Cultural Diversity in Conflict and Peace Making in Africa

Contrary to common belief that Cameroon is a haven of peace in a turbulent Central African sub region, this paper demonstrates that the absence of war in the country does not imply that it is peaceful. Given the linguistic and cultural diversity of the country with its more than 289 ethnic groups and a colonial legacy of French and English cultures and languages, plus remnants of a German sub-stratum, it should be clear that there are many potential ingredients for conflicts in Cameroon. The politicians seem to have nurtured these cultural and/or linguistic diversities in ways that fuel conflict and can even spark civil war. The tension that results from these ethnic and/or linguistic and religious splinters is not overt, however, due to the repressive nature of the regime in place. However, this tension continues to grow, to the detriment of the country's socio-economic development. There is therefore an acute need for measures to defuse such cultural conflicts which have the potential of sparking future civil strife in the country.African Journal on Conflict Resolution Vol. 7 (2) 2007: pp. 193-21

A model to design and verify context-aware adaptive service composition.

The introduction of mobile clients and context-aware behaviours intoWeb Service compositions may generate faults and inconsistencies. We introduce an extension of a composition model where context-awareness is made explicit and a number of correctness properties are verifiable. In particular, our extended model enables the verification of properties commonly used to validate context dependent applications. We also propose a set of algorithms to verify these properties efficiently

Algorithms for efficient symbolic detection of faults in context-aware applications.

Context-aware and adaptive applications running on mobile devices pose new challenges for the verification community. Current verification techniques are tailored for different domains (mostly hardware) and the kind of faults that are typical of applications running on mobile devices are difficult (or impossible) to encode using the patterns of ldquotraditionalrdquo verification domains. In this paper we present how techniques similar to the ones used in symbolic model checking can be applied to the verification of context-aware and adaptive applications. More in detail, we show how a model of a context-aware application can be encoded by means of ordered binary decision diagrams and we introduce symbolic algorithms for the verification of a number of properties

Impact Of Urbanisation And Its Effect On Coastal Communities In Chennai Region

Impact of Urbanisation in India is the process resulting into increase in the proportion o furban population to the total population in an area. The coastline of India is characterised by several ecosystems and resources. The population in cities is generally increasing because they provide easy access to ocean, rivers beaches and other natural areas and are a good source for raw material and food. In India, Chennai is the fifth-largest city and 36th- largest urban area by population in the world. The Quality of Living Survey rated Chennai as the safest coastal city in India. As a growing metropolitan city in a developing country, Chennai confronts substantial pollution and other logistical and socio-economic problems. The objective of the study is to identify the environmental pollution hotspots and preparing an environment management plan that includes rehabilitation and mitigation measures. The study draws the importance to maintain a balance between the ecology and economy in the region to ensure sustainable development. On the other hand, suggesting the measures to face the problems related to salinity ingress in land and water resources, depletion and degradation of coastal ecosystems and natural resources, pollution of resources like sewage intrusion, garbage disposal, etc, which have impacted on the life and livelihoods of people in multiple ways. Innovative approaches are needed to regulate the processes of salinisation and to manage to live with it since it cannot be eliminated.Keywords: Impact of Urbanisation, Coastal Environment, Sustainable Development

Context-driven methodologies for context-aware and adaptive systems

Applications which are both context-aware and adapting, enhance users’ experience by anticipating their need in relation with their environment and adapt their behavior according to environmental changes. Being by definition both context-aware and adaptive these applications suffer both from faults related to their context-awareness and to their adaptive nature plus from a novel variety of faults originated by the combination of the two. This research work analyzes, classifies, detects, and reports faults belonging to this novel class aiming to improve the robustness of these Context-Aware Adaptive Applications (CAAAs). To better understand the peculiar dynamics driving the CAAAs adaptation mechanism a general high-level architectural model has been designed. This architectural model clearly depicts the stream of information coming from sensors and being computed all the way to the adaptation mechanism. The model identifies a stack of common components representing increasing abstractions of the context and their general interconnections. Known faults involving context data can be re-examined according to this architecture and can be classified in terms of the component in which they are happening and in terms of their abstraction from the environment. Resulting from this classification is a CAAA-oriented fault taxonomy. Our architectural model also underlines that there is a common evolutionary path for CAAAs and shows the importance of the adaptation logic. Indeed most of the adaptation failures are caused by invalid interpretations of the context by the adaptation logic. To prevent such faults we defined a model, the Adaptation Finite-State Machine (A-FSM), describing how the application adapts in response to changes in the context. The A-FSM model is a powerful instrument which allows developers to focus in those context-aware and adaptive aspects in which faults reside. In this model we have identified a set of patterns of faults representing the most common faults in this application domain. Such faults are represented as violation of given properties in the A-FSM. We have created four techniques to detect such faults. Our proposed algorithms are based on three different technologies: enumerative, symbolic and goal planning. Such techniques compensate each other. We have evaluated them by comparing them to each other using both crafted models and models extracted from existing commercial and free applications. In the evaluation we observe the validity, the readability of the reported faults, the scalability and their behavior in limited memory environments. We conclude this Thesis by suggesting possible extensions

A Simple Model of Heat Distribution at Various Rayleigh Number in Silicon Elastomer

In order to investigate the two-dimensional flow of a non-Newtonian fluid, such as an elastomer liquid over a cylinder, a simplified model is applied. The analysis is carried out to study the thermophysical properties of the melt elastomer flow with Prandtl variable in the presence of internal heat generation. The temperature-dependent physical properties such as velocity, contour temperature, surface temperature as a function of contour velocity, and pressure are considered and discussed. Moreover, the exchange of energy from the surface to the fluids is examined through the variation in the Rayleigh number

Validating Spray Coverage Rate Using Liquid Mass on a Spray Card

Validation of agricultural sprayers is important for quantifying as-applied coverage rates under field conditions. The complexity of modern sprayer control systems presents a challenge for precise field validation due to the use of nozzle control technologies, such as pulse width modulation, to meter chemical flow rates at individual nozzles. Non-uniform flow over time may result in local variations at high spatial resolutions that are ignored when estimating as-applied coverage rates across a field. The purpose of this study was to test several methods for estimating the mass of water applied to a water-sensitive paper spray card target using steady-state and instantaneous measurement techniques. The steady-state method consisted of a spray patternator table used to quantify the mass flow rate distribution across the nozzle width at varying nozzle pressures. The mass flow rate was then projected onto a two-dimensional area traveling across the spray width to calculate the mass of water that was deposited in the area. Two instantaneous sampling methods were used. The first method directly measured the mass of the spray card and water for 5 min after exposure to model the evaporation rate and solve for the initial mass at the time of exposure. The second method indirectly used the percent coverage of the exposed spray card by droplets. Results showed that the error between the calculated mass of water from the mass flow rate and the estimated initial mass of water from the evaporation rate varied between 2% and 8%. The relationships between the calculated and estimated initial mass of water methods and the spray card percent coverage were highly linear (R2 \u3e 0.98). Both instantaneous methods produced results with higher variability between replications than the steady-state method, but the number of replications resulted in acceptably small differences between average mass measurements. These results show the potential for using evaporation rates for laboratory validation and percent coverage for laboratory or field validation of as-applied coverage rates

A Comparative Efficiency Study of Two Adsorbent Materials to Remove Eosin Y Dye from Aqueous Solutions

This study was done to find a cheap, available and ecofriendly materials that can remove eosin y dye from aqueous solutions by adsorption in this study, two adsorbent materials were used, the shells of fresh water clam (Cabicula fluminea) and walnut shells. To make a comparison between the two adsorbents, five experiments were conducted. First, the effects of the contact time, here the nut shell removed the dye quickly, while the C. flumina need more contact time to remove the dye. Second, the effects of adsorbent weight were examined. The nut shell was very promising and for all used adsorbent weight, the R% ranged from 94.87 to 99.29. However C. fluminea was less effective in removing the dye with R% ranged from 47.59 to 55.39. The third experiment was initial dye concentration. The C. fluminea showed very low ability to remove eosin y , while the nut shell was more effective in removing the dye with R% up to 97.36 and an inverse correlation between the increase of initial dye concentration and R%. The fourth experiment was the effect of pH value of the solution and the adsorbent particles size. The results show that fine particles were more effective than granular particles. Throughout the whole study, the walnut shell was very promising in removing the dye, while the C. fluminea shell was much less effective than the walnut shell