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Rapid urbanization combined with high economic growth, industrialization, and changes in socio-economic conditions increase the quantity of municipal solid waste. Cities located in South-Asia are facing serious issues due to waste, with countries like India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan top of the list of bad waste management. The increasing generation of solid waste and also the improper management of waste in Bangladesh leads to environmental degradation. Current waste management practice in Bangladesh is so weak that day by day it is harming the climate and creating a lot of unwanted situations. This research consists of an examination of the current administrative measures and presents another proposition for the executive cycle to decrease ecological contamination. The research study aims to decrease the amount of waste being dumped into municipal sanitary landfill sites & converting the waste into energy which is both financially and environmentally suitable by involving unemployed people in the management system. The results of this study will give an idea of how waste can be utilized as a resource and how this resource can be a capital good as well as how the local level problems can be solved by taking some strategies and making our environment suitable for future generations.

The idea of shipping container house is no longer a revolutionized to western country but in Asia country particularly in Malaysia it is relatively new. The idea of container house is relatively new and there is no clear sign of how far does Malaysian citizen can accept this idea. There is no indicator of what are the expectations from Malaysian citizen about the container house. This research serves as basic references for both government and private sector to the future property industry development of shipping container house as well as shipping container non-residential building in Malaysia to pursue Malaysia’s unity, economic and national integration. The purpose of this study is to test the feasibility of using ISO shipping container to build low cost house. Four set of questionnaires are prepared to assess the opinion of respondents about the acceptance of shipping container house. The result obtained is that the acceptance level of the idea to live inside a container house is only 45% but the acceptance level of using shipping container as means of storage, office, and business development is highly acceptable by Malaysian citizen.

This study aims to explore the application of fractional order chaotic system (FOCS), based on the T-S fuzzy model, in the design of secure communication (SC) and this SC system’s role in the construction of efficiency evaluation system for dispatching operation of energy saving and power generation under a low carbon economy (LCE). First, the definition of fractional order differential equations and the stability theory of FOCS are discussed. T-S fuzzy control is introduced to analyse the stability of FOCS. Then, based on the adaptive synchronisation theory, the combined FOCS is designed for SC, and the performance of the system constructed here is analysed in a MATLAB environment. Next, an evaluation index system of the dispatching operation effect of energy saving and power generation under LCE is constructed. The confidential communication system constructed here is used to transmit the index data. The particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm is then used to optimise the back propagation neural network (BPNN) model. The BPNN algorithm based on PSO (PSO-BPNN) is obtained, and the evaluation model is constructed. After training this model, it is applied to the evaluation of the dispatching operation effect for energy saving and power generation in 10 provinces in China. The simulation results show that the FOCS based on the T-S fuzzy model can acquire the criterion of system stability. Furthermore, the constructed SC system can effectively undertake the secure transmission of square and sine waves. The performance of the PSO-BPNN model seems to be better than other algorithms. After analysing the data on energy saving and power generation from 10 provinces in China using this model, the comprehensive evaluation value of province 5 is found to be the highest and good (0.802), while that of province 4 is the lowest and general (0.600). Summarising, the FOCS based on T-S fuzzy model constructed here is applied to the design of SC. This can improve the confidentiality of data transmission and reduce the transmission error. Moreover, the BPNN evaluation model based on PSO can effectively achieve the evaluation of the dispatching operation effect of energy saving and power generation under LCE.

The number of women who settle in urban areas from rural villages is growing in South Africa. The promise of a better life for these women in cities appears real. The government has done much in building low cost houses and bringing services to many poor families. However, as numbers burgeon, so does the demand for better life and essential services. This case study examines the experiences of eight women in educating their children in the city. They are all residents of Nene Informal Settlement where life has become hard. These participants were observed, shadowed and interviewed. Trying to feed their children, their stories reflect life of poverty and ill-health. With no full time jobs, they have no hopes of moving out of the squalor. However, the schooling of their children does not appear to be the ultimate solution to poverty. These poor women’s homes lack social and cultural capital necessary to support the children. Yet, with no motivation and necessary resources, it appears as if the children will live the life of their mothers. The paper concludes by showing that unless these women change own their lives, they can never change the dire course of their children’s journeys. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n14p546

In the context of the globalization and internationalization of economies, to efficiently attract financial and intellectual capital that is necessary for business sustainability, the mechanisms of corporate governance have to be based on gaining the trust of all the interested parties. These objectives require an organizational culture and a climate which is based on correctness, responsibility, transparency, and efficiency, in which ethical principles govern the spread of behaviors in the entire entity. This research identifies the relation between the corporate governance and the entities’ financial performance using the specific context of Romania. The findings of this study reveal new insights on the corporate governance and financial performance based on a sample of companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange. The results show a positive correlation between the net accounting results, earnings per share, and the duality of the CEO, and a negative correlation between price per share and the duality of the CEO.

Local development is a subject that arouses significant interest in the international scientific community in general, and in the Ibero-American one, in particular. The process of globalization has transformed the management of local development, altering the role that is played by local and regional entities, and it is the object of an important follow-up and analysis by academia. This research uses a bibliometric methodology and a fractional counting method, reviewing the 738 articles from the Scopus database in order to understand the state of Ibero-American research on local development, and analyze the scientific literature on the topic. The results show a significant increase in the number of publications in the 21st century, with Spain and Brazil leading the way. In addition, this research provides interesting results regarding the most influential authors on this topic, the most relevant journals, and the most important institutions and funding organizations. There are several areas of knowledge involved since local development is a transversal field, such as Social Science, environment, business, economics, and agriculture. A deep analysis of authors’ keywords identified new trends, linking local development with tourism, education, geotourism, climate change, local sustainable development, social innovation, and creativity, which provides academia with potential new lines of research.

Most of the climate change models for South Africa predict a reduction in freshwater availability by 2050, which implies that water availability for sectoral production activities is expected to decline. This decline has an impact on sectoral output, value added and households’ welfare. Using a computable general equilibrium approach, this study investigates the possible impact of global change on households’ welfare. The simulation results show that water scarcity due to global change can potentially lead to a general deterioration in households’ welfare. The poor households, whose incomes are adversely impacted, are the most vulnerable to the consequences of the impact of global change on water resources in South Africa. This vulnerability can only be reduced if welfare policies that maintain food consumption levels for the least and low-income households are implemented

Despite the great number of models developed in research projects, only a small percentage have been successfully transferred to the productive sector. The PRIMA programme supported by Horizon 2020, the European Union Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, aims to reverse this situation. The SUPROMED project funded by PRIMA sought to develop an online platform composed of several models adapted to the requirements of end users for increasing the economic and environmental sustainability of Mediterranean agricultural systems. MOPECO, in its research version, was designed to maximize the profitability of irrigated farms in water-scarce regions. A simplified version of this model (MOPECO irrigation scheduling) was included in the SUPROMED platform for improving irrigation efficiency, providing farmers with a useful irrigation scheduling software. This paper shows the approach to adapt and transfer MOPECO to the productive sector. The tool was validated in three different demosite areas across the Mediterranean, involving local stakeholders in the design, validation, and dissemination of the software. The simplified tool reached similar or higher yields than farmers using less water. Thus, the average water saved was around 16%, while the average yield increased around 10% in the plots located in the three demosites of the project (Eastern Mancha in Spain, Bekaa valley in Lebanon, and Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia). This fact decreased the water footprint and increased the profitability of farms. The high applicability of the tool has generated interest among many technicians, farmers, and advisory enterprises. Furthermore, regional and national governmental extension services have shown interest in spreading the use of the tool across their territories, validating the methodology used for adapting and transferring a scientific model to the productive sector.