446,383 research outputs found

    520 PROBLEMS IN PROFESSIONAL ENGLISH WRITING SKILLS DEVELOPMENT FOR STUDENTS OF ENGINEERING SCIENCES

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    Abstract. Modern engineering education involves the acquisition of competences that build up a basis for competitiveness of young professionals. These competences are normally divided into two major categories: professional and social. The latter group includes self-competence, co-operation and communication activities that serve as a means for interaction of professional knowledge and the target situation that this knowledge is meant to function in. The most fundamental form of social activities nowadays is a foreign language. The vast opportunity for communication in the ICT environment nowadays requires well-developed oral as well as written communication skills; therefore one of the major goals for the foreign language course for engineering students is to develop professional writing skills in order to comply with the target situation requirements. The problems of the current research are: a) to investigate the learning situation in the foreign language classroom within the population of engineering students of the Latvia University of Agriculture; b) find the proof of the necessity of their writing skills development; and c) discover the possibilities to improve these essential skills to the required level. Taking into account the insufficient number of classroom lessons devoted to the acquisition of the foreign language at the university, one of the ways would be to design a specific e-study course titled "English Language Writing for Engineering", which would cause a certain shift in accents in the existing foreign language programmes. Another way is to design an additional course that would be available as an optional one in the undergraduate study programmes or, otherwise, offered by the lifelong learning centre of the Latvia University of Agriculture. Keywords: professional English, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English as a foreign language (EFL), students of engineering sciences, writing skills, communication activities. Introduction Language is one of the social competences, alongside with the self-competence and cooperation (after Habermas) that are to be acquired along with the professional ones to form a solid "package" of competences necessary for effective performance in the target situation. Foreign language nowadays plays an essential part in education, especially at its tertiary level, as the contemporary education is aimed at increasing student and young professional mobility within the European Union borders and beyond. It serves as a means of oral and written communication in everyday professional settings when a fresh graduate starts his career, plus acts as an efficient back-up tool during the study process. It assists in learning the content, thus linking various courses across the curriculum together and making the approach to learning more interdisciplinary. Last, but not least, in content-based courses of English for various engineering professions which are being taught at the Latvia University of Agriculture, the content-language approach to the study process facilitates critical literacy and reflexive learning

    The Leeds Advanced Driving Simulator: Three Years In Operation

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    The Leeds Advanced Driving Simulator (LADS) at the University of Leeds is a medium cost fixed-base simulator and its development has been funded by the Science and Engineering Research Council (now EPSRC). It has been fully operational since mid-1993 for rural-road scenes (Carsten and Gallimore, 1993) but currently simulation of urban environments and vehicle interactions are possible too. This paper focuses on the recent development of LADS. Also detailed other recent research projects carried out in the simulator to date

    The Leeds Advanced Driving Simulator: Three Years In Operation

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    The Leeds Advanced Driving Simulator (LADS) at the University of Leeds is a medium cost fixed-base simulator and its development has been funded by the Science and Engineering Research Council (now EPSRC). It has been fully operational since mid-1993 for rural-road scenes (Carsten and Gallimore, 1993) but currently simulation of urban environments and vehicle interactions are possible too. This paper focuses on the recent development of LADS. Also detailed other recent research projects carried out in the simulator to date

    Welfare impacts of rural electrification : evidence from Vietnam

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    Access to electricity is crucial for economic development and there is a growing body of literature on the impact of rural electrification on development. However, most studies have so far relied on cross-sectional surveys comparing households with and without electricity, which have well known causal attribution problems. This paper is one of the first studies to examine the welfare impacts of households’ rural electrification based on panel surveys conducted in 2002 and 2005 for some 1,100 households in rural Vietnam,. The findings indicate that grid electrification has been both extensive (connecting all surveyed communes by 2005) and intensive (connecting almost 80 percent of the surveyed households by 2005). Vietnam is unusual in that once electricity is locally available, both rich and poor households are equally likely to get the connection. The econometric estimations suggest that grid electrification has significant positive impacts on households’ cash income, expenditure, and educational outcomes. The benefits, however, reach a saturation point after prolonged exposure to electricity. Finally, this study recommends investigating the long-term benefits of rural electrification - not just for households, but for the rural economy as a whole.Energy Production and Transportation,Electric Power,Engineering,Access to Finance,Rural Poverty Reduction

    Wage Work for Women: The Menstrual Cycle and the Power of Water

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    We hypothesise that women's participation in wage (off-farm) work is reduced when their greater water needs due to the menstrual cycle are not met because their household has poor access to water. For testing, we use the data from rural villages in China. Controlling for village fixed effects, poor access to water is found to decrease the probability of wage work participation of affected (pre-menopause) women by about 10 percentage points, a large effect. As expected, there is no adverse causal impact of poor household access to water for women post-menopause, or for men, ceteris paribus.wage work, women, menopause, water engineering, rural development, China

    Welfare impacts of rural electrification : a case study from Bangladesh

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    Lack of access to electricity is one of the major impediments to growth and development of the rural economies in developing countries. That is why access to modern energy, in particular to electricity, has been one of the priority themes of the World Bank and other development organizations. Using a cross-sectional survey conducted in 2005 of some 20,000 households in rural Bangladesh, this paper studies the welfare impacts of households'grid connectivity. Based on rigorous econometric estimation techniques, this study finds that grid electrification has significant positive impacts on households'income, expenditure, and educational outcomes. For example, the gain in total income due to electrification can be as much as 30 percent and as low as 9 percent. Benefits go up steadily as household exposure to grid electrification (measured by duration) increases and eventually reach a plateau. This paper also finds that rich households benefit more from electrification than poor households. Finally, estimates also show that income benefits of electrification on an average exceed cost by a wide margin.Energy Production and Transportation,Access to Finance,Engineering,Electric Power,Rural Poverty Reduction
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