Using word problems in Malaysian mathematics education: looking beneath the surface

This paper reports on aspects of a project that investigated the influence of Chinese Malaysian students&rsquo; schooling in a tradition of abstract, technical mathematics and rote learning on ways that they responded to mathematical word problems. Data from an action research project are reported. Supposedly &ldquo;shallow&rdquo; and &ldquo; deep&rdquo; learning are shown to be interlinked, and assumptions frequently made by Western educators about modelling and practice are questioned.<br /

Comparative study of international marketing strategy of Japanese and Taiwanese CNC machine tool industry in the Asean region

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Attitudes to Ageing and to Geriatric Medicine

The ageing of populations across the developed and developing world is a consequence of success (better nutrition and sanitation, improved medical care, greater choice about whether and when to have children) but older people are not always viewed or portrayed in a positive light, either in the hospital setting or in wider society. Similarly, geriatric medicine is a low prestige specialty, facing problems with recruitment. Even the British Geriatrics Society debates changing its name since "geriatrics" has "acquired negative connotations". Here, we briefly review the attitudes to geriatric medicine among medical professionals, including physicians, medical students and nurses. Societal attitudes to ageing are explored from different eras and across cultural perspectives. We consider how older people's own attitudes to their health may impact both their recovery from illness and life expectancy. We conclude that it is essential to consider the broader cultural milieu of medical schools, as this may have a greater influence than the formal curriculum on physicians' personality and conduct. Positive forces such as governmental edicts to abolish ageist practices may be undermined by what medical students hear and see on the wards. With the ageing of the inpatient population, it is critical that all physicians and nursing staff respect the ageing process and provide dignified and appropriate care to vulnerable older people

Downlink and Uplink Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Networks: NOMA and OMA

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are envisioned to provide reconfigurable wireless environments for future communication networks. In this paper, both downlink and uplink IRS-aided non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) networks are studied, in which an IRS is deployed to enhance the coverage by assisting a cell-edge user device (UD) to communicate with the base station (BS). To characterize system performance, new channel statistics of the BS-IRS-UD link with Nakagami-$m$ fading are investigated. For each scenario, the closed-form expressions for the outage probability and ergodic rate are derived. To gain further insight, the diversity order and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) slope for each scenario are obtained according to asymptotic approximations in the high-SNR regime. It is demonstrated that the diversity order is affected by the number of IRS reflecting elements and Nakagami fading parameters, but the high-SNR slope is not related to these parameters. Simulation results validate our analysis and reveal the superiority of the IRS over the full-duplex decode-and-forward relay.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Understanding Empathy in Children

Health, particularly diet and everyday nutrition, as the ultimate causal factor in life is an important aspect of every child's education. Meanwhile, computer generated (CG) 3-dimensional (3-D) graphics is a medium often used by entertainment and advertising. Educational intervention to help children make appropriate dietary choices can be designed by employing similar methods used by entertainment and advertising, such as 3-D characters aimed at children. The question that this research asked is: can creating an empathic bond between 3-D characters and children communicate a healthy nutrition message effectively? This thesis is based on qualitative research founded on the constructionist theory that focuses on exploring the perspective of children via focus groups. Educational designs based on familiar computer-generated graphics will help equip children to deal with nutritional and dietary choices, ultimately initiating behavioural change as their relationship with food matures earlier. Empathy on the children's and adult's sides of the healthy nutrition conversation is important to establish this relationship in children's nutritional decisions. The main challenge for nutrition education is not in short-term diversions, but long-term changes in behavioural responses in media literacy. A constructionist approach of helping children work through advertising by improving their media vocabulary would be a more sustainable approach to enhancing their ability to decode advertising rhetoric and in turn forming their own informed opinion and responses. Industry referenced educational content intent on healthy lifestyles can balance the prevalent advertising messages leading to a more balanced overall media that children are exposed to

A System Dynamics Approach to Improve Visibility and Performance in a Supply Chain System

This research takes an in-depth look into the supply chain system of a semiconductor company. It utilizes a system dynamics tool to detect demand indications and simulate the pipeline inventory. The semiconductor company has been practicing a lot of management principles especially postponement strategies and supply chain management (SCM). The overall performance of the supply chain system has never been measured thoroughly, thus the company is not sure about the effectiveness of its decisions. It is also concerned about the effective implementation of some of the company's policies. Using a system dynamics approach to simulation modeling, this research aims to build a complete system dynamics model for internal supply chain events (from order to ship-out). The simulation model allows for the investigation and identification of discrepancies between the business policy and actual practice of key events in order to achieve supply chain optimization. The simulation model also allows for comparison and measurement of the effectiveness of various supply chain strategies implemented by the semiconductor company. This research provides a platform into studies of supply chain systems of semiconductor industry. Its success adds a unique case study on assessing the dynamic relationships of supply chain events in the semiconductor industry using system dynamics technique. The simulation model provides empirical evidence on the effective implementation of various supply chain strategies. System dynamics approach to modeling a supply chain system is shown to be able to try out alternative practices that have high level of complexity

Performance of an IEEE 802.16 Wireless Backhaul in the Presence of a Node Failure

A wireless backhaul network is used to interconnect intermediate nodes to gateway nodes. As it is designed to serve a large population of broadband users, failure sustainability becomes an essential requirement to ensure uninterrupted telecommunication services even in the presence of occasional node or link failures. In this paper, the performance of a failure sustainable wireless backhaul, based on IEEE 802.16 radio technology, is analysed in the presence of a node failure. Furthermore, it is shown that the network performance is significantly improved by incorporating two proposed modifications, namely request-resend and dynamic mini-slot allocation, in IEEE 802.16 standard coordinated distributed scheduling

Failure Sustainable Wireless Backhaul

Backhaul network plays a significant role to interconnect access points and further connect them to gateway nodes. A failure sustainable wireless backhaul topology is proposed to ensure undisrupted telecommunication services even in the presence of occasional node or link failures. Furthermore, a new control message, called reverse notification, is proposed to improve the performance of coordinated distributed scheduling in the ladder topology. Computer simulation results show that the reverse notification scheme has improved the network throughput and reduced the packet transmission delay