MOTIVATION AND ETHICS: CRITICAL FACTORS FOR SUSTAINABLE PUBLIC SERVICE DELIVERY IN NIGERIA

The primary function of any government is to ensure an equitable distribution of public goods and services to its citizens. Despite the material and human resource in Nigeria, Nigerians have been short-changed by the quality of public service delivery in the country. Against this backdrop, this paper: examined the issues affecting public service delivery and demonstrated how motivation can enhance ethical behaviours among public servants. Corruption Perception Index (CPI) from year 2000 to 2016 was used to argue the position of the paper. The study discovered, among other things that certain Human Resource (HR), political and institutional factors have led to the erosion of moral conduct by public servants. While measures such as reforms and campaigns have been taken to curb political and institutional issues, limited remedial actions have been proffered to tackle that of HR. These have negatively affected public service delivery in Nigeria. Therefore, apart from putting some ethical principles in place, there is need to motivate public servants to get at their best. In addition to this, good behaviour is to be rewarded and bad behaviour is to be punished across all public services in the country, by a truly independent and incorruptible statutory body. By doing this, sanity and equitable service delivery will be achieved.     &nbsp

Investigation of Low Clouds Attenuation on Earth Space Path for some West-Africa Stations

The study investigate the contribution of low clouds, to signal fade rate, at Ka band in the satellite communication links on earth-space path(s) to NigComSat 2, from three tropical locations in West Africa. Extracted cloud cover statistical data such as average cloud amount, average base height, and frequency of occurrence, were used to obtain the monthly variations and seasonal variations for Lagos (6.55o, 3.35o), Bouake (7.73o, -5.07o) and Bamako (12.53o, -7.95o). Cloud attenuation statistics were computed for each of the three stations for their respective uplink and downlink. The uplink and downlink attenuation ranges between about 0.2 to 1.6 dB and 0.1 to 0.8 dB respectively for Lagos; for Bouake between 0.005 to 0.035 dB and 0.003 to 0.016 dB respectively; finally, for Bamako between about 0.2 to 2 dB and about 0.1 to 1 dB respectively. The stations downlink attenuation sets of values are generally about twice their corresponding uplink attenuation values

Nutrient composition of watermelon (Citrullis lanatus (Thunb.) Matsum.&Nakai) and egusi melon (Citrullus colocynthis (L.) Schrad.) seeds

This study investigated the nutrient composition of the seeds of two cultivars of Citrullis lanatus (\u27Rhotmas\u27 and \u27Sugar Baby\u27) and compared it with Citrullus colocynthis. The moisture content, ash, crude fiber, ether extract, crude protein and true protein ranged from 5.43 to 6.82, 2.78 to 3.72, 1.66 to 3.94, 55.7 to 58.7, 19.16 to 25.18 and 10.8 to 13%, respectively. The starch content, total sugar and reducing sugar varied between 143.7 and 172.7, 53.7 and 96.5, 5.6 and 9.5 mg/g, respectively. Iron, copper, zinc, calcium and magnesium ranged from 191 to 211, 20.12 to 35.03, 68.97 to 92.57, 98.79 to 233, and 79.75 to 123.9 mg/kg, respectively. Heavy metals (lead and cadmium) and antinutrients (phytate, oxalate and cyanide) were below deleterious levels. Arginine, glutamic acid and aspartic acids were the most abundant amino acids, whereas lysine was the limiting amino acid. It is concluded that watermelon seeds were better in nutritional value compared to egusi melon seeds and therefore could be regarded as a potential sources of food if exploited

Tropospheric Scintillation and its Impact on Earth- Space Satellite Communication in Nigeria

The study investigates the impact of tropospheric scintillation on fixed satellite communication link on earth-space path for frequencies between 10 and 50 GHz for 37 stations in Nigeria. Elevation angles of 5º, 55º which are typical look angles for links over the Atlantic Ocean region and Indian Ocean region, look angles to the Nigeria Communication Satellite was also considered. Meteorological climatic data retrieve from satellite such as; profiles of temperature, pressure, and relative humidity, were validated with the available ground data in Nigeria. These data were reprocessed to derive radio propagation input parameters, such as; water vapour density integrated water vapour content and radio refractivity. Secondly, the International Telecommunication Union Propagation model (ITU-P 618, 2009) was used to estimate tropospheric scintillation for time unavailability between 0.01 to 10% in an average year. The result shows that scintillation fade depth is between 4.0 to 19.0 dB and 0.2 to 1.3 dB at 5º and 55º elevation angles respectively. For links to NigComsat scintillation fade depth is between 0.05 to 1.26 dB for all the 37-locations. The results will help in designing, planning and quick integration and expansion of satellite telecommunication services in the six regions of Nigeria

Earth-Space Rain Attenuation Prediction: Its Impact at Ku, Ka and V-band Over Some Equatorial Stations

Attenuation due to rain predictive models have been used to calculate the impact of rainfall on satellite communication for six stations in Malaysia. The impact of rainfall is very important for designing a modern satellite system for heavy rainfall climatic regions like Malaysia, with large annual rainfall accumulation exceeding 3000 mm and rainfall rate exceeding 150 mm/h at Ku (12/14 GHz), Ka (20/30 GHz) and V (40/50 GHz) bands. The present result shows that the avalibility of link for 99.99% at the three bands for uplink and downlink to Malaysian Communication Satellite (MEASAT-3a) is not practicable. The results suggest link availability of 99.9% for Ku-uplink and Ka downlink, while 99% for Ka uplink and 99% for V band uplink and downlink due to high annual rainfall rates for most of the stations. The overall result shows that the impact of heavy rainfall on satellite communication will be more severe in the Eastern part than the Western of Malaysia

ATMOSPHERIC GASES ATTENUATION IN WEST AFRICA

Atmospheric gases variations were evaluated to have major effect on Ku-band and above at 0.01 % unavailability of an average year on both uplink and down link. The International Telecommunication Union Radio Propagation Recommendation (ITU-RP 676, 2012) data bank was used for the computation of gaseous attenuation for West Africa. Monthly and yearly mean of temperature, pressure and relative humidity were used as input parameters obtained from ITU-R study group 3 data base. The results presented on contour map show that total atmospheric absorption signal fade attenuation values at C, Ku, Ka and V bands is between 0.015 to 0.09 dB, 0.04 to 0.9 dB, 0.04 to 1.4 dB and 0.2 to 3.2 dB respectively for both uplink and downlink frequencies. Generally, consistent signal absorption due to Oxygen and water vapour are higher in the western region than southern part of West Africa

Performance Evaluation of Selected Cost Functions in Non Negative Matrix Factorization Based Decomposition of Acoustic Mixture

Interaction of acoustic signals when several audio sources are active simultaneously results in the disturbance of estimation of an individual source by co-occurring sounds. Data decomposition therefore constitutes one of the core tasks in monaural source separation.  Particularly, in semi-supervised learning approach, viable means of achieving this is through the application of Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). Owing to a paucity of information on the application of this method, especially in a speech system, evaluation of some cost functions in NMF-based monaural speech decomposition was investigated in this study. A generalized gradient descent algorithm is derived for the minimization while three cost functions: Euclidean Distance, Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Itakura-Saito divergences are applied to the derived separation NMF algorithm.  These divergences are evaluated using experimental data while the performance of each of these is evaluated based on the cost values and convergence rate. Itakura-Saito divergence yields optimal performance over the other two divergences for given number of iterations and number of channels. Keywords— Cost functions, non-negative matrix factorization, speech separation, evaluatio

Four Year Cloud Attenuation Study in a Tropical Station

The paper present four year results of Cloud attenuation measurements carried out at Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria. The links operate at frequency of 12.245 GHz and the cumulative distribution function for monthly Cloud attenuation have been estimated from the 4-year measured spectrum analyser data. The result of the visually measured Cloud and Satellite Cloud cover data are presented. The monthly variability shows that the highest cloud attenuation at the station occur in August, reaching a maximum of 3.96 dB for 0.01% of time; which corresponding to an average cloud cover of 89.86% and 75.36% by ground and satellite data respectively of which Nimbostratus (Ns) is average of 29.1%. The lowest cloud attenuation at the station occur in September, with a value of 2.5 dB for 0.01% of time; corresponding to an average cloud cover of 90.3% and 77.26% by ground and satellite data respectively, of which Nimbostratus (Ns) is average of 28.9%

Year to year variation of rainfall rate and rainfall regime in Ota, southwest Nigeria for the year 2012 to 2015

The tropics is characterized to have convective type of rainfall which has high occurrence of rainfall compared to the temperate regions of the world. In this paper, the accumulation of rainfall in Ota, Southwest, Nigeria (6o 42 N, 3o 14 E) has been analysed to present the one-minute rainfall rate and the predominant type of rainfall. Four years’ data used for this study was taken using the Davis Wireless vantage Pro2 weather station at Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State. The data collected were used to analyse the one-minute rainfall rate and different types of rainfall predominant in this region. For the prediction and modelling of rain attenuation at microwave frequencies for a region like the Nigeria at various percentage of time, one-minute rainfall rate is required. Nigeria falls into the P zone of 114 mm/hr. as per International Telecommunication Union – Recommendation (ITU-R). The analysis carried out indicated that the measured yearly averaged maximum one-minute rainfall rate for 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 are 157.7 mm/h, 148.0 mm/h, 241.2 mm/h and 157.3 mm/h respectively. It also indicated that the drizzle type of rainfall is predominant in contrast to established fact that thunderstorm occurs more in the tropics