84 research outputs found
ASSESSMENT OF TAPIOCA STARCHES OBTAINED AFTER DIFFERENT STEEPING PERIODS AS BINDERS IN A PARACETAMOL TABLET FORMULATION
No full textAbstract Starches obtained after steeping Tapioca tubers for different periods were each evaluated as a binding agent in paracetamol tablet formulations in comparison with corn starch British Pharmacopoeia (BP). Compressional properties were analyzed using density measurements and the compression equations of Heckel and Kawakita as assessment parameters, while the mechanical properties of the tablets were assessed with the use of the tensile strength (TS) and the brittle fracture index (BFI) of the tablets. Formulations containing longer steeping period starches as binding agent showed a slower onset of plastic deformation -high value of P Y , and a higher amount of deformation during compression-low value of P K . Both P Y and P K were affected by the concentration of the starch binders. The TS of the paracetamol tablets increased with the increase in the binder concentration and with the subsequent increase in starch steeping period while the BFI of the tablets decreased accordingly. Starch obtained after 72 h steeping of Tapioca tubers showed a similar result with corn starch BP. The results generally suggest that the steeping period would influence the activity of a starch binder in a formulation. Rezumat Lucrarea prezintă studii efectuate asupra amidonului de Tapioca, utilizat ca şi agent de aglutinare în formularea tabletelor cu paracetamol. Proprietăţile de compresie au fost analizate cu ajutorul ecuaţiilor Heckel şi Kawakita. Proprietăţile mecanice ale tabletelor au fost evaluate prin determinarea rezistenţei la "tensile strength" şi "brittle fracture index"
Solid Verifiable Credentials
No full textThis electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 63-66).Credentials are an integral part of our lives, as they express our capabilities and enable access to restricted services and benefits. In the early 2010s, the Verifiable Claims Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) proposed a specification for what is now the Verifiable Credentials Data Model. This living specification, which is still in development, outlines a cogent framework for the issuance, storage, presentation, and verification of credentials on the Web. Many of the leading Verifiable Credentials projects leverage Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), potentially compromising Web interoperability and sometimes exposing otherwise personal data. SolidVC is a decentralized Verifiable Credentials platform built with the open protocols of the Web. It is implemented on top of Solid, a Web framework developed at MIT in 2016 that allows decentralized applications to interact with personal user data to provide services in an access controlled environment.by Kayode Yadilichi Ezike.M. Eng.M.Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienc
Novice teachers: the challenges, supports, and effective strategies
No full textThis study used survey research to investigate the challenges novice teachers experience, the support they receive, and the leadership strategies that are implemented to support them. The research was conducted in Manitoba, Canada. Quantitative methods and convenience sampling were used to explore the research questions that guided this study: What challenges do beginning teachers perceive they encounter in their first years of teaching practice? What supports do new teachers report they receive? What strategies do novice teachers perceive are the most effective in supporting them? What challenges do school principals perceive novice teachers face? What strategies do principals use to support novice teachers? A total of 41 novice teachers and 31 school principals in Manitoba, participated in this study. The majority of the novice teacher participants were female and the majority of principal respondents were male – statistics which reflect the gender demographics of teachers and principals in Canada. The areas that novice teacher participants found most challenging were differentiating instruction, planning and preparation, accessing teaching resources, working with students with Individual Education Plans (IEPs), and assessing student learning. With regard to gender, male novice teachers found differentiating instruction and organizing the classroom significantly more challenging than did their female colleagues. Beginning teachers in rural/small town areas perceived isolation and teaching multi-age classrooms to be a greater challenge than their colleagues who taught in urban/suburban schools. With regard to teaching experience, teachers with less than two years in the classroom perceived isolation to be a significantly greater challenge than colleagues with 2-3 years teaching experience. When considering school size, teachers in smaller schools with less than 200 students considered isolation to be a greater challenge than their colleagues in larger schools; however, teachers in larger schools found planning and preparation and developing collegial relations a greater challenge than those in small schools. With regard to the areas in which novice teachers reported they received most support, the areas most supported corresponded with the areas they felt to be the greatest challenges, with the exception of differentiated instruction, which was their greatest challenge, yet was not well supported. Overall, female novice teachers perceived higher levels of support than their male colleagues. Teachers in rural/small town areas felt more supported than colleagues in urban/suburban locations. Novice teachers valued support programs such as mentoring, induction, and professional development but indicated that not all these programs were available to them. Principals identified similar challenges for novice teachers as did the teacher respondents, with the exception of planning and preparation, an area that challenged beginning teachers but was perceived as less of a challenge by their principals. Principals reported greater availability of mentoring programs than did novice teachers. The recommendations for the study included specific areas for professional development and greater provision of research-based mentoring and induction programs.Includes bibliographical references (pages 110-121)."In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education.
The African development crisis: an evaluation of the ECA's policy responses 1975-1993, 1995
No full textMost literature on development in Africa readily assumes that every leader is interested in development and that when they proclaim their commitment to development and fashion their impressive development agendas, they are ready to deliver. Those in this school of thought seem to forget the primacy of power and its conflict with other goals. This is what this study is about. This research therefore, presents a critical evaluation of the alternative development strategies which have been proposed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UN-ECA) in conjunction with the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and other Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as solutions to the Africa development problems and why, despite this concerted effort, no significant changes have occurred in Africa. To put this in proper perspective, some of the major EGA regional blue-prints since 1975 to date have been reviewed. The Economic initiatives appear in Chapter IV and the Political and Social initiatives appear in Chapter V. The primary source of the materials reviewed in this research is the UN-ECA supported by other secondary sources like the UN-Africa Recovery based in New York and the OAU, based in Addis Ababa. Our finding revealed that there are two major reasons for the abandonment of these initiatives: 1. The incompatibilities between the pursuit of development on the one hand, and the quest for political survival by the leaders on the other hand. 2. The reproduction of existing forms of economic and political domination by the ruling class. The researcher therefore comes to the conclusion that if the continent is to recover and confront the 21st century unencumbered by debt, hunger, poverty, disease and ignorance, it needs leaders who are strong, self-confident and generators of great ideas who are able to command the loyalty of their people and who are totally committed to the development of their countries. Africa's salvation, this researcher believes, lies in the hands of Africans
Myth and Social Consciousness in Wole Soyinka’s Alapata Apata
No full textThe study of myths—their relevance and importance—has always generated interest among scholars over the ages. After the initial engagements before the twentieth century when most interventions, from scholars such as Xenophanes, Plato and Euhemerus, pronounced myths as intangible, many writers today have continued to use myth as an anchor of their works. In Africa, writers like Wole Soyinka have deployed myths in the interrogation of crises in the postcolonial space. Since the publication of his seminal work, Myth, Literature and the African World (1992), which laid out the essences of primordial forms in his Yoruba tradition, Soyinka has continued to deploy the capacities of those primordial “literary” forms, particularly Ogun, in his interrogation and interventions on diverse conditions in the African landscape. Using Alapata Apatata, Soyinka’s latest play, where the issues of culture and its renaissance, survival and politics in his home country generate great concern, this article re-examines the playwright’s ambivalent attraction to myth and its use to intervene in the diverse social contradictions in the postcolonial space. The author, after establishing the link between Ogun and Alaba, the protagonist in the play, identifies Soyinka’s paradigm shift in a new twist that sees Ogun in the comedy terrain. The conclusion of the paper draws on Soyinka’s “mythmaking” or “mythbreaking” in the play in a way that conceptualises the evolutionary trend in the playwright’s exploration of Ogun
Electoral Behaviour in Ekiti 2014 Governorship Election in Nigeria
No full textThe June 21, 2014 governorship election in Ekiti State, South West Nigeria, was adjudged to be free and fair.
However, the election was unique in the sense that the incumbent governor, Kayode Fayemi lost in all the 16
local government areas of the state, while the winner, Ayodele Fayose, was a former governor impeached in
2006 on account of corruption. This paper examines what informed the political behaviour of the Ekiti people in
this particular election. The paper relies on newspaper commentaries, as well as interviews conductedby the
author with a few voters two days after the election. The paper offers sufficient reasons why the so called “power
of incumbency” did not work in favour of the APC candidate in the June 21 Ekiti election
Floristic indicators of tropical landuse systems: Evidence from mining areas in Southwestern Nigeria
No full textAbstractMost forests in the tropics have not only been reduced in size but have also experienced forest degradation. The delicate balance of the components of the forest ecosystem has been altered largely by the landuse systems which have resulted in the disappearance of some species and the introduction of new ones. In order to understand the influence of human disturbance caused by artisanal mining on plant biodiversity and the physical environment, this study assessed changes in vegetation characteristics using plant functional groups, such as invasive, pioneer and understory species. The study was conducted at two sites in two Southwestern states of Nigeria, Itagunmodi in Atakumosa West Local Government Area of Osun State and Olode in Oluyole Local Government Area of Oyo State. Complete enumerations of woody, non-woody and herbaceous plant species were carried out in 20 m by 20 m plots selected using stratified random sampling as representative of landuse classes: freshly mined (<6 months), abandoned mine (>6 months) and a control plot (secondary forest). The results showed that the control plot in Itagunmodi had undergone degradation as indicated by the presence of Alchornea laxiflora, Geophilia obvallata, Musa sapientum,Elaeis guineensis and Keetia hispida. However, if left undisturbed, it has the potential of regeneration back to its original state because of its woody tree species composition and lianas (Triclisia gilletii). In addition the forest soils in the mines had been exposed to direct insolation for a long period, and the soil structure and texture have been affected, consequently altering the viability of the seed bank. Poaceae and Papilionoideae were the most common in the freshly mined plots while invasive species were the most common in abandoned mined plots. In conclusion, the floristic composition in the mining sites has been altered and there was no clear evidence that regrowth would bring restoration of the lost ecosystem services
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
Emerging Issues in Compensation Valuation for Oil Spillage in the Niger Delta Area of Nigeria
No full textAbstract: Oil spillage often impacts substantial land area with grave consequences on the vegetation, economic crops/trees, aquatic life, and the entire eco-system. The impact of oil spills is often widespread and could persists for several years with attendant adverse repercussions on both the health and means of livelihood of people living within the impacted area. For this and other reasons, claims arising from oil spillage often run into billions of naira (N) [1US$=N165]. Given the magnitude of the consequential loss and claim, the onus is on the claimant to produce credible evidence to prove that he actually suffered the nature and extent of the injury alleged. This paper reviewed certain fundamental errors that have become commonplace among Nigerian valuers in the discharge of their role of assisting the court to arrive at a just compensation payable for oil spillage in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria. The data used were obtained from valuation reports which the author was privileged to critique as a consultant to a major oil exploration and marketing company in Nigeria. it was found that most of the valuation reports contained flagrant errors and fell short of best practices because less than the required effort is devoted to prosecuting this somewhat complex and highly technical valuation; and more specifically, little attention is paid to the provisions of relevant laws and the standards prescribed by valuation regulatory bodies, which are usually the basis for all statutory valuations
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