Search results for: cluster head

Authors: Antoifi Abdoulhalik, Ashraf Ahmed

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The ever growing threat of saltwater intrusion has prompted the need to further advance the understanding of underlying processes related to SWI for effective water resource management. While research efforts have mainly been focused on steady state analysis, studies on the transience of saltwater intrusion mechanism remain very scarce and studies considering transient SWI in heterogeneous medium are, as per our knowledge, simply inexistent. This study provides for the first time a quantitative analysis of the effect of both inland and coastal water level changes on the transition zone under transient conditions in layered coastal aquifer. In all, two sets of four experiments were completed, including a homogeneous case, and four layered cases: case LH and case HL presented were two bi-layered scenarios where a low K layer was set at the top and the bottom, respectively; case HLH and case LHL presented two stratified aquifers with High K–Low K–High K and Low K–High K– Low K pattern, respectively. Experimental automated image analysis technique was used here to quantify the main SWI parameters under high spatial and temporal resolution. The findings of this study provide an invaluable insight on the underlying processes responsible of transition zone dynamics in coastal aquifers. The results show that in all the investigated cases, the width of the transition zone remains almost unchanged throughout the saltwater intrusion process regardless of where the boundary change occurs. However, the results demonstrate that the width of the transition zone considerably increases during the retreat, with largest amplitude observed in cases LH and LHL, where a low K was set at the top of the system. In all the scenarios, the amplitude of widening was slightly smaller when the retreat was prompted by instantaneous drop of the saltwater level than when caused by inland freshwater rise, despite equivalent absolute head change magnitude. The magnitude of head change significantly caused larger widening during the saltwater wedge retreat, while having no impact during the intrusion phase.

Keywords: freshwater-saltwater transition-zone dynamics, heterogeneous coastal aquifers, laboratory experiments, transience seawater intrusion

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Authors: Ali Rahnamoun, Adri van Duin

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The concept of high velocity particle impact on the spacecraft surface materials has been one of the important issues in the design of such materials. Among these particles, water clusters might be the most abundant and the most important particles to be studied. The importance of water clusters is that upon impact on the surface of the materials, they can cause damage to the material and also if they are sub-cooled water clusters, they can attach to the surface of the materials and cause ice accumulation on the surface which is very problematic in spacecraft and also aircraft operations. The dynamics of the collisions between amorphous silica structures and water clusters with impact velocities of 1 km/s to 10 km/s are studied using the ReaxFF reactive molecular dynamics simulation method. The initial water clusters include 150 water molecules and the water clusters are collided on the surface of amorphous fully oxidized and suboxide silica structures. These simulations show that the most abundant molecules observed on the silica surfaces, other than reflecting water molecules, are H3O+ and OH- for the water cluster impacts on suboxide and fully oxidized silica structures, respectively. The effect of impact velocity on the change of silica mass is studied. At high impact velocities the water molecules attach to the silica surface through a chemisorption process meaning that water molecule dissociates through the interaction with silica surface. However, at low impact velocities, physisorbed water molecules are also observed, which means water molecule attaches and accumulates on the silica surface. The amount of physisorbed waters molecules at low velocities is higher on the suboxide silica surfaces. The evolution of the temperatures of the water clusters during the collisions indicates that the possibility of electron excitement at impact velocities less than 10 km/s is minimal and ReaxFF reactive molecular dynamics simulation can predict the chemistry of these hypervelocity impacts. However, at impact velocities close to 10 km/s the average temperature of the impacting water clusters increase to about 2000K, with individual molecules oocasionally reaching temperatures of over 8000K and thus will be prudent to consider the concept of electron excitation at these higher impact velocities which goes beyond the current ReaxFF ability.

Keywords: spacecraft materials, hypervelocity impact, reactive molecular dynamics simulation, amorphous silica

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Authors: N. Taghinejad, F. Dortaj, N. Khodabandeh

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This research aimed at comparing resilience among male and female children with and without parental supervision in Bandar Abbas. The sample consists of 200 subjects selected through cluster sampling. The research method was comparative causal and Conner and Davidson’s questionnaire form resilience was used for data collection. Results indicated that there is no difference between children with and without parental supervision regarding their resilience capacity. These findings may be challenging and useful for psychologists, officials of children’s affairs and legislators.

Keywords: resilience, children , children with parental supervision, children without parental supervision

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Authors: Alaa Eddien Abdallah, Bajes Yousef Alskarnah

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Ant colony based routing algorithms are known to grantee the packet delivery, but they suffer from the huge overhead of control messages which are needed to discover the route. In this paper we utilize the network nodes positions to group the nodes in connected clusters. We use clusters-heads only on forwarding the route discovery control messages. Our simulations proved that the new algorithm has decreased the overhead dramatically without affecting the delivery rate.

Keywords: ad-hoc network, MANET, ant colony routing, position based routing

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Authors: Muhammad Yayat Afianto, Darmawan, Agung Putra Utama, Hari Kushardanto

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Fish Forever, Rare’s innovative coastal fisheries program, combined community-based conservation management approach with spatial management to restore and protect Indonesia’s small-scale fisheries by establishing Fishing Managed Access Area. A ‘TURF-Reserve’ is a fishery management approach that positions fishers at the center of fisheries management, empowering them to take care of and make decisions about the future of their fishery. After two years of the program, social marketing campaigns succeeded in changing their behavior by adopting the new conservation behavior. The Pride-TURF-R campaigns developed an overarching hypothesis of impact that captured the knowledge, attitude and behavior changes needed to reduce threats and achieve conservation results. Rare help Batu Belah fishers to develop their group, developed with their roles, sustainable fisheries plan, and the budget plan. On 12th February 2017, the Head of Loka Kawasan Konservasi Perairan Nasional (LKKPN) which is a Technical Implementation Unit for National Marine Conservation Areas directly responsible to the Directorate General for Marine Spatial Management in the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries had signed a Partnership Agreement with the Head of Batu Belah Village to manage a TURF+Reserve area as wide as 909 hectares. The fishers group have been collecting the catch and submitting the report monthly, initiated the installation of the buoy markers for the No Take Zone, and formed the Pokmaswas (community-based surveillance group). Prior to this behavior adoption, they don’t have any fisheries data, no group of fishers, and they have still fishing inside the No Take Zone. This is really a new behavior adoption for them. This paper will show the process and success story of the social marketing campaign to conserve marine habitat in Anambas through Pride-TURF-R program.

Keywords: behavior adoption, community participation, no take zone, pride-TURF-R

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Authors: Abhisek Sarkar, Abhimanyu Gaur

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In this report we have discussed the theoretical aspects of the flow transformation, occurring through a series of bifurcations. The parameters and their continuous diversion, the intermittent bursts in the transition zone, variation of velocity and pressure with time, effect of roughness in turbulent zone, and changes in friction factor and head loss coefficient as a function of Reynolds number for a transverse flow across a cylinder have been discussed. An analysis of the variation in the wake length with Reynolds number was done in FORTRAN.

Keywords: bifurcation, attractor, intermittence, energy cascade, energy spectra, vortex stretching

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Authors: Junichi Hosoi

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Epidermal Langerhans cells reside in upper layer of epidermis and play a role in immune surveillance. The finding of the close association of nerve endings to Langerhans cells triggered the research on systemic regulation of Langerhans cells. They disappear from epidermis after exposure to environmental and internal stimuli and reappear about a week later. Myeloid progenitor cells are assumed to be one of the sources of Langerhans cells. We examined the effects of cortisol on the reappearance of Langerhans cells in vitro. Cord-blood derived CD34-positive cells were cultured in the medium supplemented with stem cell factor/Flt3 ligand/granulocyte macrophage-colony stimulating factor/tumor necrosis factor alpha/bone morphologic protein 7/transforming growth factor beta in the presence or absence of cortisol. Cells were analyzed by flow cytometry for CD1a (cluster differentiation 1a), a marker of Langerhans cells and dermal dendritic cells, and CD39 (cluster differentiation factor 39), extracellular adenosine triphosphatase. Both CD1a-positive cells and CD39-positive cells were decreased by treatment with cortisol (suppression by 35% and 22% compared to no stress hormone, respectively). Differentiated Langerhans cells are attracted to epidermis by chemokines that are secreted from keratinocytes. Epidermal keratinocytes were cultured in the presence or absence of cortisol and analyzed for the expression of CCL2 (C-C motif chemokine ligand 2) and CCL20 (C-C motif chemokine ligand 20), which are typical attractants of Langerhans cells, by quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction. The expression of both chemokines, CCL2 and CCL20, were suppressed by treatment with cortisol (suppression by 38% and 48% compared to no stress hormone, respectively). We examined the possible regulation of the suppression by cortisol with plant extracts. The extracts of Ganoderma lucidum and Iris protected the suppression of the differentiation to CD39-positive cells and also the suppression of the gene expression of LC-chemoattractants. These results suggest that cortisol, which is either systemic or locally produced, blocks the supply of epidermal Langerhans cells at 2 steps, differentiation from the precursor and attraction to epidermis. The suppression is possibly blocked by some plant extracts.

Keywords: Langerhans cell, stress, CD39, chemokine

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Authors: Adkham Paiziev, Fikrat Kerimov

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Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) is one of the biophotonic techniques which can be used to monitor oxygenation and hemodynamics in a variety of human tissues, including skeletal muscle. In the present work, we are offering tissue oximetry (OxyPrem) to measure hemodynamic parameters of skeletal muscles in rest and exercise. Purpose: - To elaborate the new wireless, portable, noninvasive, wearable NIRS device to measure skeletal muscle oxygenation during exercise. - To test this device on brachioradialis muscle of wrestler volunteers by using combined method of arterial occlusion (AO) and NIRS (AO+NIRS). Methods: Oxyprem NIRS device has been used together with AO test. AO test and Isometric brachioradialis muscle contraction experiments have been performed on one group of wrestler volunteers. ‘Accu- Measure’ caliper (USA) to measure skinfold thickness (SFT) has been used. Results: Elaborated device consists on power supply box, a sensor head and installed ‘Tubis’ software for data acquisition and to compute deoxyhemoglobin ([HHb), oxyhemoglobin ([O2Hb]), tissue oxygenation (StO2) and muscle tissue oxygen consumption (mVO2). Sensor head consists on four light sources with three light emitting diodes with nominal wavelengths of 760 nm, 805 nm, and 870 nm, and two detectors. AO and isometric voluntary forearm muscle contraction (IVFMC) on five healthy male subjects (23,2±0.84 in age, 0.43±0.05cm of SFT ) and four female subjects (22.0±1.0 in age and 0.24±0.04 cm SFT) has been measured. mVO2 for control group has been calculated (-0.65%/sec±0.07) for male and -0.69%/±0.19 for female subjects). Tissue oxygenation index for wrestlers in average about 75% whereas for control group StO2 =63%. Second experiment was connected with quality monitoring muscle activity during IVFMC at 10%,30% and 50% of MVC. It has been shown, that the concentration changes of HbO2 and HHb positively correlated to the contraction intensity. Conclusion: We have presented a portable multi-channel wireless NIRS device for real-time monitoring of muscle activity. The miniaturized NIRS sensor and the usage of wireless communication make the whole device have a compact-size, thus can be used in muscle monitoring.

Keywords: skeletal muscle, oxygenation, instrumentation, near infrared spectroscopy

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Authors: Veronica S. Moertini, Vinsensius Kevin, Gede Karya

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Customer reviews have been collected by many kinds of e-commerce websites selling products, services, hotel rooms, tickets and so on. Each website collects its own customer reviews. The reviews can be crawled, collected from those websites and stored as big data. Text analysis techniques can be used to analyze that data to produce summarized information, such as customer opinions. Then, these opinions can be published by independent service provider websites and used to help customers in choosing the most suitable products or services. As the opinions are analyzed from big data of reviews originated from many websites, it is expected that the results are more trusted and accurate. Indonesian customers write reviews in Indonesian language, which comes with its own structures and uniqueness. We found that most of the reviews are expressed with “daily language”, which is informal, do not follow the correct grammar, have many abbreviations and slangs or non-formal words. Hadoop is an emerging platform aimed for storing and analyzing big data in distributed systems. A Hadoop cluster consists of master and slave nodes/computers operated in a network. Hadoop comes with distributed file system (HDFS) and MapReduce framework for supporting parallel computation. However, MapReduce has weakness (i.e. inefficient) for iterative computations, specifically, the cost of reading/writing data (I/O cost) is high. Given this fact, we conclude that MapReduce function is best adapted for “one-pass” computation. In this research, we develop an efficient technique for extracting or mining opinions from big data of Indonesian reviews, which is based on MapReduce with one-pass computation. In designing the algorithm, we avoid iterative computation and instead adopt a “look up table” technique. The stages of the proposed technique are: (1) Crawling the data reviews from websites; (2) cleaning and finding root words from the raw reviews; (3) computing the frequency of the meaningful opinion words; (4) analyzing customers sentiments towards defined objects. The experiments for evaluating the performance of the technique were conducted on a Hadoop cluster with 14 slave nodes. The results show that the proposed technique (stage 2 to 4) discovers useful opinions, is capable of processing big data efficiently and scalable.

Keywords: big data analysis, Hadoop MapReduce, analyzing text data, mining Indonesian reviews

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Authors: Orkide Donma, Mustafa M. Donma

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Childhood obesity, which may lead to increased risk for heart diseases in children as well as adults, is one of the most important health problems throughout the world. Prevalences of morbid obesity and metabolic syndrome (MetS) are being increased during childhood age group. MetS is a cluster of metabolic and vascular abnormalities including hypercoagulability and an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). There are also some relations between some components of MetS and leukocytes. The aim of this study is to investigate complete blood cell count parameters that differ between morbidly obese boys and girls with MetS diagnosis. A total of 117 morbid obese children with MetS consulted to Department of Pediatrics in Faculty of Medicine Hospital at Namik Kemal University were included into the scope of the study. The study population was classified based upon their genders (60 girls and 57 boys). Their heights and weights were measured and body mass index (BMI) values were calculated. WHO BMI-for age and sex percentiles were used. The values above 99 percentile were defined as morbid obesity. Anthropometric measurements were performed. Waist-to-hip and head-to-neck ratios as well as homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) were calculated. Components of MetS (central obesity, glucose intolerance, high blood pressure, high triacylglycerol levels, low levels of high density lipoprotein cholesterol) were determined. Hematological variables were measured. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS. The degree for statistical significance was p ≤ 0.05. There was no statistically significant difference between the ages (11.2±2.6 years vs 11.2±3.0 years) and BMIs (28.6±5.2 kg/m² vs 29.3±5.2 kg/m²) of boys and girls (p ≥ 0.05), respectively. Significantly increased waist-to-hip ratios were obtained for boys (0.94±0.08 vs 0.91±0.06; p=0.023). Significantly elevated values of hemoglobin (13.55±0.98 vs 13.06±0.82; p=0.004), mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (33.79±0.91 vs 33.21±1.14; p=0.003), eosinophils (0.300±0.253 vs 0.196±0.197; p=0.014), and platelet (347.1±81.7 vs 319.0±65.9; p=0.042) were detected for boys. There was no statistically significant difference between the groups in terms of neutrophil/lymphocyte ratios as well as HOMA-IR values (p ≥ 0.05). Statistically significant gender-based differences were found for hemoglobin as well as mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration and hence, separate reference intervals for two genders should be considered for these parameters. Eosinophils may contribute to the development of thrombus in acute coronary syndrome. Eosinophils are also known to make an important contribution to mechanisms related to thrombosis pathogenesis in acute myocardial infarction. Increased platelet activity is observed in patients with MetS and these individuals are more susceptible to CVDs. In our study, elevated platelets described as dominant contributors to hypercoagulability and elevated eosinophil counts suggested to be related to the development of CVDs observed in boys may be the early indicators of the future cardiometabolic complications in this gender.

Keywords: children, complete blood count, gender, metabolic syndrome

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Authors: F. Heyecan Giritli, Gizem Akgül

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Because of the raising population of world; the need for houses, buildings and infrastructures are increasing rapidly. Energy and water consumption, waste production continues to increase. If this situation of resources continues, there will be a significant loss for next generations. Therefore, there are a lot of researches and solutions developed in the world. Also sustainability criteria are collected together by some countries to serve construction industry with certification systems. Sustainable building production process’s scope requires different path from traditional building production process. Moreover, the key objective of sustainable buildings is that the process includes whole life cycle duration. The process approaches from the decision of the project to the end of it; so the project team is needed from the beginning of the integrated project delivery model. Further more, by defining project team at the beginning of the project provides communication among the team members and defined problem solving and decision making methods. In this research includes the certification systems among the world to comprehend the head lines and assessment criteria. Therefore, it is understand that usually all green building criteria have the same contents. The aim of this research is to assess the sustainable project stakeholder’ perceptions in Turkish construction industry from the point of occupation, job title and years of experience. Therefore, a survey is made to assess the perceptions of each attendant. In Turkey, sustainability criteria are not clearly defined; on the other hand some regulations like waste management, energy efficiency are made by legal agencies. LEED certification system is the most popular system in Turkey that has attended and certificated. From the LEED official data, it’s understood that 308 project registered in Turkey. Therefore, LEED sustainability criteria are used in the survey. Head lines of LEED certification criteria; sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, material and resources, indoor environmental quality, innovation and regional priority are indicated to assess the perceptions of survey participants. Moreover, only surveying of criteria are not enough; so the equipment, methods, risks and benefits also considered.

Keywords: LEED, sustainability, perceptions, stakeholders, construction, Turkey, risk, benefit

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Authors: Ana C. R. P. Ferreira, Adriano H. P. Pereira

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Given the frequent variation of mineral properties throughout the Araxá pyrochlore deposit, even if a good homogenization work has been carried out before feeding the processing plants, an operation with quality and performance’s high variety standard is expected. These results could be improved and standardized if the blend composition parameters that most influence the processing route are determined, and then the types of raw materials are grouped by them, finally presenting a great reference with operational settings for each group. Associating the physical and chemical parameters of a unit operation through benchmarking or even an optimal reference of metallurgical recovery and product quality reflects in the reduction of the production costs, optimization of the mineral resource, and guarantee of greater stability in the subsequent processes of the production chain that uses the mineral of interest. Conducting a comprehensive exploratory data analysis to identify which characteristics of the ore are most relevant to the process route, associated with the use of Machine Learning algorithms for grouping the raw material (ore) and associating these with reference variables in the process’ benchmark is a reasonable alternative for the standardization and improvement of mineral processing units. Clustering methods through Decision Tree and K-Means were employed, associated with algorithms based on the theory of benchmarking, with criteria defined by the process team in order to reference the best adjustments for processing the ore piles of each cluster. A clean user interface was created to obtain the outputs of the created algorithm. The results were measured through the average time of adjustment and stabilization of the process after a new pile of homogenized ore enters the plant, as well as the average time needed to achieve the best processing result. Direct gains from the metallurgical recovery of the process were also measured. The results were promising, with a reduction in the adjustment time and stabilization when starting the processing of a new ore pile, as well as reaching the benchmark. Also noteworthy are the gains in metallurgical recovery, which reflect a significant saving in ore consumption and a consequent reduction in production costs, hence a more rational use of the tailings dams and life optimization of the mineral deposit.

Keywords: mineral clustering, machine learning, process optimization, pyrochlore processing

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Authors: Ferhat Kadioglu

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A clamped-free vibrating beam technique was used to evaluate dynamic properties of glass fiber reinforced polymer matrix composite. In the experiment, an electromagnetic shaker and a non-contact laser head were used to vibrate and to take the response of the specimens, respectively. Test results showed that damping and elastic modulus of the material, as dynamic properties, could be obtained successfully using this technique. It was found that the balanced and symmetric specimens with 45 degrees are the best for damping performance. It is believed that such results could be used for the modal design of aerospace structures.

Keywords: composite materials, damping values, dynamic properties, non-contact measurements

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Authors: Silvia Rocha, Flavio Tiago, Maria Teresa Tiago, Sandra Faria, Joao Couto

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The Azores have a tourist potential that has been developing, especially after an increase in promotion and the liberalization of airspace. However, there is still a gap with regard to the understanding of tourists from North America. Previous studies referred to the existence of two basic types of touristic flows: Emigrants and locals. Looking to help fill this gap, a study of travelers from North America was conducted. Using cluster analysis, it was determined the existence of three segments: nostalgic, regular and frequent. The recognition of these three segments is important to determine the necessary adjustments in tourist offerings to this market.

Keywords: tourism, diaspora, nostalgia, culture

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Authors: S. Pathak, R. Lazarus

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A 25-year-old male HIV patient (CD4 cells 20/µL and HIV viral load 14200000 copies/ml) with a past medical history of duodenal ulcer, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, oesophageal candidiasis presented with fever and a seizure to hospital. The only recent travel had been a religious pilgrimage from Singapore to Malaysia 5 days prior; during the trip he sustained skin abrasions. The patient had recently started highly active antiretroviral therapy 2 months prior. Clinical examination was unremarkable other than a temperature of 38.8°C and perianal warts. Laboratory tests showed a leukocyte count 12.5x109 cells/L, haemoglobin 9.4 g/dL, normal biochemistry and a C-reactive protein 121 mg/L. CT head and MRI head were unremarkable and cerebrospinal fluid analysis performed after a delay (due to technical difficulties) of 11 days was unremarkable. Blood cultures (three sets) taken on admission showed Gram-negative rods in the anaerobic bottles only at the end of incubation with culture result confirmed by molecular sequencing showing Helicobacter cinaedi. The patient was treated empirically with ceftriaxone for seven days and this was converted to oral co-amoxiclav for a further seven days after the blood cultures became positive. A Transthoracic echocardiogram was unremarkable. The patient made a full recovery. Helicobacter cinaedi is a gram-negative anaerobic fastidious organism affecting patients with comorbidity. Infection may manifest as cellulitius, colitis or as in this case as bloodstream infection – the latter is often attributed to faeco-oral infection. Laboratory identification requires prolonged culture. Therapeutic options may be limited by resistance to macrolides and fluoroquinolones. The likely pathogen inoculation routes in the case described include gastrointestinal translocation due to proctitis at the site of perianal warts, or breach of the skin via abrasions occurring during the pilgrimage. Such organisms are increasing in prevalence as our patient population ages and patients have multiple comorbidities including HIV. It may be necessary in patients with unexplained fever to prolong incubation of sterile sites including blood in order to identify this unusual fastidious organism.

Keywords: fastidious, Helicobacter cinaedi, HIV, immunocompromised

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Authors: Si-Gwan Kim

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Small-size and low-power sensors with sensing, signal processing and wireless communication capabilities is suitable for the wireless sensor networks. Due to the limited resources and battery constraints, complex routing algorithms used for the ad-hoc networks cannot be employed in sensor networks. In this paper, we propose node-disjoint multi-path hexagon-based routing algorithms in wireless sensor networks. We suggest the details of the algorithm and compare it with other works. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves better performance in terms of efficiency and message delivery ratio.

Keywords: clustering, multi-path, routing protocol, sensor network

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Authors: Jiraporn Rojtinnakorn

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ICAM-2 (intercellular adhesion molecule 2) or CD102 (Cluster of Differentiation 102) is type I trans-membrane glycoproteins, composing 2-9 immunoglobulin-like C2-type domains. ICAM-2 plays the particular role in immune response and cell surveillance. It is concerned in innate and specific immunity, cell survival signal, apoptosis, and anticancer. EST clone of ICAM-2, from P. gigas blood cell EST libraries, showed high identity to human ICAM-2 (92%) with conserve region of ICAM N-terminal domain and part of Ig superfamily. Gene and protein of ICAM-2 has been founded in mammals. This is the first report of ICAM-2 in fish.

Keywords: ICAM-2, CD102, Pangasianodon gigas, antitumor

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Authors: Hamidreza Fallah Lajimi , Elham Karami, Fatemeh Ali nasab, Mostafa Mahdavikia

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Being responsive is an increasingly important skill for firms in today’s global economy; thus firms must be agile. Naturally, it follows that an organization’s agility depends on its supply chain being agile. However, achieving supply chain agility is a function of other abilities within the organization. This paper analyses results from a survey of 71 Iran manufacturing companies in order to identify some of the factors for agile organizations in managing their supply chains. Then we classification this company in four cluster with fuzzy c-mean technique and with four validations functional determine automatically the optimal number of clusters.

Keywords: agile supply chain, clustering, fuzzy clustering

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Authors: Sandeep Singh Waraich

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Wireless sensor network (WSN ) consists of a large number of sensor nodes. The disparity in their energy consumption usually lead to the loss of equilibrium in wireless sensor network which may further results in an energy hole problem in wireless network. In this paper, we have considered the inclusion of orphan nodes which usually remain unutilized as intermediate nodes in multi-hop routing. The Orphan Node Inclusion (ONI) Protocol lets the cluster member to bring the orphan nodes into their clusters, thereby saving important resources and increasing network lifetime in critical applications of WSN.

Keywords: wireless sensor network, orphan node, clustering, ONI protocol

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Authors: Pablo Chico De Guzman, Cesar Sanchez

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Microservice architectures are increasingly in distributed cloud applications due to the advantages on the software composition, development speed, release cycle frequency and the business logic time to market. On the other hand, these architectures also introduce some challenges on the testing and release phases of applications. Container technology solves some of these issues by providing reproducible environments, easy of software distribution and isolation of processes. However, there are other issues that remain unsolved in current container technology when dealing with multiple machines, such as networking for multi-host communication, service discovery, load balancing or data persistency (even though some of these challenges are already solved by traditional cloud vendors in a very mature and widespread manner). Container cluster management tools, such as Kubernetes, Mesos or Docker Swarm, attempt to solve these problems by introducing a new control layer where the unit of deployment is the container (or the pod — a set of strongly related containers that must be deployed on the same machine). These tools are complex to configure and manage and they do not follow a pure immutable infrastructure approach since servers are reused between deployments. Indeed, these tools introduce dependencies at execution time for solving networking or service discovery problems. If an error on the control layer occurs, which would affect running applications, specific expertise is required to perform ad-hoc troubleshooting. As a consequence, it is not surprising that container cluster support is becoming a source of revenue for consulting services. This paper presents i2kit, a deployment tool based on the immutable infrastructure pattern, where the virtual machine is the unit of deployment. The input for i2kit is a declarative definition of a set of microservices, where each microservice is defined as a pod of containers. Microservices are built into machine images using linuxkit —- a tool for creating minimal linux distributions specialized in running containers. These machine images are then deployed to one or more virtual machines, which are exposed through a cloud vendor load balancer. Finally, the load balancer endpoint is set into other microservices using an environment variable, providing service discovery. The toolkit i2kit reuses the best ideas from container technology to solve problems like reproducible environments, process isolation, and software distribution, and at the same time relies on mature, proven cloud vendor technology for networking, load balancing and persistency. The result is a more robust system with no learning curve for troubleshooting running applications. We have implemented an open source prototype that transforms i2kit definitions into AWS cloud formation templates, where each microservice AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is created on the fly using linuxkit. Even though container cluster management tools have more flexibility for resource allocation optimization, we defend that adding a new control layer implies more important disadvantages. Resource allocation is greatly improved by using linuxkit, which introduces a very small footprint (around 35MB). Also, the system is more secure since linuxkit installs the minimum set of dependencies to run containers. The toolkit i2kit is currently under development at the IMDEA Software Institute.

Keywords: container, deployment, immutable infrastructure, microservice

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Authors: Tatsuhiko Aizawa, Yohei Suzuki, Tomomi Shiratori

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The austenitic stainless steel type AISI316 has been widely utilized as structural members and mold die substrates. The low temperature plasma nitriding has been utilized to harden these AISI316 members, parts, and dies without loss of intrinsic corrosion resistance to AISI316 stainless steels. Formation of CrN precipitates by normal plasma nitriding processes resulted in severe deterioration of corrosion toughness. Most previous studies on this low temperature nitriding of AISI316 only described the lattice expansion of original AISI316 lattices by the occupation of nitrogen interstitial solutes into octahedral vacancy sites, the significant hardening by nitrogen solid solution, and the enhancement of corrosion toughness. In addition to those engineering items, this low temperature nitriding process was characterized by the nitrogen supersaturation and nitrogen diffusion processes. The nitrogen supersaturated zones expanded by the nitrogen solute occupation to octahedral vacancy sites, and the un-nitrided surroundings to these zones were plastically strained to compensate for the mismatch strains across these nitrided and nitrided zones. The microstructure of nitrided AISI316 was refined by this plastic straining. The nitrogen diffusion process was enhanced to transport nitrogen solute atoms through the refined zone boundaries. This synergetic collaboration among the nitrogen supersaturation, the lattice expansion, the plastic straining, and the grain refinement yielded a thick nitrogen supersaturated layer. This synergetic relation was also characterized by the multilevel two-phase structuring. In XRD (X-Ray Diffraction) analysis, the nitrided AISI316 layer had - and -phases with the peak shifts from original lattices. After EBSD (Electron Back Scattering Diffraction) analysis, -grains and -grains homogeneously distributed in the nitrided layer. The scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) revealed that g-phase zone is N-poor cluster and a-phase zone is N-rich cluster. This proves that nitrogen supersaturated AISI316 stainless steels have multi-level two-phase structure in a very fine granular system.

Keywords: AISI316 stainless steels, chemical affinity to nitrogen solutes, multi-level two-phase structuring, nitrogen supersaturation

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Authors: Amna Khaliq

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In this article, the phenomena of common stereotypes and glass ceiling barriers in women’s career advancement in men dominating society are explored. A brief background is provided on the misconception for women as soft, delicate, polite and compassionate at a workplace in the place of strong head and go-getter. Then, the literature review supports that stereotypes and glass ceiling barriers are still in existence for young women’s leadership. Increased encouragement, emotional intelligence, and better communication skills are recommended to parents, educators, and employers to prepare young women for senior leadership roles. Young women need mentorship from other women with no competition.

Keywords: Gender inequality, Glass ceiling, Stereotypes, Leadership

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Authors: Arunai Nambi Raj N., Kaviarasu Karunakaran, Krishnamurthy K.

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The purpose of this study was to create American Association of Physicist in Medicine (AAPM) Task Group 119 (TG 119) benchmark plans for flattening filter free beam (FFF) deliveries of intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) and volumetric arc therapy (VMAT) in the Eclipse treatment planning system. The planning data were compared with the flattening filter (FF) IMRT & VMAT plan data to verify the dosimetric commissioning accuracy of FFF deliveries. AAPM TG 119 proposed a set of test cases called multi-target, mock prostate, mock head and neck, and C-shape to ascertain the overall accuracy of IMRT planning, measurement, and analysis. We used these test cases to investigate the performance of the Eclipse Treatment planning system for the flattening filter free beam deliveries. For these test cases, we generated two sets of treatment plans, the first plan using 7–9 IMRT fields and a second plan utilizing two arc VMAT technique for both the beam deliveries (6 MV FF, 6MV FFF, 10 MV FF and 10 MV FFF). The planning objectives and dose were set as described in TG 119. The dose prescriptions for multi-target, mock prostate, mock head and neck, and C-shape were taken as 50, 75.6, 50 and 50 Gy, respectively. The point dose (mean dose to the contoured chamber volume) at the specified positions/locations was measured using compact (CC‑13) ion chamber. The composite planar dose and per-field gamma analysis were measured with IMatriXX Evaluation 2D array with OmniPro IMRT Software (version 1.7b). FFF beam deliveries of IMRT and VMAT plans were comparable to flattening filter beam deliveries. Our planning and quality assurance results matched with TG 119 data. AAPM TG 119 test cases are useful to generate FFF benchmark plans. From the obtained data in this study, we conclude that the commissioning of FFF IMRT and FFF VMAT delivery were found within the limits of TG-119 and the performance of the Eclipse treatment planning system for FFF plans were found satisfactorily.

Keywords: flattening filter free beams, intensity modulated radiation therapy, task group 119, volumetric modulated arc therapy

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Authors: Palingba Aimé Marie Doilkom, Mahamadou Koïta, Jean-michel Vouillamoz, Angelbert Biaou

Abstract:

Most African populations rely on groundwater in rural areas for their consumption. Indeed, in the face of climate change and strong demographic growth, groundwater, particularly in the basement, is increasingly in demand. The question of the sustainability of water resources in this type of environment is therefore becoming a major issue. Groundwater recharge can be natural or artificial. Unlike natural recharge, which often results from the natural infiltration of surface water (e.g. a share of rainfall), artificial recharge consists of causing water infiltration through appropriate developments to artificially replenish the water stock of an aquifer. Artificial recharge is, therefore, one of the measures that can be implemented to secure water supply, combat the effects of climate change, and, more generally, contribute to improving the quantitative status of groundwater bodies. It is in this context that the present research is conducted with the aim of developing artificial recharge in order to contribute to the sustainability of basement aquifers in a context of climatic variability and constantly increasing water needs of populations. In order to achieve the expected results, it is therefore important to determine the characteristics of the infiltration basins and to identify the areas suitable for their implementation. The geometry of the aquifer was reproduced, and the hydraulic properties of the aquifer were collected and characterized, including boundary conditions, hydraulic conductivity, effective porosity, recharge, Van Genuchten parameters, and saturation indices. The aquifer of the Sanon experimental site is made up of three layers, namely the saprolite, the fissured horizon, and the healthy basement. Indeed, the saprolite and the fissured medium were considered for the simulations. The first results with FEFLOW model show that the water table reacts continuously for the first 100 days before stabilizing. The hydraulic charge increases by an average of 1 m. The further away from the basin, the less the water table reacts. However, if a variable hydraulic head is imposed on the basins, it can be seen that the response of the water table is not uniform over time. The lower the basin hydraulic head, the less it affects the water table. These simulations must be continued by improving the characteristics of the basins in order to obtain the appropriate characteristics for a good recharge.

Keywords: basement area, FEFLOW, infiltration basin, MAR

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Authors: Rima Harche, Abdelkader Mouheb

Abstract:

The Algiers refinery as all the other refineries always suffers from the problem of stopping of the tubes of heat exchanger. For that a study experimental of this phenomenon was undertaken in site on the cell of heat exchangers E101 (E101 CBA and E101 EDF) intended for the heating of the crude before its fractionation, which are exposed to the problem of the fouling on the side tubes exchangers. It is of tube-calenders type with head floating. Each cell is made up of three heat exchangers, laid out in series.

Keywords: fouling, fluid temperatue , oil, tubular heat exchanger, fouling resistance, modeling, heat transfer coefficient

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Authors: May Newisar, Richard Kingston, Philip Black

Abstract:

Heritage-led regeneration developments have been considered as one of the cornerstones of the economic and social revival of historic towns and cities in the UK. However, this approach has proved its deficiency within the development of Liverpool World Heritage site. This is due to the conflict between sustaining the tangible and intangible values as well as achieving the aimed economic developments. Accordingly, the development of such areas is influenced by a top-down approach which considers heritage as consumable experience and urban regeneration as the economic development for it. This neglects the heritage sites characteristics and values as well as the design criteria for public open spaces that overlap with the heritage sites. Currently, knowledge regarding the relationship between the physical built environment of the heritage sites including the intangible values and the design development of the public open spaces is limited. Public open spaces have been studied from different perspectives such as increasing walkability, a source of social cohesion, provide a good quality of life as well as understanding users’ perception. While heritage sites have been discussed heavily on how to maintain the physical environment, understanding the courses of threats and how to be protected. In addition to users’ experiences and motivations of visiting such areas. Furthermore, new approaches tried to overcome the gap such as the historic urban landscape approach. This approach is focusing on the entire human environment with all its tangible and intangible qualities. However, this research aims to understand the relationship between the heritage sites and public open spaces and how the overlap of the design and development of both could be used as a quality to enhance the heritage sites and improve users’ experience. A meaning-making approach will be used in order to understand and articulate how the development of Liverpool World Heritage site and its value could influence and shape the design of public open space Pier Head in order to attract a different level of tourists to be used as a tool for economic development. Consequently, this will help in bridging the gap between the planning and conservation areas’ policies through an understanding of how flexible is the system in order to adopt alternative approaches for the design and development strategies for those areas.

Keywords: historic urban landscape, environmental psychology, urban governance, identity

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Authors: Sofia Barbosa, Mariana Pinto, José António Almeida, Edgar Carvalho, Catarina Diamantino

Abstract:

The aim of this work was to test a methodology able to generate spatial-temporal maps that can synthesize simultaneously the trends of distinct hydrochemical indicators in an old radium-uranium tailings dam deposit. Multidimensionality reduction derived from principal component analysis and subsequent data aggregation derived from clustering analysis allow to identify distinct hydrochemical behavioural profiles and to generate synthetic evolutionary hydrochemical maps.

Keywords: Contamination plume migration, K-means of PCA scores, groundwater and mine water monitoring, spatial-temporal hydrochemical trends

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Authors: Alireza Sohrabi, Hamid Mohammadi

Abstract:

The pistachio fruit is a strategic product in Iran. One of the problems caused the reduction of pistachio proceeds is related to biennial- bearing or alternative bearing. Biennial- bearing is very important and is happened because of the fallen female bloom buds in vintage year. This test was done according to random blocks of 6 orchards in the type of Ahmad Aghaie with 4 iterations. Vegetative properties of branch are investigated. The results are shown that if the bunch numbers are increased, the possibility of falling is increased in bloom buds. The least possibility of falling of bloom buds is specified in trimming of one bunch and has significant difference with other trimming.

Keywords: alternate bearing, pistachio, cluster, bud

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Authors: Yolanda Ramirez, Angel Tejada, Agustin Baidez

Abstract:

In recent years, the intellectual capital reporting in higher education institutions has been acquiring progressive importance worldwide. Intellectual capital approaches becomes critical at universities, mainly due to the fact that knowledge is the main output as well as input in these institutions. Universities produce knowledge, either through scientific and technical research (the results of investigation, publications, etc.) or through teaching (students trained and productive relationships with their stakeholders). The purpose of the present paper is to identify the intangible elements about which university stakeholders demand most information. The results of a study done at Spanish universities are used to see which groups of universities have stakeholders who are more proactive to the disclosure of intellectual capital.

Keywords: intellectual capital, universities, Spain, cluster analysis

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Authors: Elmo Thiago Lins Cöuras Ford, Valentina Alessandra Carvalho do Vale

Abstract:

Given the unquestionable need of environmental preservation, the natural fibers have been seen as a salutary alternative for production of composites in substitution to the synthetic fibers, vitreous and metallic. In this work, the behavior of a composite was analyzed done with fiber of the peel of the coconut as reinforcement and latex as head office, when submitted the source of heat. The temperature profiles were verified in the internal surfaces and it expresses of the composite as well as the temperature gradient in the same. It was also analyzed the behavior of this composite when submitted to a cold source. As consequence, in function of the answers of the system, conclusions were reached.

Keywords: natural fiber, composite, temperature, latex, gradient

Procedia PDF Downloads 778