Archives-February 2013

This work deals with the vibrational spectroscopy of 2’, 4’-difluoro acetophenone (DFA) and 4’-chloro acetophenone (CA). The fundamental vibrational frequencies and intensity of vibrational bands were evaluated using density functional theory (DFT) using standard B3LYP/6-31G** method and basis set combinations. The vibrational spectra were interpreted, with the aid of normal coordinate analysis based on a scaled quantum mechanical force field. The infrared and Raman spectra were also predicted from the calculated intensities. The effects of halogen substituents on the structure and vibrational frequencies have been investigated. Comparison of simulated spectra with the experimental spectra provides important information about the ability of the computational method to describe the vibrational modes.  The ¹³C and ¹H NMR chemical shifts of the DFA and CA molecules were calculated using the Gauge-Invariant- atomic orbital (GIAO) method in DMSO solution using IEF-PCM model and compared with experimental data.

Triglycine Sulphate (TGS) is an important material used in the fabrication of high sensitivity infrared detectors at room temperature. Single crystals of TGS were grown by solution method with slow evaporation and water as solvent at room temperature. The grown crystals were characterized by XRD analysis. It is found to exhibit monoclinic structure with the space group P21. The chemical composition of triglycine sulphate crystal was confirmed by Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis (EDAX). The Refractive index was calculated as 1.534 by using Brewster’s angle method. UV-Visible spectra showed that the grown crystals have wide optical transparency in the entire visible region.

Secondary sexual organ chela of Barytelphusa cunicularis, a freshwater crab was measured in females and males collected random at field from backwaters of Jayakwadi Dam. Segmental growth of major and minor chela was analyzed among sexes. In male all the segments in major and minor chela showed positive allometric growth while in female, merus and propodus only showed positive allometric growth. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) of growth of major and minor chelae segments indicated that there was a significant difference in growth pattern between major and minor chela in males whereas in females the growth constants of major and minor chela segments did not differ significantly however, intercepts differ significantly.

Accurate rainfall prediction is of great interest for water management and flood control. In reality, physical processes influencing the occurrence of rainfall are highly complex, uncertain and nonlinear. In this paper, we present tools for modeling and predicting the behavioral pattern in rainfall phenomena based on past observations. The aim of this paper is to predict the seasonal rainfall of (Iran) khozestan using artificial neural network (ANN) and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models. In order to evaluate the prediction efficiency, we made use of 33 years of seasonal rainfall data from year 1976 to 2008 of Khozestan Province (Iran). The models were trained with 28 years of seasonal rainfall data. The ANN and the ARIMA approaches are applied to the data to derive the weights and the regression coefficients respectively. The performance of the model was evaluated by using remaining 5 years of data. The study reveals that ANN model can be used as an appropriate forecasting tool to predict the rainfall, which out performs the ARIMA model.

The operation of a business enterprise affect a wide spectrum of society. The resources that are used not only limited to those of the proprietors but also from many connected with the enterprises - the share holders, the suppliers of material resources, the consumers, the local community and the society at large. Hence, a business enterprise has to be socially responsive so that a social balance is struck between the conflicting interests of business and society. The Social responsibility of business refers to what the business shall do, over and above the statutory requirement, prescribed by the government for the benefit of the society. The word responsibility connotes that the business has some moral obligations to the society. The government of India enacted many labour welfare and social security legislations to ensure social justice. The objective of the government is to provide good working ambiance to the labour force working in different environment and to improve their standard of living by the implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility by the corporate.

In this paper, we proposed the development of neural adaptive controls to ensure the robustness of uncertain nonlinear multivariable systems. We used two techniques: Robust neural adaptive control and neural indirect adaptive control. The study of the stability and robustness of both techniques was performed by Lyapunov theory. To validate these techniques and discover their effectiveness, a simulation example was considered. The simulation results obtained by these two control techniques have shown the effects of disturbance compensation, good performance tracking data paths and stability control systems. Comparative studies between these two techniques show that the neural indirect adaptive control cannot mitigate the effect of disturbances compared to the robust neural adaptive control.

The involvement of subordinates in decision-making has attracted much attention among academicians as well as practicing managers. In the school scenario, there had been fervent calls to involve teachers in the decision making process ever since the advent of the school based management concept. However many are still debating on how to involve teachers effectively in the decision making process. One of the major concerns is, whether the decisional situation is in the zone of acceptance of the teacher. Even though much has been done in evaluating teachers’ participation in decision making in schools, there is still lack of systematic procedure to develop the right instrument to assess this phenomena. In light of this, the following paper discusses the process of developing and validating an instrument to assess teachers’ participation in decision-making. The instrument was developed via focus group interviews involving teachers and school administrators. The instrument measures teachers’ participation in decision-making from five perspectives: curriculum and instruction, student related issues, staff related issues, financial issues, and general administration. The instrument was administered to 48 school administrators and 216 teachers and based on the results the reliability index was computed. The Crobach Alpha values for the dimensions ranges from 0.79 to 0.94. Apart from that, the instrument was also subjected to various types of validity check such as face and content validity, concurrent validity, and dimensionality to ensure that it has sound psychometric properties.

Reading is a complex process that involves the use of the cognitive, affective, psychomotor and social domains. Each of these aspects has a remarkable influence a learner’s reading skills and abilities development, hence determining a learner’s rate of reading success .The teacher plays a crucial role in developing children’s reading skills, although most learners enter school having attained some degree of phonological awareness of their L1 languages. Effective reading instruction then, requires that the teacher manipulates the cognitive, affective, psychomotor and social domains in order to develop appropriate reading competencies in early grade readers through the instructional practices chosen during instruction. This paper examines significant aspects crucial to effective reading instruction among early grade readers and their implications for early grade reading instruction in Kenya. It is hoped that this paper will provide teachers and researchers with stimulating insights in reading instruction for early grade readers in developing countries and Kenya in particular.

The competitive, complex and dynamic environment of the banking industry nowadays can lead to a great transformation in making the business due to an increasingly demanding customer. The traditional product-oriented bank is moving toward customer-oriented which focuses on customer loyalty as its main goal because of stiff competition. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the extent to which demographics correlated with service loyalty focusing on credit card service. A sample of 200 respondents was randomly chosen in this survey which 150 respondents gave the feedback. Correlation Pearson test being used to determine the relationship between demographic factors (age, gender, income level, occupation and lifestyle) and customer loyalty. The result from hypotheses testing has shown that only income level has positive relationship with customer loyalty as compared to other four demographic factors. This finding is also in line with what has been found by East (1995) indicated that shoppers who are more concerned about prices are less loyal, with high income groups being more loyal than low income groups.

This study investigates the relation of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and topic familiarity to EFL learners’ success in deriving meaning from context. It intends to determine whether (breadth and depth of) vocabulary knowledge and topic familiarity are related to the learners’ lexical inferencing success, and to investigate which of these variables makes an important contribution to L2 lexical inferencing success. The participants of the study were sixty-five pre-university students in Esfahan, Iran. In two consecutive weeks, version 2 of the Vocabulary Levels Test and the Word-Associate Test were used to measure participants’ breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge, respectively. One week later, the participants received a reading text and attempted to derive the meanings of 10 unknown words from context. After inferencing task, they rated the degree of their familiarity to the text on a Likert-scale questionnaire. Result indicate a significant relationship between vocabulary knowledge and learners’ lexical inferencing as well as a significant relationship between learners’ topic familiarity and their lexical inferencing success. The results further revealed that depth of vocabulary knowledge made a significant contribution to inferential success over and above the contribution made by the learners’ breadth of vocabulary knowledge and their topic familiarity.