Economic Diplomacy was used as a an instrument of foreign policy execution in Nigeria with the aim of achieving national development. This study, while using the political economy approach therefore, investigated the institutional outcomes of this instrument in areas of debt management, Gross Domestic Product (GDP employment, and external reserves. Secondary sources of data which include publications of Central Bank of Nigeria, Africa Peer Review Mechanism country report and press reports were used to critically analyse the observed institituional outcomes of economic diplomacy. Economic diplomacy resulted in reduced debts, increases in the nation’s GDP, and external reserves. However, the level of poverty and unemployment was not positively affected by economic diplomacy. This study therefore recommends that subsequent employment of economic diplomacy should be targeted at the substantial improvements of the peoples’ socio-economic status.

This study was conducted in an attempt to provide guidelines for practitioners regarding the optimal minimum calibration sample size for pretest item estimation in the computerized adaptive test (CAT) under WINSTEPS when the fixed-person-parameter estimation method is applied to derive pretest item parameter estimates. The field-testing design discussed in this study is a form of seeding design commonly used in the large-scale CAT programs. Under such as seeding design, field-test (FT) items are stored in an FT item pool and a predetermined number of them are randomly chosen from the FT item pool and administered to each individual examinee. This study recommends focusing on the valid cases (VCs) that each item may end up with given a certain calibration sample size, when the FT response data are sparse, and introduces a simple strategy to identify the relationship between VCs and calibration sample size. From a practical viewpoint, when the minimum number of valid cases reaches 250, items parameters are recovered quite well across a wide range of the scale. Implications of the results are also discussed.

The desire to accumulate material resources and to have good life-chance is rooted deeply in the sensibilities of human society. Every individual strives to ensure that he meets not only his essential needs of today and future but also accumulate well enough to gain social standing and be able to bequeath wealthy heritage to his children. This tendency predisposes man to looking for economic means with all intensity. And, whenever profit propensity is discovered in any endeavour or vocation, entrepreneurs (or capitalists) mobilize resources – financial, technical, human etc in that direction. This work, relying largely on extant literature which highlights the overarching influence of the mass media on society, media contents, profit goal of media investors and audience response, attempts to situate the roles nudity plays within the broad spectrum of media arts. The focus is on how media moguls profiteer from explicit media content involving the private parts of women and the aftermath connected with that.

The use of beads in Ghana is a site for a robust cultural meaning-making. Beads have been very popular in the past and are growing stronger in popularity with modernity to the extent that their modern meanings seem to be eclipsing the traditional ones. This paper takes us back to their traditional meanings by examining closely their relationship with the wearer. Using qualitative instruments of research methodology basically through interviews and participant observation, this paper, by examining the bead as a cultural text, identifies two main relationships between the bead and the wearer: the synecdochic and the metonymic relationships. Using mainly linguistic theories to interrogating these relationships, the paper, relying on the entextualization theory of Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban and the performance theory of Richard Bauman, discovers that in addition to being objects of aesthetics as the modern meanings mainly suggest, the bead has very important traditional meanings. The paper also demonstrates that where the bead is placed on the body is a function of traditional meanings. Again, when the bead is used is also contingent upon traditional meanings.

The study was conducted to explore the gender relation in regarding their access on economic resources. The study was conducted among the 390 respondents of five ethnic groups of Kathmandu valley, Nepal in 2014. Study was based on the descriptive design. Simple random sampling technique was adopted to select the respondents. Structured self-reported questionnaires were administered in field. Data shows that female has more authority than male in routine household expenditure, selling livestock and purchasing the clothes of children whereas final authority was found holding by male in finalizing the business plan, taking the final decision in social activities and overall access on economic resources. Perceptually people are ready to transform the equal authority to female but in practice, it is not found in real ground. Equality aspect of gender relation in any decision level is found different between the theory and practice.

Introduction: Screening for Transfusion transmitted infections (TTI’s) is done to provide safe blood. Very often donors are found to be seropositive for one or more of the TTI’s. The present study was undertaken in a blood bank of a tertiary care hospital to determine the response rate of the blood donors after they were notified about their reactive status. Materials and Methods: The one year observational study was done in a prospective manner from January 2013 – December 2013 taking in account of all the registered donors coming to the blood bank after notification.

The physical mechanism for the formation of the Gailitis resonances has been established in a recent precision calculation. According to the condition described in the low energy nuclear fusion experiments, the likelihood of Gailitis resonance induced low energy nuclear fusion exists. In this note, the properties of Gailitis resonance, the compound nuclear resonances, the conservation laws of energy, parity and the nuclear angular momentum will be used to support the possibility of Gailitis resonance induced low energy nuclear fusion.

Here an advanced tutorial on power control issues in all generations of cellular system has been presented. Power control represents a key degree of freedom in design of cellular system, offering substantial benefits for efficient and fair of operation of the system, especially in energy efficient designs. It also supports several functionalities including QoS, bit error rate optimization and energy efficient designs in all stages of cellular system. Taking energy efficiency into account, performance of different power control algorithms have been analyzed as a function of transmitted power with some interesting results.

Crime is at alarming rate in this part of world and there are many factors that are contributing to this antisocietal behavour both among the youths and old. In this work, principal component analysis (PCA) was used as a tool to reduce the dimensionality and to really know those variables that were crime prone in the study region. Data were collected on twenty-eight crime variables from National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) databank for a period of fifteen years, while retaining as much of the information as possible. We use PCA in this study to know the number of major variables and contributors to the crime in the Southwest Nigeria. The results of our analysis revealed that there were eight principal variables have been retained using the Scree plot and Loading plot which implies an eight-equation solution will be appropriate for the data. The eight components explained 93.81% of the total variation in the data set. We also found that the highest and commonly committed crimes in the Southwestern Nigeria were: Assault, Grievous Harm and Wounding, theft/stealing, burglary, house breaking, false pretence, unlawful arms possession and breach of public peace.

In most African Countries, increase in Gross Domestic Products (GDP) has not translated to economic growth and development. For some decades had a lot of contestson economic growth and development has been a serious issues.The focus of this study is to analysing the effects of economic determinants on economic growth rate in some African Countries by employing panel data analysis. Yearly data were used from 1990 to 2013 time period. The data was obtained from the world economic outlook database of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for probing the effects of these variables on growth rate in some selected African countries which include: Nigeria, Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cape-Verde, Cameroun, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic Of Congo, Cote di’ Voire, Egypt, Equatorial-Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, and Uganda. The effects of 6 macroeconomic variables on GDP were critically examined. We used 37 Countries GDP as our dependent variable and 6 independent variables use d in this study include: Total Investment (totinv), Inflation (inf),Population (popl), current account balance (cab), volume of imports of goods and services (vimgs), and volume of exports of goods and services (vexgs). The results of our analysis shows that total investment, population and volume of exports of goods and services strongly affect the economic growth. We noticed that population of these selected countries positively affect the GDP while total investment and volume of exports negatively affect GDP. On the contrary, inflation, current account balance and volume of imports of goods and services’ contribution to the GDP are insignificant. The results of this study would be useful for individual African governments for developing a suitable and appropriate economic policies and