THE CAUSES, PREVALENCE AND THE RAVAGING COROLLARIES OF ILLEGAL CROSS BORDER TRADES (ICBTs) ON NIGERIA’S ECONOMY

This study elucidate the causes, prevalence and ravaging corollaries of Illegal Cross Border Trades ( ICBTs ) on the Nigerian economy with a view to proffering workable solutions. The study is anchored on the broken window theory. A sample size of 75 respondents was arrived at using Taro Yamane’s formula and to ensure greater representation of the sample relative to the population, proportionate stratified random sampling technique was used for the selection of respondents. Quantitative data were obtained from the 75 selected respondents who were Nigeria Customs Service staff and who resides in Illela and Sabon-Birni border areas. These areas are in Sokoto State of Nigeria but share boundary with Niger Republic. Data collected were analyzed in line with study objectives and research hypotheses, using descriptive and inferential statistics at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that though policies and programmes tailored along the line of curbing and ameliorating smuggling are made yearly, the rate of ICBTs continue to increase. Reasons for this include preference for foreign goods, craze for cheaper prices of goods, connivance between smugglers and some security personnel, paucity of border security. It was also found that the rate of ICBTs in the studied areas and by projection the nation is on the high side, thus contributing enormously to the receding economy. The study recommended among other things that a threesome relationship between Nigeria Customs Service, traditional elites and local settlers should be developed or built into government policies for curbing ICBTs; there should be a continuous orientation and re-orientation of the people by government agencies and other stakeholders; government increase employment opportunities and reduction in poverty rate; and government should be apt in carrying out statutory responsibilities.Keywords: Border, Illegal Cross Border Trade, Security personnel, Smugglers, Threesome relationship.

Modeling accuracy, response time, and bias in continuous orientation judgments

Despite the prevalence of real-world and laboratory tasks where people select among many options, cognitive models have traditionally focused on choices among small sets of alternatives. This has resulted in theoretical and empirical gaps in understanding the decision processes that go into selections among many alternatives or responses that fall along a continuum. This paper addresses these issues by modeling decisions in a perceptual study where participants produce continuous orientation judgments. The experiments showed that manipulations of stimulus difficulty and time pressure have parallel effects to binary choice, with greater stimulus difficulty yielding slower and less accurate responses and time pressure resulting in faster responses at the expense of accuracy. These effects were well accounted for by the circular diffusion model developed by Smith (2016), with drift magnitude parameters shifting with difficulty and threshold parameters shifting with time pressure. However, a manipulation of bias using a predecision cue resulted in bimodal distributions of responses that cannot be explained by the model in its original formulation. To account for this result, I developed a theory of bias based on split attention and racing 2D diffusion processes. This model suggests that responses are determined by both cue-driven and stimulus-driven evidence accumulation processes, such that the winning process determines responses and response times (RTs). As a result, it predicts critical features of responses and response times in the conditions with predecision cues, including bimodal distributions of responses and the longer RTs observed when there was a discrepancy between cue and stimulus orientations.

C2-continuous orientation trajectory planning for robot based on spline quaternion curve

Purpose To realize the smooth interpolation of orientation on robot end-effector, this paper aims to propose a novel algorithm based on the unit quaternion spline curve. Design/methodology/approach This algorithm combines the spherical linear quaternion interpolation and the cubic B-spline quaternion curve. With this method, a C2-continuous smooth trajectory of multiple teaching orientations is obtained. To achieve the visualization of quaternion curves on a unit sphere, a mapping algorithm between a unit quaternion and a point on the spherical surface is given based on the physical meaning of the unit quaternion. Findings Finally, the curvature analysis of a practical case shows that the orientation trajectory (OT) constructed by this algorithm satisfied the C2-continuity. Originality/value This OT satisfies the requirement of smooth interpolation among multiple orientations on robots in industrial applications.

Application of POD Projection to Orientation Optimization of Laminated Composite Design

In the context of laminated composite design, the integrated stiffness of the laminate depends on the number of plies, the material and the orientation of the material in each ply. The main issue of design is the prohibitive numerical simulation cost, the early technique (DMO, discrete material optimization; BCP, Bi-value Coding Parameterization Method) consists in transforming the continuous orientation angle variables to discrete design variables as multiphase material selection problems. In this work, a set of continuous orientation angle is directly considered. More precisely, the design task is the orientation of the orthotropic material in each element of the discretization and the ratio of ply thickness. In order to reduce the computational effort, Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) applied to decrease the number of design variables. The numerical results in a simple case show that the proposed method is available.