Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Quantitative Analysis Of Some Important Metals And Metalloids In Tobacco Products By Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (Icp-Ms), Syed Ghulam Musharraf, Muhammad Shoaib, Amna Jabbar Siddiqui, Muhammad Najam-Ul-Haq, Aftab Ahmed

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Background: Large scale usage of tobacco causes a lot of health troubles in human. Various formulations of tobacco are extensively used by the people particularly in developing world. Besides several toxic tobacco constituents some metals and metalloids are also believed to pose health risks. This paper describes inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometric (ICP-MS) quantification of some important metals and metalloids in various brands of smoked, sniffed, dipped and chewed tobacco products.

Results: A microwave-assisted digestion method was used for sample preparation. The method was validated by analyzing a certified reference material. Percentage relative standard deviation (% R.S.D.) between recovered …

Poverty And Disability: A Vicious Circle? Evidence From Afghanistan And Zambia, Jean-Francois Trani, Mitchell M. Loeb

Brown School Faculty Publications

Disability and poverty have a complex and interdependent relationship. It is commonly understood that persons with disabilities are more likely to be poor and that poverty may contribute to sustaining disability. This interdependency is revealed not only through an examination of poverty in terms of income but also on a broader scale through other poverty related dimensions. Just how robust is this link? This paper compares data collected from household surveys in Afghanistan and Zambia, and explores the potential link between multidimensional poverty and disability. We find evidence of lower access to health care, education and labour market for people …

Quasi Set Topological Vector Subspaces, Florentin Smarandache, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this book the authors introduce four types of topological vector subspaces. All topological vector subspaces are defined depending on a set. We define a quasi set topological vector subspace of a vector space depending on the subset S contained in the field F over which the vector space V is defined. These quasi set topological vector subspaces defined over a subset can be of finite or infinite dimension. An interesting feature about these spaces is that there can be several quasi set topological vector subspaces of a given vector space. This property helps one to construct several spaces with …

Fuzzy Linguistic Topological Spaces, Florentin Smarandache, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, K. Amal

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Cardinal Functions And Integral Functions, Florentin Smarandache, Mircea Selariu, Marian Nitu

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

This paper presents the correspondences of the eccentric mathematics of cardinal and integral functions and centric mathematics, or ordinary mathematics. Centric functions will also be presented in the introductory section, because they are, although widely used in undulatory physics, little known. In centric mathematics, cardinal sine and cosine are dened as well as the integrals. Both circular and hyperbolic ones. In eccentric mathematics, all these central functions multiplies from one to innity, due to the innity of possible choices where to place a point. This point is called eccenter S(s;") which lies in the plane of unit circle UC(O;R = …

Centric Cardinal Sine Function, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

According to any standard dictionary, the word "cardinal" is synonymous with "principal", "essential", "fundamental". In centric mathematics (CM), or ordinary mathematics, cardinal is, on the one hand, a number equal to a number of finite aggregate, called the power of the aggregate, and on the other hand, known as the sine cardinal sinc(x) or cosine cardinal cosc(x), is a special function defined by the centric circular function (CCF). sin(x) and cos(x) are commonly used in undulatory physics (see Figure 1) and whose graph, the graph of cardinal sine, which is called as "Mexican hat" (sombrero) because of its shape.

Neutrosophic Masses & Indeterminate Models Applications To Information Fusion, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this paper we introduce the indeterminate models in information fusion, which are due either to the existence of some indeterminate elements in the fusion space or to some indeterminate masses. The best approach for dealing with such models is the neutrosophic logic.

Crowd Documentation: Exploring The Coverage And The Dynamics Of Api Discussions On Stack Overflow, Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude, Lars Grammel, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditionally, many types of software documentation, such as API documentation, require a process where a few people write for many potential users. The resulting documentation, when it exists, is often of poor quality and lacks sufficient examples and explanations. In this paper, we report on an empirical study to investigate how Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, facilitate crowd documentation — knowledge that is written by many and read by many. We examine the crowd documentation for three popular APIs: Android, GWT, and the Java programming language. We collect usage data using Google Code Search, and analyze …

Topic Based Query Suggestions For Video Search, Kong-Wah Wan, Ah-Hwee Tan, Joo-Hwee Lim, Liang-Tien Chia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Query suggestion is an assistive technology mechanism commonly used in search engines to enable a user to formulate their search queries by predicting or completing the next few query words that the user is likely to type. In most implementations, the suggestions are mined from query log and use some simple measure of query similarity such as query frequency or lexicographical matching. In this paper, we propose an alternative method of presenting query suggestions by their thematic topics. Our method adopts a document-centric approach to mine topics in the corpus, and does not require the availability of a query log. …

Performance Analysis Of Two Priority Queuing Systems In Tandem, Faouzi Kamoun

All Works

In this paper, we consider a tandem of two head-of-line (HOL) non-preemptive priority queuing systems, each with a single server and a deterministic service-time. Two classes of traffic are considered, namely high priority and low priority traffic. By means of a generating function approach, we present a technique to derive closed-form expressions for the mean buffer occupancy at each node and mean delay. Finally, we illustrate our solution technique with some numerical examples, whereby we illustrate the starvation impact of the HOL priority scheduling discipline on the performance of the low-priority traffic stream. Our research highlights the important fact that …

A Hybridized Lagrangian Relaxation And Simulated Annealing Method For The Course Timetabling Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Kim Leng Poh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes a timetabling problem at universities, where a master course timetable is given extrinsically and conflicts due to students' course enrollment do not need to be considered. A solver for the problem, which integrates both teacher assignment and course scheduling, is described. An initial solution is obtained by a mathematical programming approach based on Lagrangian relaxation. This solution is further improved by a simulated annealing algorithm. The proposed method has been tested on instances from a university in Indonesia, as well as on several randomly generated datasets, and the corresponding computational results are reported.

Systems And Methods For Transaction Account Offerings, Clinton Allen, Michael Digregorio, Glade Erikson, Deepinder Gulati, Jacob Plammoottil Jacob, Sanjiv Khosla, Seema Chokshi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A method for receiving a user input for providing offerings is disclosed. Fields may be populated for creating a database query for matching a selection of offerings to a population of customers. Data may be received from the database, in response to interactively building the query and/or executing the query. Multiple rank ordered results may be produced for comparison, wherein the producing uses preprogrammed analytics, data from the database and user input, and wherein the results include customer lists linked to a distinct offering and a preferred delivery channel of the offering to a customer. A transaction account may be …

Preface: Trends In Natural And Machine Intelligence, Jonathan H. Chan, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trends in natural and machine intelligence are increasingly reflecting a convergence in these two well-established fields of study. The Third International Neural Network Society Winter Conference (INNS-WC 2012) was held in Bangkok, Thailand, on October 3-5, 2012. INNS-WC2012, with an aim to bring together scientists, practitioners, and students worldwide, to discuss the past, present, and future challenges and trends in the area of natural and machine intelligence. This event has been a bi-annual conference of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) to provide a forum for international researchers to exchange latest ideas and advances on neural networks and related discipline.

Dynamic Secure Cloud Storage With Provenance, Sherman S. M. Chow, Cheng-Kang Chu, Xinyi Huang, Jianying Zhou, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One concern in using cloud storage is that the sensitive data should be confidential to the servers which are outside the trust domain of data owners. Another issue is that the user may want to preserve his/her anonymity in the sharing or accessing of the data (such as in Web 2.0 applications). To fully enjoy the benefits of cloud storage, we need a confidential data sharing mechanism which is fine-grained (one can specify who can access which classes of his/her encrypted files), dynamic (the total number of users is not fixed in the setup, and any new user can decrypt …

Optimal Decision Making For Online Referral Marketing, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Widely available web 2.0 technologies not only bring rich and interactive user experiences, but also easily help users advertise products or services on their own blogs and social network webpages. Online referral marketing, for example, is a business practice that rewards customers who successfully refer other customers to a website or upon completion of a sale usually via their own social contacts. The referral rewards come in different forms such as shopping vouchers, redeemable points, discounts, prizes, cash payments, etc. We develop an analytical model to evaluate the business potential of incorporating an online referral marketing program into the firm's …

A Fuzzy Logic Multi-Criteria Decision Framework For Selecting It Service Providers, Amir Karami, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Selecting IT service providers in information systems outsourcing involves both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. This paper proposes an integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework to effectively handle uncertainty and subjectivity in the vendor selection process. The proposed methods apply fuzzy logic approach to integrate qualitative survey data into traditional multi-criteria decision models such as data envelope analysis (DEA), analytical hierarchy process (AHP) methods, and TOPSIS. Based on case studies from Iranian banking industry, we empirically test the proposed framework and show it is superior to existing methods. We demonstrate that the fuzzy logic approach provides a robust analysis for vendor selection …

Road: A New Spatial Object Search Framework For Road Networks, Ken C. K. Lee, Wang-Chien Lee, Baihua Zheng, Yuan Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a new system framework called ROAD for spatial object search on road networks. ROAD is extensible to diverse object types and efficient for processing various location-dependent spatial queries (LDSQs), as it maintains objects separately from a given network and adopts an effective search space pruning technique. Based on our analysis on the two essential operations for LDSQ processing, namely, network traversal and object lookup, ROAD organizes a large road network as a hierarchy of interconnected regional subnetworks (called Rnets). Each Rnet is augmented with 1) shortcuts and 2) object abstracts to accelerate network traversals and …

Imbalance Challenge Of Enacting Information Privacy Safeguards In Healthcare: A Grounded Theory Approach, Rachida Parks, Heng Xu, Chao-Hsien Chu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Healthcare organizations face significant challenges in designing and implementing the appropriate safeguards to mitigate information privacy threats. While many studies examined various technical and behavioral safeguards to protect the confidentiality and privacy of patient information, very little is known about the actual outcomes and implications of the privacy practices in which organizations engage. There is little research theoretically explaining the outcomes of enacting privacy safeguards and subsequent effects on privacy compliance. This paper reports the results of a grounded theory study investigating the intended consequences (positive impacts) and unintended (negative impacts) consequences of enacting privacy safeguards in healthcare organizations. An …

Learning Bregman Distance Functions For Semi-Supervised Clustering, Lei Wu, Chu Hong Hoi, Rong Jin, Jianke Zhu, N. Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning distance functions with side information plays a key role in many data mining applications. Conventional distance metric learning approaches often assume that the target distance function is represented in some form of Mahalanobis distance. These approaches usually work well when data are in low dimensionality, but often become computationally expensive or even infeasible when handling high-dimensional data. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme of learning nonlinear distance functions with side information. It aims to learn a Bregman distance function using a nonparametric approach that is similar to Support Vector Machines. We emphasize that the proposed scheme is …

Partitioning Method For Emergent Behavior Systems Modeled By Agent-Based Simulations, O. Thomas Holland

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Used to describe some interesting and usually unanticipated pattern or behavior, the term emergence is often associated with time-evolutionary systems comprised of relatively large numbers of interacting yet simple entities. A significant amount of previous research has recognized the emergence phenomena in many real-world applications such as collaborative robotics, supply chain analysis, social science, economics and ecology. As improvements in computational technologies combined with new modeling paradigms allow the simulation of ever more dynamic and complex systems, the generation of data from simulations of these systems can provide data to explore the phenomena of emergence.

To explore some of the …

A New Phase Speciation Leaching Procedure For The Determination Of Metals In Oxic And Anoxic Sediments, Brandon R. Gipson

OES Theses and Dissertations

Toxic trace elements such as cadmium, lead, chromium, and arsenic released by human activities can accumulate in marine and estuarine sediments, where these metals are often sequestered until local environmental changes (e.g., redox, salinity, and/or pH) allow these elements to be reintroduced into the food web. In order to assess the extent of toxic trace element contamination in sediment, numerous leaching schemes have been developed that separate sediment-bound trace metals into operationally defined geochemical phases. These "phase speciation" leaching schemes are typically designed with the purpose of being used on either oxic or anoxic sediments. However, natural sediments often contain …

Robust Distributed Scheduling Via Time Period Aggregation, Shih-Fen Cheng, John Tajan, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we evaluate whether the robustness of a market mechanism that allocates complementary resources could be improved through the aggregation of time periods in which resources are consumed. In particular, we study a multi-round combinatorial auction that is built on a general equilibrium framework. We adopt the general equilibrium framework and the particular combinatorial auction design from the literature, and we investigate the benefits and the limitation of time-period aggregation when demand-side uncertainties are introduced. By using simulation experiments on a real-life resource allocation problem from a container port, we show that, under stochastic conditions, the performance variation …

Superluminal Physics And Instantaneous Physics As New Trends In Research, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In a similar way as passing from Euclidean Geometry to Non-Euclidean Geometry, we can pass from Subluminal Physics to Superluminal Physics, and further to Instantaneous Physics. In the lights of two consecutive successful CERN experiments with superluminal particles in the Fall of 2011, we believe that these two new fields of research should begin developing.

Extenics In Higher Dimensions, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Prof. Dr. Florentin Smarandache, during his research period in the Summer of 2012 at

the Research Institute of Extenics and Innovation Methods, from Guangdong University of

Technology, in Guangzhou, China, has introduced the Linear and Non-Linear Attraction

Point Principle and the Network of Attraction Curves, he has generalized the 1D Extension

Distance and the 1D Dependent Function to 2D, 3D, and in general to n-D Spaces, and he

generalized Qiao-Xing Li’s and Xing-Sen Li’s definitions of the Location Value of a Point

and the Dependent Function of a Point on a Single Finite Interval from one dimension (1D) …

Quantization And Discretization At Large Scales, Florentin Smarandache, Victor Christianto, Pavel Pintr

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

The ongoing search of extrasolar planets is one of the most attractive fields of research in astrophysics and astronomy. Up to now, 360 extrasolar planets have been discovered near stars with similar mass as the Sun. There is also discovery related to the so-called Earth-like planets. With regards to these discoveries, one intriguing question is whether there is relationship between orbit distance of the planets and their stars. Various formulas have been suggested since 1990s, and they suggest that there may be reason to accept quantization of distances of those planets both in our solar system and also in extrasolar …

Vacuum, Space-Time, Matter And The Models Of Smarandache Geometry, Florentin Smarandache, Hu Chang-Wei

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Many fundamental concepts in physics remain unsolved:  What is time? Is it pure relative?  What is the vacuum? Is it void space or special medium?  What is mass? Can it be created? I believe that physicists have not got definite answers for the above questions. Isaac Newton said: I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. For instance, we still do not know what the clear definition of time …

Innovative Uses Of Matrices, Florentin Smarandache, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Indra Venkatbabu

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this book authors bring out the innovative applications of matrices defined, described and developed by them. Here they do not include the natural product on matrices newly described and defined by them in the book on ‘natural product ×n on matrices’.

This book is organized into seven chapters. The first one is introductory in nature. In the second chapter authors give the unique and new way of analyzing the data which is time dependent. We construct three types of matrices called Average Time Dependent data matrix (ATD matrix), Refined Time Dependent Data matrix (RTD matrix) and Combined Effective Time …

Supermodular Lattices, Florentin Smarandache, Iqbal Unnisa, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In lattice theory the two well known equational class of lattices are the distributive lattices and the modular lattices. All distributive lattices are modular however a modular lattice in general is not distributive.

In this book, new classes of lattices called supermodular lattices and semi-supermodular lattices are introduced and characterized as follows: A subdirectly irreducible supermodular lattice is isomorphic to the two element chain lattice C2 or the five element modular lattice M3. A lattice L is supermodular if and only if L is a subdirect union of a two element chain C2 and the five element modular lattice M3.

Special Quasi Dual Numbers And Groupoids, Florentin Smarandache, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this book the authors introduce a new notion called special quasi dual number, x = a + bg.

Among the reals – 1 behaves in this way, for (– 1)2 = 1 = – (– 1). Likewise –I behaves in such a way (– I)2 = – (– I). These special quasi dual numbers can be generated from matrices with entries from 1 or I using only the natural product ×n. Another rich source of these special quasi dual numbers or quasi special dual numbers is Zn, n a composite number. For instance 8 in Z12 is such that …

Special Dual Like Numbers And Lattices, Florentin Smarandache, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this book the authors introduce a new type of dual numbers called special dual like numbers. These numbers are constructed using idempotents in the place of nilpotents of order two as new element. That is x = a + bg is a special dual like number where a and b are reals and g is a new element such that g2 =g. The collection of special dual like numbers forms a ring. Further lattices are the rich structures which contributes to special dual like numbers. These special dual like numbers x = a + bg; when a and b …