Morphology of Street Vegetation along Pedestrian Walkways in Kuala Lumpur City Centre

The Kuala Lumpur City Hall (KLCH) has planted 100,000 trees along the main streets of the city centre through the National Economic Transformation Programme to make the city more liveable. This paper studies the reasons for its different establishments, and it determines the social and physical benefits to the pedestrian walkways through a further investigation regarding the morphological parameters used by the Landscape Department of KLCH. The outcomes indicated that the street vegetation morphology implemented is mainly to improve the social and physical condition of the pedestrian walkways, especially the safety of the pedestrians due to snatching and reckless crossings.Keywords: Street Vegetation; City Centre; Main Street; Pedestrian WalkwayseISSN: 2398-4287 © 2019. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/e-bpj.v4i12.162

Enhancing the Punching Behavior of High Strength Concrete Flat Plates Subjected to Repeated Load by Using Shear Reinforcement

تتضمن الدراسة الحالية التحري العملي والتحليلي لسلوك الثقب لتسليح القص السقوف المستوية مربعة الشكل والمسندة بإسناد بسيط والمصبوبة باستخدام خرسانة عالية المقاومة و المعرضة لحمل تكراري. يتألف البرنامج العملي من فحص اربع نموذج سقوف مستوية بنفس الأبعاد الكلية لجميع السقوف ( 900×900×100 ) ملم والأعمدة ( 150×150 ×300 ) ملم. أهم متغير أخذت بنظر الاعتبار في هذه الدراسة هو نوع تسليح القص (ثلاث نماذج): الاطواق الفولاذية المغلقة, مسامير القص الفولاذية و القضبان الفولاذية المنحنية. اخيرا, النموذج الرابع ( بدون حديد تسليح قصي ) يعمل كنموذج مرجعي. من نتائج هذا العمل, وجد بأن الاطواق الفولاذية المغلقة افضل انواع تسليح القص لان هذا النوع يعطي زيادة عالية في مقاومه القص الثاقب ( حوالي 92%) و استيعابيه الدوران, سهل واقتصادي. التحري التحليلي قدم أنموذجا لا خطيا بالاعتماد على عناصر ثلاثية الأبعاد ملائمة لتحليل نماذج السقوف المستوية المصبوبة باستخدام خرسانة عالية المقاومة باستخدام البرنامج الحاسوبي ( ABAQUS , الإصدار6 - النسخة 2013 ). المقارنة بين النتائج العملية والتحليلية بينت توافق جيد حيث كان معدل نسبة الاختلاف بالاعتماد على الحمل النهائي لا يزيد عن 3.67% لكل النماذج المحللة.The present study includes an experimental and numerical investigations for the punching behavior of shear reinforced square simply supported flat plates of high strength concrete (HSC) subjected to repeated load. The experimental program consists of testing four flat plate models. They were of the same overall dimensions of plate, (900×900×100) mm and dimensions of column (150×150×300) mm. The main variable has been considered in the experimental study is: type of shear reinforcement (three models): closed stirrups, headed shear studs and bent bars. Finally, a fourth model (without shear reinforced) served as control model. From the results of this work, It was found that the closed stirrups is the best type of shear reinforcement because this type is highly increase punching shear strength (about 92%) , rotation capacity, simple and cost-effective. Three-dimensional nonlinear finite element analysis has been carried out to conduct the numerical investigation of the general behavior of HSC flat plat models. ABAQUS (Version 6, copyright 2013) computer program was used in this work. A comparison between numerical and experimental results showed good validity of the numerical analysis where the average difference ratio based on the ultimate load was less than 3.67% for all analyzed models

Adopting explicit and implicit social relations by SVD++ for recommendation system improvement

Recommender systems suffer a set of drawbacks such as sparsity. Social relations provide a useful source to overcome the sparsity problem. Previous studies have utilized social relations or rating feedback sources. However, they ignored integrating these sources. In this paper, the limitations of previous studies are overcome by exploiting four sources of information, namely: explicit social relationships, implicit social relationships, users’ ratings, and implicit feedback information. Firstly, implicit social relationships are extracted through the source allocation index algorithm to establish new relations among users. Secondly, the similarity method is applied to find the similarity between each pair of users who have explicit or implicit social relations. Then, users’ ratings and implicit rating feedback sources are extracted via a user-item matrix. Furthermore, all sources are integrated into the singular value decomposition plus (SVD++) method. Finally, missing predictions are computed. The proposed method is implemented on three real-world datasets: Last.Fm, FilmTrust, and Ciao. Experimental results reveal that the proposed model is superior to other studies such as SVD, SVD++, EU-SVD++, SocReg, and EISR in terms of accuracy, where the improvement of the proposed method is about 0.03% for MAE and 0.01% for RMSE when dimension value (d) = 10

Review of Parameters in Routing Protocols in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad_hoc Network  (VANET) is a sophisticated elegance of devoted cellular network that permits automobiles to intelligently communicate for different   roadside infrastructure. VANETs bring with it some of demanding situations associated with Quality of Service (QoS) and performance. QoS relies upon on many parameters which includes packet transport ratio, bandwidth, postpone variance, records latency, etc. This paper, discuss numerous troubles associated with latency records, bandwidth usage, and transport of packet in VANETs. The demanding situations have been recognized in offering security, reliability and confidentiality of posted records. Finally, numerous packages of VANETs also are introduced in the modern computing scenario

The role of TNF-? in the pathogenesis of multiple myeloma “a study in Iraqi patients”

During recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the investigation of the cytokines roles in pathogenesis of cancer, thus the study aimed at evaluating the level of tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF-?) in sera of Iraqi multiple myeloma (MM) patients. Beta 2-microglobulion (?2-m) was assessed to determine if there was any association between this cytokine and the level of ?2- m, as the latter is related to the stage of the disease. In addition, the age and gender were also taken into consideration. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship between IgG and TNF-? in sera of patients. 49 Iraqi patients (27 males and 22 females).The patients were also divided into two groups: the first group included (17) patients who were recently diagnosed and not received any treatment at the time of collecting samples while the second group included (32) patients who received treatment. A further group was also investigated which included (12) apparently healthy individuals (9 males and 3 females), who were regarded as a control group. Serum TNF-? and ?2- m were determined using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).while the concentration of IgG was measured by radial immune diffusion plates The study reached to the following results: TNF-? levels were not significantly elevated in the patients with MM compared to control group (5.98 ± 8.47 SD vs. 4.85 ± 12.1 SD) and no significant differences (P > 0.05) were observed in the mean (6.02 ±8.1SD vs 5.9 ±9.4SD) concentration of TNF-? in patients with MM who received treatment, when compared with those who did not take the treatment .In addition, there are positive significant correlations between TNF-? and ? 2 Microglobulin (r = 0.316, P = 0 .027), and no relationship between IgG and TNF-? (r = - 0.032, P = 0.829).Furthermore, the study observed that, there was no correlation between TNF-? on the one hand and factors of age and gender on the other hand

Optical properties of diamond like carbon films prepared by DC-PECVD

Diamond-like carbon (DLC) thin films were deposited at different substrate temperatures using methane and hydrogen gas in DC-PECVD at 2x10-1Torr. From the light transmission using UV-VIS spectroscopy it was found that the optical transition had changed from allowed indirect transition to allowed direct transition as the substrate temperature increased. The Optical gap increased with temperature, highest of 3.034 eV was observed at 573 K, beyond which it dropped. Colour of the film changed from light brownish to a colourless transparent film in the higher temperature. The Urbach energy decreased from 1.25 eV to 0.75 eV with increasing substrate temperature till 573 K and a slight increase after it. This trend is attributed to change in sp3/sp2 ratio or change in structure. The cluster size decreases with temperature, resulting in larger band gap and the structure more ordered. Similar pattern is also witnessed in the emission spectrum of the photoluminescence

Experimental Investigation of The Steady Motion of Spherical- Cap Bubble

The aim of the present work is to study the hydrodynamics of sphericalcapbubble, rise bubble velocity, shape of bubble, and drag coefficient. Theexperimental work of two-phase ,air-water system was carried out using a Perspexcolumn of 14.5 cm diameter and 180 cm height. A known volume of air wassupplied to the cup from a syringe. The single gas bubble rose through theentrance region by turning the cup instantaneously. The rise bubble velocity wasmeasured by visual observation. In order to measure the terminal velocity anelectronic timer (Stop-Watch) was used. The drag coefficient of air spherica–l capbubble rising in water was measured and found to be a value between (2.8-3.8) forall Reynolds number. The experimental results are compared with the theoreticalresults of some investigators

Performance evaluation of CCM and TSCP routing protocols within/without data fusing in WSNs

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a large number of small sensor devices that can connect each other wirelessly.WSNs applications are rapidly growing in last decades, furthermore, in WSN research, energy is one of the important issues that must consider when designing a new protocol. Due to the fact, almost all of nodes' energy deplete in the communication part, and the data fusing directly impact the performance of routing protocol.This paper studies the impact of data fusing for chain based routing protocols.In this study, ns-3 simulator used to evaluate Chain-Cluster Mixed (CCM) and Two Stage Chain Protocol (TSCP) routing protocols with deterministic nodes deployment. The experiments show that TSCP overcomes CCM in network lifetime when data fusing applied while CCM overcomes TSCP in the same metric with non-fusing of data for First Node Die (FND), 10%, 25%, 50% and Last node (LND). Furthermore, CCM is still playing a good behavior in delay for both approaches. The main conclusion for this paper is non-fusing of data must be applied when design new routing protocol to study all the packets traffic behaviors in the path from source to destination

Effective electroencephalogram based epileptic seizure detection using support vector machine and statistical moment’s features

Epilepsy is one of the widespread disorders. It is a noncommunicable disease that affects the human nerve system. Seizures are abnormal patterns of behavior in the electricity of the brain which produce symptoms like losing consciousness, attention or convulsions in the whole body. This paper demonstrates an effective electroencephalogram (EEG) based seizure detection method using discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) for signal decomposition to extract features. An automatic channel selection method was proposed by the researcher to select the best channel from 23 channels based on maximum variance value. The records were segmented into a nonoverlapping segment with long 1-S. The support vector machine (SVM) model was used to automatically detect segments that contain seizures, using both frequency and time domain statistical moment features. The experimental result was obtained from 24 patients in CHB-MIT database. The average accuracy is 94.1, sensitivity is 93.5, specificity is 94.6 and the false positive rate average is 0.054

Characterisation and cytotoxicity assessment of UV absorbers-intercalated zinc/aluminium-layered double hydroxides on dermal fibroblast cells

Zn/Al-layered double hydroxide (LDH) was used as a host to intercalate various organic ultraviolet (UV) radiation absorbers. The intercalation compounds were prepared via the co-precipitation method. Powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) confirmed the successful intercalation of anions into the interlayer regions of the LDH nanocomposites. As a result of intercalation, the resulting nanocomposites loaded with UV-ray absorbers, cinnamic acid (CA), benzophenone 4 (B4) and Eusolex®232 (EUS)—exhibited basal spacings of 17.9 Å, 21.3 Å and 21.0 Å, respectively. Photochemical analysis revealed an increase in the UV-ray absorption capability of UV absorber/LDH nanocomposites compared to pure UV-ray absorbers. The retention ability of the organic moieties in the LDH host was tested in a skin pH simulation and was found to demonstrate low release over an extended period of time. Cytotoxicity findings indicated that none of the nanocomposites exhibit significant cytotoxicity towards human dermal fibroblast (HDF) cells up to the test concentration of 25 μg/mL