Transforming Aquaculture from Subsistence to Commercial Level for Sustainable Development in Niger Delta Region of Nigeria

Aquaculture venture in Niger Delta Region of Nigeria is an industry that encompasses fish cultivation in a controlled environment. It has evolved through numerous phases and stages with its potential yet to be fully tapped. To affirm this potential in contributing to human development, food security and improved standard of living, the aquaculture industry requires new approaches. Hence, this paper reviews the status of fish farming in Niger Delta, its subsistence state and its inability to meet the demand for fish by the populace, thus necessitating the need for transforming aquaculture from subsistence to commercial level. The components and the systems of commercial fish farming were thoroughly discussed. Also, constraints to commercial fish farming in the region were elucidated. The strategies for promoting commercial aquaculture such as, increase in awareness of aquaculture products, subsidizing of aquaculture inputs, training and manpower development, government support, formation of fish farmers cooperative societies, access to loans and credit facilities, promotion of research activities, effective fisheries policies, good institutional framework, and reducing the levels of corruption and insecurity in the region, were clearly pointed out as a veritable tools, for transforming the present state of aquaculture in Niger Delta, through planned, focused and coordinated effective management strategies, by individual farmers, government agencies and relevant institutions for sustainable development of the region in particular and the country in general

Fallstudie Swiss Re : «Case Management in P&C Reinsurance – Wissensarbeit im Fokus»

Die vorliegende Fallstudie von Swiss Re zeigt die komplexen Anforderungen, die Systeme zur Unterstützung von wissens- und dokumentenzentrierten Prozessen in einem kollaborativen Umfeld zu erfüllen haben. Dabei geht es in erster Linie darum, das optimale Mass an Standardisierung und Flexibilisierung zu finden, um Wissensarbeiter von Routinearbeiten zu entlasten und in ihren Entscheidungen zu unterstützen. Auf der herausfordernden Reise zur Lösung näherte sich Swiss Re schrittweise und mit einem klaren Richtungswechsel den Bedürfnissen ihrer Wissensarbeitenden

Effects of direct transfer to fresh water on the haematological parameters of Tilapia guineensis Bleeker, 1862

Changes in blood parameters of Tilapia guineensis transferred directly from brackish water (salinity 14.5 ‰) to fresh water (0.12 ‰) was investigated to assess the effect of sudden change in environment on fish blood characteristics. The results obtained indicated significant reduction (p < 0.05) in mean values of haemoglobin (Hb) from 5.50 . 0.61 to 3.65 . 0.66 dl-1, packed cell volume (PCV) 20.31 . 2.14 to 17.18 . 2.58%, red blood cell (RBC) 2.59 . 0.72 to 1.58 . 0.86 x 106, mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration (MCHC) 27.03 . 3.66 to 20.99 . 3.75 pg, mean corpuscular volume (MCV) 78.82 . 6.12 to 70.92 . 4.27 fL and platelets (PLT) 175.19 . 12.32 to 144.46 . 9.22 103uL-1. However, increases were observed in the values of erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) from 3.06 . 0.16 to 9.71 . 1.66 mm/hr, white blood cell (WBC) 27.18 . 2.96 to 29.69 . 3.75 x 109L-1, neutrophils (NEUT) 41.64 . 3.76 to 50.76 . 7.27 %, lympphocytes (LYMP) 55.30 . 3.24 to 59.30 . 11.26 % and monocytes (MON) 3.06 . 1.12 to 3.96 . 1.21 %. These alterations in the blood parameter were more noticeable in adult than juvenile fish. Results from this study therefore suggest that direct transfer of fish to area of lower salinity may have negative impact on the physiology of T. guineensis

BSML-mbeddr: Integrating Semantically Congurable State-Machine Models in a C Programming Environment

In model-driven engineering, developers express their solutions in domain-specific modelling languages (DSLs) that support domain-specific abstractions. Big-Step Modelling Languages (BSML) is a family of extended state-machine DSLs for creating executable models that have a complex execution semantics. In this paper, we present BSML-mbeddr, which imbeds a large subset of BSML within the mbeddr C programming environment, thereby extending mbeddr with language constructs for extended, semantically configurable state-machines. We also report on three case studies that exercise the expressiveness of BSML-mbeddr, assess the integrability of BSML-mbeddr into mbeddr, and demonstrate the need to provide support for state-machine models with different execution semantics.NSERC Discovery Grant, 155243-12 || Ontario Research Fund, RE05-04

Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

Introduction to BPM approach in Healthcare and Case Study of End User Interaction with EHR Interface

Nowadays, process management is a key factor in the success of organizations. The market in which the organizations operate is increasingly competitive. This increase makes the improvement of business processes a constant and essential need in organizations. In recent years, organizations increasingly choose to adopt Business Process Management (BPM) and try to use the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) to model their processes and, as a result, to make their systems and applications more interoperable with others. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is another system for the exploitation of clinical and administrative information. Much of the information is generated in the EHR itself, the rest of the information results from external systems and are loaded into the EHR support database. This technology is a system with encrypted clinical information used in hospitals. This article looks at what BPMN is, and how BPMN can be a solution for an EHR. As a result, BPMN workflow diagrams of the system processes of the study case organization were created. The platform used in the case study is the Agency for Integration, Archive and Diffusion of Medical Information (AIDA) platform. Four main modules of the EHR were modeled; one of the modules was the ambulatory module.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013

Children Achieving: Philadelphia\u27s Education Reform, Year Two Report

Children Achieving Progress Report Series 1996-1997. In February 1995, The Annenberg Foundation designated Philadelphia as one of a small number of American cities to receive a five-year $50 million Annenberg Challenge grant to improve public education. CPRE and its partners, Research for Action and OMG Center for Collaborative Learning, conducted a four-year evaluation of Philadelphia\u27s Children Achieveing initiative, funded by the Annenberg Challenge grant. This summary describes finding from Year 2

Verifiable UML Artifact-Centric Business Process Models (Extended Version)

Artifact-centric business process models have gained increasing momentum recently due to their ability to combine structural (i.e., data related) with dynamical (i.e., process related) aspects. In particular, two main lines of research have been pursued so far: one tailored to business artefact modeling languages and methodologies, the other focused on the foundations for their formal verification. In this paper, we merge these two lines of research, by showing how recent theoretical decidability results for verification can be fruitfully transferred to a concrete UML-based modeling methodology. In particular, we identify additional steps in the methodology that, in significant cases, guarantee the possibility of verifying the resulting models against rich first-order temporal properties. Notably, our results can be seamlessly transferred to different languages for the specification of the artifact lifecycles.Comment: Extended version of "Verifiable UML Artifact-Centric Business Process Models" - to appear in the Proceedings of CIKM 201

Participatory Militias: An Analysis of an Armed Movement's Online Audience

Armed groups of civilians known as "self-defense forces" have ousted the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel from several towns in Michoacan. This militia uprising has unfolded on social media, particularly in the "VXM" ("Valor por Michoacan," Spanish for "Courage for Michoacan") Facebook page, gathering more than 170,000 fans. Previous work on the Drug War has documented the use of social media for real-time reports of violent clashes. However, VXM goes one step further by taking on a pro-militia propagandist role, engaging in two-way communication with its audience. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of VXM and its audience. We examined nine months of posts, from VXM's inception until May 2014, totaling 6,000 posts by VXM administrators and more than 108,000 comments from its audience. We describe the main conversation themes, post frequency and relationships with offline events and public figures. We also characterize the behavior of VXM's most active audience members. Our work illustrates VXM's online mobilization strategies, and how its audience takes part in defining the narrative of this armed conflict. We conclude by discussing possible applications of our findings for the design of future communication technologies.Comment: Participatory Militias: An Analysis of an Armed Movement's Online Audience. Saiph Savage, Andres Monroy-Hernandez. CSCW: ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 201