Archives-April 2014

The choice of the similarity coefficient used in clustering could have great impact on the resulting classification, there is need to study and understand these coefficients better to be able to make the right choice for specific situations. In this study, variations caused by three similarity coefficients: Dice, Jaccard and Simple matching with five clustering methods: (Unweighted Pair-Group Mean Arithmetic (UPGMA), Weighted Pair-Group Mean Arithmetic(WPGMA), complete linkage, single linkage and Neighbour-Joining with AFLP markers in Colletotrichum gloeosporioides isolates from yam were assessed. Comparison among the similarity coefficients and clustering methods were made using correlation analysis, multidimensional scaling and principal component analysis. Dendrogram topology was compared using consensus fork index (CFI) and node counts. The grouping of the pathogens by the markers is not related to their agro-ecological zones. The CFI results showed varying level of similarity for the cluster analysis CA methods. It was observed that high correlation does not necessarily imply similarity in the topology of a tree, therefore care should be taken in its interpretation. The cophenetic correlation with original distances suggests that the UPGMA method gives consistent results with respect to grouping irrespective of the similarity coefficient. The use of UPGMA method is therefore recommended for its consistency.

Medical diagnosis is very much essential for the human beings to survive. Earlier the diagnosis, lesser is the pain. The disease unattended will lead to extreme conditions and greater pain, loss of health and high expenditure. This paper focuses on the comprehensive scalability analysis conducted on two kinds of thyroid dataset: original and synthetic. The results obtained with original dataset consisting of 215 instances with 5 features have been compared with the results obtained with synthetic dataset consisting of 1075 instances with 25 features. Initially the features were reduced to 3 features and 13 features on both the cases respectively. Subsequently classification accuracy is obtained using top most performing classifiers namely C4.5 and Multi layer perceptron. The results obtained are promising and the dimensionality reduction technique has proved better for smaller datasets as well as for larger datasets.

Bladder cancer is the second urogenital cancer; smoking represents the main risk factor for its occurrence. Urothelial bladder tumors without muscle infiltration are a group of tumors treated with conservative endoscopic resection, often associated with adjuvant instillations of chemotherapy or immunotherapy. The high risk of recurrence leads to a systematic monitoring. Cystoscopy represents the standard of monitoring. Prognosis of this tumor group is heterogeneous. The risk of progression to invasive cancer is highly variable and potentially lethal. Stage and tumor grade are well recognized as prognostic factors. Cystectomy may be considered in high-risk tumors, in case of failure of conservative treatment. The purpose of this article is to analyse through a literature synthesis, prinicipal topics concerning diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of non-infiltrating bladder tumors.

Most developing countries embarked on trade liberalisation at the prescription of Bretton Wood institutions. Zambia abandoned planned economy with strong interventionist and developmental objectives in the tourism sector. The country delved deeper into neoclassical, neoliberal economic policies such as Mercantilism, Absolute Advantage, Comparative Advantage, Heckscher-Ohlin Factor Endowment, and Porter’ s Diamond when formulating the Tourism Development Policies. The key beneficiaries of this new public management approach to development, remains multi- national corporations within the hospitality sector in particular and tourism in general at the expense of local lodge owners. The key findings in this paper highlight poor real growth in the sector, inadequate occupancy rate of lodges, reduces break even and expansion of the sector, increase in foreign investors, lack of expansion of locally owned lodges, dwindling market share and fewer and fewer new lodges being established since the liberalisation of the sector. This paper argues that new public management approach to development drawn from neoclassical and neoliberal theories of trade are responsible for poor policy choices.

To know Direct and indirect effect of different variables in individual changes of SHG members, the path analysis has been applied. For this purpose the data have been collected from Dharwad district, Karnataka state. It is evident that variable can have only direct effect, only indirect effect on a dependent variable or variables. To archive this, the path analysis was applied. Which reveals that the four independent variables are found to be statistically significant and Direct effect on Individual changes of SHG members.

In this paper, we study some of the properties of Q-fuzzy normal subgroups, cosets and prove some results on these.

The history of student-centered approach takes its roots from a constructivist theory, in which students learn more by doing and experiencing rather than by observing. In this theory, students are the initiators and architects of their own learning and knowledge making rather than passive ‘vessels’ who receive knowledge from expert teachers (Brown, 2008). In contrast to learner-centered, language-centered methods focus on discrete items of grammatical and lexical forms of a language that are presented to the learners. In fact linguistic forms constitute the organizing principle for syllabus construction. This paper aims at distinguishing which method is better. In order to do this three groups of female intermediate learners at three institutions in Kashmar, Iran participated in this study. There were three classes, including 30 learners in each group who were assigned to control and two experimental groups. The experimental groups received an instruction in three tenses; simple present, simple past and future tenses, followed by writing pre- and post-tests. Both tests consist of six questions and students' answers should be in form of a T-unit that including 50 words with using eight verbs. After analyzing the results of pre- and post-tests and comparing the performance of experimental groups, the findings show that the performance of learners in language-centered class is better than learner-centered class.

The heterogeneous catalytic activity of synthetic phosphate for conjugate addition was studied. This catalyst was prepared by calcination a mixture of fluorapatite and sodium nitrate. The conjugate addition between p-methoxychalcone and thiophenol has been used as model reaction. A central composite design was successfully employed for experimental design and analysis of the results. The combined effect of reaction time (X1), solvent volume (X2), catalyst weight (X3) and impregnation ratio (X4) on the reaction yield (Y) was studied and optimized using response surface methodology.

This study presents a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for modelling gas evolution and current distribution in a direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC). The improved two-phase model includes a new sub-model for estimating the interface mass transfer without empirical correlations. Simulation results in a horizontal channel of the DMFC agree with typical trends reported in the literature for bubbly flows. The increase in inlet flow rate is found to lead to a decrease in the gas content in the outlet of the anode channels. A case study illustrates applications of the CFD model for modelling gas evolution and current distribution in a DMFC with a parallel flow-field design. Simulation results with a improved two-phase model provide an explanation of experimental observations of a transparent DMFC with parallel channels. An improved three-dimensional CFD model includes all relevant phenomena and is valuable for gas management in a DMFC design.

In this study, a comparison of performance among four different methods (Probability Weighted Moments (PWM), Maximum Likelihood Methods (MLM), the Methods of Moments (MOM), and the least Square Method (LSM)) of estimating the parameters of the Weibull distribution was done, using different values of ? and ?. This study contains two different experiments; experiment I and experiment II. Values of ? > ?, ? < ?, ? = ? were used in experiment I, and another varied values of ? < ?, ? < ?, ? = ? in line with some modeled distribution of the Weibull distribution, were used in experiment II. These values were generated by simulation. The aim is to find the best methods of estimating the two-parameter Weibull distribution. Based on the sample sizes and parameters considered, the method which gave the best estimate for the two-parameter Weibull distribution, is the method of Moments (MOM), taking into consideration the total deviation as a measurement for comparison. This study will help to estimate parameters associated with various models of a component or system such as reliability problems, maintainability and predictions such as MTTF, MTTFF, MTTR, MTBF, Hazard Rate etc.