Feasibility study on utilization of palm fibre waste into fired clay brick

Malaysia is the second largest of palm oil producer after Indonesia, which contribute to 50 % of palm oil production. With this demand, the increasing of palm oil plantation over the years has led to the large production of agricultural waste, for example palm fibre waste. This study investigates different percentages of palm fibre (0 %, 1 %, 5 % and 10 %) to be incorporated into fired clay brick. Manufactured bricks were fired at 1 °C/min heating rate up to 1050 °C. The effects of manufacture bricks on the physical and mechanical properties of manufactured brick were also determined. All brick samples were tested due to the physical and mechanical properties which include dry density, firing shrinkage, initial rate of suction (IRS), water absorption, porosity and compressive strength. Findings show that increasing palm fibre waste affected the properties of brick, which decreased their density, besides increased firing shrinkage, IRS, water absorption, porosity and compressive strength. However, all the manufactured brick still followed the requirement

Future Community-Based Ecotourism (CBET) development

Ecotourism is an alternative form of tourism and is usually confused with natural and cultural tourism.CBET is fast becoming a popular biodiversity conservation tool that develops and benefits the local community. Based on the context of conservation theory and practice, Community-Based Ecotourism (CBET) is a form of community-based natural resource management. However, a sustainable CBET development through Community Capacity Building (CCB)programs is not something that it easily achievable. Local community’s capacity varies from one culture to another. It takes a high level of community participation, in order for it to come to a level where the community members themselves are motivated to participate and contribute to the development of the program. This fully qualitative research involved 15 respondents from the community of Kg. Selai, Bekok in Johor, Malaysia. The result show there are five factors that sustained the ecotourism development based for Orang Asli Community in Kg. Selai, namely, existing CBET development, past CBET development, local community participation in planning stage of tourism, local participation in implementation stage of tourism and participation in nature conservation

Impact of Si nanocrystals in a-SiOx<Er> in C-Band emission for applications in resonators structures

Si nanocrystals (Si-NC) in a-SiOx were created by high temperature annealing. Si-NC samples have large emission in a broadband region, 700nm to 1000nm. Annealing temperature, annealing time, substrate type, and erbium concentration is studied to allow emission at 1550 nm forsamples with erbium. Emission in the C-Band region is largely reduced by the presence of Si-NC. This reduction may be due to less efficient energy transfer processes from the nanocrystals than from the amorphous matrix to the Er3+ ions, perhaps due to the formation of more centro-symmetric Er3+ sites at the nanocrystal surfaces or to very different optimal erbium concentrations between amorphous and crystallized samples.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figure

Job Strain and Well-being of Teaching Professionals: An Empirical Investigation

The aim of the current study was to examine job strain and well-being in a group of male and female teaching professionals. The main objectives of the current study were to (i) Examine the difference between male teachers with low job strain and female teachers with low job strain on general well-being. (ii) Examine the difference between male teachers with high job strain and female teachers with high job strain on general well-being. (iii) Examine the difference between male teachers with low job strain and male teachers with high job strain on general well-being and (iv) Examine the difference between female teachers with low job strain and female teachers with high job strain on general well-being. A sample of 100 senior secondary teachers were selected from one of the Central Universities at Aligarh City using convenience sampling method of 32 were male and 58 were female teachers. The measures used were PGI Well-being scale (Moudgil et al, 1986) and Job Strain Questionnaire (Singh, 1989). The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics like mean and SD and inferential statistics like t-test. The findings of the current work indicate that mental health of males is better than of their female counterparts. The findings also indicate that high job strain effects the mental health of both the groups and male teachers are influenced more than females on their well-beings. Finally, significant difference was not found between the mean scores of female teachers with low job strain and high job strain on their general well-being. The study has implications for stress management programs for the teachers at senior secondary level to enhance their well-being and specific job related performanc

A New Consistency Validation Approach to Enhance the Quality of Functional Security Requirements for Secure Software

Quality security requirements contribute to the success of secure software development. However, the process of eliciting security requirements is tedious and complex. It also requires requirements engineers to have security experience in the process of eliciting consistent security requirements from the clients-stakeholders. Most of the requirements engineers faced problems in eliciting consistent security compliance requirements from the clients-stakeholders as they misunderstood the real needs and the security term used. Thus, this resulted to inconsistent security requirements being elicited. The inconsistency leads to incorrect and insecure software systems being developed as well as to disruptions of schedule and increase of a project's expenditure. Motivated by these problems, this study is aimed to propose a new approach for consistency validation of functional security requirements. Here, security requirements specifications will be collected from software vendors to analyse the flow of functional security requirements process. Next, visual differencing will be integrated to cross-validate the consistency of the elicited functional security requirements with the best-practise template. Here, security requirements best-practice template pattern library will be designed and a new mathematical formulation that defines the consistency validation rules of security requirements will also be constructed. The formulation will be based on the security-related semi-formalised model, called SecEssential Use Case (SecEUC).This approach will then be realised with a proof of concept prototype tool and will be compared with the existing approaches, focusing on its ability to validate the inconsistency of the functional security requirements. Finally, this study is believed could provide a positive impact to the software industry by reducing the development cost as it allows the requirements engineers to validate the inconsistency that occurs in the elicited security compliance requirements at the early stage of the secure software development

THE BEST FIT IN MEMORY MANAGEMENT

Dynamic memory allocation often makes up a large part of program execution time. Different variants of the best-fit allocator are implemented and their space and time costs measured and compared. We found variants of this algorithm that are 3-33% faster than the Doug Lea 2.7.0 allocato

Paperless Online Banking (e-Cheque Imaging)

This study aims to highlight the importance of using e-cheque imaging in e-business and e-banking. E-cheque imaging enables both the customer and the bank to have more flexible accessible valid transactions by electronically checking all transactions through an online bank web system. The researcher developed a prototype for e-cheque imaging system and adopted the research in general design methodology in order to make the transaction cheque clearing process more efficient and accurate. After testing the system, the findings revealed that the proposed system is capable to record a successful complete electronic transaction. By developing such a system, the study attempts to confirm that there are many potential benefits that can be obtained from applying E-cheque imaging