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Two fungal strains capable of decolourisation of CI Direct Blue 201 textile dye were isolated from textile wastewater effluent sites in Sri Lanka and they were identified as Aspergillus aculeatus and Aspergillus nomius using 18s rRNA analysis. A. nomius and A. aculeatus showed 98% decolourisation of CI Direct Blue 201 textile dye (50 mg/L) at 3rd day of incubation with the supplement of modified Kirk's medium. Both fungal strains were found to be more effective for dye decolourisation at temperatures ranging from 24 °C to 36 °C. Further, it was found that the decolourisation potential increased at pH 5 and 10 under shaking condition (100 rpm) with the presence of glucose and nitrate as additional carbon and nitrogen sources. Seed germination assay showed less germination (22.2 ± 5.0% and 10.0 ± 3.3% for Oryza sativa and Vigna radiata, respectively) when seeds were exposed to the original dye in comparison to 100% seed germination observed when exposed to fungal treated dye effluent, showing the detoxification of dye by the fungal isolates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invasive alien plants (IAPs) are a significant cause of socio-ecological change in Sri Lanka. Many studies have focused on the ecological dimensions of this problem, but few have addressed sociological factors such as the knowledge and perceptions of individuals and groups tasked with addressing IAPs. This study investigates how IAP issues are understood and perceived by professional forest and wildlife officers in Sri Lanka. The data analyzed were gathered using a questionnaire that covered three themes: the respondents' ability to identify IAPs, the impacts of IAPs and the threats they pose, and knowledge regarding control and mitigation. The questionnaire was completed by 186 field officers, and the resulting descriptive statistics and a probit regression analysis were used to analyze the data. The results show that almost all of the participating forest and wildlife officers were aware of the problems associated with IAPs but more than 75% of them lacked an accurate understanding of scientific means for controlling them and control policies established by the government of Sri Lanka. Generally, wildlife officers had a better understanding than forest officers. In addition, the analysis shows that officers' knowledge and perceptions of IAPs were positively correlated with their level of education and position within the organization. The analysis points to several recommendations for Sri Lankan officials when designing and implementing comprehensive policies and professional programs, particularly for lower-level field officers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to investigate the impact of coffee exports on long-term economic growth in an open economy for 32 countries exporting coffee over the period of 1994-2013. The study applied a dynamic panel Auto-Regressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) modelling approach with estimators. All variables involved in the specified model were found to be stationary of order I (1) at a first difference. The Pooled Mean-Group (PMG) long-run results suggest the presence of a significant positive effect of coffee exports on economic growth. The empirical findings of the study suggest policy implications, promoting the coffee sector to boost the countries' economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevailing wisdom in tobacco control literature is that adroit use of taxation policy will reduce the prevalence of tobacco use because when tobacco prices go up, consumption goes down. Empirical evidence of this axiomatic inverse relationship has been sparse. This paper analyzes the effects of increased taxation on consumption of tobacco products in 136 countries during 2009-2015. Results indicate that there is weak negative relationship between change in adult smoking prevalence and change in taxation suggesting that higher tax rates on tobacco products tend to lower adult smoking prevalence, but in a modest rather than robust sort of way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study attempts to assess the degree to which Corporate Environmental Reporting (CER) contributes to firm performance in Sri Lanka. Four qualitative characteristics of financial information as stated in the Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting (i.e., relevance, faithful representation, understandability and comparability) and three performance indicators (i.e., ROA, ROE and EPS) have been used to measure the decision usefulness of CER information and firm performance, respectively while three variables, namely, growth, firm size and leverage, were controlled in the study. For this purpose, top 30 companies based on the market capitalization in the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) of Sri Lanka were selected as the sample. Data were gathered from the annual reports of these companies during the period from 2013 to 2016, and data analysis was carried out using content analysis, descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple regression analysis. The findings show that scores for the two fundamental characteristics (i.e., relevance and faithful representation) were relatively lower than those of the enhancing qualitative characteristics (i.e., comparability and understandability), indicating a lower level of decision usefulness. With regard to the association between CER reporting and firm performance, it was evident that there is a positive association between the two variables. The findings of the study have significant policy implications such as the importance of provision of environmental information for decision making purposes rather than merely satisfying the stakeholders of companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study was to develop an environmental friendly, low cost technology for cultivation of livestock forage legumes so as to minimise the use of nitrogen fertiliser (N-fertiliser) that pollute the pristine highland watersheds. Inoculants were prepared by screening several rhizobial isolates obtained from farm cultivated clover plants and selecting the most efficient strain. In field tests at three separate sites, the average amount of biomass produced by inoculated Trifolium plants was higher compared with the plants fertilised with urea. Root nodulation and other plant parameters were assessed on several randomly harvested plants 60 days after planting. The results indicate that root nodulation and plant growth increased significantly in inoculated plants. Average results obtained from nine crop cuts taken during a period of 15 months showed that regeneration and biomass production after crop cutting were better under inoculation than under N-fertiliser application. It is inferred that rhizobial inoculation has the potential to replace N-fertiliser applications to Trifolium repens L. in the Sri Lankan highland farming systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Increasing demand for the best value for client’s money necessitates waste reduction while enhancing the project functionality in construction industry. The purpose of this paper is to propose Lean integrated Value Engineering (LiVE) approach by establishing the synergy between Lean and Value Engineering (VE) concepts for construction industry.Design/methodology/approach A literature survey and in-depth un-structured interviews with six subject matter experts in three steps were used to investigate the synergy between Lean principles and VE job plan to develop LiVE approach for the construction industry. The gathered data were analysed using code-based content analysis and the LiVE approach was finally validated using interviews by two additional subject matter experts representing industry and academia.Findings Research findings established that there is a synergy between Lean principles and VE job plan. Accordingly, the study developed a LiVE approach, which specify client’s value, identify the value stream, make value flow without interruption, let the client pull functional requirements and pursue perfection during “value establishment”, “value analysis of functional requirements”, “value creativity”, “value evaluation”, “value development”, “value verification” and “value achievement” phases.Originality/value The novel LiVE approach will guide construction industry practitioners on how to integrate Lean concept with VE in order to reduce unnecessary costs and wastes, to enhance project functionality and ultimately to achieve value for client’s money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We determined the genetic diversity of the Green Turtle Chelonia mydas (Linneaus, 1758) nesting at Kosgoda rookery, the second largest sea turtle aggregation on the southwestern coast of Sri Lanka. Skin tissue samples were collected from 68 nesting females and genetic diversity was estimated using six microsatellite loci. High genetic diversity was observed within the population as all loci analyzed were highly polymorphic with a total of 149 alleles observed. The mean number of alleles per locus was 24.7 and the mean observed and expected heterozygosity across all loci were 0.75 and 0.93, respectively. It appears that five out of six loci were not in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, while micro-checker analysis suggested that the Kosgoda Green Turtle population was possibly in equilibrium. The viability of a population is unlikely to be reduced if high genetic diversity is maintained within it. Although the Green Turtle population nesting at Kosgoda is small compared to other nesting rookeries in the world, the high genetic diversity observed suggests that the population may not be undergoing a bottleneck. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of crowd density levels and anomalies is a hot topic in video surveillance. Especially in human-centric action and activity-based movements. In some respects, the density level variation is considered an anomaly in the event. Crowd behaviour identification relies on a computer-vision-based approach and basically deals with spatial information of foreground video information. In this work, we focused on a deep-learning-based attention-oriented classification system for identifying several basic movements in public places, especially, human flock movement, sudden motion changes and panic events in several indoor and outdoor places. The important spatial features were extracted from a bilinear CNN and a multicolumn multistage CNN with preprocessed morphological video frames from videos. Finally, the abnormal and crowd density estimation was distinguished by using an attention feature combined with a multilayer CNN feature by modifying the fully connected layer for several categories (binary and multiclass). We validate the proposed method on several video surveillance datasets including PETS2009, UMN and UCSD. The proposed method achieved an accuracy of 98.62, 98.95, 96.97, 99.10 and 98.38 on the UCSD Ped1, UCSD Ped2, PETS2009, UMN Plaza1 and UMN Plaza2 datasets, respectively, with the different pretrained models. We compared the performance between recent modern approaches and the proposed method (MCMS-BCNN-Attention) and achieved the highest accuracy. The anomaly detection performance on the UMN and PETS2009 datasets was compared with that of a state-of-the-art method and achieved the best AUC results as 0.9953 and 1.00 for both scenarios, respectively, with a binary classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Delays represent one of the most critical factors that affect the cost of a construction project. They have to be therefore analysed comprehensively using appropriate techniques. The purpose of this paper is to find out the delay analysis techniques (DATs) that are most commonly used in road projects in Sri Lanka, the extent of their usage, the criteria that can be used in selecting them and the technique that is most appropriate for the selection.Design/methodology/approach The research methodology adopted included an extensive literature review, expert interviews and a questionnaire survey.Findings In road projects in Sri Lanka, five types of DATs are mainly used. The “As-planned v. As-built Analysis” technique is the most commonly used technique while “Window Analysis” is the least used technique. Out of the nine criteria identified for selecting a DAT, the most important criterion is the acceptability of the technique to courts and tribunals. “Window Analysis” was found to be the most appropriate DAT that can be used in road construction projects in Sri Lanka.Originality/value “Window Analysis” can be recommended as the most appropriate DAT for road projects in Sri Lanka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study has empirical character and includes literature review, research methodology, expected outcomes, model specification, empirical results and conclusions. Presented research employs panel data techniques and closely follows empirical literature to identify the factors that determine Unite States Foreign Direct Investment (US FDI) outflows. In order to test the implications of our models a panel of aggregate data on the outward US FDI to all European Union (EU-28) member countries, over the 2000-2013 period of time, was collected. When estimating the model, we have categorized the EU countries into four groups: EU-28 (all EU countries), EU-15 (Old EU countries), the Euro Area (19 countries), and EU-12 (New EU Members who joined the European Union in 2004 or thereafter). The goal of this research is to illustrate the impact of the following variables on outward USFDI in the New and Old European Union countries: the financial variables include the real interest differential and real exchange rate; the economic variables are represented by GDP per capita and GDP growth rate; the globalization process includes openness and is measured as total trade as a percentage of GDP; structural and location variables focus on education, infrastructure, telecommunication, civil liberty, perception of corruption, business environment; the labor quality variable incorporates labor productivity, unemployment rate, and the labor cost. The other factors integrate; inflation, tax on capital, and Research and Development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates factors affecting the inward foreign direct investment (FDI) stock in the South eastern region of the United States of America using state-level data. The first part of this paper has descriptive character and analyzes gross state product, disposable income, inward FDI flow and FDI stock in the Southeastern states. The second part of the study, focuses on the determinants of FDI stock in the Southeastern Region covering twelve states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The study identifies state-specific determinants of FDI stock and indicates the importance of selected variables in evaluating the FDI stock. The results show that the major factors exerting positive impact on FDI stock in Southeastern Region are: real per capita income, FDI related employment and real wages. In addition, the unit labor cost is negatively correlated with FDI stock indicating that lower labor cost attracts foreign investors. Other variables such as unemployment, the labor productivity, highway millage and number of airports were negatively correlated with FDI stock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the major trade blocks in Asia and Latin America and their effects on intra-regional trade flows using annual trade data for the period 1970-2006. The paper uses a gravity model augmented with several sets of dummy variables to estimate the effect of various trade blocks such as the Association for South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Central American Common Market (CACM), the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), the Andean Pact or Andean Community (AC), and the Southern Cone Common Market (MERCOSUR) on trade flows within and across membership groupings as well as the effect of trade blocks on members' trade with other Asia-Pacific and Western Hemispheric countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]