Search results for: corporate social performance

Authors: Charmaine Devinee Pillay

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Employees in both public and private sectors are expected to contribute significantly to the growth and development of the organization that employs them. Good working conditions are directly linked to the optimum output emanating from the workforce’s excellent performance. Insecurity, instability and lack of benefits negatively impact on the employees’ commitment to their job. This is a qualitative case study that comprised 40 “Contract Employees” (Academic and Supporting staff) in the Faculty of Health Sciences, Walter Sisulu University, Mthatha, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Questionnaire, as instrument of data collection, was used to obtain qualitative data. Data collected were categorized in themes and sub-themes for analyses and discussion. Findings showed that “contract Employees” are highly demoralized due to job insecurity and non-benefits, among other factors, which directly affect their overall output in discharging their duties. The case study at Walter Sisulu University typifies the generalized challenges faced by workers on contract basis in South Africa. It is therefore, recommended that employers hire their workforce on permanent basis or, where “Contract Employment “is inevitable, similar conditions that go with permanent employment should be incorporated in the contract terms of “Contract Employees”. This serves as impetus for optimum performance.

Keywords: contract employee, insecurity, instability, risk factors

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Authors: Youngmok Yun, Bosung Kim, Sungho Lee, Kyeongsu Jeon, Hyunwook Hwangbo, Byounggun Choi

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A betavoltaic battery converts nuclear energy released as beta particles (β-) directly into electrical energy. Betavoltaic cells are analogous to photovoltaic cells. The beta particle’s kinetic energy enters a p-n junction and creates electron-hole pairs. Subsequently, the built-in potential of the p-n junction accelerates the electrons and ions to their respective collectors. The major challenges are electrical conversion efficiencies and exact evaluation. In this study, the performance of betavoltaic battery was evaluated. The betavoltaic cell was evaluated in the same condition as radiation from radioactive isotope using by FE-SEM(field emission scanning electron microscope). The average energy of the radiation emitted from the Ni-63 radioisotope is 17.42 keV. FE-SEM is capable of emitting an electron beam of 1-30keV. Therefore, it is possible to evaluate betavoltaic cell without radioactive isotopes. The betavoltaic battery consists of radioisotope that is physically connected on the surface of Si-based PN diode. The performance of betavoltaic battery can be estimated by the efficiency of PN diode unit cell. The current generated by scanning electron microscope with fixed accelerating voltage (17keV) was measured by using faraday cup. Electrical characterization of the p-n junction diode was performed by using Nano Probe Work Station and I-V measurement system. The output value of the betavoltaic cells developed by this research team was 0.162 μw/cm2 and the efficiency was 1.14%.

Keywords: betavoltaic, nuclear, battery, Ni-63, radio-isotope

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Authors: Garadi Ahmed, Boubakar S. Bouazza

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The Zero Cross-Correlation (C, w) code is a family of binary sequences of length C and constant Hamming-weight, the cross correlation between any two sequences equal zero. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of ZCC code based on Balanced Incomplete Block Design (BIBD) for Spectral Amplitude Coding Optical Code Division Multiple Access (SAC-OCDMA) system using direct detection. The BER obtained is better than 10-9 for five simultaneous users.

Keywords: spectral amplitude coding-optical code-division-multiple-access (SAC-OCDMA), phase induced intensity noise (PIIN), balanced incomplete block design (BIBD), zero cross-correlation (ZCC)

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Authors: Sean W. T. Bayly, Daniel Glover, Don Horrell, Simon Horrocks, Barnes Callum, Stuart Gibson, Mac Misuira

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We assess suitability of recent, ∼7B parameter, instruction-tuned Language Models for Generative Named Entity Recognition (GNER). Alongside Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and supported by task-specific prompting, our proposed Multi-Level Information Retrieval method achieves notable improvements over finetuned entity-level and sentence-level methods. We conclude that language models directed toward this task are highly capable when distinguishing between positive classes (precision). However, smaller models seem to struggle to find all entities (recall). Poorly defined classes such as ”Miscellaneous” exhibit substantial declines in performance, likely due to the ambiguity it introduces to the prompt. This is partially resolved through a self-verification method using engineered prompts containing knowledge of the stricter class definitions, particularly in areas where their boundaries are in danger of overlapping, such as the conflation between the location ”Britain” and the nationality ”British”. Finally, we explore correlations between model performance on the GNER task with performance on relevant academic benchmarks.

Keywords: generative named entity recognition, information retrieval, lightweight artificial intelligence, prompt engineering, personal information identification, retrieval augmented generation, self verification

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Authors: Mao Ju

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As a capital organizing form, the mixed-ownership reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is an important way to stimulate enterprises’ vitality through reshaping the shareholding structure, enhancing mutual complementation of shareholders’ resources, and improving corporate governance and the quality of internal control. Based on the process of mixed-ownership reform and according to IPO and the change in the key shareholding structure of the listed companies, this paper divides the reform into two stages: primary mixed-ownership reform and secondary mixed-ownership reform (deeper mixed-ownership reform), and uses this as the basis to construct the proxy variable of the mixed-ownership reform of SOEs, research on the relationship between the mixed-ownership reform of SOEs and the quality of internal control. The research reveals that: (1) SOEs completing a secondary mixed-ownership reform can enhance the quality of internal control; (2) In the secondary mixed-ownership reform, the introduction of heterogeneous major shareholders will generate more obvious enhancement in the quality of internal control than the introduction of homogeneous major shareholders. Further research shows that the internal environment and marketization process play a moderating role in the process of the secondary mixed-ownership reform affecting the quality of internal control, that is, a better internal environment or a higher degree of marketization can promote the improvement of the quality of internal control in secondary mixed-ownership reform. The conclusion of the research provides experimental evidence for the expected results of the mixed-ownership reform policy.

Keywords: mixed-ownership reform of state-owned enterprises, secondary mixed-ownership reform, quality of internal control, primary mixed-ownership reform

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Authors: Ahmed Sameer, Braj Bhushan

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The objective of our study was to compare two techniques (no landmark vs imaginary landmark) of remembering route while traversing in an unfamiliar homogenous environment. We used two videos each having nine identical turns with no landmarks. In the first video participant was required to remember the sequence of turns. In the second video participant was required to imagine a landmark at each turn and associate the turn with it. In both the task the participant was asked to recall the sequence of turns as it appeared in the video. Results showed that performance in the first condition i.e. without use of landmarks was better than imaginary landmark condition. The difference, however, became significant when the participant were tested again about 30 minutes later though performance was still better in no-landmark condition. The finding is surprising given the past research in memory and is explained in terms of cognitive factors such as mental workload.

Keywords: wayfinding, landmarks, unfamiliar environment, cognitive psychology

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Authors: Brunno Vasques

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Due to the non-toxic nature and high performance in terms of vacuum specific impulse and density specific impulse, the combination of liquid oxygen and liquid methane have been identified as a promising option for future space vehicle systems. Applications requiring throttling capability include specific missions such as rendezvous, planetary landing and de-orbit as well as weapon systems. One key challenge in throttling liquid rocket engines is maintaining an adequate pressure drop across the injection elements, which is necessary to provide good propellant atomization and mixing as well as system stability. The potential scalability of pintle injectors, their great suitability to throttling and inherent combustion stability characteristics led to investigations using a variety of propellant combinations, including liquid oxygen and hydrogen and fluorine-oxygen and methane. Presented here are the preliminary performance and heat transfer information obtained during hot-fire testing of a pintle injector running on liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants. The specific injector design selected for this purpose is a multi-configuration building block version with replaceable injection elements, providing flexibility to accommodate hardware modifications with minimum difficulty. On the basis of single point runs and the use of a copper/nickel segmented calorimetric combustion chamber and associated transient temperature measurement, the characteristic velocity efficiency, injector footprint and heat fluxes could be established for the first proposed pintle configuration as a function of injection velocity- and momentum-ratios. A description of the test-bench is presented as well as a discussion of irregularities encountered during testing, such as excessive heat flux into the pintle tip resulting from certain operating conditions.

Keywords: green propellants, hot-fire performance, rocket engine throttling, pintle injector

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Authors: Mo'ath F. Bataineh

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Exercise is highly effective against obesity. Milk contains several components that support exercising and physical performance. However, there is a lack of published studies on the relationship between camel milk and ability to exercise. A pilot study was conducted with the purpose of comparing the impact of milk type (Cow vs Camel) compared with water on physical performance. Seven male obese participants (age: 20.3 ± 1.5 years; BMI: 35.7 ± 2.7 kg/m2; resting heart rate: 92.7 ± 4.7 beats per minute; training frequency: 4.4 ± 0.8 days/week) were recruited for this pilot study. In a randomized counterbalanced crossover design, participants took part in 3 trials that included ingesting 3 different pre workout drinks in a random order. The pre workout drinks were water (W), whole cow milk (CW), and whole camel milk (CM). On each trial day, participants were asked to report to the laboratory after an overnight fasting. Following a 15-minute short recovery period after their arrival to the laboratory, each participant was presented with a 500 ml of the assigned experimental drink and were asked to ingest it in one minute and at least 120 minutes prior to performing the 6-minute walk test. All drinks were presented at room temperature. Trials with different experimental drinks were performed on separate days. Participants were given at least 4 days of washout period between trials. The trial order was randomized to avoid bias due to learning effect. The 6-minute walk test was performed by all participants and immediately at the conclusion of the test, the covered distance in meters and the rating of perceived exertion (RPE) were recorded. All data were analysed using SPSS software (Version 29.0). The repeated measures ANOVA testing of collected data showed a significant main effect for treatment on covered distance in meters, F (2, 8) = 5.794, p=0.028 with a large effect size (partial eta squared (ηp2) =0.592). Also, LSD post hoc pairwise comparison analysis revealed that Camel milk and Cow milk were significantly (p = 0.044 and p = 0.020 respectively) superior to water in improving the covered distance during the test and that Camel milk tended to be better than Cow’s milk. The RPE values were not significantly different between experimental drinks (p>0.05). In conclusion, milk is superior to water as a pre workout drink, and camel milk is comparable to cow’s milk in enhancing ability to support a higher level of performance compared with water, therefore, camel milk could be used to replace cow’s milk as a suitable pre-exercise drink without expecting any negative consequences on physical performance. The fact that these positive results were obtained with obese individuals should encourage using camel milk without the fear of disturbing physical performance in other weight categories.

Keywords: camel milk, cow milk, obesity, physical performance, pre-workout drink

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Authors: Frimpong Kyeremeh, Albert Y. Appiah, Ben B. K. Ayawli

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Energy storage system (ESS) is an essential part of a microgrid (MG) because of its immense benefits to the economics and the stability of MG. For a direct current (DC) MG (DCMG) in which the generating units are mostly variable renewable energy generators, DC bus voltage fluctuation is inevitable; hence ESS is vital in managing the mismatch between load demand and generation. Besides, to accrue the maximum benefits of ESS in the microgrid, there is the need for proper sizing and location of the ESSs. In this paper, a performance comparison is made between two configurations of ESS; distributed battery energy storage system (D-BESS) and an aggregated (centralized) battery energy storage system (A-BESS), on the basis of stability and operational cost for a DCMG. The configuration consists of four households with rooftop PV panels and a wind turbine. The objective is to evaluate and analyze the technical efficiencies, cost effectiveness as well as controllability of each configuration. The MG is first modelled with MATLAB Simulink then, a mathematical model is used to determine the optimal size of the BESS that minimizes the total operational cost of the MG. The performance of the two configurations would be tested with simulations. The two configurations are expected to reduce DC bus voltage fluctuations, but in the cases of voltage stability and optimal cost, the best configuration performance will be determined at the end of the research. The work is in progress, and the result would help MG designers and operators to make the best decision on the use of BESS for DCMG configurations.

Keywords: aggregated energy storage system, DC bus voltage, DC microgrid, distributed battery energy storage, stability

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Authors: Jitendra Narayan Panda, Jayashree Bijwe, Raj K. Pandey

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PAEK (Polyaryl ether ketone) being a high-performance polymer, is currently being explored for its tribo-potential by incorporating various fibers, solid lubricants. In this work, influence of amount (30 and 40 %) of short glass fibers (GF) in two composites containing PAEK (60 and 50 %) and synthetic graphite (10 %) on mechanical and tribological behaviour was studied. The composites were developed by injection molding and evaluated in adhesive wear mode (pin on disc configuration) against mild steel disc. The load and speed were selected as variable input parameters while coefficient of friction (µ), specific wear rate (K0) and PVlimit (pressure × velocity) values were selected as output parameters for performance evaluation. Although higher amount of GF lead to better mechanical properties, tribological properties were not in tune to this. Overall, µ and K0 for both composites were in the range 0.04-0.08 and 3-8x 10-16 m3/Nm respectively and decreased with increase in applied PV values till failure was observed. PVlimit was indicated by 112 and 100 MPa m/s. Such high PVlimit values are not reported for any polymer composites running in dry conditions in the literature. The mechanical properties of the C40 composite (40 % GF) proved superior to C30 composite (30 % GF). However, all tribological properties of C40 were inferior to C30. It exhibited higher µ, higher K0 and slightly lower PVlimit value. The higher % fibers proved detrimental for tribo-performance and worn surface analysis by SEM & EDAX was done on the discs & pins to understand wear mechanisms.

Keywords: PAEK composites, pin-on-disk, PV limit, friction

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Authors: Dong Il Shim, Geehong Choi, Donghwi Lee, Namkyu Lee, Hyung Hee Cho

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Effective cooling technology is required to secure thermal stability in extreme heat generated systems such as integrated electronic devices and power generated systems. Pool boiling heat transfer is one of the powerful cooling mechanisms using phase change phenomena. Critical heat flux (CHF) and heat transfer coefficient (HTC) are main factors to evaluate the performance of boiling heat transfer. CHF is the limitation of boiling heat transfer before film boiling which occurs thermal failure. Surface wettability is an important surface characteristic of boiling heat transfer. A hydrophilic surface has higher CHF through effective working fluid supply to local hot spots. A hydrophobic surface promotes the onset of nucleate boiling (ONB) to enhance HTC. In this study, superbiphilic surfaces, which is combined with superhydrophillic and superhydrophobic, are applied on boiling experiments to maximize boiling performance. We conducted pool boiling heat transfer using DI water at a saturated temperature and recorded bubble dynamics using a high-speed camera with 2000 fps. As a result, superbiphilic patterned surfaces promote ONB and enhance both CHF and HTC. This study demonstrates the enhanced boiling performance using superbiphilic surfaces by effective nucleation and separation of liquid/vapor pathway. We expect that further enhancement of heat transfer could be achieved in future work using optimized patterned surfaces.

Keywords: boiling heat transfer, wettability, critical heat flux, heat transfer coefficient

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Authors: Saad Roustom, Hajo Ribberink

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In most cities in the world, traffic has increased strongly over the last decades, causing high levels of congestion and deteriorating inner-city air quality. This study analyzes the impact of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) on traffic performance and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under different CAV penetration rates in mixed fleet environments of CAVs and driver-operated vehicles (DOVs) and under three different traffic demand levels. Utilizing meso-scale traffic simulations of the City of Ottawa, Canada, the research evaluates the traffic performance of three distinct CAV driving behaviors—Cautious, Normal, and Aggressive—at penetration rates of 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%, across three different traffic demand levels. The study employs advanced correlation models to estimate GHG emissions. The results reveal that Aggressive and Normal CAVs generally reduce traffic congestion and GHG emissions, with their benefits being more pronounced at higher penetration rates (50% to 100%) and elevated traffic demand levels. On the other hand, Cautious CAVs exhibit an increase in both traffic congestion and GHG emissions. However, results also show deteriorated traffic flow conditions when introducing 25% penetration rates of any type of CAVs. Aggressive CAVs outperform all other driving at improving traffic flow conditions and reducing GHG emissions. The findings of this study highlight the crucial role CAVs can play in enhancing urban traffic performance and mitigating the adverse impact of transportation on the environment. This research advocates for the adoption of effective CAV-related policies by regulatory bodies to optimize traffic flow and reduce GHG emissions. By providing insights into the impact of CAVs, this study aims to inform strategic decision-making and stimulate the development of sustainable urban mobility solutions.

Keywords: connected and automated vehicles, congestion, GHG emissions, mixed fleet environment, traffic performance, traffic simulations

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Authors: D. Prangchumpol

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This research presents a forecasting method of requisition document demands for Military units by using Exponential Smoothing methods to analyze data. The data used in the forecast is an actual data requisition document of The Adjutant General Department. The results of the forecasting model to forecast the requisition of the document found that Holt–Winters’ trend and seasonality method of α=0.1, β=0, γ=0 is appropriate and matches for requisition of documents. In addition, the researcher has developed a requisition online system to improve the performance of requisition documents of The Adjutant General Department, and also ensuring that the operation can be checked.

Keywords: requisition, holt–winters, time series, royal thai army

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Authors: Burak Oksuzoglu, Savas Yildirim, Ferhat Kutlu

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Opinion mining (OM) is one of the natural language processing (NLP) problems to determine the polarity of opinions, mostly represented on a positive-neutral-negative axis. The data for OM is usually collected from various social media platforms. In an era where social media has considerable control over companies’ futures, it’s worth understanding social media and taking actions accordingly. OM comes to the fore here as the scale of the discussion about companies increases, and it becomes unfeasible to gauge opinion on individual levels. Thus, the companies opt to automize this process by applying machine learning (ML) approaches to their data. For the last two decades, OM or sentiment analysis (SA) has been mainly performed by applying ML classification algorithms such as support vector machines (SVM) and Naïve Bayes to a bag of n-gram representations of textual data. With the advent of deep learning and its apparent success in NLP, traditional methods have become obsolete. Transfer learning paradigm that has been commonly used in computer vision (CV) problems started to shape NLP approaches and language models (LM) lately. This gave a sudden rise to the usage of the pretrained language model (PTM), which contains language representations that are obtained by training it on the large datasets using self-supervised learning objectives. The PTMs are further fine-tuned by a specialized downstream task dataset to produce efficient models for various NLP tasks such as OM, NER (Named-Entity Recognition), Question Answering (QA), and so forth. In this study, the traditional and modern NLP approaches have been evaluated for OM by using a sizable corpus belonging to a large private company containing about 76,000 comments in Turkish: SVM with a bag of n-grams, and two chosen pre-trained models, multilingual universal sentence encoder (MUSE) and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). The MUSE model is a multilingual model that supports 16 languages, including Turkish, and it is based on convolutional neural networks. The BERT is a monolingual model in our case and transformers-based neural networks. It uses a masked language model and next sentence prediction tasks that allow the bidirectional training of the transformers. During the training phase of the architecture, pre-processing operations such as morphological parsing, stemming, and spelling correction was not used since the experiments showed that their contribution to the model performance was found insignificant even though Turkish is a highly agglutinative and inflective language. The results show that usage of deep learning methods with pre-trained models and fine-tuning achieve about 11% improvement over SVM for OM. The BERT model achieved around 94% prediction accuracy while the MUSE model achieved around 88% and SVM did around 83%. The MUSE multilingual model shows better results than SVM, but it still performs worse than the monolingual BERT model.

Keywords: BERT, MUSE, opinion mining, pretrained language model, SVM, Turkish

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Authors: Bernd Kiefer, Abraham Gebru Tesfay, Dietrich Klakow

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The motivation of our work is to detect different terrain types traversed by a robot based on acoustic data from the robot-terrain interaction. Different acoustic features and classifiers were investigated, such as Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient and Gamma-tone frequency cepstral coefficient for the feature extraction, and Gaussian mixture model and Feed forward neural network for the classification. We analyze the system’s performance by comparing our proposed techniques with some other features surveyed from distinct related works. We achieve precision and recall values between 87% and 100% per class, and an average accuracy at 95.2%. We also study the effect of varying audio chunk size in the application phase of the models and find only a mild impact on performance.

Keywords: acoustic features, autonomous robots, feature extraction, terrain classification

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Authors: Naeem Hassan

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The study intended to investigate the impact of the e banking system on the performance efficiency of the commercial banks in KP, Pakistan. In addition to this main purpose, the study also aimed at analyzing the impact of e banking on the service quality as well as satisfaction of the customers using e banking system. More over, the focus was also given to highlight the risks involved in the e banking system. The researcher has adopted the quantitative methodology in the study. in order to reach concrete finding, the researcher has analyzed the secondary data taken from the annual reports of selected banks and State bank of Pakistan as well as the primary data collected through the self-administrated questionnaire from the participants selected for the current study. The study highlighted that there is a significant impact of e banking on the financial efficiency on the commercial banks in KP, Pakistan. Additionally, the results of the study also show that the online banking is having significant effects on the customer satisfaction. The researcher recommends on the bases of findings that commercial banks should continue to adopt new technologies which will improve their margins and hence their net profit after tax in order to attract more investors. Additionally, commercial bank needs to minimize the time and risk in e-banking to attract more customers which will improve their net profit. Furthermore, the study findings also recommend the banking policy makers should also review policies related to promotion of innovation adoption and transfer of technology. Commercial banking system should encourage adoption of innovations that will improve profit of the banking industry.

Keywords: E-banking, performance efficiency, commercial banks, effect

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Authors: Dalal Benboutrif

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Religion and Development relation is one of the most arguable phrases amongst politicians, philosophers, clerics, scientists, sociologists and even the public. The main objective of this research is to clarify the relations, contrasts and interactions between religion and the major types of development including social, political, economic and scientific developments, by focusing on Islam religion. A review of the literature was performed concerning religion and development relations and conflicts, by focusing on Islam religion and then the unprocessed tips of the review were characterized. Regarding clarification of the key points of the literature, three main sectors were considered in the research. The first sector of the research mainly focused on the philosophical views on religion, which were analyzed by main evaluation of three famous philosophers’ ideas: ‘Kant’, ‘Hegel’ and ‘Weber’, and then a critical discussion on Weber’s idea about Islam and development was applied. The second sector was specified to ‘Religion and Development’ and mainly discussed the role of religion in development through poverty reduction, the interconnection of religion, spirituality and social development, religious education effects on social development, and the relation of religion with political development. The third sector was specified to ‘Islam and Development’ and mainly discussed the Islamic golden age of science, major reasons of today’s backwardness (non-development) of most Islamic countries, and Quranic instructions regarding adaptability of Islam with development. The findings of the current research approved the research hypothesis as: ‘Religious instructions (included Islam) are not in conflict with development’, rather, it could have positive effects mainly on social development and it can pave the way for society to develop. Turkey was considered as a study model, as a successful developed Islamic country demonstrating the non-conflicting relation of Islam and development.

Keywords: development, Islam, philosophy, religion

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Authors: Chen Zhang, Yongpeng Gu, Xiaotian Li

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Quasi-zero-stiffness (QZS) vibration isolation technology has garnered significant attention in both academia and industry, which enables ultra-low-frequency vibration isolation. In modern industries, such as shipbuilding and aerospace, rotating machinery generates vibrations over a wide frequency range, thus imposing more stringent requirements on vibration isolation technologies. These technologies must not only achieve ultra-low starting isolation frequencies but also provide effective isolation across mid- to high-frequency ranges. However, existing research on QZS vibration isolators primarily focuses on frequency ranges below 50 Hz. Moreover, studies have shown that in the mid-to high-frequency ranges, QZS isolators tend to generate resonance peaks that adversely affect their isolation performance. This limitation significantly restricts the practical applicability of QZS isolation technology. To address this issue, the present study investigates the high-frequency isolation performance of two typical QZS isolators: the mechanism type three-spring QZS isolator mechanism and the structure and bowl-shaped QZS isolator structure. First, the parameter conditions required to achieve quasi-zero stiffness characteristics for two isolators are derived based on static mechanical analysis. The theoretical transmissibility characteristics are then calculated using the harmonic balance method. Three-dimensional finite element models of two QZS isolators are developed using ABAQUS simulation software, and transmissibility curves are computed for the 0-500 Hz frequency range. The results indicate that the three-spring QZS mechanism exhibits multiple higher-order resonance peaks in the mid-to high-frequency ranges due to the higher-order models of the springs. Springs with fewer coils and larger diameters can shift the higher-order modals to higher frequencies but cannot entirely eliminate their occurrence. In contrast, the bowl-shaped QZS isolator, through shape optimization using a spline-based representation, effectively mitigates the generation of higher-order resonance modes, resulting in superior isolation performance in the mid-to high-frequency ranges. This study provides essential theoretical insights for optimizing the vibration isolation performance of QZS technologies in complex, wide-frequency vibration environments, offering significant practical value for their application.

Keywords: quasi-zero-stiffness, wide-frequency vibration, vibration isolator, transmissibility

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Authors: Ammar Maziz, Mostapha Tarfaoui, Said Rechak

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The high mechanical performance of composite pipes can be adversely affected by their low resistance to impact loads. Loads in dynamic origin are dangerous and cause consequences on the operation of pipes because the damage is often not detected and can affect the structural integrity of composite pipes. In this work, an advanced 3-D finite element (FE) model, based on the use of intralaminar damage models was developed and used to predict damage under low-velocity impact. The performance of the numerical model is validated with the confrontation with the results of experimental tests. The results show that at low impact energy, the damage happens mainly by matrix cracking and delamination. The model capabilities to simulate the low-velocity impact events on the full-scale composite structures were proved.

Keywords: composite materials, low velocity impact, FEA, dynamic behavior, progressive damage modeling

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Authors: W. S. Li, S. T. Yang, H. C. Cheng

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The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the perovskite solar cells has been achieved by inserting vertically-aligned ZnO nanowires (NWs) between the cathode and the active layer and shows better solar cells performance. Perovskite solar cells have drawn significant attention due to the superb efficiency and low-cost fabrication process. In this experiment, ZnO nanowires are used as the electron transport layer (ETL) due to its low temperature process. The main idea of this thesis is utilizing the 3D structures of the hydrothermally-grown ZnO nanowires to increase the junction area to improve the photovoltaic performance of the perovskite solar cells. The infiltration and the surface coverage of the perovskite precursor solution changed as tuning the length of the ZnO nanowires. It is revealed that the devices with ZnO nanowires of 150 nm demonstrated the best PCE of 8.46 % under the AM 1.5G illumination (100 mW/cm2).

Keywords: hydrothermally-grown ZnO nanowires, perovskite solar cells, low temperature process, pinholes

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Authors: Mst Shapna Akter, Hossain Shahriar

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Neural network approaches are machine learning methods used in many domains, such as healthcare and cyber security. Neural networks are mostly known for dealing with image datasets. While training with the images, several fundamental mathematical operations are carried out in the Neural Network. The operation includes a number of algebraic and mathematical functions, including derivative, convolution, and matrix inversion and transposition. Such operations require higher processing power than is typically needed for computer usage. Central Processing Unit (CPU) is not appropriate for a large image size of the dataset as it is built with serial processing. While Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has parallel processing capabilities and, therefore, has higher speed. This paper uses advanced Neural Network techniques such as VGG16, Resnet50, Densenet, Inceptionv3, Xception, Mobilenet, XGBOOST-VGG16, and our proposed models to compare CPU and GPU resources. A system for classifying autism disease using face images of an autistic and non-autistic child was used to compare performance during testing. We used evaluation matrices such as Accuracy, F1 score, Precision, Recall, and Execution time. It has been observed that GPU runs faster than the CPU in all tests performed. Moreover, the performance of the Neural Network models in terms of accuracy increases on GPU compared to CPU.

Keywords: autism disease, neural network, CPU, GPU, transfer learning

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Authors: Nargis Ali

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Since the modest fashion market is growing in the UK, there is still little understanding and more concerns found among researchers and marketers about Muslim consumers. Therefore, the present study is designed to explore critical factors influencing Muslim women’s intention to purchase clothing and to identify the differences in the purchase intention of ethnic minority groups in the UK. The conceptual framework is designed using the theory of planned behavior and social identity theory. In order to satisfy the research objectives, a structured online questionnaire was published on Facebook from 20 November to 21 March. As a result, 1087 usable questionnaires were received and used to assess the proposed model fit through structural equation modeling. Results revealed that social media does influence the purchase intention of Muslim women. Muslim women search for stylish clothes that provide comfort during summer while they prefer soft and subdued colors. Furthermore, religious knowledge and religious practice, and fashion uniqueness strongly influence their purchase intention, while hybrid identity is negatively related to the purchase intention of Muslim women. This research contributes to the literature linked to Muslim consumers at a time when the UK's large retailers were seeking to attract Muslim consumers through modestly designed outfits. Besides, it will be helpful to formulate or revise product and marketing strategies according to UK’s Muslim women’s tastes and needs.

Keywords: fashion uniqueness, hybrid identity, religiosity, social media, social identity theory, structural equation modeling, theory of planned behavior

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Authors: Paulin Mbecke

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Research Issue: Under economic constraints, socio-economic conditions of households worsen discounting child’s wellbeing to the bottom of many governments and households’ priority lists. In such situation, many governments fail to rebalance priorities in providing services such as education, housing and social security which are the prerequisites for the wellbeing of children. Consequently, many households struggle to respond to basic needs especially those of children. Although economic conditions play a crucial role in creating prosperity or poverty in households and therefore the wellbeing or misery for children; they are not the sole cause. Research Insights: The review of the South African Index of Multiple Deprivation and the South African Child Gauge establish the extent to which economic conditions impact on the wellbeing or misery of children. The analysis of social, cultural, environmental and structural theories demonstrates that non-economic factors contribute equally to the wellbeing or misery of children, yet, they are disregarded. In addition, the assessment of a child abuse database proves a weak correlation between economic factors (prosperity or poverty) and child’s wellbeing or misery. Theoretical Implications: Through critical social research theory and modelling, the paper proposes a Theory-Based Model that combines different factors to facilitate the understanding of child’s wellbeing or misery. Policy Implications: The proposed model assists in broad policy and decision making and reviews processes in promoting child’s wellbeing and in preventing, intervening and managing child’s misery with regard to education, housing, and social security.

Keywords: children, child’s misery, child’s wellbeing, household’s despair, household’s prosperity

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Authors: Sung Ryong Kim, Hyung Sup Han, Jae-Yup Kim

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Many engineering students feel uncomfortable in solving the industry related problems. There are many ways to strengthen the engineering student’s ability to solve the assigned problem when they get a job. Korea National University of Transportation has developed an industry-oriented undergraduate research program (URP). An URP program is designed for engineering students to provide an experience of solving a company’s research problem. The URP project is carried out for 6 months. Each URP team consisted of 1 company mentor, 1 professor, and 3-4 engineering students. A team of different majors is strongly encouraged to integrate different perspectives of multidisciplinary background. The corporate research projects proposed by companies are chosen by the major-related student teams. A company mentor gives the detailed technical background of the project to the students, and he/she also provides a basic data, raw materials and so forth. The company allows students to use the company's research equipment. An assigned professor has adjusted the project scope and level to the student’s ability after discussing with a company mentor. Monthly meeting is used to check the progress, to exchange ideas, and to help the students. It is proven as an effective engineering education program not only to provide an experience of company research but also to motivate the students in their course work. This program provides a premier interdisciplinary platform for undergraduate students to perform the practical challenges encountered in their major-related companies and it is especially helpful for students who want to get a job from a company that proposed the project.

Keywords: company mentor, industry oriented, interdisciplinary platform, undergraduate research program

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Authors: Soowon Park, Min-Ji Kim, Jun-Young Lee

Abstract:

Motivation: The stigma of mental illness has been studied in many disciplines, including social psychology, counseling psychology, sociology, psychiatry, public health care, and related areas, because individuals labeled as ‘mentally ill’ are often deprived of their rights and their life opportunities. To understand the factors that deepen the stigma of mental illness, it is important to understand the influencing factors of the stigma. Problem statement: Depression is a common disorder in adults, but the incidence of help-seeking is low. Researchers have believed that this poor help-seeking behavior is related to the stigma of mental illness, which results from low mental health literacy. However, it is uncertain that increasing mental health literacy decreases mental health stigmatization. Furthermore, even though decreasing stigmatization is important, the stigma of mental illness is still a stable and long-lasting phenomenon. Thus, factors other than knowledge about mental disorders have the power to maintain the stigma. Investigating the influencing factors that facilitate the stigma of psychiatric disease could help lower the social stigmatization. Approach: Face-to-face interviews were conducted with a multi-clustering sample. A total of 700 Korean participants (38% male), ranging in age from 18 to 78 (M(SD)age= 48.5(15.7)) answered demographical questions, Korean version of Link’s Perceived Devaluation and Discrimination (PDD) scale for the assessment of social stigmatization against depression, and the Korean version of the WHO-Composite International Diagnostic Interview for the assessment of mental disorders. Multiple-regression was conducted to find the predicting factors of social stigmatization against depression. Ages, sex, years of education, income, living location, and experience of mental illness were used as the predictors. Results: Predictors accounted for 14% of the variance in the stigma of depressive disorders (F(6, 693) = 20.27, p < .001). Among those, only age, years of education, and experience of mental illness significantly predicted social stigmatization against depression. The standardized regression coefficient of age had a negative association with stigmatization (β = -.20, p < .001), but years of education (β = .20, p < .001) and experience of mental illness (β = .08, p < .05) positively predicted depression stigmatization. Conclusions: The present study clearly demonstrates the association between personal factors and depressive disorder stigmatization. Younger age, more education, and self-stigma appeared to increase the stigmatization. Young, highly educated, and mentally ill people tend to reject patients with depressive disorder as friends, teachers, or babysitters; they also tend to think that those patients have lower intelligence and abilities. These results suggest the possibility that people from a high social class, or highly educated people, who have the power to make decisions, help maintain the social stigma against mental illness patients. To increase the awareness that people from high social classes have more stigmatization against depressive disorders will help decrease the biased attitudes against mentally ill patients.

Keywords: depressive disorder stigmatization, age, education, self-stigma

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Authors: Muneera Abdul Haleem Bukhari, Maryam I. Alshirawi, Elsayed S. Elkhamisi

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This study aimed at understanding the relationship between psychological security and self-esteem among Adolescent with Mild Intellectual Disability, exploring the levels of psychological security and self-esteem, as well as determining the differences between genders in psychological security and self-esteem. The sample of the study contained (60) Adolescent with Mild Intellectual Disability, (34) males and (26) females who are enrolled in the Vocational and Social Rehabilitation Center and Hope Institute in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Their ages are between (15-23) years old. The Psychological Security Scale and self-Esteem Scale (prepared by James Battle) were used by the researcher. Results showed that levels of psychological security and self-esteem among Adolescents with Mild Intellectual Disability was above average; results also showed the order of the psychological security dimensions in the following manner (future outlook – mood - family security – social security) and the order of the dimensions of self-esteem in the following manner (social self-esteem – personal self-esteem – general self-esteem) among Adolescent with Mild Intellectual Disability; as for the differences between genders, the study showed that there was an increased level of psychological security among males. However, there was no difference in self-esteem between both sexes.

Keywords: psychological security, self-esteem, adolescent, intellectual disability, the Kingdom of Bahrain

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Authors: Jennifer Knudsen

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This study observes the moderating effects of family structure on College Achievement across cohorts. Over the past half-century, social stigmas surrounding non-traditional families have shifted, as they make up an increasing proportion of American families. Using the General Social Survey, this study employs a varying coefficient model to test if family structure moderates the effects of other background variables on respondents’ educational attainment. Initial analysis suggests that living in alternative family arrangements has an increasingly negative effect on college achievement, whereas living in an intact family with a mother and father has a positive effect on college achievement.

Keywords: education, family, college, family structure

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Authors: Asmaa Selim, Peter Mizsey

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Bio-ethanol is considered of higher potential as a green renewable energy source owing to its environmental benefits and its high efficiency. In the present study, silver nanoparticles were in-situ generated in a poly (vinyl alcohol) in order to improve its potentials for pervaporation of ethanol-water mixture using solution-casting. Effect of silver content on the pervaporation separation index and the enrichment factor of the membrane at 15 percentage mass water at 40ᵒC was reported. Pervaporation data for nanocomposite membranes showed around 100% increase in the water permeance values while the intrinsic selectivity decreased. The water permeances of origin crosslinked PVA membrane, and the 2.5% silver loaded PVA membrane are 26.65 and 70.45 (g/m².kPa.h) respectively. The values of total flux and water flux are closed to each other, indicating that membranes could be effectively used to break the azeotropic point of ethanol-water. Effect of temperature on the pervaporation performance, permeation parameter and diffusion coefficient of both water and ethanol was discussed. The negative heat of sorption ∆Hs values calculated on the basis of the estimated Arrhenius activation energy values indicating that the sorption process was controlled by Langmuir’s mode. The overall results showed that the membrane containing 0.5 mass percentage of Ag salt exhibited excellent PV performance.

Keywords: bio-ethanol, diffusion coefficient, nanocomposite, pervaporation, poly (vinyl alcohol), silver nanoparticles

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Authors: Lukumba Phiri, Simon Tembo, Kumbuso Joshua Nyoni

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In Zambia recent initiatives by various power operators like ZESCO, CEC, and consumers like the mines to upgrade power systems into smart grids target an even tighter integration with information technologies to enable the integration of renewable energy sources, local and bulk generation, and demand response. Thus, for the reliable operation of smart grids, its information infrastructure must be secure and reliable in the face of both failures and cyberattacks. Due to the nature of the systems, ICS/SCADA cybersecurity and governance face additional challenges compared to the corporate networks, and critical systems may be left exposed. There exist control frameworks internationally such as the NIST framework, however, there are generic and do not meet the domain-specific needs of the SCADA systems. Zambia is also lagging in cybersecurity awareness and adoption, therefore there is a concern about securing ICS controlling key infrastructure critical to the Zambian economy as there are few known facts about the true posture. In this paper, we introduce a stochastic Edged-based Anomaly Detection for SCADA systems (SEADS) framework for threat modeling and risk assessment. SEADS enables the calculation of steady-steady probabilities that are further applied to establish metrics like system availability, maintainability, and reliability.

Keywords: anomaly, availability, detection, edge, maintainability, reliability, stochastic

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Authors: Nasir Haruna Soba

Abstract:

In addition to sustaining poverty and inequality, the issue of out-of-school children impedes efforts to accomplish the sustainable development goals (SDGs), especially Goal 4, which is to guarantee inclusive, egalitarian, and high-quality education for everyone. However, a number of social, cultural, and infrastructure barriers mean that millions of children in Nigeria are denied this privilege. This paper presents the findings of a case study conducted in Nigeria. The findings of this study revealed that out of school children in Nigeria are the most common causes of poverty; inadequate school facilities, long distances to schools, and poor road networks make it difficult for children, especially in rural areas, to access education. Social Disparities: Social inequality is sustained by differences in education, especially when it comes to financing, governance, and coordination amongst stakeholders. These differences are especially pronounced along gender and socioeconomic lines. The study recommended that policymakers and stakeholders should consider addressing the root causes, enhancing existing interventions, and implementing targeted policy measures. Nigeria can make significant strides towards ensuring inclusive and quality education for all children, thereby fostering sustainable development and reducing poverty.

Keywords: poverty, inequality, funding, education, development

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