Archives-December  

Any straightjacket formula, for a distributive justice in any given community or system is difficult to be evolved. And when the question is of international community, the task goes even more difficult, or at times nearly impossible. Any system to be fair and just has to work with the notion of ‘universal equalities with fair distribution of resources’ immaterial of the birth and power of the people in the society. But the inequalities between the developed and developing nations have given rise to different facets of distributive justice. When one talks about the problem of profit sharing of the Indigenous communities as to their Tradition Knowledge, this sounds to be an economic issue. But the reality is that it engulfs various social, cultural and political concerns of the distribution of ‘materials’.To convert the traditional knowledge and cultural heritage of the indigenous people into definitions of patents, copyrights, trademarks, personality, and trade secrets is to ignore that traditional knowledge and cultural heritage that identify an indigenous people and makes a mockery of their struggle for freedom and self-determination. Their struggle for self-determination has the symbiotic benefits of maintaining cultural cohesion and the protection of the greater public welfare. So the paper concentrates upon the distribution of honours and materials in a justified manner especially in context of indigenous people.

Ethnic conflict is a worldwide issue that has challenged many countries since the second half of the twentieth century in particular. As multi-ethnic country Iran, which is positioned at the center of an ethnic conflict area namely the Middle East, has experienced many ethnic conflicts since the formation of the modern nation state in 1906, and especially after Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979. The main ethnic groups involved in these conflicts are Kurds, Turkmen, Arabs, Baluchs and Azeries. Since the Revolution, Iran had attempted to quarrel the ethnic conflict severely. When Khatami took power, however, he behaved peacefully towards minorities and ethnic tensions eased. Based on the theory that states duplicate their domestic patterns of behavior in their inter-state relations, the paper intends to examine this theory in the case of Iran during Khatami’s administration. The article concludes that when Khatami came to office, he attempted to deal with the ethnic groups on the basis of democratic values. He extended these values to Iran’s foreign policy arena which led to an improvement in relations between Iran and other countries. In other words, he could replicate internal peaceful policy in Iran’s inter-state relations and he made a direct connection between these two spheres.

Improving tomato production is one of the important greatest challenges facing Nigeria government today. Since tomato is an important fruit crop for the country and for individual households, it has important implications for livelihood of rural people. In order to achieve this, several interventions in the sector were done in an attempt to improve production. The study analyzes the tomato production from year 1981-2017. The study was carried out to examine the trend in tomato production and importation, the determinant of tomato production and the effect of tomato import on it producer in Nigeria. Secondary data obtained from Central Bank of Nigeria Statistics and Food and Agricultural Organization were used for the study. Dickey-Fuller unit root test and Co-integration test were employed to analyze the data collected. The result showed that the time series used for the study are all stationary at first difference. The result of co-integration test in the short-run Error Correction Model (ECM) estimation at 1 lag length shows that Agricultural labour, local tomato price and rainfall are significant to tomato production. The result of the long-run ECM estimation shows that Agricultural labour, local tomato price and rainfall are significant to tomato production. The result of the trend local tomato price showed it was stationary at first difference and also positively significant to tomato production at both short-run and long-run ECM estimation which indicates that local tomato price time trend has being favourable for tomato production. Result of the trend of agriculture labour showed that it was stationary at first difference and positively significant in the short-run and positively in the long-run ECM estimation to tomato production which indicates that agricultural labour time trend is inversely related to tomato production. All this can be due to the country not depending on importation of agricultural produce, food production through agriculture to the masses by the government within the country, implying that the government support production and more exportation resulting in an government increasing revenue. It is therefore concluded that more agricultural produce should be produce in the country to control importation.

This study investigated the effect of activity-based learning strategies on secondary school Physics students’ performance in Yenagoa metropolis, Bayelsa State. Quasi-experimental pretest-posttest research design was adopted for the work. The study sample consists of 150 senior secondary school Physics (SS2) students drawn from a population of 926 Physics students using purposive sampling technique. Two schools were assigned to the experimental group, while one class was used as the control group. A 20-item multiple choice achievement test on Heat Energy titled PATHE was used to gather data for the study. The reliability of the instrument PATHE was obtained using Kudder-Richardson formula 21 ( KR21 ) and a value of 0.82 was obtained. Two research questions and two null hypotheses guided this work. Research questions were analyzed using mean and standard deviation, while the hypotheses were tested using ANCOVA at 0.05 level of significance. Major findings of this study showed that students taught using the activity-based learning strategies (cooperative, and practical work) performed significantly better than their counterparts taught using the demonstration method. Practical work method was more effective than cooperative method while cooperative method proves to be more effective than the demonstration method. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that The use of activity based learning strategies in the teaching and learning of Physics should be made compulsory for all Physics teachers, especially at the secondary school level and that Government at all levels should show commitment and support in promoting innovative teaching in Physics and other science subjects at the secondary school level by providing an enabling environment and the required facilities in secondary schools so as to make students’ centered learning activities a reality

Simple Lattice Design (SLD) was used to study the effect of level of inclusion of Orange Fleshed Sweetpotato (OFSP) on some physical parameters of bread made from composite flour while the whole wheat flour bread (sample A) served as control. The proximate composition of the various flour blends used for the preparation of the breads were determined using standard methods. The bread loaves were evaluated for their physico-chemical analyses, nutritional composition and sensory attributes. The physico-chemical analyses results obtained showed an increase in the range of 0.72 g/cm3 for BD, 0.97 g/g for WAC, 465.67 cP for trough, 1329.33 cP, 863.67 cP and decrease of 416.67 cP in setback values respectively. The chemical analyses results obtained showed an increase in the range of 32.72% for moisture, 15.63% for protein, 0.30% for crude fibre, 1.25% for ash, 72.73 g/100g for starch 0.95 mg/100g for Beta carotene, respectively. There was also a decrease in Crumb Hydration Capacity (CHC) and bread volume by 47.51 and 38.03%, respectively, with inclusion of the OFSP flour. It was concluded that a substitution of 79.75g of wheat flour and 20.25 g of flour gave the optimal mixture for the productions of enriched the bread

Although Savings and credit cooperative societies (SACCO) are formed to promote thrift among members by affording them an opportunity to accumulate savings and deposits to provide credit at fair and reasonable rate of interest, they operate in an competitive environment characterized by banks, micro finance institutions, insurance companies, capital market and pension fund that offer similar or near equal financial services to the same clientele in Kenya. In today's highly dynamic and competitive business environment, firms are exposed to strict challenges with meeting the ever-increasing market and customer needs and expectations, coping with sophisticated requirements, and facing technological obsolescence. In order to achieve sustainable competitive advantage level that not only matches those of their business rivals? but that exceed the financial industry performance averages, financial institutions have to seek understanding of relative degree on the relationship between competitive strategies and sustainable competitive advantage. Competitive strategies adopted determine the consumer satisfaction that propels the SACCO to attain sustainable competitive advantage. The aim of the study was to establish the effects of competitive strategies on sustainable competitive advantage of SACCOS in Kenya. Specifically, the study was to examine the effect of focus strategy and identify the effect of innovation strategy on sustainable competitive advantage of SACCOs in Kenya with specific interest in Mombasa County. The literature reviewed in the study was the theory of Resource-Based View of the firm (RBV), Market-Based View (MBV) and the Game Theory. A descriptive survey research design was adopted with a survey involving 168 SACCOs according to the Kenya Union of Savings & Credit Co-operatives ltd.

Disbursement involves approval, allocation, release and transmission of funds or grants to projects for implementation. Funds are always disbursed according to funding and implementation schedules agreed upon by the parties and based on the submitted budget and work plan. The developed schedule with each grant recipient is necessary to ensure proper funding accounting, reporting and timely disbursement of funds during the implementation phase to the devolved units. Implementation is the carrying out, execution, or practice of a plan, a method, or any design for doing something. The government of Kenya has made deliberate efforts to decentralize most of its development projects over the past few years, through the use of decentralized funds key among them are, Local Authority Transfer Fund (LATF), Constituency Bursary Fund (CBF), Women and Youth Enterprise Fund and Constituency Development Funds (CDF). This was made possible through Constituency Development Act of Kenya, (2003) which was enacted in order to re-distribute resources to every corner of the country so that poverty levels can be alleviated. Devolved funds have been taunted as the most effective way of fighting poverty on the strength of their ability to bring governance closer to the people thereby addressing their priorities. In a perfect world every project would be "on time and within budget." But reality tells a very different story. Even if the budget and schedules are met, one must ask if the project delivered the results and quality expected. True project success must be evaluated on all the three components otherwise a project could be considered a failure. Delays in disbursement of funds lead to delay in land acquisition among other factors which eventually has a serious impact on the overall performance in the implementation of the development project. The impact of delays in acquisition resulted into cost overruns due to price variations and time overruns and had an impact also on the successful completion of the development project.

In the present work the effect of heat treatment on wear behavior of AISI310, AISI253ma and AISI410 Silicon steels are investigated. The chosen materials were heat treated at 8500C and kept at this temperature for a soaking period of 60 minutes, cooled by quenching in air until the room temperature is attained. As-cast materials were also taken for tests for comparison. The wear tests were carried out on above three materials with three parameters viz., velocity, load & time by keeping two of the parameters as constant and varying the other one in each test.

The effect of penstock diameter on shaft power was studied as part of an ongoing development of a simplified pico-hydropower system with water recycling. The speeds of the turbine and alternator shafts and volume of water displaced were measured for each penstock diameter and nozzle area ratio. The shaft power, flow rate and efficiency of the turbine were computed. The mean efficiencies were 0.776 and 0.510 for penstocks diameters 0.0762 and 0.0381 m respectively. Hence, larger penstock diameters with small nozzle area ratios favor optimal system operation. The results show that the system can potentially impact Nigeria’s energy mix positively

The effects of substituents and solvents have been studied through the absorption spectra of nearly twelve meta,para and ortho-substituted N-Pheny maaleimide in the range of 200-400 nm. The effects of substituents on the absorption spectra of compounds under investigation are interpreted by correlation of absorption frequencies with simple and extended Hammett equations. With the help of Kamlet equation the effect of solvent polarity and hydrogen bonding on the absorption spectra are interpreted and the results are discussed.