CAGISTrans: Providing Adaptable Transactional Support for Cooperative Work – an Extended Treatment

The theme of this paper is on transactional support for cooperative work environments, focusing on data sharing – i.e., providing suitable mechanisms to manage concurrent access to shared resources. The subject is not new per se. In fact, in terms of transaction models and frameworks, several solutions already exist. Still, there are some problems that are not solved. Among these are the problems that result from the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of cooperative work. Our solution is to provide transactional support that not only can be tailored to suit different situations, but can also be modified following changes in the actual environment while the work is being performed – i.e., adaptable transactional support. As part of this, we have identified and extracted the beneficial features from existing models and attempted to extend these to form a transactional framework, called CAGISTrans. This is a framework for the specification of transaction models suiting specific applications. To handle dynamic environments we propose a new way of organizing the elements of a transaction model to allow runtime refinement. In addition, we have developed a transaction management system, built on the middleware principle, to allow interoperability and database independence. Thus this addresses the problems induced by the heterogeneous nature of cooperative environments.     

Liquid phase equilibrium of phenol extraction from bio-oil produced by biomass pyrolysis using thermodynamic models

Utilization of biomass as a new and renewable energy source is being actively conducted by various parties. One of the technologies for utilizing or converting biomass as an energy source is pyrolysis, to convert biomass into a more valuable product which is bio-oil. Bio-oil is a condensed liquid from the vapor phase of biomass pyrolysis such as coconut shells and coffee shells. Biomass composition consisting of hemicellulose, cellulose, and lignin will oxidize to phenol which is the main content in bio-oil. The total phenolic compounds contained in bio-oil are 47.03% (coconut shell) and 45% (coffee shell). The content of phenol compounds in corrosive bio-oils still quite high, the use of this bio-oil directly will cause various difficulties in the combustion system due to high viscosity, low calorific value, corrosivity, and instability. Phenol compounds have some benefits as one of the compounds for floor cleaners and disinfectants which are contained in bio-oil.The correlation between experimental data and calculations shows that the UNIQUAC Functional-group Activity Coefficients (UNIFAC) equilibrium model can be used to predict the liquid–liquid equilibrium in the phenol extraction process of the coconut shell pyrolysis bio-oil. While the Non-Random Two Liquid (NRTL) equilibrium model can be used to predict liquid–liquid equilibrium in the extraction process of phenol from bio-oil pyrolysis of coffee shells.     

Developers’ perceptions of object-oriented frameworks - An investigation into the impact of technological and individual characteristics

Framework-based development is currently regarded as one of the most promising software development approaches, boasting increases in lead time, productivity and quality. However, many frameworks and framework-related projects still fail, which indicates that frameworks still have unsolved problems. In this article, we will identify and investigate the major framework characteristics and individual differences that impact the most important users’ perceptions about frameworks. To test the causal relationships between these factors, we performed an online survey and analyzed the results using structural equation modeling. The results support the technology acceptance model (TAM), which was used as an underlying theory. In addition, we found that framework characteristics and individual differences have a significant impact on users’ perceptions, especially in the case of voluntary framework use. Beside TAM constructs, the results also suggest an additional determinant for the acceptance of frameworks: “confidence”. Despite the limits of our research, we foresee future research activities as well as theoretical and practical implications. Our results might be used to develop acceptable frameworks and for the evaluation of existing frameworks, their constituent parts and framework-related guidelines.     

Efficient recovery of ionic liquid by electrodialysis in the acid hydrolysis process

Electrodialysis (ED) has been recently known as a highly effective technique to remove and recover ionic liquids from aqueous solution. When a conventional electrolyte solution for the ED process containing Na₂SO₄ was used, a recovery ratio of an acidic IL, 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hydrogen sulfate ([Bmim][HSO₄]), was 90%. On the other hand, the value clearly increased to 96% when we employed [Bmim][HSO₄] as the electrolyte solution. In an acid hydrolysis of bagasse using the IL under microwave irradiation, the recovery ratio maintains 96%, irrespective of reaction time. This demonstrates the applicability of the proposed ED system in biomass processing.     

Hyperchaos permutation on false-positive-free SVD-based image watermarking

Multimedia Tools and Applications - This paper reports the effect of hyperchaos permutation on the False-Positive-Free (FPF) Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based image watermarking scheme. To...     

Web accessibility investigation of Slovenian municipalities’ websites before and after the adoption of European Standard EN 301 549

Universal Access in the Information Society - Digitalization and technological innovations provide many benefits for citizens worldwide, increasing the quality of life in several ways, including by...     

重力下水道中混凝土的微生物诱导腐蚀及防护涂层(英文)

Microbiologically induced corrosion of concrete(MICC) and its protective coatings has a high economic impact on sewer maintenance and rehabilitation.A better understanding of the micro-organisms and the biogenic acids that are generated in the sewer is essential in controlling the corrosion of concrete pipes and protective coatings.The role of succession of micro-organisms growth in the corrosion of concrete and protective coatings was evaluated in this study.Examination of various sewer pipe materials exhibiting various extents of degradation,including concrete,cement based and epoxy based coating revealed the presence of both organic and biogenic sulphuric acids.This reflects the activity of fungi and the thiobacilli strains.Organism growth and metabolism were strongly related to the substrate pH.Fungi were found to grow and metabolise organic acids at pH from 2.0-8.0.Whilst the thiobacilli strains grew and generated sulphuric acids at pH below 3.0.The successive growth of the organisms provides an important bearing in developing improved strategies to better manage sewers.     

Alkali Treatment of Screw Pine (Pandanus Odoratissimus) Fibers and Its Effect on Unsaturated Polyester Composites

Characteristics of Screw Pine fiber of species Pandanus Odoratissimus (PO fibers) and short PO fibers reinforced composite were studied. The results show that various alkali concentrations changed ability of PO fibers in absorptions of moisture, chemical compositions and cross-sectional area. The untreated and treated PO fibers were compounded with unsaturated polyester to evaluate their mechanical properties. The treated PO fiber composites exhibit high mechanical properties in comparison with untreated ones. SEM photographs revealed a different fracture surface between untreated PO fiber-reinforced composites and treated ones.     

Effective hate-speech detection in Twitter data using recurrent neural networks

This paper addresses the important problem of discerning hateful content in social media. We propose a detection scheme that is an ensemble of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) classifiers, and it incorporates various features associated with user-related information, such as the users’ tendency towards racism or sexism. This data is fed as input to the above classifiers along with the word frequency vectors derived from the textual content. We evaluate our approach on a publicly available corpus of 16k tweets, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness in comparison to existing state-of-the-art solutions. More specifically, our scheme can successfully distinguish racism and sexism messages from normal text, and achieve higher classification quality than current state-of-the-art algorithms.     

Population-diversity enhancement strategy against clustering of individuals in stochastic method for heat exchanger network synthesis

Random walk algorithm with compulsive evolution (RWCE) performs better for global optimization of heat exchanger network synthesis than other stochastic methods though it faces the inevitable decrease in optimization efficiency during the late period. This paper aims to analyze the relationship between population diversity and optimization performance. Firstly, population diversities are contrasted to explain the relatively satisfactory performance of RWCE. It is found that the optimal structures for individuals become significantly similar with evolution. Secondly, key evaluation indexes are established to identify similar individuals and clusters formed during the evolution. A noteworthy observation of the study is the clustering phenomenon in RWCE where most individuals cluster together with structural community while 5% individuals alone are excluded from the clusters. Finally, a population-diversity enhancement strategy is established to weaken the negative effect of the clustering phenomenon and enhance the global optimization efficiency. The new strategy is efficient in achieving more economical solutions compared to those in literatures.