Dynamic Knowledge Capitalization through Annotation among Economic Intelligence Actors in a Collaborative Environment

The shift from industrial economy to knowledge economy in today's world has revolutionalized strategic planning in organizations as well as their problem solving approaches. The point of focus today is knowledge and service production with more emphasis been laid on knowledge capital. Many organizations are investing on tools that facilitate knowledge sharing among their employees and they are as well promoting and encouraging collaboration among their staff in order to build the organization's knowledge capital with the ultimate goal of creating a lasting competitive advantage for their organizations. One of the current leading approaches used for solving organization's decision problem is the Economic Intelligence (EI) approach which involves interactions among various actors called EI actors. These actors collaborate to ensure the overall success of the decision problem solving process. In the course of the collaboration, the actors express knowledge which could be capitalized for future reuse. In this paper, we propose in the first place, an annotation model for knowledge elicitation among EI actors. Because of the need to build a knowledge capital, we also propose a dynamic knowledge capitalisation approach for managing knowledge produced by the actors. Finally, the need to manage the interactions and the interdependencies among collaborating EI actors, led to our third proposition which constitute an awareness mechanism for group work management.Annotation, knowledge representation, knowledge capitalisation, economic intelligence, collaboration, knowledge exploitation, group awareness

Continuous boundary elements for potential problems

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Clinicopathological Studies on Rats Exposed to Municipal Landfill Gaseous and Particulate Emissions

The study assessed the Clinicopathological changes of Wistar rats exposed to municipal landfill gaseous particulate emissions. Four groups of Wistar rats were exposed to the different sites of landfill emission with use of filters for filtering landfill gaseous emission while the control group was not exposed. Performance of the animals was evaluated weekly, blood and lung, liver, kidney and heart tissues were taken for haematological and histopatholgical examinations. At the end of six weeks exposure, the peak weight was recorded as 108.96±0.45 of Group B as compared to 126.352±0.88 of the Control Group, as well as the decrease in the body weight of Group A-D compared to the Control Group. There was leucocytosis, lymphocytosis and neutrophilia in the rats that were exposed to landfill emission. There were pulmonary, hepatic, and renal lesions while the heart was spared. Changes were observed on the use of filters for filtering landfill gaseous emission. The 3M 6001 CN Gas Mask Carnister Cartridge which filters 50% of landfill emission together with black polythene nylon restricting external air into the filtered cage was not sufficient to reduce the effect of landfill gaseous emission at the end of the exposure period. The screening with PM2.5 material which filters 100% of PM2.5 emission was only able to screen PM2.5 emission but could not screen other landfill gaseous emission. This indicates that landfill gaseous emission is capable of inducing respiratory problems and tissue damage on dumpsite workers if there is sufficient and continuous exposure to landfill gaseous emissions. To prevent the hazard that may arose from dumpsite activities; gas nose mask respirator is recommended for an individual who works as scavengers and landfill workers before entering the dumpsite environment.

Tradition of Concubine Holding in Hausa Society (Nigeria), 1900 – 1930

This paper examined the tradition of holding women as concubine in Muslim societies of the Hausa. Concubine holding changed the status of women and was acquired by slavery. This paper analysed concubine holding as a phenomenon that challenged female status in Hausa society. It put into perspective, the trajectories of concubine holding from the legends in the tradition of origin. It analysed the rights and privileges accrued to a concubine. And by the beginning of the twentieth century, the question of concubine holding was conveniently desirable under Islamic law and while the British law attempted to change the practices as part of efforts to abolish slavery. Thus, the paper contended that; concubine holding was part of the accepted norms in the sexual notions, which specifically privileged women to change their status and negotiate power in Hausa society. The paper adopted the historical approach by analysing court records, archival materials of the Nigerian National Archives, Kaduna, as well as books and journals relevant to the theme. Keywords: Concubine holding, British law, Islamic law, Hausa societ

Overview of the Metabolic Syndrome; An Emerging Pandemic of Public Health Significance

A cluster of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus, which occur together have become known as the metabolic syndrome. Over the years various diagnostic criteria have been proposed by different organizations and most recently efforts have been made to unify the diagnostic criteria. This article is aimed at providing an overview of the metabolic syndrome and a rational approach to the management of this very important clinical syndrome

Effects of Credit Accessibility on Performance of Tomato Market in Osun State, Nigeria

This study evaluates the effects of accessibility to credit on tomato market performance in Osun State, Nigeria. A multi-stage sampling method was employed to select one hundred and sixty (160) tomato marketers in the study area. A well structured interview schedule was designed to collect necessary data for this study. The descriptive, budgetary and logit regression analyses were carried out on data obtained. The study found that 88.8% of the respondents were female, the average age was 43.05 years, and 71.3% were married with average household size of 6.16 members. Result of analysis also revealed that 67.5% received formal education with an average of 9.81 years of schooling. On the average, respondents claimed 16.05 years of marketing experience. Only 37.5% of them claimed to have access to credit and the average amount of credit obtained within the last one year was found to be #21, 262.50. Transportation and finance were the most common challenges faced by tomato marketers in the study area. Result of logit regression analysis suggests that small scale tomato marketers are not likely to have access to credit. The result of OLS regression analysis indicated that amount of credit obtained by respondents and quantities of tomato sold per week have positive effects on marketing efficiency. The study recommends that tomato marketers should form cooperative groups/societies through which financial and transportation needs of members could be met. Keywords: Credit, Tomato, Marketing efficiency, Logit mode

Energy management of micro-grid using cooperative game theory

Micro-grid (MG) has been introduced as a low voltage and a very small power system connected to a distribution grid through the point of common coupling. It consists of distributed energy resources (DERs) such as solar Photovoltaic (PV), wind turbine, fuel cell, etc.), interconnected load and energy storage sources. It can operate in grid-connected (i.e. when connected to the main grid) or islanded (i.e. when not connected to the main grid) mode. It has an advantage of utilizing low carbon sources and the possibility of its use in the remote local environment, which means that the transmission infrastructures and their associated costs may be deferred. Although there has been a proliferation of optimization methods of energy management in the MG, most of these methods consider self-interest of the players in profit distribution. Moreover, only a few of them consider a fair profit distribution using Nash bargaining solution (NBS) (i.e. when utility function is linear) leading to even profit distribution and high degree of dissatisfaction. For the MG to achieve better economic outcomes, a novel method based on weighted fair energy management among the participants (i.e. building of different types, such as residential buildings, schools, and shops) is proposed. The novelty of the proposed method lies in the new profit sharing method to favour certain participant by assigning a weight to each participant with cooperative game theory (CGT) approach using generalized Nash bargaining solution (GNBS). The proposed approach achieves a fair (reasonable or just) profit allocation with negotiating power indicator. In this work, a case study of six different participant sites is proposed using the CGT method of energy management. The proposed method is able to cope with the drawbacks of the existing independent method, which negotiate directly with other participants for selfish profit distribution. It is demonstrated that the independent method results in (1) a reduction in the profit of each participant of MG when compared with CGT approach and (2) the variation of transfer prices in some participants having profit below the specified lower bound profit since the method does not take into consideration the lower profit bounds. The use of CGT method (i.e. when participants form a coalition) to finding multi-partner profit level subject to specified lower bounds is demonstrated. This results in (1) increase in the profit of the MG participants (2) maintaining the profit level of all the participants above status-quo profit (lower specified profit bounds) with variation in transfer prices and (3) allowing certain participant to be favoured by assigning higher negotiating power to such participant. To achieve the optimal solution in the proposed method, a teaching-learning-based optimization (TLBO) algorithm is presented to efficiently solve the problem. For TLBO algorithm, no specific control parameters are needed except the number of generations and population size. This is in contrast with other heuristic algorithms such as genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) that require other control parameters (i.e. GA requires selection and crossover operation, while PSO makes use of social parameters and cognitive weight). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TLBO method, the profit allocations are tested in the grid-connected and the islanded mode using both the CGT and the independent method. In this work, the proposed TLBO method is compared with one traditional method, i.e. Lambda iteration method and two heuristic methods, i.e. PSO and GA. Thus, by using TLBO a considerable amount of computation time is saved. Using the same parameter setting for all the heuristic algorithms used, 20 trials are performed to be able to compare the quality of solution and convergence characteristics. The investigation reveals that TLBO gives the highest quality solutions and better convergence characteristics compared to PSO and GA

Media Entertainment and Commercialization of the Body

The desire to accumulate material resources and to have good life-chance is rooted deeply in the sensibilities of human society Every individual strives to ensure that he meets not only his essential needs of today and future but also accumulate well enough to gain social standing and be able to bequeath wealthy heritage to his children This tendency predisposes man to looking for economic means with all intensity And whenever profit propensity is discovered in any endeavour or vocation entrepreneurs or capitalists mobilize resources financial technical human etc in that direction This work relying largely on extant literature which highlights the overarching influence of the mass media on society media contents profit goal of media investors and audience response attempts to situate the roles nudity plays within the broad spectrum of media arts The focus is on how media moguls profiteer from explicit media content involving the private parts of women and the aftermath connected with tha

AN AUTOMATED RAILWAY STATION TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEM

Majority of accidents experienced with railway transportation involve collision with automobiles or other vehicles and collision with other trains. These collisions can be averted by putting safety measures in place. Part of the measures can be achieved by using computerized railway station traffic control systems that use microcontrollers and electromechanical devices to shift traffic from one rail lane to another and also to operate the level crossing gate. The two major stages of the system being described here are thus the track switching stage and the level crossing gate stage.  The system makes use of microcontrollers for decision making. The microcontrollers are programmed to detect signals from sensors and to output the processed signals to control electromagnetic devices through motor drivers. The codes for the microcontrollers were written in PIC Basic programming language and were debugged and compiled using Micro Code Studio Integrated Development Environment. The resultant Hex files were programmed into the memory of the microcontrollers with the aid of a universal programmer. Software simulation was carried out using the Proteus virtual system modeling software. A scaled down prototype of the system was built and tested. The prototype was able to execute all the decisions required to control the given railway station. A practical real life system would require the scaling up of the power required to drive the various motors; the logic of the system would however remain unchanged. The inclusion of the automated traffic control lighting system at the level crossing gate in the system eliminates the fatigue and tedium associated with a manually controlled traffic system. The computerized railway station traffic control system which helps in track switching and level crossing gate traffic control is capable of improving reliability, speed, operational safety and efficiency of the railway transportation system.