Plantation land management, fires and haze in Southeast Asia

Forest fires and its resulting haze has been a recurring transboundary environmental problem in Southeast Asia. This research paper shows the strong correlation between the opening of plantation land in Indonesia and Malaysia and fires that cause haze. It argues that commercial plantations contribute significantly more to open burning fires than small-scale slash-and-burn farmers. It shows that economic motivation and governmental encouragement has motivated commercial plantations, especially for oil palm, to open land on fire-prone peatland and old cropland, producing smoke that often travels across borders. This has contributed to and exacerbated the transboundary haze problem in the region. This paper discusses two types of land use change often employed in Indonesia, and to a lesser extent Malaysia, for conversion into oil palm plantations, and how they are linked with increase in fires: conversions of pristine peatlands, and of degraded logged-over forests and old cropland

Perceived stress related to nursing education and its influence on nursing students’ academic and clinical performance.

Stress has a negative effect on student nurses well-being and can impede learning or motivate them and is conducive to learning. This study examined the perceived stress and factors that influenced daily students’ life among both the Diploma and Bachelor of Nursing students. A total of 241 nursing students were involved in this research project. Findings of this study indicated that junior nursing students (<21 years) of both cohorts perceived significantly more stress than older (≥21 years) nursing students. Second year students of the Diploma group claimed being more stressed than their peers (1st and 3rd years). Personal problems were the main issue of concern among the second year Diploma students. Workload of nursing education and fear of failing the nursing programme were the major stressors among the first year nursing students of the Bachelor cohort as compared to their seniors. A mixture of negatively and positively significant correlations was observed between academic work and clinical scores among the Diploma and Bachelor of Nursing students respectively. Both the Diploma and Bachelor of Nursing students’ stress did not influence their GPA scores. Negatively significant correlation was noted between stress and clinical scores among the Diploma of Nursing students. A negatively significant correlation was found between age and CGPA scores among the Bachelor cohort. Both male and female Diploma and Bachelor nursing students perceived no differences in stress related to their academic work. The findings of this study provide important information for nursing education at the institute examined in this study, and have implications for future research

A Comparative analysis of conditional clauses in english and persian: text analysis

This article compares the application of conditional clauses in English and Persian. Based on two classical literary works, East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952) and Missing Solooch (In Persian Ja-ye Khali-ye Solooch) by Mahmood Dolatabadi (1979), conditional clauses were retrieved and analysed. The findings indicated that Persian and English have some similarities and differences in terms of the type of conditionals and conjunctions. English seems to employ more conditionals than Persian does. Among the different types of conditionals, type one shows to be more frequent in both languages, while Persian type 2 is mostly representative of type 3 concept. Persian appears to freely employ the subject-fronting strategy to place emphasis on the subject by assigning the subject to an initial position before ‘if’. In both languages, the if-clause is mainly initial in imperative and declarative statements. Reverse conditionals and the deletion of ‘if’ in certain types suggesting high formality do not exist in Persian. Unlike English, Persian does not combine ‘if’ with adjectives and past participles and hence contracted conditionals and the courtesy-bearing structure of English are not common in Persian conditionals. Compared to Persian, the high frequency of English conditionals is also supported by the corpus of Hamshari, an Iranian newspaper, the Time Magazine corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English

Generic skills from qur'anic perspective

Generic skills are defined as a set of skills that are directly related and needed for the working environment. Employers prefer to recruit officials who are competent in interpersonal communication, leadership skill, team work, oral and written skills. They are reluctant to employ graduates lacking certain necessary skills. This reveals the fact that there is a serious gap between the skills that are required by the employers and the skills that the graduates possess. Therefore, this research is focused on five aspects of generic skills namely; communication, team work, problem solving, lifelong learning and self-esteem. From Qur’anic perspective, the same terms have been used except minor differences in using various terms. The thematic approach is used when discussing these aspects from the Qur’an. The findings showed that the ways of effective communication are represented by terms of qawl sadid, qawl ma`ruf, qawl baligh, qawl maysur, qawl karim and qawl layyin. For collective work, ta`aruf and tafahum, as the pre-requisites, should be practiced via ta`awun and takaful. For problem solving, four methods are adapted from the Qur’an such as reflection of the past, observation, demonstration and asking questions. For lifelong learning, the establishment of learning institutions and the selfmotivation of learners are two pre-requisites that should be undertaken for its accomplishment. They could be practiced through open learning system, consultation and hands-on learning. Last but not least, for personality development could be built up through physical training, spiritual training and mental training

Poetics and the study of (African) literature: forms and functions of language in literary criticism

Most likely, many literary scholars first encounter the word poetics when reading Aristotle’s celebrated treatise which attempts to give a descriptive template to (dramatic) literature. In modern times the word seems to have been transformed beyond the simplistic frame that Aristotle gave it. Interestingly, the emergence of the linguistic and critical avant-gardes like de Saussure, Chomsky, Jakobson, Halliday, Todorov, and Scholes, brought fresh and radical insights into the world of language/literary studies. Hence, as poetics is applied in linguistic/literary discourse today, it gives prominence to the study of language as a component of literature on one hand, and on the other, it provides indelible insights into what literature does to language expressions when they find definitive stance in the form. Considering poetics as indexical compass in the evaluation of literature, this essay probes into the applications of the term in literary criticism, taking-off from the standpoints of linguistic aestheticians who have somewhat attempted to apply it. The analogous result of this ambition is suggestive of literary theory. This then raises the question of the applicability of the several poetics-oriented theories to the evaluation of African literary aesthetics, which from the post colonial angle, is unparaphraseably extraneous to the scientific critical postulations of the West

Religion and the civilizational process: the civilizing role of religion in the socio-political decision making process in pre-colonial Ibo community of Nigeria

This paper looks at the role of religion in the socio-political decision making processes and the organization of the Ibo community - in a rational or systematic way - along this line, before the incursion of the colonial masters into their community, as well as the enforcement of these decisions through religion and its relevance to the contemporary time. Using the historical and analytical method, the paper delved into the history of the Ibos the arrangement and organization of the community from the little unit of the family setup to the complex whole of the community and how they are managed by those saddled with authority as well as the decision making processes in a democratic way right from the family unit to the complex whole of the larger community. The role of religion in this whole process and how it helps cement and enforce the rational organization and decision making processes of the community was also analyzed. Finally, the paper contrast this process with that of the present modern time in which religion has been relegated to the background and removed from the civilizational processes of the contemporary time. Thus, it concludes that religion, despite the negativity that is ascribed to it today in the modern world, could be a useful tool in any civilizational process because, when properly harnessed by the people, it serves as a stabilizing force in the society and, contrary to popular belief, it is not opposed to scientific and rational processes

FIS-PNN: a hybrid computational method for protein-protein interactions prediction using the secondary structure information

The study of protein-protein interactions (PPI) is an active area of research in biology because it mediates most of the biological functions in any organism. This work is inspired by the fact that proteins with similar secondary structures mostly share very similar three-dimensional structures, and consequently, very similar functions. As a result, they must interact with each other. In this study we used our approach, namely FIS-PNN, to predict the interacting proteins in yeast from the information of their secondary structures using hybrid machine learning algorithms. Two main stages of our approach are similarity score computation, and classification. The first stage is further divided into three steps: (1) Multiple-sequence alignment, (2) Secondary structure prediction, and (3) Similarity measurement. In the classification stage, several independent first order Sugeno Fuzzy Inference Systems and probabilistic neural networks are generated to model the behavior of similarity scores of all possible proteins pairs. The final results show that the multiple classifiers have significantly improved the performance of the single classifier. Our method, namely FIS-PNN, successfully predicts PPI with 96% of accuracy, a level that is significantly greater than all other sequence-based prediction methods

Straits of Malacca and Singapore: pride of the Malay archipelago, priceless maritime heritage of the world

Historical records reveal that port-kingdoms began to flourish along the Straits of Malacca and Singapore as early as the third century AD. These realms survived by regulating and exploiting trade flows between China and India and within the Malay Archipelago itself. After the fall of the Malacca Sultanate in 1511, the competition for supremacy in the Strait of Malacca continued between the regional Empires and their Western rivals until eventually, the latter were victorious. The Malay World then fell into centuries of Western colonization before the region gradually gained independence in the 20th century. Now, the Straits of Malacca is considerably bordered by Malaysia and Indonesia while the Straits of Singapore is jointly shared by Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. These Straits serve not only as two of the most important sea lines of communication in the world, but also are important economic lifelines for the coastal population. For centuries, these waterways have remained intact with their reputation as critical trading route and due to their remarkable significance, the Straits of Malacca and Singapore are undoubtedly priceless heritage of the maritime world

To be removed or not to be removed: a lexical examination of the soil subsidy debate in Nigeria

Whether oil subsidy should be removed or not has been a controversial issue in Nigeria, generating much heat but perhaps least light. This paper makes an attempt to examine the lexical features of selected online contributions on the oil subsidy debate, between October 2011 and February 2012, using a combination of approaches:Computational Stylistics, Stylometry and Critical Stylistics. The study aims at revealing the frequencies of keywords in the oil subsidy debate and providing a comparison of close correspondences between words and their contextual implications. Data for the study are provided by twenty-one (21) selected online articles in Nigerian newspapers on the oil subsidy debate. The lexical investigation reveals that majority opinion favours non – removal of oil subsidy. In other words, oil subsidy should stay