Archives-February 2013

Job satisfaction is the sense of well- being, good feeling and positive mental state that emerge in an incumbent worker when his obtained reward consequent upon his performance is congruent with his equitable reward. Extant literature in other sectors of the economy points to the fact that factors such as poor working conditions, below competitive salaries, a lack of promotional opportunities are some of the factors contributing to employee dissatisfaction.The aim of this study is to ascertain the levels of job satisfaction amongst quantity surveyors in consulting firms in Lagos, Nigeria. Biographical and job descriptive index questionnaires (JDI) were administered to gather the data. The JDI measures job satisfaction on five facets, namely, pay, promotions, supervision, co-workers and the work itself. A total of 100 questionnaires were collected and used for the study. The survey covered quantity surveyors in consulting firms in Lagos and the respondents were selected using stratified random sampling technique. Data collected were analysed using mean item score, spearman rank correlation, correlation matrix, linear regression analysis where appropriate. Findings of the study revealed that the respondents were satisfied with the relationship with co-workers, nature of work and the supervision they receive. Major sources of dissatisfaction are promotion and salaries of the respondents. This finding is a bold step and necessary benchmark for resolving major sources of dissatisfaction among quantity surveyors in consulting firms. The roles of other contextual factors on job satisfaction need to be contemplated for future research.

Living within a human community is a must for every human being upon which most scholars have agreed. The essentials of today’s life require presence of women within the community as well as men to work and do everyday activities. However, the street harassment issue as a social anomie for women is growing and their peace & comfort is taken away. Since this social anomie is a serious threat against the social security of people, so, the present research has been carried out to study the amount of street harassment for women and social elements affecting it in Iran. The methodology used in this paper was survey and the statistical community which is being evaluated is all youth between 18 and 28 among which, 280 individuals are selected randomly by the Cockron formula as the final cases. The results are analyzed using SPSS software. The results proved that there is a correlation between independent variables like age, education, monthly income of the family, relationship with the parents, monitoring and the control of official agencies and religious beliefs and the dependent variable of street harassment. Also the outcomes of regression analysis showed that %38 of changes in street harassment variable by means of the rest of six variables are defined in regression model and among those variables the relationship with the parents, age and education had the most effects on the dependent variable.

The failures of the bituminous pavements are not only due to increase in traffic but also due to extreme climatic conditions prevailing in the country. The addition of sulphur to the bitumen can improve the quality of bitumen and enhance its properties as far as its use in the road construction is considered. In this paper the effect of addition of sulphur on the physical properties of the bitumen is studied and the optimum dose of sulphur to be added to the bitumen is also determined. The effect of Aging on the physical properties of Sulphur modified bitumen is also discussed in this paper.

XML makes data flexible in representation and easily portable on the Web but it also substantially inflates data size as a consequence of using tags to describe data. Although many effective XML compressors, such as XMill, have been recently proposed to solve this data inflation problem, they do not address the problem of running queries on compressed XML data. More recently, some compressors have been proposed to query compressed XML data. However, the compression ratio of these compressors is usually worse than that of XMill and that of the generic compressor gzip, while their query performance and the expressive power of the query language they support are inadequate. In this paper we propose our approach a XML compressor which support querring compress XML data with partial de-compressor. Our approach address the compressor time and adaptive compression ratio of existing XML compressor.

Expert systems, which are the most commercially successful result of research in artificial intelligence, are software entities that follow the cognitive abilities of human experts in complex decision making situation. As one of the primary activities in computer science and dependent heavily on the rapid development in computer technology, Expert systems have been eagerly adopted by industries and applied to a wide range of applications. Expert systems belongs to a field of intelligence knowledge based systems the constitute one of the principle field of activity of computational intelligence, a field which been referred to as the science that attempts to reproduced human intelligence using computational means.

Soil samples from dump yards in Thiruvanthapuram were collected for isolation of bacteria. Isolates obtained were screened for non chitinase and protease activity, by culturing on skimmed milk and colloidal chitin agar plates respectively. The organism which did not degrade chitin but degraded protein was selected and identified by simple staining, gram staining, IMViC, and with further molecular identification by 16SrRNA analysis, it was confirmed that the isolate was Serratia marcescens. The economical application of Serratia marcescens was analyzed by quantifying the enzyme production and its degrading capacity on shell fish waste. The enzyme kinetics was studied after its purification and characterization using column chromatography and SDS-PAGE respectively. The optimum temperature and pH for maximum enzyme activity was identified and studied for future applications on a broad scale.

SOLECKSHAW, a motor assisted pedal driven three wheeled vehicle, was developed by CSIR-CMERI in 2008-09, under the recent CSIR vision, CSIR-800, aimed at empowering 800 million Indians, who belong to the underprivileged class of society in our country, by way of S&T intervention. Rear wheels of SOLECKSHAW are driven by manual power and front wheel is driven by brushless DC (BLDC) electric hub motor, leading to driving comfort of the driver. Once the product was developed and on road trial was successful, the technology was transferred to a few Indian Industries. It is found that the users of SOLECKSHAW are financially handicapped and not exposed to modern science and technology, which is a major hindrance in deploying this technology. Thus this market seeding project was taken up to make these users (rickshaw pullers) empowered through extra effort and financial facilitation. The main objective of this project was deployment of SOLECKSHAW technology on a large scale in a faster mode, to ensure its acceptability in the society. Based on the user’s feedback and ready availability of interested “Operator” in the form of either NGO or a start-up tourism company, Soleckshaws have been successfully implemented on road in different cities of the country.

Translatologists have tried to take advantage of scientific models to escape from the diversity of personal ideas to assess the quality of a piece of translation. One of those models is Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. In this paper the researcher has chosen “Uncle Willy” by William Faulkner and analysed its transitivity patterns, to find out the writer’s style, based on Halliday’s six processes and compared it with those of the translated text. The results show that the translator has emphasized the writer’s materialistic point of view and has decreased the relational interactions between the characters of the story in the interests of their mental actions. This has caused relational actions to happen in regard to dialogues while in ST more verbal actions happen in characters’ mind. And the existential aspect of the story has taken a stronger colour.

The absorber layer antimony tin sulfide thin film was deposited by physical vapor deposition (PVD) using two source simultaneous deposition techniques for solar cell applications. The photoconductivity was measured with a photoconductivity spectrometer which confirms the photo-activeness of antimony tin sulfide. Thickness, band gap, refractive index and transmittance were calculated by using ellipsometry techniques. The transmittance of the material was above the visible range which decreases with the increase of wavelength. The material has n-type conductivity measured with hot probe technique.

The paper examines the possibility of providing a platform or base for extension of knowledge and wisdom in the virtual era to benefit all the people. Availability of knowledge and wisdom objectively influencing all the people and in all occasions, time wise and place wise, will go along way in limiting the role of beauracracy. The major objectives of the Study were to determine the main dimensions in the field of virtual education, Present a Research Model for Virtual Education and also to determine the proportional degree of the Research Model from the point of view of the teachers, educational experts and specialist in Iran and India. The Statistical sample of the present Study includes 400 of the teachers and educational experts in education technology, ICT and IT in Iran and India. In order to collect the needed data, a questionnaire was designed. The obtained data were analyzed on the basis of such descriptive and inferential statistical indexes as Factor Analysis, Coloration and Cronbach’s Alfa. The SPSS package was used. This research is based on a well though out and scientifically designed “Research Model”. The ‘designed Research’ Model facilitated in-depth ground Study of each component of Virtual Education Model. Based on the empirical finding, our Conceptual Model could be refined and applied to draw conclusions. All the eight components of the Research Model were confirmed from the point of the view of the teachers and educational experts in Iran and India.