Accounting for the Effects of Oil Prices on Exchange Rate in Nigeria: Empirical Evidence from Linear and Non-Linear ARDL Models

This study empirically examines the impact oil prices on the exchange rate in Nigeria. Time series annual dataset spanning 1980 to 2018 was estimated using the linear and nonlinear ARDL model developed by Pesaran and Shin, (1998) & Pesaran, et al. (2001) and Shin, et al. (2014); where oil prices, nominal exchange rate, interest rate, and oil revenue serves as the variables for analysis.  From the result of the linear-ARDL models both the long run and short-run revealed that oil price has positive and significant impact on exchange rate. Similarly, the nonlinear model also revealed that, both in the long run and short-run, the depreciating effect of a fall in oil price is stronger than an appreciating effect of a arise in oil price of an equal magnitude. This, we argue, reflects the dependency of the economy on oil.  One policy implication of this finding is that stability of oil prices and oil revenue is critical for the stability of the domestic currency and, hence, prices. It is, therefore, recommended that authorities should focus on resolving the production difficulties in the Nigeria’s oil industry as a means of reducing the current revenue volatility

Study of Debris Flow Impact on Bridge Pier

The destructive nature of debris has ability to transport large boulders and wooden material along with the flow whose impact can pose serious safety risks to a bridge. In this study an effort has been made to study the impact of varying debris densities on a bridge pier.  The experimentation was carried out in Hydraulics Laboratory, Civil Engineering Department, University of Engineering and Technology Taxila. Hexagonal wooden pier model was used. Wooden sticks of uniform size and mass were used to act as debris in flow. Respective discharges were determined against different flow velocities. Dial gauge was installed carefully beside the bridge pier in a way that deflections were easily measurable. This debris of masses 189, 253, 316, 379 and 442 grams was floated on water for five trials at discharges of 10.3, 12.8, 16, 23.8 and 28.9 liters per second. Debris hit the pier and caused a deflection in it. These deflections were measured by a dial gauge. The results show that with increasing debris mass and intensity of flow velocity, the impact on the pier bridge in term of deflection increased. A hydraulic structure's health can be monitored using the findings of the current study

Improved MRO inventory management system in oil and gas company : increased service level and reduced average inventory investment

This study proposes a methodology for the oil and gas businesses to keep their production plant productive with a minimum investment in carrying maintenance, repair, and operating inventory planning. The goal is to assist the exploration and production companies in minimizing the investment in keeping maintenance, repair, and operating (MRO) inventory for improving production plant uptime. The MRO inventory is the most expensive asset and it requires substantial investment. It helps in keeping the oil and gas production plant productive by performing planned and unplanned maintenance activities. A (Q, r) model with a stock-out and backorder cost approach is combined with a continuous inventory review policy for the analysis of class A items of oil and gas production plant MRO inventory. The class A items are identified through popular ABC analysis based on annual dollar volume. The demand for the inventory is modeled through Poisson distribution with consideration of constant lead time. The (Q, r) model in both stock-out cost and backorder cost approaches assigned higher order frequency and lower service level to low annual demand and highly expensive items. The stock-out cost approach shows an 8.88% increase in the average service level and a 56.9% decrease in the company average inventory investment. The backorder cost approach results in a 7.77% increase in average service level and a 57% decrease in average inventory investment in contrast to the company’s existing inventory management system. The results have a direct impact on increasing plant uptime and productivity and reducing company maintenance cost through properly managing maintenance stock. The analysis is carried out on the oil and gas production plant’s MRO inventory data, but it can be applied to other companies’ inventory data as well. All the results reflected in this research are based on the inventory ordering policy of two orders per year. The inventory ordering frequency per year may be other than two orders per year depending on the type of organization

Effectiveness of Endoscopic Third Ventriculostomy in the Treatment of Obstructive Hydrocephalus

Introduction: Hydrocephalus is an abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles of the brain that is or has been under high pressure. It results in raised intracranial pressure and compressive effects of vital brain structures that can be lethal if not treated in time. Various treatment options had been tried over the years but ventriculoperitoneal shunt has been the most common treatment option. As ventriculoperitoneal shunt is associated with obstruction, infection and over drainage, endoscopic third ventriculostomy has been used to avoid these complications.Objective: To determine the effectiveness of endoscopic third ventriculostomy in the treatment of obstructive hydrocepalus.Material and Methods: This is a descriptive study that was conducted in the Department of Neurosurgery Lady Reading Hospital Peshawar from October 2010 to October 2011. In this study all patients who underwent endo-scopic third ventriculostomy of more than six months were included. Total of 94 patients were included in the study. Effectiveness of the procedure was measured in terms of improvement in clinical condition i.e. GCS, head-ache, vomiting.Results: Total of 94 patients were included of which 58 were male and 36 were female. Age ranged from one to 70 years, with 50% of the patients were below 10 years of age. Majority of the patients had hydrocephalus due to space occupying lesion making 71.9% of the whole. In 75.5% of the patients the procedure was effective. Effecti-veness had no statistically significant difference in different age groups, however procedure is more effective in hydrocephalus due to space occupying lesion.Conclusion: Endoscopic third ventriculostomy is a very effective procedure for the treatment of obstructive hydrocephalus. It is effective irrespective of the age of the patient and cause of obstruction

Frequency of Hydrocephalus in Patients Presenting with Spinal Dysraphism

Objective: The objective of this study is to determine the frequency of hydrocephalus in patients presenting with spinal dysraphism.Material and Methods: This cross sectional descriptive study was conducted at Department of Neurosurgery, Postgraduate Medical Institute Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar, Pakistan. A total of 119 patients of spinal dysraphism were included through convenience (non-probability) sampling, in a period of six months (from June, 2011 to December 2011). All patients with spinal dysraphism with either sex and age less than 2 years included, while patients with post spinal dysraphism surgery who developed hydrocephalus, posterior fossa lesion causing obstructive hydrocephalus and Patients with post tuberculous meningitis with hydrocephalus were excluded. Hydrocephalus was observed in these patients. The data was analyzed using the statistical program SPSS version 17.Results: Out of total number of 119 patients, majority was males with 66 in number (55.5%), while female were 53 (44.5%). The age of patients ranged from 10 days to 23 months with overall mean age 5.47 + 5.439 months. Majority of patients, 82 (68.9%), were in the age range of 01-06 months. Most of the patients, i.e., 56 (47.1%) were harboring spinal dysraphism at lumbar region. Hydrocephalus was found in quite large number of cases, 79 cases (66.4%), in patients of spinal dysraphism.Conclusion: Spinal dysraphism is slightly more common in males with frequency of 55.5%. Majority of the patients of spinal dysraphism (68.9%) were presented in the age range of 1 – 6 months. Spinal dysraphism is more common (47.1%) at lumbar region. Hydrocephalus was found in 79 cases (66.4%) of spinal dysraphism

Wi-fi and radar fusion for head movement sensing through walls leveraging deep learning

The detection of head movement plays a crucial role in human–computer interaction systems. These systems depend on control signals to operate a range of assistive and augmented technologies, including wheelchairs for Quadriplegics, as well as virtual/augmented reality and assistive driving. Driver drowsiness detection and alert systems aided by head movement detection can prevent major accidents and save lives. Wearable devices, such as MagTrack consist of magnetic tags and magnetic eyeglasses clips and are intrusive. Vision-based systems suffer from ambient lighting, line of sight, and privacy issues. Contactless sensing has become an essential part of next-generation sensing and detection technologies. Wi-Fi and radar provide contactless sensing, however, in assistive driving they need to be inside enclosures or dashboards, which for all practical purposes in this article have been considered as through walls. In this study, we propose a contactless system to detect human head movement with and without walls. We used ultra-wideband (UWB) radar and Wi-Fi signals, leveraging machine and deep learning (DL) techniques. Our study analyzes the six common head gestures: right, left, up, and down movements. Time-frequency multiresolution analysis based on wavelet scalograms is used to obtain features from channel state information values, along with spectrograms from radar signals for head movement detection. Feature fusion of both radar and Wi-Fi signals is performed with state-of-the-art DL models. A high classification accuracy of 83.33% and 91.8% is achieved overall with the fusion of VGG16 and InceptionV3 model features trained on radar and Wi-Fi time–frequency maps with and without the walls, respectively

Surveillance of molecular markers of antimalarial drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax in Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), Pakistan

This molecular epidemiological study was designed to determine the antimalarial drug resistance pattern, and the genetic diversity of malaria isolates collected from a war-altered Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), in Pakistan. Clinical isolates were collected from Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai and Kurram agencies of FATA region between May 2017 and May 2018, and they underwent DNA extraction and amplification. The investigation of gene polymorphisms in drug resistance genes (dhfr, dhps, crt, and mdr1) of Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax was carried out by pyrosequencing and Sanger sequencing, respectively. Out of 679 PCR-confirmed malaria samples, 523 (77%) were P. vivax, 121 (18%) P. falciparum, and 35 (5%) had mixed-species infections. All P. falciparum isolates had pfdhfr double mutants (C59R+S108N), while pfdhfr/pfdhps triple mutants (C59R+S108N+A437G) were detected in 11.5% of the samples. About 97.4% of P. falciparum isolates contained pfcrt K76T mutation, while pfmdr1 N86Y and Y184F mutations were present in 18.2% and 10.2% of the samples. P. vivax pvdhfr S58R mutation was present in 24.9% of isolates and the S117N mutation in 36.2%, while no mutation in the pvdhps gene was found. Pvmdr1 F1076L mutation was found in nearly all samples, as it was observed in 98.9% of isolates. No significant anti-folate and chloroquine resistance was observed in P. vivax; however, mutations associated with antifolate-resistance were found, and the chloroquine-resistant gene has been observed in 100% of P. falciparum isolates. Chloroquine and sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine resistance were found to be high in P. falciparum and low in P. vivax. Chloroquine could still be used for P. vivax infection but need to be tested in vivo, whereas a replacement of the artemisinin combination therapy for P. falciparum appears to be justified

Personalized wearable electrodermal sensing-based human skin hydration level detection for sports, health and wellbeing

Personalized hydration level monitoring play vital role in sports, health, wellbeing and safety of a person while performing particular set of activities. Clinical staff must be mindful of numerous physiological symptoms that identify the optimum hydration specific to the person, event and environment. Hence, it becomes extremely critical to monitor the hydration levels in a human body to avoid potential complications and fatalities. Hydration tracking solutions available in the literature are either inefficient and invasive or require clinical trials. An efficient hydration monitoring system is very required, which can regularly track the hydration level, non-invasively. To this aim, this paper proposes a machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) enabled hydration tracking system, which can accurately estimate the hydration level in human skin using galvanic skin response (GSR) of human body. For this study, data is collected, in three different hydration states, namely hydrated, mild dehydration (8 hours of dehydration) and extreme mild dehydration (16 hours of dehydration), and three different body postures, such as sitting, standing and walking. Eight different ML algorithms and four different DL algorithms are trained on the collected GSR data. Their accuracies are compared and a hybrid (ML+DL) model is proposed to increase the estimation accuracy. It can be reported that hybrid Bi-LSTM algorithm can achieve an accuracy of 97.83%

Black Tea: Chemical and Pharmacological Appraisal

Medicinal plants are gaining popularity as folk medicine due to future demand to get rid of synthetic health promoting medicines. Nowadays, black tea is gaining interest as the most frequently consumed therapeutic drink after the water. The importance of black tea is due to existence of flavonoids such as (Thearubigins (TRs) and theaflavins (TFs) and catechins) that are the main therapeutic agents and are more bio-direct and stable compounds compared to those exist in other herbal plants alongside some other promising compounds which enhance is credentials as therapeutic drug. Numerous scientific explorations have elucidated the biological worth of these bioactive moieties against plethora of ailments with special reference to metabolic disorder. The mandate of current chapter is to discuss the black tea chemistry for elucidating its pharmacological worth