Search results for: vehicle problem

Authors: Trupti Meher, Harihar Sahoo

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Premature menopause refers to the occurrence of menopause before the age of 40 years. Women who experience premature menopause either due to biological or induced reasons have a longer duration of exposure to severe symptoms and adverse health consequences when compared to those who undergo menopause at a later age, despite the fact that premature menopause has a profound effect on the health of women. This study attempted to determine the prevalence and predictors of premature menopause among women aged 25-39 years, using data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) conducted during 2015–16 in India. Descriptive statistics and multinomial logistic regression were used to carry out the result. The results revealed that the prevalence of premature menopause in India was 3.7 percent. Out of which, 2.1 percent of women had experienced natural premature menopause, whereas 1.7 percent had premature surgical menopause. The prevalence of premature menopause was highest in the southern region of India. Further, results of the multivariate model indicated that rural women, women with higher parity, early age at childbearing and women with smoking habits were at a greater risk of premature menopause. A sizeable proportion of women in India are attaining menopause prematurely. Unless due attention is given to this matter, it will emerge as a major problem in India in the future. The study also emphasized the need for further research to enhance knowledge on the problems of premature menopausal women in different socio-cultural settings in India.

Keywords: India, natural menopause, premature menopause, surgical menopause

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Authors: Spandan Sahu, Amiya Kumar Pati, Kishanjit Kumar Khatua

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River is our main source of water which is a form of open channel flow and the flow in open channel provides with many complex phenomenon of sciences that needs to be tackled such as the critical flow conditions, boundary shear stress and depth averaged velocity. During floods, part of a river is carried by the simple main channel and rest is carried by flood plains. For such compound asymmetric channels, the flow structure becomes complicated due to momentum exchange between main channel and adjoining flood plains. Distribution of boundary shear in subsections provides us with the concept of momentum transfer between the interface of main channel and the flood plains. Experimentally, to get better data with accurate results are very complex because of the complexity of the problem. Hence, CES software has been used to tackle the complex processes to determine the shear stresses at different sections of an open channel having asymmetric flood plains on both sides of the main channel and the results is compared with the symmetric flood plains for various geometrical shapes and flow conditions. Error analysis is also performed to know the degree of accuracy of the model implemented.

Keywords: depth average velocity, non prismatic compound channel, relative flow depth, velocity distribution

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Authors: Konstantinos Perifanos, Eirini Florou, Dionysis Goutsos

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This paper presents and benchmarks a number of end-to-end Deep Learning based models for metaphor detection in Greek. We combine Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks with representation learning to bear on the metaphor detection problem for the Greek language. The models presented achieve exceptional accuracy scores, significantly improving the previous state-of-the-art results, which had already achieved accuracy 0.82. Furthermore, no special preprocessing, feature engineering or linguistic knowledge is used in this work. The methods presented achieve accuracy of 0.92 and F-score 0.92 with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and bidirectional Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTMs). Comparable results of 0.91 accuracy and 0.91 F-score are also achieved with bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) and Convolutional Recurrent Neural Nets (CRNNs). The models are trained and evaluated only on the basis of training tuples, the related sentences and their labels. The outcome is a state-of-the-art collection of metaphor detection models, trained on limited labelled resources, which can be extended to other languages and similar tasks.

Keywords: metaphor detection, deep learning, representation learning, embeddings

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Authors: Yuyang Cheng, Marcos Escobar-Anel

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This paper introduces a multivariate 4/2 stochastic covariance process generalizing the one-dimensional counterparts presented in Grasselli (2017). Our construction permits stochastic correlation not only among stocks but also among volatilities, also known as co-volatility movements, both driven by more convenient 4/2 stochastic structures. The parametrization is flexible enough to separate these types of correlation, permitting their individual study. Conditions for proper changes of measure and closed-form characteristic functions under risk-neutral and historical measures are provided, allowing for applications of the model to risk management and derivative pricing. We apply the model to an expected utility theory problem in incomplete markets. Our analysis leads to closed-form solutions for the optimal allocation and value function. Conditions are provided for well-defined solutions together with a verification theorem. Our numerical analysis highlights and separates the impact of key statistics on equity portfolio decisions, in particular, volatility, correlation, and co-volatility movements, with the latter being the least important in an incomplete market.

Keywords: stochastic covariance process, 4/2 stochastic volatility model, stochastic co-volatility movements, characteristic function, expected utility theory, verication theorem

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Authors: Vivek Hokam, Vishrut Landge

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An ideal maintenance program for an industrial road network is one that would maintain all sections at a sufficiently high level of functional and structural conditions. However, due to various constraints such as budget, manpower and equipment, it is not possible to carry out maintenance on all the needy industrial road sections within a given planning period. A rational and systematic priority scheme needs to be employed to select and schedule industrial road sections for maintenance. Priority analysis is a multi-criteria process that determines the best ranking list of sections for maintenance based on several factors. In priority setting, difficult decisions are required to be made for selection of sections for maintenance. It is more important to repair a section with poor functional conditions which includes uncomfortable ride etc. or poor structural conditions i.e. sections those are in danger of becoming structurally unsound. It would seem therefore that any rational priority setting approach must consider the relative importance of functional and structural condition of the section. The maintenance priority index and pavement performance models tend to focus mainly on the pavement condition, traffic criteria etc. There is a need to develop the model which is suitably used with respect to limited budget provisions for maintenance of pavement. Linear programming is one of the most popular and widely used quantitative techniques. A linear programming model provides an efficient method for determining an optimal decision chosen from a large number of possible decisions. The optimum decision is one that meets a specified objective of management, subject to various constraints and restrictions. The objective is mainly minimization of maintenance cost of roads in industrial area. In order to determine the objective function for analysis of distress model it is necessary to fix the realistic data into a formulation. Each type of repair is to be quantified in a number of stretches by considering 1000 m as one stretch. A stretch considered under study is having 3750 m length. The quantity has to be put into an objective function for maximizing the number of repairs in a stretch related to quantity. The distress observed in this stretch are potholes, surface cracks, rutting and ravelling. The distress data is measured manually by observing each distress level on a stretch of 1000 m. The maintenance and rehabilitation measured that are followed currently are based on subjective judgments. Hence, there is a need to adopt a scientific approach in order to effectively use the limited resources. It is also necessary to determine the pavement performance and deterioration prediction relationship with more accurate and economic benefits of road networks with respect to vehicle operating cost. The infrastructure of road network should have best results expected from available funds. In this paper objective function for distress model is determined by linear programming and deterioration model considering overloading is discussed.

Keywords: budget, maintenance, deterioration, priority

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Authors: Rosdyana Mangir Irawan Kusuma, Wei-Chun Kao, Ho-Thi Trang, Yu-Yen Ou, Kai-Lung Hua

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Stock market prediction is still a challenging problem because there are many factors that affect the stock market price such as company news and performance, industry performance, investor sentiment, social media sentiment, and economic factors. This work explores the predictability in the stock market using deep convolutional network and candlestick charts. The outcome is utilized to design a decision support framework that can be used by traders to provide suggested indications of future stock price direction. We perform this work using various types of neural networks like convolutional neural network, residual network and visual geometry group network. From stock market historical data, we converted it to candlestick charts. Finally, these candlestick charts will be feed as input for training a convolutional neural network model. This convolutional neural network model will help us to analyze the patterns inside the candlestick chart and predict the future movements of the stock market. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated in stock market prediction with promising results; 92.2% and 92.1 % accuracy for Taiwan and Indonesian stock market dataset respectively.

Keywords: candlestick chart, deep learning, neural network, stock market prediction

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Authors: Myriam Ferreira

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Websites and social networks allow museums to divulge their works by new and attractive means. Besides, these technologies provide tools to generate a new history of art’s contents and promote visits to their installations. At the same time, museums are proposing more and more activities to families, children and young people. However, these activities usually take place in the museum’s physical installations, while websites and social networks seem to be mainly targeted to adults. The problem is that being children and young people digital natives, they feel apart from museums, so they need a presence of museums in digital means to feel attracted to them. Some institutions are making efforts to fill this vacuum. In this paper, resources designed specifically for children and teenagers have been selected from websites and social networks of five Spanish Museums: Prado Museum, Thyssen Museum, Guggenheim Museum, America Museum and Cerralbo Museum. After that, we have carried out an investigation in a school with children and teenagers between 11 and 15 years old. Those young people have been asked about their valuation of those web pages and social networks, with quantitative-qualitative questions. The results show that the least rated resources were videos and social networks because they were considered ‘too serious’, while the most rated were games and augmented reality. These ratings confirm theoretical papers that affirm that the future of technologies applied to museums is edutainment and interaction.

Keywords: children, museums, social networks, teenagers, websites

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Authors: Djalal Boualili

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This article considers the problem of sizing prime movers for combined heating and power (CHP) systems operating at full load to satisfy a fraction of a facility's electric load, i.e. a base load. Prime mover sizing is examined using three criteria: operational cost, carbon dioxide emissions (CDE), and primary energy consumption (PEC). The sizing process leads to consider ratios of conversion factors applied to imported electricity to conversion factors applied to fuel consumed. These ratios are labelled RCost, R CDE, R PEC depending on whether the conversion factors are associated with operational cost, CDE, or PEC, respectively. Analytical results show that in order to achieve savings in operational cost, CDE, or PEC, the ratios must be larger than a unique constant R Min that only depends on the CHP components efficiencies. Savings in operational cost, CDE, or PEC due to CHP operation are explicitly formulated using simple equations. This facilitates the process of comparing the tradeoffs of optimizing the savings of one criterion over the other two – a task that has traditionally been accomplished through computer simulations. A hospital building, located in Chlef, Algeria, was used as an example to apply the methodology presented in this article.

Keywords: sizing, heating and power, ratios, energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions

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Authors: Daniel C. Bonzo

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Practical considerations lead to the use of unit of analysis within subjects, e.g., bleeding episodes or treatment-related adverse events, in rare disease settings. This is coupled with data augmentation techniques such as extrapolation to enlarge the subject base. In general, one can think about extrapolation of data as extending information and conclusions from one estimand to another estimand. This approach induces hierarchichal clustered data with varying cluster sizes. Extrapolation of clinical trial data is being accepted increasingly by regulatory agencies as a means of generating data in diverse situations during drug development process. Under certain circumstances, data can be extrapolated to a different population, a different but related indication, and different but similar product. We consider here the problem of estimation (point and interval) using a mixed-models approach under an extrapolation. It is proposed that estimators (point and interval) be constructed using weighting schemes for the clusters, e.g., equally weighted and with weights proportional to cluster size. Simulated data generated under varying scenarios are then used to evaluate the performance of this approach. In conclusion, the evaluation result showed that the approach is a useful means for improving statistical inference in rare disease settings and thus aids not only signal detection but risk-benefit evaluation as well.

Keywords: clustered data, estimand, extrapolation, mixed model

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Authors: Ijaz Ahmad

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Weed competition is one of the major biotic constraints in wheat crop productivity. Avena fatua L. and Silybum marianum (L.) Gaertn. are among the worst weeds of wheat, greatly deteriorating wheat quality subsequently reducing its market value. In this connection, two-year experiments were conducted in 2018 & 2019. Different seeding rate wheat viz; 80, 100, 120 and 140 kg ha-1 and different weeds ratio (A. fatua: S. marianum ) sown at the rate 1:8, 2:7, 3:6, 4:5, 5:4, 6:3, 7:2, 8:1 and 0:0 respectively. The weeds ratio and wheat densities are indirectly proportional. However, the wheat seed at the rate of 140 kg ha-1 has minimal weeds interference. Yield losses were 17.5% at weeds density 1:8 while 7.2% at 8:1. However, in wheat density, the highest percent losses were computed on 80 kg ha-1 while the lowest was recorded on 140 kg ha-1. Since due to the large leaf canopy of S. marianum other species can't sustain their growth. Hence, it has been concluded that S. marianum is the hotspot that causes reduction to the yield-related parameters, followed by A. fatua and the other weeds. Due to the morphological mimicry of A. fatua with wheat crop during the vegetative growth stage, it cannot be easily distinguished. Therefore, managing A. fatua and S. marianum before seed setting is recommended for reducing the future weed problem. Based on current studies, it is suggested that sowing wheat seed at the rate of 140 kg ha-1 is recommended to better compete with all the field weeds.

Keywords: fat content, holly thistle, protein content, weed competition, wheat, wild oat

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Authors: Jiashu Shen

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Background: The abortion rate has increased significantly, which is harmful especially to adolescents, making repeat induced abortion (RIA) among adolescents a social problem. This study aims to investigate the associations of family support with sexual behavior and repeat induced abortion among Chinese adolescents Methods: This study based on a national hospital-based sample with 945 girls aged 15-19 who underwent induced abortion in 43 hospitals. Multivariate logistic regressions were performed to estimated odds ratio for the risk factors. Results: Adolescences living with parents were less inclined to undergo RIA, especially if they were rural (adjusted odds ratio=0.48 95%CI 0.31-0.72) and local (adjusted odds ratio =0.39 95%=0.23-0.66). Those with parental financial support were likely to have less sexual partnersand take contraceptives more regularly. Those with higher self-perceived importance in family were more likely to take contraceptives during the first sexual intercourse in higher age, and with higher first abortion age and less sexual partners. Conclusion: In mainland China, living with parents, parental financial support, high self-perceived importance in family and adequate family sexuality communications may contribute to lower incidence of RIA.

Keywords: Chinese adolescent, family support, repeat induced abortion, sexual behavior

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Authors: Xiaoming Jiang, Jinqiao Shi, Qingfeng Tan, Wentao Zhang, Xuebin Wang, Muqian Chen

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Nowadays, big companies such as Google, Microsoft, which have adequate proxy servers, have perfectly implemented their web crawlers for a certain website in parallel. But due to lack of expensive proxy servers, it is still a puzzle for researchers to crawl large amounts of information from a single website in parallel. In this case, it is a good choice for researchers to use free public proxy servers which are crawled from the Internet. In order to improve efficiency of web crawler, the following two issues should be considered primarily: (1) Tasks may fail owing to the instability of free proxy servers; (2) A proxy server will be blocked if it visits a single website frequently. In this paper, we propose Proxisch, an optimization approach of large-scale unstable proxy servers scheduling, which allow anyone with extremely low cost to run a web crawler efficiently. Proxisch is designed to work efficiently by making maximum use of reliable proxy servers. To solve second problem, it establishes a frequency control mechanism which can ensure the visiting frequency of any chosen proxy server below the website’s limit. The results show that our approach performs better than the other scheduling algorithms.

Keywords: proxy server, priority queue, optimization algorithm, distributed web crawling

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Authors: Ana Cristina García-Luna Romero

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This document seeks to reflect on the urban project from its conceptual identity root. In the first instance, a proposal is made on how the city project is sustained from the conceptual root, from the logos: it opens a way to assimilate the imagination; what we imagine becomes a reality. In this way, firstly, the need to use language as a vehicle for transmitting the stories that sustain us as humanity can be deemed as an important social factor that enables us to social behavior. Secondly, the need to attend to the written language as a mechanism of power, as a means to consolidate a dominant ideology or a political position, is raised; as it served to carry out the modernization project, it is therefore addressed differences between the real and the literate city. Thus, the consolidated urban-architectural project is based on logos, the project, and planning. Considering the importance of materiality and its relation to subjective well-being contextualized from a socio-urban approach, we question ourselves into how we can look at something that is doubtful. From a philosophy perspective, the truth is considered to be nothing more than a matter of correspondence between the observer and the observed. To understand beyond the relative of the gaze, it is necessary to expose different perspectives since it depends on the understanding of what is observed and how it is critically analyzed. Therefore, the analysis of materiality, as a political field, takes a proposal based on this research in the principles in transgenesis: principle of communication, representativeness, security, health, malleability, availability of potentiality or development, conservation, sustainability, economy, harmony, stability, accessibility, justice, legibility, significance, consistency, joint responsibility, connectivity, beauty, among others. The (urban) human being acts because he wants to live in a certain way: in a community, in a fair way, with opportunity for development, with the possibility of managing the environment according to their needs, etc. In order to comply with this principle, it is necessary to design strategies from the principles in transgenesis, which must be named, defined, understood, and socialized by the urban being, the companies, and from themselves. In this way, the technical status of the city in the neoliberal present determines extraordinary conditions for reflecting on an almost emergency scenario created by the impact of cities that, far from being limited to resilient proposals, must aim at the reflection of the urban process that the present social model has generated. Therefore, can we rethink the paradigm of the perception of life quality in the current neoliberal model in the production of the character of public space related to the practices of being urban. What we are trying to do within this document is to build a framework to study under what logic the practices of the social system that make sense of the public space are developed, what the implications of the phenomena of the inscription of action and materialization (and its results over political action between the social and the technical system) are and finally, how we can improve the quality of life of individuals from the urban space.

Keywords: cities, nature, society, urban quality of life

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Authors: Surbhi Mathur, J. M. Vyas

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Although the rapid development of forensic speaker recognition technology has been conducted, there are still many problems to be solved. The biggest problem arises when the cases involving disguised voice samples come across for the purpose of examination and identification. Such type of voice samples of anonymous callers is frequently encountered in crimes involving kidnapping, blackmailing, hoax extortion and many more, where the speaker makes a deliberate effort to manipulate their natural voice in order to conceal their identity due to the fear of being caught. Voice disguise causes serious damage to the natural vocal parameters of the speakers and thus complicates the process of identification. The sole objective of this doctoral project is to find out the possibility of rendering definite opinions in cases involving disguised speech by experimentally determining the effects of different disguise forms on personal identification and percentage rate of speaker recognition for various voice disguise techniques such as raised pitch, lower pitch, increased nasality, covering the mouth, constricting tract, obstacle in mouth etc by analyzing and comparing the amount of phonetic and acoustic variation in of artificial (disguised) and natural sample of an individual, by auditory as well as spectrographic analysis.

Keywords: forensic, speaker recognition, voice, speech, disguise, identification

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Authors: Yuling Cui, Danhao Deng, Chaowei Wang, Weidong Wang

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In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in wireless communication, attracting more and more attention from researchers. UAVs can not only serve as a relay for auxiliary communication but also serve as an aerial base station for ground users (GUs). However, limited energy means that they cannot work all the time and cover a limited range of services. In this paper, we investigate 2D UAV trajectory design and power allocation in order to maximize the UAV's service time and downlink throughput. Based on deep reinforcement learning, we propose a depth deterministic strategy gradient algorithm for trajectory design and power distribution (TDPA-DDPG) to solve the energy-efficient and communication service quality problem. The simulation results show that TDPA-DDPG can extend the service time of UAV as much as possible, improve the communication service quality, and realize the maximization of downlink throughput, which is significantly improved compared with existing methods.

Keywords: UAV trajectory design, power allocation, energy efficient, downlink throughput, deep reinforcement learning, DDPG

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Authors: Cezarina da Conceição Santinho Maurício, José Duque Vicente

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Established in 1987, the Erasmus Programme is a program for the exchange of higher education students. Its purposes are several. The mobility developed has contributed to the promotion of multiple learning, the internalization the feeling of belonging to a community, and the consolidation of cooperation between entities or universities. It also allows the experience of a European experience, considering multilingualism one of the bases of the European project and vehicle to achieve the union in diversity. The program has progressed and introduced changes Erasmus+ currently offers a wide range of opportunities for higher education, vocational education and training, school education, adult education, youth, and sport. These opportunities are open to students and other stakeholders, such as teachers. Portugal was one of the countries that readily adhered to this program, assuming itself as an instrument of internationalization of polytechnic and university higher education. Students and social work teachers have been involved in this mobility of learning and multicultural interactions. The presence and activation of this program was made possible by Portugal's joining the European Union. This event was reflected in the field of portuguese social work and contributes to its approach to the reality of european social work. Historically, the Portuguese social work has built a close connection with the Latin American world and, in particular, with Brazil. There are several examples that can be identified in the different historical stages. This is the case of the post-revolution period of 1974 and the presence of the reconceptualization movement, the struggle for enrollment in the higher education circuit, the process of winning a bachelor's degree, and postgraduate training (the first doctorates of social work were carried out in Brazilian universities). This influence is also found in the scope of the authors and the theoretical references used. This study examines the participation of graduates and students of social work in the Erasmus program. The following specific goals were outlined: to identify the host countries and universities; to investigate the dimension and type of mobility made, understand the learning and experiences acquired, identify the difficulties felt, capture their perspectives on social work and the contribution of this experience in training. In the methodological field, the option fell on a qualitative methodology, with the application of semi-structured interviews to graduates and students of social work with Erasmus mobility experience. Once the graduates agreed, the interviews were recorded and transcribed, analyzed according to the previously defined analysis categories. The findings emphasize the importance of this experience for students and graduates in informal and formal learning. The authors conclude with recommendations to reinforce this mobility, either at the individual level or as a project built for the group or collective.

Keywords: erasmus programme, graduates and students of social work, participation, social work

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Authors: Ankur Sachan

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The ability to make quick yet intelligent and value-added decisions to develop new fields has always been of great significance. In situations where the capital expenses and subsurface risk are high, carefully analyzing the inherent uncertainties in the reservoir and how they impact the predicted hydrocarbon accumulation and production becomes a daunting task. The problem is compounded in offshore environments, especially in the presence of heavy oils and disconnected sands where the margin for error is small. Uncertainty refers to the degree to which the data set may be in error or stray from the predicted values. To understand and quantify the uncertainties in reservoir model is important when estimating the reserves. Uncertainty parameters can be geophysical, geological, petrophysical etc. Identification of these parameters is necessary to carry out the uncertainty analysis. With so many uncertainties working at different scales, it becomes essential to have a consistent and efficient way of incorporating them into our analysis. Ranking the uncertainties based on their impact on reserves helps to prioritize/ guide future data gathering and uncertainty reduction efforts. Assigning probabilistic ranges to key uncertainties also enables the computation of probabilistic reserves. With this in mind, this paper, with the help the uncertainty and optimization process in petrel RE shows how the most influential uncertainties can be determined efficiently and how much impact so they have on the reservoir model thus helping in determining a cost effective and accurate model of the reservoir.

Keywords: uncertainty, reservoir model, parameters, optimization analysis

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Authors: Ilker Kalkan, Saruhan Kartal

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Reinforced concrete (RC) beams rarely undergo lateral-torsional buckling (LTB), since these beams possess large lateral bending and torsional rigidities owing to their stocky cross-sections, unlike steel beams. However, the problem of LTB is becoming more and more pronounced in the last decades as the span lengths of concrete beams increase and the cross-sections become more slender with the use of pre-stressed concrete. The buckling moment of a beam mainly depends on its lateral bending rigidity and torsional rigidity. The nonhomogeneous and elastic-inelastic nature of RC complicates estimation of the buckling moments of concrete beams. Furthermore, the lateral bending and torsional rigidities of RC beams and the buckling moments are affected from different forms of concrete cracking, including flexural, torsional and restrained shrinkage cracking. The present study pertains to the effects of concrete cracking on the torsional rigidities of RC beams prone to elastic LTB. A series of tests on rather slender RC beams indicated that torsional cracking does not initiate until buckling in elastic LTB, while flexural cracking associated with lateral bending takes place even at the initial stages of loading. Hence, the present study clearly indicated that the un-cracked torsional rigidity needs to be used for estimating the buckling moments of RC beams liable to elastic LTB.

Keywords: lateral stability, post-cracking torsional rigidity, uncracked torsional rigidity, critical moment

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Authors: Crystal Shackleford, Michael Pasek, Julia Smith, Jeremy Ginges

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There is extensive debate about the causal role of religion in intergroup conflict. It is commonly accepted that religious beliefs promote in-group cohesion, but religion is often believed to exacerbate inter-group conflict. Fiji is religiously diverse and has a lengthy history of ethno-religious conflict. In a preregistered field experiment using a modified version of the trolley problem dilemma, Christian and Muslim Fijians were asked, first from their own perspective, and then from their God’s perspective, whether a religious ingroup member should sacrifice their life to save five children who were ingroup or outgroup members. Almost all Muslim participants believed that the person should always sacrifice themselves to save the children. Amongst Christian participants, thinking from God’s perspective increased their likelihood of saying the children should be saved by 35% and removed a 27% gap between responses to saving ingroup versus outgroup children. These results replicate previous findings from a Palestinian sample and demonstrate, in another cross-cultural context with a history of violent conflict, that religious cognition can decrease bias and promote the application of universal moral principles.

Keywords: conflict, moral dilemma, psychology, religion, thought experiments

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Authors: Chariton Christou, David Cornwell

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Production Sharing Contract (PSC) is the type of contract that is being used widely in our time. The financial crisis made the governments tightfisted and they do not have the resources to participate in a development of a field. Therefore, more and more countries introduce the PSC. The companies have the power and the money to develop the field with their own way. The main problem is the transparency of oil and gas companies especially in the PSC and how this can be achieved. Many discussions have been made especially in the U.K. What we are suggesting is a dynamic financial simulation with the help of a flow meter. The flow meter will count the production of each field every day (it will be installed in a pipeline). The production will be the basic input of the simulation. It will count the profit, the costs and more according to the information of the flow meter. In addition it will include the terms of the contract and the costs that have been paid. By all these parameters the simulation will be able to present in real time the information of a field (taxes, employees, R-factor). By this simulation the company will share some information with the government but not all of them. The government will know the taxes that should be paid and what is the sharing percentage of it. All of the other information could be confidential for the company. Furthermore, oil company could control the R-factor by changing the production each day to maximize its sharing percentages and as a result of this the profit. This idea aims to change the way that governments 'control' oil companies and bring a transparency evolution in the industry. With the help of a simulation every country could be next to the company and have a better collaboration.

Keywords: production sharing contracts, transparency, simulation

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Authors: Amartya Hatua, Trung Nguyen, Andrew Sung

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In this paper, we study the information diffusion process on Twitter as a multivariate time series problem. Our model concerns three measures (volume, network influence, and sentiment of tweets) based on 10 features, and we collected 27 million tweets to build our information diffusion time series dataset for analysis. Then, different time series clustering techniques with Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance were used to identify different patterns of information diffusion. Finally, we built the information diffusion prediction models for new hashtags which comprise two phrases: The first phrase is recognizing the pattern using k-NN with DTW distance; the second phrase is building the forecasting model using the traditional Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model and the non-linear recurrent neural network of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Preliminary results of performance evaluation between different forecasting models show that LSTM with clustering information notably outperforms other models. Therefore, our approach can be applied in real-world applications to analyze and predict the information diffusion characteristics of selected topics or memes (hashtags) in Twitter.

Keywords: ARIMA, DTW, information diffusion, LSTM, RNN, time series clustering, time series forecasting, Twitter

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Authors: Amao Funmilayo Lanrewaju, T. Ogunlade

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The paper examines the causes and characteristics of informal settlements and outdoor advertisement in the evaluation of quality of environment. The paper identifies the problems that have aided informal settlements to: Urbanization, poverty, growth of informal sector, non-affordability of land and housing shortage. The paper asserts that the informal settlements have serious adverse effects on the people’s health, their built environment and quality of life. The secondary data was obtained from books, journals and seminar papers. The paper argues that, although the urban upgrading possesses great potential for improving quality of built environment in informal settlements, there is a need to repackage the upgrading exercise so that majority can benefit from it. It is necessary to incorporate community participation into the urban upgrading in order to assist the very poor that cannot take care of their housing consumption needs. Therefore, government is encouraged to see informal settlements as a solution to new city planning rather than problem to the urban areas. This paper suggests the implementation of policies and planning, physical infrastructural development, social economic improvement, environment and health improvement. Government, private and communities interventions on informal settlements are required in order to prevent further decay for sustainable development.

Keywords: quality of environment, informal settlements, urban upgrading, outdoor advertisement

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Authors: Olena Mayboroda, Angel Gonzalez Benito, Jonathan Sabate Del Rio, Marketa Svobodova, Sandra Julich, Herbert Tomaso, Ciara K. O'Sullivan, Ioanis Katakis

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DNA amplification is required for most molecular diagnostic applications but conventional PCR has disadvantages for field testing. Isothermal amplification techniques are being developed to respond to this problem. One of them is the Recombinase Polymerase Amplification (RPA) that operates at isothermal conditions without sacrificing specificity and sensitivity in easy-to-use formats. In this work RPA was used for the optical detection of solid-phase amplification of the potential biowarfare agent Yersinia pestis. Thiolated forward primers were immobilized on the surface of maleimide-activated microtitre plates for the quantitative detection of synthetic and genomic DNA, with elongation occurring only in the presence of the specific template DNA and solution phase reverse primers. Quantitative detection was achieved via the use of biotinylated reverse primers and post-amplification addition of streptavidin-HRP conjugate. The overall time of amplification and detection was less than 1 hour at a constant temperature of 37oC. Single-stranded and double-stranded DNA sequences were detected achieving detection limits of 4.04*10-13 M and 3.14*10-16 M, respectively. The system demonstrated high specificity with negligible responses to non-specific targets.

Keywords: recombinase polymerase amplification, Yersinia pestis, solid-phase detection, ELONA

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Authors: L. Edirisinghe, Z. Jin, A. W. Wijeratne, R. Mudunkotuwa

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Empty container repositioning is a fundamental problem faced by the shipping industry. The virtual container yard is a novel strategy underpinning the container interchange between carriers that could substantially reduce this ever-increasing shipping cost. This paper evaluates the shipping industry perception of the virtual container yard using chi-square tests. It examines if the carriers perceive that the selected independent variables, namely culture, organization, decision, marketing, attitudes, legal, independent, complexity, and stakeholders of carriers, impact the efficiency and benefits of the virtual container yard. There are two major findings of the research. Firstly, carriers view that complexity, attitudes, and stakeholders may impact the effectiveness of container interchange and may influence the perceived benefits of the virtual container yard. Secondly, the three factors of legal, organization, and decision influence only the perceived benefits of the virtual container yard. Accordingly, the implementation of the virtual container yard will be influenced by six key factors, namely complexity, attitudes, stakeholders, legal, organization and decision. Since the virtual container yard could reduce overall shipping costs, it is vital to examine the carriers’ perception of this concept.

Keywords: virtual container yard, imbalance, management, inventory

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Authors: Ali Reza Sattarzadeh, Ronny J. Kutadinata, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Van Thanh Huynh

Abstract:

Traffic congestion has become a severe worldwide problem, affecting everyday life, fuel consumption, time, and air pollution. The primary causes of these issues are inadequate transportation infrastructure, poor traffic signal management, and rising population. Traffic flow forecasting is one of the essential and effective methods in urban congestion and traffic management, which has attracted the attention of researchers. With the development of technology, undeniable progress has been achieved in existing methods. However, there is a possibility of improvement in the extraction of temporal and spatial features to determine the importance of traffic flow sequences and extraction features. In the proposed model, we implement the convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning models for mining nonlinear correlations and their effectiveness in increasing the accuracy of traffic flow prediction in the real dataset. According to the experiments, the results indicate that implementing Conv-LSTM networks increases the productivity and accuracy of deep learning models for traffic flow prediction.

Keywords: deep learning algorithms, intelligent transportation systems, spatiotemporal features, traffic flow prediction

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Authors: Xinrong Li, Jiawei Dai

Abstract:

Food production, food safety, and the food supply chain are causing a great challenge to human health and the environment. Different kinds of food have different environmental costs. Therefore, a healthy diet can alleviate this problem to a certain extent. In this project, an online questionnaire was conducted to understand the purchase behaviour of consumers and their attitudes towards basic food information. However, the data shows that the public's current consumption habits and ideology do not meet the long-term development of sustainable social needs. In order to solve the environmental problems caused by the unbalanced diet of the public and the social problems of unequal food distribution, the purpose of this paper is to explore how to use the emerging media of VR to visualize food supply chain information so as to attract users' attention to the environmental cost of food. In this project, the food supply chain of imported and local cheese was compared side-by-side in the virtual reality environment, including the origin, transportation, sales, and other processes, which can effectively help users understand the difference between the two processes and environmental costs. Besides, the experimental data demonstrated that the participant would like to choose low environmental cost food after experiencing the whole process.

Keywords: virtual reality, information design, food supply chain, environmental cost

Procedia PDF Downloads 95

Authors: Eddy K. Mukadi

Abstract:

This work is a documentary and descriptive study devoted to the epidemiological, clinical, histopathological and therapeutic profile of breast cancer deals with the department of gynecology and obstetrics of the university clinics of Kinshasa during the period from 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2014. We have identified 56 cases of breast cancer. These cancers accounted for 45.2% of gynecological mammary cancers. The youngest in our series was 18 years old while the oldest was 74 years old; And the mean age of these patients was 43.4 years and mostly multiparous (35.7%). Brides (60.7%) and bachelors (26.8%) were the most affected by breast cancer. The reasons for consultation were dominated by nodules in the breast (48.2%) followed by pain (35.7%) and nipple discharge (14.3%). In 89.2% of the cases, it was the advanced clinical stage (stage 3 and 4) and the infiltrating ductal carcinoma was the most frequent histological type (75%) The malignant tumor was mainly in the left breast (55.3%), and chemotherapy with hormone therapy and patey was the most convenient treatment (42.8%), while patey mastectomy was performed in 12.5% of patients. Because of the high incidence of breast cancer identified in our study, some preventive measures must be taken into account to address this public health problem, including breast autopalpation once a month, Early detection system development of a national breast cancer policy and the implementation of a national breast cancer control program.

Keywords: breast cancer, histopathological profile, epidemiological profile, Kinshasa

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Authors: Surangrat Srisurapanon, Chatchawal Wongjitrat, Navin Horthongkham, Ruengpung Sutthent

Abstract:

HBV infection causes a potential serious public health problem. The ability to detect the HBV DNA concentration is of the importance and improved continuously. By using quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (qPCR), several factors in standardized; source of material, calibration standard curve and PCR efficiency are inconsistent. Digital PCR (dPCR) is an alternative PCR-based technique for absolute quantification using Poisson's statistics without requiring a standard curve. Therefore, the aim of this study is to compare the data set of HBV DNA generated between dPCR and qPCR methods. All samples were quantified by Abbott’s real time PCR and 54 samples with 2 -6 log10 HBV DNA were selected for comparison with dPCR. Of these 54 samples, there were two outlier samples defined as negative by dPCR. Of these two, samples were defined as negative by dPCR, whereas 52 samples were positive by both the tests. The difference between the two assays was less than 0.25 log IU/mL in 24/52 samples (46%) of paired samples; less than 0.5 log IU/mL in 46/52 samples (88%) and less than 1 log in 50/52 samples (96%). The correlation coefficient was r=0.788 and P-value <0.0001. Comparison to qPCR, data generated by dPCR tend to be the overestimation in the sample with low HBV DNA concentration and underestimated in the sample with high viral load. The variation in DNA by dPCR measurement might be due to the pre-amplification bias, template. Moreover, a minor drawback of dPCR is the large quantity of DNA had to be used when compare to the qPCR. Since the technology is relatively new, the limitations of this assay will be improved.

Keywords: hepatitis B virus, real time PCR, digital PCR, DNA quantification

Procedia PDF Downloads 479

Authors: Ravindra N. Singh, Dheerendra P. Singh

Abstract:

Recent discoveries of Bronze Age artefacts, tin slag, furnaces and crucibles, together with new geological evidence on tin deposits in Tosham area of Bhiwani district in Haryana (India) provide the opportunity to survey the evidence for possible sources of tin and the use of bronze in the Harappan sites of north western India. Earlier, Afghanistan emerged as the most promising eastern source of tin utilized by Indus Civilization copper-smiths. Our excavations conducted at Khanak near Tosham mining area during 2014 and 2016 revealed ample evidence of metallurgical activities as attested by the occurrence of slag, ores and evidences of ashes and fragments of furnaces in addition to the bronze objects. We have conducted petrological, XRD, EDAX, TEM, SEM and metallography on the slag, ores, crucible fragments and bronze objects samples recovered from Khanak excavations. This has given positive indication of mining and metallurgy of poly-mettalic Tin at the site; however, it can only be ascertained after the detailed scientific examination of the materials which is underway. In view of the importance of site, we intend to excavate the site horizontally in future so as to obtain more samples for scientific studies.

Keywords: archaeometallurgy, problem of tin, metallography, indus civilization

Procedia PDF Downloads 298

Authors: Muhammad A. Alsubaie

Abstract:

An iterative learning control framework designed in state feedback structure suffers a lack in investigating load disturbance considerations. The presented work discusses the controller previously designed, highlights the disturbance problem, finds new conditions using singular value principle to assure safe operation conditions with error convergence and reference tracking under the influence of load disturbance. It is known that periodic disturbances can be represented by a delay model in a positive feedback loop acting on the system input. This model can be manipulated by isolating the delay model and finding a controller for the overall system around the delay model to remedy the periodic disturbances using the small signal theorem. The overall system is the base for control design and load disturbance investigation. The major finding of this work is the load disturbance condition found which clearly sets safe operation condition under the influence of load disturbances such that the error tends to nearly zero as the system keeps operating trial after trial.

Keywords: iterative learning control, singular values, state feedback, load disturbance

Procedia PDF Downloads 155