Search results for: human and animal power

Authors: Farhana Arzu, Roslan Hashim

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Renewable energy is the only alternative sources of energy to meet the current energy demand, healthy environment and future growth which is considered essential for essential sustainable development. Marine renewable energy is one of the major means to meet this demand. Turbines (both horizontal and vertical) play a vital role for extraction of tidal energy. The influence of swept area on the performance improvement of tidal turbine is a vital factor to study for the reduction of relatively high power generation cost in marine industry. This study concentrates on performance investigation of variable length blade tidal turbine concept that has already been proved as an efficient way to improve energy extraction in the wind industry. The concept of variable blade length utilizes the idea of increasing swept area through the turbine blade extension when the tidal stream velocity falls below the rated condition to maximize energy capture while blade retracts above rated condition. A three bladed horizontal axis variable length blade horizontal axis tidal turbine was modelled by modifying a standard fixed length blade turbine. Classical blade element momentum theory based numerical investigation has been carried out using QBlade software to predict performance. The results obtained from QBlade were compared with the available published results and found very good agreement. Three major performance parameters (i.e., thrust, moment, and power coefficients) and power output for different blade extensions were studied and compared with a standard fixed bladed baseline turbine at certain operational conditions. Substantial improvement in performance coefficient is observed with the increase in swept area of the turbine rotor. Power generation is found to increase in great extent when operating at below rated tidal stream velocity reducing the associated cost per unit electric power generation.

Keywords: variable length blade, performance, tidal turbine, power generation

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Authors: Hasan Vural

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The purpose of this study was to determine energy equivalents of inputs and output in tomato production in Bursa province. The data in this study were collected from tomato farms in Bursa province, Karacabey and Mustafakemalpasa district. Questionnaires were administered through face-to-face interview in 2011-2012. The results of the study show that diesel have the highest rate of energy equivalency of all the inputs used in tomato production at 60,07%. The energy equivalent rate of electricity is 4,26% and the energy equivalent rate of water is 0,87%. The energy equivalent rates for human power, machinery, chemicals and water for irrigation were determined to be low in tomato production. According to the output/input ratio calculated, the energy ratio is 1,50 in tomato production in the research area. This ratio implies that the inputs used in tomato production have not been used effectively. Ineffective use of these resources also causes environmental problems.

Keywords: Tomato production, energy ratio, energy input, Turkey

Procedia PDF Downloads 232

Authors: Iacopo Odoardi, Emanuele Felice, Dario D'Ingiullo

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We investigate the role of human capital in the Chinese inland-coastal inequality and how the consequences of the 2007-2008 crisis may induce China to refocus its development path on human capital. We compare panel data analyses for two periods for the richer/coastal and the relatively poor/inland provinces. Considering the rapid evolution of the Chinese economy and the changes forced by the international crisis, we wonder if these events can lead to rethinking local development paths, fostering greater attention on the diffusion of higher education. We expect that the consequences on human capital may, in turn, have consequences on the inland/coastal dualism. The focus on human capital is due to the fact that the growing differences between inland and coastal areas can be explained by the different local endowments. In this respect, human capital may play a major role and should be thoroughly investigated. To assess the extent to which human capital has an effect on economic growth, we consider a fixed-effects model where differences among the provinces are considered parametric shifts in the regression equation. Data refer to the 31 Chinese provinces for the periods 1998-2008 and 2009-2017. Our dependent variable is the annual variation of the provincial gross domestic product (GDP) at the prices of the previous year. Among our regressors, we include two proxies of advanced human capital and other known factors affecting economic development. We are aware of the problem of conceptual endogeneity of variables related to human capital with respect to GDP; we adopt an instrumental variable approach (two-stage least squares) to avoid inconsistent estimates. Our results suggest that the economic strengths that influenced the Chinese take-off and the dualism are confirmed in the first period. These results gain relevance in comparison with the second period. An evolution in local economic endowments is taking place: first, although human capital can have a positive effect on all provinces after the crisis, not all types of advanced education have a direct economic effect; second, the development path of the inland area is changing, with an evolution towards more productive sectors which can favor higher returns to human capital. New strengths (e.g., advanced education, transport infrastructures) could be useful to foster development paths of inland-coastal desirable convergence, especially by favoring the poorer provinces. Our findings suggest that in all provinces, human capital can be useful to promote convergence in growth paths, even if investments in tertiary education seem to have a negative role, most likely due to the inability to exploit the skills of highly educated workers. Furthermore, we observe important changes in the economic characteristics of the less developed internal provinces. These findings suggest an evolution towards more productive economic sectors, a greater ability to exploit both investments in fixed capital and the available infrastructures. All these aspects, if connected with the improvement in the returns to human capital (at least at the secondary level), lead us to assume a better reaction (i.e., resilience) of the less developed provinces to the crisis effects.

Keywords: human capital, inland-coastal inequality, Great Recession, China

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Authors: Ming-Yue Zhai

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Due to the multipath and pulse noise nature, power line communications(PLC) channel can be modelled as a memory one with the finite states Markov model(FSMC). As the most important parameter modelling a Markov channel,the memory order in an FSMC is not solved in PLC systems yet. In the paper, the mutual information is used as a measure of the dependence between the different symbols, treated as the received SNA or amplitude of the current channel symbol or that of previous symbols. The joint distribution probabilities of the envelopes in PLC systems are computed based on the multi-path channel model, which is commonly used in PLC. we confirm that given the information of the symbol immediately preceding the current one, any other previous symbol is independent of the current one in PLC systems, which means the PLC channels is a Markov chain with the first-order. The field test is also performed to model the received OFDM signals with the help of AR model. The results show that the first-order AR model is enough to model the fading channel in PLC systems, which means the amount of uncertainty remaining in the current symbol should be negligible, given the information corresponding to the immediately preceding one.

Keywords: power line communication, channel model, markovian, information theory, first-order

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Authors: Hassan Kian

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The future of millions of people and consequently, the future of societies and humanity is threatened by a great threat which is called wasted human resources. Perhaps Pasteur, Beethoven and Avicenna, Lavoisier and Einstein and millions of genius individuals and thinkers may have never been discovered and could not found a chance of being known due to various reasons such as poverty or social status, and other problems. So without being able to serve humanity, their talents are fully wasted. While, if a global mechanism exists to discover their talents in different countries and provide to them the right direction, during less than a generation, human society will face to a profound transformation and sustainable social justice will be formed as the basis of sustainable development of human resources. Therefore, the situation of the institution which organizes the affair of discovering and guiding talents was vacant at the level of the international community and its necessity has been felt. So in this plan, the establishment and development of such an organization have been suggested in the international context.

Keywords: talent identification, comparative advantage, sustainable justice, sustainable development

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Authors: Sonia Perez-Gamboa, Qingquan Sun, Yan Zhang

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Non-intrusive sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) is utilized in a spectrum of applications, including fitness tracking devices, gaming, health care monitoring, and smartphone applications. Deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNNs) provide a way to achieve HAR accurately and effectively. In this paper, we design a multi-layer hybrid architecture with CNN and LSTM and explore a variety of multi-layer combinations. Based on the exploration, we present a lightweight, hybrid, and multi-layer model, which can improve the recognition performance by integrating local features and scale-invariant with dependencies of activities. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model, which can achieve a 94.7% activity recognition rate on a benchmark human activity dataset. This model outperforms traditional machine learning and other deep learning methods. Additionally, our implementation achieves a balance between recognition rate and training time consumption.

Keywords: deep learning, LSTM, CNN, human activity recognition, inertial sensor

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Authors: R. Kiran, B. R. Lakshmikantha, R. V. Parimala

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Secure operation of power systems requires monitoring of the system operating conditions. Phasor measurement units (PMU) are the device, which uses synchronized signals from the GPS satellites, and provide the phasors information of voltage and currents at a given substation. The optimal locations for the PMUs must be determined, in order to avoid redundant use of PMUs. The objective of this paper is to make system observable by using minimum number of PMUs & the implementation of stability software at 22OkV grid for on-line estimation of the power system transfer capability based on voltage and thermal limitations and for security monitoring. This software utilizes State Estimator (SE) and synchrophasor PMU data sets for determining the power system operational margin under normal and contingency conditions. This software improves security of transmission system by continuously monitoring operational margin expressed in MW or in bus voltage angles, and alarms the operator if the margin violates a pre-defined threshold.

Keywords: state estimator (SE), flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS), optimal location, phasor measurement units (PMU)

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Authors: Yanuar Tri Wahyu Saputra, Ramadhani Pamapta Putra

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Karimunjawa is one among Indonesian islands which is lacking of electricity supply. Despite condition above, Karimunjawa is an important tourism object in Indonesia's Central Java Province. Solar Power Plant is a potential technology to be applied in Karimunjawa, in order to fulfill the island's electrical supply need and to increase daily life and tourism quality among tourists and local population. This optimation modeling of Karimunjawa uses HOMER software program. The data we uses include wind speed data in Karimunjawa from BMKG (Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics), annual weather data in Karimunjawa from NASA, electricity requirements assumption data based on number of houses and business infrastructures in Karimunjawa. This modeling aims to choose which three system categories offer the highest financial profit with the lowest total Net Present Cost (NPC). The first category uses only PV with 8000 kW of electrical power and NPC value of $6.830.701. The second category uses hybrid system which involves both 1000 kW PV and 100 kW generator which results in total NPC of $6.865.590. The last category uses only generator with 750 kW of electrical power that results in total NPC of $ 16.368.197, the highest total NPC among the three categories. Based on the analysis above, we can conclude that the most optimal way to fulfill the electricity needs in Karimunjawa is to use 8000 kW PV with lower maintenance cost.

Keywords: Karimunjawa, renewable energy, solar power plant, HOMER

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Authors: Andrea Pietrelli, Vincenzo Ferrara, Bruno Allard, Francois Buret, Irene Bavasso, Nicola Lovecchio, Francesca Costantini, Firas Khaled

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This paper aims to show some applications of microbial fuel cells (MFCs), an energy harvesting technique, as clean power source to supply low power device for application like wireless sensor network (WSN) for environmental monitoring. Furthermore, MFC can be used directly as biosensor to analyse parameters like pH and temperature or arranged in form of cluster devices in order to use as small power plant. An MFC is a bioreactor that converts energy stored in chemical bonds of organic matter into electrical energy, through a series of reactions catalysed by microorganisms. We have developed a lab-scale terrestrial microbial fuel cell (TMFC), based on soil that acts as source of bacteria and flow of nutrient and a lab-scale waste water microbial fuel cell (WWMFC), where waste water acts as flow of nutrient and bacteria. We performed large series of tests to exploit the capability as biosensor. The pH value has strong influence on the open circuit voltage (OCV) delivered from TMFCs. We analyzed three condition: test A and B were filled with same soil but changing pH from 6 to 6.63, test C was prepared using a different soil with a pH value of 6.3. Experimental results clearly show how with higher pH value a higher OCV was produced; indeed reactors are influenced by different values of pH which increases the voltage in case of a higher pH value until the best pH value of 7 is achieved. The influence of pH on OCV of lab-scales WWMFC was analyzed at pH value of 6.5, 7, 7.2, 7.5 and 8. WWMFCs are influenced from temperature more than TMFCs. We tested the power performance of WWMFCs considering four imposed values of ambient temperature. Results show how power performance increase proportionally with higher temperature values, doubling the output power from 20° to 40°. The best value of power produced from our lab-scale TMFC was equal to 310 μW using peaty soil, at 1KΩ, corresponding to a current of 0.5 mA. A TMFC can supply proper energy to low power devices of a WSN by means of the design of three stages scheme of an energy management system, which adapts voltage level of TMFC to those required by a WSN node, as 3.3V. Using a commercial DC/DC boost converter, that needs an input voltage of 700 mV, the current source of 0.5 mA, charges a capacitor of 6.8 mF until it will have accumulated an amount of charge equal to 700 mV in a time of 10 s. The output stage includes an output switch that close the circuit after a time of 10s + 1.5ms because the converter can boost the voltage from 0.7V to 3.3V in 1.5 ms. Furthermore, we tested in form of clusters connected in series up to 20 WWMFCs, we have obtained a high voltage value as output, around 10V, but low current value. MFC can be considered a suitable clean energy source to be used to supply low power devices as a WSN node or to be used directly as biosensor.

Keywords: energy harvesting, low power electronics, microbial fuel cell, terrestrial microbial fuel cell, waste-water microbial fuel cell, wireless sensor network

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Authors: Lai-Fen Yang

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In this increasingly visual world, how can we best decipher and understand the many ways that our everyday lives are organized around looking practices and the many images we encounter each day? Indeed, how we interact with and interpret visual images is a basic component of human life. Today, however, we are living in one of the most artificial visual and image-saturated cultures in human history, which makes understanding the complex construction and multiple social functions of visual imagery more important than ever before. Themes regarding our experience of a visually pervasive mediated culture, here, termed visual spectacle.

Keywords: visual culture, contemporary, images, literacy

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Authors: H. Fuad Usman, M. Rafay Khan Sial, Shahzaib Hamid

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The trend of renewable energy resources has been amplified due to global warming and other environmental related complications in the 21st century. Recent research has very much emphasized on the generation of electrical power through renewable resources like solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. The use of the photovoltaic cell has become very public as it is very useful for the domestic and commercial purpose overall the world. Although a single cell gives the low voltage output but connecting a number of cells in a series formed a complete module of the photovoltaic cells, it is becoming a financial investment as the use of it fetching popular. This also reduced the prices of the photovoltaic cell which gives the customers a confident of using this source for their electrical use. Photovoltaic cell gives the MPPT at single specific point of operation at a given temperature and level of solar intensity received at a given surface whereas the focal point changes over a large range depending upon the manufacturing factor, temperature conditions, intensity for insolation, instantaneous conditions for shading and aging factor for the photovoltaic cells. Two improved algorithms have been proposed in this article for the MPPT. The widely used algorithms are the ‘Incremental Conductance’ and ‘Perturb and Observe’ algorithms. To extract the maximum power from the source to the load, the duty cycle of the convertor will be effectively controlled. After assessing the previous techniques, this paper presents the improved and reformed idea of harvesting maximum power point from the photovoltaic cells. A thoroughly go through of the previous ideas has been observed before constructing the improvement in the traditional technique of MPP. Each technique has its own importance and boundaries at various weather conditions. An improved technique of implementing the use of both ‘Perturb and Observe’ and ‘Incremental Conductance’ is introduced.

Keywords: duty cycle, MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking), perturb and observe (P&O), photovoltaic module

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Authors: Ayesha Obaid, Abdur Rehman Cheema

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This study is about understanding the role of the gender division of work that has been assigned to men and women in different societies and cultures and its impact on labour force participation through economic development. Development in Gilgit Baltistan has been challenging due to its geographical conditions and the human development indicators are lower than the rest of the Pakistan. Various socioeconomic factors are identified that play an important role in determining the choices and roles men and women undertake for contributing towards the labour force. Our research highlights the areas lagging behind in gender equality in the labour market. The availability and access of gender over these socioeconomic resources determine gender mainstreaming in the labour market. It is a need of time that gender gaps should be addressed at the grass root level by the policy makers to enhance the growth and improve human development indicators.

Keywords: gender division of work, human development, indicators of socioeconomic factors, labour force

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Authors: Saleh Alshehri

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Human skin detection is a vital step in many applications. Some of the applications are critical especially those related to security. This leverages the importance of a high-performance detection algorithm. To validate the accuracy of the algorithm, image databases are usually used. However, the suitability of these image databases is still questionable. It is suggested that the suitability can be measured mainly by the span the database covers of the color space. This research investigates the validity of three famous image databases.

Keywords: image databases, image processing, pattern recognition, neural networks

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Authors: Da Tao, Tieyan Wang, Mingfu Qin

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While social robots have been increasingly developed and rapidly applied in our daily life, how robots should interact with humans is still an urgent problem to be explored. Appropriate use of interactive behavior is likely to create a good user experience in human-robot interaction situations, which in turn can improve people’s acceptance of robots. This paper aimed to systematically and quantitatively examine the effects of several important situational factors (i.e., interaction distance, interaction posture, and feedback style) on user experience during human-robot interaction. A three-factor mixed designed experiment was adopted in this study, where subjects were asked to interact with a social robot in different interaction situations by combinations of varied interaction distance, interaction posture, and feedback style. A set of data on users’ behavioral performance, subjective perceptions, and eye movement measures were tracked and collected, and analyzed by repeated measures analysis of variance. The results showed that the three situational factors showed no effects on behavioral performance in tasks during human-robot interaction. Interaction distance and feedback style yielded significant main effects and interaction effects on the proportion of fixation times. The proportion of fixation times on the robot is higher for negative feedback compared with positive feedback style. While the proportion of fixation times on the robot generally decreased with the increase of the interaction distance, it decreased more under the positive feedback style than under the negative feedback style. In addition, there were significant interaction effects on pupil diameter between interaction distance and posture. As interaction distance increased, mean pupil diameter became smaller in side interaction, while it became larger in frontal interaction. Moreover, the three situation factors had significant interaction effects on user acceptance of the interaction mode. The findings are helpful in the underlying mechanism of user experience in human-robot interaction situations and provide important implications for the design of robot behavioral expression and for optimal strategies to improve user experience during human-robot interaction.

Keywords: social robots, human-robot interaction, interaction posture, interaction distance, feedback style, user experience

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Authors: Aditi Acharya

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Environmental pollution is threatening the environmental and human health in the most drastic way. This paper provides insight about the affects of environmental pollution in the perspective of water pollution. Sewage in drinking water, the increasing contamination of water bodies and water resources and the human beings are the major contributors, increasing the harsh activities of pollution. The research presents information about the sources of pollution, its impacts and control activities to be undertaken to make our environment free from water pollution.

Keywords: environmental pollution, water pollution, nanotechnology, nanomaterials

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Authors: Shao Qi

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The article uses the CiteSpace knowledge graph analysis tool to sort and visualize the journal literature on urban plants and habitats in the Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure databases. Based on a comprehensive interpretation of the visualization results of various data sources and the description of the intrinsic relationship between high-frequency keywords using knowledge mapping, the research hotspots, processes and evolution trends in this field are analyzed. Relevant case studies are also conducted for the hotspot contents to explore the means of landscape intervention and synthesize the understanding of research theories. The results show that (1) from 1999 to 2022, the research direction of urban plants and habitats gradually changed from focusing on plant and animal extinction and biological invasion to the field of human urban habitat creation, ecological restoration, and ecosystem services. (2) The results of keyword emergence and keyword growth trend analysis show that habitat creation research has shown a rapid and stable growth trend since 2017, and ecological restoration has gained long-term sustained attention since 2004. The hotspots of future research on urban plants and habitats in China may focus on habitat creation and ecological restoration.

Keywords: research trends, visual analysis, habitat creation, ecological restoration

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Authors: Jiahui Song

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There have been decades of research into the action potential block in nerves. To our best knowledge electrical voltages can reversibly block the conduction of action potentials across whole animal nerves. Blocking biological electrical signaling pathways can have a variety of applications in muscular and sensory incapacitation and clinical research, including urethral pressure reduction and relieving chronic pain relief from a peripheral nerve injury. The cessation ability has been used in muscle activation and fatigue reduction. Ultrashort, high-intensity electric pulses modulate the membrane conductivity to block nerve conduction through the electroporation process. Nanopore formation on the membrane surface would increase the local membrane conductivity and effectively "short-out" the trans-membrane potential of a nerve that inhibits action potential propagation. This block would be similar in concept to stopping the propagation of an air-pressure wave down a "leaky" pipe. This research focuses on a distributed electrical model with an additional time-dependent membrane conductance to calculate the poration induced by the ultrashort, high-intensity electric pulses. The changes in membrane conductivity are used to predict changes in action potential transmission. A "strength-duration (SD)" curve is generated for action potential blockage and would be used as a design guide for benchmarking safety thresholds or setting the pulse voltage and/or durations necessary for neuro-muscular incapacitation.

Keywords: action potential, ultrashort, high-intensity, nerve, strength-duration

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Authors: Odeh Linus

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The pace of globalization is increasing continuously in terms of markets for goods and services, investment opportunities across borders amongst others. Enterprises face competition from all fronts. Human resource management is not left out in this transformation crusade as it has obligation to move along with the changing demands of the globalization process. One of the objectives of this paper is to show that effective managers should constantly be aware of the changes taking place in domestic (home country) environment, as well as around the globe (international and foreign environments) on HR issues and developments. By so doing, they can scan their environment on an ongoing basis, and when they detect opportunities and/or threats, they can transform their organization to seize the opportunities and/or combat or neutralize the threats as the case may be. In this presentation, problems, issues and trends in HRM practice in Nigeria in the current period were reviewed. The factors affecting HRM and its practice in a global context and what should be the direction of the profession and its practice in Nigeria constitute the main focus of this paper.

Keywords: human resource, globalization, management, developing countries

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Authors: Ummi Sholihah Pertiwi Abidin, Khusnul Hajar Nuansari

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Human resource is one of the most important components that can not be separated from communication fields, either in a large community like a mass or narrow ones such as an institution, office, group and even family. Human resource is an asset which is often used as a tool to achieve certain goals. Therefore, development of human resources is essential for improving skills and character of a person especially at the time that has entered globalization era. People are required to be able to compete both in the local and international arena, no matter what. This paper raised topic related to human resource development solution by a unique educational leadership and communication skill improvement through a linguistic approach. Here the authors want to go by form of public speaking method applied in Modern Islamic Boarding School Darussalam Gontor as the extracurricular activity that is using three languages, they are: Indonesian as the mother language or the nation language of the students, Arabic and English as the second language and Gontor’s mean to supply its students to be able to conquer the globalization needs. This implementation produced the establishment of great leaders through confidence growing to speak in public by adjusting the listener context. In linguistic term, it will help enhancing verbal and nonverbal communication skills and so forth in owning a lot of vocabulary.

Keywords: public speaking, Gontor, language, leadership

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Authors: S. Bahrami, A. Rezaie, Z. Boroumand, S. Ghavami

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Neospora caninum is protozoan parasite which can cause a serious disease in dogs and cattle. It has been shown that birds may be a permissive intermediate host for N. caninum since parasite DNA has been detected in tissues from birds. It is showed that embryonated chicken egg can be used as an animal model for experimental infection. The aim of present study was to compare experimental infection of Neospora in chicken and pigeons embryonated eggs. An infection with N. caninum Nc1 isolate was conducted in chicken and pigeons embryonated eggs to evaluate LD50. After calculation of LD50, 2LD50 of tachyzoites were injected to eggs. Macroscopic changes of each embryo were noticed and to investigate the parasite distribution in tissues immunohistochemistry (IHC) and molecular methods were used. In the present study, histopathological changes were considered and sections to those used for histopathological examination including heart, liver, brain and chorioallantoic (CA) membrane were subjected to IHC, too. For PCR procedure, primer pair Np21/Np6 was used for amplification of the Nc5 gene. Pigeon's embryo showed more macroscopic changes than chicken embryo. A hemorrhage of the CA was the main grass lesion. All the infected tissues had histopathological changes. Microscopic examination of tissues revealed acute neosporosis due to hemorrhage, necrosis and infiltration of mononuclear inflammatory cells. Based on IHC and molecular results, the parasite aggregation in the heart was more predominant than in the other tissues. These results reinforce that there is genetic susceptibility to N. caninum in pigeons embryonated eggs like chickens embryonated eggs and provide new insights to research an inexpensive and available animal model for N. caninum.

Keywords: immunohistochemistry, Neospora caninum, PCR, pigeon embryonated egg

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Authors: Puthsodary Tat

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Democracy has been categorially accepted and used as foreign and domestic policy agendas for the hope of peace, economic growth and prosperity for more than 25 years in Cambodia. However, the country is now in the grip of dictatorship, human rights violations, and prospective economic sanctions. This paper examines different perceptions and experiences of democratic assistance. In this study, the author employs discourse theory, idealism and realism as a theory-based methodology for debating and assessing the implications of democratization. Discourse theory is used to establish a platform for understanding discursive formations, body of knowledge and the games of truth of democracy. Idealist approaches give rational arguments for adopting key tenets that work well on the ground. In contrast, realism allows for some sweeping critiques of utopian ideal and offers particular views on why Western hegemonic missions do not work well. From idealist views, the research finds that Cambodian people still believe that democracy is a prima facie universality for peace, growth and prosperity. From realism, democratization is on the brink of death in three reasons. Firstly, there are tensions between Western and local discourses about democratic values and norms. Secondly, democratic tenets have been undermined by the ruling party-controlled courts, corruption, structural oppression and political patronage-based institutions. The third pitfall is partly associated with foreign aid dependency and geopolitical power struggles in the region. Finally, the study offers a precise mosaic of democratic principles that may be used to avoid a future geopolitical and economic crisis.

Keywords: corruption, democracy, democratic principles, discourse theory, discursive formations, foreign aid dependency, games of truth, geopolitical and economic crisis, geopolitical power struggle, hegemonic mission, idealism, realism, utopian ideal

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Authors: Maryam Torabi, Habibi, Abdolahi, Mohammadi, Hassanzadeh, Darban Maghami, Baghi

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Sheeppox Virus (SPPV) and goatpox virus (GTPV) are considerable diseases of sheep, and goats, caused by viruses of the Capripoxvirus (CaPV) genus. They are responsible for economic losses. Animal mortality, morbidity, cost of vaccinations, and restrictions in animal products’ trade are the reasons of economic losses. Control and eradication of CaPV depend on early detection of outbreaks so that molecular detection and genetic analysis could be effective to this aim. This study was undertaken to molecularly characterize SPPV and GTPV strains that have been circulating in Iran. 120 skin papules and nodule biopsies were collected from different regions of Iran and were examined for SPPV, GTPV viruses using TaqMan Real -Time PCR. Some of these amplified genes were sequenced, and phylogenetic trees were constructed. Out of the 120 samples analysed, 98 were positive for CaPV by Real- Time PCR (81.6%), and most of them wereSPPV. then 10 positive samples were sequenced and characterized by amplifying the ORF 103CaPV gene. sequencing and phylogenetic analysis for these positive samples revealed a high percentage of identity with SPPV isolated from different countries in Middle East. In conclusions, molecular characterization revealed nearly complete identity with all recent SPPVs strains in local countries that requires further studies to monitor the virus evolution and transmission pathways to better understand the virus pathobiology that will help for SPPV control.

Keywords: molecular epidemiology, Real-Time PCR, phylogenetic analysis, capripoxviruses

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Authors: Zichun Chu

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The issue of tribal poverty has always attracted attentions. Due to social and economic difficulties, the indigenous people's personal development and tribal development have been greatly restricted. Past studies have pointed out that poverty may come from a lack of education. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) also stated that if we are to solve the poverty problem, providing education widely is an important key. According to the theory of intellectual capital adaptation, “being capable” and “willing to do” are the keys of development. Therefore, we can say that the "ability" and "will" of tribal residents for their tribal development is the core concern of the tribal development. This research was designed to investigate the career choice development model of indigenous tribe people by investigating the current status of human capital, social capital, and cultural capital of tribal residents. This study collected 327 questionnaires (70% of total households) from Truku tribe to answer the research question: Did education help them for job choosing decisions from the aspects of human capital, social capital, and cultural capital in tribal status. This project highlighted the ‘single tribal research approach’ to gain an in-depth understanding of the human capital formed under the unique culture of the tribe (Truku tribe). The results show that the education level of most research participants was high school, very few high school graduates chose to further their education to college level; due to the lack of education of their parents, the social capital was limited to support them for jobs choice, most of them work for labor and service industries; however, their culture capital was comparably rich for works, the sharing culture of Taiwanese indigenous people made their work status stable. The results suggested that we should emphasize more on the development of vocational education based on the tribe’s location and resources. The self-advocacy of indigenous people should be developed so that they would gain more power on making career decisions. This research project is part of a pilot project called “INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, POVERTY, AND DEVELOPMENT,” sponsored by the National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan. If this paper were accepted to present in the 2023 ICIP, it would be lovely if a panel is formed for me and other co-researchers (Chuanju Cheng, Chih-Yuan Weng, and YiXuan Chen), for the audience will be able to get a full picture of this pilot project.

Keywords: career choices, career model, indegenous career development, indigenous education, tribe

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Authors: Erdinç Vural, Bülent Özdalyan, Serkan Özel

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The four-stroke single cylinder diesel engine has been used in this study, the pistons and valves of the engine have been stabilized, the aluminum oxide (Al₂O₃) in different ratios has been added in the power of zirconium (ZrO₂) magnesium oxide (MgO), and has been coated with the plasma spray method. The pistons and valves of the combustion chamber of the engine are coated with 5 different (ZrO₂ + MgO), (ZrO₂ + MgO + 25% Al₂O₃), (ZrO₂ + MgO + 50% Al₂O₃), (ZrO₂ + MgO + 75% Al₂O₃), (Al₂O₃) sample. The material tests have been made for each of the coated engine parts with the scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) using Cu Kα radiation surface analysis methods. The engine tests have been repeated for each sample in any electric dynamometer in full power 1600 rpm, 2000 rpm, 2400 rpm and 2800 rpm engine speeds. The material analysis and engine tests have shown that the best performance has been performed with (ZrO₂ + MgO + 50% Al₂O₃). Thus, there is no significant change in HC and Smoke emissions, but NOx emission is increased, as the engine improves power, torque, specific fuel consumption and CO emissions in the tests made with sample A3.

Keywords: ceramic coating, material characterization, engine performance, exhaust emissions

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Authors: M. Kaouane, A. Boukhelifa, A. Cheriti

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In this paper, a new Buck-Boost DC-DC converter is designed and simulated for photovoltaic energy system. The presented Buck-Boost converter has a double switch. Moreover, its output voltage is regulated to a constant value whatever its input is. In the presented work, the Buck-Boost transfers the produced energy from the photovoltaic generator to an R-L load. The converter is controlled by the pulse width modulation technique in a way to have a suitable output voltage, in the other hand, to carry the generator’s power, and put it close to the maximum possible power that can be generated by introducing the right duty cycle of the pulse width modulation signals that control the switches of the converter; each component and each parameter of the proposed circuit is well calculated using the equations that describe each operating mode of the converter. The proposed configuration of Buck-Boost converter has been simulated in Matlab/Simulink environment; the simulation results show that it is a good choice to take in order to maintain the output voltage constant while ensuring a good energy transfer.

Keywords: Buck-Boost converter, switch, photovoltaic, PWM, power, energy transfer

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Authors: Sara Mostofian

Abstract:

The nuclear industry is a technology that can fulfill future energy needs but requires special attention to ensure safety and reliability while minimizing any environmental impact. To meet these expectations, the nuclear industry is exploring different reactor technologies for power production. Several designs are under development and the technical viability of these new designs is the subject of many ongoing studies. One of these studies considers the radioactive emissions and radioactive waste generated during the life of a nuclear power production plant to allow a successful license process. For all the modern technologies, a good understanding of the radioactivity generated in the process systems of the plant is essential. Some of that understanding may be gleaned from the performance of some prototype reactors of similar design that operated decades ago. This paper presents how, with that understanding, a model can be developed to estimate the emissions as well as the radioactive waste during the normal operation of a nuclear power plant. The model would predict the radioactive material concentrations in different waste streams. Using this information, the radioactive emission and waste generated during the life of these new technologies can be estimated during the early stages of the design of the plant.

Keywords: SMRs, activity transport, model, radioactive waste

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Authors: Sebastiana Viphindratin, Silvi Asna

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The under ground economy phenomenon is exist in Indonesia. There are some factors which affect the existence this underground economy activity. One of them is a hierarchy power structure that handles the underground economy existence. The example of the existence of underground economy is the occurring informal market in Indonesia. Malang city is one of the city which has this kind of market. Junk night market (JNM) as an underground economy activity is arising in that city. The JNM is located in Gatot Subroto Sidewalk Street. The JNM is a illegal market which sell thrift, antique, imitation and black market goods. The JNM is interesting topic to be discussed, because this market is running in long time without any policy from local government. The JNM activity has their own “power” that run the market rules. Thus, it is important to analyze how the existence and power structure of JNM actors community are in Malang city. This research using qualitative method with phenomenological approach where we try to understand the phenomenon and related actors deeply. The aim of this research is to know the existence and power structure of JNM actors community in Malang. In JNM, there is no any entry barriers and tax charge from Malang government itself. Price competition also occurs because the buyer can do a bargain with the seller. In maintaining buyer loyalty, the JNM actors also do pre-order system. Even though, this market is an illegal market but the JNM actors also give the goods guarantee (without legal contract) as a formal market. In JNM actor’s community, there is no hierarchy and formal power structure. The role in JNM is managed by informal leaders who come up from the trading activity problems that are sidewalk and parking area dividing. Therefore, can be concluded that even the JNM is illegal market but it can survive with natural market pattern. In JNM development, JNM has positive and negative impact for Malang city. The positive impact of JNM is this market can open a new employment but the negative impact is there is no tax income from that market. Therefore, suggested that the government of Malang city should manage and give appropriate policies in this case.

Keywords: junk night market (JNM), Malang city, underground economy, illegal

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Authors: Erick C. Valverde, Wansu Lim

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Facial emotion recognition (FER) system has been recently developed for more advanced computer vision applications. The ability to identify human emotions would enable smart healthcare facility to diagnose mental health illnesses (e.g., depression and stress) as well as better human social interactions with smart technologies. The FER system involves two steps: 1) face detection task and 2) facial emotion recognition task. It classifies the human expression in various categories such as angry, disgust, fear, happy, sad, surprise, and neutral. This system requires intensive research to address issues with human diversity, various unique human expressions, and variety of human facial features due to age differences. These issues generally affect the ability of the FER system to detect human emotions with high accuracy. Early stage of FER systems used simple supervised classification task algorithms like K-nearest neighbors (KNN) and artificial neural networks (ANN). These conventional FER systems have issues with low accuracy due to its inefficiency to extract significant features of several human emotions. To increase the accuracy of FER systems, deep learning (DL)-based methods, like convolutional neural networks (CNN), are proposed. These methods can find more complex features in the human face by means of the deeper connections within its architectures. However, the inference speed and computational costs of a DL-based FER system is often disregarded in exchange for higher accuracy results. To cope with this drawback, an optimized DL-based FER system is proposed in this study.An extreme version of Inception V3, known as Xception model, is leveraged by applying different network optimization methods. Specifically, network pruning and quantization are used to enable lower computational costs and reduce memory usage, respectively. To support low resource requirements, a 68-landmark face detector from Dlib is used in the early step of the FER system.Furthermore, a DL compiler is utilized to incorporate advanced optimization techniques to the Xception model to improve the inference speed of the FER system. In comparison to VGG-Net and ResNet50, the proposed optimized DL-based FER system experimentally demonstrates the objectives of the network optimization methods used. As a result, the proposed approach can be used to create an efficient and real-time FER system.

Keywords: deep learning, face detection, facial emotion recognition, network optimization methods

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Authors: Aseel Zibin, Abdel Rahman Altakhaineh

Abstract:

This study analyses 30 cartoons depicting THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY as envisaged by two Jordanian cartoonists, namely, EmadHajjaj and Osama Hajjaj. Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) and Multimodal Metaphor Theory (MMT) are adopted as a theoretical framework to interpret the metaphors and metonymies used in the target cartoons. The results reveal that the target domain THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY was conceptualized mainly through layered metaphors that have metonymic basis and event metaphors\allegories. Specifically, 6 groups were identified: OBJECT or a situation involving OBJECTS, situations involving HUMANS\HYBRIDS of HUMANS and OBJECTS, an ANIMAL OR situation involving an ANIMAL, hybrids of WEAPONS and humans, and event metaphors used to build a story\allegory. The target domain was also depicted via event metaphors used to build a story; some of which are embedded in the Jordanian culture, while others could be perceivable cross-culturally. The results also demonstrate that the most widely used configurations to construe the metaphors was the pictorial source–verbal target in line with Lan and Zuo (2016); the motivation was probably the greater conceptual density and concreteness of visual representation since the target is better captured verbally because of its abstractness. The use of cross-modal mappings of this type was attributed to the abstractness of the target domain, THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY, which makes it more construable via verbal cues rather than visual ones. In contrast, the source domains used were mainly concrete and thus perceivable pictorially rather than verbally.

Keywords: semiotics, cognitive semantics, metaphor, culture, blending, cartoon

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Authors: Nutthawadee Jampanil, Kattareeya Kumthip, Niwat Maneekarn, Pattara Khamrin

Abstract:

Rotavirus A is one of the leading causes of acute gastroenteritis in children younger than five years of age, especially in low-income countries in Africa and South Asia. Two live-attenuated oral rotavirus vaccines, Rotarix and RotaTeq, have been introduced into routine immunization programs in many countries and have proven highly effective in reducing the burden of rotavirus-associated morbidity and mortality. In Thailand, Rotarix and RotaTeq vaccines have been included in the national childhood immunization program since 2020. The objectives of this research are to conduct a molecular epidemiological study and to characterize rotavirus genotypes circulating in pediatric patients with acute diarrhea in Chiang Mai, Thailand, from 2020-2022 after the implementation of rotavirus vaccines. Out of 858 stool specimens, 26 (3.0%) were positive for rotavirus A. G3P[8] (23.0%) was detected as the most predominant genotype, followed by G1P[8] (19.2%), G8P[8] (19.2%), G9P[8] (15.3%), G2P[4] (7.7%), G1P[6] (3.9%), G9P[4] (3.9%), and G8P[X] (3.9%). In addition, the uncommon rotavirus strain G3P[23] (3.9%) was also detected in this study, and this G3P[23] strain displayed a genetic background similar to the porcine rotavirus. In conclusion, there was a dramatic change in the prevalence of rotavirus A infection and the diversity of rotavirus A genotypes in pediatric patients in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, in the rotavirus post-vaccination period. The finding obtained from this research contributes to a better understanding of rotavirus epidemiology after rotavirus vaccine introduction. Furthermore, the identification of unusual G and P genotype combination strains provides significant evidence for the potential interspecies transmission between human and animal rotaviruses.

Keywords: rotavirus, infectious disease, gastroenteritis, Thailand

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