Understanding the Escalation of Brain Drain in Nigeria From Poor Leadership Point of View

Migration of people from one place to another in countries of the world in search of better conditions of living predates history. It ignited western societies’ contact with Africa and the rest of the world. Prior the contact, agriculture was the main stay of Africa’s economy. Thus, the movement of farmers from one location to another in search of fertile grounds for cultivation was in vogue. After independence in Nigeria, cattle rearers are known for relocating from the North to South during dry season in search of green grass to sustain their cattle and occupation. In the present day Nigeria, the same scenario still abounds but in a new dimension. It now involves movement of highly skilled manpower from the country to developed societies. Among other things, this paper finds out if there is a relationship between poor leadership of the country and escalation of brain drain. Simple percentage and ranking method was used to analyze the study’s data. Chi-square was used to test its hypothesis. Our result revealed a relationship between poor leadership of the country and brain drain. It equally indicated that students are interested in travelling out of the country to developed societies after their study. Also from the study, twelve causes of brain drain were indentified. Some of them are: mass unemployment, poor salaries and conditions of service, mass poverty, crises-religious, communal, political, education etc. In respect of effects of brain drain on the nation’s economy, eleven factors were identified by the respondents. Some of them are: loss of human capital assets to man various institutions in the country, loss of tax of migrated manpower to foreign countries, loss of capital invested in education of migrated manpower assets etc. Finally, eleven solutions were profiled to the lingering problem of brain drain. The most important ones are: Good leadership, salary and conditions of service as well as rewarding system for diligent staff, mass employment etc

Putting the burden of proof in its place: When are differential allocations legitimate?

It is widely assumed that legitimate differential allocations of the burden of proof are ubiquitous: that in all cases in which opposing views are being debated, one side has the responsibility of proving their claim and if they fail, the opposing view wins by default. We argue that the cases in which one party has the burden of proof are exceptions. In general, participants in reasoned discourse are all required to provide reasons for the claims they make. We distinguish between truth-directed and non-truth-directed discourse, argue that the paradigm contexts in which there are legitimate differential allocations of the burden of proof (law and formal debate) are non-truth-directed, and suggest that in truth-directed contexts, except in certain special cases, differential allocation of the burden of proof is not warranted

Changes in Property Tax Progressivity for Florida Homeowners after the “Save Our Homes Amendment?

The “Save Our Homes Amendment?to Florida’s constitution limits annual increases in the taxable value of a homestead property to 3 percent or the rate of inflation (whichever is less) as long as the property is owned by the same owner. The amount of property value protected from taxation throughout the state by this amendment has grown to over $246 billion (13.9 percent of total property value) since the amendment’s implementation in 1995. This study tests whether the protection has accrued disproportionately over time among homestead property owners, the very group of people the amendment was intended to protect. The results suggest that the amendment has reduced the degree of progressivity in the state’s property tax system such that the owners of lower value home properties are shouldering an increasing proportion of the property tax burden relative to the owners of higher value homestead properties. The differential impacts of the SOHA across value ranges of homestead properties are likely attributable to differential appreciation and ownership transfers for higher and lower value homestead properties throughout the state.

Identifying Determinants of Horizontal Property Tax Inequity: Evidence from Florida

In the property tax literature, an ad valorem property tax is considered equitable if all properties in the taxing jurisdiction are subject to the same effective tax rate. That is, all properties, regardless of value or type, should be taxed at the same percentage of their market value. Because market value is a theoretical construct and not directly observable, errors in estimating market value may result in systematic inequity, with some properties taxed at higher effective rates than others. This study extends previous research on property tax inequity by examining potential determinants of errors in the property valuation process for a sample of single-family homes in Palm Beach County, Florida. The results indicate that assessment difficulty (as measured by the variation around the mean assessment to transaction price ratio) is positively related to lot size, living area, age of the home and the percentage of minority residents in the neighborhood and is negatively related to market activity levels, resident income levels, whether the property is the permanent residence of its owner, and whether the property has a swimming pool. The generality of these results is limited by the use of transaction price as a proxy for unobservable market value.

On the behavior of EMD and MEMD in presence of symmetric alpha-stable noise

EmpiricalMode Decomposition (EMD) and its extended versions such as Multivariate EMD (MEMD) are data-driven techniques that represent nonlinear and non-stationary data as a sum of a finite zero-mean AM-FM components referred to as Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). The aim of this work is to analyze the behavior of EMD and MEMD in stochastic situations involving non-Gaussian noise, more precisely, we examine the case of Symmetric Alpha-Stable noise. We report numerical experiments supporting the claim that both EMD and MEMD act, essentially, as filter banks on each channel of the input signal in the case of Symmetric Alpha Stable noise. Reported results show that, unlike EMD, MEMD has the ability to align common frequency modes across multiple channels in same index IMFs. Further, simulations show that, contrary to EMD, for MEMD the stability property is well satisfied for the modes of lower indices and this result is exploited for the estimation of the stability index of the Symmetric Alpha Stable input signal

Head on Fire: Burning down memory

This was a symposium about the work of each artist in the exhibition. I spoke about my work with electrocution, fie and memory, also screening a film of my electrocution and an app I developed to burn pixels from pictures when under stress