Academic Performance of Less Endowed High School Students in the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

This paper investigates the academic performance of students from less endowed senior high schools in the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). Questionnaires were administered to 152 (123 males and 29 females) fourth year students who enrolled for various programmes at KNUST in 2007 through the less endowed admission policy. The items included in the questionnaires were student characteristics (e.g. age, gender, university entrance score, number of siblings) and parental characteristics (e.g. educational attainments and occupation). We found that 61.8% were high performing students (11.8% first class and 50% second class upper). We also found that among the less endowed socio-economic group, university entrance score had a significant positive influence on their academic performance at 5% level of significance. Again, it was discovered that if parental factors were not controlled for, being male had a significant positive influence on the performance of less endowed students at 5% significance level. These findings have very important policy implications for Ghana, especially policies aimed at improving participation of students from less endowed schools in public universities.Keywords: Performance, less endowed, student, admission, universit

Comparative effects of autotrophic and heterotrophic growth on some vitamins, 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical scavenging activity, amino acids and protein profile of Chlorella vulgaris Beijerinck

Chemical composition of Chlorella vulgaris Beijerinck including content of some vitamins (A, E and C), 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical scavenging activity, amino acids and protein profile was assessed under autotrophic and heterotrophic growth conditions as an indication of its nutritional value. Vitamin content (A, E and C) of heterotrophic cells increased by about 29, 52 and 20, respectively, as compared to its value for autotrophic cells. The free radical scavenging activity (RSA) was significantly higher for autotrophic cells than heterotrophic only at low concentrations (25 and 50 μl) of algal extract, but no significant difference was recorded at high concentration (100 μl). This result indicates non parallel relationship between the tested vitamins and RSA which suggest that other nonenzymatic antioxidants and/or antioxidant enzymes are involved. Concentration of essential and non essential amino acids in heterotrophic cells was double and 1.5 times, respectively its concentration in autotrophic cells. Histidine, lysine and phenylalanine constituted 77 and 44% of the total content of essential amino acids in heterotrophic and autotrophic cells, respectively. Methionine concentration was low in both types of cells. Proline content and non essential amino acid in heterotrophic cells was about 2.5 times its corresponding value in autotrophic cells. SDS-PAGE of protein extracts of autotrophic and heterotrophic C. vulgaris revealed two protein bands of molecular weight of ~75 and ~39 KDa. Higher intensity of the two bands was observed for autotrophic cells which may be associated with the effect of growth condition on the expression of regulatory genes. For valuable production of natural food supplement and/or natural pharmaceutical products, using heterotrophic cells rather than autotrophic cells for its richness in vitamins and essential amino acids is recommended.Key words: Autotrophic, heterotrophic, Chlorella vulgaris, vitamins, 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical scavenging activity, amino acid, protein profile

Chemical composition, cytotoxic activity and antimicrobial activity of essential oils of leaves and berries of Juniperus phoenicea l. Grown in Egypt

Hydrodistillation of berries and leaves of Juniperus phoenicea grown in Sinai yielded volatile oils in the yield of 0.36 and 1.96%, respectively. Using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry technique, fifty eight compounds were identified in berry oil representing 99.2% of the oil composition. α-Pinene was the major compound in berry oil (39.30%) followed by sabinene (24.29%). Berry oil composed mainly of monoterpenoids which amounted to 90.53%, of which 72.85% was monoterpene hydrocarbons. The sesquiterpenoids accounted for about 8% of the total oil composition. Leaf oil was composed of about 66 compounds representing 99.16% of the total composition of the oil. α-Pinene was the major constituent of leaf oil at concentration of 38.22%, followed by α -cedrol (31.23%). The monoterpene hydrocarbon was the predominant chemical group (41.29%) followed by the oxygenated sesquiterpenes (32.21%). Both oils showed very high cytotoxic activities against all cell line tested. They showed equal activities against brain (0.6 μg//ml) and cervix (5.0 μg//ml) human cell lines, while berry oil was slightly more active than leaf oil against lung (0.6 and 0.7 μ/ml, respectively), liver (0.7 and 0.9 μg//ml, respectively) and breast human cell lines (0.8 and 1. μg//ml, respectively). The antimicrobial activity and minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of leaf and berry oils were also determined. The oils showed high activity against most of the tested strains. Keywords: Juniperus phoenicea, Cupressaceae, essential oils, berries, leaves, antimicrobial, cytotoxic, GCMS analysis.African Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine Vol. 4 (4) 2007: pp. 417-42

Insight into inclusion complexation of indomethacin nicotinamide cocrystals

The objective of this research was to investigate the feasibility of the interaction between indomethacin-nicotinamide cocrystals with β-cyclodextrin and hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin in the solid-state. The study has emphasized on the possibility of inclusion complex formation and its effect on the dissolution performance of the cocrystals. The solid systems in the molar ratio of 1:1 of the host and guest molecules were prepared by co-grinding and co-evaporation methods and compared with their physical mixtures. Furthermore, the molecular behaviors of the cocrystals in all prepared samples were thoroughly characterized by powder X-ray diffraction, differential scanning calorimetry, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy and in-vitro dissolution performance. The results of these studies indicated that complexes prepared by the co-evaporation method with hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin have shown complete inclusion of the cocrystals into the cyclodextrin cavity and a partial inclusion with β-cyclodextrin. Moreover, a significant (p < 0.05; ANOVA/Tukey) higher in-vitro dissolution was achieved in co-evaporate complex prepared with hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin compared to that prepared with β-cyclodextrin, indomethacin-nicotinamide cocrystals and indomethacin itself

PENGENDALIAN PERSEDIAAN PADA KONDISI STOKASTIK DAN HARGA BERTINGKAT MENGGUNAKAN SIMULASI

investment value of the company in the form of supplies could reach 50 % of the value of all assets . Basically resource inventory is idle resources, which means that if the excess inventory will lead to wasted investment , but if there is no inventory would be difficult to anticipate fluctuations in demand can lead to stockout . So, we need a good inventory management to manage the balance between inventory investment and customer service . This research took a case study in Olla Bakery where there is demand and uncertain lead time , which affects the supply of raw material flour . To control the supply of the raw material , in this study using Monte Carlo simulation due to the properties of probabilistic variables , fluctuating demand , lead time is uncertain , and also considering the quantity discounts in the purchase of raw materials as a consideration in the simulation . The results obtained from this study that the Monte Carlo simulation method can reduce inventory costs by 6.83% , so it can be taken into consideration for the company in the purchase of raw materials. Keywords : Probabilistic, Quantity Discount, Monte Carl

Energy Efficient Disaggregated Servers for Future Data Centers

With the dawn of cloud computing, data centers’ power consumption has received increased attention. In this paper we evaluate the energy efficiency potential of exploiting the concept of Disaggregated Server (DS) design in data centers for efficient resource provisioning. A DS, is a new approach for future racks where servers are disaggregated and resources, such as processors, memory and IO ports are arranged in resource pools constructing processing pools, memory pools and IO pools. We developed a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for energy minimization of the virtual machine (VM) placement problem in data centres implementing DS approach. The results show that the average power savings are up to 49% for the different VM types considered

Government Politics in Legal Aid for Poor Society

The study of normative law on government law politics in providing legal aid to the poor results in the finding that the perspective of providing legal aid to the poor is based on the achievement of justice based on Pancasila in its position as the basis of the nation and the philosophy of the Indonesian nation. The balance dimension in the implementation of the balance between justice itself, legal certainty and the benefit for conflict resolution within the interaction between legal subjects. The meaning of the balance between justice and legal certainty and benefit is oriented towards the realization of this welfare understood as the needs of Indonesian society both spiritual or physical. In law enforcement the poor are marginalized and do not get the right to legal aid properly. Legal aid services are formalistic and do not address the needs of the bulk of the poor who need legal aid. For this, the legal politics of legal aid should be conditioned on the creation of an atmosphere of legal responsiveness. With the legal responsiveness of dealing with issues relating to the provision of legal aid to the poor is based on objective reality in society, without any political element attached to it. This makes poor people's assistance poorly targeted and does not meet the sense of community justice as the most important goal of providing legal aid to the poor. Keywords: Legal Politics, Legal Aid, Poor Peopl

Future Energy Efficient Data Centers With Disaggregated Servers

The popularity of the Internet and the demand for 24/7 services uptime is driving system performance and reliability requirements to levels that today's data centers can no longer support. This paper examines the traditional monolithic conventional server (CS) design and compares it to a new design paradigm: the disaggregated server (DS) data center design. The DS design arranges data centers resources in physical pools, such as processing, memory, and IO module pools, rather than packing each subset of such resources into a single server box. In this paper, we study energy efficient resource provisioning and virtual machine (VM) allocation in DS-based data centers compared to CS-based data centers. First, we present our new design for the photonic DS-based data center architecture, supplemented with a complete description of the architectural components. Second, we develop a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to optimize VM allocation for the DS-based data center, including the data center communication fabric power consumption. Our results indicate that, in DS data centers, the optimum allocation of pooled resources and their communication power yields up to 42% average savings in total power consumption when compared with the CS approach. Due to the MILP high computational complexity, we developed an energy efficient resource provisioning heuristic for DS with communication fabric (EERP-DSCF), based on the MILP model insights, with comparable power efficiency to the MILP model. With EERP-DSCF, we can extend the number of served VMs, where the MILP model scalability for a large number of VMs is challenging. Furthermore, we assess the energy efficiency of the DS design under stringent conditions by increasing the CPU to memory traffic and by including high noncommunication power consumption to determine the conditions at which the DS and CS designs become comparable in power consumption. Finally, we present a complete analysis of the communication patterns in our new DS design and some recommendations for design and implementation challenges