Corporate Rescue Law to the Rescue of Businesses in Trauma in Nigeria

The failure of a company potentially affects the livelihood and well-being of those dependent upon it. The company may be the life blood of a whole town, state or country. Therefore, the chain reaction consequent upon any business failure can not be treated as banal. Forging a robust legislated corporate or business rescue regime for Nigeria is now a necessity. The regime of insolvency as contained in its statutes are antiquated and this work examines options opened to Nigeria in reforming its law to fill the void occasioned by lack of or inadequate legislation to drive a well developed restructuring process. The options include, the adoption of the highly codified American model, the United Kingdom model, informal models such as pre-pack, the court inspired model, the Debtor Restructuring and the Corporate Management models. The paper concludes that, it is not enough to have a law to drive the process, but the judicial environment and the public and private sectors must be ready to imbibe the rescue culture. Keywords: Administrative procedure - business failure - corporate rescue - company voluntary arrangement - chapter I

A Framework for Bioacoustic Vocalization Analysis Using Hidden Markov Models

Using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) as a recognition framework for automatic classification of animal vocalizations has a number of benefits, including the ability to handle duration variability through nonlinear time alignment, the ability to incorporate complex language or recognition constraints, and easy extendibility to continuous recognition and detection domains. In this work, we apply HMMs to several different species and bioacoustic tasks using generalized spectral features that can be easily adjusted across species and HMM network topologies suited to each task. This experimental work includes a simple call type classification task using one HMM per vocalization for repertoire analysis of Asian elephants, a language-constrained song recognition task using syllable models as base units for ortolan bunting vocalizations, and a stress stimulus differentiation task in poultry vocalizations using a non-sequential model via a one-state HMM with Gaussian mixtures. Results show strong performance across all tasks and illustrate the flexibility of the HMM framework for a variety of species, vocalization types, and analysis tasks

A Framework for Bioacoustic Vocalization Analysis Using Hidden Markov Models

Using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) as a recognition framework for automatic classification of animal vocalizations has a number of benefits, including the ability to handle duration variability through nonlinear time alignment, the ability to incorporate complex language or recognition constraints, and easy extendibility to continuous recognition and detection domains. In this work, we apply HMMs to several different species and bioacoustic tasks using generalized spectral features that can be easily adjusted across species and HMM network topologies suited to each task. This experimental work includes a simple call type classification task using one HMM per vocalization for repertoire analysis of Asian elephants, a language-constrained song recognition task using syllable models as base units for ortolan bunting vocalizations, and a stress stimulus differentiation task in poultry vocalizations using a non-sequential model via a one-state HMM with Gaussian mixtures. Results show strong performance across all tasks and illustrate the flexibility of the HMM framework for a variety of species, vocalization types, and analysis tasks

An Evaluation of Teaching Practice Performance among Regular and Sandwich Students in Ekiti State, Nigeria

This study investigated the teaching practice performance between regular and sandwich student-teachers in Ekiti State. The population for the study comprised of student-teachers on teaching practice exercise undergoing NCE  sandwich programme at the College of Education,Ikere Ekiti, Ikere Ekiti study Centre and NCE regular students of the College of Education, Ikere Ekiti. Random sampling technique was used to select 100 regular and 80 sandwich teachers. The data were collected and analysed using percentages and student t – test. Two hypotheses were raised and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The findings showed that there was significant difference in the performance of regular and sandwich teachers, but there was no significance different in the teaching practice preparatory level of regular and sandwich teachers Key notes: Training, In-service, Pre-service, Teaching practice and Performance

Determinants of Risk Behaviour in Livestock Development Programs: Evidence from South Africa's Kaonafatso Yadikgomo (Kyd) Scheme

Risk plays a significant role in input use decisions and production of output in agricultural production. Understanding farmer risk attitudes and their responses to risk is significant in designing effective intervention programmes. Few studies have tried to identify how the introduction of a livestock programme has tended to influence farmer risk profile. The objective of the study was to highlight the determinants of risk behaviour in participants of a livestock development programme. The study was carried out in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Province of South Africa, utilising a purposive sample of 164 respondents who are part of the Kaonafatso Yadikgomo (KYD) Scheme. The cross-sectional survey collected data pertaining to the risk attitudes of the livestock farmers from an attitudinal scale as well as socio-economic and farm biophysical characteristics. Descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression were used to analyse the data. The results show that the livestock farmers were risk loving, with the risk attitude being influenced by the age of household head, monthly household income and experience in rearing cattle at the ð‘ < 0.1 level. Furthermore, the source of income, herd size, reason for slaughtering cattle distance to the nearest water source and access to a dip tank had significant influence of attitude towards risk at the ð‘ < 0.05 level. The study concludes that being part of a livestock development programme tends inflto uence the risk attitudes of the participants as the determinants were against a priori expectations.&nbsp

Imperative Of A Statutory Framework For The Protection Of Whistleblowers In Nigeria.

As secrecy is often a factor which permits many acts of corruption to go undetected or unreported, any programme which will encourage persons in the know of such acts to come forward and reveal them is welcome. However, as commendable as this current programme is, it still raises certain issues, the most prominent of which is the absence of a legal framework to guide the entire process and also the absence of any measure of protection to whistleblowers

Produced water treatment technologies

Produced water is a complex mixture of organic and inorganic compounds and the largest volume of by-product generated during oil and gas recovery operations. The potential of oilfield produced water to be a source of fresh water for water-stressed oil-producing countries and the increasing environmental concerns in addition to stringent legislations on produced water discharge into the environment have made produced water management a significant part of the oil and gas business. This article reviews current technologies for the management of produced water, examines how electrochemical techniques may be used in these areas and compares the prospects for future development. It suggests that treatment technologies based on electrochemistry could be the future of produced water management, since produced water is a potential electrolyte because it has a relatively good conductivity. It also explains that by applying photoelectrochemistry, water electrolysis, fuel cell and electrodeposition, electrochemical engineering could achieve energy storage, production of clean water and recovery of valuable metals from produced water with minimal or no negative impact on the environment. © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press

(E)-N-(3-(5-(3-Acetamidopropyl)-3,6-dioxopiperazin-2-yl)propyl)-5-hydroxy-3-methylpent-2-enamide

Funding The collection of materials was carried out with financial support from the UK Newton Project for UK–Chile Collaboration (JIC CA 586) to Professor Mervyn Bibb, John Inness Centre, Norwich, UK. Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Albrn Care India, Nidhan Singh Oberoi, and P.S. Oberoi, I.C.A.R-National Dairy Research Institute, India, as well as Aparna Koride for their continued support. They would also like to thank Russell Gray for his support in running the NMR experiments. Data collection was carried out in collaboration with Michael Goodfellow, University of Newcastle, and Juan Asenjo and Barbara Andrews, University of Chile.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A short-term study on the effect of environmental factor variation on a zooplankton community

1158-1164In the coastal marine ecosystem, zooplankton plays an important role. Its distribution and assortment, however, are driven by several physio-chemical parameters in an association. In the present study, a short-term investigation on the zooplankton community was carried out between July 2016 to November 2016 at the coastal region of Muttukadu, Chennai to unveil the critical association between zooplankton and physio-chemical parameters. Pronounced changes in physio-chemical parameters were recorded in study area. Nitrate (0.55 ± 0.05 µM) and nitrite (6.23 ± 1.35 µM) showed an inverse relationship with chlorophyll-a during August and November. Among the identified zooplankton groups, copepods cover 52 % of total zooplankton abundance except for the month of August 2016. This was followed by a contrast in abundance between calanoid copepod (ranging from 182 ± 45 – 67 ± 1 Individuals L-1) and Brachionus sp. (rotifer) (ranging from 15 ± 3 – 7 ± 1 Individual L-1) in the months of July and September 2016. Our findings shows a crucial binding between physio-chemical parameters, phytoplankton (chlorophyll-a), and zooplankton, and dependency between plankton groups for food within the Muttukadu ecosystem