Rd

This paper addresses the problem of optimal operation scheduling of an individual pumped-storage plant to participate in the energy and regulation markets simultaneously. The goal is achieving of the maximum expected profit when the plant participates in a day-ahead (DA) energy and regulation markets while all of the technical constraints are satisfied. This optimal operation scheduling problem is formulated and solved as a mixed integer programming (MIP) problem. Numerical results for a case study are discussed.

EVWUDFW How to design effective learning opportunities? Why is learning by experience often more efficient than learning by studying? How to provide the learning experiences needed to respond to current challenges? Using computer games and games in general for educational purposes offers a variety of knowledge presentations and creates opportunities to apply the knowledge within a virtual world, thus supporting and facilitating the learning process. An innovative education paradigm like game-based learning suitable for this purpose is described in this article. The connection of the collaborative social context of education with game-based learning is discussed.

The PCS flight apparatus was accommodated in the ISS EXPRESS Rack 2 and was remotely operated from the NASA Glenn Research Center's (GRC) Telescience Support Center in Cleveland, Ohio and at a remote site at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This sophisticated light scattering instrument is capable of imaging, and dynamic and static (D&S) light scattering from 11 to 169 degrees, Bragg scattering over the range from 10 to 60 degrees, and laser light scattering at low angles from 0.3 to 6.0 degrees. PCS was launched on 4/19/2001 on Space Shuttle STS-100. The experiment was activated on May 31, 2001. As of February 2002, PCS has accomplished around 1800 hours of onboard operation, during which, binary colloidal crystal alloys, crystal nucleation and growth and the resultant structures have been studied. The long duration microgravity environment in the ISS facilitated extended studies on the growth and coarsening characteristics of crystals. The de-mixing of the colloid- polymer critical-point sample was also studied as it phase-separates into two phases, one that resembles a gas and one that resembles a liquid. This behavior cannot be observed in the sample on Earth because sedimentation would cause the colloids to fall to the bottom of the cell faster than the de-mixing process could occur. Similarly, the study of aging of another colloid-polymer sample, the colloid-polymer gel, also provided valuable information. The investigations on the extremely slow, low concentration fractal gels gave the initial gelation rate over several days. Several exciting and microgravity unique aspects of these results will be discussed.

Dalam kehidupan sehari-hari, kita sering dihadapkan dengan masalah perhitungan. Sebagai contoh, sebuah Warung Tegal menyediakan menu yang terdiri dari 4 jenis makanan, yaitu Nasi Rawon (R), Nasi Soto (S), Nasi Pecel (P) dan Bakso (B) serta 3 jenis minuman, yaitu Es Jeruk (J), Es Teh (T) dan Es Degan (D). Masalahnya, berapa banyak macam hidangan yang berbeda jika dipilih dari satu jenis makanan dan satu jenis minuman? Masalah di atas merupakan salah satu contoh masalah diskrit yang biasa dipecahkan dengan cara mendata semua kemungkinan hidangan yang berbeda yang terdiri dari satu jenis makanan dan satu jenis minuman, yaitu:

he context of this research is the Department of Education, Science and Training's (DEST) initiative to introduce the Values Education Programme (VEP) into all Key Learning Areas (KLA)s. This paper reports on the first stages of a research project in progress aimed at exploring educationalists', teachers', and student teachers' perceptions and conceptions of the teaching of values in Brisbane secondary schools, in particular the idea of teaching or 'inculcating' students with 'values' as described in the DEST report. Interview transcripts were analysed using Leximancer and phenomenographic techniques. To date two major categories of description of conceptions of the VEP have been identified from the data pool, an institutionalisation discourse and a pragmatism discourse. Within these two major categories a dichotomy of conceptions exists. Key dimensions of the meaning that teaching the VEP holds for high school teachers show a primary focus towards: (1) teaching as a profession, being part of an institution; and (2) being a teacher, teaching strategies, students and their learning and development. The pilot study has identified nine categories of description, describing qualitatively different ways of understanding the VEP elicited from the various conceptions of teachers.

Consumers use both intrinsic and extrinsic cues when forming opinions regarding product quality. Research has shown that consumers are often unable to assess these cues accurately and may ignore product attributes that significantly influence product quality in favor of others that contribute little. Country-of-origin and price have been found to be examples of extrinsic cues repeatedly used by consumer to form product quality opinions, both before and after purchase.

Using the temperature calibration instrument, the purpose of this paper is to design the uncertainty calculation system. The test was conducted using Resistance Temperature Detector (RTD) sensor, transmitter, and repeated for three times. The data acquisition (DAQ) card is used to interface the temperature instrument and the computer. In order to determine the uncertainty of the temperature measurement, graphical user interface (GUI) software has been developed in Visual Basic(VB) programming language. The developed software shows that the uncertainty of the temperature transmitter measurement can be calculated by interfacing the instrument to the computer through DAQ card. The study focuses on manual temperature measurement and concentrates only on RTD temperature sensor. The results provide the confidence limits of five-point calibration of temperature transmitter that could improve the teaching techniques using computer-based system of the temperature measurement.

We received 18 submissions, and, given our limited capacity as a one-day workshop, we were only able to accept eight full papers for oral presentation: an acceptance rate of 44%. We further accepted four papers as posters. The regular papers were distributed in three sessions: Lexical Representation, Identification and Extraction, and Applications. The workshop also featured two invited talks, by Kyo Kageura and by Aravind K. Joshi, and a panel discussion.

A long-standing problem in Natural Language Processing has been a lack of large-scale knowledge for computers. The emergence of the Web and the rapid increase of information on the Web brought us to what could be called the "information explosion era," and drastically changed the environment of NLP. The Web is not only a marvelous target for NLP, but also a valuable resource from which knowledge could be extracted for computers. Motivated by the desire to have a very first opportunity to discuss early approaches to those issues and to share the state-of-the-art technologies at that time, the first International Workshop on NLP Challenges in the Information Explosion Era (NLPIX 2008) was successfully held in conjunction with WWW 2008 in Beijing.

Cutting fluids (CFs) in machining operations help to remove the heat generated during cutting; to achieve better tool life and surface finish and to facilitate the flushing of chips. On the other hand, machining without the use of any cutting fluid (dry) is becoming increasingly important due to concern regarding safety and environmental legislation. In the present paper we report the dry and wet machining of AISI 422 stainless steel rods on a CNC lathe. Cutting parameters were identical for both machining in order to achieve the direct comparison of the corresponding results. The main outputs monitored were the cutting tool temperature and the surface roughness. The influence of the main cutting parameters (cutting speed, feed and depth of cut) on the aforementioned outputs was studied.

The SHRIMP multicomputer provides virtual memorymapped communication (VMMC), which supports protected, user-level message passing, allows user programs to perform their own buer management, and separates data transfers from control transfers so that a data transfer can be done without the intervention of the receiving node CPU. An important question is whether such a mechanism can indeed deliver all of the available hardware performance to applications which use conventional message-passing libraries.

Consumers use both intrinsic and extrinsic cues when forming opinions regarding product quality. Research has shown that consumers are often unable to assess these cues accurately and may ignore product attributes that significantly influence product quality in favor of others that contribute little. Country-of-origin and price have been found to be examples of extrinsic cues repeatedly used by consumer to form product quality opinions, both before and after purchase.

Most existing solutions achieve this by matching structure of patterns corresponding to CFUs with sub-graphs of application data flow graphs. Often it happens that the computations performed by the two are equivalent, but due to structural dissimilarities the match is missed. What is needed is a method that can match two graphs functionally rather than structurally. In this paper, we present a novel method to do this and give implementation results to show its effectiveness.

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have gained a lot of interest in the world of medical monitoring. Current implementations generally use a large single hop network to connect all sensors to a personal server. However recent research pointed out that multihop networks are more energy-efficient and even necessary when applied near the human body with inherent severe propagation loss. In this paper we present a slotted multihop approach to medium access control and routing in wireless body area networks, the Wireless Autonomous Spanning tree Protocol or WASP. It uses crosslayer techniques to achieve efficient distributed coordination of the separated wireless links. Traffic in the network is controlled by setting up a spanning tree and by broadcasting scheme messages over it that are used both by the parent and the children of each node in the tree. We analyze the performance of WASP and show the simulation results.

It is almost 30 years since Morris Kline published his wide-ranging critique of undergraduate education in his book, "Why The Professor can't Teach" [1]. In 1999, Steve Krantz, in his book, "How to Teach Mathematics" [2] reported that academics were paying much more ...

Service-orientation represents a new wave of features and solutions by bringing closer information technology to the industrial domain, particularly factory shop floors. The service-oriented automation software entities (designated here by bots) used in such approach requires a short set of methodologies and software targeting their specification for both computer systems and embedded automation devices. The present work explains the adopted methodologies and software developments for the engineering of service-based ...

Abstract: How to design effective learning opportunities? Why is learning by experience often more efficient than learning by studying? How to provide the learning experiences needed to respond to current challenges? Using computer games and games in general for ...

This paper discusses our work on information extraction (IE) from multi-lingual, multi-media, multi-genre Language Resources, in a domain where there are many different event types. This work is being carried out in the context of MUMIS, an EU-funded project that aims at the development of basic technology for the creation of a composite index from multiple and multi-lingual sources. Our approach to IE relies on a £nite state machinery provided by GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering, pipelined with full syntactic analysis and discourse interpretation implemented in Prolog.

Coalition access control models are required in order to properly manage access to resources among different collaborating organizations. When these relationships are long term inter-organizational agreements and policies can be established that can satisfy appropriate access to the resources owned by those entities. When these coalitions are spontaneous access rights to resources among the parties in the coalition need to be specified by users and must be context dependant. A good example of this is in ad-hoc collaborative scenarios. Controlling access to private services being shared within the collaborative group is a challenge in these scenarios. This paper presents a semantic web approach in order to represent context that can be shared and used by a policy engine to form dynamic groups based on the context of the situation, as well as manage access to the private web services that each group introduces to the ad-hoc collaborative environment. The approach leverages the distributed policy framework (Rein) built on top of a rule-base reasoner (CWM).

This paper presents an analysis of the performance impact of two generic group communication APIs, namely Hedera and jGCS. The analysis was carried out in a four-node cluster by comparing the performance of different configurations of two well-known group communication middleware systems (i.e., JGroups and Spread), under different message sizes, both in standalone mode and when used as plug-ins for the two generic APIs. The results show that there are significant variations in the performance overhead imposed by each generic API on both JGroups and Spread, and that those differences are strongly related to variations in message size and the way each generic API is implemented. The paper also discusses whether it would be worth migrating from a standalone group communication implementation to a generic API.

We investigate the mechanism of drain disturb in SONOS flash memory cells. Our results show that drain disturb can be a serious concern in programmed state and is caused by injection of holes from substrate into the nitride. We identify the key factors responsible for this to be band-to-band tunneling at the drain junction and impact ionization of the channel leakage current.

Background: Latino adolescents, especially girls, experience higher obesity rates and are more likely to be physically unfıt than non-Latino white peers. Out-of-school programs to increase physical activity and fıtness in older Latino teens are critical, but sustained engagement is challenging.

... Embedded System Chihhsiong Shih1*, Chien-Ting Wu1, Cheng-Yao Lin1, Pao-Ann Hsiung2, Nien-Lin Hsueh3, Chih-Hung Chang4, Chorng-Shiuh Koong5, William C. Chu1 1Tunghai University, 2National Chung Cheng University, 3Feng Chia University, 4Hsiuping Institute of ...

The linear sampling method is a fast inversion technique for visualizing the profile of a scatterer from measurements of the far-field pattern. The mathematical result at the basis of this method is that, given a spatial grid of points covering the scatterer, for each grid point there is an approximate solution of a linear integral equation whose L norm blows up when the point approaches the boundary of the scatterer from inside and stays large when the point is outside the scatterer. According to a recent formulation, the linear sampling method requires the regularized solution of a single functional equation where the unique optimal value of the regularization parameter is fixed by means of the generalized discrepancy principle. Within this framework in this paper we first show that the introduction of an incompatibility measure in the generalized discrepancy function provides more reliable maps of the scatterer. Then we apply active contour techniques to the visualization maps in...

Service-orientation represents a new wave of features and solutions by bringing closer information technology to the industrial domain, particularly factory shop floors. The service-oriented automation software entities (designated here by bots) used in such approach requires a short set of methodologies and software targeting their specification for both computer systems and embedded automation devices. The present work explains the adopted methodologies and software developments for the engineering of service-based ...

Technology to the industrial domain, particularly factory shop floors. The service-oriented automation software entities (designated here by bots) used in such approach requires a short set of methodologies and software targeting their specification for both computer systems and embedded automation devices. The present work explains the adopted methodologies and software developments for the engineering of service-based automation systems. The main contents focus on the specification of a framework for the development of bots and supporting engineering tools that are part of the Continuum project. The paper also does an overview over the engineering steps from the system design to the operation, and focuses the importance of the maintenance of automation bots. Such applications will contribute to decrease the development time and reduce the components' interdependency, offering enough flexibility for automatic reconfiguration of shop-floor layouts.

Abstract The effect of changing the image resolution over a biometric system based on hand geometry is analyzed in this paper. Image resolution is progressively diminished from an initial 120 dpi resolution up to 24 dpi. The robustness of the examined system is analyzed with 2 databases and two identifiers. The first database acquires the images of the hand underneath whereas the second database acquires the images over the hand. The first classifier identifies with a multiclass support vector machine whereas the second classifier ...

Abstract Hardware co-processors are used for accelerating specific compute-intensive tasks dedicated to video/audio codec, encryption/decryption, etc. Since many of these data-processing tasks already have efficient software algorithms, one could reuse those to synthesize the co-processor IPs. However, such software algorithms are usually sequential and written in C/C++. High-level Synthesis (HLS) helps in converting software implementation to register transfer level (RTL) hardware design. Such co-processor based ...

In VLSI interconnect buffers are used to restore the signal level affected by the parasitics. However buffers have a certain switching time that contributes to overall signal delay. Further the transitions that occur in interconnects also contribute to crosstalk delay. Thus the overall delay in interconnects is due to combined effect of both buffer and crosstalk delay. In this work a replacement of buffers with Schmitt trigger is proposed for the same purpose of signal restoration. Due to lower threshold voltage of Schmitt trigger signal can rise early and the large noise margin of Schmitt trigger helps in reducing the noise glitches as well. Simulation results shows that the Schmitt trigger approach gives 20% delay reduction as compared to 10.4% in case of buffers.

This paper deals with the Signature Data Formats proposed by ISO 19794 project: 19794 part 7 Full Format and Compact Format (published in 2007) and the new 19794 part 11, which is under development. It will be shown how these formats handle the raw data coming from a Signature Input Device, and what the size of a Biometric Information Record is for each one.

Background: Insertion of a ventriculoperitoneal shunt (VPS) for the treatment of hydrocephalus is one of the most common neurosurgical procedures in the UK, but failures caused by infection occur in approximately 8% of primary cases. VPS infection is associated with considerable morbidity and mortality and its management results in substantial cost to the health service. Antibiotic-impregnated (rifampicin and clindamycin) and silver-impregnated VPS have been developed to reduce infection rates. Whilst there is some evidence showing that such devices may lead to a reduction in VPS infection, there are no randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to support their routine use. Methods/design: Overall, 1,200 patients will be recruited from 17 regional neurosurgical units in the UK and Ireland. Patients of any age undergoing insertion of their first VPS are eligible. Patients with previous indwelling VPS, active and ongoing cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) or peritoneal infection, multiloculated hydrocephalus requiring multiple VPS or neuroendoscopy, and ventriculoatrial or ventriculopleural shunt planned will be excluded. Patients will be randomised 1:1:1 to either standard silicone (comparator), antibiotic-impregnated, or silver-impregnated VPS. The primary outcome measure is time to VPS infection. Secondary outcome measures include time to VPS failure of any cause, reason for VPS failure (infection, mechanical failure, or patient failure), types of bacterial VPS infection (organism type and antibiotic resistance), and incremental cost per VPS failure averted. Discussion: The British antibiotic and silver-impregnated catheters for ventriculoperitoneal shunts multi-centre randomised controlled trial (the BASICS trial) is the first multi-centre RCT designed to determine whether antibiotic or silver-impregnated VPS reduce early shunt infection compared to standard silicone VPS. The results of this study will be used to inform current neurosurgical practice and may potentially benefit patients undergoing shunt surgery in the future. Trial registration: International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number: ISRCTN49474281.

Regular lidar operation and data acquisition were done in Manila at the Manila Observatory (14.64N, 121.07E) , Ateneo de Manila University from 1997 to 1998. These years coincided with the occurrence of the El Niño episode that started in the first quarter of 1997 and ended in the first half of 1998. From the lidar data gathered during this time interval, the optical depth of clouds was measured using Klett’s algorithm [1]. The results showed that the computed average cloud optical depth values in 1998 were 7% to 76% smaller compared to 1997 values. The smaller values can be deduced as the effect of the El Niño event based on the rainfall rate and southern oscillation index (SOI) data.

In this study photocatalytic oxidation of toluene, used as model VOCs in the gas phase on different types of Ti-based catalytic materials was investigated. The objective of this work was to find out additional information regarding activity and stability of catalyst during photocatalytic treatment of the polluted air. Two designs of the photoreactor were used: classical type of an annular reactor and annular reactor with recirculation. All measurements were performed at room temperature, atmospheric pressure and at constant initial toluene concentration, relative humidity and total flow rate of the reaction mixture. Some experiments were carried out with catalysts thermally treated on different temperatures (350–450 °C). It was found out that thermal treatment of deactivated photocatalyst at higher temperature is efficient method of TiO2 reactivation. According to results presented in this paper problem of catalyst deactivation can be partially solved by using annular reactor with r...

We discuss the possibility to link the lexicon of an NLP system with a formal ontology in an attempt to construct a semantic analyzer of natural language texts. The work is carried out on the material of sports news published in Russian media.

The aim of this paper is to present the results of a study, conducted at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, to improve the aggregate interlock equation used in the mechanistic design software, cncPave. It was identified that the previous relationship modelling the mechanism of concrete joints in shear (aggregate interlock) was not accurate, especially for the smaller sized coarse aggregates used in the construction of concrete pavements. A main objective of the study was to investigate existing methods for modelling aggregate interlock shear transfer efficiency and use that as the basis to develop a mechanistic model simulating variations in joint load transfer efficiency with joint opening, load magnitude, subbase characteristics, and concrete aggregate properties. A secondary objective was to investigate the difference in pavement response to static and moving impulse or dynamic loads (equivalent to traffic loads) in terms of deflections across the joint in the pavement. The specific contribution of the study to the improvement of the aggregate interlock equation used in the new mechanistic concrete pavement design method, cncPave, is highlighted in the paper. Some of the conclusions reached after interpretation of experimental results were that the deflection load transfer efficiency was greater during dynamic than static loading, and that larger maximum sized coarse aggregates in the concrete mix (37.5 mm) had lower deflections at the same crack width than smaller sized coarse aggregates (19 mm).

Abstract The collaborative project management is becoming popular in West. China is acutely aware of the need to improve its management skills in all field. Collaborative project management are developed for better dealing with those complex projects that often consist of many dissimilar, highly interdependent components and involve many different disciplines. This paper reports on recent study the aim of which was to apply the collaborative project management in preconstruction planning, in which an analytical ...

In this paper, we propose a method for cars to autonomously and cooperatively collect traffic jam statistics to estimate arrival time to destination for each car using intervehicle communication. In the method, the target geographical region is divided into areas, and each car measures time to pass through each area. Traffic information is collected by exchanging information between cars using inter-vehicle communication. In order to improve accuracy of estimation, we introduce several mechanisms to avoid same data to be repeatedly counted. Since wireless bandwidth usable for exchanging statistics information is limited, the proposed method includes a mechanism to categorize data, and send important data prior to other data. In order to evaluate effectiveness of the proposed method, we implemented the method on a traffic simulator NETSTREAM developed by Toyota Central R&D Labs, conducted some experiments and confirmed that the method achieves practical performance in sharing traffic jam information using inter-vehicle communication.

We received 18 submissions, and, given our limited capacity as a one-day workshop, we were only able to accept eight full papers for oral presentation: an acceptance rate of 44%. We further accepted four papers as posters. The regular papers were distributed in three sessions: Lexical Representation, Identification and Extraction, and Applications. The workshop also featured two invited talks, by Kyo Kageura and by Aravind K. Joshi, and a panel discussion.