Search results for: sentence extraction

Authors: Mohhamed Yassine Baroudi, Abdelkrim Benammar, Fethi Tarik Bendimerad

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This paper proposes software architecture for dynamical service adaptation. The services are constituted by reusable software components. The adaptation’s goal is to optimize the service function of their execution context. For a first step, the context will take into account just the user needs but other elements will be added. A particular feature in our proposition is the profiles that are used not only to describe the context’s elements but also the components itself. An adapter analyzes the compatibility between all these profiles and detects the points where the profiles are not compatibles. The same Adapter search and apply the possible adaptation solutions: component customization, insertion, extraction or replacement.

Keywords: adaptative service, software component, service, dynamic adaptation

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Authors: María L. Jalón, Feargal Brennan

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A non-stationary stochastic optimization methodology is applied to an OWC (oscillating water column) to find the design that maximizes the wave energy extraction. Different temporal cycles are considered to represent the long-term variability of the wave climate at the site in the optimization problem. The results of the non-stationary stochastic optimization problem are compared against those obtained by a stationary stochastic optimization problem. The comparative analysis reveals that the proposed non-stationary optimization provides designs with a better fit to reality. However, the stationarity assumption can be adequate when looking at averaged system response.

Keywords: non-stationary stochastic optimization, oscillating water, temporal variability, wave energy

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Authors: Deborah García-Magna

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When a person goes through the criminal justice system, either as a suspect, arrested, prosecuted or convicted, certain personal data are recorded, and a wide range of persons and organizations may have access to it. The recording of data can have a great impact on the daily life of the person concerned during the period of time determined by the legislation. In addition, this registered information can refer to various aspects not strictly related directly to the alleged or actually committed infraction. In some areas, the Spanish legislation does not clearly determine the cancellation period of the registers nor what happens when they are cancelled since some of the files are not really erased and remain recorded, even if their consultation is no more allowed or it is stated that they should not be taken into account. Thus, access to the recorded data of arrested or convicted persons may reduce their possibilities of reintegration into society. In this research, some of the areas in which data recording has a special impact on the lives of affected persons are analyzed in a critical manner, taking into account Spanish legislation and jurisprudence, and the influence of the European Court of Human Rights, the Council of Europe and other supranational instruments. In particular, the analysis cover the scope of video-surveillance in public spaces, the police record, the recording of personal data for the purposes of police investigation (especially DNA and psychological profiles), the registry of administrative and minor offenses (especially as they are taken into account to impose aggravating circumstaces), criminal records (of adults, minors and legal entities), and the registration of special circumstances occurred during the execution of the sentence (files of inmates under special surveillance –FIES–, disciplinary sanctions, special therapies in prison, etc.).

Keywords: ECHR jurisprudence, formal and informal criminal control, privacy, disciplinary sanctions, social reintegration

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Authors: Artur Siqueira Nóbrega de Freitas

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The Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), as well the Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV), are unmanned technologies used in oceanographic investigations, offshore oil extraction, military applications, among others. Differently from AUVs, ROVs uses a physical connection with the surface for energy supply e data traffic. The AUVs use batteries and embedded data acquisition systems. These technologies have progressed, supported by studies in the areas of robotics, embedded systems, naval engineering, etc. This work presents a methodology for external pressure vessel design, responsible for contain and keep the internal components of the vehicle, such as on-board electronics and sensors, isolated from contact with water, creating a pressure differential between the inner and external regions.

Keywords: vessel, external pressure, AUV, buckling

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Authors: Fereshteh Falah, Alireza Vasiee, Farideh Tabatabaei-Yazdi

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In this research, we investigated the usage of dairy sludge in the fermentation process and cyclosporin production. This bioactive compound is a metabolite produced by Tolypocladium inflatum. Results showed that about 200 ppm of cyclosporin can be produced in this fermentation. In order to have a proper and specific function, CyA must be free of any impurities, so we need purification. In this downstream processing, we used chromatographic extraction and evaluation of pharmacological activities of cyA. Results showed that the obtained metabolite has very high activity against Aspergilus niger (25mm clear zone). This cyclosporin was isolated for use as an antibiotic. The current research shows that this drug is very vital and commercially very important.

Keywords: fermentation, cyclosporin A, Tolypocladium inflatum, TLC

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Authors: Mayssa Bensalah, Atef Boujelben, Mouna Baklouti, Mohamed Abid

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Image segmentation has a fundamental role in analysis and interpretation for many applications. The automated segmentation of organs and tissues throughout the body using computed imaging has been rapidly increasing. Indeed, it represents one of the most important parts of clinical diagnostic tools. In this paper, we discuss a thorough literature review of recent methods of tumour segmentation from medical images which are briefly explained with the recent contribution of various researchers. This study was followed by comparing these methods in order to define new directions to develop and improve the performance of the segmentation of the tumour area from medical images.

Keywords: features extraction, image segmentation, medical images, tumor detection

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Authors: Omar Pillaca-Pullo, Arturo Alejandro-Paredes, Carol Flores-Fernandez, Marijuly Sayuri Kina, Amparo Iris Zavaleta

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Aqueous two-phase system (ATPS) is an interesting alternative for separating industrial enzymes due to it is easy to scale-up and low cost. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) mixed with potassium phosphate or magnesium sulfate is one of the most frequently polymer/salt ATPS used, but the consequences of its use is a high concentration of phosphates and sulfates in wastewater causing environmental issues. Citrate could replace these inorganic salts due to it is biodegradable and does not produce toxic compounds. On the other hand, statistical design of experiments is widely used for ATPS optimization and it allows to study the effects of the involved variables in the purification, and to estimate their significant effects on selected responses and interactions. The 24 factorial design with four central points (20 experiments) was employed to study the partition and purification of proteases produced by Pseudomonas sp. in PEG/citrate ATPS system. ATPS was prepared with different sodium citrate concentrations [14, 16 and 18% (w/w)], pH values (7, 8 and 9), PEG molecular weight (2,000; 4,000 and 6,000 g/mol) and PEG concentrations [18, 20 and 22 % (w/w)]. All system components were mixed with 15% (w/w) of the fermented broth and deionized water was added to a final weight of 12.5 g. Then, the systems were mixed and kept at room temperature until to reach two-phases separation. Volumes of the top and bottom phases were measured, and aliquots from both phases were collected for subsequent proteolytic activity and total protein determination. Influence of variables such as PEG molar mass (MPEG), PEG concentration (CPEG), citrate concentration (CSal) and pH were evaluated on the following responses: purification factor (PF), activity yield (Y), partition coefficient (K) and selectivity (S). STATISTICA program version 10 was used for the analysis. According to the obtained results, higher levels of CPEG and MPEG had a positive effect on extraction, while pH did not influence on the process. On the other hand, the CSal could be related with low values of Y because of the citrate ions have a negative effect on solubility and enzymatic structure. The optimum values of Y (66.4 %), PF (1.8), K (5.5) and S (4.3) were obtained at CSal (18%), MPEG (6,000 g/mol), CPEG (22%) and pH 9. These results indicated that the PEG/citrate system is accurate to purify these Pseudomonas sp. proteases from fermented broth as a first purification step.

Keywords: citrate, polyethylene glycol, protease, Pseudomonas sp

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Authors: Judith Hanke

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Due to the increase of students with reading difficulties, digital reading support with diagnostics was developed to foster the individual student's reading comprehension. The digital reading support focused on the reading comprehension of elementary school students. The digital reading packages consist of literary texts with aligned reading exercises. The number of students with German as a second language is growing in Germany. Students with multilingualism, language 1, and language 2 learn German together in school. The research's focus is on determining whether and to what extent multilingualism, language 1, and language 2 affect reading comprehension. For the methodology, an ABA design was selected for the intervention study to examine the reading support. The study was expedited from April 2023 until July 2023 and collected quantitative data of individuals, groups, and classes. It comprised a survey group (N = 58) and a control group (N = 53). The quantitative data was collected from 3 classes of 3 teachers and 47 students for all three test times. To show differences between the groups, a standardized reading comprehension test was used for the three test times, pretest, posttest, and follow-up. The standardized test consists of three subtests regarding word comprehension, sentence comprehension, and text comprehension. The main findings include that students who spoke German as their first language had the best test scores. Interestingly, students with a different language had better testing scores than students with German as the first language and (an) other language/s. Also, the students with another language outperformed the native language speakers in one of the subtests of the post-testing. The variables of spoken language at home and German as a second language were also examined and correlated with the test results. One significant correlation was found between spoken language at home and the text comprehension test of the pretesting. Additionally, the variable German as a second language had multiple significant correlations in the pretest, posttest and follow-up. The study's significance is to understand the influence of several languages, language 1, and language 2, on reading comprehension.

Keywords: multilingualism, language 1, language 2, reading comprehension, second language

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Authors: Albert Kwabena Osei Konadu

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Pterocarpus erinaceus, also known as Rosewood, is tropical wood, endemic in forest savannah transition zones within the middle and northern portion of Ghana. Its economic viability has made it increasingly popular and in high demand, leading to widespread conservation concerns. Ghana’s forest resource management regime for these ecozones is mainly on conservation and very little on resource utilization. Consequently, commercial logging management standards are at teething stage and not fully developed, leading to a deficiency in the monitoring of logging operations and quantification of harvested trees volumes. Tree information form (TIF); a volume estimation and tracking regime, has proven to be an effective, sustainable management tool for regulating timber resource extraction in the high forest zones of the country. This work aims to generate TIF that can track and capture requisite parameters to accurately estimate the volume of harvested rosewood within forest savannah transition zones. Tree information forms were created on three scenarios of individual billets, stacked billets and conveying vessel basis. These TIFs were field-tested to deduce the most viable option for the tracking and estimation of harvested volumes of rosewood using the smallian and cubic volume estimation formula. Overall, four districts were covered with individual billets, stacked billets and conveying vessel scenarios registering mean volumes of 25.83m3,45.08m3 and 32.6m3, respectively. These adduced volumes were validated by benchmarking to assigned volumes of the Forestry Commission of Ghana and known standard volumes of conveying vessels. The results did indicate an underestimation of extracted volumes under the quotas regime, a situation that could lead to unintended overexploitation of the species. The research revealed conveying vessels route is the most viable volume estimation and tracking regime for the sustainable management of the Pterocarpous erinaceus species as it provided a more practical volume estimate and data extraction protocol.

Keywords: convention on international trade in endangered species, cubic volume formula, forest transition savannah zones, pterocarpus erinaceus, smallian’s volume formula, tree information form

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Authors: Bechir Hbibi, Lamine Mili

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Understanding the condition of comatose patients can be difficult, but it is crucial to their optimal treatment. Consequently, numerous scoring systems have been developed around the world to categorize patient states based on physiological assessments. Although validated and widely adopted by medical communities, these scores still present numerous limitations and obstacles. Even with the addition of additional tests and extensions, these scoring systems have not been able to overcome certain limitations, and it appears unlikely that they will be able to do so in the future. On the other hand, physiological tests are not the only way to extract ideas about comatose patients. EEG signal analysis has helped extensively to understand the human brain and human consciousness and has been used by researchers in the classification of different levels of disease. The use of EEG in the ICU has become an urgent matter in several cases and has been recommended by medical organizations. In this field, the EEG is used to investigate epilepsy, dementia, brain injuries, and many other neurological disorders. It has recently also been used to detect pain activity in some regions of the brain, for the detection of stress levels, and to evaluate sleep quality. In our recent findings, our aim was to use multifractal analysis, a very successful method of handling multifractal signals and feature extraction, to establish a state of awareness scale for comatose patients based on their electrical brain activity. The results show that this score could be instantaneous and could overcome many limitations with which the physiological scales stock. On the contrary, multifractal analysis stands out as a highly effective tool for characterizing non-stationary and self-similar signals. It demonstrates strong performance in extracting the properties of fractal and multifractal data, including signals and images. As such, we leverage this method, along with other features derived from EEG signal recordings from comatose patients, to develop a scale. This scale aims to accurately depict the vigilance state of patients in intensive care units and to address many of the limitations inherent in physiological scales such as the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) and the FOUR score. The results of applying version V0 of this approach to 30 patients with known GCS showed that the EEG-based score similarly describes the states of vigilance but distinguishes between the states of 8 sedated patients where the GCS could not be applied. Therefore, our approach could show promising results with patients with disabilities, injected with painkillers, and other categories where physiological scores could not be applied.

Keywords: coma, vigilance state, EEG, multifractal analysis, feature extraction

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Authors: Ming Qian, Davis Qian

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This study compares the different organization structures of Chinese and English writing discourses in the engineering and scientific fields, and recommends approaches for translators to convert the organization structures properly. Based on existing intercultural communication literature, English authors tend to deductively give their main points at the beginning, following with detailed explanations or arguments afterwards while the Chinese authors tend to place their main points inductively towards the end. In this study, this hypothesis has been verified by the authors’ Chinese-to-English translation experiences in the fields of science and engineering (e.g. journal papers, conference papers and monographs). The basic methodology used is the comparison of writings by Chinese authors with writings of the same or similar topic written by English authors in terms of organization structures. Translators should be aware of this nuance, so that instead of limiting themselves to translating the contents of an article in its original structure, they can convert the structures to fill the cross-culture gap. This approach can be controversial because if a translator changes the structure organization of a paragraph (e.g. from a 'because-therefore' inductive structure by a Chinese author to a deductive structure in English), this change of sentence order could be questioned by the original authors. For this reason, translators need to properly inform the original authors on the intercultural differences of English and Chinese writing (e.g. inductive structure versus deductive structure), and work with the original authors to maintain accuracy while converting from one structure used in a source language to another structure in the target language. The authors have incorporated these methodologies into their translation practices and work closely with the authors on the inter-cultural organization structure mapping. Translating discourse organization structure should become a standard practice in the translation process.

Keywords: discourse structure, information structure, intercultural communication, translation practice

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Authors: Chin-Yu Lin, Kun-Chi Wang, Shih-Hsu Wang, Wei-Chih Wang

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A construction superintendent needs to know not only the amount of quantities of cost items or materials completed to develop a daily report or calculate the daily progress (earned value) in each day, but also the amount of quantities of materials (e.g., reinforced steel and concrete) to be ordered (or moved into the jobsite) for performing the in-progress or ready-to-start construction activities (e.g., erection of reinforced steel and concrete pouring). These daily construction management tasks require great effort in extracting accurate quantities in a short time (usually must be completed right before getting off work every day). As a result, most superintendents can only provide these quantity data based on either what they see on the site (high inaccuracy) or the extraction of quantities from two-dimension (2D) construction drawings (high time consumption). Hence, the current practice of providing the amount of quantity data completed in each day needs improvement in terms of more accuracy and efficiency. Recently, a three-dimension (3D)-based building information model (BIM) technique has been widely applied to support construction quantity takeoffs (QTO) process. The capability of virtual reality (VR) allows to view a building from the first person's viewpoint. Thus, this study proposes an innovative system by integrating VR (using 'Unity') and BIM (using 'Revit') to extract quantities to support the above daily construction management tasks. The use of VR allows a system user to be present in a virtual building to more objectively assess the construction progress in the office. This VR- and BIM-based system is also facilitated by an integrated database (consisting of the information and data associated with the BIM model, QTO, and costs). In each day, a superintendent can work through a BIM-based virtual building to quickly identify (via a developed VR shooting function) the building components (or objects) that are in-progress or finished in the jobsite. And he then specifies a percentage (e.g., 20%, 50% or 100%) of completion of each identified building object based on his observation on the jobsite. Next, the system will generate the completed quantities that day by multiplying the specified percentage by the full quantities of the cost items (or materials) associated with the identified object. A building construction project located in northern Taiwan is used as a case study to test the benefits (i.e., accuracy and efficiency) of the proposed system in quantity extraction for supporting the development of daily reports and the orders of construction materials.

Keywords: building information model, construction management, quantity takeoffs, virtual reality

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Authors: Mohamed Rehan, Gamil E. Ibrahim, Mohamed S. Abdel-Aziz, Shaimaa R. Ibrahim, Tawfik A. Khattab

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The utilization of natural products in finishing textiles toward multifunctional applications without side effects is an extremely motivating goal. Hibiscus sabdariffa usually has been used for many traditional medicine applications. To develop an additional use for Hibiscus sabdariffa, an extraction of bioactive compounds from Hibiscus sabdariffa followed by finishing on cellulosic fibers was designed to cleaner production of the value-added textiles fibers with multifunctional applications. The objective of this study is to explore, identify, and evaluate the bioactive compound extracted from Hibiscus sabdariffa by different solvent via ultrasonic technique as a potential eco-friendly agent for multifunctional cellulosic fabrics via two approaches. In the first approach, Hibiscus sabdariffa extract was used as a source of sustainable eco-friendly for simultaneous coloration and multi-finishing of cotton fabrics via in situ incorporations of nanoparticles (silver and metal oxide). In the second approach, the micro-capsulation of Hibiscus sabdariffa extracts was followed by coating onto cotton gauze to introduce multifunctional healthcare applications. The effect of the solvent type was accelerated by ultrasonic on the phytochemical, antioxidant, and volatile compounds of Hibiscus sabdariffa. The surface morphology and elemental content of the treated fabrics were explored using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), scanning electron microscope (SEM), and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). The multifunctional properties of treated fabrics, including coloration, sensor properties and protective properties against pathogenic microorganisms and UV radiation as well as wound healing property were evaluated. The results showed that the water, as well as ethanol/water, was selected as a solvent for the extraction of natural compounds from Hibiscus Sabdariffa with high in extract yield, total phenolic contents, flavonoid contents, and antioxidant activity. These natural compounds were utilized to enhance cellulosic fibers functionalization by imparting faint/dark red color, antimicrobial against different organisms, and antioxidants as well as UV protection properties. The encapsulation of Hibiscus Sabdariffa extracts, as well as wound healing, is under consideration and evaluation. As a result, the current study presents a sustainable and eco-friendly approach to design cellulosic fabrics for multifunctional medical and healthcare applications.

Keywords: cellulosic fibers, Hibiscus sabdariffa extract, multifunctional application, nanoparticles

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Authors: María José Bugueño, Natalia Jaime, Cristian Castro, Diego Naranjo, Guido Trautmann, Mario Pérez-Won, Vilbett Briones-Labarca

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Proteins play a crucial role in various prepared foods, including dairy products, drinks, emulsions, and ready meals. These food proteins are naturally present in food waste and byproducts. The alkaline extraction and acid precipitation method is commonly used to extract proteins from plants and animals due to its product stability, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use. This study aimed to investigate the impact of pH-shifting storage at two different pH levels on the conformational changes affecting the physicochemical and functional properties of quinoa protein isolate (QPI) and yellow shrimp byproduct protein isolate (YSPI). The QPI and YSPI were extracted using the alkaline extraction-isoelectric precipitation method. The dispersions were adjusted to pH 4 or 12, stirred for 2 hours at 20°C to achieve a uniform dispersion, and then freeze-dried. Various analyses were conducted, including flexibility (F), free sulfhydryl content (Ho), emulsifying activity (EA), emulsifying capacity (EC), water holding capacity (WHC), oil holding capacity (OHC), intrinsic fluorescence, ultraviolet spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) to assess the properties of the protein isolates. pH-shifting at pH 11 and 12 for QPI and YSPI, respectively, significantly improved protein properties, while property modification of the samples treated under acidic conditions was less pronounced. Additionally, the pH 11 and 12 treatments significantly improved F, Ho, EA, WHC, OHC, intrinsic fluorescence, ultraviolet spectroscopy, DSC, and FTIR. The increase in Ho was due to disulfide bond disruption, which produced more protein sub-units than other treatments for both proteins. This study provides theoretical support for comprehensively elucidating the functional properties of protein isolates, promoting the application of plant proteins and marine byproducts. The pH-shifting process effectively improves the emulsifying property and stability of QPI and YSPI, which can be considered potential plant-based or marine byproduct-based emulsifiers for use in the food industry.

Keywords: quinoa protein, yellow shrimp by-product protein, physicochemical properties, structural properties

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Authors: Carine Kawakami

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In French, as well as in English, there are two types of psychological predicate constructions depending on where the experiencer argument is realized; the first type is in the subject position (e.g. Je regrette d’être venu ici. ‘I regret coming here'), hereinafter called ES construction, and the second type is in the object position (e.g. Cette nouvelle m’a surpris. ‘This new surprised me.'), referred as EO construction. In the previous studies about psychological predicates, the syntactic position of the experiencer argument has been just a matter of its connection with the syntactic or semantic structure of the predicate. So that few attentions have been paid to how two types of realization of experiencer are related to the conceptualization of psychological event and to the function of the sentence describing the psychological event, in the sense of speech act theory. In this research, focusing on the French phenomena limited to the first personal pronoun and the present tense, the ES constructions and the EO constructions will be analyzed from cognitive and functional approach. It will be revealed that, due to the possibility to be used in soliloquy and the high co-occurrence with ça (‘it’), the EO constructions may have expressive function to betray what speaker feels in hic et nunc, like interjection. And in the expressive case, the experiencer is construed as a locus where a feeling appears spontaneously and is construed subjectively (e.g. Ah, ça m’énerve! ‘Oh, it irritates me!'). On the other hand, the ES constructions describe speaker’s mental state in an assertive manner rather than the expressive and spontaneously way. In other words, they describe what speaker feels to the interlocutor (e.g. Je suis énervé. ‘I am irritated.'). As a consequence, when the experiencer argument is realized in the subject position, it is construed objectively and have a participant feature in the sense of cognitive grammar. Finally, it will be concluded that the choice of construction type, at least in French, is correlated to the conceptualization of the psychological event and the discourse feature of its expression.

Keywords: french psychological verb, conceptualization, expressive function, assertive function, experiencer realization

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Authors: F. Mutelet, L. Cesari

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Development of safer and environmentally friendly processes and products is needed to achieve sustainable production and consumption patterns. Ionic liquids, which are of great interest to the chemical and related industries because of their attractive properties as solvents, should be considered. Ionic liquids are comprised of an asymmetric, bulky organic cation and a weakly coordinating organic or inorganic anion. A large number of possible combinations allows for the ability to ‘fine tune’ the solvent properties for a specific purpose. Physical and chemical properties of ionic liquids are not only influenced by the nature of the cation and the nature of cation substituents but also by the polarity and the size of the anion. These features infer to ionic liquids numerous applications, in organic synthesis, separation processes, and electrochemistry. Separation processes required a good knowledge of the behavior of organic compounds with ionic liquids. Gas chromatography is a useful tool to estimate the interactions between organic compounds and ionic liquids. Indeed, retention data may be used to determine infinite dilution thermodynamic properties of volatile organic compounds in ionic liquids. Among others, the activity coefficient at infinite dilution is a direct measure of solute-ionic liquid interaction. In this work, infinite dilution thermodynamic properties of volatile organic compounds in specific bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide based ionic liquids measured by gas chromatography is presented. It was found that apolar compounds are not miscible in this family of ionic liquids. As expected, the solubility of organic compounds is related to their polarity and hydrogen-bond. Through activity coefficients data, the performance of these ionic liquids was evaluated for different separation processes (benzene/heptane, thiophene/heptane and pyridine/heptane). Results indicate that ionic liquids may be used for the extraction of polar compounds (aromatics, alcohols, pyridine, thiophene, tetrahydrofuran) from aliphatic media. For example, 1-benzylpyridinium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl) imide and 1-cyclohexylmethyl-1-methylpyrrolidinium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide are more efficient for the extraction of aromatics or pyridine from aliphatics than classical solvents. Ionic liquids with long alkyl chain length present important capacity values but their selectivity values are low. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that specific bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide based ILs containing polar chain grafted on the cation (for example benzyl or cyclohexyl) increases considerably their performance in separation processes.

Keywords: interaction organic solvent-ionic liquid, gas chromatography, solvation model, COSMO-RS

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Authors: Zaouche Khelil, Talha Abdelaziz, Berkouk El Madjid

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In this paper, we present a grid-tied photovoltaic system. The studied topology is structured around a seven-level inverter, supplying a non-linear load. A three-stage step-up DC/DC converter ensures DC-link balancing. The presented system allows the extraction of all the available photovoltaic power. This extracted energy feeds the local load; the surplus energy is injected into the electrical network. During poor weather conditions, where the photovoltaic panels cannot meet the energy needs of the load, the missing power is supplied by the electrical network. At the common connexion point, the network current shows excellent spectral performances.

Keywords: seven-level inverter, multi-level DC/DC converter, photovoltaic, non-linear load

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Authors: Tariku Nefo Duke

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Embelia is a genus of climbing shrubs in the family Myrsinaceae. Embelia schimperi is as important in traditional medicine as the other species in the genus. The plant has been much known as a local medicine for the treatment of tapeworms. In this project, extraction, phytochemical screening tests, isolation, and characterization of berries of the Embelia schimperi plant have been conducted. The chemical investigations of methanol and ethyl acetate (1:1) ratio extracts of the berries lead to the isolation of three new compounds. The compounds were identified to be alkaloids coded as AD, AN, and AG. Structural elucidations of the isolated compounds were accomplished using spectroscopic methods (IR, UV, ¹H NMR, ¹³C NMR, DEPT and 2D NMR, HPLC, and LC-MS). The alkaloid coded as (AN) has a wide MIC range of 6.31-25.46 mg/mL against all tested bacteria strains.

Keywords: Embelia schimper, HPLC, alkaloids, 2D NMR, MIC

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Authors: Wasantha Subasinghe

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Crimes are one of big social problems in Sri Lanka. Crimes can be seen as simply way as an activity that against for the society or public law. There are offences in minor crimes and grave crimes including murder, rape, trafficking, robbery, excise, narcotic, kidnapping and so on. There are various forms of punishment such as bailing, fining, and prisoning to the death penalty. Death penalty contains the killing of an offender for an offense. There are 23 prison institutions in Sri Lanka including 03 closed prisoners and 20 remand prisons. There are 10 work camps, 02 open prison camps, 01 training school for youthful offenders and 02 correctional centers for youthful offenders. Capital punishment is legal in Sri Lanka as many other countries as India, Japan, Bangladesh, Iran and Iraq so on. When compared unconvicted prisoners from 2006-2010 there is an increase. It was 89190 in 2006 and it was 100191 in 2010. There were 28732 of convicted prisoners and it was 32128 in 2010. There were 165 Death sentences in 2006 and it was 96 in 2010. There are 540 individuals had been sentenced to death. The death penalty has not been implemented in Sri Lanka since 1976. Research problem: What are the feelings of prisoners as waiting for death?’ Objectives of the study were identifying prisoners’ point of view on their punishment and root causes for their offence. Case studies were conducted to identify the research problem and data were collected using formal interviews. Research area was Welikada prison. Stratified sampling method in probability samplings was used. Sample size was 20 cases from death penalty and life in prison prisoners and 20 from other convicted prisoners. Findings revealed causes and feelings them as offenders. They need if death penalty or freedom. Some of them need to convert death sentence to life imprisonment. They are physically and mentally damaged after their imprisonment. Lack of hope and as well as lack of welfare and rehabilitation programs they suffered their lives.

Keywords: death penalty, expectations, life imprisonment, rehabilitation

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Authors: Yasser Almazrua

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Terrorism is a multidimensional phenomenon that has increased recently. Many countries started combating terrorism through security forces; however, there has been relatively little attention given to rehabilitation programs for people involved in such terrorism acts. In Saudi Arabia, after facing so many terrorist attacks, they started understanding and countering terrorism differently by establishing Mohammad bin Naif Counselling and Care Center in 2006. The center now is considered one of the top experience centers in the world for terrorist rehabilitation and ideology correction. The center offers different programs such as training, educational, social, art and psychological programs. One of the approaches that have been used by psychological experts at the center is Narrative Therapy. It is a therapeutic approach that focuses on the ability of the client to identify their personal life story. The client during therapy works as a storyteller where he or she gets insight, meaning and better understanding of their own lives. Because each client at the center had a story, it can be better fit method for rehabilitation towards healing and personal development. The case describes a 34-years-old man who was involved in some terrorism activities locally by technically and financially supporting a terrorist group related to Al-Qaida. The beneficiary joined Mohammad bin Naif Counseling and Care Center after serving his sentence. Informed of consent has been given to the beneficiary before starting the therapeutic program. Both qualitative and quantitative data on the beneficiary are collected by self-reporting during the initial session, and by using a psychological measurement. The result found that the beneficiary was not insightful about himself, and he had a high level of repression which relatedly moved him to be targeted for recruitment in the terrorist group. With rehabilitation and by using the therapeutic approach, the beneficiary improved on the level of insight, specifically about himself and also about the experience. This case illustrates the importance of considering the effect of Narrative Therapy in terrorist rehabilitation programs.

Keywords: narrative therapy, rehabilitation, Saudi Arabia, terrorism

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Authors: C. Brierley, H. El-Farahaty, A. Farhan

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The Leeds Parallel Corpus of Arabic-English Constitutions is a parallel corpus for the Arabic legal domain. Analysis of legal language via Corpus Linguistics techniques is an important development. In legal proceedings, a corpus-based approach to disambiguating meaning is set to replace the dictionary as an interpretative tool, and legal scholarship in the States is now attuned to the potential for Text Analytics over vast quantities of text-based legal material, following the business and medical industries. This trend is reflected in Europe: the interdisciplinary research group in Computer Assisted Legal Linguistics mines big data collections of legal and non-legal texts to analyse: legal interpretations; legal discourse; the comprehensibility of legal texts; conflict resolution; and linguistic human rights. This paper focuses on ‘dignity’ as an important aspect of the overarching concept of human rights in current constitutions across the Arab world. We have compiled a parallel, Arabic-English raw text corpus (169,861 Arabic words and 205,893 English words) from reputable websites such as the World Intellectual Property Organisation and CONSTITUTE, and uploaded and queried our corpus in Sketch Engine. Our most challenging task was sentence-level alignment of Arabic-English data. This entailed manual intervention to ensure correspondence on a one-to-many basis since Arabic sentences differ from English in length and punctuation. We have searched for morphological variants of ‘dignity’ (رامة ك, karāma) in the Arabic data and inspected their English translation equivalents. The term occurs most frequently in the Sudanese constitution (10 instances), and not at all in the constitution of Palestine. Its most frequent collocate, determined via the logDice statistic in Sketch Engine, is ‘human’ as in ‘human dignity’.

Keywords: Arabic constitution, corpus-based legal linguistics, human rights, parallel Arabic-English legal corpora

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Authors: Lung-Lung Hu

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Ronald Dworkin offered a legal theory of ‘chain enterprise’ that all the judges in legal history altogether create a ‘law’ aiming a specific purpose. Those judges are like co-writers of a chain-story who not only create freely but also are constrained by the story made by the judges before them. The law created by Chinese traditional judges is another case, they, compared with the judges mentioned by Ronald Dworkin, have relatively narrower space of making a legal sentence according to their own discretions because the statutes in Chinese traditional law at the very beginning have been designed as panel code that leaves small room to judge’s discretion. Furthermore, because law is a representative of the authority of the government, i.e. the emperor, any misjudges and misuses deviated from the law will be considered as a challenge to the supreme power. However, different from judges as the defenders of law, Chinese litigation masters who want to win legal cases have to be offenders challenging the verdict that does not favor his or his client’s interest. Besides, litigation master as an illegal or non-authorized profession does not belong to any legal system, therefore, they are relatively freer to ‘create’ the law. According to Stanley Fish’s articles that question Ronald Dworkin and Owen Fiss’ ideas about law, he construes that, since law is made of language, law is open to interpretations that cannot be constrained by any rules or any particular legal purposes. Stanley Fish’s idea can also be applied on the analysis about the stories of Chinese litigation masters in traditional Chinese literature. These Chinese litigation masters’ legal opinions in the so-called chain enterprise are like an unexpected episode that tries to revise the fixed story told by law. Although they are not welcome to the officials and also to the society, their existence is still a phenomenon representing another version of justice different from the official’s and can be seen as a de-structural power to the government. Hence, in this present paper the language and strategy applied by Chinese litigation masters in Chinese legal stories will be analysed to see how they refute made legal judgments and challenge the official standard of justice.

Keywords: Chinese legal stories, interdisciplinary, litigation master, post-structuralism

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Authors: Gamzegul Koca, Evrim Eveyik-Aydin

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Genre and discipline-specific knowledge of academic discourse in writing has long been acknowledged as being a core skill to achieve formidable tasks that are expected of graduate students in academic settings. Genre analysis approaches can be adopted to unveil the challenges encountered in these tasks to be able to take instructional actions addressing the aspects of graduate writing that need improvement. In an attempt to find genre-specific academic writing needs of Turkish students enrolled in a graduate program in ELT, this study examines the rhetorical structure of discussion sections of research articles written during the course load stage of their graduate studies. The 35.437-word specialized corpus of graduate papers compiled for the purpose of the study includes discussions of 58 unpublished reports of empirical studies, 31 written in MA courses and 27 in Ph.D. courses by a total of 44 graduate students. The study does sentence-based move structure analysis using the framework developed by Eveyik-Aydın, Karabacak and Akyel in a corpus-based study that analyzed the discussion moves of expert writers in published articles in ELT journals indexed by Social Sciences Citation. The coding of 1577 sentences by three graders using this framework revealed that while the graduate papers included the same moves used in published articles, the rhetorical structure of MA and Ph.D. papers showed considerable differences in terms of the frequency of occurrence of main discussion moves, including interpretation of the results and drawing implications. The implications of these findings will be discussed with respect to the needs of graduate writers and the expectations of discourse community.

Keywords: discussion moves, genre-specific rhetorical structure, move analysis, research articles, the specialized corpus of graduate papers

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Authors: Ramandeep Kaur, Gurjit Singh Bhathal

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Cancer diagnosis is very difficult task. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan is used to produce image of any part of the body and provides an efficient way for diagnosis of cancer or tumor. In existing method, fuzzy clustering mean (FCM) is used for the diagnosis of the tumor. In the proposed method FCM is used to diagnose the cancer of the foot. FCM finds the centroids of the clusters of the foot cancer obtained from MRI images. FCM thresholding result shows the extract region of the cancer. Morphological operations are applied to get extracted region of cancer.

Keywords: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), fuzzy C mean clustering, segmentation, morphological operations

Procedia PDF Downloads 385

Authors: David Taillis, Oussama Becissa, Julien Gabaston, Jean-Michel Merillon, Tristan Richard, Stephanie Cluzet

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Nowadays, there is a strong pressure to reduce the phytosanitary inputs of synthetic chemistry in vineyards. It is, therefore, necessary to find viable alternatives in order to protect the vine against its major diseases. For this purpose, we suggest the use of a plant extract enriched in antimicrobial compounds. Being produced from vine trunks and roots, which are co-products of wine production, the extract produced is part of a circular economy. The antimicrobial molecules present in this plant material are polyphenols and, more particularly, stilbenes, which are derived from a common base, the resveratrol unit, and that are well known vine phytoalexins. The stilbenoids were extracted from trunks and roots (30/70, w/w) by a double extraction with ethyl acetate followed by enrichment by liquid-liquid extraction. The produced extract was characterized by UHPLC-MS, then its antimicrobial activities were tested on Plasmopara viticola and Botrytis cinerea in the laboratory and/or in greenhouse and in vineyard. The major compounds were purified, and their antimicrobial activity was evaluated on B. cinerea. Moreover, after its spraying, the effect of the stilbene extract on the plant defence status was evaluated by analysis of defence gene expression. UHPLC-MS analysis revealed that the extract contains 50% stilbenes with resveratrol, ε-viniferin and r-viniferin as major compounds. The extract showed antimicrobial activities on P. viticola with IC₅₀ and IC₁₀₀ respectively of 90 and 300 mg/L in the laboratory. In addition, it inhibited 40% of downy mildew development in greenhouse. However, probably because of the sensitivity of stilbenes to the environment, such as UV degradation, no activity has been observed in vineyard towards P. viticola development. For B. cinerea, the extract IC50 was 123 mg/L, with resveratrol and ε-viniferin being the most active stilbenes (IC₅₀ of 88 and 142 mg/L, respectively). The analysis of the expression of defence genes revealed that the extract can induce the expression of some defence genes 24, 48, and 72 hours after treatment, meaning that the extract has a defence-stimulating effect at least for the first three days after treatment. In conclusion, we produced a plant extract enriched in stilbenes with antimicrobial properties against two major grapevine pathogenic agents P. viticola and B. cinerea. In addition, we showed that this extract displayed eliciting activity of plant defences. This extract can therefore represent, after formulation development, a viable eco-friendly alternative for vineyard protection. Subsequently, the effect of the stilbenoid extract on primary metabolism will be evaluated by quantitative NMR.

Keywords: antimicrobial, bioprotection, grapevine, Plasmopara viticola, stilbene

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Authors: Rabia Waseem, Low Kah Hin, Najihah Mohamed Hashim

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The variability in the chemical components of the Syzygium species essential oils has been evaluated. The leaves of Syzygium species have been collected from Perak, Malaysia. The essential oils extracted by using the conventional Hydro-distillation extraction procedure and analyzed by using Gas chromatography System attached with Mass Spectrometry (GCMS). Twenty-seven constituents were found in Syzygium species in which the major constituents include: α-Pinene (3.94%), α-Thujene (2.16%), α-Terpineol (2.95%), g-Elemene (2.89%) and D-Limonene (14.59%). The aim of this study was the comparison between the evaluated data and existing literature to fortify the major variability through statistical analysis.

Keywords: chemotaxonomy, cluster analysis, essential oil, medicinal plants, statistical analysis

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Authors: Sriraman Kothuri, Komal Teja Mattupalli

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In this paper we proposed a novel algorithm for recognizing hulls in a hand written digits. This is an extension to the work on “Digit Recognition Using Freeman Chain code”. In order to find out the hulls in a user given digit it is necessary to follow three steps. Those are pre-processing, Boundary Extraction and at last apply the Hull Detection system in a way to attain the better results. The detection of Hull Regions is mainly intended to increase the machine learning capability in detection of characters or digits. This can also extend this in order to get the hull regions and their intensities in Black Holes in Space Exploration.

Keywords: chain code, machine learning, hull regions, hull recognition system, SASK algorithm

Procedia PDF Downloads 392

Authors: H. Imad, Y. Cheah, O. Aamera

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The aims of this research are to study the mitochondrial non-coding region by using the Sanger sequencing technique and establish the degree of variation characteristics of a fragment. FTA® Technology (FTA™ paper DNA extraction) utilized to extract DNA. A portion of a non-coding region encompassing positions 37 to 340 amplified in accordance with the Anderson reference sequence. PCR products purified by EZ-10 spin column then sequenced and detected by using the ABI 3730xL DNA Analyzer. New polymorphic positions 57, 63, and 101 are described may in future be suitable sources for identification purpose. The data obtained can be used to identify variable nucleotide positions characterized by frequent occurrence most promising for identification variants.

Keywords: encompassing nucleotide positions 37 to 340, HVII, Iraq, mitochondrial DNA, polymorphism, frequency

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Authors: Mehmood Ali, Attaullah Khan, Md. Abul Kalam

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Petroleum crude oil reserves are going to deplete in future due to the consumption of fossil fuels in transportation and energy generating sector. Thus, increasing the fossil fuel prices and also causing environmental degradation issues such as climate change and global warming due to air pollution. Therefore, to tackle these issues the environmentally friendly fuels are the potential substitute with lower emissions of toxic gases. A non-edible vegetable oilseed crop, Jatropha curcas, from different origins such as Malaysia, Thailand and India were cultivated in Pakistan. The harvested seeds physical, chemical and mechanical properties were measured, having an influence on the post-harvesting machines design parameters for dehulling, storing bins, drying, oil extraction from seeds with a screw expeller and in-situ transesterification reaction to produce biodiesel fuel. The seed variety from Thailand was found better in comparison of its properties with other varieties from Malaysia and India. The seed yield from these three varieties i.e. Malaysia, Thailand and India were 829, 943 and 735 kg/ acre/ year respectively. While the oil extraction yield from Thailand variety seed was found higher (i.e. 32.61 % by wt.) as compared to other two varieties from Malaysia and India were 27.96 and 24.96 % by wt respectively. The physical properties investigated showed the geometric mean diameter of seeds from three varieties Malaysia, Thailand and India were 11.350, 10.505 and 11.324 mm, while the sphericity of seeds were found 0.656, 0.664 and 0.655. The bulk densities of the powdered seeds from three varieties Malaysia, Thailand and India, were found as 0.9697, 0.9932 and 0.9601 g/cm³ and % passing was obtained with sieve test were 78.7, 87.1 and 79.3 respectively. The densities of the extracted oil from three varieties Malaysia, Thailand and India were found 0.902, 0.898 and 0.902 g/ mL with corresponding kinematic viscosities 54.50, 49.18 and 48.16 mm2/sec respectively. The higher heating values (HHV) of extracted oil from Malaysia, Thailand and India seed varieties were measured as 40.29, 36.41 and 34.27 MJ/ kg, while the HHV of de-oiled cake from these varieties were 21.23, 20.78 and 17.31 MJ/kg respectively. The de-oiled cake can be used as compost with nutrients and carbon content to enhance soil fertility to grow future Jatropha curcas oil seed crops and also can be used as a fuel for heating and cooking purpose. Moreover, the mechanical parameter micro Vickers hardness of Malaysia seed was found lowest 16.30 HV measured with seed in a horizontal position to the loading in comparison to other two varieties as 25.2 and 18.7 HV from Thailand and India respectively. The fatty acid composition of three varieties of seed oil showed the presence of C8-C22, required to produce good quality biodiesel fuel. In terms of physicochemical properties of seeds and its extracted oil, the variety from Thailand was found better as compared to the other two varieties.

Keywords: biodiesel, Jatropha curcas, mechanical property, physico-chemical properties

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Authors: J. Y. Heo, H. G. Sung

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Numerical simulations have been performed for assessment of compressibility correction of two-equation turbulence models suitable for large scale separation flows perturbed by pintle strokes. In order to take into account pintle movement, a sliding mesh method was applied. The chamber pressure, mass flow rate, and thrust have been analyzed, and the response lag and sensitivity at the chamber and nozzle were estimated for a movable pintle. The nozzle performance for pintle reciprocating as its insertion and extraction processes, were analyzed to better understand the dynamic performance of the pintle nozzle.

Keywords: pintle, sliding mesh, turbulent model, compressibility correction

Procedia PDF Downloads 479