Earticle

This study focused on the plight of children who are secondary victims of family break up in Gweru, Zimbabwe. The focus was on children who suffer loss as a result of the consequences of divorce and /or separation of parents. The researchers used purposive sampling, also referred to as convenience sampling to ensure that a significant number of participants were involved. Interviews and observations were handy in the collection of data.. The study established that children of divorced and/or separated parents suffer a lot of problems some of which result in the adoption of anti-social behaviour, decline in school performance, deterioration of health, low self-image. 75% of the participants interviewed showed that consequences of divorce and/or separation are catastrophic on children. The study further established that children as secondary victims, run away from home, dropout of school, develop a negative attitude of family life. The study recommends that counselling services be made available to these children, their parents and the society in general for behaviour change, attitude change and adjustment to the challenges caused by family break-up. Other stakeholders such as the Government and civil society should also support these children in as far as the five basic children’s rights are concerned.

This experimental study presents the effects of human hair additives in compressive strength of asphalt cement mixture as potential binder in road pavement. Human hair is strong in tension and can be used as a fibre reinforcement material. Hair Fibre (HF) is an alternate non-degradable matter is available in abundance and at a very cheap cost. It also creates environmental problem for its decompositions. This elastic property of the HF reinforced in asphalt pavement may produce better stand on traffic loading by the same fundamental mechanism of transferring the high intensity forces imparted at the surface by the wheel loads to lower levels that the subgrade can accommodate without deforming. The experiments made were asphalt mixture with human hair as the experimental group and standard asphalt mixture being the control groups. Human hair added to standard asphalt mixture with three different proportions varying from 3% to 12% by mass of with respect to bitumen. This study proves that adding cement and human hair to asphalt mixture greatly increase the strength of the mixture thus making it a good material for the construction of road pavement. Adding of both cement and human hair to asphalt mixture improves the load bearing capacity of the mixture.

Disabled students in higher education are faced with a lot of difficulties accessing learning resources when e-learning systems are inaccessible. When instructional designers and developers of e-learning systems overlook the needs of disabled students, this leads to exclusion in what is termed disability divide. This paper reviews some disabilities encountered in higher education and assistive technologies used in accessing e-learning environments and presents disabled students’ recommendations on designing inclusive e-learning systems, obtained during the user evaluation of a disability-aware e-learning software. It is hoped that these recommendations would be adopted by designers and developers of e-learning and web-based systems so that they can meet the needs of disabled students.

In order to minimize traffic disturbance during the construction of flyover, the 450 tones pier head is turned 90 degrees. A device is used in Metro Manila Skyway Project in the Philippines. The Sosrobahu device is a hydraulic non friction rotating device; it is a flat jack with a diameter of 80 cm and place in the center of pier. The pier head is then cast over the pier parallel to road axis, oil is injected into the device until the force produced but the oil pressure nearly equals the weight of the pier head, then the pier head is turned 90 degrees. Oil pressure is then released and the gap injected with non-shrink grout. Four post-tensioned U cables of total ultimate capacity of 600 tones are then turned through the pier head and pier, post-tensioned and grouted.

A parallel and pipelined Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) processor for use in the Orthogonal Frequency division Multiplexer (OFDM) and WLAN, unlike being stored in the traditional ROM. The twiddle factors in our pipelined FFT processor can be accessed directly. A novel simple address mapping scheme and the modified radix 4 FFT also proposed. FPGA was majorly used to develop the ASIC IC’s to which was implemented. Here we simulated and synthesized the 256- point FFT with radix-4 using VHDL coding and 64 point FFT Hardware implementation we designed code using System C. Finally, the pipelined 256-point FFT processor can be completely implemented within 19.103ns.

Steganography is going to gain its importance due to the exponential growth and secret communication of potential computer users over the internet. It can also be defined as the study of invisible communication that usually deals with the ways of hiding the existence of the communicated message. Generally data embedding is achieved in communication, image, text, voice or multimedia content for copyright, military communication, authentication and many other purposes. In image Steganography, secret communication is achieved to embed a message into cover image (used as the carrier to embed message into) and generate a stego-image (generated image which is carrying a hidden message). In this paper we have critically analyzed various steganographic techniques and also have covered steganography overview its major types, classification, applications.

Intrusion prospects in cloud paradigm are many and with high gains, may it be a bad user or a competitor of cloud client. Distributed model makes it vulnerable and prone to sophisticated distributed intrusion attacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) and Cross Site Scripting (XSS). Confronting new implementation situations, traditional IDSs are not well suited for cloud environment. To handle large scale network access traffic and administrative control of data and application in cloud, a new multi-threaded distributed cloud IDS model has been proposed. Our proposed cloud IDS handles large flow of data packets, analyze them and generate reports efficiently. Transparent reports are instantly send for information of cloud user and expert advice for cloud service provider’s network mis-configurations through a third party IDS monitoring and advisory service.

The aim of this study is to propose the discriminant analysis (DA) techniques to classify and manage risks in software planning development process. These techniques are used to test the controls to each of risks to determine and classify if they are effective in mitigating the occurrence of each risk planning factor. We classified risks to three levels by predicted group membership. Also top ten risks planning software development were mitigated by using controls based on discriminant analysis techniques.

A rail-to-rail class-AB CMOS buffer amplifier is proposed in this paper to drive large capacitive loads. A new technique is used to reduce the leakage power of class-AB CMOS buffer circuits without affecting dynamic power dissipation .The name of applied technique is TRANSISTOR GATING TECHNIQUE, which gives the high speed buffer with the reduced low power dissipation (1.05%), low leakage and reduced area (2.8%) also. The proposed buffer is simulated at 45nm CMOS technology and the circuit is operated at 3V supply with Cadence software. This analog circuit is performed with reduced performance degradation as well as high current driving capability for the large input voltages. The proposed paper is achieved very high speed with very low propagation delay range i.e.(292×10-12). So the delay of the circuit is reduced to 10%. The settling time of this circuit is reduced by 30% (in ns) at 3V square wave input. The measured quiescent current is 56μA.

Turbine blades of a gas turbine are responsible for extracting energy from the high temperature, high pressure gases. These blades are operated at elevated temperatures in aggressive environments and are subjected to large centrifugal forces. As many as 42 percent of the failures in gas turbine engines were only due to blading problems and the failures in these turbine blades can have dramatic effect on the safety and performance of the gas turbine engine. In this research paper, an attempt has been made to analyze the failure of gas turbine blade through Mechanical analysis. The blade under investigation belongs to a 30 MW gas turbine engines used in marine applications and is made of Nickel-Base superalloys. Before failure, the turbine blade was operated for about 10000 hours while its service life was expected to be around 15000 hours. Mechanical analysis has been carried out assuming that there might be failure in the blade material due to blade operation at elevated temperature and subjected to large centrifugal forces. The gas turbine blade model profile is generated by using CATIA V5R21software. The turbine blade is analyzed for its thermal as well as structural performance. It was observed that there was no evidence of rubbing marks on the tip section of turbine blade indicating the elongation of the blade is within the safe limit. Maximum stresses and strains are observed near to the root of the turbine blade and upper surface along the blade roots. Maximum temperatures are observed at the blade tip sections and minimum temperature at the root of the blade. Temperature distribution is decreasing from the tip to the root of the blade section. The temperatures observed are below the melting temperature of blade material.