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CONTENT ANALYSIS ON THE REPRESENTATION OF SOUTH INDIAN-NESS IN BOLLYWOOD SONGS
Cinema is an ever growing industry. As new generations keep increasing the family tree, so does new celebrities emerge in this film fraternity. There is no end to cinema. But there is always a deadline that every celebrity meets. One wrinkle and out you go! That is precisely the formula applied in this industry. The whole research is analysed in terms of the South Indian-ness that is present in nineteen Bollywood Songs. According to the researcher, South Indian-ness means the south Indian factors that touched upon in the Bollywood movies. Those factors can be the languages, traditional attires, locations, music, etc. There are certain features that make a place unique from the others. That is the basic difference that is created which has lead to two terms ?? North India and South India. Without these differences we would have been called as ??India. -
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ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT AND JOB SATISFACTION: A STUDY OF EMPLOYEES IN THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY IN BANGALORE, INDIA
The integral part of any management process is to manage the people at work. A well managed organisation sees worker as the root cause of quality and productivity .An effective organisation will always promote a sense of commitment and satisfaction among its employees. The significance and importance of the concept of organizational commitment in terms of leading to beneficial organizational and desirable outcomes such as increased productivity, reducing absenteeism and turnover, has been documented by many studies such as those of Steers (1977); Porter et al. (1974); Reiches (1985) and Tett and Meyer (1993). One way to address issue of employee turnover is to understand the job satisfaction and commitment level of employees. Organizations often try to foster commitment in their employees to achieve stability and reduce costly turnover. It is commonly believed that committed employees will also work harder and be more likely to go the extra mile to achieve organizational objectives. Research has consistently demonstrated that commitment does indeed contribute to a reduction in turnover. Motivated employees are needed in our rapidly changing workplaces. Motivated employees help organizations survive. Motivated employees are more productive. To be effective, managers need to understand what motivates employees within the context of the roles they perform. A lot of studies are conducted separately on commitment, satisfaction and motivation but very few studies are there on IT sector linking these three .So it is crucial to conduct a study on job satisfaction and organizational commitment in information technology industry and also to identify the important motivating factors to retain the highly talented workforce. The review of related literature on Organizational commitment, Job satisfaction and Motivation has helped the researcher to identify the gap and has provided an insight to the direction of current study. The population for the study was all technical employees in the Information technology Industry in Bangalore city. For the present study data was collected with the help of structured questionnaire from 300 employees working in software industry. The study is concentrated on Bangalore IT industry. The researcher used non probabilistic sampling (purposive sampling) method as sampling design. Samples were selected from 10 top IT multinational companies. Samples were drawn from three levels of management including entry level, middle level and top level employees. The pertinent information for the study is collected from both primary and secondary sources. The independent variable in this study is job satisfaction. The overall Job satisfaction was measured using the 15-item questionnaire developed by Prof.Harold Andrew Patrick in 2009, designed to measure 15 aspects of job. The aspects of overall job satisfaction are job security,interest,opportunity for advancement,appreciation,company policy and management practises, intrinsic aspects of a job,salary,supervision,social aspects of job, working conditions,communication,hours,ease, benefits ,and fair treatment. Responses were collected with the help of 7 point likert scale. The dependant variable, organizational commitment was measured using the revised Organizational Commitment Scales (Meyer, Allen and Smith 1993) that is, the Affective Commitment Scale (ACS), the Continuance Commitment Scale (CCS) and the Normative Commitment Scale (NCS) with 24 questions on 7-point Likert scales. The Kovach ten job- related factors developed by kovach , Kenneth (1999) were used to determine what motivates the employees in software industry. The respondents were asked to indicate the degree of importance of the factors and relative ranking according to motivational importance. The statistical technique used to analyse the data were descriptive statistics, The Pearsons correlation, ANOVA, Regression and Friedman test. Data was analysed with the help of SPSS. The major findings of the study were: 1. The level of organizational commitment was moderate, with relatively higher variability in affective commitment. Mean value was highest for Continuance commitment indicating employees are staying back with the organization because of the cost of leaving the organisation or its too much trouble to go somewhere else. 2. IT employees were showing only a moderate level of job satisfaction. Amongst the items comprising the scale for job satisfaction, the items with highest satisfaction levels were related to the social aspects of the job, working conditions (excluding working hours), interest (from intrinsic aspects of the job), job security, communication, and ease of the job (as an intrinsic aspect of the job). On the other hand, employees had lowest satisfaction levels for working hours, supervision, appreciation from management, and salary. It shows that IT employees are dissatisfied with the working hours, supervision, appreciation from management and the salary they are getting. 3. To increase the Job satisfaction and commitment it is very important to identify the motivational factors. . The most important motivational factors for IT employees were good wages, promotion/growth, job security, interesting work, and appreciation of work. 4. There was significant positive correlation of job satisfaction with affective commitment and normative commitment, and negative correlation with continuance commitment. This indicates that higher the level of job satisfaction greater the level of affective commitment and normative commitment. If employees are staying back with the organization because of the cost of leaving the organisation or its too much trouble to go somewhere else then there will be less satisfaction. 5. Amongst the items comprising the scale for job satisfaction, the items with highest correlation with affective commitment were related to the salary, benefits, fair treatment, opportunity for advancement, and supervision. The items with moderate correlation were appreciation (from management),interest (from intrinsic aspects of job),job security and intrinsic aspects of job(excluding ease).The job satisfaction items with lowest correlation were working conditions(excluding hours),social aspects of job, and communication. So it clearly indicates the importance of salary, benefit, fair treatment, opportunity for advancement and a good supervision in increasing the positive emotional attachment to the organisation. 6. Regression analysis revealed that job satisfaction had a significant impact on Organizational commitment. Job satisfaction was found to have a significant positive impact on affective commitment, explaining 67.0% of the variation in affective commitment. Thus, when job satisfaction increases, affective commitment would tend to increase with it. Job satisfaction was not found to have a significant impact on continuance commitment, explaining only 1.2% of the variation in continuance commitment. Thus, when job satisfaction increases, continuance commitment would be expected to slightly decrease with it. Job satisfaction was found to have a significant positive impact on normative commitment, explaining 35.1% of the variation in normative commitment. Thus, when job satisfaction increases, normative commitment would tend to increase with it, but less so than affective commitment. It is the interest of all organization to secure commitment and reduce employee turnover. So this topic has attracted the interest of many researchers. This study confirms the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment. So managers need to make effort to develop human resource policies that are in alignment to the needs and motivation of the employees. The findings of this study have pointed out some salient issues in the IT field. It is imperative for IT company management to meet the demands of their personnel to strengthen their motivation, satisfaction, and commitment to minimize turnover. -
A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CHEVROLET PRINT ADVERTISEMENTS FROM 1960S TO 2000S
The appeal of print advertisements have always been said to have both short term and long term effect and the advertisements that feature the much needed product in a clear and appealing manner deserve to stay in the minds of the readers. Talking about the print advertisements of vintage cars and the present day advertisements of cars of the same brands, there has been a change or so as to say a vast modification from what we had in the past and what we have now. The cars of Chevrolet over the years have developed in terms of features, style and power and variety of cars have been remodelled and made more presentable according to the needs and requirements of that particular generation hence making few vehicles of Chevrolet available for the third generation as well. The study would examine the different features used in print advertising by the Chevrolet car manufacturing company (a brand that goes back to the 1950s and 1960s) to woo its potential customers. -
Employee Performance Prediction Model
With the dominance of knowledge power in the success of an organization, competent human resource has become crucial for realization of organizational objectives. Human Resource Management, HRM is a set of tasks to maintain and develop a proficient human resource. A performance appraisal process helps the HRM in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of an employee. This evaluation of employee is based on several different parameters according to the work domain and organizational objectives. This activity of employee evaluation has a high significance in making strategic decisions of manpower planning than just salary reviews. The objective of the prediction model constructed in the study is to assist HR personnel in decision making by predicting the performance of an employee. This study, has developed an Employee Performance Prediction Model which can predict the performance category of an employee. Academic industry data is used for the analysis. The supervised learning approach of classification has been first applied to the performance data to construct the model. The methodology adapted by the study is a five step process of Data preprocessing, Dimensionality Reduction, Application of classification algorithm to build the classifier and Evaluation of the classifier. Based on the hierarchical characteristics of the data, three different approaches ?? Direct, Hierarchical and Integrated are followed for the construction of the classifiers. A comparative analysis of the classifiers performances based on prediction accuracy and error rate is performed. Unsupervised learning approach is used to understand natural similarities among the employees to enhance the evaluation process. The thesis is organized into five chapters. Chapter1, Introduction, starts with a brief overview of HRM and presents the objective of the study and the problem statement. It further describes a typical KDD process and role of data mining in a KDD process. Chapter 2, Literature review, discusses background work in the field of data mining and HRM. Different models and techniques used in the context are described. Chapter 3, Methodology elaborately discusses the processes and techniques used for constructing the Employee Performance Prediction Model. Starting with the block diagram, the chapter elaborates the sequence of steps that led to the results. Chapter 4, Results and Discussion discusses the performance statistics of the different classifiers constructed in the study. Chapter 5, Conclusion, summarizes the inferences concluded based on the results obtained. The chapter also discusses limitations and challenges and concludes with future scope of the study. Keywords: Human Resource Management, Performance Appraisal, Knowledge discovery, Data Mining, Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning, Classification and Prediction. -
An investigation of various algorithms suitable for 3D compute on heterogeneous platform
This research explores the usage of heterogeneous computing, which is the current trend in the computing industry, for the 3D compute based on the collaborative algorithm. As a part of literature review the areas related to the heterogeneous computing is investigated, which includes OpenCL, General Purpose Graphical Processing Unit [ GPGPU ], collaborative algorithm. The novelty of this research work is the application of collaborative algorithms, which have been used in other areas to 3D compute. This exploration of 3D compute algorithm was part of the exercise in order to find the suitable 3D compute algorithm for the monocular image to binocular image conversation engine. Here the two algorithms, i.e., intelligent water drops and zombie crowd algorithm were implemented using OpenCL to run on heterogeneous platform. The performance of both the algorithm was measured on the experimental setup rig. Based on the above research exercise, it can be inferred that, the collaborative algorithm can indeed be suitable for 3D compute and it can be also noted that each algorithm is suitable for particular 3D compute. KEYWORDS: Heterogeneous Computing, GPGPU, OpenCL, Collaborative Algorithm -
Microindentation Analysis of Bi2Te3 Crystals
Recent trends and advancements in materials research and technology have led to a renewed interest in the growth of crystalline solids with better physical perfection and high purity. The major emphasis of investigations has been on the growth of single crystals and the study of their physical properties suitable for device fabrication. The availability of crystals from natural resources is inadequate to meet the need of industries and also do not give sufficient variety. Although crystal growth has been the subject of absorbing interest for many years, much of the latest developments have been stimulated due to its increasing commercial importance for the fabrication of thermoelectric, optoelectric and nonlinear optical devices. Crystal has an ordered arrangement of atoms or molecules in microscopic scale and the atomic regularity shows up in the internal and external symmetry. The change in crystal shape should be brought about by the difference in controlling mechanisms of the growth dynamics. It is inevitable to investigate the relationship between the growth mechanism and resulting growth morphology. The developments in crystal technology have significant contribution to many areas of basic and applied solid state research. Industries currently rely on bulk grown crystals of a variety of materials. Hence, single crystals have been extensively studied to explore their novel physical properties and potential applications. The first chapter deals with an introduction to the crystal growth, followed by a brief history of semiconducting materials. A detailed account on the properties and applications of bismuth telluride crystals is reported. This chapter concludes with different mechanical properties and scope of the research problem. A review of literature to present theoretical knowledge on growth and characterization of bismuth telluride crystals is given in chapter 2. Chapter 3 outlines the experimental procedures and different characterization techniques used for the present work. A detailed study on the vapour and melt growth of bismuth telluride crystals and its mechanical properties is also reported. Chapter 4 is devoted to provide a detailed discussion on the results obtained from experimental research. Final chapter covers the summary and conclusions of this research work. The report ends with a reference section, listed as per the international standards. -
Design and Development of A Generic Framework for Surface Water Delineation and Monitoring Using a Hybrid Level Set Algorithm on Landsat Multi-Spectral Data
Surface water bodies are critical to the existence and sustenance of civilizations. Water bodies in urban cities across the world have undergone drastic decline in quality and quantity. This has been the result of a multitude of reasons like increase in population, urbanization and encroachment. Monitoring changes to water bodies is a newlinenecessary requirement in devising strategies to conserve them. This thesis proposes newlinea generic framework for monitoring and forecasting changes in the surface area of newlinelakes using a hybrid level set algorithm for water body delineation followed by a double exponential smoothing model for forecasting. The proposed hybrid level set algorithm combines the advantages of edge based and region based level sets. An edge detection term is introduced into the formulation which improves the delineation accuracy by forcing the level set evolution to stop at the boundaries of the region of interest. The performance of the algorithm was analyzed using Pearson s Correlation Co-effcient (PCC), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and Dice Similarity index and found to have superior performance compared to established methods in the literature. The study uses Landsat multi-spectral data for the last 30 years to build the proposed framework for forecasting the changes in the surface area of water bodies. The experiments were conducted for nine lakes in Bangalore, a fast growing city in India, and a steady decrease in the surface area is observed for most of the lakes that were studied. The city s renovation attempts have also seen that the some of the lakes are sustaining the rapid urbanization. The proposed forecast model has yielded acceptable results with an average error of 0.22% and a correlation coeffcient of 0.94 between the actual surface area and the forecasted surface area. The framework can be customized in the future to study specifc water bodies by plugging in external newlineparameters to improve the forecasting accuracy. -
SVM Ensemble for Insurance Data Analysis
Data mining is the process of analysing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information. Companies with a strong consumer focus use data mining. The information getting from datamining is useful to increase revenue and reduce overall costs of the company. It is applied in retail field, financial sector, communication media, and in marketing organizations. Datamining facilitate these companies to determine relationships among company internal factors such as price, product positioning, or staff skills, and external factors such as competition in products, economic indicators, and customer demographics. Ensemble learning is a machine-learning paradigm where multiple models or learners are trained to solve the problem. This research explores the usage of SVM ensemble for Insurance Data Analysis. The number of Insurance firms is increasing day by day. The main objective of this research is to find out the best policy from a given list of Insurance policies. In this research a detailed study of SVM ensemble is done. An insurance dataset obtained from UCI knowledge discovery in Databases Archive is taken in the research analysis. From the dataset five different Non-life insurance policies were selected and used in this research work. The categories of policies include Fire policy, Home policy, Car policy, Kissan policy and Boat policy. AdaBoost, multiclassifier SVM ensemble was created and tested with the insurance dataset. SVM ensemble produces better accuracy than other ensembles. The knowledge flow of SVM ensemble is loaded in Weka. From each category, the policy that gives a highest accuracy value for SVM ensemble is considered to be the best policy. A graphical user interface is also developed using .NET framework, to view the policy output. This system helps the user to find out a best policy from the analysed data. KEYWORDS: SVM ensemble, Insurance policy, Accuracy, ROC, Support Vector Machine. -
A Comparative Study on Work Engagement in Relation to Leadership in Private and Public sector Undertakings in Bangalore
Employee contribution becomes a critical business issue because in trying to produce superior output, companies have no choice but to try and engage not only the body but the mind and soul of every employee. Most organizations today realize that a satisfied employee is not necessarily the best employee in terms of loyalty and productivity. The best employee is really an engaged employee, one who is intellectually and emotionally bound with the organization, who feels passionate about its goals and committed towards its values. This employee goes the extra mile beyond the basic job requirements. Leadership in organizations ought to be authentic in order to be effective and successful over the long term. Philosophers, religious leaders, and thinkers from ancient times have given emphasis on the importance of authenticity and ethicality for leaders, if they are to attain effective governance in any circumstances. Leaders are obliged to demonstrate the highest moral standards and ethical demeanour in their everyday talk, actions, decision, and behaviours, so that others in their organizations can follow suit. The most recent financial crisis has originated from failed corporate leaders who believed in manipulations of accounts and indulged into obvious unethical corporate practices. Engaging employees of an organization is critical to the organizations success. Work Engagement is often the most significant differentiator between private and public organizations. This is true particularly for service based companies as revenues are directly proportional to number of workforce engagement in the organization. Based on the review of literatures and identified the gap, the investigator felt an imperative need to pursue with the current research. The sample consisted of 240 employees from both private and public sector organizations. The judgmental sampling technique was adopted for selecting the respondents. Two standard tools were used to measure the variables of the study- 1.The measuring instrument used for the independent variable (Leadership) is the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) (Form 5X) (Bass & Avolio, 1997). The reliability of the scale was 0.701 2.The measuring instrument used for the dependent variable (Work engagement) is the Schaufeli & Bakker (2003). The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. The reliability of the scale was 0.783 The major findings of the study were- 1. The dimensions of work engagement viz. vigor, absorption, dedication are found to have no significant relations with participative and democratic leadership style. 2. The dimensions of work engagement viz. vigor, absorption, dedication are found to have significant relations with autocratic leadership style. 3. For the dimension of Vigor, the difference between private and public organization on Vigor is statistically significant. It was found that the private sector employee scored high value(5.51) than the public sector employees(5.12) on the dimension of vigor. -
EFFECT OF GRAVITY MODULATION ON THE ONSET OF RAYLEIGH-BENARD CONVECTION IN A WEAK ELECTRICALLY CONDUCTING COUPLE STRESS FLUID WITH SATURATED POROUS LAYER
The effect of time-periodic body force (TBF, also called gravity modulation) of small amplitude in a weak electrically conducting couple stress fluid with saturated porous layer is investigated by using a linear stability analysis. A regular perturbation method is used to arrive at an expression for the correction Rayleigh number. The Venezian approach is adopted in arriving at the critical Rayleigh and wave number for small amplitudes of TBF. The effect of roles of Couple stress parameter, Hartmann number, Darcy number, Porous parameter and Prandtl number on the onset of convection is studied. It is found that TBF leads to delay in convection. Also the results suggest that instead of taking electrically non-conducting fluid it is better to consider electrically conducting fluid with weak electrical conductivity as this ensures a stable environment in the presence of a magnetic field. The system is most stable with respect to TBF. -
CREDIBILITY OF WORD OF MOUTH ADVERTISING: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MOVIES AND FMCG
Word of mouth which is synonymous to organic marketing, buzz marketing and viral marketing is one of the most popular and a non expensive form of advertising which is undertaken by almost anyone and everyone. The changing times are seeing a changing use of this form of advertising. The study revolves around this medium of mass communication and mass consumption. The researcher thus seeks to understand the use of word of mouth advertising in case of movies and fast moving consumer goods and to find out its credibility in terms of usage. A sample size of 100 was selected using snowball sampling technique. The method of primary data collection comprised of surveys in the form of questionnaire which was distributed online. The study revealed that word of mouth advertising is more preferred, trusted and considered credible in case of movies which is the greatest source of entertainment for people even today and not fast moving consumer goods which are tried and tested by consumers themselves. -
Meaning in Life as Constructed by Male Adolescents of Alcoholic Parents
Little research has been done to understand the experiences of male adolescent living with an alcoholic parent. This qualitative phenomenological study was used to explore and understand how the sons of an alcoholic parent living in South India find meaning in their situation. Alcoholism occurs in India as it does in all nations, but here there is a greater sense of shame attached to it and it is less mentioned than in Western countries. The sample in the study is selected according to the non-probability and purposive sampling technique. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews in which the researcher interacted with the participants. Five boys were interviewed between the ages of seventeen and twenty; three attend a prestigious college while the other two were no longer at school. Some from wealthy families while others were sons of day labourers. All were keen to advance in their chosen careers, some through gaining degrees. Sports and recreation were important to them and it provided a sense of achievement and a release from the stresses of a dysfunctional family. There were supporting features in the lives of the boys; support coming from mothers, older siblings, sports coaches and some teachers. Other ways of gaining a sense of value was by having a personal faith in God and by helping younger disadvantaged children. The counter to this was that some teachers did not understand and were critical of the boys while in most cases members of the extended families like uncles, aunts and cousins interacted in negative way. The exceptions were grandparents who either were able to control their alcoholic son or could provide time and support to their grandson. The negative influences added to the stresses of living with an alcoholic father. What was surprising was the degree of maturity of the boys; they accepted that alcoholism was a disease and that it was not their fathers fault, and they remained loyal to their parent. This study shows that the school sports coaches have a more positive influence than teachers. This may be because coaches have a more holistic approach than teachers. It highlights the need for schools and colleges to adopt a more proactive approach to at risk students by identifying such students and for training of teachers in how to deal with these students. Thematic network approach to data analysis was used. This involved organising the data into three levels of themes reflecting salient themes i.e. basic, organising and global themes (Attride-Stirling, 2001). Attride-Stirling describes six stages in analyses involving thematic networks involving devising a coding framework, identify themes, refine the themes, constructing the thematic network, describing, exploring and summarising the networks and interpreting the patterns. Five global themes emerged from the analysis. The male adolescent need for praise, building self-esteem, helps, belief, being misunderstood by others. Recommendations are presented to create conditions necessary for the male adolescent. This involves education and creation of supportive environments for the male adolescent and his family. Key words: Adolescent of alcoholic parents, Meaning in life, Alcoholic, Thematic network, Logotherapy. -
AN ANALYSIS OF THE PORTRAYAL OF INDIAN CHARACTERS IN HOLLYWOOD MOVIES - A CASE STUDY OF FOUR HOLLYWOOD MOVIES
The medium of film has been one of the most influential communication tools to the masses since its emergence. Life is reflected in cinema and many a times our perspective of life is manipulated by what we see in the media. There have been various studies conducted of various cultures (including African American, Asians in general, etc) being represented in a stereotypical way in Hollywood movies. However, there have not been studies about how Indians are portrayed in Hollywood movies. This study aims to find how Hollywood has portrayed Indians and Indian culture in their movies, also, to see if and how they are stereotyped. -
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT COMPONENTS IN POST-GRADUATE COUNSELING PROGRAMS IN BANGALORE: AN EVALUATION
The counseling profession is gaining ground in India and every year a large number of trainee counselors graduate with a masters degree that deems them fit to practice. Professional and Personal development of counselors is of paramount importance to ensure a competent and ethical service to clients. However, there is little research being done in the field of training and development of counselors. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to identify the personal development components in post graduate counseling courses in Bangalore. The researcher chose a program evaluation design. The curricula of three masters level counseling courses in Bangalore were evaluated for its personal development components. Three faculty members and twenty six trainee counselors participated in the study. Focus group and interviews were used to collect the data. The transcripts were analyzed using directed content analysis. The results showed that various aspects of the course had contributed to personal development of the trainees. They included personal and group therapy, Small group processes, micro-skills training, supervised practicum, journal writing, taught courses like family therapy, theories of counseling, life span development, transpersonal psychology and emotional development, specific workshops and the academic environment of the trainee which included their faculty and peers. Barriers to personal development were also identified and recommendations were made for the future. -
Influence of Rock/Metal on youth
??Influence of Rock and Metal on youth is a research paper which deals with various kinds of influence that this genre can have over its fan followers. It tries to elaborate on the change that an individual will go through, whilst he/she consumes or listens to rock/heavy metal music. Influence of music on its listeners is an obvious factor. Serious impact on huge fans may vary from different genres and the way the individual perceives it. Music can be a pastime, hobby and a career as well. Rock and heavy metal music have their own characteristics. Known to be highly influential in terms of substance and drug abuse, this genre of music is worshipped throughout the world, with a spectacular growth in its fans and followers. This study, which is based on a focus group discussion emphasizes widely as to how rock and heavy metal music has influenced its fans, but has no serious impact. The research conducted has proved that youngsters and fans who listen to this genre of music are influenced only as far as change in lifestyles, attitudes and behavior is concerned. Exposure to substance abuse, psychological changes, evil thoughts, suicide, etc. cannot be shown as the result of listening to rock and heavy metal music. -
Health Expenditure in Puducherry (U.T) A Study using National Health Accounts Framework
With the start of globalization, the Indian economy started experiencing a sudden growth and with the boom of various sector in the economy, the employment opportunity, income as standard of living started increasing. With the increase standard of living, there is an increase in demand for health care services. Health care plays an important role in the lives of the people. With government being welfare oriented every year the investment in health care increases and the private contribution to the health care sector is increasing at a higher pace. This study aims: (1) To quantify the extent of household expenditure on health by household characteristics in Puducherry; (2) To track the flow of resources in Health sector from different sources and present them in the form of accounting principles and (3) To develop a matrice format which facilitates the user to understand the sources of finances and uses of such finances on different item of expenditure. A primary data survey was conducted to capture the picture of household expenditure and the National Health Account matrices framework as prescribed by WHO was used in developing the health accounts matrices. The finding shows that majority of the household expenditure is made in purchasing medicine and other goods from the retail sector. Bulk of the spending is made in curative services. The expenditure flows to retail sale of medicines and drugs seems to be the major provider of services to the community. Households are the prominent sources for spending on health care. Out of the household surveyed only 2 to 3 per cent of the population would opt for health insurance. The present expenditure pattern seems to be shying away from other crucial functional elements of health care like Primary health care, Prevention of diseases, Public health and Promotive care. The study also finds a need to increase the awareness of Health insurance among the public and the need for more investment in health infrastructure as well as training of health personnel. -
Analysis of Web Mining Patterns Using Custom-Built Apriori Algorithm
The dissertation entitled Analysis of Web Mining Patterns Using Custom-Built Apriori Algorithm has developed a custom-built apriori algorithm for the discovery of association rules in web log data. Web server log containing the information about all the web requests to the Christ university website is used for analysis. The methodology adapted by this research is a four step process, containing data preprocessing, frequent pattern discovery, analysis and developing a tool for implementing web mining. The custom built apriori takes the preprocessed weblog file as input and generates the frequent folders and the relationship among them. This thesis has also developed a tool written in java for this web usage mining process. The tool assists the user to execute the custom built apriori algorithm and to view the associations among folders based on the given support and confidence values to the tool. The web is a highly dynamic information source. Most of the organisations put information on the web because they want it to be seen by the world. Now a days the web is well beefed up with more information in an unstructured fashion. As the web and its usage continue to grow, there is an opportunity to analyse web data and extract useful knowledge from it. The objective of this research is to predict the user behaviour in interacting with the website that helps the website designer in improving the quality of website. The dissertation is organised into 5 chapters. Chapter1, Introduction starts with a brief overview of web mining and presents the objective of the study and the problem statement. Chapter 2, Literature review, discusses background work in the field of web mining and pattern discovery. Chapter 3, methodology elaborately discusses the process used for analysing the web patterns. Chapter 4 is dedicated for results and discussion. Chapter5, conclusion, summarises the inferences concluded based on the results obtained. The chapter also discusses the limitations and challenges and concludes with future scope of the study. KeyWords: Web Mining, Preprocessing, Web Server log, Frequent pattern -
IMPACT OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND ITS PLACEMENT IN NEWS ARTICLES ON READERS.
The research is carried out to study the impact of photographs and its placement on readers in newspapers. The photographs and headline are the heavyweights, more than any other element they attract attention. This study tries to focus on the role of photographs in newspaper articles on its readers. It evaluates on the terms of its placement as well. Photographs in newspapers are researched through semiotics analysis, content analysis and other qualitative techniques. This study is undertaken in both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The researcher has used the random sampling technique with a sample size of 108. The analysis is also made on the basis of in-depth interview with experienced and seasoned members of print organisations. Based on the analysis of the data collected the research has thrown light upon the findings that, before even scanning pages in detail, the first element seen by a reader is the photographs. Both the genders have equally shown that the photographs are the first component that attracts them to read an article. A well placed photograph plays an important role by breaking the monotony of text placement and leads to visual appeal of the reader. In conclusion the photographs have high visual impact on readers. Its placement and size play a vital role in not only leading the readers to read the article but also creates an aesthetically designed layout. -
Data Structure Based Loss-less Image Compression Algorithm
Working capital in any organizations has a significant role in driving the business forward. Hence, there is an imminent need for the management of the working capital. The efficiency with which working capital is managed in a business or organization determines the health of the business or the organization. On having an effective working capital management firms tend to be successful and while ineffective working management leads to the failure of the business. Hence, the management of working capital is of great importance. The research study is to evaluate the effectiveness of working capital management in maximizing the profitability of construction companies in Bangalore. The research will analyze the construction companies to establish an understanding of the significance of effective WCM for maximizing the profitability. The working capital is the life blood of a business and an important function of finance that defines and deals with the liquidity of the firm. Also, profitability of firms is another major aspect of business. The research explores the correlation between the working capital and profitability to understand the effectiveness of working capital management in maximizing the profitability. The construction industry is the second largest industry of the country after agriculture. Construction activity is an integral part of a countrys infrastructure and industrial development. It includes hospitals, schools, townships, offices, houses and other buildings; urban infrastructure (including water supply, sewerage, drainage); highways, roads, ports, railways, airports; power systems; irrigation and agriculture systems; telecommunications etc. Covering as it does such a wide spectrum, construction becomes the basic input for socio-economic development. The construction industry generates substantial employment and provides a growth impetus to other sectors through backward and forward linkages. It is, essential therefore, that, this vital activity is nurtured for the healthy growth of the economy. With the present emphasis on creating physical infrastructure, massive investment is planned during the Tenth Plan. The construction industry would play a crucial role in this regard and has to gear itself to meet the challenges. In order to meet the intended investment targets in time, the current capacity of the domestic construction industry would need considerable strengthening. The construction sector has major linkages with the building material industry since construction material accounts for sizeable share of the construction costs these include cement, steel, bricks/tiles, sand/aggregates, fixtures/fittings, paints and chemicals, construction equipment, petro-products, timber, mineral products, aluminum, glass and plastics. The construction sector is one of the largest employers in the country. In 1999-2000, it employed 17.62 million workers, a rise of 6 million over 1993-94. The sector also recorded the highest growth rate in generation of jobs in the last two decades, doubling its share in total employment.