Abstract: Pepper spray use has gained momentum since 1992
and although the active ingredient is readily available, it is considered
a weapon with restricted use in many regions, including The
Bahamas. In light of controversy in the literature regarding the
severity of presenting respiration complaints among individuals postacute
exposure of pepper spray inhalation, this descriptive case series
study was conducted to assess the respiratory status of persons
evaluated during a mass casualty in The Bahamas. Parameters noted
were patients- demographics and respiration severity determined via
clinical examination findings, disposition and follow-up review of the
20 persons. Their most common complaint was difficulty breathing
post exposure. Two required admission and stayed for
Abstract: Component-Based software engineering provides an
opportunity for better quality and increased productivity in software
development by using reusable software components [10]. One of the
most critical aspects of the quality of a software system is its
performance. The systematic application of software performance
engineering techniques throughout the development process can help
to identify design alternatives that preserve desirable qualities such
as extensibility and reusability while meeting performance objectives
[1]. In the present scenario, software engineering methodologies
strongly focus on the functionality of the system, while applying a
“fix- it-later" approach to software performance aspects [3]. As a
result, lengthy fine-tunings, expensive extra hard ware, or even
redesigns are necessary for the system to meet the performance
requirements. In this paper, we propose design based,
implementation independent, performance prediction approach to
reduce the overhead associated in the later phases while developing a
performance guaranteed software product with the help of Unified
Modeling Language (UML).
Abstract: In this paper, stability and Hopf bifurcation analysis of
a novel hyperchaotic system are investigated. Four feedback control
strategies, the linear feedback control method, enhancing feedback
control method, speed feedback control method and delayed feedback
control method, are used to control the hyperchaotic attractor to
unstable equilibrium. Moreover numerical simulations are given to
verify the theoretical results.
Abstract: This paper discusses the effectiveness of the EEG signal
for human identification using four or less of channels of two different
types of EEG recordings. Studies have shown that the EEG signal
has biometric potential because signal varies from person to person
and impossible to replicate and steal. Data were collected from 10
male subjects while resting with eyes open and eyes closed in 5
separate sessions conducted over a course of two weeks. Features
were extracted using the wavelet packet decomposition and analyzed
to obtain the feature vectors. Subsequently, the neural networks
algorithm was used to classify the feature vectors. Results show that,
whether or not the subjects- eyes were open are insignificant for a 4–
channel biometrics system with a classification rate of 81%. However,
for a 2–channel system, the P4 channel should not be included if data
is acquired with the subjects- eyes open. It was observed that for 2–
channel system using only the C3 and C4 channels, a classification
rate of 71% was achieved.
Abstract: This research analyzes factors affecting the success of
Litecoin Value within Thailand and develops a guideline for selfreliance
for effective business implementation. Samples in this study
included 119 people through surveys. The results revealed four main
factors affecting the success as follows: 1) Future Career training
should be pursued in applied Litecoin development. 2) Didn't grasp
the concept of a digital currency or see the benefit of a digital
currency. 3) There is a great need to educate the next generation of
learners on the benefits of Litecoin within the community. 4) A great
majority didn't know what Litecoin was.
The guideline for self-reliance planning consisted of 4 aspects: 1)
Development planning: by arranging meet up groups to conduct
further education on Litecoin and share solutions on adoption into
every day usage. Local communities need to develop awareness of
the usefulness of Litecoin and share the value of Litecoin among
friends and family. 2) Computer Science and Business Management
staff should develop skills to expand on the benefits of Litecoin
within their departments. 3) Further research should be pursued on
how Litecoin Value can improve business and tourism within
Thailand. 4) Local communities should focus on developing Litecoin
awareness by encouraging street vendors to accept Litecoin as
another form of payment for services rendered.
Abstract: Sign language is used by the deaf and hard of hearing people for communication. Automatic sign language recognition is a challenging research area since sign language often is the only way of communication for the deaf people. Sign language includes different components of visual actions made by the signer using the hands, the face, and the torso, to convey his/her meaning. To use different aspects of signs, we combine the different groups of features which have been extracted from the image frames recorded directly by a stationary camera. We combine the features in two levels by employing three techniques. At the feature level, an early feature combination can be performed by concatenating and weighting different feature groups, or by concatenating feature groups over time and using LDA to choose the most discriminant elements. At the model level, a late fusion of differently trained models can be carried out by a log-linear model combination. In this paper, we investigate these three combination techniques in an automatic sign language recognition system and show that the recognition rate can be significantly improved.
Abstract: The usual method of river flow diversion involves construction of tunnels and cofferdams. Given the fact that the cost of diversion works could be as high as 10-20% of the total dam construction cost, due attention should be paid to optimum design of the diversion works. The cost of diversion works depends, on factors, such as: the tunnel dimensions and the intended tunneling support measures during and after excavation; quality and characterizes of the rock through which the tunnel should be excavated; the dimensions of the upstream (and downstream) cofferdams; and the magnitude of river flood the system is designed to divert. In this paper by use of the cost of unit prices for tunnel excavation, tunnel lining, tunnel support (rock bolt + shotcrete) and cofferdam fill the cost function was determined. The function is then minimized by the aid of PSO Algorithm (particle swarm optimization). It is found that the optimum diameter and the total diversion cost are directly related to the river flood discharge (Q). It has also shown that in addition to optimum diameter design discharge (Q), river length, tunnel length, is mainly a function of the ratios (not the absolute values) of the unit prices and does not depend on the overall price levels in the respective country. The results of optimization use in some of the case study lead us to significant changes in the cost.
Abstract: Hand gesture is an active area of research in the vision
community, mainly for the purpose of sign language recognition and
Human Computer Interaction. In this paper, we propose a system to
recognize alphabet characters (A-Z) and numbers (0-9) in real-time
from stereo color image sequences using Hidden Markov Models
(HMMs). Our system is based on three main stages; automatic segmentation
and preprocessing of the hand regions, feature extraction
and classification. In automatic segmentation and preprocessing stage,
color and 3D depth map are used to detect hands where the hand
trajectory will take place in further step using Mean-shift algorithm
and Kalman filter. In the feature extraction stage, 3D combined features
of location, orientation and velocity with respected to Cartesian
systems are used. And then, k-means clustering is employed for
HMMs codeword. The final stage so-called classification, Baum-
Welch algorithm is used to do a full train for HMMs parameters.
The gesture of alphabets and numbers is recognized using Left-Right
Banded model in conjunction with Viterbi algorithm. Experimental
results demonstrate that, our system can successfully recognize hand
gestures with 98.33% recognition rate.
Abstract: Social, mobility and information aggregation inside
business environment need to converge to reach the next step of
collaboration to enhance interaction and innovation. The following
article is based on the “Assemblage" concept seen as a framework to
formalize new user interfaces and applications. The area of research
is the Energy Social Business Environment, especially the Energy
Smart Grids, which are considered as functional and technical
foundations of the revolution of the Energy Sector of tomorrow. The
assemblages are modelized by means of mereology and simplicial
complexes. Its objective is to offer new central attention and
decision-making tools to end-users.
Abstract: The report focuses on such an important indicator of the nature and direction of development of ethnic and cultural processes in the Republic of Kazakhstan, as ethno linguistic situation. It is shown that, in essence, on the one hand, expresses the degree of the actual propagation and the level of use of the languages of the various ethnic communities. On the other hand, reflects the important patterns, trends and prospects of ethno-cultural and ethnodemographic processes in the Republic. It is important to note that the ethno linguistic situation in different regions of Kazakhstan, due to its more dynamic and much more difficult to demonstrate a much greater variety of options when compared with the ethnic situation in the country. For the two major ethnic groups of the republic – Kazakh and Russian language ethno differentiating retains its value, while for the other ethnic groups observed decline in the importance of this indicator. As you know, the language of international communication in the country is Russian. As the censuses of population, the Russian language in many areas of Northern, Central and Eastern Kazakhstan becomes a means of ethno linguistic development for most of the non-Russian population. This is most clearly illustrated by the Germans, and the Slavic ethnic groups. In this case, the Russian language is not just a means of international communication for a number of ethnic groups, and ethnic groups, it becomes a factor of ethnic self-expression. The value of the Kazakh language as their mother tongue for the other groups of the population is small. More clearly it can be traced only to the Turkic-speaking population of the republic – Uzbeks, Uighurs, Tatars, Turks, etc. The state Kazakh language is a means of international communication in the Western and Southern Kazakhstan, with a predominance of the Kazakh population. The report shows that the most important factor in the development of ethno-linguistic and ethno-cultural processes is bilingualism. Comparative analysis of materials census shows, first, on the increase of the proportion of bilingual population among Kazakhs and Russian, and second, to reduce the proportion of bilingual population of other ethnic groups living in Kazakhstan, and third, a higher proportion bilingual population among residents than rural residents, regardless of their ethnicity. Bilingualism is mainly of a "national Kazakh", "national Russian" or "Kazakh-national" or "Russian-national" character. The President N.A. Nazarbayev said that the Kazakh language is the most important factor in the consolidation of the people of Kazakhstan. He therefore called on government and other state and local representative bodies fully develop the state language, to create all the necessary organizational, material and technical conditions for free and open learning the state language by all citizens of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Abstract: The paper presents the design concept of a unitselection
text-to-speech synthesis system for the Slovenian language.
Due to its modular and upgradable architecture, the system can be
used in a variety of speech user interface applications, ranging from
server carrier-grade voice portal applications, desktop user interfaces
to specialized embedded devices.
Since memory and processing power requirements are important
factors for a possible implementation in embedded devices, lexica
and speech corpora need to be reduced. We describe a simple and
efficient implementation of a greedy subset selection algorithm that
extracts a compact subset of high coverage text sentences. The
experiment on a reference text corpus showed that the subset
selection algorithm produced a compact sentence subset with a small
redundancy.
The adequacy of the spoken output was evaluated by several
subjective tests as they are recommended by the International
Telecommunication Union ITU.
Abstract: The operating control parameters of injection
flushing type of electrical discharge machining process on stainless
steel 304 workpiece using copper tools are being optimized
according to its individual machining characteristic i.e. Electrode
Wear Ratio (EWR). Higher EWR would give bad dimensional
precision for the EDM machined workpiece because of high
electrode wear. Hence, the quality characteristic for EWR is set to
lower-the-better to achieve the optimum dimensional precision for
the machined workpiece. Taguchi method has been used for the
construction, layout and analysis of the experiment for EWR
machining characteristic. The use of Taguchi method in the
experiment saves a lot of time and cost of preparing and machining
the experiment samples. Therefore, an L18 Orthogonal array
which was the fundamental component in the statistical design of
experiments has been used to plan the experiments and Analysis of
Variance (ANOVA) is used to determine the optimum machining
parameters for this machining characteristic. The control
parameters selected for this optimization experiments are polarity,
pulse on duration, discharge current, discharge voltage, machining
depth, machining diameter and dielectric liquid pressure. The
result had shown that negative polarity machining parameter
setting will decreases EWR.
Abstract: The study concerns an experimental investigation in
the laboratory of the water erosion using a rainfall simulator. We
have focused our attention on the influence of rainfall intensity on
some hydraulic characteristics. The results obtained allow us to
conclude that there is a significant correlation between rainfall
intensity and hydraulic characteristics of runoff (Reynolds number,
Froude number) and sediment concentration.
Abstract: Climate change is a cumulative change in weather
patterns over a period of time. Trend analysis using non-parametric
Mann-Kendall test may help to determine the existence and
magnitude of any statistically significant trend in the climatic data.
Another index called Sen slope may be used to quantify the
magnitude of such trends. A toolbar extension to ESRI ArcGIS
named Arc Trends has been developed in this study for performing
the above mentioned tasks. To study the temporal trend of
meteorological parameters, 32 years (1971-2002) monthly
meteorological data were collected for 133 selected stations over
different agro-ecological regions of India. Both the maximum and
minimum temperatures were found to be rising. A significant
increasing trend in the relative humidity and a consistent significant
decreasing trend in the wind speed all over the country were found.
However, a general increase in rainfall was not found in recent years.
Abstract: In this paper, an attempt has been made to obtain nonsensitive
solutions in the multi-objective optimization of a
photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) air collector. The selected objective
functions are overall energy efficiency and exergy efficiency.
Improved thermal, electrical and exergy models are used to calculate
the thermal and electrical parameters, overall energy efficiency,
exergy components and exergy efficiency of a typical PV/T air
collector. A computer simulation program is also developed. The
results of numerical simulation are in good agreement with the
experimental measurements noted in the previous literature. Finally,
multi-objective optimization has been carried out under given
climatic, operating and design parameters. The optimized ranges of
inlet air velocity, duct depth and the objective functions in optimal
Pareto front have been obtained. Furthermore, non-sensitive solutions
from energy or exergy point of view in the results of multi-objective
optimization have been shown.
Abstract: Hot tear cracking and residual stress are two different consequences of thermal stress both of which can be considered as casting problem. The purpose of the present study is simulation of the effect of casting shape characteristic on hot tearing and residual stress. This study shows that the temperature range for simulation of hot tearing and residual stress are different. In this study, in order to study the development of thermal stress and to predict the hot tearing and residual stress of shaped casting, MAGMASOFT simulation program was used. The strategy of this research was the prediction of hot tear location using pinpointing hot spot and thermal stress concentration zones. The results shows that existing of stress concentration zone increases the hot tearing probability and consequently reduces the amount of remaining residual stress in casting parts.
Abstract: Memory forensic is important in digital investigation.
The forensic is based on the data stored in physical memory that
involve memory management and processing time. However, the
current forensic tools do not consider the efficiency in terms of
storage management and the processing time. This paper shows the
high redundancy of data found in the physical memory that cause
inefficiency in processing time and memory management. The
experiment is done using Borland C compiler on Windows XP with
512 MB of physical memory.
Abstract: The current practice of determination of moisture diffusivity of building materials under laboratory conditions is predominantly aimed at the absorption phase. The main reason is the simplicity of the inverse analysis of measured moisture profiles. However, the liquid moisture transport may exhibit significant hysteresis. Thus, the moisture diffusivity should be different in the absorption (wetting) and desorption (drying) phase. In order to bring computer simulations of hygrothermal performance of building materials closer to the reality, it is then necessary to find new methods for inverse analysis which could be used in the desorption phase as well. In this paper we present genetic algorithm as a possible method of solution of the inverse problem of moisture transport in desorption phase. Its application is demonstrated for AAC as a typical building material.
Abstract: In this paper an open agent-based modular framework
for personalized and adaptive curriculum generation in e-learning
environment is proposed. Agent-based approaches offer several
potential advantages over alternative approaches. Agent-based
systems exhibit high levels of flexibility and robustness in dynamic
or unpredictable environments by virtue of their intrinsic autonomy.
The presented framework enables integration of different types of
expert agents, various kinds of learning objects and user modeling
techniques. It creates possibilities for adaptive e-learning process.
The KM e-learning system is in a process of implementation in
Varna Free University and will be used for supporting the
educational process at the University.
Abstract: Numerous divergence measures (spectral distance, cepstral
distance, difference of the cepstral coefficients, Kullback-Leibler
divergence, distance given by the General Likelihood Ratio, distance
defined by the Recursive Bayesian Changepoint Detector and the
Mahalanobis measure) are compared in this study. The measures are
used for detection of abrupt spectral changes in synthetic AR signals
via the sliding window algorithm. Two experiments are performed;
the first is focused on detection of single boundary while the second
concentrates on detection of a couple of boundaries. Accuracy of
detection is judged for each method; the measures are compared
according to results of both experiments.