Factors Affecting Job Satisfaction: a Case Study at Fire and Rescue Department of Malaysia Terengganu (FRDMT) Fire Fighters

Job satisfaction involves the emotions and their behavioural expression towards their job. It is known that a job is the activity which involves the satisfaction of emotion and expression. These emotions and behavioural expression is in relation to the pleasant or unpleasant feeling that they experienced towards their job fulfilment within an organization. These feelings are influenced by job-related factors. This had highly suggested that a job satisfaction level should be well accepted and satisfied by any employees to guarantee a minimal turnover for any organization. Therefore, the objective of this study is to identify the factors that influence job satisfaction among Fire and Rescue Department of Malaysia, Terengganu (FRDMT) fire fighters. It involves fire fighters from different grade level. It is important to identify job satisfaction among them in order to acknowledge their expression towards job satisfaction and to accommodate their opportunities to voice their opinion anonymously. This study uses primary data of 234 Fire and Rescue Department of Malaysia, Terengganu (FRDMT) fire fighters. Stratified random sampling technique was utilized for data collection, which is then analyzed using the descriptive and correlation analysis in order to achieve the objectives of the study. The findings showed that only working environment and co-workers significantly influence job satisfaction. Meanwhile, for the other three variables, namely promotion, reward and leadership style did not influence job satisfaction. Keywords: Job satisfaction, fire fighters, working environment, promotion, reward, leadership styl

Towards a Re-Definition of Government Interpreters' Agency Against a Backdrop of Sociopolitical and Cultural Evolution: A Case of Premier's Press Conferences in China

The sociopolitical and cultural evolution as a result of the Reform and Opening up in 1978, facilitated not least by the inexorable juggernaut of globalization and technological advancement, has revolutionized the way China engages domestically and interacts with the outside world. The need for more proactive diplomacy and open engagement witnessed the institutionalization of the interpreter-mediated premier's press conferences. Such a discursive event provides a vital platform for China to articulate its discourse and rebrand its image in tandem with the profound changes signaled by the Dengist reform. This chapter investigates critically how political press conference interpreting and interpreters' agency in China are impacted in relation to such dramatic transformations. It is revealed that, while interpreters are confronted with seemingly conflicting expectations, in actual practice they are often able to negotiate a way as highly competent interpreting professionals with the additional missions of advancing China's global engagement and safeguarding China's national interests

Achieving excellence through information literacy as part of innovative curriculum

A great responsibility facing education today is to develop students with information literacy while pursuing their education and extend it further in their workplace. In order for today's students to excel in the 21st century, they must be able to acquire, evaluate, and use and present information effectively. They must become information literate workers, teachers, facilitators and coachers. Information literacy skills allow the problem solving, critical and creative thinking, decision making, and cooperative learning that prepare students for the challenges in society. Information literacy leads to skilful, responsible thinking that facilitates good judgement because it relies on criteria, is self-correcting and is sensitive to context. It helps growth of individuals through a number of methods, programmes and techniques. It would be useful if the educational incorporate these elements since the elementary stage so that by the time their reach the college and university level, they have acquired the reading and information skills much required in the current information and knowledge era

Learning, Large Scale Inference, and Temporal Modeling of Determinantal Point Processes

Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) are random point processes well-suited for modelling repulsion. In discrete settings, DPPs are a natural model for subset selection problems where diversity is desired. For example, they can be used to select relevant but diverse sets of text or image search results. Among many remarkable properties, they offer tractable algorithms for exact inference, including computing marginals, computing certain conditional probabilities, and sampling. In this thesis, we provide four main contributions that enable DPPs to be used in more general settings. First, we develop algorithms to sample from approximate discrete DPPs in settings where we need to select a diverse subset from a large amount of items. Second, we extend this idea to continuous spaces where we develop approximate algorithms to sample from continuous DPPs, yielding a method to select point configurations that tend to be overly-dispersed. Our third contribution is in developing robust algorithms to learn the parameters of the DPP kernels, which is previously thought to be a difficult, open problem. Finally, we develop a temporal extension for discrete DPPs, where we model sequences of subsets that are not only marginally diverse but also diverse across time

Integrating product emotions study in the industrial design education for sustaining affective consumers

This article highlights the importance of product emotions study in the industrial design education. The incorporation of product emotions during the design of an artefact is important as it embodies the socio-cultural preference towards that artefact, hence supporting one of the three sustainable development components—social sustainability. Therefore, through the application of product emotions study, Malaysian products could elicit positive emotions that will lead to consumer-product’s ‘affective sustainability.’ We conducted a preliminary survey among the industrial design academia to gauge how we can effectively incorporate the product emotions component into the Malaysian tertiary curriculum. We first present a selected background literature on product emotions and explain the types of response processing using examples from the market. We then explain our research method and present the results and analysis. At the conclusion of this article, we recommend how industrial design education can integrate the aspect of product emotions in its curriculum and highlight the need for research in this area if Malaysian products wish to gain sustainable affection in the global markets. We hope that the successful integration of product emotions will enable local manufacturers to improve their sales revenue and develop larger market for their products