Abstract: This study aims to identify cellular phone users- shopping motivating factors towards online shopping. 100 university students located in Klang Valley, Malaysia were involved as the respondents. They were required to complete a set of questionnaire and had to own a cellular phone in order to be selected as sample in this study. Three from five proposed hypotheses were supported: purchasing information, shopping utilities and service quality. As a result, marketers and retailers should concentrate more on the less important factors in order to encourage and create willingness of the consumers to purchase online. Recommendation for future research is also presented.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel method for inferring the
odor based on neural activities observed from rats- main olfactory
bulbs. Multi-channel extra-cellular single unit recordings were done
by micro-wire electrodes (tungsten, 50μm, 32 channels) implanted in
the mitral/tufted cell layers of the main olfactory bulb of anesthetized
rats to obtain neural responses to various odors. Neural response
as a key feature was measured by substraction of neural firing rate
before stimulus from after. For odor inference, we have developed a
decoding method based on the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation.
The results have shown that the average decoding accuracy is about
100.0%, 96.0%, 84.0%, and 100.0% with four rats, respectively. This
work has profound implications for a novel brain-machine interface
system for odor inference.
Abstract: The genus Fumaria L. (Papaveraceae) in Iran
comprises 8 species with a vast medicinal use in Asian folk
medicine. These herbs are considered to be useful in the
treatment of gastrointestinal disease and skin disorders.
Antioxidant activities of alkaloids and phenolic extracts of
these species had been studied previously. These species are:
F. officinalis, F. parviflora, F. asepala, F. densiflora, F.
schleicheri, F. vaillantii and F. indica. More than 50
populations of Fumaria species were sampled from nature. In
this study different fatty acids are extracted. Their picks were
recorded by GC technique. This species contain some kind of
fatty acids with antioxidant effects. A part of these lipids are
phospholipids. As these are unsaturated fatty acids they may
have industrial use as natural additive to cosmetics, dermal
and oral medicines. The presences of different materials are
discussed. Our studies for antioxidant effects of these
substances are continued.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to test the “work values"
inventory developed by Tevruz and Turgut and to utilize the concept
in a model, which aims to create a greater understanding of the work
experience. In the study multiple effects of work values, work-value
congruence and work centrality on organizational citizenship
behavior are examined. In this respect, it is hypothesized that work
values and work-value congruence predict organizational citizenship
behavior through work centrality. Work-goal congruence test, Tevruz
and Turgut-s work values inventory are administered along with
Kanungo-s work centrality and Podsakoff et al.-s [47] organizational
citizenship behavior test to employees working in Turkish SME-s.
The study validated that Tevruz and Turgut-s work values inventory
and the work-value congruence test were reliable and could be used
for future research. The study revealed the mediating role of work
centrality only for the relationship of work values and the
responsibility dimension of citizenship behavior. Most important, this
study brought in an important concept, work-value congruence,
which enables a better understanding of work values and their
relation to various attitudinal variables.
Abstract: The proliferation of web application and the pervasiveness of mobile technology make web-based attacks even more attractive and even easier to launch. Web Application Firewall (WAF) is an intermediate tool between web server and users that provides comprehensive protection for web application. WAF is a negative security model where the detection and prevention mechanisms are based on predefined or user-defined attack signatures and patterns. However, WAF alone is not adequate to offer best defensive system against web vulnerabilities that are increasing in number and complexity daily. This paper presents a methodology to automatically design a positive security based model which identifies and allows only legitimate web queries. The paper shows a true positive rate of more than 90% can be achieved.
Abstract: In this paper, three types of defected ground structure
(DGS) units which are triangular-head (TH), rectangular-head (RH)
and U-shape (US) are investigated. They are further used to low-pass
and band-pass filters designs (LPF and BPF) and the obtained
performances are examined. The LPF employing RH-DGS geometry
presents the advantages of compact size, low-insertion loss and wide
stopband compared to the other filters. It provides cutoff frequency of
2.5 GHz, largest rejection band width of 20 dB from 2.98 to 8.76
GHz, smallest transition region and smallest sharpness of the cutoff
frequency. The BPF based on RH-DGS has the highest bandwidth
(BW) of about 0.74 GHz and the lowest center frequency of 3.24
GHz, whereas the other BPFs have BWs less than 0.7 GHz.
Abstract: System development life cycle (SDLC) is a
process uses during the development of any system. SDLC
consists of four main phases: analysis, design, implement and
testing. During analysis phase, context diagram and data flow
diagrams are used to produce the process model of a system.
A consistency of the context diagram to lower-level data flow
diagrams is very important in smoothing up developing
process of a system. However, manual consistency check from
context diagram to lower-level data flow diagrams by using a
checklist is time-consuming process. At the same time, the
limitation of human ability to validate the errors is one of the
factors that influence the correctness and balancing of the
diagrams. This paper presents a tool that automates the
consistency check between Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs)
based on the rules of DFDs. The tool serves two purposes: as
an editor to draw the diagrams and as a checker to check the
correctness of the diagrams drawn. The consistency check
from context diagram to lower-level data flow diagrams is
embedded inside the tool to overcome the manual checking
problem.
Abstract: Image compression plays a vital role in today-s
communication. The limitation in allocated bandwidth leads to
slower communication. To exchange the rate of transmission in the
limited bandwidth the Image data must be compressed before
transmission. Basically there are two types of compressions, 1)
LOSSY compression and 2) LOSSLESS compression. Lossy
compression though gives more compression compared to lossless
compression; the accuracy in retrievation is less in case of lossy
compression as compared to lossless compression. JPEG, JPEG2000
image compression system follows huffman coding for image
compression. JPEG 2000 coding system use wavelet transform,
which decompose the image into different levels, where the
coefficient in each sub band are uncorrelated from coefficient of
other sub bands. Embedded Zero tree wavelet (EZW) coding exploits
the multi-resolution properties of the wavelet transform to give a
computationally simple algorithm with better performance compared
to existing wavelet transforms. For further improvement of
compression applications other coding methods were recently been
suggested. An ANN base approach is one such method. Artificial
Neural Network has been applied to many problems in image
processing and has demonstrated their superiority over classical
methods when dealing with noisy or incomplete data for image
compression applications. The performance analysis of different
images is proposed with an analysis of EZW coding system with
Error Backpropagation algorithm. The implementation and analysis
shows approximately 30% more accuracy in retrieved image
compare to the existing EZW coding system.
Abstract: Most papers model Joint Replenishment Problem
(JRP) as a (kT,S) where kT is a multiple value for a common review
period T,and S is a predefined order up to level. In general the (T,S)
policy is characterized by a long out of control period which requires
a large amount of safety stock compared to the (R,Q) policy. In this
paper a probabilistic model is built where an item, call it item(i),
with the shortest order time between interval (T)is modeled under
(R,Q) policy and its inventory is continuously reviewed, while the
rest of items (j) are periodically reviewed at a definite time
corresponding to item
Abstract: The method of gait identification based on the nearest neighbor classification technique with motion similarity assessment by the dynamic time warping is proposed. The model based kinematic motion data, represented by the joints rotations coded by Euler angles and unit quaternions is used. The different pose distance functions in Euler angles and quaternion spaces are considered. To evaluate individual features of the subsequent joints movements during gait cycle, joint selection is carried out. To examine proposed approach database containing 353 gaits of 25 humans collected in motion capture laboratory is used. The obtained results are promising. The classifications, which takes into consideration all joints has accuracy over 91%. Only analysis of movements of hip joints allows to correctly identify gaits with almost 80% precision.
Abstract: The performance of high-resolution schemes is investigated for unsteady, inviscid and compressible multiphase flows. An Eulerian diffuse interface approach has been chosen for the simulation of multicomponent flow problems. The reduced fiveequation and seven equation models are used with HLL and HLLC approximation. The authors demonstrated the advantages and disadvantages of both seven equations and five equations models studying their performance with HLL and HLLC algorithms on simple test case. The seven equation model is based on two pressure, two velocity concept of Baer–Nunziato [10], while five equation model is based on the mixture velocity and pressure. The numerical evaluations of two variants of Riemann solvers have been conducted for the classical one-dimensional air-water shock tube and compared with analytical solution for error analysis.
Abstract: Renewable energy systems are becoming a topic of
great interest and investment in the world. In recent years wind
power generation has experienced a very fast development in the
whole world. For planning and successful implementations of good
wind power plant projects, wind potential measurements are
required. In these projects, of great importance is the effective choice
of the micro location for wind potential measurements, installation of
the measurement station with the appropriate measuring equipment,
its maintenance and analysis of the gained data on wind potential
characteristics. In this paper, a wavelet transform has been applied to
analyze the wind speed data in the context of insight in the
characteristics of the wind and the selection of suitable locations that
could be the subject of a wind farm construction. This approach
shows that it can be a useful tool in investigation of wind potential.
Abstract: Determining depth of anesthesia is a challenging problem
in the context of biomedical signal processing. Various methods
have been suggested to determine a quantitative index as depth of
anesthesia, but most of these methods suffer from high sensitivity
during the surgery. A novel method based on energy scattering of
samples in the wavelet domain is suggested to represent the basic
content of electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. In this method, first
EEG signal is decomposed into different sub-bands, then samples
are squared and energy of samples sequence is constructed through
each scale and time, which is normalized and finally entropy of the
resulted sequences is suggested as a reliable index. Empirical Results
showed that applying the proposed method to the EEG signals can
classify the awake, moderate and deep anesthesia states similar to
BIS.
Abstract: This paper presents an adaptive motion estimator
that can be dynamically reconfigured by the best algorithm
depending on the variation of the video nature during the lifetime
of an application under running. The 4 Step Search (4SS) and the
Gradient Search (GS) algorithms are integrated in the estimator in
order to be used in the case of rapid and slow video sequences
respectively. The Full Search Block Matching (FSBM) algorithm
has been also integrated in order to be used in the case of the
video sequences which are not real time oriented.
In order to efficiently reduce the computational cost while
achieving better visual quality with low cost power, the proposed
motion estimator is based on a Variable Block Size (VBS) scheme
that uses only the 16x16, 16x8, 8x16 and 8x8 modes.
Experimental results show that the adaptive motion estimator
allows better results in term of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio
(PSNR), computational cost, FPGA occupied area, and dissipated
power relatively to the most popular variable block size schemes
presented in the literature.
Abstract: Lighvan cheese is basically made from sheep milk in
the area of Sahand mountainside which is located in the North West
of Iran. The main objective of this study was to investigate the effect
of enterococci isolated from traditional Lighvan cheese on the quality
of Iranian UF white during ripening. The experimental design was
split plot based on randomized complete blocks, main plots were four
types of starters and subplots were different ripening durations.
Addition of Enterococcus spp. did not significantly (P
Abstract: Three novel and significant contributions are made in
this paper Firstly, non-recursive formulation of Haar connection
coefficients, pioneered by the present authors is presented, which
can be computed very efficiently and avoid stack and memory
overflows. Secondly, the generalized approach for state analysis of
singular bilinear time-invariant (TI) and time-varying (TV) systems
is presented; vis-˜a-vis diversified and complex works reported by
different authors. Thirdly, a generalized approach for parameter
estimation of bilinear TI and TV systems is also proposed. The unified
framework of the proposed method is very significant in that the
digital hardware once-designed can be used to perform the complex
tasks of state analysis and parameter estimation of different types
of bilinear systems single-handedly. The simplicity, effectiveness and
generalized nature of the proposed method is established by applying
it to different types of bilinear systems for the two tasks.
Abstract: Freeze concentration freezes or crystallises the water
molecules out as ice crystals and leaves behind a highly concentrated
solution. In conventional suspension freeze concentration where ice
crystals formed as a suspension in the mother liquor, separation of
ice is difficult. The size of the ice crystals is still very limited which
will require usage of scraped surface heat exchangers, which is very
expensive and accounted for approximately 30% of the capital cost.
This research is conducted using a newer method of freeze
concentration, which is progressive freeze concentration. Ice crystals
were formed as a layer on the designed heat exchanger surface. In
this particular research, a helical structured copper crystallisation
chamber was designed and fabricated. The effect of two operating
conditions on the performance of the newly designed crystallisation
chamber was investigated, which are circulation flowrate and coolant
temperature. The performance of the design was evaluated by the
effective partition constant, K, calculated from the volume and
concentration of the solid and liquid phase. The system was also
monitored by a data acquisition tool in order to see the temperature
profile throughout the process. On completing the experimental
work, it was found that higher flowrate resulted in a lower K, which
translated into high efficiency. The efficiency is the highest at 1000
ml/min. It was also found that the process gives the highest
efficiency at a coolant temperature of -6 °C.
Abstract: Because of high ductility, aluminum alloys, have been widely used as an important base of metal forming industries. But the main week point of these alloys is their low strength so in forming them with conventional methods like deep drawing, hydro forming, etc have been always faced with problems like fracture during of forming process. Because of this, recently using of explosive forming method for forming of these plates has been recommended. In this paper free explosive forming of A2024 aluminum alloy is numerically simulated and during it, explosion wave propagation process is studied. Consequences of this simulation can be effective in prediction of quality of production. These consequences are compared with an experimental test and show the superiority of this method to similar methods like hydro forming and deep drawing.
Abstract: Software development has experienced remarkable progress in the past decade. However, due to the rising complexity and magnitude of the project the development productivity has not been consistently improved. By analyzing the latest ISBSG data repository with 4106 projects, we discovered that software development productivity has actually undergone irregular variations between the years 1995 and 2005. Considering the factors significant to the productivity, we found its variations are primarily caused by the variations of average team size and the unbalanced uses of the less productive language 3GL.
Abstract: In this paper, we use Radial Basis Function Networks
(RBFN) for solving the problem of environmental interference
cancellation of speech signal. We show that the Second Order Thin-
Plate Spline (SOTPS) kernel cancels the interferences effectively.
For make comparison, we test our experiments on two conventional
most used RBFN kernels: the Gaussian and First order TPS (FOTPS)
basis functions. The speech signals used here were taken from the
OGI Multi-Language Telephone Speech Corpus database and were
corrupted with six type of environmental noise from NOISEX-92
database. Experimental results show that the SOTPS kernel can
considerably outperform the Gaussian and FOTPS functions on
speech interference cancellation problem.