Improving Mathematical Problem-solving Ability and Self-confidence of High School Students Through Contextual Learning Model

The purposes of this study are: (1) to know if students' mathematical problem-solving ability taught by contextual learning model is higher than students taught by expository learning, (2) to know if students' self-confidence taught by contextual learning model is higher than students taught by expository learning, (3) to know if there is interaction between learning model and students' early mathematical ability to improve students' mathematical problem-solving ability, (4) to know if there is interaction between learning model and students' early mathematical to improve students' self-confidence. This study is a quasi-experimental research. The population in this study consists of 180 students in grade VIII SMP Muhammadiyah 11 Pangkalan Brandan. Two classes (60 students) are taken as sample. Data were analyzed by two way Anova. The results of this study indicate that (1) students' capability of solving mathematical problems taught with contextual learning model is higher than students taught by expository, (2) students' self-confidence taught by contextual learning model is higher than students taught by expository, (3) there is interaction between learning model and students' early mathematical ability to improve students' mathematical problem-solving ability, (4) there is interaction between learning model and students' early mathematical to improve students' self-confidence

The potency of commonly used disinfectants on bacteria isolated from in-animate surfaces in the microbiology laboratory, Umaru Musa Yardua university Katsina

Disinfection is the process of removing microorganisms including potentially pathogenic ones from the surface of in-animate objects. The ubiquity of microorganisms has implicated door knobs, human hands, desks surfaces etc. to be reservoirs of microorganisms. This study analyses three (3) samples from five (5) inanimate surfaces of the Microbiology laboratory, three different organisms were isolated and identified using series of biochemical tests, phenol coefficient and surface disinfection test were also carried out. The phenol coefficient test involve exposure of the isolates to different dilution of test disinfectants to determine the highest dilution factor that inhibit microbial growth while surface disinfection test involved the use of soiled slides to test the potency of the test disinfectants on the isolates. The organisms isolated were Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella sp. and E. coli. Klebsiella sp. showed the highest resistance to the test disinfectants than E. coli and S. aureus. The result of this study confirms the contamination of inanimate surfaces with variety of pathogenic bacteria (S. aureus 25%, E. coli 23% and Klebsiella sp. 52%). Disinfectant A had the highest phenol coefficient of 6.0, C had 4.0 and disinfectant B had the lowest phenol coefficient of 3.0. Microorganisms live as transient contaminants in fomites where they constitute a major health hazards as sources of community acquired infections. Therefore, constant and regular disinfection should always be conducted at different concentrations so as to determine the potent concentration against the adhered microorganisms on various surfaces of the laboratory.Keywords: Disinfection, Phenol coefficient, Surface disinfection, Contamination, Inanimate surfaces

Universal Dynamical Decoupling: Two-Qubit States and Beyond

Uhrig's dynamical decoupling pulse sequence has emerged as one universal and highly promising approach to decoherence suppression. So far both the theoretical and experimental studies have examined single-qubit decoherence only. This work extends Uhrig's universal dynamical decoupling from one-qubit to two-qubit systems and even to general multi-level quantum systems. In particular, we show that by designing appropriate control Hamiltonians for a two-qubit or a multi-level system, Uhrig's pulse sequence can also preserve a generalized quantum coherence measure to the order of $1+O(T^{N+1})$, with only $N$ pulses. Our results lead to a very useful scheme for efficiently locking two-qubit entangled states. Future important applications of Uhrig's pulse sequence in preserving the quantum coherence of multi-level quantum systems can also be anticipated.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, minor changes made, submitted to PR

Effect of farmyard manure on senescence, nitrogen and protein levels in leaves and grains of some cowpea vareities

The effect of farmyard manure was studied on senescence, nitrogen and protein content of the leaves and grains of cowpea. The experimental site for this study was situated at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Kano Station, Nigeria. The cowpea varieties used in this experiment were Kanannado a local variety and IT89 KD – 288 an improved variety, two treatments were used for the experiment single manure treatment (manurexl), and double manure treatment (manurex2) at the ratio of 5:1 soil to manure and the control (no manure added). Plastic pots of 250mm diameter and 17.5cm for both length and height were used in this study. The pots were arranged in completely randomize block design and labeled appropriately using white and green plastic tags according to the plant treatment applied. The rainy season trial was carried out between August 2006 to November, 2006 while the dry season trial was carried out between October, 2007 to January, 2008 onset of senescence, days to 50% senescence, 90% senescence and days to total death of the plants occurred earlier in IT89KD – 288 than in Kanannado, while comparison between the treatments showed that senescence started earlier in plant treated with double manure treatment than those treated with single manure treatment. Between the two seasons, senescence started earlier rainy season than in dry season. On the other hand nitrogen and protein content of the leaves and grains were higher in IT89KD – 288 than in Kanannado, also between the treatment double manure treatment induced higher nitrogen protein content of leaves and grains. More nitrogen and protein, content of leaves and grains were obtained during the dry season trial than in the rainy season trial

Simulation analysis of ultrasonic testing in steel-based butt weld joint

Within this study, a simulation analysis based on Ultrasonic Testing (UT) is made using Comsol Multiphysics. Comsol Multiphysics is a software that can simplify many aspects of building UT method and also can be used to obtain a fast understanding of the results of altering the fundamental parameters. The software program has useful features which can help in technique development especially for UT inspectors in Non- destructive Testing (NDT) field. The focus of this study is to conduct a simulation analysis of internal weld defects by developing the model of defects in a weld structure sample configured using the software. The model is developed based on actual parameters and characterization of weld structure sample and internal weld defects. The results of analysis show that each type of defects which are incomplete penetration, slag inclusion and lack of fusion have different signal pattern and signal amplitude which are depended on the characterizations of those defects themselves

Community detection of political blogs network based on structure-attribute graph clustering model

Complex networks provide means to represent different kinds of networks with multiple features. Most biological, sensor and social networks can be represented as a graph depending on the pattern of connections among their elements. The goal of the graph clustering is to divide a large graph into many clusters based on various similarity criteria’s. Political blogs as standard social dataset network, in which it can be considered as blog-blog connection, where each node has political learning beside other attributes. The main objective of work is to introduce a graph clustering method in social network analysis. The proposed Structure-Attribute Similarity (SAS-Cluster) able to detect structures of community, based on nodes similarities. The method combines topological structure with multiple characteristics of nodes, to earn the ultimate similarity. The proposed method is evaluated using well-known evaluation measures, Density, and Entropy. Finally, the presented method was compared with the state-of-art comparative method, and the results show that the proposed method is superior to the comparative method according to the evaluations measures

Biolistic transformation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae with β-glucosidase gene from Cellulomonas biazotea

A β-glucosidase genomic DNA from Cellulomonas biazotea NIAB 442 was isolated and coated onto tungsten microprojectiles for direct transformation of the gene into Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Transformation of β-glucosidase into S. cerevisae conferred the ability to hydrolyse esculin and cellobiose, indicated that the gene is expressed in the bombarded yeast. Key Words: Biolistic transformation, β-glucosidase, Cellulomonas biazotea, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. African Journal of Biotechnology Vol.3(1) 2004: 112-11

Real-Time Face Recognition System Using KPCA, LBP and Support Vector Machine

With increasing security threats, Biometric systems have importance in different fields. This appears clearly exactly after the rapid development that happened in power of computing. In this paper, the Design and implementation of a real-time face recognition system are presented. In such a system, Kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) and Local binary pattern (LBP) are used as feature extraction methods with the aid of support vector machine (SVM) to work as a classifier. A comparison between traditional feature extraction methods as (PCA and LDA) and a proposal methods are performed as well as a comparison between support vector neural network and artificial neural network classifier are also implemented. Two types of experiments, On-line, and Off-line experiments are done. In the On-line experiment, a new database is created and used. While in the off-line experiment, two types of databases (ORL and YALE) are used to estimate the performance and efficiency of the system. The combinations of these methods together enhances the experimental results in compare with other methods