Search results for: Urban sustainable development

Authors: Mustapha Shitu Suleiman, Francis Neshamba, Nestor Valero-Silva

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Small businesses are considered as engine of economic growth, contributing to employment generation, wealth creation, and poverty alleviation and food security in both developed and developing countries. Nigeria is facing many socio-economic problems and it is believed that by supporting small business development, as propellers of new ideas and more effective users of resources, often driven by individual creativity and innovation, Nigeria would be able to address some of its economic and social challenges, such as unemployment and economic diversification. Using secondary literature, this paper examines the role small businesses can play in the creation of jobs in North-West Nigeria to overcome issues of unemployment, which is the most devastating economic challenge facing the region. Most studies in this area have focused on Nigeria as a whole and only a few studies provide a regional focus, hence, this study will contribute to knowledge by filling this gap by concentrating on North-West Nigeria. It is hoped that with the present administration’s determination to improve the economy, small businesses would be used as vehicles for diversification of the economy away from crude oil to create jobs that would lead to a reduction in the country’s high unemployment level.

Keywords: Job creation, North-West Nigeria, small business, unemployment.

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Authors: Robert Grzeszczak, Magdalena Gniadzik

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The article deals with one of the most significant issues concerning the functioning of the internal market of the European Union – the free movement of workers and free movement of persons. The purpose is to identify the political and legal effects of the “renationalisation process” on the EU and its Member States. The concept of renationalisation is expressed through Member States’ aim to verify the relationship with the EU. The tendency is more visible in the public opinion of several MS’s of the ‘EU core’ and may be confirmed by the changes applied by the regulatory body. The thesis for the article is the return of renationalisation tendencies in the area of the Single Market, which is supported by, among others, an open criticism of the foundations of EU integration or considerations on withdrawal from the EU by some MS. This analysis will focus primarily on the effects that renationalisation may have on the free movement of persons. The free movement of persons is one of the key issues for the development of the European integration. It is still subject to theoretical reflections, new doubts and practical issues. The latest developments in politics, law and jurisprudence demonstrate the need to reflect on the attempts to redefine certain principles regarding migrant EU workers and their protection against nationality-based discrimination.

Keywords: European law, European Union, common market, free movement of workers, posting of workers, case law.

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Authors: A. Kablan

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The prediction of financial time series is a very complicated process. If the efficient market hypothesis holds, then the predictability of most financial time series would be a rather controversial issue, due to the fact that the current price contains already all available information in the market. This paper extends the Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System for High Frequency Trading which is an expert system that is capable of using fuzzy reasoning combined with the pattern recognition capability of neural networks to be used in financial forecasting and trading in high frequency. However, in order to eliminate unnecessary input in the training phase a new event based volatility model was proposed. Taking volatility and the scaling laws of financial time series into consideration has brought about the development of the Intraday Seasonality Observation Model. This new model allows the observation of specific events and seasonalities in data and subsequently removes any unnecessary data. This new event based volatility model provides the ANFIS system with more accurate input and has increased the overall performance of the system.

Keywords: Adaptive Neuro-fuzzy Inference system, High Frequency Trading, Intraday Seasonality Observation Model.

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Authors: Mohammad Soliman, Mohamed A. Abou-Shouk

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Knowledge management focuses on the development, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information and expertise. It has become an important tool to improve performance in tourism enterprises. This includes improving decision-making, developing customer services, and increasing sales and profits. Knowledge management adoption depends on human, organizational and technological factors. This study aims to explore the concept of knowledge management in travel agents in Egypt. It explores the requirements of adoption and its impact on performance in these agencies. The study targets Category A travel agents in Egypt. The population of the study encompasses Category A travel agents having online presence. An online questionnaire is used to collect data from managers of travel agents. This study is useful for travel agents who are in urgent need to restructure their intermediary role and support their survival in the global travel market. The study sheds light on the requirements of adoption and the expected impact on performance. This could help travel agents identify their situation and the determine the extent to which they are ready to adopt knowledge management. This study is contributing to knowledge by providing insights from the tourism sector in a developing country where the concept of knowledge management is still in its infancy stages.

Keywords: Benefits, determinants, Egypt, knowledge management, travel agents.

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Authors: Leandro Marcos Alves Vaz

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The teaching of physics in Brazilian public schools emphasizes strongly the theoretical aspects of this science, showing its philosophical and mathematical basis, but neglecting its experimental character. Perhaps the lack of science laboratories explains this practice. In this work, we present a method of teaching physics using the computer. As alternatives to real experiments, we have the trials through simulators, many of which are free software available on the internet. In order to develop a study on the use of simulators in teaching, knowing the impossibility of simulations on all topics in a given subject, we combined these programs with phenomenological and/or experimental texts in order to mitigate this limitation. This study proposes the use of simulators and the debate using phenomenological/experimental texts on electrostatic theme in groups of the 3rd year of EJA (Adult and Youth Education) in order to verify the advantages of this methodology. Some benefits of the hybridization of the traditional method with the tools used were: Greater motivation of the students in learning, development of experimental notions, proactive socialization to learning, greater easiness to understand some concepts and the creation of collaborative activities that can reduce timidity of part of the students.

Keywords: Physics teaching, simulators, youth and adult education, experimentation, electrostatic.

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Authors: T. Vigneswaran, B. Mukundhan, P. Subbarami Reddy

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Full adders are important components in applications such as digital signal processors (DSP) architectures and microprocessors. In addition to its main task, which is adding two numbers, it participates in many other useful operations such as subtraction, multiplication, division,, address calculation,..etc. In most of these systems the adder lies in the critical path that determines the overall speed of the system. So enhancing the performance of the 1-bit full adder cell (the building block of the adder) is a significant goal.Demands for the low power VLSI have been pushing the development of aggressive design methodologies to reduce the power consumption drastically. To meet the growing demand, we propose a new low power adder cell by sacrificing the MOS Transistor count that reduces the serious threshold loss problem, considerably increases the speed and decreases the power when compared to the static energy recovery full (SERF) adder. So a new improved 14T CMOS l-bit full adder cell is presented in this paper. Results show 50% improvement in threshold loss problem, 45% improvement in speed and considerable power consumption over the SERF adder and other different types of adders with comparable performance.

Keywords: Arithmetic circuit, full adder, multiplier, low power, very Large-scale integration (VLSI).

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Authors: Osama A. Terfas, Abdusalam A. Alaktiwi

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Pressure vessels are usually operating at temperatures where the conditions of linear elastic fracture mechanics are no longer met because massive plasticity precedes crack propagation. In this work the development of a surface crack in a pressure vessel subject to bending and tension under elastic-plastic fracture mechanics conditions was investigated. Finite element analysis was used to evaluate the hydrostatic stress, the J-integral and crack growth for semi-elliptical surface-breaking cracks. The results showed non-uniform stress triaxiality and crack driving force around the crack front at large deformation levels. Different ductile crack extensions were observed which emphasis the dependent of ductile tearing on crack geometry and type of loading. In bending the crack grew only beneath the surface, and growth was suppressed at the deepest segment. This contrasts to tension where the crack breaks through the thickness with uniform growth along the entire crack front except at the free surface. Current investigations showed that the crack growth developed under linear elastic fracture mechanics conditions will no longer be applicable under ductile tearing scenarios.

Keywords: Bending, ductile tearing, fracture toughness, stress triaxiality, tension.

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Authors: Yih-Ferng Peng

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In this paper, the local grid refinement is focused by using a nested grid technique. The Cartesian grid numerical method is developed for simulating unsteady, viscous, incompressible flows with complex immersed boundaries. A finite volume method is used in conjunction with a two-step fractional-step procedure. The key aspects that need to be considered in developing such a nested grid solver are imposition of interface conditions on the inter-block and accurate discretization of the governing equation in cells that are with the inter-block as a control surface. A new interpolation procedure is presented which allows systematic development of a spatial discretization scheme that preserves the spatial accuracy of the underlying solver. The present nested grid method has been tested by two numerical examples to examine its performance in the two dimensional problems. The numerical examples include flow past a circular cylinder symmetrically installed in a Channel and flow past two circular cylinders with different diameters. From the numerical experiments, the ability of the solver to simulate flows with complicated immersed boundaries is demonstrated and the nested grid approach can efficiently speed up the numerical solutions.

Keywords: local grid refinement, Cartesian grid, nested grid, fractional-step method.

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Authors: Isaac Kofi Mensah, Jianing Mi, Feng Cheng

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This research paper seeks to investigate the factors determining the continuance usage of online mobile payment applications among WECHAT users in China. Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory would both be applied as the theoretical foundation for this study. A developed instrument would be administered to the targeted sample of 1000 WECHAT Users in the City of Harbin, China, through an online questionnaire administration platform. Factors such as perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived service quality, social influence, trust in the internet, internet self-efficacy, relative advantage, compatibility, and complexity would be explored to determine its significant impact on the continuance intention to use mobile payment apps. This study is at the development and implementation stage. The successful completion of this research article would not only provide an insightful understanding of the factors influencing the decision of WECHAT users in China to use mobile payment applications but also enrich the e-commerce adoption literature.

Keywords: Diffusion of innovation (DOI), e-commerce, mobile payment, technology acceptance model (TAM), WECHAT.

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Authors: Sylwia Wiewiorowska, Zbigniew Muskalski

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The article presents part of research on the development of nickel plated welding wire production technology, whose application will enable the elimination of the flaws of currently manufactured welding wires. The nickel plated welding wire will be distinguished by high quality, because the Ni layer which is deposited electrochemically onto it from acid baths is characterized by very good adhesion to the steel wire surface, while the ductile nickel well deforms plastically in the drawing process and the adhesion of the Ni layer increases in the drawing process due to the occurring process of diffusion between the Ni and the steel. The Ni layer obtained in the proposed technology, despite a smaller thickness than when the wire is coated with copper, is continuous and tight, thus ensuring high corrosion resistance, as well as unsusceptible to scaling, which should provide a product that meets requirements imposed by the market. The product will also reduce, to some extent, the amount of copper brought in to steel through recycling, while the wire coating nickel introduced to the weld in the welding process is expected, to a degree, to favorably influence its mechanical properties. The paper describes the tests of the process of nickel plating of f1.96 mm-diameter wires using various nickel plating baths with different process parameters.

Keywords: Steel wire, plating baths, welding process, coatings.

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Authors: Zamri Noranai, Dayang Siti Zainab Abang Bujang, Rosli Asmawi, Hamidon Salleh, Mohammad Zainal Md Yusof

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Air conditioning is mainly to be used as human comfort medium. It has been use more often in country in which the daily temperatures are high. In scientific, air conditioning is defined as a process of controlling the moisture, cooling, heating and cleaning air. Without proper estimation of cooling load, big amount of waste energy been used because of unsuitable of air conditioning system are not considering to overcoming heat gains from surrounding. This is due to the size of the room is too big and the air conditioning has to use more energy to cool the room and the air conditioning is too small for the room. The studies are basically to develop a program to calculate cooling load. Through this study it is easy to calculate cooling load estimation. Furthermore it-s help to compare the cooling load estimation by hourly and yearly. Base on the last study that been done, the developed software are not user-friendly. For individual without proper knowledge of calculating cooling load estimation might be problem. Easy excess and user-friendly should be the main objective to design something. This program will allow cooling load able be estimate by any users rather than estimation by using rule of thumb. Several of limitation of case study is judged to sure it-s meeting to Malaysia building specification. Finally validation is done by comparison manual calculation and by developed program.

Keywords: Building, Energy and Coaling Load

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Authors: Jiwon Lee, Chanho Jung, Si-Hwan Jang, Kyung-Ill Kim, Sanghyun Joo, Wook-Ho Son

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Since the advances in digital imaging technologies have led to development of high quality digital devices, there are a lot of illegal copies of copyrighted video content on the Internet. Also, unauthorized editing is occurred frequently. Thus, we propose an editing prevention technique for high-quality (HQ) video that can prevent these illegally edited copies from spreading out. The proposed technique is applied spatial and temporal gradient methods to improve the fidelity and detection performance. Also, the scheme duplicates the embedding signal temporally to alleviate the signal reduction caused by geometric and signal-processing distortions. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves better performance than previously proposed schemes and it has high fidelity. The proposed scheme can be used in unauthorized access prevention method of visual communication or traitor tracking applications which need fast detection process to prevent illegally edited video content from spreading out.

Keywords: Editing prevention technique, gradient method, high-quality video, luminance change, visual communication.

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Authors: Nattapong Techarattanased

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This research paper aimed to identify determinants of airline service quality on passengers’ repeated purchase of service. The population of this study was Thai passengers flying domestic flights with Thai Airways, making a total of 300 samples. These 300 samples participated in this research by answering a collection of questions by means of a questionnaire. An analysis of means score and multiple regression revealed that perceived service quality for tangible elements, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy had determined repeated purchase of flight service of the passengers at a high level. Moreover, reliability and responsiveness factors could predict the passengers’ repeated purchase of flight service at the percentage of 30.6. The findings gave a signal that Thai Airways may consider a development of route network and fleet strategy as well as an establishment of aircraft and seat qualification to meet passengers’ needs and requirements. Passengers’ level of satisfaction could also be maximized by offering service value through various kinds of special deals and programs, whereas value- added pricing strategy should be considered in order to differentiate from and beat other leading airline competitors.

Keywords: Service Quality, Repeated Purchase.

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Authors: Peter Sabev, Katalina Grigorova

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Test automation allows performing difficult and time consuming manual software testing tasks efficiently, quickly and repeatedly. However, development and maintenance of automated tests is expensive, so it needs a proper prioritization what to automate first. This paper describes a simple yet efficient approach for such prioritization of test cases based on the effort needed for both manual execution and software test automation. The suggested approach is very flexible because it allows working with a variety of assessment methods, and adding or removing new candidates at any time. The theoretical ideas presented in this article have been successfully applied in real world situations in several software companies by the authors and their colleagues including testing of real estate websites, cryptographic and authentication solutions, OSGi-based middleware framework that has been applied in various systems for smart homes, connected cars, production plants, sensors, home appliances, car head units and engine control units (ECU), vending machines, medical devices, industry equipment and other devices that either contain or are connected to an embedded service gateway.

Keywords: Automated Testing, Manual Testing, Test Automation, Software testing, Test Prioritization.

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Authors: Safwan Altarazi, Raghad Hemeimat, Mousa Wakileh, Ra'ad Qsous, Aya Khreisat

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With the development of the Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) products in many applications, the challenge of investigating the raw material composition and reducing the cost have both become more and more important. Considerable research has been done investigating the effect of additives on the PVC products. Most of the PVC composites research investigates only the effect of single/few factors, at a time. This isolated consideration of the input factors does not take in consideration the interaction effect of the different factors. This paper implements a mixture experimental design approach to find out a cost-effective PVC composition for the production of electrical-insulation cables considering the ASTM Designation (D) 6096. The results analysis showed that a minimum cost can be achieved through using 20% virgin PVC, 18.75% recycled PVC, 43.75% CaCO3 with participle size 10 microns, 14% DOP plasticizer, and 3.5% CPW plasticizer. For maximum UTS the compound should consist of: 17.5% DOP, 62.5% virgin PVC, and 20.0% CaCO3 of particle size 5 microns. Finally, for the highest ductility the compound should be made of 35% virgin PVC, 20% CaCO3 of particle size 5 microns, and 45.0% DOP plasticizer.

Keywords: ASTM 6096, mixture experimental-design approach, PVC electrical cable insulation, recycled PVC.

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Authors: Dennys Robson Girardi, Hugo Bulegon, Claudia Maria Moro Barra

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Leprosy is an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium Leprae, this disease, generally, compromises the neural fibers, leading to the development of disability. Disabilities are changes that limit daily activities or social life of a normal individual. When comes to leprosy, the study of disability considered the functional limitation (physical disabilities), the limitation of activity and social participation, which are measured respectively by the scales: EHF, SALSA and PARTICIPATION SCALE. The objective of this work is to propose an on-line monitoring of leprosy patients, which is based on information scales EHF, SALSA and PARTICIPATION SCALE. It is expected that the proposed system is applied in monitoring the patient during treatment and after healing therapy of the disease. The correlations that the system is between the scales create a variety of information, presented the state of the patient and full of changes or reductions in disability. The system provides reports with information from each of the scales and the relationships that exist between them. This way, health professionals, with access to patient information, can intervene with techniques for the Prevention of Disability. Through the automated scale, the system shows the level of the patient and allows the patient, or the responsible, to take a preventive measure. With an online system, it is possible take the assessments and monitor patients from anywhere.

Keywords: Leprosy, Medical Informatics, Decision SupportSystem, Disability.

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Authors: A. Grilec, S. Petrak, M. Mahnic Naglic

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Technological development and the globalization in production and sales of clothing in the last decade have significantly influenced the changes in consumer relationship with the industrial-fashioned apparel and in the way of clothing purchasing. The Internet sale of clothing is in a constant and significant increase in the global market, but the possibilities offered by modern computing technologies in the customization segment are not yet fully involved, especially according to the individual customer requirements and body sizes. Considering the growing trend of online shopping, the main goal of this paper is to investigate the differences in customer perceptions towards online apparel shopping and particularly to discover the main differences in perceptions between customers regarding three different body sizes. In order to complete the research goal, the quantitative study on the sample of 85 Croatian consumers was conducted in 2017 in Zagreb, Croatia. Respondents were asked to indicate their level of agreement according to a five-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). To analyze attitudes of respondents, simple and descriptive statistics were used. The main findings highlight the differences in respondent perception of 3D body scanning, using 3D body scanning in Internet shopping, online apparel shopping habits regarding their body sizes.

Keywords: Consumer behavior, online shopping, 3D body scanning.

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Authors: Nacim Khelil, Amar Kahil, Said Boukais

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The aim of the present study is to investigate the changes in the mechanical properties of mortars including additions of Condensed Silica Fume (CSF), Hydrated Lime (CH) or both at various amounts (5% to 15% of cement replacement) and high water ratios (w/b) (0.4 to 0.7). The physical and mechanical changes in the mixes were evaluated using non-destructive tests (Ultrasonic Pulse Velocity (UPV)) and destructive tests (crushing tests) on 28 day-long specimens consecutively, in order to assess CSF and CH replacement rate influence on the mechanical and physical properties of the mortars, as well as CSF-CH pre-mixing on the improvement of these properties. A significant improvement of the mechanical properties of the CSF, CSF-CH mortars, has been noted. CSF-CH mixes showed the best improvements exceeding 50% improvement, showing the sizable pozzolanic reaction contribution to the specimen strength development. UPV tests have shown increased velocities for CSF and CSH mixes, however no proportional evolution with compressive strengths could be noted. The results of the study show that CSF-CH addition could represent a suitable solution to significantly increase the mechanical properties of mortars.

Keywords: Compressive strength, condensed silica fume, hydrated lime, pozzolanic reaction, UPV testing.

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Authors: Gry M, Bergström J, Lengquist J, Lindberg J, Drobin K, Schwenk J, Nilsson P, Schuppe-Koistinen I.

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Sensitive and predictive DILI (Drug Induced Liver Injury) biomarkers are needed in drug R&D to improve early detection of hepatotoxicity. The discovery of DILI biomarkers that demonstrate the predictive power to identify individuals at risk to DILI would represent a major advance in the development of personalized healthcare approaches. In this healthy volunteer acetaminophen study (4g/day for 7 days, with 3 monitored nontreatment days before and 4 after), 450 serum samples from 32 subjects were analyzed using protein profiling by antibody suspension bead arrays. Multiparallel protein profiles were generated using a DILI target protein array with 300 antibodies, where the antibodies were selected based on previous literature findings of putative DILI biomarkers and a screening process using pre dose samples from the same cohort. Of the 32 subjects, 16 were found to develop an elevated ALT value (2Xbaseline, responders). Using the plasma profiling approach together with multivariate statistical analysis some novel findings linked to lipid metabolism were found and more important, endogenous protein profiles in baseline samples (prior to treatment) with predictive power for ALT elevations were identified.

Keywords: DILI, Plasma profiling, PLSDA, Randomforest.

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Authors: Ana Paula Lisboa Sohn, Filipa Dionísio Vieria, Nelson Casarotto, Idaulo José Cunha

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This paper aims at identifying and analyzing the knowledge transmission channels in textile and clothing clusters located in Brazil and in Europe. Primary data was obtained through interviews with key individuals. The collection of primary data was carried out based on a questionnaire with ten categories of indicators of knowledge transmission. Secondary data was also collected through a literature review and through international organizations sites. Similarities related to the use of the main transmission channels of knowledge are observed in all cases. The main similarities are: influence of suppliers of machinery, equipment and raw materials; imitation of products and best practices; training promoted by technical institutions and businesses; and cluster companies being open to acquire new knowledge. The main differences lie in the relationship between companies, where in Europe the intensity of this relationship is bigger when compared to Brazil. The differences also occur in importance and frequency of the relationship with the government, with the cultural environment, and with the activities of research and development. It is also found factors that reduce the importance of geographical proximity in transmission of knowledge, and in generating trust and the establishment of collaborative behavior.

Keywords: Industrial clusters, interorganizational learning, knowledge transmission channels, textile and clothing industry.

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Authors: Vivek Agrawal, Vikas Tripathi, Nitin Seth

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This study examines several critical dimensions of eservice quality overlooked in the existing literature and proposes a model and instrument framework for measuring customer perceived e-service quality in the banking sector. The initial design was derived from a pool of instrument dimensions and their items from the existing literature review by content analysis. Based on focused group discussion, nine dimensions were extracted. An exploratory factor analysis approach was applied to data from a survey of 323 respondents. The instrument has been designed specifically for the banking sector. Research data was collected from bank customers who use electronic banking in a developing economy. A nine-factor instrument has been proposed to measure the e-service quality. The instrument has been checked for reliability. The validity and sample place limited the applicability of the instrument across economies and service categories. Future research must be conducted to check the validity. This instrument can help bankers in developing economies like India to measure the e-service quality and make improvements. The present study offers a systematic procedure that provides insights on to the conceptual and empirical comprehension of customer perceived e-service quality and its constituents.

Keywords: Testing, instrument, e-service quality, factor analysis.

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Authors: R. Berglund, T. Backström, M. Bellgran

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This study explores how management addresses psychosocial risks in seven teams of engineers and technicians in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution. The sample is from an ongoing quasi-experiment about psychosocial risk management in a manufacturing company in Sweden. Each of the seven teams belongs to one of two clusters: a positive cluster or a negative cluster. The positive cluster reports a significantly positive change in psychosocial risk levels between two time-points and the negative cluster reports a significantly negative change. The data are collected using semi-structured interviews. The results of the computer aided thematic analysis show that there are more differences than similarities when comparing the risk treatment actions taken between the two clusters. Findings show that the managers in the positive cluster use more enabling actions that foster and support formal and informal relationship building. In contrast, managers that use less enabling actions hinder the development of positive group processes and contribute negative changes in psychosocial risk levels. This exploratory study sheds some light on how management can influence significant positive and negative changes in psychosocial risk levels during a risk management process.

Keywords: Group process model, risk treatment, risk management, psychosocial.

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Authors: Rafiziana M. Kasmani, Gordon E. Andrews, Herodotos N. Phylaktou, Norazana Ibrahim, Roshafima R. Ali

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An experiment of vented gas explosions involving two different cylinder vessel volumes (0.2 and 0.0065 m3) was reported, with equivalence ratio (Φ) ranged from 0.3 to 1.6. Both vessels were closed at the rear end and fitted at the other side with a circular orifice plate that gives a constant vent coefficient (K =Av/V2/3) of 16.4. It was shown that end ignition gives higher overpressures than central ignition, even though most of the published work on venting uses central ignition. For propane and ethylene, it is found that rich mixtures gave the highest overpressures and these mixtures are not considered in current vent design guidance; which the guideline is based on mixtures giving the maximum flame temperature. A strong influence of the vessel volume at constant K was found for methane, propane, ethylene and hydrogen-air explosions. It can be concluded that self- acceleration of the flame, which is dependent on the distance of a flame from the ignition and the ‘suction’ at the vent opening are significant factors affecting the vent flow during explosion development in vented gas explosion. This additional volume influence on vented explosions is not taken into account in the current vent design guidance.

Keywords: Equivalence ratio, ignition position, self-acceleration flame, vented gas explosion.

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Authors: Amit Kumar Jakhar, Kumar Rajnish

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Inherited complexity is one of the difficult tasks in software engineering field. Further, it is said that there is no physical laws or standard guidelines suit for designing different types of software. Hence, to make the software engineering as a matured engineering discipline like others, it is necessary that it has its own theoretical frameworks and laws. Software designing and development is a human effort which takes a lot of time and considers various parameters for successful completion of the software. The cognitive informatics plays an important role for understanding the essential characteristics of the software. The aim of this work is to consider the fundamental characteristics of the source code of Object-Oriented software i.e. complexity and understandability. The complexity of the programs is analyzed with the help of extracted important attributes of the source code, which is further utilized to evaluate the understandability factor. The aforementioned characteristics are analyzed on the basis of 16 C++ programs by distributing them to forty MCA students. They all tried to understand the source code of the given program and mean time is taken as the actual time needed to understand the program. For validation of this work, Briand’s framework is used and the presented metric is also evaluated comparatively with existing metric which proves its robustness.

Keywords: Software metrics, object-oriented, complexity, cognitive weight, understandability, basic control structures.

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Authors: AlMatrouk H. S., Juszczak M. D.

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Research and development R&D work involves enormous amount of work that has to do with data measurement and collection. This process evolves as new information is fed, new technologies are utilized, and eventually new knowledge is created by the stakeholders i.e., researchers, clients, and end-users. When new knowledge is created, procedures of R&D work should evolve and produce better results within improved research skills and improved methods of data measurements and collection. This measurement improvement should then be benchmarked against a metric that should be developed at the organization. In this paper, we are suggesting a conceptual metric for R&D work performance improvement (PI) at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR). This PI is to be measured against a set of variables in the suggested metric, which are more closely correlated to organizational output, as opposed to organizational norms. The paper also mentions and discusses knowledge creation and management as an addedvalue to R&D work and measurement improvement. The research methodology followed in this work is qualitative in nature, based on a survey that was distributed to researchers and interviews held with senior researchers at KISR. Research and analyses in this paper also include looking at and analyzing KISR-s literature.

Keywords: Knowledge Creation, Performance Improvement (PI), Conceptual Metric, Knowledge Management (KM) addedvalue.

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Authors: J.R. Quevedo, E. Montañés, J. Ranilla, A. Bahamonde

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The new framework the Higher Education is immersed in involves a complete change in the way lecturers must teach and students must learn. Whereas the lecturer was the main character in traditional education, the essential goal now is to increase the students' participation in the process. Thus, one of the main tasks of lecturers in this new context is to design activities of different nature in order to encourage such participation. Seminars are one of the activities included in this environment. They are active sessions that enable going in depth into specific topics as support of other activities. They are characterized by some features such as favoring interaction between students and lecturers or improving their communication skills. Hence, planning and organizing strategic seminars is indeed a great challenge for lecturers with the aim of acquiring knowledge and abilities. This paper proposes a method using Artificial Intelligence techniques to obtain student profiles from their marks and preferences. The goal of building such profiles is twofold. First, it facilitates the task of splitting the students into different groups, each group with similar preferences and learning difficulties. Second, it makes it easy to select adequate topics to be a candidate for the seminars. The results obtained can be either a guarantee of what the lecturers could observe during the development of the course or a clue to reconsider new methodological strategies in certain topics.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, clustering, organizingseminars, student profile

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Authors: Suma. V., T. R. Gopalakrishnan Nair

Abstract:

Defect prevention is the most vital but habitually neglected facet of software quality assurance in any project. If functional at all stages of software development, it can condense the time, overheads and wherewithal entailed to engineer a high quality product. The key challenge of an IT industry is to engineer a software product with minimum post deployment defects. This effort is an analysis based on data obtained for five selected projects from leading software companies of varying software production competence. The main aim of this paper is to provide information on various methods and practices supporting defect detection and prevention leading to thriving software generation. The defect prevention technique unearths 99% of defects. Inspection is found to be an essential technique in generating ideal software generation in factories through enhanced methodologies of abetted and unaided inspection schedules. On an average 13 % to 15% of inspection and 25% - 30% of testing out of whole project effort time is required for 99% - 99.75% of defect elimination. A comparison of the end results for the five selected projects between the companies is also brought about throwing light on the possibility of a particular company to position itself with an appropriate complementary ratio of inspection testing.

Keywords: Defect Detection and Prevention, Inspections, Software Engineering, Software Process, Testing.

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Authors: Adriana Alexandru, Elena Jitaru, Rayner Mayer

Abstract:

The paper presents the results of the European EIE project “Realising the potential for small scale renewable energy sources in the home – Kyotointhehome". The project's global aim is to inform and educate teachers, students and their families so that they can realise the need and can assess the potential for energy efficiency (EE) measures and renewable energy sources (RES) in their homes. The project resources were translated and trialled by 16 partners in 10 European countries. A web-based methodology which will enable families to assess how RES can be incorporated into energy efficient homes was accomplished. The web application “KYOTOINHOME" will help the citizens to identify what they can do to help their community meet the Kyoto target for greenhouse gas reductions and prevent global warming. This application provides useful information on how the citizens can use renewable energy sources in their home to provide space heating and cooling, hot water and electricity. A methodology for assessing heat loss in a dwelling and application of heat pump system was elaborated and will be implemented this year. For schools, we developed a set of practical activities concerned with preventing climate change through using renewable energy sources. Complementary resources will also developed in the Romanian research project “Romania Contribution to the European Targets Regarding the Development of Renewable Energy Sources" - PROMES.

Keywords: Education, energy policy, Internet, renewable energy sources.

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Authors: Hee Jae Shin, Lee Ku Kwac, In Pyo Cha, Min Sang Lee, Hyun Kyung Yoon, Hong Gun Kim

Abstract:

In rapid industrial development, the demand for high-strength and lightweight materials have been increased. Thus, various CFRP (Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics) with composite materials are being used. The design variables of CFRP are its lamination direction, order and thickness. Thus, the hardness and strength of CFRP depends much on their design variables. In this paper, the lamination direction of CFRP was used to produce a symmetrical ply [0°/0°, -15°/+15°, -30°/+30°, -45°/+45°, -60°/+60°, -75°/+75° and 90°/90°] and an asymmetrical ply [0°/15°, 0°/30°, 0°/45°, 0°/60° 0°/75° and 0°/90°]. The bending flexure stress of the CFRP specimen was evaluated through a bending test. Its thermal property was measured using an infrared camera. The symmetrical specimen and the asymmetrical specimen were analyzed. The results showed that the asymmetrical specimen increased the bending loads according to the increase in the orientation angle; and from 0°, the symmetrical specimen showed a tendency opposite the asymmetrical tendency because the tensile force of fiber differs at the vertical direction of its load. Also, the infrared camera showed that the thermal property had a trend similar to that of the mechanical properties.

Keywords: Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (CFRP), Bending Test, Infrared Camera, Composite.

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Authors: Noura Boudiaf, Allaoua Chaoui

Abstract:

To analyze the behavior of Petri nets, the accessibility graph and Model Checking are widely used. However, if the analyzed Petri net is unbounded then the accessibility graph becomes infinite and Model Checking can not be used even for small Petri nets. ECATNets [2] are a category of algebraic Petri nets. The main feature of ECATNets is their sound and complete semantics based on rewriting logic [8] and its language Maude [9]. ECATNets analysis may be done by using techniques of accessibility analysis and Model Checking defined in Maude. But, these two techniques supported by Maude do not work also with infinite-states systems. As a category of Petri nets, ECATNets can be unbounded and so infinite systems. In order to know if we can apply accessibility analysis and Model Checking of Maude to an ECATNet, we propose in this paper an algorithm allowing the detection if the ECATNet is bounded or not. Moreover, we propose a rewriting logic based tool implementing this algorithm. We show that the development of this tool using the Maude system is facilitated thanks to the reflectivity of the rewriting logic. Indeed, the self-interpretation of this logic allows us both the modelling of an ECATNet and acting on it.

Keywords: ECATNets, Rewriting Logic, Maude, Finite-stateSystems, Infinite-state Systems, Boundness Property Checking.

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