Search results for: Work target

Authors: Mumtaz Begum Mustafa, Siti Salwah Salim, Feizal Dani Rahman

Abstract:

Recently, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems were used to assist children in language acquisition as it has the ability to detect human speech signal. Despite the benefits offered by the ASR system, there is a lack of ASR systems for Malay-speaking children. One of the contributing factors for this is the lack of continuous speech database for the target users. Though cross-lingual adaptation is a common solution for developing ASR systems for under-resourced language, it is not viable for children as there are very limited speech databases as a source model. In this research, we propose a two-stage adaptation for the development of ASR system for Malay-speaking children using a very limited database. The two stage adaptation comprises the cross-lingual adaptation (first stage) and cross-age adaptation. For the first stage, a well-known speech database that is phonetically rich and balanced, is adapted to the medium-sized Malay adults using supervised MLLR. The second stage adaptation uses the speech acoustic model generated from the first adaptation, and the target database is a small-sized database of the target users. We have measured the performance of the proposed technique using word error rate, and then compare them with the conventional benchmark adaptation. The two stage adaptation proposed in this research has better recognition accuracy as compared to the benchmark adaptation in recognizing children’s speech.

Keywords: Automatic speech recognition system, children speech, adaptation, Malay.

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Authors: Radwa Mabrook

Abstract:

Virtual Reality (VR) content creation is a complex and an expensive process, which requires multi-disciplinary teams of content creators. Grant schemes from technology companies help media organisations to explore the VR potential in journalism and factual storytelling. Media organisations try to do as much as they can in-house, but they may outsource due to time constraints and skill availability. Journalists, game developers, sound designers and creative artists work together and bring in new cultures of work. This study explores the collaborative experimental nature of VR content creation, through tracing every actor involved in the process and examining their perceptions of the VR work. The study builds on Actor Network Theory (ANT), which decomposes phenomena into their basic elements and traces the interrelations among them. Therefore, the researcher conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with VR content creators between November 2017 and April 2018. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques allowed the researcher to recruit fact-based VR content creators from production studios and media organisations, as well as freelancers. Interviews lasted up to three hours, and they were a mix of Skype calls and in-person interviews. Participants consented for their interviews to be recorded, and for their names to be revealed in the study. The researcher coded interviews’ transcripts in Nvivo software, looking for key themes that correspond with the research questions. The study revealed that VR content creators must be adaptive to change, open to learn and comfortable with mistakes. The VR content creation process is very iterative because VR has no established work flow or visual grammar. Multi-disciplinary VR team members often speak different languages making it hard to communicate. However, adaptive content creators perceive VR work as a fun experience and an opportunity to learn. The traditional sense of competition and the strive for information exclusivity are now replaced by a strong drive for knowledge sharing. VR content creators are open to share their methods of work and their experiences. They target to build a collaborative network that aims to harness VR technology for journalism and factual storytelling. Indeed, VR is instilling collaborative and experimental cultures in journalism.

Keywords: Collaborative culture, content creation, experimental culture, virtual reality.

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Authors: M. Adamski, J. Cwiklak

Abstract:

The contemporary battlefield creates a demand for more costly and highly advanced munitions. Training personnel responsible for operations as well as immediate execution of combat tasks which engage real asset is unrealistic and economically not feasible. Owing to a wide array of exploited simulators and various types of imitators, it is possible to reduce the costs. One of the effective elements of training, which can be applied in the training of all service branches, is imitator of aerial targets. This research serves as an introduction to the commencement of design analysis over a real aerial target imitator. Within the project, the basic aerodynamic calculations were made, which enabled to determine its geometry, design layout, performance as well as mass balance of individual components. The conducted calculations of the parameters of flight characteristics come closer to the real performance of such Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Keywords: Aerial target, aerodynamics, imitator, performance.

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Authors: W. Wanmolee, W. Sornlake, N. Laosiripojana, V. Champreda

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Conversion of lignocellulosic biomass is the basis process for production of fuels, chemicals and materials in the sustainable biorefinery industry. Saccharification of lignocellulosic biomass is an essential step which produces sugars for further conversion to target value-added products e.g. bio-ethanol, bio-plastic, g-valerolactone (GVL), 5-hydroxymethylfuroic acid (HMF), levulinic acid, etc. The goal of this work was to develop an efficient enzyme for conversion of biomass to reducing sugar based on crude fungal enzyme from Chaetomium globosum BCC5776 produced by submerged fermentation and evaluate its activity comparing to a commercial Acremonium cellulase. Five local biomasses in Thailand: rice straw, sugarcane bagasse, corncobs, corn stovers, and palm empty fruit bunches were pretreated and hydrolyzed with varying enzyme loadings. Saccharification of the biomass led to different reducing sugar levels from 115 mg/g to 720 mg/g from different types of biomass using cellulase dosage of 9 FPU/g. The reducing sugar will be further employed as sugar feedstock for production of ethanol or commodity chemicals. This work demonstrated the use of promising enzyme candidate for conversion of local lignocellulosic biomass in biorefinery industry.

Keywords: Biomass, Cellulase, Chaetomiun glubosum, Saccharification.

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Authors: H. K. Hwang, Zekeriya Aliyazicioglu, Solomon Wu, Hung Lu, Nick Wilkins, Daniel Kerr

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Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar has received increasing attention in recent years. MIMO radar has many advantages over conventional phased array radar such as target detection,resolution enhancement, and interference suppression. In this paper, the results are presented from a simulation study of MIMO uniformly-spaced linear array (ULA) antennas. The performance is investigated under varied parameters, including varied array size, pseudo random (PN) sequence length, number of snapshots, and signal to noise ratio (SNR). The results of MIMO are compared to a traditional array antenna.

Keywords: Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar, phased array antenna, target detection, radar signal processing.

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Authors: Marina Velikova, Hennie Daniels, Ad Feelders

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In many applications, it is a priori known that the target function should satisfy certain constraints imposed by, for example, economic theory or a human-decision maker. Here we consider partially monotone problems, where the target variable depends monotonically on some of the predictor variables but not all. We propose an approach to build partially monotone models based on the convolution of monotone neural networks and kernel functions. The results from simulations and a real case study on house pricing show that our approach has significantly better performance than partially monotone linear models. Furthermore, the incorporation of partial monotonicity constraints not only leads to models that are in accordance with the decision maker's expertise, but also reduces considerably the model variance in comparison to standard neural networks with weight decay.

Keywords: Mixture models, monotone neural networks, partially monotone models, partially monotone problems.

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Authors: P. Tueku, P. Supnithi, R. Wongsathan

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Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) is one of the leading technologies identified to enable areal density beyond 1 Tb/in² of magnetic recording systems. A key challenge to HAMR designing is accuracy of positioning, timing of the firing laser, power of the laser, thermo-magnetic head, head-disk interface and cooling system. We study the effect of HAMR parameters on transition center and transition width. The HAMR is model using Thermal Williams-Comstock (TWC) and microtrack model. The target and equalizer are designed by the minimum mean square error (MMSE). The result shows that the unit energy constraint outperforms other constraints.

Keywords: Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, Thermal Williams-Comstock equation, Microtrack model, Equalizer.

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Authors: Chutchada Nusai, Yoshimi Suzuki, Haruaki Yamazaki

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Selecting the word translation from a set of target language words, one that conveys the correct sense of source word and makes more fluent target language output, is one of core problems in machine translation. In this paper we compare the 3 methods of estimating word translation probabilities for selecting the translation word in Thai – English Machine Translation. The 3 methods are (1) Method based on frequency of word translation, (2) Method based on collocation of word translation, and (3) Method based on Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. For evaluation we used Thai – English parallel sentences generated by NECTEC. The method based on EM algorithm is the best method in comparison to the other methods and gives the satisfying results.

Keywords: Machine translation, EM algorithm.

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Authors: Pavel Král, Jana Klečková, Christophe Cerisara

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This paper deals with automatic sentence modality recognition in French. In this work, only prosodic features are considered. The sentences are recognized according to the three following modalities: declarative, interrogative and exclamatory sentences. This information will be used to animate a talking head for deaf and hearing-impaired children. We first statistically study a real radio corpus in order to assess the feasibility of the automatic modeling of sentence types. Then, we test two sets of prosodic features as well as two different classifiers and their combination. We further focus our attention on questions recognition, as this modality is certainly the most important one for the target application.

Keywords: Automatic sentences modality recognition (ASMR), fundamental frequency (F0), energy, modal corpus, prosody.

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Authors: Inder K. Purohit, M. Nazrul Islam, K. Vijayan Asari, Mohammad A. Karim

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A new target detection technique is presented in this paper for the identification of small boats in coastal surveillance. The proposed technique employs an adaptive progressive thresholding (APT) scheme to first process the given input scene to separate any objects present in the scene from the background. The preprocessing step results in an image having only the foreground objects, such as boats, trees and other cluttered regions, and hence reduces the search region for the correlation step significantly. The processed image is then fed to the shifted phase-encoded fringe-adjusted joint transform correlator (SPFJTC) technique which produces single and delta-like correlation peak for a potential target present in the input scene. A post-processing step involves using a peak-to-clutter ratio (PCR) to determine whether the boat in the input scene is authorized or unauthorized. Simulation results are presented to show that the proposed technique can successfully determine the presence of an authorized boat and identify any intruding boat present in the given input scene.

Keywords: Adaptive progressive thresholding, fringe adjusted filters, image segmentation, joint transform correlation, synthetic discriminant function

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Authors: M.O. Makhmalbaf, M. GhanooniBagha, M.A. Tutunchian, M. Zabihi Samani

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In this paper first, Two buildings have been modeled and then analyzed using nonlinear static analysis method under two different conditions in Nonlinear SAP 2000 software. In the first condition the interaction of soil adjacent to the walls of basement are ignored while in the second case this interaction have been modeled using Gap elements of nonlinear SAP2000 software. Finally, comparing the results of two models, the effects of soil-structure on period, target point displacement, internal forces, shape deformations and base shears have been studied. According to the results, this interaction has always increased the base shear of buildings, decreased the period of structure and target point displacement, and often decreased the internal forces and displacements.

Keywords: Seismic Rehabilitation, Soil-Structure Interaction, Short Structure, Nonlinear Static Analysis.

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Authors: Md. Sohidul Islam, Ahmad Fartheen Khan

Abstract:

In recent times, Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has received significant attention as an upcoming candidate in the world of 5G systems. The main reason for getting NOMA in 5G is because of its capacity to provide services to many users who have the same time and frequency resources. It is best used as "multiple-input, multiple-output" (MIMO) technology. In this paper, we are going to investigate outage probability as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and target rate user. These methods will be implemented using cooperative communication and fair power allocation, respectively.

Keywords: Non-orthogonal Multiple Access, Fair Power Allocation, Outage Probability, Target Rate User, Cooperative Communication, massive multiple input multiple output, MIMO, Successive Interference Cancellation.

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Authors: Ma-Wubin, Deng-Su, Huang Hongbin, Chen-Jian, Wu-Yahun, Li-zhuo

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Cyber physical system (CPS) for target tracking, military surveillance, human health monitoring, and vehicle detection all require maximizing the utility and saving the energy. Sensor selection is one of the most important parts of CPS. Sensor selection problem (SSP) is concentrating to balance the tradeoff between the number of sensors which we used and the utility which we will get. In this paper, we propose a performance constrained slide windows (PCSW) based algorithm for SSP in CPS. we present results of extensive simulations that we have carried out to test and validate the PCSW algorithms when we track a target, Experiment shows that the PCSW based algorithm improved the performance including selecting time and communication times for selecting.

Keywords: Cyber physical system, sensor selection problem, PCSW based algorithm.

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Authors: Noraini Othman, Aizzat Mohd Nasurdin

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between hope and resilience with work engagement. A total of 422 staff nurses working in three public hospitals in Peninsular Malaysia participated in this study. Statistical results using regression analysis revealed that hope and resilience were positively related to work engagement. Possible reasons for these findings, as well as their implications and future research directions are discussed.

Keywords: hope, nurses, resilience, work engagement

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Authors: Songtao Wu, Yuesheng Zhu, Ziqiang Sun

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Region covariance (RC) descriptor is an effective and efficient feature for visual tracking. Current RC-based tracking algorithms use the whole RC matrix to track the target in video directly. However, there exist some issues for these whole RCbased algorithms. If some features are contaminated, the whole RC will become unreliable, which results in lost object-tracking. In addition, if some features are very discriminative to the background, other features are still processed and thus reduce the efficiency. In this paper a new robust tracking method is proposed, in which the whole RC matrix is decomposed into several low rank matrices. Those matrices are dynamically chosen and processed so as to achieve a good tradeoff between discriminability and complexity. Experimental results have shown that our method is more robust to complex environment changes, especially either when occlusion happens or when the background is similar to the target compared to other RC-based methods.

Keywords: Visual tracking, region covariance descriptor, lowrankregion covariance

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Authors: Kozo Tanigawa, Toshihiko Sasama, Kenichi Takahashi, Takao Kawamura, Kazunori Sugahara

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In recent years, the number of the cases of information leaks is increasing. Companies and Research Institutions make various actions against information thefts and security accidents. One of the actions is adoption of the crime prevention system, including the monitoring system by surveillance cameras. In order to solve difficulties of multiple cameras monitoring, we develop the automatic human tracking system using mobile agents through multiple surveillance cameras to track target persons. In this paper, we develop the monitor which confirms mobile agents tracing target persons, and the simulator of video picture analysis to construct the tracking algorithm.

Keywords: Human tracking, mobile agent, monitoring, simulate.

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Authors: Mazeni Ismail, Nurul Aliah, Hasmadi Hassan

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The purpose of this study is to gather the consensus of experts regarding the use of moral guidance amongst preschool teachers vis-a-vis the Islamic Project module (I-Project Module). This I-Project Module seeks to provide pertinent data on the assimilation of noble values in subject-matter teaching. To obtain consensus for the various components of the module, the Modified Delphi technique was used to develop the module. 12 subject experts from various educational fields of Islamic education, early childhood education, counselling and language fully participated in the development of this module. The Modified Delphi technique was administered in two mean cycles. The standard deviation value derived from questionnaires completed by the participating panel of experts provided the value of expert consensus reached. This was subsequently analyzed using SPSS version 22. Findings revealed that the panel of experts reached a discernible degree of agreement on five topics outlined in the module, viz; content (mean value 3.36), teaching strategy (mean value 3.28), programme duration (mean value 3.0), staff involved and attention-grabbing strategy of target group participating in the value program (mean value 3.5), and strategy to attract attention of target group to utilize i-project (mean value 3.0). With regard to the strategy to attract the attention of the target group, the experts proposed for creative activities to be added in order to enhance teachers’ creativity.

Keywords: Islamic project, modified Delphi technique, project approach, teacher moral guidance.

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Authors: Sitansu Kumar Verma, Soni Yadav, Jitendra Singh, Shraddha, Ajay Kumar

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MicroRNAs (miRNAs), a class of approximately 22 nucleotide long non coding RNAs which play critical role in different biological processes. The mature microRNA is usually 19–27 nucleotides long and is derived from a bigger precursor that folds into a flawed stem-loop structure. Mature micro RNAs are involved in many cellular processes that encompass development, proliferation, stress response, apoptosis, and fat metabolism by gene regulation. Resent finding reveals that certain viruses encode their own miRNA that processed by cellular RNAi machinery. In recent research indicate that cellular microRNA can target the genetic material of invading viruses. Cellular microRNA can be used in the virus life cycle; either to up regulate or down regulate viral gene expression Computational tools use in miRNA target prediction has been changing drastically in recent years. Many of the methods have been made available on the web and can be used by experimental researcher and scientist without expert knowledge of bioinformatics. With the development and ease of use of genomic technologies and computational tools in the field of microRNA biology has superior tremendously over the previous decade. This review attempts to give an overview over the genome wide approaches that have allow for the discovery of new miRNAs and development of new miRNA target prediction tools and databases.

Keywords: MicroRNAs, computational tools, gene regulation, databases, RNAi.

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Authors: Se Ho Choi, Jong Pil Yun, Boyeul Seo, YoungSu Park, Sang Woo Kim

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This paper presents a real-time defect detection algorithm for high-speed steel bar in coil. Because the target speed is very high, proposed algorithm should process quickly the large volumes of image for real-time processing. Therefore, defect detection algorithm should satisfy two conflicting requirements of reducing the processing time and improving the efficiency of defect detection. To enhance performance of detection, edge preserving method is suggested for noise reduction of target image. Finally, experiment results show that the proposed algorithm guarantees the condition of the real-time processing and accuracy of detection.

Keywords: Defect detection, edge preserving filter, real-time image processing, surface inspection.

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Authors: Ugwu Elias Ikechukwu

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Discussions on bilingualism have always dwelt on how the mother tongue interferes with the target language. This interference is considered a serious problem in second language learning. Usually, the interference has been phonological. But the objective of this research is to explore how the target language interferes with the mother tongue. In the case of the Igbo language, it interferes with English mostly at the phonological level while English interferes with Igbo at the realm of vocabulary. The result is a new language \"Engligbo\" which is a hybrid of English and Igbo. The Igbo language spoken by about 25 million people is one of the three most prominent languages in Nigeria. This paper discusses the phenomenal Engligbo, and other implications for Igbo learners of English. The method of analysis is descriptive. A number of recommendations were made that would help teachers handle problems arising from such mutual interferences.

Keywords: Bilingualism, Implications, Language Pedagogy, Reciprocal Interferences.

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Authors: Ahmed Sh. Khusheef, Ganesh Kothapalli, Majid Tolouei-Rad

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Utilization of various sensors has made it possible to extend capabilities of industrial robots. Among these are vision sensors that are used for providing visual information to assist robot controllers. This paper presents a method of integrating a vision system and a simulation program with an industrial robot. The vision system is employed to detect a target object and compute its location in the robot environment. Then, the target object-s information is sent to the robot controller via parallel communication port. The robot controller uses the extracted object information and the simulation program to control the robot arm for approaching, grasping and relocating the object. This paper presents technical details of system components and describes the methodology used for this integration. It also provides a case study to prove the validity of the methodology developed.

Keywords: industrial robot, integration, simulation, vision system

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Authors: Dmitry A. Mikoyelov

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The paper presents a set of guidelines for analysis of industrial embedded distributed systems and introduces a mathematical model derived from these guidelines. In this study, the author examines a set of modern communication technologies that are or possibly can be used to build communication links between the subsystems of a distributed embedded system. An investigation of these guidelines results in a algorithm for analysis of specific use cases of target technologies. A goal of the paper acts as an important base for ongoing research on comparison of communication technologies. The author describes the principles of the model and presents results of the test calculations. Practical implementation of target technologies and empirical experiment data are based on a practical experience during the design and test of specific distributed systems in Latvian market.

Keywords: Distributed embedded system, analytical model, communication technology.

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Authors: Seong-Bae Park, Sang-Soo Kim, Sewook Oh, Zooyl Zeong, Hojin Lee, Seong Rae Park

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An ontology is widely used in many kinds of applications as a knowledge representation tool for domain knowledge. However, even though an ontology schema is well prepared by domain experts, it is tedious and cost-intensive to add instances into the ontology. The most confident and trust-worthy way to add instances into the ontology is to gather instances from tables in the related Web pages. In automatic populating of instances, the primary task is to find the most proper concept among all possible concepts within the ontology for a given table. This paper proposes a novel method for this problem by defining the similarity between the table and the concept using the overlap of their properties. According to a series of experiments, the proposed method achieves 76.98% of accuracy. This implies that the proposed method is a plausible way for automatic ontology population from Web tables.

Keywords: Ontology population, domain knowledge consolidation, target concept selection, property overlap.

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Authors: Erika R. Chambriard, Sandro C. Izidoro, Davidson P. Mendes, Douglas E. V. Pires

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Work-related illnesses and disorders have been a constant aspect of work. Although their nature has changed over time, from musculoskeletal disorders to illnesses related to psychosocial aspects of work, its impact on the life of workers remains significant. Despite significant efforts worldwide to protect workers, the disparity between changes in work legislation and actual benefit for workers’ health has been creating a significant economic burden for social security and health systems around the world. In this context, this study aims to propose, test and validate a modular prototype that allows for work environmental aspects to be assessed, monitored and better controlled. The main focus is also to provide a historical record of working conditions and the means for workers to obtain comprehensible and useful information regarding their work environment and legal limits of occupational exposure to different types of environmental variables, as means to improve prevention of work-related accidents and disorders. We show the developed prototype provides useful and accurate information regarding the work environmental conditions, validating them with standard occupational hygiene equipment. We believe the proposed prototype is a cost-effective and adequate approach to work environment monitoring that could help elucidate the links between work and occupational illnesses, and that different industry sectors, as well as developing countries, could benefit from its capabilities.

Keywords: Arduino prototyping, occupational health and hygiene, work environment, work-related disorders prevention.

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Authors: Ribeiro I., Tavares A.M., Sá E., Lopes M.

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The increased use of biodiesel implies variations on both greenhouse gases and air pollutant emissions. Some studies point out that the use of biodiesel blends on diesel can help in controlling air pollution and promote a reduction of CO2 emissions. Reductions on PM, SO2, VOC and CO emissions are also expected, however NOx emissions may increase, which may potentiate O3 formation. This work aims to assess the impact of the biodiesel use on air quality, through a numerical modeling study, taking the Northern region of Portugal as a case study. The emission scenarios are focused on 2008 (baseline year) and 2020 (target year of Renewable Energy Directive-RED) and on three biodiesel blends (B0, B10 and B20). In a general way the use of biodiesel by 2020 will reduce the CO2 and air pollutants emissions in the Northern Portugal, improving air quality. However it will be in a very small extension.

Keywords: air quality, biodiesel, emission scenarios, RED.

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Authors: Min-Ah Woo, Min-Cheol Lim, Hyun-Joo Chang, Sung-Wook Choi

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We developed a paper-based colorimetric sensor utilizing magnetic nanoparticles conjugated with aptamers (MNP-Apts) against E. coli O157:H7. The MNP-Apts were applied to a test sample solution containing the target cells, and the solution was simply dropped onto PVDF (polyvinylidene difluoride) membrane. The membrane moves the sample radially to form the sample spots of different compounds as concentric rings, thus the MNP-Apts on the membrane enabled specific recognition of the target cells through a color ring generation by MNP-promoted colorimetric reaction of TMB (3,3',5,5'-tetramethylbenzidine) and H₂O₂. This method could be applied to rapidly and visually detect various bacterial pathogens in less than 1 h without cell culturing.

Keywords: Aptamer, colorimetric sensor, E. coli O157:H7, magnetic nanoparticle, polyvinylidene difluoride.

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Authors: Pongthep Bunrueng

Abstract:

This action research accentuates the outcome of a development in English pronunciation, using principles of phonetics for English major students at Loei Rajabhat University. The research is split into 5 separate modules: 1) Organs of Speech and How to Produce Sounds, 2) Monopthongs, 3) Diphthongs, 4) Consonant sounds, and 5) Suprasegmental Features. Each module followed a 4 step action research process, 1) Planning, 2) Acting, 3) Observing, and 4) Reflecting. The research targeted 2nd year students who were majoring in English Education at Loei Rajabhat University during the academic year of 2011. A mixed methodology employing both quantitative and qualitative research was used, which put theory into action, taking segmental features up to suprasegmental features. Multiple tools were employed which included the following documents: pre-test and post-test papers, evaluation and assessment papers, group work assessment forms, a presentation grading form, an observation of participants form and a participant self-reflection form.

All 5 modules for the target group showed that results from the post-tests were higher than those of the pre-tests, with 0.01 statistical significance. All target groups attained results ranging from low to moderate and from moderate to high performance. The participants who attained low to moderate results had to re-sit the second round. During the first development stage, participants attended classes with group participation, in which they addressed planning through mutual co-operation and sharing of responsibility. Analytic induction of strong points for this operation illustrated that learner cognition, comprehension, application, and group practices were all present whereas the participants with weak results could be attributed to biological differences, differences in life and learning, or individual differences in responsiveness and self-discipline.

Participants who were required to be re-treated in Spiral 2 received the same treatment again. Results of tests from the 5 modules after the 2^nd treatment were that the participants attained higher scores than those attained in the pre-test. Their assessment and development stages also showed improved results. They showed greater confidence at participating in activities, produced higher quality work, and correctly followed instructions for each activity. Analytic induction of strong and weak points for this operation remains the same as for Spiral 1, though there were improvements to problems which existed prior to undertaking the second treatment.

Keywords: Action research, English pronunciation, phonetics, segmental features, suprasegmental features.

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Authors: Andrey V. Timofeev

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This paper introduces an original method for guaranteed estimation of the accuracy for an ensemble of Lipschitz classifiers. The solution was obtained as a finite closed set of alternative hypotheses, which contains an object of classification with probability of not less than the specified value. Thus, the classification is represented by a set of hypothetical classes. In this case, the smaller the cardinality of the discrete set of hypothetical classes is, the higher is the classification accuracy. Experiments have shown that if cardinality of the classifiers ensemble is increased then the cardinality of this set of hypothetical classes is reduced. The problem of the guaranteed estimation of the accuracy for an ensemble of Lipschitz classifiers is relevant in multichannel classification of target events in C-OTDR monitoring systems. Results of suggested approach practical usage to accuracy control in C-OTDR monitoring systems are present.

Keywords: Lipschitz classifiers, confidence set, C-OTDR monitoring, classifiers accuracy, classifiers ensemble.

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Authors: Q.Y. Lee, Y.M. Lim

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Building conservation work generally involves complex and non-standard work different from new building construction processes. In preparing tenders for building conservation projects, therefore, the quantity surveyor must carefully consider the specificity of non-standard items and demarcate the scope of unique conservation work. While the quantity surveyor must appreciate the full range of works to prepare a good tender document, he typically manages many unfamiliar elements, including practical construction methods, restoration techniques and work sequences. Only by fulfilling the demanding requirements of building conservation work can the quantity surveyor enhance his professionalism an area of growing cultural value and economic importance. By discussing several issues crucial to tender preparations for building conservation projects in Malaysia, this paper seeks a deeper understanding of how quantity surveying can better standardize tender preparation work and more successfully manage building conservation processes.

Keywords: Conservation Works, Quantity Surveying Practice, Tender Preparation, Malaysia

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Authors: Junichiro Kawaguchi

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Space debris problems have emerged and threatened the use of low earth orbit around the Earth owing to a large number of spacecrafts.. The robots should be sophisticated enough to access automatically the debris articulating the attitude and the translation motion with respect to the debris. This paper presents the idea of using the torpedo-like third unsophisticated and disposable body, in addition to the first body of the servicing robot and the second body of the target debris. The third body is launched from the first body from a distance further than the size of the second body. This paper presents the method and the system, so that the third body is launched from the first body. The third body carries both a net and an inflatable or extendible drag deceleration device and is built small and light. This method enables even micro to nano satellites to perform contactless and multiple debris removal even via a single flight.

Keywords: Ballute, Debris Removal, Echo satellite, Gossamer, Gun-Net, Inflatable Space Structure, Small Satellite, Un-cooperated Target.

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