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The Almajiri children in Nigeria are deserving of special interventions to reduce the life-long divide in educational achievement, social status, and economic empowerment. One way of speedily achieving this is through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). This study examined the prospects and challenges of using ICT in the teaching and learning processes of Almajiri children's education in Nigeria. A descriptive research methodology was adopted and data were collected from the Almajiri children, their teachers, and parents from communities with a high concentration of Almajiri schools. The results showed that while the official language of instruction in schools in Nigeria is English, the language often spoken by children and teachers was Hausa. Also, while teachers and parents were quite familiar with ICTs such as mobile phones, computers, and television, the Almajiri children were more familiar with television and mobile phones, and very few had used a computer. Some strategies proposed for successful adoption of ICT in Almajiri education include the use of indigenous languages in courseware development and the use of one-to-many ICT facilities, such as multimedia teaching aids, projectors, and smart televisions.

Globally, effective and efficient healthcare is critical to the wellbeing and standard of living of any society. Unfortunately, several distant communities far from the national grid do not have access to reliable power supply, owing to economic, environmental, and technical challenges. Furthermore, unreliable, unavailable, and uneconomical power supply to these communities contributes significantly to the delivery of substandard or absence of qualitative healthcare services, resulting in higher mortality rates and associated difficulty in attracting qualified healthcare workers to the affected communities. Given these circumstances, this paper aims to conduct a comprehensive review of the status of renewable energy available to rural healthcare clinics around the globe, emphasizing its potential, analysis, procedures, modeling techniques, and case studies. In this light, several renewable energy modeling techniques were reviewed to examine the optimum power supply to the referenced healthcare centers in remote communities. To this end, analytical techniques and standard indices for reliable power supply to the isolated healthcare centers are suggested. Specifically, different battery storage systems that are suitable for rural healthcare systems are examined, and the most economical and realistic procedure for the maintenance of microgrid power systems for sustainable healthcare delivery is defined. Finally, this paper will serve as a valuable resource for policymakers, researchers, and experts in rural power supply to remote healthcare centers globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The broadcast nature of radio propagation in wireless communication has been suspected as the loopholes of passive or active attacks by unauthorized users (eavesdroppers). The physical layer security techniques operate at the lowest stack of OSI layer against conventional cryptographic approaches, operating at the upper layer. However, techniques such as channel coding, power (directional antenna and artificial noise), and spread spectrum have been (and continuously) deployed to safeguard against sophisticated attacks. Most of these deployments are theoretical, and a few are enhanced for efficient security against an intruder. In this article, a boundary technique approach is proposed and applied to the physical layer to improve its secrecy‐capacity and subdue adversary effects at the legitimate receiver. Hybrid performance metrics were adopted, and a Monte Carlo simulation was performed. The result obtained using secrecy outage probability, secrecy‐capacity, and intercept‐probability show that our proposed techniques enhance the secret transmission between the main transmitter and legitimate receiver. The simulation results were compared with the analytical methods. It was found that the channel between the transmitter and the main receiver has a better signal‐to‐noise ratio than the corresponding eavesdropper's channel. Conclusively, performance of the proposed technique is validated for applications in emerging wireless communication systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Corona Virus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has negatively impacted teaching and learning globally, imposing widespread closure of schools from the elementary to tertiary levels. As of 14 April 2020, teaching activities of over 1.75 billion students globally were disrupted in about 200 countries that have implemented full or partial lockdown across the world. At the time of writing, the duration of the current pandemic cannot be ascertained. Therefore, the teaching and learning process should also adapt to the new normal, which includes suitable social distancing, self-isolation and other disruptive guidelines outlined by the World Health Organization. Thus, more than ever, COVID-19 has now emphasized the necessity to embrace different and flexible methods of teaching and, by extension, learning. Therefore, e-teaching and e-learning have emerged as complementary solutions that reduce disruption to educational activities. Despite having a solution in online teaching to reduce the effect of COVID-19 on education, it's noteworthy that the solution is not available to every educator, learner and school, especially in developing countries. In developing countries, especially across Africa, lack of awareness of the existing online teaching resources and their suitability for remote attendance teaching and lack of skill sets required for using the resources are the issues impeding online teaching. This paper reviews and evaluates twenty-two (22) remote attendance teaching resources, their special features and system requirements. The technical requirements, suitability, and limitations of each application are considered. The implementation challenges of using the resources are discussed, and some solutions are recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effect of number and shape of membership function (MF) and training data size on the performance of ANFIS model for predicting path losses in the VHF and UHF bands in built-up environments. Path loss propagation measurements were conducted in four cities of Nigeria over the cellular and broadcasting frequencies. A total of 17 broadcast transmission and cellular base stations were utilized for this study. From the results obtained, it can be concluded for the broadcasting bandsthat the generalized bell MF shows better performance with an average RMSE of 3.00 dB across all the routes, followed by gaussian, Pi, trapezoid, and triangular MFs in that order with average RMSE values of 3.09 dB, 3.11 dB, 3.16 dB, and 3.23 dB, respectively. For the cellular systems, triangular MF outperformed other MFs with the lowest average RMSE. The generalized bell MF was found to be suited for WCDMA band, while triangular MF is most suited for GSM band. Furthermore, it can also be concluded that the higher the number of membership functions, the lower the RMSE, whereas a decrease in the data size leads to a reduction in the RMSE values. The findings of this study would help researchers and network planners make a more informed decision on choosing appropriate system parameters when modeling ANFIS models for path loss prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residue Number System (RNS) has become one of the most preferred solutions for the implementation of distributed and ubiquitous computing platforms such as cloud, wireless adhoc networks, applications which require tolerance against errors and scalable solutions in mission critical and next generation's applications. The implementation of RNS for different applications require different approaches depending on the areas of applications. Some applications of Residue Number System described in literature are reviewed so as to illustrate the various possibilities. Distinct features such as applications, architectures and implementations were considered. In this paper, we presented a comprehensive survey on the different areas of applications, architectures and implementations of RNS to various fields of Information Technology while also including new areas of applications hitherto not covered in previous surveys. The implementations issues with different types of applications such as moduli set, forward conversion, residue arithmetic units, reverse conversion and hardware design, were discussed. Lastly, we focus on the various challenges with the use of RNS and the different solutions that exist and also discuss the future trends in RNS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]