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Digital Marketing in The Hospitality Industry: Adoption, Use, Firm Performance and National Development
No full textDigital marketing integrates electronic technology with traditional marketing concepts and covers strategies such as social media, video, content, affiliate, mobile and internet marketing. Embracing digital marketing can contribute to firm performance and national development. This review paper explores digital marketing in the hospitality industry. The objectives of the review are to establish how the facilities can adopt and use digital marketing, determine how digital marketing can affect the performance of the firms and highlight how digital marketing can contribute to Kenya Vision 2030 and sustainable development goals. The paper builds on the author’s knowledge, observations and experiences on digital marketing in the hospitality industry and explores secondary data from books, journal articles, newspapers and conference papers. The paper highlights the digital tools that the firms can adopt including the internet, mobile, video and social media and shows how the tools can be used to convince, educate and inspire stakeholders. The review also reveals that digital marketing can affect the non-financial and financial performance of hospitality firms. Digital marketing can contribute to customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, profits and costs. This study finds that digital marketing can contribute to Kenya Vision 2030 through selling and marketing hospitality products. Digital marketing also promotes sustainable development goals of climate action and economic growth. The paper concludes that hospitality firms should embrace digital marketing for enhanced performance and national development
Chemical Composition of Essential Oils from Ocimum Kilimandscharicum: A Review.
No full textTraditional medicine plays an important role in disease especially in developing countries. The essential oils of
Ocimum species showed anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer and insecticidal activities. Essential oils
from O. kilimandscharicum are widely used in modern perfumery and the pharmaceutical industry. However
information about the chemical composition remains scanty. This study reviewed the chemical composition of
essential oils the plant. Peer-reviewed articles were retrieved from Scopus, Science Direct, SciFinder and
Google Scholar. Fifteen articles reporting on chemical composition of essential oils extracted from O.
kilimandscharicum were accessed. The major compounds in the essential oils were identified to be camphor,
linalool, limonene, methyl eugenol, 1,8-cineole, camphene, β-caryophyllene and α-terpineol. Camphor was
reported to be in the range of 0.1-70.4%, linalool 0.2-58.9 %, limonene 1.2-13.6%, methyl eugenol 0.1-53.9%,
β-Caryophyllene 0.2-31.5%, 1,8-cineole 0.6-20.1% and camphene 0.4-13.6%. Results from this study have
confirmed that Ocimum kilimandscharicum essential oils contain a wide range of chemical compounds. The
type of compounds and the percentage composition of compounds present in the essential oils were differed.
Further studies to determine medicinal activities of the compound present in the essential oils both in pure and
blended forms are necessary
Effects of Stress Control Techniques by Middle Level Employees on Strategic Performance Management of Murang’a County Government
No full textMaster of Business Administration (Strategic Management Option), 2022Globally, employees experience stress at the workplace. It has become a real exertion in most organizations especially in the developing countries where the significance amount of stress at the workplace has had influence on employees’ strategic performance. Organizations need employees to get the job done because employee’s strategic performance is important to the success of the organization. Stress control techniques are designed to help employees reduce stress at the workplace. The impact of stress on the employee performance has a direct impact on the implementation of organizational strategies. Despite having stress control techniques in the organizations, research studies show that stress at the workplace has not been controlled effectively, thus affecting employee strategic performance management. Increased stress levels have led to reduced work performance and subsequently the strategic goals and objectives of the organization are not met. Thus, the study sought to address the issues that cause stress at the workplace and their influencing factors and therefore focused on job design, training, employee welfare programs and incentives as the key stress control techniques. The general objective is to establish the effect of stress control techniques by middle level employees on strategic performance management of Murang’a County Government. The research study adopted descriptive survey which is the method of research which concerns itself with the present phenomena in terms of conditions, practices, beliefs, processes, relationships, or trends. The study was confined to Murang’a county government in Murang’a County. This is where the strategic decisions and the central planning of Murang’a County are operated.The middle-level employees of Murang’a County Government were the target population, which they comprised of 4,254 respondents. Stratified random sampling was used as the most appropriate sampling technique, since the population is not a homogeneous group. Systematic sampling was used in each group to come up with the respondents which involves selecting the samples at regular intervals from the sampling frame. A sample size of 366 respondents were selected and administered with questionnaire as a data collection instrument by the researcher. Out of those served with questionnaires, 346 filled and returned the questionnaires. The response rate therefore was 94.5%. The study findings inferential statistics correlation and regression analysis depicted that there is a significant positive effect on job design (rho=0.6530, p-value <0.05), training (rho =0.608, P value <0.05), employee welfare programs (rho = 0.514, p value <0.05), incentives (rho = 0.521, p value <0.05) and middle-level employees’ strategic performance. Therefore, county government should endeavour to address and adopt stress control techniques focusing on job design, training, employee welfare programs and incentives to improve employee strategic performance for the organisation to achieve their strategic objectives.Murang'a University of Technolog
A Support Vector Machine and Artificial Neural Network Model for Enhanced Image Classification of Maize Leaf Diseases
No full textMaster of Science in Information Technology, 2022Image classification accuracy is the total number of images predicted correctly out of the total images in the test dataset in the field of computer vision. Classifying the images accurately is still a challenge due to single image classification models being biased and having high variance. The research created a combination of two models (Artificial Neural Network + Support Vector Machine), the maize leaf disease image features that were extracted were passed to the developed model which classified the diseases with high accuracy compared to the single models. Dimensionality reduction was also considered to reduce the computational complexity and this was achieved by using the Histogram of Oriented Gradient feature descriptor which extracted only relevant features and through away information that was not necessary. The relevant features were considered as the key point since an image was differentiated from each other using the key points. The developed model input was the features extracted which were in a form of a vector space known as an array of numbers and each number represented a particular feature. The developed image classification model consists of two modules; the feature extraction module and the image classification module. The feature extraction module was integrated to work together with the classification module and the features extracted by the feature extraction module were normalized to make them scale-invariant and less susceptible to light which is one of the factors that usually affects image classification accuracy. The classification module was also adjusted by combining two classifiers; Artificial Neural Network and Support Vector Machine and the main reason were for the Support Vector Machine to replace the softmax layer used for classification in the Artificial Neural Network since the Support Vector Machine have the hyperplane component which is a line that accurately separates data belonging to different classes and this made SVM to classify maize leaf disease images accurately. The Support Vector Machine also has the capability of minimizing the generalization error on unseen data which resulted in better prediction results. The common rust, leaf spot, and northern leaf blight and healthy images were used during the feature extraction process, training, and validation of the model. The feature extraction methods were compared on how they perform with image classification models to find out which feature descriptor performs best. The experimental results indicated that the Histogram of Oriented Gradients performs well with the image classifiers compared to KAZE and Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF and the Histogram of Oriented Gradients method reduces computational complexity during the image feature generation process. The model which was a combination of three methods, Histogram of Oriented Gradient, Artificial Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine emerged the best in terms of image classification. The experimental outcome based on performance metrics indicated that the developed model had a 0.95 accuracy score. The experimental result shows that the Histogram of the Oriented Gradient together with Artificial Neural Network and Support Vector Machine classifier is the best combination model for maize leaf disease identification since it produced the highest accuracy score compared to the other image classification models. The researcher finally recommends the model to be used today and in the future when it comes to classifying maize leaf disease images.Murang'a University of Technolog
Strategies to overcome the damages caused by covid-19 in the hotel industry
No full textThe year 2019 saw the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic that has led to low customer demand, reduced revenue, job losses and business closures in the hotel industry. Studies indicate that the hospitality industry is not committed to crisis management and hotels are reactive to crises. This paper consequently facilitates proactive planning by exploring strategies that hotels can adopt to overcome the damages caused by covid-19. The recommended strategies include cost reduction, revenue management, insurance, internal marketing, product development and market re-strategizing. The paper concludes that the covid-19 crisis has created challenges and opportunities for the hotel industry
Cluster Head Selection Algorithms for Enhanced Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Systematic Literature Review
No full textThe extension of the sensor node's life span is an essential requirement in a Wireless Sensor Network. Cluster head selection algorithms undertake the task of cluster head election and rotation among nodes, and this has significant effects on the network's energy consumption. The objective of this paper is to analyze existing cluster head selection algorithms and the parameters they implement to enhance energy efficiency. To achieve this objective, systematic literature review methodology was used. Relevant papers were extracted from major academic databases Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, IEEE, ACM Digital Library, Citeseer Library, and preprints posted on arXiv. The results show that there are many existing Cluster Head Selection Algorithms and they are categorized as deterministic, adaptive and hybrid. These algorithms use different parameters to elect Cluster Heads. In future the researchers should derive more parameters that can be used to elect cluster heads to improve on energy consumption
An expert-curated global database of online newspaper articles on spiders and spider bites
No full textMass media plays an important role in the construction and circulation of risk perception
associated with animals. Widely feared groups such as spiders frequently end up in the
spotlight of traditional and social media. We compiled an expert-curated global database on
the online newspaper coverage of human-spider encounters over the past ten years (2010–
2020). This database includes information about the location of each human-spider encounter
reported in the news article and a quantitative characterisation of the content—location,
presence of photographs of spiders and bites, number and type of errors, consultation of
experts, and a subjective assessment of sensationalism. In total, we collected 5348 unique
news articles from 81 countries in 40 languages. The database refers to 211 identifed and
unidentifed spider species and 2644 unique human-spider encounters (1121 bites and 147
as deadly bites). To facilitate data reuse, we explain the main caveats that need to be made
when analysing this database and discuss research ideas and questions that can be explored
with i
12 Tourism Adaptation Frameworks for Climate Change: A Review
No full textTourism is one of the fastest growing industries globally. It has continued to record an average of 3.5–4% despite the global challenges experienced in the last decade including the latest COVID-19 pandemic (UNWTO, 2019). Tourism is appreciated due to its social economic contribution to the global GDP estimated at 9%. It is also considered a big GDP contributor for many developing economies that have embraced tourism estimated between 10–13%. It is also considered strategic poverty eradicator and a tool for achieving sustainable development (UNWTO-UNEP-WMO, 2008). Despite the potential for tourism in the advancement of better livelihood among community’s climate variability remains one of the phenomenon challenging tourism. However, we must acknowledge that tourism is both a victim and a vector of climate change. As a vector it is estimated that tourism contributes to about 5% of global greenhouse gases (GHGs) where 85% of the GHG comes from the aviation industry. As a victim we must appreciate that tourism depends largely on climate and nature-based resources which are already being threatened (IPCC, 2007). These threats can be direct or indirect.
In order to limit the vulnerability of tourism to climate change adaptation and mitigation have been proposed. Mitigation largely focuses on strategies aimed at limiting the contribution of GHGs whereas adaptation deals with strategies aimed at limiting vulnerability and resilience enhancement. Hence, for the purpose of this research note focus will be on adaptation
Stored Grains Protection Activity of Ocimum Suave Extracts and Compounds on Larger Grain Borer
No full textPost-harvest pests cause serious losses to agricultural products in Africa. The pests consist mostly of beetles or
moths and infest the grains at the crop stage or during the storage. Larger grain borer, Prostephanus
truncatus (Horn), causes maize-grain losses during storage ranging from 30% to greater 40% of total
production in 6 months. It reduces germination potential of maize grain and increases the grain’s moisture
content thus accelerating contamination by fungi and bacteria. The aim of this study was to determine the
insecticidal extracts and compounds from Ocimum suave. Percentage mortality of the insects were recorded 1,
2, 14 and 21 days after treatment while adult emergence inhibition and weight loss prevention activities were
recorded 42 days after treatment. The essential oil of the plant gave 75.4, 77.1 and 78.5% mortality after 7, 14
and 21 days respectively, while leaf powder gave 50.3, 63.7 and 66.6% mortality after 7, 14 and 21 days
respectively. Betulinic acid gave 56.9 and 58.1% mortality 14 and 21 days after treatment respectively. The
essential oil completely prevented the emergence of the insects and also completely prevented weight loss of
maize grains. The findings from this study have provided scientific data to support the use of Ocimum suave to
control insect pests. Further studies aimed at identification on plant materials which can be used in pest
management are highly recommende