Search results for: natural methods

Authors: Sadiq Habiba Alhaji

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This is a descriptive survey design intended to determine the level of usage of the learner centred methods by student teachers of Federal College of Education Kontagora, Niger State, Nigeria. The study was guided by two null hypotheses formulated by the researcher. The population of the study are students of Federal College of Education, Kontagora. The Target Population consisted of one hundred Teaching practice students drawn from sciences, Arts, and humanities who were posted to various schools practicing different teaching methods. The student teachers were supervised using the checklist designed by the researcher to determine their level of usage of learner centred methods. Data collected was analysed using t test of independent variables. It was recommended that pre service and in service teachers should be equipped with the skills of using learner centred methods.

Keywords: assessment, usage, learner centred, methods, student teachers

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Authors: Debora C. Mendes, Matthias Eckert, Claudia S. Moço, Helio Martins, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves, Miguel Oliveira, Jose P. Da Silva

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Disposal of construction and demolition waste (C&DW) in embankments in the periphery of cities causes both environmental and social problems. To achieve the management of C&DW, a detailed analysis of the properties of these materials should be done. In this work we report a comparative study of the physical, chemical and environmental properties of natural and C&DW aggregates from 25 different origins. Assays were performed according to European Standards. Analysis of heavy metals and organic compounds, namely polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), were performed. Finally, properties of concrete prepared with C&DW aggregates are reported. Physical analyses of C&DW aggregates indicated lower quality properties than natural aggregates, particularly for concrete preparation and unbound layers of road pavements. Chemical properties showed that most samples (80%) meet the values required by European regulations for concrete and unbound layers of road pavements. Analyses of heavy metals Cd, Cr, Cu, Pb, Ni, Mo and Zn in the C&DW leachates showed levels below the limits established by the Council Decision of 19 December 2002. Identification and quantification of PCBs and PAHs indicated that few samples shows the presence of these compounds. The measured levels of PCBs and PAHs are also below the limits. Other compounds identified in the C&DW leachates include phthalates and diphenylmethanol. The characterized C&DW aggregates show lower quality properties than natural aggregates but most samples showed to be environmentally safe. A continuous monitoring of the presence of heavy metals and organic compounds should be made to trial safe C&DW aggregates. C&DW aggregates provide a good economic and environmental alternative to natural aggregates.

Keywords: concrete preparation, construction and demolition waste, heavy metals, organic pollutants

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Authors: Hocini Yousra, Medjnoun Amal, Khiatine Mohamed, Bahar Ramdane

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The development of the regions of southern Algeria require the construction of numerous road, rail, and airport infrastructures. However, this development is very expensive given the very severe climatic conditions, the difficulty of reusing local materials, and the unavailability of water on the project sites; these regions are characterized by an arid or semi-arid climate, which means that water sources are very limited. The climatic conditions and the scarcity of water make soil compaction work very difficult and excessively expensive. These constraints related to the supply of water for irrigation of these construction sites make it necessary to examine the solution of compaction with low water content. This work studies the possibility of improving the compaction with a low water content of the soils of southern Algeria and this by using natural or recycled ecological materials. Local soils are first subjected to a series of laboratory characterization tests, then mixed with varying amounts of natural additives. The new materials are, in turn, subjected to road tests.

Keywords: compaction, low water content, sand, natural materials

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Authors: Yanhua Zhao, Yu Gou, Shu Feng, Dongdong Li, Chuanmin Tao

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The natural history of HBV infection could experience immune tolerant (IT), immune clearance (IC), HBeAg-negative inactive/quienscent carrier (ENQ), and HBeAg-negative hepatitis (ENH). As current biomarkers for discriminating these four phases have some weaknesses, additional serological indicators are needed. Hepatits B core-related antigen (HBcrAg) encoded with precore/core gene contains denatured HBeAg, HBV core antigen (HBcAg) and a 22KDa precore protein (p22cr), which was demonstrated to have a close association with natural history of hepatitis B infection, but no specific cutoff values and diagnostic parameters to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy. This study aimed to clarify the distribution of HBcrAg levels and evaluate its diagnostic performance during the natural history of infection from a Western Chinese perspective. 294 samples collected from treatment-naïve chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients in different phases (IT=64; IC=72; ENQ=100, and ENH=58). We detected the HBcrAg values and analyzed the relationship between HBcrAg and HBV DNA. HBsAg and other clinical parameters were quantitatively tested. HBcrAg levels of four phases were 9.30 log U/mL, 8.80 log U/mL, 3.00 log U/mL, and 5.10 logU/mL, respectively (p < 0.0001). Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis demonstrated that the area under curves (AUCs) of HBcrAg and quantitative HBsAg at cutoff values of 9.25 log U/mL and 4.355 log IU/mL for distinguishing IT from IC phases were 0.704 and 0.694, with sensitivity 76.39% and 59.72%, specificity 53.13% and 79.69%, respectively. AUCs of HBcrAg and quantitative HBsAg at cutoff values of 4.15 log U/mlmL and 2.395 log IU/mlmL for discriminating between ENQ and ENH phases were 0.931 and 0.653, with sensitivity 87.93% and 84%, specificity 91.38% and 39%, respectively. Therefore, HBcrAg levels varied significantly among four natural phases of HBV infection. It had higher predictive performance than quantitative HBsAg for distinguishing between ENQ-patients and ENH-patients and similar performance with HBsAg for the discrimination between IT and IC phases, which indicated that HBcrAg could be a potential serological marker for CHB.

Keywords: chronic hepatitis B, hepatitis B core-related antigen, hepatitis B surface antigens, hepatitis B virus

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Authors: Cholpassorn Sitthiwarongchai

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The purposes of this paper were to search for the uniqueness of community products from Bang Khonthi District, Samut Songkram Province, Thailand and to create a proper brand for the community products. Four important questions were asked to identify the uniqueness of the community products. The first question: What is the brand of coconut sugar that community wants to imply? The answer was 100 percent authentic coconut sugar. The second question: What is the nature of this product? The answer was that it is a natural product without any harmful chemical. The third question is: Who are the target customers? The answer was that homemakers and tourists are target customers. The fourth question: What is the brand guarantee to customers? The answer was that the brand guarantees that the product is 100 percent natural process with a high quality and it is a community production. The findings revealed that in terms of product, customers rated quality and package as the two most important factors. In terms of price, customers rated lower price and a visible label as the two most important factors. In terms of place, customer rated layout and the cleanliness of the place as the two most important factors. In terms of promotion, customer rated public relations and brochure at the store as the most important factors. From the group discussion, the local community agreed that the brand for the community coconut sugar of Salapi community should be a picture of a green coconut tree and yellow color background. This brand implies the strength of community and authentic of the high quality natural product.

Keywords: coconut sugar, community brand, Samut Songkram, natural product

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Authors: Katharigatta N. Venugopala, Fernando Albericio, Bander E. Al-Dhubiab, T. Govender

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Recent years have witnessed a renaissance in the field of peptides that are obtained from various natural sources such as many bacteria, fungi, plants, seaweeds, vertebrates, invertebrates and have been reported for various pharmacological properties such as anti-TB, anticancer, antimalarial, anti-inflammatory, anti-HIV, antibacterial, antifungal, and antidiabetic, activities. In view of the pharmacological significance of natural peptides, serious research efforts of many scientific groups and pharmaceutical companies have consequently focused on them to explore the possibility of developing their potential analogues as therapeutic agents. Solid phase and solution phase peptide synthesis are the two methodologies currently available for the synthesis of natural or synthetic linear or cyclic depsi-peptides. From a synthetic point of view, there is no doubt that the solid-phase methodology gained added advantages over solution phase methodology in terms of simplicity, purity of the compound and the speed with which peptides can be synthesised. In the present study total synthesis, purification and structural elucidation of analogues of natural anti-TB cyclic depsi-peptides such as depsidomycin, massetolides and viscosin has been attempted by solid phase method using standard Fmoc protocols and finally off resin cyclization in solution phase method. In case of depsidomycin, synthesis of linear peptide on solid phase could not be achieved because of two turn inducing amino acids in the peptide sequence, but total synthesis was achieved by convergent solid phase peptide synthesis followed by cyclization in solution phase method. The title compounds obtained were in good yields and characterized by NMR and HRMS. Anti-TB results revealed that the potential title compound exhibited promising activity at 4 µg/mL against H37Rv and 16 µg/mL against MDR strains of tuberculosis.

Keywords: total synthesis, cyclic depsi-peptides, anti-TB activity, tuberculosis

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Authors: Allmin Susaiyah, Aki Härmä, Milan Petković

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Automatic generation of insights from data using insight mining systems (IMS) is useful in many applications, such as personal health tracking, patient monitoring, and business process management. Existing IMS face challenges in controlling insight extraction, scaling to large databases, and generalising to unseen domains. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach consisting of rule-based and neural components for generating insights from data while overcoming the aforementioned challenges. Firstly, a rule-based data 2CNL component is used to extract statistically significant insights from data and represent them in a controlled natural language (CNL). Secondly, a BERTSum-based CNL2NL component is used to convert these CNLs into natural language texts. We improve the model using task-specific and domain-specific fine-tuning. Our approach has been evaluated using statistical techniques and standard evaluation metrics. We overcame the aforementioned challenges and observed significant improvement with domain-specific fine-tuning.

Keywords: data mining, insight mining, natural language generation, pre-trained language models

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Authors: R. Tajau, R. Rohani, M. S. Alias, N. H. Mudri, K. A. Abdul Halim, M. H. Harun, N. Mat Isa, R. Che Ismail, S. Muhammad Faisal, M. Talib, M. R. Mohamed Zin

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Bio-based polymeric materials are increasingly used for a variety of applications, including surface coating, drug delivery systems, and tissue engineering. These polymeric materials are ideal for the aforementioned applications because they are derived from natural resources, non-toxic, low-cost, biocompatible, and biodegradable, and have promising thermal and mechanical properties. The nature of hydrocarbon chains, carbon double bonds, and ester bonds allows various sources of oil (edible), such as soy, sunflower, olive, and oil palm, to fine-tune their particular structures in the development of innovative materials. Palm oil can be the most eminent raw material used for manufacturing new and advanced natural polymeric materials involving radiation techniques, such as coating resins, nanoparticles, scaffold, nanotubes, nanocomposites, and lithography for different branches of the industry in countries where oil palm is abundant. The radiation technique is among the most versatile, cost-effective, simple, and effective methods. Crosslinking, reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT), polymerisation, grafting, and degradation are among the radiation mechanisms. Exposure to gamma, EB, UV, or laser irradiation, which are commonly used in the development of polymeric materials, is used in these mechanisms. Therefore, this review focuses on current radiation processing technologies for the development of various radiation-curable bio-based polymeric materials with a promising future in biomedical and industrial applications. The key focus of this review is on radiation curable palm oil-based products, which have been published frequently in recent studies.

Keywords: palm oil, radiation processing, surface coatings, VOC

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Authors: Jehad Al Dallal

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A class in an Object-Oriented (OO) system is the basic unit of design, and it encapsulates a set of attributes and methods. In OO systems, instead of redefining the attributes and methods that are included in other classes, a class can inherit these attributes and methods and only implement its unique attributes and methods, which results in reducing code redundancy and improving code testability and maintainability. Such mechanism is called Class Inheritance. However, some software engineering applications may require accounting for all the inherited class members (i.e., attributes and methods). This paper explains how to account for inherited class members and discusses the software engineering applications that require such consideration.

Keywords: class flattening, external quality attribute, inheritance, internal quality attribute, object-oriented design

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Authors: Hanan Hayat, Russell Lock

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The importance of usability in ensuring software quality has been well established in literature and widely accepted by software development practitioners. Consequently, numerous usability evaluation methods have been developed. However, the availability of large variety of evaluation methods alongside insufficient studies that critically analyse them resulted in an ambiguous process of selection amongst non-usability-expert practitioners. This study investigates the factors affecting the selection of usability evaluation methods within a project by interviewing a software development team. The results of the data gathered are then analysed and integrated in developing a framework. The framework developed poses a solution to the selection processes of usability evaluation methods by adjusting to individual projects resources and goals. It has the potential to be further evaluated to verify its applicability and usability within the domain of this study.

Keywords: usability evaluation, evaluating usability in non-user entered designs, usability evaluation methods (UEM), usability evaluation in projects

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Authors: Szu-Hua Wang, Yi-Wen Chen

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Urban ecosystems are complex coupled human-environment systems. They contain abundant natural resources for producing natural assets and attract urban assets to consume natural resources for urban development. Urban ecosystems provide several ecosystem services, including provisioning services, regulating services, cultural services, and supporting services. Rapid global climate change makes urban ecosystems and their ecosystem services encountering various natural disasters. Lots of natural disasters have occurred around the world under the constant changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events in the past two decades. In Taiwan, hydrological disasters have been paid more attention due to the potential high sensitivity of Taiwan’s cities to climate change, and it impacts. However, climate change not only causes extreme weather events directly but also affects the interactions among human, ecosystem services and their dynamic feedback processes indirectly. Therefore, this study adopts a systematic method, solar energy synthesis, based on the concept of the eco-energy analysis. The Taipei area, the most densely populated area in Taiwan, is selected as the study area. The changes of ecosystem services between 2015 and Typhoon Soudelor have been compared in order to investigate the impacts of extreme precipitation events on ecosystem services. The results show that the forest areas are the largest contributions of energy to ecosystem services in the Taipei area generally. Different soil textures of different subsystem have various upper limits of water contents or substances. The major contribution of ecosystem services of the study area is natural hazard regulation provided by the surface water resources areas. During the period of Typhoon Soudelor, the freshwater supply in the forest areas had become the main contribution. Erosion control services were the main ecosystem service affected by Typhoon Soudelor. The second and third main ecosystem services were hydrologic regulation and food supply. Due to the interactions among ecosystem services, fresh water supply, water purification, and waste treatment had been affected severely.

Keywords: ecosystem, extreme precipitation events, ecosystem services, solar energy synthesis

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Authors: Khaled M. Alhawiti

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Reading capability is a major segment of language competency. On the other hand, discovering topical writings at a fitting level for outside and second language learners is a test for educators. We address this issue utilizing natural language preparing innovation to survey reading level and streamline content. In the connection of outside and second-language learning, existing measures of reading level are not appropriate to this errand. Related work has demonstrated the profit of utilizing measurable language preparing procedures; we expand these thoughts and incorporate other potential peculiarities to measure intelligibility. In the first piece of this examination, we join characteristics from measurable language models, customary reading level measures and other language preparing apparatuses to deliver a finer technique for recognizing reading level. We examine the execution of human annotators and assess results for our finders concerning human appraisals. A key commitment is that our identifiers are trainable; with preparing and test information from the same space, our finders beat more general reading level instruments (Flesch-Kincaid and Lexile). Trainability will permit execution to be tuned to address the needs of specific gatherings or understudies.

Keywords: natural language processing, trainability, syntactic simplification tools, education

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Authors: Kuen Ming Shu, Ren Kai Ho

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Ultrasonic horn has the functions of amplifying amplitude and reducing resonant impedance in ultrasonic system. Its primary function is to amplify deformation or velocity during vibration and focus ultrasonic energy on the small area. It is a crucial component in design of ultrasonic vibration system. There are five common design methods for ultrasonic horns: analytical method, equivalent circuit method, equal mechanical impedance, transfer matrix method, finite element method. In addition, the general optimization design process is to change the geometric parameters to improve a single performance. Therefore, in the general optimization design process, we couldn't find the relation of parameter and objective. However, a good optimization design must be able to establish the relationship between input parameters and output parameters so that the designer can choose between parameters according to different performance objectives and obtain the results of the optimization design. In this study, an ultrasonic horn provided by Maxwide Ultrasonic co., Ltd. was used as the contrast of optimized ultrasonic horn. The ANSYS finite element analysis (FEA) software was used to simulate the distribution of the horn amplitudes and the natural frequency value. The results showed that the frequency for the simulation values and actual measurement values were similar, verifying the accuracy of the simulation values. The ANSYS DesignXplorer was used to perform Response Surface optimization, which could shows the relation of parameter and objective. Therefore, this method can be used to substitute the traditional experience method or the trial-and-error method for design to reduce material costs and design cycles.

Keywords: horn, natural frequency, response surface optimization, ultrasonic vibration

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Authors: Srikanth Korla, Mahesh Sharnangat

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Composite materials are being widely used in Aerospace, Naval, Defence and other branches of engineering applications. Studies on natural fibers is another emerging research area as they are available in abundance, and also due to their eco-friendly in nature. India being one of the major producer of coir, there is always a scope to study the possibilities of exploring coir as reinforment, and with different combinations of other elements of the composite. In present investigation effort is made to utilize properties possessed by natural fiber and make them enable with polymer/epoxy resin. In natural fiber coconut coir is used as reinforcement fiber in epoxy resin with varying weight percentages of fiber and filler material. Titanium dioxide powder (TiO2) is used as filler material with varying weight percentage including 0%, 2% and 4% are considered for experimentation. Environmental effects on the performance of the composite plate are also studied and presented in this project work; Moisture absorption test for composite specimens is conducted using different solvents including Kerosene, Mineral Water and Saline Water, and its absorption capacity is evaluated. Analysis is carried out in different combinations of Coir as fiber and TiO2 as filler material, and the best suitable composite material considering the strength and environmental effects is identified in this work. Therefore, the significant combination of the composite material is with following composition: 2% TiO2 powder 15% of coir fibre and 83% epoxy, under unique mechanical and environmental conditions considered in the work.

Keywords: composite materials, moisture test, filler material, natural fibre composites

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Authors: Esha Banerjee, Atul Kumar Ojha, Girish Nath Jha

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This study aims to develop an intonation labeled database for Hindi. Although no single standard for prosody labeling exists in Hindi, researchers in the past have employed perceptual and statistical methods in literature to draw inferences about the behavior of prosody patterns in Hindi. Based on such existing research and largely agreed upon intonational theories in Hindi, this study attempts to develop a manually annotated prosodic corpus of Hindi speech data, which can be used for training speech models for natural-sounding speech in the future. 100 sentences ( 500 words) each for declarative and interrogative types have been labeled using Praat.

Keywords: speech dataset, Hindi, intonation, labeled corpus

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Authors: Christopher Schwarz, Katrin Riegler, Erwin Zinser

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The management of outsourcing relationships between IT service providers and their customers proofs to be a critical issue that has to be stipulated by means of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Since service requirements differ from customer to customer, SLA content and language structures vary largely, standardized SLA templates may not be used and an automated processing of SLA content is not possible. Hence, SLA management is usually a time-consuming and inefficient manual process. For overcoming these challenges, this paper presents an innovative and ITIL V3-conform approach for automated SLA design and management using controlled natural language in enterprise collaboration portals. The proposed novel concept is based on a self-developed controlled natural language that follows a subject-predicate-object approach to specify well-defined SLA content structures that act as templates for customized contracts and support automated SLA processing. The derived results eventually enable IT service providers to automate several SLA request, approval and negotiation processes by means of workflows and business rules within an enterprise collaboration portal. The illustrated prototypical realization gives evidence of the practical relevance in service-oriented scenarios as well as the high flexibility and adaptability of the presented model. Thus, the prototype enables the automated creation of well defined, customized SLA documents, providing a knowledge representation that is both human understandable and machine processable.

Keywords: automated processing, controlled natural language, knowledge representation, information technology outsourcing, service level management

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Authors: Emin Z. Mahmud

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Shaking table tests are planned in order to deepen the understanding of the behavior of confined masonry structures with or without openings. The tests are realized in the laboratory of the Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology (IZIIS) – Skopje. The specimens were examined separately on the shaking table, with uniaxial, in-plane excitation. After testing, samples were strengthened with GFRP (Glass Fiber Reinforced Plastic) and re-tested. This paper presents the observations from a series of shaking-table tests done on a 1:1 scaled confined masonry wall model, with opening for a window – specimens CMWuS (before strengthening) and CMWS (after strengthening). Frequency and stiffness changes before and after GFRP wall strengthening are analyzed. Definition of dynamic properties of the models was the first step of the experimental testing, which enabled acquiring important information about the achieved stiffness (natural frequencies) of the model. The natural frequency was defined in the Y direction of the model by applying resonant frequency search tests. It is important to mention that both specimens CMWuS and CMWS are subjected to the same effects. The initial frequency of the undamaged model CMWuS is 18.79 Hz, while at the end of the testing, the frequency decreased to 12.96 Hz. This emphasizes the reduction of the initial stiffness of the model due to damage, especially in the masonry and tie-beam to tie-column connection. After strengthening the damaged wall, the natural frequency increases to 14.67 Hz. This highlights the beneficial effect of strengthening. After completion of dynamic testing at CMWS, the natural frequency is reduced to 10.75 Hz.

Keywords: behaviour of masonry structures, Eurocode, frequency, masonry, shaking table test, strengthening

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Authors: Sulmaz Mozaffari, Zahra Mozaffari, Saman Mozaffari

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Training is a counting and orderly process which purpose is to grow all as peals of the students to get the human knowledge and have the social norms. Also to help them grow their talents. Social science as in educational and training science at the sometime is very important for schools and universities. Unfortunately the method which is mostly used for teaching and training at present is student- teacher method and because of its ease the other methods are ignored. This research is to consider the most efficient methods in social science and analyse them. The Results show that the best methods in which the students are present during the teaching procedure.

Keywords: social science, methodology, student base methodology, technology

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Authors: Kelvin Datonye Bob-Manuel

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The shipping industry has begun to seriously look at ways of reducing fossil fuel consumption so that current reserves can last longer and operate their ships in a more environmentally friendly way. The concept of Green Shipping or Sustainable Shipping with the use of alternative fuels is now becoming an important issue for ship owners, shipping lines and ship builders globally. This paper provides a critical review of the performance of biodiesel and natural gas-fuelled diesel engines for shipboard application. The emission reduction technique included the use of either neat or emulsified rapeseed methyl ester (RME) for pilot ignition and the emission of NOx, CO2 and SOx were measured at engine speed range of 500 - 1500 r/min. The NOx concentrations were compared with the regulated IMO MARPOL73/78, Annex VI, Tiers I, II, III and United States Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA) standard. All NOx emissions met Tier I and II levels and the EPA standard for the minimum specification of category 1 engines at higher speed but none met the MARPOL Tier III limit which is for designated Emission Control Areas (ECAs). No trace of soot and SOx emission were observed.

Keywords: dual-fuel, biodiesel, natural gas, NOx, SOx, MARPOL 73/78 Annex VI. USEPA Tier 3, EURO V &VI

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Authors: F. Boukli Hacene, W. Soufi, S. Ghalem

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Glaucoma disease is a progressive degenerative optic neuropathy, with irreversible visual field deficits and high eye pressure being one of the risk factors. Sulfonamides are carbonic anhydrase-II inhibitors that aim to decrease the secretion of aqueous humor by direct inhibition of this enzyme at the level of the ciliary processes. These drugs present undesirable effects that are difficult to accept by the patient. In our study, we are interested in the inhibition of carbonic anhydrase-II by different natural ligands (curcumin analogues) using molecular modeling methods using molecular operating environment (MOE) software to predict their interaction with this enzyme.

Keywords: carbonic anhydrase-II, curcumin analogues, drug research, molecular modeling

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

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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

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Authors: Masek A., Diakowska K., Zaborski M.

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Polymeric materials have found their use almost in every branch of industry worldwide. Most of them constitute so-called “petropolymers" obtained from crude oil. However literature information sounds a warning that its global sources are running out. Thus, it seems that one should search for polymeric materials from renewable raw materials belonging to the group of green polymers. Therefore on account of environmental protection and the issue of sustainable technologies, nowadays greater and greater achievements have been observed in the field of green technology using engineering sciences to develop composite materials. The main aim of this study was to research what is the influence of biofillers on the properties. We used biofillers like : cellulose with different length of fiber, cellulose UFC100, silica and montmorillonite. In our research, we reported on biodegradable composites exhibitingspecificity properties by melt blending of polylactide (PLA), one of the commercially available biodegradable material, and epoxidized natural rubber (ENR) containing 50 mol.%epoxy group. Blending hydrophilic natural polymers and aliphatic polyesters is of significant interest, since it could lead to the development of a new range of biodegradable polymeric materials. We research the degradation of composites on the basis epoxidized natural rubber and poly(lactide). The addition of biofillers caused far-reaching degradation processes. The greatest resistance to biodegradation showed a montmorillonite-based mixtures, the smallest inflated cellulose fibers of varying length.The final aim in the present study is to use ENR and poly(lactide) to design composite from renewable resources with controlled degradation.

Keywords: renewable resources, biopolymer, degradation, polylactide

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Authors: Serap Kaymakci, Dogan Gundogdu, M. Bugra Yagcioglu

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Erosion (soil erosion) is a phenomenon in which the soil on the slope surface is exposed to natural influences such as wind, rainfall, etc. in open areas. The most natural solution to prevent erosion is to plant surfaces exposed to erosion. However, proper ground and natural conditions must be provided in order for planting to occur. Erosion is prevented in a fast and natural way and the loss of soil is reduced mostly. Lead to allowing plants to hold onto the soil with its three-dimensional and hollow structure are as follows: The types of geomat called MacMat that is used in a case study in Turkey in order to prevent water carry over due to rainfall. The geosynthetic combined with double twisted steel wire mesh. That consists of 95% Zn–5% Al alloy coated double twisted steel wire based that is a reinforced MacMat (geosynthetic three-dimensional erosion control mat) obtained by a polypropylene consisted (mesh type 8x10-Wire diam. 2.70 mm–95% Zn–5% Al alloy coated). That is developed by the progress of the technology. When using reinforced MacMat on top clay liners, fixing pins should not be used as they will rupture the mats. Mats are simply anchored (J Type) in the top trench and, if necessary, in intermediate berm trenches. If the slope angle greater than 20°, it is necessary to use additional rebar depending soil properties also. These applications may have specific technical and installation requirements. In that project, the main purpose is erosion control after that is greening. There is a slope area around the factory which is located in Gebze, İstanbul.

Keywords: erosion, GeoMat, geosynthetic, slope

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Authors: Ganfeng Yu, Yuefeng Ma, Shanliang Yang

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The word discovery is a key problem in text information retrieval technology. Methods in new word discovery tend to be closely related to words because they generally obtain new word results by analyzing words. With the popularity of social networks, individual netizens and online self-media have generated various network texts for the convenience of online life, including network words that are far from standard Chinese expression. How detect network words is one of the important goals in the field of text information retrieval today. In this paper, we integrate the word embedding model and clustering methods to propose a network word discovery framework based on sentence semantic similarity (S³-NWD) to detect network words effectively from the corpus. This framework constructs sentence semantic vectors through a distributed representation model, uses the similarity of sentence semantic vectors to determine the semantic relationship between sentences, and finally realizes network word discovery by the meaning of semantic replacement between sentences. The experiment verifies that the framework not only completes the rapid discovery of network words but also realizes the standard word meaning of the discovery of network words, which reflects the effectiveness of our work.

Keywords: text information retrieval, natural language processing, new word discovery, information extraction

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Authors: Nazli Darkhal

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The use of gems and ornaments has been common in Iran since the beginning of history. The prosperity of the country, the wealth, and the interest of the people of this land in luxurious and glorious life, combined with beauty, have always attracted the attention of the gems and ornaments of the Iranian people. Iranians are famous in the world for having a long history of collecting and recognizing precious stones. In this case, we can use the unique treasure of national jewelry. Raman spectroscopy method is one of the oscillating spectroscopy methods that is classified in the group of nondestructive study methods, and like other methods, in addition to several advantages, it also has disadvantages and problems. Micro Raman spectroscopy is one of the different types of Raman spectroscopy in which an optical microscope is combined with a Raman device to provide more capabilities and advantages than its original method. In this way, with the help of Raman spectroscopy and a light microscope, while observing more details from different parts of the historical sample, natural or artificial pigments can be identified in a small part of it. The EDX electron microscope also functions as the basis for the interaction of the electron beam with the matter. The beams emitted from this interaction can be used to examine samples. In this article, in addition to introducing the micro Raman spectroscopy method, studies have been conducted on the structure of three samples of existing stones in the historic citadel of Bam. Using this method of study on precious and semi-precious stones, in addition to requiring a short time, can provide us with complete information about the structure and theme of these samples. The results of experiments and gemology of the stones showed that the selected beads are agate and jasper, and they can be placed in the chalcedony group.

Keywords: bam citadel, precious and semi-precious stones, Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscope

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Authors: N. Samarinas, C. Evangelides, C. Vrekos

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The aim of this paper is the comparison of three different methods, in order to produce fuzzy tolerance relations for rainfall data classification. More specifically, the three methods are correlation coefficient, cosine amplitude and max-min method. The data were obtained from seven rainfall stations in the region of central Greece and refers to 20-year time series of monthly rainfall height average. Three methods were used to express these data as a fuzzy relation. This specific fuzzy tolerance relation is reformed into an equivalence relation with max-min composition for all three methods. From the equivalence relation, the rainfall stations were categorized and classified according to the degree of confidence. The classification shows the similarities among the rainfall stations. Stations with high similarity can be utilized in water resource management scenarios interchangeably or to augment data from one to another. Due to the complexity of calculations, it is important to find out which of the methods is computationally simpler and needs fewer compositions in order to give reliable results.

Keywords: classification, fuzzy logic, tolerance relations, rainfall data

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Authors: Rafik Djemili, Hocine Bourouba, M. C. Amara Korba

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In this paper, we present a method in order to classify EEG signals for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). EEG signals are first processed by means of spectral estimation methods to derive reliable features before classification step. Spectral estimation methods used are standard periodogram and the periodogram calculated by the Welch method; both methods are compared with Logarithm of Band Power (logBP) features. In the method proposed, we apply Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) followed by Support Vector Machine (SVM). Classification accuracy reached could be as high as 85%, which proves the effectiveness of classification of EEG signals based BCI using spectral methods.

Keywords: brain-computer interface, motor imagery, electroencephalogram, linear discriminant analysis, support vector machine

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Authors: Khaled Bahgat

Abstract:

In the present work, the characterization of 4-Amino-3-phenyl-1H-1,2,4-triazole-5(4H)-thione (APTT) molecule was carried out by quantum chemical method and vibrational spectral techniques. The FT-IR (4000–400 cm_1) and FT-Raman (4000–100 cm_1) spectra of APTT were recorded in solid phase. The UV–Vis absorption spectrum of the APTT was recorded in the range of 200–400 nm. The molecular geometry, harmonic vibrational frequencies and bonding features of APTT in the ground state have been calculated by HF and DFT methods using 6-311++G(d,p) basis set. The complete vibrational frequency assignments were made by normal coordinate analysis (NCA) following the scaled quantum mechanical force field methodology (SQMF). The molecular stability and bond strength were investigated by applying the natural bond orbital analysis (NBO) and natural localized molecular orbital (NLMO) analysis. The electronic properties, such as excitation energies, absorption wavelength, HOMO and LUMO energies were performed by time depended DFT (TD-DFT) approach. The 1H and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance chemical shift of the molecule were calculated using the gauge-including atomic orbital (GIAO) method and compared with experimental results. Finally, the calculation results were analyzed to simulate infrared, FT-Raman and UV spectra of the title compound which shows better agreement with observed spectra.

Keywords: 4-amino-3-phenyl-1H-1, 2, 4-triazole-5(4H)-thione, vibrational assignments, normal coordinate analysis, quantum mechanical calculations

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Authors: Peter Schnell, Phillip Haag

Abstract:

In the course of the structural transformation of the construction industry, the integration of industrialization and digitization has led to the development of construction methods with an increased degree of prefabrication, such as system or modular construction. Compared to conventional construction, these innovative construction methods are characterized by modified structural and procedural properties and expand the range of construction services. Faced with the supply side, it is possible to identify construction-specific customer types with different characteristics and certain preferences as far as the choice of construction method is concerned. The basis for this finding was qualitative expert interviews. By evaluating the stereotypical customer needs, a corresponding segmentation of the demand side can be made along with the basic orientation and decision behavior. This demarcation supports the target- and needs-oriented customer approach and contributes to cooperative and successful project management.

Keywords: differentiation of customer types, modular construction methods, conventional construction methods, stereotypical customer types

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Authors: Lev Idels, Arcady Ponosov

Abstract:

Stochastic fractional differential equations have recently attracted considerable attention, as they have been used to model real-world processes, which are subject to natural memory effects and measurement uncertainties. Compared to conventional hereditary differential equations, one of the advantages of fractional differential equations is related to more realistic geometric properties of their trajectories that do not intersect in the phase space. In this report, a Peano-like existence theorem for nonlinear stochastic fractional differential equations is proven under very general hypotheses. Several specific classes of equations are checked to satisfy these hypotheses, including delay equations driven by the fractional Brownian motion, stochastic fractional neutral equations and many others.

Keywords: delay equations, operator methods, stochastic noise, weak solutions

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