Mijo (my son)

textMijo emerged as an alternate project to fulfill my MFA thesis requirement when Foreign Puzzle my initial thesis project faced serious setbacks. Foreign Puzzle is an hour-long documentary about love, life, breast cancer, dance and the transcending power of the human spirit. In an attempt to unravel an individual's struggle with mortality, to understand a child's adaptation to a mother's illness and to document the healing power of creativity, I began filming Sharon Marroquin's life from September 2010. Unfortunately, when filming real people undergoing life threatening medical illness it is impossible to stick to a timeline. Sharon Marroquin, the central character in the film developed serious medical complications that pushed the deadline for Foreign Puzzle significantly. While, I was committed to the completion of the film Foreign Puzzle, I did not want to delay my graduation from film school by almost two years and hence was forced to come up with an alternate thesis project. I had an animation script ready to go into production. But, I was so deeply involved with the production of Foreign Puzzle that it became impossible to work earnestly on a completely new film. The only viable alternative was to make a short film from the footage filmed for Foreign Puzzle. For the film to work and function independently, it had to have a strong and distinct thematic strand and not seem like a trailer or a scene from a longer film. This report is an elaboration of the process that went into the creation and exhibition of Mijo and its influence on Foreign Puzzle.Radio-Television-Fil

FINANCIAL LITERACY AND DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between financial literacy and demographic factors of Malaysian university students. Data was collected using primary data. Questionnaires were distributed to 300 final year students of business major programs in one of the institutes of higher learning in Malaysia. Hierarchical multiple regression, independent t-test and ANOVA were employed to analyse the data. The results of the study indicate that those students who enrolled in Bachelor in Accountancy and Bachelor in Business Administrations appear to have higher financial literacy compared to students from other courses. The results also suggest that female students have lower level of financial literacy compared to male students, and Chinese students appear to have significantly higher level of literacy than students from other races. The results from this study contribute to the current literature relating to financial literacy particularly in Malaysian settings

INFLUENCE OF ANKLE TAPING ON JUMP PERFORMANCE

The present study aimed to investigate the influence of prophylactic ankle taping on jump performance, in the push off and the landing phase, for healthy subjects, for three types of jump. Ankle sprains represent from 38 to 50% of the total sport injuries (Jones et al., 2000). Functional taping and ankle braces are passive preventive measures frequently utilised in sports, however, studies on the influence of functional taping on sports tasks are scarce and most of them only analyse the passive ROM restriction (Hume and Gerrard, 1998)

A Study of the Effect of Ion-Exchange Resin Particle Size on Flourescent X-Ray Intensity

Ea ch of five different size fractions of Chelex 100 ion- exchange resin was loaded with various amounts of copper . The weight mean diameters of the resin fractions were 478 , 250, 112, 56 , and 27 microns . The largest three fractions were commercially available as 50- 1 00, 100- 200 and 200- 400 mesh size respectively, while the two smallest fractions were prepared by grinding and air elutriating the smallest commercially available fraction (112 microns) . The re s i n samples , loaded with t he copper , were t hen analyzed with x- ray fluorescence . Five calibration curves were obtained for the five resin sizes showing the amount of copper versus the fluorescent Cu Koc. intensity . These calibration curves show that the relationship between the radiation intensity and the copper concentration is linear for each size. The relative effect of resin particle size on fluorescent intensity was shown graphically . The effect of particle size on x - ray fluorescence was small for particles greater than 250 microns and less than 60 microns . A critical region existed , however , between these two sizes where particle size had a significant influence on the x -ray intensity. The small particle intensity was much greater than the large particle intensity

UNSUPERVISED CHANGE DETECTION FOR MULTISPECTRAL IMAGES

This paper presents a novel approach to unsupervised change detection in multispectral remote-sensing images. The proposed approach aims at extracting the change information by jointly analyzing the spectral channels of multitemporal images without any training data. This is accomplished by using a selective Bayesian thresholding for deriving a pseudo training set that is necessary for initializing an adequately defined binary semisupervised support vector machine (S3VM) classifier. Starting from these initial seeds, the S3VM performs change detection in the original multitemporal feature space by gradually considering unlabeled patterns in the definition of the decision boundary between changed and unchanged pixels according to a semisupervised learning algorithm. The values of the classifier parameters are then defined according to a novel unsupervised model-selection technique based on a similarity measure between change-detection maps obtained with different settings

Analysis of Temporal and Spatial Changes in the Vegetation Density of Similipal Biosphere Reserve in Odisha (India) Using Multitemporal Satellite Imagery

National parks and protected areas require periodic monitoring because of changing land cover types and variability of landscape contexts within and adjacent to their boundaries. In this study, remote sensing and GIS techniques were used to analyse the changes in the vegetation density particularly in the zones of higher anthropogenic pressure in the Similipal Biosphere Reserve (SBR) of Odisha (India), using Landsat imagery from 1975 to 2005. A technique for the detection of postclassification changes was followed and the change in vegetation density as expressed by normalized difference vegetation index was computed. Results indicate that high dense forest in the core zone has been conserved and the highest reforestation has also occurred in this zone of SBR. The results also reveal that anthropological interventions are more in the less dense forest areas and along the roads, whereas high dense forest areas have remained undisturbed and rejuvenated. This study provides baseline data demonstrating alteration in land cover over the past three decades and also serves as a foundation for monitoring future changes in the national parks and protected areas

STUDIES ON PESTICIDE REMOVING EFFICACY AND ANTIBACTERIAL ACTIVITY OF DHATHRI EAT PURE NATURAL VEGETABLE CLEANER FOR FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

Fruits and vegetables are highly nutritious and form as key food commodity in the human consumption. They are highly perishable due to their low shelf life. These food commodities are reported to be contaminated with microbes and health hazardous chemicals such as pesticides. Hence, it is very necessary to remove the pesticides and prevent the microbial contamination of fruits and vegetables without changing its nutritional value. For this purpose Dhathri Eat Pure Natural Vegetable Cleaner (DEPNVC) have been used to wash out the pesticides along with prevention of microbial contamination. The present study was performed to study the pesticide removing efficiency and antimicrobial activity against the food borne microbial pathogens. Dhathri Eat Pure Natural Vegetable Cleaner contains natural ingredients such as Coconut vinegar, Neem (Azadirachta indica), Turmeric (Curcuma longa). The HPTLC studies were also performed to determine the ingredients of DEPNVC. The results shown that DEPNVC has the 75 % (Organo Phosphorous) 90% (organo chlorines) of pesticides and the dose dependent antibacterial activity with mean zone of inhibition was observed as 11.63 ± 3.03 mm

Reliable differentiation of Meyerozyma guilliermondii from Meyerozyma caribbica by internal transcribed spacer restriction fingerprinting

BACKGROUND: Meyerozyma guilliermondii (anamorph Candida guilliermondii) and Meyerozyma caribbica (anamorph Candida fermentati) are closely related species of the genetically heterogenous M. guilliermondii complex. Conventional phenotypic methods frequently misidentify the species within this complex and also with other species of the Saccharomycotina CTG clade. Even the long-established sequencing of large subunit (LSU) rRNA gene remains ambiguous. We also faced similar problem during identification of yeast isolates of M. guilliermondii complex from indigenous bamboo shoot fermentation in North East India. There is a need for development of reliable and accurate identification methods for these closely related species because of their increasing importance as emerging infectious yeasts and associated biotechnological attributes. RESULTS: We targeted the highly variable internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region (ITS1-5.8S-ITS2) and identified seven restriction enzymes through in silico analysis for differentiating M. guilliermondii from M. caribbica. Fifty five isolates of M. guilliermondii complex which could not be delineated into species-specific taxonomic ranks by API 20 C AUX and LSU rRNA gene D1/D2 sequencing were subjected to ITS-restriction fragment length polymorphism (ITS-RFLP) analysis. TaqI ITS-RFLP distinctly differentiated the isolates into M. guilliermondii (47 isolates) and M. caribbica (08 isolates) with reproducible species-specific patterns similar to the in silico prediction. The reliability of this method was validated by ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 sequencing, mitochondrial DNA RFLP and electrophoretic karyotyping. CONCLUSIONS: We herein described a reliable ITS-RFLP method for distinct differentiation of frequently misidentified M. guilliermondii from M. caribbica. Even though in silico analysis differentiated other closely related species of M. guilliermondii complex from the above two species, it is yet to be confirmed by in vitro analysis using reference strains. This method can be used as a reliable tool for rapid and accurate identification of closely related species of M. guilliermondii complex and for differentiating emerging infectious yeasts of the Saccharomycotina CTG clade