EVALUATION OF POSSIBLE ANTICONVULSANT EFFECT OF ALSTONIA SCHOLARIS (LINN.) R. BR. EXTRACTS ON EPILEPSY MODELS

Objective: In this study, the effects of ethanolic extract of Alstonia scholaris (EAS) were evaluated on epilepsy models.Methods: Pentylenetetrazole (PTZ), pilocarpine, and maximal electroshock (MES)-induced convulsions in mice were recorded. EAS (100, 200, and300 mg/kg, p.o.) protected of mice against PTZ, pilocarpine, and MES-induced seizures, respectively.Results: In MES-induced seizures, the results revealed that EAS decreased the duration of the tonic hindlimb extension and percent mortality. Inaddition, these doses of EAS increased the latency for the development of convulsions and reduced mortality in mice against PTZ and pilocarpineinducedconvulsions.Conclusion: The ethanolic extract of bark A. scholaris exhibited anticonvulsant potential in various animal models.Keywords: Alstonia scholaris, Pentylenetetrazole, Pilocarpine, Maximal electroshock, Anticonvulsant effect

Exploring the factors affecting employees adoption and use of innovation

This paper explores the factors affecting innovation adoption by individual employees within an organization in Australia. Following a qualitative research approach, this paper uses a series of in-depth interviews and focus group discussions involving academic and administrative employees at a tertiary educational institution in Australia. The qualitative approach is adopted to have a deeper insight into the complexities and dynamism associated with the factors influencing innovation adoption process in organizational settings. The findings of this research highlight the need for broadening an understanding of the key factors affecting employee’s decisions to uptake the adoption of innovation. The results provide important clues for comprehending the factors influencing and determining the employee’s adoption and continued use of innovation in the work environment. In the face of the current trend towards end-user applications of technological innovation, the results suggest some guidelines for management toward effective and efficient adoption and use of innovation in organizational settings. This paper has highlighted the above findings and their implications for management practices related to innovation management in an Australian organizational setting. This paper also identifies possible limitations and future research potential in the relevant field

Mobile Phone Banking Usage Behaviour: An Australian Perspective

While the use of mobile phones in financial transactions is witnessing phenomenal growth at the international level, its growth has been relatively slow in Australia. Drawing on the theory of reasoned action and technology adoption framework, this paper reports the results concerning a survey of mobile phone users for banking transactions in Australia. The paper specifically identified the factors affecting usage behaviour when mobile phone banking services were engaged. The findings broaden and deepen our understanding of the usage of mobile-based banking in the information age. This paper contributes to the knowledge of this subject by including identification and testing of constructs of predictors regarding mobile phone banking, which are additional to those employed in the extant theories indicated above. The findings of this paper have important policy implications for banks in terms of understanding the underlying factors that drive customers’ mobile banking for financial transactions. Accordingly, design strategies have been developed to promote mobile phone banking – a cost effective channel for delivering financial services

Impact of ICT usage on indigenous peoples’ quality of life: Evidence from an Asian developing country

Indigenous communities across the world have been suffering disadvantages in several domains, e.g. erosion of land rights, language and other cultural aspects, while at the same time being discriminated against when prepared to integrate into the dominant cultures. It has been argued in the literature that information communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential of contributing to addressing some of these disadvantages – both in terms of rebuilding what has been eroded and facilitating integration into non-Indigenous societies. In trying to understand how ICTs can be useful for these processes, it is important to do so from a conceptual framework that encompasses the multi-dimensionality of the issues faced by Indigenous communities. The conceptual frameworks frequently used in the ICT literature tend to focus on adoption, use and diffusion of technologies rather than how the use of ICTs affects the livelihoods of the users, which is the focus of this paper. The conceptual framework is informed by the capability approach (CA), in particular by the five freedoms identified in the seminal work of Amartya Sen (2001), “Development as Freedom” (DaF). Data were collected from a purposive sample in an Indigenous community in Bangladesh, using a qualitative method to map how ICTs had affected the lives of these community members The findings suggest that the participants perceived that ICTs had made positive contributions, particularly the benefits they gained from learning how to use computers in the domains that are relevant from the perspective of the five freedoms espoused in DaF. The findings reported in this paper are useful for policy formulation in Bangladesh. As the study is contextualised in a transitional economy setting and can therefore not be generalised, but we believe that the conceptual framework has much to offer future research designed to understand how ICTs can improve the livelihoods of Indigenous individuals and communities

Customer Relationship Management: Examining the Central Proposition in the Online Context

This paper presents a summary of a doctoral dissertation investigating the application of customer relationship management (CRM) theory to the online context. The major finding of this study was to confirm that the central proposition of CRM theory is supported in the online context—that is, while the operational context influences the extent to which effective service enhances the relationships between a firm and its customers, and their resulting perceptions of customer loyalty; there is general support for a mediating relationship in which effective service will enhance the quality of the relationship between a firm and its customer, and increase loyalty perceptions from the customer. The study has also revealed that the service delivery channel has a significant and differential affect on the central proposition and the interactions of the key relationship marketing constructs. Perceptions of financial risk were not observed to significantly affect either service quality or relationship quality perceptions

PERFOGRAPH: A Numerical Aware Program Graph Representation for Performance Optimization and Program Analysis

The remarkable growth and significant success of machine learning have expanded its applications into programming languages and program analysis. However, a key challenge in adopting the latest machine learning methods is the representation of programming languages, which directly impacts the ability of machine learning methods to reason about programs. The absence of numerical awareness, composite data structure information, and improper way of presenting variables in previous representation works have limited their performances. To overcome the limitations and challenges of current program representations, we propose a novel graph-based program representation called PERFOGRAPH. PERFOGRAPH can capture numerical information and the composite data structure by introducing new nodes and edges. Furthermore, we propose an adapted embedding method to incorporate numerical awareness. These enhancements make PERFOGRAPH a highly flexible and scalable representation that can effectively capture program intricate dependencies and semantics. Consequently, it serves as a powerful tool for various applications such as program analysis, performance optimization, and parallelism discovery. Our experimental results demonstrate that PERFOGRAPH outperforms existing representations and sets new state-of-the-art results by reducing the error rate by 7.4% (AMD dataset) and 10% (NVIDIA dataset) in the well-known Device Mapping challenge. It also sets new state-of-the-art results in various performance optimization tasks like Parallelism Discovery and Numa and Prefetchers Configuration prediction

Analysis of Travel Behavior in Khulna Metropolitan City, Bangladesh

In modeling travel demand and analyzing travel behavior, it is important to know the behavior of a large number of individuals. How the individuals choose an alternative among others given in the choice set, and how they assess and consider the different alternatives, must be a function of several factors including their need, task, socio-economic, environmental and the level of service offered by the various alternatives. A qualitative analysis of travel behavior was done with a number of individuals as the samples. To provide the required data, a field survey as direct home interview survey and travel time survey were conducted and given a number of 233 households and 871 respondents obtained as the samples. Meanwhile, the socio-economic data were obtained directly from the institution concerned. . The collected data were analyzed by using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) Software.The results of the analysis show that people with higher income and more automobile availability make more travel than people with low income and less automobile availability. The home-based trips take the largest percentage (50%) of people in the study area. The result also indicates that the shopping trips (15%) contribute higher among different trip purpose. The results also show that about 57% of individuals are between 20-50 years. The number of trips generated from each zone is strongly related to the amount of households, population, active workers and students of that zone. By considering a significant level of 5% four trip generation models have been developed. By using these models future trip generation from each zone can be determined. By applying the Gravity Model and the Fratar Method, the trip distribution models have been developed. Three basic models have been introduced by using travel time, road distance and straight distance as the resistance index. From these models the future travel pattern of Khulna Metropolitan city, Bangladesh can be predicted. Keywords: Khulna Metropolitan City, Household survey, Travel behavior, Trip Distribution Models, Trip Generation Models