Archives-December 

This study aims to examine the response of female fashion shoppers towards the mall atmosphere. A total of 100 female students conveniently sampled at a higher learning institution in Federal Territory of Labuan, Malaysia, served as the sample. Results from regression analysis revealed that the mall atmospherics positively influence hedonic shopping value and approach behaviour among all female shopper fashion clusters. It seems that fashion forward shoppers are not responding any better than female shoppers on the low end of the fashion spectrum. This study produced evidence suggesting that store environment triggers affective reactions in customers. The paper rounds off with conclusions and an agenda for future research in this area.

Face recognition is major challenge and provides significant attention of research in the computer vision. In recent years, reliable automated face recognition has become a realistic target of biometrics research. This biometrics will provide identity and verification of the person. The objective of face recognition involves the extraction of different features of the human face from the face image which makes it different from the other persons. In this, we give a review on face recognition system and the various classifications of recognition methods. This paper will also contain the various techniques, like PCA, LDA etc, which are used in the recognition of the face.

Present study was carried out to develop and validate an instrument for measuring different factors affecting upon students’ success at higher educational level. Focus group discussions and extensive literature review was done in order to generate an item pool for the instrument. Initially 75 items were generated under ten dimensions namely: motivation, intellectual abilities, personality brought up, institutional environment, socio- economic background, family participation, peer group, influence of siblings, awareness about future goals and awareness about current trends in the subject. After qualitative item analysis, the items were reduced to 60 as 15 were found to be repetitive in nature. These 60 item statements were administered to 100 graduating students of public universities in Islamabad region. The data thus obtained was subjected to factor analysis. As a result ten subscales containing 45 items in total were constructed with Eigen value above 2.83. Split half reliability for both halves was expressed at .78 and .89. Psychometric properties demonstrate that SSHL is a valid and reliable instrument to be used in research studies related to students’ academic success at higher level.

Fault diagnosis research deals with real world problems in terms of plant efficiency, maintainability and reliability. Fault in process and manufacturing industries are crucial in order to improve production efficiency, quality of the product and the cost of production. This work is focused on the development of a fault diagnosis method for application to an actuator benchmark specifically designed for industrial fault diagnosis. The performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated on the DAMADICS benchmark problem.

A sound fiscal position is an essential pre-requisite for achieving macroeconomic stability and is a critical ingredient of sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction. Better fiscal management helps mobilize domestic savings, increase efficiency of resource allocation and achieve other worthwhile development goals. On the other hand, lax fiscal policy limits options open to the government for economic recovery, sustainable growth and poverty alleviation. The present study evaluates the fiscal situation in Pakistan and sheds light on its implications for Economic Growth and poverty reduction. Study finds that Pakistan economy have shown great resilience over the years against disastrous events. However, situation of poverty reduction is not satisfactory; Pakistan’s health and education indicators depict a dismal picture when compared with the countries with same level of development. As revenue generation efforts was only partially successful and Pakistan was unable to generate adequate revenues to meet expenditure. Consequently, successive governments have tried to reduce the deficit by reducing the development expenditure which hampered the growth process and resulted in a decline in human development indicators and increased the incidence of poverty.

In present investigation mycoflora from groundnut, soybean, sesame, safflower and sunflower was isolated by using different agar media. Total thirty fungi were isolated from these oilseeds and screened against different plant leaf extract and latex. It was found that, out of five oilseeds, soybean yielded ninteen fungi, fifteen fungi were found to be associated with sesame and safflower seed. On the other hand sunflower yielded only nine fungi. Aqueous extract of Eucalyptus angophoroides retarded the growth of Alternaria dianthicola, Curvularia pellescens, Fusarium oxysporum, Macrophomina phaseolina, Rhizopus stolonifer, Penicillium digitatum and Penicillium chrysogenum. The latex of Calotropis gigantia for Alternaria dianticola; Aloe vera for Curvularia lunata and Penicillium digitatum were found to be fungitoxic.

Nowadays, biodiesel is considered the most promising alternative fuel by the researchers due to its comparable properties with diesel fuel and also other socio-economic and environmental benefits .The investigation was conducted on a single cylinder four stroke variable compression ratio diesel engine fuelled with pure diesel, B10% (5% Methanol+ 5% Rice bran oil + 90% Diesel), 20% (5% Methanol+15% Rice bran oil +80% Diesel) and 30% (5% Methanol+25% Rice bran oil+ 70% Diesel) at different loads, at different compression ratios and at different injection pressures. The water heat loss, exhaust heat loss and unaccounted heat loss decreased with the increase of biodiesel percentage in the blends. The heat balance was in respect of useful work (HBP), heat lost through cylinder jacket water (HJW), heat lost through exhaust gasses (HGas), heat carried away by the lubricating oil and other losses (Hrad). This research work provides an in-depth analysis of the engine heat losses in different subsystems of the engine. Finally, heat energy balancing of the engine has been done by showing all energy flows in and out of the engine.

The entrepreneurship is one of the factors accelerating economic growth. There is a strong relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth. Many of the earlier studies had established this relationship and had constructed theoretical models based on the empirical findings (Casson, 1990 and Livesay 1995, Goel 1997, Glancey and McQuaid, 2000,). Access to finance is one of the factors determining entrepreneurship. The small and medium enterprises in developing countries face significant barriers to finance. The small and medium enterprises are constrained by gaps in the financial system such as high administrative costs, high collateral requirements and lack of experience within financial intermediaries. Increased access to finance for small and medium enterprises can improve economic conditions in developing countries by fostering innovation, macro-economic resilience, and GDP growth. Many studies had identified the access to finance as the major factor determining entrepreneurship. The World Bank and the International Finance Cooperation (IFC) rank economies according to their ease of doing business. In this framework, the ability for business to get credit is an important criterion. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Entrepreneurship Framework Condition also highlights the availability of financial resources for small, medium enterprises in the form of debt and equity, as one of the key factors for stimulating and supporting entrepreneurial activity. The World Bank Enterprise Surveys reveal that, in low-income countries, on an average 43% of businesses with 20 to 99 employees’ rate, access to finance or cost of finance as a major constraint to current operations. In high-income countries, only 11% of businesses of the same size rate, access to finance as a constraint. In this backdrop, an attempt was made to analyze the impact of financial inclusion on entrepreneurship in India.

Marine organisms are rich sources of new, biologically active compounds. Phytoplanktons have traditionally been used as foods. Algal powder as a food supplement for prevention or therapy of bacterial fish disease. Recently, much attention has been paid to the anticancer activity of Phytoplankton. Thus, we have screened organic extracts of Phytoplankton for their anticancer activity against human cancer cell line, and selected Skeletonema costatum as a candidate for use in treatment. The ethanolic extracts of Skeletonema costatum (EESC) showed cytotoxic activity against human cervical adenocarcinoma cell line, (HeLa). The IC50 of EESC against the HeLa cells was 250 µg/ml. Treatment of HeLa cells with various concentrations of EESC resulted in growth inhibition and induction of apoptosis in a dose-dependent manner. These results strongly suggest that EESC may be a potential candidate in the field of anticancer drug discovery.

Mathematics is typically one of the subjects with which many students struggle. To improve mathematics achivement, it is helpful for students to gain proficiency in mathematics vocabulary. The importance of developing vocabulary as a means of improving comprehension has long been understood by educators and researchers. Students who are exposed to academic vocabulary are usually more successful in their content area classes; yet, the relative effectiveness of vocabulary strategies to build content area vocabulary comprehension in mathematics at the secondary level has had limited research. In this study, two vocabulary strategies were compared in a six-week long investigation to determine the relative effectiveness of each strategy on students’ content area vocabulary development in an Algebra II class - a Modified Cloze/Maze procedure and a Concept of a Definition word map. The research findings conducted from this study are relevant to all content area teachers, in particular math teachers at the secondary level.