FRONT FOOT SLIDE VARIABILITY AND ITS RELATION TO TENPIN BOWLING PERFORMANCE

In tenpin bowling, bowlers try to knock down as many pins as possible with the allotted number of tries. In the modern power game, they achieve this by generating a lot of momentum using heavy balls released accurately at great velocities (Strickland, 1996). It must be done consistently over many tries. Although accuracy of the front foot slide during the delivery phase seems less relevant compared to the accuracy of the ball release, its consistency is still paramount. The ability to slide the front foot consistently presumably enables the bowler to have a predictable stable base to deliver the ball more accurately. Variability in performing sports skills has been studied in various disciplines such as javelin and basketball (Bartlett, 2008), but no published data is available on tenpin bowling. In fact, published work on tenpin bowling is rather scarce; the only recent study was by Chu and colleagues (2002) which compared a number of kinematic variables in the sagittal plane between male and female bowlers. The purpose of this study was to look at how variability of the front foot slide was related to average bowling score (Bave) and ball release velocity (BRvel ). In addition, the variability of the foot kinematics between elite and amateur bowlers was also compared

Development of an Arabic text-to-speech system

Research on Text-to-speech technology has received the interest of professional researchers in many languages which is a consequence of wide range of applications where Text-To-Speech is implemented. However, Arabic language, spoken by millions of people as an official language in 24 different countries, gained less attention compared with other languages despite the fact that it has a religious value for more than 1.6 billion Muslim worldwide. These facts exhibit the need for a high quality, smallsize, and completely free Arabic TTS with the ability of future improvements. The vowelized written text of Arabic language carries the pronunciation rules with limited exceptions, so rulebased system with an exception dictionary for words that fail with those letter-to-phoneme rules may be a much more reasonable approach. This paper is a development of a rulebased text-to-speech Hybrid synthesis system which is a combination formant and concatenation techniques with acceptable naturalness. The simulation results of the system shows good quality in handling word, phrase, and sentence level compared to other available Arabic TTS systems. The accuracy of the overall system is 96%. Further improvements need to be done for stressed syllable position and intonation

Novel Framework for Hidden Data in the Image Page within Executable File Using Computation between Advanced Encryption Standard and Distortion Techniques

The hurried development of multimedia and internet allows for wide distribution of digital media data. It becomes much easier to edit, modify and duplicate digital information. In additional, digital document is also easy to copy and distribute, therefore it may face many threats. It became necessary to find an appropriate protection due to the significance, accuracy and sensitivity of the information. Furthermore, there is no formal method to be followed to discover a hidden data. In this paper, a new information hiding framework is presented.The proposed framework aim is implementation of framework computation between advance encryption standard (AES) and distortion technique (DT) which embeds information in image page within executable file (EXE file) to find a secure solution to cover file without change the size of cover file. The framework includes two main functions; first is the hiding of the information in the image page of EXE file, through the execution of four process (specify the cover file, specify the information file, encryption of the information, and hiding the information) and the second function is the extraction of the hiding information through three process (specify the stego file, extract the information, and decryption of the information).Comment: 6 Pages IEEE Format, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, IJCSIS 2009, ISSN 1947 5500, Impact Factor 0.42

Performance and cost comparisons for A-PON and S-PON FTTH systems

The high cost of fibers has always been a main concern as to why they have not been deployed in access networks. As the fiber technology is maturing, the costs fibers are slowly decreasing, and hence the above issue is no longer an issue. This paper discusses the performance comparison of A-PON and S-PON FTTH architecture as well as its cost. It is established that the relationship between the fiber span and distributed area offered by S-PON is due to the power enhancement boosted by an amplifier. Meanwhile the cost of S-PON will be reasonable if there are enough users sharing the same feeder line or transmission path

Assessment of drought impacts on vegetation health: a case study in Kedah

Prolonged drought in the early of 2014 has caused Malaysia to experience water supply shortage which directly affects both health and growth of vegetation. Thus this study aims to assess the risk vegetation areas that were impacted during 2014's drought by integrating the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Normalized Differentiation Vegetation Index (NDVI) methods. These two methods were able to assess the risk areas for the vegetation by measuring its health and classifying them according to its severity while considering the rainfall reduction at the specific time and location. The results obtained from this study shows that the central and north west of Kedah was vulnerable to the occurrence of drought. Kedah was more impacted by the dry event during the northeast monsoon. This study is significant as a fundamental input for further research and as an alternative approach by the application of space technology

Exploring the use of social media tools among students for teaching and learning purpose

Social media network is a fairly recent word used to define a form of learning that can be performed via websites online learning. The exploring of the potential use of social media tools and impact of contingent factors on the relationship between three predictors was investigated. A total of 235 valid responses were received from undergraduate students Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) in the study. Several factors have been found to correlate with social media use, active learning both to affect teaching and learning. The researchers made use of the structural equation modelling (SEM) method with the SmartPLS program to shed a light on the adoption process. The results show that the use of social media positively and significantly relates to active learning, which in turn affect teaching and learning

Towards a data-driven approach to scenario generation for serious games

Serious games have recently shown great potential to be adopted in many applications, such as training and education. However, one critical challenge in developing serious games is the authoring of a large set of scenarios for different training objectives. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach to automatically generate scenarios for serious games. Compared with other scenario generation methods, our approach leverages on the simulated player performance data to construct the scenario evaluation function for scenario generation. To collect the player performance data, an artificial intelligence (AI) player model is designed to imitate how a human player behaves when playing scenarios. The AI players are used to replace human players for data collection. The experiment results show that our data-driven approach provides good prediction accuracy on scenario’s training intensities. It also outperforms our previous heuristic-based approach in its capability of generating scenarios that match closer to specified target player performance

Exceptional Points of Degeneracy and Branch Points for Transmission-Line Problems - Linear Algebra and Bifurcation Theory Perspectives

We demonstrate several new aspects of exceptional points of degeneracy (EPD) pertaining to propagation in two uniform coupled transmission-line structures. We describe an EPD using two different approaches - by solving an eigenvalue problem based on the system matrix, and as a singular point from bifurcation theory, and the link between these two disparate viewpoints. Cast as an eigenvalue problem, we show that eigenvalue degeneracies are always coincident with eigenvector degeneracies, so that all eigenvalue degeneracies are implicitly EPDs in two uniform coupled transmission lines. Furthermore, we discuss in some detail the fact that EPDs define branch points (BPs) in the complex-frequency plane; we provide simple formulas for these points, and show that parity-time (PT) symmetry leads to real-valued EPDs occurring on the real-frequency axis. We discuss the connection of the linear algebra approach to previous waveguide analysis based on singular points from bifurcation theory, which provides a complementary viewpoint of EPD phenomena, showing that EPDs are singular points of the dispersion function associated with the fold bifurcation. This provides an important connection of various modal interaction phenomena known in guided-wave structures with recent interesting effects observed in quantum mechanics, photonics, and metamaterials systems described in terms of the EPD formalism

Determining the hydrophobicity index of protected amino acids and common protecting groups

Peptides are in great demand in the pharmaceutical arena and a majority of these peptides contain 20 or more amino acids. They are infrequently synthesised using the fragment condensation approach. A key limitation in adopting this approach more commonly is that protected peptide fragments with high purity are often required prior to the final condensation steps. It is hypothesized that understanding the hydrophobic nature of the protected amino acids will assist with designing optimal fragment purification processes when needed. Whilst a myriad of hydrophobicity indices are reported in the literature for unprotected amino acids, the literature lacks any data regarding the protected amino acids which form the key precursor for the fragment condensation task. In this current study, hydrophobicity indices for protected amino acids with common α-amino and sidechain protecting groups were experimentally determined. Different positions for each amino acid within the peptide chain were considered, namely at the C-terminal and N-terminal as well as internal positions. These data give deep insights on the hydrophobicity of each amino acid with respect to its position in the peptide chain. The data acquired in this research facilitated the prediction of the retention time of protected peptide fragments with an uncertainty of less than ±1.5%