Archives-December 

We are very happy to announce that from 10th June 2017, Ms. Pooja Khanna has joined the team of Elixir Editorial Advisory Board. He/She will carry a special responsibility for dealing with manuscripts based on Computer Science Engineering. The appointment of Ms. Pooja Khanna as member Editorial Advisory Board strengthens the links and will make it easier for prospective authors to establish contact with the journal.

Psychologists have identified personality variables as one of the most important factors related to physical illness. The period since 1950s till date, research has continued to show positive results relating illness to psychological factors and personality. Research in this area suggests that stress seems to affect some people more than it does to others, and researchers have looked for personality variables that might account for differential effects of stress. This study attempts to compare the neuroticism versus emotional stability scores of hypertensive and normotensive as well as male and female participants. The study adopted a 2 (hypertensives and normotensives) x 2 (males and females) factorial design. Two hundred and forty participants (120 chronic hypertensives and 120 normotensives) are selected from Gurgaon, Delhi. Out of 120 hypertensives, there were 60 males and 60 females. Similarly 60 healthy males and 60 healthy females not suffering from hypertension or any other disease were selected. The participants of all the four groups compared with respect to their scores on neuroticism versus emotional stability. The results indicate that hypertensives showed more score in all the dimensions of neuroticism compared to normotensives. It is also found that females have more depression and anxiety than males. They are more self-conscious and more vulnerable to stress compared to males. Males score high on anger, hostility and impulsive dimensions of the personality.

In multivariate sampling, the major interest is on the problem of estimation of several population characteristics which often make conflicting demands on the sampling procedure. In this type of survey, the best allocation for one item may not in general be the best for another. There is the need to come up with compromise solution in a survey with many characteristics under study. This paper focuses on comparing some techniques of optimum sample allocation which are Yates/Chatterjee, Booth and Sedransk and Vector Maximum Criterion (VMC) on five sets of real life data stratified into six strata and two variates with desired variances using: (i.) Method of maximum variances with fixed n and (ii.) arbitrary fixing of variances. The stratum sample size nh among the classes are obtained to ascertain the criterion that will produce the smallest n. Based on the set of data collected and used for the empirical study it was discovered that Vector Maximum Criterion (VMC), Booth and Sedransk are superior to Yates/Chatterjee.

The evolution of web 2.0 has made social media networks more prevalent. Forums, blogs, tweets and posts, have become an important media for internet users to share views. With the evolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP), sentiment analysis is being essentially used as a means to determine the attitude of a person with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity from these inputs. The attitude may be his or her judgment or evaluation, effective state mind or the intended emotional communication. As e-commerce is becoming increasingly popular, the number of customer reviews that a product receives grows rapidly, which is being encouraged by the merchants selling the products. For a popular product, the number of reviews can be in hundreds or even thousands. This paper describes the concepts of sentiment analysis from unstructured text, looking at why they are useful and what tools and techniques are available. It also focuses specifically on a novel feature based opinion extraction scheme demonstrated with key open-source tools and applications and the problems associated with opinion detection in social media have also been analyzed.

The study was carried out to find out the most serious problems faced by the teachers in overcrowded classes. The population of the study included 20, all the government girls’ schools at the secondary level in district Peshawar, Province of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa, Pakistan Close –ended questionnaires was the tool of the study, which was administered to teachers in order to get clear picture of the problems faced by them. The data were given both quantitative and qualitative treatment. The outcome of the study indicated that effective teaching was not possible in overcrowded classes and majority of the teachers were facing instructional, discipline, physical and evaluation problems. In order to solve these problems some implementable measures were made which suggested that government should make strict rules and policies regarding optimum students in classrooms and provide sufficient budget to education department for providing better facilities in schools.

A selective method for the fast determination of trace amounts of Pb (II)ions in water samples has been developed. method has been developed for preconcentration of Pb on organic-solution-processable functionalized-nano graphene (SPFGraphene) adsorben in the pH range 5.0–10.0, prior to its spectrophotometric determination, based on the oxidation of bromopyrogallol red at ? = 517 nm. This method makes it possible to quantitize Pb in the range of 4.2×10?9 to 2.3×10?5 M, with a detection limit (S/N = 3) of 1.42×10?9 M. This procedure has been successfully applied to determine the ultra trace levels of Pb in the environmental samples, free from the interference of some diverse ions. The precision, expressed as relative standard deviation of three measurements is better than 3.0%.

Broadband and Wireless are the most common adoption in the communication market during the past ten years. Users want to be able to access to multimedia applications, data and voice while still using wireless mobility. To do so a high data rate is required. Moreover, multicasting is a tool used in networking which allows a selected group of users to receive the same information, and it is particularly useful for multimedia traffic. Obviously the research on the possible techniques to obtain such connection is a challenging topic in the field of mobile communication.The technological advances in wireless communications have enabled the realization of various systems which enable us to optimally use various multimedia applications. It is envisioned that many of the future wireless systems will incorporate considerable signal processing intelligence in order to provide advanced services such as multimedia transmission and detection. In general, wireless channels are hostile media to communicate, due to substantial physical impediments, primary radio frequency interference and time varying nature of the channel. The need of providing universal wireless access at high data- rate (which is the aim of many emerging wireless applications) presents a major technological challenge, and meeting this challenge necessities the development of advanced signal processing techniques for multiple- access communications in non- stationary interference rich environments. In this paper we present advanced signal processing methodologies for Multiple Access Interference (MAI) suppression in multiuser communication environment, while considering the transmission over Rayleigh fading channel. We also considered the effect of Doppler shift. A new model for realization of Rayleigh fading channel has been proposed. The statistical tests performed on the proposed channel were found satisfactory.

This paper addresses an intelligent optimal control for a flexible robot arm that is driven by a permanent-magnet synchronous servo motor. An intelligent optimal control of robot arm with 5 axes with servo gripper is proposed by the instructions given through Android device (android app on smart phone). This proposal was addressed to fourth-year engineering students and combines knowledge from android java programming and robotic control to complete an automation project task. The educational robotic arm initially learns to pick up a randomly placed target from a target surface and move it to a predefined destination after which it repeats the contouring process under the presence of the target. This paper presents an off-line trajectory generation algorithm and, therefore, it possesses significant industrial implications, as no hardware changes are needed for its implementation. The proposed method has been experimented with Dexter ER-1 Robotic Arm for optimum project based learning.

A characterization and volumetric analysis of Olomoro field was carried out using data provided by Shell Petroleum Development Corporation in order to determine the reservoir lithology, structure properties and hydrocarbon in-place. The data provided were well logs, structural map and the seismic section of Olomoro field. The well logs utilized included gamma ray, resistivity, caliper, density, neutron and sonic logs. Through the gamma ray log, it was discovered that the interval under investigation had four porous and permeable zones or reservoir interval. The resistivity log revealed with exception of the first to the third reservoir layer of well 1, presence of hydrocarbon which was used to calculate resistivity of the formation and water. The water saturation was calculated which in turn was used to calculate the hydrocarbon saturation. The values derived were used to estimate the hydrocarbon in place within the depth of 3,429m and 4,053.84m for an area of 100km². These gave a total of 4.012 x 10⁹m³ or 2.5234 x 10¹⁰ barrel as the hydrocarbon in-place. It was observed through the structural map and the seismic section that the hydrocarbon trap is a structural trap created by two fault plains and a folded anticline.

The antibacterial activity of the ethyl acetate extracts of two marine sponges collected from Tuticorin gulf of mannar region was tested against six human pathogenic bacteria and five human pathogenic fungi using the agar disk diffusion method. Bacteria cultures, Vibrio cholarae, Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhi , Pseudomonas aeruginosa , Klebsiella pneumonia (Gram negative bacteria), Bacillus subtilus, Staphylococcus aureus (NCIM 2079). Sponge extracts of Aurora globostellata (Carter) and Spirastrella inconstans Var. moeandrina Dendy appeared to be quite promising due to their capacity to inhibit the growth of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and methicillin resistant strains Staphylococcus aureus and E.coli as well as a broad-spectrum activity against all the other bacteria. The highest activity was obtained for the ethyl acetate extract of Aurora globostellata (Carter) against the Gram-positive bacteria Klebsiella pnemoniae (inhibition zone 12.33±0.33 mm) and Salmonella typhi (14.00±0.57) and against C. albicans (12.66±0.66 mm), T. rubrum (12.33±0.33 mm) and Aspergillus flavus (14.33±0.33). This extract is currently undergoing further analysis to identify the active compounds. These promising results in relation with antibacterial and antifungal activity in vitro open the way for complementary investigation in order to purify and identify active molecules.