Search results for: Multi-Agent Data Mining (MADM)

Authors: Shilpi Tyagi, D. K. Nauriyal

Abstract:

This study investigates the firm level determinants of profitability of Indian drug and pharmaceutical industry. The study uses inflation adjusted panel data for a period 2000-2013 and applies OLS regression model with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors. It has been found that export intensity, A&M intensity, firm’s market power and stronger patent regime dummy have exercised positive influence on profitability. The negative and statistically significant influence of R&D intensity and raw material import intensity points to the need for firms to adopt suitable investment strategies. The study suggests that firms are required to pay far more attention to optimize their operating expenditures, advertisement and marketing expenditures and improve their export orientation, as part of the long term strategy.

Keywords: Indian drug and pharmaceutical industry, trade related intellectual property rights, research and development, food and drug administration.

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Authors: Victoria A. Okwoche, Benjamin C. Asogwa

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This paper analysed the food security situation among Nigerian rural farmers. Data collected on 202 rural farmers from Benue State were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The study revealed that majority of the respondents (60.83%) had medium dietary diversity. Furthermore, household daily calorie requirement for the food secure households was 10,723 and the household daily calorie consumption was 12,598, with a surplus index of 0.04. The food security index was 1.16. The Household daily per capita calorie consumption was 3,221.2. For the food insecure households, the household daily calorie requirement was 20,213 and the household daily calorie consumption was 17,393. The shortfall index was 0.14. The food security index was 0.88. The Household daily per capita calorie consumption was 2,432.8. The most commonly used coping strategies during food stress included intercropping (99.2%), reliance on less preferred food (98.1%), limiting portion size at meal times (85.8%) and crop diversification (70.8%).

Keywords: Analysis, food security, rural areas, farmers, Nigeria.

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Authors: Ghazwan Al-Haji

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Most accidents occur in urban areas, and the most related casualties are vulnerable road users (pedestrians and cyclists). The traffic calming measures (TCMs) are widely used and considered to be successful in reducing speed and traffic volume. However, TCMs create unwanted effects include: noise, emissions, energy consumption, vehicle delays and emergency response time (ERT). Different vertical and horizontal TCMs have been already applied nationally (Sweden) and internationally with different impacts. It is a big challenge among traffic engineers, planners, and policy-makers to choose and priorities the best TCMs to be implemented. This study will assess the existing guidelines for TCMs in relation to safety and ERT with focus on data from Norrkoping city in Sweden. The expected results will save lives, time, and money on particularly Swedish Roads. The study will also review newly technologies and how they can improve safety and reduce ERT.

Keywords: Traffic safety, traffic calming measures, speeding, emergency response time.

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Authors: S. Balaji, E. Golden Julie, M. Rajaram, Y. Harold Robinson

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Network lifetime improvement and uncertainty in multiple systems are the issues of wireless sensor network routing. This paper presents fuzzy based particle swarm optimization routing technique to improve the network scalability. Significantly, in the cluster formation procedure, fuzzy based system is used to solve the uncertainty and network balancing. Cluster heads play an important role to reduce the energy consumption using particle swarm optimization algorithm, the cluster head sends its information along data packets to the heads with link. The simulation results show that the presented routing protocol can perform load balancing effectively and reduce the energy consumption of cluster heads.

Keywords: Wireless sensor networks, fuzzy logic, PSO, LEACH.

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Authors: Walaa M.Abd-Elhafiez, Wajeb Gharibi

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In this paper a novel color image compression technique for efficient storage and delivery of data is proposed. The proposed compression technique started by RGB to YCbCr color transformation process. Secondly, the canny edge detection method is used to classify the blocks into the edge and non-edge blocks. Each color component Y, Cb, and Cr compressed by discrete cosine transform (DCT) process, quantizing and coding step by step using adaptive arithmetic coding. Our technique is concerned with the compression ratio, bits per pixel and peak signal to noise ratio, and produce better results than JPEG and more recent published schemes (like CBDCT-CABS and MHC). The provided experimental results illustrate the proposed technique that is efficient and feasible in terms of compression ratio, bits per pixel and peak signal to noise ratio.

Keywords: Image compression, color image, Q-coder, quantization, edge-detection.

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Authors: Taotao Deng, John D. Nelson

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Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has emerged as a cost-effective transport system for urban mobility. However its ability to stimulate land development remains largely unexplored. The study makes use of qualitative (interview method) and quantitative analysis (questionnaire survey and longitudinal analysis of property data) to investigate land development impact resulting from BRT in Beijing, China. The empirical analysis suggests that BRT has a positive impact on the residential and commercial property attractiveness along the busway corridor. The statistical analysis suggests that accessibility advantage conferred by BRT is capitalized into higher property price. The average price of apartments adjacent to a BRT station has gained a relatively faster increase than those not served by the BRT system. The capitalization effect mostly occurs after the full operation of BRT, and is more evident over time and particularly observed in areas which previously lack alternative mobility opportunity.

Keywords: accessibility, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), Beijing, property value uplift

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Authors: Julio Molleda, Daniel F. García, Juan C. Granda, Francisco J. Suárez

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One of the main trouble in a steel strip manufacturing line is the breakage of whatever weld carried out between steel coils, that are used to produce the continuous strip to be processed. A weld breakage results in a several hours stop of the manufacturing line. In this process the damages caused by the breakage must be repaired. After the reparation and in order to go on with the production it will be necessary a restarting process of the line. For minimizing this problem, a human operator must inspect visually and manually each weld in order to avoid its breakage during the manufacturing process. The work presented in this paper is based on the Bayesian decision theory and it presents an approach to detect, on real-time, steel strip defective welds. This approach is based on quantifying the tradeoffs between various classification decisions using probability and the costs that accompany such decisions.

Keywords: Classification, Pattern Recognition, ProbabilisticReasoning, Statistical Data Analysis.

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Authors: H.Y. Lai, S. C. Chang, W. L. Chen

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The hydrodynamic and thermal lattice Boltzmann methods are applied to investigate the turbulent convective heat transfer in the wavy channel flows. In this study, the turbulent phenomena are modeling by large-eddy simulations with the Smagorinsky model. As a benchmark, the laminar and turbulent backward-facing step flows are simulated first. The results give good agreement with other numerical and experimental data. For wavy channel flows, the distribution of Nusselt number and the skin-friction coefficients are calculated to evaluate the heat transfer effect and the drag force. It indicates that the vortices at the trough would affect the magnitude of drag and weaken the heat convection effects on the wavy surface. In turbulent cases, if the amplitude of the wavy boundary is large enough, the secondary vortices would be generated at troughs and contribute to the heat convection. Finally, the effects of different Re on the turbulent transport phenomena are discussed.

Keywords: Heat transfer, lattice Boltzmann method, turbulence, wavy channel.

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Authors: Ali Kezmane, Said Boukais, Mohand Hamizi

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This paper presents an analytical study on the behavior of reinforced concrete walls with rectangular cross section. Several experiments on such walls have been selected to be studied. Database from various experiments were collected and nominal shear wall strengths have been calculated using formulas, such as those of the ACI (American), NZS (New Zealand), Mexican (NTCC), and Wood and Barda equations. Subsequently, nominal shear wall strengths from the formulas were compared with the ultimate shear wall strengths from the database. These formulas vary substantially in functional form and do not account for all variables that affect the response of walls. There is substantial scatter in the predicted values of ultimate shear strength. Two new semi empirical equations are developed using data from tests of 57 walls for transitions walls and 27 for slender walls with the objective of improving the prediction of peak strength of walls with the most possible accurate.

Keywords: Shear strength, reinforced concrete walls, rectangular walls, shear walls, models.

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Authors: Mahmoud Elmezain, Ayoub Al-Hamadi, Robert Niese, Bernd Michaelis

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Real-time hand tracking is a challenging task in many computer vision applications such as gesture recognition. This paper proposes a robust method for hand tracking in a complex environment using Mean-shift analysis and Kalman filter in conjunction with 3D depth map. The depth information solve the overlapping problem between hands and face, which is obtained by passive stereo measuring based on cross correlation and the known calibration data of the cameras. Mean-shift analysis uses the gradient of Bhattacharyya coefficient as a similarity function to derive the candidate of the hand that is most similar to a given hand target model. And then, Kalman filter is used to estimate the position of the hand target. The results of hand tracking, tested on various video sequences, are robust to changes in shape as well as partial occlusion.

Keywords: Computer Vision and Image Analysis, Object Tracking, Gesture Recognition.

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Authors: L.A.Kumaraswamidhas, P.Velmurugan, K.Sankaranarayanasamy

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This work has been conducted to study on comfort level of drivers of suspended cabin tractor semitrailer. Some drivers suffer from low back pain caused by vibration. The practical significance of applying suspended cabin type of tractor semi trailer was tested at different road conditions, different speed as well as different load conditions for comfortable driver seat interface (x, y, z ) and the process parameters have been prioritized using Taguchi-s L27 orthogonal array. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to optimize the human comfort vibration of suspended cabin tractor semitrailer drivers. The practical significance of applying GA to human comfort to reaction of suspended cabin tractor semitrailer has been validated by means of computing the deviation between predicted and experimentally obtained human comfort to vibration. The optimized acceleration data indicate a little uncomfortable ride for suspended cabin tractor semitrailer.

Keywords: Genetic Algorithm, Ride Comfort, Taguchi Method, Tractor Semitrailer

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Authors: E. A. Mlybari, M. S. Elbisy, A. H. Alshahri, O. M. Albarakati

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Sea level rise threatens to increase the impact of future  storms and hurricanes on coastal communities. Accurate sea level  change prediction and supplement is an important task in determining  constructions and human activities in coastal and oceanic areas. In  this study, support vector machines (SVM) is proposed to predict  daily tidal levels along the Jeddah Coast, Saudi Arabia. The optimal  parameter values of kernel function are determined using a genetic  algorithm. The SVM results are compared with the field data and  with back propagation (BP). Among the models, the SVM is superior  to BPNN and has better generalization performance.

 

Keywords: Tides, Prediction, Support Vector Machines, Genetic Algorithm, Back-Propagation Neural Network, Risk, Hazards.

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Authors: Dawei Cai

Abstract:

This paper describes a design of earphone style wearable device that may provide an automatic guidance service for visitors. With both position information and orientation information obtained from NFC and terrestrial magnetism sensor, a high level automatic guide service may be realized. To realize the service, a algorithm for position detection using the packet from NFC tags, and developed an algorithm to calculate the device orientation based on the data from acceleration and terrestrial magnetism sensors called as MEMS. If visitors want to know some explanation about an exhibit in front of him, what he has to do is only move to the object and stands for a moment. The identification program will automatically recognize the status based on the information from NFC and MEMS, and start playing explanation content about the exhibit. This service should be useful for improving the understanding of the exhibition items and bring more satisfactory visiting experience without less burden.

Keywords: Wearable device, MEMS sensor, NFC, ubiquitous computing, guide system.

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Authors: Naci Büyükkaracığan

Abstract:

Today, the need for water sources is swiftly increasing due to population growth. At the same time, it is known that some regions will face with shortage of water and drought because of the global warming and climate change. In this context, evaluation and analysis of hydrological data such as the observed trends, drought and flood prediction of short term flow has great deal of importance. The most accurate selection probability distribution is important to describe the low flow statistics for the studies related to drought analysis. As in many basins In Turkey, Gediz River basin will be affected enough by the drought and will decrease the amount of used water. The aim of this study is to derive appropriate probability distributions for frequency analysis of annual minimum flows at 6 gauging stations of the Gediz Basin. After applying 10 different probability distributions, six different parameter estimation methods and 3 fitness test, the Pearson 3 distribution and general extreme values distributions were found to give optimal results.

Keywords: Gediz Basin, goodness-of-fit tests, Minimum flows, probability distribution.

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Authors: Nino Abesadze, Marine Mindorashvili, Nino Paresashvili

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The main purpose of the article is to make complex statistical analysis of tourist expenses of foreign visitors. We used mixed technique of selection that implies rules of random and proportional selection. Computer software SPSS was used to compute statistical data for corresponding analysis. Corresponding methodology of tourism statistics was implemented according to international standards. Important information was collected and grouped from the major Georgian airports. Techniques of statistical observation were prepared. A representative population of foreign visitors and a rule of selection of respondents were determined. We have a trend of growth of tourist numbers and share of tourists from post-soviet countries constantly increases. Level of satisfaction with tourist facilities and quality of service has grown, but still we have a problem of disparity between quality of service and prices. The design of tourist expenses of foreign visitors is diverse; competitiveness of tourist products of Georgian tourist companies is higher.

Keywords: Tourist, expenses, methods, statistics, analysis.

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Authors: Yveta Pohnětalová

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The topic of possible forms of future schools according to rapid changes of life in the 21st century has become to reach several economic and social prognoses. In our research, we have tried to find out what the future school form is according to pupils’ parent’s view. School is a part of life of each person and based on own experience there is a certain individual picture created about a possible look of future education. The aim of our quantitative research was to find out how parents of first grade primary school pupils see the ideal school of the future. The quantitative research realized at the Faculty of Education of the University of Hradec Králové (Czech Republic). By statistical analysis of gained data from 120 respondents, there have been several views of schools of future identified in terms of mission and also the way of education. But a common indicator according to addressed parents would be more focused on the overall personality development rather than the field practice which is related to a realistic idea that school of the future is not and will not be the only source of education.

Keywords: Parents’ approach, school of the future, survey, ways of education.

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Authors: Hakan Aydogan, Fatih Bozkurt, Huseyin Coskun

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In this study, the signal of brain electrical activities of the sixteen students selected from the Department of Electrical and Energy at Usak University have been recorded during a lecturer performed happiness emotions for the first group and anger emotions for the second group in different time while the groups were in the classroom separately. The attention and meditation data extracted from the recorded signals have been analyzed and evaluated toward the teacher’s specific emotion states simultaneously. Attention levels of students who are under influence of happiness emotions of the lecturer have a positive trend and attention levels of students who are under influence of anger emotions of the lecturer have a negative trend. The meditation or mental relaxation levels of students who are under influence of happiness emotions of the lecturer are 34.3% higher comparing with the mental relaxation levels of students who are under influence of anger emotions of the lecturer.

Keywords: Brainwave, attention, meditation, education.

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Authors: Phusit Phukamchanoad

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This research was to analyze personality’s activities based on sufficiency economy philosophy of people and community leaders in urban communities. The data were collected through questionnaires administered to 392 people and interviewed with community leaders. It was found that most people revealed that their lives depend on activities in accordance with the sufficiency economy philosophy in high level especially, being honest and aware on sufficiency, occupations, peacefulness in the community leaders’ side, they reported on extravagant reduction, planting home vegetable garden, having household accounting, expense planning by dividing into 3 categories; 1) saving for illness cover 2) saving for business cover, and 3) household daily expense. The samples were also adjusted their livings quite well with the rapid change of urbanization. Although those people have encountered with any hardships, their honesty in occupations and awareness on sufficiency remain to survive happily.

Keywords: Sufficiency Economy Philosophy, individual and household activities, urban community.

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Authors: Josip Vasilj, Petar Sarajcev, Damir Jakus

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One of the major difficulties introduced with wind power penetration is the inherent uncertainty in production originating from uncertain wind conditions. This uncertainty impacts many different aspects of power system operation, especially the balancing power requirements. For this reason, in power system development planing, it is necessary to evaluate the potential uncertainty in future wind power generation. For this purpose, simulation models are required, reproducing the performance of wind power forecasts. This paper presents a wind power forecast error simulation models which are based on the stochastic process simulation. Proposed models capture the most important statistical parameters recognized in wind power forecast error time series. Furthermore, two distinct models are presented based on data availability. First model uses wind speed measurements on potential or existing wind power plant locations, while the seconds model uses statistical distribution of wind speeds.

Keywords: Wind power, Uncertainty, Stochastic process, Monte Carlo simulation.

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Authors: Pushkar Tripathi, Abhishek Sharma, G. N. Pillai, Indira Gupta

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This paper presents a new approach for the protection of Thyristor-Controlled Series Compensator (TCSC) line using Support Vector Machine (SVM). One SVM is trained for fault classification and another for section identification. This method use three phase current measurement that results in better speed and accuracy than other SVM based methods which used single phase current measurement. This makes it suitable for real-time protection. The method was tested on 10,000 data instances with a very wide variation in system conditions such as compensation level, source impedance, location of fault, fault inception angle, load angle at source bus and fault resistance. The proposed method requires only local current measurement.

Keywords: Fault Classification, Section Identification, Feature Selection, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Thyristor-Controlled Series Compensator (TCSC)

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Authors: A. T. M. Shahjahan, M. D. Kamrul Islam, Saikat Mitra, Kutub Uddin Chisty

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Due to rapid pressured of population growth, city has started to lose its old tradition. City becomes congested with uncomfortably living. Urban renewal refers orderly development of settlements as well as land redevelopment. For this paper Chittagong city has been selected as study area. It had a great tradition but it has been losing its concord. Land use pattern of this place is also haphazard due to lack of planning intervention. Renewal plan is needed to ascertain suitable redevelopment and to recommend on preservation of city heritage structure. The goal of this study is to prepare a renewal plan using local planning approach. Social impact methods have been used to achieve this goal. Both primary and secondary data are used to achieve the goal. This study may find out a complete solution for healthy living in old Part of city. This study will help to preserve its tradition and makes urban lives more livable.

Keywords: Renewal Plan, Social Impact.

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Authors: Elison Eduardo Jardim Bierhals, Claudineia Brazil, Deivid Pires, Rafael Haag, Elton Gimenez Rossini

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This study evaluated the uncertainties involved in the solar radiation projections generated by the Brazilian Earth System Model (BESM) of the Weather and Climate Prediction Center (CPTEC) belonging to Coupled Model Intercomparison Phase 5 (CMIP5), with the aim of identifying efficiency in the projections for solar radiation of said model and in this way establish the viability of its use. Two different scenarios elaborated by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were evaluated: RCP 4.5 (with more optimistic contour conditions) and 8.5 (with more pessimistic initial conditions). The method used to verify the accuracy of the present model was the Nash coefficient and the Statistical bias, as it better represents these atmospheric patterns. The BESM showed a tendency to overestimate the data ​​of solar radiation projections in most regions of the state of Rio Grande do Sul and through the validation methods adopted by this study, BESM did not present a satisfactory accuracy.

Keywords: Climate changes, projections, solar radiation, uncertainty.

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Authors: Md. Z. Alam, Devi R. Asih, Md. N. Salleh

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Immobilization of lipase enzyme produced from palm oil mill effluent (POME) by the activated carbon (AC) among the low cost support materials was optimized. The results indicated that immobilization of 94% was achieved by AC as the most suitable support material. A sequential optimization strategy based on a statistical experimental design, including one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) method was used to determine the equilibrium time. Three components influencing lipase immobilization were optimized by the response surface methodology (RSM) based on the face-centered central composite design (FCCCD). On the statistical analysis of the results, the optimum enzyme concentration loading, agitation rate and carbon active dosage were found to be 30 U/ml, 300 rpm and 8 g/L respectively, with a maximum immobilization activity of 3732.9 U/g-AC after 2 hrs of immobilization. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed a high regression coefficient (R²) of 0.999, which indicated a satisfactory fit of the model with the experimental data. The parameters were statistically significant at p<0.05.

Keywords: Activated carbon, adsorption, immobilization, POME based lipase.

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Authors: N. D. Karande, G. A. Patil

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Databases have become ubiquitous. Almost all IT applications are storing into and retrieving information from databases. Retrieving information from the database requires knowledge of technical languages such as Structured Query Language (SQL). However majority of the users who interact with the databases do not have a technical background and are intimidated by the idea of using languages such as SQL. This has led to the development of a few Natural Language Database Interfaces (NLDBIs). A NLDBI allows the user to query the database in a natural language. This paper highlights on architecture of new NLDBI system, its implementation and discusses on results obtained. In most of the typical NLDBI systems the natural language statement is converted into an internal representation based on the syntactic and semantic knowledge of the natural language. This representation is then converted into queries using a representation converter. A natural language query is translated to an equivalent SQL query after processing through various stages. The work has been experimented on primitive database queries with certain constraints.

Keywords: Natural language database interface, representation converter, syntactic and semantic knowledge

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Authors: Leau Y. B., Dinna Nina M. N., Habeeb S. A. H., Jetol B.

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Authentication plays a vital role in many secure systems. Most of these systems require user to log in with his or her secret password or pass phrase before entering it. This is to ensure all the valuables information is kept confidential guaranteeing also its integrity and availability. However, to achieve this goal, users are required to memorize high entropy passwords or pass phrases. Unfortunately, this sometimes causes difficulty for user to remember meaningless strings of data. This paper presents a new scheme which assigns a weight to each personal question given to the user in revealing the encrypted secrets or password. Concentration of this scheme is to offer fault tolerance to users by allowing them to forget the specific password to a subset of questions and still recover the secret and achieve successful authentication. Comparison on level of security for weight-based and weightless secret recovery scheme is also discussed. The paper concludes with the few areas that requires more investigation in this research.

Keywords: Secret Recovery, Personal Entropy, Cryptography, Secret Sharing and Key Management.

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Authors: Aree Thongpukdee, Chockpisit Thepsithar, Sujitra Timchookul

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The study aimed to investigate characteristics of vegetative tissue for taxonomic purpose and possibly trend of waste application in industry. Stems and branches of 15 species in Solanum found in Thailand were prepared for fiber and examined by light microscopy. Microstructural characteristic data of fiber i.e. fiber length and width, fiber lumen diameter and fiber cell wall thickness were recorded. The longest average fiber cell length (>3.9 mm.) were obtained in S. lycopersicum L. and S. tuberosum L. Fiber cells from S. lycopersicum also revealed the widest average diameter of whole cell and its lumen at >45.5 μm and >29 μm respectively. However fiber cells with thickest wall of > 9.6 μm were belonged to the ornamental tree species, S. wrightii Benth. The results showed that the slenderness ratio, Runkel ratio, and flexibility coefficient, with potentially suitable for feedstock in paper industry fell in 4 exotic species, i.e. Solanumamericanum L., S. lycopersicum, S. seaforthianum Andr., and S. tuberosum L

Keywords: Fiber, microstructure, Solanaceae, Solanum.

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Authors: V. T. S. Dao, T. G. Etoh, C. Vo Le, H. D. Nguyen, K. Takehara, T. Akino, K. Nishi

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We present an explicit expression to estimate driving voltage attenuation through RC networks representation of an ultrahigh- speed image sensor. Elmore delay metric for a fundamental RC chain is employed as the first-order approximation. By application of dimensional analysis to SPICE simulation data, we found a simple expression that significantly improves the accuracy of the approximation. Estimation error of the resultant expression for uniform RC networks is less than 2%. Similarly, another simple closed-form model to estimate 50 % delay through fundamental RC networks is also derived with sufficient accuracy. The framework of this analysis can be extended to address delay or attenuation issues of other VLSI structures.

Keywords: Dimensional Analysis, Elmore model, RC network, Signal Attenuation, Ultra-High-Speed Image Sensor.

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Authors: Ngozi Nwogu, Mohammed Kajama, Edward Gobina

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Atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions are considered as the greatest environmental challenge the world is facing today. The tasks to control the emissions include the recovery of CO2 from flue gas. This concern has been improved due to recent advances in materials process engineering resulting in the development of inorganic gas separation membranes with excellent thermal and mechanical stability required for most gas separations. This paper, therefore, evaluates the performance of a highly selective inorganic membrane for CO2 recovery applications. Analysis of results obtained is in agreement with experimental literature data. Further results show the prediction performance of the membranes for gas separation and the future direction of research. The materials selection and the membrane preparation techniques are discussed. Method of improving the interface defects in the membrane and its effect on the separation performance has also been reviewed and in addition advances to totally exploit the potential usage of this innovative membrane.

Keywords: Carbon dioxide, gas separation, inorganic ceramic membrane & perm selectivity.

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Authors: Mohamed Saladin Abdul Rasool, Arifin Md Salleh, Mohd Fauzi Mohd Harun

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Islamic institutions in Malaysia play a variety of socioeconomic roles such as poverty alleviation. To perform this role, these institutions face a major task in identifying the poverty group. Most of these institutions measure and operationalize poverty from the monetary perspective using variables such as income, expenditure or consumption. In practice, most Islamic institutions in Malaysia use the monetary approach in measuring poverty through the conventional Poverty Line Income (PLI) method and recently, the had al kifayah (HAK) method using total necessities of a household from an Islamic perspective. The objective of this paper is to present the PLI and also the HAK method. This micro-data study would highlight the similarities and differences of both the methods.A survey aided by a structured questionnaire was carried out on 260 selected head of households in the state of Selangor. The paper highlights several demographic factors that are associated with the three monetary indicators in the study, namely income, PLI and HAK. In addition, the study found that these monetary variables are significantly related with each other.

Keywords: Poverty line, multidimensional, necessities, monetary

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Authors: Nazar Younis, Raied Salman

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It has been always observed that the effectiveness of MIS as a support tool for management decisions degenerate after time of implementation, despite the substantial investments being made. This is true for organizations at the initial stages of MIS implementations, manual or computerized. A survey of a sample of middle to top managers in business and government institutions was made. A large ratio indicates that the MIS has lost its impact on the day-to-day operations, and even the response lag time expands sometimes indefinitely. The data indicates an infant mortality phenomenon of the bathtub model. Reasons may be monotonous nature of MIS delivery, irrelevance, irreverence, timeliness, and lack of adequate detail. All those reasons collaborate to create a degree of degeneracy. We investigate and model as a bathtub model the phenomenon of MIS degeneracy that inflicts the MIS systems and renders it ineffective. A degeneracy index is developed to identify the status of the MIS system and possible remedies to prevent the onset of total collapse of the system to the point of being useless.

Keywords: MIS, management theory, information technology, information systems, IS, organizational environment, organizations, degeneracy, organizational change.

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