Temporal variation in abundance and diversity of butterflies in Bornean rain forests: opposite impacts of logging recorded in different seasons

We used traps baited with fruit to examine how the temporal variation of butterflies within primary forest in Sabah, Borneo differed between species. In addition, we compared patterns of temporal variation in primary and selectively logged forest, and we tested the hypothesis that selective logging has different recorded impacts on species diversity of adults during the wet monsoon period and the drier remaining half of the year. Species of Satyrinae and Morphinae had significantly less-restricted flight periods than did species of Nymphalinae and Charaxinae, which were sampled mainly during the drier season. especially in primary forest. Species diversity of adults was significantly higher during the drier season in primary forest, but did not differ between seasons in logged forest. As a consequence, logging had opposite recorded impacts on diversity during wetter and drier seasons: primary forest had significantly higher diversity than logged forest during the drier season but significantly lower diversity than logged forest during the wetter monsoon season. The results of this study have important implications for the assessment of biodiversity in tropical rain forests, particularly in relation to habitat disturbance: short-term assessments that do not take account of seasonal variation in abundance are likely to produce misleading results, even in regions where the seasonal variation in rainfall is not that great

Wavelet Analysis on FECG Detection Using Two Electrodes System Device

Fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) signal detection during pregnancies is very useful in assessing fetal condition. Doppler ultrasound is very common in non-invasive FECG detection. It is safe, but inaccurate, highly sensitive to noise and the success of the measurement depends on the positioning of the probe. Recently, there are many research use non-invasive Ag/AgCl in FECG detection. However it involves large number of electrode during measurement. In addition, complex structures of signal processing are required. A study has been made on FECG detection using two electrodes biopotential device without reference electrode. Best possible electrode placement for maximum FECG waveforms detection has been identified. The FECG signals are successfully detected at 0.028Hz after processed using wavelet analysis

Serological prevalence and haematological profile of Feline Immunodeficiency virus (FIV) in semi-roamer and outdoor cats

Feline Immunodeficiency virus (FIV) is among the most common infectious diseases diagnosed in cats. In this study, 55 client-owned cats presented to the University Veterinary Hospital, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UVH-UPM) were sampled. Inclusion criteria were semi-roamer and outdoor cats aged more than 6 mont hs old. Blood samples were collected for serological testing us ing commercial immunochromatographic test kits and haematological an alysis. Of the 55 cats tested, 13 cats (23.6%) tested positive for FIV antibodies. There was a significant association (P<0.05) between neuter and health status to FIV seropositivity. FIV infect ions were more likely occured in intact cats compared to neutered cat s, and in sick cats compared to healthy cats. Erythrocytes, hemoglobin and packed cell volume (PCV) were significantly redu ced (P<0.05) in FIV cats compared to FIV-seronegative cats, however these parameters were within the normal range

Sustainable management using recycle and reuse of construction waste materials in Malaysia / Shaharin Hamid... [et al.]

Ineffective construction waste management has become a serious problem that impacted significantly to environmental pollutions especially in a developing country like Malaysia. Despite the enactment of law by the government, Malaysia is still far behind as compared to other countries like Denmark and Hong Kong in terms of implementation of recycling and reuse of construction waste. Recycling and reuse of waste materials seems to be a profitable method that will boost the lifetime of landfills and cut down the usage of virgin natural resources. This paper discusses the practices of recycling and reuse of construction waste materials in the Klang Valley. A questionnaire survey was administered to 117 respondents from construction companies. The most common types of construction waste materials that can be recycled and reused are concrete, metal, asphalt, brick, plastic, cardboard, timber and glass. A descriptive analysis using Relative Important Index (RII) was used to rank the items asked in the survey. It was found that the most frequent types of recycling and reuse of construction waste materials based on ranking is timber, while the key benefit of recycle and reuse of construction waste is reduction of landfill space. On the other hand, the key challenge that affects recycling and reuse of construction waste is the risk of contamination. This study is beneficial for all parties involved in construction activities to achieve a more sustainable construction in Malaysia and throughout the world

Land use detection in Nusajaya using higher-order modified geodesic active contour model

Urban development is a global phenomenon. In Johor, especially Nusajaya is one of the most rapidly developing cities. This is due to the increase of land demand and population growth. Moreover, land-use changes are considered to be one of the major components of current environmental monitoring strategies. In this context, image segmentation and mathematical model offers essential tools that can be used to analyze land use detection. The image segmentation process is known as the most important and difficult task in image analysis. Nonlinear fourth-order models had shown to have a good achievement in recovering smooth regions. Therefore, these motivate us to propose a fourth-order modified geodesic active contour (GAC) model. In the proposed model, a modified signed pressure force (SPF) function has been defined to segment the inhomogeneous satellite images. The simulations of the fourth-order modified GAC model through some numerical methods based on the higher-order finite difference method (FDM) have been illustrated. Matlab R2015a software in Windows 7 Ultimate on Intel (R) Core (TM) i5-3230M @ 2.60GHz CPU with 8 GB RAM has been considered as a computational platform for the simulation. Qualitative and quantitative differences between modified SPF functions and other SPF functions have been shown as a comparison. Hence land use detection is very useful for local governments and urban planners to enhance the future sustainable development plans of Nusajaya

Audio deformation based data augmentation for convolution neural network in vibration analysis

Audio deformations in audio processing have proved ability in preserve semantic meaning for audio signal. Convolution Neural Network (CNN) is among deep learning model that requires huge dataset during training for excellence performance Thus, data augmentation (DA) method is used to overcome the problem of limited dataset number for vibration analysis. Several signal processing phases including segmentation and image converting need to be performed before the vibration signal can be used as input for CNN. In this research, audio-deformation based DA is proposed in generating the additional vibration signal dataset. The proses is start by encoding the raw vibration signal to audio signal format to enable the audio deformation process performing, then decoding back into new vibration signal. Speed and amplify transformation are selected for audio deformation process. The new vibration data set of bearing fault detection problem are used for training CNN to validate the proposed approach. The results obtained from 13 experiments setting have shown that the proposed DA able to increase the accuracy of training for CNN until 13% compared with the previous DA method

3D medical image visualization and VE model to determine the pathology zone of tumor evidence-based using some numerical methods and simulation

This paper presents some integrated mathematical modeling and simulation for visualizing a 3D medical image and estimating the volume of tumor growth. Thus, these two indicators will determine the pathology zone and to provide revised evidence-based on tumor histology, location, growth and the treatment effect. There are three phases of modeling and simulation for volume visualization of the 3D tumor. The first phase is converting from 2D signal images to 2D digital images based on edge detection of the tumor. Geodesic Active Contour (GAC) model based on additive operator splitting (AOS) will be used to detect the contour line of a brain tumor on 2D images. The second phase is pre-constructing of 3D digital image from the 2D images by applying two numerical models such as an image manifold model (IM) and volume estimation model (VE). The third phase is implementing the numerical simulation and visualizing the 3D medical image on a hardware and software computational platform. The numerical comparison of VE and IM will be investigate using some performance measurements and interpretation in terms of VE, RMSE, run time and computational complexity cost. In this case study, the medical image is based on a set of 2D MRI brain tumor images from Kubang Krian Hospital Malaysia (HKK). The numerical results will determine the pathology zone and to provide revised evidence-based on tumor informatics. As a conclusion, this paper proof an alternative numerical model is superior to construct and visual the 3D medical images. Thus, volumetric image estimation from the 2D image and extended to a 3D volume image is essential for accurate evaluation of the high resolution 3D medical images

Utilizing hydraulic modelling and Geographical Information System (GIS) in developing a water distribution network for reclaimed water

Rapid development has increased water demand, combined with population growth, water scarcity, climate change, and rapid economic growth, are driving factors for water reclaim. This paper reviews previous research on developing a water distribution system for delivering reclaimed water in order to mitigate the industry's growing water demand. As a result, reclaimable wastewater should be identified in order to establish links between urban and industrial infrastructure planning and water reclamation. Correspondingly, it is tasked with the responsibility of developing low-cost water treatment for industrial water reclamation. Simultaneously, a reliable water distribution network is required to deliver reclaimed water. This can be accomplished through the use of hydraulic modelling and GIS to analyse, manage, and develop the water distribution network in response to a growing supply demand. Hydraulic modelling is used to calculate and analyse the demand for the water supply over a specified time period based on daily water use. Additionally, it computing the appropriate parameter for the pipeline in order to deliver an adequate amount of pressure to the consumer efficiently. The developed hydraulic model was then integrated into GIS to facilitate the network layout and visualization of the water distribution system. Apart from that, in order to fully implement the concept of reclaimed water and its delivery via a water distribution system, several factors must be considered, including public acceptance, economic viability, environmental stewardship, technical operation, and health risk

An improved image compression technique using large adaptive DCT psychovisual thresholds

High quality multimedia requires high bandwidth and data transfer rate to transmit multimedia data in communication networks. Image compression is one of solutions to reduce the storage of multimedia data which in turn allows an efficient transmission through networks. An adaptive image compression technique through customized quantization tables based on user preference has been widely used in many applications. Scaling quantization table can significantly influence the reconstruction error and compression rate. This paper proposes an adaptive psychovisual threshold for customizing large quantization tables to improve image compression. An adaptive psychovisual threshold is computed based on a smooth curve of the absolute reconstruction error by incrementing the DCT frequency order. Experimental results show that the performance of adaptive large DCT psychovisual threshold achieves high image quality and minimum average bit length of Huffman code. The proposed method also demonstrates that boundary effects do not appear when the compressed image is zoomed in to 400

UWB Antenna Width Tuning Effect for UWB Communication

In this paper, a performance analysis of an array of 2 x 1 Ice Cream Cone UWB Antenna for Ultra Wide Band (UWB) communication is being proposed. The antenna designs have been simulated using CST Microwave Studio. The antenna covers the UWB spectrum from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz, and had a return loss below than -10 dB throughout the entire band. The basic antenna analysis has been done including the analysis of antenna performance due to antenna width tuning. A compact antenna area of 70 x 80 mm2 is obtained. The material used is FR-4 epoxy glass substrate that has dielectric constant, r = 4.4 and the dielectric thickness; h = 1.6mm. The antenna also gives omni-directional radiation characteristics with reasonable gain values over the same frequency ban