Search results for: stochastic local search

Authors: Yi-Shiuan Chiu

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Deaf signers have been found to have better mental image performance than hearing nonsigners. The goal of this study was to investigate the ability to generate mental images, to maintain them, and to manipulate them in deaf signers of Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL). In the visual image task, participants first memorized digits formed in a cell of 4 × 5 grids. After presenting a cue of Chinese digit character shown on the top of a blank cell, participants had to form a corresponding digit. When showing a probe, which was a grid containing a red circle, participants had to decide as quickly as possible whether the probe would have been covered by the mental image of the digit. The ISI (interstimulus interval) between cue and probe was manipulated. In experiment 1, 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing nonsigners were asked to perform image generation tasks (ISI: 200, 400 ms) and image maintenance tasks (ISI: 800, 2000 ms). The results showed that deaf signers had had an enhanced ability to generate and maintain a mental image. To explore the process of mental image, in experiment 2, 30 deaf signers and 30 hearing nonsigners were asked to do visual searching when maintaining a mental image. Between a digit image cue and a red circle probe, participants were asked to search a visual search task to see if a target triangle apex was directed to the right or left. When there was only one triangle in the searching task, the results showed that both deaf signers and hearing non-signers had similar visual searching performance in which the searching targets in the mental image locations got facilitates. However, deaf signers could maintain better and faster mental image performance than nonsigners. In experiment 3, we increased the number of triangles to 4 to raise the difficulty of the visual search task. The results showed that deaf participants performed more accurately in visual search and image maintenance tasks. The results suggested that people may use eye movements as a mnemonic strategy to maintain the mental image. And deaf signers had enhanced abilities to resist the interference of eye movements in the situation of fewer distractors. In sum, these findings suggested that deaf signers had enhanced mental image processing.

Keywords: deaf signers, image maintain, mental image, visual search

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Authors: Jennifer Isabelle Rios Rendón, Ursula Sanchez, Dana Lee Baker

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Disability Policy in México has witnessed numerous changed throughout the years. Physical disabilities are more often recognized in Mexican culture. However, with an emerging focus on neurological disabilities or differences in individuals’ new policies are needed to serve better and understand the needs of these populations. The need to understand and communicate with local leaders is imperative, as the lens used to analyze autism has historically been from a Western school of thought. We are looking to comprehend the disability policy subsystem in México - specifically how autism is perceived, the language used to describe it, and how it ties to the cultural stigma of disabilities that exist in México. Therefore, to understand this, we seek to interview multiple policy leaders on their experience in autism and disability policy. The goal is to conduct qualitative research through interviews with local autism and disability leaders in México. This methodology aims to answer the questions of what language commonly and culturally is utilized in disability policy, the context of how autism is perceived in México, and in general, the lived experience of the disability policy leaders that take part in this effort in México. Local activists and policy leaders were initially found through an online search then collected using snowball sampling. The interviews were conducted through a series of pre-formulated questions that the policy leader answered via email or a phone conversation with the researchers. Acknowledging the importance of language and accessibility, the need for the content to be in both English and Spanish as well as auditory and visual is essential to take steps in the inclusion of a Neurodiverse group of leaders. This work is a demonstration of the framework of the investigation which hopes to create a more complete understanding of the policy and political culture around autism in México. Results of the project include new insight into the developing relationship between the President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration, disability activists, and neurodiverse communities. The project contributes to denormalizing the legacy of white supremacy in autism related, historically rooted in the assumption that autism occurs predominantly in white communities.

Keywords: autism, disability leaders, disability policy, México, Neurodiversity

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Authors: Ahmed Mudi, Bala Zakar

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The paper assesses the impact of safe motherhood initiative on maternal health of women in Gumel Local Government Area of Jigawa State. The work will specifically concentrate on the background on safe motherhood scheme and maternal health of women. The objective of this paper is to assess the level of safe motherhood scheme in Gumel local government area, to find out the level of maternal health in Gumel local government as well as to determine the impact of safe motherhood scheme on maternal health on women in Gumel Local Government Area Jigawa State. Various literature on the topic are reviewed, the paper adopts survey design and use questionnaire to collect data from the respondent. The study comprises 350 women selected from six rural communities in Gumel using random sampling techniques, and the data was analysed by simple frequency and percentage. The research concluded that safe motherhood initiative has a significant impact on the maternal health of women in Gumel Local Government Area of Jigawa State. Finally, suitable recommendations were given on how to improve the scheme to ensure better maternal health in the region.

Keywords: action, assessment, maternal health, safe motherhood, surgery

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Authors: Maythaya Preeyanon

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Chanthaburi Province is a province with people of many nationalities, such as Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Chong, and Khmer, resulting in a cultural mix in the past. What is a famous cultural transmission of Chanthaburi province is Chanthaburi reed mat weaving. Due to the suitability of both the climate and topography near the edge of the location, reeds have the qualities to be used to produce mats very well. There have been improvements in the methods of planting, dyeing, and weaving into various patterns that have been passed down as folk wisdom from generation to generation. Currently, there are brands of products belonging to the new generation that add creativity and add value through storytelling. Revive the value of reed mat products to increase in value until they can be exported to sell abroad. This research has therefore been conducted in order to decipher the success in transferring the Chanthaboon reed mat culture capital which has successfully advanced to being a creative economy so that it can be applied to other types of local wisdom or other local products.

Keywords: cultural capital, creative economy, communication, local product

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Authors: Amin Karimi, Lele Zhang, Mark Fackrell

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Rural-to-urban population migrations are a global phenomenon, with projections indicating that by 2050, 68% of the world's population will inhabit densely populated urban centers. Concurrently, the popularity of e-commerce shopping has surged, evidenced by a 51% increase in total e-commerce sales from 2017 to 2021. Consequently, distribution and logistics systems, integral to effective supply chain management, confront escalating hurdles in efficiently delivering and distributing products within bustling urban environments. Additionally, events like environmental challenges and the COVID-19 pandemic have indicated that decision-makers are facing numerous sources of uncertainty. Therefore, to design an efficient and reliable logistics system, uncertainty must be considered. In this study, it examine fleet sizing and routing while considering uncertainty in demand rate. Fleet sizing is typically a strategic-level decision, while routing is an operational-level one. In this study, a carrier must make two types of decisions: strategic-level decisions regarding the number and types of drones to be purchased, and operational-level decisions regarding planning routes based on available fleet and realized demand. If the available fleets are insufficient to serve some customers, the carrier must outsource that delivery at a relatively high cost, calculated per order. With this hierarchy of decisions, it can model the problem using two-stage stochastic programming. The first-stage decisions involve planning the number and type of drones to be purchased, while the second-stage decisions involve planning routes. To solve this model, it employ logic-based benders decomposition, which decomposes the problem into a master problem and a set of sub-problems. The master problem becomes a mixed integer programming model to find the best fleet sizing decisions, and the sub-problems become capacitated vehicle routing problems considering battery status. Additionally, it assume a heterogeneous fleet based on load and battery capacity, and it consider that battery health deteriorates over time as it plan for multiple periods.

Keywords: drone-delivery, stochastic demand, VRP, fleet sizing

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Authors: Shao-Tzu Huang, Chen-Chien Hsu, Wei-Yen Wang

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Matching high dimensional features between images is computationally expensive for exhaustive search approaches in computer vision. Although the dimension of the feature can be degraded by simplifying the prior knowledge of homography, matching accuracy may degrade as a tradeoff. In this paper, we present a feature matching method based on k-means algorithm that reduces the matching cost and matches the features between images instead of using a simplified geometric assumption. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the previous linear exhaustive search approaches in terms of the inlier ratio of matched pairs.

Keywords: feature matching, k-means clustering, SIFT, RANSAC

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Authors: Jiangyong Liu, Xiangxiang Xu, Bote Luo, Xiaoxue Luo, Jiang Zhu, Lingzhi Yi

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To address the problems of non-linearity and high randomness of the original power load sequence causing the degradation of power load forecasting accuracy, a short-term load forecasting method is proposed. The method is based on the Least Square Support Vector Machine optimized by an Improved Sparrow Search Algorithm combined with the Variational Mode Decomposition proposed in this paper. The application of the variational mode decomposition technique decomposes the raw power load data into a series of Intrinsic Mode Functions components, which can reduce the complexity and instability of the raw data while overcoming modal confounding; the proposed improved sparrow search algorithm can solve the problem of difficult selection of learning parameters in the least Square Support Vector Machine. Finally, through comparison experiments, the results show that the method can effectively improve prediction accuracy.

Keywords: load forecasting, variational mode decomposition, improved sparrow search algorithm, least square support vector machine

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Authors: Sihem Ferah, Karima Messaoudi

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Tourism is far from of being apprehended as a closed space limited to a defined area. The different experiences in the world have shown that tourism should be set up in the city, where locals can meet tourists, to know their history, tradition, culture, and relationship with the territory. In Algeria, the strategy employed in the context of promoting tourism is to integrate sustainable tourism based on a set of instruments such as the tourism expansion areas named ZET. Unfortunately, these areas have promoted the economic and environmental dimension, neglecting the social dimension which is the responsible of the community well–being. The case of Taleza village in Collo (characterized by its various potential) demonstrates clearly this paradox between the planned tourism in the ZET in Taleza as an economic product and the Tourism lived inside this local environment. When people by their genius and innovative action have succeeded to create an alternative tourism (social tourism) developed through guesthouses, sales of local products which have participated in promoting local Tourism Taleza. The aim of this research is to find a strong position between the planned space ZET and the village of Taleža where sustainable tourism can be installed that encourages the social membership, preservation of the natural heritage of Taleza and generates economic benefits that will ensure a local development of the village and will succeed in maintain sustainable tourism on its territory.

Keywords: sustainable tourism, local development, rural areas, tourism expansion zone

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Authors: Thiyam Tamphasana Devi, Bimlesh Kumar

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A Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technique has been applied to simulate the gas-liquid phase in double stirred tank of Rushton impeller. Eulerian-Eulerian model was adopted to simulate the multiphase with standard correlation of Schiller and Naumann for drag co-efficient. The turbulence was modeled by using standard k-ε turbulence model. The present CFD model predicts flow pattern, local gas hold-up, and local specific area. It also predicts local kLa (mass transfer rate) for single impeller. The predicted results were compared with experimental and CFD results of published literature. The predicted results are slightly over predicted with the experimental results; however, it is in reasonable agreement with other simulated results of published literature.

Keywords: Eulerian-Eulerian, gas-hold up, gas-liquid phase, local mass transfer rate, local specific area, Rushton Impeller

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Authors: Antonyous Fawzy Boshra Girgis

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Nutrition labels are diet-related health policies. They help individuals improve food-choice decisions and reduce intake of calories and unhealthy food elements, like cholesterol. However, many individuals do not pay attention to nutrition labels or fail to appropriately understand them. According to the literature, thinking and cognitive styles can have significant effects on attention to nutrition labels. According to the author's knowledge, the effect of global/local processing on attention to nutrition labels has not been previously studied. Global/local processing encourages individuals to attend to the whole/specific parts of an object and can have a significant impact on people's visual attention. In this study, this effect was examined with an experimental design using the eye-tracking technique. The research hypothesis was that individuals with local processing would pay more attention to nutrition labels, including nutrition tables and traffic lights. An experiment was designed with two conditions: global and local information processing. Forty participants were randomly assigned to either global or local conditions, and their processing style was manipulated accordingly. Results supported the hypothesis for nutrition tables but not for traffic lights.

Keywords: nutrition, public health, SA Harvest, foodeye-tracking, nutrition labelling, global/local information processing, individual differencesmobile computing, cloud computing, nutrition label use, nutrition management, barcode scanning

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Authors: Mei-Yi Wu, Shang-Ming Huang

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The online shoppers nowadays often search the product information on the Internet using some keywords of products. To use this kind of information searching model, shoppers should have a preliminary understanding about their interesting products and choose the correct keywords. However, if the products are first contact (for example, the worn clothes or backpack of passengers which you do not have any idea about the brands), these products cannot be retrieved due to insufficient information. In this paper, we discuss and study the applications in E-commerce using image retrieval and text mining techniques. We design a reasonable E-commerce application system containing three layers in the architecture to provide users product information. The system can automatically search and retrieval similar images and corresponding web pages on Internet according to the target pictures which taken by users. Then text mining techniques are applied to extract important keywords from these retrieval web pages and search the prices on different online shopping stores with these keywords using a web crawler. Finally, the users can obtain the product information including photos and prices of their favorite products. The experiments shows the efficiency of proposed system.

Keywords: mobile image retrieval, text mining, product information service system, online marketing

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Authors: Jodie Bradshaw, Rebecca Dooley, Habib Kadiri, Holly Bird, Aaliyah Felix-West, Udit Mahalingam, Ella Thomson

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The sharp rise of civil orders has led to an expansion of police powers, particularly in the realm of stop and search activities. The broad scope and objectives of these civil orders –addressing issues as varied as public safety, crime prevention, and counter-terrorism – has led to ‘mission-creep’, whereby orders were being imposed in a wider range of contexts than initially intended. The ever-widening purview of civil orders in practice necessitates proactive measures by law enforcement which often rely heavily on the utilisation of stop and search, leading to an expansion of stop and search practices and the regulation of public space. Civil liberties organisations, criminal justice and legal practitioners, activist groups, and researchers have argued that civil orders dilute and undermine foundational legal principles, pose a threat to our basic rights and freedoms, facilitate dangerous criminal justice net-widening, and disproportionately target young, working-class people of colour. Many of the provisions in these orders are potentially incompatible with the right to liberty and security. The conditions of an order (whether negative restrictions or positive obligations) tend to be extremely easy to breach –and in some cases, almost impossible for the person subject to the order not to breach. When the conditions of an order are breached, the result is criminal punishment – often in the form of imprisonment. This paper argues that civil orders set people up to fail, sending them down a path towards incarceration and the ultimate deprivation of liberty. The proclaimed intentions underpinning these civil orders – to tackle purportedly ‘undesirable’ behaviour (which in and of itself is not a crime) committed by ‘undesirable’ people – paves the way for justifying violent and racially disproportionate policing practices.

Keywords: civil orders, policing, stop and search, crime, civil liberties, criminal punishment, anti-social behaviour

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Authors: Haifeng Zhou, Tsungyang Liow, Xiaoguang Tu, Eujin Lim, Chao Li, Junfeng Song, Xianshu Luo, Ying Huang, Lianxi Jia, Lianwee Luo, Qing Fang, Mingbin Yu, Guoqiang Lo

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With the development of technology, countries gradually allocated more and more frequency spectrums for civilization and commercial usage, especially those high radio frequency bands indicating high information capacity. The field effect becomes more and more prominent in microwave components as frequency increases, which invalidates the transmission line theory and complicate the design of microwave components. Here a modeling approach based on numerical search algorithm is proposed to design various building blocks for microwave circuits to avoid complicated impedance matching and equivalent electrical circuit approximation. Concretely, a microwave component is discretized to a set of segments along the microwave propagation path. Each of the segment is initialized with random dimensions, which constructs a multiple-dimension parameter space. Then numerical searching algorithms (e.g. Pattern search algorithm) are used to find out the ideal geometrical parameters. The optimal parameter set is achieved by evaluating the fitness of S parameters after a number of iterations. We had adopted this approach in our current projects and designed many microwave components including sharp bends, T-branches, Y-branches, microstrip-to-stripline converters and etc. For example, a stripline 90° bend was designed in 2.54 mm x 2.54 mm space for dual-band operation (Ka band and Ku band) with < 0.18 dB insertion loss and < -55 dB reflection. We expect that this approach can enrich the tool kits for microwave designers.

Keywords: microwave component, microstrip and stripline, bend, power division, the numerical search algorithm.

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Authors: Jong-Bae Lee, Seongsoo Lee

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Local interconnect network (LIN) is a communication protocol that combines sensors, actuators, and processors to a functional module in automotive applications. In this paper, a LIN ver. 2.2A controller was designed in Verilog hardware description language (Verilog HDL) and implemented in field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Its operation was verified by making full-scale LIN network with the presented FPGA-implemented LIN controller, commercial LIN transceivers, and commercial processors. When described in Verilog HDL and synthesized in 0.18 μm technology, its gate size was about 2,300 gates.

Keywords: local interconnect network, controller, transceiver, processor

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Authors: Catherine Thompson, Maryam Jalali, Peter Hills

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The allocation of visual attention is critical when driving and anything that limits attention will have a detrimental impact on safety. Engaging in a secondary task reduces the amount of attention directed to the road because drivers allocate resources towards this task, leaving fewer resources to process driving-relevant information. Yet the dangers associated with a secondary task do not end when the driver returns their attention to the road. Instead, the attentional settings adopted to complete a secondary task may persist to the road, affecting attention, and therefore affecting driver performance. This 'attentional inertia' effect was investigated in the current work. Forty drivers searched for hazards in driving video clips while their eye-movements were recorded. At varying intervals they were instructed to attend to a secondary task displayed on a tablet situated to their left-hand side. The secondary task consisted of three separate computer games that induced horizontal, vertical, and random eye movements. Visual search and hazard detection in the driving clips were compared across the three conditions of the secondary task. Results showed that the layout of information in the secondary task, and therefore the allocation of attention in this task, had an impact on subsequent search in the driving clips. Vertically presented information reduced the wide horizontal spread of search usually associated with accurate driving and had a negative influence on the detection of hazards. The findings show the additional dangers of engaging in a secondary task while driving. The attentional inertia effect has significant implications for semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles in which drivers have greater opportunity to direct their attention away from the driving task.

Keywords: attention, eye-movements, hazard perception, visual search

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Authors: Sani M. Lawal, Idris Musa, Aliyu D. Usman

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The Pareto approach of optimal solutions in a search space that evolved in multi-objective optimization problems is adopted in this paper, which stands for a set of solutions in the search space. This paper aims at presenting an optimal placement of Distributed Generation (DG) in radial distribution networks with an optimal size for minimization of power loss and voltage deviation as well as maximizing voltage profile of the networks. And these problems are formulated using particle swarm optimization (PSO) as a constraint nonlinear optimization problem with both locations and sizes of DG being continuous. The objective functions adopted are the total active power loss function and voltage deviation function. The multiple nature of the problem, made it necessary to form a multi-objective function in search of the solution that consists of both the DG location and size. The proposed PSO algorithm is used to determine optimal placement and size of DG in a distribution network. The output indicates that PSO algorithm technique shows an edge over other types of search methods due to its effectiveness and computational efficiency. The proposed method is tested on the standard IEEE 34-bus and validated with 33-bus test systems distribution networks. Results indicate that the sizing and location of DG are system dependent and should be optimally selected before installing the distributed generators in the system and also an improvement in the voltage profile and power loss reduction have been achieved.

Keywords: distributed generation, pareto, particle swarm optimization, power loss, voltage deviation

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Authors: Nejah Ben Mabrouk, Bassem Jarboui, Habib Chabchoub

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Production and distribution planning is the most important part in supply chain management. In this paper, a NP-hard production-distribution problem for one product over a multi-period horizon is investigated. The aim is to minimize the sum of costs of three items: production setups, inventories and distribution, while determining, for each period, the amount produced, the inventory levels and the delivery trips. To solve this difficult problem, we propose a bi-phase approach based on a Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS). This heuristic is tested on 90 randomly generated instances from the literature, with 20 periods and 50, 100, 200 customers. Computational results show that our approach outperforms existing solution procedures available in the literature

Keywords: logistic, production, distribution, variable neighbourhood search

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Authors: Pirom Thangchitpianpol, Suttipong Jumroonrut

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This research investigates the distribution of food demand for animal food and the optimum amount of that food production at minimum cost. The data consist of customer purchase orders for the food of laying hens, price of food for laying hens, cost per unit for the food inventory, cost related to food of laying hens in which the food is out of stock, such as fine, overtime, urgent purchase for material. They were collected from January, 1990 to December, 2013 from a factory in Nakhonratchasima province. The collected data are analyzed in order to explore the distribution of the monthly food demand for the laying hens and to see the rate of inventory per unit. The results are used in a stochastic linear programming model for aggregate planning in which the optimum production or minimum cost could be obtained. Programming algorithms in MATLAB and tools in Linprog software are used to get the solution. The distribution of the food demand for laying hens and the random numbers are used in the model. The study shows that the distribution of monthly food demand for laying has a normal distribution, the monthly average amount (unit: 30 kg) of production from January to December. The minimum total cost average for 12 months is Baht 62,329,181.77. Therefore, the production planning can reduce the cost by 14.64% from real cost.

Keywords: animal food, stochastic linear programming, aggregate planning, production planning, demand uncertainty

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Authors: Samaneh Yavari, Christiane Pferrer, Elisabeth Engelke, Alexander Starke, Juergen Rehage

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Background: Three nociceptive thresholds of thermal, electrical, and mechanical thresholds commonly use to evaluate the local anesthesia in many species, for instance, cow, horse, cat, dog, rabbit, and so on. Due to the lack of investigations to evaluate and/or validate such those nociceptive thresholds, our plan was the comparison of two-foot local anesthesia methods of Intravenous Regional Anesthesia (IVRA) and our modified four-point Nerve Block Anesthesia (NBA). Materials and Methods: Eight healthy nonpregnant nondairy Holstein Frisian cows in a cross-over study design were selected for this study. All cows divided into two different groups to receive two local anesthesia techniques of IVRA and our modified four-point NBA. Three thermal, electrical, and mechanical force and pinpricks were applied to evaluate the quality of local anesthesia methods before and after local anesthesia application. Results: The statistical evaluation demonstrated that our four-point NBA has a qualification to select as a standard foot local anesthesia. However, the recorded results of our study revealed no significant difference between two groups of local anesthesia techniques of IVRA and modified four-point NBA related to quality and duration of anesthesia stimulated by electrical, mechanical and thermal nociceptive stimuli. Conclusion and discussion: All three nociceptive threshold stimuli of electrical, mechanical and heat nociceptive thresholds can be applied to measure and evaluate the efficacy of foot local anesthesia of dairy cows. However, our study revealed no superiority of those three nociceptive methods to evaluate the duration and quality of bovine foot local anesthesia methods. Veterinarians to investigate the duration and quality of their selected anesthesia method can use any of those heat, mechanical, and electrical methods.

Keywords: mechanical, thermal, electrical threshold, IVRA, NBA, hind limb, dairy cow

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Authors: Shuxin Li, Peihao Song, Haixiao Hu, Dongfeng Cao

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The interactive deformation and failure mechanisms, including local bucking/delamination propagation and global bucking, are investigated in this paper with numerical simulation and validation with experimental results. Three dimensional numerical models using ABAQUS brick elements combined with cohesive elements and contact elements are developed to simulate the deformation and failure characteristics of composite laminates with and without delamination under compressive loading. The zero-thickness cohesive elements are inserted on the possible path of delamination propagation, and the inter-laminate behavior is characterized by the mixed-mode traction-separation law. The numerical simulations identified the complex feature of interaction among local buckling and/or delamination propagation and final global bucking for composite laminates with delamination under compressive loading. Firstly there is an interaction between the local buckling and delamination propagation, i.e., local buckling induces delamination propagation, and then delamination growth further enhances the local buckling. Secondly, the interaction between the out-plan deformation caused by local buckling and the global bucking deformation results in final failure of the composite laminates. The simulation results are validated by the good agreement with the experimental results published in the literature. The numerical simulation validated with experimental results revealed that the degradation of the load capacity, in particular of the compressive strength of composite structures with delamination, is mainly attributed to the combined local buckling/delamination propagation effects. Consequently, a simple field-bolt repair approach that can hinder the local buckling and prevent delamination growth is explored. The analysis and simulation results demonstrated field-bolt repair could effectively restore compressive strength of composite laminates with delamination.

Keywords: cohesive elements, composite laminates, delamination, local and global bucking, field-bolt repair

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Authors: Akpobome Harrison

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Community radio serves as a potent vehicle for amplifying local voices and driving community progress worldwide. It facilitates grassroots communication, empowers residents, and significantly contributes to social, cultural, and economic development. This study investigates the pivotal roles of community radio in elevating local voices and advancing development within Emuoha, Obio-Akpor, and Ikwerre Local Government Areas in Rivers State. Employing a quantitative methodology, the research involved random sampling of respondents via questionnaires. The findings underscore the transformative power of community radio in promoting local voices and fostering development, particularly within Rivers State. Moreover, community radio platforms empower marginalized populations, providing them with a voice and an opportunity to actively participate in the media landscape, share their stories, and express their concerns. This empowerment holds the potential to enhance civic engagement and communal harmony. Community radio stations often prioritize local news, events, and subjects that may not receive adequate coverage in mainstream media, thus facilitating the dissemination of vital community information, including local news, weather updates, and emergency alerts. In light of these observations, this paper advocates for the encouragement of community radio by both the state government and private media entities to facilitate seamless information dissemination. Additionally, the paper highlights the significant role played by the use of Pidgin English as a communication tool, particularly in providing understanding and a voice to marginalized individuals in rural communities.

Keywords: community radio, local voices, marginalized populations, information dissemination, pidgin english, grassroots communication

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Authors: Christiana Jonut

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The study addresses tagal as an ecotourism product that is uniquely for Sabah. It is a community based tourism venture that is influenced by the Dusun ethic’s traditional law. The traditional principle of tagal is focused primarily on individual exploitation of riverine resources and it was transformed into a community participation in the riverine conservation to foster the growth or survival of ecotourism. It manages a river into a sustainable manner. A smart partnership system between the community and the authority particularly the Department of Fisheries Sabah, tagal has successfully become an instrument to protect, revive and manage the river fish resources. In 2015, Sabah Fisheries Department added 536 tagal sites. Most tagal sites were turned into a community based tourism venture. They generate income through jobs creation for the purpose of uplifting the local’s economic level. Tagal ecotourism sites also increase environmental awareness of the local people to love their culture, tradition and environment. This venture also promotes the sustainability of the eco-tourism. The objective of this study is to explore the issues and contexts of empowerment of the local people in managing a successful tagal ecotourism. This study further explains how community capacity building is the major influence of empowerment of the local community. The methodology approach used is qualitative where interview is chosen as the data collection method. This is a literature review of exploring empowerment of the local community through various community capacity building initiatives that would motivate the local people to be actively involved in the tagal.

Keywords: capacity building, Tagal, ecotourism, empowerment, Sabah

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Authors: Sandip Mitra

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Studies on Governance and Accountability has often stressed the need to release Data in public domain to increase transparency ,which otherwise act as an evidence of performance. However, inefficient handling, lack of capacity and the dynamics of transfers (especially fund transfers) are important issues which need appropriate attention. E-Governance alone can not serve as a measure of transparency as long as a comprehensive planning is instituted. Studies on Governance and public exposure has often triggered public opinion in favour or against any government. The root of the problem (especially in local governments) lies in the management of the governance. The participation of the people in the local government functioning, the networks within and outside the locality, synergy with various layers of Government are crucial in understanding the activities of any government. Unfortunately, data on such issues are not released in the public domain .If they are at all released , the extraction of information is often hindered for complicated designs. A Study has been undertaken with a few local Governments in India. The data has been analysed to substantiate the views.

Keywords: accountability, e-governance, transparency, local government

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Authors: Bereket Amare Mulu

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Ethiopia is one of the countries that consists of a huge variety of botanical resources as compared to the world. The agroclimatic is suitable for a variety of plants to grow effectively throughout the year. Sources of food plants are basic items for people in the world. Production of food items is a prior activity and needs more resources and attention to produce a huge amount of production. The local food is rich in nutrition and healthful foods. The local food is fresh and not exposed to infections easily. The community can easily get the food items in their surroundings. The local food sources are not expensive when it is compared to the other proceed food items, and it is affordable to the community purchasing power. The food is very tasty and palatable capacity by the whole community categories. The basic problems in Ethiopia are the community experiences some of the common food source items. On the contrary, inefficient food production, low economic growth, and climate variability affected food production. This leads to serious food shortages and acute health problems. The objective of the study is to identify local food sources and analyze the advantage and benefits of local food sources. Casava is one of the root crop plants in Ethiopia and easily adapts to any type of agroecology in every place in the country. 50 community members have been identified to prepare casava in different forms of food items. They have prepared in the forms of Bread, Injera, Porridge, Boiled casava, fried chips Casava, and Cocktails. The prepared food items have been exposed to the community as a food festival to eat and taste how much interesting Even though there is a cultural barrier to eating the food items, the community had the food and tasted it the food. The result showed that community awareness is still not addressed the benefits of local food sources yet. The local food has high nutritional value and healthful foods. The local food sources are fresh and easily produced in every place of the country.

Keywords: bread, cassava, injera, nutrition

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Authors: Chipo Mugova, Zuko Mjobo

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The aim of this study was to evaluate the cost of quality (COQ) at a local foundry business to identify the contribution of its units and processes to quality costs within the foundry’s operations. The foundry selected for detailed case study is one of major businesses that have been targeted by the government to produce components for building and re-furbishing wagons and trains. The study aimed at identifying areas in the foundry’s processes in which investment needs to be made to reduce quality costs. This is in alignment with government’s vision of promoting local business to support local markets leading to creation of jobs, and hence reduction of unemployment rate in South Africa. The methodology adopted used cost of quality models. Results from the study indicated that internal failure costs were significantly higher than all other cost of quality categories, taking more than 60% of the business’s income.

Keywords: appraisal costs, cost of quality, failure costs, local content, prevention costs

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Authors: Aster Misganaw

Abstract:

This study investigates the reach, influence, and credibility of international broadcasters—specifically Voice of America (VOA), Deutsche Welle (DW), and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)—among Ethiopian audiences, comparing these perceptions to local media sources. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach that included quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews, the research reveals that the majority of respondents engage regularly with international broadcasters, with younger audiences showing a marked preference. Findings indicate that most of the participants perceive these international sources as more credible than local media, largely due to concerns over government influence on local reporting. Furthermore, the study finds that the majority of respondents believe international broadcasters significantly shape their understanding of both domestic and international issues, highlighting their critical role in public discourse. To enhance their relevance, it is recommended that international broadcasters incorporate more localized content while local media must work to improve their credibility and independence to better serve the Ethiopian public. This research contributes to the understanding of media consumption dynamics in Ethiopia, emphasizing the interplay between local and international narratives in shaping public opinion.

Keywords: international media, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Ethiopian media, Voice of America, audience

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Authors: Kanate Pantusavase, Jaramporn Hassamontr

Abstract:

This research aims to develop an algorithm to generate a schedule of multiple cranes that will maximize load throughputs in anodizing operation. The algorithm proposed utilizes an enumerative strategy to search for constant time between successive loads and crane covering range over baths. The computer program developed is able to generate a near-optimal crane schedule within reasonable times, i.e. within 10 minutes. Its results are compared with existing solutions from an aluminum extrusion industry. The program can be used to generate crane schedules for mixed products, thus allowing mixed-model line balancing to improve overall cycle times.

Keywords: crane scheduling, anodizing operations, cycle time minimization

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Authors: Ibrahim Suliman Hanaish

Abstract:

Disaggregation daily rainfall using stochastic models formulated based on multivariate approach (MuDRain) is discussed in this paper. Seven rain gauge stations are considered in this study for different distances from the referred station starting from 4 km to 160 km in Peninsular Malaysia. The hourly rainfall data used are covered the period from 1973 to 2008 and July and November months are considered as an example of dry and wet periods. The cross-correlation among the rain gauges is considered for the available hourly rainfall information at the neighboring stations or not. This paper discussed the applicability of the MuDRain model for disaggregation daily rainfall to hourly rainfall for both sources of cross-correlation. The goodness of fit of the model was based on the reproduction of fitting statistics like the means, variances, coefficients of skewness, lag zero cross-correlation of coefficients and the lag one auto correlation of coefficients. It is found the correlation coefficients based on extracted correlations that was based on daily are slightly higher than correlations based on available hourly rainfall especially for neighboring stations not more than 28 km. The results showed also the MuDRain model did not reproduce statistics very well. In addition, a bad reproduction of the actual hyetographs comparing to the synthetic hourly rainfall data. Mean while, it is showed a good fit between the distribution function of the historical and synthetic hourly rainfall. These discrepancies are unavoidable because of the lowest cross correlation of hourly rainfall. The overall performance indicated that the MuDRain model would not be appropriate choice for disaggregation daily rainfall.

Keywords: rainfall disaggregation, multivariate disaggregation rainfall model, correlation, stochastic model

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Authors: Abdulah Fajar

Abstract:

Electronic Procurement System has been implemented at government institution in Indonesia. This system has been developed centrally at Institution of National Procurement Policy (LKPP) and implemented autonomously at either local or national government institution. The lack of competency at many institution on Information Technology Management arise several major problems. The main concern of LKPP to local administrator is assured that the system is running normally and always be able to serve the needs of its users. Monitoring system has been identified as the one of solution to prevent the problems appeared. Monitoring system is developed using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and implemented at LKPP. There are two modules; Main Dashboard and Local Agent. Main Dashboard is intended for LKPP and Local Agent is intended to implement at local autonomous e-procurement system (LPSE). There are several resources that must be monitored such as computation, memory and network traffic. Agile paradigm is applied to this project to assure user and system requirement is met. The length of project is the one of reason why agile paradigm has been chosen. The system has been successfully delivered to LKPP.

Keywords: procurement system, SNMP, LKPP, LPSE

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Authors: Hossein Abbasi

Abstract:

The stability is an important topic to plan and manage the energy in the microgrids as the same as the conventional power systems. The voltage and frequency stability is one of the most important issues recently studied in microgrids. The objectives of this paper are the modelling and designing of the components and optimal controllers for the voltage and frequency control of the AC/DC hybrid microgrid under the different disturbances. Since the PI controllers have the advantages of simple structure and easy implementation, so they are designed and modeled in this paper. The harmony search (HS) algorithm is used to optimize the controllers’ parameters. According to the achieved results, the PI controllers have a good performance in voltage and frequency control of the microgrid.

Keywords: frequency control, HS algorithm, microgrid, PI controller, voltage control

Procedia PDF Downloads 391