Archives-December 

Entire world is leading towards development in the phase of globalization. Progressive nations are busy in striving to attain a better wellbeing and achieving more equitable distribution of wealth within and among generations but this development had raised issues like global warming, deforestation, changing weather and exhaustion of natural resources. To endure a sustainable wellbeing and a superior equitable distribution of wealth through time, the political will, social attitude, and well-defined economic goals have to be effectively integrated. Hence framing those practices which would endeavor sustainable economic growth but not at the cost of exhaustion of natural resources and environment. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to implement green marketing practices for achieving sustainable environment and economic growth. In other words, achieving sustainability is not possible, and will not be successful over the long run unless it takes into account all the relevant factors, including the environment. The area of study is Dal Lake. Dal Lake is a Himalayan urban lake, famous for its pristine beauty which attracts thousands of tourists every year. The Dal Lake is also one of only very few water bodies in the world having permanent human settlements within its confines. It is an important source of livelihood for above 60,000 local people residing in 125 hamlets, 602 houseboats and 272 doongas (smaller boats for ferrying people and goods) though the services like tourism, water sports, fishery, cultivation of vegetables on the ‘floating gardens, providing a variety of products like lotus seeds and rhizomes, vegetables and fruits etc. Dal Lake has historically been the center of Kashmiri civilization and has played a major role in the economy of Kashmir through its attraction of tourists as well as its utilization as a source of food and water. Preservation of world famous Dal Lake hence, is need of period. Thus incorporating green marketing practices with in the vicinity of Dal Lake can function as cradle for its conservation and sustainable environment.

In this study aqueous extract of the leaves of Aerva lanata Linn., Calotropis gigantea Linn. and Elaeocarpus ganitrus Roxb were screened for the haemolytic activity towards human erythrocytes. The haemolytic activity was performed by modified spectroscopic method at four different concentrations (125, 250, 500, 1000 ?g/ml). The haemolytic activity of the different extracts was found in the following order: C. gigantea > A. lanata : C. gigantea (1 :1) > C. gigantea: E. ganitrus (1 : 1) > A. lanata : C. gigantea : E. ganitrus (1 : 1 : 1) > A. lanata : E. ganitrus (1 : 1) > A. lanata. However, all the extracts alone and in combination with each other exhibited very low haemolytic activity. E. ganitrus did not exhibit any haemolytic activity at any dilution. Hence, they can be considered as safe to human erythrocytes.

This paper examines the usefulness of human resources training and development on organizational efficiency. The need was informed following the fact that many organizations have over the years neglected the important value and usefulness of training and developing their employees and that have continued to affect organizational efficiency, performance and level of productivity. It was revealed that any organization that wants to remain in business, develop and achieve its organizational goals and objectives must not only employ qualified, skilled, professional and experienced staff in junior, middle and corporate management levels of the organization and in every department, but must also equipped the employees through training, re-training and development from time to time as the need arises to keep them abreast in the globalization trend and with the best technique in performing their duties. This is to ensure efficiency, increase performance and high level of productivity for the achievement of the vision/mission statements of the organization.

Ant colony optimization is unique convergence of Swarm Intelligence and Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence. Ants are social insects with limited skills that live in colonies able to solve complex problems. The intelligence of the global society arises from self organization mechanisms, based on the indirect communication between individuals through pheromones. The Symmetric Travelling Salesman Problem here presented is a typical case that requires a self organization type of algorithm, in order to cope with the problem dynamics. The simulation results show how the ant colony optimization is able to solve the different possible routing cases. The innovation in this entire proposal (paper) is that an attempt has been made to improve the existing ant colony algorithm and then apply to the problem set. Ant colony optimization (ACO) has been successfully applied to solve combinatorial optimization problems, but it still has some drawbacks such as stagnation behavior, long computational time, and premature convergence. These drawbacks are more evident when the problem size increases. In this paper, I have reported the analysis of using a reduced/lower pheromone trail bound and a dynamic updating rule for the heuristic parameters based on entropy to improve the efficiency of ACO in solving Traveling Salesman Problems (TSPs). TSPs are NP-hard problem. Even though the problem itself is simple, when the number of city is large, the search space will become extremely large and it becomes very difficult to find the optimal solution in a short time. From my simulations, it can be found that the proposed algorithm indeed has superior search performance over traditional ACO algorithms do.

Plant cell culture provides an alternative means for producing secondary metabolites. In this study, experiments were carried out to study the effect of cholesterol as precursor and salicylic acid and sodium nitroprusside as elicitors on the enhancement of diosgenin production in the cell suspension culture of Momordica charantia. Callus was induced from seeds when inoculated on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium supplemented with various concentrations and combinations of auxins and cytokinins to initiate cell suspension culture. The maximum diosgenin recovery was estimated in 6 week old callus (7.54 mg/gdw) which was significantly superior then the rest of time treatment and the treatment doses of salicylic acid (0.05 mM) gave highest diosgenin recovery (8.98 mg/gdw) in comparison to Sodium nitroprusside (8.53 mg/gdw) and control (7.61 mg/gdw).

Nowadays, most of managers play an important and essential role in obtaining the competitive advantages, also, they have realized going along with strategic purposes of organization. Moreover, knowledge management became as a competitive obligation in organizations. In spite the fact that a competitive obligation, if leaders cannot provide appropriate infrastructures and necessary prerequisite for the layout of knowledge management system, it will result in human resources repulsion and financial resources loss. This research is based on investigating the effect of empowering on accepting knowledge management system in petrochemical economic special zone in Mahshahr. In this research, Statistic society consists of 250 operation, middle and top managers of PET. Zone which is based on Kukran sampling formula, volume of sample was determined 158 people. The method that was applied in this research is descriptive – measurable. The results which obtained from this study indicate that all four hypotheses have been confirmed.

Pores and organic matter take a multitude of forms in soil and their characteristics change in space and time following a change in tillage practices as a new “steady state” is approached. Information on the variation with depth (stratification) in the characteristics of pores and organic matter and the rates of changes in these characteristics are vital to interpreting the short- and long-term impacts of the reduction of using conventional tillage on the productivity and hydrology of agricultural soils. This information is also of value in estimating the effect of a reduction in tillage on the sequestration of carbon in agricultural soils. The influence of tillage on bulk density, macro porosity and organic matter content was found to be documented more extensively than the effects on pore size distribution, soil organic matter fractions and their interactions at different soil depths. Many of the reports documenting tillage-induced changes in soil porosity and organic matter were based on measurements at a specific time after initiating the tillage trial. The potential advantages of conservation tillage in organic farming are reduced erosion, greater macro porosity in the soil surface due to larger number of earthworms, more microbial activity and carbon storage, less run-off and leaching of nutrients, reduced fuel use and faster tillage. Conversion from conventional (CT) to no-tillage (NT) resulted in an immediate change in the placement of aboveground crop residue and the reduced fragmentation of the soil matrix may also slow the mineralization of SOC.

Assessment of land response to certain land uses is necessary to reach the sustainable land management. In this study Almagra model from MicroLEIS DSS and remote sensing technology were used to determine the suitability of land for main crops in an arid region east of Tehran (Iran). The weighted average of land and soil characteristic were obtained from representative soil profiles in each land mapping unit, through digital classification of satellite images and entered to the model. Land suitability maps for each crop were presented as thematic maps by integrating soil map with determined land suitability classes in GIS. The results showed that %55 of the area has moderate to high suitability for wheat, alfalfa, maize and melon. Salinity, alkalinity and soil texture are considered as the main soil restrictions for studied crops in this area. According to the obtained results, the priority of the selected crops should be considered as wheat, alfalfa/ melon and maize, respectively. Application of remote sensing technology accompany with land suitability models helped  to enhance the abilities of this model by both saving the data compilation time  and generating georeferenced data to overlay with other information layers and spatialization in GIS.

Language is an important medium of communication. Keeping in mind the importance of language in the mind making process, this study aims to examine the language of e-print media advertisements of Pakistan. The linguistic analysis has been done at semantic, phonological, morphological and syntactic level. The practices along with the functions of these linguistic devices have been analyzed. E-print media advertisements from various domains have been selected for the present study. Qualitative Discourse Analytic Approach to Text was used to analyze the linguistic devices. Through the linguistic analysis, it has been observed that language of advertisements has a very innovative and peculiar form which is unique, fascinating and memorable. Despite the fact that language of advertisements is breaking the set rules of language, it appears to be very attractive and contributing towards the success of advertisements which ultimately lead towards the sale of the product. It has been found that the language of advertisements is very rich area to be investigated by the linguists.

Table of contents for the month of January 2017