The Influence of funds on the Organizational Performance of SMEs in the Tamale Metropolis of Ghana

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are critical to the economy's and industry's overall growth. However, in the long run, funding will be required to improve their performance, necessitating the need to fund their operations. This paper examined SMEs access to funds to finance their businesses and its effect on their performance in Tamale Metropolis. A Quantitative approach was used, and questionnaires were administered. The research data were collected from 92 respondents through a simple random sample technique. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyzed. The study found that the main source of funding for SMEs in the Tamale metropolis in Northern Ghana are: self, family and friends; funds sourced from these sources to a large extent did not have much effect on the performance of the SMEs. To enhance the SMEs opportunities to access funds from financial institutions, there is the need for trainings, workshops on business registrations, and entrepreneurship skills building. This will make them more attractive to financial agencies to lend them money to finance their businesses. Research paper Keywords: Funds; Small and Medium Scale Enterprise; SMEs Performance; Ghana Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Abubakari, A., Abdulai, M. S., & Adam, A. (2022). The Influence of funds on the Organizational Performance of SMEs in the Tamale Metropolis of Ghana. Journal of Entrepreneurship, Business and Economics, 10(1), 109–140

The comparison of the population rhinoceros beetle (Oryctes rhinoceros) in immature oil palm at replanting area and new open area, Ladang Fima Cendana, Terengganu / Muhammad Zul Adam Mohd Razak

Oil palm or its scientific name Eleais guineensis is one of the major crops in Malaysia that give high profit to country and largely contribute more to the Malaysia economy development. However there are various obstacles like pest and disease that limits the production of oil palm. Oryctes rhinoceros commonly known as the rhinoceros beetle is one of the dominant destructive pest that known to inflict serious damage on immature oil palm trees and cause significant yield loss of oil palm. Oryctes rhinoceros will readily migrate and infest an area of oil palm once new open area or replanting has conducted. This study focuses on the population of the beetle at Ladang Fima Cendana, Kemaman, Terengganu. The aggregation pheromone (ethyl-4-methyloctonoate) has been used during this study where it functions for mass trapping and monitoring beetles population. Pheromone trap was placed about 1 trap for every 5 hectares in immature oil palm for each area. The result obtained shows that there is no difference in result population of beetles in immature palm for both area (P > 0.05)

Developing a web-based system for inferential data analytics

Applied Thesis submitted to the Department of Computer Science, Ashesi University, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, April 2018.The rapid generation of data by businesses has created a unique and exciting opportunity for management and employees to explore relationships in their data and make informed decisions based on these insights. However, limited sets of tools exist for businesses with no programming and data analysis skills for them to explore this opportunity. This paper proposes a new and improved web-based platform based on a desktop application, INFER, developed by Songhai Group. This application takes into consideration the features and limitations of software tools for data analytics that are currently available. The proposed solution is an end-to-end data analytics platform that enables users to build inferential models from observed data

Imatinib in gastrointestinal stromal tumour: Northern Cancer Network experience

Imatinib treatment in metastatic or inoperable gastrointestinal stromal tumours (GIST) has shifted the paradigm of treatment of this disease. Successful clinical trials of imatinib led to rapid regulatory approval and, in England and Wales, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidance on use of this technology. NICE recommend detailed audit of their guidelines in clinical practice. This audit reflects that guidance and was designed to document the use of imatinib in routine clinical practice

Investigation of potential solar induced ventilation strategy in hot and humid climate

The use of solar energy in solar induced ventilation helps to enhance thestack ventilation, which is normally less efficient in hot humid climate due to the small temperature difference between the inside and outside of naturally ventilated buildings. This paper aims to examine a potential solar induced ventilation strategy for hot humid climate. There are two methods used, which are a literature survey and a preliminary test. The literature survey was executed on the Trombe wall, solar chimney and roof solar collector. This survey resulted in the combined roof solar collector and vertical stack as the most appropriate strategy. A preliminary test using a physical model was executed in the actual environmental conditions. The findings indicate that the proposed strategy attained the air temperature difference (Ti-To) of 8.5ºC for 633 W/m² solar radiation. This air temperature difference was more than the usual air temperature difference between the inside and outside of naturally ventilated buildings in Malaysia. Hence, the paper concludes that the proposed strategy is able to enhance the stack ventilation effect in hot and humid climat

Service Oriented Architecture Adoption: A Systematic Review

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has appeared as an absorbing architectural approach that empowers the available systems to reveal their performance in the act of services without creating important changes to the systems. This approach, due to its flexibility of adoption, has been widely appreciated by the businesses. Though there are many studies that depict successful factors of SOA, a few minor cases of failure have also been reported in the literature. In spite of the availability of rich material on SOA, there is no systematic literature review on the influential aspect of SOA adoption factors. Thus, this paper presents a systematic literature review of existing studies (from 2009 to 2015) related to the SOA adoption and its success and failure. The central purpose of the study is to focus on the existing issues and share the findings with researchers. Moreover, the findings of this paper would help the IT experts in organizations focus on the most important factors highlighted in this study, so they could decide whether it is advisable to adopt SOA in their context or not

Clusters of Glycemic Response to Oral Glucose Tolerance Tests Explain Multivariate Metabolic and Anthropometric Outcomes of Bariatric Surgery in Obese Patients

Glycemic responses to bariatric surgery are highly heterogeneous among patients and defining response types remains challenging. Recently developed data-driven clustering methods have uncovered subtle pathophysiologically informative patterns among patients without diabetes. This study aimed to explain responses among patients with and without diabetes to bariatric surgery with clusters of glucose concentration during oral glucose tolerance tests (OGTTs). We assessed 30 parameters at baseline and at four subsequent follow-up visits over one year on 154 participants in the Bialystok Bariatric Surgery Study. We applied latent trajectory classification to OGTTs and multinomial regression and generalized linear mixed models to explain differential responses among clusters. OGTT trajectories created four clusters representing increasing dysglycemias that were discordant from standard diabetes diagnosis criteria. The baseline OGTT cluster increased the predictive power of regression models by over 31% and aided in correctly predicting more than 83% of diabetes remissions. Principal component analysis showed that the glucose homeostasis response primarily occurred as improved insulin sensitivity concomitant with improved the OGTT cluster. In sum, OGTT clustering explained multiple, correlated responses to metabolic surgery. The OGTT is an intuitive and easy-to-implement index of improvement that stratifies patients into response types, a vital first step in personalizing diabetic care in obese subjects

Using computational fluid dynamics in the determination of solar collector orientation and stack height of a solar induced ventilation prototype

Stack ventilation in the hot and humid climate is inherently inefficient due to minimal air temperature differences between indoor and outdoor environment of a naturally ventilated building. Solar induced ventilation is a viable alternative in enhancing this stack ventilation. This paper aims to demonstrate investigations on the effective solar collector orientation and stack height for a solar induced ventilation prototype that utilizes roof solar collector and vertical stack. The orientation of the solar collector is significant as it determines the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the solar collector. Meanwhile, the height of the vertical stack influences the creation of the stack pressure in inducing air movement. Investigations were executed using a simulation modelling software called FloVENT. The validation of the simulation modelling against physical experiment indicated a good agreement between these two results. Analyses were executed on the air temperature increments inside the solar collector. A high increment of the air temperature resulted in the effective orientation. Meanwhile, the air temperature and mass flow rate of the various heights of the vertical stack were also analyzed. The findings concluded that the recommended orientation for the prototype’s solar collector is the west-facing orientation. It was also found that the higher the vertical stack, the lower the air temperature inside the stack would be, but with greater induced mass flow rate

Computer generated degenerative brain (DBrain) solution for people with memory loss and related impairements

People with dementia brain (DBrain) have acquired global impairments of the intellect, memory and personality. In Malaysia alone there are estimated 100,000 sufferers of dementia. Presently about 26.6 million people worldwide have dementia related diseases. By 2020, this is expected to rise to 34 million and 104 million by 2050.. The development of computer generated DBrain solution of pseudo-codes with expressions of natural gene sequences aims to explore other dementia-related novel genes and overcome the ethical and data protection issues The invention is the computer creation of artificial gene or pseudogene codes through a completed fundamental research funded by MOHE under FRGS 2007-2008. The invention is based on the phenomenon of recursive inter-molecular energy jumps between nucleotides. The molecular -mechanism approach attempts to represent the process of brain receptor proteins inhibiting neural transmission which may unravel decades of brain degeneration puzzles. The idea is to discover the novel receptor genes in the brain mitochondria that are responsible for modulating the inhibiting functions of a class of receptor proteins. Groups of the computer generated pseudo-gene sequences are found to have high fitness ratios of the natural gene motifs of animal and a human GABAR dementia related gene sequence. Patent for DBrain solution was filed in July 2009. The invention is being pre-commercialized by a local Industrial partner, Niche Frontiere a manufacturer of service robots through a MOSTI funded collaborative technofund project for the period 2009-2011. In this project more pseudo-gene sequences with high fitness ratios of natural DNA motifs will be generated by high speed computing grid of MIMOS-UTP and used by Niche-Frontiere’s diagnostic, therapeutic and treatment multi-agents for dementia people at the clinical and firm levels. Through this collaborative precommercialization project, the pseudo-gene sequences are also used by laboratories in USM and UTM to discover novel herbal drugs and inhibitor receptor proteins as on-line databases for the service robots