Electrochemical synthesis of melanin-like polyindolequinone

Conducting polymer is a rapidly developing area of research due to its potential in combining the physical properties of polymers with electrical properties previously found only in inorganic systems. These conducting polymers owe their unique properties to a conjugated polymer backbone and become conducting upon oxidation or reduction. Melanin, a biopolymer, possess a conjugated backbone required of a conducting polymer, and has shown properties of an amorphous semiconductor. However, there has not been much study done in this area despite its potential, and this is partially due to the lack of processing methods as melanin is generally synthesised as an intractable powder. Thus, a better synthetic method was required, and a possible solution is the use of electrochemical synthesis. In our previous study we have shown that melanin can be synthesised electrochemically as a free-standing film, which was the first step towards the use of melanin as a bulk material. This project aims to continue from this preliminary work, investigating the various synthetic parameters and possible modifications as well as investigating possible applications for the electrochemically synthesised melanin film

Clustering of twitter technology tweets and the impact of stopwords on clusters

Year of 2010 could be termed as the year in which Twitter became completely mainstream. Twitter, which started as a means of communicating with friends, became much more than its beginning. Now Twitter is used by companies to promote their new products, used by movie industry to promote movies. A lot of advertising and branding is now tied to Twitter and most importantly any breaking news that happens, the first place one goes and tries to find is to search it on Twitter. Be it the Mumbai attacks that happened in 2008, or the minor earthquakes that happened in Bay Area in 2010 or the twitter revolution cause of the Iran elections, most of the tech and not so tech savvy viewers were following twitter rather than any main stream news channels. In fact most of the breaking news now comes on Twitter because of the huge number of user base rather than the traditional mainstream media. The focus of this paper is clustering with the TF-IDF weighted mechanism of daily technology news tweets of prominent bloggers and news sites using Apache Mahout and to evaluate the effects of introducing and removing stop words on the quality of clustering. This project restricts itself to only tweets in the English language

A CLOSER LOOK ON THE MASCULINITY/FEMININITY DIMENSION OF THE JAVANESE AND CHINESE INDONESIAN FEMALE MANAGERS

In Hofstede‟s cultural values framework, Indonesia was described as a country with high power distance level, collectivist, low uncertainty avoidance and tendency toward femininity. Nevertheless, there is a possibility that the actual cultural conditions of the country is not as simple as what it seems. As the fourth largest country in the world incorporating 31 major ethnic groups, Indonesia‟s vast cultural diversity could cause some variations on the culture-related phenomenon among its ethnic groups. The aim of this study is to conduct a closer investigation specific to Hofstede‟s cultural values dimension of masculinity/femininity in Indonesia. This dimension was chosen based on the rationale that it can be used to distinguish whether a society give more emphasis toward earnings, recognition, advancement and challenge; or, more emphasis toward harmony. To achieve this aim, 40 respondents from two Indonesian ethnicities, namely Javanese and Chinese Indonesian female managers were compared in this study. Quantitative analyses were conducted using Hofstede‟s Value Survey Module formula, while pattern matching technique was employed to analyze the qualitative data obtained from the semistructured interview. The analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data revealed significant differences in terms of the masculinity/femininity cultural value in the two diverse subcultures. This finding suggests that variations in Indonesia‟s culture should be acknowledged and be given attention since it can be used to explain culture-related phenomenon in the workplace. Implications for theory and practice were also discussed

Mercury Analysis and Concentration in Seawater of Southern Sumbawa

. Current concerns over the negative impacts of Hg in the environment have led to the rapid progress of studies in this area. This progress has been directed to obtain analysis techniques that are able to accurately quantify Mercury (Hg) at extremely low concentration in which it frequently occurs. As part of a study on the environmental aspects of deep-sea submarine tailing placement at the Batu Hijau Mine, Sumbawa, this paper discusses recent progress in Hg analytical techniques, followed by the application of several techniques to investigate Hg concentration in seawater in the vicinity of the tailing discharge location. Using cold vapour atomic fluorescence spectrometry, dissolved Hg was found to be at sub-ng/l (ppt) levels. No dissolved Hg signal associated with the tailing discharge was found with concentrations being similar to adjacent coastal waters