Capital structure decisions are among the most important and crucial decisions for any business because of their effect on the performance of firms. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the impact of capital structure on financial performance of selected commercial banks in Ethiopia over the past five (5) year period from 2011 to 2015 using secondary data collected from financial statements of the commercial banks. Data was then analyzed on quantitative approach using multiple regression models. The study used two accounting-based measures of financial performance (i.e. return on equity (ROE) and return on assets (ROA)) as dependent variable and five capital structure measures (including debt ratio, debt to equity ratio, loan to deposit, bank’s size and asset tangibility) as independent variable. The results indicate that financial performance, which is measured by both ROA, is significantly and negatively associated with capital structure proxies such as DER, SIZE and TANG whereas DR have negative impact.

A cross-sectional study was conducted on bovine hydatidosis from November 2015 to June 2016 with the objectives of investigating its prevalence and Monetary loss in cattle slaughtered in Jimma municipality abattoir. Routine ante mortem and post-mortem inspection was performed on a total of 400 selected slaughtered cattle. Infection organs 223 cattle positive, 200 (89.7%) had cysts more in lungs, 20 (8.9%) in liver, 1 (0.45%) in kidney, 1(0.45%) in spleen, whereas, the rest of 1(0.45%) in heart infections involved organs. A significant association was observed (P<0.05) between the disease positivity and age groups, body condition. It was concluded that these zonotic cestodes deserve due attention to safeguard public health and that further studies are needed on epidemiology and public health importance of Echinococcus granulosus in the study area.

Transistor amplifier design is an important and fundamental concept in electronics, typically encountered by students at the junior level in electrical engineering. This paper focuses on two configurations that employ neural networks to design bipolar junction transistor circuits. The purpose of this work is to determine which design best fits the required parameters. Engineers often need to develop transistor circuits using a particular topology, e.g., common emitter, common collector, or common base. These also include a set of parameters including voltage gain, input impedance, and output impedance. For the most part, there are several methodologies that can provide a suitable solution, however the objective of this work is to indicate which external resistors are necessary to yield useful designs by employing neural networks. Here, a neural network has been trained to supply these component values for a particular configuration based on the aforementioned parameters. This should save a significant amount of work when evaluating a particular topology. And it should also permit experimentation with several designs, without having to perform detailed calculations.

The study assessed the physical land suitability for cassava cultivation in southern part of Adamawa State using Multi-criteria evaluation and GIS technique. Within the study area, the production of cassava is mainly for food and there are only little opportunities for its commercial development. This therefore makes it necessary to carry out land suitability analysis in order to provide information on the study area that would guide in sustaining long term production of cassava. The environmental variables examined were Mean Annual rainfall, Mean Temperature, Length of rainfall, Relief and Soil which were obtained from the Upper Benue River Development Authority (UBRDA), Yola. The primary data were sourced by means of field survey to obtain the coordinates of the current cassava growing areas for mapping. The five factor maps were reclassified based on environmental requirement of cassava crop in the IDRISI Taiga environment and different weights were assigned to each factor to represent their relative importance using the pair-wise comparison Matrix.

Haemoparasitic diseases account for substantial losses in terms of decreased working capacity, growth and productivity of camels. A survey of the one humped camel (Camelus dromedarius) slaughtered in Maiduguri was conducted from January to June, 2016 to determine the prevalence of haemoparasites and their effects on some haematological parameters. Blood samples were randomly collected from 209camels at the point of slaughter and subjected to standard haematological procedures to determine the white blood cell count (WBC), packed cell volume (PCV), heamoglobin concentration (Hb), mean corpuscular volume (MCV), mean corpuscular heamoglobin (MCH) and mean corpuscular heamoglobin concentration (MCHC). Blood films and Giemsa stained thin smears were prepared on clean glass slides and examined for the presence of haemoparasites. Haemoparasites were identified microscopically to generic level based on morphological features. A total prevalence of 12.6% was recorded for Anaplasma (37.7%), Trypanosoma (33.3%) and Babesia (22.2%), in addition to microfilariae of Dipetalonema species (7.5%). The haematological parameters of infected and uninfected camels were within normal range but, there was a significant difference (p<0.05) in Mean±SE RBC counts of infected and uninfected camels, while thee Mean± SEPCV, Hb, WBC, MCV, MCB and MCHC were comparable (p>0.05). We report the first occurrence of Dipetalonema species in one humped camel in Maiduguri. The role of camels as carriers or reservoir of haemoparasites for other species of domestic animals in Maiduguri is suspected. Routine screening, treatment including preventive chemoprophylaxis and vector control is recommended. There is also need for molecular studies to identify various species of haemoparasite circulating in trade camels in Maiduguri.

There is a rapid increase in the usage of social media in the most recent decade. Getting to social media platforms for example, Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn and Google+ via mediums like web and the web 2.0 has become the most convenient way for users. Individuals are turning out to be more inspired by and depending on such platforms for data, news and thoughts of different clients on various topics. The substantial dependence on these social platforms causes them to produce huge information described by three computational issues in particular; volume, velocity and dynamism. These issues frequently make informal organization information exceptionally complex to break down physically, bringing about the related utilization of computational method for dissecting them. Information mining gives an extensive variety of strategies for recognizing valuable information from huge datasets like patterns, examples and standards. Various data mining strategies are utilized for useful data recovery, factual displaying and machine learning. These systems generally do a sort of pre-processing of data, performs the data analysis and information. This study examines distinctive information mining procedures utilized as a part of mining different parts of the informal community over decades going from the chronicled systems to the forward model.

Electronic Passport (e-passport) is one of the results of the electronic revolution in the World; since the passport is the document of the person in terms of identity and nationality and is the property of the country. One of the most important challenges is to protect this document from forgery. The common forgery for the passport is replacing its holder photo. The proposed system concentrates on the security part of the e-passport. It consists of two parts; the first part is hiding of the security code by using steganography and storing the same code in the RFID tag by the issuing country of the epassport. The other part will be operated at the control point of the destination country to make sure of the e-passport validity by checking the hidden code using NFC and verify it with the one in the RFID tag. If the two values are equal, then the system will compute a key using Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange. This key will be used to read the secret information in the tag.

Sorghum bicolor (L.Moench) is one of the most important multipurpose crop for production of golden syrup and treacle and alcohol from stalk juice. Its bagasse and green foliage could be used as an excellent fodder for animals, as organic fertilizer or for paper manufacturing. Sweet sorghum is a high-biomass and sugar yielding C4 plant containing approximately equal quantities of soluble glucose and sucrose, and insoluble carbohydrates (cellulose and hemicelluloses). Sorghum has been shown to be excellent silage in many areas of the world. Plant cell walls are vast reserves of photo synthetically fixed carbon. The brown midrib mutants have been used to identify and characterize the genes that encode the major enzymes for specific steps of monolignol biosynthesis for sorghum.

AcrosssectionalstudywasconductedfromNovember2015toMarch 2016toestimatethe prevalence of Cysticercosis, to investigate prevalence and rate C.bovis infection with in different risk factors and to determine the distribution and viability of cystsin organs of animals slaughtered in Mekelle municipal abattoir. Ante-mortem and postmortem examination based on the standard and routine procedure were performed on randomly selected apparently healthy cattle brought for slaughter during period of the study. Of the total 312 inspected animals, 21 animals were found infected with C. bovis distributed in different anatomical structures with an overall prevalence of 6.7% (21/312). Even though there is no statistical significant difference among different ages groups, sex, breed and body condition score of the animals, the prevalence was roughly varied. Relatively higher prevalence of infection was found in adult 15(71.4%) than that of old 6 (28.6%). Generally prevalence of Cysticercos is bovis was prominent in males 20(95.2) unlike female animals 1(4.8). About 269(86.2 %) examined animals were local breed with considerably higher prevalence 20(95.2%). Based on body condition score, reasonably greater prevalence was found in good body condition animals 10(47.6) followed by 8(38.1) and 3(14.3) in medium and poor conditioned animals, respectively. Noticeably higher number 234(75%) of cattle slaughtered in Mekelle abattoir came from highland area with fairly increased prevalence 15(71.4%). Moderately higher rate of infection was recorded within old cattle 8.8% (6/68) compare to adult animals 6.15 %( 15/244). Regarding cyst locations, out of the total 21 cattle positive for C. bovis, carcasses of 12 cattle were having the cysts at one site only and 9 at more than one site. More cysts were encountered in tongue. From a total of 21 identified cyst positive carcasess 6 were containeda viable cyst. The overall findings of this study indicated the importance of C

A cross sectional study was carried out at Wolaita Sodo district from May 2013 to November 2014 with the aim to evaluate the bacteriological quality and to isolate and identify common milk borne zoonotic bacterial pathogens (Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Salmonella species) from raw cow milk and cheese collected in market, restaurant and cafeteria.Milk quality related practice was also assessed by direct observation and questionnaire survey. A total of 56 raw milk and 40 cheese samples were collected in cafeterias / restaurants and from market. The result revealed that 43(76.7%) were poor quality milk with a total aerobic bacterial count more than 5x105CFU/ml and only 13(23.3%) moderate or acceptable milk which have an estimated total aerobic bacterial count of below 5x105CFU/ml. The mean total bacterial count and mean of coliforms count was significantly higher (P<0.05) in raw milk collected from market point than from cafeteria / restaurant. The maximum and minimum total aerobic bacterial counts from study area were 8.00log10CFU/ml and 5.00 log10CFU/ml, and coliform counts were 7.10 log10CFU/ml and 4.23 log10CFU/ml respectively. The mean coliforms and total aerobic bacterial count were significant (P<0.05) from different sampling point. The overall mean of total aerobic bacterial count and coliform count in cheese sample was 5.38log10CFU/ml and 5.58 log10CFU respectively. The bacteriological analysis revealed that 73.5% and 70% Staphylococcus aureus were isolated in raw milk and cheese respectively. A total 55.2% and 42.5% Escherichia coli and 42.9% and 30% Salmonella species were found in raw milk and cheese sample respectively.