Comparative Analysis of Upstream Petroleum Fiscal Systems of Three (3) Petroleum Exporting Countries: Indonesia, Nigeria and Malaysia

The role of oil: its output and infrastructure and technology in the world are established. Exploration and Exploitation of oil is not only significant as a revenue generator but has become indispensible in the world economy especially as a result of the inability of world economy to find a better substitute. The recent decline and fluctuation arising from oil sector over the decades have prompted a reassessment of petroleum fiscal systems. The research compares the current upstream fiscal systems of three oil exporting countries: Nigeria, Indonesia and Malaysia. The approach adopted for this study is a review of the existing literature on fiscal regimes; the focus is an objective presentation of empirical evidence. The methodology involved desktop research which looked into published literature. Based on the evaluation, the paper arrived at possible conclusions and implications for oil fiscal regimes for the respective countries and the world fiscal systems in general

Blind Password Registration for Two-Server Password Authenticated Key Exchange and Secret Sharing Protocols

Many organisations enforce policies on the length and formation of passwords to encourage selection of strong passwords and protect their multi-user systems. For Two-Server Password Authenticated Key Exchange (2PAKE) and Two-Server Password Authenticated Secret Sharing (2PASS) protocols, where the password chosen by the client is secretly shared between the two servers, the initial remote registration of policy-compliant passwords represents a major problem because none of the servers is supposed to know the password in clear. We solve this problem by introducing Two-Server Blind Password Registration (2BPR) protocols that can be executed between a client and the two servers as part of the remote registration procedure. 2BPR protocols guarantee that secret shares sent to the servers belong to a password that matches their combined password policy and that the plain password remains hidden from any attacker that is in control of at most one server. We propose a security model for 2BPR protocols capturing the requirements of policy compliance for client passwords and their blindness against the servers. Our model extends the adversarial setting of 2PAKE/2PASS protocols to the registration phase and hence closes the gap in the formal treatment of such protocols. We construct an efficient 2BPR protocol for ASCII-based password policies, prove its security in the standard model, give a proof of concept implementation, and discuss its performance

A comparative study on the strength characteristics of Grade 25 and Grade 30 rice husk ash blended cement concrete

Rice husk ash (RHA) is an agricultural waste which is a pozzolanic material that can be blended with cement in producing concrete. This research presents investigation carried out on the comparative strength characteristics of concrete produced with grade 25 and grade 30 cement blended concrete using a replacement level of 10% rice husk ash as substitute. Two mix ratios (1:2:4 and 1:1.12:3.01) were used. A total of 60 cube size of 150mm were cast, tested and their mechanical properties determined. The RHA was made in the laboratory by burning the husk obtained from Ifo in Ogun State Nigeria using an Electric furnace, with the temperatures of the furnace at about 700°C. The results showed that the compressive strength at 28 days decreased as the percentage replacement of Portland Limestone cement (PLC) with RHA increased from 0% to 10% respectively with compressive strengths of 29.78 N/mm2 to 21.56 N/mm2 for grade 25 concrete and 32.12 N/mm2 to 26.82 N/mm2 for grade 30 concrete. It was concluded that RHA replacement in concrete can be used for the production of concrete for light structural works in the development of sustainable and green structures

The ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence Chatbot: How Well Does It Answer Accounting Assessment Questions?

ChatGPT, a language-learning model chatbot, has garnered considerable attention for its ability to respond to users’ questions. Using data from 14 countries and 186 institutions, we compare ChatGPT and student performance for 28,085 questions from accounting assessments and textbook test banks. As of January 2023, ChatGPT provides correct answers for 56.5 percent of questions and partially correct answers for an additional 9.4 percent of questions. When considering point values for questions, students significantly outperform ChatGPT with a 76.7 percent average on assessments compared to 47.5 percent for ChatGPT if no partial credit is awarded and 56.5 percent if partial credit is awarded. Still, ChatGPT performs better than the student average for 15.8 percent of assessments when we include partial credit. We provide evidence of how ChatGPT performs on different question types, accounting topics, class levels, open/closed assessments, and test bank questions. We also discuss implications for accounting education and research

Function-Hiding Inner Product Encryption is Practical

In a functional encryption scheme, secret keys are associated with functions and ciphertexts are associated with messages. Given a secret key for a function f, and a ciphertext for a message x, a decryptor learns f(x) and nothing else about x. Inner product encryption is a special case of functional encryption where both secret keys and ciphertext are associated with vectors. The combination of a secret key for a vector x and a ciphertext for a vector y reveal and nothing more about y. An inner product encryption scheme is function- hiding if the keys and ciphertexts reveal no additional information about both x and y beyond their inner product. In the last few years, there has been a flurry of works on the construction of function-hiding inner product encryption, starting with the work of Bishop, Jain, and Kowalczyk (Asiacrypt 2015) to the more recent work of Tomida, Abe, and Okamoto (ISC 2016). In this work, we focus on the practical applications of this primitive. First, we show that the parameter sizes and the run-time complexity of the state-of-the-art construction can be further reduced by another factor of 2, though we compromise by proving security in the generic group model. We then show that function privacy enables a number of applications in biometric authentication, nearest-neighbor search on encrypted data, and single-key two-input functional encryption for functions over small message spaces. Finally, we evaluate the practicality of our encryption scheme by implementing our function-hiding inner product encryption scheme. Using our construction, encryption and decryption operations for vectors of length 50 complete in a tenth of a second in a standard desktop environment

Gender Difference and Church Member Satisfaction: An Appraisal.

This paper tries to determine both male and female church- attendance trends and to study gender effect, that is, differences between males and female regarding church attendance. It also considers churches as non-profit organizations contending with a mounting problem of male disinterest and disengagement. Based on reports originating in the popular press as well as expert opinion, men are falling away from church involvement in record numbers. A Survey study in Lagos – Nigeria determined that 61% of today's church members are women (Murrow 2005). A number of practitioner books, web-sites, and lay-leader seminars have appeared in recent years with the intent of addressing this issue while offering multiple theories to explain this trend. However, empirical evidence and systematic development of male member profiles that would aid in the development of marketing strategies to better target this group are lacking. This paper begins to address this shortcoming by exploring gender differences in general and male characteristics in particular as they pertain to church satisfaction and involvement. Gender and Behaviour Vol. 5 (2) 2007: pp. 1433-144

USE OF RECYCLED POLYPROPYLENE GRAINS AS PARTIAL REPLACEMENT OF FINE AGGREGATE IN REINFORCED CONCRETE BEAMS

Waste product from polyethylene materials are non-biodegradable and they form the bulk of the materials been used today. This paper looked into how this waste product was recycled in to polypropylene grains of sizes <4.5 mm and used to partially replace fine aggregate in concrete. Sieve analysis was carried out on the recycled polypropylene waste. Reinforced concrete beams (600 mm x 150 mm x 200 mm) and concrete cubes (150 mm x 150 mm x 150 mm) were made from the mixture of the recycled material at different percentages of 0%, 4%, 8%, 12% and 16%. The beams were subjected to bending moment test, while the cubes were subjected to compressive strength test. Results revealed that 43.71% of polypropylene grains passed through the 4.75 mm sieve. The compressive strength of the 4% mixture was 16.28 N/mm2 while the control was 19.07 N/mm2. The bending moment test showed that the control mix has the highest value of 14.70 kNm, while the 12% and 16% has the lowest value of 8.40 kNm each. Deflections in the polypropylene mixes were generally higher than the control. The work concluded that recycled polypropylene grains can be used as partially replacement of fine aggregate in concrete at below 4% replacement