Abstract: Throughout the world, the Islamic way of banking and
financing is increasing. The same trend is also visible in Pakistan, where the Islamic banking sector is increasing in size and volume
each year. The question immediately arises as why the Pakistanis patronize the Islamic banking system? This study was carried out to
find whether following the Islamic rules in finance is the main factor for such selection or whether other factors such as customer service,
location, banking hour, physical facilities of the bank etc also have
importance. The study was carried by distributing questionnaire and
200 responses were collected from the clients of Islamic banks. The result showed that the service quality and other factors are as
important as following the Islamic rules for finance to retain old ustomers and catch new customers. The result is important and
Islamic banks can take actions accordingly to look after both the factors
Abstract: This article is based on the technique which is called
Discrete Parameter Tracking (DPT). First introduced by A. A. Azab
[8] which is applicable for less order reference model. The order of
the reference model is (n-l) and n is the number of the adjustable
parameters in the physical plant.
The technique utilizes a modified gradient method [9] where the
knowledge of the exact order of the nonadaptive system is not
required, so, as to eliminate the identification problem. The
applicability of the mentioned technique (DPT) was examined
through the solution of several problems.
This article introduces the solution of a third order system with
three adjustable parameters, controlled according to second order
reference model. The adjustable parameters have great initial error
which represent condition.
Computer simulations for the solution and analysis are provided
to demonstrate the simplicity and feasibility of the technique.
Abstract: In this work, an organic compound 5,10,15,20-
Tetrakis(3,5-di-tertbutylphenyl)porphyrinatocopper(II) (TDTBPPCu)
is studied as an active material for thin film electronic devices. To
investigate the electrical properties of TDTBPPCu, junction of
TDTBPPCu with heavily doped n-Si and Al is fabricated.
TDTBPPCu film was sandwiched between Al and n-Si electrodes.
Various electrical parameters of TDTBPPCu are determined. The
current-voltage characteristics of the junction are nonlinear,
asymmetric and show rectification behavior, which gives the clue of
formation of depletion region. This behavior indicates the potential
of TDTBPPCu for electronics applications. The current-voltage and
capacitance-voltage techniques are used to find the different
electronic parameters.
Abstract: Availability and mobilization of revenue is the main
essential with which an economy is managed and run. While
planning or while making the budgets nations set revenue targets to
be achieved. But later when the accounts are closed the actual
collections of revenue through taxes or even the non-tax revenue
collection would invariably be different as compared to the initial
estimates and targets set to be achieved. This revenue-gap distorts the
whole system and the economy disturbing all the major macroeconomic
indicators. This study is aimed to find out short and long
term impact of revenue gap on budget deficit, debt burden and
economic growth on the economy of Pakistan. For this purpose the
study uses autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration
and error correction mechanism on three different models for the
period 1980 to 2009. The empirical results show that revenue gap has
a short and long run relationship with economic growth and budget
deficit. However, revenue gap has no impact on debt burden.
Abstract: The market transformation in Kazakhstan during the
last two decades has essentially strengthened a gap between
development of urban and rural areas. Implementation of market
institutes, transition from public financing to paid rendering of social
services, change of forms of financing of social and economic
infrastructure have led to strengthening of an economic inequality of
social groups, including growth of stratification of the city and the
village. Sociological survey of urban and rural households in Almaty
city and villages of Almaty region has been carried out within the
international research project “Livelihoods Strategies of Private
Households in Central Asia: A Rural–Urban Comparison in
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan" (Germany, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan).
The analysis of statistical data and results of sociological research of
urban and rural households allows us to reveal issues of territorial
development, to investigate an availability of medical, educational
and other services in the city and the village, to reveal an evaluation
urban and rural dwellers of living conditions, to compare economic
strategies of households in the city and the village.
Abstract: The special constraints of sensor networks impose a
number of technical challenges for employing them. In this review,
we study the issues and existing protocols in three areas: coverage
and routing. We present two types of coverage problems: to
determine the minimum number of sensor nodes that need to perform
active sensing in order to monitor a certain area; and to decide the
quality of service that can be provided by a given sensor network.
While most routing protocols in sensor networks are data-centric,
there are other types of routing protocols as well, such as
hierarchical, location-based, and QoS-aware. We describe and
compare several protocols in each group. We present several multipath
routing protocols and single-path with local repair routing
protocols, which are proposed for recovering from sensor node
crashes. We also discuss some transport layer schemes for reliable
data transmission in lossy wireless channels.
Abstract: These paper, we approximate the average run length
(ARL) for CUSUM chart when observation are an exponential first
order moving average sequence (EMA1). We used Gauss-Legendre
numerical scheme for integral equations (IE) method for approximate
ARL0 and ARL1, where ARL in control and out of control,
respectively. We compared the results from IE method and exact
solution such that the two methods perform good agreement.
Abstract: A Ground Control System (GCS), which controls Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and monitors their missionrelated data, is one of the major components of UAVs. In fact, some traditional GCSs were built on an expensive, complicated hardware infrastructure with workstations and PCs. In contrast, a GCS on a portable device – such as an Android phone or tablet – takes advantage of its light-weight hardware and the rich User Interface supported by the Android Operating System. We implemented that kind of GCS and called it Ground System Software (GSS) in this paper. In operation, our GSS communicates with UAVs or other GSS via TCP/IP connection to get mission-related data, visualizes it on the device-s screen, and saves the data in its own database. Our study showed that this kind of system will become a potential instrument in UAV-related systems and this kind of topic will appear in many research studies in the near future.
Abstract: Anaerobic Digestion has become a promising
technology for biological transformation of organic fraction of the
municipal solid wastes (MSW). In order to represent the kinetic
behavior of such biological process and thereby to design a reactor
system, development of a mathematical model is essential.
Addressing this issue, a simplistic mathematical model has been
developed for anaerobic digestion of MSW in a continuous flow
reactor unit under homogeneous steady state condition. Upon
simulated hydrolysis, the kinetics of biomass growth and substrate
utilization rate are assumed to follow first order reaction kinetics.
Simulation of this model has been conducted by studying sensitivity
of various process variables. The model was simulated using typical
kinetic data of anaerobic digestion MSW and typical MSW
characteristics of Kolkata. The hydraulic retention time (HRT) and
solid retention time (SRT) time were mainly estimated by varying
different model parameters like efficiency of reactor, influent
substrate concentration and biomass concentration. Consequently,
design table and charts have also been prepared for ready use in the
actual plant operation.
Abstract: This paper presents parametric probability density
models for call holding times (CHTs) into emergency call center
based on the actual data collected for over a week in the public
Emergency Information Network (EIN) in Mongolia. When the set of
chosen candidates of Gamma distribution family is fitted to the call
holding time data, it is observed that the whole area in the CHT
empirical histogram is underestimated due to spikes of higher
probability and long tails of lower probability in the histogram.
Therefore, we provide the Gaussian parametric model of a mixture of
lognormal distributions with explicit analytical expressions for the
modeling of CHTs of PSNs. Finally, we show that the CHTs for
PSNs are fitted reasonably by a mixture of lognormal distributions
via the simulation of expectation maximization algorithm. This result
is significant as it expresses a useful mathematical tool in an explicit
manner of a mixture of lognormal distributions.
Abstract: Study of soil properties like field capacity (F.C.) and permanent wilting point (P.W.P.) play important roles in study of soil moisture retention curve. Although these parameters can be measured directly, their measurement is difficult and expensive. Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) provide an alternative by estimating soil parameters from more readily available soil data. In this investigation, 70 soil samples were collected from different horizons of 15 soil profiles located in the Ziaran region, Qazvin province, Iran. The data set was divided into two subsets for calibration (80%) and testing (20%) of the models and their normality were tested by Kolmogorov-Smirnov method. Both multivariate regression and artificial neural network (ANN) techniques were employed to develop the appropriate PTFs for predicting soil parameters using easily measurable characteristics of clay, silt, O.C, S.P, B.D and CaCO3. The performance of the multivariate regression and ANN models was evaluated using an independent test data set. In order to evaluate the models, root mean square error (RMSE) and R2 were used. The comparison of RSME for two mentioned models showed that the ANN model gives better estimates of F.C and P.W.P than the multivariate regression model. The value of RMSE and R2 derived by ANN model for F.C and P.W.P were (2.35, 0.77) and (2.83, 0.72), respectively. The corresponding values for multivariate regression model were (4.46, 0.68) and (5.21, 0.64), respectively. Results showed that ANN with five neurons in hidden layer had better performance in predicting soil properties than multivariate regression.
Abstract: Land use change, if not based on proper scientific
investigation affects other physical, chemical, and biological
properties of soil and leading to increased destruction and erosion. It
was imperative to study the effects of changing rangelands to
farmlands on some Soil quality indexes. Undisturbed soil samples
were collected from the depths of 0-10 and 10-30 centimeter in
pasture with good vegetation cover(GP), pasture with medium
vegetation cover(MP), abandoned dry land farming(ADF) and
degraded dry land farming(DDF) land uses in Ghareh Aghaj
watershed of Isfahan province. The results revealed that organic
matter(OM), cation exchange capacity(CEC) and available
potassium(AK) decreasing in the depth of 0-10 centimeter were 66.6,
38.8 and 70 percent and in the depth of 10-30 centimeter were 58,
61.4 and 83.5 percent respectively in DDF comparison with GP.
Concerning to the results, it seems that land use change can decrease
soil quality and increase soil degradation and lead in undesirable
consequences.
Abstract: These In this work, a regular unit speed curve in six
dimensional Euclidean space, whose Frenet curvatures are constant,
is considered. Thereafter, a method to calculate Frenet apparatus of
this curve is presented.
Abstract: World has entered in 21st century. The technology of
computer graphics and digital cameras is prevalent. High resolution
display and printer are available. Therefore high resolution images
are needed in order to produce high quality display images and high
quality prints. However, since high resolution images are not usually
provided, there is a need to magnify the original images. One
common difficulty in the previous magnification techniques is that of
preserving details, i.e. edges and at the same time smoothing the data
for not introducing the spurious artefacts. A definitive solution to this
is still an open issue. In this paper an image magnification using
adaptive interpolation by pixel level data-dependent geometrical
shapes is proposed that tries to take into account information about
the edges (sharp luminance variations) and smoothness of the image.
It calculate threshold, classify interpolation region in the form of
geometrical shapes and then assign suitable values inside
interpolation region to the undefined pixels while preserving the
sharp luminance variations and smoothness at the same time.
The results of proposed technique has been compared qualitatively
and quantitatively with five other techniques. In which the qualitative
results show that the proposed method beats completely the Nearest
Neighbouring (NN), bilinear(BL) and bicubic(BC) interpolation. The
quantitative results are competitive and consistent with NN, BL, BC
and others.
Abstract: This paper focuses on a critical component of the situational awareness (SA), the control of autonomous vertical flight for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Autonomous vertical flight is a challenging but important task for tactical UAVs to achieve high level of autonomy under adverse conditions. With the SA strategy, we proposed a two stage flight control procedure using two autonomous control subsystems to address the dynamics variation and performance requirement difference in initial and final stages of flight trajectory for a nontrivial nonlinear trirotor mini-UAV model. This control strategy for chosen mini-UAV model has been verified by simulation of hovering maneuvers using software package Simulink and demonstrated good performance for fast SA in realtime search-and-rescue operations.
Abstract: The aim of the study was to investigate phytochemical
properties, antimicrobial activity and cytotoxicity of Aloe vera. The
phytochemical screening of the extracts of leaves of A. vera revealed
the presence of bioactive compounds such as alkaloids, tannins,
flavonoids phenolic compounds, and etc. with absence of cyanogenic
glycosides. Three different solvents such as methanol, ethanol and
Di-Methyl sulfoxide were used to screen the antimicrobial activity of
A. vera leaves against four human clinical pathogens by agar well
diffusion method. The maximum antibacterial activities were
observed in methanol extract followed by ethanol and Di-Methyl
sulfoxide. It was also found that remarkable antibacterial activities
with methanolic and ethanolic extracts of A. vera compared with the
standard antibiotic, tetracycline that was not active against E. coli
and S. boydii and supported the view that A. vera is a potent
antimicrobial agent compared with the conventional antibiotic.
Moreover, the brine shrimps (Artemia salina) toxicity test exhibited
LC50 value was 569.52 ppm. The resulting data indicated that the A.
vera plant have less toxic effects on brine shrimp. Hence, it is
signified that Aloe vera plant extract is safe to be used as an
antimicrobial agent.
Abstract: Many new experimental films which were free from conventional movie forms have appeared since Nubellbak Movement in the late 1950s. Forty years after the movement started, on March 13th, 1995, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of film, the declaration called Dogme 95, was issued in Copenhagen, Denmark. It aimed to create a new style of avant-garde film, and showed a tendency toward being anti-Hollywood and anti-genre, which were against the highly popular Hollywood trend of movies based on large-scale investment. The main idea of Dogme 95 is the opposition to 'the writer's doctrine' that a film should be the artist's individual work and to 'the overuse of technology' in film. The key figures declared ten principles called 'Vow of Chastity', by which new movie forms were to be produced. Interview (2000), directed by Byunhyuk, was made in 2000, five years after Dogme 95 was declared. This movie was dedicated as the first Asian Dogme. This study will survey the relationship between Korean film and the Vow of Chastity through the Korean films released in theaters from a viewpoint of technology and content. It also will call attention to its effects on and significance to Korean film in modern society.
Abstract: This paper introduces an automatic voice classification
system for the diagnosis of individual constitution based on Sasang
Constitutional Medicine (SCM) in Traditional Korean Medicine
(TKM). For the developing of this algorithm, we used the voices of
309 female speakers and extracted a total of 134 speech features from
the voice data consisting of 5 sustained vowels and one sentence. The
classification system, based on a rule-based algorithm that is derived
from a non parametric statistical method, presents 3 types of decisions:
reserved, positive and negative decisions. In conclusion, 71.5% of the
voice data were diagnosed by this system, of which 47.7% were
correct positive decisions and 69.7% were correct negative decisions.
Abstract: Dealing with hundreds of features in character
recognition systems is not unusual. This large number of features
leads to the increase of computational workload of recognition
process. There have been many methods which try to remove
unnecessary or redundant features and reduce feature dimensionality.
Besides because of the characteristics of Farsi scripts, it-s not
possible to apply other languages algorithms to Farsi directly. In this
paper some methods for feature subset selection using genetic
algorithms are applied on a Farsi optical character recognition (OCR)
system. Experimental results show that application of genetic
algorithms (GA) to feature subset selection in a Farsi OCR results in
lower computational complexity and enhanced recognition rate.
Abstract: Many firms implemented various initiatives such as outsourced manufacturing which could make a supply chain (SC) more vulnerable to various types of disruptions. So managing risk has become a critical component of SC management. Different types of SC vulnerability management methodologies have been proposed for managing SC risk, most offer only point-based solutions that deal with a limited set of risks. This research aims to reinforce SC risk management by proposing an integrated approach. SC risks are identified and a risk index classification structure is created. Then we develop a SC risk assessment approach based on the analytic network process (ANP) and the VIKOR methods under the fuzzy environment where the vagueness and subjectivity are handled with linguistic terms parameterized by triangular fuzzy numbers. By using FANP, risks weights are calculated and then inserted to the FVIKOR to rank the SC members and find the most risky partner.