Automating School Fees Transactions in Nigerian Universities and Tertiary Institutions: A Systems Engineering and System Management Approach

This project uses system engineering and system management principles to analyze the problem of transactions in Nigerian universities and tertiary institutions. System management principles shall be used to highlight the imperfections in the transaction method currently in use especially the disconnect between the bank and the institutions using their services. It will explore other payment systems available in the country. This project will provide a recommendation of how to implement a better payment option through automating the process of school payments by using a system with a cloud-based educational software at the school bursary office and through the online payment processing on the school website. The system software will enable cashiering and payment management: centralized data, automated reports, and inventory controls. It will generate automatic invoices and receipts. This system will bridge the disconnect between the bank and the school since students would not need to deposit cash directly into the school account but into their accounts and then pay with their debit cards. The system will provide debit card encryption and protection using the Secure Socket Layer technology

Tax Dispute Resolution in Nigeria: A Storm in a Tea Cup.

The article examined the fact that the Nigerian tax culture has been characterized by a very low level of compliance with tax laws. This has lead to excessive evasion which has prompted successive governments to continually try to improve on Nigerian tax systems with a view to having a tax system that will encourage voluntary compliance, reduce tax evasion to the barest minimum, instill public confidence on the integrity of the tax systems and bring about a fair, uniform and impartial administration of relevant tax laws[1]. Most private companies in Nigeria have continually cited the inefficiency and other problems associated with the tax system as their reasons for relocation to neighboring countries to do business, thereby leaving the shores of Nigeria and depriving the country of major source of revenue. These problems which stem from the Nigerian Tax operations necessitated the need for a new National Tax Policy. Other major challenges inhibiting the growth of internally generated revenue in the country include the high level of tax evasion obsolete tax laws, weak and incapacitated tax administrative machinery, manual tax system and unwieldy operational as well as enforcement procedures. Case laws, reported and unreported cases, opinions of learned jurists was resorted to in this lucid preparation. Another trailing factor listed as a key disincentive to effective tax system in the country is the perception by tax prayers that the government is not accountable to them. The Federal Government was not unmindful of these challenges when it carried out various tax reforms in the country[2]. Part of these reforms was the establishment of the Tax Appeal Tribunal in order to reduce the incidence of tax evasion and to ensure fairness and transparency of the tax system through a quick and efficient method of dispensation of justice.[3] Keywords: Tax regime, Tax evasion, fairness, transparency, tax appeal Tribunal. .[1] Abubakar Yusuf Mahmud, “Tax policy in Nigeria” www.Buzzle.com [2] Dotun Philips, Nigerian Tax Reforms in 2003 and Beyond: Main report of the study group on the Nigerian Tax System. [3] Section 59 Federal Inland Revenue Service (Establishment)Act 200

Cluster size distributions in gas jets for different nozzle geometries

Cluster size distributions were investigated in case of different nozzle geometries in argon and xenon using Rayleigh scattering diagnostics. Different nozzle geometries result in different behaviour, therefore both spatial- and temporal cluster size distributions were studied to obtain a well-characterized cluster target. It is shown that the generally used Hagena scaling can result in a significant deviation from the observed data and the behaviour cannot be described by a single material condensation parameter. The results along with the nanoplasma model applied to the data of previous high harmonic generation experiments allow the independent measurement of cluster size and cluster density.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Media Representation of Nigerian Women in the News: Evidence from Selected Newspapers

The aim of this study was to examine newspaper representations of women. To do so, the researchers examined four newspapers that were nationally circulated. The four newspapers examined were Vanguard, the Punch, The Guardian, and ThisDay. The duration of the study was three years (January 1st, 2015 to December 31st, 2017). The study sought to achieve three objectives and tested two null hypotheses. The design that was utilized to conduct the study was content analysis while data were collected through the use of a code sheet. In the analysis of the collected data, the researcher deployed simple percentages to describe and explain the outcome while a Chi-Square test of independence was used to test the hypotheses. The result showed that the volume of representation of stories related to women was poor. Additionally, the prominence of newspaper representation of women was less. The researcher recommends, among others, that journalists should improve representation of women

Changes under the hood - a new type of non-singleton fuzzy logic system

A major asset of fuzzy logic systems is dealing with uncertainties arising in their various applications, thus it is important to make them achieve this task as effectively and comprehensively as possible. While singleton fuzzy logic systems provide some capacity to deal with such uncertainty aspects, non-singleton fuzzy logic systems (NSFLSs) have further enhanced this capacity, particularly in handling input uncertainties. This paper proposes a novel approach to NSFLSs, which further develops this potential by changing the method of handling input fuzzy sets within the inference engine. While the standard approach is getting the maximum of the intersection between input’s and antecedent’s fuzzy sets (in the ”pre-filtering” stage), it is proposed to employ the centroid of the intersection as the basis of each rule’s firing degree. The motivation is to capture the interaction of input and antecedent fuzzy sets with high fidelity, thus making NSFLSs more sensitive to the input’s uncertainty information. The testbed is the common problem of Mackey-Glass time series prediction in the presence of input noise. Analyses of the results show that the new method outperforms the standard approach (by reducing the prediction error) and has potential for a more efficient uncertainty handling in NSFLS applications

Contrasting singleton type-1 and interval type-2 non-singleton type-1 fuzzy logic systems

Most applications of both type-1 and type-2 fuzzy logic systems are employing singleton fuzzification due to its simplicity and reduction in its computational speed. However, using singleton fuzzification assumes that the input data (i.e., measurements) are precise with no uncertainty associated with them. This paper explores the potential of combining the uncertainty modelling capacity of interval type-2 fuzzy sets with the simplicity of type-1 fuzzy logic systems (FLSs) by using interval type-2 fuzzy sets solely as part of the non-singleton input fuzzifier. This paper builds on previous work and uses the methodological design of the footprint of uncertainty (FOU) of interval type-2 fuzzy sets for given levels of uncertainty. We provide a detailed investigation into the ability of both types of fuzzy sets (type-1 and interval type-2) to capture and model different levels of uncertainty/noise through varying the size of the FOU of the underlying input fuzzy sets from type-1 fuzzy sets to very “wide” interval type-2 fuzzy sets as part of type-1 non-singleton FLSs using interval type-2 input fuzzy sets. By applying the study in the context of chaotic time-series prediction, we show how, as uncertainty/noise increases, interval type-2 input fuzzy sets with FOUs of increasing size become more and more viable

High-order Harmonic Generation from Noble Gas Clusters

At modest laser intensities atomic dipole moment is induced with the interaction of light which creates a radiation. The emitted radiation contains low-order harmonics of the laser frequency with exponentially decreasing intensity. At about 1013 W/cm2 light intensity due to ionization processes high-order harmonics can also be generated approximately with the same strength

Improved uncertainty capture for nonsingleton fuzzy systems

In non-singleton fuzzy logic systems (NSFLSs), input uncertainties are modelled with input fuzzy sets in order to capture input uncertainty (e.g., sensor noise). The performance of NSFLSs in handling such uncertainties depends on both: the appropriate modelling in the input fuzzy sets of the uncertainties present in the system’s inputs, and on how the input fuzzy sets (and their inherent model of uncertainty) interact with the antecedent and thus affect the inference within the remainder of the NSFLS. This paper proposes a novel development on the latter. Specifically, an alteration to the standard composition method of type-1 fuzzy relations is proposed, and applied to build a new type of NSFLS. The proposed approach is based on employing the centroid of the intersection of input and antecedent sets as origin of the firing degree, rather than the traditional maximum of their intersection, thus making the NSFLS more sensitive to changes in the input’s uncertainty characteristics. The traditional and novel approach to NSFLSs are experimentally compared for two well-known problems of Mackey-Glass and Lorenz chaotic time series predictions, where the NSFLSs’ inputs have been perturbed with different levels of Gaussian noise. Experiments are repeated for system training under noisy and noise-free conditions. Analyses of the results show that the new method outperforms the traditional approach. Moreover, it is shown that while formally more complex, in practice, the new method has no significant computational overhead compared to the standard approach

On transitioning from type-1 to interval type-2 fuzzy logic systems

Capturing the uncertainty arising from system noise has been a core feature of fuzzy logic systems (FLSs) for many years. This paper builds on previous work and explores the methodological transition of type-l (Tl) to interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2 FSs) for given "levels" of uncertainty. Specifically, we propose to transition from Tl to IT2 FLSs through varying the size of the Footprint Of Uncertainty (FOU) of their respective FSs while maintaining the original FS shape (e.g., triangular) and keeping the size of the FOU over the FS as constant as possible. The latter is important as it enables the systematic relating of FOU size to levels of uncertainty and vice versa, while the former enables an intuitive comparison between the Tl and T2 FSs. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through a series of experiments using the well-known Mackey-Glass (MG) time series prediction problem. The results are compared with the results of the IT2 FS creation method introduced in [1] which follows a similar methodology as the proposed approach but does not maintain the membership function (MF) shape