Archives-J 

In the fashion business, privately owned brick-and-mortar fashion boutiques in the United States face the challenge of competing with online retailers who usually have low overheads and inventories. The knowledge and awareness of the changing marketing landscapes responsible for the decline in the survival rate of traditional or brick-and-mortar fashion boutiques may be essential to traditional and online entrepreneurs, to increase adaptability and business sustainability. Grounded in the general systems theory, the research conducted through the invocation of a qualitative multiple case study, entailed the exploration of strategies used by successful brick-and-mortar fashion boutique owners in contending with the online retailers. Interviews constituted the means for data collection and involved 5 brick-and-mortar fashion boutique owner participants, who operated retail fashion businesses in the southeast region of the United States. The successful existence of the business for more than 5 years, while participation criteria in the study, also indicated merit in studying success in traditional fashion retailing. The primary data from interviews were analyzed and triangulated with credible secondary sources such as information and reports from the U. S. Small Business Administration, U. S. Census Bureau, and fashion industry sources. From a thematic analysis of the interview data, the three themes that emerged from the data analysis were the importance of business success of marketing strategies, cognizance of fashion trends, and the role of customer preference in economic success. The potential knowledge from the utilization of the study results may serve to increase the success rates of traditional and online fashion startups and possibly endow these businesses with the adaptabilities and strategies capabilities in the inevitable greater transformation to an online business world.

Work on global warming is expected to have significant impacts on conditions affecting agriculture, including temperature, carbon dioxide, glacial run off, precipitation and the interaction of these elements has been reviewed in this article. To a large extent, the overall effect of climate change will depend on the balance among these factors. Assessment of the effects of global climate changes on agriculture will help to properly anticipate and adapt farming systems to maximize agricultural production. There is exponential rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was 270 ppm during pre-industrial period and human activities have added more than 100 ppm and it has reached 380 ppm with the rate of rise as high as 1.8 ppm per year. With this exponential rise in carbon dioxide, its concentration will double by the middle of 21st century. The effects of an increase in carbon dioxide would be higher on C3 plants (such as wheat) than on C4 plants (such as maize), as the former is more susceptible to carbon dioxide deficit. Increased CO2 leads to fewer stomata development in case of plants which results in less water usage. It is estimated that under optimum conditions of temperature and humidity, the yield increase could reach 36 % if the levels of CO2 are doubled. A large number of stress responsive genes have been cloned and sequenced from a number of crop plants. A common feature of many stress induced proteins is that their transcripts are induced not only by stress but also by (ABA) abscisic acid. It implies that there is a general role for ABA in the signal transduction pathway i. e. from sensing of the environmental stress and thereby leading to gene expression.

In this paper we investigate the problem of separation of human voice from a mixture of voice and different music instruments. The human voice may be a part of singing voice in a song or it may be a part of some news broadcasted by a channel and it contains background music. The final outcome of this work is a file containing only vocals. In our approach we consider stereo audio for separation. We process the signal in time frequency domain. In our method of blind source separation we processed the input stereo audio file in the form of frames, windowed them and then applied discrete Fourier transform (DFT) on signal. Then the signal is masked for de-mixing purpose using time frequency filters and non-zero DFT coefficients that are estimated as a part vocals are selected and signal is reconstructed by overlap add (OLA) method to get the final output signal containing only vocals.

L1-minimization solves the minimum L1-norm solution to an underdetermined linear system. It has recently received much attention, mainly motivated by the new compressive sensing theory that shows that under certain conditions an L1-minimization solution is also the sparsest solution to that system. In this paper an L1 minimization algorithm is proposed for solution of Dual Tone Multiple Frequ-ency (DTMF) reconstruction problems. In the method of Compressive sensing, a raw signal or image can be regarded as a vector which can be represented as a linear combination of certain basis functions. The discrete cosine transform (DCT) has been used as the basis function in the proposed algorithm. This algorithm considers only 500 samples and reconstructs the original signals exactly without any distortion. The compressed DTMF signal is estimated using DTMF decoder with the help of Goertzel algorithm, the popularity of which lies in the small number of points at which the DFT is estimated. We compare with the existing algorithms such as FFT and Goertzel algorithms. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

This paper deals with the geotechnical investigation of Geopathic Stress Zone. The energy from the earth at specific locations that have the ability to change the normal functioning of human system is called Geopathic Stress. In Structures, soil is an important component; change in Geotechnical Properties of the soil affects the stability of the structure. Experimental investigations on soil at Geopathic Stress Zone reveal that there is change in the properties of soil, due to such energies emitted by the earth, 30% of accidents take place. Investigations carried out by the researchers at mysterious accidental spots on Mumbai-Pune expressway has confirmed accidents occur due to existence of Geopathic stress, but there is no geotechnical investigations carried out on such accidental spots. This paper aims at finding out the change in soil properties due to presence of Geopathic Stress Zone. The conclusions are justified by carrying out different tests on soil such as, “determination of water-content, specific gravity, density, plastic and liquid limits, conductivity, electrical Resistivity and pH value.” The variation in the values of the Geotechnical Properties of soil at Geopathic stress zone is remarkable.

The various processing treatments like soaking, germination, boiling, steaming, roasting and fermentation are known to affect the chemical composition and improve the nutritive value of foods. Hence the present study was planned with the objectives to optimize the processing conditions and to study the effect of optimized conditions on total polyphenol content, antioxidant activity and FTIR spectra of kodo millet. The optimum time for soaking, boiling, steaming, roasting, germination and fermentation was determined by analysing the changes in moisture content, equivalent diameter, bulk density, reducing sugar and total sugar content. The optimally processed kodo millet was analysed for its total polyphenol content, antioxidant activity and FTIR spectra for identification of unknown polyphenolic compounds. Result revealed that kodo millet could be soaked for 76-78 hours, boiled/steamed for 25-30 minutes, roasted for 15-20 minutes, fermented for 48 hours at 37°C and germinated for 72 hours at 37°C and 50% RH optimally. The various processing methods significantly affected the total polyphenol content. Among the processed samples, the highest polyphenol content and antioxidant activity was noted in germinated and boiled grain respectively. FTIR spectral analysis revealed the presence of polyphenolic compounds especially with mono substituted benzene ring in all processing conditions.

A geoelectric investigation involving sixteen vertical electric soundings with maximum current electrode spacing of 650m was carried out at Obiaruku, Delta State, Nigeria and environs. This was aimed at determining the effect of seasonal variations of aquifer characterization and resistivity data. The resistivity data got from the survey is interpreted by curve matching and computer iteration techniques where the geological model parameters and curves were obtained. Three to six geological layers were observed within the whole locations. The results show that there was a slight difference in the apparent resistivity values between wet and dry seasons which could be attributed to the degree of wetness (especially the topsoil) experienced during the rainy season. The aquifers, number of layers, curve type and shape, layer thicknesses are approximately the same values for both rainy and dry seasons.

The effect of traffic density on soil along Nwanga-Ekoi- Mfamosing road Cross River State, Nigeria, was carried out. The spatial variability of pollutant concentration in high traffic density areas exerts an importance influence on some road deposited sediment characteristics due to activities of people and vehicles. The movement of vehicles from one point to another may spread contaminants on the soil. The main processes of the movement of vehicles can spread contaminants on the soil which may include wearing of car parts (Exhaust pipes, tires, brakes, engines block, leaking of oil and corrosion metal parts). These processes may release heavy metals on the surface of the soil along roadsides. The heavy metals were analyzed using Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry (AAS) and paired sampled T-test method were used for the statistical analysis of soil along High Traffic Density (HTD) and Low Traffic Density (LTD) sites. The results from AAS revealed that heavy metals concentration in HTD were Calcium 0.041, Copper 0.037, Iron 0.037, Manganese 0.086, Nickel 0.033, Lead 0.207 and Zinc 0.11 respectively. Heavy metals concentration in LTD were Calcium 0.007, Copper 0.008, Iron 0.007, Manganese 0.007, Nickel 0.005, Lead 0.003 and Zinc 0.003 respectively. The result for the ANOVA analysis shows significant difference of (F=9.1, p<0.05) between HTD sites and LTD sites. The paired sample t-test also indicates significant difference of (t6=2.9, p<0.05).This implies that heavy metals concentration in HTD sites were higher than heavy metals concentration in LTD sites. Therefore, high traffic density sites increases soil heavy metals concentration along roadside.

High Performance Concrete (HPC) is that concrete which meets special performance and uniformity requirements that cannot always be achieved by conventional materials, normal mixing, placing and curing practices. The grade of concrete selected was control mix (CM) of M80. Investigation was carried out on mixes of partial replacement of cement with metakaolin (MK) 10% and silica fume (SF) 15%. Regression analysis equations were developed for each type of curing based on compressive strength and age of concrete (7, 14, 28 and 56 days). In this study the effect of various curing conditions on compressive strength of HPC were studied. The various curing conditions adopted were normal curing (NC), wet cover curing (WCC), membrane curing (MC) and accelerated curing (AC). Normal water curing includes immersion of concrete cubes in water. Wet cover curing includes covering concrete with burlap. Membrane curing includes application of wax coating on concrete cubes. Accelerated curing includes application of heat at ordinary pressure. The overall finding of this study suggests that concrete should be cured by water curing to achieve a better compressive strength.

This research project sought to determine the effects of financial planning on the performance of transport and logistics firms in Mombasa County. The general objective was to establish the determinants of performance. The independent variables under consideration were: fund allocation, external funding, fund control and budgeting. These independent variables created the basis for the specific objectives under review as follows: to find out how the fund allocation influences the decision to growth and profitability; to establish how the degree of external funding influences the decision of firms to growth and profitability; to find out how budgeting affects the decision to growth and profitability; and to find out how fund control the decision to growth and profitability. Transport firms in Mombasa have grown in importance in the economy of the region during the last couple of decades. Although transport firms are growing speedily they face a range of challenges which work against their progress. Lack of financial knowledge is been a major setback to transport firms’ progress. Inefficient financial planning may damage transport firms profitability and, as a result, complicate the difficulties of transport firms’ growth. Conversely, efficient financial planning will help transport firms to strengthen their profitability and, as a result, these difficulties can partly be overcome. This study is motivated by the need to determine the financial planning practices used by transport firms and their impact on the financial performance of the transport firms. The target population of this study will be 102 transport firms operating in the Mombasa County. A modified Liker scale questionnaire will be developed divided into three parts. A pilot study will be carried out to refine the instrument. The quality and consistency of the study will further be assessed using Cronbach's alpha. Data analysis will be performed on a PC computer using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS Version 22) for Windows. Analysis will be done using frequency counts, percentages, means and standard deviation, regression, correlation and the information generated will be presented in form of graphs, charts and table.