15,021 research outputs found
Effect of oil palm empty fruit bunches (OPEFB) fibers to the compressive strength and water absorption of concrete
Growing popularity based on environmentally-friendly, low cost and lightweight building materials in the construction industry has led to a need to examine how these characteristics can be achieved and at the same time giving the benefit to the environment and maintain the material requirements based on the standards required. Recycling of waste generated from industrial and agricultural activities as measures of building materials is not only a viable solution to the problem of pollution but also to produce an economic design of building
SEMA4A: An ontology for emergency notification systems accessibility
This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Expert Systems with Applications. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. Reaching this goal is challenging due to users’ diversity: people with disabilities, elderly and children, and other vulnerable groups. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for such systems. In this work an ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deafblind people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages over distinct emergency response information systems providing accessibility under different conditions and for different kind of users.Ministerio de Educación y Cienci
Investigation of dielectric constant variations for Malaysians soil species towards its natural background dose
The correlation of natural background gamma radiation and real part of the complex
relative permittivity (dielectric constant) for various species Malaysian soils was investigated
in this research. The sampling sites were chosen randomly according to soils groups that
consist of sedentary, alluvial and miscellaneous soil which covered the area of Batu Pahat,
Kluang and Johor Bahru, Johor state of Malaysia. There are 11 types of Malaysian soil species
that have been studied; namely Peat, Linau-Sedu, Selangor-Kangkong, Kranji, Telemong�Akob-Local Alluvium, Holyrood-Lunas, Batu Anam-Melaka- Tavy, Harimau Tampoi, Kulai�Yong Peng, Rengam-Jerangau, and Steepland soils. In-situ exposure rates of each soil species
were measured by using portable gamma survey meter and ex-situ analysis of real part of
relative permittivity was performed by using DAK (Dielectric Assessment Kit assist by
network analyser). Results revealed that the highest and the lowest background dose rate were
94 ±26.28 μR hr-1 and 7 ±0.67 μR hr-1 contributed by Rengam Jerangau and Peat soil species
respectively. Meanwhile, dielectric constant measurement, it was performed in the range of
frequency between 100 MHz to 3 GHz. The measurements of each soils species dielectric
constant are in the range of 1 to 3. At the lower frequencies in the range of 100 MHz to 600
MHz, it was observed that the dielectric constant for each soil species fluctuated and
inconsistent. But it remained consistent in plateau form of signal at higher frequency at range
above 600 MHz. From the comparison of dielectric properties of each soil at above 600 MHz
of frequency, it was found that Rengam-Jerangau soil species give the highest reading and
followed by Selangor-Kangkong species. The average dielectric measurement for both
Selangor-Kangkong and Rengam-Jerangau soil species are 2.34 and 2.35 respectively.
Meanwhile, peat soil species exhibits the lowest dielectric measurement of 1.83. It can be clearly seen that the pattern of dielectric measurement for every soil at the frequency above
600 MHz demonstrated a specific distribution which can be classified into two main regions
which are higher and lower between the ranges of 1.83 to 2.35. Pearson correlation analysis
between the frequency of 100 MHz and 2.6 GHz with respect to exposure rate for every soil
species was r = 0.38 and r = 0.51, respectively. This indicates that there was no strong
correlation between both parameter, natural background dose and soils dielectric for each soils
sample. This factor could be contributed by major and minor elements contained in each soils
sample species, especially Ferum, Fe and Silica, Si
Wedding planner in a box
Marriage describes the connection of two souls who promise to become one heart. Everyone dreams their marriage to be nearly perfect and that will happen only if they are able to make their wedding plan with best packages. In this busy world, many couples delay their wedding mainly because of high budget required to meet their dream wedding ceremony. Wedding ceremony requires careful and meticulous planning from many aspects such as choosing the food, make up, decoration, and gifts
Integrated Web Accessibility Guidelines for Users on the Autism Spectrum - from Specification to Implementation
This research presented a compendium of web interface design guidelines and their implementation on a transport-planning website based on the needs and preferences of users on the autism spectrum. Results highlighted the importance of having simple navigation and meaningful headings, icons, labels and text to facilitate understanding and readability; these findings offer guidelines for the design of web user interfaces to continue improving the web experience of autistic users, and therefore of the whole community
Broker-based service-oriented content adaptation framework
Electronic documents are becoming increasingly rich in content and varied in format
and structure. At the same time, user preferences vary towards the contents and their
devices are getting increasingly varied in capabilities. This mismatch between rich
contents and user preferences along with the end device capability presents a challenge
in providing ubiquitous access to these contents. Content adaptation is primarily used to
bridge the mismatch by providing users with contents that is tailored to the given
contexts e.g., device capability, preferences, or network bandwidth. Existing content
adaptation systems employing these approaches such as client-side, server-side or
proxy-side adaptation, operate in isolation, often encounter limited adaptation
functionality, get overload if too many concurrent users and open to single point of
failure, thus limiting the scope and scale of their services. To move beyond these
shortcomings, this thesis establishes the basis for developing content adaptation
solutions that are efficient and scalable. It presents a framework to enable content
adaptation to be consumed as Web services provided by third-party service providers,
which is termed as “service-oriented content adaptation”. Towards this perspective, this
thesis addresses five key issues – how to enable content adaptation as services (serviceoriented
framework);
how
to
locate
services
in
the
network
(service
discovery
protocol);
how
to select best possible services (path determination); how to provide quality
assurance (service level agreement (SLA) framework); and how to negotiate quality of
service (QoS negotiation). Specifically, we have: (i) identified the key research
challenges for service-oriented content adaptation, along with a systematic
understanding of the content adaptation research spectrum, captured in a taxonomy of
content adaptation systems; (ii) developed an architectural framework that provides the
basis for enabling content adaptation as Web services, providing the facilities to serve
clients’ content adaptation requests through the client-side brokering; (iii) developed a
service discovery protocol, by taking into account the searching space, searching time,
match type of the services and physical location of the service providers; (iv) developed
a mechanism to choose the best possible combination of services to serve a given
content adaptation request, considering QoS levels offered; (v) developed an
architectural framework that provides the basis for managing quality through the
conceptualization of service level agreement; and (vi) introduced a strategy for QoS
negotiation between multiple brokers and service providers, by taking into account the
incoming requests and server utilization and, thus requiring the basis of determining
serving priority and negotiating new QoS levels. The performance of the proposed
solutions are compared with other competitive solutions and shown to be substantially
better
New insights into translation-oriented, technology-intensive localiser education: accessibility as an opportunity
In this article we look for new insights into the teaching of localisation by defining the academic field as a translation-oriented and, at the same time, technology-intensive discipline. This definition encourages us to reconcile the main objectives of both areas by integrating a user-centred, human-computer interaction approach, where verbal and non-verbal communication of meaning and affordances is central. Disciplinary and technological challenges are reviewed and confronted with some of our strategies to cope with them. By embracing the above holistic definition, and incorporating accessibility as a key factor both for the practice and the teaching of localisation, we try to make the most of the linkages between technology, communication, social and user needs, as well as professional and research-driven translatorial action
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Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions
The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions
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