Factors that Influence FinTech Adoption in South Africa: A Study of Consumer Behaviour towards Branchless Mobile Banking

The widespread use of mobile phones and growth in internet penetration has created a unique opportunity to increase access to financial services. Financial Technology (FinTech) companies and mobile banking (m-banking) empower customers to use digital platforms to utilise financial services without the physical access requirements of traditional banking. This has led to the rise of FinTech firms that are disrupting traditional industry standards by servicing consumers through a range of digital channels and mobile devices. A new completely branchless bank, Bank Zero, is set to launch in South Africa in 2020 to exploit these opportunities. This consumer behavioural study focuses on analysing FinTech adoption in the South African market. An adapted mixed-method approach was used to identify the enabling and inhibiting factors that motivate consumers to adopt or reject m-banking. Qualitative research was initially conducted via in-depth interviews with 7 respondents. The most salient factors identified in the literature review were tested, and the results were used to develop a quantitative, online questionnaire. A convenience sample of 217 valid responses was collected, and the data was analysed using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The EFA identified 6 influencing factors: four enabling and two inhibiting factors. The enabling factors that positively influenced FinTech adoption were: Utility, Socio-Economic Influencers, Mobile Device Trust and Youth. The two inhibiting factors were: Perceived Risks and Associated Costs. Interestingly, 74% of the 217 respondents indicated that they would join a completely branchless bank, using only their mobile phones and the internet to access banking services, showing a high propensity to branchless, m-banking. Finally, the Enhancement Criteria Model based on insights gained from the research findings, is proposed. This model provides recommendation criteria for existing and new FinTech providers who are looking to improve their business models. JEL Codes: D18, G40 Keywords: FinTech, mobile banking, m-banking, branchless banking, consumer behaviour, South Africa

AI-Based Vehicular Network toward 6G and IoT: Deep Learning Approaches

In recent years, vehicular networks have become increasingly large, heterogeneous, and dynamic, making it difficult to meet strict requirements of ultralow latency, high reliability, high security, and massive connections for next generation (6G) networks. Recently, deep learning (DL ) has emerged as a powerful artificial intelligence (AI ) technique to optimize the efficiency and adaptability of vehicle and wireless communication. However, rapidly increasing absolute numbers of vehicles on the roads are leading to increased automobile accidents, many of which are attributable to drivers interacting with their mobile phones. To address potentially dangerous driver behavior, this study applies deep learning approaches to image recognition to develop an AI-based detection system that can detect potentially dangerous driving behavior. Multiple convolutional neural network (CNN )-based techniques including VGG16, VGG19, Densenet, and Openpose were compared in terms of their ability to detect and identify problematic driving.

Models for Efficient Utilization of Resources for Upgrading Android Mobile Technology

The need of the customers to be connected to the network at all times has led to the evolution of mobile technology. Operating systems play a vitol role when we talk of technology. Nowadays, Android is one of the popularly used operating system in mobile phones. Authors have analysed three stable versions of Android, 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0. Incorporating a change in the version after it is released requires a lot of rework and thus huge amount of costs are incurred. In this paper, the aim is to reduce this rework by identifying certain parts of a version during early phase of development which need careful attention. Machine learning prediction models are developed to identify the parts which are more prone to changes. The accuracy of such models should be high as the developers heavily rely on them. The high dimensionality of the dataset may hamper the accuracy of the models. Thus, the authors explore four dimensionality reduction techniques, which are unexplored in the field of network and communication. The results concluded that the accuracy improves after reducing the features.

Effect of Technostress on academic productivity- E-engagement through persuasive communication

The focus of most of the existing studies on technostress is with regard to working professionals. In spite of the explosion of digital device use in education, not many studies have identified its effects on students. This study examines the presence of technostress among management students aged 22-29 years. Using a sample of 300+ students of a management college of India, this study validates the technostress instrument. With the pandemic, education has seen a paradigm shift. Sessions including classes, interactions, discussions, team projects, assignments, examinations, have gone online and this has ushered the compulsion of spending more time with technology and digital devices (laptops, mobile phones, desktop etc). It examines the effect of technostress on academic productivity of students. The study further explores the students’ expectations from the college to control their technostress, thereby indicating the need of enhancing e-engagement through persuasive communication.

Behavioral biometric based personal authentication in feature phones

<p><span>The usage of mobile phones has increased multifold in the recent decades mostly because of its utility in most of the aspects of daily life, such as communications, entertainment, and financial transactions. Feature phones are generally the keyboard based or lower version of touch based mobile phones, mostly targeted for efficient calling and messaging. In comparison to smart phones, feature phones have no provision of a biometrics system for the user access. The literature, have shown very less attempts in designing a biometrics system which could be most suitable to the low-cost feature phones. A biometric system utilizes the features and attributes based on the physiological or behavioral properties of the individual. In this research, we explore the usefulness of keystroke dynamics for feature phones which offers an efficient and versatile biometric framework. In our research, we have suggested an approach to incorporate the user’s typing patterns to enhance the security in the feature phone. We have applied k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) with fuzzy logic and achieved the equal error rate (EER) 1.88% to get the better accuracy. The experiments are performed with 25 users on Samsung On7 Pro C3590. On comparison, our proposed technique is competitive with almost all the other techniques available in the literature.</span></p>

Perancangan Buku Pop-Up Permainan Tradisional Anak sebagai Media Pelestarian Keaifan Lokal Lombok NTB

This writing aims to (1) describe children's games as ideas or inspiration for the creation of a work of Pop Up Books (2) describe the depiction of the form and process of making Visual Communication Design in the form of a three-dimensional Pop-up Book that elevates Lombok NTB's Traditional Children's Games in order to remain maintain and preserve the local wisdom of the archipelago through children's games. The methods used in the creation of this artwork include exploration and experimentation. In this case, the exploration was carried out by searching for libraries, pictures and all information related to the theme that I took, namely traditional games for children from Lombok, NTB. Then in terms of this exploration, do a sketch activity, which is then visualized in several uses of several bitmap-based applications such as Ibis applications on mobile phones and Coreldraw applications using laptops. The work is done by starting from making a sketch, then designing, printing, then cutting and pasting until finally it becomes a Pop-up book. The results of the discussion and creation are as follows: 1. The theme of the work presented in: Final Project is Traditional Children's Games in Lombok NTB, with the title "Designing Pop-up Books for Traditional Children's Games as Preservation of Local Wisdom in Lombok NTB". 2. These Visual Communication Designs visualize a collaborative design of Ibis and Coreldraw applications and then the results are printed using an albartos paper machine and create a work called Pop-up Book. 3. The number of book pages created is 11 pages consisting of 1 opening page, 9 Pop-up game pages, and 1 closing page along with front and back covers, with a manufacturing period of 4 months in 2021 starting from July-October. Keywords: Children's traditional games, Pop-up Books, Local wisdom.

Mobile Phone Radiation Deflects Brain Energy Homeostasis and Prompts Human Food Ingestion

Obesity and mobile phone usage have simultaneously spread worldwide. Radio frequency-modulated electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs) emitted by mobile phones are largely absorbed by the head of the user, influence cerebral glucose metabolism, and modulate neuronal excitability. Body weight adjustment, in turn, is one of the main brain functions as food intake behavior and appetite perception underlie hypothalamic regulation. Against this background, we questioned if mobile phone radiation and food intake may be related. In a single-blind, sham-controlled, randomized crossover comparison, 15 normal-weight young men (23.47 ± 0.68 years) were exposed to 25 min of RF-EMFs emitted by two different mobile phone types vs. sham radiation under fasting conditions. Spontaneous food intake was assessed by an ad libitum standard buffet test and cerebral energy homeostasis was monitored by 31phosphorus-magnetic resonance spectroscopy measurements. Exposure to both mobile phones strikingly increased overall caloric intake by 22–27% compared with the sham condition. Differential analyses of macronutrient ingestion revealed that higher calorie consumption was mainly due to enhanced carbohydrate intake. Measurements of the cerebral energy content, i.e., adenosine triphosphate and phosphocreatine ratios to inorganic phosphate, displayed an increase upon mobile phone radiation. Our results identify RF-EMFs as a potential contributing factor to overeating, which underlies the obesity epidemic. Beyond that, the observed RF-EMFs-induced alterations of the brain energy homeostasis may put our data into a broader context because a balanced brain energy homeostasis is of fundamental importance for all brain functions. Potential disturbances by electromagnetic fields may therefore exert some generalized neurobiological effects, which are not yet foreseeable.

PEMBINAAN MANAJEMEN INTERNET SEHAT DAN AMAN BAGI KELUARGA PADA MASYARAKAT KELURAHAN SEKANAK RAYA

Internet has a positive impact on everyday life, but it can also pose a tremendous threat to families or children. Every parent wants their child not to be trapped into the internet world that tends to be detrimental. Therefore, parents should supervise the activities of children in the internet. This activity was carried out through two meetings, which took place in Sekanak Raya Village where the participants of this devotional activity were the Sekanak Raya community. This devotional activity provides coaching to parents to be able to carry out every stage of managing the use of technology and the internet to be useful in the family including in setting mobile phones so that children cannot open things that are negative, teaching parents to be able to internet healthy with children, teaching parents to be able to supervise children well in the introduction of a healthy internet. Based on the discussion of construction conducted on the Sekanak Raya community, it was concluded as follows: (1).Participants understand about the safe use of smartphones for families; (2).Participants of devotion are able to supervise children in the internet; (3).Participants are able to apply the knowledge obtained in accordance with the material of devotion provided.

Litter Detection with Deep Learning: A Comparative Study

Pollution in the form of litter in the natural environment is one of the great challenges of our times. Automated litter detection can help assess waste occurrences in the environment. Different machine learning solutions have been explored to develop litter detection tools, thereby supporting research, citizen science, and volunteer clean-up initiatives. However, to the best of our knowledge, no work has investigated the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning object detection approaches in the context of litter detection. In particular, no studies have focused on the assessment of those methods aiming their use in devices with low processing capabilities, e.g., mobile phones, typically employed in citizen science activities. In this paper, we fill this literature gap. We performed a comparative study involving state-of-the-art CNN architectures (e.g., Faster RCNN, Mask-RCNN, EfficientDet, RetinaNet and YOLO-v5), two litter image datasets and a smartphone. We also introduce a new dataset for litter detection, named PlastOPol, composed of 2418 images and 5300 annotations. The experimental results demonstrate that object detectors based on the YOLO family are promising for the construction of litter detection solutions, with superior performance in terms of detection accuracy, processing time, and memory footprint.

Silica nanoparticles with encapsulated DNA (SPED) to trace the spread of pathogens in healthcare

Background To establish effective infection control protocols, understanding pathogen transmission pathways is essential. Non-infectious surrogate tracers may safely explore these pathways and challenge pre-existing assumptions. We used silica nanoparticles with encapsulated DNA (SPED) for the first time in a real-life hospital setting to investigate potential transmission routes of vancomycin-resistant enterococci in the context of a prolonged outbreak. Methods The two study experiments took place in the 900-bed University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland. A three-run ‘Patient experiment’ investigated pathogen transmission via toilet seats in a two-patient room with shared bathroom. First, various predetermined body and fomite sites in a two-bed patient room were probed at baseline. Then, after the first patient was contaminated with SPED at the subgluteal region, both patients sequentially performed a toilet routine. All sites were consequently swabbed again for SPED contamination. Eight hours later, further spread was tested at predefined sites in the patient room and throughout the ward. A two-run ‘Mobile device experiment’ explored the potential transmission by mobile phones and stethoscopes in a quasi-realistic setting. All SPED contamination statuses and levels were determined by real-time qPCR. Results Over all three runs, the ‘Patient experiment’ yielded SPED in 59 of 73 (80.8%) predefined body and environmental sites. Specifically, positivity rates were 100% on subgluteal skin, toilet seats, tap handles, and entertainment devices, the initially contaminated patients’ hands; 83.3% on patient phones and bed controls; 80% on intravenous pumps; 75% on toilet flush plates and door handles, and 0% on the initially not contaminated patients’ hands. SPED spread as far as doctor’s keyboards (66.6%), staff mobile phones (33.3%) and nurses’ keyboards (33.3%) after eight hours. The ‘Mobile device experiment’ resulted in 16 of 22 (72.7%) positive follow-up samples, and transmission to the second patient occurred in one of the two runs. Conclusions For the first time SPED were used to investigate potential transmission pathways in a real hospital setting. The results suggest that, in the absence of targeted cleaning, toilet seats and mobile devices may result in widespread transmission of pathogens departing from one contaminated patient skin region.