Archives-December 

Organizations came to the realization that it is not economically feasible to maintain the increasing maintenance costs of maintaining data centers with large floor space. One of the main concerns associated with Cloud Computing is the security of the service is that sensitive and important data is no longer only under the control of the data owner as the service provider also has access to that data. In terms of the methodological approach used by this thesis, this thesis will utilize the use of the qualitative method in answering the research questions posed by this thesis. The systematic literature review has shown that there are novel and innovative ways for organizations to mitigate the inherent risks associated with the use of cloud computing.

In order to better understand the zootechnical and economic characteristics of piglet farming, a diagnostic study was conducted from October to December 2019, three months with 30 pig farmers, in the form of cross-sectional and retrospective surveys in the three municipalities of the town of Kindu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The results showed that pig farming was practiced by both married and educated men and women. They were mainly zimba, Kusu and Nande and associated livestock with agriculture, private activity or trade. They operated in two different livestock systems (traditional and semi-intensive), with a clear predominance of the traditional system (85.5% of farms). The latter was characterized by semi-intensive hog barns (51.1%), where local-bred pigs were mostly reared (90.4% of farms). The average herd size was 19.2 - 20.1 pigs. In 97% of cases, farmers fed the animals from kitchen waste and agricultural and agro-industrial by-products. The average breeding age was 7.6 -1.8 months and the average litter size was 7.4 - 2.2 piglets. This livestock subsector has real potential for poverty reduction because it generates net incomes on average of $40 per piglet, depending on the system. Nevertheless, the lack of training of herders, inadequate pig habitats, food and health constraints remain the main factors hindering the development of pig farming in this city. It would be useful to find alternative ways to improve the habitat conditions, feeding and health monitoring of pigs, accompanied by better organisation and capacity building for producers and other players in the hog sector.

Despite the fact that men constitute a large portion of Nigerian media coverage, it appears that we know little about how they are represented in Nigerian newspapers especially by female writers/journalists. Most studies concerned with gender portrayal in Nigerian media tend to focus on how women are represented mainly by male writers/journalists (e.g. Odejide 1996, Daniel 2011, Adewoye et al 2014). This paper examines the many complex, subtle and contradictory patterns of linguistic representation of men in female-authored articles in Nigerian newspapers. It does so by employing methods of and insights from critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics tools to analyze 200 female-authored articles on gender and other related issues published in five Nigerian newspapers namely; The Guardian, Vanguard, The Punch, Daily Trust and New Nigerian from 1999 to 2014, a period that has witnessed an unprecedented surge in the wave of gendered discourses in Nigerian print news media. Using Lawrence Anthony’s AntConc version 3.4.3w concordance package, collocational profile of the node word MEN (and its singular variant) was extracted and investigated, and results obtained show that Nigerian female authors generally depict men as both the “problem” and the “answer.” This is evidenced by the prevalence of discourses that construct men as oppressors on one hand, and providers and leaders on the other. These contradictory patterns of representation are understood in this paper as examples of “textual heterogeneity” as exemplified by the range of different identities women have constructed for men. Moreover, these patterns of representations can also be seen as both reinforcing and resisting patriarchal social order existing in our society.

Normally, in the heart of a fetus, there is a ductus arteriosus (DA) which is to close after birth at most three months. Because DA closes, it becomes ligamentum arteriosum. When DA does not close after birth, it is known as patent (open) ductus arteriosus (PDA). The left PDA occurs more than the right PDA. The size of the PDA determines the severity of the condition. Should be diagnosed and treated early in life. It can be treated either with drugs or surgery. When left untreated for a long time, it turns into Eisenmenger syndrome.

The need of automatic classification of text has become very crucial with the rampant growth in the amount of information available in today’s world of fast digitization. Text classification (also called text categorization) is the process of classifying documents into pre-defined categories. A number of techniques have been devised over the ages for text classification. One such technique for text categorization is Support Vector Machine (SVM). SVMs are binary classifiers which classifies text into exactly two categories. Many researchers have found that SVM works reasonably well. In this paper, this technique is used for classifying a set of documents. Five models have been created from five different domains and data from each domain are classified using these models and the accuracy is recorded.

A new hybrid approach with Genetic Algorithm and Simulated Annealing is proposed to solve Multi Job-Shop Scheduling problem, which is one of the well-known hardest combinatorial optimization problems. The main objective of multi job shop scheduling problem is to find a schedule of operations of each job in a set of jobs that can minimize the maximum completion time called makespan. To improve the makespan, SA algorithm has been designed and combined with genetic algorithm . Thus, hybrid GA is implemented over MJSSP and the effectiveness and efficiency is proved by getting promising results for different benchmark job-shop scheduling problem instances.

Malignant triton tumor (MTT) is an extremely rare variant of malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor (MPNST) with rhabdomyo-sarcomatous differentiation. We report a case of a 14-year-old male without history of neurofibromatosis presented for post-traumatic abdominal pain. Ultrasonography and contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) revealed a large heterogeneous intraperitoneal mass near the vascular structures and repressing the adjacent organs. Surgery and anatomopathological examination revealed a malignant triton tumor. MTTs are highly aggressive tumors that are fast-growing with a tendency to recur locally and metastasize early. To date, there is no treatment consensus available yet and the overall prognosis remains dismal.

PPP contracts are contracts with special nature that tend to have longer contract durations compared to other conventional procurement methods; hence, contract re-equilibrium becomes an inevitable need. The objective of the re-equilibrium process is to maintain the IRR of the private sector constant. In this paper, a framework is established to calculate the different re-equilibrium scenarios. The framework proposed in this paper, in addition to addressing a constant IRR, can also be customized to work with any other contractual financial ratio such as ROE. A spreadsheet model is developed with the aid of Microsoft Excel and VBA programming language.

The history of child labor is as old as human civilization. The work children used to perform in the family and farm has always been a part of their socialization process. Child labor is an issue which has generated interest, because of the new economic policies formulated in line with the structural adjustment programmers, which hopes to put the country on the global market economy. The alarming growth of child workers in developing countries has drawn the attention of many organizations of the world. The phenomenon of child labor, as practiced today, is involuntary and exploitative. The problem of girl child labor has become an issue of great concern in recent times all over the world. In India, domestic child workers and street children, particularly the girls, are further vulnerable to sexual abuse. They are the victims of extreme discrimination and neglectful behavior. Here an attempt has been made through this paper to draw the attention of the intellectuals of the society and policy makers to look at girl child workers and their problems, conditions including policy implications.

A study was conducted to assess the barriers perceived by the learners in distance mode and to suggest the strategies for effective delivery of knowledge and skills to the learners, based on the data collected from 100 respondents randomly selected from each of 221 and 135 learners of dairy and goat farming courses of TANUVAS. The constraints perceived by the respondents of dairy and goat farming distance courses exhibited an overall mean score of 1.5 and 1.6 respectively, both ranging from ‘least constraint’ to ‘no constraint’. Lack of guidance from the local co-ordinators and lack of collaborations / co-operations with learning centres was perceived as constraint to more severe constraint. The factor - improper tracking of learners achievements – was given the score of 3.9 (by dairy course learners) and 4.0 (by goat course learners), implying it to be a severe constraint. The overall and individual constraints’ scores in social and economic barriers ranged between 1 and 2, as they were perceived not to be the constraints by the learners in both course categories.