Attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control on entrepreneurial intention of Nigerian postgraduates in UUM

The study used descriptive quantitative survey in order to examine the entrepreneurial intention among Nigerian postgraduate students of Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) in relation to attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control. Data of the study were collected through a survey questionnaire of 156 Nigerian postgraduate candidates, covering masters (50) and PhD (106) students who are studying under the College of Business, College of Arts and Sciences and College of Legal, Government and International studies. Descriptive analysis has been used to give an insight on the respondent profiles, while inferential statistics have been used to make conclusions. Then, reliability test was performed using the cronbach Alpha method which shows all variables are reliable with a value of > 0.80. Later, correlation and VIF analysis were derived with result of Pearson correlation having < 0.9 value and VIF having < 10 indicating that the data is free from multicollinearity issue. Regression analysis was also used to determine the relationship and predictive capability of the variables to entrepreneurship intention. The findings showed that attitude towards entrepreneurship (β =.475, p < .000), and perceived behavioral control (β = .349, p < .000) are positively and significantly related to entrepreneurial intention among UUM Nigerian postgraduate students. However, subjective norm, is insignificant to entrepreneurial intention (β = .112, p > .051). Considering the Beta values, attitude is the strongest factor that influences the entrepreneurial intention among UUM Nigerian postgraduate students. The Nigerian government is therefore recommended to make more effort in redesigning its entrepreneurship development policies to fit the findings of this study

Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Ride Sharing Organization for Transferable and Non-Transferable Services

Ride-sharing allows multiple persons to share their trips together in one vehicle instead of using multiple vehicles. This can reduce the number of vehicles in the street, which consequently can reduce air pollution, traffic congestion and transportation cost. However, a ride-sharing organization requires passengers to report sensitive location information about their trips to a trip organizing server (TOS) which creates a serious privacy issue. In addition, existing ride-sharing schemes are non-flexible, i.e., they require a driver and a rider to have exactly the same trip to share a ride. Moreover, they are non-scalable, i.e., inefficient if applied to large geographic areas. In this paper, we propose two efficient privacy-preserving ride-sharing organization schemes for Non-transferable Ride-sharing Services (NRS) and Transferable Ride-sharing Services (TRS). In the NRS scheme, a rider can share a ride from its source to destination with only one driver whereas, in TRS scheme, a rider can transfer between multiple drivers while en route until he reaches his destination. In both schemes, the ride-sharing area is divided into a number of small geographic areas, called cells, and each cell has a unique identifier. Each driver/rider should encrypt his trip's data and send an encrypted ride-sharing offer/request to the TOS. In NRS scheme, Bloom filters are used to compactly represent the trip information before encryption. Then, the TOS can measure the similarity between the encrypted trips data to organize shared rides without revealing either the users' identities or the location information. In TRS scheme, drivers report their encrypted routes, an then the TOS builds an encrypted directed graph that is passed to a modified version of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to search for an optimal path of rides that can achieve a set of preferences defined by the riders

Factors Affecting the Entrepreneurial Intention of PhD Candidates: A study of Nigerian International Students of UUM

The increase number of unemployment and understanding of the importance of entrepreneurship in job creation among scholars and policy makers has led to the postulation that entrepreneurial intentions would spur entrepreneurship activities. This paper examines the entrepreneurial intention of Nigerian PhD candidates due to the lack of studies on the connection between entrepreneurship and the PhD candidates. Studying the entrepreneurial intent of the PhD candidates will, therefore, be very important considering their knowledgeability and potentialities. This is because, entrepreneurship represents the opportunity to spawn employment, wealth, and revenue. A survey data of 130 usable questionnaires were conducted and the data were analyzed using SPSS. The finding reveals the sufficiency of the TPB in predicting the entrepreneurial intentions of the PhD’s. A significant positive relationship was found between attitude, subjective norm and perceived behaviour control on entrepreneurial intentions. The Policy implication and direction of future studies were discussed. Keywords: Theory of Planned Behaviour, attitude, subjective norm, perceived behaviour control, entrepreneurial intentions, and Nigeria

THE SMART CITY INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT & MONITORING

The smart city infrastructure is the introductory step for establishing the overall smart city framework and architecture. Very few smart cities are recently established across the world. Some examples are: Dubai, Malta, Kochi (India), Singapore. The scope of these cities is mainly limited to construct a technology park converting the industrial real estate to state of the art information technology using the evolution in the telecom and IP networks including insignificant asset management automation system. The development background is to create an operational platform that would manage the power consumption and operational resources in order to reduce the overall running operational cost. This paper will debate the smart infrastructure development framework and the surveying positional accuracy of locating the assets as a base of the smart city development architecture integrated with all the facilities and systems related to the smart city framework. The paper will discuss also the main advantages of the proposed architecture including the quantifiable and non quantifiable benefits.Smart Infrastructure, GIS, Smart City, Geopsatial application, Infrastructure Development, Infrastructure Monitoring.

Examining the Personality of Arthur Fleck in Joker 2019: The Shift From an Innocent Man Into a Supervillain

Todd Phillips’ film Joker, a 2019 psychological thriller, has displayed the main character, Arthur Fleck, as a perplexing, eccentric character. Arthur appears to be a poor, marginalized man at first glance. But as the plot progresses and we witness life from Arthur’s perspective, we’re left questioning whether he’s a good man, a bad man, or just schizophrenic. In this research, Arthur’s perplexing personality will be examined using Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. The study aims to uncover Arthur’s true personality and his shift from an innocent man into a supervillain by analyzing his Id, ego, and superego. The method used to study Arthur’s character dimensions is the descriptive qualitative method, by watching the movie and reading the script thoroughly. The study revealed that Arthur suffers from mental illnesses that affected how he was treated and that the tough circumstances Arthur has been through have shaped him into becoming the Joker.

Effectiveness of Web-Based Virtual Learning Environments in Business Education: Focusing on Basic Skills Training for Information Technology.

Calls for transforming the learning industries and revolutionizing business education are being answered by a proliferation of virtual learning environments, capitalizing on ever-growing and universal Internet-related technologies. This dissertation describes research investigating the effectiveness of web-based virtual environments by comparing traditional and information technology enhanced learning environments. A conceptual framework is proposed contrasting the effectiveness of these two environments across two learning models---the objectivist and the constructivist. Although technology may serve as a moderator that enhances the implementation of certain features of a learning model, there is a consensus that the learning model---not the technology---is the primary cause of learning. Theory predicts that higher levels of learner control will lead to more effective learning. Control and flexibility, among other advantages offered to the learner in virtual environments, lead us to propose that such environments are more effective than traditional environments regardless of the learning model employed. Furthermore, it is proposed that virtual environments are even more effective with the constructivist model, because of the better match between the characteristics of the virtual environments and the assumptions of the constructivist model, as compared to the objectivist model. The effectiveness of the learning environment is measured in terms of self-efficacy, performance and satisfaction. A field experiment was set up to test the components of the proposed research model with 192 business undergraduate students in an introductory Information Technology course. In this research, several hypotheses comparing students\u27 performance, satisfaction and self-efficacy in both traditional and virtual learning environments were evaluated. The results of hypotheses testing indicated that subjects in the virtual environment have reported higher levels of self-efficacy in both learning models. However, there was no statistically significant difference in performance between the two environments. Another interesting result was that subjects in the virtual environment, despite showing higher levels of self-efficacy, were less satisfied with the learning environment. The findings of this study may improve our understanding of the implications when virtual environments are implemented. As we prepare to enter the third millennium, web-based virtual learning environments present great and exciting opportunities for both academia and business communities