Archives-December  

The Indian retail sector is going through a transformation and this emerging market is witnessing a significant change in its growth and investment pattern. Both existing and new players are experimenting with new retail formats. The growth and potential of the sector is being widely acknowledged both in the domestic as well as international forums. India topped AT Kearney’s Global Retail Development Index 2009 for the third consecutive year, retaining its position in the global market as the most preferred retail destination amongst emerging markets. Consumer dynamics in India is changing and the retailers need to take note of this and formulate their strategies and tactics to deliver value to the consumer. This paper investigates impact of emergence of modern retail formats on Indian consumers in organized and unorganized sector.

Current study intended to explore cost of financial distress in case of Pakistani manufacturing ongoing firms listed at KSE. In doing so, financial distress is divided into operating distress and financial but not operating distress. Sample consists of ongoing firms that were at least once on distress counter for the period of analysis. To conclude the proposed theory descriptive and independent t-test for mean differences are used. It is found that firms bear opportunity loss before and after entering to both operating and financial distress. Moreover, results also show that operating distress affects more to firms’ value as compared to financial but not operating distress category. However, result for pre financial but not operating distress is found insignificant. In conclusion current study provides opportunity to all investors, management and other stakeholders to assess firms’ performances before and after entering to both operating and financial distress.

The occurence of building collpased has become a national embarrasment with its human and societal casualties. The issue of load bearing capacity in terms of the number of occupants observed in the building in comparism with the standard expected occupancy ratio has not being well identified. The study therefore uses purposeful method to select six buildings from the collapsed buildings in different of areas of Ikeja lagos. Questions were administered Orally to the immediate residents of the collapsed buildings. With a chi square of 65.34% in the conducted analysis it reveals that therew is a strong statistical relationship between the observed load bearing capacity in terms of occupacncy rate and the standard expected. This tend to suggest that the the occurence of buildings collpased in lagos may be due to an abnormal occupancy ratio or a higher load bearing capacity. The study thus recommends a strict adherence to the use of building codes and zoning to enforce building design and type for residential areas and the adpotion of fees payment in lieu of default for those building with a higher ratio than normal.

Wireless Sensor networks are dense wireless networks of small, inexpensive, low-power, distributed autonomous sensors which accumulate and propagate environmental data to facilitate monitoring and controlling of physical environments from remote locations with better accuracy. With the advent of new technology and low production costs, wireless sensor networks (WSN) prove to be useful in myriad of diversified applications, although its original development was motivated by military applications, such as battlefield surveillance. This paper describes the software architecture of an intelligent autonomous gateway, designed to provide the necessary middleware between locally deployed sensor networks based on mobile node and a remote location. The gateway provides hierarchical networking, auto management of the mobile wsn (MWSN), alarm notification and SMS/Internet access capabilities with user authentication. The main concern of QoS-based quadratic assignment technique is to increase reliability of network along with lifetime of the network. Several factors such as energy lifetime, throughput, end to end delay, packet delivery ratio and network security have been taken into consideration. Simulation results shows that the protocol offers a better performance in terms of network lifetime and energy consumption.

Globalization has caused dramatic changes to business practices around the world. Globalization is an interesting phenomenon since it is obvious that the world has been going through this process of change towards increasing economic, financial, social, cultural, political, market, and environmental interdependence among nations. Virtually, everyone is affected by this process because globalization brings about a borderless world. This study investigated how sustainable global market uncertainty, global market opportunities and global competitive threat affect the performance of bankers in Nigeria which can lead to a competitive advantage and an enhancement of industrial development that can bring about global partnership for development which is one of the pivotal goals of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Subjects for this study were three hundred and one bankers in Lagos, Nigeria. Two hypotheses were tested and the findings of the study revealed that that there was a significant relationship between performance of operators and global market opportunities. The result also revealed that global market uncertainty, global market opportunities and global competitive threat significantly jointly predicted performance of operators. Conclusively, the findings from this study support the argument that globalization not only benefits firms in terms of increasing opportunities, but also hurts business performance due to higher competitive threats. This study also confirms that globalization is a universal phenomenon and that firms are inevitably affected either positively or negatively. While global market opportunities are likely to enhance firm performance, global competitive threats tend to worsen it. Therefore, managers must be aware of such double-edged effects, and try to capitalize on opportunities while converting threats into opportunities. Appropriate strategies, such as developing networking relationships with other firms, must be carefully designed and implemented in order to take advantage of global market opportunities and minimize the threats from increasing competitive intensity.

This paper presents a Product recommendation system based on metric analysis of product descriptions. The developed system ranks the catalog of products and offers corresponding items to the user’s request while, at the same time, selecting the most diverse items. An algorithm for ranking is developed. Based on the request, the recommendation system finds the distance from this request to all documents from the collection of data. The request and the collection of data are sets of features. The system ranks the results in accordance with the following rules: minimizes the distance from the query to the relevant results, maximizes the distance from the query to the irrelevant results and maximizes the distance between the relevant query results. For ranking, Heterogeneous Euclidean-Overlap Metric (HEOM) of clothes catalogue items is used. HEOM metric uses different attribute distance functions to measure distances between objects in mixed scales. A dataset of clothes catalogue items is collected. The system, in addition to the basic attributes given as text descriptions of product, uses attributes based on expert description such as fashion, psychological age and attractiveness. The dataset has features of text, linear and nominal scales. The computational experiment shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The importance of features of the collection of data is defined. A software product demonstrating the recommendation system in action is developed.

Foot surgery is characterized by intense postoperative pain, difficult to control even when using balanced multimodal analgesia associating paracetamol, anti-inflammatory drugs and opioids. Ankle blocks were all but abandoned. Complications are rare using regional anesthesia for postoperative analgesia even after extensive foot surgery, however the consequences of motoric or sensory deficits can be extremely devastating as it impacts mobility.Revival of ankle blocks are a perfect example of the high impact of new technological advances in improving ambulatory surgical care after foot surgery.

Oussudu Lake is an important freshwater body of Puducherry and one of the primary sources of drinking water supply to Puducherry city. This study aims to assess the accumulation of heavy metals as a result of anthropogenic intervention. Heavy metals such as Cu, Zn, Mn, Cd and Pb in the surface water and sediments are determined using Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer. The mean concentration of Pb was found to be 0.15±0.07mg/l, whereas Cu was found to be within the safe limits for surface water (Central Pollution Control Board). The concentrations of heavy metals in the sediments were: Cd (0.25±0.31µg/g); Pb (1.1±2.32µg/g); Cu (6.6±4.63µg/g); Zn (10.16±8.79 µg/g) and Mn (44.56±21.28 µg/g). The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) resulted in two principal components accounting for a cumulative variance of 94.438%. This study reveals that the water of Oussudu Lake stands exposed to contamination with lead and constant monitoring is essential to maintain water quality.

Hexane, ethyl acetate, methanol and aqueous extracts of Swertia chirata (Gentianaceae) were screened against economically important two lepidopteran pests viz, Helicoverpa armigera and Spodoptera litura. Insects were orally treated in the third instar larval stage by no choice leaf disc method. Among the tested extracts, methanol extract of S. chirata highly inhibited the feeding activity and the different developmental stages of H. armigera and S. litura. Toxicity of S. chirata was identified as dosage dependent in both species. In H. armigera and S. litura larvae, 68 and 56% antifeedant activity was recorded as maximum respectively at 5% concentration of methanol extract. Nearly 80% and 50% larvae of H. armigera and S. litura were killed respectively by methanol extract (5%) within 96 h duration of treatment. Pupal mortality was recorded after the adult emergence, and it was varied between the treatment concentrations in H. armigera and S. litura. Due to the toxic effect of methanol extract ultimate adult emergence was gradually reduced with increasing concentration of the treatments. More than 80% of adult emergence was suppressed in both the species.

Salmonellosis causes substantial morbidity and mortality in Sub Saharan Africa. This warranted the appraisal of antibiotic susceptibility patterns of clinical Salmonella isolates from the study catchment area. The study aimed to determine in vitro antibiotic susceptibility profile of Salmonella species isolated from stool samples. Kirby Bauer and MIC results indicated significant resistance to antimicrobial agents(p<0.001). One isolate exhibited resistance to ten antibiograms tested and the resistance phenotype was; Ampicillin, tetracycline, cotrimoxazole, streptomycin, kanamycin, gentamycin, sulfamethoxazole, chloramphenicol, nalidixic acid and ciproflaxin (AmpTCotStKGmSxCNaCip). Routine surveillance of local system is vital to monitor emerging resistance trends in study area.