Search results for: socioeconomic features

Authors: Rimzhim Gupta, Bhanupriya Boruah, Jayant M. Modak, Giridhar Madras

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Microbial contamination is one of the major concerns in the field of water treatment. AOP (advanced oxidation processes) is well-established method to resolve the issue of removal of contaminants in water. A Z-scheme composite g-C₃N₄/CuWO₄ was synthesized by sol-gel method for the photocatalytic inactivation of a mixed population of Gram-positive bacteria (S. aureus) and Gram-negative bacteria (E. coli). The photoinactivation was observed for different types of bacteria in the same medium together and individually in the absence of the nutrients. The lattice structures and phase purities were determined by X-ray diffraction. For morphological and topographical features, scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy analyses were carried out. The band edges of the semiconductor (valence band and conduction band) were determined by ultraviolet photoelectron microscopy. The lifetime of the charge carriers and band gap of the semiconductors were determined by time resolved florescence spectroscopy and diffused reflectance spectroscopy, respectively. The effect of weight ratio of C₃N₄ and CuWO₄ was observed by performing photocatalytic experiments. To investigate the exact mechanism and major responsible radicals for photocatalysis, scavenger studies were performed. The rate constants and order of the inactivation reactions were obtained by power law kinetics. For E. coli and S. aureus, the order of reaction and rate constants are 1.15, 0.9 and 1.39 ± 0.03 (CFU/mL)⁻⁰.¹⁵ h⁻¹, 47.95 ± 1.2 (CFU/mL)⁰.¹ h⁻¹, respectively.

Keywords: z-scheme, E. coli, S. aureus, sol-gel

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Authors: Érick Aragão Ribeiro, George André Pereira Thé, José Marques Soares

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Several problems in industrial supervision software development projects may lead to the delay or cancellation of projects. These problems can be avoided or contained by using identification methods, analysis and control of risks. These procedures can give an overview of the possible problems that can happen in the projects and what are the immediate solutions. Therefore, we propose a risk management method applied to the teaching and development of industrial supervision software. The method is developed through a literature review and previous projects can be divided into phases of management and have basic features that are validated with experimental research carried out by mechatronics engineering students and professionals. The management is conducted through the stages of identification, analysis, planning, monitoring, control and communication of risks. Programmers use a method of prioritizing risks considering the gravity and the possibility of occurrence of the risk. The outputs of the method indicate which risks occurred or are about to happen. The first results indicate which risks occur at different stages of the project and what risks have a high probability of occurring. The results show the efficiency of the proposed method compared to other methods, showing the improvement of software quality and leading developers in their decisions. This new way of developing supervision software helps students identify design problems, evaluate software developed and propose effective solutions. We conclude that the risk management optimizes the development of the industrial process control software and provides higher quality to the product.

Keywords: supervision software, risk management, industrial supervision, project management

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Authors: Rafael Carlos C. Aniceto, Bryce Abraham M. Anos, Don Christian A. Cornel, Marjerie Brianna S. Go, Samantha Nicole U. Roque, Earl Christian C. Te

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Indigenous peoples (IPs) in the Philippines are a vulnerable, marginalized group in terms of health and overall well-being due to social inequities and cultural differences. National standards regarding maternal healthcare are geared towards facility-based delivery with modern medicine, health services, and skilled birth attendants. Standards and procedures of care for pregnant mothers do not take into account cultural differences between indigenous people and the majority of the population. There do exist, however, numerous other factors that cause relatively poorer health outcomes among indigenous peoples (IPs). This analytic cross-sectional study sought to determine the association between social determinants of health (SDH), focusing on status as indigenous peoples, and maternal health-related knowledge and attitudes (KA), and health behavior of the Dumagat-Agta indigenous people of Barangay Catablingan and Barangay San Marcelino, General Nakar, Quezon Province, and their utilization of health facilities for antenatal care, facility-based delivery and postpartum care, which would affect their health outcomes (that were not within the scope of this study). To quantitatively measure the primary/secondary exposures and outcomes, a total of 90 face-to-face interviews with IP and non-IP mothers were done. For qualitative information, participant observation among 6 communities (5 IP and 1 non-IP), 11 key informant interviews (traditional and modern health providers) and 4 focused group discussions among IP mothers were conducted. Primary quantitative analyses included chi-squared, T-test and binary logistic regression, while secondary qualitative analyses involved thematic analysis and triangulation. The researchers spent a total of 15 days in the community to learn the culture and participate in the practices of the Dumagat-Agta more intensively and deeply. Overall, utilization of all MNCHN services measured in the study was lower for IP mothers compared to their non-IP counterparts. After controlling for confounders measured in the study, IP status (primary exposure) was found to be significantly correlated with utilization of and adherence to two MNCHN-prescribed services: number of antenatal care check-ups and place of delivery (secondary outcomes). Findings show that being an indigenous mother leads to unfavorable social determinants of health, and if compounded by a difference in knowledge and attitudes, would then lead to poor levels of utilization of MNCHN-prescribed services. Key themes from qualitative analyses show that factors that affected utilization were: culture, land alienation, social discrimination, socioeconomic status, and relations between IPs and non-IPs, specifically with non-IP healthcare providers. The findings of this study aim to be used to help and guide in policy-making, to provide healthcare that is not only adequate and of quality, but more importantly, that addresses inequities stemming from various social determinants, and which is socio-culturally acceptable to indigenous communities. To address the root causes of health problems of IPs, there must be full recognition and exercise of their collective rights to communal assets, specifically land, and self-determination. This would improve maternal and child health outcomes to one of the most vulnerable and neglected sectors in society today.

Keywords: child health, indigenous people, knowledge-attitudes-practices, maternal health, social determinants of health

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Authors: Samuel Alaba Akinwotu

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Over the years, Nigeria’s educational system has greatly suffered from the menace of industrial conflict. The smooth running of the nation’s public educational institutions has been hampered by incessant strikes embarked upon by workers of these institutions. Even though industrial conflicts in Nigeria have enjoyed wide reportage in the media, there has been a dearth of critical examination of the language use that index the conflict’s discourse in the media. This study which is driven by a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Conceptual Metaphor (CM) examines the discursive and ideological features of language indexing the industrial conflict between the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) in 2013. It aims to identify and assess the conceptual and cognitive motivations of the stances expressed by the parties and the public and the role of the media in the management and resolution of the conflict. For data, media reports and readers’ comments were purposively sampled from six print and online news sources (The Punch, This Day, Vanguard, The Nation, Osun Defender and AITonline) published between July and December 2013. The study provides further insight into industrial conflict and proves to be useful for the management and resolution of industrial conflicts especially in our public educational institutions.

Keywords: industrial conflict, critical discourse analysis, conceptual metaphor, federal government of Nigeria, academic staff union of universities

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Authors: Leila Najeh

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This study investigates the motivational factors influencing Tunisian university students learning English through online platforms. Using a mixed-methods approach, data were collected from 112 undergraduate students of English across universities in Tunisia. The study employed an online questionnaire to measure intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, incorporating the Learning Motivation Questionnaire (FFLLM-Q) developed by Gonzales in 2001 and semi-structured interviews to explore students’ perspectives on their online learning experiences. Quantitative analysis revealed a significant correlation between intrinsic motivation and interactive features such as gamification and adaptive content delivery, while extrinsic motivation was strongly linked to career aspirations and academic requirements. Qualitative findings highlighted challenges such as limited interaction with peers and teachers, technical constraints, and a lack of immediate feedback as demotivating factors. Participants expressed a preference for blended learning models, combining the flexibility of online education with the collaborative environment of traditional classrooms. This study underscores the need for tailored online learning solutions to enhance the motivational landscape for Tunisian students, emphasizing the importance of culturally relevant content, accessible platforms, and supportive learning communities. Further research is recommended to evaluate the long-term impact of these interventions on language proficiency and learner autonomy.

Keywords: motivational factor, online foreign language learnig, tunsian students of english, online learning platforms

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Authors: Feran Asur

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In cities, plants; with its visual and functional effects, it helps to provide balance between human and environmental system. It is possible to develop alternative solutions to eliminate visual pollution by evaluating the potential properties of plant materials with other inanimate materials such as color, texture, form, size, etc. characteristics and other inanimate materials such as highlighter, background forming, harmonizing and concealer. In cold climates, the number of ornamental plant species that grow in warmer climates is less. For this reason, especially in the landscaping works of urban spaces, it is difficult to create the desired visuality with aesthetically qualified plants that are suitable for the ecology of the area, without creating monotony, with color variety. In this study, the importance of plant and plant compositions in the solution of visual problems in urban environments in cold climatic conditions is emphasized. The potential of ornamental plants that can be used for this purpose in preventing visual pollution is given. It has been shown how to use prominent features of these ornamental plants such as size, form, texture, vegetation periods to improve visual landscape in urban spaces in a long time. In addition to the design group disciplines that have activity on planning or application basis in the city and its surroundings, landscape architecture discipline can provide visual improvement of the studies to be carried out in detail in terms of planting design.

Keywords: residential landscape, planting, urban space, visual improvement

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Authors: Monday O. Ale, Adebukola A. Akintade, Olasunbo O. Orungbemi

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Fermentation as an important operation in the processing of cocoa beans is now affected by the recent climate change across the globe. The major requirement for effective fermentation is the ability of the material used to retain sufficient heat for the required microbial activities. Apart from the effects of climate on the rate of heat retention, the materials used for fermentation plays an important role. Most Farmers still restrict fermentation activities to the use of traditional methods. Improving on cocoa fermentation in this era of climate change makes it necessary to work on other materials that can be suitable for cocoa fermentation. Therefore, the objective of this study was to determine the effects of fermentation techniques on the quality of cocoa beans. The materials used in this fermentation research were heap-leaves (traditional), stainless steel, plastic tin, plastic basket and wooden box. The period of fermentation varies from zero days to 10 days. Physical and chemical tests were carried out for variables in quality determination in the samples. The weight per bean varied from 1.0-1.2 g after drying across the samples and the major color of the dry beans observed was brown except with the samples from stainless steel. The moisture content varied from 5.5-7%. The mineral content and the heavy metals decreased with increase in the fermentation period. A wooden box can conclusively be used as an alternative to heap-leaves as there was no significant difference in the physical features of the samples fermented with the two methods. The use of a wooden box as an alternative for cocoa fermentation is therefore recommended for cocoa farmers.

Keywords: fermentation, effects, fermentation materials, period, quality

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Authors: Vinay Agrawal, Suyash Garg, Ravindra Nagar, Vinay Chandwani

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Open ground storey with floating columns is a typical feature in the modern multistory constructions in urban India. Such features are very much undesirable in buildings built in seismically active areas. The present study proposes a feasible solution to mitigate the effects caused due to non-uniformity of stiffness and discontinuity in load path and to simultaneously hold the functional use of the open storey particularly under the floating column, through a combination of various lateral strengthening systems. An investigation is performed on an example building with nine different analytical models to bring out the importance of recognising the presence of open ground storey and floating columns. Two separate analyses on various models of the building namely, the equivalent static analysis and the response spectrum analysis as per IS: 1893-2002 were performed. Various measures such as incorporation of Chevron bracings and shear walls, strengthening the columns in the open ground storey, and their different combinations were examined. The analysis shows that, in comparison to two short ones separated by interconnecting beams, the structural walls are most effective when placed at the periphery of the buildings and used as one long structural wall. Further, it can be shown that the force transfer from floating columns becomes less horizontal when the Chevron Bracings are placed just below them, thereby reducing the shear forces in the beams on which the floating column rests.

Keywords: equivalent static analysis, floating column, open ground storey, response spectrum analysis, shear wall, stiffness irregularity

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Authors: Eva Čáslavová, Andrej Višněvský

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This research focused on the dimensions of brand personality of the Ice Hockey World Championship sporting event. The authors compared the elements in relation to different demographic groups including gender, age, level of education and student status of the population of Prague. Moreover, the differences of opinions of respondents who had experience of visiting a sports event and those who had not were assessed. In the research, the modified brand personality scale was used. This modified scale consists of five dimensions: responsibility, activity, toughness, individuality and emotionality, none of which was previously tested. The authors had an intentional sample of 291 respondents from Prague available, ranging in age from 18 years to 75 years, with either a high school or university education. The respondents rated the characteristic features in a seven-point Likert Scale and the data was collected in November 2012. The results suggest that the Ice Hockey World Championship is most identified with these dimensions: responsibility, emotionality and activity. Men had higher mean scores (4.93) on the Likert Scale in the emotionality dimension, while women had higher mean scores (4.91) in the activity dimension. Those respondents with experience visiting an Ice Hockey World Championship match had the highest mean score (5.10) in the emotionality dimension. This research had expected to show more pronounced mean values (above six) on the Likert scale in the emotionality and activity dimensions that more strongly characterize the brand personality of the Ice Hockey World Championship, however this expectation was not confirmed.

Keywords: dimensions, brand personality, ice hockey, international sports event, marketing

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Authors: Yina Donald Orga

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Osun Osogbo festival is one of the biggest art festivals in Nigeria with over 235, 518 tourist visits in 2014. The purpose of this study is to generate data on the tourists’ perception of Osun Osogbo Festival in Osogbo, Osun State Nigeria. Based on the population of 199, 860 tourist visits at Osun Osogbo festival in 2013, Krejcie and Morgan sample size table was used to select 768 tourists/respondents. Likert questionnaire were used to elicit data from the respondents. Descriptive statistic was used to describe the characteristics of respondents and analyse the tourists’ perception of the festival. The findings from data analysed suggest that the trend of domestic and international tourist visits in the past ten years for the festival had shown a consistent increase since 2004 except in 2007 and 2008 and continue to increase up to 2013. This is an indication that the tourists are satisfied with traditional, historical and authenticity features of the festival. Also, findings from the study revealed that the tourists are not satisfied with the number of toilets at Osun Sacred Grove, crowd control of visitors during the festival, medical personnel to cater for visitors during the festival, etc. In view of the findings of the study, the following recommendations are suggested; provision of more toilets at Osun Sacred grove, Osogbo Heritage Council to recruit festival guides to help control the huge crowd at the festival, the Government of State of Osun in conjunction with Red Cross Society should engage adequate medical personnel to cater for medical needs of visitors at the festival, etc.

Keywords: festival, perception, positive, tourists

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Authors: Sushma Ghogale

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With a surge in user-generated content or feedback or reviews on the internet, it has become possible and important to know consumers' opinions about products and services. This data is important for both potential customers and businesses providing the services. Data from social media is attracting significant attention and has become the most prominent channel of expressing an unregulated opinion. Prospective customers look for reviews from experienced customers before deciding to buy a product or service. Several websites provide a platform for users to post their feedback for the provider and potential customers. However, the biggest challenge in analyzing such data is in extracting latent features and providing term-level analysis of the data. This paper proposes an approach to use topic modeling to classify the reviews into topics and conduct sentiment analysis to mine the opinions. This approach can analyse and classify latent topics mentioned by reviewers on business sites or review sites, or social media using topic modeling to identify the importance of each topic. It is followed by sentiment analysis to assess the satisfaction level of each topic. This approach provides a classification of hotel reviews using multiple machine learning techniques and comparing different classifiers to mine the opinions of user reviews through sentiment analysis. This experiment concludes that Multinomial Naïve Bayes classifier produces higher accuracy than other classifiers.

Keywords: latent Dirichlet allocation, topic modeling, text classification, sentiment analysis

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Authors: Bastola Narayan, Rajeev Ranjan

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The morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) in the magnetoelectric (1-x)BiFeO3-(x)PbTiO3 has remained a matter of controversy ever since its discovery in 1964. The nature of the phase stabilized (single phase tetragonal or coexistence of tetragonal and rhombohedral phases) is very sensitive to the slight changes in the synthesis conditions. It thus remained an enigma as to what is the essential physical factor which is controlled by the slight difference in the synthesis conditions that finally determines, whether the phase formed will be single phase or coexistence of phases. In this paper, we demonstrate that the nature of the phase stabilized in this system is uniquely dependent on the crystallite size. The system is shown to exhibit features of abnormal grain growth (AGG) during sintering with abrupt increase in the grain size from ~ 1 micron to ~ 10 microns. The 10 micron grains exhibit pure tetragonal phase while the 1 micron grains exhibit coexistence of rhombohedral and tetragonal ferroelectric phases. The Rietveld analysis of powder neutron diffraction shows a paramagnetic to antiferromagnetic order transition inducing with crystalline size reduction from 10 micron to 1 micron. Since tetragonal phase is known to have paramagnetic order and rhombohedral phase has antiferromagnetic order in room temperature, this further strengthens our argument of size induced structure transition.

Keywords: size driven MPB, size driven magnetic ordering, abnormal grain growth, phase formation in BF-PT system

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Authors: Erol Karaca

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This study aims to analyze ceramic employees’ occupational health and safety training expectations. To that general objective, the study tries to examine whether occupational health and safety training expectations of ceramic employees meaningfully differentiate depending on demographic features and professional, social and economic conditions. For this purpose, the research data was collected through “Questionnaire of Occupational Health and Safety Training Expectation” (QSOHSTE) consisting of 25 open and close-ended questions developed by the researcher on the base of the literature review. QSOHSTE was applied to 125 ceramic employees working in Kutahya, Turkey. Data obtained from questionnaires were analyzed via SPSS 21. The findings, obtained from the study, revealed that employees’ agreement level to occupational health and safety training expectation statements is generally high-level. These findings also reveals that employees have various expectations about occupational health and safety training. These expectations are increasing sensitivity towards occupational health and safety training about the prevention of occupational accidents and diseases, contributing occupational health and safety training in establishing healthy and safe working environment, requiring occupational health and safety training before starting work, in case of changing working equipment and new technological applications, necessity of measurement and evaluation after occupational health and safety training. Besides these findings, employees’ agreement level to occupational health and safety training expectation statements also varies in terms of educational level, professional seniority, income level and perception of economic condition.

Keywords: occupational health and safety, occupational training, occupational expectation, professional seniority

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Authors: Nazira Kakulia

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The analysis of transformation of institutional changes outlines two important characteristics. These are: the speed of the changes and their sequence. Successful transformation must be carried out in three different stages; On the first stage, macroeconomic stabilization must be achieved with the help of fiscal and monetary tools. Two-tier banking system should be established and the active functions of central bank should be replaced by the passive ones (reserve requirements and refinancing rate), together with the involvement growth of private sector. Fiscal policy by itself here means the creation of tax system which must replace previously existing direct state revenues; the share of subsidies in the state expenses must be reduced also. The second stage begins after reaching the macroeconomic stabilization at a time of change of formal institutes which must stimulate the private business. Corporate legislation creates a competitive environment at the market and the privatization of state companies takes place. Bankruptcy and contract law is created. he third stage is the most extended one, which means the formation of all state structures that is necessary for the further proper functioning of a market economy. These three stages about the cycle period of political and social transformation and the hierarchy of changes can also be grouped by the different methodology: on the first and the most short-term stage the transfer of power takes place. On the second stage institutions corresponding to new goal are created. The last phase of transformation is extended in time and it includes the infrastructural, socio-cultural and socio-structural changes. The main goal of this research is to explore and identify the features of such kind of models.

Keywords: competitive environment, fiscal policy, macroeconomic stabilization, tax system

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Authors: Muhammedamin Hussen Saad, Geoffrey Haagler, Onno Omta, Gerben Van Der Velde

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Unfolding chaos and persistent disruptions pose threats to companies’ performance especially in vulnerable settings of SME’s particularly in developing countries. Attention for resilience research in the academic world has increased considerably during the last decade looking at the number of papers published. As we are interested in adding to the understanding of the foundation and development of the concept of resilience, we focus especially on structuring the literature of business resilience in those vulnerable settings. A well-structured systematic search & review procedure was deployed. First, we defined key search terms and applied these to multiple databases (Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Emerald, and Science Direct). To make our literature search more encompassing, we augmented with co-citation, reference checking including hand searching techniques. The paper offers (1) an overview of SMEs resilience literature from 2000 up to March 2017 comprising 88 articles, and (2) special attention, within that overview, to developing countries. This review concludes that resilience literature is very much diverse in definitions and its measurements, and is inconclusive about its influencing factors. Furthermore, resilience literature is based predominantly on research in the developed world. On the bases of how the concept resilience emerges from the literature we describe distinct features of resilience, give options to extend the theoretical bases of research into resilience and describe concrete ideas for further research.

Keywords: business resilience, systematic review, SMEs, developing countries

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Authors: Ziba R. Tehrani, Sanaz Moayer

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In the age of the knowledge-based economy, knowledge management has become a key factor in sustainable competitive advantage. Knowledge management is discovering, acquiring, developing, sharing, maintaining, evaluating, and using right knowledge in right time by right person in organization; which is accomplished by creating a right link between human resources, information technology, and appropriate structure, to achieve organisational goals. Studying knowledge management financial institutes shows the knowledge management in banking system is not different from other industries but because of complexity of bank’s environment, the implementation is more difficult. The bank managers found out that implementation of knowledge management will bring many advantages to financial institutes, one of the most important of which is reduction of threat to lose subsequent information of personnel job quit. Also Special attention to internal conditions and environment of the financial institutes and avoidance from copy-making in designing the knowledge management is a critical issue. In this paper, it is tried first to define knowledge management concept and introduce existing models of knowledge management; then some of the most important models which have more similarities with other models will be reviewed. In second step according to bank requirements with focus on knowledge management approach, most major objectives of knowledge management are identified. For gathering data in this stage face to face interview is used. Thirdly these specified objectives are analysed with the response of distribution of questionnaire which is gained through managers and expert staffs of ‘Karafarin Bank’. Finally based on analysed data, some features of exiting models are selected and a new conceptual model will be proposed.

Keywords: knowledge management, financial institute, knowledge management model, organisational knowledge

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Authors: Auday Al-Mayyahi, Phil Birch, William Wang

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A vision system-based navigation for autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) equipped with a single camera in an indoor environment is presented. A proposed navigation algorithm has been utilized to detect obstacles represented by coloured mini- cones placed in different positions inside a corridor. For the recognition of the relative position and orientation of the AGV to the coloured mini cones, the features of the corridor structure are extracted using a single camera vision system. The relative position, the offset distance and steering angle of the AGV from the coloured mini-cones are derived from the simple corridor geometry to obtain a mapped environment in real world coordinates. The corridor is first captured as an image using the single camera. Hence, image processing functions are then performed to identify the existence of the cones within the environment. Using a bounding box surrounding each cone allows to identify the locations of cones in a pixel coordinate system. Thus, by matching the mapped and pixel coordinates using a projection transformation matrix, the real offset distances between the camera and obstacles are obtained. Real time experiments in an indoor environment are carried out with a wheeled AGV in order to demonstrate the validity and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: autonomous ground vehicle, navigation, obstacle avoidance, vision system, single camera, image processing, ultrasonic sensor

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Authors: Sara Mostowfi, Hassan Sadeghinaeini, Sana Behnamasl, Leila Ensaniat, Maryam Mostafaee

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Nowadays, most of product producers, e.g. home appliance, electronic machines and vehicles focus on quality and comfort, and promise consumers ease of use and pleasurable experiences during product using. Consumers make their purchase decisions according to two needs: functional and emotional needs. Functional needs are fulfilled by product functionality, besides emotional needs are related to psychologists’ aspects of production. Emotions are distinctive elements which should be added to products and services to lead them up. In this case, the authors’ survey conducted pleasurable and hedonomic aspects in products of a home appliance company in Iran. In this regard, three samples of home appliance were selected: mixer, rice cooker, iron. Fifteen women (20-60) participated in this study. Every user evaluated each product by questionnaire based on 7 point semantic differential scale. After analyzing the results with statistical methods, results showed that 90% of users aren’t satisfied with hedonic and pleasurable criteria in interaction with these products. They notified that regarding hedonomics and pleasurable criteria’s they will have better ease of use and functionality. Our findings show a significant association between products’ features and user satisfaction. It seems that industrial design has a significant impression on the company’s products and with regard the pleasurable criteria the company sales will be more successful.

Keywords: home appliance, interaction, pleasure, hedonomy, ergonomy

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Authors: Tingting Zhou

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The partial privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is a dynamic process. The main features of this process lie in not only gradual and sequential privatizations, but also privatized shares transfer. For partially privatized SOEs, the introduction of private sector ownership is not the end of the story because the previously introduced private owners may choose to leave the SOEs by transferring the privatized shares after privatization, a process that is called “privatized shares transfer”. This paper investigates the determinants of privatized shares transfer from the perspective of large shareholders’ control rights. The results captures the fact that the higher control rights of large shareholders lead to more privatized shares transfer. After exploring the impacts of excessive control rights, the results provide evidence supporting the idea that firms with excessive numbers of directors, senior managers or supervisors who also have positions in the largest controlling shareholder’s entity are more likely to transfer privatized shares owned by private owners. In addition, the largest shareholders’ ownership also plays a role in privatized shares transfer. This evidence suggests that the large shareholders’ control rights should be limited to an appropriate range during the process of privatization, thereby giving private shareholders more opportunity to participate in the operation of firms, strengthen the state and enhance the competitiveness of state capital.

Keywords: control rights of large shareholders, partial privatization, privatized shares transfer, state-owned listed companies

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Authors: Teresa Azevedo PerdicoúLis, Paulo Lopes Dos Santos

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The conceptualisation of the problem of network optimisation as a noncooperative game sets up a holistic interactive approach that brings together different network features (e.g., com-pressor stations, sources, and pipelines, in the gas context) where the optimisation objectives are different, and a single optimisation procedure becomes possible without having to feed results from diverse software packages into each other. A mathematical model of this type, where independent entities take action, offers the ideal modularity and subsequent problem decomposition in view to design a decentralised algorithm to optimise the operation and management of the network. In a game framework, compressor stations and sources are under-stood as players which communicate through network connectivity constraints–the pipeline model. That is, in a scheme similar to tatonnementˆ, the players appoint their best settings and then interact to check for network feasibility. The devolved degree of network unfeasibility informs the players about the ’quality’ of their settings, and this two-phase iterative scheme is repeated until a global optimum is obtained. Due to network transients, its optimisation needs to be assessed at different points of the control interval. For this reason, the proposed approach to optimisation has two stages: (i) the first stage computes along the period of optimisation in order to fulfil the requirement just mentioned; (ii) the second stage is initialised with the solution found by the problem computed at the first stage, and computes in the end of the period of optimisation to rectify the solution found at the first stage. The liability of the proposed scheme is proven correct on an abstract prototype and three example networks.

Keywords: connectivity matrix, gas network optimisation, large-scale, noncooperative game, system decomposition

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Authors: Kemka Ihemelandu, Chukwuemeka Ihemelandu

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Melanoma remains a public health crisis, with incidence rates increasing rapidly in the past decades. Improving diagnostic accuracy to decrease misdiagnosis using Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to be documented. Unfortunately, unintended racially biased outcomes, a product of lack of diversity in the dataset used, with a noted class imbalance favoring lighter vs. darker skin tone, have increasingly been recognized as a problem.Resulting in noted limitations of the accuracy of the Convolutional neural network (CNN)models. CNN models are prone to biased output due to biases in the dataset used to train them. Our aim in this study was the optimization of convolutional neural network algorithms to mitigate bias in the automated diagnosis of melanoma. We hypothesized that our proposed training algorithms based on a data augmentation method to optimize the diagnostic accuracy of a CNN classifier by generating new training samples from the original ones will reduce bias in the automated diagnosis of melanoma. We applied geometric transformation, including; rotations, translations, scale change, flipping, and shearing. Resulting in a CNN model that provided a modifiedinput data making for a model that could learn subtle racial features. Optimal selection of the momentum and batch hyperparameter increased our model accuracy. We show that our augmented model reduces bias while maintaining accuracy in the automated diagnosis of melanoma.

Keywords: bias, augmentation, melanoma, convolutional neural network

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Authors: Aghasadeghi MR., Bahramali G., Sadat SM., Sadeghi SA., Yousefi M., Khodaei K., Ghorbani M., Sadat Larijani M.

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Background:The emerging COVID-19 pandemic is a serious concernfor the public health worldwide. Despite the many mutations in the virus genome, it is important to find an effective vaccine against viral mutations. Therefore, in current study, we aimed at immunoinformatic evaluation of the virus proteins immunogenicity to design a preventive vaccine candidate, which could elicit humoral and cellular immune responses as well. Methods:Three antigenic regions are included;Spike, Membrane, and Nucleocapsid amino acid sequences were obtained, and possible fusion proteins were assessed andcompared by immunogenicity, structural features, and population coverage. The best fusion protein was also evaluated for MHC-I and MHC-II T-cell epitopes and the linear and conformational B-cell epitopes. Results: Among the four predicted models, the truncated Spike protein in fusion with M and N proteins is composed of 24 highly immunogenic human MHC class I and 29 MHC class II, along with 14 B-cell linear and 61 discontinues epitopes. Also, the selected protein has high antigenicity and acceptable population coverage of 82.95% in Iran and 92.51% in Europe. Conclusion: The data indicate that the truncated Spike-M-N SARS-CoV-2form which could be potential targets of neutralizing antibodies. The protein also has the ability to stimulate humoral and cellular immunity. The in silico study provided the fusion protein as a potential preventive vaccine candidate for further in vivo evaluation.

Keywords: SARS-CoV-2, immunoinformatic, protein, vaccine

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Authors: Christine Ivy A. Nogot

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Under the colony of Spain for more than three centuries, the Philippines has a deep-rooted structure of Western ideologies and colonialism. The late 19th century, the period of Enlightenment, created a significant impact on our history when a group of middle-class Filipino men were sent to Europe to study. They were called Ilustrados, a Spanish word for erudite. They were the enlightened; the well-educated, intellectual scholars. Their writings provide intellectual grounds for the awakening of national consciousness that eventually prompted national movements and revolutions. They helped to establish a postcolonial society. In the modern era, Miguel Syjuco, a Filipino expatriate, wrote a novel and titled it Ilustrado. It is a representation of the liberal mind of the diasporic author in contemporary discourse. It provides a critical examination of the ilustrado in transition through the character of Miguel, who is also an expatriate writer. Using Syjuco’s award-winning novel as the primary text and anchored on Said’s concept of Orientalism, this paper examines how the depiction of features of the Eastern world is presented in the literary discourse. This paper looks into Said’s concept of orientalism as a hegemonic discursive structure and shows how Western superiority influences the Eastern culture in literary discourse. It explores Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony to explore Said’s argument that Western powers conquer the orient through culture and ideology. This paper presents how dominant ideologies and the social context redefine the ilustrado in the contemporary era.

Keywords: cultural hegemony, ilustrado, orientalism, postcolonial

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Authors: Ahmed Usman

Abstract:

This paper attempts to examine the relevance of an Electoral Commission in the democratic process of governance in Nigeria. However, democratic system and governance present a clear indication of responsive and responsible governments. The idea of a government being responsive and responsible is based on the premise of conventional principles of democracy such as freedom of political, economic and social rights of and individual. More so, upholding of the Rule of Law based on the ground of constitutionalism is a clear manifestation of the democratic governance. The burdens of ascertaining theses democratic ethos rely solely on the constituted election management body known as Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the case of Nigeria. This body is however, saddled with the responsibility of organizing and conducting periodic regular credible election known as free and fair election. The body also, is expected to be neutral, and independent to ensure fair treatment to all. It is on the basis of this fair treatment that credible leaders emerged. To this end, the paper examines the powers, functions and features of Independent National Electoral Commission. More so, the concepts of election and democracy have been operationalized. It is obvious that electoral process in Nigeria is marred with series of problems of which the paper identified and solutions were proffered towards credible, free and fair elections for sustainable democratic governance. In order to succinctly discuss and analyze the issues at stake, Structural Functional Analysis theory is adopted as a theoretical frame work for the paper.

Keywords: election, electoral commission, democracy, governance

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Authors: Yu Qin, Wanjiaman Li

Abstract:

The widespread use of mobile electronic devices increases the complexities of mobile security. This thesis aims to provide a secure communication environment for smartphone users. Some research proves that the one-time pad is one of the securest encryption methods, and that the key distribution problem can be solved by using the QKD (quantum key distribution). The objective of this project is to design an Android APP (application) to exchange several random keys between mobile phones. Inspired by QKD, the developed APP uses the quick response (QR) code as a carrier to dispatch large amounts of one-time keys. After evaluating the performance of APP, it allows the mobile phone to capture and decode 1800 bytes of random data in 600ms. The continuous scanning mode of APP is designed to improve the overall transmission performance and user experience, and the maximum transmission rate of this mode is around 2200 bytes/s. The omnidirectional readability and error correction capability of QR code gives it a better real-life application, and the features of adequate storage capacity and quick response optimize overall transmission efficiency. The security of this APP is guaranteed since QR code is exchanged face-to-face, eliminating the risk of being eavesdropped. Also, the id of QR code is the only message that would be transmitted through the whole communication. The experimental results show this project can achieve superior transmission performance, and the correlation between the transmission rate of the system and several parameters, such as the QR code size, has been analyzed. In addition, some existing technologies and the main findings in the context of the project are summarized and critically compared in detail.

Keywords: one-time pad, QKD (quantum key distribution), QR code, application

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Authors: Srishti Sinha, Deepti Tikariha, Kallol K. Ghosh

Abstract:

Over the past few decades protein-surfactant interactions have been a subject of extensive studies as they are of great importance in wide variety of industries, biological, pharmaceutical and cosmetic systems. Protein-surfactant interactions have been explored the effect of surfactants on structure of protein in the form of solubilization and denaturing or renaturing of protein. Globular proteins are frequently used as functional ingredients in healthcare and pharmaceutical products, due to their ability to catalyze biochemical reactions, to be adsorbed on the surface of some substance and to bind other moieties and form molecular aggregates. One of the most widely used globular protein is bovine serum albumin (BSA), since it has a well-known primary structure and been associated with the binding of many different categories of molecules, such as dyes, drugs and toxic chemicals. Protein−surfactant interactions are usually dependent on the surfactant features. Most of the research has been focused on single-chain surfactants. More recently, the binding between proteins and dimeric surfactants has been discussed. In present study interactions of one dimeric surfactant Butanediyl-1,4-bis (dimethylhexadecylammonium bromide) (16-4-16, 2Br-) and the corresponding single-chain surfactant cetyl trimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) with bovine serum albumin (BSA) have been investigated by surface tension and spectrofluoremetric methods. It has been found that the bindings of all gemini surfactant to BSA were cooperatively driven by electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions. The gemini surfactant carrying more charges and hydrophobic tails, showed stronger interactions with BSA than the single-chain surfactant.

Keywords: bovine serum albumin, gemini surfactants, hydrophobic interactions, protein surfactant interaction

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Authors: M. Devaki, K. B. Jayanthi

Abstract:

The identification of water bodies from satellite images has recently received a great deal of attention. Different methods have been developed to distinguish water bodies from various satellite images that vary in terms of time and space. Urban water identification issues body manifests in numerous applications with a great deal of certainty. There has been a sharp rise in the usage of satellite images to map natural resources, including urban water bodies and forests, during the past several years. This is because water and forest resources depend on each other so heavily that ongoing monitoring of both is essential to their sustainable management. The relevant elements from satellite pictures have been chosen using a variety of techniques, including machine learning. Then, a convolution neural network (CNN) architecture is created that can identify a superpixel as either one of two classes, one that includes water or doesn't from input data in a complex metropolitan scene. The deep learning technique, CNN, has advanced tremendously in a variety of visual-related tasks. CNN can improve classification performance by reducing the spectral-spatial regularities of the input data and extracting deep features hierarchically from raw pictures. Calculate the water body using the satellite image's resolution. Experimental results demonstrate that the suggested method outperformed conventional approaches in terms of water extraction accuracy from remote-sensing images, with an average overall accuracy of 97%.

Keywords: water body, Deep learning, satellite images, convolution neural network

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Authors: Nassib Abdallah, Pierre Chauvet, Abd El Salam Hajjar, Bassam Daya

Abstract:

In this paper, we propose an optimized brain computer interface (BCI) system for unspoken speech recognition, based on the fact that the constructions of unspoken words rely strongly on the Wernicke area, situated in the temporal lobe. Our BCI system has four modules: (i) the EEG Acquisition module based on a non-invasive headset with 14 electrodes; (ii) the Preprocessing module to remove noise and artifacts, using the Common Average Reference method; (iii) the Features Extraction module, using Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT); (iv) the Classification module based on a one-hidden layer artificial neural network. The present study consists of comparing the recognition accuracy of 5 Arabic words, when using all the headset electrodes or only the 4 electrodes situated near the Wernicke area, as well as the selection effect of the subbands produced by the WPT module. After applying the articial neural network on the produced database, we obtain, on the test dataset, an accuracy of 83.4% with all the electrodes and all the subbands of 8 levels of the WPT decomposition. However, by using only the 4 electrodes near Wernicke Area and the 6 middle subbands of the WPT, we obtain a high reduction of the dataset size, equal to approximately 19% of the total dataset, with 67.5% of accuracy rate. This reduction appears particularly important to improve the design of a low cost and simple to use BCI, trained for several words.

Keywords: brain-computer interface, speech recognition, artificial neural network, electroencephalography, EEG, wernicke area

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Authors: Deeman Yousif Mahmood, Mohammed Abdullah Hussein

Abstract:

The goal of a network-based intrusion detection system is to classify activities of network traffics into two major categories: normal and attack (intrusive) activities. Nowadays, data mining and machine learning plays an important role in many sciences; including intrusion detection system (IDS) using both supervised and unsupervised techniques. However, one of the essential steps of data mining is feature selection that helps in improving the efficiency, performance and prediction rate of proposed approach. This paper applies unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm with information gain (IG) for feature selection and reduction to build a network intrusion detection system. For our experimental analysis, we have used the new NSL-KDD dataset, which is a modified dataset for KDDCup 1999 intrusion detection benchmark dataset. With a split of 60.0% for the training set and the remainder for the testing set, a 2 class classifications have been implemented (Normal, Attack). Weka framework which is a java based open source software consists of a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks has been used in the testing process. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is very accurate with low false positive rate and high true positive rate and it takes less learning time in comparison with using the full features of the dataset with the same algorithm.

Keywords: information gain (IG), intrusion detection system (IDS), k-means clustering, Weka

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Authors: Hamdi Amroun, Yacine Benziani, Mehdi Ammi

Abstract:

In this paper, we propose an approach of detecting the behavior of the viewers of a TV program in a non-controlled environment. The experiment we propose is based on the use of three types of connected objects (smartphone, smart watch, and a connected remote control). 23 participants were observed while watching their TV programs during three phases: before, during and after watching a TV program. Their behaviors were detected using an approach based on The Dempster Shafer Theory (DST) in two phases. The first phase is to approximate dynamically the mass functions using an approach based on the correlation coefficient. The second phase is to calculate the approximate mass functions. To approximate the mass functions, two approaches have been tested: the first approach was to divide each features data space into cells; each one has a specific probability distribution over the behaviors. The probability distributions were computed statistically (estimated by empirical distribution). The second approach was to predict the TV-viewing behaviors through the use of classifiers algorithms and add uncertainty to the prediction based on the uncertainty of the model. Results showed that mixing the fusion rule with the computation of the initial approximate mass functions using a classifier led to an overall of 96%, 95% and 96% success rate for the first, second and third TV-viewing phase respectively. The results were also compared to those found in the literature. This study aims to anticipate certain actions in order to maintain the attention of TV viewers towards the proposed TV programs with usual connected objects, taking into account the various uncertainties that can be generated.

Keywords: Iot, TV-viewing behaviors identification, automatic classification, unconstrained environment

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