Low-power sensors and their applications in various fields ranging from military to civilian lives have made tremendous progress in the recent years. Low-power and extended battery life are the key focuses for long term, reliable and easy operation of these sensors. Sensors and Low Power Signal Processing provides a general overview of a sensor's working principle and a discussion of the emerging sensor technologies including chemical, electro-chemical and MEMS based sensors. Also included is a discussion on design challenges associated with low-power analog circuits and the schemes to overcome them. Finally, a short discussion of some of the simple wireless telemetry schemes best suited for low-power sensor applications and sensor packaging issues is discussed. Applications and sensor prototypes included are environmental monitoring, health care monitoring and issues related to the development of sensor prototypes and associated electronics to achieve high signal-to-noise ratio will also be presented.

From Government to E-Governance: Public Administration in the Digital Age will aim to provide relevant theoretical frameworks, past experiences, and the latest empirical research findings in the area of public administration systems that existed in earlier civilizations, as well as e-governance-introduced modern times. The target audience of this book will be composed of academics, students, civil servants, researchers, and policy advisors teaching and studying public administration and public policy, thinking to bring administrative reforms and working in government.

Low-power sensors and their applications in various fields ranging from military to civilian lives have made tremendous progress in the recent years. Low-power and extended battery life are the key focuses for long term, reliable and easy operation of these sensors. Sensors and Low Power Signal Processing provides a general overview of a sensor's working principle and a discussion of the emerging sensor technologies including chemical, electro-chemical and MEMS based sensors. Also included is a discussion on design challenges associated with low-power analog circuits and the schemes to overcome them. Finally, a short discussion of some of the simple wireless telemetry schemes best suited for low-power sensor applications and sensor packaging issues is discussed. Applications and sensor prototypes included are environmental monitoring, health care monitoring and issues related to the development of sensor prototypes and associated electronics to achieve high signal-to-noise ratio will also be presented.

Endocrine Disruption Chemicals (EDCs) are persistent against conventional wastewater treatment method. It was ascertained that ozone can effectively degrade and mineralize most of the EDCs. For this, ozonolysis of a model EDC, Diclofenac sodium (DFS) has been carried out in sami-batch process to get necessary kinetics. With this, a simulation model has been developed for flow ozone membrane reactor. Because this reactor can simultaneously mineralize and separate EDCs effectively from water and wastewater. Afterwards a model simulation has been carried out for ozone membrane reactor to predict its performance. Model simulation predicted mineralization of EDC (DFS) from water and wastewater. This work will be helpful for water treatment industries to develop suitable membrane (i.e., characteristic parameters of membrane such as efficiency, molecular weight cut-off and enhancement) to treat EDCs from water and wastewater.

The current book attempts to investigate the application of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in the Linear Constraint Minimum Variance (LCMV) beamforming technique that improves the signal to interference and noise ratio, data rates, null steering and coverage of the cellular system. LCMV forms its radiation beam towards desired signal through its weight vectors which are computed through received signal. However, weights computed by LCMV usually do not able to form the radiation beam towards the target user precisely. Hence, in this research work, PSO is incorporated into the existing LCMV technique in order to improve the weights of LCMV.

Thin film cadmium telluride absorbers with cadmium sulphide hetero-junction partner are promising candidates for high efficiency low cost solutions of solar energy harvesting devices. These devices have band gaps well-suited for effective absorption of sunlight. Most importantly, the materials used in these devices can be deposited in a variety of industry-friendly ways, so that the cost associated with manufacturing is generally lower than other available technologies. Although poly-crystalline CdS has been found to be the best suited heterojunction partner for CdTe solar cell, the conventional polycrystalline CdS/CdTe cell has few issues that limit device performance. In order to overcome these problems, this study proposes the introduction of poly-CdS to amorphous oxygenated CdS (a-CdS: O) as window layer. The a-CdS: O window material has higher optical band gap (2.5-3.1 eV), better lattice match with CdTe absorber materials and reduced inter-diffusion tendency of CdS and CdTe layers. This book systematically demonstrates the conversion process of poly CdS to a-CdS: O and develops a strategy for the fabrication of suitable a-CdS: O layer to be applied in CdTe solar ce

Cooperative communication allows several nodes to cooperatively transmit signals to a particular destination. Using cooperative communication, wireless networks could mitigate severe channel impairments arising from multipath propagation. In this case, the greater benefits are gained by exploiting spatial diversity in the channel. In this book, an overview on cooperative communication in wireless networks is presented. Practical issues and challenges in cooperative communication are identified. Cooperative routing strategies in different networks (wireless mesh networks, ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks) are discussed. However, cooperative routing strategy in a network with multiple flows may cause collision among helping nodes and thus, reduce the overall system performance. In this book, a new routing protocol based on new routing metric called Contention Sensitive Cooperative Metric (CSCM) is discussed, which takes contention relationship into consideration. Finally, the performance of the routing protocol has been evaluated using simulation. The results demonstrate significant performance improvement of cooperative communication while using CSCM.

Five pond stations, seven different physicochemical variables, qualitative and quantitative analysis of phytoplankton and bacterial abundance were studied. Relationship among bacteria, phytoplankton and physicochemical variables was investigated. Results showed that air temperature ranged from 14 to 33.5 C, water temperature 19 to 31.5 C, pH 6.59 to 8.95, dissolved oxygen 2.2 mg/l to 9.55 mg/l, conductivity 129.3 to 275 uS/cm, total dissolved solids 73.3 to 121 mg/l, alkalinity of water 1.33 to 2 meq/l, total phytoplankton count 6.7x104 to 744.5x104/l and bacterial count 5.93x101 to 1.50x105 cfu/l. A total of 28 bacterial strains were provisionally identified, out of which 26 from Bacillus and rest 2 strains were from Listeria genus. A total of 139 phytoplankton were recorded from Cyanophyceae, Chlorophyceae, Euglenophyceae, Bacillariophyceae, Cryptophyceae, Dinophyceae and Chrysophyceae where Members of Dinophyceae and Chlorophyceae were dominant and Chrysophyceae was relatively low. Phytoplankton showed a significant positive correlation with pH in station 2 and 4, and negative correlation with air temperature and water temperature in all of the 5 station."

Bangla (can also be termed as Bengali) is one of the richest languages among all the languages exist in the world and one of the largely spoken languages in the world. More than 220 million people speak in Bangla as their native language. It is ranked sixth based on the number of speakers. Bangla is the mother language of Bangladesh and also a large number of people in eastern area of India (West Bengal and Kolkata as its capital) speak and write in Bangla. This book presents the adapting rule based machine translation from English to Bangla. The proposed language translation model relies on rule based methodologies especially fuzzy rules. There are "If - Then" basis rules are applied for the English to Bangla language translation. In this language translation, we use rough set technique for Knowledge Representation System. This technique is used to classify each English sentence to a particular class using attributes of that English sentence and then translate them to the Bangla sentence using the rules that is produced earlier in the language translation system. Here English to Bangla bilingual dictionary has been formed for the purpose of language translation.

In a foreign language context, grammar is always construed as an indispensable element to learn. It is the question of how to learn it that becomes a key issue to examine. Concern is placed on how grammar instructions can nurture and develop students' grammar interlanguage system. A wave of research ranging from intensive treatment toward specific linguistic features to focus on form in interactions is put forth. Apart from the insightful research on grammar, some teachers still have a propensity to rely on language input through the adoption of meaning-oriented tasks. A common view held by teachers is that an abundant exposure to language use would warrant the development of students' grammar. The communicativeness of the tasks is believed to enable the grammar learning to take care of itself. While the view, to a large degree, is justified, it might not be sufficient for the whole processing of the intricate development of L2 grammar learning to occur. Accordingly, Swain (1994) sheds light on roles of output as potential learning mechanisms to facilitate the process. This study is an attempt to find some evidence of roles of output in L2 grammar learning.

Feed shortage is an acute problem for livestock production in developing countries. Presently ruminant animals are reared by feeding only rice straw which is very poor in quality. Feeding value of rice straw can be improved by supplementation of aquatic plants of which water hyacinth (WH- Eichhornia crassipes) ranks first. WH contains as much as protein and minerals than many conventional forages. This plant has high resistivity with a high production rate and requires no production cost. But WH is very high in water content, which makes the plant low in nutrient density. This problem can be over come by removing some moisture by partial sun drying (wilted form) and can be used as cattle feed. This book, therefore, provides a new technology for improving the low quality roughage based diet and mitigate the chronic livestock feed shortage for poor farmer who cannot rear large ruminant only for feed cost. Use of WH in cattle diet with rice straw would help to solve feed crisis, improve animal health and gradually increase the farmer's income. By this process the animal protein (meat and milk) will increase and alleviate the deficit protein demand for human being.

The context for this book is to present a proficient channel estimation technique for performance improvement and complexity reduction of multiple antenna system. Matrix factorization is applied on LS estimation to reduce a full rank matrix into a simpler form in order to eliminate matrix inversion. Results indicate a significant improvement in SNR compared with LS estimation. The complexity comparison is performed in terms of mathematical operations, which shows that the approach outperforms LS estimation at a lower complexity and represents a good solution for channel estimation technique. The book also provides design and implementation of a multiple antenna system on FPGA that provides reconfigurability, resource utilization and less power consumption. The encoder design is straight forward; however, the decoder design is little tricky as it requires resource optimization. The hardware, presented in this book, utilizes the resources by adopting the technique of parallelism. The system is developed based on modular design which simplifies system design, eases hardware update and facilitates testing the various modules in an independent manner.