The impact of future climate change on water availability in Gusau, Zamfara State, Nigeria

Climate change has continued to pose challenging global environmental problems in the 21st century. For instance, studies have shown that water resources quantity and quality will be seriously degraded by the phenomenon. This paper examines the effect of climate change on future water availability in Gusau City, Zamfara State, Nigeria. The data obtained from three Regional Climate Models (RCMs) ensembles gridded at 0.5o x 0.5o spatial resolutions were used. The analysis was carried out using ArcGIS (ArcMap, version 10.5) software and comparison of the outcome of the three ensembles was made. The findings show future temperature increase as 1- 3oC by 2040, 3oC by 2070 and 2- 5oC by 2100. Furthermore, future rainfall will increase under rcp 4.5 and 8.5 by 6.7% - 20%, 10% - 20% and 10% - 30% by 2040, 2070v and 2100 respectively. It further shows an increase of +10% to + 60% in seasonal changes of rainfall in the months of April-May-June and July-August-September respectively. These will ultimately result in the increase in surface run off and aquifer recharge. Similarly, the quality of water will also be degraded through sedimentation and nitrogen loading from farms, transport and dissolution of heavy metals by flooding. Therefore, the study recommends for the involvement in storm water harvesting and storage processes by both Government and other large scale water users

Perceptions of People Towards Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Intellectual Disability in North Eastern Nigeria

This paper examined people’s perception towards youth with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability. In-depth interviews were conducted separately with a with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Intellectual disabilities (ID) While their mothers were thoroughly investigated in order to ascertain the level of victimization in the form of bullying on these categories of youth constructs from the interview were utilized to compare groups on the frequency type and impact of victimization. The outcomes of the interview conducted reveals that youth with ASD are being victimized more frequently than their ID peers and that the form of bullying being subdued differs from each group to another. In view of submission our findings show that higher internalizing problem and conflicts in relationship are found to be a significant predictor of victimization. The paper, therefore, recommends among others that observation of extrinsic and intrinsic behaviors for proper adjustment in a classroom setting should be taken care off

The Influencing Factors of Access and Control Men and Women in Community Forest Resources Management

Tujuan penelitian ini yaitu mendeskripsikan profil aktivitas laki-laki dan perempuan pada kegiatan reproduktif, produktif dan sosial kemasyarakatan, mendeskripsikan profil akses dan kontrol laki-laki dan perempuan dalam pengelolaan sumberdaya hutan rakyat, membandingkan faktor-faktor yang berpengaruh terhadap akses dan kontrol laki-laki dan perempuan dalam pengelolaan sumberdaya hutan rakyat. Responden adalah petani rumah tangga dan buruh tani yang bekerja di hutan rakyat. Penelitian ini mengindikasikan bahwa dalam kegiatan reproduktif, perempuan pada rumahtangga buruh tani memiliki curahan waktu lebih tinggi daripada perempuan pada rumah tangga petani dan dalam kegiata produktif laki-laki pada rumahtangga buruh tani memiliki curahan waktu lebih tinggi daripada laki-laki pada rumahtangga petani. Faktor penguasaan lahan rumahtangga, keikutsertaan suami-istri dalam kegiatan kelompok dan pengetahuan lokal suami istri dalam budidaya tanaman di lahan hutan mempengaruhi akses kontrol pada rumahtangga petani terlebih pada laki-laki sedangkan pada rumahtangga buruh tani faktor-faktor tersebut tidak mempengaruhi akses dan kontrol atas sumberdaya dalam kegiatan pengelolaan hutan rakyat

Quantifying the Economic Value of Vehicle-Grid Integration: A Case Study of Dynamic Pricing in the Sacramento Municipal Utility District

This study develops a stochastic-systems approach in modeling vehicle-grid integration (VGI), where load management strategies can be compared in terms of their economic value to plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) consumers and their local utility companies. The proposed methodology is demonstrated in an assessment of VGI for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) in California. Monte-Carlo simulations have been performed to randomly assign PEV charging characteristics of the households based on given statistical distributions. Consumer adoption of time-of-use (TOU) rates is modeled as an optimization problem where consumers seek the earliest PEV charge start time among the charge schedules resulting lowest cost and satisfying their transportation needs. The preliminary results show that, considering today’s grid system, the deployment of 60,000 PEVs in Sacramento Region will have significant but manageable impacts. These impacts included increasing annual peak demand by 86MWs (5%), and overloading up to 101 neighborhood transformers in the distribution system. On the other hand, adopting proper TOU rates presents a high potential for minimizing these negative impacts of widespread PEV deployment on the grid. The proposed methodology provided several improvements to the VGI modeling literature. These improvements included combining assessments for generation and distribution systems in the same model, and advancing uncertainty analysis for the PEV consumer behavior with considering real world data sets

Near-field Hybrid Beamforming for Terahertz-band Integrated Sensing and Communications

Terahertz (THz) band communications and integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) are two main facets of the sixth generation wireless networks. In order to compensate the severe attenuation, the THz wireless systems employ large arrays, wherein the near-field beam-squint severely degrades the beamforming accuracy. Contrary to prior works that examine only either narrowband ISAC beamforming or far-field models, we introduce an alternating optimization technique for hybrid beamforming design in near-field THz-ISAC scenario. We also propose an efficient approach to compensate near-field beam-squint via baseband beamformers. Via numerical simulations, we show that the proposed approach achieves satisfactory spectral efficiency performance while accurately estimating the near-field beamformers and mitigating the beam-squint without additional hardware components.Comment: Accepted Paper in 2023 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 202

The folded k-spectrum kernel: A machine learning approach to detecting transcription factor binding sites with gapped nucleotide dependencies

Understanding the molecular machinery involved in transcriptional regulation is central to improving our knowledge of an organism’s development, disease, and evolution. The building blocks of this complex molecular machinery are an organism’s genomic DNA sequence and transcription factor proteins. Despite the vast amount of sequence data now available for many model organisms, predicting where transcription factors bind, often referred to as ‘motif detection’ is still incredibly challenging. In this study, we develop a novel bioinformatic approach to binding site prediction. We do this by extending pre-existing SVM approaches in an unbiased way to include all possible gapped k-mers, representing different combinations of complex nucleotide dependencies within binding sites. We show the advantages of this new approach when compared to existing SVM approaches, through a rigorous set of cross-validation experiments. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our new approach by reporting on its improved performance on a set of 127 genomic regions known to regulate gene expression along the anterio-posterior axis in early Drosophila embryos

Polarization enhanced interferometric imaging

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1e/21/aa/dee6cbdf9a3542/US11428626.pdfPublished versio

Comparison of experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) studies of slug flow in a vertical riser

This paper presents a comparison of the results obtained from experiments and CFD studies of slug flow in a vertical riser. A series of two experimental investigations were carried out on a 6 m vertical pipe with a 0.067 m internal diameter charged with an air–silicone oil mixture. For the first set of experiments, the riser was initially full of air, and then liquid and gas flows set to liquid and gas superficial velocities = 0.05 and 0.344 m/s, respectively, electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) and wire mesh sensor (WMS) transducers were employed. In the second one, the riser was initially full of (static) liquid, and then liquid and gas flows set to liquid and gas superficial velocities = 0.05 and 0.344 m/s, respectively, only ECT was used. A characterisation of the observed slug flow regimes was carried out. This includes the evaluation of the instantaneous distribution of the phases over the pipe cross-section, the Probability Density Function (PDF) of void fraction, time series of cross-sectional void fraction, Power Spectral Density (PSD), structure velocity of the Taylor bubble, lengths of the liquid slug and Taylor bubble and void fractions in the liquid slug and Taylor bubble. The simulation results were validated both qualitatively and quantitatively against experimental data. A reasonably good agreement was observed between the results of the experiment and CFD

Memahami Tentang Beberapa Konsep Politik (suatu Telaah dari Sistem Politik)

Politik pada dasarnya merupakan suatu fenomena yang sangat berkaitan dengan manusia, yang pada kodratnya selalu hidup bermasyarakat. Manusia adalah makhluk sosial, makhluk yang dinamis dan berkembang, serta selalu menyesuaikan keadaan sekitarnya. Sebagai anggota masyarakat, seseorang atau kelompok tentu terikat oleh nilai-nilai dan aturan-aturan umum yang diakui dan dianut oleh masyarakat itu. Oleh karena itu, politik akan selalu menggejala, mewujudkan dirinya dalam rangka proses perkembangan manusia. Dengan keterkaitan hal di atas, maka manusia inti utama realitas politik, apapun alasannya pengamatan atau analisa politik tidak dapat begitu saja meninggalkan manusia. Ini menunjukkan bahwa hakekat politik adalah perilaku manusia, baik berupa aktivitas atau pun sikap yang bertujuan mempengaruhi atau mempertahankan tatanan sebuah masyarakat dengan menggunakan kekuasaan. Penyelenggaraan kekuasaan secara konstitusional adalah mencakup pembagian kekuasaan politik yang mencakup masalah: sumber kekuasaan politik, proses legitimasi, pemegang kekuasaan tertinggi, penyelenggaraan kekuasaan, fungsi-fungsi kekuasaan/tugas ringan dan tujuan politik yang mudah dicapai