Abstract: This paper was aimed at developing a computer aided
design and manufacturing system for spatial cylindrical cams. In the
proposed system, a milling tool with a diameter smaller than that of the
roller, instead of the standard cutter for traditional machining process,
was used to generate the tool path for spatial cams. To verify the
feasibility of the proposed method, a multi-axis machining simulation
software was further used to simulate the practical milling operation of
spatial cams. It was observed from computer simulation that the tool
path of small-sized cutter were within the motion range of a standard
cutter, no occurrence of overcutting. Examination of a finished cam
component clearly verifies the accuracy of the tool path generated for
small-sized milling tool. It is believed that the use of small-sized cutter
for the machining of the spatial cylindrical cams can generate a better
surface morphology with higher accuracy. The improvement in
efficiency and cost for the manufacturing of the spatial cylindrical cam
can be expected through the proposed method.
Abstract: This paper presents an exact analytical model for
optimizing stability of thin-walled, composite, functionally graded
pipes conveying fluid. The critical flow velocity at which divergence
occurs is maximized for a specified total structural mass in order to
ensure the economic feasibility of the attained optimum designs. The
composition of the material of construction is optimized by defining
the spatial distribution of volume fractions of the material
constituents using piecewise variations along the pipe length. The
major aim is to tailor the material distribution in the axial direction so
as to avoid the occurrence of divergence instability without the
penalty of increasing structural mass. Three types of boundary
conditions have been examined; namely, Hinged-Hinged, Clamped-
Hinged and Clamped-Clamped pipelines. The resulting optimization
problem has been formulated as a nonlinear mathematical
programming problem solved by invoking the MatLab optimization
toolbox routines, which implement constrained function
minimization routine named “fmincon" interacting with the
associated eigenvalue problem routines. In fact, the proposed
mathematical models have succeeded in maximizing the critical flow
velocity without mass penalty and producing efficient and economic
designs having enhanced stability characteristics as compared with
the baseline designs.
Abstract: The proposed system identifies the species of the wood
using the textural features present in its barks. Each species of a wood
has its own unique patterns in its bark, which enabled the proposed
system to identify it accurately. Automatic wood recognition system
has not yet been well established mainly due to lack of research in this
area and the difficulty in obtaining the wood database. In our work, a
wood recognition system has been designed based on pre-processing
techniques, feature extraction and by correlating the features of those
wood species for their classification. Texture classification is a problem
that has been studied and tested using different methods due to its
valuable usage in various pattern recognition problems, such as wood
recognition, rock classification. The most popular technique used
for the textural classification is Gray-level Co-occurrence Matrices
(GLCM). The features from the enhanced images are thus extracted
using the GLCM is correlated, which determines the classification
between the various wood species. The result thus obtained shows a
high rate of recognition accuracy proving that the techniques used in
suitable to be implemented for commercial purposes.
Abstract: Chronic diseases prevailed along with economic
growth as well as life style changed in recent years in Taiwan.
According to the governmental statistics, hypertension related disease
is the tenth of death causes with 1,816 died directly from hypertension
in 2010. There were more death causes amongst the top ten had been
proofed that having strong association with the hypertension, such as
heart diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes. Hypertension or
High blood pressure is one of the major indicators for chronic diseases,
and was generally perceived as the major causes of mortality. The
literature generally suggested that regular physical exercise was
helpful to prevent the occurrence or to ease the progress of a
hypertension. This paper reported the process and outcomes in
detailed of an improvement project of physical exercise intervention
specific for hypertension patients. Physical information were
measured before and after the project to obtain information such as
weight, waistline, cholesterol (HD & LD), blood examination, as well
as self-perceived health status. The intervention project involved a
six-week exercise program, of which contained three times a week, 30
minutes of tutored physical exercise intervention. The project had
achieved several gains in changing the subjects- behavior in terms of
many important biophysical indexes. Around 20% of the participants
had significantly improved their cholesterols, BMI, and changed
unhealthy behaviors. Results from the project were encouraging, and
would be good reference for other samples.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the ability
of a genetic programming (GP) algorithm to evolve a team of data
classification models. The GP algorithm used in this work is
“multigene" in nature, i.e. there are multiple tree structures (genes)
that are used to represent team members. Each team member assigns
a data sample to one of a fixed set of output classes. A majority vote,
determined using the mode (highest occurrence) of classes predicted
by the individual genes, is used to determine the final class
prediction. The algorithm is tested on a binary classification problem.
For the case study investigated, compact classification models are
obtained with comparable accuracy to alternative approaches.
Abstract: e-mail has become an important means of electronic
communication but the viability of its usage is marred by Unsolicited
Bulk e-mail (UBE) messages. UBE consists of many types
like pornographic, virus infected and 'cry-for-help' messages as well
as fake and fraudulent offers for jobs, winnings and medicines. UBE
poses technical and socio-economic challenges to usage of e-mails.
To meet this challenge and combat this menace, we need to
understand UBE. Towards this end, the current paper presents a
content-based textual analysis of nearly 3000 winnings-announcing
UBE. Technically, this is an application of Text Parsing and
Tokenization for an un-structured textual document and we approach
it using Bag Of Words (BOW) and Vector Space Document Model
techniques. We have attempted to identify the most frequently
occurring lexis in the winnings-announcing UBE documents. The
analysis of such top 100 lexis is also presented. We exhibit the
relationship between occurrence of a word from the identified lexisset
in the given UBE and the probability that the given UBE will be
the one announcing fake winnings. To the best of our knowledge and
survey of related literature, this is the first formal attempt for
identification of most frequently occurring lexis in winningsannouncing
UBE by its textual analysis. Finally, this is a sincere
attempt to bring about alertness against and mitigate the threat of
such luring but fake UBE.
Abstract: Climate change is a phenomenon has been based on
the available evidence from a very long time ago and now its
existence is very probable. The speed and nature of climate
parameters changes at the middle of twentieth century has been
different and its quickness more than the before and its trend changed
to some extent comparing to the past. Climate change issue now
regarded as not only one of the most common scientific topic but also
a social political one, is not a new issue. Climate change is a
complicated atmospheric oceanic phenomenon on a global scale and
long-term. Precipitation pattern change, fast decrease of snowcovered
resources and its rapid melting, increased evaporation, the
occurrence of destroying floods, water shortage crisis, severe
reduction at the rate of harvesting agricultural products and, so on are
all the significant of climate change. To cope with this phenomenon,
its consequences and events in which public instruction is the most
important but it may be climate that no significant cant and effective
action has been done so far. The present article is included a part of
one surrey about climate change in Fars. The study area having
annually mean temperature 14 and precipitation 320 mm .23 stations
inside the basin with a common 37 year statistical period have been
applied to the meteorology data (1974-2010). Man-kendal and
change factor methods are two statistical methods, applying them, the
trend of changes and the annual mean average temperature and the
annual minimum mean temperature were studied by using them.
Based on time series for each parameter, the annual mean average
temperature and the mean of annual maximum temperature have a
rising trend so that this trend is clearer to the mean of annual
maximum temperature.
Abstract: Traditional object segmentation methods are time consuming and computationally difficult. In this paper, onedimensional object detection along the secant lines is applied. Statistical features of texture images are computed for the recognition process. Example matrices of these features and formulae for calculation of similarities between two feature patterns are expressed. And experiments are also carried out using these features.
Abstract: The objective of the present research manuscript is to
perform parametric, nonparametric, and decision tree analysis to
evaluate two treatments that are being used for breast cancer patients.
Our study is based on utilizing real data which was initially used in
“Tamoxifen with or without breast irradiation in women of 50 years
of age or older with early breast cancer" [1], and the data is supplied
to us by N.A. Ibrahim “Decision tree for competing risks survival
probability in breast cancer study" [2]. We agree upon certain aspects
of our findings with the published results. However, in this
manuscript, we focus on relapse time of breast cancer patients instead
of survival time and parametric analysis instead of semi-parametric
decision tree analysis is applied to provide more precise
recommendations of effectiveness of the two treatments with respect
to reoccurrence of breast cancer.
Abstract: The effect of varying holding temperature on hatching success, occurrence of deformities and mortality rates were investigated for goldlined seabream eggs. Wild broodstock (600 g) were stocked at a 2:1 male-female ratio in a 2 m3 fiberglass tank supplied with filtered seawater (37 g L-1 salinity, temp. range 24±0.5 oC [day] and 22±1 oC [night], DO2 in excess of 5.0mg L-1). Females were injected with 200 IU kg-1 HCG between 08.00 and 10.00 h and returned to tanks to spawn following which eggs were collected by hand using a 100μm net. Fertilized eggs at the gastrulation stage (120 L-1) were randomly placed into one of 12 experimental 6 L aerated (DO2 5 mg L-1) plastic containers with water temperatures maintained at 24±0.5 oC (ambient), 26±0.5 oC, 28± 0.5 oC and 30±0.5 oC using thermostats. Each treatment was undertaken in triplicate using a 12:12 photophase:scotophase photoperiod. No differences were recorded between eggs reared at 24 and 26 oC with respect to viability, deformity, mortality or unhatched egg rates. Increasing temperature reduced the number of viable eggs with those at 30 oC returning poorest performance (P < 0.05). Mortality levels were lowest for eggs incubated at 24 and 26 oC. The greatest level of deformities recorded was that for eggs reared at 28 oC.
Abstract: Urbanization and related anthropogenic modifications
cause extent of habitat fragmentation and directly lead to decline of
local biodiversity. Conservation biologists advocate corridor creation
as one approach to rescue biodiversity. Here we examine the utility of
roads as corridors in preserving plant diversity by investigating
roadside vegetation in Yellow River Delta (YRD), China. We
examined the spatio-temporal distribution pattern of plant species
richness, diversity and composition along roadside. The results
suggest that roads, as dispersal conduits, increase occurrence
probability of new settlers to a new area, meanwhile, roads accumulate
the greater propagule pressure and favourable survival condition
during operation phase. As a result, more species, including native and
alien plants, non- halophyte and halophyte species, threatened and
cosmopolitic species, were found prosperous at roadside. Roadside
may be a refuge for more species, and the pattern of vegetation
distribution is affected by road age and the distance from road verge.
Abstract: Software developed for a specific customer under contract
typically undergoes a period of testing by the customer before
acceptance. This is known as user acceptance testing and the process
can reveal both defects in the system and requests for changes to
the product. This paper uses nonhomogeneous Poisson processes to
model a real user acceptance data set from a recently developed
system. In particular a split Poisson process is shown to provide an
excellent fit to the data. The paper explains how this model can be
used to aid the allocation of resources through the accurate prediction
of occurrences both during the acceptance testing phase and before
this activity begins.
Abstract: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are increasing in importance everyday, especially since the 90’s (last decade of birth for the Millennials generation). While social interactions involving the Millennials generation have been studied, a lack of investigation remains regarding the use of the ICT by this generation as well as the impact on outcomes in education and professional training. Observing and interviewing students preparing a MSc, we aimed at characterizing the interaction students-ICT during the courses. We found that up to 50% of the students (mainly female) could use ICT during courses at a rate of 0.84 occurrence/minutes for some of them, and they thought this involvement did not disturb learning, even was helpful. As recent researches show that multitasking leads people think they are much better than they actually are, further observations with assessments are needed to conclude whether or not the use ICT by students during the courses is a real strength.
Abstract: A large quantity of world-s oil reserves exists in
carbonate reservoirs. Carbonate reservoirs are very sensitive to
chemical enhanced oil recovery process because of containing large
amount of calcite, dolomite and calcium sulfate minerals. These
minerals cause major obstacles during alkali-surfactant-polymer
(ASP) flooding. Alkali reacts with these minerals and form undesired
precipitations which plug effective porous openings, reduce
permeability and cause scale occurrence at the wellbore. In this
paper, a new chemical combination consists of acrylic acid and alkali
was used to minimize precipitation problem during ASP flooding. A
series of fluid-fluid compatibility tests were performed using acrylic
acid and different concentrations of alkaline. Two types of alkalis
namely; sodium carbonate and sodium metaborate were screened. As
a result, the combination of acrylic acid and sodium carbonate was
not effective in preventing calcium and magnesium precipitations.
However, acrylic acid and sodium metaborate showed promising
results for keeping all solutions without any precipitations. The ratio
of acrylic acid to sodium metaborate of 0.7:1.0 was found to be
optimum for achieving a compatible solution for 30 days at 80oC.
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the strategic stochastic air traffic flow management problem which seeks to balance airspace capacity and demand under weather disruptions. The goal is to reduce the need for myopic tactical decisions that do not account for probabilistic knowledge about the NAS near-future states. We present and discuss a scenario-based modeling approach based on a time-space stochastic process to depict weather disruption occurrences in the NAS. A solution framework is also proposed along with a distributed implementation aimed at overcoming scalability problems. Issues related to this implementation are also discussed.
Abstract: Heart failure is the most common reason of death
nowadays, but if the medical help is given directly, the patient-s life
may be saved in many cases. Numerous heart diseases can be
detected by means of analyzing electrocardiograms (ECG). Artificial
Neural Networks (ANN) are computer-based expert systems that
have proved to be useful in pattern recognition tasks. ANN can be
used in different phases of the decision-making process, from
classification to diagnostic procedures. This work concentrates on a
review followed by a novel method.
The purpose of the review is to assess the evidence of healthcare
benefits involving the application of artificial neural networks to the
clinical functions of diagnosis, prognosis and survival analysis, in
ECG signals. The developed method is based on a compound neural
network (CNN), to classify ECGs as normal or carrying an
AtrioVentricular heart Block (AVB). This method uses three
different feed forward multilayer neural networks. A single output
unit encodes the probability of AVB occurrences. A value between 0
and 0.1 is the desired output for a normal ECG; a value between 0.1
and 1 would infer an occurrence of an AVB. The results show that
this compound network has a good performance in detecting AVBs,
with a sensitivity of 90.7% and a specificity of 86.05%. The accuracy
value is 87.9%.
Abstract: The present models and simulation algorithms of intracellular stochastic kinetics are usually based on the premise that diffusion is so fast that the concentrations of all the involved species are homogeneous in space. However, recents experimental measurements of intracellular diffusion constants indicate that the assumption of a homogeneous well-stirred cytosol is not necessarily valid even for small prokaryotic cells. In this work a mathematical treatment of diffusion that can be incorporated in a stochastic algorithm simulating the dynamics of a reaction-diffusion system is presented. The movement of a molecule A from a region i to a region j of the space is represented as a first order reaction Ai k- ! Aj , where the rate constant k depends on the diffusion coefficient. The diffusion coefficients are modeled as function of the local concentration of the solutes, their intrinsic viscosities, their frictional coefficients and the temperature of the system. The stochastic time evolution of the system is given by the occurrence of diffusion events and chemical reaction events. At each time step an event (reaction or diffusion) is selected from a probability distribution of waiting times determined by the intrinsic reaction kinetics and diffusion dynamics. To demonstrate the method the simulation results of the reaction-diffusion system of chaperoneassisted protein folding in cytoplasm are shown.
Abstract: This paper deals with the conceptual design of the
new aeroelastic demonstrator for the whirl flutter simulation. The
paper gives a theoretical background of the whirl flutter phenomenon
and describes the events of the whirl flutter occurrence in the
aerospace practice. The second part is focused on the experimental
research of the whirl flutter on aeroelastic similar models. Finally the
concept of the new aeroelastic demonstrator is described. The
demonstrator represents the wing and engine of the twin turboprop
commuter aircraft including a driven propeller. It allows the changes
of the main structural parameters influencing the whirl flutter
stability characteristics. It is intended for the experimental
investigation of the whirl flutter in the wind tunnel. The results will
be utilized for validation of analytical methods and software tools.
Abstract: In this paper, a particle swarm optimization (PSO)
algorithm is proposed to solve machine loading problem in flexible
manufacturing system (FMS), with bicriterion objectives of
minimizing system unbalance and maximizing system throughput in
the occurrence of technological constraints such as available
machining time and tool slots. A mathematical model is used to
select machines, assign operations and the required tools. The
performance of the PSO is tested by using 10 sample dataset and the
results are compared with the heuristics reported in the literature. The
results support that the proposed PSO is comparable with the
algorithms reported in the literature.
Abstract: This study investigated the number of Aedes larvae,
the key breeding sites of Aedes sp., and the relationship between
climatic factors and the incidence of DHF in Samui Islands. We
conducted our questionnaire and larval surveys from randomly
selected 105 households in Samui Islands in July-September 2006.
Pearson-s correlation coefficient was used to explore the primary
association between the DHF incidence and all climatic factors.
Multiple stepwise regression technique was then used to fit the
statistical model. The results showed that the positive indoor
containers were small jars, cement tanks, and plastic tanks. The
positive outdoor containers were small jars, cement tanks, plastic
tanks, used cans, tires, plastic bottles, discarded objects, pot saucers,
plant pots, and areca husks. All Ae. albopictus larval indices (i.e., CI,
HI, and BI) were higher than Ae. aegypti larval indices in this area.
These larval indices were higher than WHO standard. This indicated
a high risk of DHF transmission at Samui Islands. The multiple
stepwise regression model was y = –288.80 + 11.024xmean temp. The
mean temperature was positively associated with the DHF incidence
in this area.