beSMART

SURVEY OF MOBILE PHONE USAGE PATTERNS AMONG STREET VENDORS IN DAR ES SALAAM CITY- TANZANIA

Nasibu Mramba, Professor Erkki Sutinen, Dr. Michael Haule, Dr. Peter Msami

The purpose of this exploratory study is to better understand the mobile phone usage pattern among street vendors in the Dar Es Salaam city. The survey data were collected from 174 mobile street vendors in Dar Es Salaam where stratified and convenience sampling were employed. Data were subjected to detailed exploratory analysis through descriptive procedures, and the reliability analysis was carried out by using Cronbach’s alpha. The findings show that, among street vendors, mobile phone is commonly used in social perspectives and little in business specifically for M-money and business communication. Furthermore, the results show low perceived difficulties and high perceived benefits of using mobile phones, meaning that there are opportunities of transforming street vending business using mobile technology. Generally usage is very basic and the true benefits of mobile phone access have not being realized by street vendors.

Mobile Phone, Street Vendors (SV) and Street Vending Business (SVB)

STREAMLINING COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: THE CONCEPT OF THE MEETINGS-FLOW

Chung-Yang Chen

In today’s integrated software environment, managing stakeholders’ involvement has been challenging. To help address this issue, we draw an attention on project meetings, and propose the meetings-flow (MF) concept for streamlining the stakeholder involvement. This paper serves as an introductory part of the entire MF research in software development. In this paper, we primarily focuses on reviewing the role of meetings in software development, and presenting a software company’s case to demonstrate the usage of MF, in particular for modeling the critical group proceeding of the collaborative software development.

software process modeling, collaboration, meetings-flow

INTEGRATION AND LANGUAGES OF ONTOLOGY

Michal Joštiak, Marian Švalec

From the article, we can get an overview of what ontologies are and how we most often meet with them – through the ontological languages. All examples are practically shown in e-mail communication that is easy to understand and demonstration of the basic features of described notation of ontology.

ontology, database, languages, XML, RDF, OWL

EMPLOYEES’ SATISFACTION WITH PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL
(A Case Study of Rwanda Education Board)

Dr Kerosi Josaphat Bosire. Mukamuhinda Odette, Jesse david Kabagambe

This study titled “Employees’ Satisfaction with Performance Appraisal” investigated employees’ reactions to satisfaction with the existing performance appraisal system as applied in Rwanda Education Board by utilizing 4Likert’s scale.  The study variables included Job Analysis, Performance Measures, Performance Feedback, Performance Ratings and different decisions related to performance appraisal involving Trainings and Coaching, performance based Rewards, Transfer, Promotion, and Demotion. The study was undertaken for first to “present REB appraised employees’ demographic characteristics” with regards to their Gender, Age, and Marital status, level of education and Working experiences; second to “find out various in reactions of REB’s employees to the performance appraisal done”; third to “examine the accuracy of REB’s PA decisions”. From a population of 74 employees, a sample of 62 individual units representing technical and professional employees of REB was involved. Questionnaire (SAQ) was used for data collection and data thus collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The Cronbach’s coefficient alpha was calculated to measure internal consistency that is, how closely related a set of items are as a group.  The coefficient of determination was also computed to examine the accuracy of REB’s PA decisions.  The analyses were performed using SPSS program. The main findings that came out of this case study were that the majority of respondents were male, in group age of (31-40) years, holds bachelor degree, had working experiences ranging between 6-10 years and reported to be married. Employees were found to be substantially satisfied with promotion, demotion, transfer, job analysis and performance measures; and relatively satisfied with performance related feedback, ratings, training, and reward. The majority of REB employees perform what they are not supposed to do (which are out of their attributions), and decisions of reward, promotion, demotion, transfer are based on what employees have been achieved; and the latter is totally different from what they have employed to do.

Employee Satisfaction, Performance appraisal, likert scale,

DEVELOPMENT OF A DECISION TOOL FOR COST JUSTIFICATION OF SOFTWARE USABILITY

Burchan Aydin, Ph.D. and Dr. Mario G. Beruvides, Ph.D., P. E.

Cost justification of software usability has been criticized to be subjective and in some cases biased. This study is aimed at providing scientific basis to be used in usability cost justification models. Two decision tools were developed that help usability practitioners and/or engineer managers iteratively determine expected benefits of usability. Pareto analysis, interaction modeling, distribution fitting, bootstrap resampling, quantile regression, goal programming optimization modeling, and sensitivity analysis were used to develop these decision tools. The benefits of usability incorporated into the decision tools were increased sales, increased traffic of the web sites, reduced error rate of users, and decreasing task time.

Usability, Cost Justification of Usability

AUTHENTICATION SYSTEM DEPEND ON HAND GEOMETRY
USING BACK PROPAGATION NEURAL NETWORK

  Dr. Firas  M. Al-Fiky ,    Zainab Salih Ageed

In this method, the hand geometry measurement  be used and a new features has been extracted from two landmarks determined at the first step of preprocessing . The images taken by scanner covered by a black box without peg. The data collected and then the pre-processing  applied on it, after that passed to feature extraction stage. Each person has its own features like finger length, finger width, palm width, angle value and many other measurements. Features extraction contain 20 distances for fingers and palm (D1-D20) and 10 angels values measured and determine the center point on it . The angels calculated for a ten triangles  determined, then calculate the Area and the Perimeter on it. The second part of the proposed method begin with training  a neural network. The BPNN used here with trainlm algorithm  after that testing the NN. The population size was 100 samples, for 10 person, each person have 10 samples. For Training set 70 samples taken and 30 for testing the NN. The Recognition Rate (RR) was 91%.