Attitude of agricultural professionals towards their wards taking agriculture as a career in Kwara State, North Central Nigeria

The paper examines the attitude of agricultural professionals towards their children or people under their care taking agriculture and agricultural extension as a career in Kwara State, Nigeria. A structured questionnaire was used to elicit information from one hundred and eighty respondents. The findings revealed that the mean age of the agricultural professionals was 39 years. Majority (76.1%) were males, married (86.1%) with about an average of 5 wards each under their custody. Majority of the professionals were observed to have a negative and unfavourable attitude towards their wards taking agriculture as a career. Logistical regression modelling of determinants of agricultural professionals’ attitudes towards their wards taking agriculture as a career revealed that characteristics of professionals that were more likely to have a positive attitude towards their wards taking agriculture as a career include high numbers of wards, higher educational qualification and more years of experience in the agricultural profession. The study recommends an urgent need for agricultural professionals to rise up to the task of ensuring increased participation of youths especially beginning with their wards in taking up a career in agriculture and agricultural extension.Keywords: Agricultural Professionals, attitude, career, agricultural extensio

Student performance prediction based on data mining classification techniques

The process of predicting student performance has become a crucial factor in academic environment and plays significant role in producing quality graduates. Several statistical and machine learning algorithms have been proposed for analyzing, predicting and classifying student performance. However, these classification algorithms still posed issue in terms of the performance classification. This paper presents a method to predict student performance using Iterative dichotomiser 3 (ID3), C4.5 and Classification and Regression tree (CART). The experiment was performed on Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (Weka). The experimental results showed that an ID3 accuracy of 95.9% , specificity of 95.9%, precision of 95.9%, recall of 95.9%, f-measure of 95.9% and incorrectly classified instance of 3.83. The C4.5 gave an accuracy of 98.3%, specificity of 98.3%, precision of 98.4%, recall of 98.3%, f-measure of 98.3% and incorrectly classified instance of 1.70. The CART results showed an accuracy of 98.3%, specificity of 98.3%, precision of 98.4%, recall of 98.3%, f-measure of 98.3% and incorrectly classified instance of 1.70. The time taken to build the model of ID3 is 0.05 seconds, C4.5 is 0.03 seconds and CART of 0.58 seconds. Experimental results revealed that C4.5 outperforms other classifiers and requires reasonable amount of time to build the model.Keywords: Student performance, ID3, C4.5, CART, classification, Education data minin

Staff Attendance Monitoring System using Fingerprint Biometrics

Staff Attendance System is a simple windows based attendance system that was specifically developed for small and medium scale companies. This software helps to manage the workforce and track employee time and attendance in an easier way. This software application can manage the recordings, control and monitoring of staff absence and lateness. The significance of this application is to make sure that the staff member are punctual and do their jobs on time. Currently, there is no proper system to monitor the staff attendance at some companies. Some companies still use the paper based system to store the records of the employees. With the implementation of this system, paper based system will be eliminated. This research will help the Administrator to manage recordings, monitoring and tracking the attendance of the employees. It provides an accurate time management for the employees in order to sign in and sign out their attendance. In this paper, the biometrics based Staff Attendance Monitoring System was developed using Visual Basic Programming Language as front end while Microsoft Access was used as the Database to the backend users

Prediction of Rabbit Population with Computer Application using Biotechnology

Over the decades biotechnology leading to bioinformatics has been an area of concern for scientists using Information and Communication Technology devices in different areas. Many researchers find it difficult to project the population of some species of organisms and animals.Some have devised crude methods and some have made some reasonable assumptions and thereby coming up with different conclusions. For the purpose of this research the researcher has tried to collect the total number of population for particular specie of rabbit.This was thenmodelled into an equation using an exponential function and also developed an application program with C-Sharp(C#) Programming Language which uses the exponential function to project the population of rabbit over a maximum period of ten years. This can help researchers and organizations like National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA) to build and bank on the information gotten from this process of projection. It follows that if this system is implemented with the appropriate tools that it requires, all Biotechnology Agencies can use and draw up their analysis because of its reliability and consistency

Growth performance, flock uniformity and economic indices of broiler chickens fed low crude protein diets supplemented with lysine

This study was carried out to evaluate the growth performance, flock uniformity and economic returns from feeding broiler chicken with low protein diets supplemented with lysine. One hundred and fifty unsexed day-old Abor-acre strain broiler chicks were used in a six-week feeding trial. Five experimental diets were formulated: Diet T1 which served as the control contained 22.22 % crude protein (CP) and lysine inclusion of 0.50% while diets T2 –T5 had 16.6 % CP and between 0.60-0.90 % lysine inclusion with same level of methionine. Significant differences (pEste estudio se llevó a cabo para evaluar el crecimiento, la uniformidad del lote y retornos económicos de la alimentación de pollos de engorde con dietas bajas en proteína suplementadas con lisina. Se utilizaron ciento cincuenta pollos de engorde Abor-Acre de una semana de edad, sin sexar, en un ensayo de alimentación de seis semanas. Se formularon cinco dietas experimentales: la dieta T1 que servía como control contenía 22,22 % de proteína bruta (CP) y 0,50 % de lisina; las dietas T2-T5 tenían 16,6 % de CP y entre 0,60-0,90 % de lisina con el mismo nivel de metionina (0,25 %). Se observaron diferencias significativas (

Comparative genomic variation in porcine species could lead to species-specific responses to ASF

African Swine Fever (ASF) is a highly contagious viral disease of pigs and is of utmost concern due to its presence in list A diseases by the United Nations Office International des Epizooties (OIE). It causes significant economic losses in affected countries due to resulting high mortality rates associated. In contrast, the porcine species endogenous to Africa tolerate infection. The ability of the virus to persist in one host, while killing another genetically related host implies that the disease may influence by the hosts genetic variation. This study identify genetic polymorphism among three suidae family species in susceptibility to ASFV based on five genes such as RELA, NFATCI, PPIA, PPP3CB, NKBIA. It also predicts the protein structure of each gene and draw phylogenetic trees of each gene using human as an out-group. The nucleotide and amino acid sequence (AAS) of the 5 genes of pig, warthog and Babyrus were downloaded from the National Center for Biotechnology information (NCBI) data base, United State of America and Universal protein resources (Uniprot) database, United Kingdom. Data and phylogenetic trees were constructed using MEGA7. The variation observed at position 531 in RELA gene between warthog and domestic pig may be a significant factor behind the susceptibility or tolerance to ASFV. This study could give genomic bases to the discovery of a potent vaccine for prevention, control and prophylaxis.Keywords: African Swine Fever, Pigs, Warthogs, Babirus

Target capture sequencing for the first Nigerian genotype I ASFV genome

African swine fever (ASF) is a contagious viral disease that affects domestic pigs and wild boars, causing significant economic losses globally. After the first Nigerian outbreak in 1997, there have been frequent reports of ASF in pig-producing regions in the country. To facilitate control, it is important to understand the genotype and phylogenetic relationship of ASF viruses (ASFVs). Recent genetic analysis of Nigerian ASFV isolates has revealed the presence of both genotypes I and II; this is based on analysis of a few selected genes. Phylogenetic analysis of ASFV whole genomes highlights virus origins and evolution in greater depth. However, there is currently no information on the ASFV genome from Nigerian isolates. Two ASFV-positive samples were detected during a random survey of 150 Nigerian indigenous pig samples collected in 2016. We assembled near-complete genomes of the two ASFV-positive samples using in-solution hybrid capture sequencing. The genome-wide phylogenetic tree assigned these two genomes into p72 genotype I, particularly close to the virulent Benin 97/1 strain. The two ASFVs share 99.94 and 99.92 % genomic sequence identity to Benin97/1. This provides insight into the origin and relationship of ASFV strains from Nigeria and Italy. The study reports for the first time the determination of near-complete genomes of ASFV using in-solution hybrid capture sequencing, which represents an important advance in understanding the global evolutionary landscape of ASFVs