Archives-February 2015

This study was carried out to determine the serum concentration of Creatine Kinase MB in obese subjects attending University of Port Harcourt teaching Hospital. One hundred and eighty five (185) obese subjects of BMI > 30 had their Creatine Kinase MB determined by enzyme linked with immunosorbent assay and compared with 160 age and sex matched controls. There was significant difference in the Creatine Kinase MB concentration of 2.76 ± 0.30 obtained in obese subjects compared with 2.91 ± 0.29 in control (P > 0.005). The result of this study suggests that serum levels of Creatine Kinase MB are lower in obese subjects.

In today’s era, majority of the residential construction involves masonry. Despite its wide use in structural engineering, masonry is still the least understood especially seismic behavior building material in terms of strength and deformation characteristics due to its heterogeneity. The general behavior of unreinforced masonry under lateral is brittle and thus has high seismic hazard. Confining masonry is found to enhance the seismic behavior of masonry. In this project simple masonry (unreinforced masonry) and confined masonry walls of size 1.25mx1.25mx.1m were tested and compared for their behavior under in plane lateral loads. Confinement to the masonry was provided in the form of reinforced vertical columns and horizontal beam called as tie columns and tie beam respectively. The reinforcement in confinement was provided as per the guidelines issued by Euro code 8 for confined masonry. Their ultimate load strength, deformation capacity (ductility) and initial stiffness are the parameters studied in comparison. Confined masonry showed excellent behavior under lateral loads both in terms of ultimate load capacity and ductility than the simple masonry.

This study attempts to analyze Surrealism in Oldooz and the Crows, a short story written by the Iranian author Samad Behrangi. Surrealism is a cultural movement founded in 1920s by the French poet and critic Andre Breton. The surrealists favored in the function of the world of unconscious mind in integrating fancies and dreams to the phenomenal world in order to elaborate a higher reality. They also were interested in Freud's theories about unconscious mind and the power of free imagination especially in Children. Moreover, they insisted on the automatic writing avoiding regular artistic conventions and restrictive rule. In this regard, the researcher tries to discuss the imaginative freedom and childhood dreams propounded in Behrangi's short story Oldooz and the Crows to consider whether this literary work can be considered as a surrealist work or not.

The importance of controlling water pollution has increasing in recent years. Dyes are visible in nature, despite it constitutes only a small portion of water pollution to the environment. Color delivery onto the textile fibres in the form of dyes is not an efficient process. As a result, most of the textile industry wastewater is coloured. The treatment to remove this color was not considered until the usage of synthetic dyes. Due to the effects caused by the synthetic dyes to the environment. Government is forcing textile industries to treat their waste effluent to an increasingly high standard before releasing it to the environment due to the recalcitrant nature of modern synthetic dyes. Several strategies have been investigated cost-effective process to remove the colour from wastewater produced by the textile industry. This article reviews the current available technologies and suggests an effective, cheaper alternative for dye removal and decolourisation applicable on large scale.

This study compared the concentration of ascorbic acid between citrus fruits collected from farm of Kerman in Iran. Determination of ascorbic acid was carried out using a liquid chromatograph coupled to a diode array detector, with reverse phase and isocratic elution. The validation parameters showed efficiency, adequate linearity, relative standard deviation values 0.02 % (n=10) for repeatability and 0.5 % (n=15) for reproducibility, limit of detection (LD) was 0.2 mg L-1 recovery was between 97.3 % and 103.6%. Ascorbic acid 10 species of citrus: sour and sweet orange, umbilical orange, novel orange ,lime, lemon, pink and white grapefruit, aegle marmelos, bergamot, sour and sweet tangerines and clementine was determined. The average ascorbic acid was the highest in Shahdad’s citrus fruits.

The problem of robot selection plays an important key role concern to various fields of different applications since three decades. This problem has become more difficult in recent years due to increasing complexity of applications of the environment, features and specifications, and facilities offered by various manufactures. The primary objective of this paper is to select the suitable type of robot based on various factors such as type of application, payload, working environment, accuracy, lifespan, weight, purchasing cost etc. The selection procedure is developed for selection of particular type of robot based evaluating the various alternative selection factors using AHP technique and systems of equations of the matrices i.e. Eigen values and Eigen vectors. The ranking evolution will provide a good guidance for the robot selection to the end user. The concept of this work is an attempt has been made to create exhaustive database for identifying maximum possible number of attributes.

In Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) mobile node is responsible for route establishment using wireless link where each node may behave like both as a host and router. MANET encounters number of security threats because of its open entrusted environment, with little security arrangement, security over MANET can be enhance up to some satisfactory level because of its inherent characteristics. Among some of the prominent security threats wormhole attack is considered to be a very serious security threat over MANET. In wormhole two selfish node which is geographically very far away to each other makes tunnel between each other to hide their actual location and give the illusion that they are true neighbours and attract other nodes to make conversation through the wormhole tunnel. Many researchers focused on detecting wormhole attack and its prevention mechanism. It seems that in the previous technique there is a need to improve their results in the brink of false negative rate, routing overhead etc. The present paper has proposed the hybrid model in order to detect and prevent the wormhole attack. This approach has been work with neighbour node and hop count method.

The paper investigated the effect of radiation and chemical reaction on unsteady MHD mixed convection flow past an infinite vertical plate with Ohmic heating and viscous dissipation has been is discussed. Approximate solutions have been derived for the velocity, temperature field, concentration profiles, skin friction and Nusselt number using multi-parameter perturbation technique. The obtained results are discussed with the help of the graphs to observe the effect of various parameters like Schmidt number (Sc), Prandtl number (Pr), Magnetic parameter (M), radiation parameter (F) and porosity parameter (K).

Data compression is a common requirement for most of the computerized applications. There are many number of unsecured data compression algorithms, which are dedicated to compress different unsecured data formats. Even for a single data type there are number of different compression algorithms, which use different approaches. In this research, we propose a simple and efficient data compression algorithm particularly suited to be used on available commercial basis using secured manner. Our intention is transmitting text data in secured as well as compressed in the open environment. It is using double compression technique based on Huffman coding algorithm and simple symmetric key algorithm. Experiment itself evaluates the performance of new secured data compression algorithm with other data compression algorithm.

Supplier selection and allocating orders to supplier is a complex multi objective problem which includes both quantitative and qualitative factors. In order to achieve an efficient solution in the quantitative factors, a Multi Objective Fuzzy Linear Programming [MOFLP] model with fuzziness in objective, resources, technological coefficient and resources for the proposed weighted additive model and it is compared with zimmermann method to help the management to allocate the optimum order quantities, in which the three objectives are to optimize purchasing cost, quality, and service and satisfy constraints like supplier’s capacity, supply chain demand etc are considered. The model has been applied to supplier selection of a high technology company named Multi-Flex Lami-Print Ltd which manufactures Flexible Packaging materials. In fuzzy supplier selection problem four different cases are considered to incorporate the uncertainty by zimmermann and weighted additive method. The result shows that the model is effective and applicable to industries.