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The selection of career paths and making of academic choices is a difficult and often confusing task for young people. The impact on their lives, however, is enormous as it can determine entire future career possibilities. In India, a general remedy to this stress is that instead of choosing a field of study tailored to individual preferences and strengths, topics are chosen that align with the choices of the students' families or their friends. This can have the effect of entrenching patterns of intergenerational inequity. The aim of this research is to give students greater access to the knowledge capital which will help them make better choices. This is achieved by engaging students in the career planning process, in order to convey information in a likeable and credible way. The COMPCAT (Competency and Career Assessment Tool) game engine combines the use of learning analytics and real time, interactive computer simulations designed to gain insights into the students' engagement in the making of these complex decisions. This paper presents the conceptual architecture of the game and demonstrates its role in enhancing the learning effectiveness of the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a game-theoretic framework is applied in order to model the competition scenario between high-speed rail (HSR) and airlines in the Indian context and assess the impact of speed and passengers' characteristics on the equilibrium of the game. The competition is modelled in terms of the fare and frequency offered by the operators to maximize their profits. The speed of HSR is taken as an additional strategic variable in the game with three levels of high speed: low, medium, high. A three-stage game is formulated with the entrant playing its speed strategy in the first stage followed by optimal fare and frequency selection by both the modes. Passengers are considered to be heterogeneous in nature by assuming a continuous distribution of the value of time. Numerical simulations indicate that the dominant strategy for airlines and HSR is based on accommodation and medium speed, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health care organizations worldwide are constantly under pressure to deliver quality services. Reducing the waiting time of patients is considered to be a significant issue in hospitals. In this study, a radio-diagnosis department in a healthcare organization is considered. The present study mainly focuses on the queuing system of a computed tomography scan section of a public hospital in South India. Simulation is used as an aid to study the behavior of the system. This article also contributes a Visual Basic with Applications based excel tool to tackle the need for a user-friendly tool for scheduling the patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial hydrographic data collected from August 2007 through May 2008 and the Princeton Ocean Model (POM) are utilized to explain and document the upwelling in the south eastern Arabian Sea (SEAS). The decrease in the magnitude of winds towards the coast favors local anti-cyclonic vorticity, resulting in the formation of cyclonic eddy and reversal of coastal currents. The Ekman transport due to alongshore winds, Ekman pumping due to wind stress curl, cyclonic eddy and southward West Indian Coastal Currents play different roles in the SEAS upwelling. In the offshore, wind stress curl leads to the formation of meso-scale eddies, resulting in Ekman pumping at the center and consequent upwelling. The rapid depth variation on the western side of Quilon Mount intensifies upwelling in the offshore. The upwelling Kelvin waves generated at the equator terminates in the Bay of Bengal and do not contribute to the SEAS upwelling. The possible role of local and remote winds, especially around Sri Lanka on the upwelling dynamics of SEAS is described utilizing POM. The Kelvin waves generated off the coast of Sri Lanka during the active phase of the summer monsoon also contribute to the upwelling dynamics off the west coast of India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this study, energy and exergy analysis of a coal fired steam power plant in India was carried out and the effects of varying the reference ambient temperature, stack gas temperature and the percentage of excess combustion air on this analysis were examined through computer simulation. The combustion process in the boiler was analyzed in detail considering the actual composition and condition of atmospheric air and variation of specific heat of gases with temperature. Maximum energy loss was found in the condenser (62.02%) followed by the boiler (13.03%) while maximum destruction of fuel exergy was found in the boiler system (63.02%) followed by the turbine (9.35%), and then the condenser (3.24%). Significant potential to improve plant efficiency, therefore, exists through reducing irreversibility in the boiler system. The ambient temperature was found to have its highest effect on the changes of the irreversibility rate in the boiler as compared to that in other components. To examine the effects of stack gas temperature and the excess combustion air on the irreversibility rate of the boiler system, the stack gas temperature was varied from the existing 134.3°C to 90°C and the excess air percentage was varied from 25% to 5%. The results showed that decreasing either the percentage of excess combustion air or the exhaust gas temperature or both, causes the irreversibility rate in the boiler to decrease. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fuzzy time series models are of great interest in forecasting when the information is imprecise and vague. However, the major problem in fuzzy time series forecasting is the accuracy of the forecasted values. In the present study we propose a hybrid method of forecasting based on fuzzy time series and intuitionistic fuzzy sets. The proposed model is a simplified computational approach that uses the degree of nondeterminacy to establish fuzzy logical relations on time series data. The developed model was implemented on the historical enrollment data for the University of Alabama and the forecasted values were compared with the results of existing methods to show its superiority. The suitability of the proposed method was also examined in forecasting market share prices of the State Bank of India on the Bombay Stock Exchange, India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]