The role of government on export performance (an empirical model, case study: carpet industry)

This study empirically investigates the direct and indirect effects of government planning on firm export performance. Government export programs normally define the premise for successful or failure exporting activities of the corporate sector and play a key role in stimulating international business activities of firms (Abay, stanl, slater, 1989) In this article, we explain the government activities for export development and the activities that make barriers for exporting that the promoting factors include: Tax incentive, Covering insurance, Export guarantee fund, Create exhibition, Give information about appropriate market, Export developing program, Training classes about the rules of import& export, and the barrier program include: Exchange rate fluctuations, Tariff barrier, Boycott(sanction), Political obstacle, Export license. so, the motto of this study is to find out the affecting role of government on export performance of company to ensure profitable export performance in the case of carpet company in Iran. Developing of non-oil exports are important because of revenues oil declining and oil resources renewable, on the hand, and increasing of population, on the other hand. Behavior and performance of the company in the exporting markets, also, investigating of the key success factors are one of the important factors in this scope and because of the importance of carpet industry in non-oil export, in this essay, we investigating the  effective factors on export performance in carpet companies. This study in term of purpose is applied research methods and in term of doing research is descriptive – analytical. And we use of questionnaire among 342 people that work in carpet company. And between 13 Hypothesis all of them accepted in this study according to SPSS software and regression, it means that all factors have positive and meaningful relationship with export performance. Keywords: government role, export performance, promotion program, barrier progra

Platelet Rich Plasma: Review of Literature

Objective: At present, growth factor-containing products such as enamel matrix derivatives, recombinant bone morphogenetic protein (rh-BMP), recombinant platelet derived growth factor and platelet rich plasma (PRP) have gained increasing attention. PRP is an autologous source of platelet growth factors used to enhance healing of soft and hard tissues. PRP has gained popularity due to its autologous nature, easy procurement and low cost.Review of Literatures: This study focuses on procurement and clinical applications of PRP.Conclusion: Controversy exists regarding the efficacy and applications of PRP and longitudinal studies are required to further elucidate this subject

Verifying Timed LTL Properties Using Simulink Design Verifier

RÉSUMÉ Les logiciels jouent un rôle de plus en plus important dans les systèmes embarqués notamment dans les domaines de la santé, de l’automobile et de l’avionique. Un objectif important du génie logiciel est d’offrir, aux développeurs, un support ainsi que les outils d’aide à la conception de systèmes fiables nonobstant leur complexité. Dans le but d’atteindre cet objectif, des environnements de développement comme Simulink et SCADE proposent un processus de développement, basé sur des modèles, qui intègre, d’une manière réfléchie, différentes approches et outils de vérification (test, simulation, vérification formelle, évaluation, génération de code, etc). Ils permettent ainsi de concevoir, tester, simuler, vérifier, corriger des modèles puis de générer automatiquement du code à partir de ces modèles. Cette thèse s’intéresse aux méthodes formelles et à l’intégration de celles-ci dans l’environnement de développement Simulink. Les méthodes formelles s’appuient sur des outils mathématiques pour spécifier, par des modèles, le comportement et les propriétés d’un système et prouver qu’il satisfait ses requis. Simulink-Design-Verifier (SLDV) est un outil de vérification formelle, intégré à l’environnement de développement Simulink, qui permet de vérifier des propriétés de sûreté (assertions) sur des modèles Simulink. Cette thèse vise à étendre cette classe de propriétés à des propriétés linéaires LTL (Linear Temporal Logic), LTL temporisé et LTL à base d’événements. Les contributions de cette thèse sont présentées sous forme de trois articles. Le premier article présente une étude de cas qui a permis d’expérimenter l’environnement de développement Simulink, d’identifier ses caractéristiques et ses limitations. Il s’agit de modéliser et vérifier un dispositif médical appelé sonde d’intubation. Une sonde d’intubation est une tubulure mise en place sur un sujet inconscient qui permet notamment d’assurer en permanence le passage de l’air vers les poumons. Ce système est composé de deux ballonnets, deux robinets d’accès pour gonflage manuel, deux capteurs de pression, un distributeur de puissance, une pompe et un réservoir d’air. Tous ces composants sont concurrents et contrôlés par contrôleur programmable décrit par un grafcet. Cet article montre comment utiliser l’environnement Simulink pour, d’une part, modéliser ces différents composants ainsi que leurs interactions, et d’autre part, vérifier formellement des propriétés, afin de s’assurer du bon fonctionnement du système. Cependant, la spécification de certaines propriétés temporelles n’est pas évidente car elles doivent être exprimées sous forme d’assertions. Les articles suivants proposent des blocks canevas pour des propriétés temporelles linéaires. Le deuxième article est une version améliorée et étendue du premier article. Il s’est intéressé à réduire la complexité de vérification en modifiant significative le modèle et en proposant des blocks de spécification de propriétés linéaires basées sur les événements émis par le contrôleur. Le troisième article est dédié à la spécification de propriétés LTL en utilisant SLDV. Il propose des blocs Simulink configurables qui spécifient ces propriétés. Le but de ces blocs est de transformer les propriétés en assertions qui sont vérifiables par SLDV. La solution proposée dans le seconde et troisième article, est donc une extension de la bibliothèque de blocs de Simulink qui permet aux utilisateurs moins experts de spécifier et vérifier certaines propriétés LTL. Ce travail est donc limité aux propriétés LTL à temps discret, et restreint à certaines propriétés LTL. Nos travaux futurs consisteraient à l’extension de la bibliothèque de blocs de Simulink pour supporter des propriétés LTL plus complexes et à plus grande échelle.----------ABSTRACT Software plays increasingly a significant role in embedded systems particularly used in healthcare, automotive and avionics. An important goal of software engineering is to offer developers support tools to design reliable systems despite the system complexity. In order to achieve this, development environments like Simulink and SCADE propose a model-based development process, which integrates in a thoughtful way, different approaches and verification tools (test, simulation, formal verification, evaluation, code generation, etc.). They allow to design, test, simulate, verify, correct the models and then automatically generate code from these models. This thesis is interested in formal methods and integrating them in the Simulink development environment. Formal methods are based on mathematical tools to specify the behavior and properties of a system by models, and prove, if it meets its requirements. Simulink Design Verifier (SLDV) is a formal verification tool, integrated in Simulink development environment, to verify safety properties (assertions) on Simulink models. This thesis aims to extend this class of properties to linear properties LTL (Linear Temporal Logic), timed LTL and event based LTL. The contributions of this thesis are presented in three articles. The first article presents a case study that experiment the Simulink development environment, to identify its characteristics and limitations. It consists of modeling and verifying a medical device called intubation tube. An intubation tube is a tube that assures permanent air flow to the lungs of unconscious person. This system consists of two balloons, two access valves for manual inflation, two pressure sensors, a power distributor, a pump and an air reservoir. All these components work in parallel and are controlled by a programmable controller described by grafcet. This article shows how to use the Simulink environment, to model these components and also how to verify formally the properties to ensure the system is well functioning. However, the specification of certain temporal properties is not obvious because they must be expressed as assertions. The following articles propose canvas blocks for linear temporal properties. The second article is an improved and extended version of the first article. It is interested in reducing verification complexity by changing significantly the model, and proposing specification blocks of linear properties, based on events issued by the controller. The third article is dedicated to the specification of LTL properties using SLDV. It proposes configurable Simulink blocks that specify these properties. The purpose of these blocks is to transform the properties into assertions that are verifiable by SLDV. The solution proposed in the second and third articles, is to extend the block library of Similink, which allows less-expert users to specify and verify some Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) properties. This work is limited to discrete time LTL properties, and restricted to specify some LTL properties. Our future work is devoted to extend the block library of Simulink to have support for a large scale and more complex LTL properties

A comparative study about the impact of sensory stimulation performed by family members and nurses on vital signs of patients at ICU: A randomized clinical trial

Some studies have shown the effects of sensory stimulation on vital signs of patients at intensive care unit (ICU). However, little knowledge is available about family role compared to the role of nursing staff in this issue and current results are controversial. The aim of this study is to compare the impact of sensory stimulation performed by family members and nurses on vital signs of patients at ICU. In this study, 9669 patients were categorized into two intervention groups and one control group by stratified block randomization method. Dyang sensory stimulation was provided by family members and nursing staff. No intervention was performed for control group. Sensory stimulation was performed 2 hours a day for 6 consecutive days. The vital signs were assessed 5 minutes before and 30 minutes after intervention. Data analysis was performed by ANCOVA, ANOVA and repeated measures. The results showed that there was significant difference between the experimental groups in terms of vital signs before and after the intervention (p<0.001). Of this aspect, family group was the best, nursing group was the second and control group was the last group in classification. The effect of sensory stimulation on vital signs of comatose patients was greater when provided by family members

RSS-based sensor localization with unknown transmit power

Received signal strength (RSS)-based single source localization when there is not a prior knowledge about the transmit power of the source is investigated. Because of nonconvex behavior of maximum likelihood (ML) estimator, convoluted computations are required to achieve its global minimum. Therefore, we propose a novel semidefinite programming (SDP) approach by approximating ML problem to a convex optimization problem which can be solved very efficiently. Computer simulations show that our proposed SDP has a remarkable performance very close to ML estimator. Linearizing RSS model, we also derive the partly novel least squares (LS) and weighted total least squares (WTLS) algorithms for this problem. Simulations illustrate that WTLS improves the performance of LS considerably

RSS-Based Sensor Localization in the Presence of Unknown Channel Parameters

This correspondence studies the received signal strength-based localization problem when the transmit power or path-loss exponent is unknown. The corresponding maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE) poses a difficult nonconvex optimization problem. To avoid the difficulty in solving the MLE, we use suitable approximations and formulate the localization problem as a general trust region subproblem, which can be solved exactly under mild conditions. Simulation results show a promising performance for the proposed methods, which also have reasonable complexities compared to existing approaches

Numerical solution of the inverse Gardner equation

In this paper, the numerical solution of the inverse Gardner equation will be considered. The Haar wavelet collocation method (HWCM) will be used to determine the unknown boundary condition which is estimated from an over-specified condition at a boundary. In this regard, we apply the HWCM for discretizing the space derivatives and then use a quasilinearization technique to linearize the nonlinear term in the equations. It is proved that the proposed method has the order of convergence O(∆x). The efficiency and robustness of the proposed approach for solving the inverse Gardner equation are demonstrated by one numerical example.Publisher's Versio

Bearing-only target localization with uncertainties in observer position

In this paper, the bearing-only target localization problem when the observer positions are subject to error is investigated. In this problem, the angle of arrival of the transmitted signal between target and observer are used to estimate the target position. It is assumed that not only the bearing measurements are corrupted by noise but also the exact position of observer is not available to the estimator. The accuracy of estimated location of target depends on the reliability of information from the observer position. Therefore, the previously published algorithms considering only the bearing measurement noise do not meet the expected performance when the observer positions are subject to error. The maximum likelihood, the least squares and total least square algorithms and a new method of localization based on weighted total least squares approach are developed for this problem. The corresponding Cram´er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is derived for this problem. Computer simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. Simulation results show that the new method can attain the CRLB for sufficiently high SNR