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Neurobiological aspects of violent and criminal behaviour: Deficits in frontal lobe function and neurotransmitters
Many neurobiological abnormalities have been reported in patients with violent and criminal behaviour. Strong associations exist between aggressive/violent behaviour and brain dysfunction. Also, many studies support an association between frontal lobe dysfunction and increased aggressive or antisocial behaviour. The focal orbitofrontal brain injury is specifically associated with increased aggression. Deficits in frontal lobe executive functions may increase the likelihood of future aggression, but as of now, studies have reliably demonstrated a characteristic pattern of frontal network dysfunction predictive of violent crime. The evidence is strongest for an association between focal prefrontal damage and an impulsive subtype of aggressive behaviour. This paper covers dysfunctions in these regions contributing to severe aggressive and violent behaviour, as well as neurotransmitters implicated in the same. 2018 International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences (IJCJS). -
Social media marketing and ghost shopping approach; a new business tool
Research motivation: The researcher is a mystery shopper who has vast experience in various field analyses. The researcher has taken up a few good assignments in various domains, which has given him a good experience. Thus, this experience has motivated the researcher to explore how mystery shopping is used in social media and how the process works in reality. The connectivity between mystery shopping and social media is a new emerging topic and only a very few research work is seen and hence this gap has been used to proceed with this research title. Research materials and methods: The research work makes use of quantitative and qualitative techniques to draw and analyse the data. The respondents for this research work is mystery shoppers, market research agencies, experts in marketing research and mystery shopping, a few marketers who deal with digital marketing etc. The tool used for this research is factor analysis for quantitative analysis and various qualitative techniques to determine the experience, observations, past case studies and literature works. Research outcome: From the quantitative techniques, it is clear that customer experience and relationship between the sales representatives and the customers dealing through online marketing plays an important role in the success of social media marketing which the mystery shoppers observe. Based on the observations a detailed report is submitted which will enhance the firms to form strong strategies. Future scope: The future researchers can analyse on the related aspects of mystery shopping and social media. The problems faced by mystery shoppers with regard to social media observations, the skills needed to deal with digital tools can be researched. IAEME Publication. -
Tunable direct band gap photoluminescent organic semiconducting nanoparticles from lignite
Fluorescent organic semiconducting dots (OSDs) with tunable particle size and surface functionality are synthesized from lignite by chemical oxidation method followed by ultra-sonication techniques and dialysis. The defects and oxygen functionalities play a vital role in the photoluminescent property of the synthesized nanoparticles along with quantum confinement effect. These nanomaterials are suitable for imaging and chemical sensing applications as there is no photobleaching and quenching even after a continuous UV exposure of 24 hours and storage of 2 years. The excellent excitation dependent luminescence of the synthesized carbon dots can be utilized for making a low-cost carbon-based sensor for Cu2+ metal ions sensing. The OSDs show good ratiometric fluorescent sensing and can be used as a reliable probe for the detection of Cu2+ ions. They exhibit excellent detection limit of copper ion in acidic solution to a very low concentration of 0.0089 nM. The fluorescent nanodots synthesized from such an abundant and cost-effective precursor exhibiting high copper ion sensitivity is being reported for the first time. 2017 The Author(s). -
MLLR based speaker adaptation for indian accents
Speech Recognition has become an inherent and important feature of today's mobile based apps. Speech input is a very popular option for people with limitations of using the keyboard / mouse in a computer system. Nowadays, more voice messages are used than written text as they also convey the emotions of the speakers. As solutions are developed with native speakers of a language, many of the English input systems have higher accuracy for native speakers than for people with English as their second language (L2), especially for Asian population. The complexity increases since the accent and intonation of Indian speakers are varied from region to region and state to state. This paper analyses an effective speaker adaptation mechanism implemented with Indian speaker profiles and with a very small amount of adaptation data. This research is to facilitate a speaker adaptive system for the speech disabled users with limited disabilities like stuttering and/or unintelligible speech due to illness like cerebral palsy. Experimental results show improvements in the recognition accuracy for speakers speaking small sentences. 2017 University of Bahrain. All rights reserved. -
Study on Photophysical Properties of N-Arylphthalamic Acid Derivative Containing 1, 2, 4-Triazole Scaffold
A novel N-arylphthalamic acid derivative, 2-({4-[(1H-1,2,4-triazol-1-yl)methyl]phenyl}carbamoyl)benzoic acid (TMPCB) was synthesized and their absorption and emission spectra were recorded in fifteen different solvents of varying polarities at room temperature. Ground state dipole moment of the derivative was calculated experimentally by Guggenheim method and solvatochromic approach proposed by Bilot-Kawski. The singlet excited state dipole moment of TMPCB were calculated experimentally based on different approaches of solvent polarity function proposed by LippertMataga, Bakhshiev, Kawskii-Chamma-Viallet, Reichardt and Bilot-Kawski. Singlet excited state dipole moment was greater than ground state dipole moment in all the approaches which could be attributed to considerable ?- electron density redistribution. Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) analysis based on Kamlet-Abboud-Taft and Catalan parameters were also studied to correlate solvatochromism and influence of solvents with absorbance and emission spectra. Ground and singlet excited state optimizations of the molecule were also performed using Gaussian 09W software. HOMO-LUMO energies of the phthalamic acid derivative have been obtained using TD-DFT/PCM (B3LYP/6-31G (d, p)) computations and experimentally by using cyclic voltammetry. Mulliken charges and molecular electrostatic potential plot have also been generated from DFT calculations to identify nucleophilic and electrophilic sites of TMPCB. 2017, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. -
An empirical analysis of android permission system based on user activities
In today's world there has been an exponential growth among smart-phone users which has led to the unbridled growth of smart-phone apps available in Google play store, app store etc., In case of android application, there are many free applications for which the user need not shell out a penny to use the services. Here the magic word is "free" which entices millions of pliant people into installing those apps and giving unnecessary access to their data and device control. Current studies have shown that over 70% of the apps in market, request to gather data digressive to the most functions of apps that might cause seeping of personal data or inefficient use of mobile resources. Of late, couple of malignant applications gather unobtrusive information of the user through third-party applications by increasing their permissions to high-level on the Android Operating System. Android permission system provides, the user access to the third party apps and in return based on the permissions granted by the user, an app can access the related resource from the user's mobile. A user is bound to grant or deny permits during the installation of the application. For the most part, users don't focus on the asked permissions, or sometimes users do not understand the meaning of the permission and install the app on their device. They allow a way for attackers to perform the malicious task by demanding for more than expected set of permissions. These extra permissions permit the attacker to exploit the device and also retrieve sensitive information from it. In this research paper we describe how permission system security can create an awareness among the users that would assist them in deciding on permission grants. This improved and responsible user activities in Android OS can help the users in utilizing their device securely. 2018 Ankur Rameshbhai Khunt and P. Prabu. -
Alternate models to dark energy
One of the unresolved questions currently in cosmology is that of the non-linear accelerated expansion of the universe. This has been attributed to the so called Dark Energy (DE). The accelerated expansion of the universe is deduced from measurements of Type Ia supernovae. Here we propose alternate models to account for the Type Ia supernovae measurements without invoking dark energy. 2017 COSPAR -
Origami foldaway support for beginners using image processing
Various origami works are distributed as origami books in which a succession of collapsing operations with basic outlines is portrayed. In any case, the origami book reader often will give up the instruction of the book middle, because it is too difficult to understand a way to fold in accordance with the diagrams. This paper proposes an approach to find the next step how to do the folding operation, especially for origami beginners. First, a method of detecting the folding operation based on camera images is been detected by canny edge detection. Then, in order to get the next operation camera image is been compare with the database images with the help of Bag of a visual word and Speed up robust features(SURF) detector to detect the key points by finding out the nearest neighboring distance ration (NNDR) measures to find out the similarities. 2016 Authors. -
Knowledge transfer: An information theory perspective
Personalization and codification are two dominant knowledge transfer (KT) mechanisms found in organizations and organizational networks. This paper proposes a theoretical model of KT that explains organizations' choice of KT mechanisms in terms of the tacitness of knowledge being shared and the corresponding information content. Shannon's entropy, an information theoretical concept, has been used to define the constructs of tacitness and information content and explain their influence on the choice of the corresponding KT mechanisms. Contributions of the paper include (a) use of information content as a predictor of the choice of KT mechanisms, (b) development of an expression for tacitness, and an intuitive explanation of the tacit-explicit continuum, (c) characterization of product variety in terms of information content, and (d) development of a KT theoretical model that can be operationalized for predicting the choice of KT mechanisms in real-life situations. 2017 The OR Society. -
Flavonol based surface modification of doped chalcogenide nanoflakes as an ultrasensitive fluorescence probe for Al3+ ion
A highly selective novel fluorescent probe was prepared by using surface modified ZnS:Mn nanoparticles, functionalized with morin, a flavonol. SEM investigations of the heterostructures prepared using wet chemical precipitation technique revealed a nanoflake type of morphology. HR-TEM and powder XRD analysis confirmed the crystalline planes corresponding to Wurtzite ZnS. The functionalized nanoparticles were characterized using Raman, XPS and FTIR which confirms the binding of morin to the nanoparticles via surface coordination. The prepared probe selectively interacts with Al3+ ions which has been used as an ultrasensitive analytical tool for determination of Al3+ ions. A major advantage of the proposed method is that the other metal ions closely associated with Al3+ did not interfere with the analysis. The detection limit and the quantitation limit were found to be 0.07 nM and 0.20 nM respectively with a linear dynamic range 0.20 nM80 nM. The method was successfully applied to environmental water samples and other complex matrices. 2017 Elsevier B.V. -
Indexing of exoplanets in search for potential habitability: application to Mars-like worlds
Study of exoplanets is one of the main goals of present research in planetary sciences and astrobiology. Analysis of huge planetary data from space missions such as CoRoT and Kepler is directed ultimately at finding a planet similar to Earththe Earths twin, and answering the question of potential exo-habitability. The Earth Similarity Index (ESI) is a first step in this quest, ranging from1 (Earth) to0 (totally dissimilar to Earth). It was defined for the four physical parameters of a planet: radius, density, escape velocity and surface temperature. The ESI is further sub-divided into interior ESI (geometrical mean of radius and density) and surface ESI (geometrical mean of escape velocity and surface temperature). The challenge here is to determine which exoplanet parameter(s) is important in finding this similarity; how exactly the individual parameters entering the interior ESI and surface ESI are contributing to the global ESI. Since the surface temperature entering surface ESI is a non-observable quantity, it is difficult to determine its value. Using the known data for the Solar System objects, we established the calibration relation between surface and equilibrium temperatures to devise an effective way to estimate the value of the surface temperature of exoplanets. ESI is a first step in determining potential exo-habitability that may not be very similar to a terrestrial life. A new approach, called Mars Similarity Index (MSI), is introduced to identify planets that may be habitable to the extreme forms of life. MSI is defined in the range between 1 (present Mars) and 0 (dissimilar to present Mars) and uses the same physical parameters as ESI. We are interested in Mars-like planets to search for planets that may host the extreme life forms, such as the ones living in extreme environments on Earth; for example, methane on Mars may be a product of the methane-specific extremophile life form metabolism. 2017, Springer Science+Business Media B.V. -
Dimensions of occupational stress impacting turnover intentions amongst BPO employees: An empirical study
Nowadays, many organizations are confronted with the problem of higher level of employee turnover that brings higher replacement costs to these companies. Especially analysing the current situation in the BPO Industry, it is observed that the turnover intention of call centre employees is greater than its expected level and has become a major threat to their existence. Job stress is one of the major factors which tremendously influences this problem. This study mostly focused upon the impact of job stress (JS) on employee turnover intention (Tl) of call centre employees in the BPO industry. Eight five respondents participated in the study. The study was carried out using the survey method. For the survey, the standardized questionnaire of Osipow (1998) for occupational stress and Rajkumar and Karthik Sridar (2015) for turnover intentions were used. The results revealed that scope of occupational stress, that is, role uncertainty/ambiguity, role boundary, role responsibility, and the physical environment had a substantial significant impact on turnover intentions of employees. The dimensions of occupational stress, that is, role insufficiency and role overload had a slight impact on turnover intentions of employees. The regression model stated that there was dependency between occupational stress and turnover intentions. The study suggested that empowerment should be provided at the workplace so that the employees can minimize their inter role distance and can increase job involvement. To make a productive workforce, the sub - variables of job stress like role stagnation, role isolation, and role overload should also be minimized by working more on the person-organization-fit at the time of recruitment and selection. -
Changing equations: Empowerment, entrepreneurship and the welfare of women
The world is a melange of varied cultures and norms. Some are similar, while others are strikingly different from the rest. However, every society has something in common: suppression of their women although the degree and extent may vary. It is not that women are incapable of playing those roles in society which have been dominated by men, but consistent and strategic oppression of the female sex has led many women to consider themselves as weak, powerless and a step below their male counterparts. The waves of feminism and movements to emancipate women have, to a notable extent, changed this perception. However, the world still associates women with the domestic sphere which includes rearing, nurturing and caring for children. While, this is important, this must seldom be the only role played by women. This paper while highlighting the importance of the role of women in the economic and public sphere, shall also explore the various means and steps that have been taken and further measures that can be taken to empower women and encourage entrepreneurship in developing economies such as India. The capability approach and welfare economics by Amartya Sen shall also be explored to understand how best such approaches could benefit the rural women and their empowerment. Developing economies simply cannot ignore even a fraction of their demography. This paper would thus like to bring to the fore that empowerment of women is as important to an economy as it is for their individual well-being, and ultimately their liberation. 2018 Journal of International Women's Studies. -
The decision making of business travellers in selecting online travel portals for travel booking: An empirical study of Delhi national capital region, India
The purpose of this paper is to understand the decision making pattern of the Business Travellers in Delhi National Capital Region in India while booking their trips through Online Travel Portals. The study revolves around purchase decision pattern of Business Travellers by investigating their travel decision making style in selecting online travel portals for their trip booking. The authors have adopted the quantitative methodology to achieve the objective of the study. The study is confined purely to the Business Travellers who book their travel through online travel portals. The data was collected through a structured questionnaire. 300 Business Travellers were interviewed at the departure lounge of Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, India out of which 150 questionnaires were incomplete in many respects and could not be used and only 150 questionnaires were usable resulting in the response rate of 50%. The Analytical Hierarchy process method was adopted to analyze the relative weights assigned by Business Travellers. The present study identifies through literature review the nine fundamental values of internet purchase i.e. product quality, cost, time to receive the product, convenience, time spent, confidentiality, shopping enjoyment, security and environmental impact. The research findings indicate that business travellers value confidentiality, security and product quality the most while choosing the Online Travel Portal to book their trip. The study is primarily centered on the consumer typology approach to study the decision making patterns of business travellers whereas there are other variables such as lifestyle, personality, attitude which can also be investigated. The study is only restricted to Business Travellers decision making pattern pertaining to their travel booking whereas a study can also be undertaken on leisure travellers decision making pattern. The study is restricted to only Delhi National Capital Region. More studies can be carried out in other geographical areas. The findings of the study indicate that Business Travel is one of the emerging travel segments both in terms of numbers and revenue generation and to meet the changing needs of the business travellers the Online Travel Portals need to develop innovative and effective marketing strategies and tools. India is one of the fastest growing economies and has registered its presence in the global scenario. Business Travel segment is still unexplored. The study was conducted keeping in mind the burgeoning business travel segment. The study explores the factors that the business travellers considers while selecting online travel portals for travel product purchase. 2018 Editura Universitatii din Oradea. All Rights Reserved. -
Combinational edge detection using multiple color channels and GrabCut
Identification of edges is very important in feature extraction and pattern recognition. An edge of an image detected by converting it from RGB format to a Grayscale image and can sometimes be inefficient and inaccurate. This inefficiency is caused due to various color differences that get erased or rewritten during the process of grayscale conversion. Edge locations in a colored image are derived by analysing the variations in the multiple color channels and merging the gradients in these channels to compute a single edge snapping vector field, which is derived using the Euclidean distances between two distinct pixels in an image. This lets to retain the various multidimensional characterizations of color channels of an image as the color differences can be closely calculated using human perceptions. Hence this method is proved to provide more accuracy in edge detection. Furthermore, the results are improved when combined with a finer edge detection method GrabCut, which allows the user to detect the edges in an image using reduced iterations. The proposed paper uses a combinational approach to efficiently acquire edges in the image by enhancing the color properties of an image and then using the GrabCut method to retrieve the edges present in an image. IAEME Publication. -
Utilization of Iron Ore Tailings for the Production of Fly Ash - GGBS-Based Geopolymer Bricks
In India, million tons of manufacturing ravages such as ground-granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS), fly ash and mine tailings, are endangering. These ravages turn out to be injurious as they are landfilled close to the production sites and somewhere else. Since these manufacturing ravages include silica, alumina, calcium, etc., it is probable to formulate these as unprocessed resources to produce building substance which diminishes the carbon trace. In this circumstance, this analysis observes on utilizing iron ore tailings and slag sand as a substitution for clay or natural sand for the construction of steady geopolymer obstruct. Furthermore, in this analysis, geopolymer is utilized as a binder rather than cement. Expansion of geopolymer binder-oriented bricks with fly ash and GGBS has been implemented in this study. The analysis consists of automatic possessions of the geopolymer bricks. Sodium silicate (Na2SiO3) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH) resolution have been employed as alkaline activators. The proportion of alkaline liquid to aluminosilicate solid quotient and fraction of binder encompass foremost control on the force of brick. The bricks were casted and cured at ambient warmth. The compressive strength was tested at 7, 14 and 28 days. 2017 World Scientific Publishing Company. -
MHD nanofluid flow past a rotating disk with thermal radiation in the presence of aluminum and titanium alloy nanoparticles
The effects of thermal and exponential space dependent heat sources (THS and ESHS) on magneto-nanoliquid flow across a rotating disk with uniform stretching rate along radial direction are scrutinized in this communication. H2O based nanoliquids containing aluminium (AA 7075) and titanium (Ti6Al4V) alloy nanoparticles are considered. The AA7075 is made up of 90% Al, 5-6% Zn, 2-3% Mg, 1-2% Cu with additives such as Fe, Mn and Si etc. The flow is driven due to rotating disk with uniform stretching of the disk. Impacts of Joule and viscous heating are also deployed. The multidegree ordinary differential equations are formed via Von Karman transformations. The obtained non-linear BVP is solved by Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg based shooting approach (RKFS). Graphical illustrations depict the impacts of influential parameters on flow fields. The skin friction and Nusselt number are also calculated. Results pointed out that the thermal boundary layer growth stabilizes due to the influence of ESHS aspect. Velocities of AA7075 H2O nanofluid are superior than that of Ti6 Al4V H2O nanoliquid. Furthermore, the thermal performance of base liquid is outstanding when we added titanium alloy nanoparticles in comparison with aluminium alloy nanoparticles. 2018 Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland. -
Arduino based IOT platform for remote monitoring of heart attacks and patients falls
Internet of things (IoT) is a networking concept that allows connection of various smart devices. This concept plays a huge role in the healthcare industry. The developed system is a working prototype for realtime monitoring of patient falls and heart attacks. The process of developing this system included an architecture, which was built using Arduino UNO and Arduino NANO along with pulse sensors and accelerometer sensors. The main idea is to collect health-related data from time to time and the collected data is made available using a real-time interface called Thingspeak. With the help of this process, the person can be monitored from time to time without any hassle. The proposed system also makes use of delivering notifications at the time of emergency using the GSM technology, which is embedded with the Arduino architecture. This system will be of greater help to elderly people, people suffering from Frankenstein disease or people who are in a history of getting heart attacks due to genetic disorders. 2018 Manikandan Shanmugam and Monisha Singh. -
Identification of broken characters in degraded documents
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) deals with the recognition of characters in a text document. Steps like Preprocessing, Segmentation and Recognition are embedded in the OCR machine. When a document is scanned it will be taken into OCR and will recognize the characters. But noisy scanning of documents, low-quality printed documents and thresholding error leads to the generation of broken characters. When these documents are given as inputs into OCR, the recognition becomes a tedious process since the broken characters are misunderstood by the OCR machine. So the broken characters have to be identified and segmented separately. This work aims to enhance the degraded documents with broken characters using image processing techniques. For identifying or recognizing the broken character from the image various techniques like vertical projection profile, horizontal projection profile, chain code, mean based thresholding are used. The lines from the document are separated using line segmentation. Separate characters are extracted using Vertical Projection Profile and Horizontal Projection Profile. The character is identified using chain coding. The broken characters are found from them using Mean-based Thresholding and is merged using Heuristic information. The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 92.88% and also performs well for color image documents as well as black and white image documents also because of the effective preprocessing. 2018 Intelligent Network and Systems Society. -
Effect of viscous dissipation and joule heating on three-dimensional mixed convection flow of nano fluid over a non-linear stretching sheet in presence of solar radiation
The present exploration deals the study of viscous dissipation and Joule heating effects on three-dimensional flow and heat transfer of nanofluid over a nonlinear stretching sheet. The fluid is assumed to be electrically conducting and the flow is persuaded by a stretching of an elastic sheet in two lateral directions. The governing partial differential equations are reduced to a set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations by applying the suitable similarity transformations. The so obtained similarity equations are solved by employing the fourth-fifth order Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg method. The impact of various pertinent parameters on the velocities, temperature, skin friction coefficients and Nusselt number are computed and illustrations are provided by the inclusion of figures and tables. The present results have an excellent agreement with previously published results in a limiting sense. It is found that the heat transfer rate increases when radiation parameter is increased and the effect of nanoparticle volume fraction and thermal radiation stabilizes the thermal boundary layer growth. 2017 by American Scientific Publishers All rights reserved.