ARS - 2007

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    Gem Mining and Environmental Degradation in Sri Lanka (with reference to Rathnapura District)
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Nawarathna Banda, H.M.
    Soil erosion, deforestation, and pollution of water and soil often occur as a result of gem mmmg. These impacts are relatively simple, easy to control, and nontoxic. Deforestation results from clearing land to mine; erosion and epidemic results from abandoned mining pits; and pollution is due mainly to washing schist near streams and scattering debris from the schist into soils. Implementation Df policies to control these problems is needed to control the degradation in Sri Lanka due to gem mining. The number of informal (unregistered) mines, pressure from unionized gem miners, lack of capital in the small mines, and a lack of cohesion in gem mining policies are the threat for controlling the environmental degradation due gem mining. Environmental agencies have begun to crack down on enforcing clean-up policies. The creation of a series of common washing sites for gem miners indicates that municipal government agencies are making some investments toward reducing pollution due to gem production. An environmental NGO should involve in environmental education for small miners and others in the gem production chain.
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    January Effect in the .Japanese Stock Market
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Pathirawasam, C.
    Extensive research finds that returns in January are substantially higher than returns in other months and this pattern of stock returns is known as the "January Effect". The January Effect has been studied in developed as well as developing stock markets. Gultekin and Gultekin ( 1983) studies January return patterns in 17 countries including the United States and finds that for all the countries January returns are higher than other months. Kato and Shallheim (1985) examine excess returns in January for the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). They use both Tokyo Price Index and Nikkei 225 from 1952 to 1980 for the study. W.M Gunaratne Bandara (200 1) finds that January Effect is not evident in the Colombo Stock Exchange. Objective of this study is to test whether the January Effect documented by the Kato and Shallheim ( 1985) is alive in the TSE. This study uses monthly return data of Nikkei 225 for the period from January 1950 to August 2007. To test the January effect, the following regression equation is used. 17. R, =a,+ LfJ,D; + v; { .. /. Where, a" is January average returns. D, is a Dummy variable for month i (February to December) and v; is an identically and independently distributed error term. The estimate of each fJ; represent the average difference in January and other months. The null hypothesis tested is that a" = 0 and fJ; = 0, that is there is no January effect. Findings of the test reveal that January average returns are positive and statistically significant and average differences in January returns from the other months (each other month returns minus January returns) are also negative and statistically significant for the total sample period from 1950 to 2007. However sub sample analysis shows more important evidences than the total sample. Positive January returns are statistically significant and average differences in January returns form the other months are also negative and those are statistically significant for half of the months for the sub samples of 1950 to 1964 and 1965 to 1981. This pattern has changed in the sub sample 1982 to 1995 and 1996 to 2007. In the both sub samples January returns are not statistically significant. In the sub sample 1982 to 1995 December returns slightly higher than the January returns. In the last sub sample average returns of March, June and November are higher than the January returns. Therefore it can be concluded that January anomaly has vanished in the Japanese market after 1980s.
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    Contraction of Sinhalese Legal System during the Rule of Western Invaders
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Sanjeewa, A.S.P.S.P.
    The inception and the development of the Sinhalese judiciary and legal system go back to the period of Sinhalese kings. As in India, at the beginning Sinhalese laws were not late down in writing. Even though at times certain laws were put into writing, basically the law existed as customs .One of the basic responsibilities of the ruling king was to look after and maintain existing laws and customs laid down by the previous kings. The king was counted as the ultimate source of law and the decision maker at crucial points. The Sinhalese laws were implemented and obeyed by the people throughout the country. The Sinhalese law affected even the foreigners. During times of many foreign rulers they had used Sinhalese laws to facilitate their rule. One clear example was king Elara. These laws were treated as the accepted laws in the country up to the time of the last king, Sri Wicrama Rajasingha. By this time Dutch invaders who were ruling the costal area had introduced some of their own laws in those areas. There is evidence to say the Dutch had tried to implement the Sinhalese laws, customs, and judiciary system in the areas under their rule. Anyway during the period of Dutch and British rulers they introduced separate laws for Muslims, and Tamils in Jaffna. The British declared that the Sinhalese laws will have no effect over the foreigners, Tamils, and the people from the low country who are living in the Kandyan kingdom. Due to these reasons finally the Sinhalese laws were limited to the so called Kandyan. Therefore the Sinhalese law or the Kandyan laws became a private law. My objective is to study the way in which the Sinhalese law became a private law.
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    Validation of a Gastro-oesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD) Specific Screening Instrument for Epidemiological Purposes
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Amarasiri, W.A.D.L.; Pathmeswaran, A.; Ranasinha, C.; de Silva, H.J.
    Introduction: The prevalence of GERD is increasing worldwide: the community prevalence in Sri Lanka is not known. Objectives : To develop a practical clinical score to screen for GERD in the community and assess whether a score using both symptom frequency and severity correlates better to an objective measure of GERD than one using only symptom frequency. Methodology : 100 patients (endoscopy positive - which included patients with all grades of oesophagitis) and 150 controls (comparable in age and gender) faced a GERDspecific interviewer-administered questionnaire assessing seven upper gastro-intestinal symptoms. Each symptom was graded using Likert scales for frequency (4-items) and severity (5-items) and two scores were generated. Score 1 being the sum of frequency of symptoms while score 2 was the sum of products of frequency and severity of each. All patients then underwent 24-h ambulatory pHmetry. Both symptom scores were compared against 24-h pHmetry parameters as it is considered the gold standard to diagnose GERD. Cut-off values were determined by receiver-operating characteristic curves. Results : For both scores, mean scores of cases were significantly higher than controls (p=O.OOO). The cut-off score for score 1 was 2': 10.50 (sensitivity 92.0 %; specificity 78.7 %; area under the curve- 0.937). The cut-off score for score 2 was 2': 12.50 (sensitivity 90.0%; specificity 78.0%; area under the curve - 0.929). Both showed high reproducibility (Intra class correlation coefficient score1: 0.94 and score2: 0.82). There was good correlation between both symptom scores and 24-h pHmetry parameters (Spearman rank correlation, p=0.01), but score 2 showed a significantly better correlation. Conclusion: Our GERD questionnaire is valid, reproducible and showed better correlation with an objective test when both severity and frequency of symptoms were scored than frequency alone.
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    Consumer Characteristics and Supermarket Selection Criteria
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Shamil, M.; Gajanayake, R.
    In Sri Lanka. the intensity of competition among supermarket cl-iain stores has increased. But a vacuum exists on literature and research findings in this particular area of marketing in Sri Lanka. Therefore this study attempts to explore the relationship between consumer characteristics and Supermarket selection criteria in Sri Lanka. Since an abundance of global literature exists on various formats of stores, this study utilizes variables identified in such literature. Previous research has revealed a connection between demographic characteristics and choice of retail format (Carpenter and Moore. 2006 ). Arnold ( 1997) provided empirical evidence that the demographic profile of consumers who shop at the large format stores is different from the profile of the non-shoppers (Baltas and Papastathopoulou, 2003). A field study by Zeithaml (1985) to examine the effects of five demographic variables on supermarket variables revealed that changes in the family unit would drive changes in grocery patronage in the USA (Carpenter and Moore, 2006). Stone (1995) found that demographics of warehouse club members and supermarket shoppers differ significantly (Baltas and Papastathopoulou, 2003 ). Using consumer characteristics as an independent variable should increase our standing on shopper behavior and provide insight to marketers in this field. A questionnaire was developed based on the evidences of literature and undergraduates were used as researches to collect data from shoppers that visited supermarkets in Kiribathgoda between 4. 00 p.m. and 6. 00 p.m. during weekdays and weekends. Data were collected from 1 00 shoppers that visited supermarkets in Kiribathgoda and it reveals that significant demographic characteristics exist among shoppers visiting different supermarket stores.
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    Gypsies Traditional Recognition Has Diminished (A Research of the Electronic Media Usage of Kudagama Traditional Gypsy Village)
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Dissanayaka, G.R.
    Sri Lankan Gypsies are not the indigenous Sri Lankan. They are a group of people which have recognition in tradition, tribes and ethnicity. They come to Sri Lanka through the western coast of the country and made their new settlement close to KALA WEW A, in villages such as KALA WFWA, GALGAMUW A and THAMR UTTEGAMA Those who got separated from their original group as came to eastern part of the country thought western coast and made their settlement at AKKAREIPA l I TTHUW A without going to the south. The village which was selected for this study is called KUDAGAMA that is closer to THABUTHTHFGAMA comprises of traditional gypsy features and also the modern electronic equipment can be seen in this village. The ethnic group like gypsies don't have any knowledge to select any fixed channel that can be led their lives for development. They get their simulation with the help of prevailing electronic media. When they are cut off from the social connection with the majority sinhala society their communication all so get diminished Gypsies traditional communication system was buried with the present communication. Although Sri Lankan gypsies are not an ancient Sri Lankan traditional community group, they are a group of people presently established in Sri Lankan society. When they get rid of their traditional way of gypsy life (nomadic) they feel great loneliness in their permanent settlements. Their origin was transformed from era to era in the social background when they live. But modern electronic equipment has influenced their lives in the modern social background. It is witnessed that the accesalarate unsystematic modernization of present KUDAGAMA is due to the solitariness of this village, day by day from their own society. Just because of this solitariness they get closer in touch with electronic Media but not their own tribe. The historical method is used to check about their gypsy social transformation learning method and historical background. The comparative method is used to identify the transformation of the past and present traditional unsystematic communication and modern social system of gypsies. In collecting data mainly the participant observation was used .the other method used in lesser extent among them. The interview method was used to a great extent. The gypsy reserved their traditional, social rites and rituals up today due to the continuation of the social gap. That they think prevailing between the majorities Sinhala Society. The gypsies think that there is social gap between majority sinhala society and them. Due to this social gap they have persevered their traditional rites and rituals up today. Though they believe thoroughly that they have recognition in the society. Their traditional recognition is being diminished due to the meaningless usage of electronic media without the knowledge.
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    MBROLA Formatted Diphone Database for Sinhala Language
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Kumara, K.H.; Dias, N.G.J.; Wickramasinghe, R.l.P.
    Diphone synthesis is one of the most popular methods used for creating a synthetic voice from recordings or samples of a particular person. Diphones are speech units that begin in the middle of the stable state of a phone and end in the middle of the following phone. The main interest in diphone synthesis is that they minimize the concatenation problems. The aim of the MBROLA project, recently initiated by the Facult' e Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium), is to obtain a set of speech synthesizers for as many voices, languages and dialects as possible, free of use for non-commercial and non-military applications. Central to the MBROLA project is MBROLA 2.00, a speech synthesizer based on the concatenation of diphones, takes a list of allophones associated with prosodic information as input and outputs 16 bit linear speech samples. Diphone databases tailored to the MBROLA format are necessary to run the synthesizer. Therefore we put forward a Diphone database, tailored to the MBROLA format, to generate synthetic voice for Sinhala language through MBROLA .pho reader. The first step of building the diphone database was the fixing a list of all the phones (acoustic instances of phonemes) of Sinhala language. Creating the diphone database was achieved in three steps: Creating a text corpus, Recording the corpus and Segmenting the speech corpus. For the text corpus, we used few selected chapters of two Sinhala novels. The corpus was then red by two (Male and Female) native Sinhala speakers, digitally recorded and stored. Then all diphones were spotted manually with the help of Speech Viewer ofCSLU toolkit which was developed by the Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, USA. A diphone database was finally created with 1004 diphone segments, which summarizes the results in the form of: the name of diphoncs, the related waveforms, their duration, and internal sub-splittings. Since we did not consider allophone variations in all instances, it may reduce the naturalness of the resulting synthetic speech. It is also possible that the number of diphone segments may higher than the above number (1004). However, most of the common occurrences of diphones were included in the database that we have developed. 137
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    Doping in Sport
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Alahakoon, T.D.
    Doping, the use of drugs to enhance sporting 'performance has occurred throughout history and has b~en responsible not only for some improved sporting performances, but also unhealthy side effects and even the deaths of athletes. Due to health and ethical reasons in 1967 the International Olympic Committee(IOC) agreed to ban and restricts certain substances and methods which could be used in the attempt to enhance performance. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of a range of issues regarding the use of drugs: I. The detection of types of drugs are used by athletes to improve performance II. Banned substances and methods by the International . Olympic Committee Ill. Reliability of drug tests. Although this study is supplemented with the data colleted froin secondary sources, doping in sport is essentially an underground activity with little formal published research. Some athletes will always try to seek some extra competitive advantage. Therefore, Drug taking can't be stopped. Drug taking can be controlled only if detection is likely and the penalties of detection are a sufficient deterrent
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    Place and Displacement: the Theme of Home and Belonging in I Post-Colonial Literature
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Uluwitiya, T.M.
    The preoccupation with the concept of home and belonging is a familiar aspect of literature produced by writers of former colonies. It is considered to be a result of the alienation experienced by the colonized as they are made to appropriate and integrate into the culture of the colonizer. The obvious "gap" in experience and the inadequacy of the language of the colonizer is thought to result in the creation of the "new Englishes" such as Indian English, Sri Lankan English, and Australian English and so on. This study aims to explore the aspects of home and belonging in fiction by writers of two different cultures; that of Sri Lanka and New Zealand. The primary texts concerned are "Turtle Nest" by Chand ani Lokuge, a Sri Lankan migrant writer, and "Hummingbird" by James George, a Maori writer. The paper analyses the concept of home as created by the writers in their texts as a reaction to "dislocation" and "cultural denigration". A close study of the specific imagery used by the writers to evoke their unique cultures and experiences will be considered in order to explore these concepts. Further, the research pays attention to the language of the texts, keeping in mind the use of language by postcolonial writers as a tool of subversion against colonial cultural formations. Furthermore, this research attempts to explore how the writers have used the genre of fiction as a means of exploring the concepts of "dislocation" as a result of migration as in the case of Lokuge and "cultural denigration" in terms of the conscious and unconscious suppression of the indigenous cultural identity by the imposition of the dominant cultural model of the colonizer as in the case of George. In so doing the analysis raises the following questions: Are the writers successful in subverting and questioning the structures of the language of the colonizers and thereby energizing their own "English"? Have they been able to bridge the "gap" between experience and language in a positive and creative way? The research aims to fine answers to the above queries and explore the impact of such texts on the local and international readership.
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    Physical Interpretation of Anomalous Absorption of Partial Waves by Nuclear Optical Potentials
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Piyadasa, R.A.D.; Karunatileke, N.G.A.; Munasinghe, J.M.
    A formula for semi-classical elastic S-matrix element has been derived by Brink and Takigawa for a potential having three turning points with a potential barrier (see [1] ) . If S, 1 denotes the S-matrix element corresponding to angular momentum l and total angular momentum j, S1 J is given, in the usual notation, by . s: {1 + N(iE;)exp(2iS32 )} Su =exp(2zu1) N(z'c) exp( 2z.8 ) , 32 (l) where N(z) is defined by N(z) = f rxp(zln(~)) and E = -i S21 . r 1 +z n If k = ~2:~£ is the wave number corresponding to a zero of semi-classical S-matrix element, it can be shown that 1 + 1 + exp(2nc) exp (2 1· s 31 ) -_ 0 N(ic) and one obtains s31 = (2n +I) H + __!__ ln(--N_(_ic_)_J 2 2i I + exp(2nc) (2) which is a necessary and sufficient condition for the semi-classical S-matrix element to be zero. Now, S U = 0 means the absence of an outgoing wave. Since the asymptotic wave boundary condition for the corresponding partial wave U U (k,r) is given by U lJ (k,r) ~ U1H (k,r)- SuUt) (k,r), (3) where U 1(- l and U j + l stand for the incoming and outgoing Coulomb wave functions respectively. A new phenomenon was discovered by M. Kawai and Y. Iresi (See[2]) in case of elastic scattering of nucleons on composite nuclei. They found that elastic S-matrix element becomes very small for special combinations of energy (E), orbital angular momentum (!), total angular momentum (j) and target nucleus. It has been found that this phenomenon is universal for light ion elastic scattering (see[3 ]). To the zero S-matrix element corresponding to this phenomenon, we have found that 2_ ln __!!ii~) __ ~ 0 both in case of deuterons scattering on nuclei and 2i 1 + exp(27r£) 4 He scattering on 40 Ni ,which means Su = (2n + 1) 7l'. It can be shown [1] that th~ S- 2 2i.~ 2iS1 matrix element can be put into the form Su :::::: _e_ + -=---z = 178 + 171 assuming that N N I e ZiS32 I :-:; I N 12 , where 17 B and 171 stand for the amplitude of the reflected wave at the external turning point and the amplitude of the reflected wave at the innermost turning point, respectively. Then it is clear that Su = 0 is due to the fact that the destructive interference of these waves in the asymptotic region.
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    Do Terracotta Figurines Suggest a Burial Pattern?
    (University of Kelaniya, 2007) Gunawardhana, P.; Coningharn, R.; Adikari, G.; Katugampola, M.; Namalgamuwa, H.; Saldin, M.; Simpson, I.; Batt, C.
    Terracotta figurines were discovered extensively in the northern, north central and eastern dry zones of Sri Lanka. The discovered sites indicate that they arc closely connected with river basins, canals, tanks and agricultural landscapes (Deraniyagala, 1972). The fact that many of the sites were located in agricultural areas suggests terracotta figurines might have served as cult images due to their significance in the agricultural society. These figurines may be the offerings of the rural people who could not afford to dedicate more valuable items to the Gods. Possibly they may have acted as cult images of fertility in small shrines. The aim of this paper is to discuss the results of the excavation at Waragoda in Anuradhapura. This privately owned land is located I 00 meters away from the Y oda-ela left bank that flows into the Nuwara-weva in the Anuradhapura city centre. This site was identified by the Upper Malwatu Oya archaeological exploration project in 2007. In the same year a 1 x4 metre trench excavation was conducted adjoining the house as an archaeological rescue operation due to settler's decision to expand the house. The most common type of female and animal figurines found there represents a popular artistic form. The five female figurines which are sitting on the ship seem to have been made as two halves then joined together. Perhaps the heads were designed separately and connected to the figure showing classic techniques of production significant to this culture. The hairstyle and dress of the female figurines express the popular fashion and designs which may have existed in this culture. In addition to that the six vessels which were placed in a central position towards the north south direction plays a key role among the findings. Significantly male and female rock art faces engraved at Budugala in Ratnapura District also show a similar facial expression in terracotta. Most of the figurines were discovered on the surface level of the site. One of the main objectives of this excavation was to attempt to establish the chronological sequence of this culture. The figurines found from the site are in fragments as the objects were probably broken before the God after prayers. Then the figurines were accumulated in the shrine and carefully deposited into the grave beside the shrine.
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