Search results for: no-fixed address

Authors: Jamilah Ahmad

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In 2023, Malaysia's International Trade and Industry Ministry (MITI) introduced the i-ESG framework to establish environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards to enhance organisations' ethical conduct and social responsibility. The role of education, particularly universities, is crucial in preparing future generations to understand the significance of ESG and confront sustainability challenges. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, utilizing semi-structured interviews with university leaders and students to investigate the implementation of University Social Responsibility (USR) in Malaysian universities and the impact of ESG on sustainable development in alignment with Malaysia's SDG Agenda 2030. The findings underscore the critical role of USR and ESG in fostering sustainable development, ensuring that graduates are well-equipped to address environmental and sustainability issues in Malaysia.

Keywords: USR, ESG, sustainability, higher education in Malaysia, Malaysia

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Authors: M. Safa, A. Sabet, S. MacGillivray, M. Davidson, K. Kaczmarczyk, C. T. Haas, G. E. Gibson, D. Rayside

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To address construction project requirements and specifications, scholars and practitioners need to establish a taxonomy according to a scheme that best fits their need. While existing characterization methods are continuously being improved, new ones are devised to cover project properties which have not been previously addressed. One such method, the Project Definition Rating Index (PDRI), has received limited consideration strictly as a classification scheme. Developed by the Construction Industry Institute (CII) in 1996, the PDRI has been refined over the last two decades as a method for evaluating a project's scope definition completeness during front-end planning (FEP). The main contribution of this study is a review of practical project classification methods, and a discussion of how PDRI can be used to classify projects based on their readiness in the FEP phase. The proposed model has been applied to 59 construction projects in Ontario, and the results are discussed.

Keywords: project classification, project definition rating index (PDRI), risk, project goals alignment

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Authors: Paulos Meles Yihdego

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To address the environmental impact of the cement industry and road building waste, the use of chemical stabilizers in conjunction with recycled asphalt and cement components was investigated. The silica-based chemical stabilizers and their potential effects on the base layer stabilized by cement are discussed in this paper. Strength, moisture compaction interaction, and microstructural characteristics are all examined. According to the outcome, using this stabilizer has improved the mechanical properties. The inclusion of chemical stabilizers in the combination, which is responsible for the mixture's improved strength, raised the intensity of the C-S-H (Calcium Silicate Hydrate) gel, according to a microstructural study. The design was demonstrated to be durable by the little ettringites found in the later phases. The application of this stabilizer ensures a strong, eco-friendly, durable base layer.

Keywords: ettringites, microstructure analysis, durability properties, cement stabilized base

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Authors: Yujia Sun

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Research on nominalizations in English can be traced back to at least the 1960s and even centered in the field nowadays. At the very beginning, the discussion was about the relationship between verbs and nouns, but then it moved to the distinct senses embodied in different forms of nominals, namely, various types of nominalizations. This paper tries to address the issue that how speakers perceive different forms of verbal nouns, and what might influence their perceptions. The data are collected through a self-designed questionnaire targeted at native speakers of American English, and the employment of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results show that semantic differences between different forms of nominals do play a role in people’s preference to certain form than another. But it still awaits more explorations to see how the frequency of usage is interrelates to this issue.

Keywords: corpus of contemporary American English, derived nominalization, frequency of usage, ing-formed nominalization

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Authors: Athanasia Petropoulou

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While there is a common understanding that a person’s sex, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation shape every stage of the migration experience, theories of international migration had until recently not been focused on exploring and incorporating a gender perspective in their analysis. In a similar vein, refugee law has long been the object of criticisms for failing to recognize and respond appropriately to women’s and sexual minorities’ experiences of persecution. The present analysis attempts to depict the challenges faced by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and U.S. courts when adjudicating in cases involving asylum claims with a gendered perspective. By providing a comparison between adjudicating strategies of international and national jurisdictions, the article aims to identify common or distinctive approaches in addressing gendered based claims. The paper argues that, despite the different nature of the judicial bodies and the different legal instruments applied respectively, judges face similar challenges in this context and often fail to qualify and address the gendered dimensions of asylum claims properly. The ECtHR plays a fundamental role in safeguarding human rights protection in Europe not only for European citizens but also for people fleeing violence, war, and dire living conditions. However, this role becomes more difficult to fulfill, not only because of the obvious institutional constraints but also because cases related to claims of asylum seekers concern a domain closely linked to State sovereignty. Amid the current “refugee crisis,” risk assessment performed by national authorities, like in the process of asylum determination, is shaped by wider geopolitical and economic considerations. The failure to recognize and duly address the gendered dimension of non - refoulement claims, one of the many shortcomings of these processes, is reflected in the decisions of the ECtHR. As regards U.S. case law, the study argues that U.S. courts either fail to apply any connection between asylum claims and their gendered dimension or tend to approach gendered based claims through the lens of the “political opinion” or “membership of a particular social group” reasons of fear of persecution. This exercise becomes even more difficult, taking into account that the U.S. asylum law inappropriately qualifies gendered-based claims. The paper calls for more sociologically informed decision-making practices and for a more contextualized and relational approach in the assessment of the risk of ill-treatment and persecution. Such an approach is essential for unearthing the gendered patterns of persecution and addressing effectively related claims, thus securing the human rights of asylum seekers.

Keywords: asylum, European court of human rights, gender, human rights, U.S. courts

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Authors: Qiuyu Dai, Haochong Zhang, Xiangrong Liu

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Diagonal sparse matrix-vector multiplication is a well-studied topic in the fields of scientific computing and big data processing. However, when diagonal sparse matrices are stored in DIA format, there can be a significant number of padded zero elements and scattered points, which can lead to a degradation in the performance of the current DIA kernel. This can also lead to excessive consumption of computational and memory resources. In order to address these issues, the authors propose the DIA-Adaptive scheme and its kernel, which leverages the parallel instruction sets on MLU. The researchers analyze the effect of allocating a varying number of threads, clusters, and hardware architectures on the performance of SpMV using different formats. The experimental results indicate that the proposed DIA-Adaptive scheme performs well and offers excellent parallelism.

Keywords: adaptive method, DIA, diagonal sparse matrices, MLU, sparse matrix-vector multiplication

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Authors: Rajkumar Ghosh

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The present study focuses on conducting a socio-economic assessment of groundwater contamination by arsenic and iron and explores the feasibility of rainwater harvesting (RWH) as an alternative water source in the Amdanga Block of North 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India. The region is plagued by severe groundwater contamination, primarily due to excessive concentrations of arsenic and iron, which pose significant health risks to the local population. The study utilizes a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative analysis of water samples collected from different locations within the Amdanga Block and socio-economic surveys conducted among the affected communities. The results reveal alarmingly high levels of arsenic and iron contamination in the groundwater, surpassing the World Health Organization (WHO) and Indian government's permissible limits. This contamination significantly impacts the health and well-being of the local population, leading to a range of health issues such as skin The water samples are analyzed for arsenic and iron levels, while the surveys gather data on water usage patterns, health conditions, and socio-economic factors. lesions, respiratory disorders, and gastrointestinal problems. Furthermore, the socio-economic assessment highlights the vulnerability of the affected communities due to limited access to safe drinking water. The findings reveal the adverse socio-economic implications, including increased medical expenditures, reduced productivity, and compromised educational opportunities. To address these challenges, the study explores the feasibility of rainwater harvesting as an alternative source of clean water. RWH systems have the potential to mitigate groundwater contamination by providing a sustainable and independent water supply. The assessment includes evaluating the rainwater availability, analyzing the infrastructure requirements, and estimating the potential benefits and challenges associated with RWH implementation in the study area. The findings of this study contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the socio-economic impact of groundwater contamination by arsenic and iron, emphasizing the urgency to address this critical issue in the Amdanga Block. The feasibility assessment of rainwater harvesting serves as a practical solution to ensure a safe and sustainable water supply, reducing the dependency on contaminated groundwater sources. The study's results can inform policymakers, researchers, and local stakeholders in implementing effective mitigation measures and promoting the adoption of rainwater harvesting as a viable alternative in similar arsenic and iron-contaminated regions.

Keywords: contamination, rainwater harvesting, groundwater, sustainable water supply

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Authors: Noha Badkook, Maryam Alsubaie, Samaher Dawood, Enas Khairullah

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Cloud computing has introduced transformative benefits in data storage and accessibility while posing unique forensic challenges. This paper explores cloud forensics, focusing on investigating and analyzing evidence from cloud environments to address issues such as unauthorized data access, manipulation, and breaches. The research highlights the practical use of open-source forensic tools like Autopsy and Bulk Extractor in real-world scenarios, including unauthorized data sharing via Google Drive and the misuse of personal cloud storage for sensitive information leaks. This work underscores the growing importance of robust forensic procedures and accessible tools in ensuring data security and accountability in cloud ecosystems.

Keywords: cloud forensic, tools, challenge, autopsy, bulk extractor

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Authors: Komal V. Aher, Sanjay B. Waykar

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Nowadays every individual having mobile device with them. In both computer vision and information retrieval Image search is currently hot topic with many applications. The proposed intelligent image search system is fully utilizing multimodal and multi-touch functionalities of smart phones which allows search with Image, Voice, and Text on mobile phones. The system will be more useful for users who already have pictures in their minds but have no proper descriptions or names to address them. The paper gives system with ability to form composite visual query to express user’s intention more clearly which helps to give more precise or appropriate results to user. The proposed algorithm will considerably get better in different aspects. System also uses Context based Image retrieval scheme to give significant outcomes. So system is able to achieve gain in terms of search performance, accuracy and user satisfaction.

Keywords: color space, histogram, mobile device, mobile visual search, multimodal search

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Authors: Anubhav Shrivastava Shivarudraswamy, Bhat Lakshya

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Distributed generation has indeed become a major area of interest in recent years. Distributed generation can address a large number of loads in a power line and hence has better efficiency over the conventional methods. However, there are certain drawbacks associated with it, an increase in voltage being the major one. This paper addresses the voltage control at the buses for an IEEE 30 bus system by regulating reactive power. For carrying out the analysis, the suitable location for placing distributed generators (DG) is identified through load flow analysis and seeing where the voltage profile is dipping. MATLAB programming is used to regulate the voltage at all buses within +/- 5% of the base value even after the introduction of DGs. Three methods for regulation of voltage are discussed. A sensitivity based analysis is then carried out to determine the priority among the various methods listed in the paper.

Keywords: distributed generators, distributed system, reactive power, voltage control, sensitivity analysis

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Authors: Barbora Chmelíková

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Making sound financial decisions is an essential skill which can have an impact on life of each consumer of financial products. The aim of this paper is to examine decision-making concerning financial matters and personal finance. The selected target group was university students majoring in finance related fields. The study was conducted in the Czech Republic at Masaryk University in 2015. In order to analyze financial decision-making questions related to basic finance decisions were developed to address the research objective. The results of the study suggest gaps in detecting best solutions to given financial decision-making questions among finance students. The analysis results indicate relation between financial decision-making and own experience with holding and using concrete financial products.

Keywords: financial decision-making, financial literacy, personal finance, university students

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Authors: Ghada A. Alfattni

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Analysing unbalanced datasets is one of the challenges that practitioners in machine learning field face. However, many researches have been carried out to determine the effectiveness of the use of the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) to address this issue. The aim of this study was therefore to compare the effectiveness of the SMOTE over different models on unbalanced datasets. Three classification models (Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine and Nearest Neighbour) were tested with multiple datasets, then the same datasets were oversampled by using SMOTE and applied again to the three models to compare the differences in the performances. Results of experiments show that the highest number of nearest neighbours gives lower values of error rates. 

Keywords: imbalanced datasets, SMOTE, machine learning, logistic regression, support vector machine, nearest neighbour

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Authors: Samantha Vargas-Alfonso

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The phenomenon of migration has been long-recorded since ancient history but never has mobility in huge numbers been so rapid and constant than that of the present. A significant portion of these migrants move for the promise of better economic subsistence by finding employment in foreign lands; while there are local and international instruments to protect these migrant workers, they still face human rights violations amongst other hurdles in integrating themselves into their host country. This research aims to look at the occurrence of Passport Confiscation for Filipino migrant workers (blue-collar workers) who are situated in Saudi Arabia. In addition to this, the study will look at the Kafala System which GCC countries practice regulating their foreign employees. The research attempts to prove that international conventions lack power in constraining the occurrence of passport confiscation and that while the kafala system exists, there is very little opportunity to address this issue.

Keywords: kafala, labor, migration, passport

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Authors: Danielle Jablanski

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This article addresses the use of drone strikes under international law and the intersection between Islamic law and current terrorist trends worldwide. It breaks down the legality of drone strikes under international law and dissects certain aspects of their usage in modern warfare; i.e. concepts of directly participating in hostilities and the role of CIA operators. The article then looks at international paradigms of law enforcement versus the use of military force in relation to terrorism. Lastly, it describes traditional aspects of Islamic law and several interpretations of the law today as applied to widespread campaigns of terrorism, namely that of the recent group ISIS or ISIL operating between the battlegrounds of Iraq and Syria. The piece concludes with appraisals for moving forward on the basis of honing in on reasons for terrorism and negative opinions of solely military campaigns to dismantle or disrupt terror organizations and breeding grounds.

Keywords: international law, terrorism, ISIS, islamic law

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Authors: Ahmad Forouzantabar, Mohammad Azadi, Alireza Alesaadi

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This paper describes a sliding mode controller for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The dynamic of AUV model is highly nonlinear because of many factors, such as hydrodynamic drag, damping, and lift forces, Coriolis and centripetal forces, gravity and buoyancy forces, as well as forces from thruster. To address these difficulties, a nonlinear sliding mode controller is designed to approximate the nonlinear dynamics of AUV and improve trajectory tracking. Moreover, the proposed controller can profoundly attenuate the effects of uncertainties and external disturbances in the closed-loop system. Using the Lyapunov theory the boundedness of AUV tracking errors and the stability of the proposed control system are also guaranteed. Numerical simulation studies of an AUV are included to illustrate the effectiveness of the presented approach.

Keywords: lyapunov stability, autonomous underwater vehicle, sliding mode controller, electronics engineering

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Authors: Enerit Sacdanaku, Idriz Haxhiu

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This study was conducted in the area of Vlora Bay, Albania. Data about Sea Turtles Caretta caretta and Chelonia mydas, belonging to two periods of time (1984–1991; 2008–2014) are given. All data gathered were analyzed using recent methodologies. For all turtles captured (as by catch), the Curve Carapace Length (CCL) and Curved Carapace Width (CCW) were measured. These data were statistically analyzed, where the mean was 67.11 cm for CCL and 57.57 cm for CCW of all individuals studied (n=13). All untagged individuals of marine turtles were tagged using metallic tags (Stockbrand’s titanium tag) with an Albanian address. Sex was determined and resulted that 45.4% of individuals were females, 27.3% males and 27.3% juveniles. All turtles were studied for the presence of the epibionts. The area of Vlora Bay is used from marine turtles (Caretta caretta) as a migratory corridor to pass from the Mediterranean to the northern part of the Adriatic Sea.

Keywords: Caretta caretta, Chelonia mydas, CCL, CCW, tagging, Vlora Bay

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Authors: Langa Hendrick Musawenkosi, Twala Bhekisipho

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The success or failure of students is a concern for every academic institution, college, university, governments and students themselves. Several approaches have been researched to address this concern. In this paper, a view is held that when a student enters a university or college or an academic institution, he or she enters an academic environment. The academic environment is unique concept used to develop the solution for making predictions effectively. This paper presents a model to determine the propensity of a student to succeed or fail in the French South African Schneider Electric Education Center (FSASEC) at the Vaal University of Technology (VUT). The Decision Tree algorithm is used to implement the model at FSASEC.

Keywords: FSASEC, academic environment model, decision trees, k-nearest neighbor, machine learning, popularity index, support vector machine

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Authors: Henry Venter, Murali Thyloth, Alceu Casseb

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Historically, mental and substance use disorders were not a global health priority. Since the 1993 World Development Report, the importance of the contribution of mental health and substance abuse on the relative global burden associated with disease morbidity has been recognized with 300 million people worldwide suffering from depression alone. This led to an international effort to improve the mental health of populations around the world. Despite these efforts some countries remain at the top of the list of countries with the highest rate of mental illness. Important research questions were asked: Would there be commonalities regarding mental health between these countries; would there be common factors leading to the high prevalence of mental illness; and how prepared are these countries with mental health delivery? Findings from this research can aid organizations and institutions preparing mental health service providers to focus training and preparation to address specific needs revealed by the study. Methods: Researchers decided to compare three distinctly different countries at the top of the list of countries with the highest rate of mental illness, the USA, India and Brazil, situated on three different continents with different economies and lifestyles. Data were collected using archival research methodology, reviewing records and findings of international and national health and mental health studies to subtract and compare data and findings. Results: The findings indicated that India is the most depressed country in the world, followed by the USA (and China) with Brazil in Latin America with the greatest number of depressed individuals. By 2020 roughly 20% of India, acountry of over one billion citizens, will suffer from some form of mental illnees, yet there are less than 4,000 experts available. In the USA 164.8 million people were substance abusers and an estimate of 47.6 million adults, 18 or older, had any mental illness in 2018. That means that about one in five adults in the USA experiences some form of mental illness each year, but only 41% of those affected received mental health care or services in the past year. Brazil has the greatest number of depressed individuals, in Latin America. Adults living in Sao Paulo megacity has prevalence of mental disorders at greater levels than similar surveys conducted in other areas of the world with more than one million adults with serious impairment levels. Discussion: The results show that, despite the vast socioeconomic differences between the three countries, there are correlations regarding mental health prevalence and difficulty to provide adequate services including a lack of awareness of how serious mental illness is, stigma for seeking mental illness, with comorbidity a common phenomenon, and a lack of partnership between different levels of service providers, which weakens mental health service delivery. The findings also indicate that mental health training institutions have a monumental task to prepare personnel to address the future mental health needs in each of the countries compared, which will constitute the next phase of the research.

Keywords: mental health epidemiology, mental health disorder, mental health prevalence, mental health treatment

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Authors: Sello Mokwena, Monyepao Thabang

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In this study, we propose a comprehensive approach to address the challenges in person re-identification models. By combining a centroid tracking algorithm with a Siamese convolutional neural network model, our method excels in detecting, tracking, and capturing robust person features across non-overlapping camera views. The algorithm efficiently identifies individuals in the camera network, while the neural network extracts fine-grained global features for precise cross-image comparisons. The approach's effectiveness is further accentuated by leveraging the camera network topology for guidance. Our empirical analysis on benchmark datasets highlights its competitive performance, particularly evident when background subtraction techniques are selectively applied, underscoring its potential in advancing person re-identification techniques.

Keywords: camera network, convolutional neural network topology, person tracking, person re-identification, siamese

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Authors: Kevin Krupski

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Private Military Security Companies have grown to become a major force contributor to nations in military operations. Scholars have debated the implications of this in relation to control and efficiency related to the privatization of violence, but there has been little discussion on how these companies affect the profession of arms. Specifically, this paper seeks to address how the privatization of violence influences the military’s stewardship, whether private military security companies are capable of stewardship of the military profession, and whether there are aspects of stewardship of the military profession that private military security companies are capable of emulating. This paper reviews literature on stewardship, the relationship of the military to the state, and private military security companies in order to identify overlap between uniformed military services and the private sector. Then, it offers a typology for determining under what conditions an organization would act as a steward. Ultimately, there are insufficient reasons for private military security companies to act as stewards of the profession of arms.

Keywords: stewardship, military profession, civil-military, security

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Authors: Silmy A. Humaira'

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There is an issue about Asian students including Indonesian students that tend to behave passively in the classroom and depend on the teachers’ instruction. Regarding this statement, this study attempts to address the Indonesian high school students’ attitudes on whether they have initiative and be responsible for their learning out of the classroom and if so, why. Therefore, 30 high school students were asked to fill out the questionnaires and interviewed in order to figure out their attitudes towards self-directed learning. The descriptive qualitative research analysis adapted Knowles’s theory (1975) about Self-directed learning (SDL) to analyze the data. The findings show that the students have a potential to possess self-directed learning through ICT, but they have difficulties in choosing appropriate learning strategy, doing self-assessment and conducting self-reflection. Therefore, this study supports the teacher to promote self-directed learning instruction for successful learning by assisting students in dealing with those aforementioned problems. Furthermore, it is expected to be a beneficial reference which gives new insights on the self-directed learning practice in specific context.

Keywords: ICT, learning autonomy, students’ attitudes, self-directed learning

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Authors: Kamonwat Suksumek, Seeronk Prichanont

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Access block refers to the situation where Emergency Department (ED) patients requiring hospital admission spend an unreasonable holding time in an ED because their access to a ward is blocked by the full utilization of the ward’s beds. Not only it delays the proper treatments required by the patients, but access block is also the cause of ED’s overcrowding. Clearly, access block is an inter-departmental problem that needs to be brought to management’s attention. This paper focuses on the analysis of strategies to address the access block problem, both in the operational and intermediate levels. These strategies were analyzed through a simulation model with a real data set from a university hospital in Thailand. The paper suggests suitable variable levels for each strategy so that the management will make the final decisions.

Keywords: access block, emergency department, health system analysis, simulation

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Authors: Usama Shahid

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Be it written documents, news columns, or students' essays, verifying the content can be a time-consuming task. Apart from the spelling and grammar mistakes, the proofreader is also supposed to verify whether the content included in the essay or document is relevant or not. The irrelevant content in any document or essay is referred to as off-topic text and in this paper, we will address the problem of off-topic text detection from a document using machine learning techniques. Our study aims to identify the off-topic content from a document using Echo state network model and we will also compare data with other models. The previous study uses Convolutional Neural Networks and TFIDF to detect off-topic text. We will rearrange the existing datasets and take new classifiers along with new word embeddings and implement them on existing and new datasets in order to compare the results with the previously existing CNN model.

Keywords: off topic, text detection, eco state network, machine learning

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Authors: Aditi Kashi

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While educational technologies have taken great strides, especially in Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) composition, teachers across the world are still adjusting to incorporate such technology into their curricula. While using MIDI in the classroom has become more common, limited class time and a strong focus on performance have made composition a lesser priority. The balance between music theory, performance time, and composition learning is delicate and difficult to maintain for many music educators. This makes including MIDI in the classroom. To address this issue, this paper aims to outline a general conceptual framework centered around a key element of music theory to integrate MIDI composition into the music classroom to not only introduce students to digital composition but also enhance their understanding of music theory and its applicability.

Keywords: educational framework, education technology, MIDI, music education

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Authors: E. Omanya, E. Mueni, G. Makau, M. Kariuki

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HIV infection is the strongest risk factor for a person to develop TB. Isoniazid preventive therapy (IPT) for People Living with HIV (PLWHIV) not only reduces the individual patients’ risk of developing active TB but mitigates cross infection. In Kenya, IPT for six months was recommended through the National TB, Leprosy and Lung Disease Program to treat latent TB. In spite of this recommendation by the national government, uptake of IPT among PLHIV remained low in Kenya by the end of 2015. The USAID/Kenya and East Africa Afya Jijini project, which supports 42 TBHIV health facilities in Nairobi County, began addressing low uptake of IPT through Quality Improvement (QI) teams set up at the facility level. Quality is characterized by WHO as one of the four main connectors between health systems building blocks and health systems outputs. Afya Jijini implements the Kenya Quality Model for Health, which involves QI teams being formed at the county, sub-county and facility levels. The teams review facility performance to identify gaps in service delivery and use QI tools to monitor and improve performance. Afya Jijini supported the formation of these teams in 42 facilities and built the teams’ capacity to review data and use QI principles to identify and address performance gaps. When the QI teams began working on improving IPT uptake among PLHIV, uptake was at 31.8%. The teams first conducted a root cause analysis using cause and effect diagrams, which help the teams to brainstorm on and to identify barriers to IPT uptake among PLHIV at the facility level. This is a participatory process where program staff provides technical support to the QI teams in problem identification and problem-solving. The gaps identified were inadequate knowledge and skills on the use of IPT among health care workers, lack of awareness of IPT by patients, inadequate monitoring and evaluation tools, and poor quantification and forecasting of IPT commodities. In response, Afya Jijini trained over 300 health care workers on the administration of IPT, supported patient education, supported quantification and forecasting of IPT commodities, and provided IPT data collection tools to help facilities monitor their performance. The facility QI teams conducted monthly meetings to monitor progress on implementation of IPT and took corrective action when necessary. IPT uptake improved from 31.8% to 61.2% during the second year of the Afya Jijini project and improved to 80.1% during the third year of the project’s support. Use of QI teams and root cause analysis to identify and address service delivery gaps, in addition to targeted program interventions and continual performance reviews, can be successful in increasing TB related service delivery uptake at health facilities.

Keywords: isoniazid, quality, health care workers, people leaving with HIV

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Authors: Saksit Saengboon

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The study of English in Thailand receives comparatively little attention in the world of Englishes scholarship despite a complex and dynamic linguistic landscape. Like many countries in the region, English is used in predictable contexts, such as schools and at work. However, English is being increasingly used as a contact language among Thais and non-Thais, requiring much needed empirical attention. This study aims to address this neglected issue by examining how Thais perceive and use English in contemporary Thai society. This study explored the ways in which English has been used in public signage, mass media, especially about Thai food, and perceptions of Thais (N = 80) regarding English. Findings indicate that English in Thailand is used in a complicated manner portraying both standard and non-standard English. Thais still hold a static or traditional view of English, making it impractical, if not impossible, to have Thai English as an established variety.

Keywords: Thai english, thainess in english, public signage, mass media, thai food, thai linguistic landscape

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Authors: Zainab S. Mahmood, Aisha H. Hashim, Wan Haslina Hassan, Farhat Anwar

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The wide use of the internet-based applications bring many challenges to the researchers to guarantee the continuity of the connections needed by the mobile hosts and provide reliable Internet access for them. One of proposed solutions by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is to connect the local, multi-hop, and infrastructure-less Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) with Internet structure. This connection is done through multi-interface devices known as Internet Gateways. Many issues are related to this connection like gateway discovery, hand off, address auto-configuration and selecting the optimum gateway when multiple gateways exist. Many studies were done proposing gateway selection schemes with a single selection criterion or weighted multiple criteria. In this research, a review of some of these schemes is done showing the differences, the features, the challenges and the drawbacks of each of them.

Keywords: Internet Gateway, MANET, mobility, selection criteria

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Authors: Mohammad Abdullah-Al-Wadud

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In the current era of automation and artificial intelligence, different systems have been increasingly keeping on depending on decision-making capabilities of machines. Such systems/applications may range from simple classifiers to sophisticated surveillance systems based on traditional sensors and related equipment which are becoming more common in the internet of things (IoT) paradigm. However, the available data for such problems are usually imprecise and incomplete, which leads to uncertainty in decisions made based on traditional probability-based classifiers. This requires a robust fusion framework to combine the available information sources with some degree of certainty. The theory of evidence can provide with such a method for combining evidence from different (may be unreliable) sources/observers. This talk will address the employment of the Dempster-Shafer Theory of evidence in some practical applications.

Keywords: decision making, dempster-shafer theory, evidence fusion, incomplete data, uncertainty

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Authors: Kacper Tomasz Kröber-Mulawa

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This paper will address the topic of data ownership from an economic perspective, and examples of economic limitations of data property rights will be provided, which have been identified using methods and approaches of economic analysis of law. To properly build a background for the economic focus, in the beginning a short perspective of data and data ownership in the EU’s legal system will be provided. It will include a short introduction to its political and social importance and highlight relevant viewpoints. This will stress the importance of a Single Market for data but also far-reaching regulations of data governance and privacy (including the distinction of personal and non-personal data, data held by public bodies and private businesses). The main discussion of this paper will build upon the briefly referred to legal basis as well as methods and approaches of economic analysis of law.

Keywords: antitrust, data, data ownership, digital economy, property rights

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Authors: Safia Rabaaoui, Héla Hachicha, Ezzeddine Zagrouba

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Nowadays, cloud computing is becoming the more popular technology to various companies and consumers, which benefit from its increased efficiency, cost optimization, data security, unlimited storage capacity, etc. One of the biggest challenges of cloud computing is resource allocation. Its efficiency directly influences the performance of the whole cloud environment. Finding an effective method to address these critical issues and increase cloud performance was necessary. This paper proposes a mobile agents-based framework for dynamic resource allocation in cloud computing to minimize both the cost of using virtual machines and the makespan. Furthermore, its impact on the best response time and power consumption has been studied. The simulation showed that our method gave better results than here.

Keywords: cloud computing, multi-agent system, mobile agent, dynamic resource allocation, cost, makespan

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