Competition law and socio-economic advancement: Nigeria as a case study – giving a hungry man a silk tie?

This thesis follows the recognized position that a means of improving the Nigerian socio-economic environment is through a free market economy and a competitive economic environment that has strongly rooted equal and easy access to raw materials, workforce, and technology that would be available to all businesses. It backs the position that in free market economies, through protecting demand and supply, competition law more efficiently maximizes consumer welfare as opposed to government regulation or unregulated competition, and it enhances economic development. The thesis recognizes that competition law is relatively new in Nigeria, answers the question: to what extent can the proper implementation of competition law and policy be employed to promote economic advancement in Nigeria? The submitted views are somewhat based on an analysis of the objectives of competition law and policy, in order to determine whether Nigeria has unique problems, and if so, whether the common principles in competition policy are adequate to address them. Furthermore, this research examines existing regulatory regimes and the role it plays with regards to competition regulation.the question that arises is whether the regulations set out by these bodies are sufficient to promote and preserve competition. This thesis analyses the position and effectiveness of these regulatory organs in the promotion of competition. The thesis examines the historical antecedent and institutional structure, including developments in competition law in the United States of America (US) and the European Union (EU). Furthermore, it examines some of the standards in the competition policies of these jurisdictions such as those concerning agreements, abuse of dominant position and mergers, to determine which competition model could be best adopted by Nigeria. The thesis recognises that in 2019 the Nigerian President, General Muhammadu Buhari signed the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act (FCCPA) 2019 which repealed the Consumer Protection Council Act. The introduction of a codified set of competition rules into Nigeria’s regulatory oversight framework came as a long anticipated change, to ensure that market distortions across all sectors are minimized and rules of fair play are respected in the market place. Before the enactment, the laws governing competition and consumer protection were separate, fragmented and industry-specific. The thesis recognises that while the enactment of the law was a good start, there will be certain challenges. It proposes Nigeria uses these laws and advancements which have been made over the years as a mechanism to determine whether the same rules could apply, which competition law model could be best adopted and for building a suitable competition law. Through examining these jurisdictions, the thesis provides a setting to compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems and identify best practices so as to make recommendations which may improve existing policy

Spread spectrum modulation recognition based on phase diagram entropy

Wireless communication technologies are undergoing intensive study and are experiencing accelerated progress which leads to a large increase in the number of end-users. Because of this, the radio spectrum has become more crowded than ever. These previously mentioned aspects lead to the urgent need for more reliable and intelligent communication systems that can improve the spectrum efficiency. Specifically, modulation scheme recognition occupies a crucial position in the civil and military application, especially with the emergence of Software Defined Radio (SDR). The modulation recognition is an indispensable task while performing spectrum sensing in Cognitive Radio (CR). Spread spectrum (SS) techniques represent the foundation for the design of Cognitive Radio systems. In this work, we propose a new method of characterization of Spread spectrum modulations capable of providing relevant information for the process of recognition of this type of modulations. Using the proposed approach, results higher than 90% are obtained in the modulation classification process, thus bringing an advantage over the classical methods, whose performance is below 75%

First -Generation Hindu Indian-American Undergraduates’ Grief After Death of Grandparent(S) in India

The proposed study aims to capture the unique experiences surrounding grief of first-generation Indian-American undergraduate students. Tummala-Narra (2013) defines immigrants as having been raised in the country of origin and migrating to the United States in late adolescence or adulthood and first-generation as those born in the United States or arrived to the United States as young children. Research has shown that bereavement can have profound emotional health consequences for those surviving a loss (W. Stroebe & Stroebe, 1987). Additional components such as loss of expectations, traditions, and culture (Price, 2011) may contribute to mental health challenges for the South Asian population that are often overlooked across the immigrant and first-generations (Tummala-Narra, 2013). The United States Census Bureau (2010 ) stated that the total U.S. population on April 1, 2010 was 308.7 million, out of which 14.7 million or 4.8 percent were Asian. South Asians (i.e., people from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal) were the fastest growing subgroup among the Asian population. (United States Census Bureau, 2007). Trends in Education shifted for Asians over time. In 1988, at least 38% of Asians had earned at least a bachelor’s degree, whereas in 2015, 54% of Asians who were 25 years old or older had a bachelor’s degree or higher (Ryan & Bauman, 2016) implying that there is a continued increase in the Asian undergraduate student population. Content includes a description of immigrant demographics, reasons for immigration, impact of immigration to the United States on family dynamics across generations, mental health stigma for this population, a review of the literature, gaps in the literature, theoretical foundation for the proposed study, purpose and relevance of the study, and future implications of this research

A Situational Analysis of Current Speech-Synthesis Systems for Child Voices: A Scoping Review of Qualitative and Quantitative Evidence

Background: Speech synthesis has customarily focused on adult speech, but with the rapid development of speech-synthesis technology, it is now possible to create child voices with a limited amount of child-speech data. This scoping review summarises the evidence base related to developing synthesised speech for children. (2) Method: The included studies were those that were (1) published between 2006 and 2021 and (2) included child participants or voices of children aged between 2–16 years old. (3) Results: 58 studies were identified. They were discussed based on the languages used, the speech-synthesis systems and/or methods used, the speech data used, the intelligibility of the speech and the ages of the voices. Based on the reviewed studies, relative to adult-speech synthesis, developing child-speech synthesis is notably more challenging. Child speech often presents with acoustic variability and articulatory errors. To account for this, researchers have most often attempted to adapt adult-speech models, using a variety of different adaptation techniques. (4) Conclusions: Adapting adult speech has proven successful in child-speech synthesis. It appears that the resulting quality can be improved by training a large amount of pre-selected speech data, aided by a neural-network classifier, to better match the children’s speech. We encourage future research surrounding individualised synthetic speech for children with CCN, with special attention to children who make use of low-resource languages