Onome Christopher Edo

This study was conducted in Ekpoma, a town dependent on rainwater and river water from nearby areas because of a lack of groundwater sources, and the physicochemical and bacteriological (heterotrophic plate count [HPC], total coliform count [TCC], and fecal coliform count [FCC]) properties of 123 stored river water samples grouped into five collection districts (EK1 to EK5). The results were compared with regulatory standards and previous regional studies to identify water quality trends. While most physicochemical properties met drinking water standards, 74% of samples had pH values > 8.5. Twenty-seven samples were fit for drinking, with EK4 having the highest number of bacterio-logically unsuitable samples. Ten bacterial species were identified, with Gram-negative short-rod species such as Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Salmonella typhimurium being predominant. HPC values varied from 367 × 10⁴ to 1320 × 10⁴ CFU/mL, with EK2 (2505 × 10⁴ CFU/mL) and EK5 (1320 × 10⁴ CFU/mL) showing particularly high counts. The TCC values ranged from 1049 × 10⁴ to 4400 × 10⁴ CFU/mL, and the FCC values from 130 × 10⁴ to 800 × 10⁴ CFU/mL, all exceeding WHO limits (1.0 × 10² CFU/mL). Historical data show no improvement in water quality, emphasizing the need for individuals to treat water properly before consumption. The findings provide baseline data for local water authorities and serve as a wake-up call for adequate water treatment, storage interventions, and community education on water security. Additionally, this study offers a practical process for improving the quality of water stored in similar regions.

In the U.S. public transit ridership in 2020 declined by 79% compared to 2019 levels at the start of the pandemic. With lockdowns implemented during the early days of the pandemic, direct human-to-human interactions migrated to virtual platforms. This study investigates the public's perception of transit systems via a social media analysis, given the advent of vaccines and other COVID-19 preventive measures. We developed a structured topic modeling tweet analytics (Twilytics) framework to analyze public discourse data (i.e., tweets from 2020 to 2021) on the impact of COVID-19 on transit systems. The framework has four main components: first, we extracted the tweets starting from June 2020 to November 2021. Second, we pre-processed and cleaned the data. Third, we performed statistical analysis on the cleaned data. Lastly, we performed topic modeling (TM) using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation approach to reduce the dimensionality of our textual data and uncover the prominent themes of the public's perception of transit systems during the pandemic. We extracted 44,320 tweets related to public transit in the US within the study period. On average, 2020 had 113 transit-related tweets per month, while 2021 had 59.81. In addition, categorizing the tweets resulted in four main themes: transit and social distancing, travel bans, airlines, and vaccinations. Kruskal-Wallis's analysis of variance test results showed a statistically significant difference (p < 0.05) in the number of transit-related

This paper discusses corporate taxes and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Nigeria. It is a review of literature that attempts to explore and give a reality on the response of FDI to corporate taxes. This paper shows in its introductory phase a prior discussion of the terms corporate tax and FDI and also elements of both terms and classifications. It follows with issues such as the effects of corporate taxes on FDI. This paper discusses the rhetoric whether reduced corporate taxes and other tax incentives has an effect on the inflow of FDI in Nigeria. To answer this question, the paper utilised information gathered from secondary sources including books, newspapers publications, working papers and research findings from studies. This paper shows that from surveyed empirical studies corporate taxes may have an important role in attracting FDI and have a rising effect on the development of the country, and as such recommends that tax incentives should be employed as a means to attracting FDI, a cost benefit analysis should be employed on the types of corporate taxes to determine the benefit from the perceived FDI inflow, in addition a review of the current tax policies should be carried out as they seem not to respond to the current economic situation.