Search results for: Developing child

Authors: G.B. Nurlikhina, G.N. Azhimetova, R. M. Ashimova

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Currently, one of the main directions is developing of development based on the clustering of economic operations of Kazakhstan, providing for the organization and concentration of production capacity in one region or the most optimal system. In the modern economic literature clustering is regarded as one of the most effective tools to ensure competitive businesses, and improve their business itself.

Keywords: A cluster, food market, innovation cluster.

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Authors: J. Rizk, Y. Chaiko

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This paper shows the potential system benefits of simple tracking solar system using a stepper motor and light sensor. This method is increasing power collection efficiency by developing a device that tracks the sun to keep the panel at a right angle to its rays. A solar tracking system is designed, implemented and experimentally tested. The design details and the experimental results are shown.

Keywords: Renewable Energy, Power Optimization.

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Authors: Cleopatra Gittens

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It has been recognized that some social security and national insurance systems in the Eastern Caribbean are experiencing ageing populations and economic and other crises that will present a financial challenge of being unable to pay pension benefits in fifteen to twenty years. This has implications for the fiscal and economic positions of the countries themselves. Hence, organizations would need to address the issue urgently. The study adds to the body of knowledge on social security systems and social security reforms in Small Island Developing States (SIDS). It also makes recommendations for the types of reforms that social security systems in other SIDS can implement given their special circumstances. Secondary research is used to gather financial and other related information on three social security schemes in the Eastern Caribbean. Actuarial and financial reports and other documents of the social security systems are analysed to obtain financial and static data on each of the schemes. The findings show that the three schemes studied are experiencing steady increases in benefit expenditure versus contributions and increasing pensioner to insured ratios. The schemes will deplete their reserves between 2038 and 2050. Two of the schemes have increased their retirement age while the other has not embarked on any reforms. One scheme has made changes to its contribution percentages. Due to their small size, small populations and other unique circumstances, the social security schemes in the identified territories are not likely to be able to take advantage of all of the reform initiatives that the developed world embarked on when faced with similar problems. These schemes will need to make incremental changes that align with the timeframes recommended by the actuarial studies.

Keywords: Pension benefits, pension, Small Island Developing States, Social Security Reform.

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Authors: Elena Lyakso, Olga Frolova, Yuri Matveev

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The aim of the study is to determine the acoustic features of voice and speech of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as a possible additional diagnostic criterion. The participants in the study were 95 children with ASD aged 5-16 years, 150 typically development (TD) children, and 103 adults – listening to children’s speech samples. Three types of experimental methods for speech analysis were performed: spectrographic, perceptual by listeners, and automatic recognition. In the speech of children with ASD, the pitch values, pitch range, values of frequency and intensity of the third formant (emotional) leading to the “atypical” spectrogram of vowels are higher than corresponding parameters in the speech of TD children. High values of vowel articulation index (VAI) are specific for ASD children’s speech signals. These acoustic features can be considered as diagnostic marker of autism. The ability of humans and automatic recognition of the psychoneurological state of children via their speech is determined.

Keywords: Autism spectrum disorders, biomarker of autism, child speech, voice features.

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Authors: Yen-Ting Wang, Kenny Wen-Chyuan Chen, I-Tsun Chiang, Lung-Ching Liang, Alex J.Y. Lee

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The aim of this study was to establish the feasibility of a minute incremental exercise testing protocol in young asthma children. Twenty-two children with clinically diagnosed mild to moderate asthma volunteered to participate. The maximum incremental exercise test was performed using a cycle ergometer with an electromagnetic braking. A warm-up unloaded for 2 minutes then the workload was started at 40 watts for 2 minutes, and then stepwise increments of 8 watts per 2 minutes were applied. The pedaling frequency was set at 50 rpm. Ventilation and gas exchange were measured with a breath-by-breath automatic metabolic measurement system. Results showed that this test was well tolerated by all asthmatic children. Most of the children reached the VO2 plateau and satisfied the criteria for maximal respiratory exchange ratio of ≥ 1. This Study demonstrated that this testing protocol was suitable for young asthmatic children.

Keywords: Asthma, Child, Exercise, Pediatrics.

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Authors: Kanyarat Bussaban, Siriporn Poolsuwan

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This study is conducted with the objective to prove how the distorted distribution of welfare affects the quality of school-age children lives differently in the case ofan urban community in Bangkok. 334 samples are households from Suan Oi and Ratchapatubtim communities. The study of sample communities found the difference between two communityareasthatare close. The people of Suan Oi community are economically better off people than the people of the Ratchapatubtim community. They share the benefits of using most services except the welfare of a child’s education.The resulting analysis of the variability in quality of life of the school age children indicate that heads of the households are women looking for quality of life benefits when the compulsory school age is less.A study of the two communities suggests that the inequality in incomedistribution currently affects the quality of life of school-age children.

Keywords: Inequality, Income distribution, Quality of school-age children lives, Welfare state.

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Authors: Abdul Rahiman Kannam Kulam

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Reflecting the concepts of the development of the whole child, it is claimed that, purposeful engagement in Physical activities or exercise involved ritual dances has the potential to engender in young people, The purpose of the present study was to analyze school children and their personal adjustment based on Ritual dance participation. For the purpose, two thousand and three hundred school children of Kerala were analyzed. AISS manual of A.K.P Sinha and R.P Singh was used to collect the data for adjustments. The adjustment qualities classifies as Excellent, Good, Average, Unsatisfactory and Very unsatisfactory. The total performance denotes the state of adjustment based on the classifications. Findings of the study were subjected to percentages and ‘t’ ratio. The study enlightened that, the emotional, social and overall adjustments are better than non-athletes. But the study elucidated that, there is no difference in educational adjustment of school athletes and non athletes among school children.

Keywords: Ritual dances, Emotional adjustment, Poorakkali, Kolkali, Margamkali.

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Authors: Muhibul Haque Bhuyan

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Inclusion of any design project in an undergraduate electrical and electronic engineering curriculum and producing creative ideas in the final year capstone design projects have received numerous comments at the Board of Accreditation for Engineering and Technical Education (BAETE) several times by the mentors and visiting program evaluator team members at different public and private universities in Bangladesh. To eradicate this deficiency which is needed for getting the program accreditation, a thorough change was required in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) for its BSc in EEE program at Southeast University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. We suggested making changes in the course curriculum titles and contents, emphasizing to include capstone design projects, question setting, examining students through other standard methods, selecting and retaining Outcome-Based Education (OBE)-oriented engineering faculty members, improving laboratories through purchasing new equipment and software as well as developing new experiments for each laboratory courses, and engaging the students to practical designs in various courses and final year projects. This paper reports on capstone design project course objectives, course outcomes, mapping with the program outcomes, cognitive domain of learning, assessment schemes, guidelines, suggestions and recommendations for supervision processes, assessment strategy, and rubric setting, etc. It is expected that this will substantially improve the capstone design projects offering, supervision, and assessment in the undergraduate EEE program to fulfill the arduous requirements of BAETE accreditation based on OBE.

Keywords: Course outcome, capstone design project, assessment and evaluation, electrical and electronic engineering.

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Authors: Diella Gracia Martauli

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This study investigated the relationship between music aptitude and school readiness in Indonesian children. Music aptitude is described as children’s music potential, whereas school readiness is defined as a condition in which a child is deemed ready to enter the formal education system. This study presents a hypothesis that music aptitude is correlated with school readiness. This is a correlational research study of 17 children aged 5-6 years old (M = 6.10, SD = 0.33) who were enrolled in a kindergarten school in Jakarta, Indonesia. Music aptitude scores were obtained from Primary Measures of Music Audiation, whereas School readiness scores were obtained from Bracken School Readiness Assessment Third Edition. The analysis of the data was performed using Pearson Correlation. The result found no correlation between music aptitude and school readiness (r = 0.196, p = 0.452). Discussions regarding the results, perspective from the measures and cultures are presented. Further study is recommended to establish links between music aptitude and school readiness.

Keywords: Bracken school readiness assessment, music aptitude, primary measures of music audiation, school readiness.

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Authors: Sadhana Ghnayiem

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This article deals with the issue of effective communication between parents and children and its impact on the family in general and on the child in particular. The aim of this article is to provide information to parents, students, anyone interested in family communication between parents and children, and to provide them with tools to deal with barriers to communication in the family unit. The article presented a literature review of the importance of effective communication in the family, the definition of the concept of communication, and was a reference to factors and barriers in communication between parents and children leading to conflict destructive to the extent that barriers to effective communication in the family unit. At the end of the article, strategies were introduced to motivate children to behave appropriately, and to equip parents best to foster the healthy development of their children when they can create an atmosphere of effective communication. From the literature review, it's found that effective communication between parents and children prevents problematic behavior and helps children understand how to communicate effectively with others. Communication between parents and children is the cornerstone of a happy family life and is the basis for positive interactions between parents and children and increases self-esteem in children.

Keywords: Children, communication, conflict, family.

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Authors: Mannan Mridha, Mohammad S. Islam

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Innovative medical technologies offer more effective medical care, with less risk to patient and healthcare personnel. Medical technology and devices when properly used provide better data, precise monitoring and less invasive treatments and can be more targeted and often less costly. The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) equipped with patient monitoring, respiratory and cardiac support, pain management, emergency resuscitation and life support devices is particularly prone to medical errors for various reasons. Many people in the developing countries now wonder whether their visit to hospital might harm rather than help them. This is because; clinicians in the developing countries are required to maintain an increasing workload with limited resources and absence of well-functioning safety system. A team of experts from the medical, biomedical and clinical engineering in Sweden and Bangladesh have worked together to study the incidents, adverse events at the ICU in Bangladesh. The study included both public and private hospitals to provide a better understanding for physical structure, organization and practice in operating processes of care, and the occurrence of adverse outcomes the errors, risks and accidents related to medical devices at the ICU, and to develop a ICT based support system in order to reduce hazards and errors and thus improve the quality of performance, care and cost effectiveness at the ICU. Concrete recommendations and guidelines have been made for preparing appropriate ICT related tools and methods for improving the routine for use of medical devices, reporting and analyzing of the incidents at the ICU in order to reduce the number of undetected and unsolved incidents and thus improve the patient safety.

Keywords: Accidents reporting system, patient car and safety, safe medical devices.

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Authors: Namugenyi Ephrance Eunice, Julianne Sansa Otim, Marco Zennaro, Stephen D. Wolthusen

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of connected data processing devices, mechanical and digital machinery, items, animals, or people that may send data across a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. Each component has sensors that can pick up on specific phenomena, as well as processing software and other technologies that can link to and communicate with other systems and/or devices over the Internet or other communication networks and exchange data with them. IoT is increasingly being used in fields other than consumer electronics, such as public safety, emergency response, industrial automation, autonomous vehicles, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), and general environmental monitoring. Consumer-based IoT applications, like smart home gadgets and wearables, are also becoming more prevalent. This paper presents the main IoT deployment areas for environmental monitoring in developing regions and the backhaul options suitable for them based on a couple of related works. The study includes an overview of existing IoT deployments, the underlying communication architectures, protocols, and technologies that support them. This overview shows that Low Power Wireless Area Networks (LPWANs) are very well suited for monitoring environment architectures designed for remote locations. LoRa technology, particularly the LoRaWAN protocol, has an advantage over other technologies due to its low power consumption, adaptability, and suitable communication range. The current challenges of various architectures are discussed in detail, with the major issue identified as obstruction of communication paths by buildings, trees, hills, etc.

Keywords: Communication technologies, environmental monitoring, Internet of Things, IoT, IoT deployment challenges.

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Authors: Hala S. Mekawy

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Affordable housing delivery for low and lower middle income families is a prominent problem in many developing countries; governments alone are unable to address this challenge due to diverse financial and regulatory constraints, and the private sector's contribution is rare and assists only middle-income households even when institutional and legal reforms are conducted to persuade it to go down market. Also, the market-enabling policy measures advocated by the World Bank since the early nineties have been strongly criticized and proven to be inappropriate to developing country contexts, where it is highly unlikely that the formal private sector can reach low income population. In addition to governments and private developers, affordable housing delivery systems involve an intricate network of relationships between a diverse range of actors. Collaboration between them was proven to be vital, and hence, an approach towards partnership schemes for affordable housing delivery has emerged. The basic premise of this paper is that addressing housing affordability challenges in Egypt demands direct public support, as markets and market actors alone would never succeed in delivering decent affordable housing to low and lower middle income groups. It argues that this support would ideally be through local level partnership schemes, with a leading decentralized local government role, and partners being identified according to specific local conditions. It attempts to identify major attributes that would ensure the fulfillment of the goals of such schemes in the Egyptian context. This is based upon evidence from diversified worldwide experiences, in addition to the main outcomes of a questionnaire that was conducted to specialists and chief actors in the field.

Keywords: Affordable housing, partnership schemes.

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Authors: Qiuyi Lyu, Bin Gong

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Breadth-First Search (BFS) is a core graph algorithm that is widely used for graph analysis. As it is frequently used in many graph applications, improving the BFS performance is essential. In this paper, we present a graph ordering method that could reorder the graph nodes to achieve better data locality, thus, improving the BFS performance. Our method is based on an observation that the sibling relationships will dominate the cache access pattern during the BFS traversal. Therefore, we propose a frequency-based model to construct the graph order. First, we optimize the graph order according to the nodes’ visit frequency. Nodes with high visit frequency will be processed in priority. Second, we try to maximize the child nodes’ overlap layer by layer. As it is proved to be NP-hard, we propose a heuristic method that could greatly reduce the preprocessing overheads.We conduct extensive experiments on 16 real-world datasets. The result shows that our method could achieve comparable performance with the state-of-the-art methods while the graph ordering overheads are only about 1/15.

Keywords: Breadth-first search, BFS, graph ordering, graph algorithm.

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Authors: T. Motsima

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The under-5 mortality rate is high in sub-Saharan Africa with Lesotho being amongst the highest under-5 mortality rates in the world. The objective of the study is to determine the factors associated with under-5 mortality in Lesotho. The data used for this analysis come from the nationally representative household survey called the 2009 Lesotho Demographic and Health Survey. Odds ratios produced by the logistic regression models were used to measure the effect of each independent variable on the dependent variable. Female children were significantly 38% less likely to die than male children. Children who were breastfed for 13 to 18 months and those who were breastfed for more than 19 months were significantly less likely to die than those who were breastfed for 12 months or less. Furthermore, children of mothers who stayed in Quthing, Qacha’s Nek and Thaba Tseka ran the greatest risk of dying. The results suggested that: sex of child, type of birth, breastfeeding duration, district, source of energy and marital status were significant predictors of under-5 mortality, after correcting for all variables.

Keywords: Under-5 mortality, risk factors, millennium development goals, breastfeeding, logistic regression.

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Authors: M. N. Zelenin, V. S. Mikhailov, R. P. Zhivotovsky

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It is known that residual welding deformations give negative effect to processability and operational quality of welded structures, complicating their assembly and reducing strength. Therefore, selection of optimal technology, ensuring minimum welding deformations, is one of the main goals in developing a technology for manufacturing of welded structures. Through years, JSC SSTC has been developing a theory for estimation of welding deformations and practical activities for reducing and compensating such deformations during welding process. During long time a methodology was used, based on analytic dependence. This methodology allowed defining volumetric changes of metal due to welding heating and subsequent cooling. However, dependences for definition of structures deformations, arising as a result of volumetric changes of metal in the weld area, allowed performing calculations only for simple structures, such as units, flat sections and sections with small curvature. In case of complex 3D structures, estimations on the base of analytic dependences gave significant errors. To eliminate this shortage, it was suggested to use finite elements method for resolving of deformation problem. Here, one shall first calculate volumes of longitudinal and transversal shortenings of welding joints using method of analytic dependences and further, with obtained shortenings, calculate forces, which action is equivalent to the action of active welding stresses. Further, a finiteelements model of the structure is developed and equivalent forces are added to this model. Having results of calculations, an optimal sequence of assembly and welding is selected and special measures to reduce and compensate welding deformations are developed and taken.

Keywords: Finite elements method, modeling, expected welding deformations, welding, assembling.

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Authors: Asif Ali, Daud Salim Faruquie

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With the advancement of knowledge about the utility and impact of sustainability, its feasibility has been explored into different walks of life. Scientists, however; have established their knowledge in four areas viz environmental, economic, social and cultural, popularly termed as four pillars of sustainability. Aspects of environmental and economic sustainability have been rigorously researched and practiced and huge volume of strong evidence of effectiveness has been founded for these two sub-areas. For the social and cultural aspects of sustainability, dependable evidence of effectiveness is still to be instituted as the researchers and practitioners are developing and experimenting methods across the globe. Therefore, the present research aimed to identify globally used practices of social and cultural sustainability and through evidence synthesis assess their outcomes to determine the effectiveness of those practices. A PICO format steered the methodology which included all populations, popular sustainability practices including walkability/cycle tracks, social/recreational spaces, privacy, health & human services and barrier free built environment, comparators included ‘Before’ and ‘After’, ‘With’ and ‘Without’, ‘More’ and ‘Less’ and outcomes included Social well-being, cultural coexistence, quality of life, ethics and morality, social capital, sense of place, education, health, recreation and leisure, and holistic development. Search of literature included major electronic databases, search websites, organizational resources, directory of open access journals and subscribed journals. Grey literature, however, was not included. Inclusion criteria filtered studies on the basis of research designs such as total randomization, quasirandomization, cluster randomization, observational or single studies and certain types of analysis. Studies with combined outcomes were considered but studies focusing only on environmental and/or economic outcomes were rejected. Data extraction, critical appraisal and evidence synthesis was carried out using customized tabulation, reference manager and CASP tool. Partial meta-analysis was carried out and calculation of pooled effects and forest plotting were done. As many as 13 studies finally included for final synthesis explained the impact of targeted practices on health, behavioural and social dimensions. Objectivity in the measurement of health outcomes facilitated quantitative synthesis of studies which highlighted the impact of sustainability methods on physical activity, Body Mass Index, perinatal outcomes and child health. Studies synthesized qualitatively (and also quantitatively) showed outcomes such as routines, family relations, citizenship, trust in relationships, social inclusion, neighbourhood social capital, wellbeing, habitability and family’s social processes. The synthesized evidence indicates slight effectiveness and efficacy of social and cultural sustainability on the targeted outcomes. Further synthesis revealed that such results of this study are due weak research designs and disintegrated implementations. If architects and other practitioners deliver their interventions in collaboration with research bodies and policy makers, a stronger evidence-base in this area could be generated.

Keywords: Built environment, cultural sustainability, social sustainability, sustainable architecture.

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Authors: Farida Buniatova

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Testamentary succession rules in the Russian Federation have been developing intensively since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The article analyzes specific aspects of the closed will in Russian civil law. It discusses advantages and drawbacks of the closed will. In addition to that, the paper focuses on the will drafting and attestation procedures. The research provides ways to improve and enhance Russian legislation governing the closed will.

Keywords: Closed will, testamentary succession, testator, will.

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Authors: Guneet Saini, Shahrukh, Sunil Sharma

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Traffic congestion is the most critical issue faced by those in the transportation profession today. Over the past few years, roundabouts have been recognized as a measure to promote efficiency at intersections globally. In developing countries like India, this type of intersection still faces a lot of issues, such as bottleneck situations, long queues and increased waiting times, due to increasing traffic which in turn affect the performance of the entire urban network. This research is a case study of a non-conventional roundabout, in terms of geometric design, in a small town in India. These types of roundabouts should be analyzed for their functionality in mixed traffic conditions, prevalent in many developing countries. Microscopic traffic simulation is an effective tool to analyze traffic conditions and estimate various measures of operational performance of intersections such as capacity, vehicle delay, queue length and Level of Service (LOS) of urban roadway network. This study involves analyzation of an unsymmetrical non-circular 6-legged roundabout known as “Kala Aam Chauraha” in a small town Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh, India using VISSIM simulation package which is the most widely used software for microscopic traffic simulation. For coding in VISSIM, data are collected from the site during morning and evening peak hours of a weekday and then analyzed for base model building. The model is calibrated on driving behavior and vehicle parameters and an optimal set of calibrated parameters is obtained followed by validation of the model to obtain the base model which can replicate the real field conditions. This calibrated and validated model is then used to analyze the prevailing operational traffic performance of the roundabout which is then compared with a proposed alternative to improve efficiency of roundabout network and to accommodate pedestrians in the geometry. The study results show that the alternative proposed is an advantage over the present roundabout as it considerably reduces congestion, vehicle delay and queue length and hence, successfully improves roundabout performance without compromising on pedestrian safety. The study proposes similar designs for modification of existing non-conventional roundabouts experiencing excessive delays and queues in order to improve their efficiency especially in the case of developing countries. From this study, it can be concluded that there is a need to improve the current geometry of such roundabouts to ensure better traffic performance and safety of drivers and pedestrians negotiating the intersection and hence this proposal may be considered as a best fit.

Keywords: Operational performance, roundabout, simulation, VISSIM, traffic.

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Authors: Brian A. Smith, Ronald W. McClendon, Gerrit Hoogenboom

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The mitigation of crop loss due to damaging freezes requires accurate air temperature prediction models. Previous work established that the Ward-style artificial neural network (ANN) is a suitable tool for developing such models. The current research focused on developing ANN models with reduced average prediction error by increasing the number of distinct observations used in training, adding additional input terms that describe the date of an observation, increasing the duration of prior weather data included in each observation, and reexamining the number of hidden nodes used in the network. Models were created to predict air temperature at hourly intervals from one to 12 hours ahead. Each ANN model, consisting of a network architecture and set of associated parameters, was evaluated by instantiating and training 30 networks and calculating the mean absolute error (MAE) of the resulting networks for some set of input patterns. The inclusion of seasonal input terms, up to 24 hours of prior weather information, and a larger number of processing nodes were some of the improvements that reduced average prediction error compared to previous research across all horizons. For example, the four-hour MAE of 1.40°C was 0.20°C, or 12.5%, less than the previous model. Prediction MAEs eight and 12 hours ahead improved by 0.17°C and 0.16°C, respectively, improvements of 7.4% and 5.9% over the existing model at these horizons. Networks instantiating the same model but with different initial random weights often led to different prediction errors. These results strongly suggest that ANN model developers should consider instantiating and training multiple networks with different initial weights to establish preferred model parameters.

Keywords: Decision support systems, frost protection, fruit, time-series prediction, weather modeling

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Authors: D. Estrella, A. Silva, R. Zapata, H. Rubio

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A total of 100 primary caregivers (mothers, fathers, grandparents) with at least one child or grandchild with a diagnosis of congenital bilateral profound deafness were assessed in order to evaluate the functionality of families with a deaf member, who was evaluated by specialists in audiology, molecular biology, genetics and psychology. After confirmation of the clinical diagnosis, DNA from the patients and parents were analyzed in search of the 35delG deletion of the GJB2 gene to determine who possessed the mutation. All primary caregivers were provided psychological support, regardless of whether or not they had the mutation, and prior and subsequent, the family APGAR test was applied. All parents, grandparents were informed of the results of the genetic analysis during the psychological intervention. The family APGAR, after psychological and genetic counseling, showed that 14% perceived their families as functional, 62% moderately functional and 24% dysfunctional. This shows the importance of psychological support in family functionality that has a direct impact on the quality of life of these families.

Keywords: Deafness, psychological support, family, adaptation to disability.

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Authors: Revanth Sai Kosaraju, Michael Ramscar, Melody Dye

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Accounts of language acquisition differ significantly in their treatment of the role of prediction in language learning. In particular, nativist accounts posit that probabilistic learning about words and word sequences has little to do with how children come to use language. The accuracy of this claim was examined by testing whether distributional probabilities and frequency contributed to how well 3-4 year olds repeat simple word chunks. Corresponding chunks were the same length, expressed similar content, and were all grammatically acceptable, yet the results of the study showed marked differences in performance when overall distributional frequency varied. It was found that a distributional model of language predicted the empirical findings better than a number of other models, replicating earlier findings and showing that children attend to distributional probabilities in an adult corpus. This suggested that language is more prediction-and-error based, rather than on abstract rules which nativist camps suggest.

Keywords: Abstractness, child psychology, language acquisition, prediction and error.

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Authors: Mediha B. Sılaydın Aydın, Emine D. Kahraman

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One of the important impacts of climate change is the sea level rise. Turkey is a peninsula, so the coastal areas of the country are threatened by the problem of sea level rise. Therefore, the urbanized coastal areas are highly vulnerable to climate change. At the aim of enhancing spatial resilience of urbanized areas, this question arises: What should be the priority intervention subject in the urban planning process for a given city. To answer this question, by focusing on the problem of sea level rise, this study aims to determine spatial vulnerability typologies and levels of Turkey coastal cities based on morphological, physical and social characteristics. As a method, spatial vulnerability of coastal cities is determined by two steps as level and type. Firstly, physical structure, morphological structure and social structure were examined in determining spatial vulnerability levels. By determining these levels, most vulnerable areas were revealed as a priority in adaptation studies. Secondly, all parameters are also used to determine spatial typologies. Typologies are determined for coastal cities in order to use as a base for urban planning studies. Adaptation to climate change is crucial for developing countries like Turkey so, this methodology and created typologies could be a guide for urban planners as spatial directors and an example for other developing countries in the context of adaptation to climate change. The results demonstrate that the urban settlements located on the coasts of the Marmara Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean respectively, are more vulnerable than the cities located on the Black Sea’s coasts to sea level rise.

Keywords: Climate change, coastal cities, sea level rise, urban land use planning, vulnerability.

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Authors: Wei Song, Lian-he Yang

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Interactive CAD systems have to allocate and deallocate memory frequently. Frequent memory allocation and deallocation can play a significant role in degrading application performance. An application may use memory in a very specific way and pay a performance penalty for functionality it does not need. We could counter that by developing specialized memory managers.

Keywords: Interactive CAD systems, Specialized Memory Manager.

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Authors: Hsiao-Tien Pao, Yi-Ying Li, Hsin-Chia Fu

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This paper addressed the impacts of energy consumption, economic growth, financial development, and population size on environmental degradation using grey relational analysis (GRA) for China, where foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows is the proxy variable for financial development. The more recent historical data during the period 2004–2011 are used, because the use of very old data for data analysis may not be suitable for rapidly developing countries. The results of the GRA indicate that the linkage effects of energy consumption–emissions and GDP–emissions are ranked first and second, respectively. These reveal that energy consumption and economic growth are strongly correlated with emissions. Higher economic growth requires more energy consumption and increasing environmental pollution. Likewise, more efficient energy use needs a higher level of economic development. Therefore, policies to improve energy efficiency and create a low-carbon economy can reduce emissions without hurting economic growth. The finding of FDI–emissions linkage is ranked third. This indicates that China do not apply weak environmental regulations to attract inward FDI. Furthermore, China’s government in attracting inward FDI should strengthen environmental policy. The finding of population–emissions linkage effect is ranked fourth, implying that population size does not directly affect CO₂ emissions, even though China has the world’s largest population, and Chinese people are very economical use of energy-related products. Overall, the energy conservation, improving efficiency, managing demand, and financial development, which aim at curtailing waste of energy, reducing both energy consumption and emissions, and without loss of the country’s competitiveness, can be adopted for developing economies. The GRA is one of the best way to use a lower data to build a dynamic analysis model.

Keywords: Grey relational analysis, foreign direct investment, CO2 emissions, China.

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Authors: Prashant Verma, K. K. Singh, Anjali Singh, Ujjaval Srivastava

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Contraceptive policies have been derived to achieve desired reductions in the growth rate and also, applied to the data of Uttar-Pradesh, India for illustration. Using the Lotka’s integral equation for the stable population, expressions for the proportion of contraceptive users at different ages have been obtained. At the age of 20 years, 42% of contraceptive users is imperative to reduce the present annual growth rate of 0.036 to 0.02, assuming that 40% of the contraceptive users discontinue at the age of 25 years and 30% again continue contraceptive use at age 30 years. Further, presuming that 75% of women start using contraceptives at the age of 23 years, and 50% of the remaining women start using contraceptives at the age of 28 years, while the rest of them start using it at the age of 32 years. If we set a minimum age of marriage as 20 years, a reduction of 0.019 in growth rate will be obtained. This study describes how the level of contraceptive use at different age groups of women reduces the growth rate in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The article also promotes delayed marriage in the region.

Keywords: Child bearing, contraceptive devices, contraceptive policies, population growth, stable population.

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Authors: Fatema Akram, Mohammad Golam Rasul, Mohammad Masud Kamal Khan, Md. Sharif Imam Ibne Amir

Abstract:

A variety of routing techniques are available to develop surface runoff hydrographs from rainfall. The selection of runoff routing method is very vital as it is directly related to the type of watershed and the required degree of accuracy. There are different modelling softwares available to explore the rainfall-runoff process in urban areas. XPSTORM, a link-node based, integrated stormwater modelling software, has been used in this study for developing surface runoff hydrograph for a Golf course area located in Rockhampton in Central Queensland in Australia. Four commonly used methods, namely SWMM runoff, Kinematic wave, Laurenson, and Time-Area are employed to generate runoff hydrograph for design storm of this study area. In runoff mode of XPSTORM, the rainfall, infiltration, evaporation and depression storage for subcatchments were simulated and the runoff from the subcatchment to collection node was calculated. The simulation results are presented, discussed and compared. The total surface runoff generated by SWMM runoff, Kinematic wave and Time-Area methods are found to be reasonably close, which indicates any of these methods can be used for developing runoff hydrograph of the study area. Laurenson method produces a comparatively less amount of surface runoff, however, it creates highest peak of surface runoff among all which may be suitable for hilly region. Although the Laurenson hydrograph technique is widely acceptable surface runoff routing technique in Queensland (Australia), extensive investigation is recommended with detailed topographic and hydrologic data in order to assess its suitability for use in the case study area.

Keywords: ARI, design storm, IFD, rainfall temporal pattern, routing techniques, surface runoff, XPSTORM.

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Authors: Konghe Xie

Abstract:

Two consensus problems are considered in this paper. One is the consensus of linear multi-agent systems with weakly connected directed communication topology. The other is the consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems with strongly connected directed communication topology. For the first problem, a simplified consensus protocol is designed: Each child agent can only communicate with one of its neighbors. That is, the real communication topology is a directed spanning tree of the original communication topology and without any cycles. Then, the necessary and sufficient condition is put forward to the multi-agent systems can be reached consensus. It is worth noting that the given conditions do not need any eigenvalue of the corresponding Laplacian matrix of the original directed communication network. For the second problem, the feedback gain is designed in the nonlinear consensus protocol. Then, the sufficient condition is proposed such that the systems can be achieved consensus. Besides, the consensus interval is introduced and analyzed to solve the consensus problem. Finally, two numerical simulations are included to verify the theoretical analysis.

Keywords: Consensus, multi-agent systems, directed spanning tree, the Laplacian matrix.

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Authors: Domenico Chizzoniti, Monica Moscatelli, Letizia Cattani, Piero Favino, Luca Preis

Abstract:

A settlement strategy is to anticipate and respond the needs of existing and future communities through the provision of primary health care facilities in marginalized areas. Access to a health care network is important to improving healthcare coverage, often lacking, in developing countries. The study explores that a good sanitary system strategy of rural contexts brings advantages to an existing settlement: improving transport, communication, water and social facilities. The objective of this paper is to define a possible methodology to implement primary health care facilities in disadvantaged areas of emerging countries. In this research, we analyze the case study of Lauro de Freitas, a municipality in the Brazilian state of Bahia, part of the Metropolitan Region of Salvador, with an area of 57,662 km² and 194.641 inhabitants. The health localization system in Lauro de Freitas is an integrated process that involves not only geographical aspects, but also a set of factors: population density, epidemiological data, allocation of services, road networks, and more. Data were collected also using semi-structured interviews and questionnaires to the local population. Synthesized data suggest that moving away from the coast where there is the greatest concentration of population and services, a network of primary health care facilities is able to improve the living conditions of small-dispersed communities. Based on the health service needs of populations, we have developed a methodological approach that is particularly useful in rural and remote contexts in emerging countries.

Keywords: Primary health care, developing countries, policy health planning, settlement strategy.

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Authors: K.R. Aida–Zade, C. Ardil, A.M. Sharifova

Abstract:

In this paper, the main principles of text-to-speech synthesis system are presented. Associated problems which arise when developing speech synthesis system are described. Used approaches and their application in the speech synthesis systems for Azerbaijani language are shown.

Keywords: synthesis of Azerbaijani language, morphemes, phonemes, sounds, sentence, speech synthesizer, intonation, accent, pronunciation.

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