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The purpose of this exploratory study is to look at how the Internet was used by political parties and candidates during the Indian parliamentary elections of 2009.

A total of 31 web sites belonging to political parties and their candidates in the Indian states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were examined for how they were used to mobilize volunteers and voters. An online questionnaire and in‐depth interviews were administered to the web site coordinators/designers and politicians.

The study found that sites were not used to their maximum potential but instead, merely for publicity, online presence, and to explore the new medium. There was greater reliance by most candidates on traditional media such as rallies and face‐to‐face interaction. The reason may be due to the limited Internet penetration in India, which also means the Internet may have less influence on voters. Some candidates have shown the way to the potential use of the medium for fund raising and recruiting volunteers. But Indian politicians will likely continue to be cautious in using the Internet.

This study was limited to the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat and did not consider the impact or the effectiveness of the Internet.

This is the first such study of the use of web sites for electioneering in India. It also documents the development in the use of the new medium for campaigning in 2009 as compared with the elections of 2004.

Despite the increasing popularity of natural dyeing of textiles, the low substantivity between the fibers and the natural dyes is a problem. Several methods have been used to overcome this problem. In this study, wool fibers were pretreated with oxygen plasma under different conditions and dyed with the extract of grape leaves. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of plasma treatment parameters on the color strength of the dyed samples using artificial neural network (ANN) and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and evaluate the ability of these methods for predicting the color strength.

Woolen yarns were modified under different conditions of oxygen plasma treatment. Oxygen flow rate, power and time were considered as the treatment variable factors. Plasma-treated samples were dyed under constant conditions with the extract of grape leaves as a natural dye. ANN and ANFIS were applied to model and analyze the effect of plasma treatment parameters on the color strength of the dyed samples.

The results showed that increasing all the plasma treatment process variables, including oxygen flow rate, power and time increased the color strength of the dyed samples. The results showed that the developed ANN and ANFIS could accurately predict the experimental data with correlation coefficients of 0.986 and 0.997, respectively. According to the obtained correlation coefficients, ANFIS had a higher accuracy in prediction of the results of this study compared with the ANN and RSM models (correlation coefficient = 0.902, from our previous study).

This study uses ANN and ANFIS for predicting color strength of naturally dyed textiles for the first time. The use of computational intelligence for the optimization and prediction of the effects plasma treatment for the improvement of natural dyeing of wool is another novelty of this study.