Earticle

The purpose of this research was to bear fruits in providing insights and understandings on how children responded and reacted to exhibits in the Participatory Exhibition of Masterpieces: Find the Secrets of Mona Lisa. We used quantitative methodology for this summative evaluation to assess the impact and effectiveness of the exhibition. Based on heavy on-site evaluation, we discovered that interactive exhibits holds bigger attracting power and holding power in addition to having higher degree of satisfaction overall. Also found was the statistically positive correlations between satisfaction and other factors, including viewing time, attracting power, holding power, background knowledge in science, motivation, and re- visit needs.

Thermal insulators are essential in terms of making structures conducive for people to live in and a nice place to work on. This experimental study aimed to develop a thermal insulator using recyclable materials namely; the coco coir from the coconut fruit and used polypropylene drinking straws. This lead to the assumption that all materials have a property to conduct heat and a material which has low thermal conductivity is an ideal insulator. Observing the physical properties of the coco coir being a composite material and various applications, It was incorporated, as well as the polypropylene used straws being commonly named as plastics gives an idea to make these materials the core components of a product that can be used as a thermal insulator.

Offline signature verification system finds several applications in monitory transaction systems like banks. However one of the major challenges in this direction is the capability of the system to detect skilled and unskilled forgery. Many cases of bank check forgeries have been reported. Most of the offline signature verification system adopts recognition based technique where the system classifies a given signature sample as one of the samples from the database. However detection of a forgery in a given sample is challenging as the input sample looks similar to one of the samples in the database. In this paper we propose an innovative approach for offline signature verification with polar feature descriptor for signature that contains Radon Transform and Zernike Moments. Verification is performed using Multiclass Support Vector Machine. Once a signature is verified as being of a registered class, PLS Regression is applied on the sample against all samples in the database of the verified user to obtain regression score. Log Likelihood of the sample against all sample of the user is calculated using Hidden Markov Model. Authenticity of the classification is justified if the regression score and Log Likelihood distance deviation is less than 5%. Results show that the system verifies signature with an accuracy of 98% with false acceptance rate of .8%. Proposed system also detects skilled forgery with an accuracy of 71% and Random forgery with an accuracy of 76%.

Today, use of mobile devices is very common by everyone, including the farmers. Introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has seen a keen role in daily life of farmers. Earlier, farmers used to depend on clouds for rains were looking into the Cloud Computing (CC) for their solutions towards cultivation of better crops in modern agricultural world. The conventional methods used by the farmers, particularly in India, are very slow and unreliable. The crops are damaged in field itself due to disease attacks and lack of information resources. This loss grows more than 40% in total annually. This paper proposes various ways in which a farmer can utilize MCC on their handsets using application called AgroMobile, to assist them for relatively better cultivation and marketing. The main attention of this work is focused on crop image analysis. Image processing techniques requires large amount of computation power and memory to process for which a mobile devices fails. Hence, this framework uses MCC, which in effect, these authors believe that, puts cloud into a farmer’s pocket. The experimental setup uses tools like OpenNebula 2.0, and MATLAB 2012b. In this research an Android based mobile devices are used for testing but this is not the only device.

This paper describes the use of histogram modification functions to improve the retrieval efficiency of the content-based image retrieval system based on bins approach. Four different functions explored in this paper used as histogram specification to modify the histograms are; histogram equalization (EQH), polynomial function (POLY), linear equations (LinearEQ1,2,3) and logarithmic function (LOG). Modified histograms are partitioned into 4 parts using centre of gravity (CG) to form 64 bins from 256 bins of R, G and B histograms. Bins holding the count of pixels falling in particular range of modified intensities divided into four parts using centre of gravity. Statistical properties are computed for the intensities possessed by the pixels counted into these 64 bins. These properties are representing the type of feature vector in the form of first four moments namely mean, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis. All moments are computed for three-color intensities R, G and B separately. Based on color and moment different types of feature vector databases are prepared. Comparisons of query feature vector with feature vectors of database images is carried out by means of three similarity measures namely Euclidean distance (ED), absolute distance(AD)and cosine correlation distance(CD). Role of each modification function along with all types of feature vectors is evaluated and compared and presented using three parameters; Precision Recall Cross over Point (PRCP), Longest String(LS), Length of String to Retrieve all Relevant (LSRR).

This paper is concerned with the modifications of maximum likelihood, moments and percentile estimators of the two parameter Power function distribution. Sampling behavior of the estimators is indicated by Monte Carlo simulation. For some combinations of parameter values, some of the modified estimators appear better than the traditional maximum likelihood, moments and percentile estimators with respect to bias, mean square error and total deviation.

In order to overcome escalating worldwide consumption of fossil fuel and global warming, an alternative fuel that is economically feasible, sustainable and environmental friendly must be developed for large-scale adoption. Alternative fuels like biodiesel, are being used as effective alternative for diesel. The feasibility of biodiesel production from palm oil was investigated with respect to its fuel properties. Though biodiesel can replace diesel satisfactorily, problems related to fuel properties persist. In this study ethanol (E) additive was blended in the ratios of 1%, 2%, 3% and 4% with palm oil biodiesel (POME) and tested for their properties improvement. These blends were tested for energy content and various fuel properties according to ASTM standards. Qualifying of the effect of additive on palm biodiesel fuel properties can serve the researchers who work on biodiesel fuels to indicate the fuel suitability for diesel engines according to fuel standards. Blends of ethanol in POME resulted in an improvement in acid value, viscosity, density and pour point with increasing content of ethanol in the blend. Further improvement in the pour point temperature of the palm oil methyl esters ethanol blends (B-E) at 5oC can be achieved by adding 4% ethanol additive to POME, accompanied by less than 1% decrease in energy content of biodiesel which still within specifications contained in ASTM D6751 and EN 14214 standards, suggesting that ethanol may be the suitable prudent choice as biodiesel additive.

The Automobile pollution is the major source of pollution. The majority of the environmental pollution is from the two-wheeler automobiles due to their large number. A study on nano-particle reveals that the ratio of surface area of nano-particle to the volume of the nano-particle is inversely proportional to the radius of the nano-particle. So, on decreasing the radius, this ratio is increased leading to an increased rate of reaction and the concentration of the pollutants is decreased. To achieve this objective, an innovative design of catalytic converter for two-wheeler automobiles is proposed using nano-particle as a catalyst. This research paper basically deals with the behavioral modeling and simulation of two stroke engine with developed catalytic convertor. The basic idea of behavioral modeling starts from analyzing the practical behavior of two stroke engine with designed catalytic convertor, and then approximating obtained behavior in terms of mathematical equations. These obtained equations actually represent behavior of concern system. Once mathematical equations are obtained, next stage is to implementation of these equations in Simulink platform. The last process is the validation check by the simulation of developed model.

The paper proposes the model of the data integrations systems with which the buyer/user searches and aggregates organizational entity from multiple heterogeneous data sources in order to have a contract with the proper entity for the new project. The requirement for the systems is to retrieve and integrate heterogeneous data which is non- or semi-structured. And, the systems need to be alerted when the data is changed. The proposed model supports services to retrieve and integrate an entity(s) and it also alerts the update of the entities to the user. Besides, the systems store and compute Big Data using Hadoop platform.

The estimation technical efficiency of functioning of relay protection as differences potentially possible effect in the form of an index of faults on protected object and losses (refusals of work, false and excessive actions) are carried to potential effect is an actual problem for designing and operation relay protection of electric equipment and electric networks. Distance relay protections have some special features compared with the current relay protections and the criterion technical efficiency is an objective indicator quality of functioning distance relay protection. Therefore base on its extremum is possible to define the optimum values of interest of practical problems, in particular the optimal settings of distance relay protection.