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This study examines the drivers of marketing channel participation amongst smallholder rice farmers in the northern region of Ghana.

Using a sample of 397 smallholder rice farmers drawn from a multistage sampling procedure, the study employed multivariate probit (MVP) model in the empirical estimations. In this context, the model assumes that a rice farmer should at least participate in one market channel.

The study reveals that the wholesaler market channel is the most commonly used channel among farmers, followed by the aggregator channel. However, the processor market channel is the least patronized one in the study area. The results also show statistically significant correlation coefficients in four out of the six possible combinations, implying that market channel participation among smallholder farmers is not mutually exclusive. Rice market channel participation is positively and significantly influenced by age, gender, household headship, access to credit, extension service, irrigation, improved seed and access to price information.

This study is limited in extending the analysis to include the impact of market channels on some outcome measures. This is due to data limitation.

The findings of this study add to the growing literature on smallholder market channel participation in Ghana.

The purpose of this study is to estimate the profitability of rice production for irrigated and rain-fed farmers; determine the factors that influence farmers' decision to participate in irrigation and the impact of irrigation on rice farmers' profitability in northern Ghana.

Using cross-sectional data collected from 543 rice farmers in northern Ghana, the study employed both non-parametric (cost benefit analysis) and parametric (endogenous switching regression) approaches to analyse the data.

The empirical results reveal a significant difference between the profits of irrigated (GHS 2442.30) and rain-fed farmers (GHS 576.20), as well as the cost-benefit ratios between irrigators (2.53) and rain-fed farmers (1.37). Also, participation in irrigation was found to be influenced by relatively small farm size and off-farm income; while profitability was influenced by membership in a farmer-based organization, access to agricultural extension services and perception of decreasing rainfall intensity. Irrigation also had a positive significant net impact on profitability of rice production.

The results provide justification for development partners and the government of Ghana through the “one-village-one-dam” policy, to invest in irrigation in northern Ghana in order to improve household welfare as well as build resilience for sustainable production systems.

This study is the first of its kind to provide a robust analysis of the difference in profits of rain-fed and irrigated rice farmers while estimating the determinants of Ghanaian farmers' choice of either of the regimes within a bias-corrected framework.

This paper discusses the results from the initiative that has been undertaken to utilize residues from oil palm re‐plantation, particularly the oil palm trunk (OPT) for the production of laminated veneer lumber (LVL). Efficient use of such residues is vital in order to minimize the environmental burdens associated with the disposal of the oil palm residues, thus ensuring the future growth of Malaysian palm oil industry. The bending and compression strength of the OPT LVL produced were accessed and compared with Malaysian oak (formerly known as rubberwood), timber species that is commonly used in the manufacture of furniture in Malaysia. Properties of OPT LVL were found almost comparable to solid Malaysian oak in terms of bending and compression strength. Combination of OPT veneers with several layers of Malaysian oak veneers during the process of LVL manufacturing has resulted in the improvement in bending and compression strength of the LVL as compared to those produced entirely from OPT. In addition, such practice also produced LVL board with far less variation in strength properties as compared to solid OPT properties. With further research and development embarked upon the gluability of the OPT materials, the overall performance of the OPT LVL could be improved for commercial utilization of OPT wastes in the near future. Development higher value‐added by‐products from oil palm industry residues, would benefit the industry through reduction of the overall environmental burden and would place it on a new environmentally sustainable platform.

This paper follows a systematic literature review (SLR) method covering the published studies until March 2021. The authors have extracted the related studies from different online databases utilizing quality-assessment-criteria. In order to review high-quality studies, 32 papers have been chosen through the paper selection process. The selected papers have been categorized into three main groups, decision-making methods (17 papers), meta-heuristic methods (8 papers) and fuzzy-based methods (7 papers). The existing methods in each group have been examined based on important qualitative parameters, namely, time, cost, scalability, efficiency, availability and reliability.

Cloud computing is known as one of the superior technologies to perform large-scale and complex computing. With the growing tendency of network service users to utilize cloud computing, web service providers are encouraged to provide services with various functional and non-functional features and supply them in a service pool. In this regard, choosing the most appropriate services to fulfill users' requirements becomes a challenging problem. Since the problem of service selection in a cloud environment is known as a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard problem, many efforts have been made in recent years. Therefore, this paper aims to study and assess the existing service selection approaches in cloud computing.

The obtained results indicate that in decision-making methods, the assignment of proper weights to the criteria has a high impact on service ranking accuracy. Also, since service selection in cloud computing is known as an NP-hard problem, utilizing meta-heuristic algorithms to solve this problem offers interesting advantages compared to other approaches in discovering better solutions with less computational effort and moving quickly toward very good solutions. On the other hand, since fuzzy-based service selection approaches offer search results visually and cover quality of service (QoS) requirements of users, this kind of method is able to facilitate enhanced user experience.

Although the current paper aimed to provide a comprehensive study, there were some limitations. Since the authors have applied some filters to select the studies, some effective works may have been ignored. Generally, this paper has focused on journal papers and some effective works published in conferences. Moreover, the works published in non-English formats have been excluded. To discover relevant studies, the authors have chosen Google Scholar as a popular electronic database. Although Google Scholar can offer the most valid approaches, some suitable papers may not be observed during the process of article selection.

The outcome of the current paper will be useful and valuable for scholars, and it can be a roadmap to help future researchers enrich and improve their innovations. By assessing the recent efforts in service selection in cloud computing and offering an up-to-date comparison of the discussed works, this paper can be a solid foundation for understanding the different aspects of service selection.

Although service selection approaches have essential impacts on cloud computing, there is still a lack of a detailed and comprehensive study about reviewing and assessing existing mechanisms in this field. Therefore, the current paper adopts a systematic method to cover this gap. The obtained results in this paper can help the researchers interested in the field of service selection. Generally, the authors have aimed to specify existing challenges, characterize the efficient efforts and suggest some directions for upcoming studies.

People are subjected to a multitude of interruptions. In order to manage these interruptions it is imperative to predict a person's interruptability – his/her current readiness or inclination to be interrupted. This paper aims to introduce the approach of direct interruptability inference from sensor streams (accelerometer and audio data) in a ubiquitous computing setup and to show that it provides highly accurate and robust predictions.

The authors argue that scenarios are central for evaluating the performance of ubiquitous computing devices (and interruptability predicting devices in particular) and prove this on the setup employed, which was based on that of Kern and Schiele.

The paper demonstrates that scenarios provide the foundation for avoiding misleading results, and provide the basis for a stratified scenario‐based learning model, which greatly speeds up the training of such devices.

The direct prediction seems to be competitive or even superior to indirect prediction methods and no drawbacks have been observed yet.

The paper introduces a method for accurately predicting a person's interruptability directly from simple sensors without any intermediate steps/symbols.

In any critical system, high‐availability of software components like web services has so far been achieved through replication. Three replication strategies known as active, passive, and hybrid, describe for example how many replicas are needed, where to locate replicas, and how replicas interact with the original web service and among themselves if needed. The purpose of this paper is to show how replicates could be substituted with components that are similarly functional to the component that needs back‐up in case of failure.

After examination of the different existing replication strategies, it was decided to test the suitability of the proposed web services high‐availability approach based on communities for each strategy. To this end, the specification of web services using two behaviors, namely control and operational, was deemed appropriate.

The active replication strategy is the only strategy that could support the development of a web services high‐availability approach based on communities of web services.

The proposed approach has been validated in practice by deploying a JXTA‐based testbed. The experimental work has implemented the active replication strategy.

Software component high‐availability could be achieved by components that are similarly functional to this component, which permits the common limitations of existing replication strategies to be addressed.

The current Industry 4.0 era is considered not only as a process that dominates technological developments but also as a process that influences the leadership styles. Management 4.0 is essential for businesses to find and apply the appropriate technologies in the age of Industry 4.0. The leadership styles that business managers will adopt in order to be successful in this process and to survive in an intensely competitive environment can play an important role. At this point, a significant problem arises: identifying leadership styles that will bring success. In this context, the primary purpose of this chapter is to explain the modern leadership styles that business managers can adopt or follow in the age of Industry 4.0. In line with this purpose, the chapter first describes the historical development of leadership, leadership theories and modern leadership styles, such as transactional, transformational, technological, strategic, visionary and agile leadership, and all these concepts are discussed based on the Industry 4.0 perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the existing literature on financial risk disclosure by examining a sample of non-financial Indian companies listed on the Bombay stock exchange (BSE) to explore the degree of information about financial risks contained in their annual reports.

To study the financial risk disclosure of Indian companies, a sample of 206 non-financial companies has been derived from the top 500 listed companies at BSE. The method used in this study to analyze risk disclosure is content analysis. A total of 1,854 annual reports are scanned through software Nvivo-12 to find different types of risk words. Overall, risk disclosure, category wise risk disclosure, year-wise risk disclosure and sector-wise risk disclosure are assessed. The risk disclosure index is also computed.

The results show that there are some risk disclosure practices in Indian companies. No general pattern is observed. Companies are following vague method of risk disclosure. In the true sense, Indian companies are now started risk disclosure practices since 2018. This may be because of pressure from regulating bodies and stakeholders with greater detail about their financial risks.

This study is carried out for Indian non-financial companies. The paper adds to the literature relating to financial risk disclosure in developing countries.

This study examines how cultural dimensions' influence management style and organizational culture in a multicultural environment.

This study adopts a quantitative approach to achieve these objectives, with 270 questionnaires obtained from employees working in a multicultural environment. The resulting data was analyzed using the PLS-SEM statistical approach.

The study results suggest that organizations should prioritize their integrity using the influence of cultural diversity, management styles, organization culture and social interactivity to achieve different dimensions of human satisfaction.

The results in general present a statistically significant positive effect of power distance, masculinity/femininity and uncertainty avoidance on organizational culture, indicating that disposition to organizational culture has a significant role in trust development, particularly in diverse cultures.

The influence of organizational culture on organizational performance cannot be ignored in a multicultural workplace, especially when it is related to employee performance and commitment. As the world globalizes, many organizations are facing the challenge of cultural differences. Therefore, it is necessary to examine how cultural dimensions affect management style and organizational culture. As a result, this study further considers the empirical evidence of work engagement and its impact on employee satisfaction.