Abstract: The aim of the present article is to determine the impact of the external and internal factors of bank performance on the profitability indicators of the CEE countries banks in the period from 2006 to 2012. On the basis of research conducted abroad on bank and macroeconomic profitability indicators, in order to obtain research results, the authors evaluated return on average assets (ROAA) and return on average equity (ROAE) indicators of the CEE countries banks. The authors analyzed profitability indicators of banks using descriptive methods, SPSS data analysis methods, as well as data correlation and linear regression analysis. The authors concluded that most internal and external indicators of bank performance have no direct influence the profitability of the banks in the CEE countries. The only exceptions are credit risk and bank size, which affect one of the measures of bank profitability – return on average equity.
Abstract: This study investigated the views of teachers, students and their parents on the FATIH (Movement of Enhancing Opportunities and Improving Technology) Project, which was put into service by the Ministry of National Education in cooperation with the Ministry of Transportation in Turkey in November 2010 for the purpose of increasing students’ success and planned to be completed within 5 years. The study group consisted of teachers employed in a pilot school in the province of Karaman in central Turkey included within the scope of the FATIH Project, students attending this school and parents whose children are students in that school. The research data were collected through forms developed by the researchers to determine the views of teachers, students and parents on the FATIH Project. The descriptive analysis method, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the study. An analysis of the data revealed that a large majority of the teachers and the students believed that if computers were used to serve their set purpose, then they could make considerable contributions to education. A large majority of the parents, on the other hand, regard the use of computers in education as a great opportunity for the students. The views of the teachers, students and parents on the FATIH Project usually overlap. Most of the participants in the study pointed out that the FATIH Project was intended to use technology effectively in education. Moreover, each individual participant described their role in the FATIH Project in accordance with their relative position and stated that they could perform whatever was expected of them for the effective and efficient use and progress of the Project. The views of the participants regarding the FATIH Project vary according to the kind of the participants.
Abstract: As the ecology of Lake Shihwa has been restored significantly nowadays, the urban development is in progress around Lake Shihwa areas. Each development project includes a plan on utilizing waterfront areas, but there exist a difference on waterfront design criteria between experts and users. Therefore, it is significant to analyze preferences in design elements of existing waterfront parks around Lake Shihwa (Ansan Waterfront Park, Shihwa Reed Wetland Park, and T-Light Park) based on users’ perspectives and to reflect the result on upcoming waterfront developments. This study derives design elements on waterfront parks from literature reviews. The survey questionnaires are created based on these classified elements and the surveys are conducted to experts and users with in-depth interviews. For all three parks, several park facilities appear to be not recognized by users. Therefore the circulation path should be introduced in guide maps and information activities and furthermore in disposition of park facilities.
Abstract: Discussions on bilingualism have always dwelt on how the mother tongue interferes with the target language. This interference is considered a serious problem in second language learning. Usually, the interference has been phonological. But the objective of this research is to explore how the target language interferes with the mother tongue. In the case of the Igbo language, it interferes with English mostly at the phonological level while English interferes with Igbo at the realm of vocabulary. The result is a new language \"Engligbo\" which is a hybrid of English and Igbo. The Igbo language spoken by about 25 million people is one of the three most prominent languages in Nigeria. This paper discusses the phenomenal Engligbo, and other implications for Igbo learners of English. The method of analysis is descriptive. A number of recommendations were made that would help teachers handle problems arising from such mutual interferences.
Abstract: This study explores associations between parental restriction and children's appetitive traits, putting to test the hypothesis that parental “restriction” is associated with having a child with stronger food approach tendencies (food enjoyment (FE) and food over responsiveness (FR)). The participants, from 55 nationalities, targeting 1081 parents of 5- to 11-year-old children from 7 private schools in Dubai, UAE, who completed self-reported questionnaires over the 2011-2012 school year. The questionnaire has been a tailored amalgamation of CEBQ and CFQ in order to measure the children’s appetitive traits and parental restriction, respectively. The findings of this quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional analysis confirmed the hypothesis in that “parental restriction” was positively associated with child food responsiveness (r, 0.183), food enjoyment (r, 0.102). To conclude, as far as the figures depict, the parents controlling their children’s food intake would seemingly a reverse impact on their eating behavior in the short term.
Abstract: In order to remain competitive in what is a turbulent
environment; businesses must be able to react rapidly to change. The
past response to volatile market conditions was to introduce an
element of flexibility to production. Nowadays, what is often
required is a redesign of factory structures in order to cope with the
state of constant flux. The Institute of Production Systems and
Logistics is currently developing a descriptive and causal model for
the redesign of plant structures as part of an ongoing research project.
This article presents the first research findings attained in devising
this model.
Abstract: The objectives of this research paper were to study the expectation and satisfaction of tourists in five tourism service quality dimensions, namely, website quality, service ability, trust ability, customer empathy, and responsiveness to customer and also to study the influences of satisfaction affecting loyalty toward quality service of the online tourism enterprises located in Bangkok Thailand. This research utilized both quantitative and qualitative research methods. In terms of quantitative method, a questionnaire was used as a tool to collect data from 400 tourists who were using in online travel services. Statistics analysis included descriptive statistics, t-test and Multiple Regression Analysis. In terms of qualitative analysis, an in-depth interview and content analysis were used along with 10 individual management levels of e-commerce enterprises.
The results revealed that the respondents had higher expectations than their level of satisfaction in all five categories. However, the respondents were more satisfied with online travel services than without online service. The demographic factors such as gender and age had no influence on the level of satisfaction whereas the demographic factors of education, occupation, and income had influenced the level of satisfaction. The test results also indicated that the level of satisfaction from responsiveness to customer had the highest influence on the loyalty of tourists who used online travel. The level of satisfaction from customer empathy had the highest influence on the tourists to recommend others to use online travel services. Also, the level of satisfaction from service ability had the highest influence on tourists to take an actual trip.
Abstract: Economic processes underway in the country directly and indirectly affect the welfare of the people and the social environment, starting with job security and having a direct impact on the qualitative and safe living environment.
The paper describes existing situation and gives analysis of the regional development policy determination and implementation in the all three Baltic countries. According statistical indicators there are differences between implementation of the regional development activities between all Baltic countries and in regions of inside each country.
It is analyzed more detail differences between regions in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia according possibility to evaluate success of development processes in regions of the Baltic countries. The descriptive analyze of documents, statistical indicators at national level and regional level were used in the research.
Abstract: The banking sector poses a lot of problems in Nigeria in general and the non-oil export sector in particular. The banks' lack effectiveness in handling small, medium or long-term credit risk (lack of training of loan officers, lack of information on borrowers and absence of a reliable credit registry) results in non-oil exporters being burdened with high requirements, such as up to three years of financial statements, enough collateral to cover both the loan principal and interest (including a cash deposit that may be up to 30% of the loans' net present value), and to provide every detail of the international trade transaction in question. The stated problems triggered this research. Consequently, information on bank financing of non-oil exports was collected from 100 respondents from the 20 Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) in Nigeria. The data was analysed by the use of descriptive statistics correlation and regression. It is found that, Nigerian banks are participants in the financing of non-oil exports. Despite their participation, the rate of interest for credit extended to non-oil export is usually high, ranging between 15-20%. Small and medium sized non-oil export businesses lack the credit history for banks to judge them as reputable. Banks also consider the non-oil export sector very risky for investment. The banks actually do grant less credit than the exporters may require and therefore are not properly funded by banks. Banks grant very low volume of foreign currency loan in addition to, unfavorable exchange rate at which Naira is exchanged to the Dollar and other currencies in the country. This makes importation of inputs costly and negatively impacted on the non-oil export performance in Nigeria.
Abstract: The software evolution control requires a deep
understanding of the changes and their impact on different system
heterogeneous artifacts. And an understanding of descriptive
knowledge of the developed software artifacts is a prerequisite
condition for the success of the evolutionary process.
The implementation of an evolutionary process is to make changes
more or less important to many heterogeneous software artifacts such
as source code, analysis and design models, unit testing, XML
deployment descriptors, user guides, and others. These changes can
be a source of degradation in functional, qualitative or behavioral
terms of modified software. Hence the need for a unified approach
for extraction and representation of different heterogeneous artifacts
in order to ensure a unified and detailed description of heterogeneous
software artifacts, exploitable by several software tools and allowing
to responsible for the evolution of carry out the reasoning change
concerned.
Abstract: With a growing number of digital libraries and other
open education repositories being made available throughout the
world, effective search and retrieval tools are necessary to access the
desired materials that surpass the effectiveness of traditional, allinclusive
search engines. This paper discusses the design and use of
Folksemantic, a platform that integrates OpenCourseWare search,
Open Educational Resource recommendations, and social network
functionality into a single open source project. The paper describes
how the system was originally envisioned, its goals for users, and
data that provides insight into how it is actually being used. Data
sources include website click-through data, query logs, web server
log files and user account data. Based on a descriptive analysis of its
current use, modifications to the platform's design are recommended
to better address goals of the system, along with recommendations
for additional phases of research.
Abstract: Descriptive statistics was performed with the aim to achieve research objective of to investigate lecturers- usage of the mobile technology for teaching. A representative sample of 20 lecturers from the Faculty of Industrial Art & Design Technology of Universiti Industri Selangor (UNISEL), Malaysia was selected as the respondents. The result attested that lecturers fully accept the concept of mobility in learning and game play is appealing concept to support classroom learning. Subsequently, analogous experience on small size of keypad, screen resolution, and navigation could be the major problematic factors to students and affect their mobile learning process. Recommendation for future research is also presented.
Abstract: This paper aimed to study the factors that relate to
working behavior of employees at Pakkred Municipality, Nonthaburi
Province. A questionnaire was utilized as the tool in collecting
information. Descriptive statistics included frequency, percentage,
mean and standard deviation. Independent- sample t- test, analysis of
variance and Pearson Correlation were also used. The findings of this
research revealed that the majority of the respondents were female,
between 25- 35 years old, married, with a Bachelor degree. The
average monthly salary of respondents was between 8,001- 12,000
Baht, and having about 4-7 years of working experience. Regarding
the overall working motivation factors, the findings showed that
interrelationship, respect, and acceptance were ranked as highly
important factors, whereas motivation, remunerations & welfare,
career growth, and working conditions were ranked as moderately
important factors. Also, overall working behavior was ranked as high.
The hypotheses testing revealed that different genders had a
different working behavior and had a different way of working as a
team, which was significant at the 0.05 confidence level, Moreover,
there was a difference among employees with different monthly
salary in working behavior, problem- solving and decision making,
which all were significant at the 0.05 confidence level. Employees
with different years of working experience were found to have work
working behavior both individual and as a team at the statistical
significance level of 0.01 and 0.05. The result of testing the
relationship between motivation in overall working revealed that
interrelationship, respect and acceptance from others, career growth,
and working conditions related to working behavior at a moderate
level, while motivation in performing duties and remunerations and
welfares related to working behavior towards the same direction at a
low level, with a statistical significance of 0.01.
Abstract: Internet addiction has become a critical problem on
adolescents in Taiwan, and its negative effects on various dimensions
of adolescent development caught the attention of educational and
psychological experts. This study examined the correlation between
cognitive (locus of control) and emotion (emotion venting strategies)
factors on internet addiction of adolescents in Taiwan. Using the
Compulsive Internet Use (CIU) and the Emotion Venting Strategy
scales, a survey was conducted and 215 effective samples (students
ranging from12 to14 years old) returned. Quantitative analysis
methods such as descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA, Pearson
correlations and multiple regression were adopted. The results were as
follows: 1. Severity of Internet addiction has significant gender
differences; boys were at a higher risk than girls in becoming addicted
to the Internet. 2. Emotion venting, locus of control and internet
addiction have been shown to be positive correlated with one another.
3. Setting the locus of control as the control variable, emotion venting
strategy has positive and significant contribution to internet addiction.
The results of this study suggest that coaching deconstructive emotion
strategies and cognitive believes are encouraged to integrate with
actual field work.
Abstract: In sport, human resources management gives special
attention to method of applying volunteers, their maintenance, and
participation of volunteers with each other and management
approaches for better operation of events celebrants. The recognition
of volunteers- characteristics and motives is important to notice,
because it makes the basis of their participation and commitment at
sport environment. The motivation and commitment of 281
volunteers were assessed using the organizational commitment scale,
motivation scale and personal characteristics questionnaire.The
descriptive results showed that; 64% of volunteers were women with
age average 21/24 years old. They were physical education student,
single (71/9%), without occupation (53%) and with average of 5
years sport experience. Their most important motivation was career
factor and the most important commitment factor was normative
factor. The results of examining the hypothesized showed that; age,
sport experience and education are effective in the amount of
volunteers- commitment. And the motive factors such as career,
material, purposive and protective factors also have the power to
predict the amount of sports volunteers- commitment value.
Therefore it is recommended to provide possible opportunities for
volunteers and carrying out appropriate instructional courses by
events executive managers.
Abstract: Effective employee selection is a critical component
of a successful organization. Many important criteria for personnel
selection such as decision-making ability, adaptability, ambition, and
self-organization are naturally vague and imprecise to evaluate. The
rough sets theory (RST) as a new mathematical approach to
vagueness and uncertainty is a very well suited tool to deal with
qualitative data and various decision problems. This paper provides
conceptual, descriptive, and simulation results, concentrating chiefly
on human resources and personnel selection factors. The current
research derives certain decision rules which are able to facilitate
personnel selection and identifies several significant features based
on an empirical study conducted in an IT company in Iran.
Abstract: Academics and researchers are interested in the effects of social media on college students, with a specific focus on the most popular social media website; Facebook. Previous studied have found contradictory result on the relationship between Facebook usage and the student engagement with positive, detrimental and no significant relationships. However, these studies were limited to western higher education system. This paper fills a gap in the literature by using a sample (300) of Sri Lankan management undergraduates to examine the relationship between Facebook usage and student engagement. Student engagement was measured 35 item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement and Facebook usage by Facebook intensity scale. Descriptive statistics, path analysis and structural equation modeling were applied as statistical tools and techniques. Results indicate that student engagement scale was significantly negatively related with the Facebook usage with the influence from student engagement on Facebook usage.
Abstract: The purpose of the study was to investigate the
effectiveness of ICT training workshop of tutors of Allama Iqbal
Open University Pakistan. The study was delimited to tutors of
Multan region. The total sample comprised of 100 tutors. All the
tutors who participated in ICT training workshop in Multan region
were taken as sample in the study. A questionnaire having two parts,
based on five point rating scale was developed by the researcher. Part
one was about the competency level of computer skills while Part
two was based on items related to training delivery, structure and
content. Part One of questionnaire had five levels of competency
about computer skills. The questionnaire was personally administered
and collected back by the researcher himself on the last day of
workshop.
The collected data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics.
Through this study it was found that majority of the tutors strongly
agreed that training enhanced their computer skills. Majority of the
respondents consider themselves to be generally competent in the use
of computer. They also agreed that there was appropriate
infrastructure and technical support in lab during training workshop.
Moreover, it was found that the training imparted the knowledge of
pedagogy of using computers for distance education.
Abstract: This paper presents implementation of attitude controller for a small UAV using field programmable gate array (FPGA). Due to the small size constrain a miniature more compact and computationally extensive; autopilot platform is needed for such systems. More over UAV autopilot has to deal with extremely adverse situations in the shortest possible time, while accomplishing its mission. FPGAs in the recent past have rendered themselves as fast, parallel, real time, processing devices in a compact size. This work utilizes this fact and implements different attitude controllers for a small UAV in FPGA, using its parallel processing capabilities. Attitude controller is designed in MATLAB/Simulink environment. The discrete version of this controller is implemented using pipelining followed by retiming, to reduce the critical path and thereby clock period of the controller datapath. Pipelined, retimed, parallel PID controller implementation is done using rapidprototyping and testing efficient development tool of “system generator", which has been developed by Xilinx for FPGA implementation. The improved timing performance enables the controller to react abruptly to any changes made to the attitudes of UAV.
Abstract: Contrary to negative emotion regulation, coping with
positive moods have received less attention in adolescent adjustment.
However, some research has found that everyone is different on
dealing with their positive emotions, which affects their adaptation
and well-being. The purpose of the present study was to investigate
the relationship between positive emotions dampening and
internalizing behavior problems of adolescent in Taiwan. A survey
was conducted and 208 students (12 to14 years old) completed the
strengths and difficulties questionnaire (SDQ), the Affect Intensity
Measure, and the positive emotions dampening scale. Analysis
methods such as descriptive statistics, t-test, Pearson correlations and
multiple regression were adapted. The results were as follows:
Emotionality and internalizing problem behavior have significant
gender differences. Compared to boys, girls have a higher score on
negative emotionality and are at a higher risk for internalizing
symptoms. However, there are no gender differences on positive
emotion dampening. Additionally, in the circumstance that negative
emotionality acted as the control variable, positive emotion
dampening strategy was (positive) related to internalizing behavior
problems. Given the results of this study, it is suggested that coaching
deconstructive positive emotion strategies is to assist adolescents
with internalizing behavior problems is encouraged.