Pembangunan modul pengintegrasian domain kognitif dan strategi pengajaran dalam kemahiran berfikir aras tinggi guru teknikal

Kemahiran berfikir aras tinggi (KBAT) telah memainkan peranan penting dalam pembelajaran pendidikan. KBAT merupakan datu set kemahiran dalam konsep yang menggalakkan individu terutamannya pelajar berfikir sesuatu di luar kotak. Setiap individu mempunyai kecenderungan dan kekuatan yang berbeza dalam pembelajaran serta KBAT boleh menjadi rangsangan untuk membangunkan cara pembelajaran yang baharu. Kajian ini adalah kajian pembangunan produk untuk menganalisis keperluan kajian pengintegrasian domain kognitif dan strategi pengajaran dalam KBAT guru teknikal dan membangunkan modul pengintegrasian domain kognitif dan strategi pengajaran dalam KBAT guru teknikal. Seramai 364 orang guru teknikal dipilih secara rawak sebagai sampel kajian untuk menganalisis keperluan kajian ini. Manakala dalam proses pembangunan modul, seramai 10 orang guru teknikal yang terdiri daripada lima bidang utama yang ditawarkan dalam kolej vokasional sebagai pengguna modul untuk mengenal pasti kesesuaian dari segi reka bentuk, kandungan dan kebolehgunaan modul pengintegrasian domain kognitif dan strategi pengajaran dalam KBAT guru teknikal. Hasil dapatan kajian menunjukkan bahawa tahap penguasaan domain kognitif dan strategi pengajaran dalam KBAT guru teknikal adalah lemah dan terdapat hubungan sederhana positif yang signifikan antara domain kognitif dan strategi pengajaran dalam KBAT guru teknikal. Selain itu, hasil dapatan kajian juga menunjukkan bahawa modul pengintegrasian domain kognitif dan strategi pengajaran dalam KBAT adalah sesuai dari segi reka bentuk, kandungan dan boleh digunakan oleh guru teknikal. Secara kesimpulan, imlpikasi modul pengintegrasian ini dapat memberi sumbangan sebagai bahan bacaan kepada para guru teknikal untuk mengaplikasi KBAT dalam pengajaran dan pembelajaran

Geographical study of some aspects of current economic development in Malaya

Probably several hundreds of books and articles have been written about Malaya during the last few decades and especially during the last few years. Nevertheless, despite the publication in 1955 of "The Economic Development of Malaya" by the World Bank Mission, a full scale study of current economic developments has not yet been made, though some books published recently have covered part of the form. It was therefore thought worthwhile to make the present study.Malaya ranks as the country with the second highest living standard in Asia, but is, in fact, one of the underdeveloped or developing countries.It is a common feature of most of the underdeveloped countries that their economies are mainly dependent on one or two commodity products for export, such as cacao in Ghana, coffee in Brazil, tea'and rubber in Ceylon, and rubber and tin in Malaya. The disadvantage of this is that their economies are greatly affected by the price fluctuations of the particular products in the world market. Whether the future economic development of these countries should depend on specialization in commodity production or on diversification and development of other lines, will be the main question for this study, in which Malaya is taken as an example.Due to limitation of the available source of materials and statistics, and to difficulties of analysing statistics issued separately by the two Governments, it has not been possible for the author to make a complete analysis of every sector of the economy; but certain important aspects concerning the economic development are discussed.Emphasis will throughout be laid on the geographical point of view. It is not proposed to outline detailed policies for future development; but an attempt will be made to indicate the problems and prospects of economic development.This study was undertaken by the author during 1961E -66, including two periods spent in London in order to make use of the references in several libraries during the summer of 1961 and 1965. Thus, no detailed analysis has been made of events occurring after the establishment of Malaysia on 16th September, 1963, though the statistics used are in-most cases up to the end of 1963.Except when otherwise stated, the study is of the combined area of the Federation of Malaya and Singapore, and this area is referred to as "Malaya "; while the "Federation" is referred to the Federation of Malaya alone

“Maniac” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”: A Novel Adaptation of Two TV Series for Classroom Undergraduate Psychiatry Education in an Age of COVID-19 Social Distancing

Aim: Psychiatry has traditionally been taught bedside. Multiple ethical and logistics issues preclude use of certain patient groups, and in the current COVID-19 pandemic, there is the additional obstacle of not being able to access bedside patients. There is utility in using new media, e.g., television and movies, in psychiatry education. Methods: “Maniac” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”, both available on Netflix, were used in an undergraduate psychiatry module to illustrate clinical lessons regarding schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder respectively. Results: “Maniac” was helpful in illustrating subtle changes in affect, occupational and social dysfunction, and showcasing disrupted family dynamics and distress from experiencing hallucinations and delusions. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” was instructional in crystallising psychopathology of borderline personality disorder and providing more nuanced, less cross-sectional views of psychiatric illness. Conclusions: Even though television and movies will and should not replace face-to-face bedside teaching as a primary mode of education, they are an adjunct to stimulate discussion and observe psychopathologies that are ethically difficult to capture. Both of them can be used judiciously in the current COVID-19 pandemic as bedside teaching substitutes

Life duration of bike sharing systems

Many factors have been advanced to predicate the sustainability of bike sharing system (BSS) and bike sharing usage, such as fleet size, number of docking stations, payment type and financial support, but there have been few studies that examine survival duration of BSS’ operation. Therefore, this study investigates the determinants of BSS’ duration, using bike sharing monitoring map and respective annual report data from 106 cities around the world. Three categories of independent variables, namely infrastructural factors, social factors and economic factors are included in the generalised linear model (GLM). The findings indicate that coverage area, system capacity and payment type will affect the sustainability of bike sharing operation. Moreover, financial support and purchasing power parity (PPP) per capital are the distinctive factors that seem to influence the likelihood of success of a BSS. Payment method affects the survivability of a BSS after the system is stable

Social Thinking and Risk Between Road Users: The Case of the Pedestrian in Two Cultural Contexts

Interactions between motorized and non-motorized road users constitute situations of risk for the latter. Improving the safety of pedestrians, who are the most vulnerable users, is a challenge for public health in society. The aims of this study concern the social representation of the pedestrian and the impact of the cultural variable in the construction of this knowledge; a field in which there exists little research. In this perspective, the discourse of two groups of students, one from a French city (N=85) and one from Singapore (N=124) are compared. The use of free associations and specific analyses makes it possible to isolate the words or expressions most frequently associated with pedestrians and those that discriminate the two populations. This study reveals that the pedestrian is associated with risk in both cultural environments. Nevertheless the French express more fear and apprehension and the Singaporeans’ representation is both more descriptive and personified. These results are discussed in relation to the cultural contexts

Response of yarn systems to impact loading

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

HDAC1 NEGATIVELY REGULATES BDNF TRANSCRIPTION & PARVALBUMIN INTERNEURON MATURATION IN AN EXPERIENCE-DEPENDENT MODEL OF THE MOUSE BARREL CORTEX

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

MICRAT: A Novel Algorithm for Inferring Gene Regulatory Networks Using Time Series Gene Expression Data

Background: Reconstruction of gene regulatory networks (GRNs), also known as reverse engineering of GRNs, aims to infer the potential regulation relationships between genes. With the development of biotechnology, such as gene chip microarray and RNA-sequencing, the high-throughput data generated provide us with more opportunities to infer the gene-gene interaction relationships using gene expression data and hence understand the underlying mechanism of biological processes. Gene regulatory networks are known to exhibit a multiplicity of interaction mechanisms which include functional and non-functional, and linear and non-linear relationships. Meanwhile, the regulatory interactions between genes and gene products are not spontaneous since various processes involved in producing fully functional and measurable concentrations of transcriptional factors/proteins lead to a delay in gene regulation. Many different approaches for reconstructing GRNs have been proposed, but the existing GRN inference approaches such as probabilistic Boolean networks and dynamic Bayesian networks have various limitations and relatively low accuracy. Inferring GRNs from time series microarray data or RNA-sequencing data remains a very challenging inverse problem due to its nonlinearity, high dimensionality, sparse and noisy data, and significant computational cost, which motivates us to develop more effective inference methods. Results: We developed a novel algorithm, MICRAT (Maximal Information coefficient with Conditional Relative Average entropy and Time-series mutual information), for inferring GRNs from time series gene expression data. Maximal information coefficient (MIC) is an effective measure of dependence for two-variable relationships. It captures a wide range of associations, both functional and non-functional, and thus has good performance on measuring the dependence between two genes. Our approach mainly includes two procedures. Firstly, it employs maximal information coefficient for constructing an undirected graph to represent the underlying relationships between genes. Secondly, it directs the edges in the undirected graph for inferring regulators and their targets. In this procedure, the conditional relative average entropies of each pair of nodes (or genes) are employed to indicate the directions of edges. Since the time delay might exist in the expression of regulators and target genes, time series mutual information is combined to cooperatively direct the edges for inferring the potential regulators and their targets. We evaluated the performance of MICRAT by applying it to synthetic datasets as well as real gene expression data and compare with other GRN inference methods. We inferred five 10-gene and five 100-gene networks from the DREAM4 challenge that were generated using the gene expression simulator GeneNetWeaver (GNW). MICRAT was also used to reconstruct GRNs on real gene expression data including part of the DNA-damaged response pathway (SOS DNA repair network) and experimental dataset in E. Coli. The results showed that MICRAT significantly improved the inference accuracy, compared to other inference methods, such as TDBN, etc. Conclusion: In this work, a novel algorithm, MICRAT, for inferring GRNs from time series gene expression data was proposed by taking into account dependence and time delay of expressions of a regulator and its target genes. This approach employed maximal information coefficients for reconstructing an undirected graph to represent the underlying relationships between genes. The edges were directed by combining conditional relative average entropy with time course mutual information of pairs of genes. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on the benchmark GRNs provided by the DREAM4 challenge and part of the real SOS DNA repair network in E. Coli. The experimental study showed that our approach was comparable to other methods on 10-gene datasets and outperformed other methods on 100-gene datasets in GRN inference from time series datasets

An Expressive Ansatz for Low-Depth Quantum Approximate Optimisation

The quantum approximate optimisation algorithm (QAOA) is a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm used to approximately solve combinatorial optimisation problems. It involves multiple iterations of a parameterised ansatz comprising a problem and mixer Hamiltonian, with the parameters being classically optimised. While QAOA can be implemented on NISQ devices, physical limitations can limit circuit depth and decrease performance. To address these limitations, this work introduces the eXpressive QAOA (XQAOA), an overparameterised variant of QAOA that assigns more classical parameters to the ansatz to improve its performance at low depths. XQAOA also introduces an additional Pauli-Y component in the mixer Hamiltonian, allowing the mixer to implement arbitrary unitary transformations on each qubit. To benchmark the performance of XQAOA at unit depth, we derive its closed-form expression for the MaxCut problem and compare it to QAOA, Multi-Angle QAOA (MA-QAOA), a classical-relaxed algorithm, and the state-of-the-art Goemans-Williamson algorithm on a set of unweighted regular graphs with 128 and 256 nodes for degrees ranging from 3 to 10. Our results indicate that at unit depth, XQAOA has benign loss landscapes, allowing it to consistently outperform QAOA, MA-QAOA, and the classical-relaxed algorithm on all graph instances and the Goemans-Williamson algorithm on graph instances with degrees greater than 4. Small-scale simulations also reveal that unit-depth XQAOA surpasses both QAOA and MA-QAOA on all tested depths up to five. Additionally, we find an infinite family of graphs for which XQAOA solves MaxCut exactly and analytically show that for some graphs in this family, XQAOA achieves a much larger approximation ratio than QAOA. Overall, XQAOA is a more viable choice for variational quantum optimisation on NISQ devices, offering competitive performance at low depths.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figure