A Study of the Bacterial Population Fluctuations During Poultry Processing

The microbial assessment of skin-washed water samples taken from 39 poultry carcasses and the wash water from a poultry processing unit revealed cumulative increases z"n the number of microflora at each stage of processing. A comparison of the bacterial population densities on the skin at the' start and at the end of processing showed that the levels of E. coli and coli forms increased by 231.1% and 263.1% respectively whereas the Salmonella concentrations decreased by about 9%. A positive correlation was obtained between the occurrence of bacterz"a and parameters such as wash water pH and temperature, and suspended solids concentration. An examination of the storage tank effluent which was used to store the poultry carcasses pri"or to packaging showed that E. coli and Salmonella were able to thrive in the liquid. During the 4 h incubation period, the levels of both organisms decined rapidly during the initial half hour, but quickly became adapted and multipUed z"n the subsequent hours. The implications of both, the field and laboratory studies are discussed with a view of reducing the level of contamination during processing

Derivative estimation of triangular patch by using cubic least square method

Smooth surface reconstruction of scattered data built from Delaunay triangulation need the partial derivatives to be defined at the vertices of the triangles for all the data points. Partial derivatives at the vertices of triangular elements and at the midpoint of each side usually are unavailable therefore it is a needed to approximate the derivatives information at the vertices and at the midpoint of each side. The common method use to estimate partial derivatives was the quadratic approximation of least square method. This research focused to estimate partial derivatives by using cubic approximation of least square method and compare the surface obtained between quadratic and cubic approximation. The research also implement the use of interpolating surface of cubic Bezier triangular patch. The result of the study shows comparison of interpolating surface produced by different type of functions for quadratic and cubic least square. The maximum and minimum error was also calculated and maximum error between quadratic and cubic least square was generated when using saddle function while the minimum error is on the exponential function

Facility Management in Private Finance Initiative project in UTHM Pagoh Campus

Facility management (FM) in Private Finance Initiative (PFI) involved a long-time process and duration in improving the infrastructure and associating the facilities. FM will give a support role or service within an organisation that have been strategically integrated approach to operating, maintaining, improving, and adapting the buildings and supporting services in order to create natural environment. In a long-term relationship, facility management need to evolve to a higher strategic level in compliance with the organisation’s strategy. At the end of the process, it will achieve best value and performance on delivery of support services. In this research, direct observation has been done to analyze facility management provided in UTHM Pagoh Campus. Furthermore, the satisfaction level of building occupants also was investigated by using different measurement factors in a structured questionnaire to measure the effectiveness. Hence, the results concluded that the total overall satisfaction of users towards facility provided by private sector are mostly satisfied among building occupants. From the results obtained, outdoor area was ranked first out of eight measurement factors. An interview has been done in order to clarify the success of facility management. It can be summarized that all the facility supplied by private sector were meets Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), by meant it also need to improvise their services provision

AN INVESTIGATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF COMMUNICATION AT THE OPERATIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL LEVEL AT THE WORKPLACE

Among the many types of interaction at the workplace are communication at the organisation level and communication among employees. Effective communication at the operational level provides good foundation for interaction within and outside the organisation. effective communication at individual levels among the employers’ help create positive work environment and therefore enhance productivity of each employee in the long run. This quantitative pilot study was carried out in a government organisation. 68 respondents answered a 34-item survey on 5-likert scales. Findings showed that employees felt that besides effective communication at top-down level, there should also be good communication within the organisation and among the employees themselves. Positive interaction would lead to positive communication and thus improve motivation at work as well as productivity.  Article visualizations

Polarity classification tool for sentiment analysis in Malay language

The popularity of the social media channels has increased the interest among researchers in the sentiment analysis (SA) area. One aspect of the SA research is the determination of the polarity of the comments in the social media, i.e. positive, negative, and neutral. However, there is a scarcity of Malay sentiment analysis tools because most of the work in the literature discuss the polarity classification tool in English. This paper presents the development of a polarity classification tool called Malay Polarity Classification Tool (MaCT). This tool is developed based on the AFINN sentiment lexicon for English language. We have attempted to translate each word in AFINN to its Malay equivalent and later, use the lexicon to collect the sentiment data from Twitter. The Twitter data are then classified into positive, negative, and neutral. For the validation purpose, we collect 400 positive tweets, 400 negative tweets, and 200 neutral tweets, and later, run the tweets through our sentiment lexicon and found 90% score for precision, recall and accuracy. Our main contribution in the research is the new AFINN translation for Malay language and also the classification of the sentiment data

Polarity Classification Tool for Sentiment Analysis in Malay Language

The popularity of the social media channels has increased the interest among researchers in the sentiment analysis (SA) area. One aspect of the SA research is the determination of the polarity of the comments in the social media, i.e. positive, negative, and neutral. However, there is a scarcity of Malay sentiment analysis tools because most of the work in the literature discuss the polarity classification tool in English. This paper presents the development of a polarity classification tool called Malay Polarity Classification Tool (MaCT). This tool is developed based on the AFINN sentiment lexicon for English language. We have attempted to translate each word in AFINN to its Malay equivalent and later, use the lexicon to collect the sentiment data from Twitter. The Twitter data are then classified into positive, negative, and neutral. For the validation purpose, we collect 400 positive tweets, 400 negative tweets, and 200 neutral tweets, and later, run the tweets through our sentiment lexicon and found 90% score for precision, recall and accuracy. Our main contribution in the research is the new AFINN translation for Malay language and also the classification of the sentiment data

Design and development of SEPIC DC-DC boost converter for photovoltaic application

This study highlights a new construction of SEPIC DC-DC converter. The proposed converter aims for some features such as high voltage gain, continuous input current and reduce stress on the power switch. In addition, the circuit construction ensurs the simplicity in design along with signicant cost saving, since its components are readily available and smaller in size compared to the off-shelf components. This type of converter can adjust the DC voltage to maintain its output voltage to be constant. Typically, SEPIC operated in equipment that uses battery and also in wide range input voltage DC power supply. The converter is designed for renewable energy application where it is able to regulate the output voltage of the Photovoltaic (PV). The converter has been analysed based on different switching frequencies and duty cycle. Thus the outcome of the proposed converter can be achieved by using D=0.45 and fs=30 kHz. The proposed converter is supplied by 26V as an input voltage and produces 300V output and gives 94% of efficiency

Penerapan Fuzzy Multiple Attribute Decision Making (FMADM) Berbasis Metode Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) Dalam Pemilihan Mobil Bekas

Perdagangan pembelian kendaraan mobil untuk mendukung perpindahan dari satu tempat kepada yang lain merupakan salah satu alasan utama masyarakat dalam memilih mobil bekas. Harga mobil dalam kondisi baru terbilang tinggi maka tidak sedikit masyarakat lebih memilih mobil bekas. Pemilihan mobil memiliki beberapa faktor yang mesti dipertimbangkan sesuai dengan kebutuhan kriteria berbeda dari setiap individu. Kebutuhan tersebut sebagai latar belakang pembuatan sistem pendukung keputusan dalam pemilihan mobil bekas. Sistem akan menggunakan metode Fuzzy Multiple Attribute Decision Making (FMADM) berbasis Simple Additive Weighting (SAW). Sistem dibuat dengan menggunakan database MySQL. Metode ini dipilih karena mampu menyeleksi alternatif terbaik dari sejumlah alternatif berdasarkan kriteria-kriteria yang ditentukan. Hasil dari sistem ini akan memberikan rekomendasi pilihan mobil bekas untuk pelanggan berdasarkan kriteria yang dipilih

The Arab world's contribution to solid waste literature: a bibliometric analysis

BACKGROUND: Environmental and health-related effects of solid waste material are considered worldwide problems. The aim of this study was to assess the volume and impact of Arab scientific output published in journals indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) on solid waste. METHODS: We included all the documents within the SCI whose topic was solid waste from all previous years up to 31 December 2012. In this bibliometric analysis we sought to evaluate research that originated from Arab countries in the field of solid waste, as well as its relative growth rate, collaborative measures, productivity at the institutional level, and the most prolific journals. RESULTS: A total of 382 (2.35 % of the overall global research output in the field of solid waste) documents were retrieved from the Arab countries. The annual number of documents published in the past three decades (1982–2012) indicated that research productivity demonstrated a noticeable rise during the last decade. The highest number of articles associated with solid waste was that of Egypt (22.8 %), followed by Tunisia (19.6), and Jordan (13.4 %). the total number of citations over the analysed years at the date of data collection was 4,097, with an average of 10.7 citations per document. The h-index of the citing articles was 31. Environmental science was the most researched topic, represented by 175 (45.8 %) articles. Waste Management was the top active journal. The study recognized 139 (36.4 %) documents from collaborations with 25 non-Arab countries. Arab authors mainly collaborated with countries in Europe (22.5 %), especially France, followed by countries in the Americas (9.4 %), especially the USA. The most productive institution was the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, with 6.3 % of total publications. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the expected increase in solid waste production from Arab world, research activity about solid waste is still low. Governments must invest more in solid waste research to avoid future unexpected problems. Finally, since solid waste is a multidisciplinary science, research teams in engineering, health, toxicology, environment, geology and others must be formulated to produce research in solid waste from different scientific aspects

Filling simple holes of triangular mesh by using Enhanced Advancing Front Mesh (EAFM) method

Triangular meshes are extensively used to represent 3D models. Some surfaces cannot be digitised due to various reasons such as inadequacy of the scanner, and this generally occurs for glossy, hollow surfaces and dark-coloured surfaces. This cause triangular meshes to contain holes and it becomes difficult for numerous successive operations such as model prototyping, model rebuilding, and finite element analysis. Hence, it is necessary to fill these holes in a practical manner. In this paper, the Enhanced Advancing Front Mesh (EAFM) method was introduced for recovering missing simple holes in an object. The first step in this research was to extract the feature vertices around a hole on a 3D test data function. Then the Advancing Front Mesh (AFM) method was used to fill the holes. When conflicts occurred during construction of the triangle, the EAFM method was introduced to enhance the method. The results of the study show that the enhanced method is simple, efficient and suitable for dealing with simple hole problems