Archives-April 2016

The aim of the project was to evaluate the pasting profile and functional properties of green banana composite flour. Banana samples obtained from the Volta River Estate Limited were solar dried and milled into flour. Soybean and maize were obtained from a local market at Madina in Accra, mechanically dried and made into flour. Banana, soy bean and maize flour were mixed into composite flour in seven different percentage ratios. Pasting profile and functional properties were analyzed on the composite flour. The values ranged from 6.28±0.87 to 7.41±0.46 for swelling power. Solubility index values were 15.0±3.65 to 19.37±0.92 for BMS 3 and 6 respectively. There were significant differences. Water absorption capacity values ranged from 9.67±0.58 to 14.33±0.58 for BMS 2 and 6 respectively, Oil Absorption Capacity also had values ranging from 7.0±1.0 to 10.33±0.58 for BMS 5 and 3 respectively. The bulk density values where 0.71±0.11 and 0.81±0.01 for BMS 2 and 1 respectively. The pasting profile showed significant difference between the individual samples in all the parameters. The results obtained so far indicates that banana composite flour would be good for infants.

Street delicacies are ready-to-eat foods prepared and sold by vendors and hawkers in streets and public places. Consumption of street delicacies contaminated with microorganisms are suspected to be a factor in outbreaks of some public health diseases. The microbial quality of some street delicacies in some parts of the Eastern and Volta regions of Ghana were evaluated. The parameters examined were the total viable count, total coliform count, pH, moisture and as well as their elemental composition. The moisture content for the samples in the various localities was in the range of 0.67 % to 1.90%. The samples tested contained the elements, Fe, Mg, K, Na, Zn and Mn in different concentrations. Microbial analysis indicates that, total viable counts were relatively low and were within acceptable limits (0-4.59 log10cfu/g), however coliform counts (3.20±0.02 log10cfu/g) for snail kebab in Kpong were above the acceptable limits. The organisms isolated and identified from the delicacies includes Salmonella sp., C. freundii, E. coli, and S. aureus. Street foods can be sources of food pathogens, therefore public health authorities must educate food vendors on food handling and hygiene, environmental hygiene as well as hand-washing practices.

The effect of pre-drying treatments on the proximate and phytochemical quality of oven-dried mushroom was evaluated using conventionally accepted methods. The pre-treatments used were dipping in 10% citric acid solution, dipping in 10% ascorbic acid solution and a control. The pre-treatments resulted in significant differences in pH, protein, vitamin C, some trace elements and phytochemicals present. Control sample had a protein content of 7.4%, while a range of 19.4% and 14.3% was recorded for samples pre-treated with citric acid and ascorbic acid respectively. The total phenolic content was in the range of 6.39 – 32.26 mg GAE/g of dry weight. Thus the use of these pre-treatments can be used to effect changes in some proximate and phytochemical components of oyster mushroom powder. Keywords: mushroom, oven-drying, blanching, citric acid, ascorbic acid

Fuel wood is a major forest product that serves as vital source of livelihood for large proportion of the poor and middle- class people living in or close to the forest in most tropical countries. This study carried out the economic profitability of marketing fuel wood in Ibadan town of Oyo State, Nigeria. It specifically examines the market structure and conduct for fuel wood, the profitability and type of fuel wood sellers in the study areas. A multi-stage sampling technique was used to select 50 fuel wood marketers in the study area and structured questionnaires were administered on them. Descriptive statistical tools such as frequency, percentage and table; profitability analysis, gross margin and Gini coefficient were used to analyze the data collected. The study revealed that fuel wood market is dominated by the retailers which accounted for 46% of the sellers though there were other categories of sellers such as wood fellers/ producers (16%), wholesalers (32%) and wholesalers/ retailers (6%). The profitability analysis showed that an average marketer incurred a total variable cost of ?31, 731.82 per week but earned average revenue of ?38,290.00 per week which implies that an average marketer earned ? 6,558.18 as gross margin per week. In the analysis, the marketing margin and efficiency of fuel wood were estimated to be 58.69% and 120.67% respectively. A Gini-Coefficient of 0.393 obtained in this study indicates a high level of concentration and inefficiency in the fuel wood market. It is therefore recommended that the marketers should be equipped with incentives such as means of transportation, forest subsidies inform of reduce tax, reduced forest-charges, credits and loans that will reduce the marketing cost and bring about equal distribution of sales and income.

Background: Prodrugs are form of medications in which the drug is given as inactive parent compound, and then activated in the body by various metabolic processes, after administration. The main objective of this study was to assess the awareness about the cardiovascular prodrugs and their interactions among medical practitioners and to assess the relationship between the physicians' awareness, medical professional and years of experience. Method: The study was cross sectional hospital based study, conducted among physicians working in three of Khartoum state hospitals. Data was collected via structure questionnaire. Results: This is study surveyed 196 medical practitioners, 109 (55.6%) were male and 87 (44.4%) were female, mean for the age was 29.04. more than two third (73%) of the medical practitioners knew prodrug. Concomitant prescribing of proton pump inhibitors with Clopidogrel (prodrug) was about half 97 (49%) of total medical practitioners surveyed, followed by Losartan and Metronidazole 81 (41.3%). More than half (51%) of the respondents answered correctly that Enalapril is cardiovascular prodrug. The overall knowledge of prodrugs interaction effect on therapeutic level was very low ranged from (15.85 %- 37.25%). The most frequent prodrug prescribed on daily basis was Statins followed by Clopidogrel. Conclusion: It concluded that awareness regarding prodrug is low among medical practitioners. The awareness and the knowledge of the medical practitioners about prodrug increase with age, and with their professional medical positions.

The system consists of a standard microprocessor and a hardware accelerator for Gaussian mixture model (GMM) emission probability calculation implemented on a field-programmable gate array. The GMM accelerator is optimized for timing performance by exploiting data parallelism. In order to avoid large memory requirement, the accelerator adopts a double buffering scheme for accessing the acoustic parameters with no assumption made on the access pattern of these parameters. Experiments on widely used benchmark data show that the real-time factor of the proposed system is 0.62, which is about three times faster than the pure software-based baseline system, while the word accuracy rate is preserved at 93.33%. As a part of the recognizer, a new adaptive beam-pruning algorithm is also proposed and implemented, which further reduces the average real-time factor to 0.54 with the word accuracy rate of 93.16%. The proposed speech recognizer is suitable for integration in various types of voice (speech)-controlled applications.

Cloud computing is ready to transform the structure of businesses. There will be abundance of service suppliers, as well as international players like Google, and Amazon who can roll out their Indian plans. With the concept of ‘Digital India’, it will provide an important push to enterprises to switch to the cloud computing. For India, it is an immediate helpful impact for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) across the country. This paper explains regarding the opportunities and future of cloud computing in India and the way businesses will get changed with developed infrastructure and how get benefited from it.

The paper proposes Handwritten Character Recognition method using 2D view and Support Vector Machine (SVM). In this all the character images are Pre-processed (includes Normalization and Noise Removal), which are further used for feature extraction using two dimensional (2D) views. From each character four different views (Top, Bottom, Left, and Right) are obtained called as basic views. All basic views are not able to collect the complete information of character image. The hidden information is capture separately called as extra views. From each view 16 features are extracted and combined to obtain 80 features. These features are used to train SVM to separate different classes of characters. Handwritten Character database is used for training and testing of SVM classifier. Support Vector Machine provides a good recognition result for lower case characters and upper case characters are 82%.

Mobile ad hoc networks will appear in environments where the nodes of the networks are absent and have little or no physical protection against tampering. The wireless nodes of MANET are thus susceptible to compromise and are particularly vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks launched by malicious nodes or intruders. Flooding attack is one such type of DoS attack, in which a compromised node floods the entire network by sending a large number of fake RREQs to nonexistent nodes in the network, thus resulting in network congestion. In this paper, the security of MANET AODV routing protocol is investigated by identifying the impact of flooding attack on it. A simulation study of the effects of flooding attack on the performance of the AODV routing protocol is presented using random waypoint mobility model The simulation environment is implemented by using the NS-3 network simulator. It is observed that due to the presence of such malicious nodes, average percentage of packet loss in the network, average routing overhead and average bandwidth requirement? all increases, thus degrading the performance of MANET significantly.

Rapid entry of foreign or imported cars in the domestic market leaves Malaysian car manufacturers struggling to compete with their foreign counterparts. Despite of high sales, customer’s satisfactions towards national car were low as compared to imported cars. This prompted the current investigation with the objectives to identify the most important automobile attributes influencing customer’s satisfaction and also to determine the most appealing automobile attributes among major ethnic groups in Malaysia. This study employs survey approach where 370 responses were collected from car owners and drivers of national car in Klang Valley area. Results from the regression analysis showed that all variables namely safety feature, vehicle apperance, resale value and standing charges are related to customer’s satisfaction. Thus, all hypotheses were accepted. Secondly, all major ethnic groups; Malay, Indian and Chinese were influenced mostly by safety feature. In addition, the result depict that Chinese has lower satisfaction level towards national car consumption as compared to other races.