Search results for: Assessment of indicators

Authors: Robert O. Abolade, Olumide O. Ajayi, Zacheaus K. Adeyemo, Solomon A. Adeniran

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Link adaptation is an important strategy for achieving robust wireless multimedia communications based on quality of service (QoS) demand. Scheme switching in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is an aspect of link adaptation, and it involves selecting among different MIMO transmission schemes or modes so as to adapt to the varying radio channel conditions for the purpose of achieving QoS delivery. However, finding the most appropriate switching method in MIMO links is still a challenge as existing methods are either computationally complex or not always accurate. This paper presents an intelligent switching method for the MIMO system consisting of two schemes - transmit diversity (TD) and spatial multiplexing (SM) - using fuzzy logic technique. In this method, two channel quality indicators (CQI) namely average received signal-to-noise ratio (RSNR) and received signal strength indicator (RSSI) are measured and are passed as inputs to the fuzzy logic system which then gives a decision – an inference. The switching decision of the fuzzy logic system is fed back to the transmitter to switch between the TD and SM schemes. Simulation results show that the proposed fuzzy logic – based switching technique outperforms conventional static switching technique in terms of bit error rate and spectral efficiency.

Keywords: Channel quality indicator, fuzzy logic, link adaptation, MIMO, spatial multiplexing, transmit diversity.

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Authors: M. Ismail, E. Grifell-Tatjé, A. Paz

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A significant discussion on the topic of blockchain as a solution to the issues of intellectual property highlights the relevance that this topic holds. Some experts label this technology as destructive since it holds immense potential to change course of traditional practices. The extent and areas to which this technology can be of use are still being researched. This paper provides an in-depth review on the intellectual property and blockchain technology. Further it explores what makes blockchain suitable for intellectual property, the practical solutions available and the support different governments are offering. This paper further studies the framework of universities in context of its outputs and how can they be streamlined using blockchain technology. The paper concludes by discussing some limitations and future research question.

Keywords: Blockchain, decentralization, open innovation, intellectual property, patents, university-industry relationship.

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Authors: Mustafa M. Donma, Orkide Donma

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Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a severe health problem caused by morbid obesity, the severest form of obesity. The components of MetS are rather stable in adults. However, the diagnosis of MetS in morbid obese (MO) children still constitutes a matter of discussion. The aim of this study was to develop a formula, which facilitated the diagnosis of MetS in MO children and was capable of discriminating MO children with and without MetS findings. The study population comprised MO children. Age and sex-dependent body mass index (BMI) percentiles of the children were above 99. Increased blood pressure, elevated fasting blood glucose (FBG), elevated triglycerides (TRG) and/or decreased high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) in addition to central obesity were listed as MetS components for each child. Two groups were constituted. In the first group, there were 42 MO children without MetS components. Second group was composed of 44 MO children with at least two MetS components. Anthropometric measurements including weight, height, waist and hip circumferences were performed during physical examination. BMI and homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) values were calculated. Informed consent forms were obtained from the parents of the children. Institutional Non-Interventional Clinical Studies Ethics Committee approved the study design. Routine biochemical analyses including FBG, insulin (INS), TRG, HDL-C were performed. The performance and the clinical utility of Diagnostic Obesity Notation Model Assessment Metabolic Syndrome Index (DONMA MetS index) [(INS/FBG)/(HDL-C/TRG)*100] was tested. Appropriate statistical tests were applied to the study data. p value smaller than 0.05 was defined as significant. MetS index values were 41.6 ± 5.1 in MO group and 104.4 ± 12.8 in MetS group. Corresponding values for HDL-C values were 54.5 ± 13.2 mg/dl and 44.2 ± 11.5 mg/dl. There was a statistically significant difference between the groups (p < 0.001). Upon evaluation of the correlations between MetS index and HDL-C values, a much stronger negative correlation was found in MetS group (r = -0.515; p = 0.001) in comparison with the correlation detected in MO group (r = -0.371; p = 0.016). From these findings, it was concluded that the statistical significance degree of the difference between MO and MetS groups was highly acceptable for this recently introduced MetS index. This was due to the involvement of all of the biochemically defined MetS components into the index. This is particularly important because each of these four parameters used in the formula is a cardiac risk factor. Aside from discriminating MO children with and without MetS findings, MetS index introduced in this study is important from the cardiovascular risk point of view in MetS group of children.

Keywords: Fasting blood glucose, high density lipoprotein cholesterol, insulin, metabolic syndrome, morbid obesity, triglycerides.

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Authors: M. D. Prokhorov, A. R. Kiselev, A. S. Karavaev, O. M. Posnenkova, V. I. Gridnev, V. I. Ponomarenko

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Synchronization between 0.1 Hz oscillations in heart rate and blood pressure is studied and its change during vertical tilt is evaluated in 37 myocardial infarction patients. Two groups of patients are identified with decreased and increased, respectively, synchronization of the studied oscillations as a response to a tilt test. It is shown that assessment of synchronization of 0.1 Hz oscillations as a response to vertical tilt can be used as a guideline for selecting optimal dose of beta-blocker treatment in post-myocardial infarction patients.

Keywords: Cardiovascular system, heart rate variability, synchronization.

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Authors: Bahaa Khalil, Taha B. M. J. Ouarda, André St-Hilaire

Abstract:

The world economic crises and budget constraints have caused authorities, especially those in developing countries, to rationalize water quality monitoring activities. Rationalization consists of reducing the number of monitoring sites, the number of samples, and/or the number of water quality variables measured. The reduction in water quality variables is usually based on correlation. If two variables exhibit high correlation, it is an indication that some of the information produced may be redundant. Consequently, one variable can be discontinued, and the other continues to be measured. Later, the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression technique is employed to reconstitute information about discontinued variable by using the continuously measured one as an explanatory variable. In this paper, two record extension techniques are employed to reconstitute information about discontinued water quality variables, the OLS and the Line of Organic Correlation (LOC). An empirical experiment is conducted using water quality records from the Nile Delta water quality monitoring network in Egypt. The record extension techniques are compared for their ability to predict different statistical parameters of the discontinued variables. Results show that the OLS is better at estimating individual water quality records. However, results indicate an underestimation of the variance in the extended records. The LOC technique is superior in preserving characteristics of the entire distribution and avoids underestimation of the variance. It is concluded from this study that the OLS can be used for the substitution of missing values, while LOC is preferable for inferring statements about the probability distribution.

Keywords: Record extension, record augmentation, monitoringnetworks, water quality indicators.

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Authors: Introducing Principles of Land Surveying by Assigning a Practical Project

Abstract:

A practical project is used in an engineering surveying course to expose sophomore and junior civil engineering students to several important issues related to the use of basic principles of land surveying. The project, which is the design of a two-lane rural highway to connect between two arbitrary points, requires students to draw the profile of the proposed highway along with the existing ground level. Areas of all cross-sections are then computed to enable quantity computations between them. Lastly, Mass-Haul Diagram is drawn with all important parts and features shown on it for clarity. At the beginning, students faced challenges getting started on the project. They had to spend time and effort thinking of the best way to proceed and how the work would flow. It was even more challenging when they had to visualize images of cut, fill and mixed cross sections in three dimensions before they can draw them to complete the necessary computations. These difficulties were then somewhat overcome with the help of the instructor and thorough discussions among team members and/or between different teams. The method of assessment used in this study was a well-prepared-end-of-semester questionnaire distributed to students after the completion of the project and the final exam. The survey contained a wide spectrum of questions from students' learning experience when this course development was implemented to students' satisfaction of the class instructions provided to them and the instructor's competency in presenting the material and helping with the project. It also covered the adequacy of the project to show a sample of a real-life civil engineering application and if there is any excitement added by implementing this idea. At the end of the questionnaire, students had the chance to provide their constructive comments and suggestions for future improvements of the land surveying course. Outcomes will be presented graphically and in a tabular format. Graphs provide visual explanation of the results and tables, on the other hand, summarize numerical values for each student along with some descriptive statistics, such as the mean, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation for each student and each question as well. In addition to gaining experience in teamwork, communications, and customer relations, students felt the benefit of assigning such a project. They noticed the beauty of the practical side of civil engineering work and how theories are utilized in real-life engineering applications. It was even recommended by students that such a project be exercised every time this course is offered so future students can have the same learning opportunity they had.

Keywords: Land surveying, highway project, assessment, evaluation, descriptive statistic.

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Authors: Noorfakhriah Yaakub, Madzlan Napiah

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Public bus service plays a significant role in our society as people movers and to facilitate travels within towns and districts. The quality of service of public bus is always being regarded as poor, or rather, underestimated as second class means of transportation. Reliability of service, or the ability to deliver service as planned, is one key element in perceiving the quality of bus service and the punctuality index is one of the performance parameters in determining the service reliability. This study concentrates on evaluating the reliability performance of bus operation using punctuality index assessment. A week data for each of six city bus routes is recorded using the on-board methodology to calculate the punctuality index for city bus service in Kota Bharu. The results revealed that the punctuality index for the whole city bus network is 94.25% (LOS B).

Keywords: Punctuality Index, Reliability Performance, Service Performance.

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Authors: Myo Min Aung, Yoon Seok Chang, Woo Ram Kim

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This paper presents a cold chain monitoring system which focuses on assessment of quality and dynamic pricing information about food in cold chain. Cold chain is composed of many actors and stages; however it can be seen as a single entity since a breakdown in temperature control at any stage can impact the final quality of the product. In a cold chain, the shelf life, quality, and safety of perishable food throughout the supply chain is greatly impacted by environmental factors especially temperature. In this paper, a prototype application is implemented to retrieve timetemperature history, the current quality and the dynamic price setting according to changing quality impacted by temperature fluctuations in real-time.

Keywords: Cold chain, monitoring, quality, temperature, traceability.

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Authors: J. Y. Heo, H. G. Sung

Abstract:

Numerical simulations have been performed for assessment of compressibility correction of two-equation turbulence models suitable for large scale separation flows perturbed by pintle strokes. In order to take into account pintle movement, a sliding mesh method was applied. The chamber pressure, mass flow rate, and thrust have been analyzed, and the response lag and sensitivity at the chamber and nozzle were estimated for a movable pintle. The nozzle performance for pintle reciprocating as its insertion and extraction processes, were analyzed to better understand the dynamic performance of the pintle nozzle.

Keywords: Pintle, sliding mesh, turbulent model, compressibility correction.

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Authors: Ayodele Adekunle Faiyetole, Olumide Olawale Jegede

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This paper presents the experimental design and needs justifications for a localized intelligent parking system (L-IPS), ideal for quasi-close communities with increasing vehicular volume that depends on limited or constant parking facilities. For a constant supply in parking facilities, the demand for an increasing vehicular volume could lead to poor time conservation or extended travel time, traffic congestion or impeded mobility, and safety issues. Increased negative environmental and economic externalities are other associated and consequent downsides of disparities in demand and supply. This L-IPS is designed using a microcontroller, ultrasonic sensors, LED indicators, such that the current status, in terms of parking spots availability, can be known from the main entrance to the community or a parking zone on a LCD screen. As an advanced traffic management system (ATMS), the L-IPS is designed to resolve aspects of infrastructure-to-driver (I2D) communication and parking detection issues. Thus, this L-IPS can act as a timesaver for users by helping them know the availability of parking spots. Providing on-time, informed routing, to a next preference or seamless moving to berth on the available spot on a proximate facility as the case may be. Its use could also increase safety and increase mobility, and fuel savings and costs, therefore, reducing negative environmental and economic externalities due to transportation systems.

Keywords: Intelligent parking systems, localized intelligent parking system, intelligent transport systems, advanced traffic management systems, infrastructure-to-drivers communication.

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Authors: Pedro M. Abreu, Bruno R. Mendes

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The management of pharmacotherapy and the process of dispensing medicines is becoming critical in clinical pharmacy due to the increase of incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases, the complexity and customization of therapeutic regimens, the introduction of innovative and more expensive medicines, the unbalanced relation between expenditure and revenue as well as due to the lack of rationalization associated with medication use. For these reasons, co-payments emerged in Europe in the 70s and have been applied over the past few years in healthcare. Co-payments lead to a rationing and rationalization of user’s access under healthcare services and products, and simultaneously, to a qualification and improvement of the services and products for the end-user. This analysis, under hospital practices particularly and co-payment strategies in general, was carried out on all the European regions and identified four reference countries, that apply repeatedly this tool and with different approaches. The structure, content and adaptation of European co-payments were analyzed through 7 qualitative attributes and 19 performance indicators, and the results expressed in a scorecard, allowing to conclude that the German models (total score of 68,2% and 63,6% in both elected co-payments) can collect more compliance and effectiveness, the English models (total score of 50%) can be more accessible, and the French models (total score of 50%) can be more adequate to the socio-economic and legal framework. Other European models did not show the same quality and/or performance, so were not taken as a standard in the future design of co-payments strategies. In this sense, we can see in the co-payments a strategy not only to moderate the consumption of healthcare products and services, but especially to improve them, as well as a strategy to increment the value that the end-user assigns to these services and products, such as medicines.

Keywords: Clinical pharmacy, co-payments, healthcare, medicines.

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Authors: Mahsa Karimpour, Martin Belusko, Ke Xing, Frank Bruno

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Traditionally, the embodied energy of design choices which reduce operational energy were assumed to have a negligible impact on the life cycle energy of buildings. However with new buildings having considerably lower operational energy, the significance of embodied energy increases. A life cycle assessment of a population of house designs was conducted in a mild and mixed climate zone. It was determined not only that embodied energy dominates life cycle energy, but that the impact on embodied of design choices was of equal significance to the impact on operational energy.

Keywords: Building life cycle energy, embodied energy, energy design measures, low energy buildings.

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Authors: S. Jadid, S. Jalilzadeh

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In this paper, an improved technique for contingency ranking using artificial neural network (ANN) is presented. The proposed approach is based on multi-layer perceptrons trained by backpropagation to contingency analysis. Severity indices in dynamic stability assessment are presented. These indices are based on the concept of coherency and three dot products of the system variables. It is well known that some indices work better than others for a particular power system. This paper along with test results using several different systems, demonstrates that combination of indices with ANN provides better ranking than a single index. The presented results are obtained through the use of power system simulation (PSS/E) and MATLAB 6.5 software.

Keywords: composite indices, transient stability, neural network.

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Authors: Nelson K. Lujara

Abstract:

The performance characteristics of a photovoltaic induction motor drive water pumping system with and without maximum power tracker is analyzed and presented. The analysis is done through determination and assessment of critical loss components in the system using computer aided design (CAD) tools for optimal operation of the system. The results can be used to formulate a well-calibrated computer aided design package of photovoltaic water pumping systems based on the induction motor drive. The results allow the design engineer to pre-determine the flow rate and efficiency of the system to suit particular application.

Keywords: Photovoltaic, water pumping, losses, induction motor.

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Authors: Klathea Sevilla, Marjorie Remolador, Bryan Baltazar, Imee Saladaga, Loureal Camille Inocencio, Ma. Rosario Concepcion Ang

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The underutilization of biomass resources in the Philippines, combined with its growing population and the rise in fossil fuel prices confirms demand for alternative energy sources. The goal of this paper is to provide a comparison of MODIS-based and Landsat-based agricultural land cover maps when used in the estimation of rice hull’s available energy potential. Biomass resource assessment was done using mathematical models and remote sensing techniques employed in a GIS platform.

Keywords: Biomass, geographic information system, GIS, renewable energy.

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Authors: Young-Seok Choi

Abstract:

This paper presents a multiscale information measure of Electroencephalogram (EEG) for analysis with a short data length. A multiscale extension of permutation entropy (MPE) is capable of fully reflecting the dynamical characteristics of EEG across different temporal scales. However, MPE yields an imprecise estimation due to coarse-grained procedure at large scales. We present an improved MPE measure to estimate entropy more accurately with a short time series. By computing entropies of all coarse-grained time series and averaging those at each scale, it leads to the modified MPE (MMPE) which provides an enhanced accuracy as compared to MPE. Simulation and experimental studies confirmed that MMPE has proved its capability over MPE in terms of accuracy.

Keywords: Multiscale entropy, permutation entropy, EEG, seizure.

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Authors: Muzaffer Borekci, Murat S. Kirçil

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Predicting the collapse potential of a structure during earthquakes is an important issue in earthquake engineering. Many researchers proposed different methods to assess the collapse potential of structures under the effect of strong ground motions. However most of them did not consider degradation and softening effect in hysteretic behavior. In this study, collapse potential of SDOF systems caused by dynamic instability with stiffness and strength degradation has been investigated. An equation was proposed for the estimation of collapse period of SDOF system which is a limit value of period for dynamic instability. If period of the considered SDOF system is shorter than the collapse period then the relevant system exhibits dynamic instability and collapse occurs.

Keywords: Collapse, degradation, dynamic instability, seismic response.

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Authors: Ahmed Barakat, Nourhan A. Saad, Mahmoud Hammad

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Tracking and monitoring agricultural products, cold chain activities, and transportation in real-time can effectively ensure both the quality and safety of agricultural products, as well as reduce overall logistics costs. Effective supply chain practices are one of the main requirements for enhancing agricultural business in Egypt. Cold chain is among the best practices for the storage and transportation of perishable goods and has potential within the agricultural sector in Egypt. This practice has the scope of reducing the wastage of food and increasing the profitability with a reduction in costs. Even though it has several implementation challenges for the farmers, traders, and people involved in the entire supply chain, it has highlighted better benefits for all and for the export of goods for the economic progression for Egypt. The aim of this paper is to explore cold supply chain practices for the agriculture sector in Egypt, to enhance the export performance of fresh goods. In this context, this study attempts to explore those aspects of the performance of cold supply chain practices that can enhance the functioning of the agriculture sector in Egypt from the perspective of export companies (traders) and farmers. Based on the empirical results obtained by data collection from the farmers and traders, the study argues that there is a significant association between cold supply chain practices and enhancement of the agriculture value chain. The paper thus highlights the contribution of the study with final conclusions and limitations with scope for future research.

Keywords: Agriculture sector, cold chain management, export companies, non-traded goods, supply chain management.

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Authors: Zhanna Mingaleva, Irina Mirskikh

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Part IV of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation dedicated to legal regulation of Intellectual property rights came into force in 2008. It is a first attempt of codification in Intellectual property sphere in Russia. That is why a lot of new norms appeared. The main problem of the Russian Civil Code (part IV) is that many rules (norms of Law) contradict the norms of International Intellectual property Law (i.e. protection of inventions, creations, ideas, know-how, trade secrets, innovations). Intellectual property rights protect innovations and creations and reward innovative and creative activity. Intellectual property rights are international in character and in that respect they fit in rather well with the economic reality of the global economy. Inventors prefer not to take out a patent for inventions because it is a very difficult procedure, it takes a lot of time and is very expensive. That-s why they try to protect their inventions as ideas, know-how, confidential information. An idea is the main element of any object of Intellectual property (creation, invention, innovation, know-how, etc.). But ideas are not protected by Civil Code of Russian Federation. The aim of the paper is to reveal the main problems of legal regulation of Intellectual property in Russia and to suggest possible solutions. The authors of this paper have raised these essential issues through different activities. Through the panel survey, questionnaires which were spread among the participants of intellectual activities the main problems of implementation of innovations, protecting of the ideas and know-how were identified. The implementation of research results will help to solve economic and legal problems of innovations, transfer of innovations and intellectual property.1

Keywords: Innovation activities, intellectual property rights, know-how, patents, indicators of innovation activities

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Authors: Mohammed Amroune, Hadi Sebaa, Tarek Bouktir

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Reactive power limit of power system is one of the major causes of voltage instability. The only way to save the system from voltage instability is to reduce the reactive power load or add additional reactive power to reaching the point of voltage collapse. In recent times, the application of FACTS devices is a very effective solution to prevent voltage instability due to their fast and very flexible control. In this paper, voltage stability assessment with SVC and TCSC devices is investigated and compared in the modified IEEE 30-bus test system. The fast voltage stability indicator (FVSI) is used to identify weakest bus and to assess the voltage stability of power system.

Keywords: SVC, TCSC, Voltage stability, Fast Voltage Stability Index (FVSI), Reactive power.

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Authors: Dorota Stadnicka, Katarzyna Antosz

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The idea of Lean Manufacturing has been known for 20 years. In Polish enterprises its first implementation took place in the automotive industry in the 90s. Many companies, in order to reduce costs, use lower quality materials or overload employees with work and do not notice other possibilities for improving the company’s effectiveness. Enterprises are afraid of the unknown. And that is the problem in many cases with the Lean Manufacturing conception. This article presents the study results conducted in enterprises, the aim of which was to identify waste awareness and the need of lean manufacturing implementation. The authors also wanted to gain information on the most commonly used tools and the way of implementation and the methods of the effects assessment of using the mentioned conception. The study was conducted in large enterprises located on a limited area.

Keywords: Large enterprises, lean manufacturing, tools, wastes elimination.

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Authors: Jingyu Hou

Abstract:

This paper proposes a new teaching and learning approach-project and module based teaching and learning (PMBTL). The PMBTL approach incorporates the merits of project/problem based and module based learning methods, and overcomes the limitations of these methods. The correlation between teaching, learning, practice and assessment is emphasized in this approach, and new methods have been proposed accordingly. The distinct features of these new methods differentiate the PMBTL approach from conventional teaching approaches. Evaluation of this approach on practical teaching and learning activities demonstrates the effectiveness and stability of the approach in improving the performance and quality of teaching and learning. The approach proposed in this paper is also intuitive to the design of other teaching units. 

Keywords: Computer science education, project and module based, software engineering.

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Authors: Moustafa Osman Mohammed

Abstract:

Construction industry, as one of the main contributor in depletion of natural resources, influences climate change. This paper discusses incremental and evolutionary development of the proposed models for optimization of a life-cycle analysis to explicit strategy for evaluation systems. The main categories are virtually irresistible for introducing uncertainties, uptake composite structure model (CSM) as environmental management systems (EMSs) in a practice science of evaluation small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The model simplified complex systems to reflect nature systems’ input, output and outcomes mode influence “framework measures” and give a maximum likelihood estimation of how elements are simulated over the composite structure. The traditional knowledge of modeling is based on physical dynamic and static patterns regarding parameters influence environment. It unified methods to demonstrate how construction systems ecology interrelated from management prospective in procedure reflects the effect of the effects of engineering systems to ecology as ultimately unified technologies in extensive range beyond constructions impact so as, - energy systems. Sustainability broadens socioeconomic parameters to practice science that meets recovery performance, engineering reflects the generic control of protective systems. When the environmental model employed properly, management decision process in governments or corporations could address policy for accomplishment strategic plans precisely. The management and engineering limitation focuses on autocatalytic control as a close cellular system to naturally balance anthropogenic insertions or aggregation structure systems to pound equilibrium as steady stable conditions. Thereby, construction systems ecology incorporates engineering and management scheme, as a midpoint stage between biotic and abiotic components to predict constructions impact. The later outcomes’ theory of environmental obligation suggests either a procedures of method or technique that is achieved in sustainability impact of construction system ecology (SICSE), as a relative mitigation measure of deviation control, ultimately.

Keywords: Sustainability, constructions ecology, composite structure model, design structure matrix, environmental impact assessment, life cycle analysis, climate change.

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Authors: Maria Giannopoulou

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Open urban public spaces comprise an important element for the development of social, cultural and economic activities of the population in the modern cities. These spaces are also considered regulators of the region-s climate conditions, providing better thermal, visual and auditory conditions which can be optimized by the application of appropriate strategies of bioclimatic design. The paper focuses on the analysis and evaluation of the recent unification of the open spaces in the centre of Xanthi, a medium – size city in northern Greece, from a bioclimatic perspective, as well as in the creation of suitable methodology. It is based both on qualitative observation of the interventions by fieldwork research and assessment and on quantitative analysis and modeling of the research area.

Keywords: Bioclimatic principles, Quantitative analysis, Sustainability, TownScope III, Urban open spaces

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Authors: Klara Krizova, Rudolf Hela

Abstract:

The paper reflects current state of popularization of static elasticity modulus of concrete. This parameter is undoubtedly very important for designing of concrete structures, and very often neglected and rarely determined before designing concrete technology itself. The paper describes assessment and comparison of four mix designs with almost constant dosage of individual components. The only difference is area of origin of small size fraction of aggregate 0/4. Development of compressive strength and static elasticity modulus at the age of 7, 28 and 180 days were observed. As the experiment showed, designing of individual components and their quality are the basic factor influencing elasticity modulus of current concrete.

Keywords: Concrete, Aggregate, Strength, Elasticity Modulus, Quality

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Authors: Kati Manskinen, Risto Pöykiö, Hannu Nurmesniemi

Abstract:

In an assessment of the extractability of metals in green liquor dregs from the chemical recovery circuit of semichemical pulp mill, extractable concentrations of heavy metals in artificial gastric fluid were between 10 (Ni) and 717 (Zn) times higher than those in artificial sweat fluid. Only Al (6.7 mg/kg; d.w.), Ni (1.2 mg/kg; d.w.) and Zn (1.8 mg/kg; d.w.) showed extractability in the artificial sweat fluid, whereas Al (730 mg/kg; d.w.), Ba (770 mg/kg; d.w.) and Zn (1290 mg/kg; d.w.) showed clear extractability in the artificial gastric fluid. As certain heavy metals were clearly soluble in the artificial gastric fluid, the careful handling of this residue is recommended in order to prevent the penetration of green liquor dregs across the human gastrointestinal tract.

Keywords: Dregs, non-process elements, pulping, waste.

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Authors: Doaa Hegazy, Joachim Denzler

Abstract:

SoftBoost is a recently presented boosting algorithm, which trades off the size of achieved classification margin and generalization performance. This paper presents a performance evaluation of SoftBoost algorithm on the generic object recognition problem. An appearance-based generic object recognition model is used. The evaluation experiments are performed using a difficult object recognition benchmark. An assessment with respect to different degrees of label noise as well as a comparison to the well known AdaBoost algorithm is performed. The obtained results reveal that SoftBoost is encouraged to be used in cases when the training data is known to have a high degree of noise. Otherwise, using Adaboost can achieve better performance.

Keywords: SoftBoost algorithm, AdaBoost algorithm, Generic object recognition.

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Authors: Nardine El Bardisy, Wolf Reuter, Ayat Ismail

Abstract:

In Egypt, there is continuous housing demand as a result of rapid population growth. In 1979, this forced the government to establish new urban communities in order to decrease stress around delta. New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA) was formulated to take the responsibly of this new policy. These communities suffer from social life deficiency due to their typology, which is separated island with barriers. New urban communities’ typology results from the influence of neoliberalism movement and modern city planning forms. The lack of social interaction in these communities at present should be enhanced in the future. On a global perspective, sustainable development calls for creating more sustainable communities which include social, economic and environmental aspects. From 1960, planners were highly focusing on the promotion of the social dimension in urban development plans. The research hypothesis states: “It is possible to promote social interaction in new urban communities through a set of socio-spatial recommended strategies that are tailored for Greater Cairo Region context”. In order to test this hypothesis, the case of El-Sherouk city is selected, which represents the typical NUCA development plans. Social interaction indicators were derived from literature and used to explore different social dynamics in the selected case. The tools used for exploring case study are online questionnaires, face to face questionnaires, interviews, and observations. These investigations were analyzed, conclusions and recommendations were set to improve social interaction.

Keywords: New urban communities, modern planning, social Interaction, Social life.

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Authors: Luis M. Villar, Olga M. Alegre

Abstract:

Finding effective ways of improving university quality assurance requires, as well, a retraining of the staff. This article illustrates an Online Programme of Excellence Model (OPEM), based on the European quality assurance model, for improving participants- formative programme standards. The results of applying this OPEM indicate the necessity of quality policies that support the evaluators- competencies to improve formative programmes. The study concludes by outlining how faculty and agency staff can use OPEM for the internal and external quality assurance of formative programmes.

Keywords: Formative assessment, Online faculty excellence program, Teaching competencies, University quality assurance.

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Authors: Jana Petrů, Tomáš Zlámal, Robert Čep, Lenka Čepová

Abstract:

This article is focused on the thermal spray coating machining issue. Those are irreplaceable in many areas of nowadays industrial branches such as aerospace industry, mostly thanks to their excellent qualities in production and also in renovation of machinery parts. The principals of thermal spraying and elementary diversification are described in introduction. Plasma coating method of composite materials – cermets – is described more thoroughly. The second part describes thermal spray coating machining and grinding in detail. This part contains suggestion of appropriate grinding tool and assessment of cutting conditions used for grinding a given part. Conclusion describes a problem which occurred while grinding a cermet thermal spray coating with a specially designed grindstone and a way to solve this problem.

Keywords: Coating, aerospace, plasma, grinding.

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