Households’ Energy Efficiency Practices in a Bereft Power Supply Economy of Nigeria

The study focuses on attaining energy efficiency practices in the housing sector of the Nigerian economy. This is essentially necessary in order to reduce the energy demand on the central power supply of the nation and as well attain energy security. Nigeria as a nation is endowed with enormous energy resources, yet beleaguered with chronic energy crisis because of inadequate power supply to the citizens. The overall goal is to seek ways of improving the energy use situation of the country; and the objectives are to determine the prevailing levels of energy efficiency practices in housing design; appliances in use; and occupant behavior. The findings reveal a low level of energy efficiency consideration in housing design practice; a very low level of appliances efficiency; and a much low level of energy efficiency practice by the housing occupants. Thus, a strategic scheme of energy efficiency practices to be realized by the government and housing stakeholders is proffered for the housing sector of Nigeria

The plague and the state in early modern England 1538-1667

This thesis examines the impact of and state responses to plague in early modern England – a period I define as beginning in 1538 with the emergence of parish burial registers and ending with the disappearance of epidemic plague in c.1667. The main focus is 8 national outbreaks that occurred in 1544-6, 1563-5, 1577-9, 1592-4, 1603-5, 1624-6, 1636-7, 1665-7. The aim is to build on existing studies of plague in early modern Europe by combining detailed, micro history and big data historical epidemiology to answer four key questions: 1. What were the dynamics of national plague outbreaks in the early modern period? 2. How widely were plague quarantine regulations (mandated nationally from 1578) enforced? 3. What was the demographic impact of enforcement? 4. How did English plague responses (the core policy being household quarantine) compare with those on the continent, particularly France and Italy? The results suggest whilst plague was more limited in its diffusion than previously thought, state responses were more comprehensive, sophisticated, and charitable. Plague was a highly urban disease and one that affected a relatively limited number of smaller regional and market towns in any given outbreak. It travelled predominantly by boat, along navigable rivers and sea routes. So, its diffusion patterns in England are best understood as part of a complex, European (possibly Eurasian) disease environment. Within towns, it affected poorer parishes and households most. Whilst there is little to suggest quarantine measures radically altered the severity of epidemics or the ability of plague to spread to new settlements between 1538 and 1667, there is very strong evidence the regulations were enforced with considerable intensity. There was also variation between parishes. Household quarantine policies were enforced most strongly in wealthy, well-resourced parishes. Within them they were enforced across most households regardless of affluence. Yet even as they began to roll out household quarantine, city governments were establishing supplementary pesthouses for the isolation of people who could not expect help if isolated at home – a policy which added previously unnoticed levels of care and support to existing isolation policies in England. The measures developed and implemented in response to plague would inspire public health responses up to the present day

Dynamic in-flight shifts of working memory resources across saccades

Little is known about how memory resources are allocated in natural vision across sequential eye movements and fixations, as people actively extract information from the visual environment. Here, we used gaze-contingent eye tracking to examine how such resources are dynamically reallocated from old to new information entering working memory. As participants looked sequentially at items, we interrupted the process at different times by extinguishing the display as a saccade was initiated. After a brief interval, participants were probed on one of the items that had been presented. Paradoxically, across all experiments, the final (unfixated) saccade target was recalled more precisely when more items had previously been fixated, that is, with longer rather than shorter saccade sequences. This result is difficult to explain on current models of working memory because recall error, even for the final item, is typically higher as memory load increases. The findings could however be accounted for by a model that describes how resources are dynamically reallocated on a moment-by-moment basis. During each saccade, the target is encoded by consuming a proportion of currently available resources from a limited working memory, as well as by reallocating resources away from previously encoded items. These findings reveal how working memory resources are shifted across memoranda in active vision. Public Significance Statement We continuously make rapid eye movements called saccades to inspect the world around us. A short-term store is needed to hold this information temporarily, to build an internal representation of the visual scene, or guide our actions within the visual environment. It is well established that visual short-term memory is highly limited in capacity, which confronts us with a challenge: When storing information across saccade sequences, how do we reallocate memory resources to new incoming information? Here, we show that resources are dynamically reallocated away from previously fixated items stored in memory to make room for the new saccade target. A large amount of information is stored about this target, even before the saccade is made. Our results suggest a mechanism of how limited memory resources are dynamically allocated in order to support our ability to remember information from the visual scene

Adaptive working memory training does not produce transfer effects in cognition and neuroimaging

Despite growing interest in cognitive interventions from academia and industry, it remains unclear if working memory (WM) training, one of the most popular cognitive interventions, produces transfer effects. Transfer effects are training-induced gains in performance in untrained cognitive tasks, while practice effects are improvements in trained task. The goal of this study was to evaluate potential transfer effects by comprehensive cognitive testing and neuroimaging. In this prospective, randomized-controlled, and single-blind study, we administered an 8-week n-back training to 55 healthy middle-aged (50–64 years) participants. State-of-the-art multimodal neuroimaging was used to examine potential anatomic and functional changes. Relative to control subjects, who performed non-adaptive WM training, no near or far transfer effects were detected in experimental subjects, who performed adaptive WM training. Equivalently, no training-related changes were observed in white matter integrity, amplitude of low frequency fluctuations, glucose metabolism, functional and metabolic connectivity. Exploratory within-group comparisons revealed some gains in transfer tasks, which, however, cannot be attributed to an increased WM capacity. In conclusion, WM training produces transfer effects neither at the cognitive level nor in terms of neural structure or function. These results speak against a common view that training-related gains reflect an increase in underlying WM capacity. Instead, the presently observed practice effects may be a result of optimized task processing strategies, which do not necessarily engage neural plasticity

New perspectives on binding in visual working memory.

How does visual working memory (WM) store the binding between different features of a visual object (like colour, orientation, and location), and does memorizing these bindings require additional resources beyond memorizing individual features? These questions have traditionally been addressed by comparing performance across different types of change detection task. More recently, experimental tasks such as analogue (cued) recall, combined with analysis methods including Bayesian hypothesis testing and formal model comparison, have shed new light on the properties of WM. A significant new perspective is that noise in neural representation limits the precision of recall, and several recent models incorporate this view to account for failures of binding in WM. We review the literature on feature binding with a focus on these new developments and discuss their implications for the interpretation of classical findings