Search results for: fuzzy multiple objective programming

Authors: A. Qayed Al-Emadi, C. Schwabenland, B. Czarnecka

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In 2009, the new HRM policy was implemented in Qatar for public sector organisations. The purpose of this research is to examine how Qatar’s 2009 HRM policy was significant in influencing employee retention in public organisations. The conducted study utilised quantitative methodology to analyse the data on employees’ perceptions of such HRM practices as Performance Management, Rewards and Promotion, Training and Development associated with the HRM policy in public organisations in comparison to semi-private organisations. Employees of seven public and semi-private organisations filled in the questionnaire based on the 5-point Likert scale to present quantitative results. The data was analysed with the correlation and multiple regression statistical analyses. It was found that Performance Management had the relationship with Employee Retention, and Rewards and Promotion influenced Job Satisfaction in public organisations. Relationship between Job Satisfaction and Employee Retention was also observed. However, no significant differences were observed in the role of HRM practices in public and semi-private organisations.

Keywords: Performance management, rewards, promotion, training and development, job satisfaction, employee retention, SHRM, configurationally perspective.

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Authors: Yang Song, Yifan Guo, Edward F. Gehringer

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Fifty years of research has found great potential for peer assessment as a pedagogical approach. With peer assessment, not only do students receive more copious assessments; they also learn to become assessors. In recent decades, more educational peer assessments have been facilitated by online systems. Those online systems are designed differently to suit different class settings and student groups, but they basically fall into two categories: rating-based and ranking-based. The rating-based systems ask assessors to rate the artifacts one by one following some review rubrics. The ranking-based systems allow assessors to review a set of artifacts and give a rank for each of them. Though there are different systems and a large number of users of each category, there is no comprehensive comparison on which design leads to higher reliability. In this paper, we designed algorithms to evaluate assessors' reliabilities based on their rating/ranking against the global ranks of the artifacts they have reviewed. These algorithms are suitable for data from both rating-based and ranking-based peer assessment systems. The experiments were done based on more than 15,000 peer assessments from multiple peer assessment systems. We found that the assessors in ranking-based peer assessments are at least 10% more reliable than the assessors in rating-based peer assessments. Further analysis also demonstrated that the assessors in ranking-based assessments tend to assess the more differentiable artifacts correctly, but there is no such pattern for rating-based assessors.

Keywords: Peer assessment, peer rating, peer ranking, reliability.

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Authors: Xiang Yu, Chuntao Feng, Lu Yang, Meiyang Song, Wenhao Zhou

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The existing two-dimensional micro-Doppler features extraction ignores the correlation information between the spatial and temporal dimension features. For the range-Doppler map, the time dimension is introduced, and a frequency modulation continuous wave (FMCW) radar human fall detection algorithm based on time-varying range-Doppler features is proposed. Firstly, the range-Doppler sequence maps are generated from the echo signals of the continuous motion of the human body collected by the radar. Then the three-dimensional data cube composed of multiple frames of range-Doppler maps is input into the three-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (3D CNN). The spatial and temporal features of time-varying range-Doppler are extracted by the convolution layer and pool layer at the same time. Finally, the extracted spatial and temporal features are input into the fully connected layer for classification. The experimental results show that the proposed fall detection algorithm has a detection accuracy of 95.66%.

Keywords: FMCW radar, fall detection, 3D CNN, time-varying range-Doppler features.

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Authors: Janjira Triped, Wipada Sanongraj, Bovornlak Oonkhanond, Sompop Sanongraj

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The main objective of this research is to synthesize silk fibroin fiber for indoor air particulate removal. Silk cocoons were de-gummed using 0.5 wt % Na2CO3 alkaline solutions at 90 Ó╣ìC for 60 mins, washed with distilled water, and dried at 80 Ó╣ìC for 3 hrs in a vacuum oven. Two sets of experiment were conducted to investigate the impacts of initial particulate matter (PM) concentration and that of air flow rate on the removal efficiency. Rice bran collected from a local rice mill in Ubonratchathani province was used as indoor air contaminant in this work. The morphology and physical properties of silk fibroin (SF) fiber were measured. The SEM revealed the deposition of PM on the used fiber. The PM removal efficiencies of 72.29 ± 3.03 % and 39.33 ± 1.99 % were obtained of PM10 and PM2.5, respectively, when using the initial PM concentration at 0.040 mg/m3 and 0.020 mg/m3 of PM10 and PM2.5, respectively, with the air flow rate of 5 L/min.

Keywords: Indoor air, Particulate matter, Scanning electron microscope (SEM), Silk fibroin fiber.

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Authors: K. Vijayalakshmi, S. Radhakrishnan

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In this paper we have proposed a novel dynamic least cost multicast routing protocol using hybrid genetic algorithm for IP networks. Our protocol finds the multicast tree with minimum cost subject to delay, degree, and bandwidth constraints. The proposed protocol has the following features: i. Heuristic local search function has been devised and embedded with normal genetic operation to increase the speed and to get the optimized tree, ii. It is efficient to handle the dynamic situation arises due to either change in the multicast group membership or node / link failure, iii. Two different crossover and mutation probabilities have been used for maintaining the diversity of solution and quick convergence. The simulation results have shown that our proposed protocol generates dynamic multicast tree with lower cost. Results have also shown that the proposed algorithm has better convergence rate, better dynamic request success rate and less execution time than other existing algorithms. Effects of degree and delay constraints have also been analyzed for the multicast tree interns of search success rate.

Keywords: Dynamic Group membership change, Hybrid Genetic Algorithm, Link / node failure, QoS Parameters.

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Authors: Prateep Wajeetongratana

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The purpose of this research was to study the influence of accountants’ potential performance on their working process, a case study of Government Savings Banks in the northeast of Thailand. The independent variables included accounting knowledge, accounting skill, accounting value, accounting ethics, and accounting attitude, while the dependent variable included the success of the working process. A total of 155 accountants working for Government Savings Banks were selected by random sampling. A questionnaire was used as a tool for collecting data. Descriptive statistics in this research included percentage, mean, and multiple regression analyses.

The findings revealed that the majority of accountants were female with an age between 35-40 years old. Most of the respondents had an undergraduate degree with ten years of experience. Moreover, the factors of accounting knowledge, accounting skill, accounting a value and accounting ethics and accounting attitude were rated at a high level. The findings from regression analysis of observation data revealed a causal relationship in that the observation data could explain at least 51 percent of the success in the accountants’ working process.

Keywords: Influence, Potential Performance, Success, Working Process.

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Authors: Inamullah Bhatti, Ahsanullah Baloch, Khadija Qureshi

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The objective of this research is to examine the shear thinning behaviour of mixing flow of non-Newtonian fluid like toothpaste in the dissolution container with rotating stirrer. The problem under investigation is related to the chemical industry. Mixing of fluid is performed in a cylindrical container with rotating stirrer, where stirrer is eccentrically placed on the lid of the container. For the simulation purpose the associated motion of the fluid is considered as revolving of the container, with stick stirrer. For numerical prediction, a time-stepping finite element algorithm in a cylindrical polar coordinate system is adopted based on semi-implicit Taylor-Galerkin/pressure-correction scheme. Numerical solutions are obtained for non-Newtonian fluids employing power law model. Variations with power law index have been analysed, with respect to the flow structure and pressure drop.

Keywords: finite element simulation, mixing fluid, rheology, rotating flow, toothpaste

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Authors: Santi Behera, M. Tripathy, J. K. Satapathy

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Power systems are operating under stressed condition due to continuous increase in demand of load. This can lead to voltage instability problem when face additional load increase or contingency. In order to avoid voltage instability suitable size of reactive power compensation at optimal location in the system is required which improves the load margin. This work aims at obtaining optimal size as well as location of compensation in the 39- bus New England system with the help of Bacteria Foraging and Genetic algorithms. To reduce the computational time the work identifies weak candidate buses in the system, and then picks only two of them to take part in the optimization. The objective function is based on a recently proposed voltage stability index which takes into account the weighted average sensitivity index is a simpler and faster approach than the conventional CPF algorithm. BFOA has been found to give better results compared to GA.

Keywords: BFOA, GA, SSVSL, WASI.

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Authors: Nagesha, G. Hemantha Kumar

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Although the level crossing concept has been the subject of intensive investigation over the last few years, certain problems of great interest remain unsolved. One of these concern is distribution of threshold levels. This paper presents a new threshold level allocation schemes for level crossing based on nonuniform sampling. Intuitively, it is more reasonable if the information rich regions of the signal are sampled finer and those with sparse information are sampled coarser. To achieve this objective, we propose non-linear quantization functions which dynamically assign the number of quantization levels depending on the importance of the given amplitude range. Two new approaches to determine the importance of the given amplitude segment are presented. The proposed methods are based on exponential and logarithmic functions. Various aspects of proposed techniques are discussed and experimentally validated. Its efficacy is investigated by comparison with uniform sampling.

Keywords: speech signals, sampling, signal reconstruction, asynchronousdelta modulation, non-linear quantization.

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Authors: S. Sarkar, R. Mandal

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The three-dimensional incompressible flow past a rectangular open cavity is investigated, where the aspect ratio of the cavity is considered as 4. The principle objective is to use large-eddy simulation to resolve and control the large-scale structures, which are largely responsible for flow oscillations in a cavity. The flow past an open cavity is very common in aerospace applications and can be a cause of acoustic source due to hydrodynamic instability of the shear layer and its interactions with the downstream edge. The unsteady Navier-stokes equations have been solved on a staggered mesh using a symmetry-preserving central difference scheme. Synthetic jet has been used as an active control to suppress the cavity oscillations in wake mode for a Reynolds number of ReD = 3360. The effect of synthetic jet has been studied by varying the jet amplitude and frequency, which is placed at the upstream wall of the cavity. The study indicates that there exits a frequency band, which is larger than a critical value, is effective in attenuating cavity oscillations when blowing ratio is more than 1.0.

Keywords: Cavity oscillation, Large Eddy Simulation, Synthetic Jet, Flow Control, Turbulence

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Authors: Tasnuva Tamanna, Sanjida Halim Topa

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Sputum smear conversion after one month of antituberculosis therapy in new smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis patients (PTB+) is a vital indicator towards treatment success. The objective of this study is to determine the rate of sputum smear conversion in new PTB+ patients after one month under treatment of National Institute of Diseases of the Chest and Hospital (NIDCH). Analysis of sputum smear conversion was done by re-clinical examination with sputum smear microscopic test after one month. Socio-demographic and hematological parameters were evaluated to perceive the correlation with the disease status. Among all enrolled patients only 33.33% were available for follow up diagnosis and of them only 42.86% patients turned to smear negative. Probably this consequence is due to non-coherence to the proper disease management. 66.67% and 78.78% patients reported low haemoglobin and packed cell volume level respectively whereas 80% and 93.33% patients accounted accelerated platelet count and erythrocyte sedimentation rate correspondingly.

Keywords: Followed up patients, PTB+ patients, sputum smear conversion, and sputum smear microscopic test.

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Authors: Mohamed Gouskir, Belaid Bouikhalene, Hicham Aissaoui, Benachir Elhadadi

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In this paper, we present an application of Riemannian geometry for processing non-Euclidean image data. We consider the image as residing in a Riemannian manifold, for developing a new method to brain edge detection and brain extraction. Automating this process is a challenge due to the high diversity in appearance brain tissue, among different patients and sequences. The main contribution, in this paper, is the use of an edge-based anisotropic diffusion tensor for the segmentation task by integrating both image edge geometry and Riemannian manifold (geodesic, metric tensor) to regularize the convergence contour and extract complex anatomical structures. We check the accuracy of the segmentation results on simulated brain MRI scans of single T1-weighted, T2-weighted and Proton Density sequences. We validate our approach using two different databases: BrainWeb database, and MRI Multiple sclerosis Database (MRI MS DB). We have compared, qualitatively and quantitatively, our approach with the well-known brain extraction algorithms. We show that using a Riemannian manifolds to medical image analysis improves the efficient results to brain extraction, in real time, outperforming the results of the standard techniques.

Keywords: Riemannian manifolds, Riemannian Tensor, Brain Segmentation, Non-Euclidean data, Brain Extraction.

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Authors: Naohiko Honma, Kojiro Suzuki

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This paper proposes the concept of aerocapture with aerodynamic-environment-adaptive variable geometry flexible aeroshell that vehicle deploys. The flexible membrane is composed of thin-layer film or textile as its aeroshell in order to solve some problems obstructing realization of aerocapture technique. Multi-objective optimization study is conducted to investigate solutions and derive design guidelines. As a result, solutions which can avoid aerodynamic heating and enlarge the corridor width up to 10% are obtained successfully, so that the effectiveness of this concept can be demonstrated. The deformation-use optimum solution changes its drag coefficient from 1.6 to 1.1, along with the change in dynamic pressure. Moreover, optimization results show that deformation-use solution requires the membrane for which upper temperature limit and strain limit are more than 700 K and 120%, respectively, and elasticity (Young-s modulus) is of order of 106 Pa.

Keywords: Aerocapture, flexible aeroshell, optimization, response surface methodology.

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Authors: Sangsuree Vasupongayya

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Fair share is one of the scheduling objectives supported on many production systems. However, fair share has been shown to cause performance problems for some users, especially the users with difficult jobs. This work is focusing on extending goaloriented parallel computer job scheduling policies to cover the fair share objective. Goal-oriented parallel computer job scheduling policies have been shown to achieve good scheduling performances when conflicting objectives are required. Goal-oriented policies achieve such good performance by using anytime combinatorial search techniques to find a good compromised schedule within a time limit. The experimental results show that the proposed goal-oriented parallel computer job scheduling policy (namely Tradeofffs( Tw:avgX)) achieves good scheduling performances and also provides good fair share performance.

Keywords: goal-oriented parallel job scheduling policies, fairshare.

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Authors: Selvakuma Kumaresh, Man Young Kim

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Combustion phenomenon will be accomplished effectively by the development of low emission combustor. One of the significant factors influencing the entire Combustion process is the mixing between a swirling angular jet (Primary Air) and the non-swirling inner jet (fuel). To study this fundamental flow, the chamber had to be designed in such a manner that the combustion process to sustain itself in a continuous manner and the temperature of the products is sufficiently below the maximum working temperature in the turbine. This study is used to develop the effective combustion with low unburned combustion products by adopting the concept of high swirl flow and motility of holes in the secondary chamber. The proper selection of a swirler is needed to reduce emission which can be concluded from the emission of Nox and CO2. The capture of CO2 is necessary to mitigate CO2 emissions from natural gas. Thus the suppression of unburned gases is a meaningful objective for the development of high performance combustor without affecting turbine blade temperature.

Keywords: Combustion, Emission, Can-type Combustion Chamber, CFD, Motility of Holes, Swirl Flow.

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Authors: A. Szabó Nagy, J. Szabó, Zs. Csanádi, J. Erdős

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The main objective of this study was to assess the seasonal variation of atmospheric polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) concentrations associated with PM10 in an urban site of Győr, Hungary. A total of 112 PM10 aerosol samples were collected in the years of 2012 and 2013 and analyzed for PAHs by gas chromatography method. The total PAH concentrations (sum of the concentrations of 19 individual PAH compounds) ranged from 0.19 to 70.16 ng/m3 with the mean value of 12.29 ng/m3. Higher concentrations of both total PAHs and benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) were detected in samples collected in the heating seasons. Using BaPequivalent potency index on the carcinogenic PAH concentration data, the local population appears to be exposed to significantly higher cancer risk in the heating seasons. However, the comparison of the BaP and total PAH concentrations observed for Győr with other cities it was found that the PAH levels in Győr generally corresponded to the EU average.

Keywords: Air quality, benzo[a]pyrene, PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

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Authors: M. Sivakumar, S. Saravanan

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The main function of Medium Access Control (MAC) is to share the channel efficiently between all nodes. In the real-time scenario, there will be certain amount of wastage in bandwidth due to back-off periods. More bandwidth will be wasted in idle state if the back-off period is very high and collision may occur if the back-off period is small. So, an optimization is needed for this problem. The main objective of the work is to reduce delay due to back-off period thereby reducing collision and increasing throughput. Here a method, called the virtual back-off algorithm (VBA) is used to optimize the back-off period and thereby it increases throughput and reduces collisions. The main idea is to optimize the number of transmission for every node. A counter is introduced at each node to implement this idea. Here counter value represents the sequence number. VBA is classified into two types VBA with counter sharing (VBA-CS) and VBA with no counter sharing (VBA-NCS). These two classifications of VBA are compared for various parameters. Simulation is done in NS-2 environment. The results obtained are found to be promising. 

Keywords: VBA, sequence number, counter, back-off period.

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Authors: Leong Lee, Cyriac Kandoth, Jennifer L. Leopold, Ronald L. Frank

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Protein 3D structure prediction has always been an important research area in bioinformatics. In particular, the prediction of secondary structure has been a well-studied research topic. Despite the recent breakthrough of combining multiple sequence alignment information and artificial intelligence algorithms to predict protein secondary structure, the Q3 accuracy of various computational prediction algorithms rarely has exceeded 75%. In a previous paper [1], this research team presented a rule-based method called RT-RICO (Relaxed Threshold Rule Induction from Coverings) to predict protein secondary structure. The average Q3 accuracy on the sample datasets using RT-RICO was 80.3%, an improvement over comparable computational methods. Although this demonstrated that RT-RICO might be a promising approach for predicting secondary structure, the algorithm-s computational complexity and program running time limited its use. Herein a parallelized implementation of a slightly modified RT-RICO approach is presented. This new version of the algorithm facilitated the testing of a much larger dataset of 396 protein domains [2]. Parallelized RTRICO achieved a Q3 score of 74.6%, which is higher than the consensus prediction accuracy of 72.9% that was achieved for the same test dataset by a combination of four secondary structure prediction methods [2].

Keywords: data mining, protein secondary structure prediction, parallelization.

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Authors: Andy Handouyahia, Tony Haddad, Frank Eaton

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Recent quasi-experimental evaluation of the Canadian Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP) by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) has provided an opportunity to examine alternative methods to estimating the incremental effects of Employment Benefits and Support Measures (EBSMs) on program participants. The focus of this paper is to assess the efficiency and robustness of inverse probability weighting (IPW) relative to kernel matching (KM) in the estimation of program effects. To accomplish this objective, the authors compare pairs of 1,080 estimates, along with their associated standard errors, to assess which type of estimate is generally more efficient and robust. In the interest of practicality, the authorsalso document the computationaltime it took to produce the IPW and KM estimates, respectively.

Keywords: Treatment effect, causal inference, observational studies, Propensity score based matching, Kernel Matching, Inverse Probability Weighting, Estimation methods for incremental effect.

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Authors: Nichanant Sermsri, Chonmapat Torasa

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The objective of this research was to investigate the efficiency of the light emitting diode (LED) tube in various color lights used to lure the adult coconut hispine beetle. The research was conducted by setting the forward bias on LED tubes, and the next step was to test luminous efficacy and quantity of electricity used to power each LED tube in different color lights. Finally, the researcher examined the efficiency of each color-light LED tube to lure the adult coconut hispine beetle.

The results showed that the ultraviolet LED tubes had the most capacity to allure the adult coconut hispine beetles with the percentage of 82.92, followed by the blue LED tubes with the percentage of 59.76. Whereas the yellow, pink, red and warm white LED tubes had no influence to the adult coconut hispine beetles.

Keywords: Coconut Hispine Beetle, Color Lights, Lighting Efficiency, LED Tubes.

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Authors: Hyunchul Ahn, Kyoung-Jae Kim

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Corporate credit rating prediction using statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has been one of the attractive research topics in the literature. In recent years, multiclass classification models such as artificial neural network (ANN) or multiclass support vector machine (MSVM) have become a very appealing machine learning approaches due to their good performance. However, most of them have only focused on classifying samples into nominal categories, thus the unique characteristic of the credit rating - ordinality - has been seldom considered in their approaches. This study proposes new types of ANN and MSVM classifiers, which are named OMANN and OMSVM respectively. OMANN and OMSVM are designed to extend binary ANN or SVM classifiers by applying ordinal pairwise partitioning (OPP) strategy. These models can handle ordinal multiple classes efficiently and effectively. To validate the usefulness of these two models, we applied them to the real-world bond rating case. We compared the results of our models to those of conventional approaches. The experimental results showed that our proposed models improve classification accuracy in comparison to typical multiclass classification techniques with the reduced computation resource.

Keywords: Artificial neural network, Corporate credit rating, Support vector machines, Ordinal pairwise partitioning

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Authors: Y. Abdelrazig

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Evolutionary optimization methods such as genetic algorithms have been used extensively for the construction site layout problem. More recently, ant colony optimization algorithms, which are evolutionary methods based on the foraging behavior of ants, have been successfully applied to benchmark combinatorial optimization problems. This paper proposes a formulation of the site layout problem in terms of a sequencing problem that is suitable for solution using an ant colony optimization algorithm. In the construction industry, site layout is a very important planning problem. The objective of site layout is to position temporary facilities both geographically and at the correct time such that the construction work can be performed satisfactorily with minimal costs and improved safety and working environment. During the last decade, evolutionary methods such as genetic algorithms have been used extensively for the construction site layout problem. This paper proposes an ant colony optimization model for construction site layout. A simple case study for a highway project is utilized to illustrate the application of the model.

Keywords: Construction site layout, optimization, ant colony.

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Authors: Tsugunosuke Sakai, Haruya Tamaki, Ryuichi Yoshida, Ryohei Egusa, Etsuji Yamaguchi, Shigenori Inagaki, Fusako Kusunoki, Miki Namatame, Masanori Sugimoto, Hiroshi Mizoguchi

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We aim to develop a full-body interaction game that could let children cooperate and interact with other children in small groups. As the first step for our aim, the objective of the full-body interaction game developed in this study is to make interaction between children. The game requires two children to jump together with the same timing. We let children experience the game and answer the questionnaires. The children using several strategies to coordinate the timing of their jumps were observed. These included shouting time, watching each other, and jumping in a constant rhythm as if they were skipping rope. In this manner, we observed the children playing the game while cooperating with each other. The results of a questionnaire to evaluate the proposed interactive game indicate that the jumping game was a very enjoyable experience in which the participants could immerse themselves. Therefore, the game enabled children to experience cooperation with others by using body movements.

Keywords: Children, cooperation, full-body interaction game, kinect sensor.

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Authors: Nerey H. Mvungi, Justinian Anatory, Fatuma Simba

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Digital broadcasting has been an area of active research, development, innovation and business models development in recent years. This paper presents a survey on the characteristics of the digital terrestrial television broadcasting (DTTB) standards, and implementation status of DTTB worldwide showing the standards adopted. It is clear that only the developed countries and some in the developing ones shall be able to beat the ITU set analogue to digital broadcasting migration deadline because of the challenges that these countries faces in digitizing their terrestrial broadcasting. The challenges to keep on track the DTTB migration plan are also discussed in this paper. They include financial, technology gap, policies alignment with DTTB technology, etc. The reported performance comparisons for the different standards are also presented. The interesting part is that the results for many comparative studies depends to a large extent on the objective behind such studies, hence counter claims are common.

Keywords: Digital terrestrial television broadcasting (DTTB) technologies, DTTB standards comparison, DTTB implementation.

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Authors: M. Haj Seyed Hadi, M. Taghi Darzi, Z. Ghandeharialavijeh, GH. Riazi

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The main objective of this study was to determine the effects of vermicompost and amino acids on the qualitative and quantitative yield of chamomile. The experiment was conducted during the growing season of 2010 at the Alborz Medical Research Center. The Treatment groups consisted of vermicompost (0, 5, 10, 15 and 20 tons/ha) and the sprays of amino acids (budding stag, flowering stage, and budding + flowering stage). The experimental design was a factorial experiment based on Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications. The present results have shown that the highest plant height, flower head diameter, fresh and dry flower yield and significant essential oil content were obtained by using 20- ton vermicompost per hectare. Effects of amino acids were similar to those seen in vermicompost treatment and all measured traits were seen to be significant after the spray of amino acids at the budding + flowering stage).

Keywords: Vermicompost, amino acids, chamomile, yield

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Authors: Robersy Sánchez, Ricardo Grau

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A plausible architecture of an ancient genetic code is derived from an extended base triplet vector space over the Galois field of the extended base alphabet {D, G, A, U, C}, where the letter D represent one or more hypothetical bases with unspecific pairing. We hypothesized that the high degeneration of a primeval genetic code with five bases and the gradual origin and improvements of a primitive DNA repair system could make possible the transition from the ancient to the modern genetic code. Our results suggest that the Watson-Crick base pairing and the non-specific base pairing of the hypothetical ancestral base D used to define the sum and product operations are enough features to determine the coding constraints of the primeval and the modern genetic code, as well as the transition from the former to the later. Geometrical and algebraic properties of this vector space reveal that the present codon assignment of the standard genetic code could be induced from a primeval codon assignment. Besides, the Fourier spectrum of the extended DNA genome sequences derived from the multiple sequence alignment suggests that the called period-3 property of the present coding DNA sequences could also exist in the ancient coding DNA sequences.

Keywords: Genetic code vector space, primeval genetic code, power spectrum.

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Authors: Suleyman Gokhan Gunay, Gulsevim Yumuk Gunay

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One of the most important secrets of succesful companies is the fact that cooperation with NGOs will create a good reputation for them so that they can be immunized to economic crisis. The performance of the most admired companies in the world based on the ratings of Forbes and Fortune show us that most of these firms also have close relationships with their NGOs. Today, if companies do something wrong this information spreads very quickly to do the society. If people do not like the activities of a company, it can find itself in public relations nightmare that can threaten its repuation. Since the cost of communication has dropped dramatically due to the vast use of internet, the increase in communication among stakeholders via internet makes companies more visible. These multiple and interdependent interactions among the network of stakeholders is called as the network relationships. NGOs play the role of catalyst among the stakeholders of a firm to enhance the awareness. Succesful firms are aware of this fact that NGOs have a central role in today-s business world. Firms are also aware of the fact that they can enhance their corporate reputation via cooperation with the NGOs. This fact will be illustrated in this paper by examining some of the actions of the most succesful companies in terms of their cooperations with the NGOs.

Keywords: Network relationships, cooperative behaviors, corporate reputation, immunization to crisis.

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Authors: Abdesselem Dakhli, Wajdi Bellil, Chokri Ben Amar

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DNA Barcode provides good sources of needed information to classify living species. The classification problem has to be supported with reliable methods and algorithms. To analyze species regions or entire genomes, it becomes necessary to use the similarity sequence methods. A large set of sequences can be simultaneously compared using Multiple Sequence Alignment which is known to be NP-complete. However, all the used methods are still computationally very expensive and require significant computational infrastructure. Our goal is to build predictive models that are highly accurate and interpretable. In fact, our method permits to avoid the complex problem of form and structure in different classes of organisms. The empirical data and their classification performances are compared with other methods. Evenly, in this study, we present our system which is consisted of three phases. The first one, is called transformation, is composed of three sub steps; Electron-Ion Interaction Pseudopotential (EIIP) for the codification of DNA Barcodes, Fourier Transform and Power Spectrum Signal Processing. Moreover, the second phase step is an approximation; it is empowered by the use of Multi Library Wavelet Neural Networks (MLWNN). Finally, the third one, is called the classification of DNA Barcodes, is realized by applying the algorithm of hierarchical classification.

Keywords: DNA Barcode, Electron-Ion Interaction Pseudopotential, Multi Library Wavelet Neural Networks.

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Authors: Ang Ling Weay, Mona Masood

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This paper discusses the potential benefits of an interactive multimedia information representation in enhancing students’ critical thinking aligned with history reasoning in learning history amongst Secondary School students in Malaysia. Two modes of multimedia information representation were implemented; chronologic and thematic information representations. A qualitative study of an unstructured interview was conducted among two history teachers, one history education lecturer, two i-think experts, and five students from Form Four secondary school. The interview was to elicit their opinions on the implementation of thinking maps and interactive multimedia information representation in history learning. The key elements of the interactive multimedia (e.g. multiple media, user control, interactivity and use of timelines and concept maps) were then considered to improve the learning process. Findings of the preliminary investigation reveal that the interactive multimedia information representations have the potential benefits to be implemented as an instructional resource in enhancing students’ higher order thinking skills (HOTs). This paper concludes by giving suggestions for future work.

Keywords: Multimedia Information Representation, Critical Thinking, History Reasoning, Chronological and Thematic Information Representation.

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Authors: Zhazira Kuanyshbayeva

Abstract:

Article is devoted to the problem of Kazakhstan people national values in the conditions of the Republic of Kazakhstan independence. Formation of ethnos national values is viewed as the mandatory constituent of this process in contemporary conditions. The article shows the dynamics of forming socialspiritual basis of Kazakhstan people-s national values. It depicts peculiarities of interethnic relations in poly-ethnic and multiconfessional Kazakhstan. The study reviews in every detail various directions of the state social policy development in the sphere of national values. It is aimed to consolidation of the society to achieve the shared objective, i.e. building democratic and civilized state. The author discloses peculiarities of ethnos national values development using specific sources. It is underlined that renewal and modernization of Kazakhstan society represents new stage in the national value development, and its typical feature is integration process based on peoples- friendship, cultural principles of interethnic communication.

Keywords: Interethnic relation, Kazakhstan people, national policy, national values.

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