Physical properties of electron beam irradiated poly(vinyl butyral) composites with carbamate,imidazole, and tetrazolium dye

Films of poly(vinyl butyral) composites with triphenyl tetrazolium chloride dye (TTC) and the antioxidant nickel dibutyl dithiocarbamate (NBC) or 2‐mercaptobenzimidazole (MBI) were prepared by the solution casting method using butyl alcohol as a solvent. The effect of various doses of electron beam irradiation (50–200 kGy) on color response, thermal, and mechanical properties were investigated. The color measurements showed that the films of the different composites possessed a high sensitivity to electron beam irradiation, in which the nearly colorless films were changed to deep red color, which can be easily detected by visual observations. In addition, the change in color depends on irradiation dose and the contents of the TTC dye. Moreover, the presence of the antioxidants NBC or MBI has no effect on the development of color. However, PVB/TTC and PVB/TTC/MBI composites showed high regular change in color as a function of irradiation dose. The thermogravimetric analysis used to study the thermal stability indicated that PVB/TTC composites either before or after electron beam irradiation are thermally more stable than neat PVB polymer. The presence of the antioxidants NBC or MBI offered protection to PVB/TTC composites against decomposition or oxidative degradation resulted from irradiation. Blending unirradiated PVB with TTC dye, mixture of TTC and NBC, and mixture of TTC and MBI reduced the tensile strength by 4, 20, and 17% upon blending, respectively. However, the reduction in tensile strength of the entire composite films (～7% based on the initial value) upon exposure to a dose of 50 kGy is acceptable for practical applications. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 101: 4358–4365, 2006     

EVALUATION OF SURFACE FORCE-PORE FLOW AND MODIFIED SURFACE FORCE-PORE FLOW MODELS FOR REVERSE OSMOSIS TRANSPORT

The surface force-pore flow (SF-PF) model of reverse osmosis transport and the extended and modified form (the MD-SF-PF model) have been employed to predict the performance of four aromatic polyamide (FilmTec, FT30)reverse osmosis membranes. The evaluation is based on a comparison of model predictions with experimental data. Dilute sodium chloride-water solution experimental data were used to estimate model parameters. The models are then used to predict flux and separation at various operating pressures and concentrations. Membrane performance (i.e., separation and permeate flux) can be well predicted by the MD-SF-PF model while the SF-PF model predicts the performance for the sodium chloride system less satisfactorily.     

A survey on video content rating: taxonomy,challenges and open issues

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Rating a video based on its content is one of the most important solutions to classify videos for audience age groups. In this regard, Film content rating and TV...     

Proactive discovery protocol with security enhancement for D2D communication system

With the increase in mobile traffic and the band-width demand, Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has gained tremendous interest by the researchers, cellular operators and equipment manufacturers. However, D2D communication has been limited to study the converge services at cell edge. D2D users that located outside the cellular network coverage haven’t received enough attention. Some of the problems faced in this case are discovering process of neighbor user equipment (UE) and services, as well as designing suitable and secure protocols for D2D communication. Toward these problems, in this paper, we propose security enhancement for D2D communication based on modified elliptic curve cryptography (MECC), which provides greater efficiency in computational overhead, key sizes and bandwidths for user’s authentication applied on proactive routing protocol for neighbor and service discovery. We study Diffie–Hellman, ElGamal and MECC techniques to improve service of D2D users at cell edge. Results show that the proposed scheme can strength the secrecy with less control overhead and can increase the robustness in a wide range of scenarios for service discovery in D2D networks.

     

Design of a compact dual‐band folded‐waveguide bandpass filter using multilayer waveguide resonators

A novel compact dual‐band bandpass filter based on multilayer folded‐waveguide (FWG) structure is presented in this article.In this design, slots are used to realize direct coupling between adjacent resonators and apertures are adopted to implement cross coupling between non‐adjacent resonators.A new technique of external quality factor of FWG resonator and coupling coefficients between different resonators are studied using full‐wave simulator. In order to demonstrate the proposed technique, a four‐pole dual‐band bandpass filter is designed, fabricated and measured using vector network analyzer. Measurement results which are well agreed with simulation results are presented. Moreover, four‐pole substrate integrated folded waveguide SIFW dual‐band bandpass filter, using two layers of slotted folded waveguide resonators, is demonstrated. The proposed filter has a compact size and it is excellent candidate for the application of wireless communication systems. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 25:780–788, 2015.     

Emotional Loneliness and Coping Strategies: A Reference to Older Malaysians at Nursing Homes

This article presents an in-depth qualitative study using a phenomenological approach to understand loneliness among elderly individuals in Malaysia. The objective of the study was to understand how the Malaysian elderly perceive and understand social isolation as well as loneliness, with the aim of identifying the factors that cause emotional loneliness among the elderly in nursing homes. In addition, this study also explored their coping strategies when dealing with loneliness. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten elderly participants from two different nursing homes in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor with representatives from the three major ethnic groups of Malaysia. Based on the results, there are several factors that cause the elderly to feel lonely – health factors, lack of family ties, and the lack of communication and cognitive factors, such as memory and perception. It was also found that internal (expectations and optimism) and external (work and activities) coping strategies play major roles in overcoming loneliness. In conclusion, some recommendations are made to respective party families and the government to consider when developing plans to help the elderly overcome loneliness, which could strengthen the family and social support system in Malaysia.     

Mass spectrometric immunoassay and MRM as targeted MS-based quantitative approaches in biomarker development: Potential applications to cardiovascular disease and diabetes

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD)—the leading cause of death in the United States. Yet not all subjects with T2DM are at equal risk for CVD complications; the challenge lies in identifying those at greatest risk. Therapies directed toward treating conventional risk factors have failed to significantly reduce this residual risk in T2DM patients. Thus newer targets and markers are needed for the development and testing of novel therapies. Herein we review two complementary MS-based approaches—mass spectrometric immunoassay (MSIA) and MS/MS as MRM—for the analysis of plasma proteins and PTMs of relevance to T2DM and CVD. Together, these complementary approaches allow for high-throughput monitoring of many PTMs and the absolute quantification of proteins near the low picomolar range. In this review article, we discuss the clinical relevance of the high density lipoprotein (HDL) proteome and Apolipoprotein A-I PTMs to T2DM and CVD as well as provide illustrative MSIA and MRM data on HDL proteins from T2DM patients to provide examples of how these MS approaches can be applied to gain new insight regarding cardiovascular risk factors. Also discussed are the reproducibility, interpretation, and limitations of each technique with an emphasis on their capacities to facilitate the translation of new biomarkers into clinical practice.     

Toward an efficient and scalable feature selection approach for internet traffic classification

There is significant interest in the network management and industrial security community about the need to identify the “best” and most relevant features for network traffic in order to properly characterize user behaviour and predict future traffic. The ability to eliminate redundant features is an important Machine Learning (ML) task because it helps to identify the best features in order to improve the classification accuracy as well as to reduce the computational complexity related to the construction of the classifier. In practice, feature selection (FS) techniques can be used as a preprocessing step to eliminate irrelevant features and as a knowledge discovery tool to reveal the “best” features in many soft computing applications. In this paper, we investigate the advantages and disadvantages of such FS techniques with new proposed metrics (namely goodness, stability and similarity). We continue our efforts toward developing an integrated FS technique that is built on the key strengths of existing FS techniques. A novel way is proposed to identify efficiently and accurately the “best” features by first combining the results of some well-known FS techniques to find consistent features, and then use the proposed concept of support to select a smallest set of features and cover data optimality. The empirical study over ten high-dimensional network traffic data sets demonstrates significant gain in accuracy and improved run-time performance of a classifier compared to individual results produced by some well-known FS techniques.     

Color image segmentation using adaptive unsupervised clustering approach

This paper presents the Region Splitting and Merging-Fuzzy C-means Hybrid Algorithm (RFHA), an adaptive unsupervised clustering approach for color image segmentation, which is important in image analysis and in understanding pattern recognition and computer vision field. Histogram thresholding technique is applied in the formation of all possible cells, used to split the image into multiple homogeneous regions. The merging technique is applied to merge perceptually close homogeneous regions and obtain better initialization for the Fuzzy C-means clustering approach. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme could obtain promising segmentation results, with 12% average improvement in clustering quality and 63% reduction in classification error compared with other existing segmentation approaches.     

Interleaving Guidance in Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization

In this paper, we propose a framework that uses localization for multi-objective optimization to simultaneously guide an evolutionary algorithm in both the decision and objective spaces. The localization is built using a limited number of adaptive spheres （local models） in the decision space. These spheres axe usually guided, using some direction information, in the decision space towards the areas with non-dominated solutions. We use a second mechanism to adjust the spheres to specialize on different parts of the Paxeto front by using a guided dominance technique in the objective space. Through this interleaved guidance in both spaces, the spheres will be guided towards different parts of the Paxeto front while also exploring the decision space efficiently. The experimental results showed good performance for the local models using this dual guidance, in comparison with their original version.