Search results for: financial services

Authors: Bruno Vilić Belina, Ivan Župan

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Smart industry concepts and digital transformation are very popular in many industries. They develop their own digital platforms, which have an important role in innovations and transactions. The main idea of smart industry digital platforms is central data collection, industrial data integration and data usage for smart applications and services. This paper presents the development of a digital platform for building critical infrastructure protection systems in smart industries. Different service contraction modalities in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) relations, trends and changes in business architectures (especially process business architecture) for the purpose of developing infrastructural production and distribution networks, information infrastructure meta-models and generic processes by critical infrastructure owner demanded by critical infrastructure law, satisfying cybersecurity requirements and taking into account hybrid threats are researched.

Keywords: Cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, smart industries, digital platform.

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Authors: Hani Shafeek, Mohammed Aman, Muhammad Marsudi

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Applied industrial engineering is concerned with imparting employable skills to improve the productivity for current situation of products and services. The purpose of this case study is to present the results of an initial research study conducted to identify the desired professional characteristics of an industrial engineer with an undergraduate degree and the emerging topic areas that should be incorporated into the curriculum to prepare industrial engineering (IE) graduates for the future workforce. Conclusions and recommendations for applied industrial engineering syllabus have been gathered and reported below. A two-pronged approach was taken which included a method of benchmarking by comparing the applied industrial engineering curricula of various universities and an industry survey to identify job market requirements. This methodology produced an analysis of the changing nature of industrial engineering from learning to practical education. A curriculum study for engineering is a relatively unexplored area of research in the Middle East, much less for applied industrial engineering. This work is an effort to bridge the gap between theoretical study in the classroom and the real world work applications in the industrial and service sectors.

Keywords: Applied industrial engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Industrial Engineering Curriculum, Syllabus.

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Authors: Cheng-Che Tsai, Huang-Ming Chuang

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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of cognitive decision effort in recommendation system, combined with indicators "information quality" and "service quality" from IS success model to exam the awareness of the user for the "recommended system performance". A total of 411 internet user answered a questionnaire assessing their attention of use and satisfaction of recommendation system in internet book store. Quantitative result indicates following research results. First, information quality of recommended system has obvious influence in consumer shopping decision-making process, and the attitude to use the system. Second, in the process of consumer's shopping decision-making, the recommendation system has no significant influence for consumers to pay lower cognitive decision-making effort. Third, e-commerce platform provides recommendations and information is necessary, but the quality of information on user needs must be considered, or they will be other competitors offer homogeneous services replaced.

Keywords: Recommender system, Cognitive decision-making efforts, IS success model, Internet bookstore.

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Authors: D. I. Ekine, C. C. Akpanibah

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This paper analyses the productivity of median scale battery cage and deep litter chicken egg producers in Rivers State, Nigeria. 90 battery cage and 90 deep litter farmers giving a total of 180 farmers were sampled through a multistage sampling procedure. Mean productivity was higher for the battery cage than the deep litter farmers at 2.65 and 2.33 respectively. Productivity of battery cage farmers were positively influenced by age, extension contacts, experience and feed quantity while the productivity of deep litter farmers was positively influenced by age, extension contacts, household size, experience and labour. The major constraints identified by both categories are high cost of feed, high price of day-old chick, inadequate finance, lack of credit and high cost of drug/vaccination. Furthermore, the work recommends that government should assist chicken egg farmers through subsidies of input resources and put policies to make financial institutions give out loans at low interest rate to the farmers. The farmers should abide by the recommended number of birds per unit area while stocking.

Keywords: Productivity, battery cage, deep litter, median scale, egg production.

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Authors: C. Mallada Fernández

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Economic development and globalization of international markets have created a favourable atmosphere for the emergence of new forms of crime such as money laundering or financing of terrorism, which may contribute to destabilized and damage economic systems. In particular, money laundering have acquired great importance since the 11S attacks, what has caused on the one hand, the establishment and development of preventive measures and, on the other hand, a progressive hardening of penal measures. Since then, the regulations imposed to fight against money laundering have been viewed as key components also in the fight against terrorist financing. Terrorism, at the beginning, was a “national” crime connected with internal problems of the State (for instance the RAF in Germany or ETA in Spain) but in the last 20 years has started to be an international problem that is connected with the defence and security of the States. Therefore, the new strategic concept for the defense and security of NATO has a comprehensive list of security threats to the Alliance, such as terrorism, international instability, money laundering or attacks on cyberspace, among others. With this new concept, money laundering and terrorism has become a priority in the national defense.

In this work we will analyze the methods to combat these new threats to the national security. We will study the preventive legislations to combat money laundering and financing of terrorism, the UIF that exchange information between States, and the hawala-Banking.

Keywords: Control of financial flows, money laundering, terrorism, financing of terrorism.

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Authors: Mohammad Taghi Taghavifard, Danial Mirheydari

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This paper suggests an algorithm for the evaluation and selection of suppliers. At the beginning, all the needed materials and services used by the organization were identified and categorized with regard to their nature by ABC method. Afterwards, in order to reduce risk factors and maximize the organization's profit, purchase strategies were determined. Then, appropriate criteria were identified for primary evaluation of suppliers applying to the organization. The output of this stage was a list of suppliers qualified by the organization to participate in its tenders. Subsequently, considering a material in particular, appropriate criteria on the ordering of the mentioned material were determined, taking into account the particular materials' specifications as well as the organization's needs. Finally, for the purpose of validation and verification of the proposed model, it was applied to Mobarakeh Steel Company (MSC), the qualified suppliers of this Company are ranked by the means of a Hierarchical Fuzzy TOPSIS method. The obtained results show that the proposed algorithm is quite effective, efficient and easy to apply.

Keywords: ABC analysis, Hierarchical Fuzzy TOPSIS, Primary supplier evaluation, Purchasing strategy, supplier selection

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Authors: Laimona Sliburyte

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Today advertising is actively penetrating into many spheres of our lives. We cannot imagine the existence of a lot of economic activities without advertising. That mostly concerns trade and services. Everyone of us should look better into the everyday communication and carefully consider the amount and the quality of the information we receive as well as its influence on our behaviour. Special attention should be paid to the young generation. Theoretical and practical research has proved the ever growing influence of information (especially the one contained in advertising) on a society; on its economics, culture, religion, politics and even people-s private lives and behaviour. Children have plenty of free time and, therefore, see a lot of different advertising. Though education of children is in the hands of parents and schools, advertising makers and customers should think with responsibility about the selection of time and transmission channels of child targeted advertising. The purpose of the present paper is to investigate the influence of advertising upon consumer views and behaviour of children in different age groups. The present investigation has clarified the influence of advertising as a means of information on a certain group of society, which in the modern information society is the most vulnerable – children. In this paper we assess children-s perception and their understanding of advertising.

Keywords: Advertising, children, children targeted advertising, consumer socialization process.

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Authors: Mohd. Israil, M. Salim Beg

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In order to accommodate various multimedia services, next generation wireless networks are characterized by very high transmission bit rates. Thus, in such systems and networks, the received signal is not only limited by noise but - especially with increasing symbols rate often more significantly by the intersymbol interference (ISI) caused by the time dispersive radio channels such as those are used in this work. This paper deals with the study of the performance of detector for high bit rate transmission on some worst case models of frequency selective fading channels for outdoor mobile radio environments. This paper deals with a number of different wireless channels with different power profiles and different number of resolvable paths. All the radio channels generated in this paper are for outdoor vehicular environments with Doppler spread of 100 Hz. A carrier frequency of 1800 MHz is used and all the channels used in this work are such that they are useful for next generation wireless systems. Schemes for mitigation of ISI with adaptive equalizers of different types have been investigated and their performances have been investigated in terms of BER measured as a function of SNR.

Keywords: Mobile channels, Rayleigh Fading, Equalization, NMLD.

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Authors: Kazuo Mori, Takeo Saga, Katsuhiro Naito, Hideo Kobayashi

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The asymmetric trafc between uplink and downlink over recent mobile communication systems has been conspicuous because of providing new communication services. This paper proposes an asymmetric trafc accommodation scheme adopting a multihop cooperative transmission technique for CDMA/FDD cellular networks. The proposed scheme employs the cooperative transmission technique in the already proposed downlink multihop transmissions for the accommodation of the asymmetric trafc, which utilizes the vacant uplink band for the downlink relay transmissions. The proposed scheme reduces the transmission power at the downlink relay transmissions and then suppresses the interference to the uplink communications, and thus, improves the uplink performance. The proposed scheme is evaluated by computer simulation and the results show that it can achieve better throughput performance.

Keywords: asymmetric traffic, cooperative transmissions, multihop transmissions, CDMA, FDD, cellular systems

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Authors: Kei Kawamorita, Ryouta Kasahara, Yuuki Mochizuki, Kenichiro Noguchi

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A separation-kernel-based operating system (OS) has been designed for use in secure embedded systems by applying formal methods to the design of the separation-kernel part. The separation kernel is a small OS kernel that provides an abstract distributed environment on a single CPU. The design of the separation kernel was verified using two formal methods, the B method and the Spin model checker. A newly designed semi-formal method, the extended state transition method, was also applied. An OS comprising the separation-kernel part and additional OS services on top of the separation kernel was prototyped on the Intel IA-32 architecture. Developing and testing of a prototype embedded application, a point-of-sale application, on the prototype OS demonstrated that the proposed architecture and the use of formal methods to design its kernel part are effective for achieving a secure embedded system having a high-assurance separation kernel.

Keywords: B method, embedded systems, extended state transition, formal methods, separation kernel, Spin.

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Authors: Suneel M. Agerwala, Ashley Votta, Briana Hogan, John Yannocone, Steven Samuels, SheilaChiffriller

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Road rage is an increasingly prevalent expression of aggression in our society. Its dangers are apparent and understanding its causes may shed light on preventative measures. This study involved a fifteen-minute survey administered to 147 undergraduate students at a North Eastern suburban university. The survey consisted of a demographics section, questions regarding financial investment in respondents- vehicles, experience driving, habits of driving, experiences witnessing role models driving, and an evaluation of road rage behavior using the Driving Vengeance Questionnaire. The study found no significant differences in driving aggression between respondents who were financially invested in their vehicle compared to those who were not, or between respondents who drove in heavy traffic hours compared to those who did not, suggesting internal factors correlate with aggressive driving habits. The study also found significant differences in driving aggression between males versus females, those with more points on their license versus fewer points, and those who witnessed parents driving aggressively very often versus rarely or never. Additional studies can investigate how witnessing parents driving aggressively is related to future driving behaviors.

Keywords: Aggression, college, driving, road rage.

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Authors: Pei-Chun Lee, Sheng-Shih Wang, Pei-Hsuan Ku

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Many existing amusement parks have been operated with assistance of a variety of information and communications technologies to design friendly and efficient service systems for tourists. However, these systems leave various levels of decisions to tourists to make by themselves. This incurs pressure on tourists and thereby bringing negative experience in their tour. This paper proposes a smart amusement park system to offer each tourist the GPS-based customized plan without tourists making decisions by themselves. The proposed system consists of the mobile app subsystem, the central subsystem, and the detecting/counting subsystem. The mobile app subsystem interacts with the central subsystem. The central subsystem performs the necessary computing and database management of the proposed system. The detecting/counting subsystem aims to detect and compute the number of visitors to an attraction. Experimental results show that the proposed system can not only work well, but also provide an innovative business operating model for owners of amusement parks.

Keywords: Amusement park, location-based service (LBS), mobile app, tourist service.

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Authors: Noman Khan, B. S. Chowdhry, A.Q.K Rajput

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Integrated fiber-wireless (FiWi) access networks are a viable solution that can deliver the high profile quadruple play services. Passive optical networks (PON) networks integrated with wireless access networks provide ubiquitous characteristics for high bandwidth applications. Operation of PON improves by employing a variety of multiplexing techniques. One of it is time division/wavelength division multiplexed (TDM/WDM) architecture that improves the performance of optical-wireless access networks. This paper proposes a novel feedback-based TDM/WDM-PON architecture and introduces a model of integrated PON-FiWi networks. Feedback-based link architecture is an efficient solution to improves the performance of optical-line-terminal (OLT) and interlink optical-network-units (ONUs) communication. Furthermore, the feedback-based WDM/TDM-PON architecture is compared with existing architectures in terms of capacity of network throughput.

Keywords: Fiber-wireless (FiWi), Passive Optical Network (PON), TDM/WDM architecture

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Authors: Wenguang Ding, Yang Wu, Xia Wang, Yayu Gao

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Biogas, a clean renewable energy, is attracting a growing concern of researchers and professionals in many fields. Based on the natural and climatic conditions in semi-arid regions of northwestern China, the present study introduces a specifically-designed family-size biogas plant (with a digester of 10m3) with manure and urine of animals and humanity as raw materials. The biogas plant is applicable to areas with altitudes of more than 2000 meters in northwestern China. In addition to the installation cost, a little operational expenditure, structure, characteristics, benefits of this small-scale biogas plant, this article introduces a wide range of specific popularization methods such as training, financial support, guided tour to the biogas plant, community-based group study and delivery of operational manuals. The feasibility of the biogas plant is explored on the basis of the availability of the raw materials. Simple operations contained in the current work increase the possibility of the wide use of this small-scale biogas plant in similar regions of the world.

Keywords: biogas, family-size biogas plant, northwestern China, popularization

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Authors: Abu Bakar Sedek Abdul Jamak, Saridan Abu Bakar, Zulkipli Ghazali, Roselind Wan

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The majority of micro-entrepreneurs in Malaysia operate very small-scaled business activities such as food stalls, burger stalls, night market hawkers, grocery stores, constructions, rubber and oil palm small holders, and other agro-based services and activities. Why are they venturing into entrepreneurship - is it for survival, out of interest or due to encouragement and assistance from the local government? And why is it that some micro-entrepreneurs are lagging behind in entrepreneurship, and what do they need to rectify this situation so that they are able to progress further? Furthermore, what are the skills that the micro entrepreneurs should developed to transform them into successful micro-enterprises and become small and medium-sized enterprises (SME)? This paper proposes a 7-Step approach that can serve as a basis for identification of critical entrepreneurial success factors that enable policy makers, practitioners, consultants, training managers and other agencies in developing tools to assist micro business owners. This paper also highlights the experience of one of the successful companies in Malaysia that has transformed from micro-enterprise to become a large organization in less than 10 years.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Micro-entrepreneurs, Transformation, Customers

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Authors: Sulaiman Ainin, Yusniza Kamar ulzaman, Abdul Ghani Farinda

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This study was initiated with a three prong objective. One, to identify the relationship between Technological Competencies factors (Technical Capability, Firm Innovativeness and E-Business Practices and professional service firms- business performance. To investigate the predictors of professional service firms business performance and finally to evaluate the predictors of business performance according to the type of professional service firms, a survey questionnaire was deployed to collect empirical data. The questionnaire was distributed to the owners of the professional small medium size enterprises services in the Accounting, Legal, Engineering and Architecture sectors. Analysis showed that all three Technology Competency factors have moderate effect on business performance. In addition, the regression models indicate that technical capability is the most highly influential that could determine business performance, followed by e-business practices and firm innovativeness. Subsequently, the main predictor of business performance for all types of firms is Technical capability.

Keywords: technology competency, technology capability, innovativeness, E-business practice

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Authors: Haitham Assiri, Majed Eljazzar, Priyadarsi Nanda

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The world is gradually entering the fourth industrial revolution. E-Government services are scaling government operations across the globe. However, as promising as an e-Government system would be, it is also susceptible to malicious attacks if not properly secured. In our study, we found that in Saudi Arabia, the e-Government website, Yesser, is vulnerable to external attacks. Obviously, this can lead to a breach of data integrity and privacy. In this paper, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to explore possible ways the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can take necessary measures to strengthen its e-Government system using blockchain. Blockchain is one of the emerging technologies shaping the world through its applications in finance, elections, healthcare, etc. It secures systems and brings more transparency. A total of 28 papers were selected for this SLR, and 19 of the papers significantly showed that blockchain could enhance the security and privacy of Saudi’s e-Government system. Other papers also concluded that blockchain is effective, albeit with the integration of other technologies like IoT, AI and big data. These papers have been analyzed to sieve out the findings and set the stage for future research into the subject.

Keywords: blockchain, data integrity, e-Government, security threats

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Authors: B. E. Weber, N. Vrielink, M. G. Rietbergen

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This paper explores the long-term effects of the Energy Box trajectory on households in the private rental sector, specifically households experiencing energy poverty. The concept of energy poverty has been getting increasing attention among policymakers over the past few years. In the Netherlands, as far as we know, there are no national policies on alleviating energy poverty, which negatively impacts energy-poor households. The Energy Box can help households experiencing energy poverty by stimulating them to improve the energy efficiency of their home by changing their energy-saving behavior. Important long-term effects are that respondents indicate that they live in a more environmentally friendly way and that they save money on their energy bills. Households feel engaged with the concept of energy-saving and can see the benefits of changing their energy-saving behavior. Respondents perceived the Energy Box as a means to live more environmentally friendly, instead of it solely being a means to save money on energy bills. The findings show that most respondents signed up for the Energy Box are interested in energy-saving as a lifestyle choice instead of a financial choice, which would likely be the case for households experiencing energy poverty.

Keywords: Energy-saving behavior, energy poverty, poverty, private rental sector.

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Authors: Amir Mohammad Fathollahi Fard, Mostafa Hajiaghaei-Keshteli, Mohammad Mahdi Paydar

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With increasing life expectancy in developed countries, the role of home care services is highlighted by both academia and industrial contributors in Home Health Care Supply Chain (HHCSC) companies. The main decisions in such supply chain systems are the location of pharmacies, the allocation of patients to these pharmacies and also the routing and scheduling decisions of nurses to visit their patients. In this study, for the first time, an integrated model is proposed to consist of all preliminary and necessary decisions in these companies, namely, location-allocation-routing model. This model is a type of NP-hard one. Therefore, an Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) is utilized to solve the model, especially in large sizes. Results confirm the efficiency of the developed model for HHCSC companies as well as the performance of employed ICA.

Keywords: Home health care supply chain, location-allocation-routing problem, imperialist competitive algorithm, optimization.

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Authors: Jean-Pierre Dubois, Jihad S. Daba, M. Nader, C. El Ferkh

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GSM has undoubtedly become the most widespread cellular technology and has established itself as one of the most promising technology in wireless communication. The next generation of mobile telephones had also become more powerful and innovative in a way that new services related to the user-s location will arise. Other than the 911 requirements for emergency location initiated by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) of the United States, GSM positioning can be highly integrated in cellular communication technology for commercial use. However, GSM positioning is facing many challenges. Issues like accuracy, availability, reliability and suitable cost render the development and implementation of GSM positioning a challenging task. In this paper, we investigate the optimal mobile position tracking means. We employ an innovative scheme by integrating the Kalman filter in the localization process especially that it has great tracking characteristics. When tracking in two dimensions, Kalman filter is very powerful due to its reliable performance as it supports estimation of past, present, and future states, even when performing in unknown environments. We show that enhanced position tracking results is achieved when implementing the Kalman filter for GSM tracking.

Keywords: Cellular communication, estimation, GSM, Kalman filter, positioning

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Authors: Usha N. Murthy, Rekha H. B., Mahaveer Devoor

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The introduction of more stringent pollution regulations, in relation to financial and social pressures for sustainable development, has pressed toward limiting the volumes of industrial and domestic effluents discharged into the environment - as well as to increase the efforts within research and development of new or more efficient wastewater treatment technologies. Considering both discharge volume and effluent composition, wastewater generated by the textile industry is rated as the most polluting among all industrial sectors. The pollution load is mainly due to spent dye baths, which are composed of unreacted dyes, dispersing agents, surfactants, salts and organics. In the present investigation, the textile dye wastewater was characterized by high color, chemical oxygen demand (COD), total dissolved solids (TDS) and pH. Electrochemical oxidation process for four plate electrodes was carried out at five different current intensities, out of which 0.14A has achieved maximum percentage removal of COD with 75% and 83% of color. The COD removal rate in kg COD/h/m² decreases with increase in the current intensity. The energy consumption increases with increase in the current intensity. Hence, textile dye wastewater can be effectively pretreated by electrochemical oxidation method where the process limits objectionable color while leaving the COD associated with organics left for natural degradation thus causing a sustainable reduction in pollution load.

Keywords: Electrochemical treatment, COD, color.

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Authors: André M. Senna, Mary L. G. S. Senna, Rosa M. Machado-de-Sena

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One of the great challenges presented in educational practice is how to ensure the students not only acquire knowledge of training courses throughout their academic life, but also how to apply it in their current professional activities. Consequently, aiming to incite changes in the education system of healthcare professionals noticed the inadequacy of the training providers to solve the social problems related to health, the education related to these procedures should initiate in the earliest years of process. Following that idea, there is another question that needs an answer: If the change in the education should start sooner, in the period of basic training of healthcare professionals, what guidelines should a permanent education program incorporate to promote changes in an already established system? For this reason, the objective of this paper is to present different views of the teaching-learning process, with the purpose of better understanding the behavior adopted by healthcare professionals, through bibliographic study. The conclusion was that more than imparting knowledge to the individual, a larger approach is necessary on permanent education programs concerning the performance of professional health services in order to foment significant changes in education.

Keywords: Health education, continuing education, training, behavior.

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Authors: Y. Rathiranee, D. M. Semasinghe

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This study attempts to identify the factors influencing on women empowerment of rural area in Sri Lanka through micro finance services. Data were collected from one hundred (100) rural women involving self-employment activities through a questionnaire using direct personal interviews. Judgment and Convenience Random sampling technique was used to select the sample size from three Divisional Secretariat divisions of Kandawalai, Poonakari and Karachchi in Kilinochchi District. The factor analysis was performed on fourteen (14) variables for screening and reducing the variables to identify the influencing factors on empowerment. Multiple regression analysis was used to identify the relationship between the three empowerment factors and the impact of micro finance on overall empowerment of rural women. The result of this study summarized the variables into three factors namely decision making, freedom to mobility and family support and which are positively associated with empowerment. In addition to this the value of adjusted R2 is 0.248 indicates that all the variables extracted can be explained 24.8% of the variation in the women empowerment through microfinance. Independent variables of these three factors have positive correlation with women empowerment as well as significant values at 5 percent level.

Keywords: Influencing factors, Micro finance, rural women and women empowerment.

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Authors: Siriporn Poolsuwan, Kanyarat Bussaban

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This research aims to investigate and analyze user’s behaviour towards the utilization of the online news clipping database at Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Thailand. Data is gathered from 214 lecturers and 380 undergraduate students by using questionnaires. Findings show that most users knew the online news clipping service from their friends, library’s website and their teachers. The users learned how to use it by themselves and others learned by training of SSRU library. Most users used the online news clipping database one time per month at home and always used the service for general knowledge, up-to-date academic knowledge and assignment reference. Moreover, the results of using the online news clipping service problems include the users themselves, service management, service device- computer and tools – and the network, service provider, and publicity. This research would be benefit for librarians and teachers for planning and designing library services in their works and organization

Keywords: Online Database, User Behaviour.

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Authors: Tomasz L. Nawrocki, Danuta Szwajca

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The growing importance of reputation in building enterprise value and achieving long-term competitive advantage creates the need for its measurement and evaluation for the management purposes (effective reputation and its risk management). The paper presents practical application of self-developed corporate reputation assessment model from the viewpoint of stock market investors. The model has a pioneer character and example analysis performed for selected industry is a form of specific test for this tool. In the proposed solution, three aspects - informational, financial and development, as well as social ones - were considered. It was also assumed that the individual sub-criteria will be based on public sources of information, and as the calculation apparatus, capable of obtaining synthetic final assessment, fuzzy logic will be used. The main reason for developing this model was to fulfill the gap in the scope of synthetic measure of corporate reputation that would provide higher degree of objectivity by relying on "hard" (not from surveys) and publicly available data. It should be also noted that results obtained on the basis of proposed corporate reputation assessment method give possibilities of various internal as well as inter-branch comparisons and analysis of corporate reputation impact.

Keywords: Corporate reputation, fuzzy logic, fuzzy model, stock market investors.

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Authors: Mohd Iskandar bin Illyas Tan, Iziati Saadah bt Ibrahim

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Logistics is part of the supply chain processes that plans, implements, and controls the efficient and effective forward and reverse flow and storage of goods, services, and related information between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet customer requirements. This research aims to investigate the current status and future direction of the use of Information Technology (IT) for logistics, focusing on Supply Chain Management (SCM) and E-Commerce adoption in Malaysia. Therefore, this research stresses on the type of technology being adopted, factors, benefits and barriers affecting the innovation in SCM and E-Commerce technology adoption among Logistics Service Providers (LSP). A mailed questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from 265 logistics companies in Johor. The research revealed a high level of SCM technology adoption among LSP as they had adopted SCM technology in various business processes while they perceived a high level of benefits from SCM adoption.

Keywords: E-Commerce, Logistics Service Providers, Malaysia, Supply Chain Management.

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Authors: H. C. Chinwenyi, H. D. Ibrahim, F. A. Ahmed

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In modern financial mathematics, valuing derivatives such as options is often a tedious task. This is simply because their fair and correct prices in the future are often probabilistic. This paper examines three different Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) models in finance; the Constant Elasticity of Variance (CEV) model, the Balck-Karasinski model, and the Heston model. The various Martingales option price valuation formulas for these three models were obtained using the replicating portfolio method. Also, the numerical solution of the derived Martingales options price valuation equations for the SDEs models was carried out using the Monte Carlo method which was implemented using MATLAB. Furthermore, results from the numerical examples using published data from the Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE), all share index data show the effect of increase in the underlying asset value (stock price) on the value of the European Put Option for these models. From the results obtained, we see that an increase in the stock price yields a decrease in the value of the European put option price. Hence, this guides the option holder in making a quality decision by not exercising his right on the option.

Keywords: Equivalent Martingale Measure, European Put Option, Girsanov Theorem, Martingales, Monte Carlo method, option price valuation, option price valuation formula.

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Authors: Lalla Nezha Lakmiti, Abdelkahar Zahid

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Due to the setbacks on the international scene and the wave of cacophonic financial scandals affecting large international groups, the new Islamic finance industry is not immune despite its initial resistance. The purpose of this paper is to understand and analyze the meaning of the Corporate Governance (CG) concept in Moroccan Islamic banking systems with specific reference to their institutions. The research objective is to identify also the path taken and adopted by these banks recently set up in Morocco. The foundation is rooted in shari'a, in particular, no stakeholder (the shareholding approach) must be harmed, and the ethical value is reflected into these parties’ behavior. We chose a qualitative method, semi-structured interviews where six managers provided answers about their banking systems. Since these respondents held a senior position (directors) within their organizations, it is felt that they are well placed and have the necessary knowledge to provide us with information to answer the questions asked. The results identified the orientation of participating banks and assessing how governance works, while determining which party is fovoured: shareholders, stakeholders or both. This study discusses the favorable condition to the harmonization of the regulations and therefore a better integration between Islamic finance and conventional ones in the economic context of Morocco.

Keywords: Corporate governance, participating banks, stakeholders, shareholders, and interests.

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Authors: Sharmistha Roy

Abstract:

In Singapore, there are about 1 million baby boomers, defined as those born between 1947 and 1964. They constitute a sizeable proportion (about 30 per cent) of the resident population comprising Singapore citizens and permanent residents. The first batches of these baby boomers have already 65 years old by 2012. Thereafter, baby boomers will swell the ranks of the elderly population in Singapore until 2030. The baby boomers in this study are divided into broad groups, namely, the early baby boomers (born 1947-54) and late baby boomers (1955-64). Continuing decline in fertility and mortality rates in the past three decades as well as improvements in health care facilities and services have changed the demography of Singapore from a “pyramid-shape” young, post war baby boomers population to a rapidly ageing population. With the ageing of the baby boom generation, the population of Singapore is about to grey rapidly over the next three decades. As such, there is a need for Singapore to understand the profile, perceptions and aspirations of this group, and devise strategies to address the needs and concerns as well as opportunities that arise with the ageing of baby boomers are discussed and presented in this work.

Keywords: Ageing index, Baby boomers, Demographic dependency ratio (DDR), Fertility and mortality rate, Life expectancy, Singapore.

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Authors: Necati Içer

Abstract:

Crop-hail insurance plays a vital role in managing risks and reducing the financial consequences of hail damage on crop production. Predicting insurance premium rates with short-term data is a major challenge in numerous nations because of the unique characteristics of hailstorms. This study aims to suggest a feasible approach for establishing equitable premium rates in crop-hail insurance for nations with short-term insurance data. The primary goal of the rate-making process is to determine premium rates for high and zero loss costs of villages and enhance their credibility. To do this, a technique was created using the author's practical knowledge of crop-hail insurance. With this approach, the rate-making method was developed using a range of temporal and spatial factor combinations with both hypothetical and real data, including extreme cases. This article aims to show how to incorporate the temporal and spatial elements into determining fair premium rates using short-term insurance data. The article ends with a suggestion on the ultimate premium rates for insurance contracts.

Keywords: Crop-hail insurance, premium rate, short-term insurance data, spatial and temporal parameters.

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