Search results for: American Girl

Authors: Ingrid Göpfert, Michael Stephan, Wanja Wellbrock, Malte Ackermann

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Empirical insights into the implementation of logistics competencies at the top management level are scarce. This paper addresses this issue with an explorative approach which is based on a dataset of 872 observations in the years 2000, 2004 and 2008 using quantitative content analysis from annual reports of the 500 publicly listed firms with the highest global research and development expenditures according to the British Department for Business Innovation and Skills. We find that logistics competencies are more pronounced in Asian companies than in their European or American counterparts. On an industrial level the results are quite mixed. Using partial point-biserial correlations we show that logistics competencies are positively related to financial performance.

Keywords: Logistics, supply chain management, content analysis, executive boards, multinational corporations.

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Authors: Haeng A. Seo, Changseok Oh, Seung Jun Yoo

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This study attempts to examine the disparities in S&T innovation capacity from 14 developing countries to discuss how to support specific features in national innovation systems. It includes East-Asian, Middle-Asian, Central American and African countries. Here, we particularly focus on five dimensions- resources, activities, network, environment and performance- with 37 indicators. They were derived as structuring components of the relevant diagnostic model, which encompasses the whole process of S&T innovation from the input of resources to the output of economically valuable results. For many developing nations, economic industries remain weaker than actual S&T capabilities, and relevant regulatory authorities may not exist. This paper will be helpful to provide basic evidence and to set directions for better national S&T Innovation capacities and toward national competitiveness.

Keywords: Developing countries, measurement, NIS, S&T innovation capacity.

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Authors: Mario R. Acevedo Amaya, Fernanda M. Martinez Reyes

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Through the time, the higher education has changed the learning system since mother tongue to bilingual, and in this new century has been coming develop a multilingual education. All as part of globalization process of the countries and the education. Nevertheless, this change only has been effectively in countries of the first world, the rest have been lagging. Therefore, these countries require strengthen their higher education systems through models that give way to multilingual and bilingual education. In this way, shows a new model adapted from a systemic form to allow a higher bilingual and multilingual education in Latin America. This systematization aims to increase the skills and competencies student’s, decrease the time learning of a second tongue, add to multilingualism in the American Latin Universities, also, contribute to position the region´s countries in a better global status, and stimulate the development of new research in this area.

Keywords: Bilingual Education, Higher Education, Multilingual Education, Multilingual Education Model

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Authors: Rimpi Rani

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In the 2000s, a new migration trend of highly skilled Indian professionals towards Japan has appeared. This paper examines the factors that set off the incoming of highly skilled Indian professionals in Japan, mainly focusing on IT professionals’ immigration, and the reasons of the increase in their number. It investigates the influence of four factors: The Japanese immigration policy, the bilateral relations between India and Japan, the higher education system in India and the American H-1B visa policy with its cap system. This study concludes that increased and continuous supply of highly skilled Indian professionals have intensified the competition for migration to traditional destinations like the USA. This led Indian professionals   to consider other options such as Japan.

Keywords: International migration, India, Japan, highly skilled professionals.

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Authors: Tsung-yin Lin, Yi-yu Lee

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Snoring is prevalent and is the most significant feature of sleep-disordered breathing (SDB). Ignore the therapies of SDB will lead to serious problems in health. Based on the research of mechanisms, diagnosis, and treatments of snoring, oral appliances are ensured in therapeutic effect and compliance, especially the mandibular advancement devices (MADs). Market survey includes commercial product reviews and patent analyses. Due to pay more attention to the sleep medicine, the oral appliances are considered as a standard treatment of snoring that promoted by American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). There are more and more adjustable MADs developed since 1995. According to the patent analyses, there are many drawbacks existed in the present design, such as uncomfortable, high cost, bulky volume, and complex adjustment. In this study, several new designs of the MAD are proposed.

Keywords: mandibular advancement device, mechanism design, patent review

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Authors: M. Raciti Castelli, E. Benini

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This paper presents a numerical investigation of the unsteady flow around an American 19th century vertical-axis windmill: the Stevens & Jolly rotor, patented on April 16, 1895. The computational approach used is based on solving the complete transient Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (t-RANS) equations: a full campaign of numerical simulation has been performed using the k-ω SST turbulence model. Flow field characteristics have been investigated for several values of tip speed ratio and for a constant unperturbed free-stream wind velocity of 6 m/s, enabling the study of some unsteady flow phenomena in the rotor wake. Finally, the global power generated from the windmill has been determined for each simulated angular velocity, allowing the calculation of the rotor power-curve.

Keywords: CFD, vertical-axis rotor, windmill.

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Authors: B. Kuiper

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When Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his final Presidential speech in 1961, he was using the opportunity to bid farewell to America, but he was also trying to warn his fellow countrymen about deeper challenges threatening the country. In this analysis, Eisenhower’s speech is examined in light of the impact it had on American culture, communication concepts, and political ramifications. The paper initially highlights the previous literature on the speech, especially in light of its 50^th anniversary, and reveals a man whose main concern was how the speech’s words would affect his beloved country. The painstaking approach to the wording of the speech to reveal the intent is key, particularly in light of analyzing the motivations according to “virtuous communication.” This philosophical construct indicates that Eisenhower’s Farewell Address was crafted carefully according to a departing President’s deepest values and concerns, concepts that he wanted to pass along to his successor, to his country, and even to the world.

Keywords: Eisenhower, mass communication, political speech, rhetoric.

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Authors: Wei-Ju, Huang

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It is claimed that a new style of urban planning and policy intertwined with ICT is emerging and urban planning and ICT policy are no longer considered as separate disciplines. The interactions between electronic spaces and urban spaces are so complex and uncertain that confront urban planners and policy makers with great challenges. However, the assumption about the relationship between ICT and urban planning is mainly based on North American and European experiences. In the light of empirical evidence from Taipei City, this paper shows that this new type of urban planning and policy intertwined with ICT has existed in Asian city for a decade as well. Based on these results, this paper further reviews how the Taipei City government implements this new type of urban ICT planning and the validity and realism of its underlying assumptions. Finally, it also explores the extent to which urban ICT planning could promote positive synergies between physical and electronic developments.

Keywords: ICT, Taipei City, Urban ICT Planning.

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Authors: Lubis A., Widayanti R., Hikmah Z., Endaryanto A., Harsono A., Harianto A., Etika R., Handayani D. K., Sampurna M.

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Neonatal lupus erythematous (NLE) is a rare disease marked by clinical characteristic and specific maternal autoantibody. Many cutaneous, cardiac, liver, and hematological manifestations could happen with affect of one organ or multiple. In this case, both babies were premature, low birth weight (LBW), small for gestational age (SGA) and born through caesarean section from a systemic lupus erythematous (SLE) mother. In the first case, we found a baby girl with dyspnea and grunting. Chest X ray showed respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) great I and echocardiography showed small atrial septal defect (ASD) and ventricular septal defect (VSD). She also developed anemia, thrombocytopenia, elevated C-reactive protein, hypoalbuminemia, increasing coagulation factors, hyperbilirubinemia, and positive blood culture of Klebsiella pneumonia. Anti-Ro/SSA and Anti-nRNP/sm were positive. Intravenous fluid, antibiotic, transfusion of blood, thrombocyte concentrate, and fresh frozen plasma were given. The second baby, male presented with necrotic tissue on the left ear and skin rashes, erythematous macula, athropic scarring, hyperpigmentation on all of his body with various size and facial haemorrhage. He also suffered from thrombocytopenia, mild elevated transaminase enzyme, hyperbilirubinemia, anti-Ro/SSA was positive. Intravenous fluid, methyprednisolone, intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), blood, and thrombocyte concentrate transfution were given. Two cases of neonatal lupus erythematous had been presented. Diagnosis based on clinical presentation and maternal auto antibody on neonate. Organ involvement in NLE can occur as single or multiple manifestations.

Keywords: Neonatus lupus erythematous, maternal autoantibody, clinical characteristic.

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Authors: A.R. Mortazavi Moghaddam, M. T. Ahmadian

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Bumpers play an important role in preventing the impact energy from being transferred to the automobile and passengers. Saving the impact energy in the bumper to be released in the environment reduces the damages of the automobile and passengers. The goal of this paper is to design a bumper with minimum weight by employing the Glass Material Thermoplastic (GMT) materials. This bumper either absorbs the impact energy with its deformation or transfers it perpendicular to the impact direction. To reach this aim, a mechanism is designed to convert about 80% of the kinetic impact energy to the spring potential energy and release it to the environment in the low impact velocity according to American standard1. In addition, since the residual kinetic energy will be damped with the infinitesimal elastic deformation of the bumper elements, the passengers will not sense any impact. It should be noted that in this paper, modeling, solving and result-s analysis are done in CATIA, LS-DYNA and ANSYS V8.0 software respectively.

Keywords: Bumper, Composite material, Energy Release, GMT, Impact

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Authors: Huseyin Cetin, Halil Akmese, Sercan Aras, Vahit Aytekin

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Economic crisis, terrorism, global crisis and the relations between countries are the factors affecting tourism industry and tourism industry is vulnerable against these factors. In our study, there are two dimensions about Russian crisis. The crisis between Russia and Ukraine and decreased oil prices in global market have been entailed Russian economic crisis. This crisis has induced that the ruble, Russian currency, has depreciated against American dollars and consequently the purchasing power of Russian has weakened. This is the first dimension of our study. Second dimension is a political crisis between Turkey and Russia owing to the fact that the Russian Warcraft was brought down by Turkish army. The aim of this study is to explain the impact of the consequences of Russian crisis on Turkish tourism industry. The study has been limited only Antalya province.

Keywords: Economic crisis, Turkey-Russian crisis, Turkey's tourism industry, tourism in Turkey.

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Authors: Phong Tran

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A research effort to find the reality of the business of Japan-s software globalization of enterprise-level business software systems has found that while the number of Japan-made enterpriselevel software systems is comparable with those of the other G7 countries, the business is limited to the East and Southeast Asian markets. This indicates that this business has a problem in the European and USA markets. Based on the knowledge that the research has established, the research concludes that the communication problems arise from the lack of individualists' communication styles and foreign language skills in Japan's software globalization is compensated by similarities in certain Japanese cultural factors and Japan's cultural power in the East and Southeast Asian markets and that this business does not have this compensation factor in the European and American markets due to dissimilarities and no cultural power.

Keywords: Cultural factors, global business, Japan, software globalization.

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Authors: Suparat Niwitpong

Abstract:

Motivated by the recent work of Herbert, Hayen, Macaskill and Walter [Interval estimation for the difference of two independent variances. Communications in Statistics, Simulation and Computation, 40: 744-758, 2011.], we investigate, in this paper, new confidence intervals for the difference between two normal population variances based on the generalized confidence interval of Weerahandi [Generalized Confidence Intervals. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 88(423): 899-905, 1993.] and the closed form method of variance estimation of Zou, Huo and Taleban [Simple confidence intervals for lognormal means and their differences with environmental applications. Environmetrics 20: 172-180, 2009]. Monte Carlo simulation results indicate that our proposed confidence intervals give a better coverage probability than that of the existing confidence interval. Also two new confidence intervals perform similarly based on their coverage probabilities and their average length widths.

Keywords: Confidence interval, generalized confidence interval, the closed form method of variance estimation, variance.

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Authors: L. Aparecida Bastos, J. Leige Lopes, J. Crepaldi, R. Monteiro da Silva

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The objective of this study is to analyze the evolution of some social and economic indicators of Mercosur´s economies from 1980 to 2012, based on the statistics of the Latin American Integration Association (LAIA). The objective is to observe if after the accession of these economies to Mercosur (the first accessions occurred in 1994) these indicators showed better performance, in order to demonstrate if economic integration contributed to improved trade, macroeconomic performance, and level of social and economic development of member countries. To this end, the methodologies used will be a literature review and descriptive statistics. The theoretical framework that guides the work are the theories of Integration: Classical Liberal, Marxist and structural-proactive. The results reveal that most social and economic indicators showed better performance in those economies that joined Mercosur after 1994. This work is the result of an investigation already completed.

Keywords: Economic integration, mercosur, social indicators, economic indicators.

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Authors: B. Schmid, C. Kexel, E. Djafarova

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Understanding consumers is elementary for practitioners in marketing. Consumers of sports events, the sports spectators, are a particularly complex consumer crowd. In order to identify and define their profiles different segmentation approaches can be found in literature, one of them being multidimensional segmentation. Multidimensional segmentation models correspond to the broad range of attitudes, behaviours, motivations and beliefs of sports spectators, other than earlier models. Moreover, in sports there are some well-researched disciplines (e.g. football or North American sports) where consumer profiles and marketing strategies are elaborate and others where no research at all can be found. For example, there is almost no research on athletics spectators. This paper explores the current state of research on sports spectators segmentation. An in-depth literature review provides the framework for a spectators segmentation in athletics. On this basis, additional potential consumer groups and implications for social media marketing will be explored. The findings are the basis for further research.

Keywords: Multidimensional segmentation, social media, sports marketing, sports spectators segmentation.

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Authors: Hala A. Hassan, Vasiliki K. Tsiouri, Konstantinos E. Konstantinos

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Fugitive particulate matter (PM) is a major source of airborne pollution in the Middle East countries. The meteorological conditions and topography of the area makes it highly susceptible to wind-blown particles which raise many air quality concerns. Air quality tools such as field monitoring, emission factors and dispersion modeling have been used in previous research studies to analyze the release and impacts of fugitive PM in the region. However, these tools have been originally developed based on experiments made for European and North American regions. In this work, an experimental campaign was conducted on April-May 2014 in a construction site in Doha city, Qatar. The ultimate goal is to evaluate the applicability of the existing emission factors for construction sites in dry and arid areas like the Middle East.

Keywords: Air pollution, construction, emissions, middle east, fugitive particulate matter.

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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: G. Sai Kiran , A. Kailasa Rao, R . Pradeep Kumar

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In recent years, the introduction of Pre Engineered Building (PEB) concept in the design of structures has helped in optimizing design. The adoptability of PEB in the place of Conventional Steel Building (CSB) design concept resulted in many advantages, including economy and easier fabrication. In this study, an industrial structure (Ware House) is analyzed and designed according to the Indian standards, IS 800-1984, IS 800-2007 and also by referring MBMA-96 and AISC-89. In this study, a structure with length 187m,width 40m,with clear height 8m and having R-Slope 1:10,isconsidered to carry out analysis& design for 2D frames (End frame, frame without crane and frame with 3 module cranes). The economy of the structure is discussed in terms of its weight comparison, between Indian codes (IS800-1984, IS800-2007) & American code (MBMA-96), & between Indian codes (IS800-1984, IS800-2007).

Keywords: AISC, Crane Beam, MBMA, Pre-Engineered-Buildings, Staad Pro, Utilization Ratio.

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Authors: Yoko Suganuma Oi

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The purpose of the present study is to find the efficacy of high school student self-assessment of written production. It aimed to explore the following two research questions: 1) How is topic development of their written production improved after student self-assessment and teacher feedback? 2) Does the consistency between student self-assessment and teacher assessment develop after student self-assessment and teacher feedback? The data came from the written production of 82 Japanese high school students aged from 16 to 18 years old, an American English teacher and one Japanese English teacher. Students were asked to write English compositions, about 150 words, for thirty minutes without using dictionaries. It was conducted twice at intervals of two months. Students were supposed to assess their own compositions by themselves. Teachers also assessed students’ compositions using the same assessment sheet. The results showed that both teachers and students assessed the second compositions higher than the first compositions. However, there was not the development of the consistency in coherence.

Keywords: Feedback, self-assessment, topic development.

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Authors: Omer Rashid, Ayoub Al-Hamadi, Axel Panning, Bernd Michaelis

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It is hard to percept the interaction process with machines when visual information is not available. In this paper, we have addressed this issue to provide interaction through visual techniques. Posture recognition is done for American Sign Language to recognize static alphabets and numbers. 3D information is exploited to obtain segmentation of hands and face using normal Gaussian distribution and depth information. Features for posture recognition are computed using statistical and geometrical properties which are translation, rotation and scale invariant. Hu-Moment as statistical features and; circularity and rectangularity as geometrical features are incorporated to build the feature vectors. These feature vectors are used to train SVM for classification that recognizes static alphabets and numbers. For the alphabets, curvature analysis is carried out to reduce the misclassifications. The experimental results show that proposed system recognizes posture symbols by achieving recognition rate of 98.65% and 98.6% for ASL alphabets and numbers respectively.

Keywords: Feature Extraction, Posture Recognition, Pattern Recognition, Application.

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Authors: Voicu Petre, Oaida Mircea, Surugiu Petru

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It is now unanimously accepted that conventional agriculture has led to the emergence and intensification of some forms of soil and environmental degradation, some of which are due to poorly applied or insufficiently substantiated technological measures. For this reason, the elaboration of any agricultural technology requires a deep knowledge of all the factors involved as well as of the interaction relations between them. This is also the way in which the research will be approached in this paper. Despite the fact that at European level the implementation of precision agriculture has a low level compared to some countries located on the American continent, it is emerging not only as an alternative to conventional agriculture but, as a viable way to preserve the quality of the environment in general, and the edaphic environment in particular. This gives an increased importance to the research in this paper through physical, chemical, biological, mineralogical and micromorphological analytical determinations, processing of analytical results, identification of processes, causes, factors, establishment of soil quality indicators and the perspective of measurements from distance by satellite techniques of some of these soil properties (humidity, temperature, pH, N, P, K and so on).

Keywords: Conventional agriculture, environmental degradation, precision agriculture, soil.

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Authors: Oliver Radolović

Abstract:

The subject of the paper is comparative analysis of the hotel guest-s contractual liability for breaching the obligation for non-payment of hotel services in the hotel-keeper-s contract. The paper is methodologically conceived of six chapters (1. introduction, 2. comparative law sources of the hotel-keeper-s contract, 3. the guest-s obligation for payment of hotel services, 4. hotel guest's liability for non-payment, 5. the hotel-keeper-s rights due to nonpayment and 6. conclusion), which analyzes the guest-s liability for non-payment of hotel services through the international law, European law, euro-continental national laws (France, Germany, Italy, Croatia) and Anglo-American national laws (UK, USA). The paper-s results are the synthesis of answers to the set hypothesis and comparative review of hotel guest-s contractual liability for nonpayment of hotel services provided. In conclusion, it is necessary to adopt an international convention on the hotel-keeper-s contract, which would unify the institute of the hotel guest-s contractual liability for non-payment of hotel services at the international level.

Keywords: Comparative law, hotel guest's contractual liability, non-payment, hotel-keeper's contract.

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Authors: Sonia Alberti

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The Regional Conference to Restructure Psychiatric Care in Latin America, convened by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in 1990, oriented the Brazilian Federal Act in 2001 that stipulated the psychiatric reform which requires deinstitutionalization and community-based treatment. Since then, the 15 years’ experience of different working teams in mental health led an academic working group – supervisors from personal practices, professors and researchers – to discuss certain clinical issues, as well as supervisions, and to organize colloquia in different cities as a methodology. These colloquia count on the participation of different working teams from the cities in which they are held, with team members with different levels of educational degrees and prior experiences, in order to increase dialogue right where it does not always appear to be possible. The principal aim of these colloquia is to gain interlocution between practitioners and academics. Working with the theory of case constructions, this methodology revealed itself helpful in unfolding new solutions. The paper also observes that there is not always harmony between what the psychiatric reform demands and clinical ethics.

Keywords: Mental health, supervision, clinical cases, Brazilian experience.

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Authors: Wei-Yi Yang, Li-Hui Lee, Hsiao-Li Gien, Hsing-Yi Chu, Yi-Ting Chou, Der-Ming Liou

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The American Health Level Seven (HL7) Reference Information Model (RIM) consists of six back-bone classes that have different specialized attributes. Furthermore, for the purpose of enforcing the semantic expression, there are some specific mandatory vocabulary domains have been defined for representing the content values of some attributes. In the light of the fact that it is a duplicated effort on spending a lot of time and human cost to develop and modify Clinical Information Systems (CIS) for most hospitals due to the variety of workflows. This study attempts to design and develop sharing RIM-based components of the CIS for the different business processes. Therefore, the CIS contains data of a consistent format and type. The programmers can do transactions with the RIM-based clinical repository by the sharing RIM-based components. And when developing functions of the CIS, the sharing components also can be adopted in the system. These components not only satisfy physicians- needs in using a CIS but also reduce the time of developing new components of a system. All in all, this study provides a new viewpoint that integrating the data and functions with the business processes, it is an easy and flexible approach to build a new CIS.

Keywords: HL7, Reference Information Model (RIM), web service, process management.

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Authors: Brian J. Thomas

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Recent changes in food retailing structure have led to the development of large supercenters in suburban areas of the United States. These changes have led some authors to suggest that there are food deserts in some urban areas, where food is difficult to access, especially for disadvantaged consumers. This study tests the food desert hypothesis by comparing the distance from food retailers to food secure and food insecure households in one urban, Midwest neighborhood. This study utilizes GIS to compare household survey respondent locations against the location of various types of area food retailers. Results of this study indicate no apparent difference between food secure and insecure households in the reported importance of distance on the decision to shop at various retailers. However, there were differences in the spatial relationship between households and retailers. Food insecure households tended to be located slightly farther from large food retailers and slightly closer to convenience stores. Furthermore, food insecure households reported traveling slightly farther to their primary food retailer. The differences between the two groups was, however, relatively small.

Keywords: Food desert, food retailer, food security, sociology.

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Authors: Nicoletta Adamo-Villani, Joe Kasenga, Tiffany Jen, Bryan Colbourn

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The goal of the study reported in the paper was to determine whether Ambient Occlusion Shading (AOS) has a significant effect on users' perception of American Sign Language (ASL) finger spelling animations. Seventy-one (71) subjects participated in the study; all subjects were fluent in ASL. The participants were asked to watch forty (40) sign language animation clips representing twenty (20) finger spelled words. Twenty (20) clips did not show ambient occlusion, whereas the other twenty (20) were rendered using ambient occlusion shading. After viewing each animation, subjects were asked to type the word being finger-spelled and rate its legibility. Findings show that the presence of AOS had a significant effect on the subjects perception of the signed words. Subjects were able to recognize the animated words rendered with AOS with higher level of accuracy, and the legibility ratings of the animations showing AOS were consistently higher across subjects.

Keywords: Sign Language, Animation, Ambient Occlusion Shading, Deaf Education

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Authors: Morteza Zahedi, Philippe Dreuw, Thomas Deselaers, Hermann Ney

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Sign language is used by the deaf and hard of hearing people for communication. Automatic sign language recognition is a challenging research area since sign language often is the only way of communication for the deaf people. Sign language includes different components of visual actions made by the signer using the hands, the face, and the torso, to convey his/her meaning. To use different aspects of signs, we combine the different groups of features which have been extracted from the image frames recorded directly by a stationary camera. We combine the features in two levels by employing three techniques. At the feature level, an early feature combination can be performed by concatenating and weighting different feature groups, or by concatenating feature groups over time and using LDA to choose the most discriminant elements. At the model level, a late fusion of differently trained models can be carried out by a log-linear model combination. In this paper, we investigate these three combination techniques in an automatic sign language recognition system and show that the recognition rate can be significantly improved.

Keywords: American sign language, appearance-based features, Feature combination, Sign language recognition

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Authors: A. Shebani, C. Pislaru

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The wear measuring and wear modelling are fundamental issues in the industrial field, mainly correlated to the economy and safety. Therefore, there is a need to study the wear measurements and wear estimation. Pin-on-disc test is the most common test which is used to study the wear behaviour. In this paper, the pin-on-disc (AEROTECH UNIDEX 11) is used for the investigation of the effects of normal load and hardness of material on the wear under dry and sliding conditions. In the pin-on-disc rig, two specimens were used; one, a pin is made of steel with a tip, positioned perpendicular to the disc, where the disc is made of aluminium. The pin wear and disc wear were measured by using the following instruments: The Talysurf instrument, a digital microscope, and the alicona instrument. The Talysurf profilometer was used to measure the pin/disc wear scar depth, digital microscope was used to measure the diameter and width of wear scar, and the alicona was used to measure the pin wear and disc wear. After that, the Archard model, American Society for Testing and Materials model (ASTM), and neural network model were used for pin/disc wear modelling. Simulation results were implemented by using the Matlab program. This paper focuses on how the alicona can be used for wear measurements and how the neural network can be used for wear estimation.

Keywords: Wear measuring, Wear modelling, Neural Network, Alicona.

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Authors: Adelaja O. Oriade

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The Nigerian hip-hop music genre, like the African American scene where it was adopted from, is riddled with musical lyrics that amplify and normalize hypermasculinity, homophobia, sexism, and objectification of women. Several factors are responsible for this anomaly; however, the greatest factor is the urge of hip-hop musicians to achieve the commercial success that is dependent on selling records and appealing to the established societal accepted norm for hip-hop music. Consequently, this paper presents a counter-narrative of this gender representation within the Nigerian hip-hop industry. This study analyzed the musical lyrics of the ‘Hypocrisy’ track on the 2019 album of famous Nigerian rapper, Falz the Bahd Guy; and argued that Falz in this album challenged the predominant ideas of hegemonic masculinity by singing in favor of LGBT people and women. Also, based on the success of this album, this paper argues that a hip-hop album can achieve commercial success without aligning with predominant hip-hop parameters of gender representation. The study recommends that future studies should evaluate the reactions of Nigerians to these gender presentations by Falz the Bahd guy.

Keywords: Hegemonic Masculinity, hypermasculinity, LGBT, misogyny, sexism.

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Authors: Bella Llego

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This research aims to study on “ASEAN Citizenship in the Internationalization of Thai Higher Education.” The purposes of this research are (1) to examine the Thai academics and scholars defined in the concept of internationalization of higher education, (2) to know how Thailand tries to fulfill its internationalization on education goal, (3) to find out the advantages and disadvantages of Thailand hub for higher education in Asia. Sequential mixed methods, qualitative and quantitative research methods were utilized to gather the data collected. By using a qualitative method (individual interviews from key Thai administrators and educators in the international higher education sector), a quantitative method (survey) was utilized to draw upon and to elaborate the recurring themes present during the interviews. The study found that many aspects of Thai international higher education programs received heavy influence from both the American and European higher education systems. Thailand’s role and leadership in the creation and launch of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 2015 gives its unique context for its internationalization efforts. English is being designated as the language of all Thai international programs; its influence further strengthened being the current language of academia, international business, and the internet, having global influence.

Keywords: ASEAN Citizenship, Internationalization, Thai Higher Education.

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