Search results for: Global rainfall

Authors: Swapnoneel Roy, Minhazur Rahman, Ashok Kumar Thakur

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Bioinformatics and computational biology involve the use of techniques including applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, chemistry, and biochemistry to solve biological problems usually on the molecular level. Research in computational biology often overlaps with systems biology. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and proteinprotein interactions, and the modeling of evolution. Various global rearrangements of permutations, such as reversals and transpositions,have recently become of interest because of their applications in computational molecular biology. A reversal is an operation that reverses the order of a substring of a permutation. A transposition is an operation that swaps two adjacent substrings of a permutation. The problem of determining the smallest number of reversals required to transform a given permutation into the identity permutation is called sorting by reversals. Similar problems can be defined for transpositions and other global rearrangements. In this work we perform a study about some genome rearrangement primitives. We show how a genome is modelled by a permutation, introduce some of the existing primitives and the lower and upper bounds on them. We then provide a comparison of the introduced primitives.

Keywords: Sorting Primitives, Genome Rearrangements, Transpositions, Block Interchanges, Strip Exchanges.

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Authors: Jane O. Munonye

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Climate change has both negative and positive effects in agricultural production. For agriculture to be sustainable in adverse climate change condition, some natural measures are needed. The issue is to produce more food with available natural resources and reduce the contribution of agriculture to climate change. The study reviewed climate change and sustainable agriculture in southeast Nigeria. Data from the study were from secondary sources. Ten scientific papers were consulted and data for the review were collected from three. The objectives of the paper were as follows: to review the effect of climate change on one major arable crop in southeast Nigeria (yam; Dioscorea rotundata); evident of climate change impact and methods for sustainable agricultural production in adverse weather condition. Some climatic parameter as sunshine, relative humidity and rainfall have negative relationship with yam production and significant at 10% probability. Crop production was predicted to decline by 25% per hectare by 2060 while livestock production has increased the incidence of diseases and pathogens as the major effect to agriculture. Methods for sustainable agriculture and damage of natural resources by climate change were highlighted. Agriculture needs to be transformed as climate changes to enable the sector to be sustainable. There should be a policy in place to facilitate the integration of sustainability in Nigeria agriculture.

Keywords: Agriculture, climate change, sustainability, yam.

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Authors: Vinay Chandwani, Vinay Agrawal, Ravindra Nagar

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Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) trained using backpropagation (BP) algorithm are commonly used for modeling material behavior associated with non-linear, complex or unknown interactions among the material constituents. Despite multidisciplinary applications of back-propagation neural networks (BPNN), the BP algorithm possesses the inherent drawback of getting trapped in local minima and slowly converging to a global optimum. The paper present a hybrid artificial neural networks and genetic algorithm approach for modeling slump of ready mix concrete based on its design mix constituents. Genetic algorithms (GA) global search is employed for evolving the initial weights and biases for training of neural networks, which are further fine tuned using the BP algorithm. The study showed that, hybrid ANN-GA model provided consistent predictions in comparison to commonly used BPNN model. In comparison to BPNN model, the hybrid ANNGA model was able to reach the desired performance goal quickly. Apart from the modeling slump of ready mix concrete, the synaptic weights of neural networks were harnessed for analyzing the relative importance of concrete design mix constituents on the slump value. The sand and water constituents of the concrete design mix were found to exhibit maximum importance on the concrete slump value.

Keywords: Artificial neural networks, Genetic algorithms, Back-propagation algorithm, Ready Mix Concrete, Slump value.

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Authors: Anwar Hasan Abdullah Othman, Ahamed Kameel, Hasanuddeen Abdul Aziz

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In this study, attempt has been made to investigate the relationship specifically the causal relation between fund unit prices of Islamic equity unit trust fund which measure by fund NAV and the selected macro-economic variables of Malaysian economy by using VECM causality test and Granger causality test. Monthly data has been used from Jan, 2006 to Dec, 2012 for all the variables. The findings of the study showed that industrial production index, political election and financial crisis are the only variables having unidirectional causal relationship with fund unit price. However the global oil price is having bidirectional causality with fund NAV. Thus, it is concluded that the equity unit trust fund industry in Malaysia is an inefficient market with respect to the industrial production index, global oil prices, political election and financial crisis. However the market is approaching towards informational efficiency at least with respect to four macroeconomic variables, treasury bill rate, money supply, foreign exchange rate, and corruption index.

Keywords: Fund unit price, unit trust industry, Malaysia, macroeconomic variables, causality.

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Authors: Olatinwo M. O., Oyeleke Olaosebikan, David Henry O.

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Rain attenuation plays a lot of roles in the design of satellite and terrestrial microwave radio links, hence a good knowledge of its effect is of great interest to Engineers and scientists in that it is often required to give a high level of accuracy of the rainrate distribution that expresses rainrate from the lowest value to the highest. This study proposes a model to express rainrate parameters alpha (α) and beta (β) as a function of geographical location at 0.01% of the time. The tropical locations used in the development of the effect were Ilorin, Ile-Ife, Douala, Dar-es-Selam, Nairobi, Lusaka, and Brazilia.

This expression clearly confirms the variability of rainfall from place to place. When consistency test was carried out using the expression to generate rainrate for each location examined, the result obtained was reliable for rain intensities between 5mm/h and 200mm/h. The variability of α and β with latitude also shows that different latitudes have different cumulative rain distribution. The model proposed in this study would be one of the useful tools to Radio Engineers since the precipitation effect in the design of satellite and terrestrial microwave radio links is among the factors to consider when designing communication systems.

Keywords: Rain rate, attenuation, geographical location.

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Authors: Ntokozo C. Mthembu

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The notion of sustainable chemistry has become significant in the discourse for a global post-colonial era, including South Africa, especially when it comes to access to the general health system and related policies in relation to disease or ease of human life. In view of the stubborn vestiges of coloniality in the daily lives of indigenous African people in general, the fundamentals of present Western medical and traditional medicine systems and related policies in the democratic era were examined in this study. The situation of traditional healers in relation to current policy was also reviewed. The advent of democracy in South Africa brought about a variety of development opportunities and limitations, particularly with respect to indigenous African knowledge systems such as traditional medicine. There were high hopes that the limitations of previous narrow cultural perspectives would be rectified in the democratic era through development interventions, but some sections of society, such as traditional healers, remain marginalised. The Afrocentric perspective was explored in dissecting government interventions related to traditional medicine. This article highlights that multiple medical systems should be adopted and that health policies should be aligned in order to guarantee mutual respect and to address the remnants of colonialism in South Africa, Africa and the broader global community.

Keywords: Traditional healing system, healers, pluralist healthcare system, post-colonial era.

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Authors: R. K. D. G. Kaluarachchi

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The generation of solid waste and its effective management are debated topics in Sri Lanka as well as in the global environment. It was estimated that the most of the waste generated in global was originated from construction and demolition of buildings. Thus, the proportion of construction waste in solid waste generation cannot be underestimated. The construction waste, which is the by-product generated and removed from work sites is collected in direct and indirect processes. Hence, the objectives of this research are to identify the proportion of construction waste which can be reused and identify the methods to reduce the waste generation without reducing the quality of the process. A 6-storey building construction site was selected for this research. The site was divided into six zones depending on the process. Ten waste materials were identified by considering the adverse effects on safety and health of people and the economic value of them. The generated construction waste in each zone was recorded per week for a period of five months. The data revealed that sand, cement, wood used for form work and rusted steel rods were the generated waste which has higher economic value in all zones. Structured interviews were conducted to gather information on how the materials are categorized as waste and the capability of reducing, reusing and recycling the waste. It was identified that waste is generated in following processes; ineffective storage of material for a longer time and improper handling of material during the work process. Further, the alteration of scheduled activities of construction work also yielded more waste. Finally, a proper management of construction waste is suggested to reduce and reuse waste.

Keywords: Construction waste, effective management, reduce, reuse.

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Authors: Malek Makki

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The main purpose of this research study is to assist non-profit organizations (NPOs) to better segment a group of least developing countries and to optimally target the most needier areas, so that the provided aids make positive and lasting differences. We applied international marketing and strategy approaches to segment a sub-group of candidates among a group of 151 countries identified by the UN-G77 list, and furthermore, we point out the areas of priorities. We use reliable and well known criteria on the basis of economics, geography, demography and behavioral. These criteria can be objectively estimated and updated so that a follow-up can be performed to measure the outcomes of any program. We selected 12 socio-economic criteria that complement each other: GDP per capita, GDP growth, industry value added, export per capita, fragile state index, corruption perceived index, environment protection index, ease of doing business index, global competitiveness index, Internet use, public spending on education, and employment rate. A weight was attributed to each variable to highlight the relative importance of each criterion within the country. Care was taken to collect the most recent available data from trusted well-known international organizations (IMF, WB, WEF, and WTO). Construct of equivalence was carried out to compare the same variables across countries. The combination of all these weighted estimated criteria provides us with a global index that represents the level of development per country. An absolute index that combines wars and risks was introduced to exclude or include a country on the basis of conflicts and a collapsing state. The final step applied to the included countries consists of a benchmarking method to select the segment of countries and the percentile of each criterion. The results of this study allowed us to exclude 16 countries for risks and security. We also excluded four countries because they lack reliable and complete data. The other countries were classified per percentile thru their global index, and we identified the needier and the areas where aids are highly required to help any NPO to prioritize the area of implementation. This new concept is based on defined, actionable, accessible and accurate variables by which NPO can implement their program and it can be extended to profit companies to perform their corporate social responsibility acts.

Keywords: Developing countries, International marketing, non-profit organization, segmentation.

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Authors: Amado, M. P., Amado, A., Poggi, F., Correia de Freitas, J.

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Today is widely understood that global energy consumption patterns are directly related to the urban expansion and development process. This expansion is based on the natural growth of human activities and has left most urban areas totally dependent on fossil fuel derived external energy inputs. This status-quo of production, transportation, storage and consumption of energy has become inefficient and is set to become even more so when the continuous increases in energy demand are factored in. The territorial management of land use and related activities is a central component in the search for more efficient models of energy use, models that can meet current and future regional, national and European goals.

In this paper a methodology is developed and discussed with the aim of improving energy efficiency at the municipal level. The development of this methodology is based on the monitoring of energy consumption and its use patterns resulting from the natural dynamism of human activities in the territory and can be utilized to assess sustainability at the local scale. A set of parameters and indicators are defined with the objective of constructing a systemic model based on the optimization, adaptation and innovation of the current energy framework and the associated energy consumption patterns. The use of the model will enable local governments to strike the necessary balance between human activities and economic development and the local and global environment while safeguarding fairness in the energy sector.

Keywords: Solar urban planning, solar smart city, urban development, energy efficiency.

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Authors: T. Aydin, M. F. Alaeddinoglu

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People, throughout the history, have made estimates and inferences about the future by using their past experiences. Developing information technologies and the improvements in the database management systems make it possible to extract useful information from knowledge in hand for the strategic decisions. Therefore, different methods have been developed. Data mining by association rules learning is one of such methods. Apriori algorithm, one of the well-known association rules learning algorithms, is not commonly used in spatio-temporal data sets. However, it is possible to embed time and space features into the data sets and make Apriori algorithm a suitable data mining technique for learning spatiotemporal association rules. Lake Van, the largest lake of Turkey, is a closed basin. This feature causes the volume of the lake to increase or decrease as a result of change in water amount it holds. In this study, evaporation, humidity, lake altitude, amount of rainfall and temperature parameters recorded in Lake Van region throughout the years are used by the Apriori algorithm and a spatio-temporal data mining application is developed to identify overflows and newlyformed soil regions (underflows) occurring in the coastal parts of Lake Van. Identifying possible reasons of overflows and underflows may be used to alert the experts to take precautions and make the necessary investments.

Keywords: Apriori algorithm, association rules, data mining, spatio-temporal data.

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Authors: Joseph S. Ojo, Vincent A. Akpan, Oladayo G. Ajileye, Olalekan L, Ojo

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In this paper, the intelligent algorithm (IA) that is capable of adapting to dynamical tropical weather conditions is proposed based on fuzzy logic techniques. The IA effectively interacts with the quality of service (QoS) criteria irrespective of the dynamic tropical weather to achieve improvement in the satellite links. To achieve this, an adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) has been adopted. The algorithm is capable of interacting with the weather fluctuation to generate appropriate improvement to the satellite QoS for efficient services to the customers. 5-year (2012-2016) rainfall rate of one-minute integration time series data has been used to derive fading based on ITU-R P. 618-12 propagation models. The data are obtained from the measurement undertaken by the Communication Research Group (CRG), Physics Department, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. The rain attenuation and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) were derived for frequency between Ku and V-band and propagation angle with respect to different transmitting power. The simulated results show a substantial reduction in SNR especially for application in the area of digital video broadcast-second generation coding modulation satellite networks.

Keywords: Fuzzy logic, intelligent algorithm, Nigeria, QoS, satellite applications, tropical weather.

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Authors: Amir Gandomkar

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Global warming and continental changes have been one of the people's issues in the recent years and its consequences have appeared in the most parts of the earth planet or will appear in the future. Temperature and Precipitation are two main parameters in climatology. Any changes in these two parameters in this region cause widespread changes in the ecosystem and its natural and humanistic structure. One of the important consequences of this procedure is change in surface and underground water resources. Zayanderood watershed basin which is the main central river in Iran has faced water shortage in the recent years and also it has resulted in drought in Gavkhuni swamp and the river itself. Managers and experts in provinces which are the Zayanderood water consumers believe that global warming; raining decrease and continental changes are the main reason of water decrease. By statistical investigation of annual Precipitation and 46 years temperature of internal and external areas of Zayanderood watershed basin's stations and by using Kendal-man method, Precipitation and temperature procedure changes have been analyzed in this basin. According to obtained results, there was not any noticeable decrease or increase procedure in Precipitation and annual temperature in the basin during this period. However, regarding to Precipitation, a noticeable decrease and increase have been observed in small part of western and some parts of eastern and southern basin, respectively. Furthermore, the investigation of annual temperature procedure has shown that a noticeable increase has been observed in some parts of western and eastern basin, and also a noticeable increasing procedure of temperature in the central parts of metropolitan Esfahan can be observed.

Keywords: Zayanderood, Man_Kendal, Climate Change

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Authors: R. Tlili Yaakoubi, H. Nakouri, O. Blanpain, S. Lallahem

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The current tools for real time management of sewer systems are based on two software tools: the software of weather forecast and the software of hydraulic simulation. The use of the first ones is an important cause of imprecision and uncertainty, the use of the second requires temporal important steps of decision because of their need in times of calculation. This way of proceeding fact that the obtained results are generally different from those waited. The major idea of this project is to change the basic paradigm by approaching the problem by the "automatic" face rather than by that "hydrology". The objective is to make possible the realization of a large number of simulations at very short times (a few seconds) allowing to take place weather forecasts by using directly the real time meditative pluviometric data. The aim is to reach a system where the decision-making is realized from reliable data and where the correction of the error is permanent. A first model of control laws was realized and tested with different return-period rainfalls. The gains obtained in rejecting volume vary from 19 to 100 %. The development of a new algorithm was then used to optimize calculation time and thus to overcome the subsequent combinatorial problem in our first approach. Finally, this new algorithm was tested with 16- year-rainfall series. The obtained gains are 40 % of total volume rejected to the natural environment and of 65 % in the number of discharges.

Keywords: Automation, optimization, paradigm, RTC.

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Authors: Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

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Although fisheries and aquaculture studies might seem marginal to international business (IB) studies in general, fisheries and aquaculture IB (FAIB) management is currently facing increasing pressure to meet global demand and consumption for fish in the next coming decades. In part address to this challenge, the purpose of this systematic review of literature (SLR) study is to investigate the use of the term ‘market access’ in its context of use in the generic literature and business sector discourse, in comparison to the more specific literature and discourse in fisheries, aquaculture and seafood. This SLR aims to uncover the knowledge/interest gaps between the academic subject discourses and business sector practices. Corpus driven in methodology and using a triangulation method of three different text analysis software including AntConc, VOSviewer and Web of Science (WoS) analytics, the SLR results indicate a gap in conceptual knowledge and business practices in how ‘market access’ is conceived and used in the context of the pharmaceutical healthcare industry and FAIB research and practice. While it is acknowledged that the product orientation of different business sectors might differ, this SLR study works with the assumption that both business sectors are global in orientation. These business sectors are complex in their operations from product to market. This SLR suggests a conceptual model in understanding the challenges, the potential barriers as well as avenues for solutions to developing market access for FAIB.

Keywords: Market access, fisheries and aquaculture, international business, systematic literature review.

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Authors: Paola Gattinoni, Laura Scesi, Elena Cerino Adbin, Daniele Cremonesi

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The interaction of tunneling or mining with groundwater has become a very relevant problem not only due to the need to guarantee the safety of workers and to assure the efficiency of the tunnel drainage systems, but also to safeguard water resources from impoverishment and pollution risk. Therefore it is very important to forecast the drainage processes (i.e., the evaluation of drained discharge and drawdown caused by the excavation). The aim of this study was to know better the system and to quantify the flow drained from the Fontane mines, located in Val Germanasca (Turin, Italy). This allowed to understand the hydrogeological local changes in time. The work has therefore been structured as follows: the reconstruction of the conceptual model with the geological, hydrogeological and geological-structural study; the calculation of the tunnel inflows (through the use of structural methods) and the comparison with the measured flow rates; the water balance at the basin scale. In this way it was possible to understand what are the relationships between rainfall, groundwater level variations and the effect of the presence of tunnels as a means of draining water. Subsequently, it the effects produced by the excavation of the mining tunnels was quantified, through numerical modeling. In particular, the modeling made it possible to observe the drawdown variation as a function of number, excavation depth and different mines linings.

Keywords: Groundwater, Italy, numerical model, tunneling.

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Authors: Hsien-Chou Liao, Yu-Shiang Wang

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Surveillance system is widely used in the traffic monitoring. The deployment of cameras is moving toward a ubiquitous camera (UbiCam) environment. In our previous study, a novel service, called GPS-VT, was firstly proposed by incorporating global positioning system (GPS) and visual tracking techniques for the UbiCam environment. The first prototype is called GODTA (GPS-based Moving Object Detection and Tracking Approach). For a moving person carried GPS-enabled mobile device, he can be tracking when he enters the field-of-view (FOV) of a camera according to his real-time GPS coordinate. In this paper, GPS-VT service is applied to the tracking of vehicles. The moving speed of a vehicle is much faster than a person. It means that the time passing through the FOV is much shorter than that of a person. Besides, the update interval of GPS coordinate is once per second, it is asynchronous with the frame rate of the real-time image. The above asynchronous is worsen by the network transmission delay. These factors are the main challenging to fulfill GPS-VT service on a vehicle.In order to overcome the influence of the above factors, a back-propagation neural network (BPNN) is used to predict the possible lane before the vehicle enters the FOV of a camera. Then, a template matching technique is used for the visual tracking of a target vehicle. The experimental result shows that the target vehicle can be located and tracking successfully. The success location rate of the implemented prototype is higher than that of the previous GODTA.

Keywords: visual surveillance, visual tracking, globalpositioning system, intelligent transportation system

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Authors: Lae-Jeong Park

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The paper presents a method that utilizes figure-ground color segmentation to extract effective global feature in terms of false positive reduction in the head-shoulder detection. Conventional detectors that rely on local features such as HOG due to real-time operation suffer from false positives. Color cue in an input image provides salient information on a global characteristic which is necessary to alleviate the false positives of the local feature based detectors. An effective approach that uses figure-ground color segmentation has been presented in an effort to reduce the false positives in object detection. In this paper, an extended version of the approach is presented that adopts separate multipart foregrounds instead of a single prior foreground and performs the figure-ground color segmentation with each of the foregrounds. The multipart foregrounds include the parts of the head-shoulder shape and additional auxiliary foregrounds being optimized by a search algorithm. A classifier is constructed with the feature that consists of a set of the multiple resulting segmentations. Experimental results show that the presented method can discriminate more false positive than the single prior shape-based classifier as well as detectors with the local features. The improvement is possible because the presented approach can reduce the false positives that have the same colors in the head and shoulder foregrounds.

Keywords: Pedestrian detection, color segmentation, false positives, feature extraction.

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Authors: Abdulfatah Faraj Aboufayed

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Water erosion is the most important problems of the soil in the Jabel Nefusa area located in northwest of Libya; therefore, erosion station had been established in the Faculty of Veterinary and dryfarming research Station, University of the Al-japel Al-gharbi in Zentan. The length of the station is 72.6 feet, 6 feet width and the percentage of its slope is 3%. The station were established to measure the amount of soil eroded and amount of surface water produced during the seasons 95/96 and 96/97 from each rain storms. The monitoring shows that there was a difference between the two seasons in the number of rainstorms which made differences in the amount of surface runoff water and the amount of soil eroded between the two seasons. Although the slope is low (3%), the soil texture is sandy and the land ploughed twice during each season surface runoff and soil eroded were occurred. The average amount of eroded soil was 3792 grams (gr) per season and the average amount of surface runoff water was 410 liter (L) per season. The amount of surface runoff water would be much greater from Jebel Nefusa upland with steep slopes and collecting of them will save a valuable amount of water which lost as a runoff while this area is in desperate of this water. The regression analysis of variance show strong correlation between rainfall depth and the other two depended variable (the amount of surface runoff water and the amount of eroded soil. It shows also strong correlation between amount of surface runoff water and amount of eroded soil.

Keywords: Rain, Surface runoff water, Soil, Water erosion, Soil erosion.

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Authors: Zhanar Aldubasheva, Mukhtar Senggirbay, Elnura Assyltayeva

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The modern world is experiencing fundamental and dynamic changes. The transformation of international relations; the end of confrontation and successive overcoming of the Cold War consequences have expanded possible international cooperation. The global nuclear conflict threat has been minimized, while a tendency to establish a unipolar world structure with the U.S. economic and power domination is growing. The current world system of international relations, apparently is secular. However, the religious beliefs of one or another nations play a certain (sometimes a key) role, both in the domestic affairs of the individual countries and in the development of bilateral ties. Political situation in Central Asia has been characterized by new factors such as international terrorism; religious extremism and radicalism; narcotrafficking and illicit arms trade of a global character immediately threaten to peace and political stability in Central Asia. The role and influence of Islamic fundamentalism is increasing; political ethnocentrism and the associated aggravation of inter-ethnic relations, the ambiguity of national interests and objectives of major geo-political groups in the Central Asian region regarding the division the political influence, emerge. This article approaches the following issues: the role of Islam in Central Asia; destabilizing factors in Central Asia; Islamic movements in Central Asia, Western Europe and the United States; the United States, Western Europe and Central Asia: religion, politics, ideology, and the US-Central Asia antiterrorism and religious extremism cooperation.

Keywords: USA, Central Asia, religious conflict, terrorism, regional security.

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Authors: M. Adamczak-Retecka, O. Hołub-Śniadach

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Dangerous of climate change is now global problem and as such has a strategic priority also for the European Union. Europe and European citizens try to do their best to cut greenhouse gas emissions, moreover they substantially encourage other nations and regions to follow the same way. The European Commission and a number of Member States have developed adaptation strategies in order to help strengthen EU's resilience to the inevitable impacts of climate change. The EU has long been a driving force in international negotiations on climate change and was instrumental in the development of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. As the world's leading donor of development aid, the EU also provides substantial funding to help developing countries tackle climate change problem. Global warming influences human health, biodiversity, ecosystems but also many social and economic sectors. The aim of this paper is to focus on impact of claimant change on for food security. Food security challenges are directly related to globalization, climate change. It means that current and future food policy is exposed to all cross-cutting and that must be linked with environmental and climate targets, which supposed to be achieved. In the 7th EAP —The new general Union Environment Action Program to 2020, called “Living well, within the limits of our planet” EU has agreed to step up its efforts to protect natural capital, stimulate resource efficient, low carbon growth and innovation, and safeguard people’s health and wellbeing– while respecting the Earth’s natural limits.

Keywords: Climate change, EU law, food policy, food security.

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Authors: W. Y. Wan Fairos, W. H. Wan Azaki, L. Mohamad Alias, Y. Bee Wah

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Dengue fever has become a major concern for health authorities all over the world particularly in the tropical countries. These countries, in particular are experiencing the most worrying outbreak of dengue fever (DF) and dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF). The DF and DHF epidemics, thus, have become the main causes of hospital admissions and deaths in Malaysia. This paper, therefore, attempts to examine the environmental factors that may influence the recent dengue outbreak. The aim of this study is twofold, firstly is to establish a statistical model to describe the relationship between the number of dengue cases and a range of explanatory variables and secondly, to identify the lag operator for explanatory variables which affect the dengue incidence the most. The explanatory variables involved include the level of cloud cover, percentage of relative humidity, amount of rainfall, maximum temperature, minimum temperature and wind speed. The Poisson and Negative Binomial regression analyses were used in this study. The results of the analyses on the 915 observations (daily data taken from July 2006 to Dec 2008), reveal that the climatic factors comprising of daily temperature and wind speed were found to significantly influence the incidence of dengue fever after 2 and 3 weeks of their occurrences. The effect of humidity, on the other hand, appears to be significant only after 2 weeks.

Keywords: Dengue Fever, Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever, Negative Binomial Regression model, Poisson Regression model.

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Authors: Iqbal Hossain, Monzur Alam Imteaz, Mohammed Iqbal Hossain

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Estimation of stormwater pollutants is a pre-requisite for the protection and improvement of the aquatic environment and for appropriate management options. The usual practice for the stormwater quality prediction is performed through water quality modeling. However, the accuracy of the prediction by the models depends on the proper estimation of model parameters. This paper presents the estimation of model parameters for a catchment water quality model developed for the continuous simulation of stormwater pollutants from a catchment to the catchment outlet. The model is capable of simulating the accumulation and transportation of the stormwater pollutants; suspended solids (SS), total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) from a particular catchment. Rainfall and water quality data were collected for the Hotham Creek Catchment (HTCC), Gold Coast, Australia. Runoff calculations from the developed model were compared with the calculated discharges from the widely used hydrological models, WBNM and DRAINS. Based on the measured water quality data, model water quality parameters were calibrated for the above-mentioned catchment. The calibrated parameters are expected to be helpful for the best management practices (BMPs) of the region. Sensitivity analyses of the estimated parameters were performed to assess the impacts of the model parameters on overall model estimations of runoff water quality.

Keywords: Calibration, Model Parameters, Suspended Solids, TotalNitrogen, Total Phosphorus.

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Authors: ZerarkaHizia, Akchiche Mustapha, Prunier Florent

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Landslide of Ain El Hammam (AEH) has been an old slip since 1969; it was reactivated after an intense rainfall period in 2008 where it presents a complex shape and affects broad areas. The schist of AEH is more or less altered; the alteration is facilitated by the fracturing of the rock in its upper part, the presence of flowing water as well as physical and chemical mechanisms of desegregation in joint of altered schist. The factors following these instabilities are mostly related to the geological formation, the hydro-climatic conditions and the topography of the region. The city of AEH is located on the top of a steep slope at 50 km from the city of TiziOuzou (Algeria). AEH’s topographic monitoring of unstable slope allows analyzing the structure and the different deformation mechanism and the gradual change in the geometry, the direction of change of slip. It also allows us to delimit the area affected by the movement. This work aims to study the behavior of AEH landslide with topographic monitoring and to validate the results with numerical modeling of the slip site, when the hydraulic factors are identified as the most important factors for the reactivation of this landslide. With the help of the numerical code PLAXIS 2D and PlaxFlow, the precipitations and the steady state flow are modeled. To identify the mechanism of deformation and to predict the spread of the AEH landslide numerically, we used the equivalent deviatory strain, and these results were visualized by MATLAB software.

Keywords: Equivalent deviatory strain, landslide, numerical modeling, topographic monitoring.

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Authors: M. E. Ghobadi, M. Ghobadi

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Waterlogging reduces shoot and root growth and final yield of wheat. Waterlogged sites have a combination of low slope, high rainfall, heavy texture and low permeability. This study was aimed the importance of waterlogging on root growth and wheat yield. In order to study the effects of different waterlogging duration (0, 10, 20 and 30 days) at growth stages (1-leaf stage, tillering stage and stem elongation stage) on root growth of wheat cultivars (Chamran, Vee/Nac and Yavaroos), one pot experiment was carried out. The experiment was a factorial according to a RCBD with three replications. Results showed that root dry weight and total root length in the anthesis and grain ripening stages and biological and grain yields were significantly different between cultivars, growth stages and waterlogging durations. Vee/Nac was found superior with respect to other cultivars. Susceptibility to waterlogging at different growth stages for cultivars was 1-leaf stage > tillering stage > stem elongation stage. Under waterlogging treatments, grain and biological yields, were decreased 44.5 and 39.8%, respectively. Root length and root dry weight were reduced 55.1 and 45.2%, respectively, too. In this experiment, decrease at root growth because of waterlogging reduced grain and biological yields. Based on the results, even short period (10 days) of waterlogging had unrecoverable effects on the root growth and grain yield of wheat.

Keywords: Wheat, waterlogging, root length, root dry weight, grain yield.

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Authors: Oliver F. Shyr, Yu-Hsuan Hsiao, David E. Andersson

Abstract:

Due to the call of global warming effects, city planners aim at actions for reducing carbon emission. One of the approaches is to promote the usage of public transportation system toward the transit-oriented-development. For example, rapid transit system in Taipei city and Kaohsiung city are opening. However, until November 2008 the average daily patronage counted only 113,774 passengers at Kaohsiung MRT systems, much less than which was expected. Now the crucial questions: how the public transport competes with private transport? And more importantly, what factors would enhance the use of public transport? To give the answers to those questions, our study first applied regression to analyze the factors attracting people to use public transport around cities in the world. It is shown in our study that the number of MRT stations, city population, cost of living, transit fare, density, gasoline price, and scooter being a major mode of transport are the major factors. Subsequently, our study identified successful and unsuccessful cities in regard of the public transport usage based on the diagnosis of regression residuals. Finally, by comparing transportation strategies adopted by those successful cities, our conclusion stated that Kaohsiung City could apply strategies such as increasing parking fees, reducing parking spaces in downtown area, and reducing transfer time by providing more bus services and public bikes to promote the usage of public transport.

Keywords: Public Transit System, Comparative Study, Transport Demand Management, Regression

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Authors: Shahryar Shaghaghi G., Paria Violette Shakiba , Gholamreza Irani

Abstract:

Nowadays, the earth is countered with serious problem of air pollution. This problem has been started from the industrial revolution and has been faster in recent years, so that leads the earth to ecological and environmental disaster. One of its results is the global warming problem and its related increase in global temperature. The most important factors in air pollution especially in urban environments are Automobiles and residential buildings that are the biggest consumers of the fossil energies, so that if the residential buildings as a big part of the consumers of such energies reduce their consumption rate, the air pollution will be decreased. Since Metropolises are the main centers of air pollution in the world, assessment and analysis of efficient strategies in decreasing air pollution in such cities, can lead to the desirable and suitable results and can solve the problem at least in critical level. Tabriz city is one of the most important metropolises in North west of Iran that about two million people are living there. for its situation in cold dry climate, has a high rate of fossil energies consumption that make air pollution in its urban environment. These two factors, being both metropolis and in cold dry climate, make this article try to analyze the strategies of climatic design in old districts of the city and use them in new districts of the future. These strategies can be used in this city and other similar cities and pave the way to reduce energy consumption and related air pollution to save whole world.

Keywords: Air pollution, Urban Environment, Metropolis, Residential building, Fossil energies.

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Authors: Ichiro Mukai

Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether firms applying International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), provide high-quality and comparable earnings information that is useful for decision making of information users relative to firms applying local Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Focus is placed on the earnings quality of listed firms in several developed countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US). Except for Japan and the US, the adoption of IFRS is mandatory for listed firms in these countries. In Japan, the application of IFRS is allowed for specific listed firms. In the US, the foreign firms listed on the US securities market are permitted to apply IFRS but the listed domestic firms are prohibited from doing so. In this paper, the differences in earnings quality are compared between firms applying local GAAP and those applying IFRS in each country and industry category, and the reasons of differences in earnings quality are analyzed using various factors. The results show that, although the earnings quality of firms applying IFRS is higher than that of firms applying local GAAP, this varies with country and industry category. Thus, even if a single set of global accounting standards is used for all listed firms worldwide, it is difficult to establish comparability of financial information among global firms. These findings imply that various circumstances surrounding firms, industries, and countries etc. influence business operations and affect the differences in earnings quality.

Keywords: Accruals, earnings quality, IFRS, information comparability.

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Authors: George N. Zaimes, Valasia Iakovoglou, Paschalis Koutalakis, Konstantinos Ioannou, Ioannis Kosmadakis, Panagiotis Tsardaklis, Theodoros Laopoulos

Abstract:

The advancements in technology allow the development of a new system that can continuously measure surface soil erosion. Continuous soil erosion measurements are required in order to comprehend the erosional processes and propose effective and efficient conservation measures to mitigate surface erosion. Mitigating soil erosion, especially in Mediterranean countries such as Greece, is essential in order to maintain environmental and agricultural sustainability. In this paper, we present the Automated Soil Erosion Monitoring System (ASEMS) that measures surface soil erosion along with other factors that impact erosional process. Specifically, this system measures ground level changes (surface soil erosion), rainfall, air temperature, soil temperature, and soil moisture. Another important innovation is that the data will be collected by remote communication. In addition, stakeholder’s awareness is a key factor to help reduce any environmental problem. The different dissemination activities that were utilized are described. The overall outcomes were the development of a new innovative system that can measure erosion very accurately. These data from the system help study the process of erosion and find the best possible methods to reduce erosion. The dissemination activities enhance the stakeholders and public's awareness on surface soil erosion problems and will lead to the adoption of more effective soil erosion conservation practices in Greece.

Keywords: Soil management, climate change, new technologies, conservation practices.

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Authors: M. Kouhirostamkolaei, M. Kouhirostami, M. Sam, J. Woo, A. T. Asutosh, J. Li, C. Kibert

Abstract:

Construction is one of the most energy consumed activities in the urban environment that results in a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions around the world. Thus, the impact of the construction industry on global warming is undeniable. Thus, reducing building energy consumption and mitigating carbon production can slow the rate of global warming. The purpose of this study is to determine the amount of energy consumption and carbon dioxide production during the operation phase and the impact of using new shells on energy saving and carbon footprint. Therefore, a residential building with a re-enforced concrete structure is selected in Babolsar, Iran. DesignBuilder software has been used for one year of building operation to calculate the amount of carbon dioxide production and energy consumption in the operation phase of the building. The primary results show the building use 61750 kWh of energy each year. Computer simulation analyzes the effect of changing building shells -using XPS polystyrene and new electrochromic windows- as well as changing the type of lighting on energy consumption reduction and subsequent carbon dioxide production. The results show that the amount of energy and carbon production during building operation has been reduced by approximately 70% by applying the proposed changes. The changes reduce CO₂e to 11345 kg CO₂/yr. The result of this study helps designers and engineers to consider material selection’s process as one of the most important stages of design for improving energy performance of buildings.

Keywords: Construction materials, green construction, energy simulation, carbon footprint, energy saving, concrete structure, DesignBuilder.

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Authors: Mohd Aftar Abu Bakar, Noratiqah Mohd Ariff, Abdul Aziz Jemain

Abstract:

Storm Event Analysis (SEA) provides a method to define rainfalls events as storms where each storm has its own amount and duration. By modelling daily probability of different types of storms, the onset, offset and cycle of rainfall seasons can be determined and investigated. Furthermore, researchers from the field of meteorology will be able to study the dynamical characteristics of rainfalls and make predictions for future reference. In this study, four categories of storms; short, intermediate, long and very long storms; are introduced based on the length of storm duration. Daily probability models of storms are built for these four categories of storms in Peninsular Malaysia. The models are constructed by using Bernoulli distribution and by applying linear regression on the first Fourier harmonic equation. From the models obtained, it is found that daily probability of storms at the Eastern part of Peninsular Malaysia shows a unimodal pattern with high probability of rain beginning at the end of the year and lasting until early the next year. This is very likely due to the Northeast monsoon season which occurs from November to March every year. Meanwhile, short and intermediate storms at other regions of Peninsular Malaysia experience a bimodal cycle due to the two inter-monsoon seasons. Overall, these models indicate that Peninsular Malaysia can be divided into four distinct regions based on the daily pattern for the probability of various storm events.

Keywords: Daily probability model, monsoon seasons, regions, storm events.

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