Watermelon is known to be infested by multiple insect pests both simultaneously and in sequence. Interactions by pests have been shown to have positive or negative, additive or non additive, compensatory or over compensatory effects on yields. Hardly has this sort of relationship been defined for watermelon vis-à-vis insect herbivores. A 2-year, 2-season (4 trials) field experiments were laid in the Research Farm of Federal University Wukari, to investigate the interactive effects of key insect pests of watermelon on fruit yield of Watermelon in 2016 and 2017 using natural infestations. The relationship between the dominant insect pests and fruit yield were determined by correlation (r) and linear regression (simple and multiple) analyses. Multimodel inference was used to define the predictor that impacted on fruit yield the most. Results indicated that, each pest had highly negative and significant (p < 0.05) impact on yield (range of r = -0.78 to -0.92), and that the coefficient of determination (R2) values (which were indicative of the effect of pests or their complexes on yield) did not rise on addition of interaction terms. This reveals a non additive negative impact of insect interactions on the fruit yield of watermelon. This may be due to among others; competition by the pest, phenology, plant defenses or changes in nutritional content of the plant. The need to therefore employ discriminate analysis to ascertain the contribution of each pest to yield loss when multiple pest infest a crop is thus highlighted.
The direct electron transfer behavior of hemoglobin that is immobilized onto screen-printed carbon electrode (SPCE) modified with silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and chitosan (CS) was studied in this work. Cyclic voltametry and spectrophotometry were used to characterize the hemoglobin (Hb) bioconjunction with AgNPs and CS. Results of the modified electrode showed quasi-reversible redox peaks with a formal potential of (-0.245 V) versus Ag/AgCl in 0.1 M phosphate buffer solution (PBS), pH7, at a scan rate of 0.1 Vs-1. The charge transfer coefficient (α) was 0.48 and the apparent electron transfer rate constant (Ks) was 0.47 s-1. The electrode was used as a hydrogen peroxide biosensor with a linear response over 3 to 240 µM and a detection li
... Show MoreABSTRACT Pulmonary alveolar microlithiasis is rare infiltrative pulmonary disease characterized by intra-alveoli deposition of microliths. We present a familial case of an adult female with complaint of progressive shortness of breath on exertion. Chest radiograph showed innumerable tiny dense nodules, diffusely involving both lungs mainly the lower zones. High-resolution CT scan illustrated widespread intra-alveolar microliths, diffuse ground-glass attenuation areas and septal thickening predominantly in the basal regions. Chest radiograph is all that is needed for the diagnosis of this case but CT scan was done to demonstrate the extent and severity of this disease
Soil water retention curves (SWRCs) are crucial for characterizing soil moisture dynamics and are particularly relevant in the context of irrigation management. A study was carried out to obtain the SWRC, inflection point, S index, pore size distribution curve, macro porosity, and air capacity from samples submitted to saturation and re-saturation processes. Five different-texture disturbed soil samples Sandy Loam, Loam, Sandy Clay Loam, Silt Loam, and Clay were collected. After obtaining SWRC, each air-dried soil samples were submitted to particle size distribution and clay dispersed in water analyses to verify the soil lost clay. The experimental design was completely randomized with three replications using two processes of SWRC (saturat
... Show MoreMost of the medical datasets suffer from missing data, due to the expense of some tests or human faults while recording these tests. This issue affects the performance of the machine learning models because the values of some features will be missing. Therefore, there is a need for a specific type of methods for imputing these missing data. In this research, the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is used for generating and imputing the missing values in the pain in my ass (also known Pima) Indian diabetes disease (PIDD) dataset, the proposed algorithm is called (ISSA). The obtained results showed that the classification performance of three different classifiers which are support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbour (KNN), and Naïve B
... Show MoreA substantial portion of today’s multimedia data exists in the form of unstructured text. However, the unstructured nature of text poses a significant task in meeting users’ information requirements. Text classification (TC) has been extensively employed in text mining to facilitate multimedia data processing. However, accurately categorizing texts becomes challenging due to the increasing presence of non-informative features within the corpus. Several reviews on TC, encompassing various feature selection (FS) approaches to eliminate non-informative features, have been previously published. However, these reviews do not adequately cover the recently explored approaches to TC problem-solving utilizing FS, such as optimization techniques.
... Show MoreAspect categorisation and its utmost importance in the eld of Aspectbased Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has encouraged researchers to improve topic model performance for modelling the aspects into categories. In general, a majority of its current methods implement parametric models requiring a pre-determined number of topics beforehand. However, this is not e ciently undertaken with unannotated text data as they lack any class label. Therefore, the current work presented a novel non-parametric model drawing a number of topics based on the semantic association present between opinion-targets (i.e., aspects) and their respective expressed sentiments. The model incorporated the Semantic Association Rules (SAR) into the Hierarchical Dirichlet Proce
... Show MoreThere has been a growing interest in the use of chaotic techniques for enabling secure communication in recent years. This need has been motivated by the emergence of a number of wireless services which require the channel to provide very low bit error rates (BER) along with information security. This paper investigates the feasibility of using chaotic communications over Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) channels by combining chaos modulation with a suitable Space Time Block Code (STBC). It is well known that the use of Chaotic Modulation techniques can enhance communication security. However, the performance of systems using Chaos modulation has been observed to be inferior in BER performance as compared to conventional communication
... Show MoreUntil recently, researchers have utilized and applied various techniques for intrusion detection system (IDS), including DNA encoding and clustering that are widely used for this purpose. In addition to the other two major techniques for detection are anomaly and misuse detection, where anomaly detection is done based on user behavior, while misuse detection is done based on known attacks signatures. However, both techniques have some drawbacks, such as a high false alarm rate. Therefore, hybrid IDS takes advantage of combining the strength of both techniques to overcome their limitations. In this paper, a hybrid IDS is proposed based on the DNA encoding and clustering method. The proposed DNA encoding is done based on the UNSW-NB15
... Show MoreThis paper describes a newly modified wind turbine ventilator that can achieve highly efficient ventilation. The new modification on the conventional wind turbine ventilator system may be achieved by adding a Savonius wind turbine above the conventional turbine to make it work more efficiently and help spinning faster. Three models of the Savonius wind turbine with 2, 3, and 4 blades' semicircular arcs are proposed to be placed above the conventional turbine of wind ventilator to build a hybrid ventilation turbine. A prototype of room model has been constructed and the hybrid turbine is placed on the head of the room roof. Performance's tests for the hybrid turbine with a different number of blades and different values o
... Show MoreAutomated clinical decision support system (CDSS) acts as new paradigm in medical services today. CDSSs are utilized to increment specialists (doctors) in their perplexing decision-making. Along these lines, a reasonable decision support system is built up dependent on doctors' knowledge and data mining derivation framework so as to help with the interest the board in the medical care gracefully to control the Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) virus pandemic and, generally, to determine the class of infection and to provide a suitable protocol treatment depending on the symptoms of patient. Firstly, it needs to determine the three early symptoms of COVID-19 pandemic criteria (fever, tiredness, dry cough and breat
... Show More