Optimisation of operations of wet vacuuming the carpets in Spotless services

The research topic, Optimisation of operations of wet vacuuming the carpets in Spotless cleaning services, was chosen by analysing problems in the operations of the organisation. Mixed methods involving survey and an interview, were used in the research. The survey was taken with thirty workers from the organisation, and the supervisor was interviewed. From the results, the findings are: • The machine is hard to pull and handle during the work • Time allotted to employees is insufficient to complete the work • Time allotment is a challenge for the supervisor • Safety & PPE measures needs to be increased Solutions for the problem faced by the organisation are: follow-up / refresher training programmes need to conducted: an upgrade to easy-to-use machines that will help the workers to do the work within the given time. If the organisation follows the recommendations it will help the company to optimise wet vacuuming service operations

Remote Source Coding under Gaussian Noise : Dueling Roles of Power and Entropy Power

The distributed remote source coding (so-called CEO) problem is studied in the case where the underlying source, not necessarily Gaussian, has finite differential entropy and the observation noise is Gaussian. The main result is a new lower bound for the sum-rate-distortion function under arbitrary distortion measures. When specialized to the case of mean-squared error, it is shown that the bound exactly mirrors a corresponding upper bound, except that the upper bound has the source power (variance) whereas the lower bound has the source entropy power. Bounds exhibiting this pleasing duality of power and entropy power have been well known for direct and centralized source coding since Shannon's work. While the bounds hold generally, their value is most pronounced when interpreted as a function of the number of agents in the CEO problem

Zero-rate feedback can achieve the empirical capacity

The utility of limited feedback for coding over an individual sequence of DMCs is investigated. This study complements recent results showing how limited or noisy feedback can boost the reliability of communication. A strategy with fixed input distribution $P$ is given that asymptotically achieves rates arbitrarily close to the mutual information induced by $P$ and the state-averaged channel. When the capacity achieving input distribution is the same over all channel states, this achieves rates at least as large as the capacity of the state averaged channel, sometimes called the empirical capacity.Comment: Revised version of paper originally submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Nov. 2007. This version contains further revisions and clarification

Altitudinal variation in soil organic carbon stock in coniferous subtropical and broadleaf temperate forests in Garhwal Himalaya

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Himalayan zones, with dense forest vegetation, cover a fifth part of India and store a third part of the country reserves of soil organic carbon (SOC). However, the details of altitudinal distribution of these carbon stocks, which are vulnerable to forest management and climate change impacts, are not well known.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This article reports the results of measuring the stocks of SOC along altitudinal gradients. The study was carried out in the coniferous subtropical and broadleaf temperate forests of Garhwal Himalaya. The stocks of SOC were found to be decreasing with altitude: from 185.6 to 160.8 t C ha^-1and from 141.6 to 124.8 t C ha^-1in temperature (<it>Quercus leucotrichophora</it>) and subtropical (<it>Pinus roxburghii</it>) forests, respectively.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The results of this study lead to conclusion that the ability of soil to stabilize soil organic matter depends negatively on altitude and call for comprehensive theoretical explanation</p

Identification via Channels and Constant-Weight Codes

In the standard problem of transmission, the goal is to encode a message in a way such that after it passes through a noisy channel, the message can be successfully decoded at the other end. For this case, it turns out that one can send messages that scale exponentially with the blocklength and have the error probabilit