Sustainable Housing Supply in Nigeria Through the Use of Indigenous and Composite Building Materials

Housing is one of the basic necessities of life after food. The need and importance of housing to cater for the ever increasing urban population in Nigeria is causing serious challenges to urban dwellers and the government. The high cost of conventional building materials in Nigeria is making the government and the private sector to look for alternative sources of building materials locally, in order to, meet the housing needs of the ever-increasing population. The paper highlights the combination of the use of stabilized earth blocks as an indigenous material for construction and composite building materials in Nigeria, and further stressed that the sustainability of these materials will drastically ameliorate the shortage of housing in Nigeria. Recommendations were made as to how these indigenous and composite building materials can be used to meet the housing needs of majority of the both rural and urban dwellers in Nigeria

Influence of water extract of Mexican sunflower (Tithonia diversifolia) on growth of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata)

Laboratory analysis of the water extract of Tithonia diversifolia shoot and root on infra-red spectrometer to determine the phytotoxic potential and greenhouse experiments to evaluate its phytotoxic effect and growth promoting attribute on cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L.) were carried out. T. diversifolia contained some compounds having functional groups such as alcohols, olefins, six-membered ring lactams, ester, aromatic compound which can also be found in sesquiterpene lactones, an allelochemical implicated in phytotoxicity. The extract promoted seedling and plant growth. Bacillus and Streptococcus spp. earlier isolated from the root rhizosphere of T. diversifolia caused some changes in the spectra of the component compounds in the extract. The plant extract promoted growth of cowpea.African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 4 (4), pp. 355-360, 200

Modification of A Locally Made Electric Crop Dryer

Physic nut is a biomaterial that litters villages during the seasonal period which requires effective drying for oil and bio-fuel production. However, the natural method of drying and the existing dryer are found ineffective due to prolonged drying time leading to poor quality control. Processing of dried physic nut is required to ensure preservation, availability throughout the year, easy shelling and extraction. The main objectives of this study were to improve on the design of an existing electric crop dryer with a view to optimize its efficiency, reduce the drying time and produce hygienic and quality dried physic nuts. The improvements on the design of the existing dryer were achieved by increasing the throughput on the capacity by improving the material selection for the various key component parts. An adequate size of electrical heating element with thermo-sensor which regulates the drying temperature and a centrifugal fan to blow hot air from the heat supply unit to the drying chamber were installed in the dryer. The results of the improvements carried out on the design of this dryer show that maintenance cost is reduced, since the fan is the only moving part which may rarely be faulty, drying time of physic nut was reduced, operation of the dryer does not require any specialization, the dryer is safer to operate, the energy required for loading and unloading have reduced since the trays provided are removable. Higher production rate and quality of dried physic nuts are achieved because drying temperature and air velocity can be regulated. The throughput capacity, efficiency and drying capacity of the modified crop dryer are 20 kg/batch, 79.84 % and 0.73 kg/h, respectively. This dryer is recommended for medium and large scale processors and dried products can be used for further application. Keywords: physic nut, electric crop dryer, improvement on the existing design, temperature, drying  time

Identification of Pathogenic Viruses Using Genomic Cepstral Coefficients with Radial Basis Function Neural Network

Human populations are constantly inundated with viruses, some of which are responsible for various deadly diseases. Molecular biology approaches have been employed extensively to identify pathogenic viruses despite the limitations of the approaches. Nevertheless, recent advances in the next generation sequencing technologies have led to a surge in viral genome sequence databases with potentials for Bioinformatics based virus identification. In this study, we have utilised the Gaussian radial basis function neural network to identify pathogenic viruses. To validate the neural network model, samples of sequences of four different pathogenic viruses were extracted from the ViPR corpus. Electron-ion interaction pseudopotential scheme was used to encode the extracted sample sequences while cepstral analysis technique was applied to the encoded sequences to obtain a new set of genomic features, here called Genomic Cepstral Coefficients (GCCs). Experiments were performed to determine the potency of the GCCs to discriminate between different pathogenic viruses. Results show that GCCs are highly discriminating and gave good results when applied to identify some selected pathogenic viruse

Segmentation of Melanoma Skin Lesion Using Perceptual Color Difference Saliency with Morphological Analysis

The prevalence of melanoma skin cancer disease is rapidly increasing as recorded death cases of its patients continue to annually escalate. Reliable segmentation of skin lesion is one essential requirement of an efficient noninvasive computer aided diagnosis tool for accelerating the identification process of melanoma. This paper presents a new algorithm based on perceptual color difference saliency along with binary morphological analysis for segmentation of melanoma skin lesion in dermoscopic images. The new algorithm is compared with existing image segmentation algorithms on benchmark dermoscopic images acquired from public corpora. Results of both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the new algorithm are encouraging as the algorithm performs excellently in comparison with the existing image segmentation algorithms

Factors Influencing the Awareness and Utilization of Solanum Macrocarpon (Egg Plant) as a Medicinal Plant among Rural Farmers in Oyo State Nigeria

The study examined the awareness and utilization of solanum macrocarpon (eggplant) in Oyo State, Nigeria. A multi-stage random sampling technique was used to select 150 farmers in the state. Data were collected through a structured interview schedule and analyses using frequency counts percentages and chi-square. Among the respondents 71.3% are married, the mean household size was 5 persons, 92.0% were female, more than two-thirds (80.0%) of the respondents had formal education. The level of awareness of the nutritional and medicinal value of the plant was high. Sex, marital status, level of education, religion and age significantly associated with the respondents’ level of utilization of the cultivation practices @p 12鈮?/m:t>"> 0.05. The study recommended that better cultivation practices should be introduced to the farmers by extension personnel with a view to increasing production and farmer’s standard of living Keywords: Awareness, Utilization, solanum macrocarpon

Sea floor bedforms and their influence on slope accommodation (2019)

We sincerely thank Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) Investigação Petrolífera Limitada, and specifically David Hajovsky and Scott Opdyke, that kindly provided the dataset and allowed us to show these results. We would also like to thank Schlumberger for providing academic licenses of their software (Petrel). We are grateful to Associate Editor Kei Ogata for his support, and we sincerely thank reviewers Daniele Casalbore and Kamaldeen Omosanya for their comments and suggestions that significantly improved the quality of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPostprin

Anterior bilateral temporomandibular joint dislocation: an emergency presentation

Anterior dislocation of the temporomandibular joint (TMJ) though an infrequent presentation at the emergency department; often demands an immediate reduction to relieve discomfort and prevent adverse long-term sequelae. A simple and effective technique to reduce the dislocation is successfully demonstrated by putting the operator\u27s thumbs over the molar teeth of the patient and pushing the dislocated jaw downward and backward. We report the case of a patient who presented at our accident and emergency department with bilateral anterior TMJ dislocation and was successfully reduced with this simple technique

The role of forensic dentist following mass disaster

This review article focuses on mass disaster situations that may arise from natural or manmade circumstances and the significant role of forensic dental personnel in human identification following such occurrences. The various forensic dental modalities of identification that include matching techniques, postmortem profiling, genetic fingerprinting, dental fossil assessment and dental biometrics with digital subtraction were considered. The varying extent of use of forensic dental techniques and the resulting positive impact on human identification were considered. The importance of preparation by way of special training for forensic dental personnel, mock disaster rehearsal, and use of modern day technology was stressed. The need for international standardization of identification through the use of Interpol Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) for ms was further emphasized. Recommendations for improved human identification in Nigerian situation include reform of the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA), incorporation of dental care in primary health care to facilitate proper ante mortem database of the populace and commencement of identification at site of disaster

AGE OF RESIDENTS AND SATISFACTION WITH THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IN IBADAN CORE AREA: A CASE STUDY OF OKE FOKO

This study focuses on the comparison of satisfaction level within different age groups in the core area of Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. Based on the assumption that age of residents influences neighbourhood satisfaction and that this satisfaction is in varying degrees between different age groups, non-parametric test was used to examine the differences. Result showed that age of residents was significantly related to neighbourhood satisfaction. An analysis that focused on the differing age group satisfaction with the neighbourhood showed significant differences. However, the differences were more significant below 20 years age bracket and 61-70 years. KEYWORDS: Neighbouhood satisfaction, housing satisfaction, core area housing, age of residents