Power Profile of Effective Managers: An Exploration among the Branch Managers of a Commercial Bank in Kerala

Managers are central to any fuction in a complex and developed society. Their talents are reckoned to be cardinal in developed economies and a basic yearning of all developing economies.In order to survive and produce results in a turbulent and transient environment, the task is to understand the nature of factors contributing to managerial effectiveness. This study is an attempt towards this core issue of the present from a different perspective. This study tries to focus attention on a group of managers functioning in the field of banking, a core sector in the country's economy. The gamut of economic activities in Kerala being predominantly service-oriented, importance of commercial banking is almost indisputable. Though economists would argue that the disproportionate development of service sector is anomalous when viewed against the hazy scenarios in the primary and secondary sectors of the state’s economy, the extent and pace of growth in the banking sector has had its dole meted out by ambitious and productive managers fiinctioning in the field. Researcher’s attempt here is to thresh the grain and chaff among bank managers in terms of their effectiveness and to account for the variations in the light of their ability to affect the thoughts and actions of their subordinates. To put it succinctly, the attempt herein is to explain the effectiveness of bank managers in the light of their ‘Power Profile’ taken to be comprising Power Differentials, Power Bases, their Visibility and Credibility in the organisation and, the Power Styles typically used by them for influencing subordinates.

Studies on underwater propagation development of programmable arrays

The thesis presented here includes the designing of underwater transducer arrays, taking into account the ‘interaction effects’ [30] among the closely packed radiators. Methods of minimizing the ‘interaction effects‘ by modifying the radiating aperture, are investigated. The need for this study arises as it is one of the important peculiar limitations that stands in the way of achieving maximum range of transmission of acoustic signals. Application of the modified array format for the generation of narrow beam low frequency sound waves, through nonlinear interactions, is discussed. Other techniques that can be advantageously exploited in array synthesis are also investigated

Studies on rubber compositions as passive acoustic materials in underwater electro acoustic transducer technology-and their aging characteristics

Rubber has become an indispensable material in Ocean technology. Rubber components play critical roles such as sealing, damping, environmental protection, electrical insulation etc. in most under water engineering applications. Technology driven innovations in electro acoustic transducers and other sophisticated end uses have enabled quantum jump in the quality and reliability of rubber components. Under water electro acoustic transducers use rubbers as a critical material in their construction. Work in this field has lead to highly reliable and high performance materials which has enhanced service life of transducers to the extent of 1015 years. Present work concentrates on these materials. Conventional rubbers are inadequate to meet many of the stringent functional of the requirements. There exists large gap of information in the rubber technology of under water rubbers, particularly in the context of under water electro acoustic transducers. Present study is towards filling up the gaps of information in this crucial area. The research work has been in the area of compounding and characterisation of rubbers for use in under water electro acoustic transducers. The study also covers specific material system such as encapsulation material, baffle material, seal material, etc. Life prediction techniques of under water rubbers in general has been established with reference to more than one functional property. This thesis is divided into 6 chapters.

Numerical Simulation of Two-Part Underwater Towing System

The motion instability is an important issue that occurs during the operation of towed underwater vehicles (TUV), which considerably affects the accuracy of high precision acoustic instrumentations housed inside the same. Out of the various parameters responsible for this, the disturbances from the tow-ship are the most significant one. The present study focus on the motion dynamics of an underwater towing system with ship induced disturbances as the input. The study focus on an innovative system called two-part towing. The methodology involves numerical modeling of the tow system, which consists of modeling of the tow-cables and vehicles formulation. Previous study in this direction used a segmental approach for the modeling of the cable. Even though, the model was successful in predicting the heave response of the tow-body, instabilities were observed in the numerical solution. The present study devises a simple approach called lumped mass spring model (LMSM) for the cable formulation. In this work, the traditional LMSM has been modified in two ways. First, by implementing advanced time integration procedures and secondly, use of a modified beam model which uses only translational degrees of freedoms for solving beam equation. A number of time integration procedures, such as Euler, Houbolt, Newmark and HHT-α were implemented in the traditional LMSM and the strength and weakness of each scheme were numerically estimated. In most of the previous studies, hydrodynamic forces acting on the tow-system such as drag and lift etc. are approximated as analytical expression of velocities. This approach restricts these models to use simple cylindrical shaped towed bodies and may not be applicable modern tow systems which are diversed in shape and complexity. Hence, this particular study, hydrodynamic parameters such as drag and lift of the tow-system are estimated using CFD techniques. To achieve this, a RANS based CFD code has been developed. Further, a new convection interpolation scheme for CFD simulation, called BNCUS, which is blend of cell based and node based formulation, was proposed in the study and numerically tested. To account for the fact that simulation takes considerable time in solving fluid dynamic equations, a dedicated parallel computing setup has been developed. Two types of computational parallelisms are explored in the current study, viz; the model for shared memory processors and distributed memory processors. In the present study, shared memory model was used for structural dynamic analysis of towing system, distributed memory one was devised in solving fluid dynamic equations.

Underwater Target Localization, Tracking and Classification

Underwater target localization and tracking attracts tremendous research interest due to various impediments to the estimation task caused by the noisy ocean environment. This thesis envisages the implementation of a prototype automated system for underwater target localization, tracking and classification using passive listening buoy systems and target identification techniques. An autonomous three buoy system has been developed and field trials have been conducted successfully. Inaccuracies in the localization results, due to changes in the environmental parameters, measurement errors and theoretical approximations are refined using the Kalman filter approach. Simulation studies have been conducted for the tracking of targets with different scenarios even under maneuvering situations. This system can as well be used for classifying the unknown targets by extracting the features of the noise emanations from the targets.

Rapid and Proactive Approach on Exploration of Database Vulnerabilities

In today's complicated computing environment, managing data has become the primary concern of all industries. Information security is the greatest challenge and it has become essential to secure the enterprise system resources like the databases and the operating systems from the attacks of the unknown outsiders. Our approach plays a major role in detecting and managing vulnerabilities in complex computing systems. It allows enterprises to assess two primary tiers through a single interface as a vulnerability scanner tool which provides a secure system which is also compatible with the security compliance of the industry. It provides an overall view of the vulnerabilities in the database, by automatically scanning them with minimum overhead. It gives a detailed view of the risks involved and their corresponding ratings. Based on these priorities, an appropriate mitigation process can be implemented to ensure a secured system. The results show that our approach could effectively optimize the time and cost involved when compared to the existing systems

RMAC-M: Extending the R-MAC Protocol for an Energy Efficient, Delay Tolerant Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network application with a mobile data mule node

One of the major applications of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASN) is ocean environment monitoring. Employing data mules is an energy efficient way of data collection from the underwater sensor nodes in such a network. A data mule node such as an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) periodically visits the stationary nodes to download data. By conserving the power required for data transmission over long distances to a remote data sink, this approach extends the network life time. In this paper we propose a new MAC protocol to support a single mobile data mule node to collect the data sensed by the sensor nodes in periodic runs through the network. In this approach, the nodes need to perform only short distance, single hop transmission to the data mule. The protocol design discussed in this paper is motivated to support such an application. The proposed protocol is a hybrid protocol, which employs a combination of schedule based access among the stationary nodes along with handshake based access to support mobile data mules. The new protocol, RMAC-M is developed as an extension to the energy efficient MAC protocol R-MAC by extending the slot time of R-MAC to include a contention part for a hand shake based data transfer. The mobile node makes use of a beacon to signal its presence to all the nearby nodes, which can then hand-shake with the mobile node for data transfer. Simulation results show that the new protocol provides efficient support for a mobile data mule node while preserving the advantages of R-MAC such as energy efficiency and fairness.

Exploration of Novel Organic Reactions Catalyzed by Nucleophilic Heterocyclic Carbenes (NHCs)

The thesis entitled “Exploration of Novel Organic Reactions Catalyzed by Nucleophilic Heterocyclic Carbenes (NHCs)” embodies the results of the investigations carried out to explore the synthetic potential of N–heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs) as organocatalyst towards various electrophiles for the synthesis of heterocyclic and carbocyclic systems. Recent investigations in the generation of homoenolates by the addition of NHCs to conjugated aldehydes have made it possible to study the reactivity of this unique three carbon synthon.

Attribute exploration with background implications and exceptions

Implications between attributes can represent knowledge about objects in a specified context. This knowledge representation is especially useful when it is not possible to list all specified objects. Attribute exploration is a tool of formal concept analysis that supports the acquisition of this knowledge. For a specified context this interactive procedure determines a miminal list of valid implications between attributes of this context together with a list of objects which are counterexamples for all implications not valid in the context. This paper describes how the exploration can be modified such that it determines a mimimal set of implications that fills the gap between previously given implications (called background implications) and all valid implications. The list of implications can be simplified further if exceptions are allowed for the implications.

Exploration tools in formal concept analysis

The development of conceptual knowledge systems specifically requests knowledge acquisition tools within the framework of formal concept analysis. In this paper, the existing tools are presented, and furhter developments are discussed.

Concept exploration - a tool for creating and exploring conceptual hierarchies

Concept exploration is a knowledge acquisition tool for interactively exploring the hierarchical structure of finitely generated lattices. Applications comprise the support of knowledge engineers by constructing a type lattice for conceptual graphs, and the exploration of large formal contexts in formal concept analysis.

Multisensor Modeling Underwater with Uncertain Information

This thesis develops an approach to the construction of multidimensional stochastic models for intelligent systems exploring an underwater environment. It describes methods for building models by a three- dimensional spatial decomposition of stochastic, multisensor feature vectors. New sensor information is incrementally incorporated into the model by stochastic backprojection. Error and ambiguity are explicitly accounted for by blurring a spatial projection of remote sensor data before incorporation. The stochastic models can be used to derive surface maps or other representations of the environment. The methods are demonstrated on data sets from multibeam bathymetric surveying, towed sidescan bathymetry, towed sidescan acoustic imagery, and high-resolution scanning sonar aboard a remotely operated vehicle.