Awareness and Practices of Family Planning in the Wa Municipality

The decisions of individuals to adopt family planning are affected by a number of factors. But the choice of family planning practice can affect fertility rates and population growth with its attendant problems. Family planning is a voluntary prevention of pregnancy and it entails the interruption of a chain of events that leads to conception. This study examines the awareness and practice of family planning. In all 100 respondents’ were sampled through stratified sampling procedure, Simple random sampling is then used to select the 100 respondents’.  The binary logit model is used to examine the socioeconomic and demographic variables influencing the adoption of family planning. Given that knowledge and level of awareness of family planning is high. However, the practice of family planning remains low. Keywords: Family Planning, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, World Health Organisation, Non-Governmental Organisations, Community

Modeling energy content of municipal solid waste based on proximate analysis: R-k class estimator approach

In the Ilorin metropolis, there are power challenges. Energy supplied by Power Holding Company of Nigeria is insufficient for the social, technological, and industrial requirements of the metropolis. Moreover, the huge municipal solid waste (MSW) produced daily that supposed to be converted to energy is only constituting a nuisance. In waste to energy (WTE) procedures, the heating value (HV) of the MSW generated is pertinent in the selection or design of an appropriate waste to energy (WTE) technology required for waste conversion. The HV determination using ultimate analysis is tedious, expensive, and requires specialized equipment. A proximate analysis method that is less tedious and cheaper was adopted to obtain the dependent variables for the modeling of the HV. The high heating value (HHV) of MSW components was determined using a bomb calorimeter, and proximate analysis was used to determine the typical values for fixed carbon (FC), volatile matter (VM), Ash, and moisture (MC) to be 32%, 37%, 13%, and 5% correspondingly. The typical HV was estimated to be 24 MJ/kg. The heating value obtained from the bomb calorimeter was modeled against the dependent variables from proximate analysis. The conventional ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator is popularly used to estimate the model parameters. However, the performance of the estimator suffers a setback when the predictor variables are correlated. Alternatively, the ridge estimator (RE) and the principal component regression estimator (PCE) can be adopted. In this study, we combined PCE and RE to form the r-k class estimator for effective modeling. The estimators’ performances are assessed using the mean squares error (MSE) criterion. The estimator with the smallest MSE is generally preferred. The result, the MSE of OLSE, ridge, PCE, and r-k are 581.84, 2.56, 523.69, and 0.239, respectively. The r-k class estimator outperforms other estimators considered in this study and is employed for the modeling. With a unit increase in the volatile matter and fixed carbon, heating values increased by about 21% and 36%, respectively. Also, the heating values decrease by about 0.2% and 40%, respectively, with a unit increase in Ash and Moistur

A Jamming-Resilient and Scalable Broadcasting Algorithm for Multiple Access Channel Networks

Multiple access channel (MAC) networks use a broadcasting algorithm called the Binary Exponential Backoff (BEB) to mediate access to the shared communication channel by competing nodes and resolve their collisions. While the BEB achieves fair throughput and average packet latency in jamming-free environments and relatively small networks, its performance noticeably degrades when the network is exposed to jamming or its size increases. This paper presents an alternative broadcasting algorithm called the K-tuple Full Withholding (KTFW), which significantly increases MAC networks’ resilience to jamming attacks and network growth. Through simulation, we compare the KTFW with both the BEB and the Queue Backoff (QB), an efficient and high-throughput broadcasting algorithm. We compare the three approaches against two different traffic injection models, each approximating a different environment type. Our results show that the KTFW achieves higher throughput and lower average packet latency against jamming attacks than both the BEB and the QB algorithms. The results also show that the KTFW outperforms the BEB for larger networks with or without jamming

Association between overweight/obesity perception, actual body weight and cardiometabolic risk among healthy Ghanaian adults

Background: The global rise in obesity, particularly among black Africans in developing nations experiencing nutritional transitions, underscores the importance of exploring Overweight/Obesity Perception (OP) as a crucial factor in maintaining an optimal body weight. Incorrect body image perception may impede efforts to achieve the desired body weight, leading to adverse outcomes related to Cardiometabolic Diseases (CMD). This cross-sectional study investigated the interplay between overweight/obesity perception, actual body weight, and CMD risk in a cohort of healthy Ghanaian adults. Methods: A total of 302 apparently healthy adults, aged 25–60 years, with Dagomba ancestry, were recruited from three communities. Participants were screened based on age, ancestry, history of communicable and Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD), and use of antidiabetic, lipid-lowering, and antihypertensive drugs. Anthropometric assessments and blood sample collections for biochemical analysis were conducted. Body image perception was measured using the Stunkard Figure Rating Scale (SFRS). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, correlation analysis, logistic regression, and multivariate analysis. Results: Participants had a mean age of 38.28 ± 10.88, with 61.6% being women. While 47% accurately perceived their body weight, 53% had incorrect perceptions. Notably, 47.2% underestimated and 8.5% overestimated their weight status. Among overweight individuals, 33% underestimated and 9.4% overestimated their weight, whereas among the obese, 66.7% and 33.3% respectively had inaccurate perceptions. Gender, serum triglyceride levels, and waist circumference were significantly associated with weight perception. About 55% of overweight/obese participants and 62.1% with high waist circumference did not express a desire to lose weight. Multiple logistic regression revealed that both overweight (AOR = 6, 95% CI (1.8–20.2), p < 0.05) and obesity (AOR = 20.5, 95% CI (5–84.9), p < 0.05) significantly increased the odds of CMD. Conclusion: The findings underscore the association between overweight/obesity and an elevated risk of CMD. This emphasizes the imperative for public health interventions aimed at promoting an ideal body weight and highlighting the impact of overweight/obesity on CMD risk factors

A study on Haemophilus influenzae type b growth rate and capsule production in different media

to compare growth rate and capsule production. Four liquid media namely brain heart infusion broth (BHI), trypticase soy broth (TSB), Mueller Hinton Broth (MHB) and Gonococci broth (GC) with added supplements (1% hemoglobin, 1% Isovitalex) were used. The growth was measured by colony counting (CFU/ml) using serial dilution. Four of the isolates showed the highest growth rate with the average of 1013 CFU/ml on BHI broth while TSB had the second highest growth of more than 1010 CFU/ml in an 18-hour culture at 37 ºC culture. In the next step, the amount of capsular polysaccharide (CPS-b) antigen which is made of Polyribosyl ribitol phosphate (PRP) was assessed all isolates by two methods: modified Indirect Sandwich Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and Bial method to select the isolate producing the highest amount of PRP. The antisera used in sandwich ELISA were prepared by immunization of Rabbit and Rat. The maximal amount of PRP was produced by isolate Hib (5s) with the amount of 321 mg/lit

Some Improved Generalized Ridge Estimators and their comparison

The problem of multicollinearity is often encountered in time series data since explanatory variables included in the model often share a common trend. Various methods exist in literatures to handle this problem. Among them is the most widely used ridge regression estimator which depends on the ridge parameter. This estimator can be subdivided into either generalized ridge or ordinary ridge estimators. Variance inflation factor is introduced to replace eigenvalue in the generalized ridge estimator proposed by Lawless and Wang (1976). Through this modification some new generalized ridge parameters are proposed and investigated via simulation study. The performances of these proposed estimators are compared with the existing ones using mean square error. Results show that the proposed estimators perform better than the existing ones. It is evident that increasing the level of multicollinearity and number of regressors has positive effect on the MSE. Also, the performance of the estimators depends on the level of error variance

Wetting considerations in capillary rise and imbibition in closed square tubes and open rectangular cross-section channels

The spontaneous capillary-driven filling of microchannels is important for a wide range of applications. These channels are often rectangular in cross-section, can be closed or open, and horizontal or vertically orientated. In this work, we develop the theory for capillary imbibition and rise in channels of rectangular cross-section, taking into account rigidified and non-rigidified boundary conditions for the liquid–air interfaces and the effects of surface topography assuming Wenzel or Cassie-Baxter states. We provide simple interpolation formulae for the viscous friction associated with flow through rectangular cross-section channels as a function of aspect ratio. We derive a dimensionless cross-over time, Tc, below which the exact numerical solution can be approximated by the Bousanquet solution and above which by the visco-gravitational solution. For capillary rise heights significantly below the equilibrium height, this cross-over time is Tc ≈ (3Xe/2)^(2/3) and has an associated dimensionless cross-over rise height Xc ≈ (3Xe/2)^(1/3), where Xe = 1/G is the dimensionless equilibrium rise height and G is a dimensionless form of the acceleration due to gravity. We also show from wetting considerations that for rectangular channels, fingers of a wetting liquid can be expected to imbibe in advance of the main meniscus along the corners of the channel walls. We test the theory via capillary rise experiments using polydimethylsiloxane oils of viscosity 96.0, 48.0, 19.2 and 4.8 mPa s within a range of closed square tubes and open rectangular cross-section channels with SU-8 walls. We show that the capillary rise heights can be fitted using the exact numerical solution and that these are similar to fits using the analytical visco-gravitational solution. The viscous friction contribution was found to be slightly higher than predicted by theory assuming a non-rigidified liquid–air boundary, but far below that for a rigidified boundary, which was recently reported for imbibition into horizontally mounted open microchannels. In these experiments we also observed fingers of liquid spreading along the internal edges of the channels in advance of the main body of liquid consistent with wetting expectations. We briefly discuss the implications of these observations for the design of microfluidic systems