Students’ learning preferences of English for academic purposes - A KUiTTHO Affair

Kolej Universiti Teknologi Tun Hussein Onn (KUiTTHO) aims to produce graduates who are competent in English and other core skills in order to be in parallel with other established institutions. Communication and soft skills play important roles in making a graduate a success in the working world and to meet the demands of globalization especially where English is becoming more important. English for Academic Purposes was introduced as one of the required subjects for KUiTTHO students. Students whose MUET results are below than Band 3 and achieved only 50% or less in the placement test are required to take this course. This subject is aimed to facilitate students to undertake MUET again so they are able to achieve at least a Band 3. The study aims to find the learner’s preference in learning English for Academic Purposes as a new subject. Learning preferences in this case include how they want to learn, which language skills they prefer to learn and types of activities they prefer. This research will adapt the qualitative method using questionnaire and observation in gaining data. It is hoped through this research a comprehensive needs analysis can be developed to enhance the learning and the teaching of English for Academic Purposes later

Screen Influences on Preteens

This precis analyzed the works conducted in Southern California in 2014 titled, “Five Days at Outdoor Education Camp Without Screens improves Preteens Skills with Nonverbal Emotion Cues.” The analysis begins by defining non-verbal emotional cues and continues to give a brief description of the 2014 experiment, including its sample size, experimental and control groups, and a means to account for similar demographic variables. The findings from the research conducted conclude that time spent away from screen-based media does in fact improve the recognition of nonverbal emotional cues. This precis concludes with the strengths and limitations found in the California study.Quimby, MichelannHuman Development and Family Science

The Reviving Project

When Yushan Cassie Sun arrived in America in 2012, she already had big hopes for the future. A craft and material study major with a concentration in jewelry and metalsmithing, Cassie will graduate this May with some wonderful research experiences under her belt. e summer before she came to VCU, Cassie spent time learning the techniques of three crafts- men in China. As she lived and learned with them, she realized that although her learning was valuable, there were hundreds of other endangered craft techniques in China that she was not learning—and that’s what got her interested in what would later become the Reviving Project

PENGARUH PEMASARAN SOSIAL MEDIA DAN CITRA MEREK TERHADAP NIAT BELI KONSUMEN Caffee de’ Cartel (Pada Caffee de’cartel di Kota Batu Licin)

ABSTRAK Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk : (1) mengetahui pengaruh pemasaran sosial media terhadap niat beli. (2) mengetahui pengaruh citra merek terhadap niat beli (3) mengetahui manakah diantara pemasaran sosial media dan citra merek yang memiliki pengaruh paling dominan terhadap niat beli. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kuantitatif dengan pendekatan deskriptif. Metode analisis yang digunakan adalah analisis jalur dengan SPSS 26. Penelitian ini menggunakan 170 responden dengan purposive sampling Dari penelitian tersebut diperoleh hasil (1) pemasaran sosial media berpengaruh positif signfikan terhadap niat beli (2) citra merek berpengaruh positif signfikan terhadap niat beli. (3) pemasaran sosial media memiliki pengaruh paling dominan terhadap niat beli

Public complaints: An instrument to improve services in public institution of higher learning in post modern era. Case study: Student Affairs Department in Universiti Utara Malaysia

Jurgen Habermas dan Anthony Giddens are among other postmodern thinkers have proposed the theory of public sphere and social reflexivity. Because postmodenism has undermined the structure and function of the society and gives extra power to the periphery and individuals, the rise for individual participation in voicing out their need and wants is seen as important so that decision made at the top rung of the society reflect the masses. According to Habermas, in post modern era where tradition is lacking, people are losing trust and confidence in an abstract system – the system governing them beyond their immediate surrounding. To encounter it, citizen should be given power to participate in decision making. Habermas idea is supported by Giddens with his social reflexivity concept that suggests inputting public trust back into social institution. In coherence with this argument, the paper will discuss on the public complaint in public institution which is seen as a way to improve public services. The study is carried out in Student Affairs department in Universiti Utara Malaysia in 2003. The objectives of the study is to measure the level of awareness of the services offered at the Complaint Unit HEP and complaints by the students of the university. The paper will then discuss the findings and suggests ways to improve existing systems so that the quality of service is further enhanced

Variational inequations and approximation

The existence and uniqueness of the solution of a variational inequality is considered, and methods of approximation of the solution are given. Some elementary theorems concerning bilinear forms and antimonotone operators are given in the appendix

Pakistan lags behind in technical textile

This paper highlights and demonstrates the technical and economical impact of technical textiles in the industrially developed countries and their future contribution to the development of economics of newly developing countries, such as China, South East Asia, and North Africa etc. Pakistan still lags behind in technical textile products as neither the government nor the textile industry has made any serious efforts towards synchronizing textile products with the emerging needs of the world market by developing higher value-added products. Although the textile sector is the backbone of Pakistan’s economy, the Government as well as the textile industry has kept their focus on conventional textiles, ignoring technical textiles and knowledge-based products. A special focus is placed on the application of technical textiles related automotive, medical, construction/civil engineering and sportswear’s fields.

Bottleneck-based heuristic for permutation flowshop scheduling

The newly heuristic is developed by introducing the bottleneck-based concept that was applied at the beginning of initial solution determination. The heuristic is known as Bottleneck-Based (BNB) heuristic. The previous study found that the scheduling activity become complex when dealing with large number of machine, m > 2, it is NP-hardness. Thus, the main objective of this study are to propose and develop a new heuristic for solving permutation flowshop scheduling by considering four-machines and n-jobs (n = 6, 10, 15, 20). Three phases were applied into this study in order to boost the makespan performance of the proposed heuristic. Two phases (bottleneck identification phase and initial sequence arrangement phase) were newly introduced and combined with the existing famous Nawaz, Enscore and Ham (NEH) insertion technique. There are four potential dominant machines (M1, M2, M3, M4) clustered as bottleneck machines. A total 1000 set random processing time for each job sizes was tested using Excel simple programming with built in Visual Basic for Application (VBA). The heuristic performance was evaluated based on the average makespan ratio, average percentage error, and percentage of solution performance obtained. This study considered the NEH heuristic as the best and appropriate tool for comparison purpose since NEH heuristic is the best performing heuristic in minimizing the makespan. The heuristic evaluation result showed that the BNB heuristic is performing better than the NEH at bottleneck machines M1, M3 and M4. While, heuristic verification result showed that the bottleneck algorithms performed the best in minimizing the makespan for set of problems with bottleneck machine M4. However, the overall result showed fluctuate values over the size of jobs. The result of this study shown that the developed BNB heuristic achieved good performance in solving small sized problems however further modification is needed for medium and large sized problems

A guided artificial bee colony (GABC) heuristic for permutation flowshop scheduling problem (PFSP)

Flowshop is the most common production system in the industry, and there are many documented efforts to improve the performance of the flowshop. The range spreads from the usage of heuristics to metaheuristics, and one of the promising methods is NEH (Nawaz, Enscore & Ham) heuristics. This study aims to improve NEH, using an enhanced version of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm because the original one has the problem of slow converge speed. As a result, this study will propose a mechanism to improve the convergence speed of ABC because faster convergence speed is the ability to find high-quality results in lesser iterations compared to others. The study clusters the Employed Bees (EB) and Onlooker Bees (OB) into several groups: Total Greedy, Semi Greedy and Non-Greedy. Upon completion, the study selected the Total Greedy (3+0+0) because of the leading performance in makespan value (performance indicator), and the author used it for the rest of this study. This study proposed two variants of the guided initial ABC or Guided Artificial Bee Colony (GABC) with one variant (NEH-based ABC), employing the concept of NEH and the second variant (GABC), employing the concept of NEH and First Job Sequence Arrangement Method. The study experimented according to ten datasets of Taillard benchmark and divided the experiments into several categories and the experiments run every data for several iterations, and for each dataset, there are 20 replications. This study compared the performance of NEH, ABC, NEH-based ABC and GABC, which also act as the validation process. Based on the results, ABC produced inconsistent results for a significant amount of times and interestingly, GABC, NEHbased ABC and ABC produced 68.75%, 63.33% and 0.01% results that are better than NEH, respectively. The data also shows that GABC is 37.9% better than its variant. Finally, the author can conclude that this study demonstrated the slow convergence issue of ABC