Archives-January 2012

In this work a new integral transform, namely Tarig transform was applied to solve linear system of partial differential equations with constant coefficients. We derive the formulate for Tarig transform of partial derivatives and apply them to solve initial value problems. Our purpose here is to show the applicability of this interesting new transform and its effecting to solve such problems.

More than 80% of roadway mileage in the world carries less than 400 vehicles per day and these roads are classified as low volume roads. India has essentially a rural oriented economy with 72% of its population living in villages. The low volume roads are part of tertiary road system, which consists of other district roads and village roads. The traffic conditions on these roads are distinctly different from the major roads. A variety of vehicles are used for transportation of goods on rural roads, ranging from bullock-carts to the fast moving commercial vehicles. Permanent deformation of the unbound base and sub-base layer is one of the distress types on these roads that require extensive maintenance. The gradation is the most important property that an aggregate can contribute to the performance of pavement. In the present study, an attempt has been made to investigate the rutting potential of low volume roads, taking into account base course gradation, sub-base course gradation, sub-base field density, subgrade field density, subgrade moisture content, subgrade California Bearing Ratio, and traffic volume. The influence of these factors on the rutting potential of in-service pavements has been investigated and a response type model has been developed.

Primary clarified bone waste (PCBW) from ossein factory was anaerobically co-digested with cattle dung in relative proportions at ambient temperature. A substitution of PCBW (60%) with cattle dung (40%) reported herein to be appropriate for a maximum biogas production yield with 68-71% methane content. The pH of the slurry was intensively maintained until the course of digestion. The best degradation of organic matter was achieved at a low proportion of PCBW used in the digesters. Thus, co-digestion of PCBW and cattle dung at a moderate proportion is a more noteworthy for producing maximum biogas yield with high quality methane content and to control odor in ossein factory.

Marine organisms are rich sources of new, biologically active compounds. Phytoplanktons have traditionally been used as foods. Algal powder as a food supplement for prevention or therapy of bacterial fish disease. Recently, much attention has been paid to the anticancer activity of Phytoplankton. Thus, we have screened organic extracts of Phytoplankton for their anticancer activity against human cancer cell line, and selected Skeletonema costatum as a candidate for use in treatment. The ethanolic extracts of Skeletonema costatum (EESC) showed cytotoxic activity against human cervical adenocarcinoma cell line, (HeLa). The IC50 of EESC against the HeLa cells was 250 µg/ml. Treatment of HeLa cells with various concentrations of EESC resulted in growth inhibition and induction of apoptosis in a dose-dependent manner. These results strongly suggest that EESC may be a potential candidate in the field of anticancer drug discovery.

Stable isotopes of ²H and ¹⁸O and physico-chemical data of groundwater and surface water from parts of the Ayensu Basin have been used to assess the origin of groundwater and the possible source of salinity in the groundwater. The pH of groundwaters ranges from 5.53-7.21; the groundwaters are between mildly acidic and slightly alkaline. Chloride concentration of the boreholes ranges between 49.985-399.876mg/L. The conductivity of groundwater samples also varied between 382-2140µS/cm while their total dissolved solids (TDS) varied between 164.9-913mg/L. The isotopic compositions of ? ¹⁸O versus ? ²H of the groundwaters plotted along the local meteoric water line indicating that the groundwaters do not undergo significant evaporation before recharge. The plot of ? ¹⁸O versus chloride indicates that processes for the increasing salinity could be due to enrichment by evaporation and possibly dissolution of soil salts. The study has also shown that the aquifers could be discontinuous.

Kenya is administratively divided into forty-seven (47) counties each of which shall be under the stewardship of a County Governor once the new constitution is finally implemented. These officers shall be tasked with the coordination of governance and development in the respective administrative areas. Like specific country Heads of State in the case of New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), County Governors shall be regarded as peers and hence accountable to both the government and the local community for any development activities. In the NEPAD development thinking, specific countries are required to undertake in-house reviews of their development policies and performance in governance, human rights and social service provision among others. The resultant data are presented to other African Heads of State and Government for peer review and the particular Head of State/Government made to answer for any development shortcomings. Similarly, to improve governance and accountability of leaders in areas under their purview, County Governors in Kenya could be subjected to the same peer review, hence NEPAD from below. This paper examines the APRM philosophy as a development archetype and argues for its intra-country domestication in Kenya focusing on the County.

Rapid growth of internet and market globalization, have led the organizations to try on attracting customers in such competitive electronic market. In this battle, the only way to gain competitive advantage and becoming market’ leader, is providing highly qualified electronic services. In this research, the quality of Tejarat Bank’ e-services in Iran and its relation with customer satisfaction have been evaluated. The research is an applied descriptive survey. The dimensions of e-banking services’ quality include Efficiency, Reliability, Security, Privacy, Trust, Responsiveness, Contact, Website Design, Service Variety. The population contains all of Internet banking customers of Tehran. Sample volume was calculated by Cochran method and was 270. Then, a questionnaire was designed based on SERVPERF questionnaire framework and was distributed among the respondents. The calculated data were analyzed through SPSS. The results for first hypothesis showed that e-banking services of Tejarat Bank had an optimum quality of the customers’ viewpoint with 95% significance. The results of second hypothesis showed that, with 95% of significance, there was a positive relation between service quality and customer satisfaction. Also, the dimensions of Efficiency, Reliability, Service Variety, Responsiveness, Website design and Privacy had the most relation with customer satisfaction, respectively

The study investigates the direction of volatility spillover between exchange rate and stock prices in Nigeria using quarterly data for the period of 1990-Q1 to 2009-Q4. Exponential Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic (EGARCH) framework due to Nelson (1991) was employed. Two different stock exchange indicators were used as proxy for stock prices to test the direction of volatility spillover between the variables. Thus we have two EGARCH models. The ADF and PP tests suggest that the series are random walk processes in their level form. The empirical findings suggest evidence of no long run equilibrium relationship between exchange rate and stock prices. It further shows that there is a robust unidirectional volatility spillover running from exchange rate to stock prices irrespective of the stock market indicator used. The result supports the findings of Beer and Hebeins (2008) for industrialized countries. The estimated mean equation showed that there is instantaneous positive response of stock market volatility to exchange rate fluctuation. Evidence from variance equation revealed that volatility persists longer when SMC was used as proxy for stock prices than ASI. The standard deviation statistic showed that stock market indicator is positively related to risk, validating the capital asset market hypothesis.

In this paper, some engineering properties of sugar cane stalk are determined. For this purpose, two varieties of sugar cane including L310 and L820 varieties with average moisture contents of 76.4 and 73.8% wet basis, respectively, were used. The experiments were conducted at ten internode positions down from the flower for both varieties. Based on the results obtained, the averages of stalk’s diameter, cross-section area and second moment of area of L310 variety were higher than those of L820 variety, while the average of stalk’s length of L820 variety was higher than that of L310 variety. The internode position had no significant effect on the shearing and bending properties of both varieties. Furthermore, there was significant difference between the two varieties in the case of Young’s modulus, while there was not any difference in the case of shear strength, specific shearing energy and bending strength. The average of Young’s modulus of L820 variety was significantly higher than that of L310 variety. The mean values of shear strength, specific shearing energy, bending strength, and Young’s modulus of L310 and L820 varieties were obtained as 4.92 and 5.25 MPa, 53.36 and 57.35 mJ mm^-2,  9.58 and 9.20 MPa, and 18.81 and 24.50 MPa, respectively.

Explosions like formation of algal blooms increasingly pollute both salt and fresh water ecosystems throughout the world. Owing to its negative impacts on human health and aquatic life, this widely reported phenomenon has become a serious environmental problem. While many process based, statistical and empirical models exist for water quality prediction, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models are increasingly being used for water related applications because ANNs are often capable of modelling complex systems for which behavioral rules or underlying physical processes are either unknown or difficult to simulate. Theoretical knowledge about biological processes can be easily embedded into Neural Network models by means of a constrained training procedure. It is a complex non-linear function with many parameters that are adjusted (calibrated or trained) in such a way that the network output becomes similar to the measured output on a known data set. The feed forward neural network models are effective in predicting the non-linear behaviour of algalblooms and the correlation values are as high as 0.95 between the measured and calculated values. This paper presents an overview and provides a systematic approach for modelling the algal blooms using Artificial Neural Networks.