Archives-August 2014

Every year thousands of students leave the regular formal educational institutions in Kenya, but they cannot progress to higher levels of formal education. Despite past investments in Kenya’s Technical, Industrial, Vocational Education and Training (TIVET) subsector, many school leavers fail to access TIVET. This is because the subsector is said to be facing many challenges related to wastage of resources, irrelevant training and turnover of personnel. Performance contracting has been acclaimed as an effective and promising means of improving the performance of public enterprises as well as government departments. The government of Kenya introduced performance contract signing in the year 2004. The performance contracts were aimed at improving resource utilization in public institutions among other objectives. This study sought to establish the perceptions of Kenyan tutors in Technical Institutes in Rift Valley about the impact of performance contracts as a paradigm shift on the utilization of teaching and learning resources. The study adopted a survey strategy. The study population comprised of tutors, Heads of Department and Principals of randomly selected public Technical Institutes in Kenya. The stratified random sampling technique was applied in the selection of the study sample. This involved the grouping of tutors into 8 strata according to the available departments. Thereafter the proportionate random sampling technique was applied to get an equal proportion of respondents from each stratum. The saturated sampling technique was used to sample the heads of department and principals. Questionnaires and interviews were used to collect data. This entailed the supplying of questionnaires to tutors, heads of department and principals of the sampled Technical Institutes. Interviews were conducted with principals of the sampled institutions.

Most of the organizations are running their applications in cloud due to reliability, scalability, high performance, low band width and trust on cloud service provider(CSP). The cloud service providers provide the services to the registered cloud users on payment basic across the glove. The cloud services are basically categorized as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS . The services are available to the users depending on cloud deployment and the SLA(service level agreements) between the service providers and the users. SLAs gives a transparent view to the cloud users which includes the delivery ability of a service provider, the performance target of the user’s requirement, the scope of guaranteed availability of the cloud services The main objective of this paper is to provide a clear idea about the cloud service level agreements and the cloud computing models.

Materials management is a tool to optimize performance in meeting customer service requirements at the same time adding to profitability by minimizing costs and making the best use of available resources. The main objective of the study was to assess the role of materials management on organizational performance. Specifically, the study intended to assess how inventory control systems and lead time affect organizational performance. The empirical analysis of the study focused mainly on the New Kenya Cooperative Creameries, Eldoret, Kenya, being one of the largest and the oldestdairy company in East and Central Africa. The target population of the study was 56 employees of New KCC Ltd. Eldoret. A sample of 49 respondents was selected from this population using the stratified random sampling technique, where 7 departments, which directly deal with materials, were selected which include: production, Purchasing, quality Control, Warehouse/store, Human Resource Development, Finance and audit and physical Distribution departments. Data was collected through a structured questionnaire, consisting mainly of closed ended and open-ended questions. The data was analyzed through descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, median and percentages. Results showed that there was significant increase in organizational performance as a result of inventory control system involvement. Further, results showed that lead time was highly significant to organizational performance through acquiring and delivering the needed materials within the shortest time possible. The study advocated that a lot of emphasis need to be directed to materials management in dairy companies in order to achieve significant cost savings, reduction in wastes and production costs and to achieve increase in profitability and product quality, consequently improving the organizational performance. The study recommended that dairy companies adopt the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT), use of proper codes in all materials, and the employees be trained on the use of inventory control systems.

In the present era real time security is of prime priority for any organization, corporate institutions, firms and various confederacy agencies. The idea is to design and develop an exhaustive real-time security system that will provide multifarious verification levels for enhanced security.The system uses a series of confirmation phases which includes identification, authentication, access granting and information updating and logging.In this project various components like microcontroller, Radio frequency Identification technology, GSM technology, and access control system will be integrated so as to achieve a real-time security system. This project is more secure than any other security system because the administrator will be provided with the logging information about the access moreover the passwords generated by the microcontroller will be random and hence cannot be tracked thus making the system not possible to hack

A two-dimensional laminar unsteady MHD free convective heat and mass transfer flow past a vertical porous plate immersed in a porous medium has been studied numerically in presence of chemical reaction, heat generation and variable suction. The governing partial differential equations are reduced to a system of self-similar equations using the similarity transformations. The resultant equations are then solved numerically using the Runge-Kutta method along with shooting technique. The effects of governing physical parameters on velocity, temperature and concentration as well as skin-friction coefficient, Nusselt number and Sherwood number are computed and presented in graphical and tabular forms. Comparisons with previously published work are performed and the results are found to be in excellent agreement.

In last few decades computer scientist has started taking interest in the quantum computing in order to resolve some of the problems in the recognizable classical computers. Relevant efforts have been put into the practice for two instructions: the basic assumptions behind the quantum mechanics has a residential affect, on the other hand a series of project has been used to show the series of implementation of all these algorithms. This will move the quantum from area of assumptions’ to the actual level. The relationship between these two areas is generally the feasible algorithms for quantum, which settle down their model of quantum circuit.

This paper has presented a review on different image segmentation techniques. The image segmentation; segments a given image into separate regions and objects. It is widely used in various vision applications like face detections, motion detection etc. The overall objective of this paper is to review various techniques of image segmentation. The short comings of image segmentation techniques will also be evaluated. This paper ends up with the analytical solution to overcome the problems of the existing techniques.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of instruction on the pragmatic use of Iranian learners on the speech act of request. The benefits of instruction on learners’ production and awareness of speech acts is well documented ( Alcón and Martínez-Flor, 2008). The subjects of this study were 40 upper- intermediate students at Arian Language Institute in Gorgan, Iran. They were learning English in an EFL context. The data were collected using discourse completion task (DCT) tests following Kasper and Dahl (1991: 9) formats. The data, then were rated using two native speakers. Hudson et al.’s (1995) rating scale was used to train the raters. In order to analyze the data t test was performed with mean level of students’ scores as dependent variable and instruction as a grouping variable. The findings revealed that Iranian learners performed significantly better in experimental group for speech act of request.

Grain shape quality traits of twenty (20) rice genotypes were studied in order to understand the effects of drought stress on quality traits of rice. The result of Analysis of Variance clearly indicates that genotypes significantly differ for studied grain quality traits under both for normal as well as drought prone environments, except grain breadth /thickness without bran under stress condition. Higher heritability estimates for all quality traits under both environments indicate that these characters are controlled by multiple genes. Results showed that grain length was positively correlated with length to width ratio (0.863* and 0.668*) and negatively correlated with grain width (-0.614** and -0.313**) and grain breadth (-0.321**and -0.030ns) under both normal and stress conditions respectively. Grain width was positively correlated with grain breadth (0.711** and 0.486**) and negatively correlated with length to width ratio (-0.926* and -0.910*) under both conditions respectively. Grain width was highly correlated with yield per plant (0.386** and 0.315**) under both, normal and drought stress respectively. It shows that reduction in grain width has direct effect on grain yield. Under normal condition, yield was positively correlated with grain width (0.386**) and grain breadth (0.552*) indicating that grain width and grain breadth should be considered while screening high yielding genotypes under normal condition and grain width should be considered for drought stres

In this paper, fatigue damage accumulation were studied using three methods i.e. Miner, new non-linear model and experimental method. The prediction of fatigue lifetimes based on Miner method are uneconomic and non-conservative respectively. However satisfactory predictions were obtained by applying the non-linear damage rule (present model) for 5052-H34 aluminum alloy. Many shortcomings of the Miner methods are related to their inability to take into account the surface treatment effect.