Archives-December 2012

Projects are defined as complex tasks, based on challenging questions or problems, that involve learners in design, problem-solving, decision making, or investigative activities; give learners the opportunity to work relatively autonomously over extended periods of time; and culminate in realistic products or presentations. Within a project-based approach, learners are usually provided with specifications for a desired end product, and the learning process is more oriented to following correct procedures. Teachers act as instructors or coaches, providing expert guidance, feedback and suggestions for better ways to achieve the final product. Past studies have shown the benefits of PBL which include intrinsically motivating learners to learn, fostering problem-solving, and developing independent and cooperative working skills. It is also believed that project based instruction allows learners to develop critical thinking and decision making skills and engage in in-depth learning of subject matter. This paper discusses the importance of Grant’s structures in a project as an Invention Project was assigned to each group of learners. The results, based on the Grant structure, have indicated that learners showed a significant improvement in the areas highlighted in the project-based activity. It is thus, a worthy action to be implemented in teaching and learning processes.

Advancement in the field of embedded system and VLSI has induced the researcher in designing low power embedded systems and VLSI circuit design. The embedded systems are mostly batteries operated in nature. The power loss during static, dynamic and switching characteristics are tabulated. The switching nature in cmos constitutes a large value of power loss during the switching condition. Many research papers have been proposed in reducing the switching loss, and low power estimation, this paper clearly demonstrates the comparison of them. The main features of the dominated design techniques and methodologies of transistor level, gate level, RTL level, behavior level and system level are reviewed. The corresponding advantages and drawbacks, as well as comparisons between the techniques and the methodologies are also presented. The low-power design process such as transistor level, gate level, RTL level, behavior level and system-level models are explained.

This paper explores the findings of a qualitative phenomenological study of teaching practicum as a critical component of teacher training program at a leading private University in Kenya. This phenomenological study evaluated the teachers prevailing understandings of the teaching practice phenomenon (Borg and Gall, 2007). It focuses on exploring the issues and concerns related to the planning, teacher placement, implementation and administration of teaching practicum. It addresses the teacher trainees’ experiences, challenges, pedagogic and philosophical concerns during the teaching practicum. The participants in the study were selected using purposive sampling techniques. These were teachers who had completed the mandatory course requirements in a private university and were taking the final units in readiness for the final examination before graduation. The participants took their teaching practicum in their teaching duty stations, under the mentorship of a cooperating teacher and were supervised by two faculty members during the first term of the school calendar. The research design used a phenomenological interpretive methodology that gave prominence to the participants’ subjective meanings (Cohen and Manion, 2000). The participants in the study were 78 teachers who took part in the teaching practicum in the last phase of their teacher training program. Data were collected from professional journals, reflective papers and portfolios prepared by the teachers during and after the teaching practicum. Analysis of data was done by coding the teachers’ experiences into broad themes. Following the emerging perspectives and challenges during the practicum, suggestions are made to improve aspects of planning and pedagogy the teaching practicum.

The demand for petroleum is increasing with each passing day. This may be attributed to the limited resources of petroleum crude. In that case, it becomes utmost necessity to search for alternative fuels, which are renewable, and in that biodiesel emerges as a real solution. Because of diminishing petroleum reserves and the deleterious environmental consequences of exhaust gases from petroleum diesel, biodiesel has attracted attention during the past few years as a renewable and environmentally friendly fuel. Since it is made entirely from oils, it is renewable and biodegradable. Biodiesel is a cleaner burning fuel than diesel and a suitable replacement. It is made from non-toxic, biodegradable, renewable resources. It can be produced in many ways.

IT organizations can now outsource computer hardware by leasing CPU time through cloud computing services. The problem here is the effectiveness is becoming less due to burden on single cloud while working with MTC applications .This paper deals with defining the feasible solutions with MTC applications using the programming models for computing over a Multi clouds instead of single cloud for effectiveness.

An analytical study is performed to investigate the effects of chemical reaction and radiation on unsteady MHD flow past an exponentially accelerated vertical plate with variable temperature and variable mass diffusion in the presence heat source or sink under the influence of applied transverse magnetic field. It is assumed that the effect of viscous dissipation is negligible in the energy equation and there is a first order chemical reaction between the diffusing species and the fluid. The flow is assumed to be in - direction which is taken along the infinite vertical plate in the upward direction and -axis is taken normal to the plate. At time >0, the both temperature and species concentration levels near the plate are raised linearly with time time t. A general exact solution of the governing partial differential equations is obtained by usual Laplace transform technique. The velocity, temperature and concentration fields are studied for different physical parameters like thermal Grashof number (Gr), mass Grashof number (Gm), Schmidt number (Sc), Prndtl number (Pr), radiation parameter (R), magnetic field parameter (M), accelerated parameter (a), heat source parameter (H), chemical reaction parameter (K) and time (t) are studied through graphs and tables.

In the work present, describes an attempt has been made to study the effect of temperature on plain fatigue behavior of polyester reinforced with woven of fiber glass manufactured as a laminate [0/90]3.Fatigue tests were carried out at constant and variable temperature environment. All fatigue tests were employed at stress ratio R=-1 and under constant fiber volume fraction (VF) of 33%. The results indicated that the tensile and the fatigue strength decreased with increasing temperature up to at 60 ⁰C. The fatigue strength reduction factor (FLRF) at 60 ^oC was (46%) compared to (RT) environment. A nonlinear fatigue damage model was proposed taking into account the effect of temperature sequence and fatigue loading. This model was calibrated against experimental data under different thermal conditions. The final conclusion which derived from this work was the verification of the model results with the experimental ones.

Purpose: Halitosis is defined as an unpleasant odor that emanates from the oral cavity with intra–oral and/or extra–oral origins. The present study assessed factors influenced halitosis using different diagnostic modalities. Methods: 360 patients who attended shiraz dentistry school participate in this study. A total of 100patients aged 10-56years old included 58women& 42men complained of chronic halitosis. Organoleptic assessment was used to measure intensity of halitosis. The patients were divided into 6 groups according to their age & educational levels. Descriptive analysis was carried out regarding the degree of halitosis in each group. The chi-square test was used for the comparison between groups. Result: prevalence of halitosis was 27.8% of all subjects. Halitosis was multi factorial in this group & more than one factor could be seen in these patients. Dental caries was the most common cause of halitosis(62%) followed by periodontal disease (55%), highly protein diet (28%),smoking(13%) , inadequate root canal therapy & filling(12%) xerostomia(9%), Pseudo-halitosis(6% ) ,sinusitis & nasal polyp(4%),constipation & gastric reflux (4%) hormonal factors (%4) medication(4%) dentures(2%).there was no significant correlation between patients age , sex &educational level with halitosis(p=0.05). Conclusion: In this study, intra oral factors were the most common causes of halitosis. This problem can be prevented by appropriate dental care, suitable oral hygiene &increased public awareness.

The fission product isotopic inventories have been estimated for a 90.2% highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel core of the Ghana Research Reactor-1 (GHARR-1) using the ORIGEN2 code. The results indicate a gradual decrease in the ¹³⁵Xe inventory, and a build up in the ²³⁹U and ²³⁹Np inventory. The results will assist in assessing the bounding radiological consequences of a release of actinides from fuel material. It will also assist in the design of a nuclear spent fuel storage cask for GHARR-1 using local material (Serpentine).

In last two decades continues increase of comput-ational power and recent advance in the web technology cause to provide large amounts of data. That needs large scale data processing mechanism to handle this volume of data. MapReduce is a programming model for large scale distributed data processing in an efficient and transparent way. Due to its excellent fault tolerance features, scalability and the ease of use. Currently, there are several options for using MapReduce in cloud environments, such as using MapReduce as a service, setting up one’s own MapReduce cluster on cloud instances, or using specialized cloud MapReduce runtimes that take advantage of cloud infrastructure services. Cloud computing has recently emerged as a new paradigm that provide computing infrastructure and large scale data processing mechanism in the network. The cloud is on demand, scalable and high availability so implement of MapReduce on the top of cloud services cause faster, scalable and high available MapReduce framework for large scale data processing. In this paper we explain how to implement MapReduce in the cloud and also have a comparison between implementations of MapReduce on AzureCloud, Amazon Cloud and Hadoop at the end.