ghanaopendata/ghanaian-research-english huggingface dataset:
Human defensins and Th-1 cytokines in hepatitis C viral infection

Introduction: active or chronic exacerbated forms of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection subsequently progress to liver disease and human defensins has been determined to have some level of anti-viral properties invitro whilst the expression of T helper-1 cytokines is known to promote complete recovery from acute HCV infection. The study sought to determine relationship between these immune responses. Methods: a cross sectional descriptive study design was employed. Hundred and thirty-two individuals were assessed were assessed for to anti-HCV, HCV RNA, serum levels of human alpha defensins 1 (HAD-1) and human beta defensins 1 (HBD-1). T helper 1 cytokines (IL-2, IFN gamma, TNF alpha) secreted in serum were also analyzed using commercial ELISA assay. The study was conducted in Kumasi, Obuasi and Daboya in Ghana. Results: the serum mean concentrations of HAD-1, HBD-1, IL-2, IFN gamma and TNF alpha showed no significant difference in concentrations among participants with chronic, spontaneously recovered or negative to HCV infection (p>0.05). Persons with hepatitis B co-infection were more likely to develop chronic HCV infection (p=0.039). HAD-1 and HBD-1 showed significant positive association with IL-2 (p=0.000) whilst only HAD-1 positively correlated with IL-2 (p<0.000). Conclusion: the immunological markers determined had no association with the status of HCV infection. HAD-1 increased with increasing levels of IL-2. These findings suggest that during HCV infection, inflammatory response through the production of cytokines by IL-2 cells may affect the release of HAD-1 and HBD-1.

Source: KNUST
The human head in Akan art and belief: - a study of the head as in entity: the significant of its minor form, their symbolism and their spiritual values

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the human head in Akan belief and art with the view to finding out the changes and trends in tradition concerning the human head. The important distinctive methods used in the examination has been through interview, observations and literature review from libraries and Two sub problems examines in this thesis are the significances of the head as an entity and the physiognomy. These sub problems are thus discussed under five chapters. Chapter one is a historical introduction. Chapters two and three concern the human head and the physiognomy respectively whilst chapters four and five discuss aesthetic considerations and the style and symbolism of the Asante head in life and in art

Source: KNUST
Human health risks from metals and metalloid via consumption of food animals near Gold Mines in Tarkwa, Ghana: Estimation of the daily intakes and target hazard quotients (THQs)

Heavy metal and metalloid contamination in food resulting from mining is of major concern due to the potential risk involved. Food consumption is the most likely route for human exposure to metals. This study was therefore to estimate the daily intake and health risk (based on target hazard quotients, THQ) from metals via consumption of free-range chicken, goat and sheep near gold mines in Tarkwa, Ghana. The concentrations of Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Cd, and Pb were measured with an inductively coupled plasma33 mass spectrometer and Hg analysis was done using the mercury analyzer. The mean concentrations of metals ranged from nd–542 mg/kg wet weight. Principal component analysis of the results showed a clear separation between chicken, grouped on one side, and the ruminants clustered on another side in both offal and muscle. Interestingly, As, Cd, Hg, Mn and Pb made one cluster in the offal of chicken. Chicken muscle also showed similar distribution with As, Hg and Pb clustered together. The daily intake of As (μg/kg body weight/day) were in the following ranges; [0.002 (kidneys of goat and sheep)–0.19 (chicken gizzard)], Cd [0.003 (chicken muscle)–0.55 (chicken liver)], Hg [0.002 (goat muscle)–0.29 (chicken liver)], Pb [0.01 (muscles and kidneys of goat and sheep)–0.96 (chicken gizzard)] and Mn [0.13 (goat kidney)–8.92 (sheep liver)]. From the results, daily intake of As, Cd, Hg, Pb and Mn in these food animals were low compared to the provisional tolerable daily intake guidelines. The THQs although less than one, indicated that contributions of chicken gizzard and liver to toxic metal exposure in adults and especially children could be significant.

Source: KNUST
Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), Hepatitis B Virus (HBV), Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) and Syphilis Infections among people with psychiatric disorders at the Ankaful Psychiatric Hospital, Ghana.

People with psychiatric disorders are at increased risk to HIV, Hepatitis B & C and Syphilis infections as compared to general population. Many risk behaviours have been identified in studies from both developed and developing countries. The psychiatric population is usually neglected in terms of prevention and control programs as compared to the general population. Aim: This research is the first of its kind in Ghana and seeks to determine the prevalence of HIV, HBV, HCV and Syphilis infections, its related risk behaviours among people with psychiatric disorders at the Ankaful psychiatric hospital. This is a cross-sectional study of the Ankaful psychiatric hospital with a total of 200 in-patients and out-patients surveyed. Participants (male/female) who were included in the study were clinically stable and above 18 years old. Questionnaire was administered on socio-demographic characteristics, psychiatric disorders, knowledge, attitude and substance use/abuse risk related practices for HIV, HBV, HCV and Syphilis infections. Serologic test was done for HIV, HBV, HCV and Syphilis after interview. The results revealed that, 55% (n=110) were male whilst 45% (n=90) were female. The mean age was 35.60 and most participants were in the age group 20-39 years i.e. 64.5% (n=129) as compared to 4.5% (n=9) for the age group of less than 20 years and above 60 years respectively. The overall prevalence of HIV (5.0%), HBV (9.5%), HCV (2.0%) and Syphilis (13.5%) were recorded. Multiple infections to HBV+Syphilis (0.5%), HBV+HIV (1.0%) HBV+Syphilis (0.5%) and HIV+HBV+Syphilis (0.5%) respectively.

Source: KNUST
Human relations practices in the public sector: a case study of national disaster management organization of Ghana.

Human relations practices in an organization, has proven by academics and human resources experts, to be a very crucial element in the effective and efficient utilization of the human capital of the organization. Good human relations, thus, identifying and incorporating the individual goals of employees, into that of the organization, as well as, recognizing employees as cognitive beings with needs; who would like to be respected and appreciated, has a very significant impact on their performance, in pushing the organization towards its desired goals and objectives. Likewise, if such recognition and appreciation is lacking in the organization, the effects can be damaging to both employees and the organization. It is very common in Ghana to hear public sector employees say government business is not their father‟s business; hence, they don‟t have to be ones to make it succeed. The indifference that employees in the public sector feel towards organizational goals could be linked to the disassociation of employees from the priorities of the organization. Little attention is paid to the social needs, and the individual goals of employees in the public sector. A social survey was conducted in National Disaster Management Organization of Ghana, to examine its human relations practices and its impact on employees‟ efficiency. Survey questionnaire was administered to both junior, and senior staff members of the organization, some management members were also interviewed. Gathered data was quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed, using descriptive and inferential statistics. The study revealed that, human relations practices in the organization were average and this, has severe consequences on employees‟ performance efficiency. Political interference was identified as the main cause of poor human relations practices in the organization. Separating politics from the organization as well as, promoting staff regularly was revealed as the means of improving upon the human relations practices of the organization. Some recommendations were made.

Source: KNUST
Human resource development and its impact on employee performance in the public sector: a case study of the national development planning commission.

The study examines how Human Resource Development (HRD) programmes play a role in employee performance and the challenges encountered in the implementation of HRD. It also examined how these challenges can be managed in the implementation of HRD programmes at the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC). The study was conducted using the quantitative technique of data collection and analysis. A total of sixty (60) respondents were sampled using the convenient sampling technique. The information collected from the respondents were analysed using SPSS 16.0, and descriptive statistics were generated to present the results through tables and figures. The study found that there are HRD programmes at the NDPC and these include on-the-job-training (OTJT), performance appraisal, face-to-face training and development programs. To the NDPC, HRD programmes increases confidence, commitment and skills of workers to complete tasks. However, there are challenges with implementing HRD programmes, these are limited knowledge by managers, unsupportive human resource professionals and absence of career development plans. To manage these challenges the following were identified; educating managers on HRD programmes, establishing HRD policy, incorporating HRD into the long term organisational plan, conducting extensive needs assessment and providing support for the use of HR practices. The study recommends that managers should be given extensive training on HRD in facilitate implementation and HR professionals should be encouraged and well-motivated to fully support the HRD programmes.

Source: KNUST
Human resource development in the Value Added Tax(VAT) Service : (a case study of the VAT Secretariat in Accra)

with training, it extends far beyond this and implies the development of the capabilities for work of all persons. Human resource development includes such areas as information, awareness, ethics, motivation and behaviour and strategic capacity for developing and linking these issues. It is now acknowledged that without qualified, motivated and committed staff, the state cannot play the role assigned to it in a rapidly changing and globalised economy. It is in the light of this that the study sought to find out the Human Resource Development in the Value Added (VAT) Service — a vital revenue-collecting service of the country. The basic hypothesis underlying the study is that the VAT Service will develop its human resources in spite of its economic and financial constraints. Data were collected using questionnaire and interviews. Other sources of data were from administrative records, published VAT news, specialised libraries, journals and the Internet. These were presented in tables, graphs, bar and pie charts. The study revealed that in spite of financial and economic constraints, the VAT Service is developing its human resources. However, it was recommended that attention be given to the use of Quality Circles approach, which is cost-effective, to training and solving specific problems. It was also found out that the quality of training needed some attention rather than the number of times training is organised.

Source: KNUST
Human resource development and planning in the Ghana wood industry

The Ghana timber industry, which is the third largest foreign exchange contributor to the national economy after minerals and cocoa, contributes about 6% to the Gross Domestic Product (G.D.P.) (T.E.D.B., 1996). Wood export earnings have been rising in recent times; from U.S. $15 million in 1993 to almost U.S $200 million in 1995. However, the missing link in achieving its full potential is the lack of skill development. Translated into today’s terms, it is the need for human resource development. The shortage of adequately qualified staff has led to the generation of a lot of waste during wood processing. This has subsequently given rise to low recovery with its attendant negative effects on profits and accelerated depletion of the timber resource. This situation has attracted environmental concerns on the activities of wood processing firms in Ghana. This study was undertaken to produce human resource planning guidelines for the wood industry in Ghana, in order to ensure the availability of the required skills and avoid or minimize redundancies. It involved the designing of appropriate questionnaires on the subject and supplemented with personal interviews. Through a stratified random sampling technique, fifty percent (5 0%) of the population size (forty respondents) was taken and randomly sampled after being categorized on the basis of volume of export as large, medium, and small. Though inherent company problems such as periodic scarcity of wood, especially during the rainy season, unpredictability of foreign contracts, and refusal of top management to release funds for human resource development programmes exist, most personnel managers are able to secure the necessary information for human resource planning and development. Up-to-date personnel records kept by most management have enabled continues monitoring of worker performance. Selection and recruitment procedures were observed by management when engaging skilled labour. Such procedures can be modified to suit the employment of semi-skilled labour. The on-the-job factory training practices of these companies as observed by this study must be supplemented by external formal and informal skill upgrading courses at the W. I. T. C. and the technical institutions in the country. Supervisors who oversee on-the-job training must themselves be trained first. It is therefore important that top management recognises manpower planning as an integral part of corporate planning, and that top management backing for manpower planning is essential.

Source: KNUST
Human Resource Management practices in the Ghanaian Rural-Based Banking Sector.

The concept of Human Resource Management (HRM) and environmental influences dominate most management literature today however, the focus has been on develop ed countries with little research done on Africa especially, Ghana. The study therefore aimed at providing insight into the HRM practices found in Ghanaian rural-based banking sector using case studies of two rural-based banks in the Sekyere Kumawu and Sekyere East districts of the Ashanti Region. In setting the theoretical background of the study, HRM practices, literature as well as the institutional theory and the convergence and divergence debate were explored. However, some writers regard HRM as a cosm etic measure in the sense that an organization having a human resource department does not necessarily guarantee a change in the management of their people as asset which the concept prescribes. It is against this background that this research project is being undertaken with research questions designed to provide answers about the extent to which human resource management practices are employed by organizations. The study adopted a mixed method approach. This involved the use of questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to collect data from (80) respondents from rural -based financial institution. Both the qualitative and quantitative data collected were analyzed using a number of methods, including frequency analysis and content analysis. One of the find ings of the study was that both banks are transforming their HR department to conform to high standards set by the extremely competitive business and market environment. Several studies have linked HRM to organizational success and evidence from the two case studies supports this general view. Both banks saw the need to adopt the concept HRM even if their functions are yet to reflect a change in practice, this is attributed to the general view that HRM delivers results. Among the recommendations made were that considerations should be given to link the HRM practices with the long term objectives and the strategies of the organization. HR (Human Resource) departments must be empowered and have full knowledge of the companies‟ business strategy, needs and objectives and should be in the position to take initiatives and make contributions to organizational progress

Source: KNUST
Human resource management practices in the Ghanaian rural-based banking sector. Evidence from the Ashanti Region

The concept of Human Resource Management (HRM) and environmental influences dominate most management literature today however, the focus has been on develop ed countries with little research done on Africa especially, Ghana. The study therefore aimed at providing insight into the HRM practices found in Ghanaian rural-based banking sector using case studies of two rural-based banks in the Sekyere Kumawu and Sekyere East districts of the Ashanti Region. In setting the theoretical background of the study, HRM practices, literature as well as the institutional theory and the convergence and divergence debate were explored. However, some writers regard HRM as a cosm etic measure in the sense that an organization having a human resource department does not necessarily guarantee a change in the management of their people as asset which the concept prescribes. It is against this background that this research project is being undertaken with research questions designed to provide answers about the extent to which human resource management practices are employed by organizations. The study adopted a mixed method approach. This involved the use of questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to collect data from (80) respondents from rural -based financial institution. Both the qualitative and quantitative data collected were analyzed using a number of methods, including frequency analysis and content analysis. One of the find ings of the study was that both banks are transforming their HR department to conform to high standards set by the extremely competitive business and market environment. Several studies have linked HRM to organizational success and evidence from the two case studies supports this general view. Both banks saw the need to adopt the concept HRM even if their functions are yet to reflect a change in practice, this is attributed to the general view that HRM delivers results. Among the recommendations made were that considerations should be given to link the HRM practices with the long term objectives and the strategies of the organization. HR (Human Resource) departments must be empowered and have full knowledge of the companies‟ business strategy, needs and objectives and should be in the position to take initiatives and make contributions to organizational progress

Source: KNUST
Human Resource Planning as a Tool for Addressing Human Resource Requirements in Social Security and National Insurance Trust - SSNIT.

The maintenance of appropriate human resource requirement has been one of the problems of the administrators of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT). In fact, one of the objectives of the Human Resource Department is to reduce staff levels. A Presidential Commission set up by the Government of Ghana to reform Pensions confirmed this problem by describing the size of SSNIT as excessive. The main objective of the study was to examine how Human Resource Planning could be used as a tool to address human resource requirements in SSNIT. To achieve this objective, a stratified random sampling technique was used to sample one hundred and five (105) SSNIT staff representing three branch offices, two area offices and the Head Office to respond to a questionnaire on Human Resource Planning in* SSNIT. In addition to this survey, this researcher also relied on secondary sources of information from libraries and the internet. The main result of the study was that Human Resource Planning is yet to be properly used as a tool for the maintenance of appropriate human resource requirements in SSNIT. The institution has depended on ad hoc measures in planning for human resource requirements. Human resource remains focused on traditional practices of personnel administration and not as strategic business partner necessary for organizational performance improvement. The study concluded that there is the need for SSNIT to develop a comprehensive strategic HR planning for implementation in order to maintain the right human resource requirements at the right places.

Source: KNUST
The humanistic values of the dance in the Akan Society

This thesis will inquire into the psychological and bodily needs of the Akan people that relate to humour, pleasure, emotional and physical release. This will lead the writer to study the significant domain of human thought, feeling and their response which have often received a general neglect from researchers. Two major humanistic values of Akan dance will be identified for study, to portray the contribution and significant roles they play in the emotional and bodily make-up of the Akan. Studies will demonstrate how these roles are affected through the activity of the dance, and how they relate to humour, pleasure, emotional and physical release. The two are the Therapeutic and Educational values of the Akan dance. Aspects of Graphic and Colour Symbolism in body decoration and ornamentation will also be discussed whenever they serve as a further contribution towards the Akan understanding and human concerns of humour, pleasure, emotional and physical release in the dance. Movement and rhythm - basic factors in African and Akan philosophy will also be detailed to place the topic in a broader context.

Source: KNUST
Hybrid Intelligent Predictive Maintenance Model for Multiclass Fault Classi

Data recorded from monitoring the health condition of industrial equipment are often high-dimensional, nonlinear, nonstationary and characterised by high levels of uncertainty. These factors limit the efficiency of machine learning techniques to produce desirable results when developing effective fault classification frameworks. This paper sought to propose a hybrid artificial intelligent predictive maintenance model based on Improved Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise (ICEEMDAN), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) optimised by the combination of Coupled Simulated Annealing and Nelder-Mead Simplex optimisation algorithms (ICEEMDAN-PCA-LSSVM). Here, ICEEMDAN was first employed as a denoising technique to decompose signals into series of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) of which only relevant IMFs containing the relevant fault features were retained for signal reconstruction. PCA was then employed as a dimension reduction technique through which the resulting set of uncorrelated features extracted served as input for LSSVM for classifying various fault types. The proposed technique is compared with three established methods (Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN)) with multiclass classification capabilities. The various techniques were tested on an experimental UCI machine learning benchmark data obtained from multi-sensors of a hydraulic test rig. The results from the analysis revealed that the proposed ICEEMDAN-PCA-LSSVM technique is versatile and outperformed all the compared classifiers in terms of accuracy, error rate and other evaluation metrics considered. The proposed hybrid technique drastically reduced the redundancies and the dimension of features, allowing for the efficient consideration of relevant features for the enhancement of classification accuracy and convergence speed.

Source: KNUST