Archives-December  

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a novel business management system that integrates all facets of business. There is an increasing demand for this system in both developed and developing countries. ERP has widely used in developed countries all over the world to automate the deployment, streamline processes and for achieving process improvement and global competitiveness. Today organizations of any magnitude have implemented or in the process of implementing such systems in order to remain competitive in this global market scenario. Recent trend shows that adoption of ERP is much higher in SME sector. Although ERP systems can bring competitive advantages to organizations, the high failure rate in implementing such systems is a major concern. A number of cases exist where organizations inspite of spending high amount on ERP implementation have not been able to reap any benefits out of it. This paper thus attempts to explore the existing literature to identify and prioritize some success issues leading to positive implementation of ERP in context to Indian small and medium scale enterprises.

This paper examines accounting and accountability issues relating to Australian rules country football clubs within the state of Victoria. Football clubs are part of the largely unaccountable not for profit (NFP) sector in Australia. As there has been a lack of research on country football clubs, this paper explores the myriad of financial information that is produced by both junior and senior clubs in the state of Victoria. The result of this survey has found consistency in the production of some accounting reports by club type, but also variability in regularity and usefulness.

The Bas-Uélé Province is entirely agricultural, the crops grown in the past were peanuts, cotton and coffee. Currently, the food crops grown cannot alone solve the problem of poverty from which the population suffers. It is therefore time to think about introducing cash crops, especially cocoa from the Bambesa Territory.This part of the study which consisted in evaluating the phenological behavior of the cultivars of Yangambi showed that the cocoa tree can be cultivated in the pedoclimatic conditions of Bambesa: All the three hybrids introduced in Bambesa behaved well and can be disseminated as for their behavior thus their capacity of adaptation.

Awqaf, guilds, madrasas, and Sufi orders were significant in the creation of civil societies in Islam since the first century A.H. Awqaf in particular, fostered bonds of social connection among members of different backgrounds giving rise to autonomous groups that political authorities always viewed with mistrust leading to protracted tussles between them. This paper contextualizes the ambiguities between the civil society and the political authorities through the prism of awqaf in Kenya. The change to other forms of charities illustrates the dynamics of endowments in Islam and the urge to guard the autonomy of civil groups in the public sphere.

The performance of pupils at the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education in public schools in Kenya remains a challenge since the number of pupils performing poorly is still high. In Matete Sub County, the performance of pupils at KCPE has been declining from the year 2012-2015, with a mean of 2.48. Therefore, the objective of the study was to find out the extent to which government policies affect the academic performance of primary school learners in Matete sub county, Kakamega county. The study adopted a descriptive survey design. The study population comprised of 49 head teachers, 49 senior teachers, 75 standard eight class teachers, 1759 class eight pupils, and 1 Sub County Quality Assurance Officer. The study sampled 44 head teachers, 44 senior teachers and one sub-county Quality Assurance Officer who were selected through saturated sampling technique. Sixty-three class eight teachers were selected through simple random sampling technique. It also comprised 525 standards 8 pupils, who were selected through stratified sampling technique. Instruments for data collection were questionnaire, interview schedules, focus group discussions and document analysis guide. Face validity of the instruments was ascertained by experts in educational administration. Pilot study was carried out among 15 pupils, 5 head teachers, and 5 senior teachers. A Cronbach’s coefficient alpha of 0.7 was found; hence the instruments were reliable. The quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The qualitative data was transcribed and categorized on an on-going process as themes and sub themes emerge. The study showed that Government policies moderately affect academic performance with a mean of 3.39. Staffing policy as one of the government policy profoundly affected KCPE performance with a mean of 4.39.

Indigenous knowledge in community based early warning systems is essential for drought monitoring and management. In remote areas, modern technologies for early warning are rare thus indigenous knowledge based hazard monitoring systems are commonly used. This promotes a more effective methodology of disaster management in Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs) of Northern Kenya. Communities living in the northern part of Kenya have a wealth of indigenous knowledge passed down from generations and is internalised by the communities through a process of socialisation as part of their lifestyles. Most of this knowledge is not documented and is overlooked whereas this community based practices exhibit a deep understanding and ability to cope with disasters through local actions. This creates a firm basis for assessing indigenous Knowledge (IK) for early warning for Turkana nation and adaptive strategies therein. Descriptive survey research design was used in the study. A population sample size of 902 persons was chosen using the simple random sampling technique. A study sample size was taken at 95% level of confidence. More emphasis was placed in people over the age of 60 years who were able to recall trends of drought occurrences over the study period. The data collection instruments applied included questionnaires, observation checklists and interview guides. The findings of the study showed that indigenous knowledge was invaluable if accurate and reliable drought prediction was to be achieved, hence the need for adoption of this indigenous method for early warning system. Cooperation among the local people in drought forecast improve ownership of findings hence ability to forge sustainable drought mitigation and prevention efforts. The study recommends that there is an urgent need to recognize indigenous knowledge in planning and decision making in relation to matters of drought prediction.

We study jitter control in networks with guaranteed quality of service (QoS) from the competitive analysis (as mentioned in [1]) point of view. we analyze on-line algorithms for single jitter regulator that control jitter and compare their performance to the best possible by an off-line algorithm as proposed in [1]. For delay jitter, where the goal is to minimize the difference between delay times of different packets, we show that a simple on-line algorithm using a buffer of B slots guarantees the same delay jitter as the best off-line algorithm using buffer space B/2. We prove that the guarantees made by our (proposed in [1]) on-line algorithm hold, even for simple distributed implementations, where the total buffer space is distributed along the path of the connection, provided that the input stream satisfies a certain simple property. The significance of the results is that it proves the on-line algorithm to be the best possible algorithm to reduce delay jitter for a given buffer size B. The main argue is even if both the distributed and non distributed algorithms get same jitter which one has more advantage. We focused on the advantages of distributing the buffers. The algorithm in its original form is applicable only to a fixed number of packets. We extend the results to a more practical model in which we compare off-line algorithm with n inputs and on-line algorithms with n1 (>n) inputs.

Summary The forestry regime aims at promoting the rational and sustainable management of resources in order to increase their contribution to the economic, social and cultural development of present generations, while preserving forest ecosystems and forest biodiversity for future generations. It was with this in mind that the legislator promulgated the decree of 4 April 1934, the first legal instrument on forestry adopted by the Belgian Parliament. Two years later, the decree of 13 June 1936 was added to the list and attempted to put all indigenous people on an equal footing with regard to forest access and use rights. After the Second World War, the decree of 11 April 1949 on forests had data of an economic nature that obliged the colonial authorities to adapt the forestry legislation. Over the years, the decree became obsolete, ineffective and unsuited to the political, economic, social and especially the global and sub-regional environment. In the same vein, law n°011/2002 of 29 August 2002 on the forestry code is the basic legislative text that regulates forestry management in the DRC. This law wipes out the existing texts, inherited from the colonial period, in order to meet the new socio-economic objectives that the State has assigned to the management of the forest estate. The results of our investigations in Basoko Territory confirm the marginalisation of local communities. On the one hand, they are not involved in the process because their specifications are very often not followed up. On the other hand, local communities are not involved in the management of industrial exploitation at the decision-making level.

An access control mechanism in a user hierarchy is used to provide the management of sensitive information for authorized users. The users and their own information can be organized into a number of disjoint sets of security classes according to their responsibilities. Each security class in a user hierarchy is assigned an encryption key and can derive the encryption keys of all lower security classes according to predefined partially ordered relation. In 2006, Jeng and Wang proposed an efficient key management scheme based on elliptic curve cryptosystems. This paper, however, pointed out that Jeng–Wang scheme is vulnerable to the so-called compromising attack that the secret keys of some security classes can be compromised by any adversary if some public information modified. We further proposed a secure key management scheme based on elliptic curve cryptosystems to eliminate the pointed out the security leak and provide better security requirements. As compared with Jeng and Wang’s scheme (Jeng and Wang, 2006), the proposed scheme has the following properties. (i) It is simple to execute the key generation and key derivation phases. (ii) It is easily to address dynamic access control when a security class is added into or deleted from the hierarchy. (iii) It is secure against some potential attacks. (iv) The required storage of the public/secret parameters is constant.

This study aims to predict spatial distribution of deforestation and detects factors influencing forest degradation of Northern forests of Ilam province. For this purpose, effects of six factors including distance from road and settlement areas, forest fragmentation index, elevation, slope and distance from the forest edge on the forest deforestation are studied. In order to evaluate the changes in forest, images related to TM1988, ETM+2001 and ETM+2007 are processed and classified. There are two classes as, forest and non-forest in order to assess deforestation factors. The logistic regression method is used for modeling and estimating the spatial distribution of deforestation. The results show that about 19,294 ha from forest areas are deforested in the 19 years. Modeling results also indicate that more deforestation occurred in the fragmented forest cover and in the areas of proximity to forest/non forest edge. Furthermore, slope and distance from road and settlement areas had negative relationships with deforestation rates. Meanwhile, deforestation rate is decreased with increase in elevation. Finally, a simple spatial model is presented that is able to predict the location of deforestation by using logistic regression. The validation was also tested using ROC approach which was found to be 0.96.