Archives-December 

Metal monitoring in food, like teas, provides basic information on safety aspects of food in regulatory processes in terms of suitability of food for consumption, as well as its nutritional value. The aim of this work was to measure the total content of Cd, Cr, Co, Cu, Fe, Mn, Pb and Zn in ten brands of commercially available black tea, on the Ghanaian market. All of the samples were microwave-assisted acid digested followed by measurement of the elemental contents by flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS). The concentrations of all the elements varied among the different brands of tea analysed. The total contents of Fe were comparatively higher than the other analyzed elements and varied between 302.95–27.30 µg/g. the ranges of the other elements observed, in µg/g, were as follows: Cr (<0.006-0.90), (3.85- 9.95), Mn (5.34-219.25), Pb (<0.001-2.05) and Zn(2.80-5.50). Cadmium and Cobolt were below detection limits. All values recorded were below the maximum permissible limit set by the WHO.

This paper reviews on the potential impacts of quality assurance approaches on the construction industry. Previously, researchers discovered that better product quality, not the price of the product is the key point in sustaining competition in the construction market. Hence to this fact, many construction organizations are beginning to invest relentless amounts of efforts and attention into the quality of their products as the product quality itself is the winning key in obtaining the competitive edge over local competitors in the market to ensure the sustainability of their own businesses. Quality has long been identified as one of the most basic requirements of clients as the necessity for product quality is undeniable and understandable. This is due to the fact that such buildings might be one of the biggest investments in the lives of most clients. Besides that, with the information regarding construction industry readily available for the public, potential clients are more educated and well-informed. To cater the different needs of clients, contractors have to be creative and innovative, to try their best to perform better. They must not only aim to deliver projects on time but also projects of excellent quality and price.

This paper focuses on the design of multi-element micro strip patch antenna array applicable to WLAN/MIMO at 2.4 GHz. Obviously, the performance of multi-element antenna system depends critically on the proper design of the arrays. In this paper design and simulation of 4x1 micro strip patch array with software IE3D is discussed. The performance of array have been compared with that of a single element micro strip patch antenna .Also the effect of mutual coupling of array elements on its performance is discussed .To reduce surface wave propagation, implementation of EBG substrate is discussed.

Two problems often crop up in adaptive sampling. One, it may not be feasible to sample according to a designated sampling plan. And two, the prescribed sampling plan may result in very small selection probabilities for some units thereby giving large weights to such units in estimation. In order to ameliorate these problems, a regression procedure that combines design and model-based techniques of estimation is proposed. Adaptive sampling designs are designs in which additional units or sites for observation are selected depending on the interpretation of observations made during initial sampling. Additional sampling is driven by the observed results from an initial sample. The results from this study demonstrate that the existing Horvitz-Thompson estimator for adaptive cluster sampling can be improved using model assistance.

We are very happy to announce that from 10th June 2017, Ms. Pooja Khanna has joined the team of Elixir Editorial Advisory Board. He/She will carry a special responsibility for dealing with manuscripts based on Computer Science Engineering. The appointment of Ms. Pooja Khanna as member Editorial Advisory Board strengthens the links and will make it easier for prospective authors to establish contact with the journal.

Psychologists have identified personality variables as one of the most important factors related to physical illness. The period since 1950s till date, research has continued to show positive results relating illness to psychological factors and personality. Research in this area suggests that stress seems to affect some people more than it does to others, and researchers have looked for personality variables that might account for differential effects of stress. This study attempts to compare the neuroticism versus emotional stability scores of hypertensive and normotensive as well as male and female participants. The study adopted a 2 (hypertensives and normotensives) x 2 (males and females) factorial design. Two hundred and forty participants (120 chronic hypertensives and 120 normotensives) are selected from Gurgaon, Delhi. Out of 120 hypertensives, there were 60 males and 60 females. Similarly 60 healthy males and 60 healthy females not suffering from hypertension or any other disease were selected. The participants of all the four groups compared with respect to their scores on neuroticism versus emotional stability. The results indicate that hypertensives showed more score in all the dimensions of neuroticism compared to normotensives. It is also found that females have more depression and anxiety than males. They are more self-conscious and more vulnerable to stress compared to males. Males score high on anger, hostility and impulsive dimensions of the personality.

In multivariate sampling, the major interest is on the problem of estimation of several population characteristics which often make conflicting demands on the sampling procedure. In this type of survey, the best allocation for one item may not in general be the best for another. There is the need to come up with compromise solution in a survey with many characteristics under study. This paper focuses on comparing some techniques of optimum sample allocation which are Yates/Chatterjee, Booth and Sedransk and Vector Maximum Criterion (VMC) on five sets of real life data stratified into six strata and two variates with desired variances using: (i.) Method of maximum variances with fixed n and (ii.) arbitrary fixing of variances. The stratum sample size nh among the classes are obtained to ascertain the criterion that will produce the smallest n. Based on the set of data collected and used for the empirical study it was discovered that Vector Maximum Criterion (VMC), Booth and Sedransk are superior to Yates/Chatterjee.

The evolution of web 2.0 has made social media networks more prevalent. Forums, blogs, tweets and posts, have become an important media for internet users to share views. With the evolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP), sentiment analysis is being essentially used as a means to determine the attitude of a person with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity from these inputs. The attitude may be his or her judgment or evaluation, effective state mind or the intended emotional communication. As e-commerce is becoming increasingly popular, the number of customer reviews that a product receives grows rapidly, which is being encouraged by the merchants selling the products. For a popular product, the number of reviews can be in hundreds or even thousands. This paper describes the concepts of sentiment analysis from unstructured text, looking at why they are useful and what tools and techniques are available. It also focuses specifically on a novel feature based opinion extraction scheme demonstrated with key open-source tools and applications and the problems associated with opinion detection in social media have also been analyzed.

The study was carried out to find out the most serious problems faced by the teachers in overcrowded classes. The population of the study included 20, all the government girls’ schools at the secondary level in district Peshawar, Province of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa, Pakistan Close –ended questionnaires was the tool of the study, which was administered to teachers in order to get clear picture of the problems faced by them. The data were given both quantitative and qualitative treatment. The outcome of the study indicated that effective teaching was not possible in overcrowded classes and majority of the teachers were facing instructional, discipline, physical and evaluation problems. In order to solve these problems some implementable measures were made which suggested that government should make strict rules and policies regarding optimum students in classrooms and provide sufficient budget to education department for providing better facilities in schools.

A selective method for the fast determination of trace amounts of Pb (II)ions in water samples has been developed. method has been developed for preconcentration of Pb on organic-solution-processable functionalized-nano graphene (SPFGraphene) adsorben in the pH range 5.0–10.0, prior to its spectrophotometric determination, based on the oxidation of bromopyrogallol red at ? = 517 nm. This method makes it possible to quantitize Pb in the range of 4.2×10?9 to 2.3×10?5 M, with a detection limit (S/N = 3) of 1.42×10?9 M. This procedure has been successfully applied to determine the ultra trace levels of Pb in the environmental samples, free from the interference of some diverse ions. The precision, expressed as relative standard deviation of three measurements is better than 3.0%.