The Impact of Social Professional Category Consumer＇s on Acceptance Level Towards Islamic Banking Window

Recently, Islamic banks have been presented as an alternative to conventional banks. Indeed, Islamic banks have proved their worth during the 2009 crisis. They are known like an ethical bank. In Tunisia, only three Islamic banks exist. Even the conventional banks are interested to offer Islamic banking products and services; they are called Islamic banking window. This paper aims to determine the level of acceptance of Islamic banking window on Tunisian consumers and the impact of the social professional category on it. The research questions as follows： Are the consumers familiar with the financial Islamic products？ Did they perceive any differences between conventional and Islamic financial products？ What are the levels of acceptance of an Islamic banking product offered by a conventional bank？ In this respect, a questionnaire was administrated to a sample size of 120 people constituted of 54% men and 46% women from Tunis City. Three types of social professional category are found： 62% employee, 32% senior, and 6% profession. The data were processed by SPSS 21. The results showed that the majority of the respondents have a lack of knowledge of the Islamic banking products. The majority of the respondents don＇t see any differences between the product name of conventional and Islamic banking products. The acceptance level of an Islamic banking product offered by a conventional bank is very satisfying, 53% of the respondents are certain to purchase an Islamic banking product from a conventional bank and 42% are not sure. Only 5% refused.

The relationship between age,acceptable noise level,and listening effort in middle-aged and older-aged individuals

Objective:The purpose of the study was to evaluate listening effort in adults who experience varied annoyance towards noise.Materials and methods:Fifty native Kannada-speaking adults aged 41e68 years participated.We evaluated the participant's acceptable noise level while listening to speech.Further,a sentence-final wordidentification and recall test at 0 dB SNR(less favorable condition)and 4 dB SNR(relatively favorable condition)was used to assess listening effort.The repeat and recall scores were obtained for each condition.Results:The regression model revealed that the listening effort increased by 0.6%at 0 dB SNR and by 0.5%at 4 dB SNR with every one-year advancement in age.Listening effort increased by 0.9%at 0 dB SNR and by 0.7%at 4 dB SNR with every one dB change in the value of Acceptable Noise Level(ANL).At 0 dB SNR and 4 dB SNR,a moderate and mild negative correlation was noted respectively between listening effort and annoyance towards noise when the factor age was controlled.Conclusion:Listening effort increases with age,and its effect is more in less favorable than in relatively favorable conditions.However,if the annoyance towards noise was controlled,the impact of age on listening effort was reduced.Listening effort correlated with the level of annoyance once the age effect was controlled.Furthermore,the listening effort was predicted from the ANL to a moderate degree.

Research on performance-based seismic design criteria

The seismic design criterion adopted in the existing seismic design codes is reviewed. It is pointed out that the presently used seismic design criterion is not satisfied with the requirements of nowadays social and economic development. A new performance-based seismic design criterion that is composed of three components is presented in this paper. It can not only effectively control the economic losses and casualty, but also ensure the building's function in proper operation during earthquakes. The three components are: classification of seismic design for buildings, determination of seismic design intensity and/or seismic design ground motion for controlling seismic economic losses and casualties, and determination of the importance factors in terms of service periods of buildings. For controlling the seismic human losses, the idea of socially acceptable casualty level is presented and the 'Optimal Economic Decision Model' and 'Optimal Safe Decision Model' are established. Finally, a new method is recommended for calculating the importance factors of structures by adjusting structures service period on the base of more important structure with longer service period than the conventional ones. Therefore, the more important structure with longer service periods will be designed for higher seismic loads, in case the exceedance probability of seismic hazard in different service period is same.

Security-Oriented Transmission Based on Cooperative Relays in Cognitive Radio

In this paper,we propose a securityoriented transmission scheme with the help of multiple relays in Cognitive Radio(CR).To maximise the Secrecy Capacity(SC)of the source-destination link in CR,both beamforming and cooperative jamming technologies are used to improve the performance of the Secondary User(SU)and protect the Primary User(PU).The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated using extensive simulation.Both theoretical analyses and simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme contributes to the secure transmission of the SU with acceptable attenuation of the Signal-to-Noise Ratio(SNR)at the PU receiver,and the upper bound of the SC at the SU receiver is able to exploit the power allocation strategy.