Earticle

Inefficiency in Shea butter marketing is one of the major challenging phases in Shea value chain. Specifically, the research work analyzes the structure and performance of Shea butter market and the constraints associated with the marketing of Shea butter within the sampled communities in Borgu and Bosso local government areas of Niger state, Nigeria. Four communities each were purposively selected from two local government areas of zone II and III of Niger state, Nigeria, 41% of the total number of stratified Shea butter marketers of rural buyers, wholesalers and retailer in each village were randomly sampled to whom the questionnaires were administered; this draw the actual sample size of one hundred and two (102) Shea butter marketers used for the study. Data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Gini Coefficient (Lorenz curve), marketing efficiency and margin. The study revealed that more than 90% of those involved in the marketing of Shea butter were women and more than 70% were married while 48% of the respondents had no formal education. The result also revealed an equal distribution of Shea butter amongst the three categories of the market participants (rural buyers, wholesalers and retailer) with Gini coefficients values of 0.077, 0.083 and 0.12 respectively. The marketing efficiency of rural buyer, wholesaler and retailer were 788%, 765%, and 667% while the marketing margin were 13.4%, 12.7% and 9.8% respectively. The major problems faced by Shea butter marketers were lack of standard butter measurement, poor access to credit, poor storage facilities and transportation means, low and unstable market prices. Effort to mitigate these problems entails Shea product certification and quality control, improvement of transportation means, provision of credit and market facilities, these will not only provide ease way of marketing of Shea butter but will also provide a practical, market-based incentive for marketers in the provision of substantial income to support their basic needs.

The use of the management information systems has become necessary for any organization to improve efficiency, productivity , and improve performance in general. The field of management information systems in Yemeni companies still dealing with issues in adopting the technologies and success factors. This study attempts to focus deeply on the factors that lead to successful adoption of management information systems (MIS) in Yemeni organizations. This paper investigates the relationship between technological factors (system quality, information quality, and service quality), organizational factors (top management support, and user training), and people factors (computer self-efficacy, and user experience) with organizational performance, focusing on people who are always associated with MIS in their work. This study found that there are positive correlated relationship between system quality, information quality, service quality, top management support, user training, computer self-efficacy, and user experience with organizational performance at Sabafon Company in Yemen.

Telecommunication technology introduces people with a new modern, virtual and portable digital life. Mobile banking is one of the newest applications of telecommunication technology. In this technology mediated world, ecommerce is one of the important sectors to globalize trade. In ecommerce world, existing security technologies are already proved to online fund transfer and products delivery. All of the existing technology is based on online banking. But in developing countries like Bangladesh where technologies are not so fast and lots of people have the lack of trust on online banking. There is a simple, reliable and convenient ecommerce should be introduced to include all level of people. In this paper, an overview of the current fund transfer technology and its security has been elucidated. Based on the telecommunication technology, a new complete architecture for ecommerce trade, fund transfer and confirmation about products receiving has been proposed. In the proposal, fund transfer has been done through mobile banking. As the mobile banking doesn’t need any internet connection, it has a great advantage over rural customers of the developing countries. Moreover, the proposed architecture will work together with online banking and the secured third party for the better convenience.

Data mining is vast field for mining knowledge in various fields of life. Crime mining is one of the applications focused here. Credit card and web based crime are increasingly as more technologies are rising high. To deal and overcome fraud clustering and classification techniques are implemented. Framework and process models are designed that provide user results, graphs and trees that help user to find criminals without any complex computation.

Almost every business uses SMS for various reasons to increase sales and brand exposure and Mass alert to everyone. 80% of cell phone users carry their phone all the time. Sending a text message to their cell phones is the perfect way to alert them of any urgent information, such as a change of appointment, or product ready for pickup etc. Mass alert are an ideal way for school districts to send alerts to parents regarding school closings, changes in schedules etc. The short message service (SMS) is one of the highly used and well-tried mobile services with global availability within all GSM/CDMA networks. The existing SMS is limited to the transmission of secure plain text between different mobile phone subscribers and server for different purpose. SMS does not have any built-in procedure to authenticate the text and offer security for the text transmitted as data [5], because most of the applications for mobile devices are designed and developed without taking security into consideration [6] [7], But we can use SMS service to protect our financial transaction by enable or disable the account apply some security on SMS. It will help to control fraud on financial traction by ATM or online fund transfer. In this paper detail an overview of SMS transmission and how to apply security on SMS to transfer from one point to another point.

This paper shows the implementation of an artificial intelligent chatterbot with whom human can interact by speaking to it and receive a response by chatterbot using its speech synthesizer. Objective of this paper is to show application of chatterbot that can be used in various fields like education, healthcare, and route assistance. It is statistical model and chatterbot is based on AIML (Artificial Intelligent Markup Language) structure for training the model and uses Microsoft voice synthesizer for providing speech recognition system and natural language processing.

The aim of this work is to design and simulate an armature and field control systems using state feedback controller based on bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) technique for controlling the speed of separately excited dc motor (SEDM). The controller's performances have been optimized based on social foraging behavior of Escherichia (E. Coli) bacteria. The state feedback controller's parameters (controller's gains K1 & K2) are tuned using foraging strategy. The SEDM is loading for different loads ranging from no-load to full-load to test the controller behavior and robustness for wide range of loadings variations. First the SEDM is simulated feeding back the armature current and angular speed (armature control method), second the SEDM is simulated with feeding back the field current and angular speed (field control method). For both controlling methods the controller's gains are tuned using BFO.