Abstract: This research seeks to investigate perceptions of student teachers on nurseries and housemaids on Early Childhood Development (ECD). Six factors were extracted on nurseries and five were extracted for housemaids accounting for almost the same amount of variance. The main factor for nurseries functionary importance in ECD was stimulation of the mental and social emphasis of the children; and for housemaids it was on the moral development of the children and their complimentary role to nurseries. Housemaids were more paramount in ECD in terms of their ability to fill in for time-poor parents unlike nurseries due to the varying financial requirements, they were also more flexible on the space requirements for children’s development. Overall, factor analysis was more pronounced for the perceptions on housemaids than nurseries on ECD, which suggest the presence of extraneous variables especially economic ones that influence more the latter’s viability than the former.

Abstract: A generalization of the Lomax distribution so-called the transmuted Lomax distribution is proposed and studied. Various structural properties including explicit expressions for the moments, quantiles, and mean deviations of the new distribution are derived. The estimation of the model parameters is performed by maximum likelihood method. We hope that the new distribution proposed here will serve as an alternative model to the other models which are available in the literature for modeling positive real data in many areas.

Abstract: Abstract This paper discuss a method for lacunary interpolation and their comparison with quartic splines in Generalised form as an local methods for solving lacunary interpolation problems using piecewise polynomials with certain specific properties.

Abstract: Modern engineering problems are often composed by objectives that must be taken into account simultaneously for better design performance. Normally, these objectives are conflicting, i.e., an improvement in one of them does not lead, necessarily, to better results for the other ones. To overcome this difficulty, many methods to solve multi-objective optimization problems (MOP) have been proposed. The MOP solution, unlike the single objective problems, is given by a set of non-dominated solutions that form the Pareto Curve, also known as Pareto Optimal. Among the MOP algorithms, we can cite the Firefly Algorithm (FA). FA is a bio-inspired method that mimics the patterns of short and rhythmic flashes emitted by fireflies in order to attract other individuals to their vicinities. For illustration purposes, in the present contribution the FA, associated with the Pareto dominance criterion and the anti-stagnation operator, is applied to (bio)chemical engineering system design. The first one is related to the alkylation process optimization; the second deals with the optimization of batch stirred tank reactor. The sensitivity analysis of some relevant parameters of the algorithm is performed and compared with the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA II). The results indicate that the proposed approach characterizes an interesting alternative for multi-objective optimization design.