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The need to eliminate bottlenecks to port operations in Nigeria was a fundamental goal of the port privatization about 2 decades ago. Current trends in ports management; however, suggest existence of numerous inefficiency challenges reflected in long ship turnaround time, increasing trend of cargo dwell time, high cargo pilferage risk rate, poor condition of port infrastructure and superstructure, multiple charges and government agencies, cumbersome cargo clearance & examination procedures, port congestion related delays particularly in Apapa and Onne ports, etc. The study identifies the decisive port-related factors constraining the flow of shipping trade in Nigerian ports using a survey to obtain data on the influence of the identified factors on the flow of shipping trade in Nigerian ports. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to analyze the data obtained. The results indicate that high cargo pilferage risk profile, long ship turnaround time and increasing trend of cargo dwell time constitute the significant port-related factors constraining the flow of shipping in Nigerian ports. It can be concluded that terminal operators should prioritize solutions to the problems of high cargo pilferage risk profile, long ship turnaround time and increasing cargo dwell time, which constitute the major constraints to the flow of shipping trade.

Travelers along the Onne-seaport to Eleme-junction road corridor in the hub of the oil and gas industry in Port-Harcourt, Nigeria, have continued to experience very serious traffic congestion travel time delays, culminating into loss of man-hours and declining productivity. This study estimated the economic cost of traffic congestion travel time delay along the corridor, with a view to providing economic justification for developing traffic management policies and road infrastructure, to remedy it. A mixed research approach was adopted in which data was sourced through field survey and from secondary sources. The gross output model was used to estimate the output losses occasioned by productive time losses related to traffic congestion. The study established that the average daily traffic congestion travel time delay along the traffic corridor by travelers in trucks, car, bus and taxi modes are 104.17 minutes, 46.60 minutes, 58.5 minutes and 56.4 minutes respectively. The estimated daily aggregate economic cost of output losses associated with traffic congestion time delay on the corridor is 46049809.8 naira (210923.5USD) for all modes. This justifies any investment in traffic congestion remedial strategies along the route.

EUROGAM was designed for gamma ray spectroscopy and the simplest mechanism for event detection is to count the number of coincident gamma rays detected in the array which gives a figure of merit to each event. The EUROGAM detector array uses the XIV backplane system for front-end electronics including triggering and readout. The main tasks of the trigger system are described. The trigger system is distributed with an intelligent local trigger in each of the detector electronics channels. Novel aspects of the system are the use of XIV lines to generate and to distribute trigger signals and the distributed nature of the system to allow efficient parallel and pipelined operation with low system dead times. Throughout the design of the trigger system the various design proposals were tested against a few difficult triggers devised by the physicists who intend to use the system. As an example, one of the simpler triggers is considered.<>

A new data acquisition system designed for a future high-resolution gamma-ray detector array-the Euroball-is described. It will use newly designed high-resolution electronics together with the VXIbus system as the instrumentation bus. The planned electronics and the general structure of the data acquisition system are described in detail. For control and setup of the data acquisition system, Ethernet based communication is planned. The other elements involved in a data acquisition system (readout, graphics, sorting, storage, etc.) are being planned using international standards and a European agreed solution wherever possible. Depending on the possible integration density and the number of channels, the whole system will consist of 10 to 16 VXI crates containing the digitizing electronics and several VME crates for event filter CPUs and data storage control.<>