Archives-March 2018

It is important to make structure safe and secure for inhabitants till its useful life. Being part of construction designing it becomes upmost important to design structure safe and stable. A complete structure consisting of various element like beam, column, foundation as well as slabs one such member slab commonly considered as plate has studied over here for the change in behaviour with respect to thickness. Initially a plate is analyse using classical cosine series expansion method manually, it results is check with computational model analysis so as to find out % error. As the error is in permissible limit so further analysis work is done computationally using STAAD-PRO V8i software for 7 cases with a thickness of 5mm to 250mm of plate. On the basis of analysis related to bending moment, shear stresses, deflections, principal stresses comparative observation tables are prepare. Result shows that in thin plate forces are carried in the form of principal stresses and deflections are high. While in thick plate moment and shear stresses are predominant but deflection is very less. This study shows where to concentrate while designing the plate for practical purpose.

The progression and multiplications in Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) has prompted movement of learning past the customary classroom Face-to-Face (F2F) to various sorts of adapting, for example, Distance Flexible Learning (DFL), Electronic Learning (eLearning) and to all over and whenever known as Mobile Learning (mLearning). [1] The broad utilization of versatile innovations has brought about expanding enthusiasm for portable learning. [3] In this paper we investigate the difficulties the cell phones has on learning and further talks about the outline and execution of android based understudy learning apparatuses which is worked to upgrade learning . The proposed framework has numerous learning devices, for the most part the auspicious notice for various modules, for example, exercises due dates, exam alarm and discourse notice. Incorporated with MOODLE (course administration framework) to upgrade learning, it additionally has instructional exercise apparatus for understudies/guides to decrease paper work and superfluous workload on the mentors. Other learning instruments gave to students are exam timetable, college news, exchange gathering, college and general data benefit. This proposed framework's devices gives greater adaptability, portability and advantageous than eLearning mode which rises routine consideration regarding self-learning modules which may support student's abilities in learning.

Internet of things is one of the rapidly growing fields for delivering social and economic benefits for emerging and developing economy. The field of IOT is expanding its wings in all the domains like medical, industrial, transportation, education, mining etc. Now-a-days with the advancement in integrated on chip computers like Arduino, Raspberry pi the technology is reaching the ground level with its application in agriculture and aquaculture. Water quality is a critical factor while culturing aquatic organisms. It mainly depends on several parameters like dissolved oxygen, ammonia, pH, temperature, salt, nitrates, carbonates etc. The quality of water is monitored continuously with the help of sensors to ensure growth and survival of aquatic life. The sensed data is transferred to the aqua farmer mobile through cloud. As a result preventive measures can be taken in time to minimize the losses and increase the productivity.

Since the number of server providing the facilities for the user is usually more than one, the authentication protocols for multi-server environment are required for practical applications. Most of password authentication schemes for multi-server environment are based on static ID, so the adversary can use this information to trace and identify the user's requests. It is unfavorable to be applied to special applications, such as e-commerce. In this paper, we develop a secure dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme to achieve user's anonymity. The proposed scheme only uses hashing functions to implement a robust authentication scheme for the multi-server environment. It provides a secure method to update password without the help of third trusted party. The proposed scheme does not only satisfy all requirements for multi-server environment but also achieve efficient computation. Besides, our scheme provides complete functionality to suit with the real applications.

Due to the Internet’s sheer size, complexity, and various routing policies, it is difficult if not impossible to locate the causes of large volumes of BGP update messages that oc-cur from time to time. To provide dependable global data delivery we need diagnostic tools that can pinpoint the ex-act connectivity changes. In this paper we describe an al-gorithm, called MVSChange, that can pin down the ori-gin of routing changes due to any single link failure or link restoration. Using a simplified model of BGP, called Sim-ple Path Vector Protocol (SPVP), and a graph model of the Internet, MVSChange takes as input the SPVP update messages collected from multiple vantage points and accu-rately locates the link that initiated the routing changes. We provide theoretical proof for the the correctness of the design.

The purpose of this study was to find out the effect of strategic management practices on customer retention in Commercial Banks in Kenya. Specific objective formed the basis of the study namely: To establish the effect of, strategic corporate governance practice on customer retention in the commercial banks in Kenya and the theory used was Agency theory. The total number of banks registered with the Central Bank of Kenya is forty-three (43) hence a survey method was used. The questionnaires were distributed to all banks and the managers and the department heads were requested to fill in. The total numbers issued was 123 questionnaires and 117 were returned, giving a response rate of 86%. The questionnaires were coded and fed into the SPSS. The data was then analyzed using descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation. Inferential statistics was used including ANOVA, correlation, multiple regression method. Qualitative data was used to put into categories based on themes that would be aligned to research objectives and would be integrated in the discussion of the findings. The findings of the study show that strategic corporate governance practice were significant on Customer Retention. Therefore, it was concluded that to increase customers the strategic management practices must be adopted. Banks should ensure that strategic corporate governance practice become their watchword. This will enhance efficiency and profitability and encourage an environment for the cultivation of other attributes of corporate governance. It should also promote accountability, transparency, healthy ethics, integrity and participation of stakeholders. Internal discipline and a strong operational agenda rooted in corporate governance, strong leadership, strengthened by moral questions bordering on integrity to carry out functions as appropriate should be put in place. This study gave managers invaluable; insights on how to plan allocate and enhance capabilities in ways that allowed them to achieve commercial banks objectives in dynamic and competitive environment using strategic management practices and customer retention strategy. Therefore, since strategic management practice could be of value, they were well advised to pursue customer retention as well as at a suitable level of strategic management practices

The role and importance of Mutual fund institutions is widely appreciated and acknowledged and the Kenyan government has increased emphasis on fund mobilization through legislations which gave birth to Mutual funds. Despite the significant role played by Mutual funds in Kenya, their growth is relatively low. This research seeks to assess the effect of financial innovation on growth of mutual fund institutions listed in NSE. The research adopted a descriptive survey research design. The study targeted 61 funds/ units operating under 18 listed fund institutions in 2016. The sampling technique used is stratified random sampling to ensure that each fund type is proportionately represented in the sample. Secondary and primary tools were used to supplement data collected. Reliability and validity tests were conducted to test the quality of data collected. Inferential statistics were done to identify the relationship between financial innovation and growth of mutual fund institutions listed in NSE. The study results indicate financial innovation has significant and positive influence on the growth mutual fund institutions listed in NSE. The study indicated that 17.8% explains the relationship between financial innovation and growth of mutual fund institutions linked with Return on investment while 46.3% explains financial innovation and growth of mutual fund institutions linked with assets under management

A distributed adaptive opportunistic routing scheme for multihop wireless ad hoc networks is proposed. The proposed scheme utilizes a reinforcement learning framework to opportunis-tically route the packets even in the absence of reliable knowledge about channel statistics and network model. This scheme is shown to be optimal with respect to an expected average per-packet re-ward criterion. The proposed routing scheme jointly addresses the issues of learning and routing in an opportunistic context, where the network structure is characterized by the transmission success probabilities. In particular, this learning framework leads to a sto-chastic routing scheme that optimally “explores” and “exploits” the opportunities in the network.

The high growth of the semiconductor industry over the past two decades has put Very Large Scale Integration in demand all over the world. Digital Signal Processing has played a great role in expanding VLSI device area. The recent rapid advancements in multimedia computing and high speed wired and wireless communications made DSP to grab increased attention.For an N-point transformation the direct computation of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) requires N2 operations. Cooley and Turkey explained the concept of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) which reduces the order of computation to Nlog¬2N. The FFT is not an approximation of the DFT, it's exactly equal to the DFT. FFT decomposes the set of data to be transformed into a series of smaller data sets to be transformed. The size of FFT decomposition is called "radix". Then, it decomposes those smaller sets into even smaller sets. At each stage of processing, the results of the previous stage are combined with twiddle factor multiplication. Finally, FFT is calculated for each small data set. Generally, FFT's can be decomposed using DFT's of even and odd points, which is called a Decimation-In-Time (DIT) FFT, or they can be decomposed using a first-half/second-half approach, which is called a "Decimation-In-Frequency" (DIF) FFT.A large number of FFT algorithms have been developed, but among all radix-4 are most widely used for practical applications due to their simple architecture, with constant butterfly geometry and the possibility of performing them ‘in place’. The algorithm for 16-point radix-4 FFT can be implemented with decimation either in time or frequency. In this work, the decimation in time (DIT) technique will be adopted in order to implement the 16-point radix-4 FFT.

Piezoelectric materials appealing for use in smart structures as sensors and actuators instantaneously transform mechanical energy to electrical energy and contrariwise. They remember configurations and guarantee them when subject to stimulus, have superb electromechanical coupling characteristics and outstanding frequency response .Innumerous utilization of smart structures technology to diverse physical systems have progressed to actively control shape, aeroelastic stability, noise, damping, vibration and stress distribution. In this article the research activities of piezoelectric materials for smart structures is grouped into characterization, formulation, analysis, applications & debonding in aid in future research activities in any of the grouped class.