Lack of Infrastructure as a Challenge to the Actualization of Vision 2020 in Nigeria

The study highlighted the importance of required infrastructures such as energy as a panacea to the realization of the objectives and goals of Vision 2020 in Nigeria. With the dearth of infrastructures, the move towards stability and consolidation in the polity may not be feasible. In the light of these, the importance of vision 20:2020 as a catalyst to the industrial development of the country and the placement of the nation in a central location within the comity of nations becomes imperative. It is in this instance that the millennium development goals (mdg) become realizable and of relevance in the achievement of the macro- economic objectives of government. Consequently ,the need to be well positioned in the provision of social amenities for the benefit of the citizens becomes a - must do for managers at all levels of governance and this determines to a reasonable extent the way forward for economic and technological breakthrough of the less developed economies such as Nigeri

The Impact of Liberalized Financial System on Savings, Investment and Growth in Nigeria

For the past twenty years, an enhanced financial sectoral deregulation has been a major economic tool in the agenda of most less developed economies and Nigeria is no exception. The discouraging level of growth with reference to the savings and investment culture of the people and government involvement in these economies has call to question whether financial sector liberalization have an impact on savings and investment in the economy and by extension on the level of growth and development of such economies. This study attempted to take a cursory look at the issue by examining the impact of financial system liberalization on savings and investment and by extension growth and development in Nigeria between 1997 and 2008. Some of the policy recommendations centred on the government creating an enabling environment for private investment to thrive. This will go a long way in helping to promote private investment with significant benefits in the long run for growth and development to the advantage of the citizenry and the economy at larg

Intercropping Sunflower with Soyabeans Enhances Total Crop Productivity

There is a need to develop sustainable and productive cropping systems for edible vegetable oilseeds in tropical Africa. Field trials were conducted during the late cropping season (July–Nov.) of 2001 and 2002 to determine the grain yields, and other yield attributes of sunflower and soyabeans and their productivity under monocropping and intercropping. Three sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) varieties (a local adapted var. Funtua and two exotic varieties Isaanka and Record from Argentina) and five improved, high yielding soyabean (Glycine max (L.) Merrill) varieties: TGx 1448-2E (late), TGx 1440-1E (late), TGx 1019-2EB (medium), TGx 1740-2F (early) and TGx 1485-1D (early maturing) were used. Funtua had significantly greater head weight and diameter, achene number and weight per head than Isaanka and Record during the dry and relatively hot cropping season of 2001. Cropping system significantly reduced soyabean grain yield in intercropping, relative to monocropping, except when soyabean was intercropped with Isaanka in 2001 and Record in 2002. All yield attributes of both crops exhibited significant positive relationship with grain yields, except height to the lowest pod of soyabean. TGx 1448-2E and TGx 1440-1E intercropped with Isaanka and Record had average grain yield of 1043 and 1081 kg ha–1 and land equivalent ratios (LER) of 1.47 and 1.58, respectively. It is recommended that intercropped combination of TGx 1448-2E/Isaanka and TGx 1440-1E/Record be used to improve yields of vegetable oilseeds

Nigerian Stock Exchange and Economic Development

The need to critically analyze the efficiency of capital market on the Nigerian economy for the period between 1979 and 2008 as a reference point for developing economies is the bedrock of this work. The results indicate that the stock market indeed contributes to economic growth as all variables conformed to expectation. The Nigerian Stock Exchange has not been having the best of times as an aftermath of the global financial crisis after an unprecedented surge in returns on investment which has resulted in a continuous downturn in market capitalization. Multiple regression method of econometric analysis was used for the work. The major findings revealed a negative relationship between the market capitalization and the Gross Domestic Product as well as a negative relationship between the turnover ratio and the Gross Domestic Product while a positive relationship was observed between the all-share index and the Gross Domestic Product. These findings led to some policy formulations aimed at an improved and developed market for potential gain to the benefit of rational investors even across national borders

A rule dynamics approach to event detection in Twitter with its application to sports and politics

The increasing popularity of Twitter as social network tool for opinion expression as well as informa- tion retrieval has resulted in the need to derive computational means to detect and track relevant top- ics/events in the network. The application of topic detection and tracking methods to tweets enable users to extract newsworthy content from the vast and somehow chaotic Twitter stream. In this paper, we ap- ply our technique named Transaction-based Rule Change Mining to extract newsworthy hashtag keywords present in tweets from two different domains namely; sports (The English FA Cup 2012) and politics (US Presidential Elections 2012 and Super Tuesday 2012). Noting the peculiar nature of event dynamics in these two domains, we apply different time-windows and update rates to each of the datasets in order to study their impact on performance. The performance effectiveness results reveal that our approach is able to accurately detect and track newsworthy content. In addition, the results show that the adaptation of the time-window exhibits better performance especially on the sports dataset, which can be attributed to the usually shorter duration of football events

Improving the food sovereignty in Africa – an Activity Theory approach

This article presents a new approach to the problem of food sovereignty in Africa using an Activity Theory approach. Undernourishment in Africa is big reaching 232.5 million citizens in 2015. Sufficient food sovereignty can’t be reached because of the weak food-producing abilities in Africa. Smallholder sector can’t compete with highly subsidized Northern farmers. Present intensive agriculture is causing environmental pollution and occupational hazards for the workers. Organic agriculture brings benefits - more nutritious diet, job creation and reduced health risk caused by pesticides. Small holder family farmers could double their harvest in a decade if converting to more agro-ecological production like in organic agriculture. There is an urgent need for the governmental interventions impeding selling or renting of land and natural resources to foreign countries and companies. The change of legislation is necessary to increase the private land owning of smallholders. More sustainable trade policy should be introduced to diminish the excessive export of food. Education of the African citizens is necessary to reduce the food wastes and to boost the fairness and sustainability in the food chains including holistic organic system which is actively contributing to all the 17 the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs)

Organic fertilizers improve the growth, seed quality and yield of newly released soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merrill) varieties in the tropics

Soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merrill) yield in tropical Africa remains below 1t/ha partly because most growers rarely use beneficial organic soil amendments on degraded tropical soils. Therefore, filed trials were conducted during the late cropping seasons (July – Nov.) of 2015 and 2016 on the organic research plots of the Institute of Food Security, Environmental Resources and Agricultural Research, Nigeria (7o 23´ N, 3o 39´ E, altitude 139 m above sea level) the trials evaluated the agronomic response of five recently released soybean varieties (TGx 1448-2E, TGx 1440-1E, TGx 1740-2F, TGx 1987-62F and TGx 1835-10E) to the application of three commercial organic fertilizers (Aleshinloye Grade B, Organo-Farm and Gateway) and a control. The trials were laid out in randomized complete block design (RCBD) in a 5 × 4 factorial arrangement and replicated three times. Data were collected on growth parameters, yield and yield attributes, and seed quality. Significant (P<0.05; F-Test) varietal difference was recorded for aboveground plant weight, grain filling period, height at physiological maturity, number and weight of pods per plant, number of branches and, seed yield and quality in both years. Application of organic fertilizers significantly (P<0.05; F-Test) increased aboveground plant weight, number of branches, pods, weight of seeds per plant, seed yield and quality in both years relative to the control treatment, except oil content and seed yield in 2016. The three organic fertilizers appear appropriate for soybean cultivation since soybeans grown on treated plots produced seed yield above 1/ton in both contrasting years of experimentation

A survey of data mining techniques for social media analysis

Social network has gained remarkable attention in the last decade. Accessing social network sites such as Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn and Google+ through the internet and the web 2.0 technologies has become more affordable. People are becoming more interested in and relying on social network for information, news and opinion of other users on diverse subject matters. The heavy reliance on social network sites causes them to generate massive data characterised by three computational issues namely; size, noise and dynamism. These issues often make social network data very complex to analyse manually, resulting in the pertinent use of computational means of analysing them. Data mining provides a wide range of techniques for detecting useful knowledge from massive datasets like trends, patterns and rules [44]. Data mining techniques are used for information retrieval, statistical modelling and machine learning. These techniques employ data pre-processing, data analysis, and data interpretation processes in the course of data analysis. This survey discusses different data mining techniques used in mining diverse aspects of the social network over decades going from the historical techniques to the up-to-date models, including our novel technique named TRCM. All the techniques covered in this survey are listed in the Table.1 including the tools employed as well as names of their authors