A new form of barter economy is emerging in many industrial nations. People are exchanging goods and services through Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS). These are local associations whose members list their offers of, and requests for, goods and services in a directory and then exchange them priced in a local unit of currency. Using a United Kingdom case study of Totnes LETS, this paper...

Annals of Ibadan Postgraduate Medicine is published biannually by the Association of Resident Doctors , UCH chapter. It is normally published in the months of June and December. Subscription: Subscriptions are available on a calendar year basis for a volume comprising two issues. Rate in Nigeria for individuals is N850.00 per volume and N1,000. 00 for institutions and libraries. Rest of the wor...

In this paper, an unexplored subject in the domains of Farsi/Arabic handwritten word preprocessing is introduced. Subwords play a vital role in many applications such as cheque amount recognition, text recognition, lexicon reduction and subword-based word recognition. Correcting the faults occurred in subwords will improve the overall performance of these applications. A subword is a connected-...

Research into design rationale in the past has focused on argumentation-based design deliberations. These approaches cannot be used to support change impact analysis effectively because the dependency between design elements and decisions are not well represented and cannot be quantified. Without such knowledge, designers and architects cannot easily assess how changing requirements and design ...

This paper examines the creation of modern electronic payment systems in Thailand. Thailand, like other major developed and emerging economies, experienced payment systems reforms in the 1990s. The country's economic expansion, which started in the late-1980s but unexpectedly ended in the late-1990s, led to the development of three major payment systems. The central bank played a leading role, ...

Information security is not just to provide an authenticity and integrity to the data, but there is also a need to seek identity, rights of use and origin of information, which may require some degree of process re-engineering. Rarely security technologies like digital signatures can be simply “plugged in” without streamlining the process. In this paper we address the problem of information sec...

We examine the interference of fairness and observers in digital coin systems. Since copying of coins cannot be prevented cryptographically in anonymous off-line coin systems, double-spending detection is one of the major tasks. An observer is a tamper resistant device that prevents doublespending physically, i.e., Alice has no access to her coins and therefore she cannot copy them. Digital coi...

The increasing prevalence of obesity and sedentary lifestyles has led to an increased incidence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) worldwide. In Taiwan, middle-aged women are at a greater risk of MetS, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease than men are because they have more subcutaneous fat and larger waist circumferences compared to men with equal visceral fat levels. This study investigated ...

Signature plays its authorization role in almost every document. Proper care should be taken for the verification of the genuineness of the signature in legal documents. Signature verification scheme can be online or offline based on the acquisition type. A novel method for offline signature verification in bank cheques is proposed. It is found out that using fractal dimensions for verification...