AKWA IBOM STATE PARTNERS SHELL, INTEL AND INTERSWITCH TO HOLD NATIONAL SCHOOL SCIENCE FAIR

Akwa Ibom, Nigeria – 11, February 2014:  The National School Science Fair, which brings together secondary school students from across the country, will be hosted by the Akwa Ibom State Government this year. The event is sponsored by Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), Intel Corporation, and Interswitch. 

The commencement of the Science fiesta was announced at a press conference held in Uyo Akwa Ibom, State. The Fair will accommodate pupils from the thirty-six (36) states plus the FCT Abuja and will give them the opportunity to showcase their independent research projects and inventions, as they try to solve the challenges faced in their local communities.

Science teachers who accompany the students to the Fair will participate in a one-week Science Educator Academy, where they will learn about current trends in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), including project management and mentoring of young scientists.

SPDC’s General Manager, Sustainable Development and Community Relations, Nedo Osayande said: “We’re pleased to be part of the success of the National Science Fair. We believe that, by encouraging the young ones to take interest in science subjects, we will be laying a solid foundation for the technological development of Nigeria. This has also informed the different educational programmes that SPDC and other Shell companies in Nigeria are implementing in the Niger Delta and throughout the country”.

Country Manager, Intel Nigeria, Olubunmi Ekundare while explaining the mechanics of the competition stated, “We encourage interested students to submit their original research work. The best six (6) projects will qualify to feature at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) which will holds in Los Angeles from May 11-16 2014. Over 4 million dollars in prizes and scholarships will be awarded to winners.”

Also speaking at the conference, Group Managing Director, Interswitch Transnational, Mitchell Elegbe, said that the fair is an excellent opportunity for young Nigerians to exhibit their inherent skills and demonstrate the huge potential the nation offers. “Interswitch proudly supports the National Festival of School Science Quiz and Fair competition. We remain committed to providing people development platforms that would help young Nigerians play active roles in national development in technology and beyond. This is quite essential as Nigeria strives towards becoming one of the Top-20 world economies by 2020,” he said.

As host to this year’s Fair, Commissioner for Science & Technology, Akwa Ibom State, Engr. lboro Ekanem, said, “Nigerian students have consistently given a good account of themselves at International Fairs. I am certain that the successful winners of the National School Science Fair   will excel at the 2014 Intel ISEF.”

Speaking further, the Fair’s organiser, Genius Illumina, represented by the Executive Director, Dr Jerry Orhue, said,  “For us at Genius Illumina, it's been ten years of unbroken commitment to the promotion of excellence in Science and Technology Education. Ten years ago, we stood alone, but today, we are grateful to have giants standing by us. We remain highly indebted to our financial partners – SPDC, Intel and Interswitch, who through their commitment to the Nigerian child have continued to put their money behind our noble dream. We look forward to many more years of working together with them for the good of tomorrow.”

The National School Science Fair, which began in 2004, is designed to gradually transform every student into a researcher and teach students to see themselves as part of solutions to societal problems.  It is expected that this year’s event will see even more daring science projects from participating students than in the previous years.

Dell Delivers Enterprise Class Server Solution to Handle Demanding Workloads

Dell has today announced a new addition to its PowerEdge server portfolio for enterprise, the Dell PowerEdge R920. The PowerEdge R920 is now Dell’s highest performing server, allowing customers to achieve faster results, quickly adapt to changing business needs and improve overall reliability. The solution showcases Dell’s commitment to delivering innovative solutions that meet growing demands for high performance and scalability whilst balancing cost.

Designed to provide optimal access to the vast expanses of information being recorded and processed by enterprises and built on the new Intel E7 processors, the PowerEdgeR920 offers exceptional capabilities in the handling of mission critical workloads, like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce, and very large databases – including in-memory databases. Combining a massive memory footprint and caching capacity with highly scalable memory, I/O and storage components, the R920 is ideal for environments where performance, expandability and reliability are critical.
 
The development of the PowerEdge R920 is part of Dell’s continued commitment to bringing customers’ high performance and easily scalable enterprise technology at a cost-effective price. In a recent SAP workloads study, the R920 demonstrated:
 
·         A world record 4-socket Linux benchmark result of 24,150 benchmark users on the SAP SD 2-Tier benchmark.

·         A 71% improved performance over the previous best E7-4800 4-socket SAP SD benchmark.

·         Nearly the same performance in an SAP environment compared with the previous generation 8-socket servers, providing up to a 50% cost savings in software licensing to the customer.

 
In Oracle workloads testing, the R920 offered the following advantages:
·         Customers processing more than twice the number of Oracle OLAP queries than with previous generation server configurations and when coupled with a Dell Compellent Flash-optimized solution.

·         More than twice the throughput to process larger Oracle OLAP data sets and twice the reduction in latency

 
The PowerEdge R920 further sets itself apart from other server solutions through the following qualities:
 
·         Getting results faster: Applications can perform more transactions in less time, with up to 60 cores of processing power. Several significant data access enhancements have been added, such as the 8 low latency/high performance NVMe PCIe Express Flash drives that far surpass IOPS performance of rotating drives, the new H730P PowerEdge RAID controller (PERC) that doubles the previous cache size and delivers up to 100% more IOPS performance, and the dual PERC capacity that lets customers maximize performance across the larger number of available solid state drives (SSDs).

·         Scaling to match the challenge: With 96 DIMMs of memory and up to 24 local storage drives, the R920 is designed to allow IT to grow quickly in response to dynamic business conditions. The R920 is also an excellent candidate for threaded HPC applications that require large amounts of shared memory (SMP codes). These “fat nodes” are essential in most modern HPC systems to accommodate applications that scale-up (vs. scale-out). The R920 also includes a plug-in for managing or monitoring your HPC environment via Nagios (Linux console). Customers want as much CPU performance as they can get for their applications so with that in mind, Dell has integrated agent-free out-of-band monitoring to free up those critical cycles for greater performance benefits.

·         Running without disruption: With built-in reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features, such as Dell’s Fault Resilient Memory and Intel’s Run Sure Technology the R920 lets customers operate their data centers with added confidence. New integration between OpenManage Essentials and Dell AppAssure software, along with automated embedded server configuration backup via iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller, can also help improve service continuity by backing up the entire server stack of hardware, OS and applications so customers can operate with peace of mind.

Do Not Commit To Anybody

It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to anyside or  cause but yourself.

By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others- playing people against one another, making them pursue you.

Thanks
AshmarkOlakunle

Do Not Offend The Wrong Person, Know Who You're Dealing With..

There are many different kind of people in the world, and you can never assume that everybody will react to your strategies in the same way.

Deceive some people and they will spend the rest of their lifes seeking revenge.

They are wolves in lambs' clothing. Choose your victim and opponent carefully, then never offend or deceive the wrong person.

Small word they say is enough for the wise.

Thanks
AshmarkOlakunle

Isolation Is Dangerous; Dont Build Fortress To Protect Yourself

The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere-Everyone has to protect themselves.

A fortress seems the safest, but isolation exposes you to more dangers than it protects you from it-It cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and An easy target.

Better to circulate among people, find allies, mingle.              

You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.

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AshmarkOlakunle

Cultivate An Habit Of Unpredictability

Humans are creature of habit with insatiable needs to see familiarities in other people's actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control.

Turn the table, be delibrately unpredicatable. Behaviour that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance and they will wear themselves out trying to predict your moves.

Take to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.

Thanks
AshmarkOlakunle

Destroy Your Enemy Totally

All great leaders with moses have known That a feared enemy must be destroyed completely.

If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually broke out.

More is lost through stopping half-way then through total destruction. The enemy will recover and Will seek revenge.

Crush all your enemy not only in body but also the spirit.

Thanks
AshmarkOlakunle

Post As A Friend, Work As A Spy

Knowing about your rival is important, use spies to gather important information that will keep you a step ahead.

Better still, play the spy yourself. In polite social encounter, learn to probe.

Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.

Thanks
AshmarkOlakunle

Use Generocity and Selective Honesty To Disarm Your Leaders

One sincere and honest move will cover over dozen of dishonest ones. Open hearted gesture of honesty and generocity brings down the guards of even the most suspicious people.

Once your selective honesty opens a hole in their armor, you can decieve and manipulate them at will.

Thanks
AshmarkOlakunle

Learn To Keep People To Be Dependant On You

To maintain your independence and relevance you must always be needed and wanted, the more you are relied on the more freedom you have.

Try as much as possible to make people depend on you for their happiness and prosperity and you have nothing to worry about.

Never teach them enough or your secret so that they can depend on you for everything.

Thanks
AshmarkOlakunle