Abstract: The purpose of the study was to determine if, among
32 brain injured adults in community rehabilitation programs, there is
a statistically significant relationship between the degree of severity
of brain injury and these adults- level of self-esteem and stress. The
researcher hypothesized there would be a statistically significant
difference and a statistically significant relationship in self-esteem
and stress levels among and TBI adults. A Pearson product moment
correlational analysis was implemented and results found a
statistically significant relationship between self-esteem and stress
levels. Future recommendations were suggested upon completion of
research.
Abstract: Lately, significant work in the area of Intelligent
Manufacturing has become public and mainly applied within the
frame of industrial purposes. Special efforts have been made in the
implementation of new technologies, management and control
systems, among many others which have all evolved the field. Aware
of all this and due to the scope of new projects and the need of
turning the existing flexible ideas into more autonomous and
intelligent ones, i.e.: Intelligent Manufacturing, the present paper
emerges with the main aim of contributing to the design and analysis
of the material flow in either systems, cells or work stations under
this new “intelligent" denomination. For this, besides offering a
conceptual basis in some of the key points to be taken into account
and some general principles to consider in the design and analysis of
the material flow, also some tips on how to define other possible
alternative material flow scenarios and a classification of the states a
system, cell or workstation are offered as well. All this is done with
the intentions of relating it with the use of simulation tools, for which
these have been briefly addressed with a special focus on the Witness
simulation package. For a better comprehension, the previous
elements are supported by a detailed layout, other figures and a few
expressions which could help obtaining necessary data. Such data and
others will be used in the future, when simulating the scenarios in the
search of the best material flow configurations.
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to construct a creativity
composite index designed to capture the growing role of creativity in
driving economic and social development for the 27 European Union
countries.
The paper proposes a new approach for the measurement of EU-27
creative potential and for determining its capacity to attract and
develop creative human capital. We apply a modified version of the
3T model developed by Richard Florida and Irene Tinagli for
constructing a Euro-Creativity Index. The resulting indexes establish
a quantitative base for policy makers, supporting their efforts to
determine the contribution of creativity to economic development.
Abstract: Supersonic hydrogen-air cylindrical mixing layer is
numerically analyzed to investigate the effect of inlet swirl on
ignition time delay in scramjets. Combustion is treated using detail
chemical kinetics. One-equation turbulence model of Spalart and
Allmaras is chosen to study the problem and advection upstream
splitting method is used as computational scheme. The results show
that swirling both fuel and oxidizer streams may drastically decrease
the ignition distance in supersonic combustion, unlike using the swirl
just in fuel stream which has no helpful effect.
Abstract: The effect of beak trimming on behavior of two strains
of Thai native pullets kept in floor pens was studied. Six general
activities (standing, crouching, moving, comforting, roosting, and
nesting), 6 beak related activities (preening, feeding, drinking,
pecking at inedible object, feather pecking, and litter pecking), and 4
agonistic activities (head pecking, threatening, avoiding, and fighting)
were measured twice a for 15 consecutive days, started when the
pullets were 19 wk old. It was found that beak trimmed pullets drank
more frequent (P
Abstract: Appropriate description of business processes through
standard notations has become one of the most important assets for
organizations. Organizations must therefore deal with quality faults
in business process models such as the lack of understandability and
modifiability. These quality faults may be exacerbated if business
process models are mined by reverse engineering, e.g., from existing
information systems that support those business processes. Hence,
business process refactoring is often used, which change the internal
structure of business processes whilst its external behavior is
preserved. This paper aims to choose the most appropriate set of
refactoring operators through the quality assessment concerning
understandability and modifiability. These quality features are
assessed through well-proven measures proposed in the literature.
Additionally, a set of measure thresholds are heuristically established
for applying the most promising refactoring operators, i.e., those that
achieve the highest quality improvement according to the selected
measures in each case.
Abstract: The back propagation algorithm calculates the weight
changes of artificial neural networks, and a common approach is to
use a training algorithm consisting of a learning rate and a
momentum factor. The major drawbacks of above learning algorithm
are the problems of local minima and slow convergence speeds. The
addition of an extra term, called a proportional factor reduces the
convergence of the back propagation algorithm. We have applied the
three term back propagation to multiplicative neural network
learning. The algorithm is tested on XOR and parity problem and
compared with the standard back propagation training algorithm.
Abstract: Pharmaceutical industries and effluents of sewage treatment plants are the main sources of residual pharmaceuticals in water resources. These emergent pollutants may adversely impact the biophysical environment. Pharmaceutical industries often generate wastewater that changes in characteristics and quantity depending on the used manufacturing processes. Carbamazepine (CBZ), {5Hdibenzo [b,f]azepine-5-carboxamide, (C15H12N2O)}, is a significant non-biodegradable pharmaceutical contaminant in the Jordanian pharmaceutical wastewater, which is not removed by the activated sludge processes in treatment plants. Activated carbon may potentially remove that pollutant from effluents, but the high cost involved suggests that more attention should be given to the potential use of low-cost materials in order to reduce cost and environmental contamination. Powders of Jordanian non-metallic raw materials namely, Azraq Bentonite (AB), Kaolinite (K), and Zeolite (Zeo) were activated (acid and thermal treatment) and evaluated by removing CBZ. The results of batch and column techniques experiments showed around 46% and 67% removal of CBZ respectively.
Abstract: This study investigated the seasonal prevalence of
Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus larvae in three topographical areas
(i.e. mangrove, rice paddy and mountainous areas). Samples were
collected from 300 households in both wet and dry seasons in nine
districts in Nakhon Si Thammarat province. Ae. aegypti and Ae.
albopictus were found in 21 out of 29 types of water containers in
mangrove, rice paddy and mountainous areas. Ae. aegypti and Ae.
albopictus laid eggs in different container types depending on season
and topographical areas. Ae. aegypti larvae were found most in metal
box in mangrove and mountainous areas in wet season. Ae.
albopictus larvae were also found most in metal box in mangrove and
mountainous areas in both wet and dry seasons. All Ae. albopictus
larval indices were higher than Ae. aegypti larval indices in all three
topographical areas and both seasons. HI and BI did not differ in
three topographical areas but differed between Aedes sp. HI for both
Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus in all three topographical areas in both
seasons were greater than 10 %, except Aedes aegypti in rice paddy
area in wet season. This indicated high risks of DHF transmission in
these areas.
Abstract: To investigate the energy performance of solar shading devices, this paper carried out a survey on the current status of solar shading utilization in buildings in Ningbo and performed building simulations to evaluate the energy savings potential by adopting different solar shading devices. Results show that solar shading utilization in this area is not popular and effective, and should be considered firstly in the design stage since the potential for energy savings is up to 6.8% for residential buildings and 9.4% for commercial buildings.
Abstract: For more than 120 years, gold mining formed the
backbone the South Africa-s economy. The consequence of mine
closure was observed in large-scale land degradation and widespread
pollution of surface water and groundwater. This paper investigates
the feasibility of using natural zeolite in removing heavy metals
contaminating the Wonderfonteinspruit Catchment Area (WCA), a
water stream with high levels of heavy metals and radionuclide
pollution. Batch experiments were conducted to study the adsorption
behavior of natural zeolite with respect to Fe2+, Mn2+, Ni2+, and Zn2+.
The data was analysed using the Langmuir and Freudlich isotherms.
Langmuir was found to correlate the adsorption of Fe2+, Mn2+, Ni2+,
and Zn2+ better, with the adsorption capacity of 11.9 mg/g, 1.2 mg/g,
1.3 mg/g, and 14.7 mg/g, respectively. Two kinetic models namely,
pseudo-first order and pseudo second order were also tested to fit the
data. Pseudo-second order equation was found to be the best fit for
the adsorption of heavy metals by natural zeolite. Zeolite
functionalization with humic acid increased its uptake ability.
Abstract: Clustering in high dimensional space is a difficult
problem which is recurrent in many fields of science and
engineering, e.g., bioinformatics, image processing, pattern
reorganization and data mining. In high dimensional space some of
the dimensions are likely to be irrelevant, thus hiding the possible
clustering. In very high dimensions it is common for all the objects in
a dataset to be nearly equidistant from each other, completely
masking the clusters. Hence, performance of the clustering algorithm
decreases.
In this paper, we propose an algorithmic framework which
combines the (reduct) concept of rough set theory with the k-means
algorithm to remove the irrelevant dimensions in a high dimensional
space and obtain appropriate clusters. Our experiment on test data
shows that this framework increases efficiency of the clustering
process and accuracy of the results.
Abstract: Short Message Service (SMS) has grown in
popularity over the years and it has become a common way of
communication, it is a service provided through General System
for Mobile Communications (GSM) that allows users to send text
messages to others.
SMS is usually used to transport unclassified information, but
with the rise of mobile commerce it has become a popular tool for
transmitting sensitive information between the business and its
clients. By default SMS does not guarantee confidentiality and
integrity to the message content.
In the mobile communication systems, security (encryption)
offered by the network operator only applies on the wireless link.
Data delivered through the mobile core network may not be
protected. Existing end-to-end security mechanisms are provided
at application level and typically based on public key
cryptosystem.
The main concern in a public-key setting is the authenticity of
the public key; this issue can be resolved by identity-based (IDbased)
cryptography where the public key of a user can be derived
from public information that uniquely identifies the user.
This paper presents an encryption mechanism based on the IDbased
scheme using Elliptic curves to provide end-to-end security
for SMS. This mechanism has been implemented over the standard
SMS network architecture and the encryption overhead has been
estimated and compared with RSA scheme. This study indicates
that the ID-based mechanism has advantages over the RSA
mechanism in key distribution and scalability of increasing
security level for mobile service.
Abstract: Using mobile Internet access technologies and eservices,
various economic agents can efficiently offer their products
or services to a large number of clients. With the support of mobile
communications networks, the clients can have access to e-services,
anywhere and anytime. This is a base to establish a convergence of
technological and financial interests of mobile operators, software
developers, mobile terminals producers and e-content providers. In
this paper, a client server system is presented, using 3G, EDGE,
mobile terminals, for Stock Exchange e-services access.
Abstract: Modeling of the dynamic behavior and motion are
renewed interest in the improved tractive performance of an
intelligent air-cushion tracked vehicle (IACTV). This paper presents
a new dynamical model for the forces on the developed small scale
intelligent air-cushion tracked vehicle moving over swamp peat. The
air cushion system partially supports the 25 % of vehicle total weight
in order to make the vehicle ground contact pressure 7 kN/m2. As the
air-cushion support system can adjust automatically on the terrain, so
the vehicle can move over the terrain without any risks. The springdamper
system is used with the vehicle body to control the aircushion
support system on any undulating terrain by making the
system sinusoidal form. Experiments have been carried out to
investigate the relationships among tractive efficiency, slippage,
traction coefficient, load distribution ratio, tractive effort, motion
resistance and power consumption in given terrain conditions.
Experiment and simulation results show that air-cushion system
improves the vehicle performance by keeping traction coefficient of
71% and tractive efficiency of 62% and the developed model can
meet the demand of transport efficiency with the optimal power
consumption.
Abstract: Particle boards were prepared from Maize cob (MC) and urea-formaldehyde resin (UFR) on compression moulding machine. The amount of MC was varied from 50-120g while 30g of UFR was kept constant. Some mechanical properties of the particle boards were tested using the standard ASM methods. The results show that as the MC content increased from 50- 120g in 30g UFR, the hardness increased from about 6.89 x 102 to7.51 x 102MPa. Impact strength decreased from 3.3x 10-2 to 0.45 x 10-2J/M2, while tensile strength initially increased from 2.63 x 102 to 3.14 x 102 MPa as the MC increased from 50 to 60g in 30g UFR, thereafter, it decreased to about 1.35 x 102MPa at 120g in 30g content.
Abstract: In this paper a stochastic scenario-based model predictive control applied to molten salt storage systems in concentrated solar tower power plant is presented. The main goal of this study is to build up a tool to analyze current and expected future resources for evaluating the weekly power to be advertised on electricity secondary market. This tool will allow plant operator to maximize profits while hedging the impact on the system of stochastic variables such as resources or sunlight shortage.
Solving the problem first requires a mixed logic dynamic modeling of the plant. The two stochastic variables, respectively the sunlight incoming energy and electricity demands from secondary market, are modeled by least square regression. Robustness is achieved by drawing a certain number of random variables realizations and applying the most restrictive one to the system. This scenario approach control technique provides the plant operator a confidence interval containing a given percentage of possible stochastic variable realizations in such a way that robust control is always achieved within its bounds. The results obtained from many trajectory simulations show the existence of a ‘’reliable’’ interval, which experimentally confirms the algorithm robustness.
Abstract: This research aims to analyze the regenerative burner and the recuperative burner for the different reheating furnaces in the steel industry. The warm air temperatures of the burners are determined to suit with the sizes of the reheating furnaces by considering the air temperature, the fuel cost and the investment cost. The calculations of the payback period and the net present value are studied to compare the burners for the different reheating furnaces. The energy balance is utilized to calculate and compare the energy used in the different sizes of reheating furnaces for each burner. It is found that the warm air temperature is different if the sizes of reheating furnaces are varied. Based on the considerations of the net present value and the payback period, the regenerative burner is suitable for all plants at the same life of the burner. Finally, the sensitivity analysis of all factors has been discussed in this research.
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of the partial state
feedback stabilization of a class of nonlinear systems. In order to
stabilization this class systems, the especial place of this paper is
to reverse designing the state feedback control law from the method
of judging system stability with the center manifold theory. First of
all, the center manifold theory is applied to discuss the stabilization
sufficient condition and design the stabilizing state control laws for a
class of nonlinear. Secondly, the problem of partial stabilization for a
class of plane nonlinear system is discuss using the lyapunov second
method and the center manifold theory. Thirdly, we investigate specially
the problem of the stabilization for a class of homogenous plane
nonlinear systems, a class of nonlinear with dual-zero eigenvalues and
a class of nonlinear with zero-center using the method of lyapunov
function with homogenous derivative, specifically. At the end of this
paper, some examples and simulation results are given show that the
approach of this paper to this class of nonlinear system is effective
and convenient.