New Visions in Science and Technology Vol. 5

Rather than depending exclusively on face-to-face interactions, service businesses now offer their services remotely using Self-Service Technologies (SSTs). This trend can be considered as a natural consequence of technology maturity, and it will eventually become the norm for many future service transactions. Customers presently have the option of choosing SSTs or visiting a physical site for service, but humanoid robots are predicted to eventually take the position of customer support employees. Hence, service businesses are responsible for preparing their clients for such a future. Customers typically perform self-service technologies in the absence of the company's service employees. Therefore, SSTs should provide appropriate directions and instructions to ensure that they operate efficiently and effectively. Customers would be annoyed if SSTs lacked the necessary information to complete their transactions. Thus, the nature of the information would be critical in ensuring the success of online self-service transactions. This study aims to understand the information richness in online-based self-service technologies from the customers’ perspective. Using a qualitative approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25  SST users. The study found seven critical factors that determine the information richness in online-based SST platforms: 'relevance, timeliness, accuracy, clarity, consistency, sufficiency, and simplicity.' The study advances awareness of the critical nature of information richness in the acceptance of online-based self-service technologies while providing practical guidance to service providers in designing SSTs that contain rich information to support customers' successful service performance.

Across the world, numerous land use strategies have been deployed to manage activities on, under and or above land. However, the pressure exerted on land as a result of anthropogenic and effects of climate change have been acknowledged in creating imbalances between different land uses. Spatial land use strategy seeks to promote internal linkages within key sectors of the economy while at the same time mitigating on the factors that may impede on external orientations. This paper examined the effect of Spatial Land Use Management Strategy as a tool for transformation towards sustainable development with a focus to Vihiga County in Western Kenya. The study objectives included; assessing the current Spatial Land Use activities on sustainable livelihood, examining the determinants of Spatial Land Use Strategy in Vihiga County, evaluating the influence of Spatial Land Use Strategy on sustainable livelihood, and to analyze the effects of the challenges attributed to various land use activities on sustainable livelihood. The findings as based on the methodology indicate that the geo-physical, social, economic and political dimensions were identified as major determinants of the applicability of the strategy, although agriculture and commerce were more prevalent land uses. Further, it’s possible to integrate the variables and datasets in order to develop effective and holistic spatial land use scenarios as a basis for a paradigm shift in planning and attaining sustainable development.

The ground ozone concentration over Kigali is directly proportional to solar radiation, especially when the air temperature is less than or equal to 19^oC, but when the air temperature exceeds this range, the ozone concentration begins to decrease, but R² is very low, implying that there is a very low probability of this happening. The ambient ozone concentration is inversely related to solar radiation for wind speeds between 2 and 2.81 m/s, while ambient ozone increases as solar radiation increases for wind speeds above 2.81 m/s. When the wind speed is between 2 and 2.81 m/s, the ambient ozone concentration rises as atmospheric relative humidity rises, but when the wind speed is greater than 2.81 m/s, the ambient ozone concentration falls as atmospheric relative humidity rises. With a calm state of 0%, the average wind speed observed was 3.7402 m/s. The predominant wind direction was west-south with a frequency of 31%, followed by southeast and southwest with a frequency of 22 percent with maximum wind speeds of 6–7.62 m/s. Therefore, if there is a pollutant source in west, southwest, southeast, south or east area, it might be dominantly dispersed in north, northwest, northeast area during July to September 2020.  Wind speed measured at lower lever of 10.3ppb to 20.2ppb was 4.3217 m/s with westerly, Westsouth, southeast dominant direction with frequency of about 18%, 30%.For values larger than 20.2 ppb, ambient ozone was carried from a variety of directions, including west, southwest, south, southeast, and east, with maximum wind speeds ranging from 6 to 7.62 m/s.

Objectives: The present investigation was commenced to analyze presence of possible genetic diversity among different pearl millet germplasm lines by means of diverse drought linked morpho-physiological traits along with SSR molecular markers.

Study Design: In the present investigation, 96 pearl millet germplasm lines were screened against drought using different morphological and physiological traits along with SSR markers.

Place and Duration of the Study: The present study was conducted at College of Agriculture, Gwalior, Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia Krishi Vishwa Vidyalaya, Gwalior, M.P., India during July 2019 to December, 2020.

Methodology: The study was conducted to record different morphological and physiological traits related to drought tolerance and susceptibility. Thirty-five microsatellite markers were also used in laboratory to analyze the variability among pearl millet genotypes under study.

Results: Pearl millet genotypes were grouped according to their morpho-physiological characteristics. Among 35 SSR markers, twenty-two were successfully amplified across all germplasm lines and seven SSR markers were found to be polymorphic and fifteen markers were monomorphic. All seven polymorphic SSR markers were used consequently for amplification of all the 96 germplasm lines. The range of PIC value was 0.0939 to 0.2980 with an average of 0.2274. The highest PIC value was recorded for the markers Xibmsp26 and Xibmsp29 (0.2980) followed by Xibmsp03 (0.2392), Xibmsp29 (0.2392), Xibmsp06 (0.2289) and Xibmsp07 (0.1948) while the lowest for the marker Xibmsp01 (0.0939). The range of major allele frequency value was 0.7604 to 0.9479 with an average of 0.8363. The range of genetic diversity value was 0.0987 to 0.3644 with an average of 0.2665.

Conclusions: According to the morpho-physiological data a total of 22 pearl millet genotypes were found to be grouped distantly from rest of the genotypes. These genotypes may be drought tolerance as they are linked with drought tolerant morpho-physiological traits however, rests of the genotypes were found to be susceptible against drought.

Background: Minimal invasive surgery has become the standard for most surgical procedures now. Many studies have tried to compare robotic versus laparoscopic to adrenalectomy.

Objectives: The aim of this study is to review most of the available studies comparing robotic to laparoscopic adrenalectomy to evaluate which procedure provides the superior clinical outcomes. Methods: A systematic literature search of ScienceDirect and PubMed databases. The perioperative clinical outcomes were collected by two independent reviewers. We used Random-effects (DerSimonian-Laird) models to get the pooled effect estimates.

Results: 18 studies were eligible in our study. 10 of them were prospective and 8 were retrospective. A total of 1376 patients underwent adrenalectomy, 592 (43.02%) were treated with RA and 784 (56.9%) with the LA technique. There were no significant differences between both groups regarding the conversion rate (Odds ratio: 0.70, 95% CI 0.31-1.57, P= 0.65), intraoperative complications (OR: 2.18, 95% CI 0.49- 9.71, P= 0.28), post-operative complications (OR: 0.83, 95% CI: 0.55-1.24, P= 0.49), and mortality (OR: 0.42, 95% CI: 0.07-2.72, P= 0.98). However, robotic adrenalectomy was associated with longer operative times (MD: 9.89 min, 95% CI: -2.79 to 22.58), shorter hospital stay (MD: -0.33, 95% CI: -0.46 to -0.21) with less blood loss (MD: -25.34, 95% CI: -36.77 to -13.91). Conclusions: We proved that robotic adrenalectomy has equal safety and feasibility with similar clinical outcomes when compared with laparoscopic approach. However, better well-designed studies are required to determine the role and cost-effectiveness of robotic adrenal surgery.

The increase in electricity consumption has negative effects on the environment, including greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, and rapid climate change. In an attempt to address this global problem, this research aims at developing machine learning models for the prediction of electricity consumption in hotels. The developed model steps on coupling Gaussian process regression and teaching learning based optimizer (GPR-TLBO) to forecast daily electricity consumption in hotel facilities. In this context, teaching learning based optimizer is implemented to circumvent the shortcomings of manual tuning-based intelligent models through improving the search abilities of Gaussian process regression by adaptively tuning its structure. This involves optimizing the type of kernel function and its design parameters. The developed model is assessed through its comparison against eight widely used machine learning models. These models involve: regression trees (RT), support vector machines (SVM), Elman neural network (ERNN), generalized regression neural network (GRNN), back propagation artificial neural network (BPANN), cascade forward neural network (CFNN), adaptive neuron fuzzy inference system tuned by particle swarm optimizer (ANFIS-PSO) and adaptive neuron fuzzy inference system tuned by genetic algorithm (ANFIS-GA). The comparison is carried with regards to six performance assessment metrics, namely mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), root-mean squared error (RMSE), relative absolute error (RAE), root relative squared error (RRSE) and geometric reliability index (GRI). Average ranking algorithm is exploited to create a holistic evaluation of the nine machine learning models based on their reported accuracies. The levels of dependencies between the machine learning models are studied based on Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. Results illustrated that the developed GPR-TLBO model significantly outperformed the reminder of the machine learning models yielding MAE, MAPE, RMSE, RAE, RRSE and GRI of 223.98, 8.04%, 263.37, 0.57, 0.54 and 1.1, respectively. In addition, it was interpreted that the developed GPR-TLBO model provided a better overall performance gaining average and standard deviation of rankings that are equal to one and zero, respectively. The Spearman’s correlation analysis demonstrated that higher levels of dependencies are exhibited between room degree day and daily electricity consumption.

The Nintendo DS handheld game console, which was developed by Nintendo and has been sold worldwide since 2004, incorporates dual touch screens, voice-recognition features and innovative controls.  It has been used not only as a video game device but also as an education tool in the field of education.  In this study, a research regarding Nintendo DS software for learning English is conducted with the objective of exploring the possibility of introducing and utilizing the game device as an education tool for undergraduate students.  The result is that not only the students who are proficient in English, but also the students who are not and initially displayed a little interest in learning English using the Nintendo DS, they felt it is fun and helpful to work with after actually using it.  In addition, it became clear that whether or not the software is suitable for the student affects the continuity of learning.   

Smartphone health apps show promising potential for monitoring chronic diseases and  modifying health associated behaviours due to their incredibly high reach to the general public. These health apps could greatly reduce the burden of the health care system by enabling people to monitor their chronic conditions remotely from home, especially in recent times where there is a growing older population with chronic medical diseases like diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, cancer and so on. In Spite of the concept of health apps being relatively new, it is recorded that patients with chronic medical conditions are increasingly using smartphone health apps to self-monitor their disease. In this article, we have discussed various features and benefits of smartphone health apps based on different themes such as medication monitoring, lifestyle management, alcohol regulation, diet control and others. We have also discussed if gaming features included in certain health apps increase effectiveness of smartphone health apps.

Flexibility of Internet technology gives rise to concern about the protection of digital data. Digital audio watermarking is the art of hiding important data in Digital Audio. This research paper deals with a new methodology which helps to enhance the robustness of Digital Audio Watermarking technique based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD).

Objectives: To develop an audio watermarking algorithm in transform domain and improve the performance of proposed algorithm against common signal processing attacks such as filtering, adding noise, resampling, re-quantization, & volume scaling, etc. using subjective & objective measures.

Findings: In this approach, multiple watermarks (Image -64 X 64 pixels and text) are embedded into the approximate coefficients of Discrete Wavelet Transform of an audio signal. Haar wavelet is used for decomposition while SVD is applied to get the Eigen values of approximate coefficients of audio signal. Experimental work demonstrates that watermarked audio has same perceptual quality as that of original one. The performance of the proposed work is evaluated with the help of objective measures such as Signal to Noise ratio, Peak signal to Noise ratio, Bit error rate, Normalized Cross correlation, etc. Additionally, simulation results on audio signals prove that the capacity of the proposed scheme is considerably better in comparison with the existing watermarking methods. Furthermore, the proposed work is applied for different audio signals such as classical, instrumental, flute, pop & rock to check the robustness against various attacks.

The present study was conducted in all the six blocks (taluks) of Davanagere district of Karnataka state, India with the objectives to understand the extension participation of National Horticulture Mission beneficiaries and to analyze the extent of participation of National Horticulture Mission beneficiaries in various extension programmes. The sample size was 144 randomly selected beneficiaries of National Horticulture Mission from 24 villages. Ex-post facto research design was employed for this study. The results revealed that family members (34.26 %), neighbors (33.56 %), friends and relatives (33.45) are the major sources of information for the NHM beneficiaries followed by other service providers, fellow beneficiaries and NHM personnel. Farm magazine (66.21 %), radio (57.87 %), news papers (55.10 %), internet source (44.44 %), WhatsApp (42.36 %) and mobile SMS (32.27 %). In case of contact with extension personnel, 42.82 per cent of beneficiaries had contact with agricultural assistant followed by 36.11 per cent with assistant agriculture officer, 30.09 per cent with veterinary officer and 28.70 per cent had contact with agriculture officer. The extension participation reveals that 33.45 per cent of beneficiaries participated in group meetings whereas, 33.10 per cent in krishi melas, 31.02 per cent in field visits and 28.47 per cent in training programmes. In all, 40.97 per cent of beneficiaries visited town or cities twice in a week while, 38.18 visited once in a week and 16.67 per cent visited once in fortnight. 

Distribution pattern of Pb in plant tissues (leaf, stem and root) at selected growth stages (germination or seedling stage (15 days), tillering stage (30 days), shooting/booting stage (45 days), heading( maize) and earing (wheat) stage( 60 days), flowering stage( 75 days) and ripening stage (90 days) of two varieties each of wheat- Triticum aestivum L. var. Pavon-76 (SU 1) and Siettecerros (SU 2) and maize – Zea mays L. var. TZEE-Y (yellow maize)(SU 3) and Zea mays everta L. (popcorn) (SU 4) were investigated at Kadawa, Kano State of northern Nigeria. Doruwa Salau (S1) with an average daily traffic density of 19,288 comprises of SU 1 and SU 3 as the experimental sites perpendicular to the Kano-Zaria Highway while SU 2 and SU 4 with a traffic density of 3 are the control sites within the Irrigation Research Station (IRS) (S2). They were selected based on traffic density and distances. Distances from the experimental and control sites to the Kano-Zaria highway is 345m and 2438.28m respectively. Soil and plant samples were collected for one growing harmattan season (December 2008 through to April 2009).  Prior to sowing, triplicate soil samples were collected at a depth of 25cm for physico-chemical and Pb level analyses. Triplicates of both the representative plants and corresponding soil samples were collected at a depth of 25cm at the selected growth stages after sowing. Double-beam AAS was used in determining the Pb levels. Results reveals that plant Pb in each of the two varieties of wheat and maize were reportedly higher than the soil Pb indicating atmospheric inputs. Plants differ in their uptake of heavy metals and their subsequent distribution within plant organs. Pb level was highest in the leaves at SU 1 and SU 3 and in the roots at SU 2 and SU 4 indicating atmospheric inputs and deposition on the soil respectively. Plant Pb was highest at SU 1 at the 30 days growth stage than at all the sampling units and other growth stages respectively indicating proximity to the highway and dilution of the trace metal levels as growth progresses. Soil Pb before sowing was highest (160 mg/kg) at SU 3 and lowest at (40mg/kg) at SU 1 and SU 4 respectively, which suggests that Pb levels originated from vehicular emissions due to absence of industrial, residential and commercial activities. Individual ANOVA for each sampling units was highly significant for plant parts at SU 2 only and combined ANOVA was highly significant (p=0.01 and 0.05) for sampling units or varieties, growth stages, plant parts and interaction of plant parts, growth stages and sampling units, which remarks that plant parts, growth stages and distances as well as their interactions had a great influence on the distribution of Pb in the crops. Pb (2 mg/kg) levels exceeded the WHO permissible limits posing a potential health risks to food crops, livestock and humans.

Improvements in technologies provide incredible service performance that customers have never been experienced at traditional service encounters managed by service staff. Further, Self Service Technologies (SSTs) presents remarkable customer convenience by allowing them to perform various service transactions at their fingertips. However, very few studies focused on understanding SSTs profoundly. Thus, this research aims to explore ‘performance’ and ‘convenience’ related to SSTs in detail which cause customer movement from traditional physical service encounters to SSTs. Based on the qualitative research approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 SST users, and data were analyzed using the thematic analysis approach. The study found eight performance features: ‘usefulness, speed, efficiency, consistency, cost-effectiveness, user-friendliness, reliability, trialability’ and three convenience features, ‘locational convenience, time convenience and physical exertion’ as important in customer choice of SSTs. This study fills the gap in the literature by discussing two crucial matters in customer choice of SSTs in detail. It opens theoretical lenses to understand the significance of self-service technologies to customers from its performance and convenience perspectives. It provides useful insights for SST service providers that can be incorporated into their SSTs in designing and delivering a high-quality service that matches the customers’ expectations.

This study focussed on the usage of Rice Husk Ash (RHA) as a partial replacement of cement for clay soil incompressed earth blocks.  Rice husk ash percentage varied in range of 0%, 2.5%, 5%, 7.5%, 10% and 12.5%.  Highest compressive strength of 1.90 MPa was obtained for blocks admixed with 10% of rice husk ash. Water absorption was found to increase steadily with increase in percent of rice husk ash and value is 8.55% for the block with 12.5% RHA.  Unit weight of blocks decreased with increase in percent of rice husk ash.