Archives-November 2013

Three languages dominate the linguistic atmosphere of the present day Iran, namely, Persian, English, and Arabic. While Persian is the singly official language of the country and English is a case of English in an expanding circle in Kachru's terms, the status and functions of Arabic are less straightforward to delineate. The educational policy of the country is for the teaching of Persian and Arabic to begin in kindergartens and primary schools and postpone English till secondary schools. Arabic is taught under various guises like including teaching Quran, religion, prayers, etc. Despite all the resources, both financial and humanistic, that goes into Arabic teaching, little is known about how the language is taught in terms of syllabus, aims, and language teaching methodology. This study was an attempt to approach Arabic language teaching in an ELT orientation to throw some light on how Arabic is currently taught in Iranian secondary schools. Moreover, we investigated the nature of final examinations and their effects on language teaching. Findings indicate that the productive skills of speaking and writing are given little, if any, attention and final tests and language teaching parallel one another, making it difficult to decide the teaching methodology is under the influence of final tests or it is the tail that wags the dog, i.e., tests driving the syllabus. We also attempted validating an instrument for future studies dealing with Arabic pedagogy. The factors that appeared were not however interpretable sufficiently, mainly due to the inadequacy of the sample of the study.

India has come a long way from being called the ‘land of snake-charmers’ to one of the fastest developing countries of the SAARC region. Having seen the rise and fall of many a kingdoms and being ruled by many, India has soaked up the essence of almost every dynasty resulting in a rich cultural milieu which manages to enthrall everybody. Post independence, India witnessed the drafting of the Constitution which pronounced India as a ‘Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic, Republic’ and as a newly emerged welfare state. Since then and after 66 years of Independence, India has been growing steadily though not without challenges. To contextualize this article, we can argue that the health care system of India has been facing many challenges in terms of the perspective of being user friendly and distributed equitably, to favor all the sections of the society equally. Widespread loopholes have been noticed in the delivery of the health care system in India. Availing quality health care has now become the prerogative of only the well to do section of the society, leaving the marginalized section of the society at the mercy of governmental setups which are drowned in their own incompetence and corruption therefore failing to provide quality health care to the society. This paper proposes to take a look at these existent inequalities in the delivery of the health care system. In this effort data has been collected from 6 districts of Karnataka, 3 of which are rural districts and 3 of which are urban. Rural and urban districts are operationally understood as 3 districts each having lowest HDI and 3 districts having the highest recorded human develop index (HDI) of Karnataka respectively. High human development Index (HDI) is being represented by Bangalore, Udupi and Mangalore consisting of 1136 people interviewed in total, whereas low level of HDI is represented by Raichur, Chamarajnagara and Gulbarga, with a total of 1327 respondents.

In this study, the role of migration and its impacts on sustainable development in urban and suburban areas have been investigated. In order to perform this, by reviewing the theoretical and empirical literature of migration and sustainable urban development and the role of migration on sustainable development of mother city and its relationship with the suburbs, in order to understand and recognize the migration and urban sustainability, by reviewing the quantitative and qualitative indicators, (economic, social, environmental) factors are discussed. The research is descriptive, analytical and inferential. Also qualitative and quantitative indicators have been examined.

The world’s entrance into the computer age along with web has certainly had a profound impact on our society. With increase in purchasing power, mass production, lesser costs, exponential growth in computer technology and population growth were one of the main drivers of increases in global warming and climate change. The onset of Information age is associated with the digital revolution, just as the Industrial Revolution marked the information age. Computerization of modern society has brought convenience to all aspects of human life. It seems evident that there will be both positive and negative effects on society and global environment. Computers have added a new source of heat generation and emission into environment. In spite of recent studies indicating possible threats to global warming and global climate, there is no long term data available on the amount of heat generated, emitted and dissipated into environment by computer monitors. The scope of this research work is to experimentally measure the heat generated by computer monitors during on (sleep/Idle) mode and working mode. For this research work four decimal digit temperature measurement test instrument was designed and exclusively fabricated. A special air locked container was also fabricated for conducting heat emission experiments on computer monitors. Population and computers projections for India, China, USA and the whole world were also included in this research work for 2050. An attempt is made to indicate amount of heat generated, emitted and dissipated into environment by India, China, USA and entire world by computer monitors at present and projections for 2050.

Financial crisis have led to sharp fluctuations of China’s foreign trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), which in no doubt exert a profound influence on the stabilizing effect of China’s economic growth. As trade and FDI are the primary impetuses of China’s economic growth, will this kind of growth effect fall dramatically during financial crisis? Utilizing data on China’s 36 industrial sectors, this paper conducts panel data regressions in terms of two stages - periods before and after financial crisis, and in terms of classification on the different degree of revealed comparative advantage(RCA). The result shows that financial crisis doesn’t weaken the economic growth effect of trade and FDI; instead, it strengthen the high efficiency of trade and FDI firms and the crowding out effect on other firms; In the group with higher RCA, the direct economic promotion of trade and FDI is stronger in post-crisis period than that in pre-crisis period, while in the group with lower RCA, the result is totally reversed. It demonstrates that financial crisis strengthens the efficiency advantage and resource reallocation effect of trade and FDI. From this point, the steady growth of trade and FDI is more important than enlarging domestic demand and investment to the stabilizing effect of economic growth.

Software quality depends upon Software Reliability as it is one of its most important characteristics. Software Reliability is an important attribute of software quality, together with functionality, usability, performance, serviceability, capability, installability, maintainability, and documentation. It is hard to be achieved, because the complexity of software tends to be high. The development of many Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) over the last several decades have resulted in the improvement of software facilitating many engineers and managers in tracking and measuring the growth of reliability. This paper proposes Pareto type IV based Software Reliability growth model with interval domain data. The unknown parameters of the model are estimated using the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation approach. Reliability of a software system using Pareto type IV distribution, which is based on Non-Homogenous poisson process (NHPP) is presented through estimation procedures. Comparison is also made between the Pareto type II model and Proposed model. The performance of the SRGM is judged by its ability to fit the software failure data. How good does a mathematical model fit to the data is also being calculated. Besides, an analysis of two software failure data sets is included.

The present work analyzes the influence of chemical reaction on free convective flow of a visco-elastic incompressible and electrically conducting fluid past an infinite vertical porous plate through porous medium with constant suction in presence of uniform transverse magnetic field. The necessity of the present analysis arises as the most industrial fluids exhibit the visco-elastic behavior. The coupled nonlinear partial differential equation are turned to ordinary by super imposing a solution with steady and time dependent transient part. Finally, the set of ordinary differential equations is solved with a perturbation scheme to meet the inadequacy of boundary condition. The solutions for the velocity, temperature and concentration are obtained and displayed graphically for pertinent parameters such as magnetic parameter, Grashof number, modified Grashof number, Prandtl number, Schmidt number, Eckert number and permeability parameter. It is observed that the magnetic parameter and the Schmidt number retard the velocity of the flow field while the Grashof number for heat and mass transfer, the porosity parameter have accelerating effect on the velocity of the flow field at all points. Further, the Prandtl number reduces the temperature and Schmidt number and chemical reaction parameter diminishes the concentration distribution of the flow field at all points.

In recent years energy generation from renewable sources in clean, efficient and environment friendly manner is a real challenge. Among the various non conventional sources, photovoltaic(PV) generation using multilevel inverter topologies are widely used due to the economy of use, flexibility in control under partially shaded conditions and the high quality of voltage waveforms. This work focuses on a single phase nine level cascaded inverter using PIC16F877A microcontroller to generate the required gate signals. The notch angles for the gate signals are calculated using selective harmonic elimination method. Using this method the total harmonic distortion is minimized by eliminating the most significant low frequency harmonic components from the voltage waveforms. The high frequency harmonic components can then be easily eliminated using additional filter circuits. The entire setup has been simulated in MATLAB and verified using the hardware setup.

Quality of pharmaceutical is of vital importance for patient safety. The loss of potency may influence the efficacy and safety of pharmaceuticals. This study determines the influence of storage conditions on the shelf life and potency of selected antibiotics. A significant statistical difference was observed across the potency data selected antibiotics brands. The data point out that maximum reduction in shelf life was observed at room temperature as compared with cool temperature. These results authenticated that improper storage conditions resulted in failure to meet product characteristic and specification during shelf life. Optimum storage conditions and procedures ensure that the potency and integrity of medicinal products are maintained throughout their shelf life.

Good optical quality single crystals of pure and glycine doped zinc tris thiourea sulphate (ZTS) were grown from aqueous solution by slow evaporation technique at ambient temperature. The grown crystals were subjected to various studies such as powder X-ray diffraction, UV-Vis spectral analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA)-Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) studies and second harmonic generation (SHG). Powder X-ray diffraction of pure and glycine doped samples reveals some minor structural variations. Changes in intensity patterns and slight shift in peak positions are observed because of doping. The UV-vis spectrum shows that the materials have wide optical transparency in the entire visible region. The SHG efficiency of the crystals was found to increase substantially with increase in glycine concentration. The presence of dopant has been confirmed and analyzed by FTIR. TGA and DSC analysis confirmed that the thermal stability of grown crystal is increasing with the doping concentration of glycine. Mechanical properties of the grown pure and glycine doped crystals were studied by using HMV-2T microhardness testor.