This paper determined the socioeconomic effects of contributory pension scheme on the wellbeing of retired federal civil servant in Borno State. The paper employed self-developed questionnaire to collect data from a simple random and a purposive sample of 162 respondents in the study area. One hundred and sixty-two (162) copies of questionnaires were administered but only one hundred and forty-two (142) copies were retrieved, making 88％ return rate. The study employed inferential statistics for data analysis (Logistic regression analysis). The results of the study revealed that MPCR, SOR, AOR, NYR, FSR, VRSA and SSR were the determinants of prompt and timely payment of retirement benefits (lumpsum and monthly pension) at retirement and the new pension scheme has significantly contributed in addressing the problems inherent in the old pension schemes in the study area. The study recommended that Federal Government should also increase the pension of retirees from time to time because retirees’ expenses could increase at old age due to health challenges.

The Nigeria Government implemented IPPIS in the country in order to entrench transparency and accountability in the public service Human Resources (HR) records and payroll administration. Successive Government has observed gross inadequacies in the payroll and personnel records in the public service. Several efforts have been made to reduce these challenges, but it tends to worsen with time, resulting to greater difference in accessing reliable data for human resources planning and management, chaotic state of pension administration; ghost worker syndrome and various forms of payroll and credential fraud. Manual computation of salary and documentation of personnel information has been compounding the problem of transparency and accountability. This also affects accuracy in computation of salary hence overpayment or underpayment of salaries, omission of staff name in payment, wrong calculation of promotion and pension that is due to staff and Ex-staff as the case may be. With the introduction of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System scheme, if properly implemented and managed, will go a long way in eradicating or at least bring the above mentioned problems to the barest minimum. Despite the laudable benefits of IPPIS to the country, some civil servants do not want to enroll in IPPIS due to the fear of denial of allowances and some financial benefits they enjoy in their organizations. Against this background this paper determined the effect of IPPIS implementation on governance and civil servants in Nigeria. Paper employed self-developed questionnaire to collect data from a simple random and a purposive sample of 141 respondents in the study area. One hundred and fourty-two (141) copies of questionnaires were administered and all the one hundred and forty-one (141) copies were retrieved, making 100％ return rate. The study employed inferential statistics for data analysis (Logistic regression analysis). The results of the study revealed IPPIS implementation has significant and positive effect on governance and civil servants in Nigeria. The paper recommended that government should take advantage of the identity management system to reduce cost of governance and private sector should also key into some form of identity management which would be synchronised on a centralised data base, secured and could only be accessed by permission from the national bureau of statistics to ensure protection of private data.

The regression expectation maximization (REM) algorithm, which is a variant of expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, uses parallelly a long regression model and many short regression models to solve the problem of incomplete data. Experimental results proved resistance of REM to incomplete data, in which accuracy of REM decreases insignificantly when data sample is made sparse with loss ratios up to 80％. However, the convergence speed of REM can be decreased if there are many independent variables. In this research, we use mixture model to decompose REM into many partial regression models. These partial regression models are then unified in the so-called semi-mixture regression model. Our proposed algorithm is called semi-mixture regression expectation maximization (SREM) algorithm because it is combination of mixture model and REM algorithm, but it does not implement totally the mixture model. In other words, only mixture coefficients in SREM are estimated according to mixture model whereas regression coefficients are estimated by REM. The experimental results show that SREM converges faster than REM does although the accuracy of SREM is not better than the accuracy of REM in fair tests.

Cosine similarity is an important measure to compare two vectors for many researches in data mining and text processing. In this research, we evaluate cosine measure and its advanced variants for collaborating filtering (CF). We also propose a so-called triangle area (TA) measure as an improved version of cosine measure. TA measure uses ratio of the basic triangle area to the whole triangle area as reinforced factor for Euclidean distance so that it can alleviate negative effect of Euclidean distance whereas it keeps simplicity and effectiveness of both cosine measure and Euclidean distance in making similarity of two vectors. TA is considered as an advanced cosine measure. We test advanced cosine measures with other similarity measures. From experimental results, TA is not a preeminent measure, but it is better than traditional cosine measures in most cases and it is also adequate to real-time application. Moreover, its formula is simple too.