An Investigation Into The Relationships Between Creativity, Problem Solving And Life Stress: A Focus On Malaysian University Students

Two studies were conducted to investigate the relationships between creativity, problem-solving ability and life stress. Dua siri penyelidikan telah dijalankan untuk meneliti hubungankait antara kreativiti, kebolehan menyelesaikan masalah dan tekanan hidu

COMIC: Towards A Compact Image Captioning Model with Attention

Recent works in image captioning have shown very promising raw performance. However, we realize that most of these encoder-decoder style networks with attention do not scale naturally to large vocabulary size, making them difficult to be deployed on embedded system with limited hardware resources. This is because the size of word and output embedding matrices grow proportionally with the size of vocabulary, adversely affecting the compactness of these networks. To address this limitation, this paper introduces a brand new idea in the domain of image captioning. That is, we tackle the problem of compactness of image captioning models which is hitherto unexplored. We showed that, our proposed model, named COMIC for COMpact Image Captioning, achieves comparable results in five common evaluation metrics with state-of-the-art approaches on both MS-COCO and InstaPIC-1.1M datasets despite having an embedding vocabulary size that is 39x - 99x smaller. The source code and models are available at: https://github.com/jiahuei/COMIC-Compact-Image-Captioning-with-AttentionComment: Added source code link and new results in Table

Developing 21st Century Teachers as a Knowledge Builder

The capacity to engage in deep discussion about knowledge should be an expected outcome of all university graduates. This paper describes an attempt to develop teachers as a knowledge builder through a master’s level course. Based on the socio-cognitive determinants of knowledge building proposed by Scardamalia and Bereiter, I identified and applied instructional tactics that could help foster knowledge building behaviors among the participants. These tactics include case study, reciprocal teaching, online discussion, and working on a consequential task. The participants consisted of 11 teachers aged between 27 to 50 years old. They actively contributed to the online forum by frequently querying, clarifying, adding and revising their notes. They led group discussions in class and introduced additional reference materials to their classmates. In short, the participants demonstrated high degree of epistemic agency by taking ownership of their learning and contributing to deep understanding of theories related to knowledge building

A review of natural fiber reinforced poly(Vinyl alcohol) based composites: application and opportunity

Natural fibers are fine examples of renewable resources that play an important role in the composites industry, which produces superior strength comparable to synthetic fibers. Poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) composites in particular have attracted enormous interest in view of their satisfactory performance, properties and biodegradability. Their performance in many applications such as consumer, biomedical, and agriculture is well defined and promising. This paper reviews the utilization of natural fibers from macro to nanoscale as reinforcement in PVA composites. An overview on the properties, processing methods, biodegradability, and applications of these composites is presented. The advantages arising from chemical and physical modifications of fibers or composites are discussed in terms of improved properties and performance. In addition, proper arrangement of nanocellulose in composites helps to prevent agglomeration and results in a better dispersion. The limitations and challenges of the composites and future works of these bio-composites are also discussed. This review concludes that PVA composites have potential for use in numerous applications. However, issues on technological feasibility, environmental effectiveness, and economic affordability should be considered