Isolated ellipticals and their globular cluster systems III. NGC 2271, NGC 2865, NGC 3962, NGC 4240, and IC 4889

As tracers of star formation, galaxy assembly, and mass distribution, globular clusters have provided important clues to our understanding of early-type galaxies. But their study has been mostly constrained to galaxy groups and clusters where early-type galaxies dominate, leaving the properties of the globular cluster systems (GCSs) of isolated ellipticals as a mostly uncharted territory. We present Gemini-South/GMOS g&#39; i&#39; observations of five isolated elliptical galaxies: NGC 3962, NGC 2865, IC 4889, NGC 2271, and NGC 4240. Photometry of their GCSs reveals clear color bimodality in three of them, but remains inconclusive for the other two. All the studied GCSs are rather poor with a mean specific frequency S (N) similar to 1.5, independently of the parent galaxy luminosity. Considering information from previous work as well, it is clear that bimodality and especially the presence of a significant, even dominant, population of blue clusters occurs at even the most isolated systems, which casts doubts on a possible accreted origin of metal-poor clusters, as suggested by some models. Additionally, we discuss the possible existence of ultra-compact dwarfs around the isolated elliptical NGC 3962.</p

Students’ perception of student industrial work experience scheme (SIWES): Benefits and challenges

This study focused on the perception of private university students of SIWES programme. The authors administered questionnaires to 105 students and a response rate of 74% was achieved. Data was analysed using mean and Relative Importance Index (RII) and presented in TABLEs. The analysis showed amongst others that the SIWES programme is generally beneficial to students as it help them to acquire professional skills (RII = 0.846). They however stressed that getting a placement was their major challenge (RII = 0.700). Appropriate recommendations were made and a conclusion drawn from the study

The impact of basic forensic accounting skills on financial reporting credibility among listed firms in Nigeria.

The paper aims at evaluating the impact of basic forensic accounting skills viz: communication skills, technical & analytical skills, accounting & auditing skills and psycho-social skills on the financial reporting credibility of listed organisations in Nigeria. The scope of the study is composed of firms quoted on the Nigerian Stock Exchange as at January, 2018 while the study population is the users and auditors of the financial reports produced by these entities. The users of financial reports are represented by investment advisers which a segment of capital market operators while the auditors are represented by the Big 4 Audit Firms operating in Nigeria as at January, 2018. The research design employed is the survey approach by which primary data was collected from the sample respondents described above while the multivariate analysis was conducted to highlight the impact of the selected independent variables on financial reporting. It was found that, with the exception of communication skills which exhibited a negative but significant impact, all the other basic forensic accounting skills exert positive and significant impact on the methods by which an organization reports her financials. It is prescribed that aspiring forensic accountants should be adequately trained to be able to practice the profession satisfactorily

Development of paediatric non-stage prognosticator guidelines for population-based cancer registries and updates to the 2014 Toronto Paediatric Cancer Stage Guidelines

Population-based cancer registries (PBCRs) generate measures of cancer incidence and survival that are essential for cancer surveillance, research, and cancer control strategies. In 2014, the Toronto Paediatric Cancer Stage Guidelines were developed to standardise how PBCRs collect data on the stage at diagnosis for childhood cancer cases. These guidelines have been implemented in multiple jurisdictions worldwide to facilitate international comparative studies of incidence and outcome. Robust stratification by risk also requires data on key non-stage prognosticators (NSPs). Key experts and stakeholders used a modified Delphi approach to establish principles guiding paediatric cancer NSP data collection. With the use of these principles, recommendations were made on which NSPs should be collected for the major malignancies in children. The 2014 Toronto Stage Guidelines were also reviewed and updated where necessary. Wide adoption of the resultant Paediatric NSP Guidelines and updated Toronto Stage Guidelines will enhance the harmonisation and use of childhood cancer data provided by PBCRs

MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African languages

In this paper, we present AfricaPOS, the largest part-of-speech (POS) dataset for 20 typologically diverse African languages. We discuss the challenges in annotating POS for these languages using the universal dependencies (UD) guidelines. We conducted extensive POS baseline experiments using both conditional random field and several multilingual pre-trained language models. We applied various cross-lingual transfer models trained with data available in the UD. Evaluating on the AfricaPOS dataset, we show that choosing the best transfer language(s) in both single-source and multi-source setups greatly improves the POS tagging performance of the target languages, in particular when combined with parameter-fine-tuning methods. Crucially, transferring knowledge from a language that matches the language family and morphosyntactic properties seems to be more effective for POS tagging in unseen languages

The WAGGS project - II. The reliability of the calcium triplet as a metallicity indicator in integrated stellar light.

Using data from the WiFeS Atlas of Galactic Globular cluster Spectra, we study the behaviour of the calcium triplet (CaT), a popular metallicity indicator in extragalactic stellar population studies. A major caveat of these studies is that the potential sensitivity to other stellar population parameters such as age, calcium abundance, and the initial mass function has not yet been empirically evaluated. Here, we present measurements of the strength of the CaT feature for 113 globular clusters in the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies. We derive empirical calibrations between the CaT index and both the iron abundance ([Fe/H]) and calcium abundance ([Ca/H]), finding a tighter relationship for [Ca/H] than for [Fe/H]. For stellar populations, 3 Gyr and older the CaT can be used to reliably measure [Ca/H] at the 0.1 dex level but becomes less reliable for ages of ∼2 Gyr and younger. We find that the CaT is relatively insensitive to the horizontal branch morphology. The stellar mass function however affects the CaT strengths significantly only at low metallicities. Using our newly derived empirical calibration, we convert our measured CaT indices into [Ca/H] values for the globular clusters in our sample

MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but are underrepresented in NLP research and development. The challenges impeding progress include the limited availability of annotated datasets, as well as a lack of understanding of the settings where current methods are effective. In this paper, we make progress towards solutions for these challenges, focusing on the task of named entity recognition (NER). We create the largest human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African languages, and we study the behavior of state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an Africa-centric setting, demonstrating that the choice of source language significantly affects performance. We show that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 scores by an average of 14 points across 20 languages compared to using English. Our results highlight the need for benchmark datasets and models that cover typologically-diverse African languages