Abstract: This paper presents and evaluates a new classification
method that aims to improve classifiers performances and speed up
their training process. The proposed approach, called labeled
classification, seeks to improve convergence of the BP (Back
propagation) algorithm through the addition of an extra feature
(labels) to all training examples. To classify every new example, tests
will be carried out each label. The simplicity of implementation is the
main advantage of this approach because no modifications are
required in the training algorithms. Therefore, it can be used with
others techniques of acceleration and stabilization. In this work, two
models of the labeled classification are proposed: the LMLP
(Labeled Multi Layered Perceptron) and the LNFC (Labeled Neuro
Fuzzy Classifier). These models are tested using Iris, wine, texture
and human thigh databases to evaluate their performances.
Abstract: In this study, the Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) C
needles (i.e. the current-year-needles) were used as bioindicators in
determining the aerial distribution pattern of sulphur emissions
around industrial point sources at Kemi, Northern Finland. The
average sulphur concentration in the C needles was 897 mg/kg
(d.w.), with a standard deviation of 118 mg/kg (d.w.) and range 740 –
1350 mg/kg (d.w.). According to results in this study, Scots pine
needles (Pinus sylvestris L.) appear to be an ideal bioindicators for
identifying atmospheric sulphur pollution derived from industrial
plants and can complement the information provided by plant
mapping studies around industrial plants.
Abstract: The main purpose of the study was to determine whether students- interpretation achievement differed with the use of various multimedia presentation types. Four groups of students, text only (T), audio only (A), text and audio (TA), text and image (TI), were arranged and they were presented the same story via different types of multimedia presentations. Inference achievement was measured by a critical thinking inference test. Higher mean scores for the TA group compared to the other three groups were found. Also when compared pairwise, interpretation achievement of the TA group differed significantly from scores of the T and TI groups. These differences were interpreted with the increased cognitive load. Increased cognitive load for the TA group may have invited students to put more effort into comprehending the text, thus resulting in better test scores. Findings of the study can be seen as a sign of the importance of learning situations and learning outcomes in multimedia-supported learning environments and may have practical benefits for instructional designers.
Abstract: Although automotive industry has brought different beneficiaries to human life, it is being pointed out as one of the major cause of global air pollution which resulted in climate change, smog, green house gases (GHGs), and human diseases by many reasons. Since auto industry is one of the largest consumers of fossil fuels, the realization of green innovations is becoming a crucial choice to meet the challenges towards sustainable development. Recently, many auto manufacturers have embarked on green technology initiatives to gain a competitive advantage in the global market; however, innovative manufacturing systems and technologies can enhance operational performance only if the human resource management is in place to elicit the motivation of the employees and develop their organizational expertise. No organization can perform at peak levels unless each employee is committed to the company goals and works as an effective team member. Strategic human resource practices are the primary means by which firms can shape the skills, attitudes, and behavior of individuals to align with the business strategic objectives. This study investigates on the comprehensive approach of multiple advanced technology innovations and human resource management at Toyota Motor Corporation as the market leader of full hybrid technology in the automotive industry. Then, HRM framework of the company is described and three sets of human resource practices that support the innovation-oriented HR system, presented. Finally, a conceptual framework for innovativeness in green technology in automotive industry by applying a deliberate strategic HR management system and knowledge management with the intervening factors of organizational culture, knowledge application and knowledge sharing is proposed.
Abstract: A two dimensional numerical simulation has been
performed for incompressible and compressible fluid flow through
microchannels in slip flow regime. The Navier-Stokes equations have
been solved in conjunction with Maxwell slip conditions for
modeling flow field associated with slip flow regime. The wall
roughness is simulated with triangular microelements distributed on
wall surfaces to study the effects of roughness on fluid flow. Various
Mach and Knudsen numbers are used to investigate the effects of
rarefaction as well as compressibility. It is found that rarefaction has
more significant effect on flow field in microchannels with higher
relative roughness. It is also found that compressibility has more
significant effects on Poiseuille number when relative roughness
increases. In addition, similar to incompressible models the increase
in average fRe is more significant at low Knudsen number flows but
the increase of Poiseuille number duo to relative roughness is sharper
for compressible models. The numerical results have also validated
with some available theoretical and experimental relations and good
agreements have been seen.
Abstract: In this paper, the construction of a detailed spine
model is presented using the LifeMOD Biomechanics Modeler. The
detailed spine model is obtained by refining spine segments in
cervical, thoracic and lumbar regions into individual vertebra
segments, using bushing elements representing the intervertebral
discs, and building various ligamentous soft tissues between
vertebrae. In the sagittal plane of the spine, constant force will be
applied from the posterior to anterior during simulation to determine
dynamic characteristics of the spine. The force magnitude is
gradually increased in subsequent simulations. Based on these
recorded dynamic properties, graphs of displacement-force
relationships will be established in terms of polynomial functions by
using the least-squares method and imported into a haptic integrated
graphic environment. A thoracolumbar spine model with complex
geometry of vertebrae, which is digitized from a resin spine
prototype, will be utilized in this environment. By using the haptic
technique, surgeons can touch as well as apply forces to the spine
model through haptic devices to observe the locomotion of the spine
which is computed from the displacement-force relationship graphs.
This current study provides a preliminary picture of our ongoing
work towards building and simulating bio-fidelity scoliotic spine
models in a haptic integrated graphic environment whose dynamic
properties are obtained from LifeMOD. These models can be helpful
for surgeons to examine kinematic behaviors of scoliotic spines and
to propose possible surgical plans before spine correction operations.
Abstract: This study examines the effect of Islamic Corporate
Social Responsibility disclosure and on corporate reputation as well
as performance. These relationships are examined based on content
analysis of of annual reports of 17 Islamic banks in Malaysia for
2008, 2009 and 2010. Results of this study provide evidence that
CSR activities communicated in corporate annual reports are
significantly positively related with corporate reputation as well as
firm performance. These results indicate that CSR activities and
disclosure from Islamic perspectives are equally important business
strategies in creating continuous superior performance for
organisations. In addition, it also highlights that organisations need to
develop a stakeholder orientation particularly in an environment of
increasing pressure from jurisdictions dominated by Islamic
stakeholders on organisations engaging in Islamic products to
increase their social responsibilities from the Islamic perspectives.
Abstract: The agriculture lignocellulosic by-products are receiving increased attention, namely in the search for filter materials that retain contaminants from water. These by-products, specifically almond and hazelnut shells are abundant in Portugal once almond and hazelnuts production is a local important activity. Hazelnut and almond shells have as main constituents lignin, cellulose and hemicelluloses, water soluble extractives and tannins. Along the adsorption of heavy metals from contaminated waters, water soluble compounds can leach from shells and have a negative impact in the environment. Usually, the chemical characterization of treated water by itself may not show environmental impact caused by the discharges when parameters obey to legal quality standards for water. Only biological systems can detect the toxic effects of the water constituents. Therefore, the evaluation of toxicity by biological tests is very important when deciding the suitability for safe water discharge or for irrigation applications.
The main purpose of the present work was to assess the potential impacts of waters after been treated for heavy metal removal by hazelnut and almond shells adsorption systems, with short term acute toxicity tests.
To conduct the study, water at pH 6 with 25 mg.L-1 of lead, was treated with 10 g of shell per litre of wastewater, for 24 hours. This procedure was followed for each bark. Afterwards the water was collected for toxicological assays; namely bacterial resistance, seed germination, Lemna minor L. test and plant grow. The effect in isolated bacteria strains was determined by disc diffusion method and the germination index of seed was evaluated using lettuce, with temperature and humidity germination control for 7 days. For aquatic higher organism, Lemnas were used with 4 days contact time with shell solutions, in controlled light and temperature. For terrestrial higher plants, biomass production was evaluated after 14 days of tomato germination had occurred in soil, with controlled humidity, light and temperature.
Toxicity tests of water treated with shells revealed in some extent effects in the tested organisms, with the test assays showing a close behaviour as the control, leading to the conclusion that its further utilization may not be considered to create a serious risk to the environment.
Abstract: With the development of ubiquitous computing,
current user interaction approaches with keyboard, mouse and pen
are not sufficient. Due to the limitation of these devices the useable
command set is also limited. Direct use of hands as an input device is
an attractive method for providing natural Human Computer
Interaction which has evolved from text-based interfaces through 2D
graphical-based interfaces, multimedia-supported interfaces, to fully
fledged multi-participant Virtual Environment (VE) systems.
Imagine the human-computer interaction of the future: A 3Dapplication
where you can move and rotate objects simply by moving
and rotating your hand - all without touching any input device. In this
paper a review of vision based hand gesture recognition is presented.
The existing approaches are categorized into 3D model based
approaches and appearance based approaches, highlighting their
advantages and shortcomings and identifying the open issues.
Abstract: Texture information plays increasingly an important
role in remotely sensed imagery classification and many pattern
recognition applications. However, the selection of relevant textural
features to improve this classification accuracy is not a straightforward
task. This work investigates the effectiveness of two Mutual
Information Feature Selector (MIFS) algorithms to select salient
textural features that contain highly discriminatory information for
multispectral imagery classification. The input candidate features are
extracted from a SPOT High Resolution Visible(HRV) image using
Wavelet Transform (WT) at levels (l = 1,2).
The experimental results show that the selected textural features
according to MIFS algorithms make the largest contribution to
improve the classification accuracy than classical approaches such
as Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant
Analysis (LDA).
Abstract: The Emergency Department of a medical center in
Taiwan cooperated to conduct the research. A predictive model of
triage system is contracted from the contract procedure, selection of
parameters to sample screening. 2,000 pieces of data needed for the
patients is chosen randomly by the computer. After three
categorizations of data mining (Multi-group Discriminant Analysis,
Multinomial Logistic Regression, Back-propagation Neural
Networks), it is found that Back-propagation Neural Networks can
best distinguish the patients- extent of emergency, and the accuracy
rate can reach to as high as 95.1%. The Back-propagation Neural
Networks that has the highest accuracy rate is simulated into the triage
acuity expert system in this research. Data mining applied to the
predictive model of the triage acuity expert system can be updated
regularly for both the improvement of the system and for education
training, and will not be affected by subjective factors.
Abstract: This paper presents strategies for dynamically creating, managing and removing mesh cells during computations in the context of the Material Point Method (MPM). The dynamic meshing approach has been developed to help address problems involving motion of a finite size body in unbounded domains in which the extent of material travel and deformation is unknown a priori, such as in the case of landslides and debris flows. The key idea is to efficiently instantiate and search only cells that contain material points, thereby avoiding unneeded storage and computation. Mechanisms for doing this efficiently are presented, and example problems are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of dynamic mesh management relative to alternative approaches.
Abstract: In this study, effects of EGR on CO and HC emissions
of a dual fuel HCCI-DI engine are investigated. Tests were
conducted on a single-cylinder variable compression ratio (VCR)
diesel engine with compression ratio of 17.5. Premixed gasoline is
provided by a carburetor connected to intake manifold and equipped
with a screw to adjust premixed air-fuel ratio, and diesel fuel is
injected directly into the cylinder through an injector at pressure of
250 bars. A heater placed at inlet manifold is used to control the
intake charge temperature. Optimal intake charge temperature was
110-115ºC due to better formation of a homogeneous mixture
causing HCCI combustion. Timing of diesel fuel injection has a great
effect on stratification of in-cylinder charge in HCCI combustion.
Experiments indicated 35 BTDC as the optimum injection timing.
Coolant temperature was maintained 50ºC during the tests. Results
show that increasing engine speed at a constant EGR rate leads to
increase in CO and UHC emissions due to the incomplete
combustion caused by shorter combustion duration and less
homogeneous mixture. Results also show that increasing EGR
reduces the amount of oxygen and leads to incomplete combustion
and therefore increases CO emission due to lower combustion
temperature. HC emission also increases as a result of lower
combustion temperatures.
Abstract: This paper presents the design, fabrication and
evaluation of magneto-rheological damper. Semi-active control
devices have received significant attention in recent years because
they offer the adaptability of active control devices without requiring
the associated large power sources. Magneto-Rheological (MR)
dampers are semi- active control devices that use MR fluids to
produce controllable dampers. They potentially offer highly reliable
operation and can be viewed as fail-safe in that they become passive
dampers if the control hardware malfunction. The advantage of MR
dampers over conventional dampers are that they are simple in
construction, compromise between high frequency isolation and
natural frequency isolation, they offer semi-active control, use very
little power, have very quick response, has few moving parts, have a
relax tolerances and direct interfacing with electronics. Magneto-
Rheological (MR) fluids are Controllable fluids belonging to the
class of active materials that have the unique ability to change
dynamic yield stress when acted upon by an electric or magnetic
field, while maintaining viscosity relatively constant. This property
can be utilized in MR damper where the damping force is changed by
changing the rheological properties of the fluid magnetically. MR
fluids have a dynamic yield stress over Electro-Rheological fluids
(ER) and a broader operational temperature range. The objective of
this papert was to study the application of an MR damper to vibration
control, design the vibration damper using MR fluids, test and
evaluate its performance. In this paper the Rheology and the theory
behind MR fluids and their use on vibration control were studied.
Then a MR vibration damper suitable for vehicle suspension was
designed and fabricated using the MR fluid. The MR damper was
tested using a dynamic test rig and the results were obtained in the
form of force vs velocity and the force vs displacement plots. The
results were encouraging and greatly inspire further research on the
topic.
Abstract: This work presents the experimental results obtained
at a pilot plant which works with a slow, wet and catalytic pyrolysis
process of dry fowl manure. This kind of process mainly consists in
the cracking of the organic matrix and in the following reaction of
carbon with water, which is either already contained in the organic
feed or added, to produce carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Reactions
are conducted in a rotating reactor maintained at a temperature of
500°C; the required amount of water is about 30% of the dry organic
feed. This operation yields a gas containing about 59% (on a volume
basis) of hydrogen, 17% of carbon monoxide and other products such
as light hydrocarbons (methane, ethane, propane) and carbon
monoxide in lesser amounts. The gas coming from the reactor can be
used to produce not only electricity, through internal combustion
engines, but also heat, through direct combustion in industrial
boilers. Furthermore, as the produced gas is devoid of both solid
particles and pollutant species (such as dioxins and furans), the
process (in this case applied to fowl manure) can be considered as an
optimal way for the disposal and the contemporary energetic
valorization of organic materials, in such a way that is not damaging
to the environment.
Abstract: Universities have an important role in social education in many aspects. In terms of creating awareness and convincing public about social issues, universities take a leading position for public. The best way to provide public support for social education is to develop public communication campaigns. The aim of this study is to present a public communication model which will be guided in social education practices. The study titled “Importance of public communication campaigns and art activities in Social Education “is based on the following topics: Effects of public communication campaigns on social education, Public relations techniques for education, communication strategies, Steps of public relations campaigns in social education, making persuasive messages for public communication campaigns, developing artistic messages and organizing art activities in social education. In addition to these topics, media planning for social education, forming a team as campaign managers, dialogues with opinion leaders in education and preparing creative communication models for social education will be taken into consideration. This study also aims to criticize social education Case studies in Turkey. At the same time, some communicative methods and principles will be given in the light of communication campaigns within the context of this notice.
Abstract: Due to availability of powerful image processing software
and improvement of human computer knowledge, it becomes
easy to tamper images. Manipulation of digital images in different
fields like court of law and medical imaging create a serious problem
nowadays. Copy-move forgery is one of the most common types
of forgery which copies some part of the image and pastes it to
another part of the same image to cover an important scene. In
this paper, a copy-move forgery detection method proposed based
on Fourier transform to detect forgeries. Firstly, image is divided to
same size blocks and Fourier transform is performed on each block.
Similarity in the Fourier transform between different blocks provides
an indication of the copy-move operation. The experimental results
prove that the proposed method works on reasonable time and works
well for gray scale and colour images. Computational complexity
reduced by using Fourier transform in this method.
Abstract: 28 healthy adult Maradi bucks were used to evaluate
sperm production and sperm storage capacity in the breed. Daily
sperm production (DSP) averaged 0.55±0.05x109, while the daily
sperm production/g (DSP/g) was 1.37±0.12 x107. Gonadal sperm
reserve was 1.99±0.18 x109, while the caput, upper corpus and lower
corpus averaged 0.58±0.04 x109, 0.36±0.02 x109 and 0.33±0.08 x109
respectively. The proximal cauda, mid cauda, distal cauda and ductus
deferens had values of 0.68±0.10 x109, 1.23±0.16 x109,1.87±0.
x109and 0.17±0.05 x109 respectively. The relative contributions of
the respective epididymal sections and ductus deferens to the total
extragonadal sperm reserves were, 11.11%, 6.89%, 6.32%, 13.03%,
23.56%, 35.82% and 3.26% respectively. Gonadal sperm reserves
were significantly higher (p0.05) to
mid cauda and distal cauda epididymal reserves.
Abstract: The aim of this retrospective study was to evaluate the
parameters of dental implants such as patient gender, number of
implant, failed implant before prosthetic restorations and failed
implant after implantation and failed implant after prosthetic
restorations. 135 male and 99 female patients, total 234 implant
patients which have been treated with 450 implant between 2005-
2009 years in GATA Haydarpasa Training Hospital Dental Service.
Twelve implants were failed before prosthetic restorations. Four
implant were failed after fixed prosthetic restorations. Cumulative
survival rate after prostheses were 97.56 % during 6 years period.
Abstract: This paper describes part of a project about Learningby-
Modeling (LbM). Studying complex systems is increasingly
important in teaching and learning many science domains. Many
features of complex systems make it difficult for students to develop
deep understanding. Previous research indicates that involvement
with modeling scientific phenomena and complex systems can play a
powerful role in science learning. Some researchers argue with this
view indicating that models and modeling do not contribute to
understanding complexity concepts, since these increases the
cognitive load on students. This study will investigate the effect of
different modes of involvement in exploring scientific phenomena
using computer simulation tools, on students- mental model from the
perspective of structure, behavior and function. Quantitative and
qualitative methods are used to report about 121 freshmen students
that engaged in participatory simulations about complex phenomena,
showing emergent, self-organized and decentralized patterns. Results
show that LbM plays a major role in students' concept formation
about complexity concepts.