Modeling the nexus between coal consumption, FDI inflow and economic expansion: does industrialization matter in South Africa?

This study examines the role of industrialization in the energy-growth-FDI nexus for the case of South Africa using data over the period 1970 to 2018. The empirical exercise was conducted using Pesaran Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach. To accomplish our study objective, we analyze stationarity properties of the series using the unit root test after which we applied Bayer-Hanck (B-H) combined technique to cointegration to assess whether a long-run relationship exists among the series. Empirical results show that a 1% change in FDI account for 0.002% and 0.013% increase in economic expansion in the short- and long- run respectively. Also, a 1% increase in coal consumption influence GDP negatively by 0.083% and 0.207% in the short- and long- run respectively. Furthermore, a 1% increase in total natural resource rent positively affects GDP by 0.02% and 0.05% respectively in the short- and long- run. Industrialization, on the other hand, demonstrates a positive and significant impact on the economic growth process both in the short and long run. Industrialization contributes 0.506% and 1.274% to economic expansion both in the short and long run respectively. The causality tests suggest that a one-way causal link running from FDI to industrialization, and from industrialization to coal consumption exists. Finally, FDI inflow drives Total Natural Resource rents in South Africa. This study also gives reliable growth and energy policy proposals to policymakers applicable to countries around the globe

Kinetic Energy and Transportation History of Sediments in Ogunniyi, Western Nigeria.

The analysis of grain-size sediments was carried out to determine the grading of textural parameters which result in the description of the energy environment, that of deposition and information on sediment transport. A German standard sieve set of mesh with shaker was used for the analysis. 12 sets of sediment sizes resulting in 84 samples from seven locations. The results of grain size analysis indicates that almost all the sediments are poorly sorted which is due to short distance of transportation of sediment from the source (only locations OG12 and OG18 show moderately well sorted sediment), fine to coarse skewed with dominance of leptokurtic. Positively skewed sediment represents finely skewed and describes the kinetic energy of the sediment as low and therefore, far from the source. Negatively skewed considers as coarse skewed with high energy of the environment or medium of transportation because it is greater than that experienced where fine particles are deposited though the distance of travel is closer to its source. Fine materials presence may encourage dredging for sand in the appropriate locations; coarser materials subjected to cementation could contain some minerals in them and exploration for these targets may be carried out over a period of time

Design and Implementation of a Self-Monitoring and Management System for Persons with Mental Health Disorders

  The last decade has witnessed the digital revolution led by smartphones which has made progress in all aspects of life, not excluding healthcare. This revolution originated with the exponential upsurge of the smartphone, along with its equivalents in tablet technology and some wearables such as smart watches. Over 20 million Nigerians suffer from the mental disease (20% to 30% of the population), with a significant portion of them not receiving professional help. The traditional methods for tracking daily changes in a person's mental state over long periods of time have proven difficult. As solutions for tackling common mental disorders, mobile mental health support applications can be very simple but effective. Although many of the existing applications serve a useful purpose, the majority of them are over-engineered, rather than focusing on the core features that patients require to keep track of their health. This study aims to create a Mobile application that allows patients to track their mental health outside of regular clinical visits by inputting symptom data and receiving personalized feedback. The Mobile application was designed using Flutter as the front end, Node.JS as the server side, and NoSQL as the database. The developed system was found to meet predefined user requirements after it was evaluated by potential users.   &nbsp

Examining the external-factor-led growth hypothesis for the South African economy

Reducing the unemployment rate and achieving a sustainable economic growth underscore the sustainable development goal 8. Our study investigates a new model that specifies the external-factors-led growth hypothesis for the South African economy. The independent variables include trade openness, external debt, FDI and exchange rate against the GDP as the targeted variable. The ARDL approach was adopted after achieving a mixed order of integration from the stationarity test using traditional unit root tests. All external factors were found to exert a positive influence on economic expansion. Trade openness and exchange rate specifically, exert significant influence on economic growth which means that an improvement in these factors will proportionately favour economic expansion. In essence, a 1% improvement in the trade openness and the exchange rate will generate an equivalent of 0.30% and 0.19% increase in GDP in the long-run. On average, trade openness, exchange rate and external loan are beneficial to the economy of South Africa. Thus, a recommendation was made of the need for the authority concern to open more line of bilateral trade to enable the economy to fully tap from the benefits accrued from indulging in economic openness

Impact Of Marketing Strategies And Performance Of Banks And Its Ffects On Nigeria Economy

The banking industry has been facing a lot of challenges in recent times in Nigeria. These include competition among them and non banking financial institutions such as insurance Companies. Therefore this research, impact of marketing strategies and performance of banks and its effects on Nigeria economy is aimed tonbsp identify the various types of the marketing mix components employed by thenbsp banks . to examine the effect of the marketing strategies on the performance of the banks. Andnbsp to determine if the marketing strategies employed by the Banks differ significantly from one another. Questionnaire was administered on two population which arenbsp Management andnbsp staff of thenbsp banks and customers of thenbsp banks. 250 questionnaire was administered tonbsp Management andnbsp staff of thenbsp banks,nbsp and also 250 was administered to customers of the bank in Nigeria. Result of the analysis revealed four factors which were distribution network, quality of service, promotion and price with the percentage contribution of each factor being 51.9%, 73.6%, 31.2% and 38.5% respectively. Multiple regression analysis shows that R2 = 0.563 which indicated that the four factor accounted for 56% variability in the performance ofnbsp marketing strategies employed by the banks. The result of the analysis of variance indicated that the mean ratings for thenbsp banks were not significantly different at 0.05level. We thereby conclude that banks should focus its innovative efforts on enlarging the size of the market in which it participates by introducing new products and services, promoting new uses for existing products and seeking out new class of customers

Cardiac Repair and Regenerative Potential in the Goldfish (Carassius auratus) Heart

The remarkable ability of the heart to regenerate has been demonstrated in the zebrafish and giant danio, two fish members of the cyprinid family. Here we use light and electron microscopy to examine the repair response in the heart of another cyprinid, the goldfish (Carassius auratus), following cautery injury to a small portion of its ventricularmyocardium. We observed a robust inflammatory response in the first two weeks consisting primarily of infiltrating macrophages, heterophils, and melanomacrophages. These inflammatory cells were identified in the lumen of the spongy heart, within the site of the wound, and attached to endocardial cells adjacent to the site of injury. Marked accumulation of collagen fibers and increased connective tissue were also observed during the first and second weeks in a transition zone between healthy and injured myocardium as well as in adjacent sub-epicardial regions. The accumulation of collagen and connective tissue however did not persist. The presence of capillaries was also noted in the injured area during repair. The replacement of the cauterized region of the ventricle by myocardial tissue was achieved in 6 weeks. The presence of ethynyl deoxyuridinepositive cardiac myocytes and partially differentiated cardiac myocytes during repair suggest effective cardiac myocyte driven regeneration mechanisms also operate in the injured goldfish heart, and are similar to those observed in zebrafish and giant danio. Our data suggest the ability for cardiac regeneration may be widely conserved among cyprinids

Evidence for glutamate as a neuroglial transmitter within sensory ganglia

This study examines key elements of glutamatergic transmission within sensory ganglia of the rat. We show that the soma of primary sensory neurons release glutamate when depolarized. Using acute dissociated mixed neuronal/glia cultures of dorsal root ganglia (DRG) or trigeminal ganglia and a colorimetric assay, we show that when glutamate uptake by satellite glial cells (SGCs) is inhibited, KCl stimulation leads to simultaneous increase of glutamate in the culture medium. With calcium imaging we see that the soma of primary sensory neurons and SGCs respond to AMPA, NMDA, kainate and mGluR agonists, and selective antagonists block this response. Using whole cell patch-clamp technique, inward currents were recorded from small diameter (<30 µm) DRG neurons from intact DRGs (ex-vivo whole ganglion preparation) in response to local application of the above glutamate receptor agonists. Following a chronic constriction injury (CCI) of either the inferior orbital nerve or the sciatic nerve, glutamate expression increases in the trigeminal ganglia and DRG respectively. This increase occurs in neurons of all diameters and is present in the somata of neurons with injured axons as well as in somata of neighboring uninjured neurons. These data provides additional evidence that glutamate can be released within the sensory ganglion, and that the somata of primary sensory neurons as well as SGCs express functional glutamate receptors at their surface. These findings, together with our previous gene knockdown data, suggest that glutamatergic transmission within the ganglion could impact nociceptive thresholdpublished_or_final_versio

Distinct Metal Ion Requirements for the Phosphomonoesterase and Phosphodiesterase Activities of Calf Intestinal Alkaline Phosphatase

The roles of Mg2+ and Zn2+ ions in promoting phosphoryl transfer catalysed by alkaline phosphatase are yet to be fully characterised. We investigated the divalent metal ion requirements for the monoesterase and diesterase activities of calf intestinal alkaline phosphatase. The synergistic effect of Mg2+ and Zn2+ in promoting the hydrolysis of para-nitrophenyl phosphate (monoesterase reaction) by alkaline phosphatase is not observed in the hydrolysis of the diesterase substrate, bis-para-nitrophenyl phosphate. Indeed, the diesterase reaction is inhibited by concentrations of Mg2+ that were optimal for the monoesterase reaction. This study reveals that the substrate specificities of alkaline phosphatases and related bimetalloenzymes are subject to regulation by changes in the nature and availability of cofactors, and the different cofactor requirements of the monoesterase and diesterase reactions of mammalian alkaline phosphatases could have significance for the biological functions of the enzymes

Decoding machine learning benchmarks

Despite the availability of benchmark machine learning (ML) repositories (e.g., UCI, OpenML), there is no standard evaluation strategy yet capable of pointing out which is the best set of datasets to serve as gold standard to test different ML algorithms. In recent studies, Item Response Theory (IRT) has emerged as a new approach to elucidate what should be a good ML benchmark. This work applied IRT to explore the well-known OpenML-CC18 benchmark to identify how suitable it is on the evaluation of classifiers. Several classifiers ranging from classical to ensembles ones were evaluated using IRT models, which could simultaneously estimate dataset difficulty and classifiers' ability. The Glicko-2 rating system was applied on the top of IRT to summarize the innate ability and aptitude of classifiers. It was observed that not all datasets from OpenML-CC18 are really useful to evaluate classifiers. Most datasets evaluated in this work (84%) contain easy instances in general (e.g., around 10% of difficult instances only). Also, 80% of the instances in half of this benchmark are very discriminating ones, which can be of great use for pairwise algorithm comparison, but not useful to push classifiers abilities. This paper presents this new evaluation methodology based on IRT as well as the tool decodIRT, developed to guide IRT estimation over ML benchmarks.Comment: Paper published at the BRACIS 2020 conference, 15 pages, 4 figure

Capital Flight and the Economic Growth: Evidence From Nigeria

This research examined the impact of capital flight and its determinants on the Nigerian economy using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to analyze data source from the period of 1981 to 2015. The variables included current account balance, capital flight, foreign direct investments, foreign reserve, inflation rate, external debt, and the real gross domestic product. It was to examine the existence of a long run relationship among the variables studied. The result indicates that capital flight has a negative impact on the economic growth of Nigeria. Therefore, there is a need for government to implement policies that will promote domestic investment and discourage capital flight from Nigeria