Abstract: The objective of the paper was to understand the use
of an important element of design, namely color in a Semiotic
system. Semiotics is the study of signs and sign processes, it is often
divided into three branches namely (i) Semantics that deals with the
relation between signs and the things to which they refer to mean, (ii)
Syntactics which addresses the relations among signs in formal
structures and (iii) Pragmatics that relates between signs and its
effects on they have on the people who use them to create a plan for
an object or a system referred to as design. Cubism with its versatility
was the key design tool prevalent across the 20th century. In order to
analyze the user's understanding of interaction and appreciation of
color through the movement of Cubism, an exercise was undertaken
in Dept. of Design, IIT Guwahati. This included tasks to design a
composition using color and sign process to the theme 'Between the
Lines' on a given tessellation where the users relate their work to the
world they live in, which in this case was the college campus of IIT
Guwahati. The findings demonstrate impact of the key design
element color on the principles of visual perception based on image
analysis of specific compositions.
Abstract: The pollutant removal efficiency of the Intermittently
Decanted Extended Aeration (IDEA) wastewater treatment system at
Curtin University Sarawak Campus, and conventional activated
sludge wastewater treatment system at a local resort, Resort A, is
monitored. The influent and effluent characteristics are tested during
wet and dry weather conditions, and peak and off peak periods. For
the wastewater treatment systems at Curtin Sarawak and Resort A,
during dry weather and peak season, it was found that the BOD5
concentration in the influent is 121.7mg/L and 80.0mg/L
respectively, and in the effluent, 18.7mg/L and and 18.0mg/L
respectively. Analysis of the performance of the IDEA treatment
system showed that the operational costs can be minimized by 3%, by
decreasing the number of operating cycles. As for the treatment
system in Resort A, by utilizing a smaller capacity air blower, a
saving of 12% could be made in the operational costs.
Abstract: Environmental studies have expanded dramatically all
over the world in the past few years. Nowadays businesses interact
with society and the environment in ways that put their mark on both
sides. Efforts improving human standard living, through the control
of nature and the development of new products, have also resulted in
contamination of the environment. Consequently companies play an
important role in environmental sustainability of a region or country.
Therefore we can say that a company's sustainable development is
strictly dependent on the environment. This article presents a fuzzy
model to evaluate a company's environmental impact. Article
illustrates an example of the automotive industry in order to prove the
usefulness of using such a model.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of
cognitive decision effort in recommendation system, combined with
indicators "information quality" and "service quality" from IS success
model to exam the awareness of the user for the "recommended system
performance". A total of 411 internet user answered a questionnaire
assessing their attention of use and satisfaction of recommendation
system in internet book store. Quantitative result indicates following
research results. First, information quality of recommended system
has obvious influence in consumer shopping decision-making process,
and the attitude to use the system. Second, in the process of consumer's
shopping decision-making, the recommendation system has no
significant influence for consumers to pay lower cognitive
decision-making effort. Third, e-commerce platform provides
recommendations and information is necessary, but the quality of
information on user needs must be considered, or they will be other
competitors offer homogeneous services replaced.
Abstract: Ti-6Al-4V alloy has demonstrated a high strength to
weight ratio as well as good properties at high temperature. The
successful application of the alloy in some important areas depends
on suitable joining techniques. Friction welding has many
advantageous features to be chosen for joining Titanium alloys. The
present work investigates the feasibility of producing similar metal
joints of this Titanium alloy by rotary friction welding method. The
joints are produced at three different speeds and the performances of
the welded joints are evaluated by conducting microstructure studies,
Vickers Hardness and tensile tests at the joints. It is found that the
weld joints produced are sound and the ductile fractures in the tensile
weld specimens occur at locations away from the welded joints. It is
also found that a rotational speed of 1500 RPM can produce a very
good weld, with other parameters kept constant.
Abstract: For a variety of safety and economic reasons, engineering undergraduates in Australia have experienced diminishing access to the real hardware that is typically the embodiment of their theoretical studies. This trend will delay the development of practical competence, decrease the ability to model and design, and suppress motivation. The author has attempted to address this concern by creating a software tool that contains both photographic images of real machinery, and sets of graphical modeling 'tools'. Academics from a range of disciplines can use the software to set tutorial tasks, and incorporate feedback comments for a range of student responses. An evaluation of the software demonstrated that students who had solved modeling problems with the aid of the electronic tutor performed significantly better in formal examinations with similar problems. The 2-D graphical diagnostic routines in the Tutor have the potential to be used in a wider range of problem-solving tasks.
Abstract: Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have been used successfully in many scientific, industrial and business domains as a method for extracting knowledge from vast amounts of data. However the use of ANN techniques in the sporting domain has been limited. In professional sport, data is stored on many aspects of teams, games, training and players. Sporting organisations have begun to realise that there is a wealth of untapped knowledge contained in the data and there is great interest in techniques to utilise this data. This study will use player data from the elite Australian Football League (AFL) competition to train and test ANNs with the aim to predict the onset of injuries. The results demonstrate that an accuracy of 82.9% was achieved by the ANNs’ predictions across all examples with 94.5% of all injuries correctly predicted. These initial findings suggest that ANNs may have the potential to assist sporting clubs in the prediction of injuries.
Abstract: This paper presents an integrated case based and rule
based reasoning method for car faulty diagnosis. The reasoning
method is done through extracting the past cases from the Proton
Service Center while comparing with the preset rules to deduce a
diagnosis/solution to a car service case. New cases will be stored to
the knowledge base. The test cases examples illustrate the
effectiveness of the proposed integrated reasoning. It has proven
accuracy of similar reasoning if carried out by a service advisor from
the service center.
Abstract: This paper presents the new results of energy plant –
rye and triticale at yellow ripeness and ripe, pre-treatment in high
pressure steam reactor and monosaccharide extraction. There were
investigated the influence of steam pressure (20 to 22 bar), retention
duration (180 to 240 s) and catalytic sulphuric acid concentration
strength (0 to 0.5 %) on the pre-treatment process, contents of
monosaccharides (glucose, arabinose, xylose, mannose) and
undesirable by-compounds (furfural and HMF) in the reactor. The
study has determined that the largest amount of monosaccharides
(37.2 % of glucose, 2.7 % of arabinose, 8.4 % of xylose, and 1.3 %
of mannose) was received in the rye at ripe, the samples of which
were mixed with 0.5 % concentration of catalytic sulphuric acid, and
hydrolysed in the reactor, where the pressure was 20 bar, whereas the
reaction time – 240 s.
Abstract: The consumption capability of people in China has
been a big issue to tourism business. Due to the increasing of China
tourists, Taiwan-s government rescinded the category of people in
China and opened up the non-stopped airline from China to Taiwan.
The “one-day traveling style between China and Taiwan" has formed,
hoping to bring business to Taiwan. Night market, which shows
foreigners the very local character of Taiwan, contains various
merchandise for consumers to purchase. With the increasing numbers
of non-stopped airline, visiting Taiwan-s night markets has also been
one of major activities to China-s tourists. The purpose of the present
study is to understand the consumer behavior of China tourists in
tourist night markets in Taipei and analyze that if their shopping
motives cause the different shopping behaviors and post-purchase
satisfaction and revisiting intention. The results reveled that for the
China tourists, the motives of significant influence to the shopping
behaviors. Also, the shopping behaviors significant influence to the
whole satisfaction and the whole satisfaction significant influence to
post-purchase behavior.
Abstract: This paper describes a paradigmatic approach to develop architecture of secure systems by describing the requirements from four different points of view: that of the owner, the administrator, the user, and the network. Deriving requirements and developing architecture implies the joint elicitation and describing the problem and the structure of the solution. The view points proposed in this paper are those we consider as requirements towards their contributions as major parties in the design, implementation, usage and maintenance of secure systems. The dramatic growth of the technology of Internet and the applications deployed in World Wide Web have lead to the situation where the security has become a very important concern in the development of secure systems. Many security approaches are currently being used in organizations. In spite of the widespread use of many different security solutions, the security remains a problem. It is argued that the approach that is described in this paper for the development of secure architecture is practical by all means. The models representing these multiple points of view are termed the requirements model (views of owner and administrator) and the operations model (views of user and network). In this paper, this multiple view paradigm is explained by first describing the specific requirements and or characteristics of secure systems (particularly in the domain of networks) and the secure architecture / system development methodology.
Abstract: The river flow forecasting represents a crucial point to employ for improving a management policy addressed to the right use of water resources as well as for conjugating prevention and defense actions against environmental degradation. The difficulties occurring during the field activities encourage the development and implementation of operative computation and measuring methods addressed to time reduction for data acquisition and processing maintaining a good level of accuracy. Therefore, the aim of the present work is to test a new entropy based expeditive methodology for the evaluation of the rating curves on three gauged sections with different geometric and morphological characteristics. The methodology requires the choice of only three verticals along the measure section and the sampling of only the maximum velocity. The results underline how in most conditions the rating curves drawn can replace those built with classic methodologies, simplifying thus the procedures of data monitoring and calculation.
Abstract: This paper illustrates why existing technology
acceptance models are only of limited use for predicting and
explaining the adoption of future information and communication
technologies. It starts with a general overview over technology
adoption processes, and presents several theories for the acceptance
as well as adoption of traditional information technologies. This is
followed by an overview over the recent developments in the area of
information and communication technologies. Based on the
arguments elaborated in these sections, it is shown why the factors
used to predict adoption in existing systems, will not be sufficient for
explaining the adoption of future information and communication
technologies.
Abstract: In recent years, “Bottom-up Planning Approach" has been widely accepted and expanded from planning theorists. Citizen participation becomes more important in decision-making in informal settlements. Many of previous projects and strategies due to ignorance of citizen participation, have been failed facing with informal settlements and in some cases lead physical expansion of these neighbourhoods. According to recent experiences, the new participatory approach was in somehow successful. This paper focuses on local experiences in Iran. A considerable amount of people live in informal settlements in Iran. With the previous methods, the government could not solve the problems of these settlements. It is time to examine new methods such as empowerment of the local citizens and involve them to solve the current physical, social, and economic problems. The paper aims to address the previous and new strategies facing with informal settlements, the conditions under which citizens could be involved in planning process, limits and potentials of this process, the main actors and issues and finally motivations that are able to promote citizen participation. Documentary studies, observation, interview and questionnaire have been used to achieve the above mentioned objectives. Nearly 80 percent of responder in Saadi Community are ready to participate in regularising their neighbourhoods, if pre-conditions of citizen involvement are being provided. These pre-conditions include kind of problem and its severity, the importance of issue, existence of a short-term solution, etc. Moreover, confirmation of dweller-s ownership can promote the citizen engagement in participatory projects.
Abstract: In this paper a one-dimension Self Organizing Map
algorithm (SOM) to perform feature selection is presented. The
algorithm is based on a first classification of the input dataset on a
similarity space. From this classification for each class a set of
positive and negative features is computed. This set of features is
selected as result of the procedure. The procedure is evaluated on an
in-house dataset from a Knowledge Discovery from Text (KDT)
application and on a set of publicly available datasets used in
international feature selection competitions. These datasets come
from KDT applications, drug discovery as well as other applications.
The knowledge of the correct classification available for the training
and validation datasets is used to optimize the parameters for positive
and negative feature extractions. The process becomes feasible for
large and sparse datasets, as the ones obtained in KDT applications,
by using both compression techniques to store the similarity matrix
and speed up techniques of the Kohonen algorithm that take
advantage of the sparsity of the input matrix. These improvements
make it feasible, by using the grid, the application of the
methodology to massive datasets.
Abstract: Threedimensional numerical simulations are conducted on a full scale CANDU Moderator and Transient variations of the temperature and velocity distributions inside the tank are determined. The results show that the flow and temperature distributions inside the moderator tank are three dimensional and no symmetry plane can be identified.Competition between the upward moving buoyancy driven flows and the downward moving momentum driven flows, results in the formation of circulation zones. The moderator tank operates in the buoyancy driven mode and any small disturbances in the flow or temperature makes the system unstable and asymmetric. Different types of temperature fluctuations are noted inside the tank: (i) large amplitude are at the boundaries between the hot and cold (ii) low amplitude are in the core of the tank (iii) high frequency fluctuations are in the regions with high velocities and (iv) low frequency fluctuations are in the regions with lower velocities.
Abstract: The actual grow of the infrastructure in develop country require sophisticate ways manage the operation and control the quality served. This research wants to concentrate in the operation of this infrastructure beyond the construction. The infrastructure-s operation involves an uncertain environment, where unexpected variables are present every day and everywhere. Decision makers need to make right decisions with right information/data analyzed most in real time. To adequately support their decisions and decrease any negative impact and collateral effect, they need to use computational tools called decision support systems (DSS), but now the main source of information came from common users thought an extensive crowdsourcing
Abstract: Software development is moving towards agility with use cases and scenarios being used for requirements stories. Estimates of software costs are becoming even more important than before as effects of delays is much larger in successive short releases context of agile development. Thus, this paper reports on the development of new linear use case based software cost estimation model applicable in the very early stages of software development being based on simple metric. Evaluation showed that accuracy of estimates varies between 43% and 55% of actual effort of historical test projects. These results outperformed those of wellknown models when applied in the same context. Further work is being carried out to improve the performance of the proposed model when considering the effect of non-functional requirements.
Abstract: The microbial production of ethanol from biodiesel¬derived crude glycerol by Enterobacter aerogenes TISTR1468, under micro-aerobic and anaerobic conditions, was investigated. The experimental results showed that micro-aerobic conditions were more favorable for cellular growth (4.0 g/L DCW), ethanol production (20.7 g/L) as well as the ethanol yield (0.47 g/g glycerol) than anaerobic conditions (1.2 g/L DCW, 6.3 g/L ethanol and 0.72 g/g glycerol, respectively). Crude glycerol (100 g/L) was consumed completely with the rate of 1.80 g/L/h. Two-stage fermentation (combination of micro-aerobic and anaerobic condition) exhibited higher ethanol production (24.5 g/L) than using one-stage fermentation (either micro-aerobic or anaerobic condition. The two- stage configuration, exhibited slightly higher crude glycerol consumption rate (1.81 g/L/h), as well as ethanol yield (0.56 g/g) than the one-stage configuration. Therefore, two-stage process was selected for ethanol production from E. aerogenes TISTR1468 in scale-up studies.
Abstract: During signal transmission, the combined effect of the
transmitter filter, the transmission medium, and additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN) are included in the channel which distort
and add noise to the signal. This causes the well defined signal
constellation to spread causing errors in bit detection. A compact pi
neural network with minimum number of nodes is proposed. The
replacement of summation at each node by multiplication results in
more powerful mapping. The resultant pi network is tested on six
different channels.