Archives-August 2015

Work on global warming is expected to have significant impacts on conditions affecting agriculture, including temperature, carbon dioxide, glacial run off, precipitation and the interaction of these elements has been reviewed in this article. To a large extent, the overall effect of climate change will depend on the balance among these factors. Assessment of the effects of global climate changes on agriculture will help to properly anticipate and adapt farming systems to maximize agricultural production. There is exponential rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was 270 ppm during pre-industrial period and human activities have added more than 100 ppm and it has reached 380 ppm with the rate of rise as high as 1.8 ppm per year. With this exponential rise in carbon dioxide, its concentration will double by the middle of 21st century. The effects of an increase in carbon dioxide would be higher on C3 plants (such as wheat) than on C4 plants (such as maize), as the former is more susceptible to carbon dioxide deficit. Increased CO2 leads to fewer stomata development in case of plants which results in less water usage. It is estimated that under optimum conditions of temperature and humidity, the yield increase could reach 36 % if the levels of CO2 are doubled. A large number of stress responsive genes have been cloned and sequenced from a number of crop plants. A common feature of many stress induced proteins is that their transcripts are induced not only by stress but also by (ABA) abscisic acid. It implies that there is a general role for ABA in the signal transduction pathway i. e. from sensing of the environmental stress and thereby leading to gene expression.

This work carries a novel method that uses demands response strategies to develop and evaluate the consumer’s perspective through a computational experiment approach. The price of electricity is assumed to be a time-varying parameter. The proposed method describes an optimization model that adjusts the hourly load level of consumer with response to hourly electricity prices. This approach has a home energy consumption simulator and a demand response mechanism obtained through optimization, particle swam method, and an integrative computing platform that combines the home energy simulator and MATLAB together for demand response development and evaluation. A lot more number of demand response strategies are developed and evaluated through computational experiment technique. This work investigates and compares characteristics of different demand response strategies and how they are affected by dynamic pricing tariffs, seasons, and weather. A simple bidirectional communication device between the power supplier and the consumer enables the implementation of the proposed model.

In this work, concentrations of radon indoor were measured at 10 locations in Al-Kufa and Al- Najaf cities, using RAD-7 radon monitoring system of Durridge company USA. Some factors affecting on the radon factor have been studied such as times of day (morning, afternoon and evening) and seasons of year (winter, spring, summer and autumn). This study show that the radon concentration indoor increases at mornings, evenings, decreases at afternoon, also increases in winter and autumn, decreases in spring and summer.

Wireless Sensor Network has a growing demand worldwide. This network plays a vital role in creating reliable and scalable system making human life easier and faster. WSN is a sensitive network which is effective and efficient. In this paper we have implemented WSN for keeping regular updates on a health of a machine and its control. For wireless communication purpose Zigbee protocol is deployed. Required algorithms have been developed allowing evaluation of additional parameters using data from measurements held.

The objective of the present work was to synthesize co polymer hydrogel composed of (PAAc) and (PAAc / Pectin) which are very sensitive to environmental stimulus, this feature is important for their application in biomedical applications, due to its unique Properties which can resemble human living organs, Wound dressing, drug delivery systems. Gamma radiation induce synthesis and modification of monomer to polymer hydrogel was studied. The effect of different parameter onto preparation of smart hydrogel such as monomer concentration, radiation dose on to swelling percent of the prepared copolymer hydrogel have been studied, gel fraction have been studied as a function of swelling ratio. Structure characterization of the prepared copolymer hydrogel have been investigated using fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, The morphological structure using X–ray diffraction analysis and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) have been studied. The swelling properties of the prepared copolymers have been studied at different time and pH. It was found that the swelling percent increases as the time increase and increases as pH increase and the maximum swelling occurs at pH 6 with the value of 19000 % for (PAAc) hydrogel and 10000% for (PAAc/pectin) hydrogels after 24 h. Drug loading measurements using ciprofloxacin drug at pH7 for (PAAc) hydrogel after 24 h and at pH11 for (PAAc/pectin) hydrogels. Studies of drug releasing of ciprofloxacin as drug model have been investigated, at different time and pH and it was found that the drug release incases as pH increase and the maximum release occurs at pH4 for (PAAc) and pH ( 3 , 8) for (PAAc/pectin) hydrogels, the antimicrobial activity of the synthesized co polymeric hydrogel under study was evaluated based on the diameters of clear zone surrounding the polymeric substance ( disk diffusion test ) this proved that polymeric hydrogel can be used as antibacterial agent.

This study aimed to determine the level of transformational leadership practices by school principals in the national secondary schools in the district of Kinta Utara, Perak, Malaysia. The four dimensions of transformational leadership studied were individual consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation and idealized influence. The study also looks at the level of teachers’ job satisfaction as well as the relationship with the practice of transformational leadership by the national secondary school principals’. The respondents consisted of 225 teachers employed in 15 national secondary schools in the district of Kinta Utara, Perak. The data obtained was analyzed using SPSS version 20.0. Descriptive analysis and Pearson Correlation Coefficient were used to analyze the strength of the relationship. The results showed that the practice of transformational leadership by school principals’ in the district of Kinta Utara, Perak was high and the job satisfaction of secondary school teachers’ was satisfactory with a significant relationship between the level of transformational leadership and job satisfaction. The implication of this study is that the school principals should always ensure that their leadership performance is always kept high to have a significant relationship with the job satisfaction of secondary school teachers’.

This paper discusses in detail different configurations for comparing the performances of different combinations of commonly used techniques for speech recognition and speaker identification. The Feature extraction techniques considered were MFCC, LPC and Autocorrelation. The feature matching techniques considered were VQ, HMM, DTW and ANN.

The study provides a conceptual overview of the quality assurance models as a tool for higher education and presents a set of performance indicators for its assessment in case of Pakistan. It is interesting to note that different models are in use in different countries to ensure a provision of quality education in their Higher Education Institutes (HEIs). In Pakistan, Higher Education Commission (HEC) is also following a set of different models for the uplift of the higher education. However review reveals that performance funding and budgeting model is more effective as compare to its counterparts as it encourages universities to increase output to get performance-based funding because it constitutes 15% of total recurring grant provided by the HEC to the HEIs. However, the model can be improved by reshuffling the composition of the recurring grant. The share of performance based funding should be increased from 15% and share of base grant may be decreased from 65% to create space. Furthermore the study suggest that much more is required to enhance quality of education in HEIs in Pakistan for which HEC has to take drastic measures to modify and improve the quality assessment model keeping in view the socio-cultural environment of Pakistan.

Ionically conducting polymer electrolytes are important materials for practical applications in solar cells, high energy density solid-state batteries, super capacitors, fuel cells, sensors and electrochemical devices. Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have been attracting intensive interest for scientific research and industrial applications owing to their low fabrication cost, environmentally friendly operation and relatively high efficiency. In order to improve the efficiency of DSSCs, many efforts on modification of polymer gel electrolyte have been made through synthesizing new polymers or adding inorganic nanofillers. Hence, we report on the synthesis of polymer nanocomposite electrolyte consisting of polyvinylpyrrolidone-polyethylene glycol (PVP-PEG)/nano ZnO/KI/I2. Zinc oxide nanoparticle synthesized by sol-gel method is used as inorganic nanofiller. Polymeric nanocomposite electrolyte was prepared by blending polymer with ZnO nanoparticle using solution-casting technique. The property of nanocomposites depends mainly on the chemistry of polymer matrices. The dispersion of nanoparticles in the polymer matrices is a general prerequisite for achieving desired mechanical and physical properties. ZnO nanoparticles and polymer nanocomposite were characterised by Ultraviolet-Visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy, Fourier Transform Infra Red (FT-IR) spectroscopy, X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) analysis and Field Emission-Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM). The effect of structural modification of material on conductivity of polymer and its composite was evaluated and compared by SEM and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. The polymer nanocomposite electrolyte synthesised have its practical application in the fabrication of DSSC.

In this study, an organized method for determining the novelty of submitted manuscript is presented. The importance of the need for objective determination of the novelty of submitted manuscript is identified. Discussions on the meaning of novelty are presented and used as basis to form mathematical expressions defining parameters useful to quantify the novelty of submitted manuscript. The defined parameters will be found more useful in objective decision of the novelty of submitted manuscripts as opposed to the current frustrating subjective methodology adopted by editors and reviewers world over.