Effect of Blanching methods on drying kinetics of bell paper

Various blanching methods and drying temperatures were applied to bell pepper (Capiscum annum) to investigate the effect on its drying characteristics. Pepper (Capiscum annum) is an abundant and cheap source of vitamins, minerals and fibre. However, its high moisture content makes it susceptible to deterioration. The most common method of preservation is drying but the dried products obtained are of reduced nutritional qualities. Pretreatment of pepper before drying improves the quality of the dried pepper and increases its drying rate. Steam and water blanching as a form of pretreatment has been reported to increase drying rate and improve the quality of dried products but there is not much information on other types of oil/water blanching methods. The effect of blanching (steam, water, palm oil/water and groundnut oil/water) as a pretreatment on the drying kinetics of bell pepper dried at temperatures of 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90oC, was studied. Drying of raw untreated bell pepper was taken as a control. The results indicate that water removal at the initial stage of the drying process was highest and there was a rapid decrease as drying continued until equilibrium was reached at the end of process. The blanched samples generally had higher drying rates (at p<0.05) than the untreated samples. The values for the drying rate for steam and water blanched samples were higher (but not at p<0.05) than the drying rates for samples blanched in oil/water mixtures. The drying rate as well as effective moisture diffusivity, Deff, increased with increasing drying temperature. Values of Deff varied from 3.55 x 10-9 m2/s to 2.34 x 10-9 m2/s with the highest being SB (steam blanched) at 80oC and the lowest UB (unblanched) at 50oC. The drying process took place mainly in the falling rate period. The activation energies varied from 39.59 to 83.87 kJ/mol, with PB (palm oil/water blanched) samples having the lowest and UB having the highest Ea value. The lower values for pretreated samples imply that water movement from the internal regions is faster in pretreated samples. This suggests that blanching as a method of pretreatment generally increases water diffusion

Estimation of image quality factors for face recognition

Over the past few years, verification and identification of humans using biometric has gained attention of researchers and of the public in general. Face recognition systems are used by the public and the government and are applied in different facets of life including security, identification of criminals and identification of terrorists. Because of the importance of these applications, it is of great necessity that face recognition systems be as accurate as possible. Some research has shown that image quality degrades the performance of face recognition systems. Most previous research has focused on designing algorithms for face recognition that deal or compensate a single effect such as blur, lighting conditions, pose, and emotions. In this thesis we identify a number of factors influencing recognition performance and conduct an extensive study of the effects of image quality factors on recognition performance and discuss methods to estimate this quality factors

Prevalence of echocardiographic left atrial enlargement among hypertensive Nigerian subjects

Background: Left atrial enlargement (LAE) predispose to arrhythmias, atrial thrombogenesis and cardioembolic stroke. Whether LAE constitute a major risk among African hypertensive subjects is not well described. This study was aimed to describe the epidemiologic pattern of LAE among hypertensive subjects and determine their correlates. Methods: Clinical and demographic details of 414 hypertensive subjects used were taken. Echocardiography was done. LAE was defined as Left atrial dimension (LAD ) >3.7 cm. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS 17.0. Result: 414 subjects including 258 (62.3%) males were recruited. The mean age was 56.8±16.8 years. LAE was present in 57.73% of hypertensive subjects. Those with LAE were likely to be older (58.23±14.5 vs. 54.8 ±19.7 years, p<0.05), had a higher waist circumference (88.1 ±26.8 ±75.8 ±28.4 cm, p<0.05), left ventricular mass index (79.2 ± 12.4 vs. 48.7 ±15.5g/m2.7 , p<0.05) and a higher frequency of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) (65.3% vs. 40.0 %, p<0.05) respectively than those without LAE. LAD was significantly higher among those with LVH than those without LVH (41.4 ±8.4 vs. 35.6 ±5.9 mm respectively, p<0.05). Conclusion: LAE is common among Nigerian hypertensive subjects. Age, waist circumference, left ventricular wall dimension and mass index are the important correlates of LAE in hypertensive Nigerians. Keywords: Left atrial enlargement; hypertension; prevalence; Nigeria

Modeling of hot-air drying of pretreated cassava chips

Tunde-Akintunde T. Y, A. A Afon(Department of Food Science and Engineering, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, PMB 4000, Ogbomoso, Oyo State, Nigeria)Abstract: Effects of pretreatment (soaking and boiling) on cassava chips dried in a hot air drier at temperature of 60℃ and constant air velocity of 1.5 m/s were investigated.  Mass transfer during air-drying of pretreated cassava chips was described using the Fick’s diffusion model.  Drying took place entirely in the falling rate period.  The form of pretreatment was observed to have an effect on drying rate of the samples.  In order to select a suitable drying model for prediction of the drying kinetics of dried cassava chips, four thin-layer drying models were fitted to the experimental data.  The Page model best described the drying behaviour of pretreated cassava chips with high correlation coefficient values.  The effective moisture diffusivities of the pretreated samples varied from 7.31×10–7 – 8.06×10–7 m2/s.Keywords: modeling, cassava chips, pretreatment, batch dryingCitation: Tunde-Akintunde T. Y, and A. A. Afon. Modeling of hot-air drying of pretreated cassava chips.  Agric Eng Int: CIGR Journal, 2010, 12(2): 34-41.&nbsp

Conflict Induced Migration and its Impact on Land Resources in Plateau State, Nigeria

The study assessed the Impact of conflict induced migration on the environment in Plateau State, Nigeria, through a combination of both the Geographic Information System and the SPSS to analyze the satellite images and the population data for the internally displaced persons in the area. It related the images of the area for 4 different years in the last decade; the year just before the crises began (2000), the second after two major conflicts (2006), the third after the fourth major conflict (2010) and finally, a projection of the area in the year 2020.From the image analyses and the correlations, a significant positive relationship was discovered to be present between conflict and environmental degradation (r= 0.84, at p<0.05) and the correlation ascertaining the relationship between migration and the depletion of land resources shows that the more the mobility of conflict displaced migrants the less the land resources become in the destination areas, and the less the migration the more the land resources with (r= -0.45, at p<0.05). The Markov Chain analysis and cellular automata analysis forecast showed that by the year 2020, in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria, there will be increased demand and pressure on land resources; which will show up in forms of declining crop production, biodiversity loss, degradation of land quality and quantity, and competition for land. Little accessible forest cover will remain; the deforestation will lead to a catastrophic increase in soil erosion and loss of productive land through accelerated landslide incidence, and a possible disruption of the normal hydrological cycle. Furthermore, by this time the built up area would have taken over about 80% of the total area while the land resources will only be found in 20% of the total area. Keywords: Conflict, Migration, Resources, Land, Degradation, Plateau State Crises.

The Use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the Teaching and Learning of English Language in Nigeria

The importance and impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on English language learning in Nigeria cannot be overemphasize as it has been acknowledged globally that the integration of ICT in language learning has become indispensable in modern day learning environment. This is because of the major role it plays in the advancement and development of the frontiers of knowledge in language learning. This is more so when the world is fast becoming a global village where the use of modern technological gadgets to improve language learning has become imperative. This paper examines the importance and use of ICT in language learning and highlights some of the prospects from the plethora of using ICT for optimal performance. Some of the problems which include no internet facilities, erratic power supply, overcrowded classrooms, lack of computer knowledge and so on facing the use of ICT in language learning in a developing country like Nigeria are also discussed. Teaching of computer courses, provision of internet facilities in schools, regular supply of electricity are some of the recommendations made to improve language learning through ICT. Keywords: Language, multimedia, gadgets, foreign language teaching (FLT), Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Nigeria

Queue arrival characteristics of catenated rainfall cells over wireless radio links

Abstract: The arrival of rain cells during rain events is an important factor applied in the deployment of site diversity for mitigating rainfall attenuation in communication systems. In this study, the queue arrival characteristics of rain cells over radio links are explored from ground measurements in Durban (29°52′S, 30°58′E) in South Africa and Butare (2°36′S, 29°44′E) in Rwanda. The results suggest that cumulative arrivals of rain cell queues influence the event duration and equivalent rain cell distance, during typical rain events

Verification of RNN-based neural agent-environment systems

We introduce agent-environment systems where the agent is stateful and executing a ReLU recurrent neural network. We define and study their verification problem by providing equivalences of recurrent and feed-forward neural networks on bounded execution traces. We give a sound and complete procedure for their verification against properties specified in a simplified version of LTL on bounded executions. We present an implementation and discuss the experimental results obtained

Framework and architecture to assess viability of rain cloud platform cooling

Abstract: Data center cooling constitutes a significant overhead in existing terrestrial cloud data centres and platforms. This paper addresses the challenges arising from the necessity of cooling data centres by leveraging on environment friendly free-cooling. It proposes the post-hydrometeor cooling effect for temperature reduction in data centres. The post-hydrometeor cooling effect considers the effect of long duration hydrometeor showers on data center cooling. In leveraging the post-hydrometeor cooling effect, the paper proposes a novel weather station diversity architecture and data analytic framework. The weather station diversity architecture enables the acquisition of climate data. This enables the suitability of a given geographical region for hosting data centres that leverage on the post – hydrometeor cooling effect to be investigated. In addition, a data analytic framework is proposed. The data analytic framework presents algorithms that enable the decision making process as regards determining the suitability of a given location. In addition, performance evaluation shows that the cooling cost is reduced by up to 25% and by a minimum of 8.35% on average when the proposed hydrometeor cooling effect is incorporated in data center cooling

STOCHASTIC PREDICTION OF MONTHLY INFLATION RATES THROUGH KALMAN FILTERING

Inflation measure is an important indicator of the state of an economy and the desire to determine it ahead of “time” cannot be overemphasised. This paper presents a step-by-step algorithm to predict the would-be monthly inflation rate of the Nigerian economy, using Kalman Filtering Predictor (KFP). The ordinary structural model for a time series (structTS) is highlighted to “fairly” compete against our proposed KFP. The structTS is a powerful “competitor”, it is in recommended R package “stats” and used for fitting basic structural models to “univariate” time series. It is quite reliable and fast, and is used as a benchmark in some comparisons of filtering techniques, it is indeed the “predictor” to “beat”, yet our proposed KFP has more to “offer”. The pertinent statistics and pictorial representation of the results obtained, through both techniques, is highlighted for any “incorruptible” judge’s perusal. All of these are contained in the couple of illustrative examples that exhibit the steps involved in the proposed algorithm, using a hypothetical monthly inflation rate and the monthly inflation rates data (January, 2011 to June, 2014) of the Nigerian economy.     &nbsp