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Developing the Elderly Tourism Market in China
No full textWith a rapidly growing number of the elderly in the population, the consumption level of the elderly continuously improves to afford travel. Consequently, the elderly tourism industry faces unprecedented opportunities. The aim of this study was to promote the healthy development of the elderly tourism market in China. We provide practical suggestions for providers of senior tourism products and services, in addition to proposing a new way to build a favorable environment for senior tourism industry. Based on the comprehensive literature review on the consumption of senior tourism, we incorporate the marketing strategy of 4C into specifying recommendations that will promote the development of the senior tourism industry. Our recommendations will motivate the healthy development of our country’s senior tourism industry in four aspects of product, cost, convenience and communication
Survey on Prominent RFID Authentication Protocols for Passive Tags
No full textRadio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the leading technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) to create an efficient and reliable system to securely identify objects in many environments such as business, health, and manufacturing areas. Recent RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to satisfy the security features of RFID communication. In this article, we identify and review some of the most recent and enhanced authentication protocols that mainly focus on the authentication between a reader and a tag. However, the scope of this survey includes only passive tags protocols, due to the large scale of the RFID framework. We examined some of the recent RFID protocols in term of security requirements, computation, and attack resistance. We conclude that only five protocols resist all of the major attacks, while only one protocol satisfies all of the security requirements of the RFID system.http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s1810358
Energy Optimization in Residential Spaces Using BEopt
No full textThe residential sector in the United states accounts for 22 percent of the total energy consumption according to the reports from U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) (2013). 31 percent of the house holds are reported facing challenges in paying their energy bills for heating or cooling their homes in 2015 according to the Residential energy consumption survey (RECS). To promote green buildings and to reduce the carbon footprints. The US Green building council has developed LEED certification to evaluate energy performance of a building. To achieve this level of energy efficiency software's such as BEopt, Equest are used. These software's help evaluate building design and identify cost optimal efficiency to save energy. This research project compares results of the software and average energy costs per household to determine housing design adjustments to minimize energy usage for different geographic regions in the Northern US. Data are taken from government website such as EIA and census.gov These results can be used to inform housing design and retrofit and remodeling actives
Vision Zero a Program to Make the Crosswalks Safer for People with Special Conditions by Using RFID Technology
No full textBased on reliable reports people are killed crossing the street 16 times more than natural disasters. Each year 4,500 pedestrians are killed and another 68,000 are injured in the United States just because didn't have enough time crossing the street, and drivers didn't notice them. The victims disproportionately are children, disabled people, and seniors. Vision Zero prime objective is to reduce crossing pedestrian's deaths to optimal zero
Computer Vision-Based Framework for Supporting the Mobility of the Visually Impaired
No full textFaculty Research Day 2018: Doctoral Student Poster 1st PlaceThis poster presents an intelligent framework that includes several types of sensors embedded in a wearable device to support the visually impaired (VI) community. The proposed work is based on an integration of sensor-based techniques and a computer vision-based in order to introduce an efficient and economical visual device. The 98% accuracy rate of the proposed sequence is based on a wide detection view that used two camera modules. In this framework, we use several computer vision algorithms including Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), Random sample consensus (RANSAC), and K-mean. However, the novelty of this work is the obstacle avoidance approach that is based on the image depth and fuzzy control rules. The results of our real time experiments emphasize that the proposed collision avoidance approach is able to aid the VI users in avoiding 100% of detected objects
The Utilization of Fuel Cell Waste Heat at the University of Bridgeport
No full textDistrict heating system is cost effective and helps to reduce green house gases. It uses the waste heat from existing power plants to provide low temperature heat to the commercial and residential buildings. At UB, the 1.4 MW fuel cell system is owned by another company and the waste heat is free to us. Currently, less than 50% of the waste heat is utilized in several buildings
Employing Topological Data Analysis On Social Networks Data To Improve Information Diffusion
No full textFor the past decade, the number of users on social networks has grown tremendously from thousands in 2004 to billions by the end of 2015. On social networks, users create and propagate billions of pieces of information every day. The data can be in many forms (such as text, images, or videos). Due to the massive usage of social networks and availability of data, the field of social network analysis and mining has attracted many researchers from academia and industry to analyze social network data and explore various research opportunities (including information diffusion and influence measurement). Information diffusion is defined as the way that information is spread on social networks; this can occur due to social influence. Influence is the ability affect others without direct commands. Influence on social networks can be observed through social interactions between users (such as retweet on Twitter, like on Instagram, or favorite on Flickr). In order to improve information diffusion, we measure the influence of users on social networks to predict influential users. The ability to predict the popularity of posts can improve information diffusion as well; posts become popular when they diffuse on social networks. However, measuring influence and predicting posts popularity can be challenging due to unstructured, big, noisy data. Therefore, social network mining and analysis techniques are essential for extracting meaningful information about influential users and popular posts. For measuring the influence of users, we proposed a novel influence measurement that integrates both users’ structural locations and characteristics on social networks, which then can be used to predict influential users on social networks. centrality analysis techniques are adapted to identify the users’ structural locations. Centrality is used to identify the most important nodes within a graph; social networks can be represented as graphs (where nodes represent users and edges represent interactions between users), and centrality analysis can be adopted. The second part of the work focuses on predicting the popularity of images on social networks over time. The effect of social context, image content and early popularity on image popularity using machine learning algorithms are analyzed. A new approach for image content is developed to represent the semantics of an image using its captions, called keyword vector. This approach is based on Word2vec (an unsupervised two-layer neural network that generates distributed numerical vectors to represent words in the vector space to detect similarity) and k-means (a popular clustering algorithm). However, machine learning algorithms do not address issues arising from the nature of social network data, noise and high dimensionality in data. Therefore, topological data analysis is adopted. It is a noble approach to extract meaningful information from high-dimensional data and is robust to noise. It is based on topology, which aims to study the geometric shape of data. In this thesis, we explore the feasibility of topological data analysis for mining social network data by addressing the problem of image popularity. The proposed techniques are employed to datasets crawled from real-world social networks to examine the performance of each approach. The results for predicting the influential users outperforms existing measurements in terms of correlation. As for predicting the popularity of images on social networks, the results indicate that the proposed features provides a promising opportunity and exceeds the related work in terms of accuracy. Further exploration of these research topics can be used for a variety of real-world applications (including improving viral marketing, public awareness, political standings and charity work)
Cloning of Putative Cobalamin Reductases of Thermosipho melanesiensis
No full textCobalamin, commonly known as Vitamin B12, is a vitamin that plays an essential role in keeping human nerve and blood cells healthy. It is also a cofactor for the synthesis of enzymes involved in citric acid cycle metabolism, DNA synthesis, and gene regulation. Only certain Bacteria and Archaea possess the required enzymes for Cobalamin biosynthesis. Eukaryotes cannot synthesize Cobalamin de novo, but obtain it in one of two ways: via gut microorganisms that synthesize Cobalamin, or via food sources. Humans use the latter method by consuming animal products. Our aim is to uncover the unknown gene identities of three reductase enzymes in Thermosipho melanesiensis that are suspected to be required for de novo Cobalamin synthesis. Previous research on protein comparison to Salmonella enterica has targeted three DNA sequences as possible reductase genes
The Prevalence of the Term Subluxation in Chiropractic Degree Program Curricula Throughout the World
Get PDFBackground: The subluxation construct generates debate within and outside the profession. The International Chiropractic Education Collaboration, comprised of 10 chiropractic programs outside of North America, stated they will only teach subluxation in a historical context. This research sought to determine how many chiropractic institutions worldwide still use the term in their curricula and to expand upon the previous work of Mirtz & and Perle. Methods: Forty-six chiropractic programs, 18 United States (US) and 28 non-US, were identified from the World Federation of Chiropractic Educational Institutions list. Websites were searched by multiple researchers for curricular information September 2016–September 2017. Some data were not available on line, so email requests were made for additional information. Two institutions provided additional information. The total number of mentions of subluxation in course titles, technique course (Tech) descriptions, principles and practice (PP) descriptions, and other course descriptions were reported separately for US and non-US institutions. Means for each category were calculated. The number of course titles and descriptions using subluxation was divided by the total number of courses for each institution and reported as percentages. Results: Means for use of subluxation by US institutions were: Total course titles = .44; Tech = 3.83; PP = 1.50; other = 1.16. For non-US institutions, means were: Total course titles = .07; Tech = .27; PP = .44; other = 0. The mean total number of mentions was 6.94 in US vs. 0.83 in non-US institutions. Similarly, the mean course descriptions was 6.50 in US vs. 0.72 in non-US institutions. Conclusions: The term subluxation was found in all but two US course catalogues. The use of subluxation in US courses rose from a mean of 5.53 in 2011 to 6.50 in 2017. US institutions use the term significantly more frequently than non-US. Possible reasons for this were discussed. Unscientific terms and concepts should have no place in modern education, except perhaps in historical context. Unless these outdated concepts are rejected, the chiropractic profession and individual chiropractors will likely continue to face difficulties integrating with established health care systems and attaining cultural authority as experts in conservative neuro-musculoskeletal health care.https://doi.org/10.1186/s12998-018-0191-
Fake News or Marketing Bonanza? Exploring Non-Traditional "Holidays" as Sales Stimuli
No full textEdward Lisi and Joel Fernandes' poster about non-traditional holidays as attempts at sales stimuli