Using Approximate Method for the Construction of Mosque Domes

Domes remain a unique structure in building construction as a result of stylistic forms and composition in the field of architecture. They are important elements that adequately define the Islamic architecture. The construction of domes which is a doubly curved surface and formed by rectilinear structures always resulted in difficulties to get the curvilinear shape correctly. The study therefore made the use of an approximate method to develop the dome using materials that are provided in the locality. The knowledge of descriptive geometry in surface development was adopted to obtain approximation cone components that produce the hemispherical dome. The components were properly installed and supported by centering which composed eight equally spaced timber frameworks that were supported by planks. Lack of appropriate modern technological advancement should not be factor militating against production of perfect forms, thus appropriate technical drawing basic skills should be acquired by the builders to take the construction of dome from a poor to a good system of accurate centering with good quality control

SDN-Sim: Integrating System Level Simulator with Software Defined Network

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. With the introduction of diverse technology paradigms in next-generation cellular and vehicular networks, design and structural complexity are skyrocketing. The beyond- 5G use cases such as mobile broadband, 5G-V2X and UAV communications require support for ultra-low latency and high throughput and reliability with limited operational complexity and cost. These use cases are being explored in 3GPP Release 16 and 17. To facilitate end-to-end performance evaluation for these applications, we propose SDN-Sim - an integration of a System Level Simulator (SLS) with a Software Defined Network (SDN) infrastructure. While the SLS models the communication channel and evaluates system performance on the physical and data link layers, the SDN performs network and application tasks such as routing, load balancing, etc. The proposed architecture replicates the SLS-defined topology into an SDN emulator for offloading control operations. It uses link and node information calculated by the SLS to compute routes in SDN and feeds the results back to the SLS. Along with the architecture, data modeling and processing, replication and route calculation frameworks are proposed

Traumatic Tympanic Membrane perforation: An aetiological profile

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Traumatic perforation of the tympanic membrane may be due to direct or indirect source. The aim of the study is to profile the various aetiologies of traumatic tympanic membrane perforation in Ilorin, north central Nigeria.</p> <p>A retrospective review of 64 patients seen at the University of Ilorin Teaching hospital, Ilorin, Nigeria over a ten year period (January 1998 to Dec 2007) with history of traumatic tympanic membrane perforation from various causes, these also included multiply injured patients with bleeding from middle ear as part of their presentations. The data retrieved included the biodata, the clinical presentations, source of injury, the clinical findings and the treatment outcome. The data were entered into an SPSS version 11 computer soft ware and analyzed descriptively.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>Sixty four (64) ears were analysed, Age range 6 months to 50 yrs, mean age of 29.2 yrs 7.9% of them were ≤5 years, 29.7% between 21-34 years, and 37.7% were 35 years and above. The male to female ratio was 2.5:1.0. Commonest aetiology was from slaps, then road traffic injury (RTI) in 35.9% and 23.5%, Majority of the slap injury were from fights (30.5%), security agents, senior students and cultists at schools (17.4% each). Sudden hearing loss was a typical presentation (95.3%), majority of the patient defaulted from follow up once the symptoms of bleeding and pain subsided. Only 7.8% had neomembrane formation on follow up</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Traumatic perforation of the tympanic membrane is an uncommon injury that is under-reported, there is the need to educate on alternative punitive measure among students and security agents, unskilled removal of foreign body, early identification, evaluation and referral of patients reduces the attendant morbidity.</p

Clinico-pathological pattern of nasopharyngeal carcinoma in Ilorin, Nigeria

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma is an uncommon tumour in Nigeria but the burden of the disease in terms of morbidity and mortality is very high.The aim of the study was to document the clinic-pathological characteristics of nasopharyngeal carcinoma in Ilorin, North central Nigeria.This was a retrospective review of all patients seen in ENT department, University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital with the diagnosis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma between January 1st 1999 and December 31st,2008. The patient's biodata, clinical presentation and histopathological findings are presented. The histopathological diagnosis was in accordance with the 1991WHOclassification. A total of 30 patients with histologically confirmed nasopharyngeal carcinoma seen during the study period accounted for 2% of the total cancers recorded in Ilorin cancer registry. There were 20 males and 10 females with a mean age of 48.7 ± 15.9 years. The commonest presenting complaint was cervical lymphadenopathy in 96.7% of patients followed by epistaxis (66.7%) and hearing loss (66.7%). Identifiable riskfactors included regular intake of ungutted salted smoked fish (76.7%) and tobacco use (23.3%) with some having both risk factors. Histologically, undifferentiated carcinoma was the commonest (70%) followed by welldifferentiated keratinizing squamous cell carcinoma (20%) and differentiated nonkeratinizing squamous cell carcinoma (10%).Undifferentiated carcinoma was the commonest type of nasopharyngeal carcinoma reported from this study especially among males in the 4th and 5th decades of life. Identifiable risk factors included consumption of ungutted salted smoked fish with tobaccon usage. Early diagnosis with effective referral system and easy access to radiotherapy would improve the survival outcome in patients with the disease

Robust, Resilient and Reliable Architecture for V2X Communication

The new developments in mobile edge computing (MEC) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications has positioned 5G and beyond in a strong position to answer the market need towards future emerging intelligent transportation systems and smart city applications. The major attractive features of V2X communication is the inherent ability to adapt to any type of network, device, or data, and to ensure robustness, resilience and reliability of the network, which is challenging to realize. In this work, we propose to drive these further these features by proposing a novel robust, resilient and reliable architecture for V2X communication based on harnessing MEC and blockchain technology. A three stage computing service is proposed. Firstly, a hierarchcial computing architecture is deployed spanning over the vehicular network that constitutes cloud computing (CC), edge computing (EC), fog computing (FC) nodes. The resources and data bases can migrate from the high capacity cloud services (furthest away from the individual node of the network) to the edge (medium) and low level fog node, according to computing service requirements. Secondly, the resource allocation filters the data according to its significance, and rank the nodes according to their usability, and selects the network technology according to their physical channel characteristics. Thirdly, we propose a blockchain-based transaction service that ensures reliability. We discussed two use cases for experimental analysis, plug- in electric vehicles in smart grid scenarios, and massive IoT data services for autonomous cars. The results show that car connectivity prediction is accurate 98% of the times, where 92% more data blocks are added using micro-blockchain solution compared to the public blockchain, where it is able to reduce the time to sign and compute the proof-of-work (PoW), and deliver a low-overhead Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This approach can be considered a strong candidate architecture for future V2X, and with more general application for everything- to-everything (X2X) communications

Searching for configurations in clone evaluation - A replication study

Clone detection is the process of finding duplicated code within a software code base in an automated manner. It is useful in several areas of software development such as code quality analysis, bug detection, and program understanding.We replicate a study of a geneticalgorithm based framework that optimises parameters for clone agreement (EvaClone). We apply the framework to 14 releases of Mockito, a Java mocking framework. We observe that the optimised parameters outperform the tools’ default parameters in term of clone agreement by 19.91% to 66.43 %. However, the framework gives undesirable results in term of clone quality. EvaClone either maximises or minimises a number of clones in order to achieve the highest agreement resulting in more false positives or false negatives introduced consequently

Pre-Operative Vocal Cord Palsy in Goitre Patient

Objectives: Determine the prevalence of vocal cord palsy and the relative prevalence of asymptomatic vocal cord palsy in pre-operative goitre patients using flexible fibreoptic laryngoscope (FFL) as a laryngeal  visualisation technique.Design: Hospital-based, cross-sectional study conducted throughout 2011 on consecutive, consenting pre-operative goitre patients referred to the E.N.T Department, University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital. Ilorin, Nigeria.Setting: University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (U.I.T.H) Ilorin is a 600-bedded tertiary institution, serving primarily patients from Kwara State.Subjects: One hundred and ten consenting patients, age 16 and above- whose cooperation could easily be gained for an awake-laryngoscopy procedure.Results: Mean age, 42.98 ± 14.71. Female: Male = 4.5:1. Palsy rate was 2.9% and 25% in benign and malignant goitre respectively. Hoarseness was reported by 3(2.7%) patients with vocal cord palsy (p 0.001). Asymptomatic palsy was 40%.Conclusion: The prevalence of pre-operative vocal cord palsy was 4.5%; Relative prevalence was 2.9% and relative prevalence was 25% in benign and malignant goitre respectively

Uncommon complications of Otitis media in a tertiary center: A Case Series

Background: The aim is to report cases of unusual and infrequent complication of otitis media in North-central Nigeria, as well as evaluate their outcome. We present 7 case reports of patients with unusual complications from otitis media in our setting.Case 1: A fifteen year old Yoruba girl presented at the Accident and emergency of our hospital with a 2 week history of left sided ear ache, 10 day history of left sided ear discharge and 3 day history of jaw and neck stiffness. There was a positive history of use of ‘Turari’ locally prepared perfume and application of an ear drop from a local chemist. Caregiver said patient was fully immunized. Examination revealed a young girl, conscious and alert, not pale, anicteric with stiff neck, positive and rigid joints on movement.Case 2: An 8 year old Yoruba girl presented first to the eye clinic with 2 days history of swelling of the right eye, associated pain, reduction in vision and eyelid swelling without eye discharge or itch. There was a of purulent ear discharge 8 days prior to eye symptoms. No history of trauma was obtained. Examination revealed proptosis with zygomatic abscess extending to the post-auricular. She had incision and drainage with systemic and topical antibiotics for ear dressing. Outcome was uneventful.Conclusion: The unusual complication of otitis media still occurs in our environment usually due to late presentation and contamination of wound. Prevention is still the best option.  Keywords: Otitis Media, Complications, Otogenic Tetanus, Ophthalmic, Proptosi

Self-compacting concrete in pavement construction: Strength grouping of some selected brands of cements

This paper investigates strength properties of some selected cement brands for self-compacting concrete application in pavement construction. Three brands each of Portland limestone cement grades, CEM II/A-L 42.5 (Brand A), CEM II/B-L 32.5 (Brand B) and CEM II/B-L 32.5 (Brand C), were used. Rheological test was carried out using the L-Box, V-Funnel and slump cone while compressivegas emissions from the building sector. These systems require high investments which are returned through the heat sales. Due to the changed climate conditions and building renovation policies, heat demand in the future could decreas