Effects of lattice variations on confinement in photonic crystal microcavity using green tensor method

Electric field distribution in and around the 2D PC cavity was calculated for different lattice parameters using the Dyson formulation of the Green tensor. The results demonstrate the sensitive effects of structural variation of the photonic crystal on the effectiveness of field confinement in the cavity

The influence of social networking on food security status of cassava farming households in Nigeria

Open Access Journal; Published online: 4 Jul 2020Food security, at national and household levels, is on the decline because traditional capital (physical, natural, human and financial) has not fully led to its improvement. There is an increasing shift of attention to social capital as an element that explains household food security, but there is a lack of adequately documented information on this. Therefore, this study investigates the effects of social capital on food security, using data collected on a cross-section of 775 cassava farming households from four zones of Nigeria. About 58% of the respondents (cassava farming households) fall under the intermediate category in terms of the benefits received from belonging in social groups. Age and educational level increased the probability to receive benefit from group activities (p < 0.05), while membership density, labor contribution and decision making significantly affected the level of benefit received (p < 0.10). Based on the estimated food security line, 41% of the cassava households were food secure, while 59% were food insecure. Membership density, cash and labor contribution significantly affected food security. Membership density (p < 0.10) and cash contribution (p < 0.05) increased the probability of being food secure. It was recommended that cassava farming households should be encouraged or aided to form cooperatives or farmers’ groups, participate in the activities, and make financial contributions to investments that reduce manual labor-input in the farming activities to enhance household food security

Estimating multidimensional poverty AmongCassava producers in Nigeria: patterns and socioeconomic determinants

Open Access Journal; Published online: 02 Jul 2020The scourge of poverty, including its correlates, has been witnessing an incremental sequence over the years in Nigeria despite the natural endowment of the country. Efforts by various stakeholders to address this problem have not yielded tangible results. Using cross-sectional data collected in 2015 on 775 cassava farmers spread across four geographical zones, this study estimates multidimensional poverty of cassava producers in Nigeria. This is to determine the factors responsible for poverty increase and contribution(s) of these factors to poverty. The study found that about 74% of the respondents were multidimensionally poor. Assets and public/housing utility were the main contributors to aggregate multidimensional poverty index (MPI), while education and health contributed most to povertyreduction. The results also showed major contributing indicators to MPI to be formal employment, school enrolment, years of schooling, frequency of hospital visits, and household assets’ ownership. The South-eastzone of Nigeria had the highest adjusted headcount of poverty among cassava producers. The estimated coefficient of age, farming experience, years of schooling, household size, and access to informal credit were significant determinants of poverty in the study area. In conclusion, the results suggest that although Nigeria is a federation of more than 30 states that continue to rely on nation-wide policy initiatives of the central government, policies on cassava aiming to lift millions of people out of poverty should instead vary according to the peculiar poverty dimensions of each federation unit. We suggest reform in the agriculture sector that will emphasize facilitation and access to incentives (credits, training, extension, cooperate system, etc.) by younger farmers to engage in modern cassava farming, thereby, enhancing the chances of rural cassava growers to move out of poverty

Parallel machine scheduling to maximize the weighted number of just-in-time jobs

Parallel machine scheduling problem of maximizing the weighted number of just-in-time jobs was investigated. The problem was NP complete in the strong sense, for which finding an optimal solution had been considered very unlikely. The performances of 4 greedy heuristic algorithms (WO1, WO2, DO1 and DO2) dev-eloped for solving the Pm|| &Sigma; wј xiј problem were analysed. Two approaches adopted for assigning jobs to the machines were according to the earliest start time, and according to difference between latest due date and the job processing time. The time complexity of each algorithm was O(nmlogn). The heuristics WO2 and DO2 were suitable for certain number of machines and number of jobs, while WO1 and DO1 out classed the other two

Privacy enforcement on subscribers data in cloud computing

Data stored in the cloud are susceptible to an array of threats from hackers. This is because threats, hackers and unauthorized access are not supported by the cloud service providers as implied. This study improves user privacy in the cloud system, using privacy with non-trusted provider (PNTP) on software and platform as a service model. The subscribers encrypt the data using user’s personal Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric key algorithm and send the encrypted data to the storage pool of the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) via a secure socket layer. The AES performs a second encryption on the data sent to the cloud and generates for the subscriber a key that will be used for decryption of previously stored data. The encryption and decryption keys are managed by the key server and have been hardcoded into the PNTP system. The model was simulated using the Stanford University multimedia dataset and benchmarked with a Privacy with Trusted cloud Provider (PTP) model using encryption time, decryption time and efficiency (brute force hacking) as parameters. Results showed that it took a longer time to access the user files in PNTP than in the PTP system. The brute force hacking took a longer time (almost double) to access data stored on the PNTP system. This will give subscribers a high level of control over their data and increase the adoption of cloud computing by businesses and organizations with highly sensitive information