The New Public Management and its Challenges in Africa

The years of 1990s were the period of the spread of the so called new public management (NPM) in most African countries. These countries decided to adopt the new public management model as their administrative framework with expectation of getting high efficiency and effectiveness in their public sectors. However, due to various challenges confronting the reform process, new public management reforms have continued to be partially implemented in Africa. Never the less, since the adoption, some African countries have demonstrated improvement in this reform type while others have been driven completely into disappointing situation. Although new public management model seems to have taken a lead all over the world in achievement, in Africa it has been a different case. The program is still facing challenges that will need particular attention before significant success to be realized.  In order to tone down these challenges there should be deliberate efforts of taking into consideration of local context before implementing any outside based reform. This is why this paper also suggests for Africa to shift in new public management in the form of public value management. Keywords: Africa, new public management, public administration, public sector reform, public value managemen

Assessment of Selected Heavy Metal Concentrations in Selected Fresh Fruits in Eldoret Town, Kenya

This study assessed levels of selected heavy metals (Lead, Chromium and Cadmium) in oranges and mangoes sold in Eldoret town and their health implications to consumers. A total of one hundred and eighty (180) samples were collected for analysis from randomly selected market sites within Eldoret town. Samples were wet digested using a mixture of 1:3 (65% HCl: HNO3) and analyzed using Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer version 200. One Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to test the significance of selected heavy metal levels in consideration of market sites at 5% significance level. There was insignificant variance in mean chromium levels in mango fruits among market sites (f=2.1, f=3, p=0.10) with the highest mean level occurring at 2.43±0.24 mg/kg. Lead levels in orange fruits were significant (f=13.3, df=3, p=0.00) with the highest mean level occurring at 0.65±0.03 mg/kg. Cadmium levels were significant in mango fruits among market sites (f=6.5, df =3, p=0.00) with the highest level at 0.09±0.05 mg/kg. Risk Assessment in terms of values of Daily Intake of Metal (D.I.M) had chromium levels in mango fruits with the highest at 0.05mg/day, lead in orange fruits was at 0.02mg/day with the least D.I.M occurring in cadmium levels in mango fruits at 0.002mg/day. Mango and orange fruits sold in Eldoret town posed no health risks to consumers based on their D.I.M levels, as the values were within Provisional Daily Tolerable Intake standards of World Health Organization (WHO). The elevated chromium D.I.M levels in mango fruits in this study meant that environment in which mango fruits are grown were high in chromium content. There is need to initiate and sustain continued monitoring of heavy metals in fruits and food sold to consumers due to their different sources where contamination of heavy metals varies to ascertain food safety. Keywords: Daily Intake of Metal, Hazard Quotient and Heavy metal

Angiotensin I converting enzyme and kinin–hydrolyzing enzymes along the rabbit nephron

Angiotensin I converting enzyme and kinin–hydrolyzing enzymes along the rabbit nephron. Angiotensin I converting enzyme (ACE) and kininase activities were measured in various segments of the rabbit nephron. ACE was determined with tritiated hippuryl-glycylglycine as substrate. Lysyl-bradykinin (LBK) hydrolysis (kininase activity) was measured by radioimmunoassay. ACE was only found in the glomerulus and in the two parts of proximal tubule: the convoluted proximal tubule and the pars recta (PR). It was distributed along a concentration gradient which increased from the glomerulus to PR. Kininase activity was found in both proximal and distal parts of the nephron. Besides intense LBK-hydrolyzing activity in the proximal tubule, a kininase activity was also found in the medullary collecting tubule (MCT). Kininase activity in the glomerulus and the proximal tubule was completely inhibited by chelating agents. Captopril inhibited this activity only in the PR and at high concentrations (above 10-7 M). These results indicate that several types of enzymes other than ACE hydrolyze kinins in the glomerulus and in the proximal tubule. The contribution of ACE to kinin hydrolysis appears only minimal. The kininase activity found in MCT was different from ACE and other proximal tubule kininases because it was not inhibited by chelating agents. This kininase may play a physiological role in inactivating the kinins formed by kallikrein at or beyond the connecting tubule

Crowdsourcing for Speech: Economic, Legal and Ethical analysis

With respect to spoken language resource production, Crowdsourcing - the process of distributing tasks to an open, unspecified population via the internet - offers a wide range of opportunities: populations with specific skills are potentially instantaneously accessible somewhere on the globe for any spoken language. As is the case for most newly introduced high-tech services, crowdsourcing raises both hopes and doubts, certainties and questions. A general analysis of Crowdsourcing for Speech processing could be found in (Eskenazi et al., 2013). This article will focus on ethical, legal and economic issues of crowdsourcing in general (Zittrain, 2008a) and of crowdsourcing services such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (Fort et al., 2011; Adda et al., 2011), a major platform for multilingual language resources (LR) production

DTN based Management Framework for Green On/Off Networks

National audienceThe increasing cost of powering high performance networking infrastructure has led to the proposal of various energy saving schemes. The On/Off technique, being the most common energy saving scheme, consists of powering down partially or entirely a network infrastructure for energy saving purposes. Despite their capability to achieve great energy savings, On/Off networks experience high packet-loss rates due to the absence of reliability on packet delivery. Moreover, they cannot guarantee any response time to user applications. This paper presents the design and implementation of MFO2N; Experimental results show a correlation between offered quality of service and overall network power consumption, revealing that a trade-off should be made

Linux-based virtualization for HPC clusters

International audienceThere has been an increasing interest in virtualization in the HPC community, as it would allow to easily and efficiently share computing resources between users, and provide a simple solution for checkpointing. However, virtualization raises a number of interesting questions, on performance and overhead, of course, but also on the fairness of the sharing. In this work, we evaluate the suitability of KVM virtual machines in this context, by comparing them with solutions based on Xen. We also outline areas where improvements are needed, to provide directions for future works

Towards a Green and Sustainable Software

International audienceInformation and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are responsible around 2% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions [1]. On the other hand, the use of mobile devices (smartphone, tablet, etc.) is continually increasing. Due to the accessibility of the Internet and the cloud computing, users will use more and more software applications which will cause even an increasing effect on gas emission. Thus, an important research question is "how can we reduce or limit the energy consumption related to ICT and, in particular, related to software?" For a long time, proposed solutions focused only on the hardware design, however in recent years the software aspects have also become important. Our first objective is to compare the studies in the research area of energy efficient/green software. Relying on this survey, we will propose a methodology to measure the energy consumed by software at runtime

Beyond CPU: Considering Memory Power Consumption of Software

International audienceICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) are responsible around 2% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions (Gartner, 2007). And according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) recent reports, CO2 emissions due to ICTs are increasing widely. For this reason, many works tried to propose various tools to estimate the energy consumption due to software in order to reduce carbon footprint. However, these studies, in the majority of cases, takes into account only the CPU and neglects all others components. Whereas, the trend towards high-density packaging and raised memory involve a great increased of power consumption caused by memory and maybe memory can become the largest power consumer in servers. In this paper, we model and then estimate the power consumed by CPU and memory due to the execution of a software. Thus, we perform several experiments in order to observe the behavior of each component

A blockchain ontology for DApps development

Decentralized Applications, or DApps, provide distributed trusted applications that use blockchains. They are often composed of several services, such as transaction scalability protocols, decentralized storage and distributed computing solutions. In order to help formalize these applications, facilitate their development and improve their interoperability, we propose a novel blockchain Ontology focused on the concepts involving DApps. This ontology extends the existing EthOn ontology. It defines several key concepts related to DApps development, as well as the relations between these concepts. It features the formalization of known use cases and design patterns of blockchain technology through blockchain patterns. We use Semantic Web Rule language (SWRL) in order to define rules that express constraints on the formalized concepts. We then execute an inference engine and obtain new constraints on the properties of a defined DApp, such as its cost, based on the DApp characteristics and the services it uses. For illustration we show the inference of constraints between the Ethereum blockchain and its sidechain Polygon. We apply our research work in the field of blockchain video games. This application shows how to use the ontology to model DApps, and can be adapted to other fields.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio