Abstract: The theatre-auditorium under investigation following
the highly reflective characteristics of materials used in it (marble,
painted wood, smooth plaster, etc), architectural and structural
features of the Protocol and its intended use (very multifunctional:
Auditorium, theatre, cinema, musicals, conference room) from the
analysis of the statement of fact made by the acoustic simulation
software Ramsete and supported by data obtained through a
campaign of acoustic measurements of the state of fact made on the
spot by a Fonomet Svantek model SVAN 957, appears to be
acoustically inadequate. After the completion of the 3D model
according to the specifications necessary software used forecast in
order to be recognized by him, have made three simulations, acoustic
simulation of the state of and acoustic simulation of two design
solutions.
Improved noise characteristics found in the first design solution,
compared to the state in fact consists therefore in lowering
Reverberation Time that you turn most desirable value, while the
Indicators of Clarity, the Baricentric Time, the Lateral Efficiency,
Ratio of Low Tmedia BR and defined the Speech Intelligibility
improved significantly. Improved noise characteristics found instead
in the second design solution, as compared to first design solution, is
finally mostly in a more uniform distribution of Leq and in lowering
Reverberation Time that you turn the optimum values. Indicators of
Clarity, and the Lateral Efficiency improve further but at the expense
of a value slightly worse than the BR. Slightly vary the remaining
indices.
Abstract: In the present study, the oleaginous fungus
Mortierella alpina CBS 754.68 was screened for arachidonic
acidproduction using inexpensive agricultural by-products as
substrate. Four oilcakes were analysed to choose the best substrate
among them. Sunflower oilcake was the most effective substrate for
ARA production followed by soybean, colza and olive oilcakes. In
the next step, seven variables including substrate particle size,
moisture content, time, temperature, yeast extract supply, glucose
supply and glutamate supply were surveyed and effective variables
for ARA production were determined using a Plackett-Burman
screening design. Analysis results showed that time (12 days),
substrate particle size (1-1.4 mm) and temperature (20ºC) were the
most effective variables for the highest level of ARA production
respectively.
Abstract: In order to answer the general question: “What does a simple agent with a limited life-time require for constructing a useful representation of the environment?" we propose a robot platform including the simplest probabilistic sensory and motor layers. Then we use the platform as a test-bed for evaluation of the navigational capabilities of the robot with different “brains". We claim that a protocognitive behavior is not a consequence of highly sophisticated sensory–motor organs but instead emerges through an increment of the internal complexity and reutilization of the minimal sensory information. We show that the most fundamental robot element, the short-time memory, is essential in obstacle avoidance. However, in the simplest conditions of no obstacles the straightforward memoryless robot is usually superior. We also demonstrate how a low level action planning, involving essentially nonlinear dynamics, provides a considerable gain to the robot performance dynamically changing the robot strategy. Still, however, for very short life time the brainless robot is superior. Accordingly we suggest that small organisms (or agents) with short life-time does not require complex brains and even can benefit from simple brain-like (reflex) structures. To some extend this may mean that controlling blocks of modern robots are too complicated comparative to their life-time and mechanical abilities.
Abstract: Performance of vehicle depends on driving patterns
and vehicle drive train configuration. Driving patterns depends on
traffic condition, road condition and driver behavior. HEV design is
carried out under certain constrain like vehicle operating range,
acceleration, decelerations, maximum speed and road grades which
are directly related to the driving patterns. Therefore the detailed
study on HEV performance over a different drive cycle is required
for selection and sizing of HEV components. A simple hardware is
design to measured velocity v/s time profile of the vehicle by
operating vehicle on Indian roads under real traffic conditions. To
size the HEV components, a detailed dynamic model of the vehicle is
developed considering the effect of inertia of rotating components
like wheels, drive chain, engine and electric motor. Using vehicle
model and different Indian drive cycles data, total tractive power
demanded by vehicle and power supplied by individual components
has been calculated.Using above information selection and estimation
of component sizing for HEV is carried out so that HEV performs
efficiently under hostile driving condition. Complete analysis is
carried out in LABVIEW.
Abstract: Rhizopus oligosporus was used in the present study
for the production of protease enzyme under SSF. Sunflower meal
was used as by-product of oil industry incorporated with organic salts
was employed for the production of protease enzyme. The main
purpose of the present was to study different parameters of protease
productivity, its yields and to optimize basal fermentation conditions.
The optimal conditions found for protease production using
sunflower meal as a substrate in the present study were inoculum size
(1%), substrate (Sunflower meal), substrate concentration (20 g), pH
(3), cultivation period (72 h), incubation temperature (35oC),
substrate to diluent-s ratio (1:2) and tween 81 (1 mL). The maximum
production of protease in the presence of cheaper substrate at low
concentration and stability at acidic pH, these characteristics make
the strain and its enzymes useful in different industry.
Abstract: Iran has diverse climates and each have established distinct properties in their area. The extent and intensity of climatic factors effects on the lives of people living in various regions of Iran is so great that it cannot be simply ignored. In a large part of Iran known as the Central Plateau there is no precipitation for more than half of the year and dry weather and scarcity of fresh water pose an ever present problem for the people of these regions while in north of Iran upon the southern shores of the Caspian Sea the people face 80% humidity caused by the sea and 2 meters of annual precipitation. This article tries to review the past experiences of local architecture of Iran-s various regions so that they can be used to reshape and redirect the urban areas and structure of Iran-s current cities to provide environmental comfort by minimum use of fossil fuels.
Abstract: Emotions are related with learning processes and
physiological signals can be used to detect them for the
personalization of learning resources and to control the pace of
instruction. A model of relevant emotions has been developed, where
specific combinations of emotions and cognition processes are
connected and integrated with the concept of 'flow', in order to
improve learning. The cardiac pulse is a reliable signal that carries
useful information about the subject-s emotional condition; it is
detected using a classroom chair adapted with non invasive EMFi
sensor and an acquisition system that generates a ballistocardiogram
(BCG), the signal is processed by an algorithm to obtain
characteristics that match a specific emotional condition. The
complete chair system is presented in this work, along with a
framework for the personalization of learning resources.
Abstract: In this work, effects of catalysts (TiO2, and Nb2O5) were investigated on the hydrogen desorption of Mg(BH4)2. LiBH4 and MgCl2 with 2:1 molar ratio were mixed by using ball milling to prepare Mg(BH4)2. The desorption behaviors were measured by thermo-volumetric apparatus. The hydrogen desorption capacity of the mixed sample milled for 2 h was 4.78 wt% with a 2-step released. The first step occurred at 214 °C and the second step appeared at 374 °C. The addition of 16 wt% Nb2O5 decreased the desorption temperature in the second step about 66 °C and increased the hydrogen desorption capacity to 4.86 wt% hydrogen. The addition of TiO2 also improved the desorption temperature in the second step and the hydrogen desorption capacity. It decreased the desorption temperature about 71°C and showed a high amount of hydrogen, 5.27 wt%, released from the mixed sample. The hydrogen absorption after desorption of Mg(BH4)2 was also studied under 9.5 MPa and 350 °C for 12 h.
Abstract: The lecture represents significant advances in
understanding of the transfer processes mechanism in turbulent
separated flows. Based upon experimental data suggesting the
governing role of generated local pressure gradient that takes place in
the immediate vicinity of the wall in separated flow as a result of
intense instantaneous accelerations induced by large-scale vortex
flow structures similarity laws for mean velocity and temperature and
spectral characteristics and heat and mass transfer law for turbulent
separated flows have been developed. These laws are confirmed by
available experimental data. The results obtained were employed for
analysis of heat and mass transfer in some very complex processes
occurring in technological applications such as impinging jets, heat
transfer of cylinders in cross flow and in tube banks, packed beds
where processes manifest distinct properties which allow them to be
classified under turbulent separated flows. Many facts have got an
explanation for the first time.
Abstract: A set of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based methods
for the design of an effective system of speech recognition of
numerals of Assamese language captured under varied recording
conditions and moods is presented here. The work is related to
the formulation of several ANN models configured to use Linear
Predictive Code (LPC), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and
other features to tackle mood and gender variations uttering numbers
as part of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system in
Assamese. The ANN models are designed using a combination of
Self Organizing Map (SOM) and Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP)
constituting a Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) block trained in a
cooperative environment to handle male and female speech samples
of numerals of Assamese- a language spoken by a sizable population
in the North-Eastern part of India. The work provides a comparative
evaluation of several such combinations while subjected to handle
speech samples with gender based differences captured by a microphone
in four different conditions viz. noiseless, noise mixed, stressed
and stress-free.
Abstract: Process planning and production scheduling play
important roles in manufacturing systems. In this paper a multiobjective
mixed integer linear programming model is presented for
the integrated planning and scheduling of multi-product. The aim is
to find a set of high-quality trade-off solutions. This is a
combinatorial optimization problem with substantially large solution
space, suggesting that it is highly difficult to find the best solutions
with the exact search method. To account for it, a PSO-based
algorithm is proposed by fully utilizing the capability of the
exploration search and fast convergence. To fit the continuous PSO
in the discrete modeled problem, a solution representation is used in
the algorithm. The numerical experiments have been performed to
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Abstract: Evidence-based medicine is a new direction in modern healthcare. Its task is to prevent, diagnose and medicate diseases using medical evidence. Medical data about a large patient population is analyzed to perform healthcare management and medical research. In order to obtain the best evidence for a given disease, external clinical expertise as well as internal clinical experience must be available to the healthcare practitioners at right time and in the right manner. External evidence-based knowledge can not be applied directly to the patient without adjusting it to the patient-s health condition. We propose a data warehouse based approach as a suitable solution for the integration of external evidence-based data sources into the existing clinical information system and data mining techniques for finding appropriate therapy for a given patient and a given disease. Through integration of data warehousing, OLAP and data mining techniques in the healthcare area, an easy to use decision support platform, which supports decision making process of care givers and clinical managers, is built. We present three case studies, which show, that a clinical data warehouse that facilitates evidence-based medicine is a reliable, powerful and user-friendly platform for strategic decision making, which has a great relevance for the practice and acceptance of evidence-based medicine.
Abstract: Airbag deployment has been known to be responsible
for huge death, incidental injuries and broken bones due to low crash
severity and wrong deployment decisions. Therefore, the authorities
and industries have been looking for more innovative and intelligent
products to be realized for future enhancements in the vehicle safety
systems (VSSs). Although the VSSs technologies have advanced
considerably, they still face challenges such as how to avoid
unnecessary and untimely airbag deployments that can be hazardous
and fatal. Currently, most of the existing airbag systems deploy
without regard to occupant size and position. As such, this paper will
focus on the occupant and crash sensing performances due to frontal
collisions for the new breed of so called smart airbag systems. It
intends to provide a thorough discussion relating to the occupancy
detection, occupant size classification, occupant off-position
detection to determine safe distance zone for airbag deployment,
crash-severity analysis and airbag decision algorithms via a computer
modeling. The proposed system model consists of three main
modules namely, occupant sensing, crash severity analysis and
decision fusion. The occupant sensing system module utilizes the
weight sensor to determine occupancy, classify the occupant size,
and determine occupant off-position condition to compute safe
distance for airbag deployment. The crash severity analysis module is
used to generate relevant information pertinent to airbag deployment
decision. Outputs from these two modules are fused to the decision
module for correct and efficient airbag deployment action. Computer
modeling work is carried out using Simulink, Stateflow,
SimMechanics and Virtual Reality toolboxes.
Abstract: The purpose of this research was to study the
influence of learning efficiency on local accountants’ job
performance effectiveness. This paper drew upon the survey data
collected from 335 local accountants survey conducted at Nakhon
Ratchasima province, Thailand. The statistics utilized in this paper
included percentage, mean, standard deviation, and regression
analysis. The findings revealed that the majority of samples were
between 31-40 years old, married, held an undergraduate degree, and
had an average income between 10,000-15,000 baht. The majority of
respondents had less than five years of accounting experience and
worked for local administrations. The overall learning efficiency
score was in the highest level while the local accountants’ job
performance effectiveness score was also in the high level. The
hypothesis testing’s result disclosed that learning efficiency factors
which were knowledge, Skill, and Attitude had an influence on local
accountants’ job the performance effectiveness.
Abstract: This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of
gibberellic acid and 2,4- dichlorophenoxyacetic acid on flower
number, fruit growth and fruit quality of wax apple. GA3 and 2,4-D
were applied at small bud and petal fall stage. Number of flower,
fruit set, fruit drop, fruit crack, fruit growth and fruit quality were
recorded. Results indicated that spraying with 10 ppm GA3 had the
best results in number of flower. GA3 spray at 30 ppm gave the
faster rate of fruit growth than the other treatments. Fruit set, fruit
size as well as fruit weight markedly improved by spraying 30 ppm
GA3, followed by 10 ppm GA3 compared to untreated control.
Moreover, spray GA3 at 30 ppm was the most effective and
increased total soluble solids, reduced titratable acidity and fruit
drop. On the other hand, it was noticed that with 10 ppm 2,4-D
application also enhanced the fruit growth rate, improved
physiological and biochemical characters of fruit compared to
untreated control. It was concluded that both GA3 and 2,4-D spray
have positive effects on fruit development, reduced fruit drop, fruit
crack and improved fruit quality of wax apple under field conditions.
Abstract: The increments of aromatic structures are widely used to monitor the degree of humification. Compost derived from mix manures mixed with agricultural wastes was studied. The compost collected at day 0, 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 49, 77, 91, 105, and 119 was divided into 3 stages, initial stage at day 0, thermophilic stage during day 1-48, and mature stage during day 49-119. The change of highest absorptions at wavelength range between 210-235 nm during day 0- 49 implied that small molecules such as nitrates and carboxylic occurred faster than the aromatic molecules that were found at wavelength around 280 nm. The ratio of electron-transfer band at wavelength 253 nm by the benzonoid band at wavelength 230 nm (E253/E230) also gradually increased during the fermenting period indicating the presence of O-containing functional groups. This was in agreement with the shift change from aliphatic to aromatic structures as shown by the relationship with C/N and H/C ratios (r = - 0.631 and -0.717, p< 0.05) since both were decreasing. Although the amounts of humic acid (HA) were not different much during the humification process, the UV spectral deconvolution showed better qualitative characteristics to help in determining the compost quality. From this study, the compost should be used at day 49 and should not be kept longer than 3 months otherwise the quality of HA would decline regardless of the amounts of HA that might be rising. This implied that other processes, such as mineralization had an influence on the humification process changing HA-s structure and its qualities.
Abstract: Manufacturing Industries face a crucial change as products and processes are required to, easily and efficiently, be reconfigurable and reusable. In order to stay competitive and flexible, situations also demand distribution of enterprises globally, which requires implementation of efficient communication strategies. A prototype system called the “Broadcaster" has been developed with an assumption that the control environment description has been engineered using the Component-based system paradigm. This prototype distributes information to a number of globally distributed partners via an adoption of the circular-based data processing mechanism. The work highlighted in this paper includes the implementation of this mechanism in the domain of the manufacturing industry. The proposed solution enables real-time remote propagation of machine information to a number of distributed supply chain client resources such as a HMI, VRML-based 3D views and remote client instances regardless of their distribution nature and/ or their mechanisms. This approach is presented together with a set of evaluation results. Authors- main concentration surrounds the reliability and the performance metric of the adopted approach. Performance evaluation is carried out in terms of the response times taken to process the data in this domain and compared with an alternative data processing implementation such as the linear queue mechanism. Based on the evaluation results obtained, authors justify the benefits achieved from this proposed implementation and highlight any further research work that is to be carried out.
Abstract: Suppose KY and KX are large sets of observed and
reference signals, respectively, each containing N signals. Is it possible to construct a filter F : KY → KX that requires a priori
information only on few signals, p N, from KX but performs better than the known filters based on a priori information on every
reference signal from KX? It is shown that the positive answer is
achievable under quite unrestrictive assumptions. The device behind
the proposed method is based on a special extension of the piecewise
linear interpolation technique to the case of random signal sets. The proposed technique provides a single filter to process any signal from
the arbitrarily large signal set. The filter is determined in terms of pseudo-inverse matrices so that it always exists.
Abstract: The paper describes a self supervised parallel self organizing neural network (PSONN) architecture for true color image segmentation. The proposed architecture is a parallel extension of the standard single self organizing neural network architecture (SONN) and comprises an input (source) layer of image information, three single self organizing neural network architectures for segmentation of the different primary color components in a color image scene and one final output (sink) layer for fusion of the segmented color component images. Responses to the different shades of color components are induced in each of the three single network architectures (meant for component level processing) by applying a multilevel version of the characteristic activation function, which maps the input color information into different shades of color components, thereby yielding a processed component color image segmented on the basis of the different shades of component colors. The number of target classes in the segmented image corresponds to the number of levels in the multilevel activation function. Since the multilevel version of the activation function exhibits several subnormal responses to the input color image scene information, the system errors of the three component network architectures are computed from some subnormal linear index of fuzziness of the component color image scenes at the individual level. Several multilevel activation functions are employed for segmentation of the input color image scene using the proposed network architecture. Results of the application of the multilevel activation functions to the PSONN architecture are reported on three real life true color images. The results are substantiated empirically with the correlation coefficients between the segmented images and the original images.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to understand how peers can
influence adolescent girls- dieting behaviour and their body image.
Departing from imitation and social learning theories, we study
whether adolescent girls tend to model their peer group dieting
behaviours, thus influencing their body image construction. Our
study was conducted through an enquiry applied to a cluster sample
of 466 adolescent high school girls in Lisbon city public schools. Our
main findings point to an association between girls- and peers-
dieting behaviours, thus reinforcing the modelling hypothesis.