Education Policy in Nigeria: the Bane of Her Practice of Functional Vocational Education

Poor policy formulation as opined by few individuals has little or no influence on the practice of functional vocational education. This paper therefore sought to find out whether it is true that policy formulation does not significantly influence the practice of functional vocational education in Nigeria as policy implementation does. Two null hypotheses and research questions respectively were formulated to guide the study. A five-point Likert Scale and a 10-item questionnaire were designed for data collection. Mean statistics was used to answer the research questions while t-test was used to test the null hypotheses at an alpha level of 0.05. It was found out that policy formulation was equally a major cause of doom in the practice of functional vocational education in Nigeria. The study therefore recommended that equal degree of importance should be given to policy formulation and policy implementation

Parallelizing Deadlock Resolution in Symbolic Synthesis of Distributed Programs

Previous work has shown that there are two major complexity barriers in the synthesis of fault-tolerant distributed programs: (1) generation of fault-span, the set of states reachable in the presence of faults, and (2) resolving deadlock states, from where the program has no outgoing transitions. Of these, the former closely resembles with model checking and, hence, techniques for efficient verification are directly applicable to it. Hence, we focus on expediting the latter with the use of multi-core technology. We present two approaches for parallelization by considering different design choices. The first approach is based on the computation of equivalence classes of program transitions (called group computation) that are needed due to the issue of distribution (i.e., inability of processes to atomically read and write all program variables). We show that in most cases the speedup of this approach is close to the ideal speedup and in some cases it is superlinear. The second approach uses traditional technique of partitioning deadlock states among multiple threads. However, our experiments show that the speedup for this approach is small. Consequently, our analysis demonstrates that a simple approach of parallelizing the group computation is likely to be the effective method for using multi-core computing in the context of deadlock resolution

Systems Biology And The Development Of Vaccines And Drugs For Malaria Treatments

The sequencing race has ended and the functional race has already begun. Microarray technology enables simultaneous gene expression analysis of thousands of genes, enabling a snapshot of an organisms' transcriptome at an unprecedented resolution. The close correlation between gene transcription and function, allow the inference of biological processes from the assessed transcriptome profile. Among the sophisticated analytical problems in microarray technology at the front and back ends respectively, are the selection of optimal DNA oligos and computational analysis of the genes expression. In this review paper, we analyse important methods in use today in customized oligos design. In the course of executing this, we discovered that the oligos designer algorithm hanged on gene PFA0135w of chromosome 1, while designing oligos for the gene sequences of Plasmodium falciparum . We do not know the reason for this yet, as the algorithm runs on other sequences like the yeast ( Saccharomyces cervisiae ) and Neurospora crassa . We conclude the paper highlighting the procedures encompassing the back end phase and discuss their application to the development of vaccines and drugs for malaria treatment. Note that, malaria is the cause of significant global morbidity and mortality with 300-500 million cases annually. Our aims are not ends, but a means to achieve the following: Iterate the need for experimental biologists to (i) know how to design their customized oligos and (ii) have some idea about gene expression analysis and the need for cooperation between experimental biologists and their counterpart, the computational biologists. These will help experimental biologists to coordinate very well the front and the back ends of the system biology analysis of the whole genome effectively

Hepatoprotective Potential and Histological Studies of Effects of Celosia Argentea L. on Paracetamol-Induced Liver Damage

Celosia argentea L. is a common vegetable known to possess anti-oxidative and other therapeutic properties. This study evaluates the hepatoprotective activities and histological effects of aqueous extract of Celosia argentea L. on acetaminophen-induced liver damage in rats, compared to the effects of a standard drug –silymarin. Twenty-five male rats were used in this study. These were divided into five groups of five animals each. Animals in group 1 were given 1ml/kg body weight (b.w)distilled water (control [C]), group 2 were given 100mg/kg b.w silymarin for 4 days plus acetaminophen for 3 days [SL], groups 3 and 4 were given 250 and 500mg/kg b.w aqueous extract of C. argentea for 4 days plus acetaminophen for 3 days (CA1 and CA2, respectively) and group 5 were given 1 ml/kg b.w. distilled water for 4 days and 1g/kg b.w acetaminophen (PCM) for 3 days. Serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and total bilirubin activities were assessed on day 8, values of mean and standard error were compared at significance level of p 0.05). Mean values in control group were similar to CA2 but significantly lower than PCM and CA1. Total bilirubin was higher but not significantly different compared to C group, suggesting a lack of effect on total bilirubin. C. argentea ameliorates and protects against acetaminophen-induced liver damage in rats, with a comparable effect with silymarin at a dose of 500mg/kg b.w. A regular consumption of the vegetable can play a role in sustaining health and can be used in place of long term therapy in individuals with compromised liver or actively exposed to chemotherapeutic drugs with adverse effects on liver

Mitigating the Event and Effect of Energy Holes in Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks Using an Ultra-Low Power Wake-up Receiver and an Energy Scheduling Technique

This research work presents an algorithm for extending network lifetime in multi-hop wireless sensor networks (WSN). WSNs face energy gap issues around sink nodes due to the transmission of large amounts of data through nearby sensor nodes. The limited power supply to the nodes limits the lifetime of the network, which makes energy efficiency crucial. Multi-hop communication has been proposed as an efficient strategy, but its power consumption remains a research challenge. In this study, an algorithm is developed to mitigate energy holes around the sink nodes by using a modified ultra-low-power wake-up receiver and an energy scheduling technique. Efficient power scheduling reduces the power consumption of the relay node, and when the residual power of the sensor node falls below a defined threshold, the power emitters charge the nodes to eliminate energy-hole problems. The modified wake-up receiver improves sensor sensitivity while staying within the micro-power budget. This study's simulations showed that the developed RF energy harvesting algorithm outperformed previous work, achieving a 30% improvement in average charged energy (AEC), a 0.41% improvement in average energy (AEH), an 8.39% improvement in the number of energy transmitters, an 8.59% improvement in throughput, and a 0.19 decrease in outage probability compared to the existing network lifetime enhancement of multi-hop wireless sensor networks by RF Energy Harvesting algorithm. Overall, the enhanced power efficiency technique significantly improves the performance of WSNs

Contrasting effects of cover crops on 'hot spot' arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities in organic tomato

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) communities are fundamental in organic cropping systems where they provide essential agro-ecosystem services, improving soil fertility and sustaining crop production. They are affected by agronomic practices, but still, scanty information is available about the role of specific crops, crop rotations and the use of winter cover crops on the AMF community compositions at the field sites. A field experiment was conducted to elucidate the role of diversified cover crops and AMF inoculation on AMF diversity in organic tomato. Tomato, pre-inoculated at nursery with two AMF isolates, was grown following four cover crop treatments: Indian mustard, hairy vetch, a mixture of seven species and a fallow. Tomato root colonization at flowering was more affected by AMF pre-transplant inoculation than by the cover crop treatments. An enormous species richness was found by morphological spore identification: 58 AMF species belonging to 14 genera, with 46 and 53 species retrieved at the end of cover crop cycle and at tomato harvest, respectively. At both sampling times, AMF spore abundance was highest in hairy vetch, but after tomato harvest, AMF species richness and diversity were lower in hairy vetch than in the cover crop mixture and in the mustard treatments. A higher AMF diversity was found at tomato harvest, compared with the end of the cover crop cycle, independent of the cover crop and pre-transplant AMF inoculation. Our findings suggest that seasonal and environmental factors play a major role on AMF abundance and diversity than short-term agronomic practices, including AMF inoculation. The huge AMF diversity is explained by the field history and the Mediterranean environment, where species characteristic of temperate and sub-tropical climates co-occur

Constructing Brezing-Weng pairing friendly elliptic curves using elements in the cyclotomic field

We describe a new method for constructing Brezing-Weng-like pairing-friendly elliptic curves. The new construction uses the minimal polynomials of elements in a cyclotomic field. Using this new construction we present new ``record breaking\u27\u27 families of pairing-friendly curves with embedding degrees of $k \in \{16,18,36,40\}$, and some interesting new constructions for the cases $k \in \{8,32\}

Recent advances in functionalized quinoline scaffolds and hybrids—Exceptional pharmacophore in therapeutic medicine

Quinoline is one of the most common nitrogen-containing heterocycles owing to its fascinating pharmacological properties and synthetic value in organic and pharmaceutical chemistry. Functionalization of this moiety at different positions has allowed for varying pharmacological activities of its derivative. Several publications over the last few decades have specified various methods of synthesis. This includes classical methods of synthesizing the primary quinoline derivatives and efficient methods that reduce reaction time with increased yield employing procedures that fulfill one of the twelve green chemistry principles, “safer solvent”. The metal nanoparticle-catalyzed reaction also serves as a potent and effective technique for the synthesis of quinoline with excellent atom efficiency. The primary focus of this review is to highlight the routes to synthesizing functionalized quinoline derivatives, including hybrids that have moieties with predetermined activities bound to the quinoline moiety which are of interest in synthesizing drug candidates with dual modes of action, overcoming toxicity, and resistance amongst others. This was achieved using updated literature, stating the biological activities and mechanisms through which these compounds administer relief. The ADMET studies and Structure-Activity Relationship (SAR) of novel derivatives were also highlighted to explore the drug-likeness of the quinoline-hybrids and the influence of substituent characteristics and position on the biological activity of the compounds

Quantum Electronics

Contains reports on three research projects.Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-75-C-1346