Using Action Song to Improve the Ability in Using Punctuation Among Year Three Pupils

The purpose of this research was to investigate the use of action song to improve the USAge of punctuation among Year 3 pupils in a primary school in Johor. The whole class of eighteen pupils were selected as the target group. The teaching strategy comprised of the action song and the signs of punctuation marks such as full stop and comma. This study adopts a classroom action research. Tests, teacher's reflective journal and interview were used to gather the data for the study. The findings showed improvement when comparing the pupils' results in the tests before and after the implementation of action songs they were able to use the punctuations of full stop and comma correctly in the sentences. The findings also showed that the pupils were motivated to learn English and the strategy used improved the teacher's teaching practice. A few suggestions were given to improve the strategy for the next cycle of action research

Using Multimedia Interactive Grammar to Enhance Possessive Pronouns Among Year 4 Pupils

This study was designed to improve the students' grammar specifically in possessive pronouns using Multimedia Interactive Grammar (MIG) as a teaching and learning strategy. The participants of the study were Year 4 pupils from a primary school and the researcher was the teacher who conducted the action research in the classroom and the cycle of the intervention had been done once. The data collected were tests, supported with interview and teacher's reflective journal. Improvement was shown based on the data obtained as there was an increase of scores in the second test compared to first test. Moreover, it was found that MIG was able to enhance pupils' understanding, motivation and promote fun learning in the classroom. The results of the study indicated pupils' positive behaviors and responses towards the use of MIG in learning grammar

Influence of Deformed Metal Decking Composite Floors to Beam-column Connections

A series of tests designed to investigate the interaction of a variety of different steel beam to column connection details with a composite metal deck floor is described. The main emphasis is on assessing the connections\u27 moment capacity, rotational stiffness and rotation capacity. The full details of the experimental behaviour of the flush end plate and partial depth end plate connections will be described in this paper. A simple method for moment capacity calculation based on the test results is proposed herein

Chemical Raman Enhancement of Organic Adsorbates on Metal Surfaces

Using a combination of first-principles theory and experiments, we provide a quantitative explanation for chemical contributions to surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy for a well-studied organic molecule, benzene thiol, chemisorbed on planar Au(111) surfaces. With density functional theory calculations of the static Raman tensor, we demonstrate and quantify a strong mode-dependent modification of benzene thiol Raman spectra by Au substrates. Raman active modes with the largest enhancements result from stronger contributions from Au to their electron-vibron coupling, as quantified through a deformation potential, a well-defined property of each vibrational mode. A straightforward and general analysis is introduced that allows extraction of chemical enhancement from experiments for specific vibrational modes; measured values are in excellent agreement with our calculations.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures and Supplementary material included as ancillary fil

Traveling Granular Segregation Patterns in a Long Drum Mixer

Mixtures of granular media often exhibit size segregation along the axis of a partially-filled, horizontal, rotating cylinder. Previous experiments have observed axial bands of segregation that grow from concentration fluctuations and merge in a manner analogous to spinodal decomposition. We have observed that a new dynamical state precedes this effect in certain mixtures: bi-directional traveling waves. By preparing initial conditions, we found that the wave speed decreased with wavelength. Such waves appear to be inconsistent with simple PDE models which are first order in time.Comment: 11 page

A performance comparison of the contiguous allocation strategies in 3D mesh connected multicomputers

The performance of contiguous allocation strategies can be significantly affected by the distribution of job execution times. In this paper, the performance of the existing contiguous allocation strategies for 3D mesh multicomputers is re-visited in the context of heavy-tailed distributions (e.g., a Bounded Pareto distribution). The strategies are evaluated and compared using simulation experiments for both First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) and Shortest-Service-Demand (SSD) scheduling strategies under a variety of system loads and system sizes. The results show that the performance of the allocation strategies degrades considerably when job execution times follow a heavy-tailed distribution. Moreover, SSD copes much better than FCFS scheduling strategy in the presence of heavy-tailed job execution times. The results also show that the strategies that depend on a list of allocated sub-meshes for both allocation and deallocation have lower allocation overhead and deliver good system performance in terms of average turnaround time and mean system utilization

Tyrosine phosphorylation profiling in FGF-2 stimulated human embryonic stem cells

10.1371/journal.pone.0017538PLoS ONE63

Anti-tumor activity mediated by protein and peptide transduction of HIV viral protein R (Vpr)

Peptides that are capable of traversing the cell membrane, via protein transduction domains (PTDs), are attractive either directly as drugs or indirectly as carriers for the delivery of therapeutic molecules. One such PTD, a HIV-1 Tat derived peptide has successfully delivered a variety of "cargoes" including proteins, peptides and nucleic acids into cells. There also exists other naturally occurring membrane permeable peptides which have potential as PTDs. Specifically, one of the accessory proteins of HIV (viral protein R; i.e., Vpr), which is important in controlling viral pathogenesis, possesses cell transduction domain characteristics. Related to these characteristics, Vpr has also been demonstrated to induce cell cycle arrest and host/target cell apoptosis, suggesting a potential anticancer activity for this protein. In this report we assessed the ability of Vpr protein or peptides, with or without conjugation to a PTD, to mediate anti-cancer activity against several tumor cell lines. Specifically, several Vpr peptides spanning carboxy amino acids 65-83 induced significant (i.e., greater than 50%) in vitro growth inhibition/toxicity of murine B16.F10 melanoma cells. Likewise, in in vitro experiments with other tumor cell lines, conjugation of Vpr to the Tat derived PTD and transfection of this construct into cells enhanced the induction of in vitro apoptosis by this protein when compared to the effects of transfection of cells with unconjugated Vpr. These results underscore the potential for Vpr based reagents as well as PTDs to enhance anti-tumor activity, and warrants further examination of Vpr protein and derived peptides as potential therapeutic agents against progressive cell proliferative diseases such as cancer. ©2009 Landes Bioscience

A hierarchical key pre-distribution scheme for fog networks

Security in fog computing is multi-faceted, and one particular challenge is establishing a secure communication channel between fog nodes and end devices. This emphasizes the importance of designing efficient and secret key distribution scheme to facilitate fog nodes and end devices to establish secure communication channels. Existing secure key distribution schemes designed for hierarchical networks may be deployable in fog computing, but they incur high computational and communication overheads and thus consume significant memory. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical key pre-distribution scheme based on “Residual Design” for fog networks. The proposed key distribution scheme is designed to minimize storage overhead and memory consumption, while increasing network scalability. The scheme is also designed to be secure against node capture attacks. We demonstrate that in an equal-size network, our scheme achieves around 84% improvement in terms of node storage overhead, and around 96% improvement in terms of network scalability. Our research paves the way for building an efficient key management framework for secure communication within the hierarchical network of fog nodes and end devices. KEYWORDS: Fog Computing, Key distribution, Hierarchical Networks