Search results for: Social background.

Authors: Hadas Sopher, Davide Schaumann, Yehuda E. Kalay

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This paper addresses the shortcomings of architectural computation tools in representing human behavior in built environments, prior to construction and occupancy of those environments. Evaluating whether a design fits the needs of its future users is currently done solely post construction, or is based on the knowledge and intuition of the designer. This issue is of high importance when designing complex buildings such as hospitals, where the quality of treatment as well as patient and staff satisfaction are of major concern. Existing computational pre-occupancy human behavior evaluation methods are geared mainly to test ergonomic issues, such as wheelchair accessibility, emergency egress, etc. As such, they rely on Agent Based Modeling (ABM) techniques, which emphasize the individual user. Yet we know that most human activities are social, and involve a number of actors working together, which ABM methods cannot handle. Therefore, we present an event-based model that manages the interaction between multiple Actors, Spaces, and Activities, to describe dynamically how people use spaces. This approach requires expanding the computational representation of Actors beyond their physical description, to include psychological, social, cultural, and other parameters. The model presented in this paper includes cognitive abilities and rules that describe the response of actors to their physical and social surroundings, based on the actors’ internal status. The model has been applied in a simulation of hospital wards, and showed adaptability to a wide variety of situated behaviors and interactions.

Keywords: Agent based modeling, architectural design evaluation, event modeling, human behavior simulation, spatial cognition.

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Authors: Luis Gracia, Carlos Perez-Vidal, Carlos Gracia

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This paper presents the theoretical background and the real implementation of an automated computer system to introduce machine vision in flower, fruit and vegetable processing for recollection, cutting, packaging, classification, or fumigation tasks. The considerations and implementation issues presented in this work can be applied to a wide range of varieties of flowers, fruits and vegetables, although some of them are especially relevant due to the great amount of units that are manipulated and processed each year over the world. The computer vision algorithms developed in this work are shown in detail, and can be easily extended to other applications. A special attention is given to the electromagnetic compatibility in order to avoid noisy images. Furthermore, real experimentation has been carried out in order to validate the developed application. In particular, the tests show that the method has good robustness and high success percentage in the object characterization.

Keywords: Image processing, Vision system, Automation

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Authors: Inês Ramalhete, Hugo Farias, Rui da Silva Pinto

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Adequate housing has been a widely discussed theme in academic circles related to low-cost housing, whereas its physical features are easy to deal with, overcrowding (related to social, cultural and economic aspects) is still ambiguous, particularly regarding the set of indicators that can accurately reflect and measure it. This paper develops research on low-cost housing models for developing countries and what is the best method to embed overcrowding as an important parameter for adaptability. A critical review of international overcrowding indicators and their application in two developing countries, Cape Verde and Angola, is presented. The several rationales and the constraints for an accurate assessment of overcrowding are considered, namely baseline data (statistics), which can induce misjudgments, as well as social and cultural factors (such as personal choices of residents). This paper proposes a way to tackle overcrowding through housing adaptability, considering factors such as physical flexibility, functional ambiguity, and incremental expansion schemes. Moreover, a case-study is presented to establish a framework for the theoretical application of the proposed approach.

Keywords: Adaptive housing, low-cost housing, overcrowding.

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Authors: Sandhya, Rajbir Singh, Ramesh Kumar

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The purpose of this research paper on the subject of Leadership Effectiveness attempts to conduct a focused amount of research to examine the employees’ perceptions pertaining to specific competencies of leadership effectiveness in Indian manufacturing industries and to correlate their perceptions between private sectors and public sector undertakings. It specifically looks at the current definitions of leadership and looks at some historical background information relating to the more common theories that relate to leadership and effectiveness. This research was conducted by using a variety of current books and periodical articles on the topic of leadership effectiveness and employees’ perceptions. A number of leadership effectiveness competencies have been identified. The demographic details and perception of the employees on importance of leadership effectiveness competencies have been obtained through a well designed online questionnaire. For this purpose, a likert scale of seven-point has been used. Descriptive and inferential statistics is used to analyze the gathered data.

Keywords: Employees Perception, Leadership Effectiveness, Leadership Competencies, Manufacturing.

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Authors: Karim Kemih, Yacine Yaiche, Malek Benslama

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To establish optical communication between any two satellites, the transmitter satellite must track the beacon of the receiver satellite and point the information optical beam in its direction. Optical tracking and pointing systems for free space suffer during tracking from high-amplitude vibration because of background radiation from interstellar objects such as the Sun, Moon, Earth, and stars in the tracking field of view or the mechanical impact from satellite internal and external sources. The vibrations of beam pointing increase the bit error rate and jam communication between the two satellites. One way to overcome this problem is the use of very small transmitter beam divergence angles of too narrow divergence angle is that the transmitter beam may sometimes miss the receiver satellite, due to pointing vibrations. In this paper we propose the use of genetic algorithm to optimize the BER as function of transmitter optics aperture.

Keywords: Optical Satellite Communication, Genetic Algorithm, Transmitter Optics Aperture

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Authors: K. Nirmala Devi, V. Murali Bhaskaran

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Traditional document representation for classification follows Bag of Words (BoW) approach to represent the term weights. The conventional method uses the Vector Space Model (VSM) to exploit the statistical information of terms in the documents and they fail to address the semantic information as well as order of the terms present in the documents. Although, the phrase based approach follows the order of the terms present in the documents rather than semantics behind the word. Therefore, a semantic concept based approach is used in this paper for enhancing the semantics by incorporating the ontology information. In this paper a novel method is proposed to forecast the intraday stock market price directional movement based on the sentiments from Twitter and money control news articles. The stock market forecasting is a very difficult and highly complicated task because it is affected by many factors such as economic conditions, political events and investor’s sentiment etc. The stock market series are generally dynamic, nonparametric, noisy and chaotic by nature. The sentiment analysis along with wisdom of crowds can automatically compute the collective intelligence of future performance in many areas like stock market, box office sales and election outcomes. The proposed method utilizes collective sentiments for stock market to predict the stock price directional movements. The collective sentiments in the above social media have powerful prediction on the stock price directional movements as up/down by using Granger Causality test.

Keywords: Bag of Words, Collective Sentiments, Ontology, Semantic relations, Sentiments, Social media, Stock Prediction, Twitter, Vector Space Model and wisdom of crowds.

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Authors: Yun-Husan Huang

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Many English for Specific Purposes (ESP) textbooks are distributed globally as the content development is often obliged to compromises between commercial and pedagogical demands. Therefore, the issue of regional application and usefulness of globally published ESP textbooks has received much debate. For ESP instructors, textbook selection is definitely a priority consideration for curriculum design. An appropriate ESP textbook can facilitate teaching and learning, while an inappropriate one may cause a disaster for both teachers and students. This study aims to investigate the regional application and usefulness of an ESP textbook for information technology (IT). Participants were 51 sophomores majoring in Applied Informatics and Multimedia at a university in Taiwan. As they were non-English majors, their English proficiency was mostly at elementary and elementary-to-intermediate levels. This course was offered for two semesters. The textbook selected was Oxford English for Information Technology. At class end, the students were required to complete a survey comprising five choices of Very Easy, Easy, Neutral, Difficult, and Very Difficult for each item. Based on the content design of the textbook, the survey investigated how the students viewed the difficulty of grammar, listening, speaking, reading, and writing materials of the textbook. In terms of difficulty, results reveal that only 22% of them found the grammar section difficult and very difficult. For listening, 71% responded difficult and very difficult. For general reading, 55% responded difficult and very difficult. For speaking, 56% responded difficult and very difficult. For writing, 78% responded difficult and very difficult. For advanced reading, 90% reported difficult and very difficult. These results indicate that, except the grammar section, more than half of the students found the textbook contents difficult in terms of listening, speaking, reading, and writing materials. Such contradictory results between the easy grammar section and the difficult four language skills sections imply that the textbook designers do not well understand the English learning background of regional ESP learners. For the participants, the learning contents of the grammar section were the general grammar level of junior high school, while the learning contents of the four language skills sections were more of the levels of college English majors. Implications from the findings are obtained for instructors and textbook designers. First of all, existing ESP textbooks for IT are few and thus textbook selections for instructors are insufficient. Second, existing globally published textbooks for IT cannot be applied to learners of all English proficiency levels, especially the low level. With limited textbook selections, third, instructors should modify the selected textbook contents or supplement extra ESP materials to meet the proficiency level of target learners. Fourth, local ESP publishers should collaborate with local ESP instructors who understand best the learning background of their students in order to develop appropriate ESP textbooks for local learners. Even though the instructor reduced learning contents and simplified tests in curriculum design, in conclusion, the students still found difficult. This implies that in addition to the instructor’s professional experience, there is a need to understand the usefulness of the textbook from learner perspectives.

Keywords: ESP textbooks, ESP materials, ESP textbook design, learner perspectives on ESP textbooks.

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Authors: S. A. S. Zakaria, G. Brewer, T. Gajendran

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Currently, the Malaysian construction industry is focusing on transforming construction processes from conventional building methods to the Industrialized Building System (IBS). Still, research on the decision making of IBS technology adoption with the influence of contextual factors is scarce. The purpose of this paper is to explore how contextual factors influence the IBS decision making in building projects which is perceived by those involved in construction industry namely construction stakeholders and IBS supply chain members. Theoretical background, theoretical frameworks and literatures which identify possible contextual factors that influence decision making towards IBS technology adoption are presented. This paper also discusses the importance of contextual factors in IBS decision making, highlighting some possible crossover benefits and making some suggestions as to how these can be utilized. Conclusions are drawn and recommendations are made with respect to the perception of socio-economic, IBS policy and IBS technology associated with building projects.

Keywords: decision making, technology adoptions, contextualfactors, Industrialized Building Systems

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Authors: Vahid Khorramshahi, Alireza Behrad, Neeraj K. Kanhere

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In this paper we present a new method for over-height vehicle detection in low headroom streets and highways using digital video possessing. The accuracy and the lower price comparing to present detectors like laser radars and the capability of providing extra information like speed and height measurement make this method more reliable and efficient. In this algorithm the features are selected and tracked using KLT algorithm. A blob extraction algorithm is also applied using background estimation and subtraction. Then the world coordinates of features that are inside the blobs are estimated using a noble calibration method. As, the heights of the features are calculated, we apply a threshold to select overheight features and eliminate others. The over-height features are segmented using some association criteria and grouped using an undirected graph. Then they are tracked through sequential frames. The obtained groups refer to over-height vehicles in a scene.

Keywords: Feature extraction, over-height vehicle detection, traffic monitoring, vehicle tracking.

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Authors: Mohd Afandi Salleh

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The paper examines two women advocacy groups of the American Christian Right, namely: Concerned Women for America (CWA) and Eagle Forum. Focus will be placed on their interests in American foreign policy and global social policy particularly during the George W. Bush administration. It examines the organizations’ historical backgrounds, and study their agendas, issues and forms of international engagement which relate to American foreign policy. The paper shows that the Christian Right movement is not a monolithic movement in term of its focus, objectives or activism. Despite their diversity, various actions of these advocacy groups have strengthened the role of the Christian Right in exerting its influence on US foreign policy. Finally, it contends that, although traditionally the Christian Right advocacy groups’ motives for activism are strongly based on the Bible and Judeo–Christian values, the arguments and ideas behind their present struggle are presented in a very nationalistic, secular and pragmatic vein.

Keywords: Christian Right, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, Global social policy, US foreign policy.

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Authors: M. Sankari, C. Meena

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Enhancing the quality of two dimensional signals is one of the most important factors in the fields of video surveillance and computer vision. Usually in real-life video surveillance, false detection occurs due to the presence of random noise, illumination and shadow artifacts. The detection methods based on background subtraction faces several problems in accurately detecting objects in realistic environments: In this paper, we propose a noise removal algorithm using neighborhood comparison method with thresholding. The illumination variations correction is done in the detected foreground objects by using an amalgamation of techniques like homomorphic decomposition, curvelet transformation and gamma adjustment operator. Shadow is removed using chromaticity estimator with local relation estimator. Results are compared with the existing methods and prove as high robustness in the video surveillance.

Keywords: Chromaticity Estimator, Curvelet Transformation, Denoising, Gamma correction, Homomorphic, Neighborhood Assessment.

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Authors: M. Bambulyakа

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Tolerance is a tool for achieving a social cohesion, particularly, among individuals and groups with different values. The aim is to study the characteristics of the ethnic tolerance, the inhabitants of Latvia. The ethnic tolerance is taught as a set of conscious and unconscious orientations of the individual in social interaction and inter-ethnic communication. It uses the tools of empirical studies of the ethnic tolerance which allows to identify the explicitly and implicitly levels of the emotional component of Latvia's residents. Explicit measurements were made using the techniques of self-report which revealed the index of the ethnic tolerance and the ethnic identity of the participants. The implicit component was studied using methods based on the effect of the emotional priming. During the processing of the results, there were calculated indicators of the positive and negative implicit attitudes towards members of their own and other ethnicity as well as the explicit parameters of the ethnic tolerance and the ethnic identity of Latvia-s residents. The implicit measurements of the ratio of neighboring ethnic groups against each other showed a mutual negative attitude whereas the explicit measurements indicate a neutral attitude. The data obtained contribute to a further study of the ethnic tolerance of Latvia's residents.

Keywords: ethnic tolerance, implicit measure, priming, ethnic attitudes

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Authors: Premvadee Na Nakornpanom

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Code- mixing in spontaneous speech has been widely discussed, but not in virtual situations; especially in context of the third language learning students. Thus, this study is an attempt to explore the linguistic characteristics of the mixing of Japanese, English and Thai in a mobile Line chat room by students with their background of English as L2, Japanese as L3 and Thai as mother tongue. The result found that insertion of Thai content words is a very common linguistic phenomenon embedded with the other two languages in the sentences. As chatting is to be ‘relational’ or ‘interactional’, it affected the style of lexical choices to be speech-like, more personal and emotionally-related. A personal pronoun in Japanese is often mixed into the sentences. The Japanese sentence-final question particle か “ka” was added to the end of the sentence based on Thai grammar rules. Some unique characteristics were created while chatting.

Keywords: Code-mixing, Japanese, English, Thai, Line chat.

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Authors: Adebisi A. Sunday, Babajide Adeokin

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The persistent rise in farm theft in rural region of Nigeria is attributed to the lack of adequate and effective policing in the regions; thus, this brought about the inevitable introduction of native charms on farmlands as a means of fortification of harvests against theft in Ayetoro community. The use of charm by farmers as security on farmlands is a traditional crime control mechanism that is largely based on unwritten laws which greatly influenced the lives of people, and their attitudes toward the society. This research presents a qualitative sociological study on how native charms are deployed by farmers for protection against theft. The study investigated the various types of charms that are employed as security measures among farmers in Ayetoro community and the rationale behind the use of these mechanisms as farm security. The study utilized qualitative method to gather data in the research process. Under the qualitative method, in-depth interview method was adopted to generate a robust and detailed data from the respondents. Also the data generated were analysed qualitatively using thematic content analysis and simple description which was preceded by transcription of data from the recorder. It was revealed that amidst numerous charms known, two major charms are used on farmlands as a measure of social control in Ayetoro community, Ogun state South West Nigeria. Furthermore, the result of this study showed that, the desire for safekeeping of harvest from pilferers and the heavy punishments dispense on offenders by native charms are the reasons why farmers deploy charms on their farms. In addition, findings revealed that the adoption of these charms for protection has improved yields among farmers in the community because the safety of harvest has been made possible by virtue of the presence of various charms in the farm lands. Therefore, based on the findings of this study, it is recommended that such measures should be recognized in mainstream social control mechanisms in the fight against crime in Nigeria and the rest of the world. Lastly, native charms could be installed in all social and cooperate organisation and position of authority to prevent theft of valuables and things hold with utmost importance.

Keywords: Farm theft, native charms, mechanism, Ayetoro, pilferer.

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Authors: Mohammad Saraj Sharifzai, Keisuke Kitagawa, Mohammad Kamil Halimee, Javid Habib, Daishi Sakaguchi

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The overall goal of this paper is to examine the suitability and potential of the policies addressing the sustainability and affordability of housing for returnees, and to determine the impact of this policy on housing delivery for Afghan refugees. Housing is a central component of the settlement experience of refugees. A positive housing situation can facilitate many aspects of integration. Unaffordable, and unsafe housing, however, can cause disruptions in the entire settlement process. This paper aims to identify a suite of built forms for housing that is both affordable and environmentally sustainable for Afghan refugees. The result was the development of a framework that enables the assessment of the overall performance of various types of housing development in all zones of the country. There is very little evidence that the present approach of housing provision to the vagaries of market forces has provided affordable housing, especially for Afghan refugees. There is a need to incorporate social housing into the policy to assist people who cannot afford to have their own houses.

Keywords: Afghan refugees, housing policy, affordability, social housing, housing provision, environmental sustainability principles, resettlement.

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Authors: Tholokuhle T. Ntshakala, Seraphin D. Eyono Obono

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Nations are still finding it quite difficult to win mega sport competitions despite the major contribution of sport to society in terms of social and economic development, personal health, and in education. Even though the world of sports has been transformed into a huge global economy, it is important to note that the first step of sport is usually its introduction to children at school through physical education or PE. In other words, nations who do not win mega sport competitions also suffer from a weak and neglected PE system. This problem of the neglect of PE systems is the main motivation of this research aimed at examining the factors affecting the perceived awareness of physical education teachers on the ICTs that are adoptable for the teaching and learning of physical education. Two types of research objectives will materialize this aim: relevant theories will be identified in relation to the analysis of the perceived ICT awareness of PE teachers and subsequent models will be compiled and designed from existing literature; the empirical testing of such theories and models will also be achieved through the survey of PE teachers from the Camperdown magisterial district of the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. The main hypothesis at the heart of this study is the relationship between the demographics of PE teachers, their behavior both as individuals and as social entities, and their perceived awareness of the ICTs that are adoptable for PE, as postulated by existing literature; except that this study categorizes human behavior under performance expectancy, computer attitude, and social influence. This hypothesis was partially confirmed by the survey conducted by this research in the sense that performance expectancy and teachers’ age, gender, computer usage, and class size were found to be the only factors affecting their awareness of ICTs for physical education.

Keywords: Human Behavior, ICT Awareness, Physical Education, Teachers.

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Authors: Guangzhuang Yu, Chun-Chu Liu

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With the advent of the Internet era in recent years, social music education has gradually shifted from the original entity education mode to the mode of entity plus network teaching. No matter for school music education, professional music education or social music education, the teaching quality is the most important evaluation index. Regarding the research on teaching quality evaluation, scholars at home and abroad have contributed a lot of research results on the basis of multiple methods and evaluation subjects. However, to our best knowledge the complete evaluation model for the virtual teaching interaction mode of the emerging network music education Application (APP) has not been established. This research firstly found out the basic dimensions that accord with the teaching quality required by the three parties, constructing the quality evaluation index system; and then, on the basis of expounding the connotation of each index, it determined the weight of each index by using method of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, providing ideas and methods for scientific, objective and comprehensive evaluation of the teaching quality of network education APP.

Keywords: Network music education APP, teaching quality evaluation, index, connotation.

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Authors: Jacopo Baboni Schilingi

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We here describe the theoretical and philosophical understanding of a long term use and development of algorithmic computer-based tools applied to music composition. The findings of our research lead us to interrogate some specific processes and systems of communication engaged in the discovery of specific cultural artworks: artistic creation in the sono-musical domain. Our hypothesis is that the patterns of auditory learning cannot be only understood in terms of social transmission but would gain to be questioned in the way they rely on various ranges of acoustic stimuli modes of consciousness and how the different types of memories engaged in the percept-action expressive systems of our cultural communities also relies on these shadowy conscious entities we named “Reduced Descriptive Structures”.

Keywords: Algorithmic sonic computation, corrected and self-correcting learning patterns in acoustic perception, morphological derivations in sensorial patterns, social unconscious modes of communication.

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Authors: Alex Elentukh

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The paper is based on data collected from final exams administered during five years teaching the graduate course in software engineering. The visualization instrument with four distinct personas has been used to improve effectiveness of each class. The study offers a plethora of clues toward students' behavioral preferences. Diversity among students (professional background, physical proximity) is too significant to assume a single face of a learner. This is particularly true for a body of on-line graduate students in computer science. Conclusions of the study (each learner is unique and each class is unique) are extrapolated to demystify the notion of an 'average software engineer'. An immediate direction for an educator is to assure a course applies to a wide audience of very different individuals. On another hand, a student should be clear about his/her abilities and preferences - to follow the most effective learning path.

Keywords: K.3.2 computer & information science education, learner profiling, adaptive learning, software engineering.

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Authors: Eiad Yafi, Ahmed Sultan Al-Hegami, M. A. Alam, Ranjit Biswas

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Association rules are an important problem in data mining. Massively increasing volume of data in real life databases has motivated researchers to design novel and incremental algorithms for association rules mining. In this paper, we propose an incremental association rules mining algorithm that integrates shocking interestingness criterion during the process of building the model. A new interesting measure called shocking measure is introduced. One of the main features of the proposed approach is to capture the user background knowledge, which is monotonically augmented. The incremental model that reflects the changing data and the user beliefs is attractive in order to make the over all KDD process more effective and efficient. We implemented the proposed approach and experiment it with some public datasets and found the results quite promising.

Keywords: Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), Data mining, Incremental Association rules, Domain knowledge, Interestingness, Shocking rules (SHR).

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Authors: Veronika Kántor-Forgách

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To comply with the international human right legislation concerning the freedom of movement, transport systems are required to be made accessible in order that all citizens, regardless of their physical condition, have equal possibilities to use them. In Hungary, apparently there is a considerable default in the improvement of accessible public transport. This study is aiming to overview the current Hungarian situation and to reveal the reasons of the deficiency. The result shows that in spite of the relatively favourable juridical background linked to the accessibility needs and to the rights of persons with disabilities there is a strong delay in putting all in practice in the field of public transport. Its main reason is the lack of financial resource and referring to this the lack of creating mandatory regulations. In addition to this the proprietary rights related to public transport are also variable, which also limits the improvement possibilities. Consequently, first of all an accurate and detailed regulatory procedure is expected to change the present unfavourable situation and to create the conditions of the fast realization, which is already behind time.

Keywords: accessibility, legislation, people with reducedmobility, public transport.

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Authors: J. K. Shrestha, A. Benta, R. B. Lopes, N. Lopes

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This paper presents a multi-objective model for addressing two main objectives in designing rural roads networks: minimization of user operation costs and maximization of population covered. As limited budgets often exist, a reasonable trade-off must be obtained in order to account for both cost and social benefits in this type of networks. For a real-world rural road network, the model is solved, where all non-dominated solutions were obtained. Afterwards, an analysis is made on the (possibly) most interesting solutions (the ones providing better trade-offs). This analysis, coupled with the knowledge of the real world scenario (typically provided by decision makers) provides a suitable method for the evaluation of road networks in rural areas of developing countries.

Keywords: Multi-objective, user operation cost, population covered, rural road network.

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Authors: Saowapa Phaithayawat

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The purposes of this study are 1) to study the over 20-year attempt of Mahakan fort community to negotiate with Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) to remain in their residential area belonging to the state, and 2) to apply the new social and cultural dimension between the state and the community as an alternative for local participation in keeping their residential area. This is a qualitative research, and the findings reveal that the community claimed their ancestors’ right as owners of this piece of land for over 200 years. The community, therefore, requested to take part in the preservation of land, culture and local intellect and the area management in terms of being a learning resource on the cultural road in Rattanakosin Island. However, BMA imposed the law concerning the community area relocation in Rattanakosin Island. The result of law enforcement led to the failure of the area relocation, and the hard hit on physical structure of the area including the overall deterioration of the cultural road renovated in the year 1982, the 200 years’ celebration of Bangkok. The enforcement of law by the state required the move of the community, and the landscape improvement based on the capital city plan. However, this enforcement resulted in the unending conflicts between the community and the state, and the solution of this problem was unclear. At the same time the community has spent a long time opposing the state’s action, and preparing themselves by administrating the community behind Mahakan fortress with community administrative committee under the suggestion of external organization by registering all community members, providing funds for community administration. At the meantime the state lacked the continuation of the enforcement due to political problem and BMA’s administration problem. It is, therefore, suggested that an alternative solution to this problem lie at the negotiation between the state and the community with the purpose of the collaboration between the two to develop the area under the protective law of each side.

Keywords: Pom-Mahakan Community, The Reduction of Conflicts, The Social Area Disclosure.

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Authors: Eric Ho

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Pedagogical approaches in Asia nowadays are imported from the West. In Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC), however, there is a dichotomy between the perceived benefits of Western pedagogies and the real classroom practices in Chinese societies. The success of Hong Kong students in large-scale international assessments has proved that both the strengths of both Western pedagogies and CHC educational approaches should be integrated for the sake of the students. University students aim to equip themselves with employability skills upon graduation. Formative assessments allow students to receive detailed, positive, and timely feedback and they can identify their strengths and weaknesses before they start working. However, there remains a question of whether university year 1 students who come from an examination-driven secondary education background are ready to respond to more formative assessments. The findings show that year 1 students are less concerned about competition in the university and more open to new teaching approaches that will allow them to improve as professionals in their major study areas.

Keywords: Formative assessment, higher education, learning styles, Confucian heritage culture.

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Authors: N. Areerachakul

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In developing countries located in monsoon areas like Thailand where rainwater is currently of no value for urban dwellers due to easily access to piped water supply at each household, studies in rainwater harvesting for domestic use are of low interest. However it is needed to undertake research to find out appropriate rainwater harvesting systems particularly for small urban communities that are recently developed from a full rural structure to urban context. As a matter of fact, in such transitional period, relying on only common water resources is risky. With some specific economic settings, land use patterns, and historical and cultural context that dominate perceptions of water users in the study area, the level of service in this study may certainly be different from megacities or cities located in industrial zone. The overviews of some available technologies and background of rainwater harvesting including alternate resource are included in this paper. Among other sources of water supply, ground water use as the water resource of Thailand and also in the study area.

Keywords: Developing country, water supply, rainwater, ground water.

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Authors: Changhyuk Jang, Keechul Jung

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Human pose estimation can be executed using Active Shape Models. The existing techniques for applying to human-body research using Active Shape Models, such as human detection, primarily take the form of silhouette of human body. This technique is not able to estimate accurately for human pose to concern two arms and legs, as the silhouette of human body represents the shape as out of round. To solve this problem, we applied the human body model as stick-figure, “skeleton". The skeleton model of human body can give consideration to various shapes of human pose. To obtain effective estimation result, we applied background subtraction and deformed matching algorithm of primary Active Shape Models in the fitting process. The images which were used to make the model were 600 human bodies, and the model has 17 landmark points which indicate body junction and key features of human pose. The maximum iteration for the fitting process was 30 times and the execution time was less than .03 sec.

Keywords: Active shape models, skeleton, pose estimation.

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Authors: Lovorka Galetić, Maja Klindžić, Ivana Načinović Braje

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Generation Y individuals or Millennials are known for their unique views, work values and motivational needs which implies that, in order to attract and retain those individuals, activities in the area of career management should be given special attention by HRM managers. After a theoretical background on Millennials’ life and work attitudes, an empirical research on career preferences of Millennials in Croatia was described. Empirical research was conducted among 249 members of generation Y. The data analysis revealed that respondents generally perceive promotion opportunities as the most important career aspect; however, job security and work-life balance are almost as important. Furthermore, it was shown that Generation Y is not necessarily a homogenous group. More precisely, women assign greater importance than men to work-life balance and job security. Therefore, HRM managers should adapt career planning activities not only with respect to generational preferences, but individual characteristics as well.

Keywords: Career, individual differences, millennials, work values.

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Authors: Nada Azhar

Abstract:

The aim of the paper is to investigate the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) CSR on the National Commercial Bank (NCB) in Saudi Arabia. In order to achieve this, a case study was made of the CSR activities of this bank from the perspective of its branch managers. The NCB was chosen as it was one of the first Saudi banks to engage in CSR and currently has a wide range of CSR initiatives. A qualitative research method was used. Open-ended questionnaires were administered to eighty branch managers of the NCB, with fifty-five usable questionnaires returned and twenty managers were interviewed as part of the primary research. Data from both questionnaires and interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Six themes emerged from the questionnaire findings were used to develop the interview questions. These themes are the following: Awareness of employees about CSR in the NCB; CSR activities as a type of investment; Government and media support; Increased employee loyalty in the NCB; Prestige and profit to the NCB; and View of CSR in Islam. This paper makes a theoretical contribution in that it investigates and increases understanding of the effect of CSR on the NCB in Saudi Arabia. In addition, it makes a practical contribution by making recommendations which can support the development of CSR in the NCB. A limitation of the paper is that it is a case study of only one bank. It is therefore recommended that future research could be conducted with other banks in Saudi Arabia, or indeed, with a range of other types of firm within the financial services area in Saudi Arabia. In this way, the same issues could be explored but with a greater potential generalisability of findings of CSR within the Saudi Arabian financial services industry. In addition, this paper takes a qualitative approach and it is suggested that future research be carried out using mixed methods, which could provide a greater depth of analysis.

Keywords: Branch managers, corporate social responsibility. national commercial bank, Saudi Arabia.

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Authors: Mohamed A. Tantawy, Nourelhoda A. Hussein, Moataz A. Mahrous

Abstract:

New planning and city design theories are continuously debated and optimized for seeking efficiency and adequacy in economic and life quality aspects. Here, we examine the children-city relationship, to reflect on how modern and traditional cities affect the social climate. We adopt children as a proper caliber for urbanism, as for their very young age, they are independent and attached to family. Their fragility offers a chance to gauge how various urban settings directly affect their feeling of safety, containment, and their perception of belonging for home territory. The importance of street play for the child development process is discussed thoroughly. The authority they have on their play (when and what to play) pushes us to our conclusion. A mediocre built environment characterized by spontaneity and human-scale semi-private urban spaces, is irreplaceable by a perfectly designed far away playgrounds. Street play has a huge role in empowering children for a gradual engagement with grown-ups’ urban flow.

Keywords: Child's psychology, social activity, street play, urban fabric.

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

Abstract:

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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