Search results for: distributed training

Authors: Dlir Abdullah Ahmed

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Overall aims of this study are to investigate the effects of differences of opinions among Shari’ah supervisory bodies on standardization and internationalization of Islamic banking products and services. The study has used semi-structured in-depth interview where five respondents from both the Middle East and Malaysia Shari’ah advisors participated in the interview sessions. The data were analyzed by both manual and software techniques. The findings reveal that indeed there are differences of opinions among Shari’ah advisors in different jurisdictions. These differences are due to differences in educational background, schools of thoughts, environment in which they operate, and legal requirements. Moreover, the findings also reveal that these differences in opinions among Shari’ah bodies create confusions among public and bankers, and negatively affect standardization of Islamic banking transactions. In addition, the study has explored the possibility to develop Islamic-based products. However, the finding shows that it is difficult for the industry to have Islamic-based products due to high competition from conventional counterpart, legal constraints and moral hazard. Furthermore, the findings indicate that lack of political will and unity, lack of technology are the main constraints to internationalization of Islamic banking products. Last but not least, the study found that there are possibility of convergence of opinions, standardization of Islamic banking products and services if there are unified international Shari’ah h advisory council, international basic requirements for Islamic Shari’ah h advisors, and increase training and educations of Islamic bankers. This study has several implications to the bankers, policymakers and researchers. The policymakers should be able to resolve their political differences and set up unified international advisory council and international research and development center. The bankers should increase training and educations of the workforce as well improve on their banking infrastructure to facility cross-border transactions.

Keywords: Shari’ah h views, Islamic banking, products & services, standardization.

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Authors: Ayesha Selwyn, Annapoorni Chandrashekar, Kumar Ashwarya, Nishant Baghel

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Project-based learning (PBL) activities are typically implemented in technology-enabled schools by highly trained teachers. In rural India, students have limited access to technology and quality education. Implementing typical PBL activities is challenging. This study details how Pratham Education Foundation’s Hybrid Learning model was used to implement two PBL activities related to music in 900 remote Indian villages with 46,000 students aged 10-14. The activities were completed by 69% of groups that submitted a total of 15,000 videos (completed projects). Pratham’s H-Learning model reaches 100,000 students aged 3-14 in 900 Indian villages. The community-driven model engages students in 20,000 self-organized groups outside of school. The students are guided by 6,000 youth volunteers and 100 facilitators. The students partake in learning activities across subjects with the support of community stakeholders and offline digital content on shared Android tablets. A training and implementation toolkit for PBL activities is designed by subject experts. This toolkit is essential in ensuring efficient implementation of activities as facilitators aren’t highly skilled and have limited access to training resources. The toolkit details the activity at three levels of student engagement - enrollment, participation, and completion. The subject experts train project leaders and facilitators who train youth volunteers. Volunteers need to be trained on how to execute the activity and guide students. The training is focused on building the volunteers’ capacity to enable students to solve problems, rather than developing the volunteers’ subject-related knowledge. This structure ensures that continuous intervention of subject matter experts isn’t required, and the onus of judging creativity skills is put on community members. 46,000 students in the H-Learning program were engaged in two PBL activities related to Music from April-June 2019. For one activity, students had to conduct a “musical survey” in their village by designing a survey and shooting and editing a video. This activity aimed to develop students’ information retrieval, data gathering, teamwork, communication, project management, and creativity skills. It also aimed to identify talent and document local folk music. The second activity, “Pratham Idol”, was a singing competition. Students participated in performing, producing, and editing videos. This activity aimed to develop students’ teamwork and creative skills and give students a creative outlet. Students showcased their completed projects at village fairs wherein a panel of community members evaluated the videos. The shortlisted videos from all villages were further evaluated by experts who identified students and adults to participate in advanced music workshops. The H-Learning framework enables students in low resource settings to engage in PBL and develop relevant skills by leveraging community support and using video creation as a tool. In rural India, students do not have access to high-quality education or infrastructure. Therefore designing activities that can be implemented by community members after limited training is essential. The subject experts have minimal intervention once the activity is initiated, which significantly reduces the cost of implementation and allows the activity to be implemented at a massive scale.

Keywords: community supported learning, project-based learning, self-organized learning, education technology

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Authors: Caroline Lavratti, Pedro Dal Lago, Gustavo Reinaldo, Gilson Dorneles, Andreia Bard, Laira Fuhr, Daniela Pochmann, Alessandra Peres, Luciane Wagner, Viviane Elsner

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Approximately 1% of the world's population is affected by schizophrenia (SZ), a chronic and debilitating neurodevelopmental disorder. Among possible factors, reduced levels of Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) has been recognized in physiopathogenesis and course of SZ. In this context, peripheral BDNF levels have been used as a biomarker in several clinical studies, since this neurotrophin is able to cross the blood-brain barrier in a bi-directional manner and seems to present a strong correlation with the central nervous system fluid levels. The patients with SZ usually adopts a sedentary lifestyle, which has been partly associated with the increase in obesity incidence rates, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease. On the other hand, exercise, a non-invasive and low cost intervention, has been considered an important additional therapeutic option for this population, promoting benefits to physical and mental health. To our knowledge, few studies have been pointed out that the positive effects of exercise in SZ patients are mediated, at least in part, to enhanced levels of BDNF after training. However, these studies are focused on evaluating the effect of single bouts of exercise of chronic interventions, data concerning the short- and long-term exercise outcomes on BDNF are scarce. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the effect of a concurrent exercise protocol (CEP) on plasma BDNF levels of SZ patients in different time-points. Material and Methods: This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Centro Universitário Metodista do IPA (no 1.243.680/2015). The participants (n=15) were subbmited to the CEP during 90 days, 3 times a week for 60 minutes each session. In order to evaluate the short and long-term effects of exercise, blood samples were collected pre, 30, 60 and 90 days after the intervention began. Plasma BDNF levels were determined with the ELISA method, from Sigma-Aldrich commercial kit (catalog number RAB0026) according to manufacturer's instructions. Results: A remarkable increase on plasma BDNF levels at 90 days after training compared to baseline (p=0.006) and 30 days (p=0.007) values were observed. Conclusion: Our data are in agreement with several studies that show significant enhancement on BDNF levels in response to different exercise protocols in SZ individuals. We might suggest that BDNF upregulation after training in SZ patients acts in a dose-dependent manner, being more pronounced in response to chronic exposure. Acknowledgments: This work was supported by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (FAPERGS)/Brazil.

Keywords: exercise, BDNF, schizophrenia, time-points

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Authors: Jia Yi Yap, Angela S. H. Lee

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With the use of big data technologies, organization can get result that they are interested in. Big data technologies simply load all the data that is useful for the organizations and provide organizations a better way of analysing data. The purpose of this research is to get employees’ opinion from films in Malaysia to explore the use of big data technologies in their organization in order to provide how it may affect the perception of the employees on job performance. Therefore, in order to identify will accepting big data technologies in the organization affect the perception of the employee, questionnaire will be distributed to different employee from different Small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) organization listed in Malaysia. The conceptual model proposed will test with other variables in order to see the relationship between variables.

Keywords: big data technologies, employee, job performance, questionnaire

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Authors: Valeria Cotza

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School drop-out is a multifactorial phenomenon that in Italy concerns all those underage students who, at different school stages (up to 16 years old) or training (up to 18 years old), manifest educational difficulties from dropping out of compulsory education without obtaining a qualification to repetition rates and absenteeism. From the 1980s to the 2000s, there was a progressive attenuation of the economic and social model towards a multifactorial reading of the phenomenon, and the European Commission noted the importance of learning about the phenomenon through approaches able to integrate large-scale quantitative surveys with qualitative analyses. It is not a matter of identifying the contextual factors affecting the phenomenon but problematising them by means of systemic and comprehensive in-depth analysis. So, a privileged point of observation and field of intervention are those schools that propose alternative models of teaching and learning to the traditional ones, such as popular and second-chance schools. Alternative schools and interventions grew in these years in Europe as well as in the US and Latin America, working in the direction of greater equity to create the conditions (often absent in conventional schools) for everyone to achieve educational goals. Against extensive Anglo-Saxon and US literature on this topic, there is yet no unambiguous definition of alternative education, especially in Europe, where second-chance education has been most studied. There is little literature on a second chance in Italy and almost none on alternative education (with the exception of method schools, to which in Italy the concept of “alternative” is linked). This research aims to fill the gap by systematically surveying the alternative interventions in the area and beginning to explore some models of popular and second-chance schools and experiences through a mixed methods approach. So, the main research objectives concern the spread of alternative education in the Lombardy region, the main characteristics of these schools and interventions, and their effectiveness in terms of students’ well-being and school results. This paper seeks to answer the first point by presenting the preliminary results of the first phase of the project dedicated to mapping. Through the Google Forms platform, a questionnaire is being distributed to all schools in Lombardy and some schools in the rest of Italy to map the presence of alternative schools and interventions and their main characteristics. The distribution is also taking place thanks to the support of the Milan Territorial and Lombardy Regional School Offices. Moreover, other social realities outside the school system (such as cooperatives and cultural associations) can be questioned. The schools and other realities to be questioned outside Lombardy will also be identified with the support of INDIRE (Istituto Nazionale per Documentazione, Innovazione e Ricerca Educativa, “National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research”) and based on existing literature and the indicators of “Futura” Plan of the PNRR (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, “National Recovery and Resilience Plan”). Mapping will be crucial and functional for the subsequent qualitative and quantitative phase, which will make use of statistical analysis and constructivist grounded theory.

Keywords: school drop-out, alternative education, popular and second-chance schools, map

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Authors: Boubacar Niang, Denis Raulin

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This paper presents the design of a dedicated board for learning and programming with ATMEL AVR new generation micro controller’s family. This board designed as a "shield" for the Arduino Uno allows us to focus on the design and programming of basic micro controller functionalities in high level language with a considerable time saving because of dealing with additional components is not required.

Keywords: Arduino, microcontroller, programming, language

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Authors: Shirko Ahmadi, Ahmad Fallahi, Marco C. Uchida, Gustavo L. Gutierrez

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The aims of the present study are to assess and compare the health habits and quality of life (QoL) of Iranian amateur athletes in different sports. A total of 120 male amateur athletes between 17 and 31 years, engaged in 16 kinds of sports which include team (n=44), individual (n=40) and combat sports (n=36) from sports clubs in the west cities of Iran; and also those not involved in any competition in the past. Additionally, this is a cross-sectional, descriptive observational study, which the subjects completed the WHOQOL-brief questionnaire to evaluate QoL. The questionnaire is composed of 26 questions in four domains (physical health, psychological, social and environmental domains), that was applied in the Persian language. Information on the frequency and duration of training sessions were also collected. The Shapiro-Wilk test was used to verify normal distribution, followed by the chi-squared test for proportions and simple analysis of variance for comparisons between groups of sports. Pearson’s correlation was used to assess the relationships between the variables analyzed. According to the findings, those from individual sports obtained highest points in the all domains of QoL; physical domains (87.1 ± 8.1 point), psychological domains (87.6 ± 9.6 point), social domains (89.7 ± 9.2 point), environmental domains (75.5± 10.7 point) and overall QoL score (84.9 ± 9.4 point). Generally, social domains were the highest QoL index (84.3 ± 7.2 points), and environmental domains were the lowest QoL index (68.1 ± 10.8 points), in all of the sports. No correlations were found between QoL domains and time engaged in the sport (r = 0.01; p = 0.93), number of weekly training sessions (r = 0.09; p = 0.37) and session duration (r = -0.06; p= 0.58). Comparison of QoL results with those of the general population revealed higher levels in the physical and psychological components of amateur athletes. In the present study, engaging in sports was associated with higher QoL levels in amateur athletes, particularly in the physical and psychological domains. Moreover, correlations were found between the overall score and domains of QoL.

Keywords: amateur, domains, Iranian, quality of life

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Authors: Florence Roselle Adalin, Misha Louise Delariarte, Fabbette Laire Lagas, Sarah Emanuelle Mejia, Lika Mizukoshi, Irish Paullen Palomeno, Gibrianne Alistaire Ramos, Danica Pauline Ramos, Josefina Tuazon, Jo Leah Flores

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Pain, often a missed and undertreated symptom, affects the quality of life of individuals. Nurses are key players in providing effective pain management to decrease morbidity and mortality of patients in pain. Nurses’ knowledge and attitude on pain greatly affect their ability on assessment and management. The Pain Society of the Philippines recognized the inadequacy and inaccessibility of data on the knowledge, skills, and attitude of nurses on pain management in the country. This study may be the first of its kind in the county, giving it the potential to contribute greatly to nursing education and practice through providing valuable baseline data. Objectives: This study aims to describe the level of knowledge and attitude, and current practices of nurses on pain assessment and management; and determine the relationship of nurses’ knowledge and attitude with years of experience, training on pain management and clinical area of practice. Methodology: A survey research design was employed. Four hospitals were selected through purposive sampling. A total of 235 Medical-Surgical Unit and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) nurses participated in the study. The tool used is a combination of demographic survey, Nurses’ Knowledge and Attitude Survey Regarding Pain (NKASRP), Acute Pain Evidence Based Practice Questionnaire (APEBPQ) with self-report questions on non-pharmacologic pain management. The data obtained was analysed using descriptive statistics, two sample T-tests for clinical areas and training; and Pearson product correlation to identify relationship of level of knowledge and attitude with years of experience. Results and Analysis: The mean knowledge and attitude score of the nurses was 47.14%. Majority answered ‘most of the time’ or ‘all the time’ on 84.12% of practice items on pain assessment, implementation of non-pharmacologic interventions, evaluation and documentation. Three of 19 practice items describing morphine and opioid administration in special populations were only done ‘a little of the time’. Most utilized non-pharmacologic interventions were deep breathing exercises (79.66%), massage therapy (27.54%), and ice therapy (26.69%). There was no significant relationship between knowledge scores and years of clinical experience (p = 0.05, r= -0.09). Moreover, there was not enough evidence to show difference in nurses’ knowledge and attitude scores in relation to presence of training (p = 0.41) or areas (Medical-Surgical or ICU) of clinical practice (p = 0.53). Conclusion and Recommendations: Findings of the study showed that the level of knowledge and attitude of nurses on pain assessment and management is suboptimal; and no relationship between nurses’ knowledge and attitude and years of experience. It is recommended that further studies look into the nursing curriculum on pain education, culture-specific pain management protocols and evidence-based practices in the country.

Keywords: knowledge and attitude, nurses, pain management, practices on pain management

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Authors: Seyed M. Zahrai, Saeid Lotfi

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If an infill panel does not have enough ductility against the loading, it breaks and gets damaged before depreciation and load transfer. As steel infill panel has appropriate ductility before fracture, it can be used as an alternative to typical infill panels under blast loading. Concerning enough ductility of out-of-plane behavior the infill panel, the impact force enters the horizontal diaphragm and is distributed among the lateral elements which can be made from steel infill panels. This article investigates the behavior of steel infill panels with different thickness and stiffeners using finite element analysis with geometric and material nonlinearities for optimization of the steel plate thickness and stiffeners arrangement to obtain more efficient design for its out-of-plane behavior.

Keywords: blast loading, ductility, maximum displacement, steel infill panel

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Authors: Maria C. Almario, Pam Remer, Jeff Resse, Kathy Moran, Linda Theander Adam

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The identification of victims of human trafficking and consequential service provision is characterized by a significant disconnection between the estimated prevalence of this issue and the number of cases identified. This poses as tremendous problem for human rights advocates as it prevents data collection, information sharing, allocation of resources and opportunities for international dialogues. The current paper introduces the Inclusive Human Trafficking Checklist (IHTC) as a measurement methodology with theoretical underpinnings derived from dialectic theory. The presence of human trafficking in a person’s life is conceptualized as a dynamic and dialectic interaction between vulnerability and exploitation. The current papers explores the operationalization of exploitation and vulnerability, evaluates the metric qualities of the instrument, evaluates whether there are differences in assessment based on the participant’s profession, level of knowledge, and training, and assesses if users of the instrument perceive it as useful. A total of 201 participants were asked to rate three vignettes predetermined by experts to qualify as a either human trafficking case or not. The participants were placed in three conditions: business as usual, utilization of the IHTC with and without training. The results revealed a statistically significant level of agreement between the expert’s diagnostic and the application of the IHTC with an improvement of 40% on identification when compared with the business as usual condition While there was an improvement in identification in the group with training, the difference was found to have a small effect size. Participants who utilized the IHTC showed an increased ability to identify elements of identity-based vulnerabilities as well as elements of fraud, which according to the results, are distinctive variables in cases of human trafficking. In terms of the perceived utility, the results revealed higher mean scores for the groups utilizing the IHTC when compared to the business as usual condition. These findings suggest that the IHTC improves appropriate identification of cases and that it is perceived as a useful instrument. The application of the IHTC as a multidisciplinary instrumentation that can be utilized in legal and human services settings is discussed as a pivotal piece of helping victims restore their sense of dignity, and advocate for legal, physical and psychological reparations. It is noteworthy that this study was conducted with a sample in the United States and later re-tested in Colombia. The implications of the instrument for treatment conceptualization and intervention in human trafficking cases are discussed as opportunities for enhancement of victim well-being, restoration engagement and activism. With the idea that what is personal is also political, we believe that the careful observation and data collection in specific cases can inform new areas of human rights activism.

Keywords: exploitation, human trafficking, measurement, vulnerability, screening

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Authors: Yuki Matsumoto, Yuma Ishimoto

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Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) with children has shown effective application to various problems such as anxiety and depression. Although there are barriers to access to mental health services including lack of professional services in communities and parental concerns about stigma, school has a significant role to address children’s health problems. Schools are regarded as a suitable arena for prevention and early intervention of mental health problems. In this line, CBT can be adaptable to school education and useful to enhance students’ social and emotional skills. However, Japanese school curriculum is rigorous so as to limit available time for implementation of CBT in schools. This paper describes Brief Cognitive Behavior Therapy (BCBT) with children in a Japanese school setting. The program has been developed in order to facilitate acceptability of CBT in schools and aimed to enhance students’ skills to manage anxiety and difficult behaviors. The present research used a single arm design in which 30 students aged 9-10 years old participated. The authors provided teachers a CBT training workshop (two hours) at two primary schools in Tokyo metropolitan area and recruited participants in the research. A homeroom teacher voluntarily delivered a 6-session BCBT program (15 minutes each) in classroom periods which is called as Kaerinokai, a meeting before leaving school. Students completed a questionnaire sheet at pre- and post-periods under the supervision of the teacher. The sheet included the Spence Child Anxiety Scale (SCAS), the Depression Self-Rating Scale for Children (DSRS), and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). The teacher was asked for feedback after the completion. Significant positive changes were found in the total and five of six sub-scales of the SCAS and the total difficulty scale of the SDQ. However, no significant changes were seen in Physical Injury Fear sub-scale of the SCAS, in the DSRS or the Prosocial sub-scale of the SDQ. The effect sizes are mostly between small and medium. The teacher commented that the program was easy to use and found positive changes in classroom activities and personal relationships. This preliminary research showed the feasibility of the BCBT in a school setting. The results suggest that the BCBT offers effective treatment for reduction in anxiety and in difficult behaviors. There is a good prospect of the BCBT suggesting that BCBT may be easier to be delivered than CBT by Japanese teachers to promote child mental health. The study has limitations including no control group, small sample size, or a short teacher training. Future research should address these limitations.

Keywords: brief cognitive behavior therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, mental health services in schools, teacher training workshop

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Authors: Nyathi Mpumelelo; Moeng Thabiso Maria

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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Radiopharmaceuticals are used for diagnosis, treatment, staging and follow up of various diseases. However, there is concern that the ionizing radiation (gamma rays, α and ß particles) emitted by radiopharmaceuticals may result in exposure of radiographers and nurses with limited knowledge of the principles of radiation protection and safety, raising the risk of cancer induction. This study aimed at investigation radiation safety awareness levels among radiographers and nurses at a small tertiary hospital in South Africa. METHODS: An analytical cross-sectional study. A validated two-part questionnaire was implemented to consenting radiographers and nurses working in a Nuclear Medicine Department. Part 1 gathered demographic information (age, gender, work experience, attendance to/or passing ionizing radiation protection courses). Part 2 covered questions related to knowledge and awareness of radiation protection principles. RESULTS: Six radiographers and five nurses participated (27% males and 73% females). The mean age was 45 years (age range 20-60 years). The study revealed that neither professional development courses nor radiation protection courses are offered at the Nuclear Medicine Department understudy. However, 6/6 (100%) radiographers exhibited a high level of awareness of radiation safety principles on handling and working with radiopharmaceuticals which correlated to their years of experience. As for nurses, 4/5 (80%) showed limited knowledge and awareness of radiation protection principles irrespective of the number of years in the profession. CONCLUSION: Despite their major role of caring for patients undergoing diagnostic and therapeutic treatments, the nurses showed limited knowledge of ionizing radiation and associated side effects. This was not surprising since they never received any formal basic radiation safety course. These findings were not unique to this Centre. A study conducted in a Kuwaiti Radiology Department also established that the vast majority of nurses did not understand the risks of working with ionizing radiation. Similarly, nurses in an Australian hospital exhibited knowledge limitations. However, nursing managers did provide the necessary radiation safety training when requested. In Guatemala and Saudi Arabia, where there was shortage of professional radiographers, nurses underwent radiography training, a course that equipped them with basic radiation safety principles. The radiographers in the Centre understudy unlike others in various parts of the world demonstrated substantial knowledge and awareness on radiation protection. Radiations safety courses attended when an opportunity arose played a critical role in their awareness. The knowledge and awareness levels of these radiographers were comparable to their counterparts in Sudan. However, it was much more above that of their counterparts in Jordan, Nigeria, Nepal and Iran who were found to have limited awareness and inadequate knowledge on radiation dose. Formal radiation safety and awareness courses and workshops can play a crucial role in raising the awareness of nurses and radiographers on radiation safety for their personal benefit and that of their patients.

Keywords: radiation safety, radiation awareness, training, nuclear medicine

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Authors: Robert Caulk

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A generalized framework for adaptive machine learning deployments in algorithmic trading is introduced, tested, and released as open-source code. The presented software aims to test the hypothesis that recent data contains enough information to form a probabilistically favorable short-term price prediction. Further, the framework contains various adaptive machine learning techniques that are geared toward generating profit during strong trends and minimizing losses during trend changes. Results demonstrate that this adaptive machine learning approach is capable of capturing trends and generating profit. The presentation also discusses the importance of defining the parameter space associated with the dynamic training data-set and using the parameter space to identify and remove outliers from prediction data points. Meanwhile, the generalized architecture enables common users to exploit the powerful machinery while focusing on high-level feature engineering and model testing. The presentation also highlights common strengths and weaknesses associated with the presented technique and presents a broad range of well-tested starting points for feature set construction, target setting, and statistical methods for enforcing risk management and maintaining probabilistically favorable entry and exit points. The presentation also describes the end-to-end data processing tools associated with FreqAI, including automatic data fetching, data aggregation, feature engineering, safe and robust data pre-processing, outlier detection, custom machine learning and statistical tools, data post-processing, and adaptive training backtest emulation, and deployment of adaptive training in live environments. Finally, the generalized user interface is also discussed in the presentation. Feature engineering is simplified so that users can seed their feature sets with common indicator libraries (e.g. TA-lib, pandas-ta). The user also feeds data expansion parameters to fill out a large feature set for the model, which can contain as many as 10,000+ features. The presentation describes the various object-oriented programming techniques employed to make FreqAI agnostic to third-party libraries and external data sources. In other words, the back-end is constructed in such a way that users can leverage a broad range of common regression libraries (Catboost, LightGBM, Sklearn, etc) as well as common Neural Network libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch) without worrying about the logistical complexities associated with data handling and API interactions. The presentation finishes by drawing conclusions about the most important parameters associated with a live deployment of the adaptive learning framework and provides the road map for future development in FreqAI.

Keywords: machine learning, market trend detection, open-source, adaptive learning, parameter space exploration

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Authors: Behrooz Ghasemi, Bahram Sharijian

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Al2O3/Mo nanocomposite powders were successfully synthesized by mechanical milling through mechanochemical reaction between MoO3 and Al. The structural evolutions of powder particles during mechanical milling were studied by X-ray diffractometry (XRD), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy(EDX) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Results show that Al2O3-Mo was completely obtained after 5 hr of milling. The crystallite sizes of Al2O3 and Mo after milling for 20 hr were about 45 nm and 23 nm, respectively. With longer milling time, the intensities of Al2O3 and Mo peaks decreased and became broad due to the decrease in crystallite size. Morphological features of powders were influenced by the milling time. The resulting Al2O3- Mo nanocomposite powder exhibited an average particle size of 200 nm after 20 hr of milling. Also nanocomposite powder after 10 hr milling had relatively equiaxed shape with uniformly distributed Mo phase in Al2O3 matrix.

Keywords: Al2O3/Mo, nanocomposites, mechanochemical, mechanical milling

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Authors: James Newman

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Process mining is an emerging technology that looks to serialize enterprise data in time series data. It has been used by many companies and has been the subject of a variety of research papers. However, the majority of current efforts have looked at how to best create process mining from standard relational databases. This paper is the first pass at outlining a database custom-built for the minimal viable product of process mining. We present Block Miner, a blockchain protocol to store process mining data across a distributed network. We demonstrate the feasibility of storing process mining data on the blockchain. We present a proof of concept and show how the intersection of these two technologies helps to solve a variety of issues, including but not limited to ransomware attacks, tax documentation, and conflict resolution.

Keywords: blockchain, process mining, memory optimization, protocol

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Authors: G. Aloh Obianuju, C. Chukwu Kelvin, Henry Aloh

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The study was undertaken to assess the environmental and socio-economic impact of quarrying in Umuoghara quarrying community of Ebonyi State, South East Nigeria. Questionnaires were distributed targeting quarry workers and people living within the community; personal interviews with other key informants were also conducted. All these were used as data gathering instruments. The study reveals that there were actually some benefits as well as marked environmental impacts in the community as a result of quarrying activities. Recommendations that can assist in mitigating these adverse impacts were suggested.

Keywords: environment, quarrying, environmental degradation, mitigation

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Authors: V. A. Vieira, M. P. Sforcini, V. Endo, G. C. Magioni, M. D. S. Oliveira

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The main goal of this paper was evaluate the effect of diets containing different levels of probiotic on performance and milk composition of lactating cows. Eight Holstein cows were distributed in two 4x4 Latin square. The diets were based on corn silage, concentrate and the treatment (0, 3, 6 or 9 grams of probiotic/animal/day). It was evaluated the dry matter intake of nutrients, milk yield and composition. The use of probiotics did not affect the nutrient intake (p>0.05) neither the daily milk production or corrected to 4% fat (p>0.05). However, it was observed that there was a significant fall in milk composition with higher levels of probiotics supplementation. These results emphasize the need of further studies with different experimental designs or improve the number of Latin square with longer periods of adaptation.

Keywords: dairy cow, milk composition, probiotics, daily milk production

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Authors: Suparman

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This paper addresses the problem of the signal segmentation within a Bayesian framework by using reversible jump MCMC algorithm. The signal is modelled by piecewise constant Moving-Average (MA) model where the numbers of segments, the position of change-point, the order and the coefficient of the MA model for each segment are unknown. The reversible jump MCMC algorithm is then used to generate samples distributed according to the joint posterior distribution of the unknown parameters. These samples allow calculating some interesting features of the posterior distribution. The performance of the methodology is illustrated via several simulation results.

Keywords: piecewise, moving-average model, reversible jump MCMC, signal segmentation

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Authors: Anda-veronica Gherman, Dimitrios Varthalitis

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Neurosurgery, like many surgical specialties, undoubtedly exhibits a significant gender gap, particularly in leadership positions. While increasing women representation in neurosurgery is important, it is crucial to increase their presence in leadership positions. Across the globe and Europe there are concerning trends of only 4% of all neurosurgical departments being chaired by women. This study aims to explore the situation regarding gender disparities in leadership in the United Kingdom and to identify possible contributing factors as well as discussing future strategies to bridge this gap. Methods: A literature review was conducted utilising PubMed as main database with search keywords including ‘female neurosurgeon’, ‘women neurosurgeon’, ‘gender disparity’, ‘leadership’ and ‘UK’. Additionally, a manual search of all neurosurgical departments in the UK was performed to identify the current female department leads and training director leads. Results: The literature search identified a paucity of literature addressing specifically leadership in female neurosurgeons within the UK, with very few published papers specifically on this topic. Despite more than half of medical students in the UK being female, only a small proportion pursue a surgical career, with neurosurgery being one of the least represented specialties. Only 27% of trainee neurosurgeons are female, and numbers are even lower at a consultant level, where women represent just 8%.Findings from published studies indicated that only 6.6% of leadership positions in neurosurgery are occupied by women in the UK. Furthermore, our manual searches across UK neurosurgical departments revealed that around 5% of department lead positions are currently held by women. While this figure is slightly higher than the European average of 4%, it remains lower compared to figures of 10% in other North-West European countries. The situation is slightly more positive looking at the training directors, with 15% being female. Discussion: The findings of this study highlight a significant gender disparity in leadership positions within neurosurgery in the UK, which may have important implications, perpetuating the lack of diversity on the decision-making process, limiting the career advancement opportunities of women and depriving the neurosurgical field from the voices, opinions and talents of women. With women representing half of the population, there is an undeniable need for more female leaders at the policy-making level. There are many barriers that can contribute to these numbers, including bias, stereotypes, lack of mentorship and work-like balance. A few solutions to overcome these barriers can be training programs addressing bias and impostor syndrome, leadership workshops tailored for female needs, better workplace policies, increased in formal mentorship and increasing the visibility of women in neurosurgery leadership positions through media, speaking opportunities, conferences, awards etc. And lastly, more research efforts should focus on the leadership and mentorship of women in neurosurgery, with an increased number of published papers discussing these issues.

Keywords: female neurosurgeons, female leadership, female mentorship, gender disparities

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Authors: Diamant Irene, Dar Tamar

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Burnout, conceptualized within the framework of stress research, is to a large extent a result of a threat on resources of time or a feeling of time shortage. In reaction to numerous tasks, deadlines, high output, management of different duties encompassing work-home conflicts, many individuals experience ‘time pressure’. Time pressure is characterized as the perception of a lack of available time in relation to the amount of workload. It can be a result of local objective constraints, but it can also be a chronic attribute in coping with life. As such, time pressure is associated in the literature with general stress experience and can therefore be a direct, contributory burnout factor. The present study examines the relation of chronic time pressure – feeling of time shortage and of being rushed, with another central aspect in subjective temporal experience - time perspective. Time perspective is a stable personal disposition, capturing the extent to which people subjectively remember the past, live the present and\or anticipate the future. Based on Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources Theory, it was hypothesized that individuals with chronic time pressure would experience a permanent threat on their time resources resulting in relatively increased burnout. In addition, it was hypothesized that different time perspective profiles, based on Zimbardo’s typology of five dimensions – Past Positive, Past Negative, Present Hedonistic, Present Fatalistic, and Future, would be related to different magnitudes of chronic time pressure and of burnout. We expected that individuals with ‘Past Negative’ or ‘Present Fatalist’ time perspectives would experience more burnout, with chronic time pressure being a moderator variable. Conversely, individuals with a ‘Present Hedonistic’ - with little concern with the future consequences of actions, would experience less chronic time pressure and less burnout. Another temporal experience angle examined in this study is the difference between the actual distribution of time (as in a typical day) versus desired distribution of time (such as would have been distributed optimally during a day). It was hypothesized that there would be a positive correlation between the gap between these time distributions and chronic time pressure and burnout. Data was collected through an online self-reporting survey distributed on social networks, with 240 participants (aged 21-65) recruited through convenience and snowball sampling methods from various organizational sectors. The results of the present study support the hypotheses and constitute a basis for future debate regarding the elements of burnout in the modern work environment, with an emphasis on subjective temporal experience. Our findings point to the importance of chronic and stable temporal experiences, as time pressure and time perspective, in occupational experience. The findings are also discussed with a view to the development of practical methods of burnout prevention.

Keywords: conservation of resources, burnout, time pressure, time perspective

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Authors: Tuba Senel Zor, Oktay Aslan

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With current trends in nanoscience and nanotechnology (NST), scientists have paid much attention to education and nanoliteracy in parallel with the developments on these fields. To understand the advances in NST research requires a population with a high degree of science literacy. All citizens should soon need nanoliteracy in order to navigate some of the important science-based issues faced to their everyday lives. While the fields of NST are advancing rapidly and raising their societal significance, general public’s awareness of these fields has remained at a low level. Moreover, students enrolled different education levels and teachers don’t have awareness at expected level. This problem may be stemmed from inadequate education and training. To remove the inadequacy, teachers have greatest duties and responsibilities. Especially science teachers at all levels need to be made aware of these developments and adequately prepared so that they are able to teach about these advances in a developmentally appropriate manner. If the teachers develop understanding and awareness of NST, they can also discuss the topic with their students. Therefore, the awareness and conceptual understandings of both the teachers who will teach science to students and the students who will be introduced about NST should be increased, and the necessary training should be provided. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of NST education on preservice science teachers’ awareness of NST. The study was designed in one group pre-test post-test quasi-experimental pattern. The study was conducted with 32 preservice science teachers attending the Elementary Science Education Program at a large Turkish university in central Anatolia. NST education was given during five weeks as two hours per week. Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Awareness Questionnaire was used as data collected tool and was implemented for pre-test and post-test. The collected data were analyzed using Statistical package for the Social Science (SPSS). The results of data analysis showed that there was a significant difference (z=6.25, p< .05) on NST awareness of preservice science teachers after implemented NST education. The results of the study indicate that NST education has an important effect for improving awareness of preservice science teachers on NST.

Keywords: awareness level, nanoliteracy, nanoscience and nanotechnology education, preservice science teachers

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Authors: Ryan C. Igama

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The complexity of disaster risk reduction management paved the way for various innovations and approaches to mitigate the loss of lives and casualties during disaster-related situations. The efficiency of doing response operations during disasters relies on the timely and organized deployment of search, rescue and retrieval teams. Indeed, the assistance provided by the search, rescue, and retrieval teams during disaster operations is a critical service needed to further minimize the loss of lives and casualties. The Armed Forces of the Philippines was mandated to provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations during calamities and disasters. Thus, this study “Interoperability of 505TH Search and Rescue Group and the 205TH Tactical Helicopter Wing of the Philippine Air Force in Search and Rescue Operations: An Assessment” was intended to provide substantial information to further strengthen and promote the capabilities of search and rescue operations in the Philippines. Further, this study also aims to assess the interoperability of the 505th Search and Rescue Group of the Philippine Air Force and the 205th Tactical Helicopter Wing Philippine Air Force. This study was undertaken covering the component units in the Philippine Air Force of the Armed Forces of the Philippines – specifically the 505th SRG and the 205th THW as the involved units who also acted as the respondents of the study. The qualitative approach was the mechanism utilized in the form of focused group discussions, key informant interviews, and documentary analysis as primary means to obtain the needed data for the study. Essentially, this study was geared towards the evaluation of the effectiveness of the interoperability of the two (2) involved PAF units during search and rescue operations. Further, it also delved into the identification of the impacts, gaps, and challenges confronted regarding interoperability as to training, equipment, and coordination mechanism vis-à-vis the needed measures for improvement, respectively. The result of the study regarding the interoperability of the two (2) PAF units during search and rescue operations showed that there was a duplication in terms of functions or tasks in HADR activities, specifically during the conduct of air rescue operations in situations like calamities. In addition, it was revealed that there was a lack of equipment and training for the personnel involved in search and rescue operations which is a vital element during calamity response activities. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that a strategic planning workshop/activity must be conducted regarding the duties and responsibilities of the personnel involved in the search and rescue operations to address the command and control and interoperability issues of these units. Additionally, the conduct of intensive HADR-related training for the personnel involved in search and rescue operations of the two (2) PAF Units must also be conducted so they can be more proficient in their skills and sustainably increase their knowledge of search and rescue scenarios, including the capabilities of the respective units. Lastly, the updating of existing doctrines or policies must be undertaken to adapt advancement to the evolving situations in search and rescue operations.

Keywords: interoperability, search and rescue capability, humanitarian assistance, disaster response

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Authors: Rajlakshmi Guha, Sajjad Ansari, Shazia Nasreen, Hirak Banerjee, Jiaul Paik

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Dyslexia is a neurocognitive disorder, affecting around fifteen percent of the Indian population. The symptoms include difficulty in reading alphabet, words, and sentences. This can be difficult at the phonemic or recognition level and may further affect lexical structures. Therapeutic intervention of dyslexic children post assessment is generally done by special educators and psychologists through one on one interaction. Considering the large number of children affected and the scarcity of experts, access to care is limited in India. Moreover, unavailability of resources and timely communication with caregivers add on to the problem of proper intervention. With the development of Educational Technology and its use in India, access to information and care has been improved in such a large and diverse country. In this context, this paper proposes an ICT enabled home-based intervention program for dyslexic children which would support the child, and provide an interactive interface between expert, parents, and students. The paper discusses the details of the database design and system layout of the program. Along with, it also highlights the development of different technical aids required to build out personalized android applications for the Indian dyslexic population. These technical aids include speech database creation for children, automatic speech recognition system, serious game development, and color coded fonts. The paper also emphasizes the games developed to assist the dyslexic child on cognitive training primarily for attention, working memory, and spatial reasoning. In addition, it talks about the specific elements of the interactive intervention tool that makes it effective for home based intervention of dyslexia.

Keywords: Android applications, cognitive training, dyslexia, intervention

Procedia PDF Downloads 280

Authors: Meifang Chen

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Background: As China increased its engagement in global health affairs and research, global Health (GH) emerged as a new discipline in China after 2010. Duke Kunshan University (DKU), as a member of the Chinese Consortium of Universities for Global Health, is the first university that experiments “Western-style” liberal arts and sciences (LAS) education pedagogy in GH undergraduate and postgraduate programs in China since 2014. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought significant disruption to education across the world. At the peak of the pandemic, 45 countries in the Europe and Central Asia regions closed their schools, affecting 185 million students. DKU, as many other universities and schools, was unprepared for this sudden abruptness and were forced to build emergency remote learning systems almost immediately. This qualitative study aims to gain a deeper understanding of 1) how Chinese students and parents embrace GH training in the liberal arts and sciences education context, and 2) how the COVID pandemic influences the students’ learning experience as well as affects students and parents’ perceptions of GH-related study and career development in China. Methods: students and parents at DKU were invited and recruited for open-ended, semi-structured interviews during Sept 2021-Mar 2022. Open coding procedures and thematic content analysis were conducted using Nvivo 12 software. Results: A total of 18 students and 36 parents were interviewed. Both students and parents were fond of delivering GH education using the liberal arts and sciences pedagogy. Strengths of LAS included focusing on whole person development, allowing personal enrichment, tailoring curriculum to individual’s interest, providing well-rounded knowledge through interdisciplinary learning, and increasing self-study capacity and adaptability. Limitations of LAS included less time to dive deep into disciplines. There was a significant improvement in independence, creativity, problem solving, and team coordinating capabilities among the students. The impact of the COVID pandemic on GH learning experience included less domestic and abroad fieldwork opportunities, less in-person interactions (especially with foreign students and faculty), less timely support, less lab experience, and coordination challenges due to time-zone difference. The COVID pandemic increased the public’s awareness of the importance of GH and acceptance of GH as a career path. More job and postgraduate program opportunities were expected in near future. However, some parents expressed concerns about GH-related employment opportunities in China. Conclusion: The application of the liberal arts and science education pedagogy in GH training were well-received by the Chinese students and parents. Although global pandemic like COVID disrupted GH learning in many ways, most Chinese students and parents held optimistic attitudes toward GH study and career development.

Keywords: COVID, global health, liberal arts and sciences pedagogy, China

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Authors: Sajjad Yahaghifar

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From the end of the last century, the importance and use of renewable energy sources have gained prominence, due not only by the fossil fuels dependence reduction, but mainly by environmental reasons related to climate change and the effects to the humanity. Consequently, solar energy has been arousing interest in several countries for being a technology considered clean, with reduced environmental impact. The output power of photo voltaic (PV) arrays is always changing with weather conditions,i.e., solar irradiation and atmospheric temperature. Therefore, maximum power point tracking (MPPT) control to extract maximum power from the PV arrays at real time becomes indispensable in PV generation system. This paper Study MPPT and total harmonic distortion (THD) in the city of Tabriz, Iran with the grid-connected PV system as distributed generation.

Keywords: MPPT, THD, grid-connected, PV system

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Authors: Ruhollah Basatnia, Ali Reza Aghababa, Mehrdad Anbarian, Sara Akbari, Mohammad Khazaee

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Introduction: The investigation of brain activity in sports has become a subject of interest for researchers. Several studies have examined the patterns or differences in brain activity during different sports situations. Previous studies have suggested that the pattern of cortical activity may differ between different football positions, such as goalkeepers and other players. This study aims to investigate the differences in electroencephalographic (EEG) activity between the positions of goalkeeper and forward in professional football players. Methods: Fourteen goalkeepers and twelve forwards, all males between 19-28 years old, participated in the study. EEG activity was recorded while participants were sitting with their eyes closed for 5 minutes. The mean relative power of EEG activity for each frequency band was compared between the two groups using independent samples t-test. Findings: The study found significant differences in the relative power of EEG activity between different frequency bands and electrodes. Notably, significant differences were observed in the mean relative power of EEG activity between the two groups for certain frequency bands and electrodes. These findings suggest that EEG activity can serve as a sensory indicator for cognitive and performance differences between goalkeepers and forwards in football players. Discussion: The results of this study suggest that EEG activity can be used to identify cognitive and performance differences between goalkeepers and forwards in football players. However, further research is needed to establish the relationship between EEG activity and actual performance in the field. Future studies should investigate the potential influence of other factors, such as fatigue and stress, on the EEG activity of football players. Additionally, the use of real-time EEG feedback could be explored as a tool for training and performance optimization in football players. Further research is required to fully understand the potential of EEG activity as a sensory indicator for cognitive and performance differences between football player positions and to explore its potential applications for training and performance optimization in football and other sports.

Keywords: football, brain activity, EEG, goalkeepers, forwards

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Authors: Burak Oksuzoglu, Savas Yildirim, Ferhat Kutlu

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Opinion mining (OM) is one of the natural language processing (NLP) problems to determine the polarity of opinions, mostly represented on a positive-neutral-negative axis. The data for OM is usually collected from various social media platforms. In an era where social media has considerable control over companies’ futures, it’s worth understanding social media and taking actions accordingly. OM comes to the fore here as the scale of the discussion about companies increases, and it becomes unfeasible to gauge opinion on individual levels. Thus, the companies opt to automize this process by applying machine learning (ML) approaches to their data. For the last two decades, OM or sentiment analysis (SA) has been mainly performed by applying ML classification algorithms such as support vector machines (SVM) and Naïve Bayes to a bag of n-gram representations of textual data. With the advent of deep learning and its apparent success in NLP, traditional methods have become obsolete. Transfer learning paradigm that has been commonly used in computer vision (CV) problems started to shape NLP approaches and language models (LM) lately. This gave a sudden rise to the usage of the pretrained language model (PTM), which contains language representations that are obtained by training it on the large datasets using self-supervised learning objectives. The PTMs are further fine-tuned by a specialized downstream task dataset to produce efficient models for various NLP tasks such as OM, NER (Named-Entity Recognition), Question Answering (QA), and so forth. In this study, the traditional and modern NLP approaches have been evaluated for OM by using a sizable corpus belonging to a large private company containing about 76,000 comments in Turkish: SVM with a bag of n-grams, and two chosen pre-trained models, multilingual universal sentence encoder (MUSE) and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). The MUSE model is a multilingual model that supports 16 languages, including Turkish, and it is based on convolutional neural networks. The BERT is a monolingual model in our case and transformers-based neural networks. It uses a masked language model and next sentence prediction tasks that allow the bidirectional training of the transformers. During the training phase of the architecture, pre-processing operations such as morphological parsing, stemming, and spelling correction was not used since the experiments showed that their contribution to the model performance was found insignificant even though Turkish is a highly agglutinative and inflective language. The results show that usage of deep learning methods with pre-trained models and fine-tuning achieve about 11% improvement over SVM for OM. The BERT model achieved around 94% prediction accuracy while the MUSE model achieved around 88% and SVM did around 83%. The MUSE multilingual model shows better results than SVM, but it still performs worse than the monolingual BERT model.

Keywords: BERT, MUSE, opinion mining, pretrained language model, SVM, Turkish

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Authors: Sharanya C. H., Pragathi M., Vathsala R. S., Theja K. V., Yashaswini S.

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Identifying counterfeit products have become increasingly important in the product manufacturing industries in recent decades. This current ongoing product issue of counterfeiting has an impact on company sales and profits. To address the aforementioned issue, a functional blockchain technology was implemented, which effectively prevents the product from being counterfeited. By utilizing the blockchain technology, consumers are no longer required to rely on third parties to determine the authenticity of the product being purchased. Blockchain is a distributed database that stores data records known as blocks and several databases known as chains across various networks. Counterfeit products are identified using a QR code reader, and the product's QR code is linked to the blockchain management system. It compares the unique code obtained from the customer to the stored unique code to determine whether or not the product is original.

Keywords: blockchain, ethereum, QR code

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Authors: Charles U. Eze, Joy Johnbest Egbo

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The study investigated the effect of Context-Based Instructional Strategy (CBIS) on students’ achievement in chemistry. CBIS was used as an experimental group and expository method (EM) as a control group, sources showed that students poor achievement in chemistry is from teaching strategy adopted by the chemistry teachers. Two research questions were answered, and two null hypotheses were formulated and tested. This strategy recognizes the need for student-centered, relevance of tasks and students’ voice; it also helps students develop creative and critical learning skills. A quasi-experimental (non-equivalent, pretest, posttest control group) design was adopted for the study. The population for the study comprised all senior secondary class one (SSI) students who were offering chemistry in co-education schools in Agbani Education zone. The instrument for data collection was a self-developed Basic Chemistry Achievement Test (BCAT). Relevant data were collected from a sample of SSI chemistry students using purposive random sampling techniques from two co-education schools in Agbani Education Zone of Enugu State, Nigeria. A reliability co-efficient was obtained for the instrument using Kuder-Richardson formula 20. Mean and standard deviation scores were used to answer the research questions while two-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the hypotheses. The findings showed that the experimental group taught with context-based instructional strategy (CBIS) obtained a higher mean achievement score than the control group in the post BCAT; male students had higher mean achievement scores than their female counterparts. The difference was significant. It was recommended, among others, that CBIS should be given more emphasis in the training and re-training program of secondary school chemistry teachers.

Keywords: context-based instructional strategy, expository strategy, student-centered

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Authors: Enqing Chen, Jianbo Wang

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It is well known that the wavelet transform provides a very effective framework for multiscale edges analysis. However, wavelets are not very effective in representing images containing distributed discontinuities such as edges. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale edge detection method in nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain, which is based on the dominant multiscale, multidirection edge expression and outstanding edge location of NSCT. Through real images experiments, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is better than other edge detection methods based on Canny operator, wavelet and contourlet. Additionally, the proposed method also works well for noisy images.

Keywords: edge detection, NSCT, shift invariant, modulus maxima

Procedia PDF Downloads 478