Search results for: weak rule priority

Authors: Zineb Abidi, Marc-Arthur Diaye

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There exists a large empirical literature concerning the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance. This literature, however, applies mainly to large corporations and/or listed firms. To the best of our knowledge, the question of whether meeting CSR requirements impacts the financial performance of small and medium-sized unlisted SMEs has not so far been analyzed. This paper aims to analyze, for the first time, the effect of CSR on the financial performance of SMEs. Using an original database including 5,257 French SMEs, we show that adopting CSR practices has a positive but weak effect on a firm’s financial performance. To develop this further, we analyzed CSR practices interactions assessing the best combination of CSR components that positively influence SME financial performance. Our results show that French SMEs benefit more from their pro-social behavior when they choose a combination of CSR components best adapted to their individual characteristics.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility, financial performance, unlisted firms, SMEs

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Authors: Safak Baykal

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The purpose of this study is analyzing the relationship between self leadership and social capital of people with using Social Network Analysis. In this study, two aspects of social capital will be focused: bonding, homophilous social capital (BoSC) which implies better, strong, dense or closed network ties, and bridging, heterophilous social capital (BrSC) which implies weak ties, bridging the structural holes. The other concept of the study is Trust (Tr), namely interpersonal trust, willingness to ascribe good intentions to and have confidence in the words and actions of other people. In this study, the sample group, 61 people, was selected from a private firm from the defense industry. The relation between BoSC/BrSC and Tr is shown by using Social Network Analysis (SNA) and statistical analysis with Likert type-questionnaire. The results of the analysis show the Cronbach’s alpha value is 0.73 and social capital values (BoSC/BrSC) is highly correlated with Tr values of the people.

Keywords: bonding social capital, bridging social capital, trust, social network analysis (SNA)

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Authors: Haq Nawaz, Muhammad Amjad Iqbal, Kamran Malik

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"Altasreef" is an automated system available for Web and Android users which provide facility to the users to learn the Quran verbs. It provides the facility to the users to practice the learned material and also provide facility of exams of Arabic verbs variation focusing on Quran text. Arabic is a highly inflectional language. Almost all of its words connect to roots of three, four or five letters which approach the meaning of all their inflectional forms. In Arabic, a verb is formed by inserting the consonants into one of a set of verb patterns. Suffixes and prefixes are then added to generate the meaning of number, person, and gender. The active/passive voice and perfective aspect and other patterns are than generated. This application is designed for learners of Quranic Arabic who already have learn basics of Arabic conjugation. Application also provides the facility of translation of generated patterns. These translations are generated with the help of rule-based approach to give 100% results to the learners.

Keywords: NLP, Quran, Computational Linguistics, E Learning

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Authors: Kingsley Ononogbo, Ashiru Bello

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The purpose of this study is to determine the factors responsible for the inclination of the youths of Bida to passive recreation, with a view to finding out whether their occupations influence their attitudes towards active recreation. Using the 5-point Likert scale, a total number of 267 participants were drawn from the two major wards in Bida town. They are Cheniyan and Nassarafu. Study evidence revealed that youths were constrained from participating in active recreation due to preoccupation with family responsibilities and lack of their choices of recreational facilities. The result of the Chi Square Test showed that the youths had positive attitudes towards physical exercises, while the Spearman’s Correlation (r=0.21) signifies a positive but weak correlation. The P- value, however, equals .7610 which is greater than 0.05 and, so significant. The study concluded by suggesting regular enlightenment programmes, focusing on the values of participating in active recreation, and building and maintenance of desired neighborhood recreation facilities for youths, as a measure to encourage them to take part in the active form of recreation.

Keywords: attitudes, Bida, recreation development, recreation of youth

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Authors: S. Pullteap, M. Pathomsuriyaporn

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In this article, a study of employee’s opinion to the factors that affect to the flood preventive and the corrective action plan in an electronic industry at the Sharp Manufacturing (Thailand) Co., Ltd. has been investigated. The surveys data of 175 workers and supervisors have, however, been selected for data analysis. The results is shown that the employees emphasize about the needs in a subsidy at the time of disaster at high levels of 77.8%, as the plan focusing on flood prevention of the rehabilitation equipment is valued at the intermediate level, which is 79.8%. Demonstration of the hypothesis has found that the different education levels has thus been affected to the needs factor at the flood disaster time. Moreover, most respondents give priority to flood disaster risk management factor. Consequently, we found that the flood prevention plan is valued at high level, especially on information monitoring, which is 93.4% for the supervisor item. The respondents largely assume that the flood will have impacts on the industry, up to 80%, thus to focus on flood management plans is enormous.

Keywords: flood prevention plan, flood event, electronic industrial plant, disaster, risk management

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Authors: Sabri Serkan Güllüoğlu

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Analysis can be defined as the process of gathering, recording and researching data related to products and services, in order to learn something. But for marketers, analyses are not only used for learning but also an essential and critical part of the business, because this allows companies to offer products or services which are focused and well targeted. Market analysis also identify market trends, demographics, customer’s buying habits and important information on the competition. Data mining is used instead of traditional research, because it extracts predictive information about customer and sales from large databases. In contrast to traditional research, data mining relies on information that is already available. Simply the goal is to improve the efficiency of supermarkets. In this study, the purpose is to find dependency on products. For instance, which items are bought together, using association rules in data mining. Moreover, this information will be used for improving the profitability of customers such as increasing shopping time and sales of fewer sold items.

Keywords: data mining, association rule mining, market basket analysis, purchasing

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Authors: Mohsen Qasemi

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In the international economic order multilateral trading system which established by General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1947 (GATT) was dominant until about two decades ago. Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) have changed this order and become an important phenomenon. One of the main objectives of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a central institution of multilateral trading system is raising standards of living. There are many scholars who suggest that WTO should take steps to protect human rights in its activities. Although it has always been opposing views who declare that since WTO has no explicit rule for human rights, it has no human rights related obligations. At the time that the WTO was established, member states began to join RTAs and since then, the escalating growth of these agreements and their effects on multilateral trading system has been controversial. There are some aspects of RTAs that have received too little attention from scholars. It is important to take a different view and evaluate the RTAs based on non-commercial aspects. The present paper seeks to answer this question: which system could be more useful in protecting human rights, RTAs or WTO?

Keywords: WTO, RTAs, human rights, multilateral trading system, non discrimination

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Authors: Xiaohui Zhao, Shahan Mafuz

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Context-aware technologies provide system applications with the awareness of environmental conditions, customer behaviour, object movements, etc. Further, with such capability system applications can be smart to adapt intelligently their responses to the changing conditions. Concerning business operations, this promises businesses that their business processes can run more intelligently, adaptively and flexibly, and thereby either improve customer experience, enhance reliability of service delivery, or lower operational cost, to make the business more competitive and sustainable. Aiming at realizing such context-aware business process management, this paper firstly explores its potential benefit and then identifies some gaps between the current business process management support and the expected. In addition, some preliminary solutions are also discussed with context definition, rule-based process execution, run-time process evolution, etc. A framework is also presented to give a conceptual architecture of context-aware business process management system to guide system implementation.

Keywords: business process adaptation, business process evolution, business process modelling, and context awareness

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Authors: Nurbanu Guzey, S. Jagannathan

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Locating radio controlled (RC) devices using their unintended emissions has a great interest considering security concerns. Weak nature of these emissions requires near field localization approach since it is hard to detect these signals in far field region of array. Instead of only angle estimation, near field localization also requires range estimation of the source which makes this method more complicated than far field models. Challenges of locating such devices in a near field region and real time environment are analyzed in this paper. An ESPRIT like near field localization scheme is utilized for both angle and range estimation. 1-D search with symmetric subarrays is provided. Two 7 element uniform linear antenna arrays (ULA) are employed for locating RC source. Experiment results of location estimation for one unintended emitting walkie-talkie for different positions are given.

Keywords: localization, angle of arrival (AoA), range estimation, array signal processing, ESPRIT, Uniform Linear Array (ULA)

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Authors: Aysha Alshehri

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This paper provides a literature review of the sources of women’s rights under the Saudi legal framework, taking account of the constitutional primacy of Sharia under the Saudi legal system as well as the state’s obligations under international law. Building on one of the central aims of the paper, it conducts an exploration of how Saudi Arabia already has or might be further able to more clearly delineate its position and reservations in the adoptions of international human rights agreements while preserving its core religious beliefs and societal practices in regard to women’s rights at the domestic level. In this regard, the paper will consider the apparent tension between certain jurisprudential and customary aspects on gender equality and contemporary discourses of women’s rights from within and outside the Muslim world. Particular attention will be devoted to the question of the causes behind the lack of direct application of women’s rights mentioned by international reports and any challenges this may bring in the contexts of Saudi Arabia’s evolving gender equality policies.

Keywords: Islamic Constitution, executive actions, gender equality, judicial review

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Authors: Adriano Valdes-Gomez, Francisco Javier Sevilla

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We devise a numerical algorithm to simulate the diffusion of a Brownian particle restricted to the surface of a three-dimensional sphere when the particle is under the effects of an external potential that is coupled linearly. It is obtained using elementary geometry, yet, it converges, in the weak sense, to the solutions to the Smoluchowski equation. Rotations on the sphere, which are the analogs of linear displacements in euclidean spaces, are calculated using algebraic operations and then by a proper scaling, which makes the algorithm efficient and quite simple, especially to what may be the short-time propagator approach. Our findings prove that the global effects of curvature are taken into account in both dynamic and stationary processes, and it is not restricted to work in configuration space, neither restricted to the overdamped limit. We have generalized it successfully to simulate the Kramers or the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, where it is necessary to work directly in phase space, and it may be adapted to other two dimensional surfaces with non-constant curvature.

Keywords: diffusion on the sphere, Fokker-Planck equation on the sphere, non equilibrium processes on the sphere, numerical methods for diffusion on the sphere

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Authors: Antonio Abatemarco, Francesca Stroffolini

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In the economic literature, Rawls’ Theory of Justice is usually interpreted in a two-stage setting, where a priority to the worst off individual is imposed as a distributive value judgment. In this paper, instead, we model Rawls’ Theory in a three-stage setting, that is, a separating line is drawn between the original position, the educational stage, and the working life. Hence, in this paper, we challenge the common interpretation of Rawls’ Theory of Justice as Fairness by showing that this Theory goes well beyond the definition of a distributive value judgment, in such a way as to embrace efficiency issues as well. In our model, inequalities are shown to be permitted as far as they stimulate a greater effort in education in the population, and so economic growth. To our knowledge, this is the only possibility for the inequality to be ‘bought’ by both the most-, and above all, the least-advantaged individual as suggested by the Difference Principle. Finally, by recalling the old tradition of ‘universal ex-post efficiency’, we show that a unique optimal social contract does not exist behind the veil of ignorance; more precisely, the sole set of potentially Rawls-optimal social contracts can be identified a priori, and partial justice orderings derived accordingly.

Keywords: justice, Rawls, inequality, social contract

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Authors: Cinzia Carrodano, Dimitri Konstantas

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Risk is part of our lives. In today’s society risk is connected to our safety and safety has become a major priority in our life. Each person lives his/her life based on the evaluation of the risk he/she is ready to accept and sustain, and the level of safety he/she wishes to reach, based on highly personal criteria. The assessment of risk a person takes in a complex environment and the impact of actions of other people’actions and events on our perception of risk are alements to be considered. The concept of Holistic Risk Assessment (HRA) aims in developing a methodology and a model that will allow us to take into account elements outside the direct influence of the individual, and provide a personalized risk assessment. The concept is based on the fact that in the near future, we will be able to gather and process extremely large amounts of data about an individual and his/her environment in real time. The interaction and correlation of these data is the key element of the holistic risk assessment. In this paper, we present the HRA concept and describe the most important elements and considerations.

Keywords: continuous data, dynamic risk, holistic risk assessment, risk concept

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Authors: Matan Cohen, Maxim Shoshany

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Climatic, topographic and geological diversity, together with frequent disturbance and recovery cycles, produce highly complex spatial patterns of trees, shrubs, dwarf shrubs and bare ground patches. Assessment of spatial and temporal variations of these life-forms patterns under climate change is of high ecological priority. Here we report on one of the first attempts to discriminate between images of three Mediterranean life-forms patterns at three densities. The development of an extensive database of orthophoto images representing these 9 pattern categories was instrumental for training and testing pre-trained and newly-trained DL models utilizing DenseNet architecture. Both models demonstrated the advantages of using Deep Learning approaches over existing spectral and spatial (pattern or texture) algorithmic methods in differentiation 9 life-form spatial mixtures categories.

Keywords: texture classification, deep learning, desert fringe ecosystems, climate change

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Authors: Odile Amoncou, Djedje-Kossu Zahui

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The integration of a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) approach within a company appears nowadays as a fundamental system of response to the different problems that threaten our planet. The abusive exploitation of natural resources, social inequalities, discrimination and poverty are some examples. Thus, faced with these different global problems, each company must include in its operating system measures or actions with the aim not only of achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but also for the improvement of its performance and its brand internationally. The objective of this article is to assess the implementation of CSR by telecommunication companies. It is our belief that given its high energy consumption and proximity to society, the telecom sector must pay particular attention to environmental and social issues. Our study examines the CSR of three Ivorian telecom operators, namely ORANGE CI, MOOV Africa and MTN, by applying a series of performance indicators related to CSR management. We hope that our study will raise awareness about sustainability issues for all other Ivorian companies but also sub-Sahara African companies in general in order to encourage CEOs to make CSR concept a top priority.

Keywords: CSR, telecom, SDGs, cote d’Ivoire

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Authors: Ines Gasmi, Salima Smiti, Makram Soui, Khaled Ghedira

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Credit risk is considered as one of the important issues for financial institutions. It provokes great losses for banks. To this objective, numerous methods for credit risk evaluation have been proposed. Many evaluation methods are black box models that cannot adequately reveal information hidden in the data. However, several works have focused on building transparent rules-based models. For credit risk assessment, generated rules must be not only highly accurate, but also highly interpretable. In this paper, we aim to build both, an accurate and transparent credit risk evaluation model which proposes a set of classification rules. In fact, we consider the credit risk evaluation as an optimization problem which uses a genetic programming (GP) algorithm, where the goal is to maximize the accuracy of generated rules. We evaluate our proposed approach on the base of German and Australian credit datasets. We compared our finding with some existing works; the result shows that the proposed GP outperforms the other models.

Keywords: credit risk assessment, rule generation, genetic programming, feature selection

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Authors: Lluís Bermúdez, Isabel Morillo

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Road safety involves carrying out a determined and explicit policy to reduce accidents. In the city of Barcelona, through the Local Road Safety Plan 2013-2018, in line with the framework that has been established at the European and state level, a series of preventive, corrective and technical measures are specified, with the priority objective of reducing the number of serious injuries and fatalities. In this work, based on the data from the accidents managed by the local police during the period 2010-2019, an analysis is carried out to verify whether the measures established in the Plan to reduce the accident rate have had an effect or not and to what extent. The analysis focuses on the type of accident and the type of vehicles involved. Different count regression models have been fitted, from which it can be deduced that the number of serious and fatal victims of the accidents that have occurred in the city of Barcelona has been reduced as the measures approved by the authorities.

Keywords: accident reduction, count regression models, road safety, urban traffic

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Authors: Ritsuko Kawasaki (Aiba), Takeshi Hiromatsu

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Management is required to understand all information security risks within an organization, and to make decisions on which information security risks should be treated in what level by allocating how much amount of cost. However, such decision-making is not usually easy, because various measures for risk treatment must be selected with the suitable application levels. In addition, some measures may have objectives conflicting with each other. It also makes the selection difficult. Moreover, risks generally have trends and it also should be considered in risk treatment. Therefore, this paper provides the extension of the model proposed in the previous study. The original model supports the selection of measures by applying a combination of weighted average method and goal programming method for multi-objective analysis to find an optimal solution. The extended model includes the notion of weights to the risks, and the larger weight means the priority of the risk.

Keywords: information security risk treatment, selection of risk measures, risk acceptance, multi-objective optimization

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Authors: J. K. Alhassan, S. A. Lawal

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This work is on decision tree-based classification for the disbursement of scholarship. Tree-based data mining classification technique is used in other to determine the generic rule to be used to disburse the scholarship. The system based on the defined rules from the tree is able to determine the class (status) to which an applicant shall belong whether Granted or Not Granted. The applicants that fall to the class of granted denote a successful acquirement of scholarship while those in not granted class are unsuccessful in the scheme. An algorithm that can be used to classify the applicants based on the rules from tree-based classification was also developed. The tree-based classification is adopted because of its efficiency, effectiveness, and easy to comprehend features. The system was tested with the data of National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) Abuja, a Parastatal of Federal Ministry of Communication Technology that is mandated to develop and regulate information technology in Nigeria. The system was found working according to the specification. It is therefore recommended for all scholarship disbursement organizations.

Keywords: classification, data mining, decision tree, scholarship

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Authors: Alsaidi M. Altaher, Mohd Tahir Ismail

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Wavelet thresholding has been a power tool in curve estimation and data analysis. In the presence of outliers this non parametric estimator can not suppress the outliers involved. This study proposes a new two-stage combined method based on the use of the median filter as primary step before applying wavelet thresholding. After suppressing the outliers in a signal through the median filter, the classical wavelet thresholding is then applied for removing the remaining noise. We use automatic boundary corrections; using a low order polynomial model or local polynomial model as a more realistic rule to correct the bias at the boundary region; instead of using the classical assumptions such periodic or symmetric. A simulation experiment has been conducted to evaluate the numerical performance of the proposed method. Results show strong evidences that the proposed method is extremely effective in terms of correcting the boundary bias and eliminating outlier’s sensitivity.

Keywords: boundary correction, median filter, simulation, wavelet thresholding

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Authors: Sulistyaningtyas

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Examining the role of Middle Eastern freedom activists’ speech based on gender perspective is considered noteworthy because the society in the Middle East is patriarchal. This research aims to examine the language use of the Middle Eastern freedom activists’ speeches through gender perspective. The data sources are from male and female Middle Eastern freedom activists’ speech videos. In analyzing the data, the theories employed are about Language Style from Gender Perspective and The Language for Speech. The result reveals that there are sets of spoken language differences between male and female speakers. In using the language for speech, both male and female speakers produce metaphor, euphemism, the ‘rule of three’, parallelism, and pronouns in random frequency of production, which cannot be separated by genders. Moreover, it cannot be concluded that one gender is more potential than the other to influence the audience in delivering speech. There are other factors, particularly non-verbal factors, existing to give impacts on how a speech can influence the audience.

Keywords: gender perspective, language use, Middle Eastern freedom activists, speech

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Authors: Gabrielle Pilliat

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The Supreme Court of Canada rendered unconstitutional the sections of the Canadian Criminal Code which prohibited the Physician-assisted suicide in February 2015. However, in 1993, the same Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Physician-assisted suicide should remain absolutely prohibited. In the light of these historical facts, we will explore how the Supreme Court of Canada was able to make two different decisions 20 years apart. To understand how Canada could rule so differently between 1993 and 2015 about Physician-assisted suicide, we will analyze the content of the Supreme Court of Canada decisions’ discourse of 1993 and of 2015. Our preliminary results indicate that A) the patient autonomy (or the personal choice) has taken over the idea of the preservation of life (or the sacred character of life) in 2015. B) That between 1993 and 2015, the physician is seen differently by the Judges; like an abusive murderer in 1993 and like an objective evaluator in 2015. C) That the patient is seen as a victim in 1993 and more like a hero in 2015.

Keywords: physician-assisted suicide, patient autonomy, choice, sacred character of life, dignity

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Authors: Dina K. Badawy, Dina M. Ibrahim, Alsayed A. Sallam

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Distributed database is a collection of logically related databases that cooperate in a transparent manner. Query processing uses a communication network for transmitting data between sites. It refers to one of the challenges in the database world. The development of sophisticated query optimization technology is the reason for the commercial success of database systems, which complexity and cost increase with increasing number of relations in the query. Mariposa, query trading and query trading with processing task-trading strategies developed for autonomous distributed database systems, but they cause high optimization cost because of involvement of all nodes in generating an optimal plan. In this paper, we proposed a modification on the autonomous strategy K-QTPT that make the seller’s nodes with the lowest cost have gradually high priorities to reduce the optimization time. We implement our proposed strategy and present the results and analysis based on those results.

Keywords: autonomous strategies, distributed database systems, high priority, query optimization

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Authors: Maarten J. Van der Burgt

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A universe containing matter and antimatter can only exist when matter and antimatter repel each other. Such a system, where like attracts like and like repels unlike, will always expand. Calculations made for such a symmetric universe demonstrate that the expansion is consistent with Hubble’s law, the observed increase in the expansion velocity with time, the initial high acceleration and the foam structure of the universe. Conversely, these observations can be considered as proof for a symmetrical universe and for antimatter possessing a negative gravitational mass. A second proof can be found by reinterpreting the behavior of relativistic moving charged particles. Attributing their behavior to a charge defect of √(1-v2/c2) instead of to a mass defect of 1/√(1-v2/c2) makes it plausible that gravitation is an electromagnetic force, as already suggested by Feynman. This would automatically imply that antimatter has a negative gravitational mass. These proofs underpin the untenability of the Weak Equivalence Principle which states that in a gravitational field all structure less point-like particles follow the same path.

Keywords: celestial mechanics, cosmology, gravitation astrophysics, origin of structure, miscellaneous (matter and antimatter)

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Authors: Evelyn Fabian

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The focus of this discussion centres on the emerging issues in Early Childhood Care and development in Nigeria. Early childhood care is the bedrock of Nigeria’s educational system. However, there are critical issues that had not been addressed and it is frustrating the entire educational process. Thus, this paper will show the inter-connectedness between these issues such as poor funding, trained skillful teachers that would supervise the learning process of the kids, unconducive learning environment and lack of relevant facilities. For a clear grasp of these issues, the researcher visited 36 early childhood centres distributed across the 36 spates of Nigeria. The findings which were expressed in simple percentages revealed a near total absence or government neglect of these critical areas. The findings equally showed a misplaced priority in the government allocation of funds to early child care education and development. The study concludes that this mismatch in the training of these categories of pupils, government should expedite action in addressing these emerging issues in early childhood care and development in Nigeria.

Keywords: early childhood, ECCE, education, emerging issues

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Authors: Jonida Canaj

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A simple method of extraction and determination of fifteen priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from drinking water using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has been validated with limits of detection (LOD) and limits of quantification (LOQ), method recovery and reproducibility, and other factors. HPLC parameters, such as mobile phase composition and flow standardized for determination of PAHs using fluorescent detector (FLD). PAH was carried out by liquid-liquid extraction using dichloromethane. Linearity of calibration curves was good for all PAH (R², 0.9954-1.0000) in the concentration range 0.1-100 ppb. Analysis of standard spiked water samples resulted in good recoveries between 78.5-150%(0.1ppb) and 93.04-137.47% (10ppb). The estimated LOD and LOQ ranged between 0.0018-0.98 ppb. The method described has been used for determination of the fifteen PAHs contents in drinking water samples.

Keywords: high performance liquid chromatography, HPLC, method validation, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PAHs, water

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Authors: Mahdi Bazarganigilani

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Aortic enlargement, also known as an aortic aneurysm, can occur when the walls of the aorta become weak. This disease can become deadly if overlooked and undiagnosed. In this paper, a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system was introduced to accurately diagnose aortic enlargement from chest x-ray images. An enhanced convolutional neural network (CNN) was employed and then trained by transfer learning by using three different main areas from the original images. The areas included the left lung, heart, and right lung. The accuracy of the system was then evaluated on 1001 samples by using 4-fold cross-validation. A promising accuracy of 90% was achieved in terms of the F-measure indicator. The results showed using different areas from the original image in the training phase of CNN could increase the accuracy of predictions. This encouraged the author to evaluate this method on a larger dataset and even on different CAD systems for further enhancement of this methodology.

Keywords: computer-aided diagnosis systems, aortic enlargement, chest X-ray, image processing, convolutional neural networks

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Authors: Adel El-Hadidy

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For any industry, the production and quality management or wastages reductions have major impingement on overall factory economy. This work discusses the quality improvement of garment industry by applying Pareto analysis, cause and effect diagram and Taguchi experimental design. The main purpose of the work is to reduce the stitching defects, which will also minimize the rejection and reworks rate. Application of Pareto chart, fish bone diagram and Process Sigma Level/and or Performance Level tools helps solving those problems on priority basis. Among all, only sewing, defects are responsible form 69.3% to 97.3 % of total defects. Process Sigma level has been improved from 0.79 to 1.3 and performance rate improved, from F to D level. The results showed that the new set of sewing parameters was superior to the original one. It can be seen that fabric size has the largest effect on the sewing defects and that needle size has the smallest effect on the stitching defects.

Keywords: garment, sewing defects, cost of rework, DMAIC, sigma level, cause and effect diagram, Pareto analysis

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Authors: Nattida Wannaruk, Wasawat Nakkiew

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This research aims to study the factors that affect the performance of green supply chain management in the Lampang ceramics industry. The data investigation of this research was questionnaires which were gathered from 20 factories in the Lampang ceramics industry. The research factors are divided into five major groups which are green design, green purchasing, green manufacturing, green logistics and reverse logistics. The questionnaire has consisted of four parts that related to factors green supply chain management and general information of the Lampang ceramics industry. Then, the data were analyzed using descriptive statistic and priority of each factor by using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The understanding of factors affecting the green supply chain management of Lampang ceramics industry was indicated in the summary result along with each factor weight. The result of this research could be contributed to the development of indicators or performance evaluation in the future.

Keywords: Lampang ceramics industry, green supply chain management, analysis hierarchy process (AHP), factors affecting

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Authors: Edwin Njoroge Kimani, Alan M. Munyao

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Despite Kenya’s status as a regional economic powerhouse, it struggles with economic shocks that expose the consumers. This, however, seems not to affect major cooperates such as those in the telecommunication and energy sectors. Through their operations, they have not only been able to fluctuate prices at will but also they have been accused of curtailing their rivals from penetrating the market. This study, through literature review of the legal and institutional framework, reports and publications interrogates the law and uncovers the following; i) failings of the legal framework to define market dominance and abuse of such positions, ii) the participation of the state, iii) the inertia of the government to prosecute corporations that abuse their market dominance, iv) the role of the state as a market player and as a regulator through the Competition Authority of Kenya. This study concludes that the market distortion is as a result of weak legal and institutional framework as well as conflict of interest by the government. Not much has been researched in the field of competition law the greater East Africa. This research is intended to form part of the growing research in the field and inform legal reform.

Keywords: competition law, economic power, dominance, Kenya

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