Archives- 

Stable isotopes of hydrogen (?²H) and oxygen (?¹⁸O) in groundwater, streams and Volta Lake collected in southwestern margin of the Volta Lake were investigated. While the spatial distribution of ?¹⁸O in groundwater (-3.61 to -2.17 ‰ vs VSMOW) showed that most of the heavy-isotope depleted samples were located in the higher portion of the study area (northeastern) on the Kwahu Plateau, more positive values (from -2.62 to -2.17‰ vs VSMOW) were found in areas in proximity of the Volta Lake. The isotope composition of streams (?¹⁸O) varied closely from -2.80 to -2.61‰ vs VSMOW with most depleted being the most forested stream. The Volta Lake showed relatively enriched and homogenous isotope composition (?¹⁸O between -0.66 and -0.43) reflecting high evaporation of the Lake. Stable isotope signature of the water samples point to meteoric origin of recharge to groundwater in the area also show possible intrusion of Volta Lake into the aquifers near the banks of the Volta Lake.

This study is aimed at examining the effects of socio- economic and financial factors on the performance of women entrepreneurs in Oyo state and two hundred and forty women entrepreneurs who are involved in trading, hairdressing and tailoring were purposively selected from amongst those registered in their respective associations. All the data were derived from primary sources. The results demonstrated that a significant relationship exists between socio- economic factors and the performance of women entrepreneurs. All the socio- economic factors (age, marital status, education and years of experience) were significant and positive at (P < 0.05). This implied that socio- economic factors are critical success factors that help entrepreneurs to survive, manage in difficult conditions and keep the business profitable. Furthermore, credit and savings impacted significantly on the performance of the entrepreneurs. The micro-entrepreneurs surveyed were revealed to be performing very poorly because majority of the entrepreneurs had no access to external funds. The finding indicated that the women entrepreneurs’ propensity to save for the growth of their enterprises was on average very low implying that they were experiencing some constraint factors. This tends to affect the performance of the women entrepreneurs negatively. Therefore, the study recommended that formal and informal entrepreneurship education should be given to micro- entrepreneurs in order to develop their managerial capabilities, accounting skills and overall be made more credit worthy and the Federal government should consider developing policies that will create an enabling environment for the development and proper operation of cooperative thrift and credit societies and other group initiatives.

In this work, the vibrational characteristics of 1-hydroxynaphthalene-2-carboxylicacid (1HN2CA) have been investigated and both the experimental and theoretical vibrational data indicate the presence of functional groups in the title molecule. The density functional theoretical (DFT) computations were performed at the B3LYP/(ccPVDZ, 6-311+G(d)) levels to derive the optimized geometry, vibrational wavenumbers with IR and Raman intensities. Furthermore, the molecular orbital calculations such as natural bond orbital’s (NBOs), HOMO–LUMO energy gap and Mapped molecular electrostatic potential (MEP) surfaces were also performed with the same level of DFT. The thermal flexibility of molecule in associated with vibrational temperature was also illustrated on the basis of correlation graphs. The detailed interpretation of the vibrational spectra has been carried out with the aid of potential energy distribution (PED) results obtained quantum chemical calculations. The delocalization of electron density of various constituents of the molecule has been discussed with the aid of NBO analysis.

Many deserving students dream of higher education, but only a few are able to arrange the necessary funds to support it. Sometimes students have to struggle for funds so that they can get the taste of higher education and build their futures. Much needed help has come in the form of student loans. The paper covers many issues relating to HE finance from students’ view point. They are the real beneficiaries of education finance schemes promoted by Government of India (GOI) in coordination with banking sector. In current study efforts have been made to analyze whether or not there exists a significant difference between average attitudes of two groups of students’ towards education loan for professional courses. The research results show that attitude towards education loan between two groups though positive but group of passed out students feel under pressure, financially as well as psychologically.

Different soil erosion types including water and wind erosion which result in soil degradation and reducing fertility potential of soil, cause desertification in the region. "Gully Erosion" is one of water erosion types that with progressive trend results in soil degradation, and on the other hand, produces a lot of sediments. Determination of effective factors on gully erosion and its hazard zonation is one of substantial approaches in order to manage and control this phenomenon, and select the most appropriate and applied effective option. Hence this study is performed to classify effective factors on gully erosion, and identify regions with high potential in gully erosion using analytical hierarchy process method in Neyzar region, Qom. The most effective factors in gully erosion including slope degree, slope aspect, lithology, land use, and land suitability, were collected and digitized in geographical information systems. Then, gullies inventory map prepared using 1:20000 aerial photos (1372), and field studies was carried out by GPS. In the next step, effective factors were compared in pairs, and the weight of each factor was calculated that illustrates their contribution. Next, scaled map of each factor in respect to their quantities was prepared, and finally, gully erosion was zoned using scaled layers and scale index related to each factor. Results indicate that lithology (0.4978), and land use (0.2227) are the most important factors in gully initiation, respectively. For the assessment of zonation map, gullies inventory map shows that about 91% of gullies are located in zones of high and very high risk in this region. Therefore, due to the fact that AHP is based on dual comparision of factors, results in easy and accurate necessery calculations and it includes many effective factors, it is a suitable and efficient method for gully erosion hazard zonation.

Identification of sex of an unknown individual from the skeletal remains is the first and the most important step encountered by the forensic experts and archiologists. The hip bone is considered as an ideal bone for sex determination as it provides the highest accuracy levels. Many workers have studied various metric parameters for sexing of hip bone. The present study was done with an aim to find out the sex of hip bone using various parameters of greater sciatic notch. For this purpose, 100 dry hip bones were collected from the Department of Anatomy, VIMS, Bellary. Seven different parameters of the greater sciatic notch were used for the study: Maximum width, Maximum depth, Posterior segment, Index I, Index II, Total angle and Posterior angle. All the parameters (especially posterior segment, posterior angle and index II) were found to be highly indicative of sex hip bone by t- test (p<0.005) except the depth.

This paper is an attempt to investigate the type and amount of lexical/phrasal and external modifiers employed in the English e-requests of Iranian EFL postgraduate students (nonnative speakers of English) to their professors during their education at Islamic Azad University, Najaf Abad Branch, Isfahan, Iran. To that end, the study employed both quantitative and qualitative approaches to investigate 60 English e-mails composed by the participants. More specifically, Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper's (1989), Blum-Kulka and Olshtain's (1984), and Edmondson's (1981) classification of requests was employed for coding the modification of the collected electronic requests. Findings from the study reveal that the Iranian students’ e-mails are not overly adorned with politeness modification. This paper argues that such e-mails fail to create e-polite messages to faculty and therefore capable of causing pragmatic failure.

The calcaneo navicular coalition is congenital fusion of the two bones of the tarsus, the calcaneus and the navicular bone. With the talocalcaneal coalition, it constitutes the most common form of tarsal coalitions. Often asymptomatic, the calcaneo navicular coalition, generally easy at radiological diagnosis when it comes to oblic foot exercise, requires in case of intense pain, a surgical operation. Several surgical methods are proposed by the authors, including the double arthrodesis and resection of the coalition with the interposition of the extensor brevis muscle or fat tissue. The interest of this study is to shed light on the interest of the pedal muscle interposition after resection of the tarsal coalition at the talocalcaneal articulation achieved before the end of the growth for the prevention of recurrence and total disappearance of symptoms in children. As sample, we propose the observation of a girl aged ten years old, with symptomatic form of calcaneo navicular coalition treated surgically by resection with pedal muscle interposition. Clinical results, valued at an average of twelve months after surgery, were satisfactory.

Modern landmines are mainly non- metallic or contain small amount of metal, that they cannot be detected using conventional detectors. Ground Penetration Radar (GPR) is capable of detecting shallowly buried non-metallic objects. GPR is the best alternative for detecting non-metallic landmines. But, GPR also performs inadequately due to the presence of clutter which dominates the data and obscures the main information. In this paper symmetrical ?ltering method is going to be applied on measured B-scan data to reduce unsymmetrical clutter. Results of the symmetry ?ltering and symmetry point location algorithm are presented.

Weather forecasting is a very fundamental application in meteorology and technologically challenging problem. The estimation of temperature values are needed for agricultural, technical and environmental applications. Meteorological dataset has historical data of all weather parameters and the temporal analysis of this dataset can help to mine meaningful knowledge. There are number of techniques available in data mining, but Association Rule Mining is one of the most popular technique to mine large amount of dataset for finding the hidden relationship between various dataset variables values and identifies correlations between them. The scope of this research is to analyze temporal rules generated to predict day to day temperature variation of a specific region Surat, India. To accomplish this, the framework is proposed for prediction of day temperature variation from seasons. From the experiments, achieved higher accuracy compare to other data mining technique and the rules which show how day variations are related. Also prepared the list of parameters which is less in number to help for the prediction instead of all parameters and thus it helps in the reduction of the dataset size.