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ABSTRACTThis three years field study examined the influence of application rates of manure from sheep and goat (S/G) and their mixture with wood-based or farm yard manure-based biochars (FYMB) on growth performance of Foeniculum vulgare(fennel) and Cuminum cyminum(cumin). The fertilizer amendment rates were 1.66, 3.32 and 6.64 t ha−1, which were applied for three consecutive years in field. The nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) and phosphorus use efficiency (PUE) in seeds and stover of test crops were analyzed for third year cropping only. Results demonstrated that in general, fertilizers did not influence yield of first and second year crops. The significant (P ≤ 0.05) positive influences of organic fertilizers were observed for third year crops and were of higher magnitude for C. cyminumthan F. vulgare(126–306.6% increase for C. cyminumand 24.5–48.4% increase for F. vulgarethan control). As compared to S/G applied at 6.64 t ha−1rate, its co-amendment with wood-derived biochar at all application rates significantly reduced P in seeds; whereas, its co-amendment with both biochar types and at all application rates significantly reduced P in the stover of F. vulgare(Table 3; P ≤ 0.05). For the crop C. cyminum, there was no difference between treatments for the concentration of P in stover. The phosphorus use efficiency (PUE) of stover of F. vulgarewas significantly improved by 80–108% and by 60–79% in response to the application of S/G and its co-amendment with FYMB respectively than control. The PUE of seeds of F. vulgarewas increased by 100% than control in response to the co-amendment of manure with wood-derived biochar at high application rate (P ≤ 0.05). More profound significant improvement in PUE was observed for third year crop of C. cyminum, as most of the treatments improved PUE of seeds by171 – 561% and stover by 196–294% than control with no significant differences between fertilizer treatments. Results show no relationship between fertilizer application rates and life history trait of crops in space and time, since there was non-consistent and in general non-significant differences between fertilizer treatments for both crops.

Seaports play a crucial role in international trade and economic development. This study aims to analyze the existing literature on port facilities to identify research patterns and emerging areas of interest. Using the Scopus database, the researchers searched for publications related to port facilities and found a total of 178 scholarly articles. The data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel, Publish or Perish and VOS viewer. The study examined subject areas, keywords, citations, and Journal/publishers metrics, to understand the key contributors and collaborative efforts in this field. The findings revealed a lack of scholarly evaluation of port facilities literature until 1975. From 1975 to 2003, there were 57 publications with very few citations. However, interest in this field grew significantly between 2004 and 2023, with 114 publications and 496 citations. Most of the documents were written in English, and there was concentration of research efforts in specific areas. International collaboration was observed among 12 countries. The study suggests the need for more research, collaborations, and citations in the field of port facilities, particularly in areas beyond engineering and earth and planetary sciences. Logistics management, computing, and maritime should be further explored to address gaps in the current literature.

ABSTRACTThe annual cumin and perennial fennel are economically important medicinal crops of cold dry regions of Pakistan. We hypothesized that the cumin, which produces 2–3 times less biomass, will respond to lower rates of mixture of biochar with synthetic NPK fertilizer or manure, compared to fennel. The NPK, poultry manure and their mixture with wood-derived or cow manure-derived biochars were applied for three consecutive years. No positive relation between application rate of biochar-mixed fertilizers and yield of both crops was observed over three years of study, except that manure-derived biochar-NPK mixture had a positive relation (R2 = 0.99, P= 0.01) with the yield of fennel only during the third year. Significant positive influences of biochar-based fertilizers compared to control were observed for cumin and fennel of third year cropping. The co-amendment of NPK (0.14 kg ha−1) with manure-derived biochar (6.6 t ha−1) consistently increased the yield of cumin during the first two years of cropping, as opposed to NPK fertilizer. Cumin had a greater seed:stover biomass ratio when it received the co-amendment of wood-derived biochar with NPK or poultry manure. Our findings indicate that there is some potential for biochar-fertilizer amendments to improve the growth of these high-value medicinal crops.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is twofold: to determine the factors contributing to farm income in the Transitional and Savanna zones of Ghana and to ascertain variations between in the same and across the two locations; and to determine the impact of credit on farm income in each of the two zones and to ascertain the variation in impact of credit across the two locations. Design/methodology/approach: In order to address endogeneity and sample selection bias, the authors draw from the theory of impact evaluation in nonrandom experiment, employing the endogenous switching regression (ESR) while using the propensity score matching (PSM) to check for robustness of the results. Findings: The results show significant mean differences between some characteristics of households that have access to credit and those that did not have access. Further, the results revealed farm size, labor; gender, age, literacy, wealth and group membership as the significant determinants of both credit access and income in the two zones. With the ESR, credit access increases households farm income by GH¢206.56/ha and GH¢39.74/ha in the Transitional and Savanna zones, respectively, but with the PSM, credit increases farm income by GH¢201.50 and GH¢45.69 and in the Transitional and Savanna, respectively. Research limitations/implications: The mean differences in characteristics of the households revealed the presence of selection bias in the distribution of household’s covariates in the two zones. The results further indicate the importance of productive resources, information and household characteristics in improved access to credit and farm income. Also, the results from both methods indicate that credit access leads to significant gains in farm income for households in both zones. However, differences exist in the results of PSM and that of the ESR results. Practical implications: The presence of selection bias in the samples suggests that the use of ESR and PSM techniques is appropriate. Further, the results suggesting that enhanced credit access and farm income could be attained through improved access to household resources and information. The results also suggest the need for establishing and expanding credit programs to cover more households in both zones. The differential impact of credit between the two methods employed in each zone revealed the weakness of each model. The low values from PSM could indicate the presence of selection bias resulting from unobservable factors whiles the high values from the ESR could stem from the restrictive assumption of the model. This reinforces the importance of combining mixed methods to check robustness of results and to explore the weakness of each method employed. Originality/value: The novelty of this study lies in the use of a very extensive and unique data set to decompose the determinants of credit access and farm income and as well as the impacts of credit into zones.

ABSTRACTCloud computing in VANETs (CC-V) has been investigated into two major themes of research including vehicular cloud computing (VCC) and vehicle using cloud (VuC). VCC is the realization of autonomous cloud among vehicles to share their abundant resources. VuC is the efficient usage of conventional cloud by on-road vehicles via a reliable Internet connection. Recently, a number of advancements have been made to address the issues and challenges in VCC and VuC. This paper qualitatively reviews CC-V with the emphasis on layered architecture, network component, taxonomy, and future challenges. Specifically, a four-layered architecture for CC-V is proposed including perception, coordination, artificial intelligence and smart application layers. Three network components of CC-V, namely, vehicle, connection, and computation are explored with their cooperative roles. A taxonomy for CC-V is presented considering major themes of research in the area including design of architecture, data dissemination, security, and applications. Related literature on each theme is critically investigated with comparative assessment of recent advances. Finally, some open research challenges are identified as future issues. The challenges are the outcome of the critical and qualitative assessment of the literature on CC-V.

The quest for maintenance of market share and survival had left no option for banks than to provide quality customer services. This has led to the introduction of information technology (IT) innovations to offer quality services. This study examined the factors influencing intensity of adoption of such innovations in northern Ghana. Using a multi-stage sampling procedure, we obtained data from 476 customers for the study. The Poisson and Negative Binomial models were employed for the analysis. However, the Poisson model fits better to the data than the Negative Binomial model and the results revealed personal/household and attitudinal attributes as the significant determinants of the intensity of adoption in northern Ghana. Specifically, number of visits made by a customer to a bank, relative advantage, trialability and compatibility constitute these attributes. This thus, highlights the importance of introducing innovations that are not only user-friendly, but beneficial in terms of cost.

EMMPRIN (CD147) is known largely for its ability to stimulate matrix metalloproteinase production in stromal cells. Since it modulates tumor microenvironment and orchestrate epithelial to mesenchymal transition, it is likely to play an important role in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) progression. The aim of the present study was to determine the immuohistochemical expression of EMMPRIN (CD147) and its association with clinicopathological parameters in OSCC patients presenting in our part of the world.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors affecting the adoption of agricultural technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically the role of credit market inefficiency in adoption of agricultural technologies in the region. Design/methodology/approach: Most importantly, the paper applies a 2SLS model on a unique data set on nine agrarian countries from Sub-Saharan Africa’s intensification of food crops agriculture (Afrint) to provide evidence on how credit market inefficiency affects adoption of technologies in the sub region. Findings: The study finds that the relationship between credit and technology adoption is one-way causal relation (i.e. credit access leads to technology adoption) as opposed to a two-way relation (i.e. mutual dependent relation). Further, the results indicate that credit market inefficiency can be a major barrier to the adoption of yield enhancing technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Further, the study showed mixed results for household variables. The results give credence to studies that highlight the importance of infrastructure and risk control in the adoption of new technologies. Research limitations/implications: The study is limited to only nine countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, the findings and interpretations should be considered as such. Further, there is the need for further research that considers all the region so as to establish whether or not there is a relationship between credit market inefficiencies and technology adoption in the region. Practical implications: The policy implication is that microfinance institutions should consider scaling up their credit services to ensure that more households benefit from it, and in so doing technology adoption will be enhanced. Originality/value: The main contribution of the study lies in its use of a unique data set from Sub-Saharan Africa’s intensification of food crops agriculture (Afrint) to investigation relationship between credit market inefficiency and technology adoption.

Routing in sensor networks is very challenging compared to contemporary communication and wireless ad–hoc networks. This is attributed to several characteristics that distinguish them from such networks. Transmitting data from every sensor node within the deployment region might result in significant and unnecessary redundancy in data and incur avoidable energy and traffic expenditure; thus, a routing protocol which is able to select a set of sensor nodes and utilise data aggregation during the relaying of data is of great importance. Furthermore, timely delivery of data is required in many applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), such as real–time target tracking in battle environments, emergent event triggering in monitoring applications impose the need of efficient routing protocol. In this paper, we propose a data routing scheme which ensures increased network lifetime by exploiting energy efficiently, supporting reliability, fast delivery of delay–sensitive data and achieving low–cost sensor design. Simulation results demonstrate that, the proposed routing scheme outperforms related existing approaches in terms of all the evaluation metrics such as packet delivery ratio, energy efficiency and timely delivery of data.

Purpose: To compare the safety and efficacy of single oral-dose azithromycin with a 7-week topical tetracycline ointment course in the treatment of active trachoma.

Security and privacy are the most important concerns related to vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), as it is an open-access and self-organized network. The presence of ‘selfish’ nodes distributed in the network are taken into account as an important challenge and as a security threat in VANET. A selfish node is a legitimate vehicle node which tries to achieve the most benefit from the network by broadcasting wrong information. An efficient and proper security model can be useful to tackle advances from attackers, as well as selfish nodes. In this study, a privacy-preserving node and message authentication scheme, along with a trust model was developed. The proposed node authentication ensures the legitimacy of the vehicle nodes, whereas the message authentication was developed to ensure the message's integrity. To deal with selfish nodes, an experience-based trust model was also designed. Additionally, to fulfill the privacy-preserving aspect, the mapping of each vehicle was performed using a different pseudo-identity. In this paper, fog nodes instead of road-side units (RSUs), were distributed along the roadside. This was mainly because of the fact that fog computing reduces latency, and results in increased throughput. Security analysis indicated that our scheme met the VANETs' security requirements. In addition, the performance analysis showed that the proposed scheme had a lower communication and computation overhead, compared to the other related works. Monte-Carlo simulation results were applied to estimate the false-positive rates (FPR), which also proved the validity of the proposed security scheme.

Resource scheduling assigns the precise and accurate tasks to CPU, network, and storage. The aim behind this is the optimum usage of resources. However, well-organized scheduling is needed for both cloud providers and cloud users. Several resource scheduling algorithms have been discussed in the literature, but there are little emphases to reliability aware resource scheduling. In this research article, an innovative technique is proposed that is known as the Fuzzy Cuckoo Search (FCS) technique based on the fuzzy theory and cuckoo search algorithm to solve real-time optimization problematic issues. The FCS technique is used to address the reliability aware resource scheduling problems in IaaS Cloud. An experiment has been carried out on the CloudSim simulator and results of FCS techniques are compared with the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Honey Bee (HB) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) scheduling algorithms. Finally, computational results demonstrate that the FCS technique is produced 39.21% better optimal solutions than the best solutions obtained by the comparison algorithms in terms of failure rate. It specifies that the FCS technique is more appropriate for reliability aware resource scheduling for IaaS Cloud.

M2M communication is the next vital part of IoT infrastructure. It is extremely important for IoT systems to prosper in machine-type communication (MTC) devices that have low computational power, limited energy and small amount of memory capabilities. Thousands of devices transmitting data while working remotely and independent of any external supervision, creates concern for the security of data and devices as the topology is totally different to that of personal computers. In relation to the security of the devices, authentication is the first important part that has to be addressed against all possible security threats in IoT communication. In this regard, we focus on different types of authentication techniques being carried out by the researchers in M2M communicating environment of several remotely operating devices and address their security threats.

Highlights: [•] A novel learning-based harmony search (HS) algorithm is proposed in this paper. [•] Learning automata is employed for fine-tuning of HS parameters. [•] No parameter-setting is required in the proposed learning automata based harmony search algorithm. [•] The numerical results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other HS variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]