Securities are sure a safe way to earn public trust to invest their money in various securities with different risks and also to collect small investments which alone cannot be exploited but can be used in order to provide a large capital for economic development. The sensitivity of stock exchanges towards the price trend has caused the developments regarding this phenomenon to be closely analyzed. In recent years different models have been used by researchers for predicting stock price, and since the artificial intelligence techniques, including neural networks, genetics algorithm and fuzzy logic have been successful in solving complex problems, more models have been based on this method. \nThe purpose of this research is to observe if there is a way to combine the artificial intelligence techniques to create a model that compared to other linear and nonlinear methods, predicts the stock price (Tehran Stock Exchange from 2006 to 2009- Iran Khodro Co.) with less error rate. In the research the combination of artificial intelligence techniques, including neural network, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithm have been used to foresee the stock price; and this hybrid model has been compared to other neural network methods as another artificial intelligence and linear model (ARIMA), considering MSE, MAPE, MAE, R2 criteria. The research results show that the hybrid model is preferable comparing to other models surveyed.

This study proposes a water resources linking issue of system infrastructures, environmental change, water allocation, assessment of water requirement, flow measurement and responsibility of stakeholders. The study presents the field activities in the pilot project of Nam Houm Irrigation Scheme, Laos PDR to update information by undertaking field observation, interviewing stakeholder and collecting data. It is found from the results that water requirement is appraised using all parameters conducted in the fields. Those parameters are described as follows; evaporation, ETo, rainfall, crop coefficient, evapotranspiration, percolation, identify actual planted area, cropping pattern and crop calendar. The project water management appraisal was conducted including stakeholders involved in water management in the project (organization chart, responsibility of stakeholders, level of water management). Water allocation plan is made for dry- season cultivation, but not provided for wet season cultivation. However, the plan is fixed with few changes to the piratical situation of water allocation and actual water requirement in each cultivation stage. An active monitoring of water allocation was also not found in the project. Based on observation on water allocation practice, the reservoir is operated mainly for dry season cultivation, but rarely operated during the wet season cultivation, except land preparation and transplanting and dry spell of the rain. The constraints of the project can be summarized as follows; limited budget, limited funds, limited experience and capability of staff, poor condition of irrigation infrastructures, insufficient vehicles to facilitate work, weakness in water user groups (WUGs) functioning. The results of the focal group discussions and interviews show that the main problems in the area are low production, insufficient water supply and high cost of production. The suggestion to improve this situation includes the provision or introduction of improved farming technology through training and extension and improved water management. The recommended solutions include strengthening of WUGs through intensive education and involvement of membership improves financial transparency and strict implementation of roles, rules and regulations (RRR). Solving poor condition of irrigation facilities can be done by repairing irrigation canals and structures, strict implementation of the RRR and increase of repair funds through better Irrigation Service Fees (ISF) collection.

Gated communities appear as one of the new urban forms and trends in modern settlements. In general it referred to the communities ‘forting up’ in order to provide refuge from crime. In Malaysia, gated community problem does not only revolve around the issue of social and physical planning in short term impact but most importantly in long term impact. In response to this the state has amended the related legislations and introduced new guidelines to control the emergence of this trend of residential development. This study addresses critical questions around the issue of residents’ motivation, and the roles of the residents association in the guarded neighborhoods development. Using Klang Valley as case study, the findings conclude that the safety and security has become a main reason for residents to live in guarded neighborhood development. Thus, the roles of the resident association are significantly important to create a high quality of life within neighborhood area. However, a wider holistic approach needs to be considered looking at the social and physical impacts towards people living both inside and outside the community which warrant greater role by the state. The study concludes that to create harmonious of living, the community (residents and the resident association) must play their role well apart from maintaining their own neighbourhood with the guidance from the state.

This study used the Partial Least Squares (PLS) techniques to examine the impact of entrepreneurial orientation on the overall organizational performance through the enhancement of entrepreneurial culture. In other words, it measures the role of entrepreneurial orientation in the development of the entrepreneurial organizational culture that helps organizations to explore and exploit new and risky business opportunities. This study reviewed the literature related to the interaction between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and organizational performance for the model development. The developed model was tested using the data collected from the Yemeni banking industry. The statistical results confirmed the positive impact of entrepreneurial orientation and entrepreneurial organizational culture on the organizational performance. In addition to that, the results confirmed that the entrepreneurial organizational culture partially mediates the impact of entrepreneurial orientation on organizational performance. The findings of this study might be of value for researchers and policy makers since it contributes in explaining how various implemented strategies or practices can affect, and be affected, by the organizational culture.

Problem statement: This research is to present the crack initiation prediction for perforated plate at elevated temperature in fatigue testing based on the inelastic behavior of both methods as Neuber’s law and Stress Redistribution Locus (SRL) method. Approach: The specimens are made from stainless steel (SUS304). The temperature is kept to be 550°C. The geometries of specimens are changed by diameter size of holes. The Neuber’s law and the SRL method are used to predict the cycle number of crack initiation (Nc) and the cycle number to failure (Nf) for perforated plate. Results: The results demonstrated the prediction method for strain amplitude is employed by the proposed method of the Neuber’s law and the SRL method under strain range of 0.5 and 0.3%. The prediction trend by the SRL method is more accurate for prediction the crack initiation of perforate plate than that the Neuber’s law. Conclusion: However, the selection of accurate and appropriate method for prediction is benefit in cost reduction for used material in design and construction.

Earthquake characteristics have prevailing effects on damage state of RC buildings. Earthquake characteristics are generally influenced by many factors. Among these factors, Peak Ground Acceleration and frequency contents are considered the two main factors that have dominant effects on the seismic response of structures and consequently their damage state. The present study presents a detailed investigation on the combined effects of these two factors on damage assessment of RC buildings. Twenty one earthquake records are analyzed and sorted into groups, according to their frequency contents. These records are used in a comprehensive investigation to define the expected damage state that would be attained by RC buildings, if subjected to varying ground motion characteristics. The structural damage assessment is conducted through examining drift ratios and damage indices of the overall structure as well as of the significant structural components of RC building. Other significant seismic design parameters such as base and story shear are also assessed for the varying ground motion characteristics. Nonlinear dynamic analyses are performed on a 2-dimensional model of a 12-story R.C. building.

Essential work of fracture (EWF) approach was used to evaluate the fracture toughness of uPVC film. It was found that the specific essential work of fracture, (we) is independent of specimen width, specimen gauge length, loading rate and test temperature, but dependent on the geometry of the test specimens. Test temperature and geometry were the only testing parameters affecting the specific non-essential work of fracture (βwp) in a very significant way. This approach has proved to be capable of determining toughness and to illustrate the crack grow from DENT specimen. This difference was confirmed by the high ductility and the development of the necking zone at the crack tip under two different conditions (Plan strain and plane stress). The present work is aimed at studying the response and ligament length effects on the fracture behaviour of a amorphous polyvinyl chloride - Pipe. The evaluation of toughness under plane stress conditions was performed by this method. The results are examined and discussed in terms of recent developments.

The cloud computing is a technology for retrieving the services from various heterogeneous resources which are available at the centralized location. The problem of cloud computing is not a standard way of accessing a cloud service from the cloud environment i.e., different Cloud Service Providers have different services. The previous work is focused on the service separation among the cloud services in order to provide the quality service to the Cloud Service Users. Later the interoperability is implemented over the software applications which are used to provide the quality of services to the Cloud Service Users. Various deployment models are used for those software applications they are private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud and community cloud. The interoperability can be implemented over community cloud because some of the CSP share the services. The features are extracted from software application of various CSP by using the feature extractor then it is stored into the storage. The extracted features are collectively sent to the feature deployment model. The Cloud Service User can select the suitable services and sends the request to the cloud. This paper focuses on the features of the Software as a Service (SaaS) with common feature deployment model. The cloud service features are evaluated using various method of evolutionary computing. The fuzzy logic rules can give the prediction of cloud service selection with interoperability. In future this work can be extended to the Platform and Infrastructure Level.

This paper reports studies related to problems of inner surface corrosion of the closed-loop oscillating heat-pipe with check valves (CLOHP/CV). The main objective of the work was to obtain basic information and understanding of the corrosion behaviour of the CLOHP/CV using distilled water and ethanol as working fluid over a range of relevant operation conditions on the working temperature was 200 °C. The CLOHP/CV made of copper tubes with an inner diameter of 2.03 mm. In the run times of the experiments were 500, 1000 and 3000 hours. The investigation included scanning electron microscopy (SEM), flame atomic absorption spectroscopy (Flame-AAS) tested to observe the inner surfaces of the CLOHP/CV and checked the copper solution in the working fluids. The results show that duration of testing was 3000 hours; it can be found a characteristic was corrosion of the CLOHP/CV was clearly. And the concentration of copper particle in the amount of ethanol as working fluid at duration of testing was 3000 hours found that the copper tube had the most corrosive concentration was 18.57228 ppm or 0.408590 mg. And the risen reaction in the tube found Non-condensable gas (NCG) that when the over duration time pass 1000 hours NCG will drop and it was no effect with inner corrosion.

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is an important research topic in image processing. In this paper, an efficient relevance feedback content based image retrieval technique is proposed, based on colour, texture, shape and pattern. The RGB input image is converted into three different colour spaces (HSV, YCbCr and Lab colour space). The statistical colour features (mean, variance and skewness) are extracted from the above colour spaces. The fuzzy texture unit is determined by extracting the local texture information from each pixel. This context does not refer to the shape of an image, but to the shape of a particular (edge) region that is determined by Effective Robust Kernel based FCM (ERKFCM) segmentation. The pattern features are generated from the input image. This proposed system focuses on increasing the accuracy of the retrieval of the images from the Berkeley database based on colour, texture, shape and pattern for an input query. This process takes three stages. In the first stage, the features are extracted with respect to colour, texture, shape and pattern from the query image. Then, similarity measure using Euclidean distance is done between the features obtained from the query image and Berkeley database. Finally, Relevance Feedback mechanism has been adopted to improve the accuracy of image retrieval. Precision and Recall ratio is improved through the increase of iterations of Relevance Feedback.

This paper presents an improved ant colony optimization (IACO) for solving the reliability redundancy allocation problem (RAP) in order to maximize system reliability. To improve the performance of ACO algorithm, two additional techniques, i.e. neighborhood search, and re-initialization process are presented. To show its efficiency and effectiveness, the proposed IACO is applied to solve three RAPs. Additionally, the results of the proposed IACO are compared with those of the conventional heuristic approaches i.e. genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and ant colony optimization (ACO). The experimental results show that the proposed IACO approach is comparatively capable of obtaining higher quality solution and faster computational time.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is part of the emerging carbon market and aims to achieve both sustainable development in developing countries and cost-effective reduction of greenhouse gasses (GHG) in developed countries. The developing countries have the potential to undermine the effectiveness of any reduction outcomes undertaken in developing countries and in turn, will give advantages and opportunities in production cost over those in the developed countries. The mechanism is expected to not just benefit economically but environmentally and socially which mean if properly organized help to achieve sustainable development agenda. The paper facilitates a discussion and to assess the state of knowledge on the CDM implementation in Malaysia and how the CDM contribute to sustainable development (SD). The objective of this paper is hence, to examine the Malaysian context in terms of determining the effectiveness of application of CDM implementation in a developing country context. Reviews from previous literature and related government documents in data collection will be a source to provide further exploration on data analysis and will provide solution in this paper.

Clustering is the most important exploratory data analysis method widely used in many real time applications. Most of the clustering algorithms proved their efficiency in solving different kind of problems for various data sets. Partition based algorithms are simple to implement in order to test its performance and its clustering quality. This research work analyses about the performance of two of such algorithms namely k-Means and Fuzzy C-Means. The performance comparison is carried out by arbitrarily distributed data points. Different shapes of arbitrarily distributed data points are given as input to the algorithms and number of data points in each cluster and time complexity is the output of the algorithms. The comparison study is observed from the computational time between two algorithms. The experimental results show that the performance of k-Means algorithm is better than the Fuzzy C-Means algorithm.

Scouting is an actively practiced movement and currently performed in 216 countries by 40 million individuals. This research has been carried out in the 2010 Anatolian International Scout Camp which was held in Turkey. The primary purpose of the research is to determine Scouts’ expectations and satisfaction levels. A total of 239 scouts, between the ages of 10 and 20, participated in the study. The research survey includes 35 questions. The level of significance is assumed as 0.05. The findings demonstrate that according to the scouts participating in the research scout camps improve social skills, knowledge of nature, and physical education. Secondly, the scouts indicated that scout camps help them make new friends and expressed their intention to come back to scouting camps in the future.

Nowadays the physical structure of the psychiatric centers in urmia doesn’t meet the needs of mentally patients. On the other hand the buildings of these centers in this city have substantial and comparable difference with existing centers in Tehran and advanced countries in terms of methods, new standards in design and interior design. The reason is that the existing centers are not designed for this performance and most of the centers are buildings with different performance which government has provided for welfare organization. these buildings lack the physical principles for this performance. Paying attention to mentally patients has significant importance for authorities. Providing appropriate care environment in order to hospitalize these patients are main concerns of mental health practitioners. The goal of designing psychotherapy centers is not only treatment and maintenance of patients and providing health care but also providing spiritual needs of users. Great importance should be given to design appropriate psychiatric centers according to feeling and understanding of patients which meet their material and spiritual needs. \nLooking at past history suggests that psychiatric patients were home with primary and incomplete tools. But nowadays respect to psychiatric patients\' right and design psychiatric centers suit the patients is very important. In this study we have discussed about architecture for psychiatric patients. Principles and criteria of design , the structure of psychiatric centers, interior decoration, safety and security considerations, designing building based on climate. The aim of this study is to create appropriate treatment, relaxed and friendly environment for the patient not afraid of being in this place and come to this center to become healthy with his own will.

This paper aims to propose a theoretical framework to study third party logistics provider (3PLs) changing role towards sustainable service offerings in product returns management. Reverse logistics (RL) and closed loop supply chains (CLSCs) are the latest emerging concept that can help firms to achieve their sustainability objectives. Firms with or without RL and CLSCs capabilities may outsource several or full activities from 3PLs. Nonetheless, firms are still facing limited service coverage from 3PLs and that are forcing them to source the service from other multiple service providers. Through role changes as a service ‘orchestrator’, appropriate full services with the best practices at the maximum efficiencies in RL and CLSCs are expected to be served to customers. Customers on the other hand can reap the benefits by having to deal its supply chain as a single entity so that the focus of building the efficiency will be much easier and effective.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of wheat production on economic growth. The manuscript questions the economic growth exogenous models. It introduces new proxies to explain the economic growth as wheat production, foreign direct investment and globalization index. The results indicate that economic growth is a dynamic process. The wheat production has a positive impact on economic growth. This paper confirms relevant theoretical hypothesis as foreign direct investment and globalization promote the economic growth.

In rice cropping systems in irrigated-type environments have been reducing the frequency of old cultivar in a shift to modern cultivar because severity lodging especially in high nitrogen rates. The focus of this paper is the nitrogen uptake, nitrogen content and nitrogen use efficiency between nitrogen rates in environments of North Iran with summer-dominant warm in different time of CCC application. Our aims were to (i) rice grain yield response to nitrogen rates and different time of CCC application, (ii) explain yield response in terms of efficiency in the use of nitrogen, and (iii) assess nitrogen uptake, nitrogen content and nitrogen use efficiency. We used in split experiment combining nitrogen rates and time of CCC application treatments. Addition of 46–92 kg of nitrogen increased seed nitrogen uptake between 14 and 22 kg ha−1compared to control that only received the background soil nitrogen. Nitrogen uptake gain from additional nitrogen input in straw increased from 10 kg ha−1 to 13 when the nitrogen increased from 0 to 46 and 92 kg ha−1. The effect of nitrogen rates on agronomical nitrogen efficiency, recovery nitrogen efficiency, nitrogen harvest index and partial factor productivity nitrogen efficiency at 1% probability level were affected by nitrogen rates and differences was significant. Therefore, nitrogen harvest index, agronomical nitrogen efficiency and recovery nitrogen efficiency had decreased with additional nitrogen supply.

Monte Carlo techniques have been widely used in medical radiation physics, because of the availability of powerful codes such as ETRAN/ITS/MCNP and EGS family radiation transport codes and massive increase in the computing power over last decades. Despite all the advantages of the Monte Carlo, it is still a time-consuming technique. An improved method used in this study to speed up the Monte Carlo calculations. The MCNP4C Monte Carlo code used to assimilate the 9MV photon beam of a Neptune10PC medical linear accelerator. Two different models developed in this study. The first model includes the electron beam specifications, target, and backing plate. This model used to earn the energy and angular distribution under the target. The second model was a restored photon source model. In which the photon energy spectrum and angular distribution of the first model used for specifying the photon source. The photon fluence under the target calculated by this method and showed an excellent agreement with the SSW/SSR method. The calculated dose profiles earned by the developed method benchmarked against our measured data. The agreement between the calculated and measured data was excellent with a calculation error less than 1%. This method increased significantly (19 times) the speed of the calculation time of the dose profile of the 9MV photon beam. In a reasonable run time, to trace 109 photon histories was achievable by this method

This paper carries out an approach as concerns more issues related to private retiring pensions’ funds. For the beginning, the current level of covering the private retiring pensions is analyzed. Then, the levels of expenditures are emphasized, as regards the benefits payment, as well as the exploitation expenditures and the method of their financing, by the cashed in commissions. The last part of the paper is dedicated to the assets assignment of the private retiring pension diagrams.

Performance appraisal has been in research for last many decades. The core aim\nof performance appraisal, as agreed upon, is to check the level of objectives that has been\nachieved. Performance appraisal is not only to meet these objectives, but to change\nperformance goals, reward system, feedback process to achieve performance objectives\nand appraisal goals. This study aims to examine the performance appraisal system\nthrough its determinants and its ultimate consequence on the effectiveness of\nperformance appraisal under the moderating effect of individual five big personality traits\nin the banking sector of Pakistan. Most of the empirical studies in effectiveness of\nperformance appraisal (EPA) have given less attention to moderating role of personality\ntraits on effectiveness of performance appraisal, and has only considered the relationships\namong employees’ performance and organizational goal achievements. This research hits\nthe question that how determinants of performance appraisal contribute toward the\nperformance appraisal system and how it leaves it consequences on the effectiveness of\nperformance appraisal if five big personality traits are used as moderator between them.\nThis study suggests a model to test relationship of facets of performance appraisal system\nand their contribution to effectiveness of performance appraisal system, through\nmoderation of personality traits. It is purely a conceptual paper using literary base to\nexplain the proposed relationship of variables.

The objective of this study is to identify the relationship between macroeconomic variables and the impact of these variables in return on total stocks. Thus we considered economic fluctuation of five important variables on risks and return on total stocks of companies admitted in Tehran stock exchange in cement, petrochemical and automotive industries from 1998 to 2011. Hypotheses were tested by convergence relationships and model of return on stocks-inflation. The methodology of the study is modeling based on time and cross sectional series. Results indicate that there is no significant relationship between risks and return on total stocks and variables of gross domestic product, currency rate, rate of consumer price in the studied industries.

Researchers have done extensive work on ownership structures including family ownership. But the question how family ownership impacts the performance of the firm by influencing debt agency problem is still debatable. This study investigates the impact of family ownership and agency cost of debt in case of Pakistan. Hence this study answers the question that whether debtholders’ interest is protected in the firms owned by family or not in Pakistan. Agency cost of debt is measured by two proxies; proportion of firm assets not tied in fix plant & equipment and Liquidity of firm assets. By using fix effect and random effect technique of generalized least square regression on sample of 100 manufacturing firms listed in Karachi Stock Exchange in period of 2006-2010, we document that family ownership, ownership of blockholders and leverage reduces the agency cost of debt whereas profitability raises it. Our study is useful for investors as well as debtholders also. Practical implications of findings are that debtholders may grant the debt to the firms owned by family members without fear because such firms have least debt agency problem. Similarly investors who want long-term performance of the firm may invest in firms owned by families because such firms try to maintain long-term performance.

This paper attempts to investigate the influence of earning management on the value-relevance of the book value and the earning-to-market value. The sum of the discretionary accruals, including both short and long-term, has been considered as the source of the earning. Besides, in order to evaluate the different influences of any earning management sources within accepted companies in Tehran’s Stock Exchange. the models of Jones (1991) and Woolen (2004) have been employed. The results of the hypotheses testing indicate that the earning management through the sum of the discretionary accruals, reduces all the three earning relevance indices of such items, but it has no effect upon the relevance of the book value. By the same token, earning management through the long-term discretionary accruals has the same amount of influence upon the relevance of the book value, as does earning management through the short-term discretionary accruals.

In this paper, we employed the Optimal Homotopy Asymptotic Method (OHAM) to find the approximate solution of fifth order linear and nonlinear boundary value problems. The approximate solution using OHAM is compared with the exact solution and excellent agreement has been found. This indicates that OHAM is effective for solving high order linear and nonlinear boundary value problems. Several examples are given to verify the reliability and efficiency of the suggested method.

This paper presented direct effects and indirect effects on job productivity. Determinants that had either a direct or indirect effect on job productivity were financial management, financial stress level, financial problem, and financial behavior. A total of 2000 respondents, were selected using multi-stage sampling technique among employees in public and private sectors in the study. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was conducted by using AMOS 16.0 to assess factors affects on job productivity. The results of this study can be used for better understanding on the relationships between and among determinants of job productivity by highlighting the relationships among financial problem, financial behaviors, financial stress, and financial management. This research found that financial problem will lead to financial stress and further affect job productivity negatively. These results depict the general concern of managers for low employee productivity is due to high financial stress of employee. Moreover the concern over financial problems and productivity is critical due to the increased financial difficulties and uncertainty in the workplace. Further, the research findings of this study specifically revealed that individuals who exhibit lower financial problem tend to have lower financial stress, and therefore, higher workplace productivity. This observed evidence should be utilized by human resource managers, employers, and employees to encourage the development of financial education within the private and public corporate.

The purpose is to design a structure with predictable performance for different types of earthquake, so that the performance of the structure can be chosen on the basis of its purpose. In seismic evaluation of a concrete structure, its behavior, particularly plastic behavior in the effect of earthquake, is studied. For this purpose, seismic requirement parameter is compared to the capacity parameter of the structure. In the capacity spectrum method, it is necessary to determine of performance purpose of the structure, the Capacity Curve of the structure, and the performance point of the structure. The new building codes, unlike the old codes, consider certain criteria for obtaining the desired performance for the structure, by taking into account the level of earthquake hazard. According to these codes, a structure is designed on the basis of the performance of the structural and nonstructural elements. For example, in FEMA code, the performance requirements include prevention of complete collapse, security for human life, immediate settlement, and functionality after the earthquake. In this paper, two hospitals in Mazandaran state were studied and their performances were obtained accordance of Iran code. Results show that structures that design in recent year have Immediate Occupancy but older structures are in life safety level.

This study aims to derive the key factors of agricultural efficiency for European countries. It focuses on the efficiency of EU countries together with Turkey. In the first stage Data Envelopment Analysis and Malmquist Index are used to derive efficiency scores and the Total Productivity Change in time for 24 countries between 1993 and 2006. The panel data tobit regression is employed in the second stage to assess the key factors explaining the observed variations in the efficiency levels. Four governance indicators namely, voice and accountability, control of corruption, government effectiveness and regulatory quality and agricultural exports, education, research and development expenditures are analyzed in this stage whether effective on agricultural efficiency or not. Findings show that the average efficiency of EU countries between 1993 and 2006 was slightly increased. The impact of voice and accountability, the share of R&D in GDP and the share of food products in exports upon the agricultural efficiency are positive whereas the impacts of the share of GDP allocated to education upon agricultural efficiency is negative.

This paper develops the model for evaluating reliability of oil circuit breaker (OCB) subject to multiple competing failure processes during operation period. Two independent degradation processes are studied, namely: the wear out of the circuit breaker contacts and the aged insulation oil, the third one is the random shocks associated to the strong solicitations of the OCB. A particular interest is given to this component, regarding its design, its dangerous failure and the possibility of implementing several types of degradations. The degradation paths are modeled by two continuous probabilistic functions; applicable to power system components. These functions help to predict the degradation state probabilities of electrical components under various operating conditions such as; electrical, thermal and ambient (due to the associated environment) stresses. The aim is to determine both dynamic reliability and state probabilities upon the mission time of the oil circuit breaker.

A method is presented that a cascaded H-Bridge multilevel inverter can be implemented using unequal dc power sources and less number of switches. A standard cascade multilevel inverter requires h dc sources for 2h + 1 levels. Proposed scheme allows less number of unequal DC power sources without the requirement of transformers. Cascaded H-Bridge multilevel inverter fed induction motor shows the better performance due to fundamental frequency switching scheme. High quality output power is derived due to the absence of lower order harmonics. High conversion efficiency is also achieved for induction motor drive when it is operated by the proposed method. The performance of three phase cascaded H-Bridge multilevel inverter with unequal dc source is simulated by using MATLAB/Simulink. Harmonic analysis is done on cascaded H-Bridge seven level inverter and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed system.

PET nanocomposites were prepared by melt blending of poly(ethylene terephthalate) pellets and mica nanoparticles. The morphology of PET/mica nanocomposites was characterized by X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), showing exfoliated/intercalated structures for different concentrations of mica. The crystallization behavior was studied by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Incorporation of mica nanoparticles in PET matrix had pronounced effect on crystallization of poly(ethylene terephthalate). Both crystallization rate and degree of crystallinity increased due to nucleation effect of mica nanoparticles. The results of mechanical test indicated that addition of micas to PET matrix caused to slight diminish of tensile strength and ductility of polymer.

The goal of this study is to determine architecture of the bone from textural parameters of CT images to explain the quality of cancellous bone due to loss of teeth & to identify textural features whose changes in values must closely correlate with changes in bone level. In this paper Fractal, Fourier transforms and Gabor based approaches to characterize the texture variations of the trabecular network in bone is analyzed.Gabor wavelet analysis is a new tool for characterizing complex structures on a pixel level without a binarization step and then could provide more insight into bone structure.Fifty-two designated implant sites were selected.Texture features are extracted from designated endosseous implant sites using multi resolution based techniques, fractal methods and Fourier based power spectral method. Bays classifier has been used for classification. However the performance of any classifier is not optimized when all features are used. The feature optimization problem is addressed using classical sequential method in terms of the best recognition rate and the optimal number of features. First the combination of the features from run length and first order statistics achieved overall classification accuracy in the range 51.2%-72.9%. Features selected from the gabor based co occurrence matrix performed better with overall classification accuracy in the range 84%-88%.In order to increase the success rate the classification is done using the combination of gabor statistical features, run length and gabor co occurrence features as feature vector and using this, a mean success rate of 98.4% is obtained in SFS and SFFS with correct classification rate estimation using AB cross validation.

In this paper, an optimization via simulation heuristic algorithm has been developed to address the so-called Simple and U-shaped Assembly Line Balancing Problems which are type I. The proposed heuristic algorithm integrates mathematical programming and simulation techniques to solve the NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem by using the optimum solutions of the corresponding relaxed model into the simulation model as empirical distributions. These empirical distributions are the key factors to make the simulation model efficient in order to find the near optimum solutions which is the main contribution of the paper. Several computational experiments were carried out to test the performance of the proposed algorithm based on a set of benchmark test problems taken from the literature. As the results show, the proposed algorithm has good efficiency in terms of solutions quality and algorithm speed to be used in real world applications.

Background: Patient satisfaction represents a key marker for the quality of health care delivery. There are many studies about assessment of satisfaction level of patients from clinic health services. However, there is no study in military clinics. The aim of this study was assessment of satisfaction level of patients from six military hospital clinics of Iran.\nMaterials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study 330 patients were randomly selected among people who admitted in six military hospital clinics throughout Iran in 2008. Basic socio-demographic data (age, sex, marital status, education and insurance type) were recorded for all patients. In addition, a satisfaction level assessment questionnaire was completed for each patient. This 24-items questionnaire assesses the level of patient’s satisfaction in five domains (numbering and waiting time, accessibility to the clinic, physical environment, welfare and helping facilities, personnel behavior and physician services). The physician services were assessed in detail in three domains (behavior and respect to religious customs, examination skills and offering guidelines to patients about laboratory and radiologic findings and future follow-up).\nResults: Overall, 316 patients (96%) were satisfied from clinic health care services. The satisfaction level in numbering and waiting time, accessibility to the clinic, physical environment, welfare and helping facilities, behavior of personnel and physician services were 78.2%, 80.6%, 89.1%, 91.2% and 93.6%, respectively(p<0.001). In various domains of physician services, such as behavior and respect to religious customs, examination skills and offering guidelines to patients about laboratory and radiologic findings and future follow-up, the satisfaction level of patients were 91.2%, 90.6% and 83.6%, respectively(p=0.003). \nConclusion: Findings showed that most patients had favorable satisfaction from clinic health services. However, it is necessary to programming for reducing patient’s waiting time and training of physicians for offering guidelines to patients.\nKeywords: Patient satisfaction, Clinic, Military Hospital, outpatient services

Search engine helps to extract information from the web. When the query is given to the search engine, large numbers of results are returned to the user. Picking up the most relevant and useful information from the returned results becomes an important task. So, ranking gets a major role in this situation. A website or simply site is a collection of related web pages containing content such as text, images, video, audio, etc. In order to obtain necessary information from the web quickly and easily, ranking a web site is a very essential task. In this paper, we present some of the features of the web sites which help to rank the web sites.

Texas Star [Tecoma stans (L.) Juss.] is an import ornamental tree in south of Iran. Due to its tolerance to poor conditions of soil and water, attention to its vegetative propagation has been abundant. In this paper, the effect of indolebutyric acid (IBA) and cutting age on rooting traits was studied. Two collections of cuttings were taken from one-year old and two-year old branches and were examined with five levels of indolebutyric acid concentration (0, 1000, 1500, 2000 and 2500 ppm (mg.L-1)). The experiments were performed in factorial and completely randomized design with 45 replicates per treatment. The base of each cutting was pretreated in appropriate IBA dose for 10 seconds and then planted in 5-Kg plastic pots under natural irradiance and photoperiod in a greenhouse maintained at 25/23ºC. At the end of 75 days experiment, results showed that the stem cuttings pretreated with 2000 ppm indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) showed the best rooting traits (Rooting percentage, root fresh and dry weight, primary and secondary root number and root diameter). Analysis of the variance on the rooting parameters between the two collections of Tecoma stans stem cuttings also showed significant difference at 5% level of probability and the one-year old stem cuttings were better in most rooting traits than two-year old stem cuttings.

In this paper, collocation method is proposed for solving fuzzy linear differential equation. To this end, we convert the fuzzy linear differential equation to the integral form and then define its collocation equation under the generalized differentiability\nand try to approximate fuzzy solution by using them which we called it ”fuzzy collocation solution”. After that, we express a special case and make its collocation equations under the generalized differentiability. Finally, the results obtained for numerical examples show the accuracy and efficiency\nof the method.

Abstract— A novel technique was employed to miniaturize the open-ended radiator using electromagnetic meta-materials (MTM). In this paper, an open - ended rectangular waveguide antenna loaded with Back to Back Square Broad Side Coupled Meta-Material Split Resonator (BBSCMM-SR), radiating below the cut-off frequency of the waveguide are designed is proposed. This work has investigated design development, simulation, miniaturization and are comparing with these different types of Ring Resonators of an open end a waveguide dual band antenna. The antenna is capable of radiating below the cutoff frequency of the waveguide by supporting backward waves. Comparing previous work of miniaturization of waveguides, a better bandwidth about 600 MHz, good matching, dual band and low profile antenna is obtained.

Many researchers have expressed that the major cause of failures in KM\nperformance is the inability to evaluate its contributions. Therefore, for KM to be\nsuccessful, it is essential to have an appropriate device to evaluate its\nperformance. This study, by reviewing KM and BSC literature, tries to propose\nan effective method to assess the contribution of KM to the firms with respect to\nthe four perspectives of BSC i.e. financial, customer, internal business process\nand learning and growth perspectives. Then in a case study, the proposed method\nwas applied to one of the Iranian companies to evaluate its KM performance. For\nthis purpose a questionnaire is designed according to the goals and objectives of\nthe company. The positive correlations between four perspectives are illustrated\nin this case study. Also, FAHP has been used to prioritize indices of the\nproposed method in this company.

Abstract\nIn this paper, a set of operators of remote sensing applications have been proposed to fulfill most of the Functional Requirements (FR). These operators capture the functions/ behavior of the applications, which can be considered as the services provided by the applications. In General, a good application/ software meets maximum FR from user. In this paper, we have defined a RS application by a set, having all images created at dissimilar time instances, and each image is categorized into set of different layers.\nKey words: Remote sensing applications, retrieval operators, functional requirements, satellite images, geographical information system

The purpose of this paper is to develop a deeper understanding of merger and acquisitions’ field of corporate finance, particularly with reference to value creation in merger and acquisition. Our aim is to provide a review of empirical literature to identify and evaluate the main areas in merger and acquisitions transactions; in particular to shed some light on valuation issues in M&A’s in context of post acquisition performance of the companies. Most of the time researchers tend to evaluate the impact of M&A’s in terms of financial aspects such as profitability etc. but they ignore the human aspect that is the effect of M&A’s on the people or employees of the companies. Most of the times employees are laid off as result of these activities as consequence this create new but conflicting networks of relationships in new companies.\nWe found that on average research tend to show that acquiring firms underperformed the market in contrast to acquired firms, which create value at the expense of bidding and acquiring companies.

Determination of fault section is a necessary step for locating the fault in the distribution power system. In this paper a new practical based method is presented for fault section estimation in distribution system. In the proposed method, at first different zones is defined using impedance classifier. Then, the suitable locations for installing the cutout fuses are determined using expert of designer. After that, special settings for cutout fuse links are determined in such a way that they operate coordinately. Finally, current waveforms are used to distinguish which cutout fuse operated or in which section fault occurred.

Street business has been considered as one of the important aspects of micro business that has continued to grow tremendously in almost every major street across the globe, in which a large population of youths and widows are found to engage in. In the recent times, street business is heavily contributing to the economic growth and transformation of many developing countries in the world. Despite the importance of street business to the socio-politico-economic transformation of a country like Nigeria, its activity is still less understood, less recognized, and unaccounted for in the country economic statistics and this has been attributed to the lack of enabling policies, regulations and proper organization of the sector. As a result, this paper explores and highlights the importance of street business to Nigerian economy and it is written to provide the conceptual framework in studying the street business. The conceptual framework focuses on the factors that aid an effective street business within the Nigeria context and, as a whole, shall be useful for examining successful street business in the developing countries.

Type 2 diabetic patients will be vulnerable to a several problems. The fungal infections of nails may be one of these problems. Aims: The present study aimed to assess the prevalence of toenail Onychomycosis among type 2 diabetes mellitus Three hundred type 2 diabetic patients were studied. The data of age, gender, racial origin, area of residence, Body Mass Index, serum Fasting Blood Sugar, glycosylated hemoglobin, creatinine and onychomycosis clinical types were obtained.19 onychomycosis patients (6.3%) were diagnosed. The men (6.7%) and Fars ethnic groups (6.9%) were more affected than women (6.2%) and Non-Fars (4.4%), respectively (p> 0.05). The patients who live in rural area (7.4%) were more affected than city (5.9%) (p> 0.05). Patients who have body mass index >30 (7.9%) were more affected than other body mass index values (p> 0.05). The most clinical type observation of onychomycosis was Hyperkeratotic (P<0.05). Lower prevalence rate of onychomycosis among type 2 diabetic patients may depend on different reasons. These may include climate, better hygiene, the medical advisory of dermatologist to the diabetic patients and the repeated examination by dermatologist may be the important reasons for low prevalence of onychomycosis among these patients.