Search results for: center–focus problem

Authors: Saidu Ibrahim, Winston M. W. Shakantu

Abstract:

The problem of construction material waste remains unresolved, as a significant percentage of the materials delivered to some project sites end up as waste which might result in additional project cost. Cost overrun is a problem which affects 90% of the completed projects in the world. The argument on how to eliminate it has been on-going for the past 70 years, but there is neither substantial improvement nor significant solution for mitigating its detrimental effects. Research evidence has proposed various construction cost overruns and material-waste management approaches; nonetheless, these studies failed to give a clear indication on the framework and the equation for managing construction material waste and cost overruns. Hence, this research aims to develop a conceptual framework and a mathematical equation for managing material waste and cost overrun in the construction industry. The paper adopts the desktop methodological approach. This involves comparing the causes of material waste and those of cost overruns from the literature to determine the possible relationship. The review revealed a relationship between material waste and cost overrun that; increase in material waste would result to a corresponding increase in the amount of cost overrun at both the pre-contract and the post contract stages of a project. It was found from the equation that achieving an effective construction material waste management must ensure a “Good Quality-of-Planning, Estimating, and Design Management” and a “Good Quality- of-Construction, Procurement and Site Management”; a decrease in “Design Complexity” which would reduce “Material Waste” and subsequently reduce the amount of cost overrun by 86.74%. The conceptual framework and the mathematical equation developed in this study are recommended to the professionals of the construction industry.

Keywords: Conceptual framework, cost overrun, material waste, project stags.

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Authors: A. S. Issa, S. K. Q. AL-Omari

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In this paper, we investigate certain spaces of generalized functions for the Fourier and Fourier type integral transforms. We discuss convolution theorems and establish certain spaces of distributions for the considered integrals. The new Fourier type integral is well-defined, linear, one-to-one and continuous with respect to certain types of convergences. Many properties and an inverse problem are also discussed in some details.

Keywords: Fourier type integral, Fourier integral, generalized quotient, Boehmian, distribution.

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Authors: Ziraguen O. Williams, Shield B. Lin, Fouad N. Matari, Leslie J. Quiocho

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In a task to assist NASA in analyzing the dynamic forces caused by operational countermeasures of an astronaut’s exercise platform impacting the spacecraft, feedback delay and signal noise were added to a simulation model of an active controlled vibration isolation and stabilization system to regulate the movement of the exercise platform. Two additional simulation tools used in this study were Trick and MBDyn, software simulation environments developed at the NASA Johnson Space Center. Simulation results obtained from these three tools were very similar. All simulation results support the hypothesis that an active controlled vibration isolation and stabilization system outperforms a passive controlled system even with the addition of feedback delay and signal noise to the active controlled system. In this paper, squat exercise was used in creating excited force to the simulation model. The exciter force from squat exercise was calculated from motion capture of an exerciser. The simulation results demonstrate much greater transmitted force reduction in the active controlled system than the passive controlled system.

Keywords: Astronaut, counterweight, stabilization, vibration.

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Authors: Pearl K. Atuhaire, Sylvia Kaye

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While the need for equal access to civil, political as well as economic, social and cultural rights is clear under the international law, the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against women in 1979 made this even clearer. Despite this positive progress, the abuse of refugee women's rights is one of the basic underlying root causes of their marginalisation and violence in their countries of asylum. This paper presents a critical review on the development of refugee women's rights at the international levels and national levels. It provides an array of scholarly literature on this issue and examines the measures taken by the international community to curb the problem of violence against women in their various provisions through the instruments set. It is cognizant of the fact that even if conflict affects both refugee women and men, the effects on women refugees are deep-reaching, due to the cultural strongholds they face. An important aspect of this paper is that it is conceptualised against the fact that refugee women face the problem of sexual and gender based first as refugees and second as women, yet, their rights are stumbled upon. Often times they have been rendered "worthless victims" who are only in need of humanitarian assistance than active participants committed to change their plight through their participation in political, economic and social participation in their societies. Scholars have taken notice of the fact that women's rights in refugee settings have been marginalized and call for a need to incorporate their perspectives in the planning and management of refugee settings in which they live. Underpinning this discussion is feminism theory which gives a clear understanding of the root cause of refugee women's problems. Finally, this paper suggests that these policies should be translated into action at local, national international and regional levels to ensure sustainable peace.

Keywords: Feminism theory, human rights, refugee women, sexual and gender based violence.

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Authors: Satish Kumar, Arun Kumar Gupta, Pankaj Chandna

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In the modern manufacturing systems, the use of thermal cutting techniques using oxyfuel, plasma and laser have become indispensable for the shape forming of high quality complex components; however, the conventional chip removal production techniques still have its widespread space in the manufacturing industry. Both these types of machining operations require the positioning of end effector tool at the edge where the cutting process commences. This repositioning of the cutting tool in every machining operation is repeated several times and is termed as non-productive time or airtime motion. Minimization of this non-productive machining time plays an important role in mass production with high speed machining. As, the tool moves from one region to the other by rapid movement and visits a meticulous region once in the whole operation, hence the non-productive time can be minimized by synchronizing the tool movements. In this work, this problem is being formulated as a general travelling salesman problem (TSP) and a genetic algorithm approach has been applied to solve the same. For improving the efficiency of the algorithm, the GA has been hybridized with a noble special heuristic and simulating annealing (SA). In the present work a novel heuristic in the combination of GA has been developed for synchronization of toolpath movements during repositioning of the tool. A comparative analysis of new Meta heuristic techniques with simple genetic algorithm has been performed. The proposed metaheuristic approach shows better performance than simple genetic algorithm for minimization of nonproductive toolpath length. Also, the results obtained with the help of hybrid simulated annealing genetic algorithm (HSAGA) are also found better than the results using simple genetic algorithm only.

Keywords: Non-productive time, Airtime, 2.5 D milling, Laser cutting, Metaheuristic, Genetic Algorithm, Simulated Annealing.

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Authors: M. Senthil Arumugam, M.V.C. Rao

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This paper presents a novel two-phase hybrid optimization algorithm with hybrid genetic operators to solve the optimal control problem of a single stage hybrid manufacturing system. The proposed hybrid real coded genetic algorithm (HRCGA) is developed in such a way that a simple real coded GA acts as a base level search, which makes a quick decision to direct the search towards the optimal region, and a local search method is next employed to do fine tuning. The hybrid genetic operators involved in the proposed algorithm improve both the quality of the solution and convergence speed. The phase–1 uses conventional real coded genetic algorithm (RCGA), while optimisation by direct search and systematic reduction of the size of search region is employed in the phase – 2. A typical numerical example of an optimal control problem with the number of jobs varying from 10 to 50 is included to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm. Several statistical analyses are done to compare the validity of the proposed algorithm with the conventional RCGA and PSO techniques. Hypothesis t – test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) test are also carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The results clearly demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only improves the quality but also is more efficient in converging to the optimal value faster. They can outperform the conventional real coded GA (RCGA) and the efficient particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm in quality of the optimal solution and also in terms of convergence to the actual optimum value.

Keywords: Hybrid systems, optimal control, real coded genetic algorithm (RCGA), Particle swarm optimization (PSO), Hybrid real coded GA (HRCGA), and Hybrid genetic operators.

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Authors: Abdurazzag Ali Aburas, Indira Rustempasic, Indira Muhic, Busra Gheith Yildiz

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At present time, competition, unpredictable fluctuations have made communication engineering education in the global sphere really difficult. Confront with new situation in the engineering education sector. Communication engineering education has to be reformed and ready to use more advanced technologies. We realized that one of the general problems of student`s education is that after graduating from their universities, they are not prepared to face the real life challenges and full skilled to work in industry. They are prepared only to think like engineers and professionals but they also need to possess some others non-technical skills. In today-s environment, technical competence alone is not sufficient for career success. Employers want employees (graduate engineers) who have good oral and written communication (soft) skills. It does require for team work, business awareness, organization, management skills, responsibility, initiative, problem solving and IT competency. This proposed curriculum brings interactive, creative, interesting, effective learning methods, which includes online education, virtual labs, practical work, problem-based learning (PBL), and lectures given by industry experts. Giving short assignments, presentations, reports, research papers and projects students can significantly improve their non-technical skills. Also, we noticed the importance of using ICT technologies in engineering education which used by students and teachers, and included that into proposed teaching and learning methods. We added collaborative learning between students through team work which builds theirs skills besides course materials. The prospective on this research that we intent to update communication engineering curriculum in order to get fully constructed engineer students to ready for real industry work.

Keywords: communication engineering, curriculum education, ICT, industry

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Authors: Hae-Soon Ahn, Eun-Jun Yoon

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With the rapid development of wireless mobile communication, applications for mobile devices must focus on network security. In 2008, Chang-Chang proposed security improvements on the Lu et al.-s elliptic curve authentication key agreement protocol for wireless mobile networks. However, this paper shows that Chang- Chang-s improved protocol is still vulnerable to off-line password guessing attacks unlike their claims.

Keywords: Authentication, key agreement, wireless mobile networks, elliptic curve, password guessing attacks.

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Authors: S. Ge, T. Wu, HY. Tang, X. Xiao, K. Iramina, W. Wu

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It is crucial to quantitatively evaluate the treatment of epilepsy patients. This study was undertaken to test the hypothesis that compared to the healthy control subjects, the epilepsy patients have abnormal resting-state connectivity. In this study, we used the imaginary part of coherency to measure the resting-state connectivity. The analysis results shown that compared to the healthy control subjects, epilepsy patients tend to have abnormal rhythm brain connectivity over their epileptic focus.

Keywords: Coherence, connectivity, resting-state, epilepsy

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Authors: Nadeem Iftikhar, Zouhaib Zafar, Shaukat Ali

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Efficient retrieval of multimedia objects has gained enormous focus in recent years. A number of techniques have been suggested for retrieval of textual information; however, relatively little has been suggested for efficient retrieval of multimedia objects. In this paper we have proposed a generic architecture for contextaware retrieval of multimedia objects. The proposed framework combines the well-known approaches of text-based retrieval and context-aware retrieval to formulate architecture for accurate retrieval of multimedia data.

Keywords: Context-aware retrieval, information retrieval, multimedia databases, multimedia data.

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Authors: Raoudha Chaabane, Faouzi Askri, Sassi Ben Nasrallah

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Simultaneous transient conduction and radiation heat transfer with heat generation is investigated. Analysis is carried out for both steady and unsteady situations. two-dimensional gray cylindrical enclosure with an absorbing, emitting, and isotropically scattering medium is considered. Enclosure boundaries are assumed at specified temperatures. The heat generation rate is considered uniform and constant throughout the medium. The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) was used to solve the energy equation of a transient conduction-radiation heat transfer problem. The control volume finite element method (CVFEM) was used to compute the radiative information. To study the compatibility of the LBM for the energy equation and the CVFEM for the radiative transfer equation, transient conduction and radiation heat transfer problems in 2-D cylindrical geometries were considered. In order to establish the suitability of the LBM, the energy equation of the present problem was also solved using the the finite difference method (FDM) of the computational fluid dynamics. The CVFEM used in the radiative heat transfer was employed to compute the radiative information required for the solution of the energy equation using the LBM or the FDM (of the CFD). To study the compatibility and suitability of the LBM for the solution of energy equation and the CVFEM for the radiative information, results were analyzed for the effects of various parameters such as the boundary emissivity. The results of the LBMCVFEM combination were found to be in excellent agreement with the FDM-CVFEM combination. The number of iterations and the steady state temperature in both of the combinations were found comparable. Results are found for situations with and without heat generation. Heat generation is found to have significant bearing on temperature distribution.

Keywords: heat generation, cylindrical coordinates; RTE;transient; coupled conduction radiation; heat transfer; CVFEM; LBM

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Authors: Masao Ohta, Yoshiyuki Higuchi

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This study analyses store layout among the many factors that underlie supermarket store design, this; in terms of what to display in a shop and where to place the items. This report examines newly-opened stores and evaluates their interior shop floor layouts, which we then attempt to categorize by various styles. We then consider the interaction between shop floor layout and customer behavior from the perspective of the supermarket as the seller. At this point, we focus on the “store magnets"–the main sections within the shop likely to attract customers into the store.

Keywords: Supermarket Store Layout, Sales magnet, Customer Circulation Rate, Section Drop-by Rates.

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Authors: Yujun Zheng, Qin Song, Haihe Shi, and Jinyun Xue

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There are a number of different cars for transferring hundreds of close contacts of swine influenza patients to hospital, and we need to carefully assign the passengers to those cars in order to minimize the risk of influenza spreading during transportation. The paper presents an approach to straightforward obtain the optimal solution of the relaxed problems, and develops two iterative improvement algorithms to effectively tackle the general problem.

Keywords: Influenza spread, discrete optimization, stationary point, iterative improvement

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Authors: Ian Kree, Davina Chin Lee Yien

Abstract:

This paper presents Cost per Equivalent Wafer Out, which we find useful in wafer fab operational cost monitoring and controlling. It removes the loading and product mix effect in the cost variance analysis. The operation heads, therefore, could immediately focus on identifying areas for cost improvement. Without this, they would have to measure the impact of the loading variance and product mix variance between actual and budgeted prior to make any decision on cost improvement. Cost per Equivalent Wafer Out, thereby, increases efficiency in wafer fab operational cost monitoring and controlling.

Keywords: Cost Control, Cost Variance, Operational Expenditure, Semiconductor.

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Authors: Beibei Han, Yong-Jin Yoon, Muhammad Hamidullah, Angel Tsu-Hui Lin, Woo-Tae Park

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This paper presents the design of a ring-shaped tri-axial fore sensor that can be incorporated into the tip of a guidewire for use in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). The designed sensor comprises a ring-shaped structure located at the center of four cantilever beams. The ringdesign allows surgical tools to be easily passed through which largely simplified the integration process. Silicon nanowires (SiNWs) are used aspiezoresistive sensing elementsembeddedon the four cantilevers of the sensor to detect the resistance change caused by the applied load.An integration scheme with new designed guidewire tip structure having two coils at the distal end is presented. Finite element modeling has been employed in the sensor design to find the maximum stress location in order to put the SiNWs at the high stress regions to obtain maximum output. A maximum applicable force of 5 mN is found from modeling. The interaction mechanism between the designed sensor and a steel wire has been modeled by FEM. A linear relationship between the applied load on the steel wire and the induced stress on the SiNWs were observed.

Keywords: Triaxial MEMS force sensor, Ring shape, Silicon Nanowire, Minimally invasive surgery.

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Authors: Pavel Psota, Vít Lédl, Jan Václavík, Roman Doleček, Pavel Mokrý, Petr Vojtíšek

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This paper presents advanced time average digital holography by means of frequency shift and phase modulation. This technique can measure amplitudes of vibrations at ultimate dynamic range while the amplitude distribution evaluation is done independently in every pixel. The main focus of the paper is to gain insight into behavior of the method at low amplitudes of vibrations. In order to reach that, a set of experiments was performed. Results of the experiments together with novel noise suppression show the limit of the method to be below 0.1 nm.

Keywords: Acousto-optical modulator, digital holography, low amplitudes, vibrometry.

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Authors: Yu-Yu Wang, Shih-Hua Hsieh, Ru-Shian Hsieh

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Wishes and choices being respected, and the right to be supported rather than coerced, have been internationally recognized as the human rights of persons with mental illness. In Taiwan, ‘coerced hospitalization’ has become difficult since the revision of the mental health legislation in 2007. Despite trend towards human rights, the real problem families face when their family members are in mental health crisis is the lack of alternative services. This study aims to explore: 1) When is hospitalization seen as the only solution by family members? 2) What are the barriers for arranging hospitalization, and how are they managed? 3) What have family carers learned, in their experiences of caring for their family members with mental illness? To answer these questions, qualitative approach was adopted, and focus group interviews were taken to collect data. This study includes 24 family carers. The main findings of this research include: First, hospital is the last resort for carers in helplessness. Family carers tend to do everything they could to provide care at home for their family members with mental illness. Carers seek hospitalization only when a patient’s behavior is too violent, weird, and/or abnormal, and beyond their ability to manage. Hospitalization, nevertheless, is never an easy choice. Obstacles emanate from the attitudes of the medical doctors, the restricted areas of ambulance service, and insufficient information from the carers’ part. On the other hand, with some professionals’ proactive assistance, access to medical care while in crisis becomes possible. Some family carers obtained help from the medical doctor, nurse, therapist and social workers. Some experienced good help from policemen, taxi drivers, and security guards at the hospital. The difficulty in accessing medical care prompts carers to work harder on assisting their family members with mental illness to stay in stable states. Carers found different ways of helping the ‘person’ to get along with the ‘illness’ and have better quality of life. Taking back ‘the right to control’ in utilizing medication, from passiveness to negotiating with medical doctors and seeking alternative therapies, are seen in many carers’ efforts. Besides, trying to maintain regular activities in daily life and play normal family roles are also experienced as important. Furthermore, talking with the patient as a person is also important. The authors conclude that in order to protect the human rights of persons with mental illness, it is crucial to make the medical care system more flexible and to make the services more humane: sufficient information should be provided and communicated, and efforts should be made to maintain the person’s social roles and to support the family.

Keywords: Family carers, coercive treatment, independent living, mental health crisis, persons with mental illness.

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Authors: Thomas Bryan, Veton Kepuska, Ivica Kostanic

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A simple adaptive voice activity detector (VAD) is implemented using Gabor and gammatone atomic decomposition of speech for high Gaussian noise environments. Matching pursuit is used for atomic decomposition, and is shown to achieve optimal speech detection capability at high data compression rates for low signal to noise ratios. The most active dictionary elements found by matching pursuit are used for the signal reconstruction so that the algorithm adapts to the individual speakers dominant time-frequency characteristics. Speech has a high peak to average ratio enabling matching pursuit greedy heuristic of highest inner products to isolate high energy speech components in high noise environments. Gabor and gammatone atoms are both investigated with identical logarithmically spaced center frequencies, and similar bandwidths. The algorithm performs equally well for both Gabor and gammatone atoms with no significant statistical differences. The algorithm achieves 70% accuracy at a 0 dB SNR, 90% accuracy at a 5 dB SNR and 98% accuracy at a 20dB SNR using 30d B SNR as a reference for voice activity.

Keywords: Atomic Decomposition, Gabor, Gammatone, Matching Pursuit, Voice Activity Detection.

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Authors: Antonio Di Leva, Roberto Berchi, Gianpiero Pescarmona, Michele Sonnessa

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The aim of a biological model is to understand the integrated structure and behavior of complex biological systems as a function of the underlying molecular networks to achieve simulation and forecast of their operation. Although several approaches have been introduced to take into account structural and environment related features, relatively little attention has been given to represent the behavior of biological systems. The Abstract Biological Process (ABP) model illustrated in this paper is an object-oriented model based on UML (the standard object-oriented language). Its main objective is to bring into focus the functional aspects of the biological system under analysis.

Keywords: Biological processes, system dynamics, systemmodeling, UML.

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Authors: Lidia Obojska

Abstract:

This paper has, as its point of departure, the foundational axiomatic theory of E. De Giorgi (1996, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Preprints di Matematica 26, 1), based on two primitive notions of quality and relation. With the introduction of a unary relation, we develop a system totally based on the sole primitive notion of relation. Such a modification enables a definition of the concept of dynamic unary relation. In this way we construct a simple language capable to express other well known theories such as Robinson-s arithmetic or a piece of a theory of concatenation. A key role in this system plays an abstract relation designated by “( )", which can be interpreted in different ways, but in this paper we will focus on the case when we can perform computations and obtain results.

Keywords: language, unary relations, arithmetic, computability

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Authors: Yoshinori Matsuura, Saori Iwanaga

Abstract:

The Great East Japan Earthquake occurred at 14:46 on Friday, March 11, 2011. It was the most powerful known earthquake to have hit Japan. The earthquake triggered extremely destructive tsunami waves of up to 40.5 meters in height. We focus on the ship’s evacuation from tsunami. Then we analyze about ships evacuation from tsunami using multi-agent simulation and we want to prepare for a coming earthquake. We developed a simulation model of ships that set sail from the port in order to evacuate from the tsunami considering the ship carrying dangerous goods.

Keywords: Multi-agent simulation, Ship’s evacuation, Tsunami.

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Authors: M. Y. Ismail, M. Inam

Abstract:

This paper presents the design and analysis of Liquid Crystal (LC) based tunable reflectarray antenna with slot embedded patch element configurations within X-band frequency range. The slots are shown to modify the surface current distribution on the patch element of reflectarray which causes the resonant patch element to provide different resonant frequencies depending on the slot dimensions. The simulated results are supported and verified by waveguide scattering parameter measurements of different reflectarray unit cells. Different rectangular slots on patch element have been fabricated and a change in resonant frequency from 10.46GHz to 8.78GHz has been demonstrated as the width of the rectangular slot is varied from 0.2W to 0.6W. The rectangular slot in the center of the patch element has also been utilized for the frequency tunable reflectarray antenna design based on K-15 Nematic LC. For the active reflectarray antenna design, a frequency tunability of 1.2% from 10GHz to 9.88GHz has been demonstrated with a dynamic phase range of 103° provided by the measured scattering parameter results. Time consumed by liquid crystals for reconfiguration, which is one of the drawback of LC based design, has also been disused in this paper.

Keywords: Liquid crystal, tunable reflectarray, frequency tunability, dynamic phase range.

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Authors: Qurban A Memon, Mohammad S. Laghari

Abstract:

Integration of system process information obtained through an image processing system with an evolving knowledge database to improve the accuracy and predictability of wear debris analysis is the main focus of the paper. The objective is to automate intelligently the analysis process of wear particle using classification via self-organizing maps. This is achieved using relationship measurements among corresponding attributes of various measurements for wear debris. Finally, visualization technique is proposed that helps the viewer in understanding and utilizing these relationships that enable accurate diagnostics.

Keywords: Relationship Network, Relationship Measurement, Self-organizing Clusters, Wear Debris Analysis, Kohonen Network

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Authors: Mohib ur Rehman, Mohammad Haseeb Anwer, Nadeem Iftikhar

Abstract:

The need to have standards has always been a priority of all the disciplines in the world. Today, standards such as XML and USB are trying to create a universal interface for their respective areas. The information regarding every family in the discipline addressed, must have a lot in common, known as Metadata. A lot of work has been done in specific domains such as IEEE LOM and MPEG-7 but they do not appeal to the universality of creating Metadata for all entities, where we take an entity (object) as, not restricted to Software Terms. This paper tries to address this problem of universal Metadata Definition which may lead to increase in precision of search.

Keywords: Metadata, Standard, Universal, XML.

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Authors: S. S. Dol

Abstract:

Improvement in vehicle efficiency can reduce global fossil fuels consumptions. For that sole reason, Shell Global Corporation introduces Shell Eco-marathon where student teams require to design, build and test energy-efficient vehicles. Hence, this paper will focus on design processes and the development of a fuel economic vehicle which satisfying the requirements of the competition. In this project, three components are designed and analyzed, which are the body, chassis and powertrain of the vehicle. Optimum design for each component is produced through simulation analysis and theoretical calculation in which improvement is made as the project progresses.

Keywords: Energy efficient vehicle, drag force, chassis, powertrain.

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Authors: Marina Nosik, Irina Rymanova, Sergei Sevostyanihin, Natalya Sergeeva, Alexander Sobkin

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This paper presents results of the survey regarding the awareness about HIV/AIDS among HIV-infected individuals. A questionnaire covering various aspects of HIV-infection was conducted among 110 HIV-infected individuals who attended the G.A. Zaharyan Moscow Tuberculosis Clinic, Department for treatment of TB patients with HIV. The questionnaire included questions about modes of HIV transmission and preventive measures against HIV/AIDS, as well as questions about age, gender, education and employment status. The survey revealed that the respondents in the whole had a good knowledge regarding modes of HIV transmission and preventive measures against HIV/AIDS: about 83,6% male respondents and 85,7% female respondents gave an accurate answers regarding the HIV-infection. However, the overwhelming majority of the study participants, that is, 88,5% men and 98% women, was quite ignorant about the risk of acquiring HIV through saliva and toothbrush of HIV-infected individual. Though that risk is rather insignificant, it is still biologically possible. And this gap in knowledge needs to be filled. As the study showed another point of concern was the fact, that despite the knowledge of HIV transmission risk through unprotected sex about 40% percent of HIVpositive men and 25% of HIV-positive women did not insist on using condoms with their sexual partners. These findings indicate that there are still some aspects about HIV-infection which needed to be clarified and explained through more detailed and specific educational programs.

Keywords: AIDS, HIV transmission risks, HIV misconceptions, risk behavior.

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Authors: Nedra Bahri-Ammari

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Literature review revealed the importance of the adoption of marketing Relationship for loyalty and retaining profitable customer (Customer Relationship Management). LPQ satisfaction will reinforce the loyalty and customer brand attachment. Customer will communicate the operator to others. The focus of this study is to examine the relationship between the LPPQ and the WOM recommendations through: customer satisfaction, loyalty and attachment. The results show that LPQ affect positively the satisfaction, negatively the loyalty. LPQ has an indirectly effect on WOM recommendations but through the satisfaction and attachment. The mediating effect of satisfaction in the relationship between LPQ and Loyalty is rejected. This finding can be explained by the nature of mobile sector in Tunisia.

Keywords: Attachment, Loyalty program quality, satisfaction, WOM

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Authors: Masimuddin Mohd Khaled

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This paper subsidizes to the discussion of Six Sigma in the Aerospace Industry. The main aim of this report is to study the literature review of Six Sigma emphasizing on the aerospace industry. The implementation of Six Sigma stages are studied and how the improvement cycle ‘Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control cycle’ (DMAIC) and the design process is ‘Define, Measure, Analyze, Design and Verify cycle’ (DMADV) is used. The focus is also done by studying how the implementation of Six Sigma on an aerospace company has brought a positive effect to the company.

Keywords: Six Sigma, DMAIC, DMADV, aerospace.

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Authors: Thomas Klauß

Abstract:

In networks, mainly small and medium-sized businesses benefit from the knowledge, experiences and solutions offered by experts from industry and science or from the exchange with practitioners. Associations which focus, among other things, on networking, information and knowledge transfer and which are interested in supporting such cooperations are especially well suited to provide such networks and the appropriate web platforms. Using METORA as an example – a project developed and run by the Federal Association for Information Economy, Telecommunications and New Media e.V. (BITKOM) for the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) – This paper will discuss how associations and other network organizations can achieve this task and what conditions they have to consider.

Keywords: Associations, collaboration, communities, crossdepartmental organizations, semantic web, web 2.0.

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Authors: Ferdi Sönmez, Başak Buluz

Abstract:

Agility in Knowledge Management (AKM) tries to capture agility requirements and their respective answers within the framework of knowledge and learning for organizations. Since it is rather a new construct, it is difficult to claim that it has been sufficiently discussed and analyzed in practical and theoretical realms. Like the term ‘agile learning’, it is also commonly addressed in the software development and information technology fields and across the related areas where those technologies can be applied. The organizational perspective towards AKM, seems to need some more time to become scholarly mature. Nevertheless, in the literature one can come across some implicit usages of this term occasionally. This research is aimed to explore the conceptual background of agility in KM, re-conceptualize it and extend it to business applications with a special focus on e-business.

Keywords: Knowledge management, agility requirements, agility in knowledge management, knowledge.

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