Mahogany is ranked as one of the best known and most valuable commercial tropical timbers on the international market. These species are becoming scarcer in the wake of dwindling forest cover in Ghana with illegal logging as the major contributing factors. Since plantation species have not been used enough in the past, their kiln schedules and their drying rates are unknown. In this study kiln drying schedule for plantation grown Khaya ivorensis was developed. The testing method followed Terrazawa: 1965. Results indicate that the mildest drying conditions for the plantation species would be the initial and final temperatures of 65°C and 90°C respectively and this coincided with the temperature schedule T11. The wet bulb depression (WBD) of 5.5°C which also corresponds to WBD schedule of 5 was recorded. Madison Drying Schedule T11-B5 is therefore proposed for the plantation grown Khaya ivorensis.

In this paper, motor imagery EEG signals are preprocessed, using the state-of-the-art measurement and control software LabVIEW. Firstly, the elliptic filter is used for digital band-pass filtering. Then the soft-thresholding approach is adopted for wavelet denoising to enable programming with the BCI Competition 2005 dataset. The experimental results show that the method not only saves a lot of time in development and debugging, but also provides a good foundation for implementing a BCI system.

This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation carried out to evaluate the compressive strength of concrete. An exploratory study on the suitability of the tannery shredded waste as partial replacement for normal fine aggregate in concrete works has been carried out. Physical and mechanical properties of tannery shredded waste and locally available normal aggregates have been determined and compared. A large number of concrete cubes of size 150X150X150 mm were cast with different percentage replacements of fine aggregates by tannery shredded waste in the order 100:0, 5:5, 10:10, and 15:15, were cast and compressive strength test values were determined.

This paper proposes a new model for design of standalone two axis sun-tracker (SATAST) and some considerations regarding design, modeling and control solutions. Proposed overall system model and sub-models are developed to allow designer to have maximum numerical visual and graphical data to select, test and analyze a given SATAST system for desired output performance and characteristics, under given input operating conditions, to meet desired outputs for specific application requirements.

The soil utilized as underneath the layer of sub-base in many civil engineering applications such as; roads, foundations of buildings, walkways, airfield, etc. The thickness of sub-base layer depends on the design load, project type and the soil type. Which will effect on the field density. This study was applied on a sub-base soil grade B as classified according to AASHTO which a wide spread in Iraq. Different tests were conducted on this soil to evaluate its properties such as sieve analysis, Atterberg's limits, compaction and chemicals. Three energies of compactive efforts were used in the laboratory work (EN1= 585.17 kJ/m3, EN2 =5898.5 kJ/m3, and EN3=1799 kJ/m3, ) to study the effect of different compactive efforts on the maximum dry density. Furthermore, built field model with the compactive effort of 1711.3kJ/m3 was used to determine the compaction ratio (RC). This model was 3m*1m * 0.80m which was from the confining base and sides by plain concrete to prevent the energy from transmitting to the soil behind and below the model. Four layer thicknesses (0.1m, 0.15m, 0.2m, and 0.3m) were used to study the effect of compactive effort on the layer thickness and then to evaluate the RC. The results obtained from this study showed that RC was Inversely proportional to the thickness of layer when it was equal or less than 0.2m. RC was (97%, 94.2% and 88.5%) at 0.1m, 0.15m, and 0.2m respectively. However, this was not the case when the layer thickness exceeded 0.2m. The results also showed that the adequate thickness was less than 0.2m.

In order to compete in the dynamic business environment, it is has become extremely essential for the businesses and industries to enhance their performance. To achieve this new product development is considered a vital source. Therefore, the companies are now required to focus more on the quality of the product instead of internal efficiency. Hence, more emphasis is being placed on the new product development processes that enable the firms to develop more complex products to provide paramount quality products and services to the customers. this research has analyzed the benefits as well as challenges of new product development. The researcher also examined various factors that affect new product development. A comprehensive product development constitutes of 8 steps. It has been also observed that factors such customer satisfaction, design and culture significantly influence the development of new products.

Data clustering has been considered as the most important raw data analysis method used in data mining technology. To extract the unknown valuable information from the large volume of data for so many real time applications are used in data classification. Most of the clustering techniques proved their efficiency in many applications such as decision making systems, medical sciences, earth sciences etc. Partition based clustering is one of the main approach in clustering. There are various algorithms of data clustering, every algorithm has its own advantages and disadvantages. This work reports the results of classification performance of three such widely used algorithms namely K-means (KM), Fuzzy c-means and Possibilistic Fuzzy c-Means (PFCM) clustering algorithms. To analyze these algorithms two known data sets from UCI machine learning repository are taken. From the repository the efficiency of clustering output is compared with the classification performance, percentage of correctness and no. of iterations taken to converge objective function. The experimental results prove that PFCM produces poor results compared to FCM and Kmeans algorithm yields more accurate results than the FCM and PFCM algorithms for liver data.

Article has been removed

Effect of xanthosoma biomass in vegetable oil industry effluent by coag-flocculation process has been undertaken at room temperature. The coag-flocculation activity and kinetic parameters of xanthosoma biomass in vegetable oil industry effluent were determined at varying; dosages, settling time and pH. The coag-flocculation behaviour of xanthosoma biomass was evaluated using standard Jar test method. The maximum kinetic parameters determined were recorded at K of 3x10-5L/mg, pH of 6, t1∕2=33.33 min while the minimum values are recorded at K of 1 x10-5, pH of 10, t1∕2 = 80min. Regression analysis was used to ascertain the accuracy of the fit to the postulated kinetic model. However, it was concluded that the second order kinetic model described the reaction most adequately with highest regression coefficient (R2) of 0.9869, pH of 6 at 2g dosage. The maximum turbidity removal efficiency (E) was recorded at 83 for dosage, time and pH indicating that xanthosoma biomass is a potential coagulant for effective wastewater treatment.

This study sought to determine whether the academic self-concepts of children come from teacher appraisal or their own cognitive abilities. Longitudinal data from the Millennium Cohort Study were used to answer this question by testing the internal/external frame of reference (I/E) model for English children aged 5, 7, and 11 years and of ethnic minority, disadvantaged, and advantaged backgrounds. The I/E model predicts that high verbal achievement leads to a high verbal self-concept but a low mathematical self-concept, and high mathematics achievement leads to a high mathematical self-concept but a low verbal self-concept. The results of structural equation modelling revealed that the I/E model was generally supported, but teacher assessment had greater effects on self-concept than did cognitive ability. Teacher assessment and cognitive ability measured in children at the age of 7 years predicted child self-concepts at 11 years old. Teacher assessment was less influenced by the type of measurement used but more influenced by the cultural backgrounds of the children than cognitive ability. The implications of these results are discussed herein.