Due to regionalization and global competition, many companies have turned their attention to othe... more Due to regionalization and global competition, many companies have turned their attention to other markets outside the domestic ones in anticipation of securing profitable market(s) for their products. Cormart (Nigeria) Limited is one of such companies, seeking to expand beyond its domestic borders. Cormart is a Nigerian trading company specializing in Industrial Raw Materials and Chemicals. It represents the business interests of top Multinational Companies that wish to do business in Nigeria. In line with its expansion strategy, Cormart seeks to introduce its newly developed spray starch product (RENEW) into the Ghanaian market.
Past and current research efforts in the use of nondestructive testing to evaluate the integrity ... more Past and current research efforts in the use of nondestructive testing to evaluate the integrity and capacity of drilled shafts containing defects are described. The results of a drilled shaft test program containing both controlled and uncontrolled defects (five shafts at a dense soil site and six shafts at a soft soil site) are presented. The test program was designed to demonstrate in a relative way the ability to find defects, the ability to quantify the location and magnitude of defects, and the correlation of defects with acceptance criteria. Planned defects were created by attaching soil-filled bags to the rebar cages. Uncontrolled defects were created by using improper drilling procedures, such as pulling the tremie pipe out of the concrete, using low slump concrete for portions of the shaft, and using improper slurry control procedures. All shafts contained four preplaced access tubes attached to the rebar cage and were tested using both sonic logging and gamma logging proc...
The study was conducted to isolate factors that correlate with ownership and usage of insecticide... more The study was conducted to isolate factors that correlate with ownership and usage of insecticide treated nets (ITNs) as a prophylactic to malaria in Asamankese, Ghana and explore the policy implications of the findings for ITN programmes. A cross-sectional design was deployed. A structured close-ended interviewer-administered questionnaire was designed and administered. Snowball technique was adopted to sample views from 500 mothers and care-givers of children under five years from 23 communities of Asamankese, Ghana. A chisquare test was employed to ascertain the significance of certain variables; a logistic regression model was utilized to isolate factors that had possible influence on ITN usage at 95% confidence interval. In determining one’s motivation for usage of ITN, sleeping area allowing for use of ITN was the most important (Wald Chi-square = 45.184), followed by expected monthly income (Wald Chi-square =7.114), then second cycle level of education (Wald Chi-square = 6.51...
The drift towards face-based recognition systems can be attributed to recent advances in supporti... more The drift towards face-based recognition systems can be attributed to recent advances in supportive technology and emerging areas of application including voting systems, access control, human-computer interactions, entertainments, and crime control. Despite the obvious advantages of such systems being less intrusive and requiring minimal cooperation of subjects, the performances of their underlying recognition algorithms are challenged by the quality of face images, usually acquired from uncontrolled environments with poor illuminations, varying head poses, ageing, facial expressions, and occlusions. Although several researchers have leveraged on the property of bilateral symmetry to reconstruct half-occluded face images, their approach becomes deficient in the presence of random occlusions. In this paper, we harnessed the benefits of the multiple imputation by the chained equation technique and image denoising using Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWTs) to reconstruct degraded face i...
Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal, 2016
The Health of the individuals in a nation contributes to the Wealth and Good of the nation. Healt... more The Health of the individuals in a nation contributes to the Wealth and Good of the nation. Health care (or healthcare) is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness and other physical and mental impairments in human. Quality in health can be explained as the difference between patient expectations and perceptions; expectation means service provider performance during deliverance of services whereas perception is measurement of delivery by the service provider. The study comparesthe patientssatisfaction between private and public hospital”. The study was limited to Bawku Presbyterian hospital and Case Medical Centre in the Upper East Region of Ghana. The researcher use only primary source of data.The objective was to compare the relationships between patients and medical staffs in public and private hospitals.To determine if there are difference in the diagnostic service in public and private hospitals and evaluate the difference in diagnostic facilities in public ...
Decentralisation policy is important in ensuring effective delivery of development services at th... more Decentralisation policy is important in ensuring effective delivery of development services at the local level. Governments across the globe utilize decentralised government system as a way of promoting people-centered development. Notwithstanding the value of decentralisation policy, governments struggle with the provision of development services at the local level. This suggests that more efforts need to be made to ensure the realisation of the dividends of decentralisation. However, this cannot be made without an awareness of the challenges local actors face in the delivery of development services. This paper examines the views of stakeholders on the challenges associated with the delivery of development projects within the Ghanaian decentralised government system using the Shama District as a case in order to proffer some measures to improve the situation in the country using the sequential-explanatory mixed method design. Data were collected using interview guide and interview...
International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences
The study recognized the worth of understanding the how’s of handling censoring and censored data... more The study recognized the worth of understanding the how’s of handling censoring and censored data in survival analysis and the potential biases it might cause if researchers fail to identify and handle the concepts with utmost care. We systematically reviewed the concepts of censoring and how researchers have handled censored data and brought all the ideas under one umbrella. The review was done on articles written in the English language spanning from the late fifties to the present time. We googled through NCBI, PubMed, Google scholar and other websites and identified theories and publications on the research topic. Revelation was that censoring has the potential of biasing results and reducing the statistical power of analyses if not handled with the appropriate techniques it requires. We also found that, besides the four main approaches (complete-data analysis method; imputation approach; dichotomizing the data; the likelihood-based approach) to handling censored data, there wer...
Extreme events in earthquakes, wind speed, among others are rare but may lead to catastrophic eff... more Extreme events in earthquakes, wind speed, among others are rare but may lead to catastrophic effects on humans and the environment. The primary parameter in the estimation of such rare events is the tail index which measures the tail heaviness of an underlying distribution. Since extreme events are rare, the presence of missing observations may further lead to flawed. In view of this, there is a growing effort by researchers to address this problem. However, the existing methods of estimating the tail index use only the available nonmissing data. Thus, if the missing observations are influential values, ignoring them could introduce more bias and higher mean square error (MSE) in the tail index estimation and subsequently other extreme event--estimators such as high quantiles and small exceedance probabilities. In this study, we propose imputation of the missing observations before applying some standard estimators (Hill and geometric-type) to estimate the tail index. Through a sim...
Purpose: Approximately 1.4 million adults identify as transgender in the United States. Transgend... more Purpose: Approximately 1.4 million adults identify as transgender in the United States. Transgender patients face societal, legal, and medical discrimination that can lead to health disparities. The objective of this study was to evaluate knowledge and perceptions of transgender health care across various levels of medical training and specialties. Methods: Between April 1, 2019 and May 1, 2019, an anonymous survey was distributed to residents and attendings, in both medical and surgical specialties, at a university-affiliated hospital. Participants were recruited into the study with survey distribution by email to residency program directors, residents, and residency-affiliated attendings. Results: There was a response rate of 29.5% (118/400). Across all respondents, 34.7%, 31.4%, and 39% knew where to refer transgender patients for hormone replacement, psychotherapy, or surgery, respectively. Only 37.9% of residents and 46.2% of attendings reported that they were confident of providing care for a transgender patient (p = 0.130). In addition, less than one-third of surgical respondents reported sufficient knowledge to describe transgender surgery. The most common reasons affecting comfort level when caring for transgender patients were lack of exposure (53.4%) and lack of formal education (47.6%), with other reasons being personal, moral, and religious reasons (11%, 8.5%, and 6.8%, respectively). Conclusion: Despite literature demonstrating the effectiveness of formal didactics and education in transgender health, there remain disparities in the knowledge and comfort of residents and attendings across all specialties. To deliver competent health care to transgender patients, efforts must focus on improving the availability of system-wide resources and educational opportunities for all specialties.
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) or Embedded Systems are now so wide spread that we see applications ... more Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) or Embedded Systems are now so wide spread that we see applications in almost every aspect of our everyday activities. Application fields include industrial process control, health care, transportation, financial transaction systems, building security systems, home electronics, and automobiles, among others. The "Physical" aspect of CPS indicates that these systems interact mainly with the physical world and thus can significantly impact human and environmental safety as well as large physical infrastructure systems. CPS failure can therefore have catastrophic consequences. It is thus very important that CPS operate in a safe, reliable and secure manner. While these systems have seen a lot of technological improvements resulting in increased functionality, the issue of security has been a low priority in their design, thus exposing them to several security threats. If we are to benefit fully from the many applications of CPS then security needs to take a central role in their design. The challenges of security design for CPS are aggravated by the lack of standardization in hardware, operating systems, networking and the diverse physical environment. Addressing such challenges needs a strong collaboration between those skilled in CPS component design as well as those skilled in security and other aspects of these complex systems. This study includes an analysis of the available literature and design practices in several CPS application fields, with an emphasis on design for security. The Information Technology community has a rich background in security analysis, although not generally applied to CPS design. Thus a security analysis methodology for CPS was developed from recognized security analysis techniques for conventional computing. Assets, security threats and risks are analyzed relative to a CPS environment. Current security solutions are presented and compared. We discuss evolutionary changes of CPS leading to their growing importance within computing disciplines and their increasing role in large, heterogeneous distributed systems. Finally the integrative nature of CPS design is discussed and the role of Information Technology as a major contributor to CPS design for security is emphasized.
International Journal of Physical Sciences, Oct 31, 2009
... An integro-differential equation of Volterra type can be obtained by setting Mensah et al. 57... more ... An integro-differential equation of Volterra type can be obtained by setting Mensah et al. 579 )( )( tAtp ν = . ... The kernel decreases exponentially. This kind of kernel corresponds to the viscoelastics rheological behavior of Voigt-Kelvin materials and Maxwell simple fluids. ...
CHAPTER 1 1.0 Introduction 1 1.1. Problem Discussion 2-3 1.2 Research Question/ Main Topic 3 1.3 ... more CHAPTER 1 1.0 Introduction 1 1.1. Problem Discussion 2-3 1.2 Research Question/ Main Topic 3 1.3 Thesis Structure 4 1.3.1 Delimitations 4 CHAPTER 2. 2.0 Research Methodology 5 2.1 Qualitative Methodology Approach 6 2.2 Sources of Primary Data 7 2.3 Sources of Secondary Data 7 2.4 Data Collection and Analysis 7-10 2.5 Reliability, Replicability and Validity 10-12 CHAPTER 3 3.0 Literature Review/Theoretical Framework 12 3.1 What is a Parcel Delivery? 12 3.2 Drivers of Parcel Delivery in the Supply Chain (Logistics) Industry 13-16 3.3 What is "Service" in Parcel Delivery? 16-18 3.4 What is a Courier Service? 18 3.5 Express Delivery Services 18 3.6 Parcel Delivery Services 19-20 3.7 Service as an important component and "New" concept in the Parcel Delivery Industry 20 3.8 Illustration of a Parcel Delivery Process 20-23 3.9 Summary of Theoretical Framework 23 CHAPTER 4 4. Empirical Findings 24-36 CHAPTER 5 5.0 Analysis 36 5.1 Introduction 36 5.2 Problems (Factors) 36-39 5.2.1 Summary of the Factors (Problems) 39 5.3. Remedy 39-41 5.3.1 Summary of the Remedy 41 5.4. SWOT Analysis 42-43 CHAPTER 6 6.0. Conclusion 44-45 6.1 Research Question and Answers 45-46 6.2 Recommendations 46-47 6.3 Future research 47-48 References 49-52 Appendix Acknowledgement I would firstly give God the praise and glory for the strength to carry on this project. It has been a roller coaster academic sojourn climaxing with unforeseen obstacles which could have prevented me from the completion of this research. Time has always been my adversary! I want to extend my profound and immeasurable gratitude to Dr. Rick Middel my thesis supervisor who has been supportive and whose suggestions are the platform and template for this Master's Thesis. An enormous 'thank you' to my colleagues at United Parcel Service (UPS), Duetsche Post DHL , FedEx and Post Nord (Swedish Post) for according me the opportunity for the empirical aspect of this research and squeezing those minutes out of your busy schedule for the responses to the questions and the little chitchats. This is highly laudable and I appreciate your contribution to knowledge development and academia. You are the bed rock of this research! To all my professors for transferring and imparting knowledge, thanks for the gesture and it is indelible! To my classmates; as diverse as we are culturally, racially, age wise and intellectually, the lecture halls are the laboratory for career building but the world (our work places) is where the true translation of our knowledge is worth. Best wishes in all your individual endeavors! Finally, saving the best for the last: my family especially my kids and my wife for her timeless understanding and patience; and 'friends' who have been a source of constant support. I appreciate and love you all and thanks for the support!
Rheology is the study of the flow and deformation of matter under constraints. Considering blood ... more Rheology is the study of the flow and deformation of matter under constraints. Considering blood as a rheological fluid, we review the basic rheological properties of blood and more importantly the ones for the polymerization of deoxy-hemoglobin in sickle cell anemia. We present the nonlinear dynamical model of the polymerization of deoxy-Hemoglobin S molecules and show that the use of a cumulative braking term homogeneous to a time dependent shear, transforms the evolution equation of the dynamical variable into an integro-differential equation of Volterra. However, it is well known that the solutions of the Volterra integro-differential equations can only be put into parametric forms. Nevertheless, using the original idea of Chasse J.L. et al. to obtain the solution on an explicit form by adequate approximations, we proved in this work that the mathematical model allows a correct description of the stationary and non-stationary rheological behaviors of the gel of Deoxy-hemoglobin ...
The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the structural and rheological properties of the... more The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the structural and rheological properties of the hemoglobin molecule as it impacts sickle-cell disease and also presents a detailed mathematical model for sickle cell hemoglobin molecules as they polymerize.
The research was self-financed by the authors. Abstract The study assessed the effectiveness of t... more The research was self-financed by the authors. Abstract The study assessed the effectiveness of the Government spraying program which was introduced to eradicate cocoa pests and diseases in Ghana. One hundred and twenty (120) cocoa farmers were randomly selected from six communities in the Wassa Amenfi West District of the Western Region of Ghana and interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire. Effectiveness of the spraying program was assessed using descriptive statistics while the Kendall's coefficient of concordance was used to analyze the constraints facing the program. The study showed that 14.2% of farmers never benefitted from the spraying program since its inception in 2001. In addition, the study found that the spraying program in the district did not follow the recommended spraying regime with 68.3% of farmers expressing dissatisfaction with the performance of the spraying personnel. Inadequate supply of chemicals and inadequate spraying personnel were the most c...
The human resource is the most productive of all resources, the most versatile, and the most reso... more The human resource is the most productive of all resources, the most versatile, and the most resourceful. Thus an enterprise's wealth does not depend on the financial and material resources available but rather on the people who make things work. It is therefore important for owners and managers of firms to understand how best to manage this most resourcefulhuman resource-of the firm. This study examined the human resource practices in the informal sector in Ghana, using the situation in the Cape Coast Metropolis as a case study. The main objective of the study was to find out how the human resources within the informal economy were being managed. Six major informal sector operators were randomly selected. A combination of cluster sampling and quota sampling techniques were applied to generate the sample for the study. The total sample for the study was one hundred and seventy. The results of the study show that human resource management practices within the informal sector enterprises are inadequate and therefore impede the development of the workforce which invariably affects the growth of the enterprises. The findings suggest that assistance programmes that encourage the efficient and effective human resource management practices in the informal sector should be provided. The main limitation of the study is that it could not
Proceedings of the 2nd annual conference on Research in information technology - RIIT '13, 2013
Advances in computing technologies have provided the needed tools to transform traditional single... more Advances in computing technologies have provided the needed tools to transform traditional single user architecture Computer Aided Applications (CAx) to multi-user collaborative CAx architectures that supports simultaneous concurrency. To allow for a successful deployment in a corporate enterprise environment, the multi-user CAx architecture will require reliable security mechanisms to ensure protection of intellectual property. In this paper we propose mechanisms for securing user access and communications in a multi-user collaborative CAx software system. The proposed security solution is currently under development and is being tested on a collaborative multi-user version of a popular commercial CAD application.
Water vapor is one of the most important atmospheric variables that play a key role in air qualit... more Water vapor is one of the most important atmospheric variables that play a key role in air quality, global warming, and climate change. However, it remains one of the most poorly characterized meteorological parameters. For example, water vapor measurements have proven to be difficult below 300 m in the lower troposphere. Despite its abundance in the atmosphere, and its importance
Due to regionalization and global competition, many companies have turned their attention to othe... more Due to regionalization and global competition, many companies have turned their attention to other markets outside the domestic ones in anticipation of securing profitable market(s) for their products. Cormart (Nigeria) Limited is one of such companies, seeking to expand beyond its domestic borders. Cormart is a Nigerian trading company specializing in Industrial Raw Materials and Chemicals. It represents the business interests of top Multinational Companies that wish to do business in Nigeria. In line with its expansion strategy, Cormart seeks to introduce its newly developed spray starch product (RENEW) into the Ghanaian market.
Past and current research efforts in the use of nondestructive testing to evaluate the integrity ... more Past and current research efforts in the use of nondestructive testing to evaluate the integrity and capacity of drilled shafts containing defects are described. The results of a drilled shaft test program containing both controlled and uncontrolled defects (five shafts at a dense soil site and six shafts at a soft soil site) are presented. The test program was designed to demonstrate in a relative way the ability to find defects, the ability to quantify the location and magnitude of defects, and the correlation of defects with acceptance criteria. Planned defects were created by attaching soil-filled bags to the rebar cages. Uncontrolled defects were created by using improper drilling procedures, such as pulling the tremie pipe out of the concrete, using low slump concrete for portions of the shaft, and using improper slurry control procedures. All shafts contained four preplaced access tubes attached to the rebar cage and were tested using both sonic logging and gamma logging proc...
The study was conducted to isolate factors that correlate with ownership and usage of insecticide... more The study was conducted to isolate factors that correlate with ownership and usage of insecticide treated nets (ITNs) as a prophylactic to malaria in Asamankese, Ghana and explore the policy implications of the findings for ITN programmes. A cross-sectional design was deployed. A structured close-ended interviewer-administered questionnaire was designed and administered. Snowball technique was adopted to sample views from 500 mothers and care-givers of children under five years from 23 communities of Asamankese, Ghana. A chisquare test was employed to ascertain the significance of certain variables; a logistic regression model was utilized to isolate factors that had possible influence on ITN usage at 95% confidence interval. In determining one’s motivation for usage of ITN, sleeping area allowing for use of ITN was the most important (Wald Chi-square = 45.184), followed by expected monthly income (Wald Chi-square =7.114), then second cycle level of education (Wald Chi-square = 6.51...
The drift towards face-based recognition systems can be attributed to recent advances in supporti... more The drift towards face-based recognition systems can be attributed to recent advances in supportive technology and emerging areas of application including voting systems, access control, human-computer interactions, entertainments, and crime control. Despite the obvious advantages of such systems being less intrusive and requiring minimal cooperation of subjects, the performances of their underlying recognition algorithms are challenged by the quality of face images, usually acquired from uncontrolled environments with poor illuminations, varying head poses, ageing, facial expressions, and occlusions. Although several researchers have leveraged on the property of bilateral symmetry to reconstruct half-occluded face images, their approach becomes deficient in the presence of random occlusions. In this paper, we harnessed the benefits of the multiple imputation by the chained equation technique and image denoising using Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWTs) to reconstruct degraded face i...
Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal, 2016
The Health of the individuals in a nation contributes to the Wealth and Good of the nation. Healt... more The Health of the individuals in a nation contributes to the Wealth and Good of the nation. Health care (or healthcare) is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness and other physical and mental impairments in human. Quality in health can be explained as the difference between patient expectations and perceptions; expectation means service provider performance during deliverance of services whereas perception is measurement of delivery by the service provider. The study comparesthe patientssatisfaction between private and public hospital”. The study was limited to Bawku Presbyterian hospital and Case Medical Centre in the Upper East Region of Ghana. The researcher use only primary source of data.The objective was to compare the relationships between patients and medical staffs in public and private hospitals.To determine if there are difference in the diagnostic service in public and private hospitals and evaluate the difference in diagnostic facilities in public ...
Decentralisation policy is important in ensuring effective delivery of development services at th... more Decentralisation policy is important in ensuring effective delivery of development services at the local level. Governments across the globe utilize decentralised government system as a way of promoting people-centered development. Notwithstanding the value of decentralisation policy, governments struggle with the provision of development services at the local level. This suggests that more efforts need to be made to ensure the realisation of the dividends of decentralisation. However, this cannot be made without an awareness of the challenges local actors face in the delivery of development services. This paper examines the views of stakeholders on the challenges associated with the delivery of development projects within the Ghanaian decentralised government system using the Shama District as a case in order to proffer some measures to improve the situation in the country using the sequential-explanatory mixed method design. Data were collected using interview guide and interview...
International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences
The study recognized the worth of understanding the how’s of handling censoring and censored data... more The study recognized the worth of understanding the how’s of handling censoring and censored data in survival analysis and the potential biases it might cause if researchers fail to identify and handle the concepts with utmost care. We systematically reviewed the concepts of censoring and how researchers have handled censored data and brought all the ideas under one umbrella. The review was done on articles written in the English language spanning from the late fifties to the present time. We googled through NCBI, PubMed, Google scholar and other websites and identified theories and publications on the research topic. Revelation was that censoring has the potential of biasing results and reducing the statistical power of analyses if not handled with the appropriate techniques it requires. We also found that, besides the four main approaches (complete-data analysis method; imputation approach; dichotomizing the data; the likelihood-based approach) to handling censored data, there wer...
Extreme events in earthquakes, wind speed, among others are rare but may lead to catastrophic eff... more Extreme events in earthquakes, wind speed, among others are rare but may lead to catastrophic effects on humans and the environment. The primary parameter in the estimation of such rare events is the tail index which measures the tail heaviness of an underlying distribution. Since extreme events are rare, the presence of missing observations may further lead to flawed. In view of this, there is a growing effort by researchers to address this problem. However, the existing methods of estimating the tail index use only the available nonmissing data. Thus, if the missing observations are influential values, ignoring them could introduce more bias and higher mean square error (MSE) in the tail index estimation and subsequently other extreme event--estimators such as high quantiles and small exceedance probabilities. In this study, we propose imputation of the missing observations before applying some standard estimators (Hill and geometric-type) to estimate the tail index. Through a sim...
Purpose: Approximately 1.4 million adults identify as transgender in the United States. Transgend... more Purpose: Approximately 1.4 million adults identify as transgender in the United States. Transgender patients face societal, legal, and medical discrimination that can lead to health disparities. The objective of this study was to evaluate knowledge and perceptions of transgender health care across various levels of medical training and specialties. Methods: Between April 1, 2019 and May 1, 2019, an anonymous survey was distributed to residents and attendings, in both medical and surgical specialties, at a university-affiliated hospital. Participants were recruited into the study with survey distribution by email to residency program directors, residents, and residency-affiliated attendings. Results: There was a response rate of 29.5% (118/400). Across all respondents, 34.7%, 31.4%, and 39% knew where to refer transgender patients for hormone replacement, psychotherapy, or surgery, respectively. Only 37.9% of residents and 46.2% of attendings reported that they were confident of providing care for a transgender patient (p = 0.130). In addition, less than one-third of surgical respondents reported sufficient knowledge to describe transgender surgery. The most common reasons affecting comfort level when caring for transgender patients were lack of exposure (53.4%) and lack of formal education (47.6%), with other reasons being personal, moral, and religious reasons (11%, 8.5%, and 6.8%, respectively). Conclusion: Despite literature demonstrating the effectiveness of formal didactics and education in transgender health, there remain disparities in the knowledge and comfort of residents and attendings across all specialties. To deliver competent health care to transgender patients, efforts must focus on improving the availability of system-wide resources and educational opportunities for all specialties.
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) or Embedded Systems are now so wide spread that we see applications ... more Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) or Embedded Systems are now so wide spread that we see applications in almost every aspect of our everyday activities. Application fields include industrial process control, health care, transportation, financial transaction systems, building security systems, home electronics, and automobiles, among others. The "Physical" aspect of CPS indicates that these systems interact mainly with the physical world and thus can significantly impact human and environmental safety as well as large physical infrastructure systems. CPS failure can therefore have catastrophic consequences. It is thus very important that CPS operate in a safe, reliable and secure manner. While these systems have seen a lot of technological improvements resulting in increased functionality, the issue of security has been a low priority in their design, thus exposing them to several security threats. If we are to benefit fully from the many applications of CPS then security needs to take a central role in their design. The challenges of security design for CPS are aggravated by the lack of standardization in hardware, operating systems, networking and the diverse physical environment. Addressing such challenges needs a strong collaboration between those skilled in CPS component design as well as those skilled in security and other aspects of these complex systems. This study includes an analysis of the available literature and design practices in several CPS application fields, with an emphasis on design for security. The Information Technology community has a rich background in security analysis, although not generally applied to CPS design. Thus a security analysis methodology for CPS was developed from recognized security analysis techniques for conventional computing. Assets, security threats and risks are analyzed relative to a CPS environment. Current security solutions are presented and compared. We discuss evolutionary changes of CPS leading to their growing importance within computing disciplines and their increasing role in large, heterogeneous distributed systems. Finally the integrative nature of CPS design is discussed and the role of Information Technology as a major contributor to CPS design for security is emphasized.
International Journal of Physical Sciences, Oct 31, 2009
... An integro-differential equation of Volterra type can be obtained by setting Mensah et al. 57... more ... An integro-differential equation of Volterra type can be obtained by setting Mensah et al. 579 )( )( tAtp ν = . ... The kernel decreases exponentially. This kind of kernel corresponds to the viscoelastics rheological behavior of Voigt-Kelvin materials and Maxwell simple fluids. ...
CHAPTER 1 1.0 Introduction 1 1.1. Problem Discussion 2-3 1.2 Research Question/ Main Topic 3 1.3 ... more CHAPTER 1 1.0 Introduction 1 1.1. Problem Discussion 2-3 1.2 Research Question/ Main Topic 3 1.3 Thesis Structure 4 1.3.1 Delimitations 4 CHAPTER 2. 2.0 Research Methodology 5 2.1 Qualitative Methodology Approach 6 2.2 Sources of Primary Data 7 2.3 Sources of Secondary Data 7 2.4 Data Collection and Analysis 7-10 2.5 Reliability, Replicability and Validity 10-12 CHAPTER 3 3.0 Literature Review/Theoretical Framework 12 3.1 What is a Parcel Delivery? 12 3.2 Drivers of Parcel Delivery in the Supply Chain (Logistics) Industry 13-16 3.3 What is "Service" in Parcel Delivery? 16-18 3.4 What is a Courier Service? 18 3.5 Express Delivery Services 18 3.6 Parcel Delivery Services 19-20 3.7 Service as an important component and "New" concept in the Parcel Delivery Industry 20 3.8 Illustration of a Parcel Delivery Process 20-23 3.9 Summary of Theoretical Framework 23 CHAPTER 4 4. Empirical Findings 24-36 CHAPTER 5 5.0 Analysis 36 5.1 Introduction 36 5.2 Problems (Factors) 36-39 5.2.1 Summary of the Factors (Problems) 39 5.3. Remedy 39-41 5.3.1 Summary of the Remedy 41 5.4. SWOT Analysis 42-43 CHAPTER 6 6.0. Conclusion 44-45 6.1 Research Question and Answers 45-46 6.2 Recommendations 46-47 6.3 Future research 47-48 References 49-52 Appendix Acknowledgement I would firstly give God the praise and glory for the strength to carry on this project. It has been a roller coaster academic sojourn climaxing with unforeseen obstacles which could have prevented me from the completion of this research. Time has always been my adversary! I want to extend my profound and immeasurable gratitude to Dr. Rick Middel my thesis supervisor who has been supportive and whose suggestions are the platform and template for this Master's Thesis. An enormous 'thank you' to my colleagues at United Parcel Service (UPS), Duetsche Post DHL , FedEx and Post Nord (Swedish Post) for according me the opportunity for the empirical aspect of this research and squeezing those minutes out of your busy schedule for the responses to the questions and the little chitchats. This is highly laudable and I appreciate your contribution to knowledge development and academia. You are the bed rock of this research! To all my professors for transferring and imparting knowledge, thanks for the gesture and it is indelible! To my classmates; as diverse as we are culturally, racially, age wise and intellectually, the lecture halls are the laboratory for career building but the world (our work places) is where the true translation of our knowledge is worth. Best wishes in all your individual endeavors! Finally, saving the best for the last: my family especially my kids and my wife for her timeless understanding and patience; and 'friends' who have been a source of constant support. I appreciate and love you all and thanks for the support!
Rheology is the study of the flow and deformation of matter under constraints. Considering blood ... more Rheology is the study of the flow and deformation of matter under constraints. Considering blood as a rheological fluid, we review the basic rheological properties of blood and more importantly the ones for the polymerization of deoxy-hemoglobin in sickle cell anemia. We present the nonlinear dynamical model of the polymerization of deoxy-Hemoglobin S molecules and show that the use of a cumulative braking term homogeneous to a time dependent shear, transforms the evolution equation of the dynamical variable into an integro-differential equation of Volterra. However, it is well known that the solutions of the Volterra integro-differential equations can only be put into parametric forms. Nevertheless, using the original idea of Chasse J.L. et al. to obtain the solution on an explicit form by adequate approximations, we proved in this work that the mathematical model allows a correct description of the stationary and non-stationary rheological behaviors of the gel of Deoxy-hemoglobin ...
The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the structural and rheological properties of the... more The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the structural and rheological properties of the hemoglobin molecule as it impacts sickle-cell disease and also presents a detailed mathematical model for sickle cell hemoglobin molecules as they polymerize.
The research was self-financed by the authors. Abstract The study assessed the effectiveness of t... more The research was self-financed by the authors. Abstract The study assessed the effectiveness of the Government spraying program which was introduced to eradicate cocoa pests and diseases in Ghana. One hundred and twenty (120) cocoa farmers were randomly selected from six communities in the Wassa Amenfi West District of the Western Region of Ghana and interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire. Effectiveness of the spraying program was assessed using descriptive statistics while the Kendall's coefficient of concordance was used to analyze the constraints facing the program. The study showed that 14.2% of farmers never benefitted from the spraying program since its inception in 2001. In addition, the study found that the spraying program in the district did not follow the recommended spraying regime with 68.3% of farmers expressing dissatisfaction with the performance of the spraying personnel. Inadequate supply of chemicals and inadequate spraying personnel were the most c...
The human resource is the most productive of all resources, the most versatile, and the most reso... more The human resource is the most productive of all resources, the most versatile, and the most resourceful. Thus an enterprise's wealth does not depend on the financial and material resources available but rather on the people who make things work. It is therefore important for owners and managers of firms to understand how best to manage this most resourcefulhuman resource-of the firm. This study examined the human resource practices in the informal sector in Ghana, using the situation in the Cape Coast Metropolis as a case study. The main objective of the study was to find out how the human resources within the informal economy were being managed. Six major informal sector operators were randomly selected. A combination of cluster sampling and quota sampling techniques were applied to generate the sample for the study. The total sample for the study was one hundred and seventy. The results of the study show that human resource management practices within the informal sector enterprises are inadequate and therefore impede the development of the workforce which invariably affects the growth of the enterprises. The findings suggest that assistance programmes that encourage the efficient and effective human resource management practices in the informal sector should be provided. The main limitation of the study is that it could not
Proceedings of the 2nd annual conference on Research in information technology - RIIT '13, 2013
Advances in computing technologies have provided the needed tools to transform traditional single... more Advances in computing technologies have provided the needed tools to transform traditional single user architecture Computer Aided Applications (CAx) to multi-user collaborative CAx architectures that supports simultaneous concurrency. To allow for a successful deployment in a corporate enterprise environment, the multi-user CAx architecture will require reliable security mechanisms to ensure protection of intellectual property. In this paper we propose mechanisms for securing user access and communications in a multi-user collaborative CAx software system. The proposed security solution is currently under development and is being tested on a collaborative multi-user version of a popular commercial CAD application.
Water vapor is one of the most important atmospheric variables that play a key role in air qualit... more Water vapor is one of the most important atmospheric variables that play a key role in air quality, global warming, and climate change. However, it remains one of the most poorly characterized meteorological parameters. For example, water vapor measurements have proven to be difficult below 300 m in the lower troposphere. Despite its abundance in the atmosphere, and its importance
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Papers by Francis Mensah