Mobile Commerce and Applications: An Exploratory Study and Review

Mobile commerce is enabling the development of additional revenue streams for organizations through the delivery of chargeable mobile services. According to the European Information Technology Observatory, the total amount of revenue generated by mobile commerce was reported to be less than {\pounds}9 million in the United Kingdom in 2001. By 2005 this had, at least, doubled and more recent industry forecasts project significant global growth in this area. Mobile commerce creates a range of business opportunities and new revenue streams for businesses across industry sectors via the deployment of innovative services, applications and associated information content. This paper presents a review of mobile commerce business models and their importance for the creation of mobile commerce solutions.Comment: Journal of Computing online at https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing

Context Based Knowledge Management in Healthcare: An EA Approached

While an enterprise architectural approach is appropriate for business and IT alignment it also has potential with respect to the design and implementation of healthcare applications by effective representation of healthcare processes. Our research is to develop an enterprise architectural framework for managing contextual knowledge by exploiting object location deduction technologies in healthcare processes that involve the movement of patients. Such a framework is intended to facilitate healthcare managers in adopting location deduction technologies for patient care resulting in improvements in clinical process management and healthcare services

Bacteriocin-mediated inhibition of some common pathogens by wild and mutant Lactobacillus species and in vitro amplification of bacteriocin encoding genes

Lactobacilli are the most common probiotics used in food and other industries because of their capability of producing bacteriocins. Bacteriocins are compounds that are used to kill pathogenic microorganisms. As most bacteria have become resistant to synthetic antibacterial tools, the importance of using probiotics as antibacterial agents has increased. This work was done to check the bacteriocin effect on some common pathogens and the influence of mutation on the bacteriocin activity of Lactobacilli was also investigated. Four strains were isolated, identified from meat and pickles samples via culturing methods, staining, biochemical tests, and ribotyping. Preliminary tests, including Gram staining and catalase test, were done for the confirmation of Lactobacillus species. All strains were gram-positive and catalase-negative. Antibacterial activity was checked against Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus thuringiensis, Escherichia coli, and Salmonella enteritis via agar well diffusion method. The mutations were done using ethidium bromide and the influence of wild and mutants were also checked. Interestingly, mutants developed more virulence than wild ones. It was also observed that they all were sensitive to pepsin. Protein estimation was done via Bradford method. Ribotyping of GCU-W-PS1 revealed 99 % homology with Lactobacillus plantarum and GCU-W-MS1 to Lactobacillus curvatus (99 % homology). Curvacin A, sakacin P, and plantaricin A genes were also amplified using specific primers. Gene sequence showed the presence of curvacin A gene in GCU-W-MS1. It was concluded that lactic acid bacteria could be used as antibacterial tools against common pathogens

Cellular Services Packages and their Impact on Social Values of Youth

Youth plays a significant role in building of the nation and in the development of a country. Their adoption, aspiration, and objective lead towards change in social value of a culture. Ongoing study investigates the impact of telecom cellular services packages like late night call & unlimited Short Messaging Service (SMS) on the social values of Pakistani youth. In today’s competitive environment cellular companies are mainly targeting youth through their advertisements and would like the youth to get indulge in these activities in order to increase their sales but the point is up to what extent youth showing receptiveness and emotional attachment to these packages. Study was conducted in capital city of Pakistan i.e. Islamabad, mainly considering three famous universities; Iqra University, Bahria University & Foundation University with the sample of 250 respondents; convenient sampling technique is used & results are measured using multiple regression test. Major findings concluded that cellular advertisements of unlimited Short Messaging Service (SMS) and late night call packages have a negative impact on youth but youth is still willing to accept these advertisements as they are negatively attached to the advertisement and use of these packages

Brain Death Islamic Perspective

Western world has well defined criteria for declaring the patient brain dead and discontinuation of life support treatment. However in the Muslim world these methods and practices are seen with skepticism as to their acceptance from Islamic and Sharia point op view, which in fact is incorrect and is due to lack of knowledge and absence of Institutional guidelines on this matter. Islamic law permits the withdrawal of futile treatment, including life support, from brain dead patients allowing death to take its natural course. “Do not resuscitate” is permitted in Islamic law in brain dead patients. Euthenesia is however unacceptable in Islam. Although debate continues about the details of brain death criteria within Islamic scholars, brain death is accepted as true death by the majority of Mulim scholars and there is concensus on discontinuation of life support treatment in brain dead patients

Indirect Fluorescent Antibody Technique based Prevalence of Surra in Equines

This project was carried out to find the prevalence of trypanosomiasis in equine in District Gujranwala by using indirect fluorescent antibody technique and thin smear method. Blood samples were collected from a total of 200 horses and donkeys of different ages and either sex. Duplicate thin blood smears were prepared from each sample and remaining blood samples were centrifuged to separate the serum. Smears from each animal were processed for giemsa staining and indirect fluorescent antibody test (IFAT). Giemsa stained smears revealed Trypanosome infection in 4/200 (2.0%) samples and IFAT in 12/200 (6.0%) animals

RFID-Based Automated Shared Drop Box for Laundry Business: A Process Model

Collection and delivery of laundry is an important process in the laundry business. The laundry businesses have adopted diverse models such as over the counter collection/delivery, online booking etc. The laundries are collected or delivered from customers’ doorstep or from customers’ desired location at a convenient time. In this paper, business process re-engineering concept has been incorporated to improve the collection and delivery process of laundry using RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) tagging and Automated Laundry Collection Drop Box. The Devil’s Quadrangle has been used as a tool for evaluation. The proposed model will result in reduction in cost, time and improvement in service quality. It ultimately results in customers’ loyalty, economic efficiency and gain of a competitive advantage over competitor. Other advantages for laundry business include automatic collection and delivery, enhanced customer convenience, enhanced flexibility and industry economic savings, enhanced customer satisfaction and decreased labor work. In the proposed automated laundry collection model, reputed laundry businesses will make a consortium and outsource collection and delivery process to a courier company. Different collection and delivery options are proposed in the model

Analysis of deep convolutional neural network models for the fine-grained classification of vehicles

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is a broad area that encompasses vehicle identification, classification, monitoring, surveillance, prediction, management, reduction of traffic jams, license plate recognition, etc. Machine learning has practical and significant applications in ITS. Intelligent transportation systems rely heavily on vehicle classification for traffic management and monitoring. This research uses convolutional neural networks to classify cars at fine-grained classifications (make and model). Numerous obstacles must be overcome in order to complete the task, the greatest of which are intra- and inter-class similarities between the manufacturer and model of vehicles, different lighting effects, the shape and size of the vehicle, shadows, camera view angle, background, vehicle speed, colour occlusion and environmental conditions. This paper studies various machine learning algorithms used for the fine-grained classification of vehicles and presents a comparative analysis in terms of accuracy and the size of the implemented deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). Specifically, four DCNN models, mobilenet-v2, inception-v3, vgg-19 and resnet-50, are evaluated with three datasets, BMW-10, Stanford Cars and PAKCars. The evaluation results show that mobileNet-v2 is the smallest model as it is not computationally intensive due to depthwise separable convolution. However, resnet-50 and vgg-19 outperform inception-v3 and mobilenet-v2 in terms of accuracy due to their complex structure