Archives-June 2012

Since independence, the governance of development in Kenya has for the most part been centralised under the armpit of government officials. As such devolution is vaguely understood especially by grassroots leaders and communities. Consequently, central government officials have continued to determine the path of development at the grassroots especially so since they also control financial resources through the district treasury. However, the government has recognised this top-down development archetype as a major bottleneck to welfare and has been implementing policies to bring on board the beneficiaries. One major attempt was the District Focus for Rural Development Strategy of the early 1980s, which made the district the local level planning and development coordination and implementation unit. This policy faced several challenges which necessitated more focussed strategies to move decision-making powers from the centre to margin. The early years of the 21st century marked increased resource devolution and decentralized decision-making to the grassroots including Constituencies Development Fund, recruitment of some cadre of staff, management of health facilities and water resources among others. The Constitution of Kenya endorsed by about 70% of votes cast during the August 4th 2010 Referendum and subsequently promulgated by the president on August 27th 2010 is yet another devolution stab to enhance development and governance at the grassroots. This paper highlights the devolution proposals and the envisaged benefits to grassroots communities in Chapter Eleven of the Constitution of Kenya.

The phytochemical screening, proximate composition, mineral elements and quantitative assay of anti-nutrients of the seeds of Cassia hirsute have been evaluated. The brown seeds have pungent smell and are bitter and unpleasant to taste. The phytochemical screening indicated the presence of alkaloids, tannins, saponins, phenols, sterols, triterpenes, glycosides and carbohydrates; phlobatannins and flavonoids were absent. The proximate composition of the seeds was 8.7% moisture, 7.7% ash, 7.0% fat, 10.5% protein, 13.2% fibre and 52.9% carbohydrate with estimated caloric value of 316.20 kCal/100g sample. The mineral elements determined in the seeds include K, Ca, Na, Fe, Mg and P, heavy metals such as Pb, Cr and Cu were not present. The antinutrient assay revealed that the total tannins, oxalate and phytic acid contents were high but hydrocyanic acid was not detected. The high values of these toxic materials suggest that the seeds are not suitable for consumption as food, but the solvent extract may be suitable as fumigant to dispel insects, rodents and snakes.

In the last twelve months, petrol prices have been hiked 19 times, making the life of common man miserable. It seems certain that, this crisis will sooner or later put a spoke in a riding Indian’s Life Wheel. The use of Ethanol blended fuel in automobiles is the only ‘spark of hope’ for minimizing vehicular emissions as well as to reduce the exponentially increasing oil import bills.

This paper presents a digital method to develop the three phase voltage source inverter control unit using field programmable gate array (FPGA) based digital Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation (SVPWM) algorithm. In this paper the complicate equations of SVPWM algorithm are simplified to effortless instructions such as shift, addition and subtraction operands in the proposed digital design. Furthermore low power digital circuit to make FPGA based SVPWM control is implemented. The achieved dynamic power consumption is about 63 mW in FPGA clock frequency of 100 MHz. The proposed digital SVPWM was synthesized and implemented using Xilinx ISE and Virtex IV FPGA, with target device XC4VFX100. Also power is analyzed using XPower analyzer. The simulation results demonstrate that proposed method has reduced power consumption.

A parametric mean length is defined as the quantity , Where This being the useful mean length of codewords weighted by utilities,  Lower and upper bounds for are derived in terms of ‘useful’ information measure.

Residual levels of organophosphorous pesticides were determined in 44 fermented and dried cocoa beans samples collected from two cocoa beans storage warehouses located in Tema and Takoradi; cities in Ghana from November 2010 to January 2011. The main objective of the study was to monitor and assess the residue levels of 13 organophosphorous pesticides in fermented and dried cocoa beans produced from Ghana. The extraction method uses acetonitrile as the extracting solvent. Two solid phase extraction clean-up cartridges were employed; bond elut C18 cartridge, followed by envi-carp/LC-NH2 superclean cartridge; using acetonitrile and a mixture of toluene/acetonitrile in the ratio 1:3 as eluting solvents, respectively. The determination was done using gas chromatography with pulse flame photometric detector (GC-PFPD). The targeted compounds were methamidophos, ethoprophos, phorate, fonofos, diazinon, dimethoate, pirimiphos-methyl, chlorpyrifos, malathion, fenitrothion, parathion, chlorfenvinphos and profenofos. The percentage recoveries ranged from 70-95 percent, with instrumental method determination limit of 5.0 ?g/kg. The results indicated that ethoprophos is not being used in cocoa production in Ghana. However, there were appreciable amounts of Dimethoate (22.3 µg/kg), Pirimiphos-methyl (29.5 µg/kg), Malathion (20.6 µg/kg), Chlorpyrifos (50.2 µg/kg) and Fenitrothion (93.8 µg/kg). These notwithstanding, residue levels of all organophosphorous pesticides detected were below both the EU and Japanese maximum residue limits; with the exception of Methamidophos, Chlorpyrifos, Malathion and Profenofos which average residue values were comparable with either one of the two international maximum residue limits set.

One of the key issues in management today is the lack of Job Involvement in employees. This lack ultimately leads to lack of Performance in employees. The study was conducted to see the impact of Job Involvement on the Job Performance and the difference between the females and males with respect to Job Performance. The data was collected using questionnaires. The respondents were mainly from the Banking sector of Pakistan. The results show that there is a positive correlation (r=0.705, p<0.01) between Job Involvement and Job Performance. Moreover, the results for group statistics show there is no significant difference between performance of males and females (µm=48.6744, µf=47.2432) at confidence Levels of almost 35%. The reasons for such results are then discussed.

The present study assessed the contributions of Aga Khan Education Services Pakistan (AKESP) in Early Childhood Development (ECD) in Chitral. The study aimed to find out head teachers, teachers and parents’ views about contributions of AKESP in Early Childhood Development (ECD) centers at Chitral, and to assess their views about contributions of ECD centers in physical, social, cognitive, emotional, academic and moral development of children. The study was descriptive. Data were collected from parents, teachers and heads of ECD centers from valleys of Chitral through two sets of questionnaires. Findings report that ECD centers are contributing a lot in providing facilities for children at these centers and that ECD centers are contributing a lot in the social, emotional, moral, academic and physical development of children. However, ECD Centers of AKESP may focus on launching more programs for cognitive development of children and programs of teachers training in ECD.

This paper addresses the concepts of sustainable development, sustainable regional development and constitutes for an indicators for sustainable development. The notion of sustainable development has a fundamental nature, and serves as the basis for other new and innovative concepts and principles arising within environmental conventions. Sustainable development (SD) is development that lasts for long time. This paper has two parts. Firstly, the idea of sustainable regional development (SRD) refers to the integration of sustainable development principles into regional development practice. Secondly, indicators are today seen as having an increasingly important role in sustainable development or sustainable regional development and can provide crucial guidance for decision- making in a variety of ways. This study uses for traditional data sources and measures as a basis for SD and SRD indicators. The aim of this study is to analyze the indicators for sustainable development and sustainable regional development. This paper finds that it is a qualitative policy concept, which needs a quantitative operationalization. It is hoped that this paper will make a significant contribution to the realisation of sustainable regional development.

The most likely process that can lead to the release of radionuclides from a repository to the geosphere is transport by groundwater. Hence, waste disposal-related safety analyses must assess the possibility of the migration of radionuclides in the conservative assumption of leaching by groundwater after the destruction of the engineered barriers. The need to protect groundwater from possible radioactive contamination and the need to investigate radionuclide migration through soils and rocks of the zone of aeration into groundwater has become very urgent at a time when geological disposal of radioactive waste is being considered. This is why the Borehole Disposal Concept (BDC) is being implemented to address the problem. The BDC involve the conditioning and emplacement of disused sealed radioactive sources in an engineered facility of a relatively narrow diameter borehole (0.26 m). This concept is inherent with physical and chemical characteristics such as intrusion barriers, casing, lining materials, back-filling materials and stainless steel waste containers that prevent or delay the movement of radionuclides between components and inadvertent access to humans, animals and plants.