Juha the Whale

Juha the Whale is a short coming-of-age fiction film that explores the isolation a refugee mother and her young daughter face as they await the status of their claimant hearing in Toronto, Canada. Najah (45) and her daughter Noor (8), spend the days leading up to their hearing in cramped refugee housing, awaiting the verdict, which will determine whether they can remain in Canada or be deported back to war-torn Syria. The story is told through fragmented scenes, conveying a lost sense of time as the hours blend together. Striking visuals capture the alienation of their cramped apartment, while fleeting snapshots of bustling city life from their small bedroom window emphasize their isolation. This domestic reality is juxtaposed with Noors disjointed auditory memories of her father as she struggles to mentally cope with war-related trauma. Through these creative elements, Juha the Whale seeks to authentically portray the complex and desperate experiences of a broken family caught between hope and despair

Low Complexity V-BLAST MIMO-OFDM Detector by Successive Iterations Reduction

V-BLAST detection method suffers large computational complexity due to its successive detection of symbols. In this paper, we propose a modified V-BLAST algorithm to decrease the computational complexity by reducing the number of detection iterations required in MIMO communication systems. We begin by showing the existence of a maximum number of iterations, beyond which, no significant improvement is obtained. We establish a criterion for the number of maximum effective iterations. We propose a modified algorithm that uses the measured SNR to dynamically set the number of iterations to achieve an acceptable bit-error rate. Then, we replace the feedback algorithm with an approximate linear function to reduce the complexity. Simulations show that significant reduction in computational complexity is achieved compared to the ordinary V-BLAST, while maintaining a good BER performance.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. The final publication is available at www.aece.r

From brand experience to happiness: exploring the impacts on brand loyalty and price premium

Dr Karam Al Mandil, Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Cumbria, will be attending the Linnaeus University School of Business and Economics in Kalmar, Sweden which will play host to the 12th Global Brand Conference of the Academy of Marketing’s SIG (special interest group) in Brand, Identity and Corporate Reputation from April 26 2017. From a broadband provider offering to “do you right” to another supplier offering an “epic” feeling, marketing’s move to offer greater contentment is now much in evidence. “My paper argues that since the advent of the 21st Century, the overemphasis on the utilitarian aspects of products has shifted the interest to the hedonic facets of consumption,” Dr Al Mandil said. “Experience marketing presents a new approach to address this shift and to achieve long and lasting competitive advantages. More recently, happiness has received attention from marketers and studies examining happiness in consumer research have also begun to appear. Therefore, this research is investigating how brands contribute to consumers’ happiness through experiences.

Material Interactions and Self-Assembly in Inkjet Printing

Inkjet printing has attracted much attention in recent years as a versatile manufacturing tool, suitable for printing functional materials. This facile, low-cost printing technique with high throughput and accuracy is considered promising for a wide range of applications including but not limited to optical and electronic devices, sensors, solar cells, biochips, and displays. The performance of such functional devices is significantly influenced by the deposit morphology and printing resolution. Therefore, fabrication functional devices with precise footprints by inkjet printing requires deep understanding of ink properties, material interactions, and material self-assembly. In conventional inkjet printing process, where sessile droplets are directly printed on substrates, particle depositions are usually associated with the well-known, undesirable coffee-ring effect due to the high solvent evaporation rate at the edges of the printed droplets. Such particle accumulation phenomenon in vicinity of the three-phase contact lines of sessile droplets is considered detrimental to inkjet printing applications. This study investigates the material interactions and self-assembly of colloidal inks in inkjet printing applications at different length scales. The potential of inkjet printing has been exploited through employing the dual-droplet inkjet printing of colloidal particles to investigate the self-assembly of colloidal nanoparticles at the air-liquid interface and at the three-phase contact line of sessile droplets, which provide better understanding of the particle deposition morphologies after solvent evaporation. Different from conventional inkjet printing, the dual-droplet printing involves jetting wetting droplets, containing colloidal nanoparticles dispersed in solvents with high vapor pressure, over supporting droplets composed of water only. By tuning the surface tensions and controlling the jetting parameters of the jetted droplets, monolayers with closely-packed deposition of colloidal nanoparticles are demonstrated. Various solutions are proposed to totally suppress or mitigate the coffee-ring effect in inkjet printing applications through tuning the pH value of the supporting droplets in the dual-droplet inkjet printing to control the multibody interactions (i.e., particle-particle, particle-interface, and particle-substrate interactions) or by applying magnetic field to direct the self-assembly of colloidal particles in conventional inkjet printing. In addition, the influence of various forces such as drag force, van der Waals force, electrotactic force, and capillary force on the particle deposition and assembly in vicinity of the three-phase contact line area were investigated for both the conventional and dual-droplet inkjet printing techniques. Finally, fabrication of functional devices such as stretchable conductors have also been demonstrated by inkjet printing of silver nanowires into elastomer substrate, where the viscous liquid elastomer layer shaped the printed silver wire lines into tens of micrometers in dimeter. The silver nanowires align along the printing direction during solvent evaporation, resulting in wires with good mechanical stability and electrical performance. The printing techniques and the outcomes presented in this study can be harnessed in engineering and manufacturing a wide range of technological applications ranging from high-performance optical and electronic devices to stretchable conductors and sensors

From brand experience to happiness: exploring the impacts on brand loyalty and price premium

Since the advent of the 21st century, the overemphasis on the utilitarian aspects of products has shifted the interest to the hedonic facets of consumption (Pine & Gilmore, 2011). Experience marketing presents a new approach to address this shift and to achieve long and lasting competitive advantages (Gentile, Spiller & Noci, 2007) and loyalty (Smilansky, 2009). Despite the increasing number and quality of articles addressing brand experience, this research area remains underdeveloped and not as well-established as other marketing constructs, such as consumer attitudes, consumer satisfaction and brand equity (Schmitt & Zarantonello, 2013). More recently, happiness has received attention from marketers, and studies examining happiness in consumer research have also begun to appear (Schmitt, Brakus & Zarantonello, 2015; Bhattacharjee & Mogilner, 2014; Schmitt, 2012; Bettingen & Luedicke, 2009). Further, in a world where social concerns are garnering more insistence, it is argued that brands should contribute to consumers’ happiness through experiences (Schmitt, Brakus & Zarantonello, 2014). The main aim of this study is to model the relationship between brand experience dimensions (sensory, emotional, relational and cognitive) on the one hand and happiness on the other hand through the three orientations to happiness (pleasure, meaning, and engagement) (Peterson, Park & Seligman, 2005), and to examine the influence of happiness on brand loyalty and price premium. Therefore, the current research represents a meeting point between brand experience and happiness—two unique areas in marketing and psychology that are being afforded more importance nowadays (Brakus, Schmitt & Zarantonello, 2012; Carter & Gilovich, 2010; Brakus, Schmitt & Zarantonello, 2009; Peterson, Park & Seligman, 2005). Figure 1 displays the conceptual framework and the suggested hypotheses of the study

Exploration in Using Algae to Enhance Indoor Environment in the Tropical Climate

This paper discusses an exploration in algae application as a sun shading device for buildings. Four basic algae photobioreactors were constructed to investigate the effectiveness of Chlorella species to reduce direct sunlight transmission and solar heat gain in the Tropical climate of Kuala Lumpur. From the experiment, algae flat panel photobioreactor with direct carbon dioxide supply manage to reduce up to 44.9% of heat gain due to solar radiation on average. The overall solar transmission was also reduced to only 25% on average. These indicate that algae have the potential to be used as sun shading material for buildings

Quality Nurse Scheduling

The nurse-scheduling problem has fascinated mathematicians, computer scientists, and nursing professionals alike for years. The aim of this project is to create a website that will schedule nursing shifts in a fair and humane way. The website will allow nurse managers to create a schedule that considers the wants and needs of all staff members. The website will be easily modifiable with an understandable user-interface. The scheduling mechanism used will factor in personal preferences such as time off and shift requests. The schedule will also ensure that nurses do not work consecutive shifts and that there is a fair distribution of shifts amongst all nurses. Furthermore, the scheduling program will eliminate personal bias or favoritism when creating the schedule. This will decrease conflict amongst nurses because the schedule is created with total objectivity. Our research in this field has shown us that there does not currently exist a website or application that values the humanity of nurses by taking into account fairness and personal preferences

IMPLEMENTATION OF NEURAL - CRYPTOGRAPHIC SYSTEM USING FPGA

Modern cryptography techniques are virtually unbreakable. As the Internet and other forms of electronic communication become more prevalent, electronic security is becoming increasingly important. Cryptography is used to protect e-mail messages, credit card information, and corporate data. The design of the cryptography system is a conventional cryptography that uses one key for encryption and decryption process. The chosen cryptography algorithm is stream cipher algorithm that encrypt one bit at a time. The central problem in the stream-cipher cryptography is the difficulty of generating a long unpredictable sequence of binary signals from short and random key. Pseudo random number generators (PRNG) have been widely used to construct this key sequence. The pseudo random number generator was designed using the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) providing the required nonlinearity properties that increases the randomness statistical properties of the pseudo random generator. The learning algorithm of this neural network is backpropagation learning algorithm. The learning process was done by software program in Matlab (software implementation) to get the efficient weights. Then, the learned neural network was implemented using field programmable gate array (FPGA)

Apodization Defocused Optical Imaging System with Different Apertures using Hanning Amplitude Filter

The Optical system performance is characterized by the modulus and the phase of the amplitude impulse response (point spread function). An optical system with a nonuniform amplitude across its pupil called an apodized system. The motivation of apodizing a system is to increase the image quality of the system. In this paper, the influence of Hanning amplitude filters on the intensity of incoherent optical systems has been analyzed. A general expression for the PSF in the case of different square size pupil apertures (half diagonal=........