Search results for: evidence based practice

Authors: Nor Azlina Ab. Aziz, Kamarulzaman Ab. Aziz, Wan Zakiah Wan Ismail

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Coverage is one of the main research interests in wireless sensor networks (WSN), it is used to determine the quality of service (QoS) of the networks. Therefore this paper aims to review the common strategies use in solving coverage problem in WSN. The strategies studied are used during deployment phase where the coverage is calculated based on the placement of the sensors on the region of interest (ROI). The strategies reviewed are categorized into three groups based on the approaches used, namely; force based, grid based or computational geometry based approach.

Keywords: Computational geometry, coverage, Delaunay triangulation, force, grid, Voronoi diagram, wireless sensor networks.

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Authors: Hicham Benamirouche, Oum Elkheir Moussi

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The purpose of the study is to examine the dynamics of Algeria’s natural gas exports through the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach with break points. The analysis was carried out for the period from 1967 to 2015. Based on imperfect substitution specification, the ARDL approach reveals a long-run equilibrium relationship between Algeria’s Natural gas exports and their determinant factors (Algeria’s gas reserves, Domestic gas consumption, Europe’s GDP per capita, relative prices, the European gas production and the market share of competitors). All the long-run elasticities estimated are statistically significant with a large impact of domestic factors, which constitute the supply constraints. In short term, the elasticities are statistically significant, and almost comparable to those of the long term. Furthermore, the speed of adjustment towards long-run equilibrium is less than one year because of the little flexibility of the long term export contracts. Two break points have been estimated when we employ the domestic gas consumption as a break variable; 1984 and 2010, which reflect the arbitration policy between the domestic gas market and gas exports.

Keywords: Natural gas exports, elasticity, ARDL bounds testing, break points, Algeria.

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Authors: L. Edirisinghe, P. Mukherjee, H. Edirisinghe

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Virtual Container Yard (VCY) is a modern concept that helps to reduce the empty container repositioning cost of carriers. The concept of VCY is based on container interchange between shipping lines. Although this mechanism has been theoretically accepted by the shipping community as a feasible solution, it has not yet achieved the necessary momentum among container shipping lines (CSL). This paper investigates whether there is any legal influence on this industry myopia about the VCY. It is believed that this is the first publication that focuses on the legal aspects of container exchange between carriers. Not much literature on this subject is available. This study establishes with statistical evidence that there is a phobia prevailing in the shipping industry that exchanging containers with other carriers may lead to various legal implications. The complexity of exchange is two faceted. CSLs assume that offering a container to another carrier (obviously, a competitor in terms of commercial context) or using a container offered by another carrier may lead to undue legal implications. This research reveals that this fear is reflected through four types of perceived components, namely: shipping associate; warehouse associate; network associate; and trading associate. These components carry eighteen subcomponents that comprehensively cover the entire process of a container shipment. The statistical explanation has been supported through regression analysis; INCO terms were used to illustrate the shipping process.

Keywords: Container, legal, shipping, virtual.

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Authors: M. S. Sreejith, Steffy Joy, Abhishesh Pal, Beom-Sahng Ryuh, V. R. Sanal Kumar

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In this paper, an attempt has been made for the design of a robotic library using an intelligent system. The robot works on the ARM microprocessor, motor driver circuit with 5 degrees of freedom with Wi-Fi and GPS based communication protocol. The authenticity of the library books is controlled by RFID. The proposed robotic library system is facilitated with embedded system and ARM. In this library issuance system, the previous potential readers’ authentic review reports have been taken into consideration for recommending suitable books to the deserving new users and the issuance of books or periodicals is based on the users’ decision. We have conjectured that the Wi-Fi based robotic library management system would allow fast transaction of books issuance and it also produces quality readers.

Keywords: GPS based based robotic library, library management system, robotic library, Wi-Fi library.

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Authors: M. Al-Jepoori, D. Bennett

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Teaching Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) as part of a Computing-related university degree is a very difficult task; the road to ensuring that students are actually learning object oriented concepts is unclear, as students often find it difficult to understand the concept of objects and their behavior. This problem is especially obvious in advanced programming modules where Design Pattern and advanced programming features such as Multi-threading and animated GUI are introduced. Looking at the students’ performance at their final year on a university course, it was obvious that the level of students’ understanding of OOP varies to a high degree from one student to another. Students who aim at the production of Games do very well in the advanced programming module. However, the students’ assessment results of the last few years were relatively low; for example, in 2016-2017, the first quartile of marks were as low as 24.5 and the third quartile was 63.5. It is obvious that many students were not confident or competent enough in their programming skills. In this paper, the reasons behind poor performance in Advanced OOP modules are investigated, and a suggested practice for teaching OOP based on a complex case study is described and evaluated.

Keywords: Complex programming case study, design pattern, learning advanced programming, object oriented programming.

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Authors: Emad E Abdallah, A.F. Otoom, ArwaSaqer, Ola Abu-Aisheh, Diana Omari, Ghadeer Salem

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As emails communications have no consistent authentication procedure to ensure the authenticity, we present an investigation analysis approach for detecting forged emails based on Random Forests and Naïve Bays classifiers. Instead of investigating the email headers, we use the body content to extract a unique writing style for all the possible suspects. Our approach consists of four main steps: (1) The cybercrime investigator extract different effective features including structural, lexical, linguistic, and syntactic evidence from previous emails for all the possible suspects, (2) The extracted features vectors are normalized to increase the accuracy rate. (3) The normalized features are then used to train the learning engine, (4) upon receiving the anonymous email (M); we apply the feature extraction process to produce a feature vector. Finally, using the machine learning classifiers the email is assigned to one of the suspects- whose writing style closely matches M. Experimental results on real data sets show the improved performance of the proposed method and the ability of identifying the authors with a very limited number of features.

Keywords: Digital investigation, cybercrimes, emails forensics, anonymous emails, writing style, and authorship analysis

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Authors: Mohammed Meziani, Pierre-Louis Cayrel

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In this paper we propose two first non-generic constructions of multisignature scheme based on coding theory. The first system make use of the CFS signature scheme and is secure in random oracle while the second scheme is based on the KKS construction and is a few times. The security of our construction relies on a difficult problems in coding theory: The Syndrome Decoding problem which has been proved NP-complete [4].

Keywords: Post-quantum cryptography, Coding-based cryptography, Digital signature, Multisignature scheme.

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Authors: Walid S. Abd El-hamid, Sherif S. El-etriby, Mohiy M. Hadhoud

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This paper presents a new methodology to select test cases from regression test suites. The selection strategy is based on analyzing the dynamic behavior of the applications that written in any programming language. Methods based on dynamic analysis are more safe and efficient. We design a technique that combine the code based technique and model based technique, to allow comparing the object oriented of an application that written in any programming language. We have developed a prototype tool that detect changes and select test cases from test suite.

Keywords: Regression testing, Model based testing, Dynamicbehavior.

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Authors: Ioannis Pratikakis, Anna Karahaliou, Katerina Vassiou, Vassilis Virvilis, Dimitrios Kosmopoulos, Stavros Perantonis

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In this paper, a Web-based e-Training platform that is dedicated to multimodal breast imaging is presented. The assets of this platform are summarised in (i) the efficient representation of the curriculum flow that will permit efficient training; (ii) efficient tagging of multimodal content appropriate for the completion of realistic cases and (iii) ubiquitous accessibility and platform independence via a web-based approach.

Keywords: Breast imaging, e-Training, web-based learning.

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Authors: Ahmad Javid Habib, Tetsuo Kidokoro

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There is an increasing demand for developing urban land to provide better living conditions for all citizens in Afghanistan. Most of the development will involve the acquisition of land. And the current land acquisition method practiced by central government is expropriation, which is a cash-based transaction method that imposes heavy fiscal burden on local municipalities and central government, and it does not protect ownership rights and social equity of landowners besides it relocates the urban poor to remote areas with limited access to jobs and public services. The questionnaire analysis, backed by observations of different case studies in countries where land readjustment is used as a collaborative land development tool indicates that the method plays a key role in valuing landowners’ rights, giving other community members and stakeholders the opportunity to collaboratively implement urban development projects. The practice of the method is reducing the heavy fiscal burden on the local and central governments and is a better option to deal with the current development challenges in Afghanistan.

Keywords: Collaboration, land readjustment, master plan, expropriation.

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Authors: Pham Thanh Trung, Huynh Quyet Thang

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Reliability is one of the most important quality attributes of software. Based on the approach of Reussner and the approach of Cheung, we proposed the reliability prediction model of component-based software architectures. Also, the value of the model is shown through the experimental evaluation on a web server system.

Keywords: component-based architecture, reliability prediction model, software reliability engineering.

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Authors: C. S. Caires, A. Barbosa, W. Hanyou

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In this paper, we present the main results achieved during a five-week international workshop on Interactive Furniture for the Classroom, with 22 Chinese design students, in Jiangmen city (Guangdong province, China), and five teachers from Portugal, France, Iran, Macao SAR, and China. The main goal was to engage design students from China with new skills and practice methodologies towards interactive design research for furniture and product design for the classroom. The final results demonstrate students' concerns on improving Chinese furniture design for the classrooms, including solutions related to collaborative learning and human-interaction design for interactive furniture products. The findings of the research led students to the fabrication of five original prototypes: two for kindergartens ('Candy' and 'Tilt-tilt'), two for primary schools ('Closer' and 'Eks(x)'), and one for art/creative schools ('Wave'). From the findings, it was also clear that collaboration, personalization, and project-based teaching are still neglected when designing furniture products for the classroom in China. Students focused on these issues and came up with creative solutions that could transform this educational field in China.

Keywords: Product design, interface design, interactive design, collaborative education and design research, design prototyping.

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Authors: Nasser Mozayani, Maryam Barzegar, Hoda Madani

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Vehicular communications play a substantial role in providing safety in transportation by means of safety message exchange. Researchers have proposed several solutions for securing safety messages. Protocols based on a fixed key infrastructure are more efficient in implementation and maintain stronger security in comparison with dynamic structures. These protocols utilize zone partitioning to establish distinct key infrastructure under Certificate Authority (CA) supervision in different regions. Secure anonymous broadcasting (SAB) is one of these protocols that preserves most of security aspects but it has some deficiencies in practice. A very important issue is region change of a vehicle for its mobility. Changing regions leads to change of CA and necessity of having new key set to resume communication. In this paper, we propose solutions for informing vehicles about region change to obtain new key set before entering next region. This hinders attackers- intrusion, packet loss and lessons time delay. We also make key request messages secure by confirming old CA-s public key to the message, hence stronger security for safety message broadcasting is attained.

Keywords: Secure broadcasting, Certificate authority (CA), Key exchange, Vehicular network.

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Authors: C. Ardil

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In this study, a model, together with a software tool that implements it, has been developed to determine the performance ratings of employees in an organization operating in the information technology sector using the indicators obtained from employees' online study data. Weighted Sum (WS) Method and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method based on multidimensional decision making approach were used in the study. WS and TOPSIS methods provide multidimensional decision making (MDDM) methods that allow all dimensions to be evaluated together considering specific weights, allowing employees to objectively evaluate the problem of online performance tracking. The application of WS and TOPSIS mathematical methods, which can combine alternatives with a large number of dimensions and reach simultaneous solution, has been implemented through an online performance tracking software. In the application of WS and TOPSIS methods, objective dimension weights were calculated by using entropy information (EI) and standard deviation (SD) methods from the data obtained by employees' online performance tracking method, decision matrix was formed by using performance scores for each employee, and a single performance score was calculated for each employee. Based on the calculated performance score, employees were given a performance evaluation decision. The results of Pareto set evidence and comparative mathematical analysis validate that employees' performance preference rankings in WS and TOPSIS methods are closely related. This suggests the compatibility, applicability, and validity of the proposed method to the MDDM problems in which a large number of alternative and dimension types are taken into account. With this study, an objective, realistic, feasible and understandable mathematical method, together with a software tool that implements it has been demonstrated. This is considered to be preferable because of the subjectivity, limitations and high cost of the methods traditionally used in the measurement and performance appraisal in the information technology sector.

Keywords: Weighted sum, entropy ınformation, standard deviation, online performance tracking, performance evaluation, performance management, multidimensional decision making.

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Authors: Wei Hu, Tianzhou Chen, Qingsong Shi

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In recent years, the development of e-learning is very rapid. E-learning is an attractive and efficient way for computer education. Student interaction and collaboration also plays an important role in e-learning. In this paper, a collaborative web-based e-learning environment is presented. A wide range of interactive and collaborative methods are integrated into a web-based environment. This e-learning environment is designed for information security curriculum.

Keywords: E-learning, information Security, curriculum, web-based environment.

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Authors: Thanh-Phong Dao, Shyh-Chour Huang

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This study presents a quasi-zero stiffness (QZS) vibration isolator using flexure-based spring mechanisms which afford both negative and positive stiffness elements, which enable self-adjustment. The QZS property of the isolator is achieved at the equilibrium position. A nonlinear mathematical model is then developed, based on the pre-compression of the flexure-based spring mechanisms. The dynamics are further analyzed using the Harmonic Balance method. The vibration attention efficiency is illustrated using displacement transmissibility, which is then compared with the corresponding linear isolator. The effects of parameters on performance are also investigated by numerical solutions. The flexure-based spring mechanisms are subsequently designed using the concept of compliant mechanisms, with evaluation by ANSYS software, and simulations of the QZS isolator.

Keywords: Vibration isolator, quasi-zero stiffness, flexure-based spring mechanisms, compliant mechanism.

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Authors: Vahhab Attar Olyaee, Fouad Attar Olyaee

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Many IT projects come to failure because of having technical approach, focusing on the final product and lack of proper attention to strategic alignment. Project management models quite often have technical management view [4], [8], [13], [14]. These models focus greatly on the finalization of the project product and the delivery of the product to the customer. However, many project problems are due to lack of attention to the needs and capabilities of the organizations or disregarding how to deploy and use the product in the organization. In this regard, in the current research we are trying to present a solution with the purpose of raising the value of the project in an organization. This way, the project outputs will be properly deployed in the organization. Therefore, a comprehensive model is presented which takes into account the whole processes from initial step of project definition to the deployment of the final outputs in the organization and then the definition of all roles and responsibilities to put the model into practice. Taking into account the opinions of experts and project managers, to prove the performance of the model, the project problems were recognized and based on the model, categorized and analyzed. And at the end it is made clear that ignoring the proper definition of the project and not having a proper understanding of the expected value on the one hand and not supervising the emerged value in the process of production and installment are among the most important factors that bring a project to failure.

Keywords: IT Governance, Project Model, Roles and Responsibilities of Project

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Authors: Christina Van Wingerden

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The aim of this paper is to propose pedagogical design for learning management systems (LMS) that offers greater inclusion for students based on a number of theoretical perspectives and delineated through an example. Considering the impact of COVID-19, including on student mental health, the research suggesting the importance of student sense of belonging on retention, success, and student well-being, the author describes intentional LMS design incorporating theoretically based practices informed by critical theory, feminist theory, indigenous theory and practices, and new materiality. This article considers important aspects of these theories and practices which attend to inclusion, identities, and socially just learning environments. Additionally, increasing student sense of belonging and mental health through LMS design influenced by adult learning theory and the community of inquiry model are described.  The process of thinking through LMS pedagogical design with inclusion intentionally in mind affords the opportunity to allow LMS to go beyond course use as a repository of documents, to an intentional community of practice that facilitates belonging and connection, something much needed in our times. In virtual learning environments it has been harder to discern how students are doing, especially in feeling connected to their courses, their faculty, and their student peers. Increasingly at the forefront of public universities is addressing the needs of students with multiple and intersecting identities and the multiplicity of needs and accommodations. Education in 2020, and moving forward, calls for embedding critical theories and inclusive ideals and pedagogies to the ways instructors design and teach in online platforms. Through utilization of critical theoretical frameworks and instructional practices, students may experience the LMS as a welcoming place with intentional plans for welcoming diversity in identities.

Keywords: Belonging, critical pedagogy, instructional design, Learning Management System, LMS.

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Authors: G. S. Dangayach

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For any country the project management has been a vital part for its development. The highly competitive business world has created tremendous pressure on the project managers to achieve success. The pressure is derived from survival and profit building in business organizations which compels the project managers to pursue unethical practices. As a result unethical activities in business projects can be found easily where situations or issues arise due to dubious business practice, high corruption, or absolute violation of the law. The recent spur on Commonwealth games to be organized in New Delhi indicates towards the same. It has been seen that the project managers mainly focus on cost, time, and quality rather than social impact and long term effects of the project. Surprisingly the literature as well as the practitioner-s perspective also does not identify the role of ethics in project success. This paper identifies ethics as the fourth most important dimension in the project based organizations. The paper predicts that the approach of considering ethics will result in sustainability of the project. It will increase satisfaction and loyalty of the customers as well as create harmony, trust, brotherhood, values and morality among the team members. This paper is conceptual in nature as inadequate literature exists linking the project success with an ethical approach.

Keywords: Ethics, Loyalty, Morality, Project success

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Authors: Cheng Li, Jie Shen, Yutian Tang

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Embracing the upcoming era of urbanization with the challenges of limitation of resources, disappearing cultural identities and conflicts among different groups of stakeholders, new integrated approaches are offered in our urban practice to help decision-makers and stakeholders frame and develop well-conceived, practical strategies for urban developing trajectories to approach urban-level sustainability in multiple social, cultural, ecological dimensions. Through bottom-up participation, we take advantage of tourism and leisure industries as driving forces for urbanization in China to promote integrated sustainable systems, with the hope of approaching both historical and ecological aspects of urban sustainability; and also thanks to top-down participation, we have codes, standards and rules established by the governments to strengthen the implementation of ecological urban sustainability. The results are monitored and evaluated experimentally and multidimensionally and the sustainable systems we constructed with local stakeholder groups turned out to be effective. The presentation of our selected projects would indicate our different focuses on urban sustainability.

Keywords: Urban sustainability, integrated urban strategy, tourism and leisure industries, history, modern technology.

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Authors: E. Osorio Schmied

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Architects commonly attempt a depiction of organic forms when their works are inspired by nature, regardless of the building site. Nevertheless it is also possible to try matching structures with natural scenery, by applying a phenomenological approach in terms of spatial operations, regarding perceptions from nature through architectural aspects such as protection, views, and orientation. This method acknowledges a relationship between place and space, where intentions towards tangible facts then become design statements. Although spaces resulting from such a process may present an effective response to the environment, they can also offer further outcomes beyond the realm of form. The hypothesis is that, in addition to recognising a bond between architecture and nature, it is also plausible to associate such perceptions with the inner ambient of buildings, by analysing features such as daylight. The case study of a single-family house in a rainforest near Valdivia, Chilean Patagonia is presented, with the intention of addressing the above notions through a discussion of the actual effects of inhabiting a place by way of a series of insights, including a revision of diagrams and photographs that assist in understanding the implications of this design practice. In addition, figures based on post-occupancy behaviour and daylighting performance relate both architectural and environmental issues to a decision-making process motivated by the observation of nature.

Keywords: Architecture, design statements, nature, perception.

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Authors: Gurung S., Yadav B. N., Budhathoki SS.

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Problem based learning is one of the highly acclaimed learning methods in medical education since its first introduction at Mc-Master University in Canada in the 1960s. It has now been adopted as a teaching learning method in many medical colleges of Nepal. B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences (BPKIHS), a health science deemed university is the second institute in Nepal to establish problem-based learning academic program and need-based teaching approach hence minimizing teaching through lectures since its inception. During the first two years of MBBS course, the curriculum is divided into various organ-systems incorporated with problem-based learning exercise each of one week duration.

Keywords: PBL, medical education.

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Authors: Leila Maleki, Ahmad Esmali Kooraneh, Hossein Taghi Derakhshi

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Neural activity in the human brain starts from the early stages of prenatal development. This activity or signals generated by the brain are electrical in nature and represent not only the brain function but also the status of the whole body. At the present moment, three methods can record functional and physiological changes within the brain with high temporal resolution of neuronal interactions at the network level: the electroencephalogram (EEG), the magnet oencephalogram (MEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); each of these has advantages and shortcomings. EEG recording with a large number of electrodes is now feasible in clinical practice. Multichannel EEG recorded from the scalp surface provides very valuable but indirect information about the source distribution. However, deep electrode measurements yield more reliable information about the source locations intracranial recordings and scalp EEG are used with the source imaging techniques to determine the locations and strengths of the epileptic activity. As a source localization method, Low Resolution Electro-Magnetic Tomography (LORETA) is solved for the realistic geometry based on both forward methods, the Boundary Element Method (BEM) and the Finite Difference Method (FDM). In this paper, we review the findings EEG- LORETA about epilepsy.

Keywords: Epilepsy, EEG, EEG- Loreta, loreta analysis.

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Authors: Thusitha Mabotuwana, Christopher S. Hall

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Radiologists routinely make follow-up imaging recommendations, usually based on established clinical practice guidelines, such as the Fleischner Society guidelines for managing lung nodules. In order to ensure optimal care, it is important to make guideline-compliant recommendations, and also for patients to follow-up on these imaging recommendations in a timely manner. However, determining such compliance rates after a specific finding has been observed usually requires many time-consuming manual steps. To address some of these limitations with current approaches, in this paper we discuss a methodology to automatically detect finding-specific follow-up recommendations from radiology reports and create a visualization for relevant subsequent exams showing the modality transitions. Nearly 5% of patients who had a lung related follow-up recommendation continued to have at least eight subsequent outpatient CT exams during a seven year period following the recommendation. Radiologist and section chiefs can use the proposed tool to better understand how a specific patient population is being managed, identify possible deviations from established guideline recommendations and have a patient-specific graphical representation of the imaging pathways for an abstract view of the overall treatment path thus far.

Keywords: Follow-up recommendations, care pathways, imaging pathway visualization, follow-up tracking.

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Authors: Ammar Ayad Issa Al-Rifaie, Zuhreya Muazu, Maysam Ali Abdulwahid, Dermot Gleeson

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The aim of this audit was to examine the efficiency of alcohol history documentation and screening for hazardous drinkers at the Medical Admission Unit (MAU) of Northern General Hospital (NGH), Sheffield, to identify any potential for enhancing clinical practice. Data were collected from medical clerking sheets, ICE system and directly from 82 patients by three junior medical doctors using both CAGE questionnaire and AUDIT-C tool for newly admitted patients to MAU in NGH, in the period between January and March 2015. Alcohol consumption was documented in around two-third of the patient sample and this was documented fairly accurately by health care professionals. Some used subjective words such as 'social drinking' in the alcohol units’ section of the history. CAGE questionnaire was applied to only four patients and none of the patients had documented advice, education or referral to an alcohol liaison team. AUDIT-C tool had identified 30.4%, while CAGE 10.9%, of patients admitted to the NGH MAU as hazardous drinkers. The amount of alcohol the patient consumes positively correlated with the score of AUDIT-C (Pearson correlation 0.83). Re-audit is planned to be carried out after integrating AUDIT-C tool as labels in the notes and presenting a brief teaching session to junior doctors. Alcohol misuse screening is not adequately undertaken and no appropriate action is being offered to hazardous drinkers. CAGE questionnaire is poorly applied to patients and when satisfactory and adequately used has low sensitivity to detect hazardous drinkers in comparison with AUDIT-C tool. Re-audit of alcohol screening practice after introducing AUDIT-C tool in clerking sheets (as labels) is required to compare the findings and conclude the audit cycle.

Keywords: Alcohol screening, AUDIT-C, CAGE, Hazardous drinking.

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Authors: Junjie Gao, Guishi Deng

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In order to integrate knowledge in heterogeneous case-based reasoning (CBR) systems, ontology-based CBR system has become a hot topic. To solve the facing problems of ontology-based CBR system, for example, its architecture is nonstandard, reusing knowledge in legacy CBR is deficient, ontology construction is difficult, etc, we propose a novel approach for semi-automatically construct ontology-based CBR system whose architecture is based on two-layer ontology. Domain knowledge implied in legacy case bases can be mapped from relational database schema and knowledge items to relevant OWL local ontology automatically by a mapping algorithm with low time-complexity. By concept clustering based on formal concept analysis, computing concept equation measure and concept inclusion measure, some suggestions about enriching or amending concept hierarchy of OWL local ontologies are made automatically that can aid designers to achieve semi-automatic construction of OWL domain ontology. Validation of the approach is done by an application example.

Keywords: OWL ontology, Case-based Reasoning, FormalConcept Analysis, Knowledge Integration

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Authors: R. Bourziza, W. El Khoumsi, I. Mghabbar, I. Rahou

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The flood-risk zones called Merjas are lowlands that are flooded during the rainy season. Indeed, these depressed areas were reclaimed to dry them out in order to exploit their agricultural potential. Thus, farmers were able to start exploiting these drained lands. As the development of modern agriculture in Morocco progressed, farmers began to practice irrigated agriculture. In a context of vulnerability to floods and the need for optimal exploitation of the agricultural potential of the flood-risk zones, the question of how farmers are adapting to this context and the degree of exploitation of this potential arises. It is in these circumstances that this work was initiated, aiming at the characterization of irrigation practices in the flood-risk zones of the Ghareb lowland (Morocco). This characterization is based on two main axes: the characterization of irrigation techniques used, as well as the management of irrigation in these areas. In order to achieve our objective, two complementary approaches have been adopted; the first one is based on interviews with administrative agents and on farmer surveys, and the second one is based on field measurements of a few parameters, such as flow rate, pressure, uniformity coefficient of drippers and salinity. The results of this work led to conclude that the choice of the practiced crop (crop resistant to excess water in winter and vegetable crops during other seasons) and the availability and nature of water resources are the main criteria that determine the choice of the irrigation system. Even if irrigation management is imprecise, farmers are able to achieve agricultural yields that are comparable to those recorded in the entire irrigated perimeter. However, agricultural yields in these areas are still threatened by climate change, since these areas play the role of water retaining basins during floods by protecting the downstream areas, which can also damage the crops there instilled during the autumn. This work has also noted that the predominance of private pumping in flood-risk zones in the coastal zone creates a risk of marine intrusion, which risks endangering the groundwater table. Thus, this work enabled us to understand the functioning and the adaptation measures of these vulnerable zones for the sustainability of the Merjas and a better valorization of these marginalized lowlands.

Keywords: Flood-risk zones, irrigation practices, climate change, adaptation measures.

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Authors: Amine Rezzoug, Said Abdi, Nadjet Bouhelal, Ismail Daoud

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This paper investigates the application of metallic coatings on high fiber volume fraction carbon/epoxy polymer matrix composites. For the grip of the metallic layer, a method of modifying the surface of the composite by introducing a mixture of copper and steel powder (filler powders) which can reduce the impact of thermal spray particles. The powder was introduced to the surface at the time of the forming. Arc spray was used to project the zinc coating layer. The substrate was grit blasted to avoid poor adherence. The porosity, microstructure, and morphology of layers are characterized by optical microscopy, SEM and image analysis. The samples were studied also in terms of hardness and erosion resistance. This investigation did not reveal any visible evidence damage to the substrates. The hardness of zinc layer was about 25.94 MPa and the porosity was around (∼6.70%). The erosion test showed that the zinc coating improves the resistance to erosion. Based on the results obtained, we can conclude that thermal spraying allows the production of protective coating on PMC. Zinc coating has been identified as a compatible material with the substrate. The filler powders layer protects the substrate from the impact of hot particles and allows avoiding the rupture of brittle carbon fibers.

Keywords: Arc spray, coating, composite, erosion.

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Authors: Jianguo Tang, Kun She, William Zhu

Abstract:

Covering-based rough sets is an extension of rough sets and it is based on a covering instead of a partition of the universe. Therefore it is more powerful in describing some practical problems than rough sets. However, by extending the rough sets, covering-based rough sets can increase the roughness of each model in recognizing objects. How to obtain better approximations from the models of a covering-based rough sets is an important issue. In this paper, two concepts, determinate elements and indeterminate elements in a universe, are proposed and given precise definitions respectively. This research makes a reasonable refinement of the covering-element from a new viewpoint. And the refinement may generate better approximations of covering-based rough sets models. To prove the theory above, it is applied to eight major coveringbased rough sets models which are adapted from other literature. The result is, in all these models, the lower approximation increases effectively. Correspondingly, in all models, the upper approximation decreases with exceptions of two models in some special situations. Therefore, the roughness of recognizing objects is reduced. This research provides a new approach to the study and application of covering-based rough sets.

Keywords: Determinate element, indeterminate element, refinementof covering-element, refinement of covering, covering-basedrough sets.

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Authors: Wen Zhang

Abstract:

The smartphone plays a significant role in media convergence, and smartphone photography is reconstructing the way we communicate and think. This article aims to explore the smartphone photography practices of urban Chinese smartphone users and images produced by smartphones from a techno-cultural perspective. The analysis consists of two types of data: One is a semi-structured interview of 21 participants, and the other consists of the images created by the participants. The findings are organised in two parts. The first part summarises the current tendencies of capturing, editing, sharing and archiving digital images via smartphones. The second part shows that food and selfie/anti-selfie are the preferred subjects of smartphone photographic images from a technical and multi-purpose perspective and demonstrates that screenshots and image texts are new genres of non-photographic images that are frequently made by smartphones, which contributes to improving operational efficiency, disseminating information and sharing knowledge. The analyses illustrate the positive impacts between smartphones and photography enthusiasm and practices based on the diffusion of innovation theory, which also makes us rethink the value of photographs and the practice of ‘photographic seeing’ from the screen itself.

Keywords: Digital photography, photographic-seeing, media convergence, technological innovation, smartphone, selfie/anti-selfie, image-text.

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