AUDITORS' INDEPENDENCE AND CORRUPTION ALLEVIATION IN THE NIGERIAN PUBLIC SERVICE

Corruption is the greatest enemy of the Nigerian state evidenced by the recent rating of the nation as most corrupt country in the world. The debilitating effect of corruption pervades the Nigerian public service which is the machinery of government for the delivery of public goods and social services to the populace. This situation seemingly continues unabated under the watchful eyes of external auditors saddled with the responsibility of reviewing the operations of public service agencies. In evaluating the culpability of external auditors, this study investigates the external auditors’ independence as a factor in combating corruption in Nigeria public service. Survey method was adopted to assess the four factors identified by the study that affect the independence posture of external auditors. The responses from the questionnaire were analyzed using the SPSS test of statistics. The result reveals that the independence status of external auditors in Nigeria is compromised in the four areas investigated: appointment, professional fees, arms-length and tenure. The study therefore recommended that external auditors should be appointed by the Nigerian supreme audit institution and their fees should be determined by the same institution to which they should also render the audit report and management letter directly.

Impact of Microfinancein Promoting Financial Inclusion in Nigeria

Despite the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) initiatives to encourage banks to extend their services and facilities to rural areas, a high percentage of the rural dwellers still remain unbanked and as such, the initiatives appear not to promote financial inclusion services among the poor in Nigeria. As a result, small entrepreneurs often lack enabling financial environment to grow. The study undertakes an empirical analysis of the impact of microfinance in promoting financial inclusion in Nigeria between 1990 and 2014 using OLS regression method. Unit root test was conducted on the variables to examine their level of stationary to avoid spurious regression results. The findings showed that minimum deposit amount have a positive and significant relationship with saving. It was observed that access to microfinance minimum deposit amount has significant effect on savings account opened by rural dwellers. Microfinance interest rate was however found to have a negative and insignificant relationship with the rural dwellers loans and advances. Recommendations were made among which are that Government should facilitate microfinance branches close to the rural area, products and services accessible to a large segment of the potentially productive Nigeria population, who are currently not being served by the formal financial sector

Teacher Participation Styles in Foreign Language Chats and Their Effect on Student Behavior

This paper investigates the impact that a teacher's virtual presence--or lack thereof--has on students' chat behavior with regard to error correction, uptake, target language use, and on-task behavior. The data come from beginning German students engaged in pair and small-group chatting activities at a major American university. Transcripts from chat sessions in a first-semester German class and a second-semester German class were analyzed. The data were triangulated with student surveys and teacher interviews. Results suggest that the teachers' participation styles had a greater influence on learners' chat behavior than simply whether or not the teachers were present and that the form-focused participation style of one of the teachers had an apparently inhibitory effect on learner participation

Adequacy of micronutrient content of south eastern Nigerian meals in meeting the nutritional needs of vulnerable groups

The Zinc (Zn), iron Fe) and copper (Cu) contents and their bioavailability in south-eastern Nigerian meals were evaluated. Their adequacy in meeting the nutritional requirements of pregnant and lactating women and preschool children were determined. Mineral content was determined using atomic absorption spectrophotometer after dry ashing. Phytate was determined by the ion exchange method. The bioavailability of Zn was evaluated using the phytate: Zn molar ratio (PZMR). Bioavailability of iron was determined by the in vitro procedure involving a simulated gastrointestinal digestion followed by dialysis. Portion sizes of meals consumed by these vulnerable groups were obtained during an interview and validated using data obtained from food consumption surveys. The amount of Zn and Fe in such portions were calculated and compared with the recommended intakes. Zn content of the meals ranged from 1.18mg to 4.99mg/100g, Fe from 1.10mg to 3.31mg/100g and Cu from 0.03mg to 0.21mg/100g edible portion or as consumed. Phytate levels varied from 4.11mg to 53.05mg/100g. The PZMR of the meals and serving portions wer

A breast cancer diagnosis system: a combined approach using rough sets and probabilistic neural networks

In this paper, we present a medical decision support system based on a hybrid approach utilising rough sets and a probabilistic neural network. We utilised the ability of rough sets to perform dimensionality reduction to eliminate redundant attributes from a biomedical dataset. We then utilised a probabilistic neural network to perform supervised classification. Our results indicate that rough sets was able to reduce the number of attributes in the dataset by 67% without sacrificing classification accuracy. Our classification accuracy results yielded results on the order of 93%

Resource Use Efficiency of Cassava farmers in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

This study examined the resource use efficiency of cassava farmers in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Data collated from 100 farmers selected using a multi stage random sampling technique were subjected to statistical and economic analyses to unveil the pattern of resource use efficiency in cassava enterprise. Result from the ordinary least square multiple regression informed that 92 percent of the variation in cassava output was explained by farm size, fertilizer use, cuttings and labour inputs, with only farm size and cuttings being significant at five percent level. Data on resource use efficiency reveal that the farmers were operating in the second stage of production as regards the use of land (farm size), cuttings and labour, thus, implying decreasing returns to scale, whereas for fertilizer use, they operated within the third stage of the production process as Marginal Physical Product (MPP) was below zero. Based on these findings, the study recommends policies to raise the level of resource use especially through the provision and maintenance of an efficient input delivery system. Keywords: Cassava Farmers, Resource Use Efficiency, Returns to Scale, Marginal Physical Produc

Finite Density QCD in the Chiral Limit

We present the first results of an exact simulation of full QCD at finite density in the chiral limit. We have used a MFA (Microcanonical Fermionic Average) inspired approach for the reconstruction of the Grand Canonical Partition Function of the theory; using the fugacity expansion of the fermionic determinant we are able to move continuously in the ($\beta -\mu$) plane with $m=0$.Comment: 3 pages, LaTeX, 3 figures, uses espcrc2.sty, psfig. Talk presented by A. Galante at Lattice 97. Correction of some reference

The MASSIVE Survey XIII -- Spatially Resolved Stellar Kinematics in the Central 1 kpc of 20 Massive Elliptical Galaxies with the GMOS-North Integral-Field Spectrograph

We use observations from the GEMINI-N/GMOS integral-field spectrograph (IFS) to obtain spatially resolved stellar kinematics of the central $\sim 1$ kpc of 20 early-type galaxies (ETGs) with stellar masses greater than $10^{11.7} M_\odot$ in the MASSIVE survey. Together with observations from the wide-field Mitchell IFS at McDonald Observatory in our earlier work, we obtain unprecedentedly detailed kinematic maps of local massive ETGs, covering a scale of $\sim 0.1-30$ kpc. The high ($\sim 120$) signal-to-noise of the GMOS spectra enable us to obtain two-dimensional maps of the line-of-sight velocity, velocity dispersion $\sigma$, as well as the skewness $h_3$ and kurtosis $h_4$ of the stellar velocity distributions. All but one galaxy in the sample have $\sigma(R)$ profiles that increase towards the center, whereas the slope of $\sigma(R)$ at one effective radius ($R_e$) can be of either sign. The $h_4$ is generally positive, with 14 of the 20 galaxies having positive $h_4$ within the GMOS aperture and 18 having positive $h_4$ within $1 R_e$. The positive $h_4$ and rising $\sigma(R)$ towards small radii are indicative of a central black hole and velocity anisotropy. We demonstrate the constraining power of the data on the mass distributions in ETGs by applying Jeans anisotropic modeling (JAM) to NGC~1453, the most regular fast rotator in the sample. Despite the limitations of JAM, we obtain a clear $\chi^2$ minimum in black hole mass, stellar mass-to-light ratio, velocity anisotropy parameters, and the circular velocity of the dark matter halo.Comment: Accepted to Ap

Evaluated activation cross section data for proton induced nuclear reactions on W up to 3 GeV incidence energy (KIT Scientific Reports ; 7628)

Evaluated cross-section data files were prepared for the stable tungsten isotopes to provide reliable and sound nuclear data for activation and inventory calculations of the European Spallation Source (ESS) which utilizes a tungsten target. The data files contain yields of radionuclides produced by proton induced reactions with incident energies up to 3 GeV. The data were obtained from the analysis of calculations using advanced nuclear models, available experimental data and systematics