Search results for: Best Management Practices (BMP)

Authors: Mbainaibeye Jérôme, Noureddine Ellouze

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We study in this paper the effect of the scene changing on image sequences coding system using Embedded Zerotree Wavelet (EZW). The scene changing considered here is the full motion which may occurs. A special image sequence is generated where the scene changing occurs randomly. Two scenarios are considered: In the first scenario, the system must provide the reconstruction quality as best as possible by the management of the bit rate (BR) while the scene changing occurs. In the second scenario, the system must keep the bit rate as constant as possible by the management of the reconstruction quality. The first scenario may be motivated by the availability of a large band pass transmission channel where an increase of the bit rate may be possible to keep the reconstruction quality up to a given threshold. The second scenario may be concerned by the narrow band pass transmission channel where an increase of the bit rate is not possible. In this last case, applications for which the reconstruction quality is not a constraint may be considered. The simulations are performed with five scales wavelet decomposition using the 9/7-tap filter bank biorthogonal wavelet. The entropy coding is performed using a specific defined binary code book and EZW algorithm. Experimental results are presented and compared to LEAD H263 EVAL. It is shown that if the reconstruction quality is the constraint, the system increases the bit rate to obtain the required quality. In the case where the bit rate must be constant, the system is unable to provide the required quality if the scene change occurs; however, the system is able to improve the quality while the scene changing disappears.

Keywords: Image Sequence Compression, Wavelet Transform, Scene Changing, Zero Tree, Bit Rate, Quality.

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Authors: Claudineia Brazil, Elison Eduardo Bierhals, Francisco Pereira, José Leandro Néris, Matheus Rippel, Luciane Salvi

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The global concern about climate change has been increasing, since the emission of gases from human activities contributes to the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, indicating significant impacts to the planet in the coming years. The study of precipitation regime is fundamental for the development of research in several areas. Among them are hydrology, agriculture, and electric sector. Using the climatic projections of the models belonging to the CMIP5, the main objective of the paper was to present an analysis of the impacts of climate change without rainfall in the Uruguay River basin. After an analysis of the results, it can be observed that for the future climate, there is a tendency, in relation to the present climate, for larger numbers of dry events, mainly in the winter months, changing the pluviometric regime for wet summers and drier winters. Given this projected framework, it is important to note the importance of adequate management of the existing water sources in the river basin, since the value of rainfall is reduced for the next years, it may compromise the dynamics of the ecosystems in the region. Facing climate change is fundamental issue for regions and cities all around the world. Society must improve its resilience to phenomenon impacts, and spreading the knowledge among decision makers and citizens is also essential. So, these research results can be subsidies for the decision-making in planning and management of mitigation measures and/or adaptation in south Brazil.

Keywords: Climate change, hydrological potential, precipitation, mitigation.

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Authors: Al-Khalid Othman, Wan A. Wan Zainal Abidin, Kee M. Lee, Hushairi Zen, Tengku. M. A. Zulcaffle, Kuryati Kipli

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This paper provides an in-depth study of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) application to monitor and control the swiftlet habitat. A set of system design is designed and developed that includes the hardware design of the nodes, Graphical User Interface (GUI) software, sensor network, and interconnectivity for remote data access and management. System architecture is proposed to address the requirements for habitat monitoring. Such applicationdriven design provides and identify important areas of further work in data sampling, communications and networking. For this monitoring system, a sensor node (MTS400), IRIS and Micaz radio transceivers, and a USB interfaced gateway base station of Crossbow (Xbow) Technology WSN are employed. The GUI of this monitoring system is written using a Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) along with Xbow Technology drivers provided by National Instrument. As a result, this monitoring system is capable of collecting data and presents it in both tables and waveform charts for further analysis. This system is also able to send notification message by email provided Internet connectivity is available whenever changes on habitat at remote sites (swiftlet farms) occur. Other functions that have been implemented in this system are the database system for record and management purposes; remote access through the internet using LogMeIn software. Finally, this research draws a conclusion that a WSN for monitoring swiftlet habitat can be effectively used to monitor and manage swiftlet farming industry in Sarawak.

Keywords: Swiftlet, WSN, Habitat Monitoring, Networking.

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Authors: Marjone Van Der Bank, C. M. Van Der Bank

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This paper presents an overview of the foundation and evolution of environmental related problems in local governments with specific reference on air pollution in South Africa. Local government has a direct mandate in terms of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (hereafter, the Constitution). This mandate to protect, fulfil, respect and promote the Bill of Rights by local governments in respect of the powers and functions creates confusion around the role of where a local government fits in, in addressing the problem of climate change in South Africa. A reflection of the evolving legislations, developments, and processes regarding climate change that shaped local government dispensation in South Africa is addressed by the notion of developmental local governments. This paper seeks to examine the advances for mitigation and adaptation regulation of air pollution and application in South Africa. This study involves a qualitative approach that will involve South African national legislation as well as an interpretation of international strategies. A literature review study was conducted to undertake the various aspects of law in order to support the argument undertaken of mitigation and adaptation strategies. The paper presents a detailed discussion of the current legislation and the position as it currently stands, as well as the relevant protections as outlined in the National Environmental Management Act and the National Environmental Management: Air Quality Act. It then proceeds to outline the responsibilities of local governments in South Africa to mitigate and adapt to air pollution strategies.

Keywords: Adaptation, climate change, disaster, local governments, mitigation.

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Authors: Munazza A. Mirza, Khawar Khurshid

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Individuals are generally associated with different learning styles, which have been explored extensively in recent past. The learning styles refer to the potential of an individual by which s/he can easily comprehend and retain information. Among various learning style models, VARK is the most accepted model which categorizes the learners with respect to their sensory characteristics. Based on the number of preferred learning modes, the learners can be categorized as uni-modal, bi-modal, tri-modal, or quad/multi-modal. Although there is a prevalent belief in the learning styles, however, the model is not being frequently and effectively utilized in the higher education. This research describes the identification model to validate teacher’s didactic practice and student’s performance linkage with the learning styles. The identification model is recommended to check the effective application and evaluation of the various learning styles. The proposed model is a guideline to effectively implement learning styles inventory in order to ensure that it will validate performance linkage with learning styles. If performance is linked with learning styles, this may help eradicate the distrust on learning style theory. For this purpose, a comprehensive study was conducted to compare and understand how VARK inventory model is being used to identify learning preferences and their correlation with learner’s performance. A comparative analysis of the findings of these studies is presented to understand the learning styles of tertiary students in various disciplines. It is concluded with confidence that the learning styles of students cannot be associated with any specific discipline. Furthermore, there is not enough empirical proof to link performance with learning styles.

Keywords: Learning style, VARK, sensory preferences, identification model, didactic practices.

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Authors: G. Dottavio, M. F. Andrade, F. Renard, V. Cheutet, A.-L. L. S. Vercraene, P. Hoang, S. Briet, R. Dachicourt, Y. Baizet

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An important number of technological equipment and high-skilled workers over long periods of time have to be mobilized during nuclear decommissioning processes. The related operations generate complex flows of waste and high inventory levels, associated to information flows of heterogeneous types. Taking into account that more than 10 decommissioning operations are on-going in France and about 50 are expected toward 2025: A big challenge is addressed today. The management of decommissioning and dismantling of nuclear installations represents an important part of the nuclear-based energy lifecycle, since it has an environmental impact as well as an important influence on the electricity cost and therefore the price for end-users. Bringing new technologies and new solutions into decommissioning methodologies is thus mandatory to improve the quality, cost and delay efficiency of these operations. The purpose of our project is to improve decommissioning management efficiency by developing a decision-support framework dedicated to plan nuclear facility decommissioning operations and to optimize waste evacuation by means of a logistic approach. The target is to create an easy-to-handle tool capable of i) predicting waste flows and proposing the best decommissioning logistics scenario and ii) managing information during all the steps of the process and following the progress: planning, resources, delays, authorizations, saturation zones, waste volume, etc. In this article we present our results from waste nuclear flows simulation during decommissioning process, including discrete-event simulation supported by FLEXSIM 3-D software. This approach was successfully tested and our works confirms its ability to improve this type of industrial process by identifying the critical points of the chain and optimizing it by identifying improvement actions. This type of simulation, executed before the start of the process operations on the basis of a first conception, allow ‘what-if’ process evaluation and help to ensure quality of the process in an uncertain context. The simulation of nuclear waste flows before evacuation from the site will help reducing the cost and duration of the decommissioning process by optimizing the planning and the use of resources, transitional storage and expensive radioactive waste containers. Additional benefits are expected for the governance system of the waste evacuation since it will enable a shared responsibility of the waste flows.

Keywords: Nuclear decommissioning, logistical optimization, decision-support framework, waste management.

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Authors: Hassan Zarei, Ali Vahidian Kamyad, Sohrab Effati

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In this paper, a mathematical model of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is utilized and an optimization problem is proposed, with the final goal of implementing an optimal 900-day structured treatment interruption (STI) protocol. Two type of commonly used drugs in highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), reverse transcriptase inhibitors (RTI) and protease inhibitors (PI), are considered. In order to solving the proposed optimization problem an adaptive memetic algorithm with population management (AMAPM) is proposed. The AMAPM uses a distance measure to control the diversity of population in genotype space and thus preventing the stagnation and premature convergence. Moreover, the AMAPM uses diversity parameter in phenotype space to dynamically set the population size and the number of crossovers during the search process. Three crossover operators diversify the population, simultaneously. The progresses of crossover operators are utilized to set the number of each crossover per generation. In order to escaping the local optima and introducing the new search directions toward the global optima, two local searchers assist the evolutionary process. In contrast to traditional memetic algorithms, the activation of these local searchers is not random and depends on both the diversity parameters in genotype space and phenotype space. The capability of AMAPM in finding optimal solutions compared with three popular metaheurestics is introduced.

Keywords: HIV therapy design, memetic algorithms, adaptivealgorithms, nonlinear integer programming.

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Authors: Rishabh Garg

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Blockchain technology can allow remote, untrusted parties in the banking and financial sector to reach consensus on the state of databases without the involvement of gatekeepers. Like a bookkeeper, it can manage all financial transactions including payments, settlements, fundraising, securities management, loans, credits and trade finance. It can outperform existing systems in terms of identity verification, asset transfers, peer-to-peer transfers, hedge funds, security and auditability. Blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) is a new financial protocol. Being open and programmable, it enables various DeFi use-cases, including asset management, tokenization, tokenized derivatives, decentralized autonomous organizations, data analysis and valuation, payments, lending and borrowing, insurance, margin trading, prediction market, gambling and yield-farming, etc. In addition, it can ease financial transactions, cash-flow, use of programmable currency, no-loss lotteries, etc. This paper aims to assess the potential of decentralized finance by leveraging the blockchain-enabled Ethereum platform as an alternative to traditional finance. The study also aims to find out the impact of decentralized finance on prediction markets, quadratic funding and crowd-funding, together with the potential challenges and solutions associated with its implementation.

Keywords: Advance trading, crowd funding, exchange tokens, fund aggregation, margin trading, quadratic funding, smart contracts, streaming money, token derivatives.

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Authors: Claudio Díaz, Mabel Ortiz

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An EFL teacher education programme in Chile takes five years to train a future teacher of English. Preservice teachers are prepared to learn an advanced level of English and teach the language from 5th to 12th grade in the Chilean educational system. In the context of their first EFL Methodology course in year four, preservice teachers have to create a five-minute digital story that starts from a critical incident they have experienced as teachers-to-be during their observations or interventions in the schools. A critical incident can be defined as a happening, a specific incident or event either observed by them or involving them. The happening sparks their thinking and may make them subsequently think differently about the particular event. When they create their digital stories, preservice teachers put technology, teaching practice and theory together to narrate a story that is complemented by still images, moving images, text, sound effects and music. The story should be told as a personal narrative, which explains the critical incident. This presentation will focus on the creation process of 50 Chilean preservice teachers’ digital stories highlighting the critical incidents they started their stories. It will also unpack preservice teachers’ beliefs and reflections when approaching their teaching practices in schools. These beliefs will be coded and categorized through content analysis to evidence preservice teachers’ most rooted conceptions about English teaching and learning in Chilean schools. The findings seem to indicate that preservice teachers’ beliefs are strongly mediated by contextual and affective factors.

Keywords: Beliefs, Digital stories, Preservice teachers, Practicum.

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Authors: Chongya Song, Kang Yen, Alexander Pons, Jin Liu

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In the field of machine learning, the ensemble has been employed as a common methodology to improve the performance upon multiple base classifiers. However, the true predictions are often canceled out by the false ones during consensus due to a phenomenon called “curse of correlation” which is represented as the strong interferences among the predictions produced by the base classifiers. In addition, the existing practices are still not able to effectively mitigate the problem of imbalanced classification. Based on the analysis on our experiment results, we conclude that the two problems are caused by some inherent deficiencies in the approach of consensus. Therefore, we create an enhanced ensemble algorithm which adopts a designed rank-based chain-mode consensus to overcome the two problems. In order to evaluate the proposed ensemble algorithm, we employ a well-known benchmark data set NSL-KDD (the improved version of dataset KDDCup99 produced by University of New Brunswick) to make comparisons between the proposed and 8 common ensemble algorithms. Particularly, each compared ensemble classifier uses the same 22 base classifiers, so that the differences in terms of the improvements toward the accuracy and reliability upon the base classifiers can be truly revealed. As a result, the proposed rank-based chain-mode consensus is proved to be a more effective ensemble solution than the traditional consensus approach, which outperforms the 8 ensemble algorithms by 20% on almost all compared metrices which include accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score and area under receiver operating characteristic curve.

Keywords: Consensus, curse of correlation, imbalanced classification, rank-based chain-mode ensemble.

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Authors: Hossam el-ddin Mostafa, Pavel Čičak

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IETF RFC 2002 originally introduced the wireless Mobile-IP protocol to support portable IP addresses for mobile devices that often change their network access points to the Internet. The inefficiency of this protocol mainly within the handoff management produces large end-to-end packet delays, during registration process, and further degrades the system efficiency due to packet losses between subnets. The criterion to initiate a simple and fast full-duplex connection between the home agent and foreign agent, to reduce the roaming duration, is a very important issue to be considered by a work in this paper. State-transition Petri-Nets of the modeling scenario-based CIA: communication inter-agents procedure as an extension to the basic Mobile-IP registration process was designed and manipulated. The heuristic of configuration file during practical Setup session for registration parameters, on Cisco platform Router-1760 using IOS 12.3 (15)T is created. Finally, stand-alone performance simulations results from Simulink Matlab, within each subnet and also between subnets, are illustrated for reporting better end-to-end packet delays. Results verified the effectiveness of our Mathcad analytical manipulation and experimental implementation. It showed lower values of end-to-end packet delay for Mobile-IP using CIA procedure. Furthermore, it reported packets flow between subnets to improve packet losses between subnets.

Keywords: Cisco configuration, handoff, packet delay, Petri-Nets, registration process, Simulink.

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Authors: A. Bouabid, B. Bielenberg, S. Ainane, N. Pasha

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In this paper, a team of faculty members of the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, UAE representing six different courses across General Engineering (ENGR), Communication (COMM), and Design (STPS) worked together to establish a clear developmental progression of learning outcomes and performance indicators for targeted knowledge, areas of competency, and skills for the first three semesters of the Bachelor of Sciences in Engineering curriculum. The sequences of courses studied in this project were ENGR/COMM, COMM/STPS, and ENGR/STPS. For each course’s nine areas of knowledge, competency, and skills, the research team reviewed the existing learning outcomes and related performance indicators with a focus on identifying linkages across disciplines as well as within the courses of a discipline. The team reviewed existing performance indicators for developmental progression from semester to semester for same discipline related courses (vertical alignment) and for different discipline courses within the same semester (horizontal alignment). The results of this work have led to recommendations for modifications of the initial indicators when incoherence was identified, and/or for new indicators based on best practices (identified through literature searches) when gaps were identified. It also led to recommendations for modifications of the level of emphasis within each course to ensure developmental progression. The exercise has led to a revised Sequence Performance Indicator Mapping for the knowledge, skills, and competencies across the six core courses.

Keywords: Curriculum alignment, horizontal and vertical progression, performance indicators, skill level.

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Authors: A. S. Adesuyi, Z. Munch

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This study investigates the use of a time-series of MODIS NDVI data to identify agricultural land cover change on an annual time step (2007 - 2012) and characterize the trend. Following an ISODATA classification of the MODIS imagery to selectively mask areas not agriculture or semi-natural, NDVI signatures were created to identify areas cereals and vineyards with the aid of ancillary, pictometry and field sample data for 2010. The NDVI signature curve and training samples were used to create a decision tree model in WEKA 3.6.9 using decision tree classifier (J48) algorithm; Model 1 including ISODATA classification and Model 2 not. These two models were then used to classify all data for the study area for 2010, producing land cover maps with classification accuracies of 77% and 80% for Model 1 and 2 respectively. Model 2 was subsequently used to create land cover classification and change detection maps for all other years. Subtle changes and areas of consistency (unchanged) were observed in the agricultural classes and crop practices. Over the years as predicted by the land cover classification. Forty one percent of the catchment comprised of cereals with 35% possibly following a crop rotation system. Vineyards largely remained constant with only one percent conversion to vineyard from other land cover classes.

Keywords: Change detection, Land cover, NDVI, time-series.

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Authors: N. Matveev, A. Pervov

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Local utilities often face problems of local industrial wastes, storm water disposal due to existing strict regulations. For many local industries, the problem of wastewater treatment and discharge into surface reservoirs can’t be solved through the use of conventional biological treatment techniques. Current discharge standards require very strict removal of a number of impurities such as ammonia, nitrates, phosphate, etc. To reach this level of removal, expensive reagents and sorbents are used. The modern concept of rational water resources management requires the development of new efficient techniques that provide wastewater treatment and reuse. As RO membranes simultaneously reject all dissolved impurities such as BOD, TDS, ammonia, phosphates etc., they become very attractive for the direct treatment of wastewater without biological stage. To treat wastewater, specially designed membrane "open channel" modules are used that do not possess "dead areas" that cause fouling or require pretreatment. A solution to RO concentrate disposal problem is presented that consists of reducing of initial wastewater volume by 100 times. Concentrate is withdrawn from membrane unit as sludge moisture. The efficient use of membrane RO techniques is connected with a salt balance in water system. Thus, to provide high ecological efficiency of developed techniques, all components of water supply and wastewater discharge systems should be accounted for.

Keywords: Reverse osmosis, stormwater treatment, openchannel module, wastewater reuse.

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Authors: Omar Boutkhoum, Mohamed Hanine, Abdessadek Bendarag

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Sustainable economic growth is nowadays driving firms to extend toward the adoption of many green supply chain management (GSCM) solutions. However, the evaluation and selection of these solutions is a matter of concern that needs very serious decisions, involving complexity owing to the presence of various associated factors. To resolve this problem, a comparative analysis approach based on multi-criteria decision-making methods is proposed for adequate evaluation of sustainable supply chain management solutions. In the present paper, we propose an integrated decision-making model based on FAHP (Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process), TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) and PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organisation METHod for Enrichment Evaluations) to contribute to a better understanding and development of new sustainable strategies for industrial organizations. Due to the varied importance of the selected criteria, FAHP is used to identify the evaluation criteria and assign the importance weights for each criterion, while TOPSIS and PROMETHEE methods employ these weighted criteria as inputs to evaluate and rank the alternatives. The main objective is to provide a comparative analysis based on TOPSIS and PROMETHEE processes to help make sound and reasoned decisions related to the selection problem of GSCM solution.

Keywords: GSCM solutions, multi-criteria analysis, FAHP, TOPSIS, PROMETHEE, decision support system.

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Authors: Amol A. Talankar, Prakash Verma, Nitin Seth

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The purpose of this study is to identify the critical success factors (CSFs) for the effective implementation of Six Sigma in non-formal service Sectors.

Based on the survey of literature, the critical success factors (CSFs) for Six Sigma have been identified and are assessed for their importance in Non-formal service sector using Delphi Technique. These selected CSFs were put forth to the panel of expert to cluster them and prepare cognitive map to establish their relationship.

All the critical success factors examined and obtained from the review of literature have been assessed for their importance with respect to their contribution to Six Sigma effectiveness in non formal service sector.

The study is limited to the non-formal service sectors involved in the organization of religious festival only. However, the similar exercise can be conducted for broader sample of other non-formal service sectors like temple/ashram management, religious tours management etc.

The research suggests an approach to identify CSFs of Six Sigma for Non-formal service sector. All the CSFs of the formal service sector will not be applicable to Non-formal services, hence opinion of experts was sought to add or delete the CSFs. In the first round of Delphi, the panel of experts has suggested, two new CSFs-“competitive benchmarking (F19) and resident’s involvement (F28)”, which were added for assessment in the next round of Delphi.  One of the CSFs-“fulltime six sigma personnel (F15)” has been omitted in proposed clusters of CSFs for non-formal organization, as it is practically impossible to deploy full time trained Six Sigma recruits.

Keywords: Critical success factors (CSFs), Quality assurance, non-formal service sectors, Six Sigma.

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Authors: Haitao Yang, Jianming Lv, Fei Xu, Xintong Wang, Yilin Huang, Lanting Xia, Xuewu Zhu

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Given a fixed fund, purchasing fewer hosts of higher capability or inversely more of lower capability is a must-be-made trade-off in practices for building a Hadoop big data platform. An exploratory study is presented for a Housing Big Data Platform project (HBDP), where typical big data computing is with SQL queries of aggregate, join, and space-time condition selections executed upon massive data from more than 10 million housing units. In HBDP, an empirical formula was introduced to predict the performance of host clusters potential for the intended typical big data computing, and it was shaped via a regression approach. With this empirical formula, it is easy to suggest an optimal cluster configuration. The investigation was based on a typical Hadoop computing ecosystem HDFS+Hive+Spark. A proper metric was raised to measure the performance of Hadoop clusters in HBDP, which was tested and compared with its predicted counterpart, on executing three kinds of typical SQL query tasks. Tests were conducted with respect to factors of CPU benchmark, memory size, virtual host division, and the number of element physical host in cluster. The research has been applied to practical cluster procurement for housing big data computing.

Keywords: Hadoop platform planning, optimal cluster scheme at fixed-fund, performance empirical formula, typical SQL query tasks.

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Authors: Ayodele Adekunle Faiyetole, Olumide Olawale Jegede

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This paper presents the experimental design and needs justifications for a localized intelligent parking system (L-IPS), ideal for quasi-close communities with increasing vehicular volume that depends on limited or constant parking facilities. For a constant supply in parking facilities, the demand for an increasing vehicular volume could lead to poor time conservation or extended travel time, traffic congestion or impeded mobility, and safety issues. Increased negative environmental and economic externalities are other associated and consequent downsides of disparities in demand and supply. This L-IPS is designed using a microcontroller, ultrasonic sensors, LED indicators, such that the current status, in terms of parking spots availability, can be known from the main entrance to the community or a parking zone on a LCD screen. As an advanced traffic management system (ATMS), the L-IPS is designed to resolve aspects of infrastructure-to-driver (I2D) communication and parking detection issues. Thus, this L-IPS can act as a timesaver for users by helping them know the availability of parking spots. Providing on-time, informed routing, to a next preference or seamless moving to berth on the available spot on a proximate facility as the case may be. Its use could also increase safety and increase mobility, and fuel savings and costs, therefore, reducing negative environmental and economic externalities due to transportation systems.

Keywords: Intelligent parking systems, localized intelligent parking system, intelligent transport systems, advanced traffic management systems, infrastructure-to-drivers communication.

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Authors: Salina Budin, Shaira Ismail

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Students learn effectively in a learning environment with a suitable teaching approach that matches their learning preferences. The main objective of the study is to examine the learning preferences amongst the students in the Science and Technology (S&T), and Social Science (SS) fields of study at the Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM), Pulau Pinang. The measurement instrument is based on the Dunn and Dunn Learning Styles which measure five elements of learning styles; environmental, sociological, emotional, physiological and psychological. Questionnaires are distributed amongst undergraduates in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Faculty of Business Management. The respondents comprise of 131 diploma students of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and 111 degree students of the Faculty of Business Management. The results indicate that, both S&T and SS students share a similar learning preferences on the environmental aspect, emotional preferences, motivational level, learning responsibility, persistent level in learning and learning structure. Most of the S&T students are concluded as analytical learners and the majority of SS students are global learners. Both S&T and SS students are concluded as visual learners, preferred to be in an active mobility in a relaxing and enjoying mode with some light of refreshments during the learning process and exhibited reflective characteristics in learning. Obviously, the S&T students are considered as left brain dominant, whereas the SS students are right brain dominant. The findings highlighted that both categories of students exhibited similar learning preferences except on psychological preferences.

Keywords: Learning preferences, Dunn and Dunn learning style, teaching approach, science and technology, social science.

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Authors: Csilla M. Szabó

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In Hungary, the society has changed a lot for the past 25 years, and these changes could be detected in educational situations as well. The number and the intensity of conflicts have been increased in most fields of life, as well as at schools. Teachers have difficulties to be able to handle school conflicts. What is more, the new net generation, generation Z has values and behavioural patterns different from those of the previous one, which might generate more serious conflicts at school, especially with teachers who were mainly socialising in a traditional teacher – student relationship. In Hungary, the bill CCIV of 2011 declared the foundation of Institutes of Teacher Training in higher education institutes. One of the tasks of the Institutes is to survey the competences and needs of teachers working in public education and to provide further trainings and services for them according to their needs and requirements. This job is supported by the Social Renewal Operative Programs 4.1.2.B. The professors of a college carried out a questionnaire and surveyed the needs and the requirements of teachers working in the region. Based on the results, the professors of the Institute of Teacher Training decided to meet the requirements of teachers and to launch short teacher further training courses in spring 2015. One of the courses is going to focus on school conflict management through mediation. The aim of the pilot course is to provide conflict management techniques for teachers and to present different mediation techniques to them. The theoretical part of the course (5 hours) will enable participants to understand the main points and the advantages of mediation, while the practical part (10 hours) will involve teachers in role plays to learn how to cope with conflict situations applying mediation. We hope if conflicts could be reduced, it would influence school atmosphere in a positive way and the teaching – learning process could be more successful and effective.

Keywords: Conflict resolution, generation Z, mediation, teacher training.

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Authors: Matthias Schmidt, Steffen C. Eickemeyer, Prof. Peter Nyhuis

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Guaranteeing the availability of the required parts at the scheduled time represents a key logistical challenge. This is especially important when several parts are required together. This article describes a tool that supports the positioning in the area of conflict between low stock costs and a high service level for a consumer.

Keywords: Systems Modeling, Manufacturing Systems, Simulation & Control, logistics and supply chain management

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Authors: K. Qonono

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Despite the significance and economic benefits of petrol stations in South Africa, these still pose a huge risk of fire and explosion threatening public safety. This research paper examines the extent to which land-use planning in Stellenbosch, South Africa, considers the fire risk posed by petrol stations and the implications for public safety as well as preparedness for large fires or explosions. To achieve this, the research identified the land-use types around petrol stations in Stellenbosch and determined the extent to which their locations comply with the local, national, and international land-use planning regulations. A mixed research method consisting of the collection and analysis of geospatial data and qualitative data was applied, where petrol stations within a six-kilometre radius of Stellenbosch’s town centre were utilised as study sites. The research examined the risk of fires/explosions at these petrol stations. The research investigated Stellenbosch Municipality’s institutional preparedness to respond in the event of a fire/explosion at these petrol stations. The research observed that siting of petrol stations does not comply with local, national, and international good practices, thus exposing the surrounding developments to fires and explosions. Land-use planning practice does not consider hazards created by petrol stations. Despite the potential for major fires at petrol stations, Stellenbosch Municipality’s level of preparedness to respond to petrol station fires appears low due to the prioritisation of more frequent events.

Keywords: Petrol stations, technological hazard, DRR, land-use planning, risk analysis.

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Authors: Claude Alavoine, Ferkan Kaplanseren

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Negotiation is a specific form of interaction based on communication in which the parties enter into deliberately, each with clear but different interests or goals and a mutual dependency towards a decision due to be taken at the end of the confrontation. Consequently, negotiation is a complex activity involving many different disciplines from the strategic aspects and the decision making process to the evaluation of alternatives or outcomes and the exchange of information. While gender differences can be considered as one of the most researched topic within negotiation studies, empirical works and theory present many conflicting evidences and results about the role of gender in the process or the outcome. Furthermore, little interest has been shown over gender differences in the definition of what is negotiation, its essence or fundamental elements. Or, as differences exist in practices, it might be essential to study if the starting point of these discrepancies does not come from different considerations about what is negotiation and what will encourage the participants in their strategic decisions. Some recent and promising experiments made with diverse groups show that male and female participants in a common and shared situation barely consider the same way the concepts of power, trust or stakes which are largely considered as the usual driving forces of any negotiation. Furthermore, results from Human Resource self-assessment tests display and confirm considerable differences between individuals regarding essential behavioral dimensions like capacity to improvise and to achieve, aptitude to conciliate or to compete and orientation towards power and group domination which are also part of negotiation skills. Our intention in this paper is to confront these dimensions with negotiation’s usual driving forces in order to build up new paths for further research.

Keywords: Gender, negotiation, personality, power, stakes, trust.

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Authors: Muhammed Ordu, Eren Demir, Chris Tofallis

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Over the past decade, the non-elective admissions in the UK have increased significantly. Taking into account limited resources (i.e. beds), the related service managers are obliged to manage their resources effectively due to the non-elective admissions which are mostly admitted to inpatient specialities via A&E departments. Geriatric medicine is one of specialities that have long length of stay for the non-elective admissions. This study aims to develop a discrete event simulation model to understand how possible increases on non-elective demand over the next 12 months affect the bed occupancy rate and to determine required number of beds in a geriatric medicine speciality in a UK hospital. In our validated simulation model, we take into account observed frequency distributions which are derived from a big data covering the period April, 2009 to January, 2013, for the non-elective admission and the length of stay. An experimental analysis, which consists of 16 experiments, is carried out to better understand possible effects of case studies and scenarios related to increase on demand and number of bed. As a result, the speciality does not achieve the target level in the base model although the bed occupancy rate decreases from 125.94% to 96.41% by increasing the number of beds by 30%. In addition, the number of required beds is more than the number of beds considered in the scenario analysis in order to meet the bed requirement. This paper sheds light on bed management for service managers in geriatric medicine specialities.

Keywords: Bed management, bed occupancy rate, discrete event simulation, geriatric medicine, non-elective admission.

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Authors: N. Nor Azman, M. F. Kamarudin, S. I. Ong, N. Maaulot

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PERMATApintar^® National Gifted Center is, to the author’s best of knowledge, the first center in Malaysia that provides a platform for Malaysian talented students with high ability in thinking. This center has built a teaching and learning biology curriculum that suits the ability of these gifted students. The level of PERMATApintar^® biology curriculum is basically higher than the national biology curriculum. Here, the foundation students are exposed to the PERMATApintar^® biology curriculum at the age of as early as 11 years old. This center practices a 4-time-a-year examination system to monitor the academic performances of the students. Generally, most of the time, male students show no or low interest towards biology subject compared to female students. This study is to investigate the association of students’ gender and their academic performances in biology examination. A total of 39 students’ scores in twelve sets of biology examinations in 3 years have been collected and analyzed by using the statistical analysis. Based on the analysis, there are no significant differences between male and female students against the biology academic performances with a significant level of p = 0.05. This indicates that gender is not associated with the scores of biology examinations among the students. Another result showed that the average score for male studenta was higher than the female students. Future research can be done by comparing the biology academic achievement in Malaysian National Examination (Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia, SPM) between the Foundation 3 students (Grade 9) and Level 2 students (Grade 11) with similar PERMATApintar^® biology curriculum.

Keywords: Academic performances, biology, gender differences, gifted students.

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Authors: Mohammed Ali Ahmed, Vaughan Coffey, Bo Xia

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Quality management systems (QMSs) in the construction industry are often implemented to ensure that sufficient effort is made by companies to achieve the required levels of quality for clients. Attainment of these quality levels can result in greater customer satisfaction, which is fundamental to ensure long-term competitiveness for construction companies. However, the construction sector is still lagging behind other industries in terms of its successful adoption of QMSs, due to the relative lack of acceptance of the benefits of these systems among industry stakeholders, as well as from other barriers related to implementing them. Thus, there is a critical need to undertake a detailed and comprehensive exploration of adoption of QMSs in the construction sector. This paper comprehensively investigates in the construction sector setting, the impacts of all the salient factors surrounding successful implementation of QMSs in building organizations, especially those of external factors. This study is part of an ongoing PhD project, which aims to develop a new framework that integrates both internal and external factors affecting QMS implementation. To achieve the paper aim and objectives, interviews will be conducted to define the external factors influencing the adoption of QMSs, and to obtain holistic critical success factors (CSFs) for implementing these systems. In the next stage of data collection, a questionnaire survey will be developed to investigate the prime barriers facing the adoption of QMSs, the CSFs for their implementation, and the external factors affecting the adoption of these systems. Following the survey, case studies will be undertaken to validate and explain in greater detail the real effects of these factors on QMSs adoption. Specifically, this paper evaluates the effects of the external factors in terms of their impact on implementation success within the selected case studies. Using findings drawn from analyzing the data obtained from these various approaches, specific recommendations for the successful implementation of QMSs will be presented, and an operational framework will be developed. Finally, through a focus group, the findings of the study and the new developed framework will be validated. Ultimately, this framework will be made available to the construction industry to facilitate the greater adoption and implementation of QMSs. In addition, deployment of the applicable recommendations suggested by the study will be shared with the construction industry to more effectively help construction companies to implement QMSs, and overcome the barriers experienced by businesses, thus promoting the achievement of higher levels of quality and customer satisfaction.

Keywords: Barriers, critical success factors, external factors, internal factors, quality management systems.

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Authors: Phusit Phukamchanoad

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This study aimed to analyse the application of sufficiency economy in students’ ways of life on campus at Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University. Data was gathered through 394 questionnaires. The study results found that the majority of students were confident that “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Overall, the students applied the sufficiency economy at a great level, along with being persons who do not exploit others, were satisfied with living their lives moderately, according to the sufficiency economy. Importance was also given to kindness and generosity. Importantly, students were happy with living according to their individual circumstances and status at the present. They saw the importance of joint life planning, self-development, and self-dependence, always learning to be satisfied with “adequate”. As for their practices and ways of life, socially relational activities rated highly, especially initiation activities for underclassmen at the university and the seniority system, which are suitable for activities on campus. Furthermore, the students knew how to build a career and find supplemental income, knew how to earnestly work according to convention to finish work, and preferred to study elective subjects which directly benefit career-wise. The students’ application of sufficiency economy philosophy principles depended on their lives in their hometowns. The students from the provinces regularly applied sufficiency economy philosophy to their lives, for example, by being frugal, steadfast, determined, avoiding negligence, and making economical spending plans; more so than the students from the capital.

Keywords: Application of Sufficiency Economy Philosophy, Way of Living, Undergraduate Students.

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Authors: Wei Wang

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Queli Hotel, Xixi Scenery Spot Reception and Square Pagoda Garden are three important landmarks of localized Chinese modern architecture (LCMA) in the architectural design context of "Inheriting the Traditions in Modern Architecture" in the 1980s. As the most representative cases of LCMA in the 1980s, they interpret the traditions of Chinese garden and imperial roof from different perspectives. Based on the research text, conceptual drawings, construction drawings and site investigation, this paper extracts two groups of prominent contradictions in practice ("Pattern-Material-Structure" and "Type-Topography-Body") for keyword-based analysis to compare and examine different choices and balances by architects. Based on this, this paper attempts to indicate that the ideographic form derived from macro-narrative and the innovative investigation in construction is a pair of inevitable contradictions that must be handled and coordinated in these practices. The collision of the contradictions under specific conditions results in three cognitive attitudes and practical strategies towards traditions: Formal symbolism, spatial abstraction and construction-based narrative. These differentiated thoughts about Localization and Chineseness reflect various professional ideologies and value standpoints in the transition of Chinese Architecture discipline in the 1980s. The great variety in this particular circumstance suggests tremendous potential and possibilities of the future LCMA.

Keywords: Construction, Meaning, Queli Hotel, Square Pagoda Garden, Tradition, Xixi Scenery Spot Reception.

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Authors: Pragya Paneru

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This paper explores altogether 10 primary teachers’ views on gender representation in primary level textbooks. Data were collected from the teachers who taught in private schools in the Kailali and Kathmandu districts. This research uses a semi-structured interview method to obtain information regarding teachers’ attitudes toward gender representations in textbook contents. The interview data were analysed by using critical skills of qualitative research. The findings revealed that most of the teachers were unaware and regarded gender issues as insignificant to discuss in primary-level classes. Most of them responded to the questions personally and claimed that there were no gender issues in their classrooms. Some of the teachers connected gender issues with contexts other than textbook representations such as school discrimination in the distribution of salary among male and female teachers, school practices of awarding girls rather than boys as the most disciplined students, following girls’ first rule in the assembly marching, encouraging only girls in the stage shows, and involving students in gender-specific activities such as decorating works for girls and physical tasks for boys. The interview also revealed teachers’ covert gendered attitudes in their remarks. Nevertheless, most of the teachers accepted that gender-biased contents have an impact on learners and this problem can be solved with more gender-centred research in the education field, discussions, and training to increase awareness regarding gender issues. Agreeing with the suggestion of teachers, this paper recommends proper training and awareness regarding how to confront gender issues in textbooks.

Keywords: Content analysis, gender equality, school education, critical awareness.

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Authors: Aziz, Nur Mardhiyah, Salleh, Hafez

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Implementing Information Technology/ Information System (IT/IS) is critical for every industry as its potential benefits have been to motivate many industries including the Malaysian construction industry to invest in it. To successfully implement IT/IS has become the major concern for every organisation. Identifying the critical success factors (CSFs) has become the main agenda for researchers, academicians and practitioners due to the wide number of failures reported. This research paper seeks to identify the CSFs that influence the successful implementation of IT/IS in construction industry in Malaysia. Limited factors relating to people issue will be highlighted here to showcase some as it becomes one of the major contributing factors to the failure. Three (3) organisations have participated in this study. Semi-structured interviews are employed as they offer sufficient flexibility to ensure that all relevant factors are covered. Several key issues contributing to successful implementations of IT/IS are identified. The results of this study reveal that top management support, communication, user involvement, IT staff roles and responsibility, training/skills, leader/ IT Leader, organisation culture, knowledge/ experience, motivation, awareness, focus and ambition, satisfaction, teamwork/ collaboration, willingness to change, attitude, commitment, management style, interest in IT, employee behaviour towards collaborative environment, trust, interpersonal relationship, personal characteristic and competencies are significantly associated with the successful implementations of IT/IS. It is anticipated that this study will create awareness and contribute to a better understanding amongst construction industry players and will assist them to successfully implement IT/IS.

Keywords: critical success factors, construction industry , IT/IS, people

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