Study Of Some Aspects Of Nutrition And Culture Of Malaysian Freshwater Catfish Mystus Nemurus (C. & V.)

Mystus nemurus (C.&V.) has enormous potential of becoming a cultured species in Malaysia . In the absence of information on import ant nutritional requirements of the species,aquaculture development could be considerably limited. With the objective of introducing the species to aquaculture , the following studies were conducted : i ) digestibility of M .nemurus with potential feed ingredients , such as fish meal , soybean meal , rice bran , maize , copra meal and chicken viscera ; ii ) optimum dietary protein requirement of the species under tank and pond culture conditions using six isoenergetic practical diets that contained 27 , 32 , 37 , 42 , 47 and 50% protein ; and iii ) determination of optimum stocking density of M . nemurus cultured intensively at six variable densities, such as 105 , 195 , 285, 375 , 465 and 555 fish/m3 respectively

Some Aspects Of The Biology Of Ikan Baung, Mystus Nemurus C. &. V. With Reference To Chenderoh Reservoir

Some aspects of the biology of Ikan Baung, Mystus nemurus C. & V. including taxonomy, food and feeding habits, reproduction, growth and its ecology were studied. The fish is a bottom feeder and fed extensively on a wide range, of food items that include teleosts, crustaceans, benthic invertebrates and detrital materials. The relative gut index has been found to vary from the lowest 0.783 to the highest 1.07 in a size range of 8 . 2 to 67. 0 cm. External fertilization and heterosexuality are exhibited. Sexual differentiation can be made depending on visual observation of secondary sex characters. Five maturing stages have been identified. Size at first sexual maturity has been found within the length range of 3 2 . 5 t o 3 5. 5 cm in case of female and 35 .5 to 38.5 cm in male. Fecundity has been found to vary from 6 , 900 to 93 , 510 in specimens having a length range of 34 .8 to 45 cm . The relationship between Fecundity, F, and Length, L can be expressed as F = 0.00 11L4.758 The fish i s a partial spawner and spawning period has been found long and indefinite. The ripe oocytes are therefore shed off within an interval of time. No major spawning season can be detected as is evidenced from the seasonal fluctuation of gonadosomatic index , ovadiameter measurements and different maturity stages. Fat contents in the abdominal mesentaries are associated mainly with maintenance and also for reproduction

Role of silicon on the tribological performance of Al-based automotive alloys and the effect of used motor oil

A wear test in a used motor oil sliding environment was performed on Al-based automotive alloys with Silicon doped in various levels. Where a pin-on-disc wear testing equipment was used at a normal pressure of 1.53 MPa and a sliding speed of 0.51 m/s, kept constant. For comparison of the wear performance, dry and fresh motor oil sliding environments were also considered. The results showed that as silicon content was increased in the alloys, the wear rate decreased up to the eutectic composition, followed by an increase for all the environments. It was mainly for higher levels of Si-rich intermetallic Mg2Si precipitates in the α-aluminum matrix and made the alloys’ strength superior, in addition to increased wear resistance. In the post eutectic composition, primary silicon particles which are coarse and polyhedral appeared weakening the matrix. The coefficient of friction also decreased because of the higher hardness and the Si particles' employment as solid lubricants. In a dry environment, the wear rate and friction coefficient were much greater for their direct contact but lower under motor oil due to the reduced roughness caused by the sealing effects of the contact surfaces. Conversely, in oil environment, the opposite phenomenon was observed where coefficient of friction was incased with Si level to the alloy because the oil formed a thin film working as a lubricant between the contact surfaces which controlled the wear properties. Used oil demonstrates some degree of higher wear rate along with friction coefficient due to heavy and harmful chemical compounds in it. Examined by optical microscopy and SEM analysis, worn surfaces have shown that Si added alloy improved wear resistance through mild and smooth abrasive grooves filled with oxides in dry sliding conditions. In case of oil sliding environment smooth surfaces are created by the resistance of the oil film to the direct contact between the surfaces

The power of implicit social relation in rating prediction of social recommender systems of social recommender

The explosive growth of social networks in recent times has presented a powerful source of information to be utilized as an extra source for assisting in the social recommendation problems. The social recommendation methods that are based on probabilistic matrix factorization improved the recommendation accuracy and partly solved the cold-start and data sparsity problems. However, these methods only exploited the explicit social relations and almost completely ignored the implicit social relations. In this article, we firstly propose an algorithm to extract the implicit relation in the undirected graphs of social networks by exploiting the link prediction techniques. Furthermore, we propose a new probabilistic matrix factorization method to alleviate the data sparsity problem through incorporating explicit friendship and implicit friendship. We evaluate our proposed approach on two real datasets, Last.Fm and Douban. The experimental results show that our method performs much better than the state-of-the-art approaches, which indicates the importance of incorporating implicit social relations in the recommendation process to address the poor prediction accuracy

Mutagenic Effect of Sodium Azide on Seed Germination of Eruca sativa (L

Abs tract: Eruca sa t i v a is a very important crop of M adeterranean region, and highly us ed as s alad 3 in European countries. Sodium azide (NaN ) is a chemic a l mutagen, and widely us ed in crops to 3 improve their yield and quality traits. W e studied the effect of various concentrations of NaN ranged (1mM , 2mM , 3 mM , 4 mM and 5 mM ) on germination and seedling growth of Eruca at various time 3 intervals . The seeds treated at 5 mM of NaN , the percent germination profoundly affe c t e d o n d a ys 9 and 12 following its application for 120 min and 180 min of time intervals . The h ig h e s t and lowest % germin a t io n was found for 30 min and 180 min of time intervals, whilst seeds were treated at same 3 3 concentration of NaN . The radicle and coleoptile length were decreased as the concentration of NaN increas ed, and highly affected at concentratio n s 3 mM, 4 mM and 5 mM res pectively. M ore variation was found on radicle length than that of coleoptile leng t h a t s a me c o n centrations and at same time intervals

Anaesthetic Management in a Child with Goldenhar Syndrome

Goldenhar syndrome is a congenital disorder involving deformities of the face. It usually affects one side of the face only and poses significant challenges in the airway management. We herein, report an 8-year boy, known case of Goldenhar syndrome, who presented to our radiology suite for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain, followed by a computed tomography (CT) scan brain. The boy had various features of Goldenhar syndrome, e.g. cleft palate, absent right eye and ear, right mandibular hypoplasia, micrognathia, and preauricular tags. His developmental milestones were delayed. Airway evaluation showed Mallampati class II with limited movements of head and neck, which suggested possibility of difficult laryngoscopy and intubation. He had no vertebral anomalies or cardiac disease. A difficult airway continues to be a major cause of anaesthesia-related morbidity and mortality; and maintaining spontaneous breathing remains a vital technique in its management. Lack of anaesthesia-related complications with supraglottic devices encouraged us to present the advantage of utilising a laryngeal mask airway (LMA) under anaesthesia for successful management of predicted difficult airway

Feature analysis for web forum question post detection

A web forum which is also known as discussion board or Internet forum is an online community of users with a common interest. It is a problem-solving platform that engages experts across the globe. Both technical and non-technical problems are resolved on a daily basis within web forums. Research activities in this domain have been concentrated on answer detection with the assumption that the initial post of a thread is a question post. The quality of web forum question posts varies from excellent to mediocre or even spam. Detecting good question posts require utilization of salient features. In this paper, we implement a bag-of-words (BoW) model to mine web forum question posts. We empirically address the following questions in the paper. Can BoW model effectively detect web forum question post? What feature selection method is most appropriate for BoW model in this domain? Is choice of classifier influenced by web forum genre? We used three publicly available datasets of varying technical degrees for the experiments. The experimental results revealed that BoW can perform better than complex techniques that implement higher N-gram with part-of-speech tagging