Biopolymers represent a carbon emission solution: they are green and eco-friendly with a variety of uses in biomedical engineering, the automotive industry, the packaging and paper industries, and for the development of new building materials. This book describes the various raw materials of biopolymers and their chemical and physical properties, the polymerization process, and the chemical structure and properties of biopolymers. Furthermore, this book identifies the drawbacks of biopolymers and how to overcome them through modification methods to enhance the compatibility, flexibility, physicochemical properties, thermal stability, impact response, and rigidity.

The hard disk drive is one of the finest examples of the precision control of mechatronics, with tolerances less than one micrometer achieved while operating at high speed. Increasing demand for higher data density as well as disturbance-prone operating environments continue to test designers' mettle. Explore the challenges presented by modern hard disk drives and learn how to overcome them with Hard Disk Drive: Mechatronics and Control. Beginning with an overview of hard disk drive history, components, operating principles, and industry trends, the authors thoroughly examine the design and manufacturing challenges. They start with the head positioning servomechanism followed by the design of the actuator servo controller, the critical aspects of spindle motor control, and finally, the servo track writer, a critical technology in hard disk drive manufacturing. By comparing various design approaches for both single- and dual-stage servomechanisms, the book shows the relative pros and cons of each approach. Numerous examples and figures clarify and illustrate the discussion. Exploring practical issues such as models for plants, noise reduction, disturbances, and common problems with spindle motors, Hard Disk Drive: Mechatronics and Control avoids heavy theory in favor of providing hands-on insight into real issues facing designers every day.

Biopolymers represent a carbon emission solution: they are green and eco-friendly with a variety of uses in biomedical engineering, the automotive industry, the packaging and paper industries, and for the development of new building materials. This book describes the various raw materials of biopolymers and their chemical and physical properties, the polymerization process, and the chemical structure and properties of biopolymers. Furthermore, this book identifies the drawbacks of biopolymers and how to overcome them through modification methods to enhance the compatibility, flexibility, physicochemical properties, thermal stability, impact response, and rigidity.

th This volume is an edition of the papers selected from the 12 FIRA RoboWorld C- gress, held in Incheon, Korea, August 16-18, 2009. The Federation of International Robosoccer Association (FIRA - www. fira. net) is a non-profit organization, which organizes robotic competitions and meetings around the globe annually. The RoboSoccer competitions started in 1996 and FIRA was - tablished on June 5, 1997. The Robot Soccer competitions are aimed at promoting the spirit of science and technology to the younger generation. The congress is a forum in which to share ideas and future directions of technologies, and to enlarge the human networks in robotics area. The objectives of the FIRA Cup and Congress are to explore the technical dev- opment and achievement in the field of robotics, and provide participants with a robot festival including technical presentations, robot soccer competitions and exhibits - der the theme "Where Theory and Practice Meet. " th Under the umbrella of the 12 FIRA RoboWorld Congress Incheon 2009, six int- national conferences were held for greater impact and scientific exchange: th * 6 International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CIRAS) th * 5 International Symposium on Autonomous Minirobots for Research and Edutainment (AMiRE) * International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) * International Conference on Advanced Humanoid Robotics Research (ICAHRR) * International Conference on Entertainment Robotics (ICER) * International Robotics Education Forum (IREF) This volume consists of selected quality papers from the six conferences.

th This volume is an edition of the papers selected from the 12 FIRA RoboWorld C- gress, held in Incheon, Korea, August 16-18, 2009. The Federation of International Robosoccer Association (FIRA - www. fira. net) is a non-profit organization, which organizes robotic competitions and meetings around the globe annually. The RoboSoccer competitions started in 1996 and FIRA was - tablished on June 5, 1997. The Robot Soccer competitions are aimed at promoting the spirit of science and technology to the younger generation. The congress is a forum in which to share ideas and future directions of technologies, and to enlarge the human networks in robotics area. The objectives of the FIRA Cup and Congress are to explore the technical dev- opment and achievement in the field of robotics, and provide participants with a robot festival including technical presentations, robot soccer competitions and exhibits - der the theme "Where Theory and Practice Meet. " th Under the umbrella of the 12 FIRA RoboWorld Incheon Congress 2009, six int- national conferences were held for greater impact and scientific exchange: th * 6 International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CIRAS) th * 5 International Symposium on Autonomous Minirobots for Research and Edutainment (AMiRE) * International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) * International Conference on Advanced Humanoid Robotics Research (ICAHRR) * International Conference on Entertainment Robotics (ICER) * International Robotics Education Forum (IREF) This volume consists of selected quality papers from the six conferences.

Corporate governance can be considered as an environment of trust, ethics, moral values, and confidence as a synergistic effort of all the constituent parts, including stakeholders, the public, service provides, and the corporate sector. The actions of an organization and the consequences of those actions has become increasingly concerned with corporate governance. As such, it is essential to examine the latest concepts and trends that can lead to the development of effective models for corporate boards. Transforming Corporate Governance and Developing Models for Board Effectiveness is an essential reference source that contains forward-thinking research intended to facilitate effective, entrepreneurial, and prudent management that can deliver the long-term success of the company. The book discusses the different theories and practices surrounding boards of directors' responsibilities and innovative strategies for the governance of their companies that allow them to become and remain successful. Highlighting topics that include board diversity and independence, business ethics, and family business governance, this book is intended for corporate boards, board of directors, executives, managers, business professionals, academicians, researchers, policymakers, and students.

Developing nations currently utilize various methods and practices used in most entrepreneurial activities. Manipulating these processes to work in a categorically low-income area, however, can be challenging. Micro-Entrepreneurship and Micro-Enterprise Development in Malaysia: Emerging Research and Opportunities provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of entrepreneurial promotional programs and applications within global economics. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as emerging economics, organizational development, and gender diversity, this book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, policymakers, governmental and non-governmental organizations, business professionals, academics, researchers, and students seeking current research on improving the socio-economic condition of low-income households through various entrepreneurial activities.

Corporate governance can be considered as an environment of trust, ethics, moral values, and confidence as a synergistic effort of all the constituent parts, including stakeholders, the public, service provides, and the corporate sector. The actions of an organization and the consequences of those actions has become increasingly concerned with corporate governance. As such, it is essential to examine the latest concepts and trends that can lead to the development of effective models for corporate boards. Transforming Corporate Governance and Developing Models for Board Effectiveness is an essential reference source that contains forward-thinking research intended to facilitate effective, entrepreneurial, and prudent management that can deliver the long-term success of the company. The book discusses the different theories and practices surrounding boards of directors' responsibilities and innovative strategies for the governance of their companies that allow them to become and remain successful. Highlighting topics that include board diversity and independence, business ethics, and family business governance, this book is intended for corporate boards, board of directors, executives, managers, business professionals, academicians, researchers, policymakers, and students.

Developing nations currently utilize various methods and practices used in most entrepreneurial activities. Manipulating these processes to work in a categorically low-income area, however, can be challenging. Micro-Entrepreneurship and Micro-Enterprise Development in Malaysia: Emerging Research and Opportunities provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of entrepreneurial promotional programs and applications within global economics. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as emerging economics, organizational development, and gender diversity, this book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, policymakers, governmental and non-governmental organizations, business professionals, academics, researchers, and students seeking current research on improving the socio-economic condition of low-income households through various entrepreneurial activities.

There has been a very rapid global expansion of freshwater prawn farming since 1990; this is mainly because of the huge production of China but also, in the last few years, because of a rapid take-off of farming in India and Bangladesh. Survival at the end of the nursery phase can vary substantially and may be related to the territorial and cannibalistic nature of prawn PLs when cultured at high densities. Nursery production may be enhanced by the addition of artificial substrates. Seed cost is a dominant variable cost in prawn production. Thereby, cost efficiency of nurseries significantly impacts the prices of stocker size juveniles, which in turn has a dramatic influence on the profitability of prawn grow-out. Therefore, investigation into potential benefits derived from using artificial substrates, a study was conducted in recirculatory system to evaluate the effects of substrates on the growth and survival of Macrobrachium rosenbergii postlarvae (PL). Result of the present study indicated that growth of M. rosenbergii PLs improved in presence of artificial substrates but the artificial substrates did not improved survival.

The polder five is a designed project of the Bangladesh Water Development Board, which was constructed during the period from 1965 to 1970. The entire area of polder five is situated in Shyamnagar upazila under Satkhira district of Bangladesh. The research area is within the Burigoalini union Shyamnagar upazila, which is about 65 kilometer away from Satkhira district town. The area is located between 220 15 to 220 25 Nlatitudes, 890 00 to 890 15 E longitudes and is bounded by the Sundarban on the south, Kaligonj and Assasuni upazila on the north, Koira upazila of Khulna district on the east and Kaligonj and west-Bengal of India on the west. Embankments around the reclaimed areas (polder) provide protection against river floods and salt water intrusion. The salinity of the area was found to have an increasing trend during the months of January to mid April while it followed a decreasing trend from mid April to end of the April.The water quality of the area in terms of various quality classifications, some are good for irrigation but some are not good for general crops. The quality of pond water in terms of various ionic constituents are good for drinking purpose."

Data compression has important application in the areas of data transmission and data storage. Many data processing applications require storage of large volumes of data. A compression is beneficial from many perspectives. It minimizes the storage requirement and required bandwidth, as well as transmission time between the encoder and decoder. Huffman encoding scheme is widely used in text, image and video compression. Many techniques have been presented since then. But still this is an important field as it significantly reduces storage requirement and communication cost. This research presented a new memory efficient data structure for the static Huffman tree. Memory efficient representation of Huffman tree increases the compression ratio of Huffman coding especially for Repeated and Block Huffman coding. Based on the memory efficient data structure, a new Huffman decoding algorithm is presented. The advantage of this decoding process is that it does not require reconstructing Huffman table or tree in the receiver end for decoding a compressed file. This type of data structures will be really applicable for low memory machines.

The aim of this project is to give a clear picture on the corporate governance mechanisms and its theories. Corporate governance refers to a set of rules and regulations which are complied with by corporations. Scholars defined governance is a term that refers to the way in which an enterprise or body of people is governed and to the rules and regulations for governing by people in authority and power. Principles of corporate governance are noted as directors, directors' remuneration, shareholders, audit and accountability. However, CEO duality, audit committee, board independence and board composition are the most researched issues in academic and business globe. Based on this concept this project intended to depict the above mentioned issues. In addition, there are number theories related to corporate governance and its mechanisms, though it is claimed that agency theory is the most significant theory in the world of corporate governance. Whereas other proponents of corporate governance claim that agency theory is unable to cover corporate governance. In this vein, this project intends to depict the related theories of corporate governance and its mechanisms. Mechanisms covered h

Pollution of the aquatic environment by heavy metals has detrimental effect on living species. In this work, novel carbon nano-materials (CNM) and commercial granular activated carbon (GAC) adsorbents were evaluated for removal of heavy metal matrix (Cu, Ni and Pb) from aqueous solution to meet Department of Environment (DOE) Malaysia's guideline. Results from the characterization of GAC and CNM showed that GAC had higher surface area and more functional groups. Optimum adsorption capacity of GAC and CNM were observed at pH 5 and 1 g/L dosage, while equilibrium adsorption conditions were generally noticed by 60 minutes of agitation at 100 rpm. The initial metal concentrations and functional groups on adsorbents were the major factors affecting the affinity of metals by both GAC and CNM.

The use of Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) in the design of microwave band pass filter has been very popular in recent years. Attractive SIW filters include compact size, high power handling capability and low loss. The aim of this project is to design and investigate the performance of RF filter using Half-mode Substrate Integrated Waveguide (HMSIW) technique. The project is divided into three major parts, design, simulation and fabrication. The report starts with a brief literature review followed by details on the most important aspects of building a filter. The simulation software's used are briefly discussed with the key aspects of individual and how they are being used in the design and simulation process. The next section comprises of details about the design process combining with bulk simulation data and also the fabrication process of the filter. The section compares data after methodical changes brought to the filter and concludes by discussing about the final experimental data. The following section briefly summarizes all the simulation performed on a multilayer filter, and observes how certain changes to the filter affect the response.

The aim of this project is to develop a prototype "Intelligent Microphone System." The system is able to adjust the height of the microphone automatically to suit the different speaker's height so that manual adjusting is not need, which is more reliable and time effective. This height detection is done by means of continuous monitoring the audio signal produced by the speaker while speaking.Unlike the existing microphone system, this project aims to use "BASIC Stamp 2P 40-pin" to decide whether the audio level is high or low and according to that it controls the motor. Motor is using power screw method for vertical translation and eventually the microphone moves up or down accordingly. Unfortunately the prototype described in this thesis does not fully minimize the noise level. So as a matter of fact the noise level is also affects the system. But solution to this problem is also described as a feature improvement. Moreover many calibrations were held for the system. In the end it can be conclude that this project will be useful in the daily life, which means no need to adjust the microphone stand manually.

The Santals, being one of the important indigenous group of India and Bangladesh are studied mostly on the perspective of ethnology and the process of acculturation. This book, possibly is the first one to depict the pattern of psychiatric illness among the Santals which in fact is an approach overlapping environmental psychology, psychiatric anthropology and cultural psychiatry. In this regard the researcher made a scholarly approach in translating the suffering of one of the ethnic minorities of our globe, which often remain unaddressed. This is a book we should all be reading.

1905. This slim volume contains a small collection of the authentic utterances of the Prophet. The supreme importance of the sayings of Muhammad, apart from their general ethical value, can be fully realized only when one becomes aware that the whole religious, moral, social and political fabric of a vast section of humanity rests on the Book (the Kur'an), the sayings and acts (the Sunnah) of the Prophet, and analogical deductions therefrom.