Archives-December 

Terrorism in the 21^st century globally, has taken a dangerous and alarming dimension which has a catastrophic consequences on the economy of the affected state if not contained. Boko Haram a terrorist Islamic group in Nigeria whose name translates to western education is sin or taboo has become a major security challenge to the Nigerian state. The terrorist activities of this group has negatively affected the Nigerian economic development, which has been stagnated before now by the presence of the military in seat of power coupled with a culture of corruption which has almost become synonymous to the Nigerian state. This research article was embarked on to ex-ray the Nigerian Boko Haram Saga and it’s implication on Nigerian economic development. the study was subcategorized into introduction which established an over view of the theme, origin and background of Boko Haram, some of the Boko Haram Haram’s record of attacks on Nigeria state and economy, Nigerian economic development (a review), sociol-economic cum political implication of Boko Haram terrorist activities in Nigeria, Nigerian government effort to curb Boko haram Menace, Recommendations and conclusion.

Career is of immense important and plays vital role in life of an individual. In Pakistan mostly students don’t plan about their professional career during their studies and even if they plan, the planning is very vague and ambiguous. The aim of this study is to discuss the perception of business students about their career and explore the factors which influence their choice. In order to achieve this end, 300 business students were randomly selected from Lahore Business School. The data was collected through structured questionnaire. Data is analyzed by using SPSS, simple descriptive statistics, mean, standard deviation and frequency distribution is used for analysis. It had been revealed that majority of students like to choose finance as their career furthermore results showed that the most influential factor was personal interest (Mean = 4.15 & S.D=1.04), followed by Team Work Skills (Mean = 4.10 & S.D= 0.97).

Two  appropriate post-tax petroleum exploration models were constructed and tested for three hypothetical field profiles (i.e low, medium and high volume fields) from a development economics perspective and the proposed tax regimes tested for both oil price and development cost ($/bbl). 40% government participation through the international oil company was considered in both cases. The resulted government takes for the first proposal are 76.89%, 83.07%, and 86.94% for low, medium and high volume fields respectively. Respective percentages for the second proposal are 76.20%, 80.03% and 85.43%. These values are above the average global take of 64% but within the range of 40% to 87% for most world oil producers. Analysis of the models indicates an increase in government take as the development costs ($/bbl) increases but a decrease when the oil price ($/bb) increases, which shows regressivity. However, the second regime shows more neutrality, efficiency and focused stability, though still maintaining high government take. This contributes to more attraction for investment from both government and investors perspective. Thus, the second fiscal proposal is recommended to the Nigerian government, considering its incentives.

The entomopathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana is a promising biocontrol agent against coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus hampei in coffee. The fungus conidial survival was influenced by both environment and agrochemicals normally used to protect crop plants. The present study evaluates the fungitoxic effect of commonly used chemical insecticides (endosulfan, chlorpyriphos, dimethoate and quinalphos) and fungicides (bordeaux, hexaconazole and triadimefon) on germination, vegetative growth and sporulation of B. bassiana. The insecticides and fungicides were tested at three concentrations (Field Recommendation (FR), half FR, and twice FR). All the tested concentrations inhibited the germination (9.0-81.19% and 19.3-100%), vegetative growth (0.5-62.9% and 37.1-100%) and sporulation (7.0-99.9% and 99-100%) of B. bassiana by the insecticides and fungicides respectively, but dimethoate exhibited minimum inhibitory effect. Dimethoate showed better compatibility to B. bassiana in all the three concentrations. As dimethoate is safer to biological control agent, could be used as an integrated pest management in coffee.

The Efficiency, Performance and Activity of a RDBMS must be consistent. This consistency is achieved through Concurrency Control. Concurrency control deals with the issues involved with allowing multiple people simultaneous access to shared entities, be they objects, data records, or some other representation. The Concurrency Control mechanism ensures that the database maintains its consistency. Concurrency control of distributed transactions requires a distributed synchronization algorithm, which has to ensure that concurrent transactions are not only serializable at each site where they execute, but that they are also globally serializable. The advanced protocols put forward are focused on increasing the level of concurrency and simultaneously decreasing the rate of transaction restarts. Some protocols also compromise consistency in order to achieve concurrency. Several Concurrency Control algorithms have been suggested and implemented and used in a variety of real world applications. This article reveals the analysis of various Concurrency Control Techniques on the database systems and further discusses some of the Hybrid Techniques, which provide efficient Concurrency Control on database systems.

This paper aims to examine drivers and its moderating variable that influencing consumers’ purchase intention on green personal care products. Total of 137 completed and usable set of questionnaires was obtained from white collars employees that having knowledge about the availability of green personal care products that working in Penang, Malaysia. Data were analyzed by employing multiple regression analysis on testing on the independent variables (drivers) to dependent variables (purchase intention) and hierarchical regression analysis for moderating relationship between the drivers and purchase intention. The results revealed that environmental attitudes and self efficacy were found to be the factors that drive the purchase intention of consumers on purchasing of green personal care products. In addition, it was found that willingness of consumers to pay more on green personal care products was moderating the relationship between environmental attitudes and purchase intention. The findings created an understanding on what are the factors that influencing consumer purchase intention on green personal care product and serve as the information for marketers to plan for the marketing program that able to enlarge the market size of the said products.

Companies have been collecting data for decades, building massive data warehouses in which to store it. Even though this data is available, very few companies have been able to realize the actual value stored in it. The question these companies are asking is how to extract this value. The answer is Data mining. Data mining, the extraction of hidden predictive information from large databases, is a powerful new technology with great potential to help companies focus on the most important information in their data warehouses. There are many technologies available to data mining practitioners, including Artificial Neural Networks, Regression, and Decision Trees. Many practitioners are wary of Neural Networks due to their black box nature, even though they have proven themselves in many situations. In our current research we are attempting to compare the aforementioned technologies and determine if Neural Networks outperform more traditional statistical techniques. This paper is an overview of neural networks and questions their position as a preferred tool by data mining practitioners.

Digital comic was developed by students of the Bachelor of creative technology with honours in multimedia elective and visual communication elective. Students developed the comic digital through the process learning which use studio based learning approach is. The implementation of Studio Based Learning approach was been enhance by project based learning approach. Students had been asked to establish their company by group. All activities through the learning process was been activated based on companies activities. Hence, corporate culture will be embedded into students. Digital comic is a big project which is role as a final product. An effort to produce comic digital, students will be able to adopted soft skills attribute and entrepreneur attributes. Therefore, produced digital comic with intelligent collaboration among strategic group such as Faculty of Creative Technology and Heritage, MDeC, Icon, Pekartun, Pekomik and a various of related agency will be a effective platform to generate techno-entrepreneurship in education.

The dispersion of bioactive glass, (BG), sample was studied using cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB). An array of experimental techniques like adsorption, zeta potential and turbidity were used to achieve this goal. Turbidity was used as a parameter to reflect the degree of dispersion where a higher value of turbidity represents higher dispersion efficiency. Dispersion of the BG particles was largely affected by CTAB concentration and the solution pH. Dispersion of the BG particles was increased with increasing of CTAB concentration till the CMC of CTAB is reached. Beyond the CMC , the BG particles become hydrophilic causing a decrease in glass dispersion. On the other hand, dispersion of the BG particles was affected with the solution pH. It was increased with increasing pH till pH 9. At higher pH, dispersion was decreased where the formation of micelles is favored.

Domain Moderator (DM13) was developed by Che Ghani Che Kob in year 2013 as a part of his Education Doctorate (EdD) research instrument to evaluate engineering students learning and lecturers teaching domains. Domain Moderator is an education instrument to measure the domains of Engineering Learning & Teaching Domains (ELTD). The ELTD model comes out to enhance the whole process of Education Measurement & Evaluation Methods. The data’s of pilot survey among 26 lecturers by using DM13 shown that among engineering lecturer are (61.5% ) at active domain,(38.5%) at reflective domain, (73.1%) at sensing domain, (26.9%) at intuitive domain, (92.3%) at visual domain, (7.7%) at verbal domain, (61.5%) at sequential, and (38.5%) at global domain. This data’s collection hopes can be use as a moderator among engineering lecturers to success in Outcome Based Education (OBE) at Polytechnics & College Community, KPM, MALAYSIA.