Manufacturing Of Robust Natural Fiber Preforms Utilizing Bacterial Cellulose as Binder

We present a novel method of manufacturing rigid and robust short natural fiber preforms using a papermaking process. Bacterial cellulose acts simultaneously as the binder for the loose fibers and provides rigidity to the fiber preforms. These preforms can be infused with a resin to produce truly green hierarchical composites

The Role of Soft skills in Empowering Fresh Engineering Graduates in India

Soft Skills are personal attributes that enables one to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. During campus recruitment process students with high grades fail to get a job due to poor soft skills. NASSCOM-McKinsey report (2005), states that only 25% of technical students and 10-15% of the general graduates in India are employable. In the recent past the awareness regarding soft skill has increased but the studentrsquos attitude and efforts to imbibe these qualities hasnrsquot.nbspConsidering the above facts it is high time that the present generation should change their attitude towards imbibing soft skills in their daily life. The growing population, increasing number of engineering colleges across the country, shrinking number of job opportunities and volatile market conditions will only add further burden to our younger generation.nbs

The Relationship Between Job Satisfaction and Psychological/Physical Health among Malaysian Working Women

Background: The workplace environment has a great influence on employees' health. Job dissatisfaction has been widely recognised as a workplace stressor that can influence employees' psychological and physical health statuses. However, job satisfaction is a multi-dimensional concept, and it is necessary to investigate its different facets and their unique consequences. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess the relationship between the nine facets of job satisfaction and psychological health and somatic complaints (i.e., sleep disorders, headache, gastro-intestinal and respiratory problems). Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted among 567 Malaysian women working in the public sector. Data collection was conducted using a series of self-administered questionnaires. Results: The results of this study show that there is a link between job satisfaction and psychological distress as well as four somatic complaints. Satisfaction with the nature of work was the strongest predictor for psychological distress, sleep disorders, headaches and gastro-intestinal problems. Conclusion: From the results of this study, we conclude that there is a link between job satisfaction and the health status of employees. In addition, job satisfaction levels vary across different dimensions and can even differ from an individual's feelings of global job satisfaction. Policies and practices should focus on improving working conditions to enhance the fit of the job and the employee

Embedded Scale United Moment Invariant for Identification of Handwriting Individuality

Past few years, a lot of research on moment functions have been explored in pattern recognition. Several new techniques have been investigated to improve conventional regular moment by proposing the scaling factor of geometrical function. In this paper, integrated scaling formulations of Aspect Invariant Moment and Higher Order Scaling Invariant with United Moment Invariant are presented in Writer Identification to seek the invarianceness of authorship or individuality of handwriting perseverance. Mathematical proving and results of computer simulations are included to verify the validity of the proposed technique in identifying eccentricity of the author in Writer Identification

DISCRETIZATION OF INTEGRATED MOMENT INVARIANTS FOR WRITER IDENTIFICATION

Conservative regular moments have been proven to exhibit some shortcomings in the original formulations of moment functions in terms of scaling factor. Hence, an incorporated scaling factor of geometric functions into United Moment Invariant function is proposed for mining the feature of unconstrained words. Subsequently, the discrete proposed features undertake discretization procedure prior to classification for better feature representation and splendid classification accuracy. Collectively, discrete values are finite intervals in a continuous spectrum of values and well known to play important roles in data mining and knowledge discovery. Many induction algorithms found in the literature requires that training data contains only discrete features and some works better on discretized data; in particular rule based approaches like rough sets. Hence, in this study, an integrated scaling formulation of Aspect Scaling Invariant is presented in Writer Identification to hunt for the individuality perseverance. Successive exploration is executed to investigate for the suitability of discretization techniques in probing the issues of writer authorship. Mathematical proving and results of computer simulations are embraced to attest the feasibility of the proposed technique in Writer Identification. The results disclose that the proposed discretized invariants reveal 99% accuracy of classification by using 3520 training data and 880 testing data

Embedded Scale United Moment Invariant for Identification of Handwriting Individuality

Past few years, a lot of research on moment functions have been explored in pattern recognition. Several new techniques have been investigated to improve conventional regular moment by proposing the scaling factor of geometrical function. In this paper, integrated scaling formulations of Aspect Invariant Moment and Higher Order Scaling Invariant with United Moment Invariant are presented in Writer Identification to seek the invarianceness of authorship or individuality of handwriting perseverance. Mathematical proving and results of computer simulations are included to verify the validity of the proposed technique in identifying eccentricity of the author in Writer Identification

Chemical composition changes of two water apple (Syzygium samaragense)

Changes in physical properties (weight, size, colour and weight loss) and chemical properties (proximate analysis, TSS, pH, freezing point, total acidity and sugar content) of two water apple (Syzgium samaragense) cultivars, Semarang Rose and Kristal Taiwan were evaluated during ripening at 10°C and 50% RH. The results showed that the Kristal Taiwan cultivar was larger in size and weight but smaller in length compared to Semarang Rose. The Semarang Rose cultivar was sweeter than Kristal Taiwan. In this study, data obtained suggests that the water apple fruit can be stored at cold storage until 19 days

Tools and concepts of journey towards a natural capitalism with special reference to environmental impact assessment, life cycle assessment and industrial ecology.

The evolution of tool applications and approaches for industrial-environmentally related management systems in minimizing their impact on natural environment has facilitated the concept of journey to natural capitalism, notably, on physical flows and the accumulation of substances and materials due to industrial activities. These environmental management tools include risk assessment, resource accounting, costbenefit analysis, environmental impact statement, and environmental impact assessment. In addition, environmental management system (EMS) series of standards derived fromSociety of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) and International Standard of Organization (ISO) Technical Committee 207 initiatives emphasizing on EMS, environmental auditing, life cycle assessment, ecolabeling, environmental performance evaluation, design for environment and climate change. Recent concept on industrial ecology (IE) was introduced and applied respectively into EMS for industrial sustainability. It is based on the integration of human dimension, industrial processes, and environmental concerns that perpetually mimics natural ecosystem processes. This paper describes how these theoretical frameworks of Environmental Impact Assessment(EIA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools being developed and applied and subsequently used as central tenet in IE concept in meeting their objectives that indirectly could be further enhanced the journey towards natural capitalism

Quantum-Inspired Particle Swarm Optimization for Feature Selection and Parameter Optimization in Evolving Spiking Neural Networks for Classification Tasks

Introduction: Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) was introduced in 1995 by Russell Eberhart and James Kennedy (Eberhart & Kennedy, 1995). PSO is a biologically-inspired technique based around the study of collective behaviour in decentralized and self-organized animal society systems. The systems are typically made up from a population of candidates (particles) interacting with one another within their environment (swarm) to solve a given problem. Because of its efficiency and simplicity, PSO has been successfully applied as an optimizer in many applications such as function optimization, artificial neural network training, fuzzy system control. However, despite recent research and development, there is an opportunity to find the most effective methods for parameter optimization and feature selection tasks. This chapter deals with the problem of feature (variable) and parameter optimization for neural network models, utilising a proposed Quantum–inspired PSO (QiPSO) method. In this method the features of the model are represented probabilistically as a quantum bit (qubit) vector and the model parameter values as real numbers. The principles of quantum superposition and quantum probability are used to accelerate the search for an optimal set of features, that combined through co-evolution with a set of optimised parameter values, will result in a more accurate computational neural network model. The method has been applied to the problem of feature and parameter optimization in Evolving Spiking Neural Network (ESNN) for classification. A swarm of particles is used to find the most accurate classification model for a given classification task. The QiPSO will be integrated within ESNN where features and parameters are simultaneously and more efficiently optimized. A hybrid particle structure is required for the qubit and real number data types. In addition, an improved search strategy has been introduced to find the most relevant and eliminate the irrelevant features on a synthetic dataset. The method is tested on a benchmark classification problem. The proposed method results in the design of faster and more accurate neural network classification models than the ones optimised through the use of standard evolutionary optimization algorithms. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces PSO with quantum information principles and an improved feature search strategy used later in the developed method. Section 3 is an overview of ESNN, while Section 4 gives details of the integrated structure and the experimental results. Finally, Section 5 concludes this chapter

Factors influencing Social Acceptance of Residential Solar Energy Technology

The world is facing many environmental problems such as global warming due to high demand of energy use, especially our dependency on fossil fuels. The Malaysian government has introduced various policies and programs to promote alternative green energy solutions such as solar energy to address this issue. However, social acceptance of solar energy could influence the feasibility of the energy as an alternative to satisfy the rising demand. Drawing from research survey and the academic literature, this paper explores the factors that could influence social acceptance of residential solar energy project in Malaysia. Data for this study were collected through a survey in Taiping, Perak; a city recognized as the top three most sustainable in the world by the International Tourismus-Börse in 2019. A total of 240 questionnaires were collected from the respondents in Taiping and the data were analysed using descriptive and correlation analysis. This study reveals that knowledge is able to determine society’s perception and change their opposition towards solar energy. In addition, high cost could hinder society’s acceptance of solar energy, thus their willingness to switch to the energy.