Archives-March 2025

Low density polyethylene samples were reinforced with wood fibres from Dracaena arborea, the fibres were either bleached, unbleached, blended, unblended or in the acetylated form. Films formed after reinforcement of the polyethylene with the various forms of the fibres were tested to confirm their mechanical properties like tensile strength and tensile modulus. Moisture regains and water imbibitions were also determined. The reinforced samples were compared with a film formed from pure polyethylene. Mechanical properties of the wood fibre reinforced polyethylene composites were better than that of pure polyethylene. Pure polyethylene has a tensile strength of 20kN/m2 and tensile modulus of 219kN/m2 while the bleached and blended wood fibre reinforced polyethylene had a tensile strength of 42kN/m2 and tensile modulus of 3620kN/m2. Therefore, the reinforced polyethylene is suitable for use as specially tailored light weight structural parts in reinforcement. Whereas pure polyethylene is stable and resistant to environmental decomposition, the wood fibre reinforced polyethylene is renewable due to its ability to absorb moisture and imbibe water. Also, the wood fibre treatment showed improved moisture absorption and water imbibition potentials. This offers the possibility of biodegradation thereby meeting environmental demands.

Current FPGA soft processor systems use dedicated hardware modules or accelerators to speed up data-parallel applications. This work explores an alternative approach of using a soft vector processor as a general-purpose accelerator. Due to the complexity and expense of floating point hardware, these algorithms are usually converted to fixed point operations or implemented using floating-point emulation in software. As the technology advances, more and more homogeneous computational resources and fixed function embedded blocks are added to FPGAs and hence implementation of floating point hardware becomes a feasible option. In this research we have implemented a high performance, autonomous floating point vector co-processor (FPVC) that works independently within an embedded processor system. We have presented a unified approach to vector and scalar computation, using a single register file for both scalar operands and vector elements. The FPVC is completely autonomous from the embedded processor, exploiting parallelism and exhibiting greater speedup than alternative vector processors. The FPVC supports scalar computation so that loops can be executed independently of the main embedded processor.

Businesses calculate the life time value of customers and extrapolate their future profits. Higher revenues are guaranteed only when the customer keeps a business relationship with the business for entire his or her life. Given the small sample population of micro businesses are keen to retain their customers for longevity of their profits as against a situation where a customer switches before his life time value ceases. This study indicates that micro businesses are keeping good customer relationship with its customers via word-of-mouth marketing which is considered as instrumental for success of majority of micro business as it serves as a credibility filter and is carried out independently by the customers. At the same time, this finding does not indicate any clear picture as to which form of marketing is doing better. Because our empirical analysis indicates that majority of micro business are dormant in the domain of social media marketing.

A good insight of performance or execution in projects along with needed requirements of project management has the most important effect on customers’ satisfactions in a project-based organization. The performance result of each project in an organization has direct relationship with interaction manner of executive processes with project.In this paper, the combination of Delphi and Analytical Network Process (ANP) and Friedman Test have  been applied to detect and rank the best strategy for improving customer’s satisfaction and determining its most important sub-indexes.Based upon obtained results, cost as the main area of project management has the most important effect on customer’s satisfaction in case of applying Information Technology (IT) in BRP of PBO, and the most important strategy in improving and boosting customers’ satisfaction in PBOs is BRP. Furthermore, IT and software are respectively the most important and considerable sub-indexes of structures and IT in BRP of PBOs.

The health and cosmetics industry in Malaysia is growing rapidly and is expected to grow steadily in the future. However, the usage of ostrich oil in this industry is still new. This paper aims to analyze the strategic issues and challenges faced by ostrich oil based manufacturing company in the health and cosmetic industry known as MS Worldwide Manufacturing (M) Sdn. Bhd. The qualitative study is done based on several unstructured interviews and also based on the published data obtained from relevant websites. Based on this primary and secondary data, the company is found to be facing problems with strategy and execution in the specific market place of Malaysia. This paper discusses the situation and tries to diagnose the problems areas, generate alternative solutions, predict outcomes and evaluate alternatives strategic planning and implementation to produce better results.

Rural development hinges on soci-economic and institutional development of the region and the inhabitants. Inclusion of excluded confirms to sumptuous development and amidst women is considered as one of the strong deterministic pillars to it. The “Action-Oriented Learning (AoL)” is a process led approach of inclusion of marginalized to the mainstream development, and thereby ensures sustainable development. The study is assessing the inclusive impact of “Sustainable Tribal Empowerment Project-(STEP)” executed in four northern districts of the state of Andhra Pradesh to restore the life and livelihood of tribal adhering in-situ  approaches to rural development as well as fostering due cognizance of social-ecological-institutional factors.

In present year ad-hoc parallel data processing has emerged to be one of the killer applications for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) clouds. Major Cloud computing companies have started to integrate frameworks for parallel data and making it easy for customers to access these. However, the processing frameworks which are currently used have been designed for static, homogeneous cluster setups and disregard the particular nature of a cloud. Consequently, the allocated compute resources may be inadequate for big parts of the submitted job and unnecessarily increase processing time and cost. In this project the data processing framework to explicitly exploit the dynamic resource allocation offered by today’s IAAS clouds for both, task scheduling and execution is constructed. Particular tasks of a processing job can be assigned to different types of virtual machines which are automatically instantiated and terminated during the job execution.

An access control mechanism in a user hierarchy is used to provide the management of sensitive information for authorized users. The users and their own information can be organized into a number of disjoint sets of security classes according to their responsibilities. Each security class in a user hierarchy is assigned an encryption key and can derive the encryption keys of all lower security classes according to predefined partially ordered relation. In 2006, Jeng and Wang proposed an efficient key management scheme based on elliptic curve cryptosystems. This paper, however, pointed out that Jeng–Wang scheme is vulnerable to the so-called compromising attack that the secret keys of some security classes can be compromised by any adversary if some public information modified. We further proposed a secure key management scheme based on elliptic curve cryptosystems to eliminate the pointed out the security leak and provide better security requirements. As compared with Jeng and Wang’s scheme (Jeng and Wang, 2006), the proposed scheme has the following properties. (i) It is simple to execute the key generation and key derivation phases. (ii) It is easily to address dynamic access control when a security class is added into or deleted from the hierarchy. (iii) It is secure against some potential attacks. (iv) The required storage of the public/secret parameters is constant.

The paper aims at assessing cost of governance and revenue assurance mechanisms. The methodology adopted by the paper involves the use of quantitative data for 9 years, from 2002 to 2010, which was generated from the annual report and accounts of the Central Bank of Iran. The data generated for the study was analyzed using graphs and simple percentage analysis. The finding of the paper shows that Cost of governance at state level has greatly increased in Iran. Similarly, the trend of Extra-Budgetary Expenditure put to question the implementation of budgets at the States. The paper concludes that the task of reducing cost of governance for revenue assurance at states level does not rest on the executive, legislature and judiciary alone. It is task demanding the collective effort of all stakeholders. Finally, the paper recommends that there is the need to reduce recurrent expenditure to sustainable level through reducing waste, inefficiency, corruption and duplication in government, as well as, make capital spending more effective.

Earned Value Management System (EVMS) is designed for controlling the costs and determining the periods of attracting financial credits (domestic or Rial and foreign currencies) in the project. Unfortunately, this controlling system is poorly carried out in most of the operational projects or merely its show-off aspects are highlighted. But, in reality, this system is able to predict the process of attracting costs at the beginning of the executive operation, and also, to control the amount of costs spent during the executive activities. Furthermore, the project status can be assessed in different time intervals using the key indices of this system and different cost analyses acquired from these indices. The aim of this project is the examination of the concepts involved in the earned value method, the methods and metrics it employs as well as the performance measurements and methods of forecasting project progress that are used. A case study regarding the construction of a Cattle Barn in Qazvin city, an actual project, is utilized to illustrate the comparison between traditional methods and the EVMS method. By utilizing information obtained when employing the earned value method with the project, findings the valuable would be early warning with regard to a problematic situation, it is possible to take steps to correct the problem before too much time has elapsed. It is possible to make more informed decisions about the project's direction with accurate forecasting. With accurate forecasting, it is possible to make better decisions with regard to issues that are outside the scope of the project but that may be affected by the project's progress. Sponsor confidence is boosted when a view of progress is available that is open and that can be verified.