Innovations in Science and Technology Vol. 3

There is the urgent to provide housing to reduce the ever increasing housing deficit in Ghana. The root causes include improper planning and incoherent political activities, mismanagement and consequent abandonment of public housing projects are not far-fetched. Even projects established in the colonial period to provide shelter have been abandoned. Some housing projects initiated for mere selfish politics (face-saving purpose) only to be abandoned along the way. Worse still, others were commenced to please electorates so as to avert threats and disloyalty from them, while politicians are somewhat aware that the government’s finances cannot complete those projects. This study has the objective of developing a sustainable approach to reactivate abandoned public housing projects. The study brings out three major categories of causes for public housing project abandonment, namely; poor project implementation, negative politics practiced by the governments that culminate in abandonment of public projects and lack of proper structures to ensure the continuation of public projects when there is a change in government. These three major categories of causes are iteratively refined and eventually, the root causes emerged. This information is then used as a guide, with the aid of “Cause and Effect Diagram”, to generate a model that could be used to revive abandoned housing projects as well as ensure its sustenance. The model presented three main factors that when adopted could lead to project reactivation. These include: proper implementation of public housing project, positive politics practice by government and adequate structures that ensure continuation of public housing projects when there is a change in government.

The results of a study of hydrogen saturation during corrosion of aluminum alloys of eight alloying systems are presented. The tests were carried out for four years with additional irrigation with chloride solutions in a moderately warm climate. It is shown that during corrosion, intense saturation of alloys with hydrogen occurs. The type of corrosion - with intercrystalline corrosion, determines the amount of hydrogen in the alloy hydrogen penetration occurs more intensively than with pitting and delaminating corrosion. The mechanism of hydrogen saturation of alloys is proposed. The change in the energy of an aluminum crystal during the blockage of atomic hydrogen and the formation of a hydrogen molecule are determined by quantum chemical calculations. The relationship between the plasticity of the tested aluminum alloy alloys and the intensity of hydrogen saturation is shown.

The objective of this research is to compare the parameter estimation of penalized regression and penalized logistic regression using the lasso, elastic net, adaptive lasso, and adaptive elastic net methods on high-dimensional data. The parameter estimation of the multiple linear regression model is an important problem in two related variables consisting of dependent and independent variables. Usually, the number of independent variables is less than the number of sample sizes, so the ordinary least squares give a unique solution. However, the number of independent variables is larger than a number of sample sizes, which is called the high-dimensional data. The traditional regression analysis does not estimate the solution to this problem in the case of high-dimensional data.  To overcome this problem, penalized regression analysis concerns to solve high-dimensional data. The computational part focuses on estimating the lasso, adaptive lasso, elastic net, and adaptive elastic net methods called penalized regression analysis. Lasso (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) is added the penalty term as the scaled sum of the absolute value of the coefficients. The elastic net mixes between ridge regression and lasso on the penalty term. The lasso and elastic net methods can shrink the coefficients for variable selection. The adaptive lasso and elastic net methods use the adaptive weights on the penalty term based on the lasso and elastic net estimates. The adaptive weight is related to the power order of the estimator. Commonly, these methods focus on estimating parameters in linear regression models based on the dependent variable and independent variable as a continuous scale.  Moreover, these methods can apply the penalized regression based on logistic regression to classify high-dimensional data. The classification is used to classify the categorical data for dependent variables dependent on the independent variables, called the penalized logistic regression model. The categorical data are considered a binary variable, and the independent variables are used as the continuous variable. In this case, the independent variables are generated from the normal distribution on several variances at 20, 30, 40, and 50 when the sample sizes are less than the independent variables. For penalized regression, the comparison criterion is the average mean square error. The average percentage of accuracy is used to compare penalized logistic regression performance.

Soybean is elegant to be a key crop attributable to its significant contribution as vegetable oil and protein in human diet. Nevertheless, inopportunely, its production has been exaggeratedly declined due to the ordinariness of drought related stress. In present investigation, total 12 SSR molecular markers were employed for screening of 53 soybean genotypes to determine the effectiveness of existing markers in genetic diversity analysis as well as their validation on the basis of their connotation with drought tolerant gene. Among applied drought tolerance gene-linked SSR molecular markers, the highest genetic diversity (0.6629) was documented with marker Satt520 while lowest (0.0370) was for the marker Satt557 with an average of 0.3746. The highest PIC value was 0.5887 prearranged by similar markers viz., Satt520 and lowest 0.0363 by Satt557 with the mean worth of 0.3063. Dendrogram constructed owing to banding profile of used markers was able to victimize some putative drought tolerant genotypes i.e., JS97-52, JS95-60 from rest of the genotypes. The findings of the current investigation may contribute towards improvement of soybean to bread drought tolerant varieties in future.

Purpose: The moderating effect of demographic factors on mobile phone technology use by undergraduate public university students in Nairobi, Kenya was investigated in this study. The study's goal was to determine the moderating effect of demographic characteristics on undergraduate university students' use of mobile phone technology.

Methodology: As a theoretical framework, the research employed the media technological determinism theory. The target population consisted of 246,871 undergraduate university students from Nairobi's six public universities. The quantitative research design was used. As data collection tools, self-administered questionnaires were used. Purposive sampling was used in this study to generate a sample size of 573 undergraduate students. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data, which was then processed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22.

Findings: The findings revealed that undergraduate university students' use of mobile phone technology was not influenced by demographic factors. The study concluded that respondents' demographics had no moderating effect on the relationship between undergraduate public university students and mobile phone technology use levels.

Unique Contribution to Theory and Practice and Policy: Since this research focused on undergraduate university students in public universities in Nairobi, Kenya, the researcher recommends that another research could be carried among post graduate students and also among private universities to find out if demographic factors may be affecting mobile phone technology use.

Dams are among the world’s oldest hydro-engineering structures. They are constructed to control flooding and safeguard land, property, people and livestock. Knowledge of uplift pressure and hydraulic gradient are essential for dam designers because they impact the stability of the dam. Dam stability refers to dam sliding, overturning and maximum stresses (tension or compression) that are exerted on the dam foundation. This study focuses on the hydraulic gradient and uplift pressure in three types of dams, i.e., homogeneous earth dams, heterogeneous earth dams, and concrete gravity dams. Seepage, hydraulic gradient and uplift pressure were computed by numerical simulation, using the finite element method (FEM). The dam geometry, material, the computational mesh, and boundary conditions (BCs) are all input into the FEM.  Results showed that the hydraulic gradient for two types of dams, i.e., the concrete gravity and the homogeneous earth dam, were similar and were less than 0.5. But the hydraulic gradient exceeded 2.5 at the beginning and ending of the clay core heterogeneous earth dam. Implementation of filter material in such zones will be necessary to prevent the dam foundation from piping/undermining phenomenon. The uplift pressures for the two earth dams exceeded that of the concrete gravity dam. It is believed that uplift pressure for earth dams is not dangerous because of the large width of earth dams prevents them from overturning.

Soybean is well-thought-out to be a main crop as an important foundation of nutrients to humans and animals. The current investigation has been executed to recognize different soybean genotypes on account of diverse morpho-physiological traits and SSR molecular markers. Data for different morpho-physiological traits were documented from experiment conducted under field conditions in RBD design whereas molecular work was conducted in laboratory with 32 microsatellite markers to analyze the existence of possible diversity among different soybean genotypes. Morpho-physiological investigation evidenced the incidence of substantial magnitude of variability. Phylogenetic tree based on morpho-physiological traits grouped the genotypes into major and minor cluster. Major cluster had fifty genotypes while minor cluster had only three genotypes. Among polymorphic 32 microsatellite markers, the highest genetic diversity (0.66) was documented for the marker Satt520 whilst lowest (0.037) for the marker Satt557 with an average of 0.35. The highest PIC value also was 0.59 prearranged by same marker viz., Satt520 and lowest 0.036 by marker Satt557. An average major allele frequency was 0.69 while, an average PIC value was 0.32. Microsatellite markers-based data also congregated the genotypes into one major and one minor cluster. Molecular analysis based on microsatellite markers confirms the presence of genetic variability among genotypes under the investigation. Data obtained from the present research may contribute towards improvement of soybean genotypes to advance high yielding varieties by considering assorted genotypes with good agronomical traits in breeding scheme.

Aims: Nigeria has a lot of conventional and heavy oil resources. Although majority of the conventional oil resources have been developed since independence, the heavy oil resources have remained untapped due to low primary production recovery and, as a result, concerns regarding economic sustainability under the existing fiscal framework. This chapter examines the application of Steam Flooding enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method by using suitable Nigerian heavy oil reservoirs as case study, seeks to develop a diagnostic model to predict the performance, evaluates the economics to determine the viability of the EOR method. Nigeria's oil reserves and production will expand as heavy oil is developed.

Study Design:  Data was collected for two heavy oil reservoirs from two oil companies in Nigeria following a Non-disclosure Agreement (NDA)

Place and Duration of Study: Emerald Energy Institute, University of Port Harcourt Nigeria, 2016 - 2021.

Methodology: The screening criteria of commercially effective EOR methods were applied to select steam flooding for the studied reservoirs. Design of Experiment (DoE) was used to evaluate the reservoirs and operating parameters and to determine their optimum values, which were then used to predict the performance of the reservoirs. The economics of the steam flood technique endorsed for the reservoirs considered were also evaluated using Discounted Cash Flow Analysis (DCFA).

Results: These assessments confirmed that steam flooding technique was technically and economically viable for the heavy oil reservoirs considered. The steam flood was observed to have a good recovery efficiency of 24%, as against the water flooding technique which had 13% OOIP and natural depletion of 9% for the offshore reservoir. For the onshore reservoir, the recovery efficiency was 20% for steam flood, and 4% for natural depletion. The economic analysis showed that even at a worst-case heavy oil price of US$15, the project was viable.

Conclusion: Steam flooding is viable, can be applied to develop heavy oil reservoirs in Nigeria that meet the screening criteria, and thus increase national oil reserve and production.

Recommendation: The fiscal policy should be adjusted, especially the petroleum profit tax from 85% to 50% as an incentive to operators and investors to embark on steam flooding and other EOR methods.

Identical twins were thought to share most of the features in common. Dermatoglyphics (from ancient Greek derma=skin, glyph=carving) is the scientific study of fingerprints. The ridges and groves on palms and soles are under the influence of genes and are unique. Palmar and finger dermatoglyphics are formed between the 10th and the 17th weeks of gestation and their morphology can be influenced by genetic or environmental factors, interfering with normal intrauterine development. The aim of the present study is to determine the dermatoglyphic patterns in twins-both monozygotic and dizygotic and to observe the extent to which they share between them. After receiving informed verbal consent from three pairs of twins, the fingerprint patterns were analysed from the images captured. The results of two pairs of dizygotic twins (one pair females and one pair males) and one pair monozygotic twins (females) were as follows: 1st pair-: The patterns on the left hand did not match at all, but three fingers on the same hand demonstrates similar patterns.2^nd pair-: The dermatoglyphics of two fingers of the right hand and three digits of the left hand were the same. Patterns of the remaining digits were not identical.3^rd pair-: The evaluation of dizygotic males revealed the same pattern of two digits on the left hand but no digits on the right hand were identical. The current study found that the patterns were identical on a few digits but different on the rest. This study could be improved by evaluating a larger number of twins.

This paper describes the educational software for analysis of complex networks using the spectral graph theory and visualization of algorithms. The system is developed in Java programming language and can be executed as a standalone Java application or Java applet. The term network often refers to a real system, such as a web or social network or an Internet infrastructure network. A graph is the mathematical representation of the network. In order to understand a system, it is necessary to understand the graph representing the network of that system. Specific topological features of a graph are used to characterize the connectivity, and have a substantial impact on dynamic processes in complex networks, and the spectral graph theory studies the relationship between graphs and eigenvalues and eigenvectors. The system enables the creation of numerous laboratory exercises that offer students opportunity to visually follow characteristic processes in complex networks.