Search results for: exposure to foreign language translation

Authors: Laila Algalal, Chen Xi

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The US dollar has long served as the world's primary reserve currency. However, this dominance faces growing challenges from internal US economic pressures and the rise of alternative currencies. Internally, issues like high debt, inflation, reduced competitiveness, and economic instability due to inequality in economic policies threaten the dollar's position. Externally, more countries are establishing alternative currencies, payment systems, and regional financial institutions to reduce dollar dependence. These drivers have contributed to a decline in the dollar's share of global foreign exchange reserves from 71% in 2001 to an estimated 58% in 2022. While this 13-percentage point drop took two decades, recent initiatives suggest de-dollarization could accelerate in the coming few decades. Efforts to establish non-dollar trade deals and alternative financial systems show more substantial progress compared to initiatives in the early 2000s. As the nature of the world system is anarchic, states make either individual or group efforts to guarantee their economic security and achieve their interests. Based on neoclassical realism, this paper analyzes both internal and external US economic factors driving current and future de-dollarization and the implications on the international monetary system, in addition to examining the motivation for such moves.

Keywords: de-dollarization, US dollar, monetary system, economic security, economic policies.

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Authors: Saud Al Taj

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Employer branding is considered as a useful tool for addressing the global-local problem facing complex organisations that have operations scattered across the globe and face challenges of dealing with the local environment alongside. Despite being an established field of study within the Western developed world, there is little empirical evidence concerning the relevance of employer branding to global companies that operate in the under-developed economies. This paper fills this gap by gaining rich insight into the implementation of employer branding programs in a foreign multinational operating in Pakistan dealing with the global-local problem. The study is qualitative in nature and employs semi-structured and focus group interviews with senior/middle managers and local frontline employees to deeply examine the phenomenon in case organisation. Findings suggest that authenticity is required in employer brands to enable them to respond to the local needs thereby leading to the resolution of the global-local problem. However, the role of signaling theory is key to the development of authentic employer brands as it stresses on the need to establish an efficient and effective signaling environment wherein signals travel in both directions (from signal designers to receivers and backwards) and facilitate firms with the global-local problem. The paper also identifies future avenues of research for the employer branding field.

Keywords: authenticity, counter-signals, employer branding, global-local problem, signaling theory

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Authors: Maslan Lamria, Ralph E. H. Sims, Tatang H. Soerawidjaja

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In increasing its self-sufficiency on transportation fuel, Indonesia is currently developing commercial production and use of drop-in biofuel (DBF) from vegetable oil. To maximize the level of success, it is necessary to get insights on how the implementation would develop as well as any important factors. This study assessed the dynamics of transition from existing fossil fuel system to a renewable fuel system, which involves the transition from existing biodiesel to projected DBF. A systems dynamics approach was applied and a model developed to simulate the dynamics of liquid biofuel transition. The use of palm oil feedstock was taken as a case study to assess the projected DBF implementation by 2045. The set of model indicators include liquid fuel self-sufficiency, liquid biofuel share, foreign exchange savings and green-house gas emissions reduction. The model outputs showed that supports on DBF investment and use play an important role in the transition progress. Given assumptions which include application of a maximum level of supports over time, liquid fuel self-sufficiency would be still unfulfilled in which palm biofuel contribution is 0.2. Thus, other types of feedstock such as algae and oil feedstock from marginal lands need to be developed synergically. Regarding support on DBF use, this study recommended that removal of fossil subsidy would be necessary prior to applying a carbon tax policy effectively.

Keywords: biofuel, drop-in biofuel, energy transition, liquid fuel

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Authors: Debit Datta, Jeffrey J. Coleman, Scott A. Enebak, Lori G. Eckhardt

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Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) is a leading productive timber species in the southeastern USA. Over the past three years, an emerging threat is expressed by successive needle defoliation followed by stunted growth and tree mortality in loblolly pine plantations. Considering economic significance, it has now become a rising concern among landowners, forest managers, and forest health state cooperators. However, the symptoms of the disease were perplexed somewhat with root disease(s) and recurrently attributed to invasive Phytophthora species due to the similarity of disease nature and devastation. Therefore, the study investigated the potential causal agent of this disease and characterized the fungi associated with loblolly pine needle defoliation in the southeastern USA. Besides, 70 trees were selected at seven long-term monitoring plots at Chatom, Alabama, to monitor and record the annual disease incidence and severity. Based on colony morphology and ITS-rDNA sequence data, a total of 28 species of fungi representing 17 families have been recovered from diseased loblolly pine needles. The native brown-spot pathogen, Lecanosticta acicola, was the species most frequently recovered from unhealthy loblolly pine needles in combination with some other common needle cast and rust pathogen(s). Identification was confirmed using morphological similarity and amplification of translation elongation factor 1-alpha gene region of interest. Tagged trees were consistently found chlorotic and defoliated from 2019 to 2020. The current emergence of the brown-spot pathogen causing loblolly pine mortality necessitates the investigation of the role of changing climatic conditions, which might be associated with increased pathogen pressure to loblolly pines in the southeastern USA.

Keywords: brown-spot needle blight, loblolly pine, needle defoliation, plantation forestry

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Authors: Salwa Hagag Abdelaziz, Dorria Salem, Hoda Zaki, Suzan Atteya

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Early detection of breast cancer saves many thousands of lives each year via application of mammography and genetic screening and many more lives could be saved if nurses are involved in breast care screening practices. So, the aim of the study was to identify nurse's role in early detection of breast cancer through mammography and genetic screening and its impact on patient's outcome. In order to achieve this aim, 400 women above 40 years, asymptomatic were recruited for mammography and genetic screening. In addition, 50 nurses and 6 technologists were involved in the study. A descriptive analytical design was used. Five tools were utilized: sociodemographic, mammographic examination and risk factors, women's before, during and after mammography, items relaying to technologists, and items related to nurses were also obtained. The study finding revealed that 3% of women detected for malignancy and 7.25% for fibroadenoma. Statistically, significant differences were found between mammography results and age, family history, genetic screening, exposure to smoke, and using contraceptive pills. Nurses have insufficient knowledge about screening tests. Based on these findings the present study recommended involvement of nurses in breast care which is very important to in force population about screening practices.

Keywords: mammography, early detection, genetic screening, breast cancer

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Authors: Luqman Shah

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The myopic gender discrimination is now a well-documented and recognized fact. However, gender is only one facet of an individual’s multiple identities. The aim of this work is to investigate gender discrimination highlighted in print media in the subcontinent with a specific focus on Pakistan and India. In this study, an approach is adopted by using the James Paul Gee model for the identification of gender discrimination. As a matter of fact, gender discrimination is not consistent in its nature and intensity across global societies and varies as social, geographical, and cultural background change. The World has been changed enormously in every aspect of life, and there are also obvious changes towards gender discrimination, prejudices, and biases, but still, the world has a long way to go to recognize women as equal as men in every sphere of life. The history of the world is full of gender-based incidents and violence. Now the time came that this issue must be seriously addressed and to eradicate this evil, which will lead to harmonize society and consequently heading towards peace and prosperity. The study was carried out by a mixed model research method. The data was extracted from the contents of five Pakistani English newspapers out of a total of 23 daily English newspapers, and likewise, five Indian daily English newspapers out of 52 those were published 2018-2019. Two news stories from each of these newspapers, in total, twenty news stories were taken as sampling for this research. Content and semiotic analysis techniques were used to analyze through James Paul Gee's seven building tasks of language. The resources of renowned e-papers are utilized, and the highlighted cases in Pakistani newspapers of Indian gender-based stories and vice versa are scrutinized as per the requirement of this research paper. For analysis of the written stretches of discourse taken from e-papers and processing of data for the focused problem, James Paul Gee 'Seven Building Tasks of Language' is used. Tabulation of findings is carried to pinpoint the issue with certainty. Findings after processing the data showed that there is a gross human rights violation on the basis of gender discrimination. The print media needs a more realistic representation of what is what not what seems to be. The study recommends the equality and parity of genders.

Keywords: gender discrimination, print media, Paul Gee model, subcontinent

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Authors: Veronica S. Moertini, Vinsensius Kevin, Gede Karya

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Customer reviews have been collected by many kinds of e-commerce websites selling products, services, hotel rooms, tickets and so on. Each website collects its own customer reviews. The reviews can be crawled, collected from those websites and stored as big data. Text analysis techniques can be used to analyze that data to produce summarized information, such as customer opinions. Then, these opinions can be published by independent service provider websites and used to help customers in choosing the most suitable products or services. As the opinions are analyzed from big data of reviews originated from many websites, it is expected that the results are more trusted and accurate. Indonesian customers write reviews in Indonesian language, which comes with its own structures and uniqueness. We found that most of the reviews are expressed with “daily language”, which is informal, do not follow the correct grammar, have many abbreviations and slangs or non-formal words. Hadoop is an emerging platform aimed for storing and analyzing big data in distributed systems. A Hadoop cluster consists of master and slave nodes/computers operated in a network. Hadoop comes with distributed file system (HDFS) and MapReduce framework for supporting parallel computation. However, MapReduce has weakness (i.e. inefficient) for iterative computations, specifically, the cost of reading/writing data (I/O cost) is high. Given this fact, we conclude that MapReduce function is best adapted for “one-pass” computation. In this research, we develop an efficient technique for extracting or mining opinions from big data of Indonesian reviews, which is based on MapReduce with one-pass computation. In designing the algorithm, we avoid iterative computation and instead adopt a “look up table” technique. The stages of the proposed technique are: (1) Crawling the data reviews from websites; (2) cleaning and finding root words from the raw reviews; (3) computing the frequency of the meaningful opinion words; (4) analyzing customers sentiments towards defined objects. The experiments for evaluating the performance of the technique were conducted on a Hadoop cluster with 14 slave nodes. The results show that the proposed technique (stage 2 to 4) discovers useful opinions, is capable of processing big data efficiently and scalable.

Keywords: big data analysis, Hadoop MapReduce, analyzing text data, mining Indonesian reviews

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Authors: Zikora K. G. Anyaegbunam, Annabel A. Nnawuihe, Ngozi J. Anyaegbunam, Emmanuel A. Eze

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The discovery and production of new antibiotics is unavoidable in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria. However, this is only part of the problem; we have never really had medications that could completely eradicate an infection. All pathogens create a limited number of dormant persister cells that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. When the concentration of antibiotics decreases, surviving persisters repopulate the population, resulting in a recurrent chronic infection. Bacterial populations have an alternative survival strategy to withstand harsh conditions or antibiotic exposure, in addition to the well-known methods of antibiotic resistance and biofilm formation. Persister cells are a limited subset of transiently antibiotic-tolerant phenotypic variations capable of surviving high-dose antibiotic therapy. Persisters that flip back to a normal phenotype can restart growth when antibiotic pressure drops, assuring the bacterial population's survival. Persister cells have been found in every major pathogen, and they play a role in antibiotic tolerance in biofilms as well as the recalcitrance of chronic infections. Persister cells has been implicated to play a role in the establishment of antibiotic resistance, according to growing research. Thusthe need to basically elucidate the biology of persisters and how they are linked to antibiotic resistance, and as well it's link to diseases.

Keywords: persister cells, phenotypic variations, repopulation, mobile genetic transfers, antibiotic resistance

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Authors: Sarwan Hasan

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This article is to investigate the main forms and causes of corruption and provides anti-corruption policies. It is significant to find out how both interact and affect each other. The research focuses particularly on the case study of Iraq from 2003 to 2023. In this way, the main methods of analysis will be the system approach to analyze the relationship of different elements of the political system of Iraq in the context of corruption, the process-tracing method to explain the reasons for corruption, and content analysis of the official documents important for the research topic. Moreover, the SWOT analysis will be used in the part about the anti-corruption policies. This article concludes that the main causes behind corruption in Iraq are power distribution based on muhassasa tayifiya (power apportionment based on ethno-sectarianism), decentralized political system, sectarian division, Iran, and socio-cultural structure. The main forms of corruption in the country are illegal enrichment, using public positions for sectarian agenda, criminal corruption, bribery, political patronage, clientelism, cronyism, nepotism, embezzlement, kickback, extortion, money laundry, speed money, theft, and justice obstruction. The main anti-corruption policies in Iraq are establishing the Commission of Integrity, Board of Supreme Audit, Inspectors General and Parliamentary Committee, Internalization (assistance from foreign actors), economic adjustment and financial reform, and the new anti-corruption program of the new Prime Minister (Mohamed Shiyah al-Sudani).

Keywords: anti-corruption, corruption, Iraq, anti-corruption policies

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Authors: Jeffrey Cacho, Sherwin Reyes

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The research targeted enhancing energy utilization and reducing waste in roasting processes, particularly in Camarines Norte, where Bounty Agro Ventures Incorporated dominates through brands such as Chooks-to-Go, Uling Roaster, and Reyal. Competitors like Andok’s and Baliwag Lechon Manok also share the market. A staggering 90% of these businesses use traditional glass-type roasting furnaces fueled by wood charcoal, leading to significant energy loss and inefficiency due to suboptimal heat conservation. Only a mere 10% employ electric ovens. Many available furnaces, typically constructed from industrial materials through welding and other metal joining techniques, are not energy-efficient. Cost-prohibitive commercial options compel some micro-enterprises to fabricate their furnaces. The study proposed developing an eco-friendly, cost-effective roasting furnace with excellent heat retention. The distinct design aimed to reduce cooks' heat exposure and overall fuel consumption. The furnace features an angle bar frame, a combustion chute for fuel burning, a heat-retaining clay-walled chamber, and a top cover, all contributing to improved energy savings and user safety.

Keywords: biomass roasting furnace, heat storage, combustion chute, start-up roasting business

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Authors: Merih Welay Welesilassie

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Understanding educators' readiness to incorporate AI tools into their teaching methods requires comprehensively examining the influencing factors. This understanding is crucial, given the potential of these technologies to personalise learning experiences, improve instructional effectiveness, and foster innovative pedagogical approaches. This study evaluated factors affecting teachers' adoption of AI tools in their English language instruction by extending the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to encompass digital readiness support, perceived risk, and trust. A cross-sectional quantitative survey was conducted with 128 English language teachers, supplemented by qualitative data collection from 15 English teachers. The structural mode analysis indicated that implementing AI tools in Ethiopian higher education was notably influenced by digital readiness support, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived risk, and trust. Digital readiness support positively impacted perceived ease of use, usefulness, and trust while reducing safety and privacy risks. Perceived ease of use positively correlated with perceived usefulness but negatively influenced trust. Furthermore, perceived usefulness strengthened trust in AI tools, while perceived safety and privacy risks significantly undermined trust. Trust was crucial in increasing educators' willingness to adopt AI technologies. The qualitative analysis revealed that the teachers exhibited strong content and pedagogical knowledge but needed more technology-related knowledge. Moreover, It was found that the teachers did not utilise digital tools to teach English. The study identified several obstacles to incorporating digital tools into English lessons, such as insufficient digital infrastructure, a shortage of educational resources, inadequate professional development opportunities, and challenging policies and governance. The findings provide valuable guidance for educators, inform policymakers about creating supportive digital environments, and offer a foundation for further investigation into technology adoption in educational settings in Ethiopia and similar contexts.

Keywords: digital readiness support, AI acceptance, risk, trust

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Authors: Qiao-Yu Warren Cai

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Due to the rise of big data, building corpora and using them to analyze ChineseL2 learners’ language output has become a trend. Various empirical research has been conducted using Chinese corpora built by different academic institutes. However, most of the research analyzed the data in the Chinese corpora usingcorpus-based qualitative content analysis with descriptive statistics. Descriptive statistics can be used to make summations about the subjects or samples that research has actually measured to describe the numerical data, but the collected data cannot be generalized to the population. Comte, a Frenchpositivist, has argued since the 19th century that human beings’ knowledge, whether the discipline is humanistic and social science or natural science, should be verified in a scientific way to construct a universal theory to explain the truth and human beings behaviors. Inferential statistics, able to make judgments of the probability of a difference observed between groups being dependable or caused by chance (Free Geography Notes, 2015)and to infer from the subjects or examples what the population might think or behave, is just the right method to support Comte’s argument in the field of TCSOL. Also, inferential statistics is a core of quantitative research, but little research has been conducted by combing corpora with inferential statistics. Little research analyzes the differences in Chinese L2 learners’ language corpus output errors by using theOne-way ANOVA so that the findings of previous research are limited to inferring the population's Chinese errors according to the given samples’ Chinese corpora. To fill this knowledge gap in the professional development of Taiwanese TCSOL, the present study aims to utilize the One-way ANOVA to analyze corpus output errors of Chinese L2 learners from America, Myanmar, and Singapore. The results show that no significant difference exists in ‘shì (是) sentence’ and word order errors, but compared with Americans and Singaporeans, it is significantly easier for Myanmar to have ‘sentence blends.’ Based on the above results, the present study provides an instructional approach and contributes to further exploration of how Chinese L2 learners can have (and use) learning strategies to lower errors.

Keywords: Chinese corpus, error analysis, one-way analysis of variance, Chinese L2 learners, Americans, myanmar, Singaporeans

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Authors: S. Benkraouda, Z. Djelloul-Khedda, B. Yagoubi

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we present a method for early detection of forest fires from a thermal infrared satellite image, using the image matrix of the probability of belonging. The principle of the method is to compare a theoretical mathematical model to an experimental model. We considered that each line of the image matrix, as an embodiment of a non-stationary random process. Since the distribution of pixels in the satellite image is statistically dependent, we divided these lines into small stationary and ergodic intervals to characterize the image by an adequate mathematical model. A standard deviation was chosen to generate random variables, so each interval behaves naturally like white Gaussian noise. The latter has been selected as the mathematical model that represents a set of very majority pixels, which we can be considered as the image background. Before modeling the image, we made a few pretreatments, then the parameters of the theoretical Gaussian model were extracted from the modeled image, these settings will be used to calculate the probability of each interval of the modeled image to belong to the theoretical Gaussian model. The high intensities pixels are regarded as foreign elements to it, so they will have a low probability, and the pixels that belong to the background image will have a high probability. Finally, we did present the reverse of the matrix of probabilities of these intervals for a better fire detection.

Keywords: forest fire, forest fire detection, satellite image, normal distribution, theoretical gaussian model, thermal infrared matrix image

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Authors: Sijia Hu

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Tensile creep tests were performed along the normal direction on the as-solutioned (AS) and as-aged (AA) samples of a commercial ZK60 alloy in this work. The results showed that the AA sample obtained a stronger 0.2% proof stress but a poorer creep resistance in comparison to the AS sample. It was revealed that the creep deformation in the AS sample was attributed to basal slip and twinning, while the creep behavior of the AA sample was controlled by basal slip, pyramidal slip and twinning. Besides, the reasons for the poorer creep resistance of the AA sample were unveiled. Pyramidal dislocations towards various moving directions were found to accelerate the creep deformation, and basal dislocations kinking at twin boundaries were found to induce heavy stress concentration. Furthermore, massive dynamic precipitates, including beta 1 prime and beta 2 prime types, were formed in the AS sample during the creep exposure, contributing to the superior creep resistance. But in the AA sample, plentiful beta 1 prime and beta 2 prime phases generated during the prior peak-aging treatment dissolved into the matrix fast and only beta 1 prime re-precipitated during the creep process. With the decreased area fractions of precipitates, the age-hardening effect slacked off and failed to enhance the creep resistance.

Keywords: Mg alloy, creep, precipitation, microstructure

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Authors: Muna A. Eissawi, Safaa Abed Elfataah, Haytham Hago, Fatima E Abukunna, Ibtisam Amin Goreish, Nahid Gornas

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The study examined and analyzed the genetic diversity of DRB1locus of exon 2 of major histocompatibility complex of Sudanese desert sheep using PCR-RFLP and DNA sequencing. Five hundred samples belonging to five ecotypes of Desert Sudanese sheep (Abrag (Ab), Ashgar (Ash), Hamari (H), Kabashi (K) and Watish (W) were included. Amplification of exon 2 of the DRB1 gene yielded (300bp) amplified product in different ecotypes. Nine different digestion patterns corresponding to Five distinct alleles were observed with Rsa1 digestion. Genotype (ag) was the most common among all ecotypes, with a percentage comprised (40.4 %). The Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) test showed that the studied ecotypes have significantly deviated from the theoretical proportions of Rsa1 patterns; probability values of the Chi-square test for HWE for MHC-DRB1 gene in SDS were 0.00 in all ecotypes. The constructed phylogenetic tree revealed the relation of 22 Sudanese isolates with each other and showed the shared sequences with 47 published foreign sequences randomly selected from different geographic regions. The results of this study highlight the effect of heterozygosity of MHC genes of the Desert sheep of Sudan which may clarify some of genetic back ground of their disease resistance and adaptation to environment.

Keywords: desert sheep, MHC, Ovar-DRB1, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP)

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Authors: Mohammad Alqahtani, Eric Atwell

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This paper reviews and classifies most of the important types of search techniques that have been applied on the holy Quran. Then, it addresses the limitations in these techniques. Additionally, this paper surveys most existing Quranic ontologies and what are their deficiencies. Finally, it explains a new search tool called: A semantic search tool for Al Quran based on Qur’anic ontologies. This tool will overcome all limitations in the existing Quranic search applications.

Keywords: holy Quran, natural language processing (NLP), semantic search, information retrieval (IR), ontology

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Authors: Myoung-Jin Lee, Sung-Jin Lee, Young-Kon Park, Jin-Wook Kim, Bo-Kyoung Kim, Song-Hun Chong, Sun-Ii Kim

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The ability to resist the shear strength arises mainly from the web panel of steel girders and as such, the shear buckling strength of these girders has been extensively investigated. For example, Blaser’s reported that when buckling occurs, the tension field has an effect after the buckling strength of the steel is reached. The findings of these studies have been applied by AASHTO, AISC, and to the European Code that provides guidelines for designs aimed at preventing shear buckling. Steel girders are susceptible to corrosion resulting from exposure to natural elements such as rainfall, humidity, and temperature. This corrosion leads to a reduction in the size of the web panel section, thereby resulting in a decrease in the shear strength. The decrease in the panel section has a significant effect on the maintenance section of the bridge. However, in most conventional designs, the influence of corrosion is overlooked during the calculation of the shear buckling strength and hence over-design is common. Therefore, in this study, a steel girder with an A/D of 1:1, as well as a 6-mm-, 16-mm-, and 12-mm-thick web panel, flange, and intermediate reinforcing material, respectively, were used. The total length was set to that (3200 mm) of the default model. The effect of corrosion shear buckling was investigated by determining the volume amount of corrosion, shape of the erosion patterns, and the angular change in the tensile field of the shear buckling strength. This study provides the basic data that will enable designs that incorporate values closer (than those used in most conventional designs) to the actual shear buckling strength.

Keywords: corrosion, shear buckling strength, steel girder, shear strength

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Authors: Yousif Mohamed Y. Abdallah

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This is an experimental study deals with detection, measurement and analysis of the periodic physiological organ motion during external beam radiotherapy; to improve the accuracy of the radiation field placement, and to reduce the exposure of healthy tissue during radiation treatments. The importance of this study is to detect the maximum path of the mobile structures during radiotherapy delivery, to define the planning target volume (PTV) and irradiated volume during both inspiration and expiration period and to verify the target volume. In addition to its role to highlight the importance of the application of Intense Guided Radiotherapy (IGRT) methods in the field of radiotherapy. The results showed (body contour was equally (3.17 + 0.23 mm), for left lung displacement reading (2.56 + 0.99 mm) and right lung is (2.42 + 0.77 mm) which the radiation oncologist to take suitable countermeasures in case of significant errors. In addition, the use of the image registration technique for automatic position control is predicted potential motion. The motion ranged between 2.13 mm and 12.2 mm (low and high). In conclusion, individualized assessment of tumor mobility can improve the accuracy of target areas definition in patients undergo Sterostatic RT for stage I, II and III lung cancer (NSCLC). Definition of the target volume based on a single CT scan with a margin of 10 mm is clearly inappropriate.

Keywords: respiratory motion, external beam radiotherapy, image processing, lung

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Authors: Jui-Hsueh Hu

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This study investigated various models of refusal speech acts among three target groups: French learners of Mandarin Chinese (FM), Taiwanese native Mandarin speakers (TM), and native French speakers (NF). The refusal responses were analyzed in terms of their options, frequencies, and sequences and the contents of their semantic formulas. This study also examined differences in refusal strategies, as determined by social status and social distance, among the three groups. The difficulties of refusal speech acts encountered by FM were then generalized. The results indicated that Mandarin instructors of NF should focus on the different reasons for the pragmatic failure of French learners and should assist these learners in mastering refusal speech acts that rely on abundant cultural information. In this study, refusal policies were mainly classified according to the research of Beebe et al. (1990). Discourse completion questionnaires were collected from TM, FM, and NF, and their responses were compared to determine how refusal policies differed among the groups. This study not only emphasized the dissimilarities of refusal strategies between native Mandarin speakers and second-language Mandarin learners but also used NF as a control group. The results of this study demonstrated that regarding overall strategies, FM were biased toward NF in terms of strategy choice, order, and content, resulting in pragmatic transfer under the influence of social factors such as 'social status' and 'social distance,' strategy choices of FM were still closer to those of NF, and the phenomenon of pragmatic transfer of FM was revealed. Regarding the refusal difficulties among the three groups, the F-test in the analysis of variance revealed statistical significance was achieved for Role Playing Items 13 and 14 (P < 0.05). A difference was observed in the average number of refusal difficulties between the participants. However, after multiple comparisons, it was found that item 13 (unrecognized heterosexual junior colleague requesting contacts) was significantly more difficult for NF than for TM and FM; item 14 (contacts requested by an unrecognized classmate of the opposite sex) was significantly more difficult to refuse for NF than for TM. This study summarized the pragmatic language errors that most FM often perform, including the misuse or absence of modal words, hedging expressions, and empty words at the end of sentences, as the reasons for pragmatic failures. The common social pragmatic failures of FM include inaccurately applying the level of directness and formality.

Keywords: French Mandarin, interlanguage refusal, pragmatic transfer, speech acts

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Authors: Nnedum Obiajuru Anthony Ugochukwu, Ezechukwu Emmanuel Ntomchukwu

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The research investigated the importance of marketing and customer relationship management in post-consolidated banks in achieving success and survival in the face of intense competition and global economic meltdown. The problem lies in the fact that during the pre-consolidation era in the banking industry in Nigeria, banks were comfortable transacting their businesses from their armchairs. Little attention was paid to marketing by banks as a veritable means of achieving and consolidating their profit position. This situation, no doubt sustained because banks were more or less currency exchange centers where customers buy and sell foreign exchange which was highly demanded, but in very short supply. Today, deregulation and consolidation of banks in Nigeria have tremendously increased the tempo of activities in the banking industry, and competition has become very severe among banks. The weak link in the success of post-consolidated banks in Nigeria is the utter neglect, and light or unserious consideration of customer relationship marketing by banks. Armchair banking which banks have been practicing has no regard for marketing as a means to survival. However, in order to survive, post-consolidated banks must take relationship marketing and customer relationship management seriously especially in the face of the current global economic crisis. This paper aims at exploring the role of marketing in building and managing customer relationships as a means to survival in post-consolidation banking in Nigeria.

Keywords: marketing, customer relationships, banking sector, Nigeria

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Authors: H. Yousefnia, S. Zolghadri

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The measurement of organ radiation exposure dose is one of the most important steps to be taken initially, for developing a new radiopharmaceutical. In this study, the dosimetric studies of a novel agent for SPECT-imaging of the bone metastasis, 111In-1,4,7,10-tetraazacyclododecane-1,4,7,10 tetraethylene phosphonic acid (111In-DOTMP) complex, have been carried out to estimate the dose in human organs based on the data derived from rats. The radiolabeled complex was prepared with high radiochemical purity in the optimal conditions. Biodistribution studies of the complex was investigated in the male Syrian rats at selected times after injection (2, 4, 24 and 48 h). The human absorbed dose estimation of the complex was made based on data derived from the rats by the radiation absorbed dose assessment resource (RADAR) method. 111In-DOTMP complex was prepared with high radiochemical purity of >99% (ITLC). Total body effective absorbed dose for 111In-DOTMP was 0.061 mSv/MBq. This value is comparable to the other 111In clinically used complexes. The results show that the dose with respect to the critical organs is satisfactory within the acceptable range for diagnostic nuclear medicine procedures. Generally, 111In-DOTMP has interesting characteristics and can be considered as a viable agent for SPECT-imaging of the bone metastasis in the near future.

Keywords: In-111, DOTMP, Internal Dosimetry, RADAR

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Authors: Jong-Bae Lee, Seongsoo Lee

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Local interconnect network (LIN) is a communication protocol that combines sensors, actuators, and processors to a functional module in automotive applications. In this paper, a LIN ver. 2.2A controller was designed in Verilog hardware description language (Verilog HDL) and implemented in field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Its operation was verified by making full-scale LIN network with the presented FPGA-implemented LIN controller, commercial LIN transceivers, and commercial processors. When described in Verilog HDL and synthesized in 0.18 μm technology, its gate size was about 2,300 gates.

Keywords: local interconnect network, controller, transceiver, processor

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Authors: Gaurav Bisht, Rahul Rathnakumar, Ravikumar Duggirala

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Predictive simulations are one of the key focus areas in safety-critical industries such as aerospace and high-performance automotive engineering. The stone-chipping study is one such effort taken up by the industry to predict and evaluate the damage caused due to gravel impact on vehicles. This paper describes a finite elements based method that can simulate the ejection of gravel chips from a vehicle tire. The FE simulations were used to obtain the initial ejection velocity of the stones for various driving conditions using a computational contact mechanics approach. To verify the accuracy of the tire model, several parametric studies were conducted. The FE simulations resulted in stone loft velocities ranging from 0–8 m/s, regardless of tire speed. The stress on the tire at the instant of initial contact with the stone increased linearly with vehicle speed. Mesh convergence studies indicated that a highly resolved tire mesh tends to result in better momentum transfer between the tire and the stone. A fine tire mesh also showed a linearly increasing relationship between the tire forward speed and stone lofting speed, which was not observed in coarser meshes. However, it also highlighted a potential challenge, in that the ejection velocity vector of the stone seemed to be sensitive to the mesh, owing to the FE-based contact mechanical formulation of the problem.

Keywords: abaqus, contact mechanics, foreign object debris, stone chipping

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Authors: Omar M. Al Aufi, Abdulwahab Noorwali, Ahmed Al Abd, Safia Alattas, Fathya Zahran, Fahd Almutairi

Abstract:

Cisplatin (CDDP) is a potent anticancer agent used for several tumor types. Thymoquinone (TQ) is a naturally occurring compound drawing great attention as an anticancer and chemomodulator for chemotherapies. Herein, we studied the potential cytotoxicity of thymoquinone, CDDP and their combination against human oral squamous cell carcinoma cells in contrast to normal oral epithelial cells. CDDP similarly killed both head and neck squamous cell carcinoma cells (UMSCC-14C) and normal oral epithelial cells (OEC). TQ alone exerted considerable cytotoxicity against UMSCC-14C cells, while it induced a weaker killing effect against normal oral epithelial cells (OEC). The equitoxic combination of TQ and CDDP showed additive to synergistic interaction against both UMSCC-14C and OEC cells. TQ alone increased apoptotic cell fraction in UMSCC-14C cells as early as after 6 hours. In addition, prolonged exposure of UMSCC-14C to TQ alone resulted in 96.7±1.6% total apoptosis, which was increased after combination with CDDP to 99.3±1.2% in UMSCC-14C cells. On the other hand, TQ induced a marginal increase in the apoptosis in OEC and even decreased the apoptosis induced by CDDP alone. Finally, apoptosis induction results were confirmed by the change in the expression levels of p53, Bcl-2 and Caspase-9 proteins in both UMSCC-14c and OEC cells.

Keywords: thymoquinone, cisplatin, apoptosis, oral squamous cell carcinoma, P53, Caspase-9, Bcl-2

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Authors: Seung-Seok Bak, Chang-Mu Jung

Abstract:

An enough amount supply of industrial complexes is an important national policy in South Korea, which is highly dependent on foreign trade. A development process of the industrial complex can distinguish between the planning stage and the construction stage. The planning stage consists of the process of consulting with many stakeholders on the contents of the development of industrial complex, feasibility study, compliance with the Regional policies, and so on. The industrial complex planning stage, including licensing procedure, usually takes about three years in South Korea. The government determined that the appropriate supply of industrial complexes have been delayed, due to the long licensing period and drafted a law to shorten the license period in 2008. The law was expected to shorten the period of licensing, which was about three years, to six months. This paper attempts to show that the shortening of the licensing period does not positively affect the appropriate supply of industrial complexes. To do this, we used Interrupted Time Series Designs. As a result, it was found that the supply of industrial complexes was influenced more by other factors such as actual industrial complex demand of private sector and macro-level economic variables. In addition, the specific provisions of the law conflict with local policy and cause some problems such as damage to nature and agricultural land, traffic congestion.

Keywords: development of industrial complexes, industrial complexes, interrupted time series designs, simplification of licensing procedures for industrial complexes, time series regression

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Authors: Pangihutan Panjaitan, Helda Risman, Devindra Oktaviano

Abstract:

This research is departed from the security issues generated from China’s unilateral claims in the South China Sea conflict. The diplomacy challenges come from Indonesia’s relations with China as well as with ASEAN-member countries involved in the conflict. It is estimated that the conflict in the South China Sea region will become an endless conflict. Comprehensively, Indonesia is implementing a gradual shift in diplomatic approach in creating positive and constructive ties among Indonesia, China, and ASEAN. In line with the rapid-changing world order, the conventional military approach becomes less significant in today’s modern inter-state interactions. This research is conducted in a qualitative literature review to explain how Indonesia’s recent soft diplomacy approach applied in the South China Sea conflict. This type of diplomacy theoretically assumed as one of the most preferred ways to establish mutual trust and confidence among conflicting parties. Maritime issues found its significance in contemporary foreign policy since the world’s most dynamic region has moved to the archipelagic Asia-Pacific. As mentioned by rationalists, every country, including Indonesia, has surely formulated its own prominent national interest, such as the defense aspect. Finally, this research will provide a deep analysis on Indonesia’s centrality in ASEAN as an effective way to ensure Indonesia’s strategic policy in the region well accommodated.

Keywords: soft diplomacy, south China sea, national defense, China

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Authors: Hadjer Didouh, Mohammed Hadj Melliani, Izzeddine Sameut Bouhaik

Abstract:

Microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) is a major cause of pipeline failure in the oil and gas industry, particularly affecting carbon steel, which is widely used for its cost-effectiveness and mechanical properties. This study investigates the adhesion of sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) and other corrosive microbial species on API 5L X52 carbon steel in crude oil and injection water environments. Experimental results showed that after 72 hours of exposure, biofilm formed extensively, leading to significant corrosion rates. Weight loss measurements indicated a corrosion rate of 0.39 mm/year, with localized pitting observed at depths reaching 120 μm. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) revealed a drastic decrease in charge transfer resistance, from 1200 Ω/cm² for sterile samples to 240 Ω/cm² in the presence of SRB biofilm. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) analyses confirmed the presence of iron sulfide deposits, indicating active bacterial colonization and biofilm-induced pitting corrosion. This study highlights the severe impact of MIC on pipeline infrastructure, emphasizing the need for efficient microbial control strategies. Furthermore, the results provide a framework for the development of enhanced protective coatings and environmentally friendly biocides to mitigate the economic and environmental risks associated with MIC in oilfield operations in Algeria.

Keywords: MIC, corrosion, bacteria, API 5L X52

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Authors: Chenyu Huang, Minrong Cui, Hua Fang, Luqing Zhang, Yunlong Yu

Abstract:

The emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) have become a pressing issue in global agricultural production. However, understanding how these ARGs spread across different spatial scales, especially when exposed to both pesticides and antibiotics, has remained a challenge. Here, metagenomic assembly and binning methodologies were used to determine the mechanism of ARG propagation within soil-lettuce systems exposed to both fungicides and antibiotics. The results of our study showed that the presence of fungicide and antibiotic stresses had a significant impact on certain bacterial communities. Notably, we observed that ARGs were primarily transferred from the soil to the plant through plasmids. The selective pressure exerted by fungicides and antibiotics contributed to an increase in unique ARGs present on lettuce leaves. Moreover, ARGs located on chromosomes and plasmids followed different transmission patterns. The presence of diverse selective pressures, a result of compound treatments involving antibiotics and fungicides, amplifies this phenomenon. Consequently, there is a higher probability of bacteria developing multi-antibiotic resistance under the combined pressure of fungicides and antibiotics. In summary, our findings highlight that combined fungicide and antibiotic treatments are more likely to drive the acquisition of ARGs within the soil-plant system and may increase the risk of human ingestion.

Keywords: soil-lettuce system, fungicide, antibiotic, ARG, transmission

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Authors: Yurdum Cokadar

Abstract:

The United States is the country where the majority of highly skilled immigrants are hosted. Two-thirds of foreign-born migrants from Turkey - an underrepresented and understudied immigrant group in the United States - are highly skilled. Generated by the aim of filling this gap in the literature, the motivation of this research is to understand highly skilled Turkish immigrant women’s integration into the U.S. labor market, including barriers that they face and strategies they develop to rebuild their career after relocation. The in-depth interviews of 20 highly skilled Turkish women residing in the U.S. revealed that the majority of women participants are either not integrated into the labor market, occupy positions below their skill, or cannot reach the same upper segments of the labor market in the host country, arising from a range of structural and personal barriers interplaying in their career trajectories. Furthermore, many of them cannot transfer their social and cultural capital gained in their home country into the United States. The labor market participation process of these women is analyzed in the light of Bourdieu’s theory of capital and the intersectional approach of gender, class and ethnicity in order to understand the positions of highly skilled immigrant women in the host country labor market.

Keywords: deskilling, gender, class and ethnicity, highly skilled women immigrants, integration into the U.S. the labor market, labor market participation, skilled migration, theory of capital

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Authors: Gulnaz Erkomaishvili

Abstract:

Introduction: There are some of the biggest technological shifts happening in the modern world. The introduction of digital technologies, information, and communication services has given rise to unprecedented global socio-political and economic changes. The role of digital technologies in increasing productivity and national competitiveness is increasing. Today, it is used in almost every area of the economy. E-commerce, organizational process in computerized management, and digital infrastructure's pace of growth is remarkably high and is a key instrument of economic development. Methodology: Different research methods are applied in the presented paper; statistical, analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, comparison ones. Works by local and foreign scientists, Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development, as well as various organizations' studies and reports were used as a theoretical basis for research and variety of laws, government decrees and orders, and the publications of the National Statistics Office of Georgia were used as an informational basis. Conclusions: The paper deals with the processes and challenges in Georgia in the digital economy. Access to current resources in Georgia and current processes are described. Digital technology for the development of the required environmental conditions is described, how the Internet and communications are available for the population in the regions of Georgia. The pros and cons of the digital economy development and its impact on the country's economy are analyzed. The main difficulties of implementation of the digital economy in Georgia, government involvement, and future action plans are presented.

Keywords: digital economy, digital technologies, internet, communications, economic policy

Procedia PDF Downloads 178