Headmaster's Managerial Ability Under School-Based Management And Its Relationship With School Improvement : A Study In City Secondary Schools Of Bangladesh [LB2831.926.B3 K23 2007 f rb].

Kajian ini berkaitan dengan pentadbiran berasaskan sekolah di Bangladesh serta mengkaji hipotesis berkenaan hubungkait antara kebolehan pentadbiran pengetua dengan peningkatan pretasi sekolah. This study seeks to describe the school–based management system in Bangladesh and explores the hypotheses about the relationship between headmaster’s managerial roles and school improvement and also determines the moderator effect of teachers’ professional development activities on this relationship

Searching the Visual Style and Structure of D3 Visualizations

We present a search engine for D3 visualizations that allows queries based on their visual style and underlying structure. To build the engine we crawl a collection of 7860 D3 visualizations from the Web and deconstruct each one to recover its data, its data-encoding marks and the encodings describing how the data is mapped to visual attributes of the marks. We also extract axes and other non-data-encoding attributes of marks (e.g., typeface, background color). Our search engine indexes this style and structure information as well as metadata about the webpage containing the chart. We show how visualization developers can search the collection to find visualizations that exhibit specific design characteristics and thereby explore the space of possible designs. We also demonstrate how researchers can use the search engine to identify commonly used visual design patterns and we perform such a demographic design analysis across our collection of D3 charts. A user study reveals that visualization developers found our style and structure based search engine to be significantly more useful and satisfying for finding different designs of D3 charts, than a baseline search engine that only allows keyword search over the webpage containing a chart

Relación entre el cambio tecnológico, la digitalización y las actitudes de los estudiantes hacia la educación a distancia en institutos de Educación Superior de Lagos

The focus of this research is to investigate the relationship between learning flexibility, support services, and students' attitudes toward remote learning programs in Nigeria. A correlational research methodology is used, and 385 individuals drawn from a multi-stage sampling technique form the study's sample. The data collecting tool is a three-section questionnaire devised by the researchers. Experts validated the questionnaire, which was then administered once on a randomly selected sample to assess the internal consistency. The Cronbach Alpha formula produced values of .74, .77, and .78 for the three separate questionnaire constructs. At the .05 level of significance, two research questions were posed, and two related null hypotheses were investigated. The collected data is analysed using the Mean, Standard Deviation, and Pearson Product Moment Correlation formulas. The findings show that there is a positive relationship between digital learning flexibility and students' attitudes toward distant learning programs (r =.439, Freq=476, p.05). There is also a favourable link between technology supports and students' attitudes toward distant learning programs (r =.339, Freq=476, p.05). It is thus recommended, among other things, that providers of distance learning programs guarantee high flexibility and quality learner support services to cater to the academic needs of learners with different characteristics, as this would improve students' positive attitudes and increase the enrolment of candidates in distance learning programs.El enfoque de este estudio es investigar la relación entre la flexibilidad de aprendizaje, los servicios de apoyo y las actitudes de los estudiantes hacia los programas de aprendizaje remoto en Nigeria. Se utiliza una metodología de investigación correlacional y se extraen 385 individuos con una técnica de muestreo de etapas múltiples para formar la muestra del estudio. La herramienta de recolección de datos es un cuestionario de tres secciones diseñado por los investigadores. Los expertos validaron el cuestionario, que luego se administró una vez en una muestra seleccionada al azar para evaluar la consistencia interna. El alfa de Cronbach produjo valores de .74, .77 y .78 para las tres construcciones de cuestionario separadas. En el nivel de significación de .05, se plantean dos preguntas de investigación y se investigan dos hipótesis nulas relacionadas. Los datos recopilados se analizan utilizando las fórmulas de correlación de producto-momento de Pearson, desviación estándar y media. Los hallazgos muestran que existe una relación positiva entre la flexibilidad del aprendizaje digital y las actitudes de los estudiantes hacia los programas de aprendizaje a distancia (r =.439, Freq=476, p.05). También existe un vínculo favorable entre los apoyos tecnológicos y las actitudes de los estudiantes hacia los programas de aprendizaje a distancia (r =.339, Freq=476, p.05). Por lo tanto, se recomienda, entre otras cosas, que los proveedores de programas de educación a distancia garanticen servicios de apoyo al estudiante de alta flexibilidad y calidad para atender las necesidades académicas de los estudiantes con diferentes características, ya que esto mejoraría la actitud positiva de los estudiantes y aumentaría la inscripción de candidatos para programas de aprendizaje a distancia

Why Company Should Adopt Integrated Reporting?

Sustainability and transparency issues have been evolving the nature of corporate reporting. On these issues stakeholders are very keen to get access financial and nonfinancial information on companies' business activities and sustainable value creation. Despite availability of information, yet many stakeholders cannot use pertinently the disclosed information due to separation of reports. Thus, ‘Integrated Report' brings together financial and nonfinancial measure in one-piece of the report. It also shows the links among financial and nonfinancial performance metrics. This paper highlights integrated reporting as the holistic reporting approach for company and discusses the potentiality of a single report. Specifically, what integrated report can do for companies and stakeholder, for instance, integrated report for sustainability and CSR reporting, improvement in stakeholder engagement process and integrated thinking lead to changes in corporate behaviour as well as for enchancing reputation and performance. Hence, the paper justifies reasons why companies should adopt integrated reporting as reporting tools. Keywords: Integrated reporting; integrated thinking; stakeholder engagement; sustainability reporting JEL Classifications: G3, G380, M48

Retinal Microvascular Feature Extraction Using Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network

Artificial Intelligence (AI) more specifically Deep Learning (DL) incorporating with image processing is being employed widely to solve different refractory problems by academia and industry from the ophthalmology discipline. The microvascular structure of the human retina shows remarkable abnormalities responding to different kinds of hazardous ophthalmic and cardiovascular diseases. The high dimensionality and complex hierarchical microvascular structure of the human retina, and random retinal image accumulation create enormous size data. This scenario is offering the challenge of understanding and managing retinal image data. The original input data need to be projected into output data which has a smaller number of features whilst as much as possible preserving its native information. This process is known as feature extraction. A recently introduced DL approach, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), is dedicated to extracting and quantifying the complex hierarchical image features with more abstraction. The supervised CNN methods employ different algorithms that iteratively learn from data for analyzing data and predicting outcomes. The implementation of CNN methods has proved their efficiency in the identification, localization, and quantification of interesting retinal image features such as exudates, microaneurysms. These features are considered remarkable signs for detecting Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), Hypertensive Retinopathy (HR), and stroke. The quantitative features such as vessel widening and deviation in bifurcation angle are also relative to these diseases. The recently reported DL-based retinal image feature extraction methods are not dedicated to extracting retinal vessel segments from multiple locations of the retinal image. Extracting retinal vessel segments from the retinal image is important for vessel diameter and bifurcation angle quantification. Moreover, employing inappropriate image processing techniques at the pre-processing level can lead to poor system performance. This work is dedicated to developing an image processing-based AI method for retinal vessel extraction from retinal images. This thesis includes a brief explanation of the proposed method, Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster RCNN) for retinal image feature extraction. At the initial stage of this proposed method, fundamental image processing was used for retinal image preprocessing. The retinal images were taken from the different public databases to train, test, and validate the performance of this proposed method. This proposed method obtained 91.82% Mean Average Precision (mAP), 92.81% sensitivity, and 63.34% Positive Predictive Value (PPV). According to the performance analysis, it can be expected to integrate this proposed method into the ophthalmic diagnostic tools after further development, evaluation, and validatio

Feature Extraction of Retinal Microvasculature of Retinal Images

Image Processing, more generally digital image processing is one of the most widely used computer vision technology, especially in Biomedical engineering. Modern ophthalmology is directly dependent on this robust technology, digital image processing to find out the biomarkers analyzing the fundus eye images that are responsible for different kinds of life-threatening diseases like diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, hypertensive retinopathy, transient ischemic attack or sharp stroke and some other cardiovascular disease. The geometric features like vessel tortuosity, branching angles, vessel diameter and fractal dimension are considered as the biomarkers for the cardiovascular diseases mentioned above. Retinal vessel diameter widening has found as the early symptom of transient ischemic attack or sharp stroke. A succinct and meaningful review of the latest quantitative diagnostic methods that are developed employing the digital image analysis principles for measuring the remarkable features mainly the vessel diameter has been provided in the literature of this project. In this project, a completely new and computer-aided automatic method to measure the retinal vessel diameter employing the Euclidean Distance Transform technique has been developed. The proposed system measures the Euclidean Distance of the bright pixels exist on the Region of Interest (ROI). Further, the proposed system was evaluated on the High-Resolution Fundus Image Database (HRFID) and Retinal Vessel Image set for Estimation of Width (REVIEW) Database. The HRFID was used to evaluate the performance of the segmentation technique that was employed in this project and obtained 94.3% accuracy with 66.5% Sensitivity, 97.86% Specificity, 77.265 Positive Predictive Value (PPV) and 96.60% Negative Predictive Value (NPV). The Vascular Disease Image Set (VDIS) and Central Light Reflex Image Set (CLRIS) of REVIEW database were used to evaluate the overall system performance that measures the vessel diameter. The proposed system obtained 98.1% accuracy for the CLRIS and 97.7% accuracy for VDIS. With further evaluation, validation and enhancement of the method, it can be integrated into the clinical computer-aided diagnostic tool. The methodology and the evaluation results are explained in this report

Inequalities in Private Tutoring of English: A Phenomenological Qualitative Study Based on Bangladeshi Higher Secondary Students

This phenomenological qualitative study analyzes the lived experiences of eleven Bangladeshi higher secondary students in mainstream schools to provide insight into their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, values, and assumptions of private tutoring in English (PT-E). The study also focused on PT-E that contribute to inequalities between students who have access to private tutoring and those who do not. Each participant participated in a one-to-one in-depth semi-structured interview. Using phenomenological analysis, 321 significant statements and three themes emerged. The data show that unequal practice, discrimination due to financial capability, and social psyche for PT-E that influences students to widen the negative impacts of PT-E between students, particularly those who do not have an access in private tutoring of English (PT-E)

Household costs of healthcare during pregnancy, delivery, and the postpartum period : a case study from Matlab, Bangladesh

A household survey was undertaken in Matlab, a rural area of Bangladesh, to estimate the costs incurred during pregnancy, delivery, and the postpartum period for women delivering at home and in a health facility. Those interviewed included 121 women who delivered at home, 120 who delivered in an ICDDR,B basic obstetric care (BEOC) facility, 27 who delivered in a public comprehensive obstetric care (CEOC) hospital, and 58 who delivered in private hospitals. There was no significant difference in total costs incurred by those delivering at home and those delivering in a BEOC facility. Costs for those delivering in CEOC facilities were over nine times greater than for those delivering in BEOC facilities. Costs of care during delivery were predominant. Antenatal and postnatal care added between 7% and 30% to the total cost. Services were more equitable at home and in a BEOC facility compared to services provided at CEOC facilities. The study highlights the regressive nature of the financing of CEOC services and the need for a financing strategy that covers both the costs of referral and BEOC care for those in need.This research was funded under the Cooperative Agreement No. 388-A-00-97-00032-00 with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (ICDDR,B Grant No. GR-00089). ICDDR,B acknowledges with gratitude the commitment of USAID to the Centre’s research efforts. Carine Ronsmans and Jo Borghi are funded by the Department for International Development, UK