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The Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Center in Sumengko Village, Nganjuk, has emerged as a well-known shuttlecock production center, responding to local market demand with quality comparable to factory-made brands. Haris Jatmiko, Head of the local Department of Industry and Trade, highlighted the center's role in the strategic framework for SMES development under the Industrial Law of 2014. Despite its success, the center faces significant quality control challenges. The Head of the SME Center revealed that 50% of products failed the initial quality test due to reliance on a visual-based manual inspection process that did not comply with standard testing methods, such as the SNI 0036:2014 standard. Previous research shows that only one in ten local brands meet SNI requirements, thus underscoring the need for improved quality control to increase competitiveness against regions such as Tegal, which produces shuttlecocks that meet national standards. Production at Sumengko mostly uses outsourced labor, causing inconsistencies in product quality. This study uses value chain analysis to identify gaps and quality control problems in the Shuttlecock SMEs value chain and suggests improvements based on in-depth interviews and critical point analysis, by SNI 0036:2014. Recommendations are provided to address gaps in quality control practices, supported by proposals for further research to test these improvements and conduct a cost-benefit analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper's purpose is to quantify the measurement consequences in the purge test of equipment protected with the "p" type of protection. In order to achieve this objective, the authors involved a simulation process for a pressurization enclosure. The simulation was conducted, in the first stage, without measurement to obtain a reference after that simulation was conducted for scenarios involving sampling separately for each measurement point. The first part of the paper presented the risks of explosion and pressurized enclosure as a protection type. The use, production, processing, and storage of petroleum products and gases generate atmospheres that can ignite or even cause explosions, resulting in serious losses. In the second part, the simulation model for obtaining test gas concentrations was proposed and presented, as well as the conditions imposed in the simulation model for the purpose of simulation. Within this approach, the influence of the measurement process (by sampling) on the test as a whole was investigated. The prevalent conclusion is that the measurement process with sampling at the configured parameters influences the purging test and this effect manifests differently on the considered measuring points. The implemented and presented method allows the classification of pre-set measurement locations as critical points. The magnitude of the deviation underlines the need to return the gas mixture due to the sampling involved in the measurement process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydrological extremes (drought-flood) are a phenomenon that is occurring more and more frequently because of climate change. The human-altered landscape cannot sufficiently withstand these extreme phenomena. For this reason, society feels pressure on the design, and assessment, but especially the implementation of adaptation and mitigation measures in the landscape. For best-designed measures, it is crucial to determine where the given problem arises and what are the possibilities of its solution with subsequent quantification of effectiveness. In the Czech Republic, this problem is solved in the long term by processing flood maps and determining flood areas. In 2009, a methodology was created for the identification of places that are potentially threatened by flash floods. In the interest area of the Dyje basin, 1356 critical points were determined by this methodology. The work's main goal was to evaluate these points and their contributing areas based on current data, and the summary and evaluation of the accessible data that will be used for proposals for measures. All analyses were made by using geographic information systems. It was specifically about evaluating the percentage representation of arable land, as one of the main criteria for determining the critical point. It was found that in almost 42 % of the critical points (or in their contributing areas) there was a decrease in arable land by more than 10 %. Furthermore, the occurrence of recorded erosion events was addressed. According to information from the Research Institute for Soil and Water Conservation, there were 622 erosion events in the Dyje basin area, and 43 % were in catchment areas of critical points. One of the crucial topics that are currently resonating in society in terms of proposals for measures in the landscape is drainage areas. According to vectorized documents from the Agricultural Water Management Company, these areas are in 57 % of the collection areas of critical points. The evaluation will further enter a multi-criteria analysis for the selection of a priority area, as the Dyje basin is quite extensive for more detailed analyses. Subsequently, protective measures close to nature will be designed and evaluated in the priority area using mathematical modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simulating direct runoff is vital, especially with regard to flash floods. The frequency of flash flood events increases as they are concomitant phenomena of the climate change. Considering the difficult prediction and rapid onset, as well as often lack of input data, the Soil Conservation Service curve number procedure (SCS-CN) poses a useful approach applied globally. Nevertheless, the method was developed for small agricultural watersheds in the USA, thus demanding corresponding modifications in order to provide relevant outputs in different environments. This work focuses on optimization of the initial abstraction ratio in the Husí potok catchment, the Czech Republic. In this watershed, severe flash flood events occurred in summer 2009 and 2010. Proper estimation of surface runoff is therefore a crucial issue here. The analysis of the initial abstraction ratio values was carried out using pairs of rainfall and discharge measurements. The results outline that the original value of the initial abstraction ratio 0.2 is too high and should be decreased. The identified values were then incorporated in direct runoff simulations to validate the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Derivatives of functions and their applications are important in Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) fields. Pedagogical observations of the engineering students' conceptual knowledge of the derivative are necessary for finding an effective way of teaching derivative concept to students. Chain rule and its' applications in engineering education are particularly important noting that functions seen in real life engineering applications are complicated in nature and require applying the chain rule to find their derivatives. In this paper, undergraduate engineering students' conceptual derivative knowledge is observed qualitatively and quantitatively. Participants of this study were undergraduate engineering students enrolled at a mid-sized Northeast U.S. university. These students were asked to determine the derivative of a composition function as a part of a questionnaire consisting of calculus questions and were expected to apply the chain rule to solve the research question. Participants' cognitive approaches to solve the research question were investigated during the video recorded interviews. The research question was used as a part of another pedagogical research conducted at a large Midwest U.S. university to study undergraduate and graduate students' conceptual derivative knowledge. Quantitative results obtained in this article are bi-product of the participating students' schema classification introduced by Piaget and Garcia in 1989.15 The qualitative results are students' video recorded responses to the research question evaluated by using the concept image and concept definition of Vinner and Tall18. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering and mathematics undergraduate and graduate students' conceptual function knowledge can have an important impact on their success in conceptually advanced courses. In building blocks of STEM concepts, function concept requires knowledge of sub-concepts such as limit, first derivative, second derivative, and asymptote. In this study, calculus concept knowledge of seventeen undergraduate and graduate engineering and mathematics students enrolled in a Numerical Methods-Analysis course at a large Midwest Research Institution are analyzed based on their responses to a calculus graphing question similar to the research question of Baker, Cooley, and Trigueros (2000). This question is analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively by using the triad classification in Action-Process-Object-Schema (APOS) theory. Mathematics graduate and undergraduate students succeeded the most among all the participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Success in many engineering and mathematics courses is tied to well-developed calculus knowledge. Several important calculus concepts used in STEM courses include limit, first derivative, second derivative, and asymptote. In this article, undergraduate and graduate engineering and mathematics students' ability to transform an algebraic function to its geometric representation is analyzed. Participants were either enrolled or recently (two week period) completed a Numerical Methods/Analysis course during the data collection period. Video recorded and written responses to graphing a quotient function are analyzed by using Action-Process- Object-Schema (APOS) theory. Participants are asked to sketch the graph of the given quotient function after calculating its limiting values, first derivative, second derivative and asymptotes. Qualitative and quantitative results indicated Mathematics majors' higher success rate among all the participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theoretical procedure for making a three dimensional landscape sketch is proposed in this paper. At the first stage, the critical points such as summits, ravine bottoms and passes are allocated by a user. These critical points construct fundamental properties of the mountain that a user tries to draw. Applying Morse theory to these critical points, the landscape of the mountain is defined as a sequence of a CW-complex that explains how the surface structure of the mountain changes when the mountain is formed from the bottom to the top step by step. The CW-complex is then concreted by obtaining skeletons from the Reeb graph of the mountain. The skeleton consisting of contour lines is modified without changing its topological structure by giving ranges and ravines. These lines constitute a series of continuous critical points and become invariants as well as summits, ravine bottoms and passes. At the final step, the system automatically generates a proposed landscape from the skeleton using Nurbs lines and surfaces or polygon meshes. By rendering the landscape, a user can change its shape by modifying ranges and ravines until the user satisfies it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper is devoted to study a class of projected dynamical inclusions in a reflexive Banach space introduced making use of a projection operator by E. Zarantonello in 1977 (see [9]). Then the equality of the set of critical points of these inclusions and the set of solutions to a variational inequality is shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thermal decomposition of inorganic compounds have been analyzed by simultaneous differential thermal analysis (DTA) method. Also phase transitions and critical points have been investigated. Additionally a computer model based on backpropagation multilayer feed-forward artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been used for the stimulation and prediction of critical points and phase transitions of inorganic compounds. Experimental data and output values of artificial neural networks have been compared and ANN predictions showed a considerably good result due to some unjustified data values and ANN predictions concurred with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]