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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.

Video on demand (VOD) service is widely used nowadays to watch online videos. Video on demand has evolved as a major Problem implementation for network. This research aims to design a suitable grid computing system to enhance performance of video on demand. The goal of using Grid computing system is to create the simple but large and powerful virtual computer with large collection of heterogeneous systems sharing resources. User can submit request for video to grid server without necessary knowing where it will be execute. It is the responsibility of the grid server to distribute request among several servers (clusters). The results we get optimize resource usage, load balance, and time delay for delivering video file. The MATLAB simulation program is designed to compare old server performance with Grid server performance focusing on time delay and system throughput, which decreases Video delay 60 % - 70%.

Water pipelines are also called as lifelines as they serve the most important parameter to the peoples. Hence water pipelines are most important structural element and to make it more safe take utmost priority. When pipelines are subjected to various loads such as earth fill or surcharge load, uplift pressure, lateral side pressure and sometimes may be subjected to superimposed traffic load if roadway or railway comes over it. The various factors such as depth of fill above pipe, side trench width, internal water pressure, support conditions are the some factor which are observed, which greatly affect he stress behavior in the pipeline. The study and experimental work done shows the satisfactory parameters for making underground pipe structure more safe and efficient and thus will prove beneficiary to society even in worse disasters such as earthquake.

Disease progression is a complex process which involves multiple sequential steps leading to cellular changes, altered signaling pathways and metabolic events. Cancer is a very wide spread disease in the world. Among the various types of cancers, ovarian cancer is the leading cause of death in gynecological malignancies. Biomarkers are cellular, biochemical, molecular or genetic alterations by which a normal, abnormal or simply biological process can be predicted or monitored. Various Biomarkers like Cancer Antigen 125, HCG, Human Kallikreins, Membrane Tyrosine Kinase Receptors, HE 4 and Mesothelin etc. are used to identify pathological processes before individuals become symptomatic or to identify individuals who are susceptible to cancer.

The synthesis of nanoparticles has been entirely a chemical process till last few years. Because of environmental threat, the development of eco-friendly processes for the synthesis of nano-materials is the need of the day. One approach that shows great potential is synthesis of nanoparticles using micro-organisms and plants. The present study deals with the synthesis of silver nanoparticles and investigating the effect of process variables like reductant concentrations, reaction pH, mixing ratio of the reactants and interaction time on the morphology and size of silver nanoparticles synthesized using aqueous extract of previously unexploited plant Cephalandra indica leaves. These nanoparticles were characterized with UV-Vis spectrum, FTIR and SEM analysis which revealed that the morphology and size of silver nanoparticles were strongly dependent on the process parameters. Within 4 hrs interaction period, the nanoparticles are polydisperse and nearly spherical shape with size ranging from 40 to 90nm in size. Further these biologically synthesized nanoparticles were found to be highly toxic against different bacterial species.