Linkage

Nigerian stocks advanced 2.6 per cent last week during which the listing of Tony Elumelu-backed Transcorp Power added N1.88 trillion to the Nigerian Exchange’s market capitalisation. That is not to mention the 46.4 per cent capital gain the equity contributed to the overall market value in its first week of trade. Interestingly, equities continue to win investors over despite improved yields on fixed income assets, which have become considerably attractive after monetary authorities bucked up the reference…

Last week, a good number of corporate results were issued, many of them coming out strong and fairly impressive. That in part helped the market capitalisation of the Nigerian exchange appreciate by 2 per cent. Investors are awaiting the earnings reports of big-cap stocks like Dangote Cement, MTN Nigeria, BUA Cement and Nestle as well as those of four of the Big 5 lenders (United Bank for Africa, GTCO, Access Holdings and Zenith). The financial performance of these stocks are likely to shape the direction of the…

Comparison of extreme wildfire activity recorded from Qinghai Lake sediments with Holocene climatic events. Credit: Hao et al As a major Earth system component, wildfire plays an important role in the Earth's terrestrial ecosystems and climate system, with significant impacts on the atmosphere, radiation effects, vegetation, surface properties, global biogeochemical cycles and human survival. Understanding the interactions…

 The US Federal Trade Commission is examining the nature of Microsoft Corp.'s investment in OpenAI Inc. and whether it may violate antitrust laws, according to a person familiar with the matter.The inquiries are preliminary and the agency hasn't opened a formal investigation, according to the person, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.  Microsoft didn't report the transaction to the agency because the investment in OpenAI doesn't amount to control of the company under US law, the person said.…

Both the poleward ocean heat convergence and the hydrological cycle are strengthened with climate warming. (P: precipitation; E: evaporation.). Credit: Qiang Wang et al. The Arctic Ocean is connected with the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans through several ocean gateways, and changes in the linkage between these oceans and the Arctic Ocean can affect both climate and marine ecosystems.…

As India and Singapore on Tuesday linked their respective online payments systems for seamless cross-border transactions between the two countries, Singaporean High Commissioner to India Simon Wong Wie Kuen on Tuesday said this collaboration would take bilateral relations to greater heights and his country looks forward to continuing to be part of India's digital transformation journey.Unified Payments Interface (UPI) of India and PayNow of Singapore have been linked earlier today at a virtual event, which was attended by…

How unsupervised learning is used to estimate model parameters in SplinkPhoto by Suzanne D. Williams on UnsplashSplink is a free probabilistic record linkage library that predicts the likelihood that two records refer to the same entity. For example, what is the probability that the following two records match?Example pairwise record comparisonThe underlying statistical model is called the Fellegi Sunter model. It works by computing partial match weights, which are a measure of the importance of the different columns in…