Exergy and economic analyses of methanol production process

A process that utilized CO2 recovered from thermal power plant flue gas for methanol production was simulated using Aspen HYSYS V8.4 software. Exergy and economic analyses approaches were used to determine the optimum number of trays in the distillation column for economic operation of the process. The results from both approaches showed that the optimum numbers of trays were 20 and further increase in the number of trays did not yield any significant improvement in the process efficiency and quality of methanol produced. The profitability analysis of the plant showed a payback period of 3 years. The study concluded that locating such plant close to the thermal power plant will mitigate the emission of CO2 by providing onsite utilization for the CO2 emitted and captured from the thermal power plant.Keywords: CO2 capture; methanol production; exergy analysis; economic analysi

Effects of Literature Circles, Dialogic Reading and Vocabulary Self-Selection Strategies on the Reading Comprehension Skill of Lower Primary School in Osun State, Nigeria

Acquisition of early reading skills is of immense significance to the growth and development of children’s academic pursuit as virtually all subjects require reading at all levels of education. It has however been observed that children and students at primary and post primary institutions have poor reading habit that has been affecting them in their academic performances both at the internal and external examinations. It is on this premise that these researchers employed literature circles, dialogic reading and vocabulary self-selection strategies with a view to improving the children’s reading comprehension of pupils at the early childhood stage. Pretest-posttest control quasi experimental design was used. Multistage sampling technique was used in selecting eight schools from the three senatorial districts of Osun State. Data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Results revealed that reading comprehension of the pupils were positively significantly improved. Keywords:Literature Circles, Dialogic Reading, Vocabulary Self-selection, Reading skill, Reading Comprehension

Reconceptualizing Service Profit Chain in Church Management: Scale Development Approach

This paper portrays a knowledge-based point of view to acknowledge the relevance of service profit chain in churches, and how it compels a church to be diverse via workers internal service quality such as workers satisfaction and external service quality such as customer satisfaction amongst others. It exploited a multistage growth measure procedures where review questionnaires were shared to 50 participants which includes members and workers of a Faith-based Church. The conclusion of the confirmatory and exploratory factor examination displays the multi-stage type of service profit chain in churches. Eight sections were approved which consists- Internal service quality, workers satisfaction, workers retention, workers productivity, members loyalty, members satisfaction, revenue growth and productivity. This paper proposes an evidence of reliability and validity of the measures used which implies fresh tactic to verify service profit chain in churches. Conclusions show that churches who participate in service profit chain are recognized to be creative and use their information base as a winning platform to stimulate means to increase and achieve their objectives

A Decision Support System for Information Technology Policy Formulation

The implementation of an effective ICT policy requires the development of material and intellectual resources to support good decision making by humans.   In this paper, we examined and analysed Information Technology (IT) policy development process with a view to developing automated system supporting such process.  The data used for this work were obtained through purposeful interview of five professionals and experts who are familiar with IT policy formulation in Nigerian environment.  Some of the experts had earlier participated in policy design and formulation process at national level.     The Hierarchical Input Process Output (HIPO) model was used to analyse various input (contributions of professionals and experts) and output (agreed resolution of the professionals and experts) of the system.  The information obtained from the experts was represented using rule base techniques.  The overall system was designed using the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and implemented using the Visual Prolog version 7.0.  The metrics used for evaluating the system includes: processing time, decision process efficiency and cost effectiveness.   We compared the result of our system with that of the traditional manual system in use.  Our result showed that the DSS for policy formulation process enhances the decision output significantly when compared to the manual process where no DSS is used.  Moreover, the quality of policy produced by our DSS system is more consistent when compared with the manual process.

Design and Development of Student Data Retrieval System via GSM

Remote data access and machine to machine communication are some of the value added services made possible by the GSM communication technology. With this service, automated access to records, information and updates can be achieved by the use of the GSM short message system (SMS) queries. This work presents the development of a remote access platform for remote access to a database. The system utilizes the GSM-SMS technology and an interactive voice recorder system to access data. The database contains students result, financial status and information on the number of exeats taken. This data is accessed by calling dedicated phone number and following the voice prompt voice prompt, the user is able to access the desired information from the database. Once the required data is accessed, the GSM module transmits this query result back to the caller in SMS format. The system provides a cost effective channel for accessing data from remote databases

RESTORING TONE-MARKS IN STANDARD YORÙBÁ ELECTRONIC TEXT: IMPROVED MODEL

Diacritic Restoration is a necessity in the processing of languages with Latinbased scripts that utilizes letters outside the basic Latin alphabet used by English language. Yorùbá is one such languages, marking underdot (dot-below)on three characters and tone marks on all seven vowels and two syllabic nasals. The problem of restoring underdotted characters has been fairly addressed using character as linguistic units for restoration. However, the existing characterbased approaches and word-based approach has not been able to sufficiently address restoration of tone marks in Yorùbá. We address in this study tone marks restoration as a subset of diacritic restoration.We proposed using the syllable (derived from word) as the linguistic token for tone marks restoration. In our experimental setup, we used Yoruba text collected from various sources as data with total word count of 250,336 words. These words, on syllabification, yielded 464,274 syllables. The syllables were divided into training and testing data in different proportions ranging from 99% used for training and 1% used for testing to 70% used for training and 30% used for testing. The aim of evaluation different proportions was to determine how the ratio of training-to-test data affect the variations that may occur in the result. We applied Memory-based learning to train the models. We also set up a similar experiment using character token to be able to compare the performance.The result showed that using syllable was able to increase accuracy at word level to 96.23% and an average of almost 15% over that gotten from using character. We also found out that using 75% of data for training and the remaining 25% for testing gives the results with the least variation in a ten-fold cross validation test. Hybridizing the syllable „based approach with other methods like lexicon lookup might likely lead to improvement over the current result

Towards Development of an Indigenous African Language-based Programming Language

Programming languages based on the lexicons of indigenous African languages are rare to come by unlike those based on Asian and / or European languages. It is opined that an African native language-based programming language would enhance comprehension of computer-based problem solving processes by indigenous students and teachers. This study intends to attempt a design and implementation of an African native language-based programming language using Yoruba as case study. Yoruba is the first language of over 30 million people in the south-west of Nigeria, Africa; and is spoken by over one hundred million people world-wide. In preparation towards actual implementation of a prototype of the intended programming language, a mini token recognizer has been developed in QBasic. Keywords— Native language-based programming languages, Yoruba language, Digital divide, Information and communication technology, prototype implementation.

Non-Pharmacological Management of Acute Pain after Breast and Thoracic Surgery

Pain after thoracic and breast surgery is a common phenomenon, and it is usually influenced by various factors including surgical, patient, and cultural factors. However, the pain that patients who have undergone breast or thoracic surgery experience has either been overlooked, undermanaged, or managed solely with pharmacotherapy by healthcare providers. This oftentimes result in impacting the patients’ recovery process and even quality of life. Literature has identified that inadequate pain management after breast and thoracic surgery and the resultant side effects of pharmacological therapies can be reduced by including non-pharmacological interventions into patients’ care plan. Some of the recommended interventions include music, massage, aromatherapy, cold therapy, meditation, acupuncture, and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. Most of these non-pharmacological therapies are easy to use, promote patients’ involvement in their own care, have no or minimal side effect, and are cost-effective. Therefore, it is essential for healthcare providers to include non-pharmacological pain management in the plan of care even before surgery