ARS - 2010

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    Similarities and differences of ant communities in three types of habitats in the intermediate zone of Sri Lanka
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Peiris, H .A .W .S.; Dias, R.K.S.
    Ants are a common biotic component in different types of terrestrial ecosystems. Similarities and differences of ant fauna that inhabited selected forests and cultivated and uncultivated lands in Anuradhapura district were investigated in 2008 and this investigation was extended to intermediate zone, Kurunegala lands, in 2009. Worker ants were collected during 30th September to 1st of October from Badagamuwa forest (F), a banana cultivation (B) and an uncultivated land (U) in Mawathagama. Soil (40) and litter (40) sifting, honey baiting (40) for an hour and manual collection (40) were carried out at 2.5 m distance along five, 100 m transects laid at each land. Twenty, honey-baited pitfall traps were placed throughout each sampling area and the traps were collected after five hours. All samples were preserved in 70% ethanol. Worker ants were sorted and identified to the furthest possible taxon in the laboratory. Air (F: 26.2 ± 0.9 0C ; B: 26.7 ± 0.75 0C ; U: 29.8 ± 1.7 0C) and soil temperatures (F: 25.7 ± 0.27 0C ; B: 27.1 ± 0.22 0C ; U: 32.1 ± 1.8 0C), soil moisture% (F: 15.2 ± 3.2 ; B: 17 ± 2.3 ; U: 16.9 ± 2) and soil pH (F: 5.08 ± 0.5 ; B: 5.4 ± 0.18 ; U: 4.62 ± 0.21) of each transect were also recorded. Worker ants belonging to five subfamilies, twenty one genera and thirty six species and morphospecies were recorded. Dolichoderinae, Formicinae and Myrmicinae were common at the three lands but ponerines were restricted to the forest. Two pseudomyrmecines were common at the forest and the uncultivated land. Anoplolepis gracilipes Jerdon (F-32.6%, B-76%, U-14.3%) and Paratrechina yerburyi Bolton (F-2%, B-5.3%, U-7.6%) were common to the three lands (Proportional similarity = 16.4%). Pheidologeton diversus Jerdon (37.6%), Pachycondyla luteipes Brown (6.9%), Solenopsis geminata Fabricius (3.9%), Technomyrmex albipes Smith (2%), Odontomachus simillimus Smith (0.8%), Leptogenys ocellifera Roger (0.7%), Tetramorium tortuosum Roger (0.7%), Tetraponera allaborans Walker (0.6%) , Hypoponera sp. 1 (0.2%) and Leptogenys sp. 1 (0.2%) were restricted to the forest (H/=1.7) and A. gracilipes, Pheidole sp. 3, P. diversus and P. luteipes were dominant in this community (Chi-square ; p<0.05). Lophomyrmex quadrispinosus Jerdon (4.6%), Tetramorium walshi Forel (1.3%), Crematogaster biroi Mayr (0.6%), Crematogaster sp. 3 (0.4%), Recurvidris sp. 1 (0.4%) and Monomorium floricola Jerdon (0.2%) were observed only in the banana cultivation (H/=0.98) while A. gracilipes, P. yerburyi and Meranoplus bicolor Guerin-Meneviile were the dominant species (Chi-square; p<0.05). Tapinoma melanocephalum Fabricius (8.8%), Lepisiota sp. 1 (3%), Paratrechina longicornis Latrielle (3%), Oecophylla smaragdina Fabricius (0.9%), Tetramorium smithi Mayr (0.6%), Camponotus sericeus Fabricius (0.3%), Monomorium sp. 3 (0.3%), and Tetraponera rufonigra Smith (0.3%) were observed only in the uncultivated land (H/=2) and T. melanocephalum, A. gracilipes, P. yerburyi, Crematogaster rothneyi Mayr and Pheidole sp. 4 contributed higher proportions (Chi – square p<0.05).
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    Rice bran Lipase; its stability and fatty soil cleaning efficiency under various storage conditions
    (The Journal of the Vidyodaya Institute of Pali and Buddhist University of Sri Lanka, 2010) Weerasooriya, M.K.B.; Kumarasinghe, A. A. N.
    Clearing of lipid stain on textile fabrics is a major problem in detergent industry. Current cleaning method which involve the saponification at high temperature cost energy and wear and tear of textile fibers. In this regard, enzyme lipases which act as lipid stain digesters appear to be more effective , more economical and safer to use in detergent industry. Rice bran Lipas , one such enzyme was extracted, fractionated with (NH4)2SO4 and 75-100% (NH4)2SO4 fraction which had the highest lipase activity was obtained with 67% recovery. Stability and fatty soil cleaning efficiency of this enzyme fraction was tested for the period of 24 weeks under freeze dried/ un freeze dried conditions storing at 4°C /room temperature. Study showed that freeze dried and un freeze dried enzyme fractions stored at room temperature remained active and showed 100% fatty soil cleaning efficiency up to 16 weeks. Above this time limit enzyme remain less active and displayed poor cleaning efficiency. However, freeze dried and un freeze dried enzyme fractions stored at 4°C were more stable than the fractions stored at room temperature. and maintain 100% cleaning efficiency even at the 24th week These findings suggest stability and fatty soil cleaning efficiency of freeze-dried enzyme behave almost same as the unfreeze dried one implying freeze-drying doesn’t make any positive or negative contribution to the stability or to the cleaning efficiency of the enzyme. Storing the sample at 4°C is recommended to maintain the longer life span of the lipase activity and the fatty soil cleaning efficiency.
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    Village tank renovation induced changes in aquatic plant varieties
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Dangalla, N.K.; Najim, M.M.M.; Nishantha, K.P.L.
    Village tank renovation programs that were implemented in Sri Lanka aimed at increasing in agricultural productivity and alleviating rural poverty. However, those did not consider the probable changes on the surrounding environments. In this study twelve village tanks from Galgamuwa D.S. Division were selected using stratified random sampling technique to assess the renovation induced variations on floral diversity in and around the renovated tanks. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 150 farmers who were randomly selected. Twelve PRA surveys were conducted to cover all the sample village tanks employing 400 randomly selected farmers. Results from questionnaire and PRA surveys were assessed to evaluate the presence and abundance of plant species before and after the tank renovation. This study revealed that the plant varieties Nelumbo nucifera (Lotus), Nemphaea pubescens (Lilly), Nymphoides indica (Blue water Lilly), Pistia stratiotes (Diya gowa), Eichhornia crassipes (Water hyacinth), and Colocasia sp. are available in all the study tanks. Plant species Pistia stratiotes, Colocasia esculenta and Eichhornia crassipes are alien invasive plants which have been a major threat for the existence of the marshland environment and related hydro systems. As per the Mann-Whitney Test at 95% significant level, significant changes in the plant varieties were observed after the tank renovation. Tank renovation has positively controlled the aquatic plants available within the tank. Dredging of the tanks during the renovation process has resulted in the reduction in plant densities. Dredging and deepening the tanks has influenced the distribution of Nelumbo nucifera (lotus) by reducing its distribution. Distribution of Nymphoides indica (Blue water Lilly), Aponogeton crispus, (Kekatiya) Eichhornia crassipes (Water hyacinth) and Musa sapientum (Diyameneri) have significantly decreased due to tank renovation. The aggregated rank mark has reduced to 430 from 517 after the tank renovation and it shows a clear reduction in the distribution of plant species grown in the tanks.
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    Dynamic Time Warping Based Speech Recognition for Isolated Sinhala Words
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Priyadarshani, P. G. N.; Dias, N.G.J.
    Communication between computer and the human is basically done through keyboard and screen-oriented systems. In the current Sri Lankan context, this restricts the usage of computers to a small fraction of the population, who are both computer literate and conversant with English. Accordingly, the major barrier between the computer and people in Sri Lanka is the language since English is not the mother tongue of most of the people and there is a large proportion of under educated people in rural areas of Sri Lanka. In order to enable a wider proportion of population to benefit from Information Technology, there is a dire need for an interface other than keyboard and screen interface that is widely used at present. The best solution is an efficient speech recognizer so that a natural human-machine interface could be developed to replace the traditional interfaces, such as keyboard and mouse of the computer. Further speech technologies guarantee to be the next generation user interface. For many languages speech recognition applications as well as text to speech synthesis applications have been developed and they have achieved a considerably high precision and applied them in real world applications successfully in developed countries. Even though currently there is no proper speech recognition approach for Sinhala language and the researches in this field in Sri Lanka is still in an infant stage. Here we investigated the fitness of the dynamic programming technique called Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm in conjunction with the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) to identify separately pronounced Sinhala words. One of the major difficulties in speech recognition is that although different recordings of the same words includes more or less the same sounds in the same order, the durations of each sub word within the word do not match. Consequently, when recognizing words by matching them with reference templates it gives inaccurate results if there is no temporal alignment. DTW solves this problem by accommodating differences in timing between test words and reference templates. Converting the sound waves into a parametric representation is a major part of any speech recognition approach and here we have used MFCCs along with their first and second derivatives in time as the feature vector because they have been shown good performance in both speech recognition a well as in speaker recognition than other conventional speech features, In addition the derivatives reflect better dynamic changes of human voice over time. For extracting the features we divide speech signal into equally spaced frames and compute one set of features per frame as the speech signals are not stationary. We developed the referencetemplates for each word from one example of that particular word per speaker and matched the test speech against to those reference patterns using DTW approach rather than other methods such as Vector Quantization and Euclidean distance because DTW can successfully deal with test signal and reference templates of the same word having different durations. The local distance measure is the distance between features at a pair of frames while the global distance from beginning of utterance until last pair of frames reflects the similarity between two vectors. Based on that, we could recognize the words that we input from our selected vocabulary. In most of the systems developed based on DTW for other languages have been used very limited vocabulary for instance ten words but in this work we have used a considerably large vocabulary of 600 words. We obtained the recordings and separated each utterance and made an audio file for each using the software Praat. We developed the program in MATLAB 7.0. For our experiment we used two informants whose native language is Sinhala since we followed speaker dependent approach and tested each speaker separately, it displayed 80.33% overall accuracy.
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    Predisposing factors associated with Mycoplasma pneumoniae respiratory tract infections
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Wijesooriya, W.R.P.L.I.; Kok, T.W.; Perera, J.; Thilakarathna, Y.
    Introduction Lower respiratory tract infections account for ~10% of worldwide burden of morbidity and mortality. Pneumonia is the 9th leading cause of hospital mortality in Sri Lanka and atypical pathogens account for 1/5th of the cases. M. pneumoniae is the predominant (50%) atypical pathogen. Knowing predisposing factors strengthen the modes of prevention. Objective Determination of predisposing-factors associated with M. pneumoniae respiratory infections in Sri Lanka. Methodology A prospective clinical study was done involving 416 adult-patients in Colombo-North Teaching-Hospital, Ragama and chest-hospital, Welisara (Pneumonia-97, acute-bronchitis-182, pharyngitis-137). M. pneumoniae specific IgG and IgM were tested in paired-sera using commercial-ELISA. Patient-interviewed-questionnaire was used to obtain data on predisposing factors and evaluated in serologically-positive and serologically-negative groups. The level of significance was considered as p < 0.05. Results There was no significant difference observed in relation to age (p-value-0.28, 0.76 and 0.2in pneumonia, bronchitis, pharyngitis respectively), gender, number of individuals/room (sleeping area) (p=0.82), having respiratory tract infections in close contacts (p=0.15), malignancies or past history of asthma (p>0.05 in both groups) with M. pneumoniae infection. However, there was significant association between M. pneumoniae pneumonia and diabetes mellitus (p<0.05). Discussion There was no specific age group detected to have M. pneumoniae infections which predominantly occur in childhood or significant gender predominance seen as with previous studies. The present study was not carried out in a setting with closed population to have significant infection amongst closed contacts. The significant association between M.pneumoniae infection and having diabetes mellitus would need further studies. Conclusion There were no identifiable strong factors predisposing to M. pneumoniae infection except diabetes mellitus.
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    ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ රොඩී ජනතාව සතු දේශීය ඥාන පද්ධතිය පිලිබඳ අධ්‍යයනයක්
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Ankumbura, H.V.M.K
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    From jungle to village and village to cyber world: social dynamics and Vadda community in Dambana (An ethno archaeological perspective)
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Wijesuriya, D.; Indika, M.K.A.
    Archaeology is the study of change and it focuses attention on how human societies and their material culture alter and evolve. Analysis and understanding of change lies at the heart of the archaeological endeavor. The study of social dynamics and affected factors of relatively simple societies such as Vadda people has become a main objective in ethno archaeology. This field investigation was conducted among the Vadda people in Dambana with special emphasis on the changes in material culture. In the past, they carried out their traditional hunting and gathering life style as a simple society. Then this community adapted to the settled agro-pastoral life due to the number of social, economic and political factors. Now they have started to join with the cyber world as a result of external influences. Not only the subsistence pattern changed but also most aspects of the life has subjected to the same phenomenon. According to the extent of adaptations two groups can be identified within the Vadda people in Dambana who have different views on the issue. One group has adapted to the Sinhalese culture and the other try to follow the traditional culture for some extent. Number of factors such as losing the traditional lands to continue their hunting and gathering subsistence strategy due to the establishment of Maduruoya national park, deforestation and settlement expansion and development polices of the government, cultural and biological mixture with Sinhalese people, tourism and so on cause to the dynamics of the Vadda community in Dambana. The main problem they have been facing is to protect traditional elements of the culture as far as possible within the modern socio economic realities.
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    Enhancing the community based tourism of Vedda community in Dambana
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Indika, M.K.A.
    Utilizing tourism as a social development strategy can be identified as a developing trend among the indigenous societies of the modern world. Although, it is not officially stated, the tourism centered on the Wannilaaththo heritage center in Dambana belong to the category of community tourism in accordance to its main characteristics. The main objectives of this study are analyzing positive and negative impacts of the tourism, identifying problems and lapses associated with it and recognizing potentials for tourism development. In this context, the attention is focused on proposing tourism development strategies for Dambana Vedda community, which can be used for the sustainable development while increasing the community participation, protecting the traditional cultural elements, their authenticity and natural environment. Generally, the tourists spend relatively short time within the community and lack of activities for them cause to the occurrence of low expenditure at the destination. Tourism has affected to protect certain cultural elements representing their identity. Tourism has made some Vedda people to be more materialized and modernized. In the development of tourism, it is essential to combining the concepts of community tourism with social, cultural and economic sphere of Vedda community in Dambana. Development of number of new destinations, introducing new activities and package tours, improvement of tourist facilities, advertising for niche markets and increasing community participation are main issues of the tourism development. It is proposed to build a small eco-lodge, which will be managed by the community and establishment of a traditional craft and product center and tourist information center. Introducing home stay concept, volun-tourism, community based ecotourism, agro tourism and creative tourism would yield successful results.
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    The changing pattern of Classical Song on the impact of Electronic media; with special reference to Radio and T.V media in Sri Lanka
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Jinadasa, W.W Manoj Pushpa Kumara; Dias, W.K.R.R.
    The objective of this study is to identify the characteristic features behind the changing of Classical Song on the impact of Electronic Media with special reference to the Radio and Television media channels in Sri Lanka. In 1990, after the high circulation of electronic media in Sri Lanka well-made classical song, which has been standardized in the radio media for nearly six decades, happened to change its both semantic construction and classical music construction. In this, with compare to its previous decades, classical song, which is highly popular in so called electronic media, has to seen many failures in poetic expression in both semantic and acoustic appreciation. Qualitative analysis is used in this study. In this, Interviewing form the selected electronic media personals by whom embarked on musical song programmes and Textual analysis from selected narrations of songs, which are highly popular at electronic media is descriptively analyzed.
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    A feasibility study on the establishment of an Online Institutional Repository of Faculty publications: Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Ranasinghe, W.M.T.D.
    There is a growing interest among academic institutions in collecting, preserving, and providing access to digital content produced by the Faculty members during their teaching and research activities. In the past several years open source platforms such as Eprints, Dspace, and Fedora have been released to allow this content to be organized, described, shared, and preserved in an Online environment. Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya was established in 1991 and it is one of the leading medical schools in Sri Lanka. Currently the Faculty has approximately 110 academic staff members serving in 16 academic departments. They produce high quality research which is published in international as well as local journals, conference proceedings, monographs, etc. According to the University Calendar 2010, during the past 6 years, the highest number of research papers and books has been published by the Faculty of Medicine. It includes 1535 research papers, 571 published abstracts and 360 books. Therefore, it has become a timely need to collect, organize, preserve and provide access to this literature in an efficient and effective manner. Present study aims to examine the feasibility of establishing an Online Institutional Repository (IR) of these publications based on DSpace software. The study does an environmental scan, proposes an implementation strategy, and discusses issues related to establishing an Institutional Repository. Establishing an Online IR will ensure free and open access to the publications of academic staff members. It will minimize the impact of restrictions imposed by publishers on authors in sharing their research findings with peers. Providing a wider visibility to research work is another advantage of this repository. By facilitating author self-archiving, it will also save the administrative tasks of librarians such as maintaining publication lists and dissemination of information. Finally, this online IR will serve as an Online digital archive which preserves the scholarly work of the Faculty members for future generations.
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    The impact of types of ownership on small firm performance in Sri Lanka
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Nanayakkara, K.G.M.; Wijetunge, W.A.D.S.
    Over the past 2years new and small firms have been identified by most economies as significant components of economic strategies for job and wealth creation. This has paved the way for a large amount of innovators to start new ventures. In the Sri Lankan context, according to the recent (2003/2004) banking survey done by International Finance Corporation on the Sri Lankan SMEs, SMEs constitute 80-90% of total establishments, 70% of employment and 20% of industrial value added. However recent literature shows that percentage of collapse of these newly started ventures is substantially high due to various reasons. Birley and Westhead (1990) pointed out that types of ownership directly affect the performance of small businesses. Businesses with one owner have been performed well and they have survived long time. Accordingly with the objectives of identifying different types of ownership and testing it against performance of SMEs in the Sri Lankan context, this study has been carried out. The sample consisting of 5small business owners, which was selected from the Gampaha District. The study followed the inductive method of research and the data was collected through a structured questionnaire and interviews. Data analysis was carried out using SPSS software which includes both descriptive statistics and parametric tests. The results of the study showed that the ownership of small firms concentrated on sole proprietors, partnership, family members and private limited and 78% of the small businesses are run by sole proprietors. Further the study revealed that the different types of ownership will affect the performance of the small firms.
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    Simple proof of Fermat’s last theorem for n =11
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Shadini, A.M.D.M.; Piyadasa, R.A.D.
    Proof of Fermat’s last theorem for any odd prime is difficult. It may be extremely difficult to generalize any available Proof of Fermat’s last theorem for small prime such as n  3,5,7 to n 11[1]. The prime n 11 is different from n 13,17,19 in the sense that 2n 1 23 is also a prime and hence the corresponding Fermat equation may have only one type (Class.2) of solutions due to a theorem of Germaine Sophie[1],[2]. In this contribution, we will give a simple proof for the exponent n 11 based on elementary mathematics. The Darbrusow identity[1] that we will use in the proof can be obtained as Darbrusow did using the multinomial theorem on three components[1]. In our proof, it is assumed that the Fermat equation 11 11 11 z  y  x , (x, y) 1 has non-trivial integer solutions for (x, y, z) and the parametric solution of the equation is obtained using elementary mathematics. The proof of the theorem is done by showing that the necessary condition that must be satisfied by the parameters is never satisfied.
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    Accounting information of cooperative rural banks in Sri Lanka
    (Research Symposium 2010 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2010) Jayamaha, A.
    Many small financial institutions (SFIs) in developing countries make great effort to provide efficient services to the poorhouse holders. In Sri Lanka, Cooperative rural banks (CRBs), one of the formal SFIs in Sri Lanka, serve a large number of customers, deal with a large amount of funds and have substantial contributions to the rural financial sector during the last four decades. In recent literature, accounting information, integral part of the corporate governance mechanism has been highlighted in regulatory and supervisory framework of SFIs (Bushman and Smith2001; Mullineux 2006; Cayanan 2007). However, there is a doubt of providing relevant and sufficient information to the stakeholders in SFIs in developing countries due to not maintaining appropriate accounting practices. In Sri Lanka, recent collapses of many financial institutions also signal that they do not provide relevant and sufficient information to their stakeholders. This paper seeks to assess the accounting practices of CRBs in Sri Lanka. In the absence of accepted standards for the preparation and presentation of financial statements of SFIs in Sri Lanka, the accounting practices of CRBs were assessed, by using generally accepted accounting principles for financial institutions and international guidelines for Microfinance institutions. Those are considered as the most appropriate benchmark for CRBs in Sri Lanka. The empirical analysis reveals that there is considerable variation in the accounting practices for the provision for loan losses and write-off of loan losses across CRBs. Some CRBs use accounting practices that are on par with those accepted by global financial institutions even though no specific guidelines exist for Sri Lankan CRBs.