Search

The study was conducted on secondary school students to find out the relationship between school climate and academic achievement of secondary school students studying in government and private schools. A sample of 240 secondary school students (120 Male and 120 Female) was selected randomly from two districts (Pulwama and Kulgam) of Kashmir (J&K). For data collection, self-standardized "School Climate Scale" ("SCS") was administered to measure the perceived school climate of secondary school students. The yard stick to measure the academic achievement has been taken from students' performance in JKBOSE Examinations. Statistical treatments such as mean, t- test and correlation approach were computed for data analysis. The results of the study highlighted a significant and positive relationship between school climate and academic achievement of secondary school students. Further, the study reflected a significant difference in the perception of school climate with respect to gender and type of school. The results also revealed a significant difference in academic achievement of male-female and government-private secondary school going students.

In this work, the authors report the fabrication and characterization of CeO2 -HfO2 mixed oxide thin film based oxygen gas sensors. The atomic concentrations of the individual elements Ce and Hf in the mixed oxide (CeO2 -HfO2) thin films were controlled and tuned using a novel method in RF sputtering to achieve better oxygen sensing characteristics. The characteristics of the sensing film were evaluated using various characterization techniques such as TEM-EDS, FESEM-EDS, XPS and XRD. The XPS and EDS data revealed that the Hf concentration increases with an increase in size as well as number of the HfO2 pellets that are placed on a 3-inch CeO2 target during sputtering. From the XRD and XPS analysis, it was found that the mixed oxide film with 10-11% Hf atomic concentration has the best sensing characteristics. The superior sensing characteristics of the CeO2 -HfO2 film can be attributed to the existence of a highly reactive plane (200) with the highest surface energy and a strongly reduced surface with oxygen vacancy formation due to the presence of Ce3+ ions and HfOx, x < 2 on the surface of the mixed oxide film. The sensor film detected the presence of oxygen gas even at low temperatures (< 400°C); however, the response time and recovery time were slightly higher. The sensor film of thickness 220 nm with Hf concentration between 10-11% showed excellent sensitivity (~15), fast response and recovery times of 8 s and 10 s respectively at an operating temperature of 400°C, which are the best values reported till date for CeO2 based oxygen sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fully differential energy-efficient switching scheme for binary-weighted capacitor digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is presented. It is observed that the proposed switching scheme reduces energy consumption of DAC by 97% and the capacitance area by 50% over the conventional ones. The effect of supply and common mode voltage variations on the linearity of successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is reduced. Moreover, with this switching scheme, one can achieve the same dynamic range as the conventional one, with half the supply voltage as compared to the existing schemes. This makes the proposed switching method suitable for ultra-low-voltage SAR ADCs, which are widely used in biomedical applications. The proposed method is modelled using MATLAB. The results show that the nonlinearity (INL and DNL) caused by capacitor mismatch is reduced. The circuit-level implementation of 10-bit SAR ADC is simulated using UMC 90nm CMOS 1P9M process technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People knowledge, along with knowledge acquired from past and ongoing projects, provides valuable support to successful handling of the current projects. IT projects are exceptional cases of evidence. Since IT companies have high attrition rate, knowledge of the existing project people should be properly managed. Different IT companies may have different practices in managing the knowledge of projects and project people. In order to study such knowledge management practices in detail, a case study was taken up in a big Indian IT company. A unique mechanism was found to be in existence to identify and fill the knowledge gaps for successful management of projects. A learning center can play a vital role in enhancing, sharing and extracting knowledge of project people. The case study offers some important suggestions drawn from the people interviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]