Archives-June... 

A study is conducted to investigate the effects of socio economic factors on agricultural land use in Malaysia. Relevant socio – economic variables (from 1965 to 2007) were aggregated from the databases of various international and national agencies. These data include agricultural and non agricultural land uses, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) & Gross National Product (GNI); labour force, population age distribution, numbers of cars per 1000 people; road density. GDP/capita & GNI/capita, labour efficiencies ie (ha/worker in agricultural subsectors), percentage of male and female in the agricultural labour force and % change in outputs of major crops were derived from relevant data. Data were then subjected to multiple linear regression analysis using SPSS version 18. Findings indicated that, relevant socio – economic factors in agricultural land use in Malaysia are available workforce of the population, percentage of workers engaged in plantation farming, female workforce in agriculture, farm size and the workers condition of service in non - agricultural sector. This study has revealed that labour supply and their conditions of service are major factors in agricultural land use. This study further underscores the need for technology – driven - agricultural practices in the face of better posited industries competing for available labour.

One of the factors effective on success of the organizations is their human resources which has direct effect on productivity of the organizations. For this reason, performance of human resources is very important. In this paper, efficiency of personnel of Islamic Azad University, Tehran Sciences and Research Branch has been studied with approach of human resources. For efficiency analysis and ranking, two combined models of DEA and artificial neural networks (ANNs) were used. At first, analytical results of two models were compared with DEA and then two trained network models were compared with each others. Results of this research show that training method of the second model compared to the first model show potential of neural networks in identification of model, estimation of function, prediction allow to use it in order to assess the organizations with decision making branches, therefore, it can be presented as top model.

The research, development and the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains one of the most important research challenges over the years e.g. speaker and language variability, vocabulary size and domain, noise. This paper describes the recent progress and the author’s perspective of ASR and gives an overview of major technological perspective and appreciation of the fundamental progress of Automatic speech recognition.

ABSTRACT Batch arrival retrial queue with positive and negative customers is considered. Positive customers arrive in batches according to Poisson process. If the server is idle upon the arrival of a batch, one of the customers in the batch receives service immediately and others join the orbit. If the server is busy, the arriving batch joins the orbit or collides with the customer in service resulting in all being shifted to the orbit or one of the customers in the batch interrupts the customer in service to get his own service. The arrival of a negative customer brings the server down and makes the interrupted customer to leave the system. The repair of the failed server starts after a random amount of time. During the repair time and delay time, customers may balk the system. After each service completion, the server searches for customers in the orbit with certain probability. Using supplementary variable technique various performance measures are derived. Stochastic decomposition property is established. Special cases are discussed and numerical results are presented.

In present study, calli of commercial indica rice variety PAU 201 were transformed following particle gun methods with the GUS gene (encoding ?-glucuronidase) for its transient expression. Various biological and physical parameters like age of calli (weeks), preculture treatment prior to bombardment (hrs), post-bombardment incubation time (hrs), helium pressure (psi), vacuum pressure (mm Hg), distance from stopping plate to target tissue (cm), number of bombardments per Petri dish were studied. Optimized conditions include 4 weeks old fresh calli bombarded twice at helium and vacuum pressure of 1100 psi & 28mm Hg, keeping target distance 9cm with 12 hours pre-culture prior to bombardment and 72 hours post bombardment incubation duration gave a transient GUS expression of 32-39%. The parameters of this study could be used to improve the transient expression, enabling stable expression of introduced genes using callus as target tissue.

New advancement in the field of Software Engineering increases more issues and problems. After reviewing quite a few research papers & articles in the field of Software Engineering, we obtained various challenges that rise in building a complex software system. This paper describes several challenges evolved in building a complex software system.

The purpose of this paper is comparing the role of teachers on teaching - learning process in ordinary and smart schools of Bojnurd (the center of north-eastern province of Iran). This type of survey and the questionnaire as a data collection tool is a cross-sectional study. This study was based upon descriptive-measuring model and due to its objective is categorized in functional research group. The population of the study including the teachers, girls and boys of middle school and high schools are in Bojnourd during Spring-2013. Cochran's formula for determining the sample size and the method used are stratified random sampling. It was found that the reliability obtained was high. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics for the analytical tests such as correlation analysis, analysis of variance and Tukey test. The statistical analyses used are SPSS and Microsoft Excel. The effect of variables such as attitudes toward technology, job outlook and teachers’ teaching methods in teaching-learning process are also investigated in this paper.

If survival data follows a specific survival distribution (weibull, exponential), survival probabilities can be estimated by using the specific survival function. Alternate easy and assumptions free methods for computing the survival probabilities are Kaplan-Meier and Bootstrap survival functions. The aim of present study is to compare the two non-parametric methods under the influence of different percentage of censoring presented in four different data sets “Leukaemia data set, Stanford Heart Transplant data set, Thalassaemia data set and Lung cancer data set”. Results of analysis show that the performance of Kaplan-Meier survival function is better than the Bootstrap survival function. This is due to the easy concept, less time, less time, easily availability as well as in terms of survival probabilities

This paper investigates the performance of an 11 kV silicone rubber (SiR) outdoor insulator when subjected to an alternative voltage at 50 Hz. The electrical field and potential distributions over the insulator surface were computed and analysed using the Finite Element Method (FEM) COMSOL Multiphysics software. Comparative studies of field and equipotential contours for the insulator under dry clean and uniformly contaminated surface conditions are presented. The surface power dissipation along insulator surface is calculated. The critical of high field regions on SiR surfaces were identified and the power dissipated in the pollution layer along insulator profile was revealed. This study showed useful information about the surface heating which, might be help to predict any dry band formations along the leakage path of the insulator and to evaluate the insulator characteristics and its behavior.

This paper addresses the concepts of sustainable development, sustainable regional development and constitutes for an indicators for sustainable development. The notion of sustainable development has a fundamental nature, and serves as the basis for other new and innovative concepts and principles arising within environmental conventions. Sustainable development (SD) is development that lasts for long time. This paper has two parts. Firstly, the idea of sustainable regional development (SRD) refers to the integration of sustainable development principles into regional development practice. Secondly, indicators are today seen as having an increasingly important role in sustainable development or sustainable regional development and can provide crucial guidance for decision- making in a variety of ways. This study uses for traditional data sources and measures as a basis for SD and SRD indicators. The aim of this study is to analyze the indicators for sustainable development and sustainable regional development. This paper finds that it is a qualitative policy concept, which needs a quantitative operationalization. It is hoped that this paper will make a significant contribution to the realisation of sustainable regional development.