Creative and innovative ways to teach English: You make the difference

The Malaysian education scene is under going seismic change as we move from years of tried and tested rote learning strategies and venture towards advocating creative thinking skills. In keeping with the demands of globalization, there is deliberate effort to depart from an examination oriented system, often deemed the malaise of the Asian society, to one of creative learning. In order to encourage students to concentrate and participate in the class, teachers need to be creative and innovative. A wide variety of materials and methods of teaching should be explored as students come in different packages with different learning styles and capabilities. But perennial problems plague both the novice and the experienced teacher. The innovative teacher can extract information from texts, audio and visual sources of information for teaching purposes. This paper seeks to inform, to motivate and to explore the many possibilities of making out-of-the-box teaching a reality. Based on classroom and journalistic research across Malaysian schools and universities, this paper deals with the challenges that teachers face and provides practical classroom ideas on how to wear Edward De Bono’s thinking hats in the very mundane classroom. This paper will focus on the following issues: 1.How to generate interest among students, 2.How to make use of everyday objects to bring fun into the classroom, 3. Task-based teaching/ Activity centred teaching, 4. Problems that teachers and students face (ESL context), 5. Thematic teaching methods - across the 4 skill

Escherichia coli K1 RS218 Interacts with Human Brain Microvascular Endothelial Cells via Type 1 Fimbria Bacteria in the Fimbriated State

Escherichia coli K1 is a major gram-negative organism causing neonatal meningitis. E. coli K1 binding to and invasion of human brain microvascular endothelial cells (HBMEC) are a prerequisite for E. coli penetration into the central nervous system in vivo. In the present study, we showed using DNA microarray analysis that E. coli K1 associated with HBMEC expressed significantly higher levels of the fim genes compared to nonassociated bacteria. We also showed that E. coli K1 binding to and invasion of HBMEC were significantly decreased with its fimH deletion mutant and type 1 fimbria locked-off mutant, while they were significantly increased with its type 1 fimbria locked-on mutant. E. coli K1 strains associated with HBMEC were predominantly type 1 fimbria phase-on (i.e., fimbriated) bacteria. Taken together, we showed for the first time that type 1 fimbriae play an important role in E. coli K1 binding to and invasion of HBMEC and that type 1 fimbria phase-on E. coli is the major population interacting with HBMEC

The Marketing Philosophy and Challenges for the New Millennium

The world has changed a lot during this millennium and it still keeps changing. For this reason it sounds logical, that together with these changes marketing faces a lot of challenges which need to be overcome. That is why the second purpose of this paper is to define the challenges for marketing in the new millennium. Both theoretical considerations will be applied to the selected practical cases from international and Lithuanian markets.marketing, marketing orientations, philosophy, millennium challenges, Starbucks, Coffee Inn, the USA, Lithuania

B -> K1 gamma and tests of factorization for two-body non leptonic Bdecays with axial-vector mesons

The large branching ratio for B-> K1 gamma recently measured at Belle implies a large B -> K1 transition form factor and large branching ratios for non leptonic B decays involving an axial-vector meson. In this paper we present an analysis of two-body B decays with an axial-vector meson in the final state using naive factorization and the B -> K1 form factors obtained from the measured radiative decays. We find that the predicted B -> J/psi K1 branching ratio is in agreement with experiment. We also suggest that the decay rates of B -> K1 pi, B -> a1 K and B -> b1 K could be used to test the factorization ansatz.Comment: 8 pages; 7 new references included and a comment on K2(1430) in the final state adde

Radiative Decay Width Measurements of Neutral Kaon Excitations Using the Primakoff Effect

We produce a sample consisting of 147 candidate events, with minimal backgrounds, of the mixed axial vector pair K1(1270)-K1(1400) by exciting Kl's in the Coulomb field of lead and report the first measurements of the radiative widths Gamma_r(K1(1400)) = 280.8+-23.2(stat)+-40.4(syst) keV and Gamma_r(K1(1270)) = 73.2+- 6.1(stat)+-28.3(syst) keV. We also place 90% CL upper limits Gamma_r(K*(1410)) < 52.9 keV for the vector state and Gamma_r(K2*(1430)) < 5.4 keV for the tensor state. These measurements allow for significant tests of quark-model predictions of radiative widths for the low-lying vector mesons.Comment: PRL-size article, 4 figure

Immunity to K1 killer toxin: internal TOK1 blockade.

K1 killer strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae harbor RNA viruses that mediate secretion of K1, a protein toxin that kills virus-free cells. Recently, external K1 toxin was shown to directly activate TOK1 channels in the plasma membranes of sensitive yeast cells, leading to excess potassium flux and cell death. Here, a mechanism by which killer cells resist their own toxin is shown: internal toxin inhibits TOK1 channels and suppresses activation by external toxin