49 research outputs found
Vitamin D and COVID-19 susceptibility and severity in the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative: A Mendelian randomization study.
No full textBackgroundIncreased vitamin D levels, as reflected by 25-hydroxy vitamin D (25OHD) measurements, have been proposed to protect against COVID-19 based on in vitro, observational, and ecological studies. However, vitamin D levels are associated with many confounding variables, and thus associations described to date may not be causal. Vitamin D Mendelian randomization (MR) studies have provided results that are concordant with large-scale vitamin D randomized trials. Here, we used 2-sample MR to assess evidence supporting a causal effect of circulating 25OHD levels on COVID-19 susceptibility and severity.Methods and findingsGenetic variants strongly associated with 25OHD levels in a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 443,734 participants of European ancestry (including 401,460 from the UK Biobank) were used as instrumental variables. GWASs of COVID-19 susceptibility, hospitalization, and severe disease from the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative were used as outcome GWASs. These included up to 14,134 individuals with COVID-19, and up to 1,284,876 without COVID-19, from up to 11 countries. SARS-CoV-2 positivity was determined by laboratory testing or medical chart review. Population controls without COVID-19 were also included in the control groups for all outcomes, including hospitalization and severe disease. Analyses were restricted to individuals of European descent when possible. Using inverse-weighted MR, genetically increased 25OHD levels by 1 standard deviation on the logarithmic scale had no significant association with COVID-19 susceptibility (odds ratio [OR] = 0.95; 95% CI 0.84, 1.08; p = 0.44), hospitalization (OR = 1.09; 95% CI: 0.89, 1.33; p = 0.41), and severe disease (OR = 0.97; 95% CI: 0.77, 1.22; p = 0.77). We used an additional 6 meta-analytic methods, as well as conducting sensitivity analyses after removal of variants at risk of horizontal pleiotropy, and obtained similar results. These results may be limited by weak instrument bias in some analyses. Further, our results do not apply to individuals with vitamin D deficiency.ConclusionsIn this 2-sample MR study, we did not observe evidence to support an association between 25OHD levels and COVID-19 susceptibility, severity, or hospitalization. Hence, vitamin D supplementation as a means of protecting against worsened COVID-19 outcomes is not supported by genetic evidence. Other therapeutic or preventative avenues should be given higher priority for COVID-19 randomized controlled trials
Hauntings and the Legacies of Colonialism and Slavery in Olumide Popoola's Works
No full textOlumide Popoola is a German Nigerian author whose works vary in genre from short
fiction to poetry and theater. Popoola was raised travelling between Germany and Nigeria with
her German mother and Nigerian father, but, since leaving Germany in 2002, she lives in
London and teaches undergraduate Creative Writing classes at Goldsmiths University of London
(Deutsche Welle). She attended East London University to complete a Master’s Degree in
Writing: Imaginative Practice in 2009; after receiving her Master’s, Popoola stayed at the
University of East London for her PhD which she completed in 2015. Despite having been raised
in Germany, Popoola writes in English, citing the fact that her everyday language is English, so it
“is the sensible choice” (Layne). In an email interview with Dr. Priscilla Layne, she states that
because of the lack of interest in creative writing by Afro-German authors in Germany as she
was beginning of her career, it made more sense for her to begin her career elsewhere;
however, despite writing in English, her earlier works were all published by German publishers.
Her first published work, this is not about sadnesss (2010), was written originally as her
Master’s Thesis in Creative Writing and was edited by Sharon Otoo, a prominent Afro-German
writer. Her second published work is a short play entitled Also by Mail (2013) and was also
edited by Otoo. The last work that will be discussed in this thesis is a collection of poetry
published in an anthology of works by people of color in Germany and their experiences
entitled Arriving in the Future (2014). Popoola’s more recent work are two novels: Breach was
co-written with Annie Holmes and published by a British press, and When We Speak of Nothing
(2017) was published by a Nigerian press.Bachelor of Art
Determinants of training needs of youths in broiler chicken production in Osun State, Nigeria and implications for extension workers
No full textSaabunud / Received 10.10.2019 ; Aktsepteeritud / Accepted 17.12.2019 ; Avaldatud veebis / Published online 25.12.2019 ; Vastutav autor / Corresponding author: Mary Oluwaseun Olumide-Oyaniyi e-mail: [email protected] study identified the factors influencing the training needs of youth in broiler chicken production and drew implications for extension workers in Osun State, Nigeria. Data were collected from 221 youth farmers through a purposive sampling procedure and a snowball sampling technique. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation, regression and factor analytical techniques. Findings reveal that 43.4% of the respondents were between the ages of 26 and 30 years, 26.7% were between the ages of 31 and 35 years, 19.0% were above 36 years of age while 10.9% of the respondents were less than 25 years of age. Majority (60.2%) of the respondents were males while others 39.8% were females. In addition, 40.7% of the respondents had at least three years of broiler chicken production experience, 34.8% had four to six years of experience, 17.6% had seven to nine years of experience and the remaining 6.8% had more than 10 years of broiler chicken production experience. In addition, vast Majority 86.0% of the respondents raise below 200 birds at the time of this research, 8.1% raise between 201 and 300 birds, 5.0% raised above 401 birds while the remaining 0.9% of the respondents raised between 301 and 400 birds. Furthermore, majority (60.2%) of the respondents have not received any training in poultry farming in the past one year while 39.8% of respondents received training between two to five times in the past one year. In addition, respondents were highly in need of training in five standard practices involved in broiler chicken production, which are: growing management / daily routine management, poultry housing, marketing of birds, litter management and equipment. Two groups of factors; income factors (33.2%) and training related factors (21.0%) that were isolated contributed 54.2% to the training needs of youth in broiler chicken production in Osun State, Nigeria
Marshall Stability and Flow of Lime-modified Asphalt Concrete
No full textAbstractThe purpose of highway pavement is to provide smooth surface over which vehicles can move safely from one place to another. The two major types of pavement (flexible and rigid) have been mostly selected for the highway pavement to fulfil this function and they must be capable of transferring the wheel load to the subgrade such that its bearing capacity is not exceeded. However, the flexible pavements normally show defects like rutting, fatigue failure, low skid resistance and so on, causing the pavement to fail before its design life. Therefore, it is important to modify the asphalt concrete to make it more resistant to rutting and fatigue failure. Lime-modified asphalt has been observed to have better resistance to rutting, cracking and stripping, as well as having improved aging behavior. Therefore, this study looks at the Marshall properties of hydrated lime-modified asphalt mixture and the conventional asphalt. The conventional asphalt mixture was made using 10% mineral filler while for the lime-modified asphalt, the mineral filler was replaced with hydrated lime. The bitumen with penetration grade 60/70 was used and the content varied from 5.0 to 7.5%. Marshall stability and flow tests were carried out on the samples. The results show that the Marshall stability for the asphalt concrete with mineral filler ranges from 5.89 – 7.90 kN while that with hydrated lime ranges from 5.9 to 8.2 kN. The flow values for the asphalt concrete with mineral filler range from 2.3 mm – 3.3 mm, while that with hydrated lime range from 2.4 – 3.4 mm. The optimum bitumen content for both mixtures was found to be 6.5%. The stability and flow for the mixture with mineral filler were 7.9 kN and 3.3 mm, respectively, while for the mixtures with hydrated lime they were 8.2 kN and 3.4 mm, respectively. This indicates the replacement of the mineral filler with lime improves the stability of the mixtures, while there was slight increase in the flow of the mixture with hydrated lime. The slight increase in stability and flow values may be attributed to the complete replacement of the mineral filler with lime and the high lime content used in the study. More studies are being carried out to evaluate the Marshall properties for mixture with the mineral filler partially replaced with lime and for varying proportions of the lime content in the asphalt mixture
Intimate partner violence during COVID-19 restrictions: a study of 30 countries from the I-SHARE Consortium
No full textThe author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: JT received support from the US NIH (NIAID K24AI143471, UH3HD096929).Campbell L., Tan R.K.J., Uhlich M., Francis J.M., Mark K., Miall N., Eleuteri S., Gabster A., Shamu S., Plášilová L., Kemigisha E., Olumide A., Kosana P., Hurtado-Murillo F., Larsson E.C., Cleeve A., Calvo González S., Perrotta G., Fernández Albamonte V., Blanco L., Schröder J., Adebayo A., Hendriks J., Saltis H., Marks M., Wu D., Morroni C., Esho T., Briken P., Hlatshwako T.G., Ryan R., Farid N.D.N., Gomez Bravo R., Van de Velde S., Tucker J.D
A mode matching analysis of rectangular dielectric discontinuities in metal waveguides applicable to characterisation of liquids
No full textIn this paper we present a generalised scattering matrix approach using mode matching to analyse a generic case of a rectangular dielectric sample and sample holder partially filling a metal waveguide; as encountered in liquid measurements. The results for both samples having real and complex permittivity values, for varying sample thickness are presented and compared to that obtained by a commercial finite element method software
Machine Learning Approaches to Improve Security and Performance Monitoring of IoT Devices
No full textThe author has granted permission for their work to be available to the general public.In this current era of Internet of Things (IoT), data privacy and security of Internet enabled devices has become a major concern of many users and device manufacturers. Massive amount of data is being generated by these IoT devices and there might be possibilities of user's information being exposed without any privacy protection. The rate of data transfer, size, kind of information transmitted and secure channels used by these IoT devices are of utmost importance and demand more exploratory research. Moreover, the "always on" and "always connected" attributes of IoT devices necessitate working condition as well as performance monitoring. Unexpected downtime and sudden breakdown of IoT devices can be extremely destructive especially for safety-critical systems. Condition monitoring and health state estimation are vital techniques for maintaining high reliability. Effective approach to investigate security and privacy of wide range of IoT devices needs to be developed. Using a proxy server, we investigate the data being transmitted by six representative IoT devices, analyze the data and propose an intelligent approach for proxy connection monitoring. Our results show that user's information and devices' identities were being leaked in our experiments. The applied neural network classifier uses network connection information to effectively detect proxy connections and performs better than Support Vector Machine as well as logistic regression models that were developed. We further propose a robust proxy detection mechanism suit-able for stochastic and deterministic malicious alteration of connection information. The approach is based on Deep Q-Network and Generative Adversarial Network. For condition monitoring, we propose a lightweight model operable on edge device for Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation. The model aptly utilizes the time series sensor data and successfully predicts the remaining useful life. Towards a distributed estimator in smart home environment, we also developed a model based on Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural network for estimating energy utilization. These research works demonstrate excellent results and contribution to knowledge. Our work addressed two major challenges in IoT, namely security and performance monitoring. The various data driven approaches and methods that we developed can be applied to enhance data security and performance monitoring in IoT. Security mechanisms to detect unsolicited proxy connection, anomalies or cyber attacks have been proposed. Furthermore, our techniques for estimating remaining useful life and energy utilization in smart home environment are effective. Efficient method for distributed learning and use case are also proposed to illustrate its feasibility. These are approaches that can improve reliability, performance monitoring and time-critical data driven computation.Computer Scienc
Mixed connective tissue disease complicated by heart failure in Ile-Ife, Nigeria: management challenges in a resource-limited economy
No full textOladapo A Adewuya,1 Rasaaq A Adebayo,1 Adeola I Ajibade,2 Gbenga J Odunlami,2 Anthony O Akintomide,1 Suraj A Ogunyemi,1 Olufemi E Ajayi,1 Adebola O Adetiloye,3 Adeleye D Omisore,4 Oladipo A Olanipekun,1 Adeyinka O Owolabi,1 Ifeoluwa Amjo,1 Olumide A Akinyele,1 Abayomi O Bamgboje,1 Michael O Balogun1 1Department of Cardiology, 2Department of Rheumatology, 3Department of Pulmonology, 4Department of Radiology, Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospitals Complex, Ile-Ife, Osun, Nigeria Background: Mixed connective tissue disease (MCTD; also known as Sharp’s syndrome) is a rare autoimmune inflammatory disorder characterized by high titer of U1 ribonucleoprotein (U1RNP) antibody and clinical and serological overlap of systemic lupus erythematosus, systemic sclerosis, and polymyositis. The diagnosis is based on clinical and serological factors in criteria such as Alarcon-Segovia, Khan, Kusakawa, and Sharps. Cardiac disease can be a complication of connective tissue disease (CTD). There are few reports in Africa. Aims: To present MCTD as underlying cause of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction and highlight challenges of investigations and treatment. Objectives: To highlight the first case in our center and discuss the cardiac, respiratory, and rheumatologic management. Patient and methods: We present a 52-year-old woman with 3 weeks history of productive cough with whitish sputum, severe dyspnea, orthopnea, paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea, right sided abdominal pain, leg swellings, a one year history of recurrent fever, Raynaud’s phenomenon, small joint swellings and deformities with pain in both hands. Results: On examination there was microstomia, tethered forehead and lower eyelid skin, tender swelling of the interphalangeal joints and arthritis mutilans. Laboratory findings showed estimated glomerular filtration rate <60 mL/kg/min/1.73 m2, U1RNP antibody levels were eight times upper limit of normal, elevated rheumatoid factor, speckled antinuclear antibody pattern, negative anticentromere antibody, anti Scl-70 and anticyclic citrullinated peptide. Chest X-ray/CT revealed pulmonary fibrosis. Echocardiography findings showed reduced ejection fraction of 40%, elevated pulmonary arterial pressure at rest of 60.16 mmHg. The patient showed improvement on antifailure drugs, but prednisolone was stopped for sudden reversal of previously controlled stage 2 hypertension (HTN), and the patient was discharged in a stable condition. Difficulties ensued in obtaining prompt definite results due to the unavailability of serologic tests in the hospital, and the tests were done outside the state and country. Conclusion: Identifying MCTD is critical, especially in patients requiring steroids that may worsen systemic HTN and heart failure. There is a need to have definitive investigative facilities for such patients in hospitals. Keywords: mixed connective tissue disorder, U1RNP, arthritis mutilans PAH, HFrEF, prednisolon
Paleoenvironments and Hydrocarbon Potential of Upper Cretaceous Shales in Agbabu-1 Well, Dahomey Basin – Insight from Geochemistry and Foraminifera Paleontology
No full textUpper Cretaceous shales partially exposed in the northern fringes of the Dahomey Basin are well developed in the subsurface in Southwestern part of the basin where Agbau-1 well is sited. These shales were evaluated in respect to their paleoenvironments and potentials for hydrocarbon using foraminiferal assemblages, biomarkers and Rock Eval pyrolysis studies. The dominance of benthonic foraminifera species suggests a shallow marine environment and high percentage of calcareous to arenaceous benthic www.eujournal.org 195foraminifera indicate high water salinity and hypersline environment. Dysoxic oxygen condition is also prevalent probably because most of the benthic foraminifera recovered are epifauna that live in a reduced oxygen condition. 1.90 wt%, 244 mgHC/gTOC and 429℃ average values of total organic carbon, hydrogen index and Tmax reveal that the Upper Cretaceous shales have relatively fair to good organic matter, predominantly Type II-III kerogen and currently immature. Though three is a trend of an increase in maturity down the hole. All the steranes have uniform distributions (C27>C28>C29), suggesting a relatively higher input from the marine red algae and a low level of land plant contribution to the source organic matter. Pristane/phytane ratios and C29/C27 steranes confirmed the organic matter type to be a Type II/III and anoxic source rock depositional condition as well as a reducing diagenetic system in the sediment water column. The Upper Cretaceous shales in Dahomey Basin can be targeted for exploration as an unconventional petroleum resource
