Land use in northern megalopolis

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Land use in northern Megalopolis

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Nigeria: Ethno-linguistic Competition in the Giant of Africa

Nigeria is a country with an immense population of over 140 million, the largest in Africa, and several hundred languages and ethnic groups (over 400 in some estimates, 510 according to Ethnologue 2005), though with no single group being a majority, and the three largest ethnic groups together constituting only approximately half of the country's total population. Having been formed as a united territory by British colonial forces in 1914, with artificially created borders arbitrarily including certain ethnic groups while dividing others with neighbouring states, Nigeria and its complex ethno-linguistic situation in many ways is a prime representation of the classic set of problems faced by many newly developing states in Africa when decisions of national language policy and planning have to be made, and the potential role of language in nation-building has to be determined. When independence came to Nigeria in 1960, it was agreed that English would be the country's single official language, and there was little serious support support for the possible attempted promotion of any of Nigeria's indigenous languages into the role of national official language. This chapter considers the socio-political and historical background to the establishment of English as Nigeria's official language, and the development of the country over the subsequent post-independence era, and asks the following question. After five decades of experience of life with English as the nation's sole official language, if people in Nigeria were to be given the opportunity to reformulate national language policy as they wished, might one expect a different official language structure to be requested, perhaps with one or a combination of indigenous languages as a replacement for English, or is the current English-centred structuring of officialdom felt to be satisfactory and appropriate given the ethnic configuration of the country

Gun facilitates adhesive bonding of studs to surfaces

Gun facilitates adhesive bonding of thermoplastic-backed studs to smooth, hard surfaces. Such studs can be used for mounting loads where defacement with drilled holes cannot be tolerated. These studs can be easily removed by softening the plastic bonding with heat from the gun

Representations of the fundamental group of a surface in PU(p,q) and holomorphic triples

We count the connected components in the moduli space of PU(p,q)-representations of the fundamental group for a closed oriented surface. The components are labelled by pairs of integers which arise as topological invariants of the flat bundles associated to the representations. Our results show that for each allowed value of these invariants, which are bounded by a Milnor-Wood type inequality, there is a unique non-empty connected component. Interpreting the moduli space of representations as a moduli space of Higgs bundles, we take a Morse theoretic approach using a certain smooth proper function on the Higgs moduli space. A key step is the identification of the function's local minima as moduli spaces of holomorphic triples. We prove that these moduli spaces of triples are non-empty and irreducible.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Ser. I Mat

Analysis of interior noise ground and flight test data for advanced turboprop aircraft applications

Interior noise ground tests conducted on a DC-9 aircraft test section are described. The objectives were to study ground test and analysis techniques for evaluating the effectiveness of interior noise control treatments for advanced turboprop aircraft, and to study the sensitivity of the ground test results to changes in various test conditions. Noise and vibration measurements were conducted under simulated advanced turboprop excitation, for two interior noise control treatment configurations. These ground measurement results were compared with results of earlier UHB (Ultra High Bypass) Demonstrator flight tests with comparable interior treatment configurations. The Demonstrator is an MD-80 test aircraft with the left JT8D engine replaced with a prototype UHB advanced turboprop engine