Abstract: The grain quality of chickpea in Iran is low and
instable, which may be attributed to the evolution of cultivars with a
narrow genetic base making them vulnerable to biotic stresses. Four
chickpea varieties from diverse geographic origins were chosen and
arranged in a randomized complete block design. Mesorhizobium sp.
cicer strain SW7 was added to all the chickpea seeds. Chickpea seeds
were planted on October 9, 2013. Each genotype was sown 5 m in
length, with 35 cm inter-row spacing, in 3 rows. Weeds were
removed manually in all plots. Results showed that Analysis of
variance on the studied traits showed significant differences among
genotypes for N, P, K and Fe contents of chickpea, but there is not a
significant difference among Ca, Zn and Mg continents of chickpea.
The experimental coefficient of variation (CV) varied from 7.3 to
15.8. In general, the CV value lower than 20% is considered to be
good, indicating the accuracy of conducted experiments. The highest
grain N was observed in Hashem and Jam cultivars. The highest grain
P was observed in Jam cultivar. Phosphorus content (mg/100g)
ranged from 142.3 to 302.3 with a mean value of 221.3. The negative
correlation (-0.126) was observed between the N and P of chickpea
cultivars. The highest K and Fe contents were observed in Jam
cultivar.
Abstract: Latin hypercube designs (LHDs) have been applied in
many computer experiments among the space-filling designs found in
the literature. A LHD can be randomly generated but a randomly
chosen LHD may have bad properties and thus act poorly in
estimation and prediction. There is a connection between Latin
squares and orthogonal arrays (OAs). A Latin square of order s
involves an arrangement of s symbols in s rows and s columns, such
that every symbol occurs once in each row and once in each column
and this exists for every non-negative integer s. In this paper, a
computer program was written to construct orthogonal array-based
Latin hypercube designs (OA-LHDs). Orthogonal arrays (OAs) were
constructed from Latin square of order s and the OAs constructed
were afterward used to construct the desired Latin hypercube designs
for three input variables for use in computer experiments. The LHDs
constructed have better space-filling properties and they can be used
in computer experiments that involve only three input factors.
MATLAB 2012a computer package (www.mathworks.com/) was
used for the development of the program that constructs the designs.
Abstract: This paper investigates the benefits of deliberately
unbalancing both operation time means (MTs) and unreliability
(failure and repair rates) for non-automated production lines. The
lines were simulated with various line lengths, buffer capacities,
degrees of imbalance and patterns of MT and unreliability imbalance.
Data on two performance measures, namely throughput (TR) and
average buffer level (ABL) were gathered, analyzed and compared to
a balanced line counterpart. A number of conclusions were made
with respect to the ranking of configurations, as well as to the
relationships among the independent design parameters and the
dependent variables. It was found that the best configurations are a
balanced line arrangement and a monotone decreasing MT order,
coupled with either a decreasing or a bowl unreliability configuration,
with the first generally resulting in a reduced TR and the second
leading to a lower ABL than those of a balanced line.
Abstract: Public-private partnerships (PPP) arrangements have
been extensively used in Canada, where the participation of private
companies in financing and managing infrastructure projects has
increased significantly in the last decade, particularly in the
transportation sector. This paper analyses the evolution of the PPP
market for transportation projects in Canada and examines the
participation of Spanish developers in this market, which have been
particularly successful in winning PPP contracts during the last
decade.
Abstract: Two finite element (FEM) models are presented in
this paper to address the random nature of the response of glued
timber structures made of wood segments with variable elastic
moduli evaluated from 3600 indentation measurements. This total
database served to create the same number of ensembles as was the
number of segments in the tested beam. Statistics of these ensembles
were then assigned to given segments of beams and the Latin
Hypercube Sampling (LHS) method was called to perform 100
simulations resulting into the ensemble of 100 deflections subjected
to statistical evaluation. Here, a detailed geometrical arrangement of
individual segments in the laminated beam was considered in the
construction of two-dimensional FEM model subjected to in fourpoint
bending to comply with the laboratory tests. Since laboratory
measurements of local elastic moduli may in general suffer from a
significant experimental error, it appears advantageous to exploit the
full scale measurements of timber beams, i.e. deflections, to improve
their prior distributions with the help of the Bayesian statistical
method. This, however, requires an efficient computational model
when simulating the laboratory tests numerically. To this end, a
simplified model based on Mindlin’s beam theory was established.
The improved posterior distributions show that the most significant
change of the Young’s modulus distribution takes place in laminae in
the most strained zones, i.e. in the top and bottom layers within the
beam center region. Posterior distributions of moduli of elasticity
were subsequently utilized in the 2D FEM model and compared with
the original simulations.
Abstract: Flow blockages referring to the increase in flow are
being considered as a vital equipment for marine current energy
conversion. However, the shape of these devices will result in
extracted energy under the operation. The present work investigates
the effect of two configurations of a grating, convergent and
divergent that located upstream, to the water flow velocity. The flow
characteristics are studied by Computational Fluid Dynamic
simulation by using the ANSYS Fluent solver for these specified
arrangements of the grating. The results indicate that distinguished
characteristics of flow velocity between “convergent” and
“divergent” grating placements is up to 10% in confined conditions.
Furthermore, the velocity in case of convergent grating is higher
than that of divergent grating.
Abstract: The 3D body movement signals captured during
human-human conversation include clues not only to the content of
people’s communication but also to their culture and personality.
This paper is concerned with automatic extraction of this information
from body movement signals. For the purpose of this research, we
collected a novel corpus from 27 subjects, arranged them into groups
according to their culture. We arranged each group into pairs and
each pair communicated with each other about different topics.
A state-of-art recognition system is applied to the problems of
person, culture, and topic recognition. We borrowed modeling,
classification, and normalization techniques from speech recognition.
We used Gaussian Mixture Modeling (GMM) as the main technique
for building our three systems, obtaining 77.78%, 55.47%, and
39.06% from the person, culture, and topic recognition systems
respectively. In addition, we combined the above GMM systems with
Support Vector Machines (SVM) to obtain 85.42%, 62.50%, and
40.63% accuracy for person, culture, and topic recognition
respectively.
Although direct comparison among these three recognition
systems is difficult, it seems that our person recognition system
performs best for both GMM and GMM-SVM, suggesting that intersubject
differences (i.e. subject’s personality traits) are a major
source of variation. When removing these traits from culture and
topic recognition systems using the Nuisance Attribute Projection
(NAP) and the Intersession Variability Compensation (ISVC)
techniques, we obtained 73.44% and 46.09% accuracy from culture
and topic recognition systems respectively.
Abstract: Modern low earth orbit (LEO) satellites that require multi-mission flexibility are highly likely to be repositioned between different operational orbits. While executing this process the satellite may experience high levels of vibration and environmental hazards, exposing the deployed solar panel to dangerous stress levels, fatigue and space debris, hence it is desirable to retract the solar array before satellite repositioning to avoid damage or failure.
A novel concept of deployable/retractable hybrid solar array systemcomposed of both rigid and flexible solar panels arranged within a petal formation, aimed to provide a greater power to volume ratio while dramatically reducing mass and cost is proposed.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel statistical description of
the counterpoise effective length due to lightning surges, where the
(impulse) effective length had been obtained by means of regressive
formulas applied to the transient simulation results. The effective
length is described in terms of a statistical distribution function, from
which median, mean, variance, and other parameters of interest could
be readily obtained. The influence of lightning current amplitude,
lightning front duration, and soil resistivity on the effective length has
been accounted for, assuming statistical nature of these parameters. A
method for determining the optimal counterpoise length, in terms of
the statistical impulse effective length, is also presented. It is based on
estimating the number of dangerous events associated with lightning
strikes. Proposed statistical description and the associated method
provide valuable information which could aid the design engineer in
optimising physical lengths of counterpoises in different grounding
arrangements and soil resistivity situations.
Abstract: In this paper, extract of papaya leaves are used as a
natural dye and combined by variations of solvent concentration
applied on DSSC (Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell). Indonesian geographic
located on the equator line occasions the magnitude of the potential
to develop organic solar cells made from extracts of chlorophyll as a
substitute for inorganic materials or synthetic dye on DSSC material.
Dye serves as absorbing photons which are then converted into
electrical energy. A conductive coated glass layer called TCO
(Transparent Conductive Oxide) is used as a substrate of electrode.
TiO2 nanoparticles as binding dye molecules, redox couple iodide/
tri-iodide as the electrolyte and carbon as the counter electrode in the
DSSC are used. TiO2 nanoparticles, organic dyes, electrolytes, and
counter electrode are arranged and combined with the layered
structure of the photo-catalyst absorption layer. Dye absorption
measurements using a spectrophotometer at 400-800 nm light
spectrum produces a total amount of chlorophyll 80.076 mg/l. The
test cell at 7 watt LED light with 5000 lux luminescence was
obtained Voc and Isc of 235.5 mV and 14 μA, respectively.
Abstract: Self-compacting concrete (SCC) developed in Japan
in the late 80s has enabled the construction industry to reduce
demand on the resources, improve the work condition and also
reduce the impact of environment by elimination of the need for
compaction. Fuzzy logic (FL) approaches has recently been used to
model some of the human activities in many areas of civil
engineering applications. Especially from these systems in the model
experimental studies, very good results have been obtained. In the
present study, a model for predicting compressive strength of SCC
containing various proportions of fly ash, as partial replacement of
cement has been developed by using Fuzzy Inference System (FIS).
For the purpose of building this model, a database of experimental
data were gathered from the literature and used for training and
testing the model. The used data as the inputs of fuzzy logic models
are arranged in a format of five parameters that cover the total binder
content, fly ash replacement percentage, water content,
superplasticizer and age of specimens. The training and testing results
in the fuzzy logic model have shown a strong potential for predicting
the compressive strength of SCC containing fly ash in the considered
range.
Abstract: Solar air heater is a type of heat exchanger which
transforms solar radiation into heat energy. The thermal performance
of conventional solar air heater has been found to be poor because of
the low convective heat transfer coefficient from the absorber plate to
the air. It is attributed to the formation of a very thin boundary layer
at the absorber plate surface commonly known as viscous sub-layer.
Thermal efficiency of solar air heater can be improved by providing
the artificial roughness on absorber plate is the most efficient
technique. In this paper an attempt is made to provide artificial
roughness by incorporating inclined multiple V-ribs in the underside
of the absorber plate. 60˚V – ribs are arranged inclined to the
direction of air flow. Performance of collector estimated theoretically
and experimentally. Results of the investigation reveal that thermal
efficiency of collector with multiple V-ribs increased by 14%.
Abstract: Key frame extraction methods select the most
representative frames of a video, which can be used in different areas
of video processing such as video retrieval, video summary, and video
indexing. In this paper we present a novel approach for extracting key
frames from video sequences. The frame is characterized uniquely by
his contours which are represented by the dominant blocks. These
dominant blocks are located on the contours and its near textures.
When the video frames have a noticeable changement, its dominant
blocks changed, then we can extracte a key frame. The dominant
blocks of every frame is computed, and then feature vectors are
extracted from the dominant blocks image of each frame and arranged
in a feature matrix. Singular Value Decomposition is used to calculate
sliding windows ranks of those matrices. Finally the computed ranks
are traced and then we are able to extract key frames of a video.
Experimental results show that the proposed approach is robust
against a large range of digital effects used during shot transition.
Abstract: The primary purpose of this paper is to explain the
impact of successful classroom management on the academic
achievements of students, the importance of positive relationship
between teacher and students, among students, between teacher and
parents. Effective communication plays an important role to
encourage students study hard and learn materials which are covered
by the teacher in the class. Friendly relationships among students
other than their preferred friends help them to have team working and
be socialized. In addition, a well-organized classroom arrangement
enhances students learning. As the consequence of successful
classroom management students should feel responsibility and need
to feel it. The one who is responsible to provide a comfortable
environment and help students learn is the manager of the classroom
who is named Teacher.
Abstract: Collapsible soils go through radical rearrangement of
their particles when triggered by water, stress or/and vibration,
causing loss of volume. This loss of volume in soil as seen in
foundation failures has caused millions of dollars’ worth of damages
to public facilities and infrastructure and so has an adverse effect on
the society and people. Despite these consequences and the several
studies that are available, more research is still required in the study
of soil collapsibility. Discerning the pedogenesis (formation) of soils
and investigating the combined effects of the different geological soil
properties is key to elucidating and quantifying soils collapsibility.
This study presents a novel laboratory testing regime that would be
undertaken on soil samples where the effects of soil type, compactive
variables (moisture content, density, void ratio, degree of saturation)
and loading are analyzed. It is anticipated that results obtained would
be useful in mapping the trend of the combined effect thus the basis
for evaluating soil collapsibility or collapse potentials encountered in
construction with volume loss problems attributed to collapse.
Abstract: This paper is drawn from a wider study of the
management of gender, age and disability diversity in the banking
sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), which aims to develop
a framework for diversity management (DM) in this sector. The
paper focuses on the management of disability diversity. The purpose
of the paper is to assist in understanding disability DM in the banking
sector in KSA and to make suggestions for its enhancement. Hence, it
contributes to filling a research gap, as there is a dearth of literature
on disability DM, in KSA in general, and in the banking sector
specifically.
Discrimination against people with disabilities is a social issue that
has not been entirely overcome in any society. However, in KSA,
Islam informs almost every aspect of daily life including work, and
Islam is against discrimination. Hence, in KSA, there are regulations
to accommodate people with disabilities; however, employers are still
free not to hire job applicants with disabilities specifically because of
their condition. Indeed, disabled people are almost entirely absent
from the labour market.
There are 12 Saudi-owned or part-Saudi-owned banks in KSA and
two managers from each of these were interviewed, making a total of
24. The interviews aimed to investigate empirically the understanding
of managers in the banking sector in KSA of diversity management,
including disability DM, in the banking sector. The interview data
were analysed using thematic analysis. Two interviewees stated that
banks used the employment of people with disabilities to enhance
their corporate image, while five expressed the opinion that disabled
employees could contribute to the bank provided they did not have to
deal with customers face-to-face. Nine of the interviewees perceived
that disabled employees could be of value to the bank for their own
sake, not only in ‘behind the scenes’ roles. Another two interviewees
mentioned that employing disabled people could be part of the bank’s
community service programme and one thought it would be part of
the bank’s Saudisation efforts. The remaining five interviewees did
not know how disabled people could contribute to the bank.
The findings show that disability DM in the banking sector in
KSA is a relatively new concept, and is not yet well understood. In
the light of the findings, in order to achieve the purpose of the paper,
the following suggestions were made for the enhancement of
disability DM in the banking sector in KSA. A change in attitudes
towards disabled people is necessary. Such a change in the workplace
can only be achieved if a top-down approach is taken to the
integration of disabled people. Hence, it is suggested that
management and employees follow a course in disability awareness.
Further, a diversity officer in the HR department could enhance the
integration of disabled people into the banking workforce. It is also
suggested that greater government support is required through closely
monitored and enforced anti-discrimination legislation. Moreover,
flexible working arrangements such as part-time work would
facilitate the employment of disabled people and benefit other groups
of employees.
Abstract: In order to study the effect of drought stress on grain
yield, yield components and associated traits of durum wheat
cultivars, an experiment was done as split plot arrangement using
randomized complete block design with three replications in Ilam
province, Iran in 2009-2010 cropping season. Different levels of
irrigation (Full irrigation, drought stress at stem elongation,
Flowering and grain formation stages) were considered as a main plot
and three durum wheat cultivars (Yavaros, Seimareh and Karkheh)
were assigned as a sub plot. The results showed that drought stress
was significant on grain yield, spike.m-2, grain. Spike-1, 1000-grain
weight, biological yield, harvest index and protein content. Drought
stress at all stages caused a loss in grain yield and its components.
Full irrigation had the highest grain yield and yield components.
Drought stress at stem elongation, flowering and grain formation
stages caused a reduction in spike.m-2, grain.spike-1 and 1000-grain
weight, respectively. Protein content was significantly affected by
drought stress. The highest protein content was obtained from
drought stress at grain formation stage. Cultivars had an influence on
grain yield and yield components. Yavaros and Seimareh cultivars
had the highest and lowest grain yield, respectively. Interaction effect
between drought stress and cultivar had a significant effect on grain
and yield components. Full irrigation and Yavaros cultivar had the
highest grain yield and drought stress at grain formation stage and
Seimareh cultivar had the lowest grain yield, respectively.
Abstract: In this numerical study, we want to present the design
of highly efficient extruded-type heat sink. The symmetrically
arranged extruded-type heat sinks are used instead of a single extruded
or swaged-type heat sink. In this parametric study, the maximum
temperatures, the base temperatures between heaters, and the heat
release rates were investigated with respect to the arrangements of heat
sources, air flow rates, and amounts of heat input. Based on the results
we believe that the use of both side of heat sink is to be much better for
release the heat than the use of single side. Also from the results, it is
believed that the symmetric arrangement of heat sources is
recommended to achieve a higher heat transfer from the heat sink.
Abstract: In this study, we will touch upon the legal arrangements issued in Turkey for prevention of condensation and for ensuring pluralism in the media. We will mention the legal arrangements concerning the regulatory and supervisory authority, namely the Radio and Television Supreme Council, for the visual and auditory media. In this context; the legal arrangements, which have been introduced by the Law No 6112 on the Establishment of Radio and Television Enterprises and Their Media Services in relation to the media ownership, will be reviewed through comparison with the Article 29 of the repealed Law No 3984.
Abstract: Virtual reality (VR) is a rapidly emerging computer
interface that attempts to immerse the user completely within an
experimental recreation; thereby, greatly enhancing the overall
impact and providing a much more intuitive link between the
computer and the human participants. The main objective of this
study is to design tractor trailer capable of meeting the customers’
requirements and suitable for rough conditions to be used in
combination with a farm tractor in India. The final concept is capable
of providing arrangements for attaching the trailer to the tractor easily
by pickup hitch, stronger and lighter supporting frame, option of
spare tyre etc. Furthermore, the resulting product design can be sent
via the Internet to customers for comments or marketing purposes.
The virtual prototyping (VP) system therefore facilitates advanced
product design and helps reduce product development time and cost
significantly.