Assessment of Poverty Levels in Selected Districts of Rural Ghana

Major studies and statistical evidence on the subject of poverty in Ghana have indicated poverty is on the decline but agree that there exists geographical imbalance in the distribution. The perceptions of the poor on formal poverty reduction institutions are largely that of ineffectiveness and irrelevance in their lives as government poverty reduction activities contributes little in their struggles to survive and rarely help them to escape poverty. As a result, the study made an independent assessment of poverty levels in some selected districts of Ghana.The three dimensions of poverty were considered in the assessment process using structured questionnaires and in-depth interviews. The FGT method of poverty assessment was paramount in indicating the level, the severity and inequality among the poor. The result shows that while national poverty is declining geographical imbalances in poverty do not only exist but is worsening. Purposive projects to lift the poor in these areas are highly recommended. Keywords:  Poverty levels, Dimensions of poverty, FGT Method, Selected Districts, Ghana

Effect of Problem-Based Learning on Students’ Achievement in Chemistry

The study investigated the effect of problem-based learning on students’ achievement in chemistry.   Learners’ low achievement in Science in South Africa has been a concern to government, stakeholders, school principals and parents over the years as a result of poor teaching techniques, students’ attitudes, lack of teaching and learning materials, teachers’ pedagogical skills etc. Several studies, for instance Monitoring Learner Achievement (MLA) project conducted by UNESCO and UNICEF have shown no improvement in the performance of South African students in Mathematics and Science. Quasi-experimental design was employed for the study. 101 equivalent students were selected for the study using pre-test. The control group was taught with the traditional lecture method whiles the experimental group received instruction with PBL. Independent T-test was used for the analysis. Results showed that there was significant difference (p < 0.05) in chemistry achievement of students between control and the experimental group while there was no significant differences in the before the study. The results show that PBL is an effective way for to teach chemistry so as to improve students’ critical thinking and problem solving skills. Keywords: Chemistry, Problem-Based Learning, Critical thinking, Traditional lecture, Achievement

Prevalence of red blood cell antibodies among transfused patients at Komfo Anokye teaching (Kath) hospital, Ghana

Red blood cell (RBC) alloimmunisation is a common problem in transfused patients because of the possibility of haemolytic reaction and limited availability of compatible blood. In highincome countries, pre-transfusion antibody screening is performed routinely. In Ghana, patients are transfused with ABO Rh ‘D’ compatible blood without screening for immune antibodies. We therefore studied the prevalence and specificities of RBC antibodies in transfused patients at Komfo Anokye Teaching hospital, Ghana. The study was cross-sectional, involving previously transfused patients who required another transfusion. Participants’ basic data on demography and transfusion history were recorded. Blood samples were screened and subsequently typed for RBC antibodies using a column gel agglutination test. A total of 106 transfused patients, 52 male and 54 females were enrolled. The patients had previously received a median of 4 RBC units (range 1-14). Of these, ten patients (9.4%) had 11 RBC alloantibodies, whose specificities were 2 anti-K; 2 anti-C; one each of anti-D, -E, -M, and -S; and 3 were pan-reactive. The number of transfusion episodes was significantly associated with the rate of alloimmunisation (p=0.000). In conclusion the overall alloimmunisation rate in the study was 9.4% and this was significantly associated with increasing number of transfusion episodes. Antibodies were mainly directed against antigens in the Rhesus system and K antigen. We recommend that antibody screening be incorporated into routine pre-transfusion testing procedures in Ghana. Keywords: Alloimmunisation, multi transfusion, Alloantibod

Climate Change Awareness and Coping Strategies of Cocoa Farmers in Rural Ghana

The study assessed the perception of farmers on the awareness, causes and impact of climate change on their farming activities. The study further identifies and describes the various coping strategies adopted by farmers and ways of improving upon them to effectively tackle change in climatic conditions. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, such as frequencies, and percentages. The other key technique that was employed to address the objective includes the Chi square analysis. The findings indicates that, the ( ) calculated (25.846) is greater than critical (18.307); implying that, respondents (cocoa farmers) in all the cocoa growing regions in the country are much aware of climate change and its impact on their farming activities ranging from the time of planting cocoa to the time of harvesting and drying cocoa beans. Main causes of climate change by farmers’ perception include God’s plan signifying the end of time, usage of heavy machines on land, air and water, deforestation, indiscriminate bush burning before farming or in search of game, farming alongside river bodies and illegal mining. Amongst the coping strategies identified include the soil fertility strategy, shade management strategy, land preparation strategy, farm size strategy and lining and pegging strategy.  It evident that the existing agencies and government bodies have not been responsive enough in addressing the climatic problems, forecasting skills and opportunities facing cocoa farmers as crucial factors of risk posed by climate change. The study advocates that government and stakeholders should put up educational programmes tailored to meet the climatic information needs of farmers especially the causes to enable them cope with the emerging challenges to enhance their production. This could be realized through effective extension services. Keywords: Cocoa Farmers, Climate Change, Chi square, Coping strategies, Rural Ghana.

Cyber threat intelligence for improving cyber supply chain security

Cyber supply chain (CSC) systems provide operational efficiency and business continuity due to the integrated nature of various network system nodes. Such integration has made the overall system vulnerable to various cyber attacks and malware propagation is one of the common attacks for CSC. Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) provides an organization the capability to identify, gather, analyze threats and the associated risks so that CSC organization can forecast the existing and future threat trends and manage the cybersecurity risk in a proactive manner. A threat actor may attack the system and propagate a malware. The purpose is to manipulate, alter, or change delivery mechanisms. It is imperative to integrate CTI into the existing cybersecurity practice to detect and understand the threat actor's intents and motive. In our previous paper, we used threat analysis gathering to provide us an understanding of the adversaries' capabilities, actions, and intents. This paper contributes to improving the cybersecurity of CSC by using CTI. In particular, we extend our previous work which identifies and analysis CSC attacks and adopts CTI approach to understand the attack trends so that appropriate control can determine proactively. We use the malware a smart grid case study as CSC context to demonstrate our approach. The result demonstrations how CTI approach is applied to assist in preventing cyberattacks and to disseminate threat information sharing

Efficiency of Listed Banks Operations and Stock Price Movements

Banks' efficiency is linked to stock performance; literature from Ghana on the subject is that most banks are inefficient. What is not clear is whether this inefficiency translates into affecting stock price movements. Therefore, the study examines the effect of efficiency of listed banks operations on stock price movements in Ghana utilizing annual data from 2013-2017 for five banks. The banks' input and output variables were used to estimate the efficiency scores, within the Data Envelopment techniques. The results reveal that, the input and output variables accounted for about 80.5% of the banks' profitability and 92.5% of the banks' cost. The results indicated that, changes in profit efficiency have a significant positive impact on stock returns. However, a significant but negative effect of cost efficiency on stock returns was found. Thus, policy makers should encourage banks to operate efficiently in order to make effective capital allocation decisions. Keywords: Banks Efficiency, Stock Price Movements, Data Envelopment Analysis JEL Classifications:  C23, G14, G21, G32 DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/ijefi.8392

Topological Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Multilayer Blockchain Networks

Motivated by the recent surge of criminal activities with cross-cryptocurrency trades, we introduce a new topological perspective to structural anomaly detection in dynamic multilayer networks. We postulate that anomalies in the underlying blockchain transaction graph that are composed of multiple layers are likely to also be manifested in anomalous patterns of the network shape properties. As such, we invoke the machinery of clique persistent homology on graphs to systematically and efficiently track evolution of the network shape and, as a result, to detect changes in the underlying network topology and geometry. We develop a new persistence summary for multilayer networks, called stacked persistence diagram, and prove its stability under input data perturbations. We validate our new topological anomaly detection framework in application to dynamic multilayer networks from the Ethereum Blockchain and the Ripple Credit Network, and demonstrate that our stacked PD approach substantially outperforms state-of-art techniques.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures, 7 table

Evaluation of attention-based LSTM and Bi-LSTM networks for abstract text classification in systematic literature review automation.

Systematic Review (SR) presents the highest form of evidence in research for decision and policy-making. Nonetheless, the structured steps involved in carrying out SRs make it demanding for reviewers. Many studies have projected the abstract screening stage in the SR process to be the most burdensome for reviewers, thus automating this stage with artificial intelligence (AI). However, majority of these studies focus on using traditional machine learning classifiers for the abstract classification. Thus, there remain a gap to explore the potential of deep learning techniques for this task. This study seeks to bridge the gap by exploring how LSTM and Bi-LSTM models together with GloVe for vectorisation can accelerate this stage. As a further aim to increase precision while sustaining a recall >= 95% due to precision-recall trade-off, attention mechanics is added to these classifiers. The final experimental results obtained showed that Bi-LSTM with attention has the capacity to expedite citation screening

Cyber resilience in supply chain system security using machine learning for threat predictions

Purpose Cyber resilience in cyber supply chain (CSC) systems security has become inevitable as attacks, risks and vulnerabilities increase in real-time critical infrastructure systems with little time for system failures. Cyber resilience approaches ensure the ability of a supply chain system to prepare, absorb, recover and adapt to adverse effects in the complex CPS environment. However, threats within the CSC context can pose a severe disruption to the overall business continuity. The paper aims to use machine learning (ML) techniques to predict threats on cyber supply chain systems, improve cyber resilience that focuses on critical assets and reduce the attack surface. Design/methodology/approach The approach follows two main cyber resilience design principles that focus on common critical assets and reduce the attack surface for this purpose. ML techniques are applied to various classification algorithms to learn a dataset for performance accuracies and threats predictions based on the CSC resilience design principles. The critical assets include Cyber Digital, Cyber Physical and physical elements. We consider Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes and Random Forest classification algorithms in a Majority Voting to predicate the results. Finally, we mapped the threats with known attacks for inferences to improve resilience on the critical assets. Findings The paper contributes to CSC system resilience based on the understanding and prediction of the threats. The result shows a 70% performance accuracy for the threat prediction with cyber resilience design principles that focus on critical assets and controls and reduce the threat. Research limitations/implications Therefore, there is a need to understand and predicate the threat so that appropriate control actions can ensure system resilience. However, due to the invincibility and dynamic nature of cyber attacks, there are limited controls and attributions. This poses serious implications for cyber supply chain systems and its cascading impacts. Practical implications ML techniques are used on a dataset to analyse and predict the threats based on the CSC resilience design principles. Social implications There are no social implications rather it has serious implications for organizations and third-party vendors. Originality/value The originality of the paper lies in the fact that cyber resilience design principles that focus on common critical assets are used including Cyber Digital, Cyber Physical and physical elements to determine the attack surface. ML techniques are applied to various classification algorithms to learn a dataset for performance accuracies and threats predictions based on the CSC resilience design principles to reduce the attack surface for this purpose

Early ontogeny of the African bony-tongue (Heterotis niloticus) and the effect of Artemia and rotifer live feeds on larval digestive enzyme activity and performance

High larval and fry mortality has been a major challenge to the commercial culture of the African bony-tongue (Heterotis niloticus). Research indicates inadequate feeding to be a possible cause of the high mortality rates of larvae/fry grown in captivity. An experiment was conducted to first describe the developmental stages of H. niloticus eggs and larvae until schooling, 6 days after hatching (DAH), at 26°C. The morphological development, survival, growth (weight gain and length), and swimming behavior of the larvae were monitored. A follow-up feeding trial was conducted with H. niloticus fry from 6 to 27 DAH involving four treatments: feeding with Artemia nauplii; a combined feed of 50% Artemia nauplii and 50% rotifers (w/w); feeding with rotifers; and no feeding. The activities of three digestive enzymes (trypsin, lipase, and amylase) were assessed in fry exposed to the live feed treatments. At hatching, the larvae had a large, vascularized yolk sac filled with yolk platelets, which occupied approximately one-third of the total body length of the abdominal cavity. Yolk platelet reabsorption started at 1 DAH and was complete at 6 DAH. Metamorphosis was completed at 6 DAH, and schooling behavior was observed. For the feeding trial, the fry that received Artemia nauplii underwent the fastest development until 27 DAH. Similarly, the survival rate was considerably higher in fry fed with Artemia nauplii than in those that received a combination of Artemia nauplii and rotifers or only rotifers. Overall, the survival rates for fry fed with Artemia nauplii and larvae co-fed were 72.7% ± 0.9% and 41.2% ± 3.3%, respectively. Fry did not survive until 27 DAH in the rotifer-fed and unfed treatment groups. Digestive enzyme activity differed significantly (p< 0.05) between treatments and sampling dates. All digestive enzymes were detectable at the onset of mouth opening (5 DAH) and fluctuated through the 7 and 9 DAH. Lower enzyme activity was observed when the fry were subjected to starvation or the rotifer treatment. Results indicate that Artemia nauplii is the best live feed organism for H. niloticus larviculture