Surface sediment samples were collected from five locations at the downstream of Klang River in January 2007 to examine the spatial distribution, composition, and sources of 19 parent polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and aliphatic hydrocarbon (n-alkanes) using gas chromatographymass spectrometry. The total concentrations of the 19 PAHs in the sediments were found to range from 1304 to 2187 ng g-1 sediment. Meanwhile, total concentrations of n-alkanes ranged from 17008 to 27116 μg g-1 sediment. The concentration of n-alkanes in the sediment was significantly correlated (r = 0.991, p = 0.001) with the content of sediment organic carbon. In this study, all the sediments exhibited phenanthrene/anthracene (PHE/ANT >15) fluoranthene/(fluorantene+pyrene) (FLT/FLT+PYR < 0.4), ethylphenanthrenes/phenanthrene (MP/P >1), combustion PAHs/total PAHs (CombPAH/Σ19PAH
This paper investigates the confidence intervals of R2 MAD, the coefficient of determination based on
median absolute deviation in the presence of outliers. Bootstrap bias-corrected accelerated (BCa)
confidence intervals, known to have higher degree of correctness, are constructed for the mean and standard deviation of R2 MAD for samples generated from contaminated standard logistic distribution. The results indicate that by increasing the sample size and percentage of contaminants in the samples, and perturbing the location and scale of the distribution affect the lengths of the confidence intervals. The results obtained can also be used to verify the bound of R2 MAD.
Ultraviolet radiation is at shorter wavelengths than the visible spectrum (400 to 700 nm) and is divided into three components: UV-A (315 to 400 nm), UV-B (280 to 315 nm), and UV-C (less than 280 nm). Global increases in UV-B fluxes from decreasing stratospheric ozone amounts caused by anthropogenic chlorine releasing gases (mostly chlorofluorocarbons) have been a matter of public concern for the past 20 years. This surface UV irradiance data retrieved from Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) from AURA spacecraft with the filename OMUVB. OMUVB contains surface UV irradiance data along with supplementary information generated using the OMI global mode measurements. In this mode each file contains the sunlit portion of a single orbit from pole-to-pole, with an approximately 2600 km wide swath composed of 60 ground pixels. The OMI measurements are used to estimate the ultraviolet (UV) radiation reaching the Earth’s surface. The product contains spectral irradiances at 305.1, 310.1, 324.1, and 380.1 nm corresponding to both the overpass time and the local solar noon. Using the correspondence latitude and longitude of Peninsular Malaysia, we can develop the pattern of distribution of UV irradiance interpolations using Sigma Plot and Adobe Photoshop.
Carbon monoxide (CO) is a ubiquitous, an indoor and outdoor air pollutant. It is not a significant greenhouse gas as it absorbs little infrared radiation from the Earth. It is produced by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, and biomass burning. The CO data are obtained from Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) onboard NASA’s Aqua satellite. The AIRS provides information for several greenhouse gases, CO2, CH4, CO, and O3 as a one goal of the AIRS instrument (included on the EOS Aqua satellite launched, May 4, 2002) as well as to improve weather prediction of the water and energy cycle. The results of the analysis of the retrieved CO total column amount (CO_total_column_A) as well as effective of the CO volume mixing ratio (CO_VMR_eff_A), Level-3 monthly (AIR*3STM) 1º*1º spatial resolution, ascending are used to study the CO distribution over the East and West Malaysia for the year 2003. The CO maps over the study area were generated by using Kriging Interpolation technique and analyzed by using Photoshop CS. Variations in the biomass burning and the CO emissions where noted, while the highest CO occurred at late dry season in the region which has experienced extensive biomass burning and greater draw down of CO occurred in the pristine continental environment (East Malaysia). In all cases, the CO concentration at West Malaysia is higher than East Malaysia. The southeastern Sarawak (lat. 3.5˚ - long. 115.5˚) is less polluted regions and less the CO in most of times in the year. Examining satellite measurements revealed that the enhanced CO emission correlates with occasions of less rainfall during the dry season.
Melaleuca cajuputi and Acacia auriculiformis trees are major sources of nectar and pollen for Apis dorsata and the colonies are a major source of honey to the rural poor, honey hunters. Honey is a supplementary income to many of these people (including school children) in the Marang district, Terengganu. In this study, Marang area with 270 square kilometers was chosen as pilot study area in Terengganu state for mapping M. cajuputi and A. auriculiformis as two dominant species in low land secondary forest in Terengganu state.To inventory and produce land use map of Melaleuca forest in Marang area, in this study SPOT-5 satellite image in multispectral mode with 10 meter resolution which is acquired in 2007 as optical satellite was utilized. Most images from optical satellites have some null data from ground because of clouds and shadow of clouds. To solve this problem, Hue, Saturation and value (HSV) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) were used as fusion techniques to replace null data with microwave data which taken from Radarsat-1 image in C-band with 25 meter resolution image. Accordingly, fusion technique which was used in this research not only was a technique to improve information but also caused the accuracy increasing than land use map by just only SPOT-5 image. Also between two different fusion techniques, PCA shows the better result than HSV as two different fusion techniques.
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and three dimensional (3D) World Wide Web (WWW) applications usage are on the rise. The demand for online 3D terrain visualization for GIS data has increased. Current users demand for more complex data which have higher accuracy and realism. This is aided by the emergence of geo-browsers in the market which provide free service and also cater for the commercialized market. Other new technology driving the market is the use of software such as CityGML, Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML)/ Entensive 3D (X3D), geoVRML, and Keyhole Markup Language (KML). These technologies also play an important role for this new era of online 3D terrain visualization. The aim of this paper is to implement the online 3D terrain visualization for GIS data by using VRML technology and launching the system into three different web servers. The data used for this system are contour data and high resolution satellite image (QUICKBIRD) for Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) area. Testing was done only for satellite image overlaid to 3D terrain data. The web servers used in this experiment were the Spatial Research Group Server in UPM, Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) web server, and ruzinoor.my web server. The comparison was based on the performance of web servers in terms of accessibility, uploading time, CPU usage, frame rate per second (fps), and number of users. The results from this experiment will be of help and guidance to the developers in finding the right web servers for the best performance on implementing online 3D terrain visualization for GIS data.
This paper presents the evaluation of integrated partial match query in Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR). To facilitate the evaluation, Kuala Lumpur tourist related data is used as test collection and is stored in SuperWeb, a map server. Then the map server is customized to enhance its query capability to recognize word in partial or case sensitive between layers of spatial data. Query keyword is tested using the system and results are evaluated using experiments on sample data. Findings show that integrated partial match query provides more flexibility to tourist in determining search results.
Normally, topographic map is produced using aerial photogrammetry. The recent development in aerial photogrammetry is the use of large format digital aerial camera for producing topographic map, however, the cost of the camera is too expensive and many mapping organization around the world could not afford to purchase it. In certain application, there is a need to map small area with limited budget. This issue has been solved by using small format camera (i.e. conventional or digital) to produce digital map. This study concentrates on the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for producing digital map. UAV has been widely used in military for reconnaissance, planning, combat, and etc. Today, UAV can be used by civilian for reconnaissance, monitoring, mapping, and others. The objectives of this study are to investigate the capability of UAV in producing digital map and assess the accuracy of mapping using UAV. In this study, a light weight fixed wing UAV was used as a platform and a high resolution digital camera was used to acquire aerial digital images of the study area. The aerial digital images were acquired at low altitude. After capturing the aerial digital images, ground control points and check points were established using GPS. Then the aerial digital images were processed using photogrammetric software. The output of the study is a digital map and digital orthophoto. For accuracy assessment, the root mean square error (RMSE) is used. Based on the assessment, the results showed that accuracy of sub-meter can be obtained using the procedure and method used in the study. In conclusion, this study shows that UAV can be used for producing digital map at sub-meter accuracy and it can also be used for diversified applications.
Eshtehard aquifer located in southwest of Tehran province, Iran, provides a large amount of water requirement for inhabitants of Eshtehard district. Monitoring and analyzing of groundwater quality are important for protecting groundwater as sustainable water resource. One of the most advanced techniques for groundwater quality interpolation and mapping is geostatistics methods. The purposes of this study are (1) to investigate major ions concentration and their relative abundance to provide an overview of present groundwater chemistry and (2) to map the groundwater quality in the study area using geostatistics techniques. In this investigation, ArcGIS 9.2 was used for predicting spatial distribution of some groundwater characteristics such as: Chloride, Sulfate, pH, and Conductivity. These methods are applied for data from 44 wells within the study area. The final maps show that the south parts of the Eshtehard aquifer have suitable groundwater quality for human consumption and in general, the groundwater quality degrades south to north and west to east of the Eshtehard plain along the groundwater flow path.
The problem of difficulty in obtaining cloud-free scene at the equatorial region from satellite platforms can be
overcome by using airborne imagery as an attempt for introducing an economical method of remote sensing
data; which only requires a digital camera to provide near time data. Forty three digital images were captured
using a high resolution digital camera model pentax optio A40 (12 megapixels)at a selected location in the same day in Penang Island from a low-altitude flying autopilot aircraft (CropCam) to generate land use/land cover (LULC) map of the test area. The CropCam was flown at an average altitude of 320 meters over the ground while capturing images which were taken during two flying missions for the duration of approximately 15 and 20 minutes respectively. The CropCam was equipped with a digital camera as a sensor to capture the GPS points based digital images according to the present time to ensure the mosaic of the digital images. Forty one images were used in providing a mosaic image of a bigger coverage of area (full panorama). Training samples were collected simultaneously when the CropCam captured the images by using hand held GPS. Supervised classification techniques, such as the maximum likelihood, minimum-to-distance, and parallelepiped were applied to the panoramic image to generate LULC map for the study area. It was found that the maximum likelihood classifier produce superior results and achieved a high degree of accuracy. The results indicated that the CropCam equipped with a high resolution digital camera can be useful and suitable tool for the tropical region, and this technique could reduce the cost and time of acquiring images for LULC mapping.
Xylitol can be obtained from lignocellulosic materials containing xylose. However, the fraction of lignocellulose converted through dilute acid hydrolysis contains compounds that inhibit the fermenting micro-organisms. These inhibitors can be removed from the hydrolysate by detoxification method, prior to fermentation. This study describes effectiveness of overliming process to reduce the toxicity of hydrolysates generated from pre-treatment of sago trunk for xylitol production. The overliming pH 9 and 10 was studied and the results showed that pH 9 was showed 20% of sugar loss, which is low compared to pH 10. Candida tropicalis strain was used to evaluate the fermentability of overlimed sago trunk hydrolysate at pH 9 and non-overlimed hydrolysate medium. Meanwhile, Xylitol accumulation and productivity in the overlimed medium was found to be higher than the non-treated medium. The maximum production of xylitol was increased up to 74% and converted within 76 h. The results obtained improved the fermentation process when compared with the nontreated medium.
Yeast producing alcohol dehydrogenase 1 (YADH 1) enzyme has been used as a biocatalyst for the synthesis of an optically active flavouring compound known as citronellol. However, the slow growth of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) has deterred the progress of biotransformation. The main purpose of this work is to clone the genes producing YADH1 enzyme from yeast into a faster growing bacteria, Escherichia coli. Initially, the sequence of the gene encoding this protein has been identified in the S. cerevisiae Genome Databases (SGD). The so-called Yadh1 gene sequence is located from coordinate 159548 to 160594 on chromosome XV of yeast. Based on this information, two primer sequences (Forward and Reverse) were constructed. Each of these primers will bind to either end of the Yadh1 gene. The Yadh1 gene was then amplified using Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technique. The amplified Yadh 1 gene was successfully cloned into a cloning vector, TOPO TA plasmid. This plasmid also contains a gene which confers resistance to ampicillin. This recombinant
plasmid was then inserted into Escherichia coli TOP 10 using heat shock protocol at 42oC. Finally, the cloned bacteria containing the recombinant TOPO TA plasmid harbouring Yadh1 gene was able to grow on Luria Bertani (LB) media supplied with antibiotic.
This paper presents a new approach to identify fatigue damaging potential locations using the Morlet wavelet coefficients. For solving the subject matter, the 122.4 second SAESUS strain signal was selected for the simulation purpose. As the result, the Morlet wavelet coefficients predicted that the maximum fatigue damage occurs at 40.4 - 42.6 seconds and 67.4 - 70 seconds. For the validation purpose, the Morrow’s fatigue damaging value was calculated and was obtained that the maximum fatigue damage occurs at 0 seconds and 99.7 seconds. The fatigue damaging value at the points was 0.0047 cycles to failure. Since both the plots had similar pattern, the Morlet wavelet coefficients could be used as the early warning of the fatigue damaging potential locations, although the locations were not entirely correct.
This research focuses on the ASTER DEM generation for visual and mathematical analysis of topography, landscapes and landforms, as well as modeling of surface processes of Central Alborz, Iran. ASTER DEM 15 m generated using tie points over the Central Alborz and Damavand volcano with 5671 m height from ASTER (Advanced Space borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) satellite data using PCI Geomatica 9.1. Geomorphic parameters are useful to identify and describe geomorphologic forms and processes, which were extracted from ASTER DEM in GIS environment such as elevation, aspect, slope angle, vertical curvature, and tangential curvature. Although the elevation values are slightly low in altitudes above 5500 m asl., the ASTER DEM is useful in interpretation of the macro- and meso-relief, and provides the opportunity for mapping especially at medium scales (1:100,000 and 1:50,000). ASTER DEM has potential to be a best tool to study 3D model for to geomorphologic mapping and processes of glacial and per glacial forms above 4300 m asl.
An experimental study was performed to determine the drying characteristics of dried papaya using different drying methods. They were dried using several methods, such as sun drying, solar drying, oven drying, and microwave drying. The effects of different operating conditions on physical quality attributes were investigated. The papaya were cut into different thicknesses and cooked in sugar syrup with different sugar concentration for 24 hours. Three different temperature settings were used in oven and microwave drying. The drying curve and drying rate of each method, temperature, sample
thickness and sugar concentration were studied. The drying times were found as in 6-15 minutes, 5 to 11 h, 10 to 18 h, and 14 to 23 h for the microwave, oven, sun and solar drying, respectively. The drying time increased with the increase of sample thickness and sugar concentration, as well as with the decrease of the drying temperature. In this study, quality attributes like colours and textural property of dried papaya were explored. Among the various methods of the drying characteristics
of papaya halwa, oven drying was preferred with the optimum sample in 5 mm thickness and at the air temperature of 70ºC as it saved up to 40% of the drying time as compared to other methods, except microwave, and produced acceptable physical quality of product.
Controller tuning is needed to select the optimum response for the controlled process. This work presents a new tuning procedure of PID controllers with safety and response quality measures on a non-linear process model by optimization procedure, with a demonstration of two tanks in series. The model was developed to include safety constraints in the form of path constraints. The model was then solved with a new optimization solver, NLPOPT1, which uses a primal-dual interior point method with a novel non-monotone line search procedure with discretized penalty parameters. This procedure generated a grid of optimal PID tuning parameters for various switching of steadystates to be used as apredictor of PID tunings for arbitrary transitions. The interpolation of tuning parameters between the available parameters was found to be capable to produce state profiles with no violation on the safety measures, while maintaining the quality of the solution with the final set points targeted achievable.
Digital elevation model (DEM) generation from stereo images is an effective and economical method in topography mapping. This paper used the stereo pair methodology to generate the digital elevation model (DEM) from PRISM (Panchromatic Remote-Sensing Instrument Satellite) sensor which is onboard of ALOS (Advanced Land Observing Satellite). The pair of forward-backward is used as stereoscopic imagery in this study. Ten ground control points (GCPs) are collected with residual error 0.49 pixels to generate an absolute DEM. This generated DEM with 2.5 m spatial resolution is then matched with the 90 m spatial resolution of
SRTM (Space Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) DEM to compare the result. Although SRTM-DEM has a much coarser resolution, the positional accuracy of the matching is found. The difference of the height from the mean sea level (MSL) between the SRTM-DEM and the PRISM-DEM is analyzed and the correlation between the two DEMs is R²=0.8083. The accuracy of the DEM generated is given by the RMSE value of 0.8991 meter.
Microwave Remote sensing data have been widely used in land cover and land use classification. The objective of this research paper is to investigate the feasibility of the multi-polarized ALOS-PALSAR data for land cover mapping. This paper presents the methodology and preliminary result including data acquisitions, data processing and data analysis. Standard supervised classification techniques such as the maximum likelihood, minimum distance-to-mean, and parallelepiped were applied to the ALOS-PALSAR images in the land cover mapping analysis. The PALSAR data training areas were chosen based on the information obtained from
optical satellite imagery. The best supervise classifier was selected based on the highest overall accuracy and
kappa coefficient. This study indicated that the land cover of Butterworth, Malaysia can be mapped accurately
using ALOS PALSAR data.
A Boolean permutation is called nonlinear if it has at least one nonlinear component function. All nonlinear Boolean permutations and their complements are called non-affine Boolean permutations. Any non-affine Boolean permutation is a potential candidate for bijective S-Box of block ciphers. In this paper, we find the number of n-variable non-affine Boolean permutations up to multiplicative n and show a simple method of construction of non-affine Boolean permutations. However, non-affinity property is not sufficient for S-Boxes. Nonlinearity is one of the basic properties of an S-Box. The nonlinearity of Boolean permutation is a distance between set of all non-constant linear combinations of component functions and set of all non-affine Boolean functions. The cryptographically strong S-Boxes have high nonlinearity. In this paper, we show a method of construction of 8-variable highly nonlinear Boolean permutations. Our construction is based on analytically design (8, 1), (8, 2), and (8, 3) highly nonlinear vectorial balanced functions and random permutation for other component functions.
The partial integrals of the N-fold Fourier integrals connected with elliptic polynomials (not necessarily
homogeneous; principal part of which has a strictly convex level surface) are considered. It is proved that if a + s > (N – 1)/2 and ap = N then the Riesz means of the nonnegative order s of the N-fold Fourier integrals of continuous finite functions from the Sobolev spaces Wpa (RN) converge uniformly on every compact set, and if a + s > (N – 1)/2 and ap = N, then for any x0 ∈ RN there exists a continuous finite function from the Sobolev space such, that the corresponding Riesz means of the N-fold Fourier integrals diverge to infinity at x0. AMS 2000 Mathematics Subject Classifications: Primary 42B08; Secondary 42C14.