Archives-June 2014

Student performance is the result of the interaction between the students and the instructional environment; and teachers can reasonably accommodate most of the students’ needs after analyzing student learning needs. Good teachers are surely aware of the students’ needs.(Douglas D Christensen ,Ph.D)In this study, we like to investigate the relationship between teachers’ ability and awareness of their students’ needs. Participants are 40 teachers (male and female) that teach English in foreign language institutes and 160 students who are in Intermediate level. This study was performed in Khorasan and Torsys foreign languages institutes in Kashmar. Participants were given questionnaires and asked to answer the questions. This research uses information from both teachers and students to explore the relationship between students’ needs and awareness of teachers’ ability. The data from the questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS 13.After analyzing the data, it was clear than there is a significant correlation between teachers' ability and awareness of the students' needs.

This article makes comprehensive literature review and analysis on various scientific experiments and research about the role of age in foreign language learning. Additionally the introduction and analysis of “Critical Period Hypothesis” and its relevant research in second language acquisition has been presented in order to put forward some scientific implications for foreign language learning and instruciton in the context of China.

Food security is a major global concern since food is the most basic human need and access to food is a fundamental human right. The right to food is contained in the universal declaration of human rights that was adopted in 1948 by the general assembly and reaffirmed by the World Food Summit and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN in 1996. To show their solidarity over poverty and hunger issues, nations under the umbrella of the United Nation (UN) targets to halve by the year 2015 the proportion of people who are hungry. Tackling food insecurity problem on a global level poses critical dynamic challenges. Every country has its own individual dimensions adding to the overall food crisis in farming areas. Due to unprecedented subsidies given to farmers in terms of seeds and fertilizers, they are easily enticed to use larger portion of their land for cultivation of food. Consequently, farmers have to either spend more on buying food or reduce their food consumption, which subject their families to malnourishment and starvation. In other words, low level of investment practiced by poor small scale farmers do not attract economies of scales but makes them remain in constant debts and this incapacitates households’ ability to afford adequate food. Farmers being trapped in a debt cycle provide them no option but to keep cultivating this crop irrespective of the long-term, veiled hazardous consequences and questionable economic gains. The power of technological solutions to solve poverty problems currently witnessed in Kenya is installed by the myriad of institutional and supply policies. Moreover, with a better policy environment, investment in rural infrastructure and transport network can bring down input costs considerably by reducing one of the major supply constraints to adoption. Considerable adaptive research, stronger and decentralized research-extension farmer linkage is required to increase the speed with which farmers apply the viable technologies. The best judges of agricultural technology are the end users-the farmers and involving them in technology use is critical to the success of research investment programs for increased sustainable production to alleviate the persistent food insecurity in Kenya.

What distinguishes a brand from its unbranded commodity counterpart and gives it equity is the sum total of consumers’ perceptions and feelings about the product’s attributes and how they perform, about the brand name and what it stands for, and about the company associated with the brand. By creating perceived differences among products through branding and developing a loyal consumer franchise, marketers create value that can translate to financial profits for the firm. This marketing activity resides in the mind of customers and as a result customer shapes a perception about the brand, biggest challenge here is creating positive perceptions by ensuring that customers have right type of experiences with product so that both functional experiences as well as emotional experiences become associated with the product. Thus Brand perception is the image which a brand creates in the mind of the customers due to the various associations linked with the brand. How does brand matter? Brand matters how it has been differentiated or created competitive advantage. Competitive advantage can developed in two ways; some brands create with product performance and some brands create through non-product-related performance. For example Coca-cola has been a leader in soft-drink category for decades by understanding consumer motivations and desires and creating relevant appealing images surrounding their products. Often these intangible image associations may be the only way to distinguish different brands in a product category. Thus this study tries to understand how these imagery associations or non-product-related performance plays important role in product differentiation.

The research is to investigate the denitrosation of N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) by the mitochondrial fractions (MF) and post-mitochondrial fractions (PMF) of liver, kidney, spleen and testes of rats and to determine the level of toxicity in these organs. In the first part of the work, a group of male albino rats (5 rats) was used to obtain the organs whose homogenates were used for the Kinetic experiments. In the second part, two groups were used. One group was group was treated with 2.5mg/kg NDMA twice per week for four weeks, while the other group was the control. The organs obtained from the rats were used for histology and biochemical parameters (ALT, AST and GGT). In the four organs, the level of nitrite was found to be higher in the MF than PMF. The (Km) values of denitrosation were lower in the MF than the PMF. The Km values for the MF of the kidney, spleen and testes were calculated to be 0.005, 0.004, 0.004 and 0.005 ?M, respectively, while the Km values for the PMF were calculated to be 0.013, 0.025, 0.007 and 0.033 ?M, respectively. The activities of ALT, AST and GGT enzymes in serum and liver were significantly higher (p < 0.05) in the NDMA-treated rats than controls. Histology showed the presence of shrunken hepatocytes in liver, interstitial cellular infiltration in kidney, lymphoid depletion in spleen, and severe subcapsular congestion in the testes of NDMA-treated rats, compared with controls. This research shows that NDMA denitrosating enzymes in the MF have greater affinity for NDMA than the same enzymes in the PMF, It also shows that NDMA at a low dose could induce toxicity in the spleen, kidney, testes, as well as liver.

Present study was conducted in the Old Age Homes (OAH) of Kolkata to assess the socio-demographic profile of elderly & the nature of care as indicator of quality of life (QoL) of elderly in OAH and to understand the social adjustment pattern & interpersonal relations of elderly as a gauge of QoL of elderly. Data were collected purposively from 100 elderly over 65 years of age through interview procedure from 10 OAH in Kolkata and analyzed through‘t’ test and chi square. Finding suggests majority of elderly are from 70-74 year old; their income was between Rs, 50001 to 15,000/-; significant difference between male and female boarders regarding their perceived feeling of care which indicate their quality of life. Female interpersonal relationships were more frequent in OAH than male elderly as their social adjustment is better than their male counterparts.

Distributed file systems (DFS) is one of the important building blocks for cloud computing environment which supports Map Reduce programming pattern where nodes at the same time serve both computing as well as the storage functions. A file is partitioned into variety of chunk units allotted in different nodes in order that the Map Reduce tasks can be carried out in parallel over the nodes. However, in cloud environment, files can be dynamically performs all the operation like creation, deletion, and modification. These consequences in load imbalance on the storage resources; that is, the different file modules are not distributed as consistently as possible among the nodes. A fully distributed load balancing algorithm is offered to manage with the load imbalance problem and thus it increases the overall performance of the system.

The important issue concerning claims management is that the question of claims in contract agreements is an inevitable one and , hence, under present circumstances , where many faults are found in the process of signing contract agreements and in questions relating to the execution phase of contracts, the idea of their elimination does not appear to be a reasonable one. From among the problems faced in eliminating these claims, reference can be made to the present shortcomings in the general conditions of contracts and to the very noticeably slow progress made in the study and design phases of contracts. The purpose in writing this article was to offer strategies for selecting the win – win approach by parties to contracts for the whole duration of the projects from the start of the study phase to the end of the utilization period. It was necessary to conduct this research because many projects run into crises due to inappropriate management of claims laid and only result in wasting national resources.

This study is focus on the conversion and optimization of cassava peel to bioethanol. Classical optimization technique was employed in studying the process variables effect of temperature, acid concentration, cassava peel concentration and time of hydrolysis of cassava peel to glucose. Optimum glucose yield of 78mg/ml was obtained at the temperature of 100oC, acid concentration of 0.40mole, cassava peel concentration of 2g/L and hydrolysis time of 45 minutes. After which the glucose obtained from hydrolysis of cassava peel was fermented to produce bioethanol using a classical optimization technique for the effects of pH, temperature, yeast concentration, glucose concentration and fermentation time on bioethanol yield. Results obtained revealed that the optimum yield of 45.50% of bioethanol was obtained at the pH of 5, fermentation temperature of 35oC, yeast concentration of 10%, glucose concentration of 100g/L and fermentation time of 6 days. The bioethanol produced from cassava peel was characterized to determine the kinematic viscosity, specific gravity, flash point, refractive index, distillation property, sulphur content, octane number and water content. Results obtained on the properties of the bioethanol produced revealed that that the bioethanol produced shows corresponding fuel properties recommended by ASTM, thus providing a good alternative fuel of clean and renewable resource and establishing the potential for bioethanol commercialisation.

Amaranthus hybridus and Adansonia digitata leaves were analysed for their proximate and mineral elements (potassium, sodium, calcium and magnesium) using standard methods of food analysis. Ash contents of 19.72±0.5 and 10.63±0.2% for both samples revealed that they are good mineral source. 35.30±6.3 and 45.44±8.1% of carbohydrate concentrations obtained resulted in high energy values. Potassium has the highest concentration among the mineral elements analysed with 1133±4.50 and 892±3.10mg/100g, followed by calcium with 737±2.30 and 1042±6.20mg/100g for the leaves of Amaranthus hybridus and Adansonia digitata respectively. However, the ratio of sodium to potassium values obtained from the two leafy vegetables in this study indicated that they could possibly serve to reduce high blood pressure diseases in the human body. Nutrient density (ND) greater than 100% recorded for all the elements indicated that vegetables of our study can serve as source of supplement for these mineral elements.