Measurement of brix level of Malaysian local oranges at resonance frequency

The production of citrus in worldwide has increased over the years. This is due to demandfrom consumer as well as positive progress in agriculture-related industry. Malaysia alsoproduces a lot of citrus but at the same time statistics shows that the number of citrus beingimported from other countries is also high. In order to maintain the quality of citrusproduction, a non-destructive method by using monopole antenna is used in this study. Thereflection coefficient is measured at range operating frequency of 8MHz to 5 GHz. Therelationship between dielectric constant and S11 is determined. The other variables arecompared during S11 at resonance.S11 of oranges is the highest at 2.6 GHz with a value of -42.84 dB.Keywords: citrus; monopole antenna; reflection coefficien

Compressibility and Permeability of Solidified Dredged Marine Soils (DMS) with the Addition of Cement and/or Waste Granular Materials (WGM)

Dredged marine soils that obtained from dredging work were characterize as geo-waste, which is prone to be dumped rather than to be reused. This type of soil is high in compressibility and low in load bearing capacity. The engineering properties of this soft soil can be improve via soil solidification method. Cement is the common hydraulic binder used in soil solidification, were found to generate the emission of greenhouse gasses (GHG), particularly carbon dioxide (CO2) which also had affected the earth’s atmosphere. Therefore, there has been an increasing interest in using alternate pozzolanic materials such as waste granular materials (WGM) to fully or partially substituted the use of cement in soil solidification. WGM such as coal bottom ash (BA) and palm oil clinker (POC) were opted due to its pozzolanic properties. Prior to the planning of reclamation work using DMS admixed with conventional and/or alternate pozzolanic materials, the consolidation characteristics of the admixed materials must be acknowledged. Hence, the present study will examine the amount of settlement and coefficient of permeability (k) of DMS treated with cement and/or WGM in laboratory-scale experiments. Samples were prepared in various proportion in order to examine the individual effect of the cement and/or alternate pozzolanic materials on compressibility and permeability. For cement-admixed DMS, sample with 20 % of cement have significantly reduced the settlement than untreated and 10 % cemented DMS. For WGM-admixed DMS, the initial void ratio is low as compared to the untreated DMS due to the rearrangement of soil particles, which is densely packed. For cement-WGM-admixed DMS, samples of 15C50BA and 15C50POC displayed significant settlement reduction than 10C100BA, 10C100POC and untreated samples

Experimental (n,γ\gamma) cross sections of the p-process nuclei 74^{74}Se and 84^{84}Sr

The nucleosynthesis of elements beyond iron is dominated by the s and r processes. However, a small amount of stable isotopes on the proton-rich side cannot be made by neutron capture and are thought to be produced by photodisintegration reactions on existing seed nuclei in the so-called "p process". So far most of the p-process reactions are not yet accessible by experimental techniques and have to be inferred from statistical Hauser-Feshbach model calculations. The parametrization of these models has to be constrained by measurements on stable proton-rich nuclei. A series of (n,$\gamma$) activation measurements, related by detailed balance to the respective photodisintegrations, were carried out at the Karlsruhe Van de Graaff accelerator using the $^7$Li(p,n)$^7$Be source for simulating a Maxwellian neutron distribution of kT= 25 keV. First results for the experimental (n,$\gamma$) cross sections of the light p nuclei $^{74}$Se and $^{84}$Sr are reported. These experimental values were used for an extrapolation to the Maxwellian averaged cross section at 30 keV, $_{30}$, yielding 271$\pm$15 mb for $^{74}$Se, and 300$\pm$17 mb for the total capture cross section of $^{84}$Sr. The partial cross section to the isomer in $^{85}$Sr was found to be 190$\pm$10 mb.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Identification and role of microbial species developed in aerobic granular sludge bioreactor for livestock wastewater treatment

The purpose of the microbial diversity studies conducted is to discover species composition, structure, bacterial distribution, spatial activity as well as the function and role of the microbial. A laboratory-scale sequencing batch reactor with a working volume of 2 L was used to develop aerobic granular sludge to treat livestock wastewater. The seed sludge was taken from municipal wastewater treatment plant, while the wastewater was collected from cattle farm at Primaternak Enterprise, Johor, Malaysia. The composition and diversity of microbial community in the seed sludge and aerobic granules were explored using next generation sequencing analysis. Based on the findings, the details of phylogenetic bacterial which consists of phylum, class, order and family were identified and compared between the seed sludge and aerobic granules. The metagenome DNA sequencing analysis has revealed an abundance of microbial diversity in the seed sludge and 8 hours aerobic granular sludge samples. The metagenome analysis discovered wide variety of microorganism including archaea, bacteria, eukaryote, and virus. Bacteria has been evaluated as the most dominant microbial in both seed sludge and aerobic granules. Acidovorax sp JS42 was found to be the most abundance bacteria species in seed sludge while Thauera MZIT was the most abundance bacteria species in aerobic granules. Whereas, Bacteroides, Flavobacterium, Comamonas, Pseudomonas and Acinetobacter were the most abundance bacteria that responsible in developing aerobic granules were observed to be higher in aerobic granules compared to the seed sludge. The results from this study indicated that distinct differences of microbial community from the seed sludge and aerobic granular sludge were observed clearly, which provided some evidence of the granulation process

Care practice and health level of elderly in care centre: enhance digital lifestyle

One of the issues faced by the senior citizens is inherited from the society’s lifestyle which is less active physically, or not active at all. Retirement causes the problems amongst senior citizen more notable as it makes them not physically active anymore. Lifestyle is important in going through their daily life from health aspects, shelter, social life and many more. The aim of this research is focused on the founding of senior citizens’ lifestyle in order to identify their lifestyle, their care practices on their health, and their overall health level as well as views on elderly care center. This research used qualitative and quantitative methodology by distributing questionnaire forms and interviews with a few of respondents in the elderly care center. In summary, these results show that 73.3 percent of respondents have decent health level, but 26.7 percent of respondents have health issues. This research also found that 93.4 percent of the senior citizens prefer to live in an elderly care center compared to living with their own family. Researchers have found that exercises and physical activities can lead to an increase of senior citizens’ health level for those who aged 70 and above

The roles and values of wild foods in agricultural systems

Almost every ecosystem has been amended so that plants and animals can be used as food, fibre, fodder, medicines, traps and weapons. Historically, wild plants and animals were sole dietary components for hunter–gatherer and forager cultures. Today, they remain key to many agricultural communities. The mean use of wild foods by agricultural and forager communities in 22 countries of Asia and Africa (36 studies) is 90–100 species per location. Aggregate country estimates can reach 300–800 species (e.g. India, Ethiopia, Kenya). The mean use of wild species is 120 per community for indigenous communities in both industrialized and developing countries. Many of these wild foods are actively managed, suggesting there is a false dichotomy around ideas of the agricultural and the wild: hunter–gatherers and foragers farm and manage their environments, and cultivators use many wild plants and animals. Yet, provision of and access to these sources of food may be declining as natural habitats come under increasing pressure from development, conservation-exclusions and agricultural expansion. Despite their value, wild foods are excluded from official statistics on economic values of natural resources. It is clear that wild plants and animals continue to form a significant proportion of the global food basket, and while a variety of social and ecological drivers are acting to reduce wild food use, their importance may be set to grow as pressures on agricultural productivity increase.</jats:p

Colon Capsule Endoscopy compared to Conventional Colonoscopy under routine screening conditions

Colonoscopy (CSPY) for colorectal cancer screening has several limitations. Colon Capsule Endoscopy (PillCam Colon, CCE) was compared to CSPY under routine screening conditions

Mediating effect of positive psychological strength, study skills on examination anxiety among nigerian college students

Examination plays a vital role in the present contemporary educational setting as well as serving as an indicator and yardstick to place students in relation to their examination scores after they undergo the examination. However, students at different educational levels experience examination anxiety, which can interfere with making right decisions either before or during examinations and is considered to be a phenomenon associated with low examination scores. Therefore, the present research study was aimed at determining the mediating effect of positive psychological strengths between study skills and examination anxiety among Nigerian college students. The study employed survey research on 315 Nigerian college students. The result of the path analysis shows that study skills (SSK) have a significant and direct relationship on examination anxiety. The mediation between positive psychological strength (PPS) and examination anxiety is identified as being effective and significant. Therefore, positive psychological strength (PPS) acts as an effective mediator towards examination anxiety

Evaluating privacy-preserving record linkage using cryptographic long-term keys and multibit trees on large medical datasets.

Background: Integrating medical data using databases from different sources by record linkage is a powerful technique increasingly used in medical research. Under many jurisdictions, unique personal identifiers needed for linking the records are unavailable. Since sensitive attributes, such as names, have to be used instead, privacy regulations usually demand encrypting these identifiers. The corresponding set of techniques for privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) has received widespread attention. One recent method is based on Bloom filters. Due to superior resilience against cryptographic attacks, composite Bloom filters (cryptographic long-term keys, CLKs) are considered best practice for privacy in PPRL. Real-world performance of these techniques using large-scale data is unknown up to now. Methods: Using a large subset of Australian hospital admission data, we tested the performance of an innovative PPRL technique (CLKs using multibit trees) against a gold-standard derived from clear-text probabilistic record linkage. Linkage time and linkage quality (recall, precision and F-measure) were evaluated. Results: Clear text probabilistic linkage resulted in marginally higher precision and recall than CLKs. PPRL required more computing time but 5 million records could still be de-duplicated within one day. However, the PPRL approach required fine tuning of parameters. Conclusions: We argue that increased privacy of PPRL comes with the price of small losses in precision and recall and a large increase in computational burden and setup time. These costs seem to be acceptable in most applied settings, but they have to be considered in the decision to apply PPRL. Further research on the optimal automatic choice of parameters is needed