ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

Chaperone driven polymer translocation through Nanopore: spatial distribution and binding energy

Chaperones are binding proteins which work as a driving force to bias the biopolymer translocation by binding to it near the pore and preventing its backsliding. Chaperones may have different spatial distribution. Recently we show the importance of their spatial distribution in translocation and how it effects on sequence dependency of the translocation time. Here we focus on homopolymers and exponential distribution. As a result of the exponential distribution of chaperones, energy dependency of the translocation time will changed and one see a minimum in translocation time versus effective energy curve. The same trend can be seen in scaling exponent of time versus polymer length, $\beta$ ($T\sim\beta$). Interestingly in some special cases e.g. chaperones of size $\lambda=6$ and with exponential distribution rate of $\alpha=5$, the minimum reaches even to amount of less than $1$ ($\beta<1$). We explain the possibility of this rare result and base on a theoretical discussion we show that by taking into account the velocity dependency of the translocation on polymer length, one could truly predict the amount of this minimum

Hubungan antara beban tugas dengan keresahan guru sekolah menengah teknik di Johor

Isu beban tugas mendapat perhatian yang meluas di Malaysia apabila ada guru-guru menghadapi keresahan atau keletihan emosi akibat dari beban tugas berlebihan. Oleh itu, kajian ini bertujuan untuk melihat hubungan antara beban tugas dengan keresahan guru sekolah yang mana beban tugas dan keresahan guru merupakan pemboleh ubah bersandar sementara latar belakang reponden adalah pemboleh ubah bebas. Kajian ini menggunakan instrumen terpiawai Maslach Burnout Inventory - Educators Survey (MBI-ES) (1966) yang telah diubahsuai bagi mengukur tahap keresahan guru. Keresahan ini berdasarkan tiga subskala MBI-ES iaitu keletihan emosi, gangguan keperibadian kendiri dan pencapaian peribadi. Soal selidik merupakan instrumen yang digunakan bagi mengenal pasti tahap beban tugas mengajar dan bukan mengajar serta keresahan yang dialami oleh guru di tujuh buah Sekolah Menengah Teknik di Johor. Seramai 277 orang guru telah menjadi responden iaitu SMT Kluang, SMT Kota Tinggi, SMT Muar, SMT Perdagangan Johor Bahru, SMT Pontian, SMT Segamat dan SMT Tanjung Puteri, Johor. Perisian Statistical Package for Social Science version 12 for Windows (SPSS v!2) digunakan bagi menganalisis data yang diperolehi. Min, kekerapan dan peratusan digunakan untuk menganalisis dapatan bagi kesemua item yang dibangunkan. Manakala ujian korelasi digunakan untuk melihat hubungan secara statistik antara beban tugas dengan tiga subskala keresahan. Dapatan kajian menunjukkan terdapat hubungan pada tahap yang sangat lemah antara beban tugas dengan subskala gangguan keperibadian kendiri. Manakala tidak terdapat hubungan antara beban tugas dengan subskala keletihan emosi dan pencapaian peribadi. Namun begitu, terdapat hubungan yang signifikan antara keletihan emosi dengan gangguan keperibadian kendiri pada tahap signifikan 0.01 iaitu nilai kekuatan korelasi ialah 0.610 manakala nilai signifikannya ialah 0.00. Di sini, terdapat hubungan yang sederhana antara dua pemboleh ubah tersebut. Cadangan juga telah diberikan bagi membantu menyelesaikan masalah beban tugas berlebihan yang terpaksa ditanggung oleh guru SMT