Search results for: precipitation data

Authors: Tuğrul Varol, Halil Barış Özel

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In this study which has been conducted in Akçasu Forest Range District of Devrek Forest Directorate; 3 methods (weed control with labourer power, cover removal with Hitachi F20 Excavator, and weed control with agricultural equipment mounted on a Ferguson 240S agriculture tractor) were utilized in weed control efforts in regeneration of degraded oriental beech forests have been compared. In this respect, 3 methods have been compared by determining certain work hours and standard durations of unit areas (1 hectare). For this purpose, evaluating the tasks made with human and machine force from the aspects of duration, productivity and costs, it has been aimed to determine the most productive method in accordance with the actual ecological conditions of research field. Within the scope of the study, the time studies have been conducted for 3 methods used in weed control efforts. While carrying out those studies, the performed implementations have been evaluated by dividing them into business stages. Also, the actual data have been used while calculating the cost accounts. In those calculations, the latest formulas and equations which are also used in developed countries have been utilized. The variance of analysis (ANOVA) was used in order to determine whether there is any statistically significant difference among obtained results, and the Duncan test was used for grouping if there is significant difference. According to the measurements and findings carried out within the scope of this study, it has been found during living cover removal efforts in regeneration efforts in demolished oriental beech forests that the removal of weed layer in 1 hectare of field has taken 920 hours with labourer force, 15.1 hours with excavator and 60 hours with an equipment mounted on a tractor. On the other hand, it has been determined that the cost of removal of living cover in unit area (1 hectare) was 3220.00 TL for labourer power, 1250 TL for excavator and 1825 TL for equipment mounted on a tractor. According to the obtained results, it has been found that the utilization of excavator in weed control effort in regeneration of degraded oriental beech regions under actual ecological conditions of research field has been found to be more productive from both of aspects of duration and costs. These determinations carried out should be repeated in weed control efforts in degraded forest fields with different ecological conditions, it is compulsory for finding the most efficient weed control method. These findings will light the way of technical staff of forestry directorate in determination of the most effective and economic weed control method. Thus, the more actual data will be used while preparing the weed control budgets, and there will be significant contributions to national economy. Also the results of this and similar studies are very important for developing the policies for our forestry in short and long term.

Keywords: Artificial regeneration, weed control, oriental beech, productivity, mechanization, man power, cost analysis.

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Authors: Cătălin Mărculescu, Andrei Avram, Cătălin Pârvulescu, Marioara Avram, Cătălin Mihai Bălan

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The present microfluidic study is emphasizing the flow behavior within a Y shape micro-bifurcation in two similar flow configurations. We report here a numerical and experimental investigation on the velocity profiles evolution and secondary flows, manifested at different Reynolds numbers (Re) and for two different boundary conditions. The experiments are performed using special designed setup based on optical microscopic devices. With this setup, direct visualizations and quantitative measurements of the path-lines are obtained. A Micro-PIV measurement system is used to obtain velocity profiles distributions in a spatial evolution in the main flows domains. The experimental data is compared with numerical simulations performed with commercial computational code FLUENT in a 3D geometry with the same dimensions as the experimental one. The numerical flow patterns are found to be in good agreement with the experimental manifestations.

Keywords: Micro-PIV, numerical investigations, secondary flows, velocity profiles.

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Authors: M. Selvaggi, F. Pinto, A. R. Pesce Delfino, A. Vicenti, C. Dario

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Data from 1731 Gentile di Puglia lambs, sired by 65 rams over a 5-year period were analyzed by a mixed model to estimate the variance components for heritability. The considered growth traits were: birth weight (BW), weight at 30 days of age (W30) and average daily gain from birth to 30 days of age (DG). Year of birth, sex of lamb, type of birth (single or twin), dam age at lambing and farm were significant sources of variation for all the considered growth traits. The average lamb weights were 3.85±0.16 kg at birth, 9.57±0.91 kg at 30 days of age and the average daily gain was 191±14 g. Estimates of heritability were 0.33±0.05, 0.41±0.06 and 0.16±0.05 respectively for the same traits. These values suggest there is a good opportunity to improve Gentile di Puglia lambs by selecting animals for growth traits.

Keywords: heritability estimate, growth traits, lambs, Gentile diPuglia.

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Authors: Narong Anurak

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The objectives of this research were to investigate the knowledge and understanding of public relations principles for public relations officials of the office of the faculty of management science in Ratjabhat Suan Sunandha University and to determine the approach of public relations for the Office of Faculty of Management Science.  The questionnaire was utilized as a tool to collect data. Statistics utilized included frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, and regression analysis. The results of the research showed that the public relations officials misunderstood on public relations principles. The lack of the perception in media of the target groups both in-house and outside caused the misunderstanding on the roles, mission, and responsibilities. It would be beneficial to public relations division and other divisions of the office of the faculty of management science to be trained and obtained more knowledge and skills on the public relations to support the public relations work for the organization.

Keywords: Faculty of Management Science, Public Relations, Ratjabhat Suan Sunandha University.

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Authors: Veronica Sri Lestari, Asmuddin Natsir, Hasmida Karim, Ian Patrick

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The research aimed at investigating the factors affecting consumers’ willingness to pay for chicken meat from biosecure farms. The research was conducted in Makassar City, South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia. Samples were taken using random sampling technique in two supermarkets namely Lotte Mart and Gelael. Total samples were 50 respondents which comprised the chicken meat consumers. To find out the consumers’ willingness to pay for chicken meat from the biosecure farms, the contingent valuation method was utilized. Data were collected through interviews and questionnaires. Probit Logistic was estimated to examine the factors affecting the consumers’ willingness to pay for at the premium price for chicken meat from the biosecure farms. The research indicates that the education and income affect significantly the consumers’ willingness to pay for chicken meat from the biosecure farms (P < 0.05). The results of the study will be beneficial for the policy makers, producers, consumers and those conducting research.

Keywords: Biosecure, chicken, farms, consumer, willingness to pay.

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Authors: N. Singh, N. Sharma, J. K. Katnoria

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Water a vital component for all living forms is derived from variety of sources, including surface water (rivers, lakes, reservoirs and ponds) and ground water (aquifers). Over the years of time, water bodies are subjected to human interference regularly resulting in deterioration of water quality. Therefore, pollution of water bodies has become matter of global concern. As the water quality closely relate to human health, water analysis before usage is of immense importance. Improper management of water bodies can cause serious problems in availability and quality of water. The quality of water may be described according to their physico-chemical and microbiological characteristics. For effective maintenance of water quality through appropriate control measures, continuous monitoring of metals, physico-chemical and biological parameter is essential for the establishment of baseline data for the water quality in any study area. The present study has focused on to explore the status of water pollution in various areas and to estimate the magnitude of its toxicity using different bioassay.

Keywords: Genotoxicity, Heavy metals, Mutagenicity, Physico-chemical analysis.

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Authors: Bolarinwa, K. K., Oyeyinka, R. A.

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Relevant agricultural information disseminator (extension agent) ratio of 1:3500 farm families which become a menace to agricultural production capacity in developing countries necessitate this study. Out of 4 zones in the state, 24 extension agents in each zone, 4 extension agents using cell phones and 120 farmers using cell phone and 120 other farmers not using cell phone were purposively selected to give 240 farmers that participated in the research. Data were collected using interview guide and analysized using frequency, percentage and t-test.. Frequency of contact with agricultural information centers revealed that cell phone user farmers had greater means score of X 41.43 contact as against the low mean X19.32 contact recorded by farmers receiving agricultural information from extension agents not using cell phone and their production was statistically significant at P < 0.05. Usage of cell phone increase extension agent contact and increase farmers- production capacity.

Keywords: Cell phone, contact, extension agents and production.

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Authors: Wenhua Hou, Xing Liu, Deqiang Chen

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The ubiquitous payment problems within construction industry of China are notoriously hard to be resolved, thus lead to a series of impacts to the industry chain. Among of them, the most direct result is affecting the normal operation of contractors negatively. A wealth of research has already discussed reasons of the payment problems by introducing a number of possible improvement strategies. But the causalities of these problems are still far from harsh reality. In this paper, the authors propose a model for cash flow system of construction projects by introducing System Dynamics techniques to explore causal facets of the payment problem. The effects of payment arrears on both cash flow and profitability of project are simulated into four scenarios by using data from real projects. Simulating results show visible clues to help contractors quantitatively determining the consequences for the construction project that arise from payment delay.

Keywords: payment problems, cash flow, profitability, system dynamics.

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Authors: Supriya Pal, Kalyan Adhikari, Somnath Mukherjee, Sudipta Ghosh

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This study presents the application of artificial neural network for modeling the phenolic compound migration through vertical soil column. A three layered feed forward neural network with back propagation training algorithm was developed using forty eight experimental data sets obtained from laboratory fixed bed vertical column tests. The input parameters used in the model were the influent concentration of phenol(mg/L) on the top end of the soil column, depth of the soil column (cm), elapsed time after phenol injection (hr), percentage of clay (%), percentage of silt (%) in soils. The output of the ANN was the effluent phenol concentration (mg/L) from the bottom end of the soil columns. The ANN predicted results were compared with the experimental results of the laboratory tests and the accuracy of the ANN model was evaluated.

Keywords: Modeling, Neural Networks, Phenol, Soil media

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Authors: M. Ebrahimi Shohani, S. M. Taheri, S. M. Golgoun

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Environmental radiation dosimeter is a kind of detector that measures the dose of the radiation area. Dosimeter registers the radiation and converts it to the dose according to the calibration parameters. The limit of a dose is different at each radiation area and this limit should be notified and reported to the user and health physics department. The stochastic nature of radiation is the reason for the fluctuation of any gamma detector dosimetry. In this research we investigated Geiger-Muller type of dosimeter and tried to improve the dose measurement. Geiger-Muller dosimeter is a counter that converts registered radiation to the dose. Therefore, for better data analysis, it is necessary to apply an algorithm to smooth statistical variations of registered radiation. We proposed a method to smooth these fluctuations much more and also proposed a dynamic way to trace rapid changes of radiations. Results show that our method is fast and reliable method in comparison the traditional method.

Keywords: Geiger-Muller, radiation detection, smoothing algorithms, dosimeter, dose calculation.

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Authors: Nader Gharibnavaz, Mostafa Mosadeghi, Naser Gharibnavaz

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In today's world where everything is rapidly changing and information technology is high in development, many features of culture, society, politic and economy has changed. The advent of information technology and electronic data transmission lead to easy communication and fields like e-learning and e-commerce, are accessible for everyone easily. One of these technologies is virtual training. The "quality" of such kind of education systems is critical. 131 questionnaires were prepared and distributed among university student in Toba University. So the research has followed factors that affect the quality of learning from the perspective of staff, students, professors and this type of university. It is concluded that the important factors in virtual training are the quality of professors, the quality of staff, and the quality of the university. These mentioned factors were the most prior factors in this education system and necessary for improving virtual training.

Keywords: Training , Virtual Training, Strategic Positioning, Positioning Mapping, Unique Selling Proposition, Strong Brands, Indoors industry

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Authors: Devin Atkin, Orly Yadid-Pecht

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The continual demands for increasing resolution and dynamic range in complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors have resulted in exponential increases in the amount of data that need to be read out of an image sensor, and existing readouts cannot keep up with this demand. Interesting approaches such as sparse and burst readouts have been proposed and show promise, but at considerable trade-offs in other specifications. To this end, we have begun designing and evaluating various readout topologies centered around an attempt to parallelize the sensor readout. In this paper, we have designed, simulated, and started testing a light-controlled oscillator topology with dual column and row readouts. We expect the parallel readout structure to offer greater speed and alleviate the trade-off typical in this topology, where slow pixels present a major framerate bottleneck.

Keywords: CMOS image sensors, high-speed capture, wide dynamic range, light controlled oscillator.

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Authors: S Hariharan, K Chaitanya, P Muthuchidambaranathan

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The IEEE 802.22 working group aims to drive the Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) bands for data communication to the rural area without interfering the TV broadcast. In this paper, we arrive at a closed-form expression for average detection probability of Fusion center (FC) with multiple antenna over the κ − μ fading channel model. We consider a centralized cooperative multiple antenna network for reporting. The DVB-T samples forwarded by the secondary user (SU) were combined using Maximum ratio combiner at FC, an energy detection is performed to make the decision. The fading effects of the channel degrades the detection probability of the FC, a generalized independent and identically distributed (IID) κ − μ and an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel is considered for reporting and sensing respectively. The proposed system performance is verified through simulation results.

Keywords: IEEE 802.22, Cooperative spectrum sensing, Multiple antenna, κ − μ .

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Authors: Salomé Elizabeth Scholtz

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Reviewers are the gatekeepers of knowledge dissemination and promote the scientific validity of the research. However, authors often receive questionable feedback on qualitative manuscripts. Thus, this qualitative descriptive study sought to explore the qualitative knowledge and experiences of reviewers of psychology journals. A purposive and snowball sample (n = 27) of psychology journal reviewers completed an online questionnaire, and data were analysed using thematic analysis. Reviewers felt their postgraduate education, reading, and the process of reviewing qualitative articles equipped them to review qualitative manuscripts. Less than half of the reviewer’s published articles were qualitative and male reviewers published more than females. Despite not expecting authors to have the same level of research skills, reviewers still experienced authors as unskilled and biased, creating difficulty in accepting and reviewing qualitative articles. The applicability of the qualitative method and recommendations in preparing qualitative manuscripts for reviewing are reported.

Keywords: Journal reviewers, psychology, qualitative research, research method, research skills.

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Authors: Nantida Otakum

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The purpose of the study is to study the level of public consciousness of Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University undergraduate students. This study also compares differences in the level of public consciousness among undergraduate students who are different in sex and year of study. The research methodology employed a questionnaire as a quantitative method. The respondents were undergraduate students at Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University. Totally, 400 usable questionnaires were received. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used in data analysis. The results showed that the level of public consciousness of undergraduate students was at a good level in all aspects. The aspect of social participation was at the highest level, while the aspect of shared vision was at the lowest level. The results also indicated that undergraduate students with differences in sex and year of study were not significantly different in public consciousness level.

Keywords: Participation, public consciousness, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, undergraduate students.

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Authors: Dongho Kim, Sung Choi, Kyowoong Pee, Youngsik Cho, Seungwoo Jeong, Soo-Ho Kim

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This study is about the orbital TIG welding robot system which travels on the guide rail installed on the pipe, and welds and tracks the pipe seam using the LVS (Laser Vision Sensor) joint profile data. The orbital welding robot system consists of the robot, welder, controller, and LVS. Moreover we can define the relationship between welding travel speed and wire feed speed, and we can make the linear equation using the maximum and minimum amount of weld metal. Using the linear equation we can determine the welding travel speed and the wire feed speed accurately corresponding to the area of weld captured by LVS. We applied this orbital TIG welding robot system to the stainless steel or duplex pipe on DSME (Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co. Ltd.,) shipyard and the result of radiographic test is almost perfect. (Defect rate: 0.033%).

Keywords: Adaptive welding, automatic welding, Pipe welding, Orbital welding, Laser vision sensor, LVS, welding D/B.

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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. O. Welcome, Y. E. Razvodovsky, E. V. Pereverzeva, V. A. Pereverzev

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The error monitoring and processing system, EMPS is the system located in the substantia nigra of the midbrain, basal ganglia and cortex of the forebrain, and plays a leading role in error detection and correction. The main components of EMPS are the dopaminergic system and anterior cingulate cortex. Although, recent studies show that alcohol disrupts the EMPS, the ways in which alcohol affects this system are poorly understood. Based on current literature data, here we suggest a hypothesis of alcohol-related glucose-dependent system of error monitoring and processing, which holds that the disruption of the EMPS is related to the competency of glucose homeostasis regulation, which in turn may determine the dopamine level as a major component of EMPS. Alcohol may indirectly disrupt the EMPS by affecting dopamine level through disorders in blood glucose homeostasis regulation.

Keywords: Alcohol related disruption, Error monitoring andprocessing system, Mechanism.

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Authors: M. A. N. Rasanjalee Perera

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The world is facing several problems due to increasing elderly population. In Sri Lanka, along with the complexity of the modern society and structural and functional changes of the family, “caring for elders” seems as an emerging social problem. This situation may intensify as the county is moving into a middle income society. Seeking higher education and related career opportunities, and urban living in modern housing are new trends, through which several problems are generated. Among many issues related with elders, “lack of accessible and appropriate facilities in their houses as well as public buildings” can be identified as a major problem. This study argues that welfare facilities provided for the elderly people, particularly in the home environment, in the country are not adequate. Modern housing features such as bathrooms, pantries, lobbies, and leisure areas etc. are questionable as to whether they match with elders’ physical and mental needs. Consequently, elders have to face domestic accidents and many other difficulties within their living environments. Records of hospitals in the country also proved this fact. Therefore, this study tries to identify how far modern houses are suited with elders’ needs. The study further questioned whether “aging” is a considerable matter when people are buying, planning and renovating houses. A randomly selected sample of 50 houses were observed and 50 persons were interviewed around the Maharagama urban area in Colombo district to obtain primary data, while relevant secondary data and information were used to have a depth analysis. The study clearly found that none of the houses included to the sample are considering elders’ needs in planning, renovating, or arranging the home. Instead, most of the families were giving priority to the rich and elegant appearance and modern facilities of the houses. Particularly, to the bathrooms, pantry, large setting areas, balcony, parking slots for two vehicles, ad parapet walls with roller-gates are the main concerns. A significant factor found here is that even though, many children of the aged are in middle age and reaching their older years at present, they do not plan their future living within a safe and comfortable home, despite that they are hoping to spent the latter part of their lives in the their current homes. This fact highlights that not only the other responsible parts of the society, but also those who are reaching their older ages are ignoring the problems of the aged. At the same time, it was found that more than 80% of old parents do not like to stay at their children’s homes as the living environments in such modern homes are not familiar or convenient for them. Due to this context, the aged in Sri Lanka may have to be alone in their own homes due to current trend of society of migrating to urban living in modern houses. At the same time, current urban families who live in modern houses may have to face adding accessible facilities in their home environment, as current modern housing facilities may not be appropriate them for a better life in their latter part of life.

Keywords: Aging population, elderly care, home environment, housing facilities.

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Authors: D. Mirauda, M. Greco, A. Volpe Plantamura

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The necessity of updating the numerical models inputs, because of geometrical and resistive variations in rivers subject to solid transport phenomena, requires detailed control and monitoring activities. The human employment and financial resources of these activities moves the research towards the development of expeditive methodologies, able to evaluate the outflows through the measurement of more easily acquirable sizes. Recent studies highlighted the dependence of the entropic parameter on the kinematical and geometrical flow conditions. They showed a meaningful variability according to the section shape, dimension and slope. Such dependences, even if not yet well defined, could reduce the difficulties during the field activities, and also the data elaboration time. On the basis of such evidences, the relationships between the entropic parameter and the geometrical and resistive sizes, obtained through a large and detailed laboratory experience on steady free surface flows in conditions of macro and intermediate homogeneous roughness, are analyzed and discussed.

Keywords: Froude number, entropic parameter, roughness, water discharge.

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Authors: Jorge A. Ruiz-Vanoye, Ocotlán Díaz-Parra, Alejandro Fuentes-Penna, Daniel Vélez-Díaz, Edith Olaco García

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In this paper, we present the use of the discriminant analysis to select evolutionary algorithms that better solve instances of the vehicle routing problem with time windows. We use indicators as independent variables to obtain the classification criteria, and the best algorithm from the generic genetic algorithm (GA), random search (RS), steady-state genetic algorithm (SSGA), and sexual genetic algorithm (SXGA) as the dependent variable for the classification. The discriminant classification was trained with classic instances of the vehicle routing problem with time windows obtained from the Solomon benchmark. We obtained a classification of the discriminant analysis of 66.7%.

Keywords: Intelligent transportation systems, data-mining techniques, evolutionary algorithms, discriminant analysis, machine learning.

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Authors: Chenxue Yang, Mao Ye, Zijian Liu, Tao Li, Jiao Bao

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Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a useful computational method to find basis information of multivariate nonnegative data. A popular approach to solve the NMF problem is the multiplicative update (MU) algorithm. But, it has some defects. So the columnwisely alternating gradient (cAG) algorithm was proposed. In this paper, we analyze convergence of the cAG algorithm and show advantages over the MU algorithm. The stability of the equilibrium point is used to prove the convergence of the cAG algorithm. A classic model is used to obtain the equilibrium point and the invariant sets are constructed to guarantee the integrity of the stability. Finally, the convergence conditions of the cAG algorithm are obtained, which help reducing the evaluation time and is confirmed in the experiments. By using the same method, the MU algorithm has zero divisor and is convergent at zero has been verified. In addition, the convergence conditions of the MU algorithm at zero are similar to that of the cAG algorithm at non-zero. However, it is meaningless to discuss the convergence at zero, which is not always the result that we want for NMF. Thus, we theoretically illustrate the advantages of the cAG algorithm.

Keywords: Non-negative matrix factorizations, convergence, cAG algorithm, equilibrium point, stability.

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Authors: Ashkan Ebadi, Andrea Schiffauerova

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Every year, a considerable amount of money is being invested on research, mainly in the form of funding allocated to universities and research institutes. To better distribute the available funds and to set the most proper R&D investment strategies for the future, evaluation of the productivity of the funded researchers and the impact of such funding is crucial. In this paper, using the data on 15 years of journal publications of the NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering research Council of Canada) funded researchers and by means of bibliometric analysis, the scientific development of the funded researchers and their scientific collaboration patterns will be investigated in the period of 1996-2010. According to the results it seems that there is a positive relation between the average level of funding and quantity and quality of the scientific output. In addition, whenever funding allocated to the researchers has increased, the number of co-authors per paper has also augmented. Hence, the increase in the level of funding may enable researchers to get involved in larger projects and/or scientific teams and increase their scientific output respectively.

Keywords: Bibliometrics, Collaboration, Funding, Productivity.

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Authors: G.A.C.P. Ganegoda, D.M.A. Samaranayake, L.S. Bandara, K.A.D.N.K. Wimalawarne

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With the popularity of the multi-core and many-core architectures there is a great requirement for software frameworks which can support parallel programming methodologies. In this paper we introduce an Eclipse toolkit, JConqurr which is easy to use and provides robust support for flexible parallel progrmaming. JConqurr is a multi-core and many-core programming toolkit for Java which is capable of providing support for common parallel programming patterns which include task, data, divide and conquer and pipeline parallelism. The toolkit uses an annotation and a directive mechanism to convert the sequential code into parallel code. In addition to that we have proposed a novel mechanism to achieve the parallelism using graphical processing units (GPU). Experiments with common parallelizable algorithms have shown that our toolkit can be easily and efficiently used to convert sequential code to parallel code and significant performance gains can be achieved.

Keywords: Multi-core, parallel programming patterns, GPU, Java, Eclipse plugin, toolkit,

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Authors: Durgesh Kumar Ojha, Monica Subashini

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The proposed method is to study and analyze Electrocardiograph (ECG) waveform to detect abnormalities present with reference to P, Q, R and S peaks. The first phase includes the acquisition of real time ECG data. In the next phase, generation of signals followed by pre-processing. Thirdly, the procured ECG signal is subjected to feature extraction. The extracted features detect abnormal peaks present in the waveform Thus the normal and abnormal ECG signal could be differentiated based on the features extracted. The work is implemented in the most familiar multipurpose tool, MATLAB. This software efficiently uses algorithms and techniques for detection of any abnormalities present in the ECG signal. Proper utilization of MATLAB functions (both built-in and user defined) can lead us to work with ECG signals for processing and analysis in real time applications. The simulation would help in improving the accuracy and the hardware could be built conveniently.

Keywords: ECG Waveform, Peak Detection, Arrhythmia, Matlab.

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Authors: Edlira Donefski, Tina Donefski, Lorenc Ekonomi

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Edgeworth Approximation, Bootstrap and Monte Carlo Simulations have a considerable impact on the achieving certain results related to different problems taken into study. In our paper, we have treated a financial case related to the effect that have the components of a Cash-Flow of one of the most successful businesses in the world, as the financial activity, operational activity and investing activity to the cash and cash equivalents at the end of the three-months period. To have a better view of this case we have created a Vector Autoregression model, and after that we have generated the impulse responses in the terms of Asymptotic Analysis (Edgeworth Approximation), Monte Carlo Simulations and Residual Bootstrap based on the standard errors of every series created. The generated results consisted of the common tendencies for the three methods applied, that consequently verified the advantage of the three methods in the optimization of the model that contains many variants.

Keywords: Autoregression, Bootstrap, Edgeworth Expansion, Monte Carlo Method.

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Authors: Tales H. J. Moreira, Thiago M. R. Dias, Gray F. Moita

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The adviser-advised relationship, in addition to the evident propagation of knowledge, can provide an increase in the scientific production of the advisors. Specifically, in post-graduate programs, in which the advised submit diverse papers in different means of publication, these end up boosting the production of their advisor, since in general the advisors appear as co-authors, responsible for instructing and assisting in the development of the work. Therefore, to visualize the orientation process and the scientific production resulting from this relation is another important way of analyzing the scientific collaboration in the different areas of knowledge. In this work, are used the data of orientations and postgraduate supervisions from the Lattes curricula, from the main advisors who work in the Engineering area, to obtain an overview of the process of orientation of this group, and even, to produce Academic genealogical trees, where it is possible to verify how knowledge has spread in the diverse areas of engineering.

Keywords: Academic genealogy, advice, engineering, lattes platform.

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Authors: Liming Chen, Baoxin Xiu, Zhaoyun Ding, Bin Liu, Xianqiang Zhu

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In the era of big data, public investors are faced with more complicated information related to investment decisions than ever before. To survive in the fierce competition, it has become increasingly urgent for investors to combine multi-source knowledge and evaluate the companies’ true value efficiently. For this, a rule-based ontology reasoning method is proposed to support steel companies’ value assessment. Considering the delay in financial disclosure and based on cost-benefit analysis, this paper introduces the supply chain enterprises financial analysis and constructs the ontology model used to value the value of steel company. In addition, domain knowledge is formally expressed with the help of Web Ontology Language (OWL) language and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) rules. Finally, a case study on a steel company in China proved the effectiveness of the method we proposed.

Keywords: Financial ontology, steel company, supply chain, ontology reasoning.

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Authors: Alexander L. Dmitriev, Sophia A. Bulgakova

Abstract:

Temperature dependence of force of gravitation is one of the fundamental problems of physics. This problem has got special value in connection with that the general theory of relativity, supposing the weakest positive influence of a body temperature on its weight, actually rejects an opportunity of measurement of negative influence of temperature on gravity in laboratory conditions. Really, the recognition of negative temperature dependence of gravitation, for example, means basic impossibility of achievement of a singularity («a black hole») at a gravitational collapse. Laboratory experiments with exact weighing the heated up metal samples, indicating negative influence temperatures of bodies on their physical weight are described. Influence of mistakes of measurements is analyzed. Calculations of distribution of temperature in volume of the bar, agreed with experimental data of time dependence of weight of samples are executed. The physical substantiation of negative temperature dependence of weight of the bodies, based on correlation of acceleration at thermal movement of micro-particles of a body and its absolute temperature, are given.

Keywords: Gravitation, temperature, weight.

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Authors: Diella Gracia Martauli

Abstract:

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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