Archives-July 2012

The Malaysian housing industry landscape is evolving and increasing in complexity, with increasing demand, growing competition and frequent reports of abandoned projects, poor quality and delayed delivery. Confronted with these issues, the industry has never been in a greater need to provide answers to the perennial questions; Are house buyers really satisfied? And do the private developers build to satisfy their house buyers? By looking at key facts and trends, this paper examines the latest developments in the housing delivery systems in Malaysia and the multiple concepts associated with customer satisfaction. It explores the current issues faced by housing developers and house buyers in the Malaysian housing industry.

This paper deals with the study of the potential substitution of Karanja methyl ester blends for diesel as fuel for automobiles and other industrial purposes. The objective of this study is the analysis of the performance, combustion and emission characteristics of the karanja methyl esters and comparing with petroleum diesel. The tests were carried out on a 4.4 KW, single cylinder, direct injection, Air-cooled diesel engine. The results of investigations carried out in studying the fuel properties of karanja methyl ester (KME) and its blend with diesel fuel from 20 to 100% by volume and in running a diesel engine with these fuels. Engine tests have been carried out with the aim of obtaining comparative measures of Brake power, specific fuel consumption and emissions such as CO2, CO, HC, smoke density and NOx to evaluate and compute the behavior of the diesel engine running on above mentioned fuels. The reduction in exhaust emissions together with increase in brake power, brake thermal efficiency and reduction in specific fuel consumption make the blends of karanja esterified oil (B20) a suitable alternative fuel for diesel and could help in controlling air pollution.

This study was intended to investigate the satisfaction level of prospective teachers towards their training course and in this regard relevant literature was searched and required data was collected from the sample of 100 prospective teachers (only B.Ed. student,) through administration of questionnaire. After analysis of data it was disclosed that all factors including curriculum, teaching methodology, library and physical facilities and assessment have correlation with each other as well as great influence on quality of education and if all these components are considered while planning training program for prospective teachers than it will surely enhance satisfaction level among student teachers and quality of education in teacher training institutes will also raise.

In this paper we propose a new set of features based on morphology for total RBC count in given blood sample is explained along with classification of WBC. For the diagnosis of any disease first requirement is complete blood count i.e total number of RBC, WBC and platelets in given blood sample. And if there are excess of any of these types or any of these is few in number then this gives the doctor a basic idea that the person is not healthy for sure. To do this manually is very tedious. Here RBC and WBC are first differentiated and then counted through some algorithm. Implementation here is done through MATLAB.

6-amino-4-(substitutedphenyl)-1-(2,4-dinitrophenyl)-3-methyl-pyrazolo [3,4-b] pyridine-5-carbonitrile have been prepared by the refluxation for six hours of 4-(substitutedbenzylidene)-2-(2,4-dinitrophenyl)-5-methyl-2,4-dihydro-pyrazol-3-one, malononitrile and ammonium acetate in presence of ethanol. The intermediate 4-(substituted benzylidene)-2-(2,4-dinitrophenyl)-5-methyl-2,4-dihydro-pyrazol-3-one have been prepared by the refluxation for five hours of 2-(2,4-dinitro phenyl)-5-methyl-2,4-dihydro-pyrazol-3-one with substituted benzaldehyde in presence of glacial acetic acid. The synthesized compounds were characterized by means of their IR, 1H-NMR spectral data and elemental analysis.

Obesity is now a common childhood disease and is widely acknowledged as having become a global epidemic. There are well-recognized health consequences of childhood obesity, both during childhood and adulthood, affecting health and psychological welfare. Childhood obesity is a risk factor for adult morbidity and mortality, independent of body mass index (BMI) in adulthood, family history of cardiovascular disease or cancer, and smoking. The present study was designed with the objectives to study contributing factors of childhood obesity like genetic, environmental, behavioral, metabolic, biochemical and social factors and its relationship. Hence, this research investigates the most contributing / impactful factor of childhood obesity using Induced Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (IFCMs). IFCMs are a fuzzy-graph modeling approach based on expert’s opinion. This is the non-statistical approach to study the problems with imprecise information.

Child care has become an essential component of life in our society .Quality child care can make a significant difference in child’s development .Here we consider some regulations in favour of lower child staff ratio ,higher educational standards for care givers and smaller group size . In this paper we present a methods for fuzzy risk analysis based on, child- staff ratio group size and care giver ability. We obtain the expected number of children in queue needing attention at any time by using both function principle and Graded Mean Integration method. Furthermore we calculate the proportion of time that a child would spend engaged by using both function principle and Graded Mean Integration method. The model presented in this paper can be applied to other educational services also

The bacterial polyesters may be considered as “Green Plastics”, because of their biodegradable nature. These polyesters can be employed for packaging and coating materials / as biodegradable carriers and applied in biomedical field. PHA producing Bacteria were isolated from the soil samples collected from various locations of Salem district in Tamil Nadu, India. The bacterial consortium was screened and confirmed for indigenous Ralstonia strains producing Polyhydroxy alkanoates (PHA) by colony morphology and biochemical analysis. The PHA production was confirmed by the presence of lipid cellular inclusions using Sudan Black B staining. Three strains (YRF2a, YTF2 and YRF1) among the 38 isolates tested were found to be Ralstonia strains. The positive isolates were then cultured in E2 broth containing 2% glucose (w/v) to study the PHA production. The correlation between PHA production and cell dry weight were studied and found to be statistically significant. Among the three isolates tested the strain YRF1 showed highest PHA production and peaked in degradation also. The high PHA yielding strain (YRF1) was further characterized for PHA production in large quantity with different physical and chemical parameters viz; pH, incubation temperature, carbon sources, concentration of nitrogen, incubation period. The result presumed that at pH 7, at 37°C and 72 hours of incubation period accompanying with glucose as carbon source and reducing nitrogen concentration to 1/6 in growth medium increased the accumulation of PHA by 88%, a highly feasible amount. The extracted PHA was apparently confirmed by FT-IR and NMR analysis.

This paper has two primary purposes; first, we expand confines of Resource Opportunity (hence forth referred to as; RO) by introducing two entrepreneurial concepts: 1) entrepreneurial recognition, which we describe as the recognition of opportunities and opportunity seeking behaviour as a resource and 2) the method of combining and organizing resources as a resource. The second objective is to build theory for the field of entrepreneurship that can potentially cover micro and macro issues by focusing on the resources as the unit of analysis. This attempt is ordered around the four conditions of RO: resource heterogeneity, ex post limits to competition, imperfect factor mobility and ex ante limits to competition. By defining entrepreneurship which we define as the recognition and exploitation of opportunities which result in firm creation that seeks to obtain entrepreneurial rents, through the four conditions of RO we hypothetically inform and expand current research in both entrepreneurship and RO.

Cadmium sulphide (CdS) thin films were deposited from different cadmium salts by acidic chemical bath deposition (CBD) method. The effect of cadmium source on CdS thin films by thickness, optical properties, structural properties, functional groups and surface morphology with elemental composition were studied. Film growth rate and band gap were found to the sensitive to the Cd source used. The transmittance data analysis indicates that the optical band gap ranging from 2.37 eV to 2.43 eV was deduced. The XRD study reveals that the films were cubic in nature. SEM with EDS data shows that all the particles were spherical and average atomic ratio of Cd/S increases with the decrease in particle sizes.