A fuzzy assessment framework to select among transportation investment projects in Turkey

Selecting the best transportation investment project (TIP) is often a difficult task, since many social, environmental and economic criteria have to be considered simultaneously. Evaluating a set of different projects, especially the best set of alternatives, portfolios, is even more complex. Pursuing the goal of selecting the best TIP portfolio, we propose a fuzzy assessment method to aid the selection process of a multi-criterion project by utilizing the concept of entropy and interval normalization procedure in a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP). Then, regarding this informative phase, we propose a fuzzy linear programming model to select the best TIP portfolio under uncertain cost pressure. A real case study is conducted to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method.     

iConAwa - An intelligent context-aware system

Context-awareness becomes an increasingly important concept in the development of mobile and ubiquitous systems. Applications and services, which run in these kinds of highly dynamic environments, should be aware of and adapt to their contexts. Context-aware applications improve and enrich people’s interactions with devices, computers and other people.In this paper, design and development of iConAwa, which is an intelligent context-aware multi-agent system proactively providing mobile users with context-aware information and services, is described. In iConAwa, mobile users can get information and services about nearby resources (attraction points) according to their context and also communicate with each other by exchanging messages. Context and point of interest ontologies are developed in OWL. Context and points of interest are modelled in a flexible and extensible way by the developed ontology models. Knowledge sharing and knowledge reuse are also provided by using these ontology models. iConAwa makes use of rule-based context reasoning which provides derivation of high level implicit context from low level explicit context. With this approach context reasoning is decoupled from the source code of the system. JADE agent development framework is used to develop the agents and Jena semantic web framework is used to manipulate ontologies and for rule based reasoning.     

Positive and negative association rule mining on XML data streams in database as a service concept

In recent years, data mining has become one of the most popular techniques for data owners to determine their strategies. Association rule mining is a data mining approach that is used widely in traditional databases and usually to find the positive association rules. However, there are some other challenging rule mining topics like data stream mining and negative association rule mining. Besides, organizations want to concentrate on their own business and outsource the rest of their work. This approach is named “database as a service concept” and provides lots of benefits to data owner, but, at the same time, brings out some security problems. In this paper, a rule mining system has been proposed that provides efficient and secure solution to positive and negative association rule computation on XML data streams in database as a service concept. The system is implemented and several experiments have been done with different synthetic data sets to show the performance and efficiency of the proposed system.     

A stochastic neighborhood search approach for airport gate assignment problem

An appropriate and efficient gate assignment is of great importance in airports since it plays a major role in the revenue obtained from the airport operations. In this study, we have focused mainly on maximum gate employment, or in other words minimize the total duration of un-gated flights. Here, we propose a method that combines the benefits of heuristic approaches with some stochastic approach instead of using a purely probabilistic approach to top-down solution of the problem. The heuristic approaches are usually used in order to provide a fast solution of the problem and later stochastic searches are used in order to ameliorate the previous results of the heuristic approach whenever possible. The proposed method generates an assignment order for the whole planes that corresponds to assignment priority. The ordering process is followed by the allocation step. Since, in practice, each airport has its own physical architecture, there have been arisen many constraints mainly concerning airplane types and parking lots in this step. Sequentially handling the plane ordering and allocation phases provides us great modularity in handling the constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology has been tried to be illustrated firstly on fictively generated flight schedule data and secondly on the real world data obtained from a real world application developed for ?stanbul Atatürk Airport.     

Calcium-related changes of enzyme activities in energy metabolism of cultured embryonic chick myoblasts and myotubes

Changes in activity of enzymes involved in energy metabolism have been determined in unfused, fused as well as in fusion-inhibited chick embryo muscle cells in vitro. Functionally related enzymes which supposedly are coded by "gene clusters" show a similar degree and rate of enzyme activity increase. Hexokinase and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase reveal only slight activity changes during muscle cell development under the conditions studied. The elevation of phosphofructokinase can be distinguished from that of the other glycolytic enzymes by its higher rate of increase and from that of phosphorylase by its time-course of activity change. The Ca2+ dependence of the phosphorylase activity increase runs parallel to myoblast fusion rate. Experiments in which calcium was removed from cultures which had reached the final morphological state of mature myotubes 24 h after onset of fusion show that increases of enzyme activities are irreversible and that these increases proceed at unchanged rates. Experimental evidence suggest that although fusion and enzyme syntheses may be uncoupled, both are similarly triggered by being dependent on Ca2+ concentration.     

Results of surgical treatment of early carcinoma of the stomach (author's transl)

From 1961 to 1975, 53 patients were operated on for early carcinoma of the stomach, 24 of the total of 57 cancer sites being limited to the mucosa, 33 having already infiltrated into the submucosa. Macroscopically, most of them were ulcerative carcinoma, while histologically the intestinal type predominated. The cumulative five-year survival rate (excluding hospital deaths) was 86.5%, while after "typical" carcinoma resection by the Billroth II procedure with removal of the greater and lesser omentum it was 100% for mucosal and 93% for submucosal carcinoma.     

Ultrastructural and biochemical changes of hepatocytes during ether and fluothane anesthesia under experimental conditions

A study was made of a possibility of using Soviet made membranes "Vladipor" with a pore diameter of 16--17 nm for the purpose of concentration and purification of antigenic extracts from stab cultures of S. typhi obtained by the action of typsin, hydrogen peroxide and detergents. Preparations, complete by antigenic structure, were obtained by ultrafiltration, with a good yield. The maximal rate of ultrafiltration was noted in case of "peroxide" antigenic preparations. The use of diafiltration provided a significant reduction of the ash content in the end products.     

Animal experimental studies on the thrombolytic effect of streptokinase

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the feasibility of enhancing the electrochemical stability of dental amalgam restorations by a process of "selective interfacial amalgamation." If dental amalgam restorations can be selectively alloyed at the tooth-amalgam interface, to a minor thickness as compared with the dimensions of the bulk amalgam, so as to present a more electrochemically stable phase than psi2 to the oral environment, corrosion will be reduced and desirable qualities of existing amalgams can be utilized. It was found that selective interfacial amalgamation was indeed possible and that it could be readily accomplished using a silver suspension as a cavity liner. By then placing a conventional silver-tin amalgam according to ordinary dental techniques, mercury expressed during hand condensing reacted with the silver in the liner resulting in the formation of an integral amalgam restoration with the more noble psi1 phase adjacent to tooth structure. In vitro corrosion tests of samples so prepared exhibited corrosion resistance far superior to unlined control samples.     

Tuberculosis in BCG-vaccinated and unvaccinated young Swedish Men. A comparative study

Tuberculosis causing exemption from military service was studied in 47,791 tuberculin-tested military recruits between 1941 and 1946. A total of 46.6% were tuberculin negative, and two-thirds were BCG vaccinated. An analysis was made of 304 cases of tuberculosis discovered from 6 months after the test up to the end of 1960. It has been calculated that 69% of "expected cases" of tuberculosis were in the BCG-vaccinated men during the 5-year period after the test, and 20% during the following period; 46% of "expected cases" of post-primary pulmonary tuberculosis and 83% of "expected" deaths were prevented. The differences on which these percentages are based were statistically significant. The efficacy of BCG vaccination was lower in areas with widespread cattle tuberculosis than in areas where cattle tuberculosis is less frequent; this is explained by the influence of previously acquired immunity.