Archives-February 2014

Green Banking means combination of operational improvements, technology and changing client habits in banking business. Adopting green banking is not only useful for environment but also benefits in greater operational efficiency. This paper analyzes the evolution of green banking concepts in India, its necessity and significance. It also highlights the major benefits and challenges of Green Banking. Banks should go green and play a pro-active role in India’s emerging economy. This paper has also presented the status of Indian Banks as far as Green banking adoption is concerned. It also highlights the green banking initiatives been taken by the Indian Banking Industry. It gives a detailed study on the findings that there have not been many initiatives in this regard by banks and financial institutions in India though they play an active role in India’s emerging economy. The objective of this study is to find out what initiative has been taken by the Indian Banking Industry to adopt Green Banking. This article also presents the to find out different ways to overcome such hindrances. Observational method and descriptive research design has been adopted for this research and secondary data has been chosen for the research.

Sugarcane fertilization in Kenyan plantations is largely concentrated on Nitrogen and Phosphorus. Use of Potassium, secondary nutrients and micronutrients is altogether missing. Recent soil analysis results indicate that soils in the Mumias Sugar zone of western Kenya that accounts for 50-60 % of national production are K- deficient. In examining the quality factor in sugarcane payment systems as envisaged in recent legislation, adoption of balanced nutrition by inclusion of K would help improve sugar cane productivity and enhance sugar recovery. This paper reports the effect of K, N and their interaction on sugarcane yield and juice quality on acrisols. Four experiments were established in several locations from 2009-2011. The treatments included a factorial combination of four rates of K at 0, 60, 120 and 180 kg/ha K2O and four rates of N at 0, 46, 92 and 138 kg/ha N. Recommended basal phosphate was included in every plot at 92 kg/ha P2O5. Each experiment was harvested after 18 months of growth. Results showed significant responses to K and N. Agronomic efficiency was higher in plots supplied with K along with N. Nitrogen and K2O application rates that produced optimum cane yields were: N = 46kg/ha and K2O = 60 kg/ha; however, economically profitable rates were N = 46-92 kg/ha and K2O at 60 kg/ha. Productivity gains did not offset costs when rates were higher than 120 kg/ha of K2O and 138 kg/ha of N. The results imply that the inclusion of K in the sugar cane fertilization regime at Mumias will be beneficial. An initial rate of 60kg/ha K2O (2 bags of 50 kg muriate of potash is recommended on soils with K-deficiency. There were strong indications that with K fertilization the current N recommendation of 120 – 150 kg N/ha could be reduced to only 78-92 kg/ha due to better N utilization from the interaction with K.

This review describes the concept of Sustainable Development with emphasis on company’s approaches towards improving environmental performance and the effect of environmental legislation on the company’s performance. A proactive approach towards improving environmental performance often leads to improvement in company’s performance because resources are optimally utilised, and there is diversification in business activities through the creation of vital products from waste. Other benefits include excellent public image, reduction in the cost of landfill or landfill tax, avoidance of environmental fines, and availability of sufficient time to plan for the possible changes in the future. Environmental Management Systems and Life Cycle Analysis/Assessment of products are some of the fundamental measures required to take a proactive approach towards improving environmental performance and company’s performance. With various evidence obtained from some multinational corporations, this review confirms that the benefits of a proactive approach towards improving environmental performance of any organisation outweighs its cost.

This paper aims to develop and analyze a framework for measuring the competitiveness of a primary school. In order to evaluate the competitiveness the qualitative analysis has been adopted. The competitiveness of City School and Roots School System was evaluated using the developed competitiveness framework. Roots School was evaluated as more competitive. City School needs to focus more on grooming of students, faculty employment, retention and feedback mechanisms. The framework can be used to further improve the private sector primary schools.

The research study attempts to focus on the general attitudes that consumers tend to form towards advertising based on its three primary determinants of product information, social integration and hedonism. The literature starts by defining what attitudes actually are and their role in inclining people towards the desired products and services. It then highlights the ABC model of attitudes by focusing on the interrelationships among feeling, knowing and doing. Moving on with the research study, attitude towards advertisements accompanied by optimum advertising has also been described. The optimal distribution of resources between the various elements of the marketing mix tools remains a significant issue relevant to both the practitioners and academics. In factual terms, the issues crowding advertising and sales promotion spending continue to attract considerable managerial attention. Giving an ending note to the literature review, the significance of mass media advertising comprising of its primary determinants have been comprehensively described. In this research study, Statistical Package for the Social Science 20.0 was applied. Being an effective tool for performing quantitative research, it is quite easy to use and serves as a good starting point to adapt to advanced statistical packages. The results clearly pin point, that the independent variables of product information, social affiliation and hedonism have a positive impact on the general attitude development of the consumer towards advertising. The strongest positive correlation was against hedonism indicating that the emotional and excitement appeals play a major role in influencing consumers to be exposed to mass media promotional tools. Regression analysis was also applied to evaluate the relationship between one dependent variable and one or more independent variables, which indicated that the predictors explained the dependent variable of attitude towards advertising by 73%. Overall the results of the study truly supported our three hypotheses which show that as time passes by, the role of mass media advertising will play a major role in influencing potential consumer’s attitudes towards the advertised product and services.

Data mining is the process of extracting previously unknown patterns from large amount of data. Association rule mining is one of very important data mining models. Swarm intelligence is a new subfield of artificial intelligence which studies the collective behavior of groups of simple agents. In this paper, a new efficient algorithm is proposed for exploring high-quality association rules by firefly algorithm. The proposed method mines interesting and understandable association rules without relying upon the minimum support and the minimum confidence thresholds in only single run. Experimental evaluation shows the efficiency of proposed algorithm in terms of computation time.

Bacterial communities exist everywhere in the universe so in the caves. The ever increasing human activities inside any cave, in the form of ecotourism exert a major impact on its native microbial communities, which often stops its growth and pollutes the whole ecosystem. The situation is often found to be responsible for producing some human pathogenic bacteria inside it, which might pose a threat of infection to the other tourist. Kotumsar cave is a well known tourist pulling limestone cave of central India. In the present study the soil bacterial communities earlier isolated and characterized from different microhabitats of Kotumsar cave have been further confirmed by molecular identifications by applying 16S rDNA analysis and serotyping. All bacterial strains were also assayed for antibiotic resistance. Among the tested strains, support the PIB-win results and also shows the maximum resistance (about 69.23%) to Vancomycin and Polymyxin B.

For the many people in world social networks are playing major role day to day life. Depending on the user’s behavior and interaction with each other, the social networking sites are reshaped. Growing interest and development of social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, YouTube etc. imposing many research challenges. And hence this is allowing researchers to do many research studies using data mining concepts. The main challenge of such online social networking websites is to find out the individuals behavior over social network. Understanding the user’s behavior on social networking websites is called as collective behavior. There are many data mining techniques presented to identify the behavior of individuals. Such methods of collective behavior allows to learn and predict the users online behavior and based on it assign the appropriate label to actor in network. But the another main problem occurs in such methods is the networks scalability due to which this systems becomes poor in performance and many not be work if the network size is too big. To overcome this problem we need to have scalable learning of collective behavior to deal with any size of social networks. Recently one such method presented, in this method an edge-centric clustering technique is presented to extract social network dimensions. With sparse social dimensions, the proposed approach can efficiently handle networks of any size. In this paper we are presenting the detailed discussion on this method.

Terminalia spinosa species have very high durability and could survive for long while in use, even in areas prone to attack by termites or fungi. Extractives have been found to have different inhibition rates against fungi. Wood extractives play an important role in the natural durability. The objective of this study was to investigate the durability of Terminalia spinosa when exposed to wood decay fungi. Three brown-rot and three white-rot wood decay fungi were screened for their capacity to degrade T. spinosa .Samples were evaluated for decay by weight loss measurements using a modified E7-93 standard (AWPA) for block test method, growth inhibition by solvent extract of T. spinosa was also tested. Brown rot fungi P. placenta and C. puteana caused the highest weight losses of 16% and 15% on heartwood extracted with dichloromethane and acetone, respectively. P. sanguines a member of white rot fungi was the most aggressive in reducing weight by 24% on toluene/ethanol extracted heartwood. The later was comparable to weight loss of P. patula wood which was used as a positive control. All the test fungi species caused negligible weight loss of less than 2% on un-extracted heartwood of T. spinosa implying that extractives in the heartwood played an important role in preventing fungal infestation and hence damage. Efficacy of extracts increased with increase in concentration.

Set partitioning problems are known to be NP-hard, thus it requires massive amounts of times and efforts to solve them using linear programming and traditional algorithms. This study proposes to use a scatter search algorithm coupled with a tabu search algorithm for such problems. The proposed algorithm is applied to the 3rd level football leagues in Turkey. 54 teams competing in the league are divided into three categories randomly by the Turkish Football Federation. The proposed algorithm in this study aims to set up these categories with the goal of minimizing the total amount of travelling, thus cost and time throughout the league. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reduces the total travelling by a significant amount of 56%.