer. In this research the inner
insulating layer is made of lightweight Autoclaved Aerated Concrete
(AAC) blocks which has good thermal insulation properties and yet
possess reasonable mechanical strength. The shear strength of the
AAC infill is relied upon to replace the traditionally used insulating
foam and to provide the shear capacity of the panel. A
comprehensive experimental program was conducted on full scale
sandwich panels subjected to bending. In this paper, detailed
numerical modeling of the tested sandwich panels is reported. Nonlinear
3-D finite element modeling of the composite action of the
sandwich panel is developed using ANSYS. Solid elements with
different crashing and cracking capabilities and different constitutive
laws were selected for the concrete and the AAC. Contact interface
elements are used in this research to adequately model the shear
transfer at the interface between the different layers. The numerical
results showed good correlation with the experimental ones
indicating the adequacy of the model in estimating the loading
capacity of panels.
Abstract: A hardware efficient, multi mode, re-configurable
architecture of interleaver/de-interleaver for multiple standards,
like DVB, WiMAX and WLAN is presented. The interleavers
consume a large part of silicon area when implemented by using
conventional methods as they use memories to store permutation
patterns. In addition, different types of interleavers in different
standards cannot share the hardware due to different construction
methodologies. The novelty of the work presented in this paper is
threefold: 1) Mapping of vital types of interleavers including
convolutional interleaver onto a single architecture with flexibility
to change interleaver size; 2) Hardware complexity for channel
interleaving in WiMAX is reduced by using 2-D realization of the
interleaver functions; and 3) Silicon cost overheads reduced by
avoiding the use of small memories. The proposed architecture
consumes 0.18mm2 silicon area for 0.12μm process and can
operate at a frequency of 140 MHz. The reduced complexity helps
in minimizing the memory utilization, and at the same time
provides strong support to on-the-fly computation of permutation
patterns.
Abstract: This work explores blind image deconvolution by recursive function approximation based on supervised learning of neural networks, under the assumption that a degraded image is linear convolution of an original source image through a linear shift-invariant (LSI) blurring matrix. Supervised learning of neural networks of radial basis functions (RBF) is employed to construct an embedded recursive function within a blurring image, try to extract non-deterministic component of an original source image, and use them to estimate hyper parameters of a linear image degradation model. Based on the estimated blurring matrix, reconstruction of an original source image from a blurred image is further resolved by an annealed Hopfield neural network. By numerical simulations, the proposed novel method is shown effective for faithful estimation of an unknown blurring matrix and restoration of an original source image.
Abstract: Fluids are used for heat transfer in many engineering
equipments. Water, ethylene glycol and propylene glycol are some
of the common heat transfer fluids. Over the years, in an attempt to
reduce the size of the equipment and/or efficiency of the process,
various techniques have been employed to improve the heat transfer
rate of these fluids. Surface modification, use of inserts and
increased fluid velocity are some examples of heat transfer
enhancement techniques. Addition of milli or micro sized particles
to the heat transfer fluid is another way of improving heat transfer
rate. Though this looks simple, this method has practical problems
such as high pressure loss, clogging and erosion of the material of
construction. These problems can be overcome by using nanofluids,
which is a dispersion of nanosized particles in a base fluid.
Nanoparticles increase the thermal conductivity of the base fluid
manifold which in turn increases the heat transfer rate. In this work,
the heat transfer enhancement using aluminium oxide nanofluid has
been studied by computational fluid dynamic modeling of the
nanofluid flow adopting the single phase approach.
Abstract: Timetabling problems are often hard and timeconsuming
to solve. Most of the methods of solving them concern
only one problem instance or class. This paper describes a universal
method for solving large, highly constrained timetabling problems
from different domains. The solution is based on evolutionary
algorithm-s framework and operates on two levels – first-level
evolutionary algorithm tries to find a solution basing on given set of
operating parameters, second-level algorithm is used to establish
those parameters. Tabu search is employed to speed up the solution
finding process on first level. The method has been used to solve
three different timetabling problems with promising results.
Abstract: Light is one of the most important qualitative and
symbolic factors and has a special position in architecture and urban
development in regard to practical function. The main function of
light, either natural or artificial, is lighting up the environment and
the constructional forms which is called lighting. However, light is
used to redefine the urban spaces by architectural genius with regard
to three aesthetic, conceptual and symbolic factors. In architecture
and urban development, light has a function beyond lighting up the
environment, and the designers consider it as one of the basic
components. The present research aims at studying the function of
light and color in architectural view and their effects in buildings.
Abstract: In 2002 an amendment to SOLAS opened for
lightweight material constructions in vessels if the same fire safety as
in steel constructions could be obtained. FISPAT (FIreSPread
Analysis Tool) is a computer application that simulates fire spread
and fault injection in cruise vessels and identifies fire sensitive areas.
It was developed to analyze cruise vessel designs and provides a
method to evaluate network layout and safety of cruise vessels. It
allows fast, reliable and deterministic exhaustive simulations and
presents the result in a graphical vessel model. By performing the
analysis iteratively while altering the cruise vessel design it can be
used along with fire chamber experiments to show that the
lightweight design can be as safe as a steel construction and that
SOLAS regulations are fulfilled.
Abstract: Explosions may cause intensive damage to buildings
and sometimes lead to total and progressive destruction. Pressures
induced by explosions are one of the most destructive loads a
structure may experience. While designing structures for great
explosions may be expensive and impractical, engineers are looking
for methods for preventing destructions resulted from explosions. A
favorable structural system is a system which does not disrupt totally
due to local explosion, since such structures sustain less loss in
comparison with structural ones which really bear the load and
suddenly disrupt. Designing and establishing vital and necessary
installations in a way that it is resistant against direct hit of bomb and
rocket is not practical, economical, or expedient in many cases,
because the cost of construction and installation with such
specifications is several times more than the total cost of the related
equipment.
Abstract: Addition of milli or micro sized particles to the heat
transfer fluid is one of the many techniques employed for improving
heat transfer rate. Though this looks simple, this method has
practical problems such as high pressure loss, clogging and erosion
of the material of construction. These problems can be overcome by
using nanofluids, which is a dispersion of nanosized particles in a
base fluid. Nanoparticles increase the thermal conductivity of the
base fluid manifold which in turn increases the heat transfer rate.
Nanoparticles also increase the viscosity of the basefluid resulting in
higher pressure drop for the nanofluid compared to the base fluid. So
it is imperative that the Reynolds number (Re) and the volume
fraction have to be optimum for better thermal hydraulic
effectiveness. In this work, the heat transfer enhancement using
aluminium oxide nanofluid using low and high volume fraction
nanofluids in turbulent pipe flow with constant wall temperature has
been studied by computational fluid dynamic modeling of the
nanofluid flow adopting the single phase approach. Nanofluid, up till
a volume fraction of 1% is found to be an effective heat transfer
enhancement technique. The Nusselt number (Nu) and friction factor
predictions for the low volume fractions (i.e. 0.02%, 0.1 and 0.5%)
agree very well with the experimental values of Sundar and Sharma
(2010). While, predictions for the high volume fraction nanofluids
(i.e. 1%, 4% and 6%) are found to have reasonable agreement with
both experimental and numerical results available in the literature.
So the computationally inexpensive single phase approach can be
used for heat transfer and pressure drop prediction of new nanofluids.
Abstract: This paper aims to (1) analyze the profiles of
transgressors (detected evaders); (2) examine reason(s) that triggered a
tax audit, causes of tax evasion, audit timeframe and tax penalty
charged; and (3) to assess if tax auditors followed the guidelines as
stated in the 'Tax Audit Framework' when conducting tax audits. In
2011, the Inland Revenue Board Malaysia (IRBM) had audited and
finalized 557 company cases. With official permission, data of all the
557 cases were obtained from the IRBM. Of these, a total of 421 cases
with complete information were analyzed. About 58.1% was small and
medium corporations and from the construction industry (32.8%). The
selection for tax audit was based on risk analysis (66.8%), information
from third party (11.1%), and firm with low profitability or fluctuating
profit pattern (7.8%). The three persistent causes of tax evasion by
firms were over claimed expenses (46.8%), fraudulent reporting of
income (38.5%) and overstating purchases (10.5%). These findings
are consistent with past literature. Results showed that tax auditors
took six to 18 months to close audit cases. More than half of tax
evaders were fined 45% on additional tax raised during audit for the
first offence. The study found tax auditors did follow the guidelines in
the 'Tax Audit Framework' in audit selection, settlement and penalty
imposition.