Well-known Disciplines Research Articles

Green synthesis and characterisation of silver nanoparticles using Prunus laurocerasus L. fruits

Nanotechnology is the most well-known disciplines of science due to its wide range of applications. Nanoparticles have been used commonly for agriculture, electronic, medicine, medicinal material, and sensory. In this study, Prunus laurocerasus L. fruits were heated in distilled water for 2 hours at 40°C. After filtration, the treatment of silver nitrate (1.0 mM) with plant solution yielded silver nanoparticles (AgNPsμ@pl). Advanced spectroscopic techniques elucidated the synthesized AgNPs@pl. The functional moieties of secondary metabolites responsible for capping, reducing and stabilizing agents were determined by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). The surface plasmon resonance at 468 nm was presented by UV-Vis spectroscopy. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) displayed the particles as spherical in the size of 15 nm. The structure and particle size were also calculated by X-ray diffraction (XRD) spectroscopy and AgNPsμ@pl were found as cubic structure with the particle size of 17 nm. The zeta potential confirmed the stability of nanostructures. The high negative zeta potential value (-16.5 mV) displayed the dispersion of the nanostructure with stability.

Methodology of Iiji in Qira'at and its impact in understanding of Quran from the perspective of his tafsir "Jamey-ul-Bayan" (Qualitative Study)

The Holy Quran holds nothing but absolute divine truth as it is the book of Allah Who assures its preservation Himself: “We have, without doubt, sent down the Message; and we will assuredly guard it (from corruption)”. This preservation is a divine miracle. Among Islamic disciplines of knowledge, Ilm-ul-Qiraat is a well-known discipline which has been carried through by the Islamic scholars over the course of centuries as they served their lives in teaching, practising and spreading the Ilm-ul-Qiraat. Likewise the scholars of exegesis made efforts for interpreting and explaining the jurisprudence, miracles of Quran and have extracted different teachings from various perspectives. Imam Eiji is one of the scholars of exegesis of Holy Quran who was born in Persia in 8th Century A.H. A review of his famous tafsir “Jamey-al-Bayan” shall be given in this article.

Sensor based posture detection system

Posture identification system has been extensively useful in areas such as physical activities, ecological awareness events, man machine interfacing applications, control room panel monitoring systems and in autonomous old people caring systems. This paper describes a sensor based posture detection and guidance system while doing yoga exercise. In our day-to-day life, doing yoga exercise has become a well-known discipline, which helps people to be physically fit and have good mental health. Practicing yoga exercise is a recognized system for the human beings to improve their physical and mental activities. This practice helps in regulatory activities in an individual’s mind, body and soul. As a result of this, flexibility, muscle power and body image will increase. The existing method has shown the recognition of posture analysis through virtual reality and exergame. We proposed a suit that is designed and implemented through a virtual master. The suit is integrated with various types of accelerometer sensors which are fixed on the flexible bands, that are light in weight and are used indirectly to measure the orientation of the limbs. Also the sensor integrated suit is very helpful to measure the direction of the tilt moment. Predefined calibrated values are loaded on to the microcontroller, which are compared with the measured values and when there is a match the information is sent to a mobile application. The mobile app identifies whether the user is doing the posture correctly or not based on the information given to practice the yoga exercise.

The Design and Evaluation of a User-Centric Information Security Risk Assessment and Response Framework

The risk of sensitive information disclosure and modification through the use of online services has increased considerably and may result in significant damage. As the management and assessment of such risks is a well-known discipline for organizations, it is a challenge for users from the general public. Users have difficulties in using, understanding and reacting to security-related threats. Moreover, users only try to protect themselves from risks salient to them. Motivated by the lack of risk assessment solutions and limited impact of awareness programs tailored for users of the general public, this paper aims to develop a structured approach to help in protecting users from threats and vulnerabilities and, thus, reducing the overall information security risks. By focusing on the user and that different users react differently to the same stimuli, the authors developed a user-centric risk assessment and response framework that assesses and communicates risk on both user and system level in an individualized, timely and continuous way. Three risk assessment models were proposed that depend on user-centric and behavior-related factors when calculating risk. This framework was evaluated using a scenario-based simulation of a number of users and results analyzed. The analysis demonstrated the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach. Encouragingly, this analysis provided an indication that risk can be assessed differently for the same behavior based upon a number of user-centric and behavioral-related factors resulting in an individualized granular risk score/level. This granular risk assessment, provided a more insightful evaluation of both risk and response. The analysis of results was also useful in demonstrating how risk is not the same for all users and how the proposed model is effective in adapting to differences between users offering a novel approach to assessing information security risks.

Designing Services with Models from Interaction Design and Cognitive Systems Engineering

Objective: This paper discusses how service design is related to two well-known disciplines, interaction design and cognitive systems engineering, which are applied to the design of software, websites and mobile phones, and the design of control room of nuclear power plants and cockpit control, respectively. Background: Service design has been spotlighted recently due to its promisingness to service industry. Successful cases of service design are widely shared among designers. Service design, however, is treated as practice rather than a discipline. Method: It was discussed that it is important to consider the interaction between customers and services as in interaction design, and some domains are complex enough and have functional limitation as in cognitive systems engineering. Results: Models and design tools of the disciplines are introduced and applied to service design practices. Conclusion: It was concluded that service design has the characteristics of both interaction design and cognitive systems engineering.

A History of Savate, Chausson and ‘French Boxing’ (1828–1978): A Short Story for a Long Past

Both savate and chausson are French self-defence practices which originated at the beginning of the nineteenth century and combined during the 1960s. Over the last two centuries, these combat disciplines were transformed into several practices: ‘fitness’ gymnastics, a discipline for training soldiers, an academic sport for health, a combat discipline and finally a competitive sport. Each step of the transformation follows the general evolution of sport and gymnastics in France. As a result, modernisation at the end of the eighteenth century and the specific progression of French history can explain the origins and the transformations of these popular combat arts into a fighting sport in the seventies, called ‘French boxing’. Beyond its technical complexities, the history of the discipline was troubled by cultural, political, economic and social contradictions that prevented its evolution into a worldwide combat sport. By focusing on this specific and not so well-known discipline, a large part of French sport history can be interpreted.

Structural, elicitation and computational issues faced when solving complex decision making problems with influence diagrams

Influence diagrams have become a popular tool for representing and solving decision making problems under uncertainty (Shachter, Operations Research 1986;34:871–82). We show here some practical difficulties when using them to construct a medical decision support system. Specifically, it is hard to tackle issues related to the problem structuring, like the existence of constraints on the sequence of decisions, and the time evolution modeling; related to the knowledge-acquisition, like probability and utility assignment; and related to computational limitations, in memory storage and evaluation phases, as well as the explanation of results. We have recently developed a complex decision support system for neonatal jaundice management — a very common medical problem — , encountering all these difficulties. In this paper, we describe them and how they have been undertaken, providing insights into the community involved in the design and solution of decision models by means of influence diagrams. Scope and purpose Decision Analysis is a very well-known discipline that deals with the practice of Decision Theory (Clemen, Making hard decisions: an introduction to decision analysis, 2nd ed. Pacific Grove, CA: Duxbury, 1996). It comprises various steps usually implemented in a decision support system: definition of the alternatives and objectives, modelization of the structure of the decision problem, as well as the beliefs and preferences of the decision maker. The recommended alternative is the one with maximum expected utility, once all the assignments have been refined via sensitivity analyses. However, there are a number of difficulties faced in practice when solving large problems, that require an attentive study.

An advanced macro spreadsheet program for the simplex method

Spreadsheets have evolved into sophisticated computation and presentation tools that are versatile, easy to use and accessible. This paper illustrates the power of macro spreadsheets by presenting an advanced macro program that finds the solution of linear programming problems using the simplex method. As an example, the transportation problem is solved with different numbers of origins and destinations. Taking advantage of some programming features of spreadsheets, the program uses an improved pivotal elimination subroutine to reduce the execution time drastically. The macro program is described and computational results based on some examples are given. Scope and purpose Linear programming is a well-known discipline with many real-word applications. Real-world examples solved by linear programming techniques include the transportation problem in which the minimum cost of transportation is to be found when a certain quantity of product is to be shipped from one location to another. The most common optimization technique for solving these types of problems is the simplex method. The purpose of this paper is to present an advanced macro spreadsheet program that finds the solution of the transportation problem using the simplex method with an improved elimination subroutine. As a result the computation time is reduced drastically, hence demonstrating the potential of the program for an efficient and real-time application of the program to this type and other practical problems.

Analysis of cyclic service systems with limited service: Bounds and approximations

In this paper we analyze cyclic service queueing systems in which the server serves at most a prespecified number of jobs when it visits a queue. The system parameters are not required to be symmetric. Both exhaustive-limited and gated-limited disciplines are studied, which include well-known disciplines such as exhaustive, gated and serve-at-most-one as special cases. We derive tight bounds for the conservation laws in such systems. These bounds reduce to exact equalities for several known special cases. Then, simple approximations are proposed for the mean waiting times of jobs at each queue in such systems. Extensive numerical examples indicate that the accuracy of the approximations is well within 20% of the simulated results provided they are not extremely asymmetric and the switchover times are not large relative to the service times.