Archives-July 2011

The growth of complexity of the business environment in which firms operate, calls for more effective tools, able to consider the effect of the strategic choices of the actors of the market and to supply information useful for managerial decision process. Game theory seems to be an ideal candidate for this scope. Nevertheless, because of its axiomatic approach, its validity to highlight and define marketing issues has many critics. This paper analyses the main literature about the use of game theory for marketing management decisions and highlights its limits in this field in order to answer to the question: Can game theory be an effective marketing tool?

In this paper, we study Lu’s system, and we study the stability of equilibrium point of Lu’s system. Then, we study chaos synchronization of Lu’s system by using adaptive control methods.

Currently, Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology in Thailand has focused on information and communication technology (ICT) to provide innovation solutions for socio-economic growth. The best concept for ICT Reform is that the Thai government should not dominate the role of providing ICT services, but they should be run more efficiently by private companies. Rather, the role of the government should be to be responsible for planning, structuring and regulation, whilst the private sector may be responsible for management, investment, construction and finance. The transfer of responsibility to the private sector and the introduction of competition should be accomplished through some transparent arrangements including management contracts, capital leases, concessions, sale of assets and rights to operate (Best Practices for Telecommunications Reform, 2002). However, there exist difficulties when the government has to formulate the ICT policy. The policymakers are often unfamiliar with the technologies that they are harnessing for the national development. This article explores the national ICT development models employed in different countries which exhibit some similarities and differences. In overall, the ICT policy is not only the direction about developing the ICT industry or sector of the economy but also encompasses the use of ICTs to engender economic, social, and political growth.

This study investigated how the exploitation of wetlands, locally known as dambos, changes their vegetation composition, soil properties and how that in-turn affects the water quality. We therefore compared diversity and soil conditions between a protected (Madikane) and exploited (Dufuya) dambo impacted by communal agriculture and grazing in Lower Gweru, Zimbabwe. Species diversity was higher in Madikane (H’ = 2.52) than Dufuya (H’ = 2.14). Species that were present in Madikane indicated a permanent or semi-permanent wetness compared to species tolerant to arid conditions, reflecting disturbance in Dufuya. Dambo utilization also indicated a change in dominance from perennials to annuals and an increase in exotic species. There was no significant difference in the physical structure of the soil between the rather pristine and exploited sites (% clay and % silt, p > 0.05). A significant difference was recorded in the chemical properties of the soil (pH, phosphorus, nitrate-N, ammonium-N and organic carbon content). Water quality was good in the protected dambo than the exploited dambo as indicated by the differences in calcium ions and conductivity. The protection of wetlands is shown to be important in conserving biological diversity.

At present study first, some physical properties of four varieties of peanut (pod and kernel) were measured at initial moisture content. Afterwards, the required force for initial rupturing of the peanut kernels under compression loading was determined as a function of kernel moisture content (between 7 and 35% w.b.) and compression load direction. The compression load was applied laterally containing the suture line (direction 1), perpendicular to direction 1 (direction 2) and longitudinally through the hilum (direction 3). Results showed that Iraqi 1 variety had the highest value of rupture force for both kernel and pod. Also, it was observed that there was a strongly polynomial relationship between rupture force and kernel moisture content for whole tested varieties. The average values of the rupture force at direction 2 were 61, 60, 64 and 57% higher than direction 3 for Goli, Valencia, Iraqi 1 and Iraqi 2 varieties, respectively. Considering peanut kernels, the rapture force required to initiate rupturing was less at direction 3 than directions 1 and 2, therefore it is proposed that cracking operation should be performed along this direction.

This article reviews the benefits of a collaborative school culture, including reduced teacher isolation, social and emotional support, opportunities for professional development and learning, and closer ties with significant stakeholders, such as families and community organizations. While collaborative cultures may be powerful, they also may be either misguided or superficial. Further, cultural change is difficult and norms such as teacher isolation and autonomy are well entrenched. These concerns point to the need for a change process that has a positive focus, is essentially self-organizing, encourages deep reflection, and avoids the pitfalls of manipulation by school administrators. This analysis points to consideration of appreciative inquiry, a strengths-based process that builds on ‘the best of what is’ in an organization. The second portion of the article reports on the impact that an appreciative inquiry process had on building a collaborative culture in 22 schools located in British Columbia, Canada and reflects on its strengths and limitations.

Recently, the focus of scientific investigations has moved from the primary role of food as the source of energy and body-forming substances to the more subtle action of biologically active food components on human health. There has been an explosion of consumer interest in the active role of food in the well-being and life prolongation, as well as in the prevention of initiation, promotion, and development of non-transmissible chronic diseases. As a result, a new term—functional food—was proposed. Among these foods, probiotics exert positive effects on the composition of gut micro biota and overall health, and the market is increasing annually. In the current study the probiotic bacterium Lactobacillus acidophilus was encapsulated in microcapsules of sodium alginate. These encapsulated microbes were used in the fermentation and production of curd with high nutritional values. On comparing the curd fermented with microencapsulated bacterium with that of the non-encapsulated forms (traditional fermentation technique) it was found out that there was a considerable reduction in the fat content of the sample prepared with the microencapsulated form (2.20 gm) to the non-encapsulated organisms (3.90 gm). The protein and the vitamin-C content were found to be more or less the same in both the cases. The iron content of the sample prepared with microencapsulated form was found to be 7.2 gm to 3 gm of iron content for the sample produced through non-encapsulated bacterium. It was found out that the curd fermented through the microencapsulated L. acidophilus was found to be nutritionally rich and that the organism could also act survive as a probiotic in the gut in the presence of a protective microencapsulation.

Rapid growth of technology and prevalent use of computers in the business and other areas, more and more organizations are converting their handwritten paper documents into electronic documents that can be processed by computers. Handwriting recognition has attracted voluminous research in recent times. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) deals with machine recognition of characters present in an input image obtained using scanning operation. It refers to the process by which scanned images are electronically processed and converted to an editable text. Almost all the existing handwritten character recognition techniques use neural network approach, which requires lot of pre-processing and hence accomplishing these problems using neural network is a tedious task. In this paper we propose a novel solution for performing character recognition in TAMIL, the official language of the south Indian province of TamilNadu. Pursued by the pre-processing techniques, Segmentation and Feature Extraction are done for recognizing handwritten Tamil characters, which improves the efficiency. The tolerance of the system is evident as it can overwhelm the complexities arise out of font variations and proves to be flexible and robust. These initial results are promising and warrant further research in this direction.

Proton (¹H), proton decouple phosphorus (¹H{³¹P}), and phosphorus decouple proton (³¹P{¹H}) NMR  of propyl isopropylphosphonofluoridate in an environment of water have been produced and resonances peaks obtained have been assigned. The ³¹P{¹H} spectrum of the chemical gave two resonances peaks with chemical shifts at 28.505 and 34.129 ppm, which is an indication that propyl isopropylphosphonofluoridate has undergone degradation to produce two phosphorus containing chemicals. This does not come as surprise, since in water propyl isopropylphosphonofluoridate undergoes hydrolysis to produce to two chemicals, propyl isopropylphosphonate and isopropylphosphonic acid. The resonances at 28.505 and 34.129 ppm are assigned to isopropylphosphonic acid and propyl isopropylphosphonate respectively. The ¹H and the corresponding ¹H{³¹P}NMR of propyl isopropylphosphonate produced five resonances peaks in the NMR spectral. These resonances are consistent with the structure of propyl isopropylphosphonate. The ¹H and ¹H{³¹P} spectral of isopropylphosphonic acid also produced two resonances peaks with chemical shifts at 1.03 and 1.75 ppm respectively which is consistent with the structure.

Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) is a promising real-time non-invasive technique for diagnosing the health of an individual and identifying any potential disorders in their early stages. In this paper, we give a detailed description of the theory behind the GDV technique and the GDV-grams (images of fingertips) that could present unique signature patterns characteristic of specific health disorders. We then present two computational models, developed in our earlier work, to analyze the GDV-grams and illustrate the results from pilot studies obtained using these models. The two models studied are: (i) A quadrant-based visualization and computational model to assess the functional state of human organs and organ systems and its application to Autistic children and (ii) A clustering model to analyze English language anxiety in non-native speakers. The results from the pilot studies have been very encouraging. We conjecture that GDV will be a valuable tool for Medical Biometrics to identify as well as confirm the presence of health disorders at an early stage.