The present paper is concerned with the propagation of Stoneley waves at the interface of two couple stress thermoelastic medium in context with Lord and Shulman (LS) and Green and Lindsay (GL) theories of thermoelasticity. It is observed that shear wave get decoupled from rest of the motion. After developing the formal solution, the secular equation for surface wave propagation is derived. The dispersion curve giving the phase velocity and attenuation coefficient related to wave number are plotted graphically to depict the effect of thermal relaxation times. The amplitude ratios of displacement components and temperature distribution are also computed numerically and shown graphically to depict the effect of thermal relaxation times. Some special cases are also deduced from the present investigation.

This experiment was conducted for assessing the antifungal activities of essential oils and crude extracts of some aromatic plants against Fusarium rot of Trichosanthes dioica was at the Central Department of Botany. Pathogenicity test was taken for the confirmation of disease by transferring the inoculum from pure culture. For the control of the above fungus essential oils and extracts of five aromatic plants Zanthoxylum armatum, Mentha arvensis, Amomum subulatum, Valeriana jatamansi and Cymbopogon flexuosus were used. Each oil and extracts were diluted in different concentration in 80% acetone and in distilled water respectively .The value of minimum inhibitory concentration and percentage of mycelia growth inhibition of oil and extracts were obtained as, oil of C. flexuosus showed the higest fungitoxicity (100%) at the 5.0 and 50 μlml-1 concentration followed by Z.armatum, M. arvensis, A. subulatum and V. jatamansi were found to be 10 and 100 μlml-1 respectively also the higest percentage of mycelial growth inhibitors were found to be C. flexuosus followed by A. subulatum, Z. armatum, M. arvensis and V. jatamansi . Similarly extracts of C. flexuosus followed by Z. armatum, A. subulatum, V. jatamansi and M. arvensis respectively.

Personalized teaching materials are the materials created by using the names of people, experiences and objects (a friend’s name, mother’s name, favorite team, and favorite objects’ names) in presentations, examples, exercises & practices and exams. There are studies in field literature that present positive and negative findings about the effects of these materials to teaching and learning. In this study, personalization preferences of information technologies teacher candidates who were trained about the preparation and application of personalized teaching materials were examined. In addition to these teacher candidates, 22 teachers’ positive and negative opinions on the teaching where personalized materials were used and their suggestions about the improvement of personalized teaching were examined. The data required for the study conducted in 2011- 2012 education years was obtained through a semi-structured form, which was applied to teacher and teacher candidates. Obtained data was collected under three main groups.

The paper examines the issue of youth restiveness and insecurity in the Niger Delta as a whole and Delta State in particular. Youth restiveness and insecurity began with agitation and demands by the youths in the Niger Delta societies for their rights (economic, political and environmental rights), crystallizing into the inducement of the evolution and activities of youth restiveness and insecurity in the Niger Delta states in general and Delta State in particular. The data used for the study were obtained from the secondary sources and were analyzed using a quantitative method to ascertain the level of the existence and effects of youth restiveness and insecurity in Niger- Delta and particularly in Delta State. The paper reveals that youth restiveness and the high spate of insecurity in the Niger- Delta states and Delta State in particular has a very negative impact on the Niger Delta states, economy and the Nigerian society in general.

The fracture performance of steel wires for civil engineering applications remains a major concern in civil engineering construction and maintenance of wire reinforced structures. The need to employ approaches that simulate micromechanical material processes which characterizes fracture in civil structures has been emphasised recently in the literature. However, choosing from the numerous micromechanics-based fracture models, and identifying their applicability and reliability remains an issue that still needs to be addressed in a greater depth. Laboratory tensile testing and finite element tensile testing simulations with the shear, ductile and Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman’s micromechanicsbased models conducted in this work reveal that the shear fracture model is an appropriate fracture model to predict the fracture performance of steel wires used for civil engineering applications. The need to consider the capability of the micromechanics-based fracture model to predict the “cup and cone” fracture exhibited by the wire in choosing the appropriate fracture model is demonstrated

The industry requires an understanding of the effects of reverse bending and straightening test wires for civil engineering applications undergo to detect laminations in them on their tensile properties. In this paper, the identification of the appropriate plasticity hardening model for the simulation of wires reverse bending and straightening test which involves “double” strain reversal is presented. Finite element simulations revealed that the isotropic hardening model predicted a continuous work hardening of the wire during the bending, reverse bending, and straightening operations and did not capture the softening of the wire due to the Bauschinger effect. Conversely, the combined hardening model adequately captured both the work hardening and Bauschinger effect that are associated with the reverse bending and straightening processes. Consequently, it is demonstrated that the combined hardening model is the appropriate plasticity hardening model for the simulation of reverse bending and straightening of carbon steel wires used for civil engineering applications. This paper thus established the appropriate plasticity hardening model required for the FE simulation of the wires’ reverse bending and straightening test needed to investigate the effects of reverse bending and straightening test on the tensile and fracture properties of a typical wire used for civil engineering applications.

The electrocardiogram ECG signal plays an important role in the primary diagnosis, prognosis and survival analysis of heart diseases. The ECG signal contains an important amount of information that can be exploited in different manners. However, during its acquisition it is often contaminated with different sources of noise making difficult its interpretation. In this paper, a new approach based on Morphological Top-Hat Transform (MTHT) is developed in order to suppress noises from the ECG signals. The morphological operators (dilation, erosion, opening, closing) constitute the fundamental stage of Top-Hat transform. Method presented in this paper is compared with the Visu Shrink, Sure Shrink, and Bayes Shrink methods. The experimental results indicated that the proposed methods in this work were better than the compared methods in terms of retaining the geometrical characteristics of the ECG signal, SNR. Due to its simplicity and its fast implementation, the method can easily be used in clinical medicine.

The need to guide the land users on the appropriate usage of land and fertility maintenance is very imperative in addressing food sufficiency. Thus, a study was conducted to investigate the erroneous belief by local farmers’ that soil colour can effectively predict soil productivity. Three land use types namely: arable cropping (land use 1), oil palm (land use 2), and secondary forest (land use 3) were studied. Profile pits (3 per land use type) were dug at the three predominant land types encountered on the site viz: crest, middle slope, and valley bottom. Soil colour (moist and dry) was determined using the munsell colour chart. The results revealed that pedons at the crest and middle slope are more reddish to brownish while that of valley bottom are greyish. This changes with depth across the soil profiles. The hue varies with land use type, with land use 1 having higher hue at the valley bottom than other land use types. While this decreases as the slope increases in land use 1, the reverse was the trend in oil palm site. However, in land use 3, the hue was generally low at the valley bottom and not as high as in land use 1. In land use 1, the exchangeable bases increase as the hue 10YR – 25YR decreases in the surface soils except for valley bottom soils, where the reverse is the trend. Organic carbon and exchangeable acidity increases with decrease in hue irrespective of the land type in land use 1. However, phosphorous value decreases as the hue decreases in all the land types, while Zn is constant. At land use 2, the exchangeable bases except for calcium follow the reverse trend as in land use 1. While organic carbon increases in land use 1, the reverse is the trend in the land use 2, with nitrogen following the same sequence as organic carbon. Exchangeable acidity, phosphorous and Zinc only decreases with decreasing soil hue in valley bottom soils, and increases in the other land types. At land use 3, only sodium and potassium increase with decreasing hu

Two filed experiments were conducted at the Agricultural Experimental Farm during two seasons, to study some weed control treatments and plant density (distance between plants) on weeds competition in soybean fields. Each experiment included 16 treatments which were the combination of 8 weed control treatments (6 herbicides beside hoeing and un weeded treatment) and two distances between plants namely, 5 and 10 cm (70000 & 140000 plants/fed.). The obtained results showed that the favorite weed control treatments were hoeing (twice) followed by trifurlin and diphenamid in 1st and 2nd season, hoeing (twice) treatment gave the highest decrease in total fresh weight of weeds, followed by pndimethalin, dinitramine and linuron. The total fresh weight of weeds was significantly decreased at 5cm distance between plants as compared with those at 10cm distance. The effect of the interaction between weed control treatments and distance between plants caused a significant effect on fresh weight of weeds. The effect of hoeing (twice) on fresh weight of weeds at narrow plant distance was greater than that at 10 cm distance. No significant difference in fresh weight of weeds were obtained between dinitramin ,linuron, trifluralin and prometryne treatments at 5 cm distance between plants, but this was not the case at the distance 10 cm between plants.

The main aim of work is to develop morlet wavelet using Munich and Cambridge filters, for audio compression and most psycho-acoustic models for coding applications use a uniform -equal bandwidth, spectral decomposition for compression. In this paper we present a new design of a psycho-acoustic model for audio coding following the model used in the standard MPEG-1 audio layer 3. This architecture is based on appropriate wavelet packet decomposition instead of a short term Fourier transformation. To fulfill this aim, the following objectives are carried out: Approximate the frequency selectivity of the human auditory system. However, the equal filter properties of the uniform sub- bands do not match the non uniform characteristics of cochlear filters and reduce the precision of psycho-acoustic modeling. This architecture is based on appropriate wavelet packet decomposition instead of a short term Fourier transformation. In this paper Morlet Munich coder shows best performance. The MPEG/Audio is a standard for both transmitting and recording compressed ratio. The MPEG algorithm achieves compression by exploiting the perceptual limitation of the human ear.