115 research outputs found
Indigenous technology as a basis for science and technology education in junior secondary schools : a Sierra Leonean case study
No full textThis study investigates two issues: a) the usefulness of indigenous technology as an approach for teaching science and technology to junior pupils of secondary schools in Sierra Leone. b) the factors which influence its implementation. In order to carry out this investigation, the author developed a fifteen lesson module on energy, using the `coalpot', a significant indigenous technology device as centre-piece. The module was tried out in three schools in Sierra Leone, using a total of 224 pupils. Other members of the sample were experimental teachers (who taught the module) and non-experimental (who only evaluated it) and science educators. Using the triangulation method, data were collected by achievement tests, questionnaires, structured and unstructured observations and informal discussions. The results were statistically analyzed using the SPSS/PC and Minitab Computer packages. It emerged from the findings that indigenous technology is a useful approach for teaching science to junior secondary school pupils, irrespective of the problems encountered. The post-achievement test results show that on the whole, the module had a positive effect on pupils' learning. The study also shows that indigenous technology has the potential to generate pupils' interest and improve their attitudes towards science. The factors which can become barriers to the implementation of an innovation like this one, were identified and shown to be teacher- and school-related. It is recommended among other things that science education researchers, teacher trainers, curriculum developers and teachers collaborate to develop and document instructional materials based on indigenous technology. That indigenous technology be incorporated into teacher training methodology courses so that trainee teachers will have a longer period to become familiar with both the content and the teaching strategies that may be used.</p
Research trends on CAPTCHA: A systematic literature
Get PDFThe advent of technology has crept into virtually all sectors and this has culminated in automated processes making use of the Internet in executing various tasks and actions. Web services have now become the trend when it comes to providing solutions to mundane tasks. However, this development comes with the bottleneck of authenticity and intent of users. Providers of these Web services, whether as a platform, as a software or as an Infrastructure use various human interaction proof’s (HIPs) to validate authenticity and intent of its users. Completely automated public turing test to tell computer and human apart (CAPTCHA), a form of IDS in web services is advantageous. Research into CAPTCHA can be grouped into two -CAPTCHA development and CAPTCH recognition. Selective learning and convolutionary neural networks (CNN) as well as deep convolutionary neural network (DCNN) have become emerging trends in both the development and recognition of CAPTCHAs. This paper reviews critically over fifty article publications that shows the current trends in the area of the CAPTCHA scheme, its development and recognition mechanisms and the way forward in helping to ensure a robust and yet secure CAPTCHA development in guiding future research endeavor in the subject domain
Pragmatic Acts in the Inaugural Speeches of Military Heads of Government in Nigeria
No full text<p>An Inaugural speech can be described as the first official speech delivered by an individual on the assumption of any office of public trust. The inaugural speech is an important formal presentation that allows the presenter to express certain views and ideas relating to particular situations. For the presidential inaugural speech, however, we can go a step further by saying that the inaugural speech is a public piece of discourse that is usually formally presented by the president as a political office holder and which signifies the commencement of a particular administration. For a military head of government, the inaugural speech is almost in all cases, a post-coup presentation where the speaker attempts a justification of the change in government. Abaya (2008:5) defined a coup speech as “a broadcast to the nation on military intervention on the day-to-day administration of a country”. This intervention is sometimes executed through illegitimate and violent means. Thomas and Wareing (1999) argued that when people engage in politics, they make use of a wide range of linguistic choices to build up their discourse and these usually have crucial effects on shaping an ideology that will lead the people to accept their argument more easily. We can infer from the foregoing that a coup speech, being a form of communication meant for the citizens will focus on issues that are of interest to the generality of the people. As opined by Adebiyi (2006), the inaugural speech, whether it is prepared, memorised or delivered without formal preparation or notification, is geared towards motivating, mobilising, educating, informing and in some cases entertaining the target audience. It can however be argued that Adebiyi (2006) is perhaps oblivious of a salient point. This is the fact that a presidential inaugural speech, being a form of political discourse, can equally be deployed as a tool for criticism which is the case in Ademilokun (2016) where the author examined the lexical choices of President Buhari’s inaugural speech. He concluded that the lexical choices in the speech under review were meant to praise his supporters and condemn the activities of the previous governments. This shows that the inaugural speeches are not only used for motivating and mobilising as suggested by Adebiyi, but are also used to criticise and condemn previous administrations which is always the case especially in post-coup speeches where ‘military politicians’ make every effort to condemn the activities of previous regimes in order to justify the current government. This criticism can be in form of institutional or attitudinal criticism. It is therefore apt to describe the presidential inaugural speech as a comprehensive piece of discourse that addresses various aspects of a nation’s life in one clean sweep. In the views of Akinrinola (2016), presidential inaugural speeches are crafted to achieve specific objectives. This crafting therefore takes cognizance of certain factors which in turn determine the linguistic choices of the speech encoder which eventually will make him or her achieve his or her pragmatic intent in order to successfully achieve the objectives of this discourse genre. It is therefore on this basis that this study examines the pragmatic actions performed in the inaugural speeches presented by Nigeria’s military heads of government.</p>
Towards a Futuristic Educational Development in Nigeria
Full text linkMajority of the nations of t e world were colonized and went through wars at various times, but had turned around their fo unes through economic and educational reforms. In Nigeria however, there had been series of edcational reforms from: 7/6-5-4 to 6-3-3-4 and now 9-3-4 system. Similarly, the recent reform in the higher education sector which has resulted into the conversion of the nation\u27s higher techtjical educational institutions to degree awarding universities, which arose largely from the disphrity between the graduates of the two institutions in the labor market and the fallen standard of education. This paper presents a critidal review of the various educational reforms with a view to designing a viable educational model/ based on the examples of some developed and developing nations. It attempts to proffer solutioqs to some of the existing problems
Opening the ‘black box’ of national digital identity systems: another invisible border for Africans?
No full textBiometric digital identity systems have been promoted as a solution for Africa’s development challenges. By providing accurate and reliable identification of citizens, these systems are expected to enable better planning and resource allocation by states. However, this optimistic view overlooks the border logic embedded in the design and deployment of these systems. In this article, the author critically examines the assumptions and implications of biometric digital identity systems in Africa. By broadening the debate on the intersection of African ‘mobilities’, responsible innovation, and the deployment of biometric technology, the author attempt to pry open the ‘black box’ of national digital identity systems and contends that the diffusion of these systems in Africa is driven more by the Global North’s border interests than by the local populations’ development needs.
Big data stream analysis: a systematic literature review
Full text linkRecently, big data streams have become ubiquitous due to the fact that a number of
applications generate a huge amount of data at a great velocity. This made it difcult
for existing data mining tools, technologies, methods, and techniques to be applied
directly on big data streams due to the inherent dynamic characteristics of big data. In
this paper, a systematic review of big data streams analysis which employed a rigorous
and methodical approach to look at the trends of big data stream tools and technologies as well as methods and techniques employed in analysing big data streams. It
provides a global view of big data stream tools and technologies and its comparisons.
Three major databases, Scopus, ScienceDirect and EBSCO, which indexes journals and
conferences that are promoted by entities such as IEEE, ACM, SpringerLink, and Elsevier
were explored as data sources. Out of the initial 2295 papers that resulted from the
frst search string, 47 papers were found to be relevant to our research questions after
implementing the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The study found that scalability,
privacy and load balancing issues as well as empirical analysis of big data streams and
technologies are still open for further research eforts. We also found that although, signifcant research eforts have been directed to real-time analysis of big data stream not
much attention has been given to the preprocessing stage of big data streams. Only a
few big data streaming tools and technologies can do all of the batch, streaming, and
iterative jobs; there seems to be no big data tool and technology that ofers all the key
features required for now and standard benchmark dataset for big data streaming analytics has not been widely adopted. In conclusion, it was recommended that research
eforts should be geared towards developing scalable frameworks and algorithms that
will accommodate data stream computing mode, efective resource allocation strategy
and parallelization issues to cope with the ever-growing size and complexity of data
Soft Computing Techniques for Stock Market Prediction: A Literature Survey
Full text linkStock market trading is an unending investment exercise globally. It has potentials to generate high returns on investors’ investment. However, it is characterized by high risk of investment hence, having knowledge and ability to predict stock price or market movement is invaluable to investors in the stock market. Over the years, several soft computing techniques have been used to analyze various stock markets to retrieve knowledge to guide investors on when to buy or sell. This paper surveys over 100 published articles that focus on the application of soft computing techniques to forecast stock markets. The aim of this paper is to present a coherent of information on various soft computing techniques employed for stock market prediction. This research work will enable researchers in this field to know the current trend as well as help to inform their future research efforts. From the surveyed articles, it is evident that researchers have firmly focused on the development of hybrid prediction models and substantial work has also been done on the use of social media data for stock market prediction. It is also revealing that most studies have focused on the prediction of stock prices in emerging market
Real-time event detection in social media streams through semantic analysis of noisy terms
No full textAbstract Interactions via social media platforms have made it possible for anyone, irrespective of physical location, to gain access to quick information on events taking place all over the globe. However, the semantic processing of social media data is complicated due to challenges such as language complexity, unstructured data, and ambiguity. In this paper, we proposed the Social Media Analysis Framework for Event Detection (SMAFED). SMAFED aims to facilitate improved semantic analysis of noisy terms in social media streams, improved representation/embedding of social media stream content, and improved summarization of event clusters in social media streams. For this, we employed key concepts such as integrated knowledge base, resolving ambiguity, semantic representation of social media streams, and Semantic Histogram-based Incremental Clustering based on semantic relatedness. Two evaluation experiments were conducted to validate the approach. First, we evaluated the impact of the data enrichment layer of SMAFED. We found that SMAFED outperformed other pre-processing frameworks with a lower loss function of 0.15 on the first dataset and 0.05 on the second dataset. Second, we determined the accuracy of SMAFED at detecting events from social media streams. The result of this second experiment showed that SMAFED outperformed existing event detection approaches with better Precision (0.922), Recall (0.793), and F-Measure (0.853) metric scores. The findings of the study present SMAFED as a more efficient approach to event detection in social media
PCA Model For RNA-Seq Malaria Vector Data Classification Using KNN And Decision Tree Algorithm
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