Culture practices of freshwater giant prawn in some selected areas of Mymensingh

A study was conducted to examine the culture practices of freshwater giant prawn, Macrobrachium rosenbergii in some selected areas of Mymensingh. Based on a sample of 100 farmers from three different upazila, namely Phulpur, Gouripur and Ishwargonj in Mymensingh district, 94% of farmers cultured prawn with fish in their pond. Only 6% of farmers cultured prawn, fish and dike crops for higher economic return. The culture period is typically nine months; hatchery produced post-larvae were stocked from May to June and harvested from November to January. Per hectare production of prawn, 375 kg/yr was very low because the farmers followed simple culture method. Most of the farmers made a profit of Tk. 68,403/ha/yr and the major costs incurred were for purchasing prawn seed and feed. The culture of prawn in pond system is technically possible under different conditions though expansion of small-scale prawn farming mainly depends on reduction of production costs. Future targets could be integration of pond prawn culture with other agricultural activities especially dike cropping and rice production in the monsoon

Homeshare Scheme

Homeshare is a scheme in which older people – ‘Homeowners’ - provide an affordable home to young professionals or possibly students – ‘Homesharers’ - in exchange for help or support with everyday tasks (e.g. shopping and cleaning), and companionship. This pairing is intended to be mutually beneficial, whereby older people are provided with help and support to live independently and young people are offered a much needed home. There are similar schemes in London, but nothing like this is currently in place in Leeds. This report presents findings from a research project conducted in Leeds to investigate the demand for this service and the feasibility of this type of scheme. The research was funded by Leeds Metropolitan University and Leeds City Council

System-supported instructor feedback on the students’ design and prototyping processes in Fab Lab education context

Abstract. Fab Lab represents a unique concept in educational platforms where both teachers and students can get access to work on digital fabrication. Digital fabrication allows students to do creative tasks using different categorized software tools and technologies in the Fab Lab. Most of the time, students and instructors face challenges to compile a successful job through prototype designing and documentation in the proper way. Instructors have no opportunity to give feedback to the students’ prototyping and documentation through any dedicated application in the present Fab Lab. For evaluating digital fabrication, it isn’t easy to provide timely feedback in the traditional approaches. For this reason, the present thesis proposes a solution to the difficulty of giving timely feedback to the students based on their documentation and prototyping design which considers a reflection as an activity in Fab Lab. The solution based on several iterations of Fab Lab Oulu digital fabrication courses. This thesis presents means of Interaction and communication for both teachers and students using comment which helps students create a new and unique concept of prototype design through an application in Fab Lab. Based on the submission of students’ weekly prototypes, this application implements the questionnaires for evaluation. It focuses on the easy way to give proper feedback to the students in the Fab Lab education context. This task performed various functions for developing new techniques for giving feedback, such as an evaluation of students. In this thesis, we developed a new application named "Protobooth Oulu" for providing feedback to the students. This thesis represents a real demonstration that assigns different scaling such as, rating, Semantic Differential, and Likert scales for grading the projects and giving feedback to students by instructors, which is also helpful to make decisions. This scaling can compare the current and previous works and quantify the development of individual students’ works. This study also focuses on the various stages of prototyping and different satisfaction levels of the students. As a result, meaningful feedback comes from the educators, which is visible to both the instructors and the students. We also hope to develop new functions for education which are visual and fetch the data based on specific scaling in future. Adding more scaling helps educators give feedback very specifically on the students’ prototyping design, and excellent results will be accurate and can be predicted

The burden of diabetes mellitus during pregnancy in low- and middle-income countries : a systematic review

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Preparation of wheat-potato-peanut composite flour cakes

This study reports on the suitable formulation of cake using potato and peanut flour with wheat flour. Fresh potato and peanut were analyzed for their chemical compositions and then dried in cabinet dryer. Four samples of cake: containing wheat flour only; containing 70% wheat flour, 5% potato flour and 25% peanut flour; containing 70% wheat flour, 15% potato flour and 15% peanut flour; and containing 70% wheat flour, 20% potato flour and 10% peanut flour were analyzed for proximate compositions. The properties of cakes were evaluated in terms of volume, moisture content, weight, and crumb and crust characteristics. The prepared cake samples were also judged in categories of color, flavor, texture and overall acceptability. Among the formulations, cake sample containing 70% wheat flour, 15% potato flour and 15% peanut flour secured the highest score with respect to color, texture and overall acceptability. Finally, the storage stability of the composite cake, packaged with single layer polythene, was evaluated in terms of moisture uptake by storing it in room temperature (25°C)

Preparation of wheat-potato-peanut composite flour cakes

This study reports on the suitable formulation of cake using potato and peanut flour with wheat flour. Fresh potato and peanut were analyzed for their chemical compositions and then dried in cabinet dryer. Four samples of cake: containing wheat flour only; containing 70% wheat flour, 5% potato flour and 25% peanut flour; containing 70% wheat flour, 15% potato flour and 15% peanut flour; and containing 70% wheat flour, 20% potato flour and 10% peanut flour were analyzed for proximate compositions. The properties of cakes were evaluated in terms of volume, moisture content, weight, and crumb and crust characteristics. The prepared cake samples were also judged in categories of color, flavor, texture and overall acceptability. Among the formulations, cake sample containing 70% wheat flour, 15% potato flour and 15% peanut flour secured the highest score with respect to color, texture and overall acceptability. Finally, the storage stability of the composite cake, packaged with single layer polythene, was evaluated in terms of moisture uptake by storing it in room temperature (25°C)

Reaching the poor with health interventions: programme-incidence analysis of seven randomised trials of women's groups to reduce newborn mortality in Asia and Africa

Efforts to end preventable newborn deaths will fail if the poor are not reached with effective interventions. To understand what works to reach vulnerable groups, we describe and explain the uptake of a highly effective community-based newborn health intervention across social strata in Asia and Africa

The impact of mobile amusement information on use behavior, satisfaction, and loyalty

The relationship between satisfaction and loyalty has been well explored in services marketing or customer relationship management. In this study, the authors studied the relationship of 7 types of service variables under “amusement” factor. Amusement is one of the three factors extracted from 21 mobile information services. Among many different frameworks of satisfaction-loyalty, we used the framework of “past use behavior” on “satisfaction”, and then of “satisfaction” on “continued use intention” (or loyalty), resulting in a strong support of the existing model with positive significant influence on the both paths. Further, our research reveals that, on the both paths, there are stronger, significant positive relationships between a latent variable and the measurement variables for mobile information services with stronger amusement elements than those with other ones. The results lead to useful implications that amusement is a crucial dimension in mobile information services, not only in use motivation, but also on behavior, satisfaction, and continued use intention

Strain performance of tilapia in freshwater prawn polyculture

Production performance of two tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) strain viz. Chitralada and GIFT (Genetically Improved Farmed Tilapia) in fish-prawn polyculture system was compared, and possible effect of tilapia inclusion in freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) culture was evaluated in 120 days of grow-out phase. There were three treatments, i.e. only freshwater prawn as control (T1), prawn + Chitralada (T2), and prawn + GIFT (T3) with three replications of each. Stocking densities for prawn juvenile was 30,000 ha-1 in all the treatments and for both tilapia strains were 10,000 ha-1. Floating feed containing 28% protein for tilapia and pelleted sinking feed for prawn were provided twice daily at a rate of 10-5% bw adjusted after each month of sampling. Water transparency was significantly lower (P0.05) among the treatments. In case of tilapia, average individual weight was significantly higher in Chitralada (254.22 g) than that of GIFT (201.52 g). However, survival of GIFT was significantly higher (92.50%) than that of Chitralada (65.83%). Gross and net production of tilapia did not vary significantly. It was concluded that prawn-tilapia mixed culture is advantageous over traditional mono culture regarding production augmentation, and tilapia inclusion improving water quality