The Implications of Family Size on Students Educational Attainment in Cameroon

The purpose of this study is to find out the implications of family size on students educational attainment in Cameroon. To this effects educational attainment was capture through various levels of child education. The ordered probit model was use to estimate our result while data was Demographic Health Survey. The result shows that family size negatively and significantly affects child educational attainment while a child is more likely to attain primary education but less likely to attain both secondary and higher education relative a child from small family size. We recommend that the ministry of planning and urban development should passed a law limiting the number of children one should have so that more resources will be allocated per child which will go a long way to increase child quality

The effect of temperature and concentration on the corrosion inhibition of recycled aluminum alloy of 3-aminopropyltrimethoxysilane (APTMS)

This work investigated the adsorption properties of 3-aminopropyltrimethoxysilane on recycled aluminum alloy. The influence of deposition conditions, such as pH and temperature of the sol-gel solution and the deposit's crosslinking temperature, on the coating's protective properties was studied by potentiodynamic polarization and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. With Fourier Fourier-transformed infra-red spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy, the quality of the coating was analyzed. The polarization curves performed on the coating deposited at different pH and temperature values showed that a more compact coating was obtained at pH 4 – 6  with a depositing temperature of ~ 25 °C. The best crosslinking temperatures are between 100 and 140°C. The analysis of the evolution of the protective barrier properties under long-time immersion conditions by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy showed that the coating exhibits good corrosion performance, compared to the bare alloy,  at less than one week

Electricity cost saving comparison due to tariff change and ice thermal storage (ITS) usage based on a hybrid centrifugal-ITS system for buildings : A university district cooling perspective

In this paper, the case study of a district cooling system of a university located in a South East Asia region (lat: 01°29′; long: 110°20′E) is presented. In general, the university has high peak ambient temperature of around 32–35 °C coupled with high humidity of about 85% during afternoon period. The total electricity charge for the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak Campus is very high amounting to more than $314,911 per month. In this paper, a few district cooling schemes are investigated to provide “what-if analysis” and in order to minimize the overall electricity charges. Few scenarios designed for the application of centrifugal with and without ice-thermal storage (ITS) systems on the buildings were investigated. It was found that, due to the local tariff status, marginally saving can be achieved in the range of 0.08–3.13% if a new tariff is adopted; and a total of further saving of 1.26–2.43% if ITS is operated. This marginally saving is mainly due to the local tariff conditions and lower local temperature range (ΔT) which are less favorable as compared with those reported in the literature elsewhere

Genomic Epidemiology of Multidrug-Resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis During Transcontinental Spread

The transcontinental spread of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis is poorly characterized in molecular epidemiologic studies. We used genomic sequencing to understand the establishment and dispersion of MDR Mycobacterium tuberculosis within a group of immigrants to the United States. We used a genomic epidemiology approach to study a genotypically matched (by spoligotype, IS6110 restriction fragment length polymorphism, and mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units-variable number of tandem repeat signature) lineage 2/Beijing MDR strain implicated in an outbreak of tuberculosis among refugees in Thailand and consecutive cases within California. All 46 MDR M. tuberculosis genomes from both Thailand and California were highly related, with a median difference of 10 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The Wat Tham Krabok (WTK) strain is a new sequence type distinguished from all known Beijing strains by 55 SNPs and a genomic deletion (Rv1267c) associated with increased fitness. Sequence data revealed a highly prevalent MDR strain that included several closely related but distinct allelic variants within Thailand, rather than the occurrence of a single outbreak. In California, sequencing data supported multiple independent introductions of WTK with subsequent transmission and reactivation within the state, as well as a potential super spreader with a prolonged infectious period. Twenty-seven drug resistance-conferring mutations and 4 putative compensatory mutations were found within WTK strains. Genomic sequencing has substantial epidemiologic value in both low- and high-burden settings in understanding transmission chains of highly prevalent MDR strain

The Economic Impact of Eradicating Peste des Petits Ruminants:A Benefit-Cost Analysis

Peste des petits ruminants (PPR) is an important cause of mortality and production loss among sheep and goats in the developing world. Despite control efforts in a number of countries, it has continued to spread across Africa and Asia, placing an increasing burden on the livelihoods of livestock keepers and on veterinary resources in affected countries. Given the similarities between PPR and rinderpest, and the lessons learned from the successful global eradication of rinderpest, the eradication of PPR seems appealing, both eliminating an important disease and improving the livelihoods of the poor in developing countries. We conducted a benefit-cost analysis to examine the conomic returns from a proposed programme for the global eradication of PPR. Based on our knowledge and experience, we developed the eradication strategy and estimated its costs. The benefits of the programme were determined from (i) the averted mortality costs, based on an analysis of the literature, (ii) the downstream impact of reduced mortality using a social accounting matrix, and (iii) the avoided control costs based on current levels of vaccination. The results of the benefit-cost analysis suggest strong economic returns from PPR eradication. Based on a 15-year programme with total discounted costs of US$2.26 billion, we estimate discounted benefits of US$76.5 billion, yielding a net benefit of US$74.2 billion. This suggests a benefit cost ratio of 33.8, and an internal rate of return (IRR) of 199%. As PPR mortality rates are highly variable in different populations, we conducted a sensitivity analysis based on lower and higher mortality scenarios. All the scenarios examined indicate that investment in PPR eradication would be highly beneficial economically. Furthermore, removing one of the major constraints to small ruminant production would be of considerable benefit to many of the most vulnerable communities in Africa and Asia

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Patterns of change in beef production and consumption

Introduction The total production of beef in Africa increased from 2.8 million tonnes (t) in 1978 to 3.71 million t in 1998. This increase of 38% (1.91% per year) is higher than in the developed world where, on average, production increased by only 1%. Changes in the quantity of the beef produced are caused by the following: -changes in the total number of cattle -changes in the proportion of animals in the herd which are slaughtered -changes in the productivity of each animal. Of course, other biological, environmental and economic factors also influence these sources of change. In Africa as a whole, the total cattle population and the number of cattle slaughtered grew by about 2% per year during the years from 1978 to 1998. The largest percentage increase occurred in Central Africa. Beef yield per animal grew by less than 1% during the same period. The total consumption of beef in Africa increased faster than production. Approximately 2.6 million t of beef were consumed in 1978 and, by 1998, total consumption had grown to 3.9 million t. This rapid growth in consumption, which is equivalent to 49% (2.43% per year), is an indication of what Delgado et al. (4) refer to as the 'livestock revolution'. The growth in human population, increased urbanisation, rising income levels and, above all, changes in consumption habits explain this demand-led revolution. This paper analyses the patterns of change in the production and consumption of beef in Africa over the last two decades. A 'decomposition' method is used to analyse the percentage change in total beef production, attributable to changes in herd size, the proportion of cattle slaughtered and productivity per head of cattle. Sub-regional aggregations are complemented with similar analyses for individual countries to demonstrate the diverse patterns of change in beef production and consumption in Africa. Such an analysis should not only document elements of the 'livestock revolution', but also identify production and consumption problems that need to be addressed. Changes in herd size, percentage of slaughtered animals and yield per animal The continent of Africa contains approximately 216 million cattle. The cattle population increased by 34% (1.69% per year) Rev. sci. tech. Off. int. Epiz., 2003, 22 (3), 965-976 Summary This paper analyses the patterns of change in the production and consumption of beef in Africa over the last two decades. A 'decomposition' method of analysis is used to examine the change in total beef production during this period, attributable to changes in herd size, in the proportion of cattle slaughtered and in productivity per head of cattle. Sub-regional aggregations are complemented with similar analyses for individual countries to demonstrate the diverse patterns of change in beef production and consumption. The results reveal an overall increase in total beef production (due mainly to an increase in cattle numbers and in the percentage of slaughtered cattle, rather than to productivity gains), a stagnation in per capita production, and an overall increase in the total consumption of beef and a decline in per capita consumption (due mainly to faster population growth and urbanisation, and a decline in per capita income, respectively). Keywords Africa -Beef production and consumption -Decomposition analysis -Herd size effectInteraction effect -Off-take effect -Yield effect

Fertility characterization of soils at six research sites in NW Cameroon

Fertility capability of surface (0–20 cm) soils was evaluated at six sites in the North-West Cameroon highlands. Two main soil groups, designated as Classes A and B, were identified based on elevation. The Class A soils from low elevations (600–1178 m) had higher Ca, Mg, K, pH, sorbed less P and were lower in organic carbon and sesquioxides than the highland (> 1200 m) soils. Soil acidity (Al saturation > 30%) and high P sorption appeared to be the most limiting factors to crop production especially on the Class B soils where the Standard P Requirement exceeded 500 mg kg−1. Phosphorus sorption data were best described by the Freundlich equation. Amorphous aluminium was the most important determinant of solution P concentration (r = 0.85,p < 0.001) followed by soil organic carbon, (r = 0.80,p < 0.001) at high P rates. Nitrogen deficiency symptoms of maize were pronounced on the Class B soils. Consequently, crop growth and yield were lower on Class B than on Class A soils despite the high organic carbon in B. We hypothesize that the supply of high quality organic material (high in N and low in lignin and polyphenols) at site B through agroforestry and related cropping systems, would improve the fertility of the soil and crop yield