308 research outputs found
The Nigerian Law of Evidence and the Emerging Rules of Civil Procedure: Ignoring Validity on the Alter of Expediency?
Nigeria, as a commonwealth country operates an adversarial system of justice, a system that requires judges to remain unbiased umpires with minimum or no interference in the conduct of cases by the parties, especially in civil litigation. All the rules of civil procedure in Nigeria have always been premised on the strict adversarial philosophy but this had only succeeded in creating room for unnecessary delay and congestion in civil litigation in the country. A set of new civil procedure rules aimed at giving the judges firmer control over proceedings before them were therefore recently enacted. However, these rules, in a bid to promote speedy trial, seem to have ignored the issue of validity in respect of some of their provisions which appear to challenge the existing law of evidence in the country. Evidence is one of the maters under the Exclusive Legislative List of the country’s Constitution[1] with the result that only the federal legislature can make law on the subject. On the other hand, all the new rules, with the exception of that of the Federal Capital Territory, were made by the states. Therefore, any provision in the rules which touches on evidence may constitute an encroachment on the federal legislative power and as such may not be valid. The object of this paper is to examine those provisions in the new rules which appear to deal with evidence and to evaluate the extent of the validity such provisions. Keywords: Nigerian law of evidence, new rules of civil procedure, validity. [1] Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999
In vivo nematicidal potential of camel milk on Heligmosomoides polygyrus gastro-intestinal nematode of rodents
Following our previous fi ndings on the in vitro anthelmintic effect of camel milk on Haemonchus
contortus, the current study aimed at investigating its in vivo effect. Investigations were carried out
using mice infected with Heligmosomoides polygyrus which is a parasite commonly used to test
the effi cacy of anthelmintics. Thirty six Swiss white mice of both sexes aged 5 – 6 weeks old, and
weighing between 20 and 25 g were orally infected with 0.5 ml dose of 100, 1-week-old H. polygyrus
infective larvae (L3
). After the pre-patent period, infected animals were randomly divided into
6 groups of 6 animals each. The nematicidal effi cacy of camel milk was monitored through faecal
egg count reduction (FECR) and total worm count reduction (TWCR). Four doses (8.25; 16.5; 33.0;
66.0 ml/kg body weight (bw)) for fresh camel milk and 22 mg/kg bw for albendazole were studied
using a bioassay. Albendazole and 4 % dimethylsulfoxide were included in the protocol as reference
drug and placebo, respectively. For all tested doses except 8.25 ml/kg bw, camel milk was effective
in vivo against H. polygyrus reducing both faecal egg count and worm count (p < 0.05). The dose
66 ml/kg bw showed the highest nematicidal activity causing a 76.75 % FECR and a 69.62 % TWCR
7 day after initiating the treatment. These results support the possible use of camel milk in the control
of gastro-intestinal helminthiasis
A Multi-Agent Architecture for the Design of Hierarchical Interval Type-2 Beta Fuzzy System
This paper presents a new methodology for building and evolving hierarchical fuzzy systems. For the system design, a tree-based encoding method is adopted to hierarchically link low dimensional fuzzy systems. Such tree structural representation has by nature a flexible design offering more adjustable and modifiable structures. The proposed hierarchical structure employs a type-2 beta fuzzy system to cope with the faced uncertainties, and the resulting system is called the Hierarchical Interval Type-2 Beta Fuzzy System (HT2BFS). For the system optimization, two main tasks of structure learning and parameter tuning are applied. The structure learning phase aims to evolve and learn the structures of a population of HT2BFS in a multiobjective context taking into account the optimization of both the accuracy and the interpretability metrics. The parameter tuning phase is applied to refine and adjust the parameters of the system. To accomplish these two tasks in the most optimal and faster way, we further employ a multi-agent architecture to provide both a distributed and a cooperative management of the optimization tasks. Agents are divided into two different types based on their functions: a structure agent and a parameter agent. The main function of the structure agent is to perform a multi-objective evolutionary structure learning step by means of the Multi-Objective Immune Programming algorithm (MOIP). The parameter agents have the function of managing different hierarchical structures simultaneously to refine their parameters by means of the Hybrid Harmony Search algorithm (HHS). In this architecture, agents use cooperation and communication concepts to create high-performance HT2BFSs. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated by several comparisons with various state of art approaches on noise-free and noisy time series prediction data sets and regression problems. The results clearly demonstrate a great improvement in the accuracy rate, the convergence speed and the number of used rules as compared with other existing approaches
Subclustering and Luminous-Dark Matter Segregation in Galaxy Clusters
We have performed a series of N-body experiments on Connection Machine-5 in
order to simulate the formation of galaxy clusters gravitationally dominated by
a massive dark background. In accordance with previous authors we find an
extremely inhomogeneous evolution where subcondensations are continually formed
and merged. The final distribution of galaxies is more centrally condensed than
that of dark matter particles. We have analyzed the origin of this galaxy-dark
matter segregation and also the origin of subclustering leading to this effect.
We have then analysed, analytically and numerically, the dependence of final
segregation on the physical parameters characterizing the model of
protocluster. We also find that such a segregation persists even when inelastic
encounters of dark halos around galaxies are taken into account. We conclude
that this effect cannot be in general avoided in any hierarchical clustering
scenario.Comment: 26 pages plus 13 figures (4 of which, not included, available upon
request to [email protected]), postscript, Preprint OP-9303
Novel 6-aryl-7-alkyl/aryl-[1,2,4]triazolo[4,3-a][1,3,5]triazine-5(6H)-thiones, processes for their preparation, characterization and evaluation of their in vitro antioxidant activity
ABSTRACT. A series of nine new 6-aryl-7-alkyl/aryl-[1,2,4]triazolo[4,3-a][1,3,5]triazine-5(6H)-thiones (2a-i) were synthesized by a reaction of N-triazol-3-yl imidates (1) with three different isothiocyanate derivatives (RNCS) in refluxing toluene. The structures of the final heterocyclic compounds were confirmed by 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR, FT-IR, elemental analysis, and mass spectral analysis. The target compounds (2a-i) were in vitro screened for their activity as antioxidants using DPPH (2,2′-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) and FRAP (ferric reducing/antioxidant power) methods. The results revealed that some triazolotriazine-5-(6H)thiones exhibited antioxidant activity ranging from moderate to high. The obtained findings revealed that the triazolotriazine-5-(6H)thiones (2g, 2h, and 2i) have superiority among all compounds, It is obvious that the presence of a hydroxyl group in the structure is essential for the antioxidant properties and should be taken into consideration in further design of structures with potential antioxidant properties.
KEY WORDS: Imidates, Isothiocyanates, Antioxidant, Triazole, DPPH, FRAP
Bull. Chem. Soc. Ethiop. 2021, 35(3), 565-572.
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/bcse.v35i3.
Stability of spherical stellar systems II : Numerical results
We have performed a series of high resolution N-body experiments on a
Connection Machine CM-5 in order to study the stability of collisionless
self-gravitating spherical systems. We interpret our results in the framework
of symplectic mechanics, which provides the definition of a new class of
particular perturbations: The preserving perturbations, which are a
generalization of the radial ones. Using models defined by the Ossipkov-Merritt
algorithm, we show that the stability of a spherical anisotropic system is
directly related to the preserving or non-preserving nature of the
perturbations acting on the system. We then generalize our results to all
spherical systems. Since the ``isotropic component'' of the linear variation of
the distribution function cannot be used to predict the stability or
instability of a spherical system, we propose a more useful stability parameter
which is derived from the ``anisotropic'' component of the linear variation.Comment: uuencoded gzip compressed postscript file containing 14 pages,
accepted for publication in MNRA
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