1,720,954 research outputs found
Emerging Issues in Compensation Valuation for Oil Spillage in the Niger Delta Area of Nigeria
Get PDFAbstract: 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
Improving the equity component of the Lagos State Land Use Charge (2018) for enhanced property tax yields / Gabriel Kayode Babawale
Get PDFProperty tax has remained a subject of recurrent debate amongst policy makers, scholars, public officials, real estate valuers, and other stakeholders, virtually everywhere over the years. The contention centres on issues such as the tax base, tax incidence, efficiency, and particularly, equity or fairness, among others. Qualities like ease of collection, difficulty of avoidance, accountability, and transparency etc., that ordinarily mark out property tax as a good tax in principle, are often compromised by controversial policies and mal-administration, particularly the latter. The new Lagos State Land Use Charge2018 (LUC, 2018) came into force effective January, 2018. Ina similar version that its immediate predecessor, the Land Use Charge2001 (LUC, 2001), attracted spontaneous and widespread protests on promulgation, the criticisms and protests that greeted the passage LUC (2018)has been vehement and remained unabated until the government was forced, like it did with the erstwhile law, to succumb to substantial but arbitrary reductions in rates and allowances across board (at two different times to date) but without a formal amendment to the law; an exact replica of what transpired under the erstwhile law and which opened it to abuse and arbitrary implementation with its compliance and revenue yields implications. The last of these reductions which took place in August saw a whopping 50%, and 25% cut in assessed rates on commercial properties and industrial properties, respectively. This study employed the doctrinal research methodology whereby the valuation or assessment aspect of the LUC (2018) was diagnosed with a view to finding amicable resolutions to the equity problem that virtually crippled the effectiveness of LUC (2001) over its seventeen years of existence and is already threatening the survival of the new LUC (2018)
A valuation framework for assessing compensation arising from oil spills in the Niger delta area of Nigeria / Gabriel Kayode Babawale and Titilayo Ukabam
Get PDFBoth empirical and anecdotal evidences suggest that valuers in the study area do not generally follow appropriate valuation procedure particularly when assessing compensation for environmental pollution arising from oil spills. This abuse of the valuation process, according to a number of extant studies, is largely responsible for widespread incoherent, inconsistent and controversial compensation assessment with its numerous potential socio-economic repercussions for a nation that oil revenue is her economic mainstay. This study is based exclusively on secondary data drawn from results of extant studies, valuation reports, relevant statutes and civil laws including several years of experience of one of the authors as expert witnesses in cases relating to compensation for oil spills in the study area. The paper is particularly written in response to Babawale (2013) which observed certain fundamental procedural deficiencies in valuation for compensation with “potentially grave repercussion for the integrity and the future of the valuation profession in the study area.” To redress the observed deficiencies and save the profession from further embarrassment, the study provides practitioners with an institutional perspective; a purpose-designed procedural framework that reflects and addresses the peculiarities of valuation for compensation for oil spills. Besides contributing to the recurrent debate on the vexed subject of compensation for oil spills and filling up part of the apparent wide gap presently existing in the body of knowledge particularly in Nigeria, the eight-step valuation process proffered is expected to boost valuers’ confidence and improve the reliability of valuation for compensation in the study area. The ultimate goal is overall improvement in the practice of valuation for compensation in the study area in particular, and Nigeria as a whole. This is expected to minimize the costs of protracted court cases including the contention and restiveness that is often associated with compensation matters in the study area
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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