Search results for: Public space

Authors: Mehwish Raza

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Mobile learning (m-learning) offers unique affordances to learners, setting them free of limitations posed by time and geographic space; thus becoming an affordable device for convenient distant learning. There is a plethora of research available on mobile learning projects planned, implemented and evaluated across disciplines in the context of developed countries, however, the potential of m-learning at different educational levels remain unexplored with little evidence of research carried out in developing countries. Despite the favorable technical infrastructure offered by cellular networks and boom in mobile subscriptions in the developing world, there is limited focus on utilizing m-learning for education and development purposes. The objective of this review is to unify findings from m-learning projects that have been implemented in developing countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, India, and Tanzania for teachers’ in-service training. The purpose is to draw upon key characteristics of mobile learning that would be useful for future researchers to inform conceptualizations of mobile learning for developing countries.

Keywords: design model, developing countries, key characteristics, mobile learning

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Authors: K. W. Nam, B. J. Kim, S. J. Lee

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Along with the development of network infrastructures, such as high-speed Internet and mobile environment, the explosion of multimedia data is expanding the range of multimedia services beyond voice and data services. Amid this flow, research is actively being done on the creation, management, and transmission of metadata on digital content to provide different services to users. This paper proposes a system for the insertion, storage, and retrieval of metadata about digital content. The metadata server with Binary XML was implemented for efficient storage space and retrieval speeds, and the transport data size required for metadata retrieval was simplified. With the proposed system, the metadata could be inserted into the moving objects in the video, and the unnecessary overlap could be minimized by improving the storage structure of the metadata. The proposed system can assemble metadata into one relevant topic, even if it is expressed in different media or in different forms. It is expected that the proposed system will handle complex network types of data.

Keywords: video, multimedia, metadata, editing tool, XML

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Authors: Humaira Irfan Khan

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The paper explores teaching of creative writing in Pakistani classroom. The data collected from the questionnaire and focus group interview with a large public sector university’s Master of Arts in English students, who are also in-service school teachers, discovers that English teachers in Pakistan do not teach to develop the creative writing of pupils. The findings show that English teachers can define creative writing but are confused about strategies needed in rousing learners’ interest in creative writing. The teachers make their students memorise compositions from the textbooks to be reproduced in class. English teachers must be encouraged and trained to engage in activities that are essential for enhancing creative writing in schools.

Keywords: creative writing, teaching creative writing, textbooks, Pakistan

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Authors: Moufida Benmoussa

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Since the escalation of the Syrian conflict in 2011, 6.9 million Syrians have fled to neighbouring countries, and 6.7 have remained displaced in Syria. Out of the 6.9 who fled Syria, over one million have crossed the Mediterranean Sea and become refugees and asylum seekers in various European countries. As a European and a member country of the EU, the Republic of Ireland was not an exception. In response to the refugee crisis caused mainly by the Syrian displacement, Ireland established the Syrian Humanitarian Admission Programme (SHAM) in 2014 and the Irish Refugee Protection Programme (IRPP) in 2015, followed by its second phase in 2019. In light of these events, Irish print media played a significant role in covering the Irish government’s decisions, political stance, and public opinion on the debate on taking Syrian refugees into Ireland. Considering the tremendous impact of media on politics and public opinion, my research examined how The Irish Times and Irish Independent framed Syrian migration to Ireland. I adopted a qualitative framing analysis to identify the prominent framings in these two newspapers. The collection of newspaper articles focused on three periods. The first period is from the first of January 2014 to the end of December 2014. During this period, the media covered the launch of the Syrian Humanitarian Admission Programme (SHAP) and stories about the first arrival of the Syrian refugees to Ireland. The second period is the year 2015. During this year, various events gained the attention of the Irish media. These events include Ireland’s establishment of the Irish Refugee Protection Programme, the Paris attacks, and the publishing of Aylan Kurdi’s Photograph. The third period is from the first of December 2019 to the thirtieth of January 2020. In this period, the media covered the convention of Ireland with the UNHCR and the European Union to provide sanctuary to 2900 refugees in the years 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. The primary findings of my study indicate that The Irish Times and Irish Independent’s framing of Syrian migration to Ireland was various. My research findings indicate that The Irish Times and Irish Independent’s framing of Syrian migration to Ireland was varied and asymmetrical. The dominant frames used by these two newspapers are humanitarian, responsibility, contribution, burden, intruder, and threat. The former three frames positively perceive Syrian migration to Ireland and support the Irish government’s decisions to welcome more Syrian refugees. On the other hand, the last three frames perceive Syrian migration and refugees negatively and stand for the principle that Ireland should not take Syrian refugees.

Keywords: framing, Syrian migration, Ireland, newspaper

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Authors: Thomas E. Portegys

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An animal behavior problem is presented in the form of a nest-building task that involves two cooperating virtual birds, a male and female. The female builds a nest into which she lays an egg. The male's job is to forage in a forest for food for both himself and the female. In addition, the male must fetch stones from a nearby desert for the female to use as nesting material. The task is completed when the nest is built, and an egg is laid in it. A goal-seeking neural network and a recurrent neural network were trained and tested with little success. The goal-seeking network was then enhanced with “place cells”, allowing the birds to spatially navigate the world, building the nest while keeping themselves fed. Place cells are neurons in the hippocampus that map space.

Keywords: artificial animal intelligence, artificial life, goal-seeking neural network, nest-building, place cells, spatial navigation

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Authors: Lingmao Xu, Hui Zhou

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Ge film is widely used in infrared optical systems. Because of the special requirements of space application, it is usually used in low temperature. The refractive index of Ge film is always changed with the temperature which has a great effect on the manufacture of high precision infrared optical film. Specimens of Ge single film were deposited at ZnSe substrates by EB-PVD method. During temperature range 80K ~ 300K, the transmittance of Ge single film within 2 ~ 15 μm were measured every 20K by PerkinElmer FTIR cryogenic testing system. By the full spectrum inversion method fitting, the relationship between refractive index and wavelength within 2 ~ 12μm at different temperatures was received. It can be seen the relationship consistent with the formula Cauchy, which can be fitted. Then the relationship between refractive index of the Ge film and temperature/wavelength was obtained by fitting method based on formula Cauchy. Finally, the designed value obtained by the formula and the measured spectrum were compared to verify the accuracy of the formula.

Keywords: infrared optical film, low temperature, thermal refractive coefficient, Ge film

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Authors: Bojana Tot, Goran BošKović, Goran Vujić

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Route optimisation is a process of planning one or multiple routes, with the purpose of minimizing overall costs, while achieving the highest possible performance under a set of given constraints. It combines routing or route planning, which is the process of creating the most cost-effective route by minimizing the distance or travelled time necessary to reach a set of planned stops, and route scheduling, which is the process of assigning an arrival and service time for each stop, with drivers being given shifts that adhere to their working hours. The objective of this paper is to provide benefits on the implementation of waste collection route optimisation and thus achieve economic efficiency for public utility companies, better service for citizens and positive environment and health.

Keywords: waste management, environment, collection route optimisation, GIS

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Authors: Pei-Jyun Hsieh, Cheng-Hsuan Li, Bor-Chen Kuo

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For hyperspectral image classification, feature reduction is an important pre-processing for avoiding the Hughes phenomena due to the difficulty for collecting training samples. Hence, lots of researches developed feature selection methods such as F-score, HSIC (Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion), and etc., to improve hyperspectral image classification. However, most of them only consider the class separability in the original space, i.e., a linear class separability. In this study, we proposed a nonlinear class separability measure based on kernel trick for selecting an appropriate feature subset. The proposed nonlinear class separability was formed by a generalized RBF kernel with different bandwidths with respect to different features. Moreover, it considered the within-class separability and the between-class separability. A genetic algorithm was applied to tune these bandwidths such that the smallest with-class separability and the largest between-class separability simultaneously. This indicates the corresponding feature space is more suitable for classification. In addition, the corresponding nonlinear classification boundary can separate classes very well. These optimal bandwidths also show the importance of bands for hyperspectral image classification. The reciprocals of these bandwidths can be viewed as weights of bands. The smaller bandwidth, the larger weight of the band, and the more importance for classification. Hence, the descending order of the reciprocals of the bands gives an order for selecting the appropriate feature subsets. In the experiments, three hyperspectral image data sets, the Indian Pine Site data set, the PAVIA data set, and the Salinas A data set, were used to demonstrate the selected feature subsets by the proposed nonlinear feature selection method are more appropriate for hyperspectral image classification. Only ten percent of samples were randomly selected to form the training dataset. All non-background samples were used to form the testing dataset. The support vector machine was applied to classify these testing samples based on selected feature subsets. According to the experiments on the Indian Pine Site data set with 220 bands, the highest accuracies by applying the proposed method, F-score, and HSIC are 0.8795, 0.8795, and 0.87404, respectively. However, the proposed method selects 158 features. F-score and HSIC select 168 features and 217 features, respectively. Moreover, the classification accuracies increase dramatically only using first few features. The classification accuracies with respect to feature subsets of 10 features, 20 features, 50 features, and 110 features are 0.69587, 0.7348, 0.79217, and 0.84164, respectively. Furthermore, only using half selected features (110 features) of the proposed method, the corresponding classification accuracy (0.84168) is approximate to the highest classification accuracy, 0.8795. For other two hyperspectral image data sets, the PAVIA data set and Salinas A data set, we can obtain the similar results. These results illustrate our proposed method can efficiently find feature subsets to improve hyperspectral image classification. One can apply the proposed method to determine the suitable feature subset first according to specific purposes. Then researchers can only use the corresponding sensors to obtain the hyperspectral image and classify the samples. This can not only improve the classification performance but also reduce the cost for obtaining hyperspectral images.

Keywords: hyperspectral image classification, nonlinear feature selection, kernel trick, support vector machine

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Authors: Chien-Song Chyang, Yu-Chi Wang

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For sludge disposal, incineration is considered to be better than direct burial because of regulations and space limitations in Taiwan. Additionally, burial after incineration can effectively prolong the lifespan of a landfill. Therefore, it is the most satisfactory method for treating sludge at present. Of the various incineration technologies, the fluidized bed incinerator is a suitable choice due to its fuel flexibility. In this work, sludge generated from industrial plants was treated in a pilot-scale vortexing fluidized bed. The moisture content of the sludge was 48.53%, and its LHV was 454.6 kcal/kg. Primary gas and secondary gas were fixed at 3 Nm³/min and 1 Nm³/min, respectively. Diesel burners with on-off controllers were used to control the temperature; the bed temperature was set to 750±20 °C, and the freeboard temperature was 850±20 °C. The experimental data show that the NO emission increased with bed temperature. The maximum NO emission is 139 ppm, which is in agreement with the regulation. The CO emission is low than 100 ppm through the operation period. The mean particle size of fly ash collected from baghouse decreased with operating time. The ration of bottom ash to fly ash is about 3. Compared with bottom ash, the potassium in the fly ash is much higher. It implied that the potassium content is not the key factor for aggregation of bottom ash.

Keywords: bottom ash, fluidized-bed combustion, incineration, sludge

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Authors: D. Nam Kim, D. Jin Kim, Jeonghwan Jeon

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Defense Defensive Modeling and Simulation (M&S) is a system which enables impracticable training for reducing constraints of time, space and financial resources. The necessity of defensive M&S has been increasing not only for education and training but also virtual fight. Soldiers who are using defensive M&S for education and training will obtain empirical knowledge and know-how. However, the obtained knowledge of individual soldiers have not been managed and utilized yet since the nature of military organizations: confidentiality and frequent change of members. Therefore, this study aims to develop a management system for the experience of defensive M&S based on data mining approach. Since individual empirical knowledge gained through using the defensive M&S is both quantitative and qualitative data, data mining approach is appropriate for dealing with individual empirical knowledge. This research is expected to be helpful for soldiers and military policy makers.

Keywords: data mining, defensive m&s, management system, knowledge management

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Authors: Zoran Barac, Maja Martinovic

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Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are a special kind of organization, with its unique purpose and combination of actors. From the societal point of view, they are central institutions in the society that are involved in the activities of education, research, and innovation. At the same time, their societal function derives complex relationships between involved actors, ranging from students, faculty and administration, business community and corporate partners, government agencies, to the general public. HEIs are also particularly interesting as objects of governance research because of their unique public purpose and combination of stakeholders. Furthermore, they are the special type of institutions from an organizational viewpoint. HEIs are often described as “loosely coupled systems” or “organized anarchies“ that implies the challenging nature of their governance models. Governance models of HEIs describe roles, constellations, and modes of interaction of the involved actors in the process of strategic direction and holistic control of institutions, taking into account each particular context. Many governance models of the HEIs are primarily based on the balance of power among the involved actors. Besides the actors’ power and influence, leadership style and environmental contingency could impact the governance model of an HEI. Analyzing them through the frameworks of institutional and contingency theories, HEI governance models originate as outcomes of their institutional and contingency adaptation. HEIs tend to fit to institutional context comprised of formal and informal institutional rules. By fitting to institutional context, HEIs are converging to each other in terms of their structures, policies, and practices. On the other hand, contingency framework implies that there is no governance model that is suitable for all situations. Consequently, the contingency approach begins with identifying contingency variables that might impact a particular governance model. In order to be effective, the governance model should fit to contingency variables. While the institutional context creates converging forces on HEI governance actors and approaches, contingency variables are the causes of divergence of actors’ behavior and governance models. Finally, an HEI governance model is a balanced adaptation of the HEIs to the institutional context and contingency variables. It also encompasses roles, constellations, and modes of interaction of involved actors influenced by institutional and contingency pressures. Actors’ adaptation to the institutional context brings benefits of legitimacy and resources. On the other hand, the adaptation of the actors’ to the contingency variables brings high performance and effectiveness. HEI governance models outlined and analyzed in this paper are collegial, bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, network, professional, political, anarchical, cybernetic, trustee, stakeholder, and amalgam models.

Keywords: governance, governance models, higher education institutions, institutional context, situational context

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Authors: Anvikshaa Bisen, Krish Makkar

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Professionals misdiagnose autism by ticking off symptoms on a checklist without questioning the causes of said symptoms, and without understanding the innate neurophysiology of the autistic brain. A dysfunctional cingulate gyrus (CG) hyperfocuses attention in the left frontal lobe (logical/analytical) with no ability to access the right frontal lobe (emotional/creative), which plays a central role in spontaneity, social behavior, and nonverbal abilities. Autistic people live in a specialized inner space that is entirely intellectual, free from emotional and social distractions. They have no innate biological way of emotionally connecting with other people. Autistic people process their emotions intellectually, a process that can take 24 hours, by which time it is too late to have felt anything. An inactive amygdala makes it impossible for autistic people to experience fear. Because they do not feel emotion, they have no emotional memories. All memories are of events that happened about which they felt no emotion at the time and feel no emotion when talking about it afterward.

Keywords: autism, Asperger, Asd, neuropsychology, neuroscience

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Authors: Ana Claudia de Souza Costa, Beatriz de Cássia Pinheiro Goulart, Karine de Cássia Cavalari, Henrique Ceretta Oliveira, Edineis de Brito Guirardello

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Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing represents the largest category of health professionals who were on the front line. Thus, investigating the practice environment and the job satisfaction of nursing professionals during the pandemic becomes fundamental since it reflects on the quality of care and the safety climate. The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare the nursing professionals' perception of the work environment, job satisfaction, and safety climate of the different hospitals and work shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: This is a cross-sectional survey with 130 nursing professionals from public, private and mixed hospitals in Brazil. For data collection, was used an electronic form containing the personal and occupational variables, work environment, job satisfaction, and safety climate. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and ANOVA or Kruskal-Wallis tests according to the data distribution. The distribution was evaluated by means of the Shapiro-Wilk test. The analysis was done in the SPSS 23 software, and it was considered a significance level of 5%. Results: The mean age of the participants was 35 years (±9.8), with a mean time of 6.4 years (±6.7) of working experience in the institution. Overall, the nursing professionals evaluated the work environment as favorable; they were dissatisfied with their job in terms of pay, promotion, benefits, contingent rewards, operating procedures and satisfied with coworkers, nature of work, supervision, and communication, and had a negative perception of the safety climate. When comparing the hospitals, it was found that they did not differ in their perception of the work environment and safety climate. However, they differed with regard to job satisfaction, demonstrating that nursing professionals from public hospitals were more dissatisfied with their work with regard to promotion when compared to professionals from private (p=0.02) and mixed hospitals (p< 0.01) and nursing professionals from mixed hospitals were more satisfied than those from private hospitals (p= 0.04) with regard to supervision. Participants working in night shifts had the worst perception of the work environment related to nurse participation in hospital affairs (p= 0.02), nursing foundations for quality care (p= 0.01), nurse manager ability, leadership and support (p= 0.02), safety climate (p< 0.01), job satisfaction related to contingent rewards (p= 0.04), nature of work (p= 0.03) and supervision (p< 0.01). Conclusion: The nursing professionals had a favorable perception of the environment and safety climate but differed among hospitals regarding job satisfaction for the promotion and supervision domains. There was also a difference between the participants regarding the work shifts, being the night shifts, those with the lowest scores, except for satisfaction with operational conditions.

Keywords: health facility environment, job satisfaction, patient safety, nursing

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Authors: Nadjib Drouiche

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Water resources in Algeria are scarce, often low quality, fragile, and unevenly distributed in space and time. The pressure on water resources can be associated with industrial development, a steady population growth, and demanding land irrigation measures. These conditions createa tense competitionfor managing waterresourcesand sharing thembetween agricultural development, drinking water supply, industrial activities, etc. Moreover, the impact of climate change has placed in the forefront national policies focused on the water-energy-food nexus (WEF). In this context, desalination membrane technologies could play an increasing rolefor supporting segments of the Algerian economy that are heavily water-dependent. By implementing water reuse and desalination strategies together in the agricultural sector, there is an opportunity to expand the access to healthy food and clean water, thereby keeping the WEF nexus effects under control.

Keywords: desalination, mitigation, climate change, sustainable development goals

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Authors: Fadzil Ahmad, Noor Ashidi Mat Isa

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This study introduces an improved genetic algorithm procedure that focuses search around near optimal solution corresponded to a group of elite chromosome. This is achieved through a novel crossover technique known as Segmented Multi Chromosome Crossover. It preserves the highly important information contained in a gene segment of elite chromosome and allows an offspring to carry information from gene segment of multiple chromosomes. In this way the algorithm has better possibility to effectively explore the solution space. The improved GA is applied for the automatic and simultaneous parameter optimization and feature selection of artificial neural network in pattern recognition of medical problem, the cancer and diabetes disease. The experimental result shows that the average classification accuracy of the cancer and diabetes dataset has improved by 0.1% and 0.3% respectively using the new algorithm.

Keywords: genetic algorithm, artificial neural network, pattern clasification, classification accuracy

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Authors: A. Errasti, F. Doffagne, O. Foucrier, S. Kao, A. Meigne, H. Pellae, T. Rouland

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Renewable energy recovery is an important domain of research in past few years in view of protection of our ecosystem. Several industrial companies are setting up widespread recovery systems to exploit wave energy. Most of them have a large size, are implanted near the shores and exploit current flows. However, as oceans represent 70% of Earth surface, a huge space is still unexploited to produce energy. Present analysis focuses on surface small scale wave energy recovery. The principle is exactly the opposite of wheel damper for a car on a road. Instead of maintaining the car body as non-oscillatory as possible by adapted control, a system is designed so that its oscillation amplitude under wave action will be maximized with respect to a boat carrying it in view of differential potential energy recuperation. From parametric analysis of system equations, interesting domains have been selected and expected energy output has been evaluated.

Keywords: small scale wave, potential energy, optimized energy recovery, auto-adaptive system

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Authors: Rahma Fitriani, Zerlita Fahdha Pusdiktasari, Herman Cahyo Diartho

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Spatial panel model is commonly used to specify more complicated behavior of economic agent distributed in space at an individual-spatial unit level. There are several spatial panel models which can be adapted based on certain assumptions. A package called splm in R has several functions, ranging from the estimation procedure, specification tests, and model selection tests. In the absence of prior assumptions, a comprehensive procedure which utilizes the available functions in splm must be formed, which is the objective of this study. In this way, the best specification and model can be fitted based on data. The implementation of the procedure works well. It specifies SARAR-FE as the best model for agricultural productivity growth of the 38 East Java’s Regencies/Municipalities.

Keywords: spatial panel, specification, splm, agricultural productivity growth

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Authors: Mohammed Alkahtani, Ahmed El-Sherbeeny

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Industrial engineering is among engineering disciplines that have been introduced relatively recently to higher education in Saudi Arabian engineering colleges. The objective of this paper is to shed light on the history and status of IE higher education in different Saudi universities, including statistics comparing student enrollment and graduation in different Saudi public and private universities. This paper then proposes how industrial engineering programs could participate successfully in the Saudi Vision 2030. Finally, the authors show the results of a survey conducted on a number of IE students evaluating various academic and administrative aspects of the IE program at King Saud University.

Keywords: higher education, history, industrial engineering, Vision 2030

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Authors: Hananto Prakoso, Jean-Pierre Orfeuil

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The relationship between city size, urban transport efficiency (speed), employment proximity (distance) and accessibility of labour market is rarely examined especially in developing countries. This paper reveals the relationship using 2 points of views (active population and company). Then the analysis is divided according to 3 transport modes (car, public transport and motorcycle) and takes into account the vehicle ownership rate. We employ data across 111 districts in 4 big cities of Indonesia. In our result, speed indicator contributed positively to accessibility of labour market while distance elasticity is negative. In absolute value, elasticity of speed indicator is higher than that of distance.

Keywords: labour market, travel time, travel cost threshold, transportation

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Authors: Doaa S. Mahmoud, Nivin M. Ahmed, Salwa H. El-Sabbagh

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The rheometric characteristics and physicomechanical properties of bentonite / acrylonitrile-butadiene rubber (NBR) were investigated. The influences of adding bentonite (Bt) and / or modified bentonite (organo-Bt) to the rubber were observed. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed that the rubber chains may be confined within the interparticle space and the Bt particles presented a physical dispersion in NBR matrix. Bentonite (Bt) was modified with tetra butyl phosphonium bromide (TBP) in order to produce organo-Bt. The modification was carried out at 0.5, 1 and 2 cation exchange capacity (CEC) of bentonite. Results showed that the maximum torque of organo-Bt / NBR composite increases at high bentonite loading. The scorch time (tS2) and cure time (tC90) of the organo-Bt / NBR composites decreased simultaneously relative to those of the neat NBR. The prepared composite exhibited significant improvement in mechanical compared with that of neat NBR.

Keywords: acrylonitrile-butadiene rubber, bentonite, composites, physico-mechanical properties

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Authors: Naoki Okamura

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From a perspective of moral education, this study has examined the experiences of a group of college students who volunteered in disaster areas after the magnitude 9.0 Earthquake, which struck the Northeastern region of Japan in March, 2011. The research, utilizing the method of grounded theory, has uncovered that most of the students have gone through positive changes in their development of moral and social characters, such as attaining deeper sense of empathy and caring personalities. The study expresses, in identifying the nature of those transformations, that the importance of volunteer work should strongly be recognized by the colleges and universities in Japan, in fulfilling their public responsibility of creating and building learning communities that are responsible and caring.

Keywords: moral development, moral education, service learning, volunteer learning

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Authors: Glenn Guira

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Domestic violence is an international pandemic that has affected women from all walks of life. The World Health Organization (2016), announced that recent global prevalence of violence against women indicates that 1 in 3 (35 %) women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner violence in their lifetime. It further said that violence against women is a major public health problem and violations of women’s human rights. Furthermore, the agency said that the factors associated in an increased risk of experiencing intimate partner and sexual violence include low education, child maltreatment or exposure to violence between parents, abuse during childhood, attitudes accepting violence and gender inequality. This is an integrative review of domestic violence focusing on four themes namely types of domestic violence against women, predictors of domestic violence against women, effects of domestic violence against women and strategies in addressing domestic violence against women. This integrative research study was conducted to identify relevant themes on domestic violence that was conducted and published. This study is geared toward understanding further domestic violence as a public health concern. Using the keywords domestic violence, Google Scholar, MEDLINE PLUS, and Ingenta Connect were searched to identify relevant studies. This resulted in 3,467 studies that fall within the copyright year 2006 – 2016. The studies were delimited to domestic violence against women because there are other types of violence that can be committed such as senior citizens abuse, child abuse, violence against males and gay/lesbian abuse. The significant findings of the research study are the following: the forms of domestic violence against women include physical, sexual, psychological, emotional, economic, spiritual and conflict-related violence against, the predictors of domestic violence against women include demographic, health-related, psychological, behavioral, partner-related and social-stress factors, the effects of domestic violence against women include victim-related factors and child-related factors and the strategies addressing domestic violence against women include personal-related strategies, education-related strategies, health-related strategies, legal-related strategies and judicial-related strategies. Consequent to the foregoing findings, the following conclusions are drawn by the researcher that there are published researches that presented different forms, predictors, effects and strategies addressing domestic violence committed by perpetrators against women. The researcher recommended that the summarized comprehensive data should be use to educate people who are potential victims of domestic violence and that future researchers should continue to conduct research for the development of pragmatic programs aimed at reducing domestic violence.

Keywords: domestic violence, physical abuse, intimate partner violence, sexual violence

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Authors: Shamsher Singh

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The Diaspora Literature involves a concept of native land, from where the displacement occurs and a record of harsh journeys undertaken on account of economic compulsions. Basically, Diaspora is a splintered community living in eviction. The scattering (initially) signifies the location of a fluid human autonomous space involving a complex set of negotiations and exchange between the nostalgia and desire for the native land and the making of a new home, adapting to the relationships between the minority and majority, being spokes persons for minority rights and their people back native place and significantly transacting the Contact Zone - a space changed with the possibility of multiple challenges. They write in the background of the sublime qualities of their homeland and, at the same time, try to fit themselves into the traditions and cultural values of other strange communities or land. It also serves as an interconnection of the various cultures involved, and it is used to understand the customs of different cultures and countries; it is also a source of inspiration globally. Although diasporic literature originated back in the 20th century, it spread to other countries like Britain, Canada, America, Denmark, Netherland, Australia, Kenya, Sweden, Kuwait and different parts of Europe. Meaning of Diaspora is the combination of two words which means the movement of people away from their own country or motherland. From a historical point of view, the ‘Diaspora’ is often associated with Jewish bigotry. At the moment, the Diaspora is used for the dispersal of social or cultural groups. This group will be living in two different streams of cultures at the same time. One who left behind his culture and the other has to adapt himself to new cultural situations. The diasporic mind hangs between his birth land and place of work at the same time. A person’s mental state, living in dual existence, gives birth to Dysphoria sensation. Litterateurs had different experiences in this type of sensation e.g., social, universal, political, economic and experiences from the strange land. The struggle of these experiences is seen in diasporic literature. When a person moves to different land or country to fulfill his dreams, the discrimination of language, work and other difficulties with strangers make his relationship more emotional and deeper into his past. These past memories and relations create more difficulties in settling in a foreign land. He lives there physically, but his mental state is in his past constantly, and he ends up his life in those background memories. A person living in Diaspora is actually a dual visionary man. Although this double vision expands his global consciousness, due to this vision, he gains judgemental qualities to understand others. At the same time, he weighs his respect for his native land and the situations of foreign land he experiences, and he finds it difficult to survive in those conditions. It can be said that diaspora literature indicates a person or social organization who lives dual life inquisition structure which becomes the cause of diasporic literature.

Keywords: homeland sickness, language problem, quest for identity, materialistic desire

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Authors: Marzena Tomaszewska, Beata Bilska, Danuta Kolozyn-Krajewska

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Food loss and food waste are a global problem of the modern economy. The research undertaken aimed to analyze how food is handled in catering establishments when it comes to food waste and to demonstrate main ways of management with foods/dishes not served to consumers. A survey study was conducted from January to June 2019. The selection of catering establishments participating in the study was deliberate. The study included establishments located only in Mazowieckie Voivodeship (Poland). 42 completed questionnaires were collected. In some questions, answers were based on a 5-point scale of 1 to 5 (from 'always'/'every day' to 'never'). The survey also included closed questions with a suggested cafeteria of answers. The respondents stated that in their workplaces, dishes served cold and hot ready meals are discarded every day or almost every day (23.7% and 20.5% of answers respectively). A procedure most frequently used for dealing with dishes not served to consumers on a given day is their storage at a cool temperature until the following day. In the research, 1/5 of respondents admitted that consumers 'always' or 'usually' leave uneaten meals on their plates, and over 41% 'sometimes' do so. It was found additionally that food not used in food service sector is most often thrown into a public container for rubbish. Most often thrown into the public container (with communal trash) were: expired products (80.0%), plate waste (80.0%), and inedible products (fruit and vegetable peels, egg shells) (77.5%). Most frequently into the container dedicated only for food waste were thrown out used deep-frying oil (62.5%). 10% of respondents indicated that inedible products in their workplaces is allocate for animal feeds. Food waste in the food service sector still remains an insufficiently studied issue, as owners of these objects are often unwilling to disclose data pertaining to the subject. Incorrect ways of management with foods not served to consumers were observed. There is the need to develop the educational activities for employees and management in the context of food waste management in the food service sector. This publication has been developed under the contract with the National Center for Research and Development No Gospostrateg1/385753/1/NCBR/2018 for carrying out and funding of a project implemented as part of the 'The social and economic development of Poland in the conditions of globalizing markets - GOSPOSTRATEG' program entitled 'Developing a system for monitoring wasted food and an effective program to rationalize losses and reduce food wastage' (acronym PROM).

Keywords: food waste, inedible products, plate waste, used deep-frying oil

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Authors: Felippe Clemente, Evaldo Henrique da Silva

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The need to adopt some type of industrial policy and innovation in Brazil is a recurring theme in the discussion of public interventions aimed at boosting economic growth. For many years, the country has adopted various policies to change its productive structure in order to increase the participation of sectors that would have the greatest potential to generate innovation and economic growth. Only in the 2000s, tax incentives as a policy to support industrial and technological innovation are being adopted in Brazil as a phenomenon associated with rates of productivity growth and economic development. In this context, in late 2004 and 2005, Brazil reformulated its institutional apparatus for innovation in order to approach the OECD conventions and the Frascati Manual. The Innovation Law (2004) and the 'Lei do Bem' (2005) reduced some institutional barriers to innovation, provided incentives for university-business cooperation, and modified access to tax incentives for innovation. Chapter III of the 'Lei do Bem' (no. 11,196/05) is currently the most comprehensive fiscal incentive to stimulate innovation. It complies with the requirements, which stipulates that the Union should encourage innovation in the company or industry by granting tax incentives. With its introduction, the bureaucratic procedure was simplified by not requiring pre-approval of projects or participation in bidding documents. However, preliminary analysis suggests that this instrument has not yet been able to stimulate the sector diversification of these investments in Brazil, since its benefits are mostly captured by sectors that already developed this activity, thus showing problems with moral hazard. It is necessary, then, to analyze the 'Lei do Bem' to know if there is indeed the need for some change, investigating what changes should be implanted in the Brazilian innovation policy. This work, therefore, shows itself as a first effort to analyze a current national problem, evaluating the effectiveness of the 'Lei do Bem' and suggesting public policies that help and direct the State to the elaboration of legislative laws capable of encouraging agents to follow what they describes. As a preliminary result, it is known that 130 firms used fiscal incentives for innovation in 2006, 320 in 2007 and 552 in 2008. Although this number is on the rise, it is still small, if it is considered that there are around 6 thousand firms that perform Research and Development (R&D) activities in Brazil. Moreover, another obstacle to the 'Lei do Bem' is the percentages of tax incentives provided to companies. These percentages reveal a significant sectoral correlation between R&D expenditures of large companies and R&D expenses of companies that accessed the 'Lei do Bem', reaching a correlation of 95.8% in 2008. With these results, it becomes relevant to investigate the law's ability to stimulate private investments in R&D.

Keywords: brazilian innovation system, moral hazard, R&D, Lei do Bem

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Authors: Onkar Nath Verma, Nitish Kumar Singh, Raghvendra, Pravin Kumar, Prabhakar Singh

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The perovskite type electrolyte material LaAlO3 was prepared by solution based auto-combustion method using Al (NO3)3.6H2O, La2O3 with dilute nitrate acid (HNO3) as precursors and citric acid (C6H8O7.H2O) as a fuel. The synthesis protocol gave an easy processing of the LaAlO3 nano-particles. The XRD measurement revealed that the material has single phase with space group R-3c (rhombohedral). Thermal behavior was measured by simultaneous differential thermal analysis and thermo gravimetric analysis (DTA-TGA). The compact pellet density was determined. Also, the surface morphology was studied using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The conductivity of LaAlO3 was measured employing LCR meter and found to increase with increasing temperature. This increase in conductivity may be attributed to increased mobility of oxide ion.

Keywords: perovskite, LaAlO3, XRD, SEM, DTA-TGA, SOFC

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Authors: Natalia Bustos Sierra, Katrien Tersago

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It is currently proven that both extremes of temperature are associated with increased mortality and that air pollution is associated with temperature. This relationship is complex, and in countries with important seasonal variations in weather such as Belgium, some effects can appear as non-significant when the analysis is done over the entire year. We, therefore, analyzed the effect of short-term outdoor air pollution exposure on cardiovascular mortality during the warmer and colder months separately. We used daily cardiovascular deaths from acute cardiovascular diagnostics according to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10: I20-I24, I44-I49, I50, I60-I66) during the period 2008-2013. The environmental data were population-weighted concentrations of particulates with an aerodynamic diameter less than 10 µm (PM₁₀) and less than 2.5 µm (PM₂.₅) (daily average), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) (daily maximum of the hourly average) and ozone (O₃) (daily maximum of the 8-hour running mean). A Generalized linear model was applied adjusting for the confounding effect of season, temperature, dew point temperature, the day of the week, public holidays and the incidence of influenza-like illness (ILI) per 100,000 inhabitants. The relative risks (RR) were calculated for an increase of one interquartile range (IQR) of the air pollutant (μg/m³). These were presented for the four hottest months (June, July, August, September) and coldest months (November, December, January, February) in Belgium. We applied both individual lag model and unconstrained distributed lag model methods. The cumulative effect of a four-day exposure (day of exposure and three consecutive days) was calculated from the unconstrained distributed lag model. The IQR for PM₁₀, PM₂.₅, NO₂, and O₃ were respectively 8.2, 6.9, 12.9 and 25.5 µg/m³ during warm months and 18.8, 17.6, 18.4 and 27.8 µg/m³ during cold months. The association with CV mortality was statistically significant for the four pollutants during warm months and only for NO₂ during cold months. During the warm months, the cumulative effect of an IQR increase of ozone for the age groups 25-64, 65-84 and 85+ was 1.066 (95%CI: 1.002-1.135), 1.041 (1.008-1.075) and 1.036 (1.013-1.058) respectively. The cumulative effect of an IQR increase of NO₂ for the age group 65-84 was 1.066 (1.020-1.114) during warm months and 1.096 (1.030-1.166) during cold months. The cumulative effect of an IQR increase of PM₁₀ during warm months reached 1.046 (1.011-1.082) and 1.038 (1.015-1.063) for the age groups 65-84 and 85+ respectively. Similar results were observed for PM₂.₅. The short-term effect of air pollution on cardiovascular mortality is greater during warm months for lower pollutant concentrations compared to cold months. Spending more time outside during warm months increases population exposure to air pollution and can, therefore, be a confounding factor for this association. Age can also affect the length of time spent outdoors and the type of physical activity exercised. This study supports the deleterious effect of air pollution on cardiovascular mortality (CV) which varies according to season and age groups in Belgium. Public health measures should, therefore, be adapted to seasonality.

Keywords: air pollution, cardiovascular, mortality, season

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Authors: Venkat Garigapati

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To date, more than a dozen oligonucleotide products are approved as injectable products for clinical use. However, there is no single oligo nucleotide product approved for clinical use. Oral delivery of oligo nucleotides is patient friendly administration however, many challenges involved in the development of oral formulation. Over the course of last twenty plus years, the research in this space aimed to address these challenges. This paper describes the issues involved in solubility, stability, enzymatic (nuclease) induced degradation, and permeation of nucleotides in the Gastrointestinal (GI) and how to overcome these challenges. Also, the translation of in vitro data to in vivo models hinders the formulation development. This paper describes the challenges involved in the development of Oligo Nucleotide products for oral administration. It also discusses the chemistry and formulation strategies for oral administration of oligonucleotides.

Keywords: oral adminstration, oligo nucleotides, stability, permeation, gastrointestinal tract

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Authors: Harvey Hyman, Thomas Hull

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As one of the largest cancer treatment centers in the United States, we continuously confront the challenge of how to leverage the best possible technological solutions, in order to provide the highest quality of service to our customers – the doctors, nurses and patients at Moffitt who are fighting every day for the prevention and cure of cancer. This paper reports on the transition from a vertical to a horizontal IT infrastructure. We discuss how the new frameworks and methods such as public, private and hybrid cloud, brokering cloud services are replacing the traditional vertical paradigm for computing. We also report on the impact of containers, micro services, and the shift to continuous integration/continuous delivery. These impacts and changes in delivery methodology for computing are driving how we accomplish our strategic IT goals across the enterprise.

Keywords: cloud computing, IT infrastructure, IT architecture, healthcare

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Authors: Dominik Szczesniak, Sabre Kais

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In the present communication, we analyze selected local aspects of the metal-induced gap states (MIGSs) that may be responsible for the magnetic flux noise in some of the superconducting qubit modalities at low-dimension. The presented theoretical analysis stems from the earlier bulk considerations and is aimed at further explanation of the decoherence effect by recognizing its universal character. Specifically, the analysis is carried out by using the complex band structure method for arbitrary low-dimensional junctions. This allows us to provide the most fundamental and general observations for the systems of interest. In particular, herein, we investigate in detail the MIGSs behavior in the momentum space as a function of the potential fluctuations and the electron-electron interaction magnitude at the interface. In what follows, this study is meant to provide a direct relationship between the MIGSs behavior, the discussed decoherence effect, and the intrinsic properties of the low-dimensional Josephson junctions.

Keywords: superconducting qubits, metal-induced gap states, decoherence, low-dimension

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