The Effect Of Different Generations Psychosocial Work Climate On The Employees’ Work Performance

The main objective of this paper is to examine the psychosocial work environment factors that influence the employee’s work performance at difference generation

Oral History Interview with Tan Chin Tiong: Conceptualising SMU

This is an abridged version of the original interview. Please contact the Library at [email protected] for access to the full version of the transcript and/or audio recording.</p

Green Synthesis of Magnetite Nanoparticles (via Thermal Decomposition Method) with Controllable Size and Shape

Magnetite (Fe3O4) nanoparticles with controllable size and shape were synthesized by the thermal decomposition method. In contrast to previously reported thermal decomposition methods, our synthesis method had utilized a much cheaper and less toxic iron precursor, iron acetylacetonate (Fe(acac)3), and environmentally benign and non-toxic polyethylene oxide (PEO) was being used as the solvent and surfactant simultaneously. Fe3O4 nanoparticles of controllable size and shape were prepared by manipulating the synthesis parameters such as precursor concentrations, reaction durations and surfactants

Temperature regulation for hydrodistillation of essential oil extraction process from garcinia mangostana linn (GML) pericarp

Garcinia Mangostana Linn (GML), commonly known as mangosteen is an emerging category of novel functional foods sometimes called “the queen of fruit”. It is presumed to have a combination of appealing subjective characteristics such as taste, visual qualities and fragrance, nutrient richness, antioxidant streangth and potential impact for lowering risk of human diseases. GML contains natural antioxidant constituents such as phenolic compounds, which have attracted a great deal of public and scientific interest due to their health-promoting effects as antioxidants. Eight hundreds (800) grams of GML pericarps were used as the raw material to produce essential oil through hydrodistillation. Temperature of distilled water was measured to study the relation between the temperature and the composition in the essential oil. HPLC analysis report shows that the significant amount component contained in GML pericarp is Ferulic Acid. The relation between the temperature and concentration of Ferulic Acid cannot be determined since the mercury thermometer cannot measure a slightly elevation of temperature precisely. Boiling-point elevation occurs due to solute dissolved in the wate

Application of Differential Scanning Calorimetric Method for Assessing and Monitoring Various Physical and Oxidative Properties of Vegetable Oils

Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) can be a powerful instrumental technique for analyzing oils and fats systems but has tended not to be well understood and used in the field of oils and fats. The main purpose of this project is to develop various techniques based on DSC to study the physical and chemical properties of vegetable oils. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas-liquid chromatography (OLC), oxidative stability instrument (OS1), and various standard chemical analyses were used in this investigation to complement the DSC methods. This work is a systematic study of vegetable oils' melting and crystallization profiles by using DSC. The investigation began with the successful comparison of the DSC thermal curves of 17 different vegetable oils. Thorough investigations in this work were also directed towards obtaining basic information about the relationship between thermal profiles and chemical compositions of 17 different vegetable oils. Thereafter, the effects ofDSC scanning rate variation were studied. Scanning rates were found to affect melting/crystallization profile, melting (and/or crystallization) offset (and/or onset) and peak. temperatures, and peak. enthalpies of all vegetable oils. In this study, DSC was utilized to monitor the oxidation of heated oils during deep-fat frying and microwave heating. A statistical comparative study was carried out on the DSC and standard chemical methods. The results revealed that there is good correlation (P < 0.01) between the DSC method and other standard chemical methods. In another study, a new calorimetric technique was developed to determine three important quality indices in deep-fat frying industry namely, total polar compounds (TPC), free fatty acid (FFA) content and iodine value (IV) of heated oils using the DSC cooling profiles. The studies have shown that all DSC methods developed were comparable to the standard American Oil Chemists' Society (AOCS) methods. A simple and efficient DSC technique to determine the oxidative stability of vegetable oils was described. The isothermal DSC technique for direct determination of the oxidative stability of vegetable oils has been built and a comparative study to OSI was demonstrated. The results indicated that there is good correlation (P < 0.01) between the DSC oxidative induction time (To) and OSI values. Isothermal calorimetry was then employed as a general analytical method where the Arrhenius kinetic data for the lipid oxidation of vegetable oils were obtained by measurement of the DSC To at various temperatures. The present study also developed a simple method for measuring the antioxidant activity in RBDPOo using isothermal DSC technique. Generally, this project concluded that DSC appears to be a useful method in determining various physical and chemical parameters of vegetable oils, and it may have the potential to replace the laborious, time- and chemical-consuming standard methods. The various methods developed here can be applied in the oils and fats industry

Speaker Independent Speech Recognition Using Neural Network

In spite of the advances accomplished throughout the last few decades, automatic speech recognition (ASR) is still a challenging and difficult task when the systems are applied in the real world. Different requirements for various applications drive the researchers to explore for more effective ways in the particular application. Attempts to apply artificial neural networks (ANN) as a classification tool are proposed to increase the reliability of the system. This project studies the approach of using neural network for speaker independent isolated word recognition on small vocabularies and proposes a method to have a simple MLP as speech recognizer. Our approach is able to overcome the current limitations of MLP in the selection of input buffers’ size by proposing a method on frames selection. Linear predictive coding (LPC) has been applied to represent speech signal in frames in early stage. Features from the selected frames are used to train the multilayer perceptrons (MLP) feedforward back-propagation (FFBP) neural network during the training stage. Same routine has been applied to the speech signal during the recognition stage and the unknown test pattern will be classified to one of the nearest pattern. In short, the selected frames represent the local features of the speech signal and all of them contribute to the global similarity for the whole speech signal. The analysis, design and the PC based voice dialling system is developed using MATLAB®