Archives-June...  

Present medical science very much depends on the medical images and medical imaging technology like MRI, CT, US, etc. Doctors are using these medical images for the anatomical structure study and for the treatment planning. But generally medical images are complex and noisy. This paper discuss about the segmentation and pre-processing which reduce the complexity of medical image analysis and eliminate noise and unwanted region without any loss of important information in the image. Region growing segmentation is considered for the segmentation and compared the performance with pre-processing.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of Student Councils Involvement in Decision Making and Its Effect on Students’ Discipline in Nandi North Sub-County. This study was hinged on the Participative Leadership Theory (Yukl, 1994) which posits that involvement in decision making improves the understanding of the issues in schools. The study adopted mixed research methodology and targeted 43 school principals, 43 deputy principals and 559 student Council leaders. The sample size for students in this study was determined using Krejcie and Morgan formula. The respondents were selected through the use of stratified and simple random sampling techniques. Questionnaires, interviews and document analysis were used for collecting data relevant to this study. Validity was determined through expert opinion while reliability was determined through piloting and use of croncbach alpha. The analysis involved descriptive and inferential statistics namely; Pearson rank correlation. Data was presented in form of tables, figures and charts. Further, most (55.6%) of the student council leaders reported that students in their schools participated in BOM meetings. Similarly, majority of the student council leaders believed that student involvement in decision making through council members have helped solve indiscipline cases in school. The study findings indicated that there is a strong and significant relationship student council involvement in decision making (r = .723) and school discipline in secondary schools in Nandi North Sub-County. This implies that students should be involved in development and implementation of school rules and regulations in order to enhance student discipline. The study will be useful to the Ministry of Education to have information on the operation and effectiveness of students’ councils since it is still a new policy. It also will yield data and information that was useful to policy planners and decision makers to follow up on policy implementation and evaluation on its role in improving the welfare of students.

It is fact that an Islamic society has different religious teachings and different values for its members as compared to non Islamic society. Therefore, in an Islamic society, cultural, social and moral values should be different; and consumer crimes should be also different. In practice, it is seen that in the era of globalization, mostly developing societies whether these are Islamic or non Islamic societies, all have similar consumer crimes. This shows that whether the Islamic societies are not acting upon Islamic teachings, or members of Islamic society have same worldly objectives like others. Or, these members are also giving preference to this mortal life over hereafter world. Therefore, in this article an overview about the consumer crimes of modern and globalized era is presented. In these crimes, some are committed by consumers while some others are committed by sellers and manufacturers. The purpose of both parties is to deceive the other which is not true, morally, socially and religiously also.

The present paper identifies the critical success factors while the implementation of TQM, to evaluate their impact on the primary measures as expressed by the operational performance and the secondary measures as organizational performance, and to find out the effect of the operational and organizational performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a selected industrial sector using the semi structured interview approach. A total 297 samples are identified for analysis. 139 responses received with all detail. Respondent’s profiles are quality managers and deferent sectors are targeted. A focus is needed on analyzing various techniques and strategies to be adopted by the Indian companies.

The simple random sampling technique was employed in selecting 62 farmers drawn from the sampling frame obtained from the list of Agricultural Development Programme (ADP) contact farmers in the four Local Governments Areas (LGAs) of Egbedore, Olorunda, Ede South and Ife Central, which made up the study area. The main instrument for collecting the primary data was structured questionnaire. It is evident from the result is that an average total cost of N371486.35 was incurred per annum by fish farmers while gross revenue of N791242.52 was realized with a gross margin of N 574314 and a profit of N 419756.17. The rate of return on investment of 0.58 implies that for every one naira invested in Fish production by farmers, a return of N1.5 and a profit of 58k were obtained. The multiple regression result revealed that fish output was significantly determined by pond size, labour used, cost of feeds, cost of lime and cost of fingerlings. The coefficient of determination indicates that 52.2% of the variation in the value of fish output was explained by pond size, quantity of labour used, cost of feed, cost of lime and cost of fingerlings. The study concluded that fish production in the study area is economically rewarding and profitable.

Objective: to understand the conditions of the elder’s depression and to explore the connections between personal background, self-concept, and depression. Design: The population included 366 samples of the older people above 65 in Ren-Ai district, Keelung City, Taiwan. A self-designed structured questionnaire was used as our research tool. Our data were collected through both questionnaire and one-on-one interview, and then processed and analyzed by package software - IBM SPSS Statistics 20 (Windows version). Results: The average depression scores from our research targets were 2.69 (±2.76). Some major factors that might have to do with the elder’s depression included gender, age, education degree, marriage status, self-consciousness of economic condition, chronic disease index, self-consciousness of health condition, self-concept, and social support.The degree of depression developed by the population of higher education degree (such as college) is less than lower education degree (below junior high school and the illiterate); the female are less than the male; the married and the widowed are less than the divorced; self-consciousness of the economic sufficiency is less than economic insufficiency; and the self-consciousness of healthy condition is less than unhealthy condition.The age and chronic disease index both are positively correlated to the degree of depression, but self-concept and social support are negatively correlated. Lower education degree (below junior high school and the illiterate), self-consciousness of economic condition, self-consciousness of health, age, chronic disease index, self-concept, and social support all have important forecasting capability for the elder’s depression. Self-concept, among them, has the highest explaining capability for the elder’s depression. Conclusions: Our study suggested self-concept and social support should be emphasized for treating the elder’s depression. This should be considered for any future researches.

Aeromonas species are ubiquitous bacteria in terrestrial and aquatic milieus. They are becoming renowned as enteric pathogens of serious public health concern as they acquire a number of virulence determinants that are linked with human diseases, such as gastroenteritis, septicaemia, and skin diseases. Identification of Aeromonads to the species level is problematic and complex due to their phenotypic and genotypic heterogeneity. With the aim of clarifying taxonomic relationships among the strains, Repetitive Extragenic Palindromic sequence (REP) was used as molecular marker for biotyping Aeromonas strains isolated from surface and sub- surface soil sediments from Forest ecosystem. Out of a collection of 120 strains isolated from surface and sub-surface soil sediments, 15 strains were confirmed as Aeromonas based on phenotypic fingerprinting obtained from 69 biochemical tests. Genetic diversity among Aeromonas sp. was determined by analysing their REP fingerprint patterns using NTSYS pc software package and UPGMA cluster method. Considerable amount of genetic diversity was observed among the isolated strains. Furthermore, dendrogram demonstrated the existence of distinctive clusters at various similarity levels. These fingerprinting techniques can therefore be used to recognize the relatedness of strains derived from clinical and environmental isolates, which helps in further characterization of factors/genes responsible for the disease.

Cloud delivers computing resources as a service. Finest usage of cloud services is used to store information in the cloud servers. Pool of virtual servers is configured to store the users’ data with low cost. Cloud offers more advantages to the cloud users. Apart from the advantages and benefits of cloud, it has more security issues and vulnerability on the data stored in the cloud. This paper proposes asecurity service named AROMONcrypt to address the security issues in cloud storage. This security service is used to secure the data in cloud storage. AROMONcrypt uses two types of techniques to ensure the confidentiality of data namely encryption and obfuscation. This paper also describes Security as a Service (SEaaS). SEaaS provides AROMONcrypt security service from the Cloud Service Provider (CSP). Simulation is conducted with AROcrypt and MONcrypt security services considering time and security level. AROMONcrypt provides optimum security, and MONcrypt has taken minimum time.

Partnerships have the potential to create significant benefits for all participants provided that there is a mutual understanding of and respect for the inputs required and the outputs sought from the arrangements by each party. The aim of this study was to explore the inputs required and the outputs achieved by partners as a function of the level of involvement required within the partnership arrangement. The study has investigated the extent to which the input criteria defined by the DTI and the output criteria defined by Kantar, within three health and safety initiatives involving home worker-employer, employee-employer, and contractor-employer partnerships varied, as a function of the level of partnership defined by Thompson and Sanders. The examination of the partnership arrangements within the three case studies demonstrated that the inputs were very similar whether the arrangements were classified as co-operation, collaboration or coalescence, although the extent of the output criteria was greatest in the case of the coalescence partnership. The results illustrated the level of inputs required within a range of partnership arrangements in the context of health and safety management and the range of outputs that might be anticipated.

In Nigeria, access to finance has been identified as a key element for Small and Medium Scale Enterprises to succeed in their drive to build productive capacity, compete, create jobs and contribute to poverty elimination in the country. Banks in Nigeria have been recapitalized and adopt necessary infrastructures (ICT) to enhance their performance and stimulate the real sector as catalysts of development. How effectively have they performed this function as a pivot around which economic development revolves? Without finance SMEs cannot acquire or absorb new technologies neither can they expand to compete in global market or even strike business linkages with larger firms. Despite this, SMEs have faced difficulties in obtaining formal credit or equity from the commercial banks. A regression of bank facilities to SMEs prior and after recapitalization with GDP showed a downward trend and eventual positive downward correlation movement in the main two variables. It was found that banks need to do more to assist the SMEs for effective performance than mere recapitalization.