Middle Class and Pro-Poor Growth in Egypt: The Missing Connection

Assessing whether distributional changes are “pro-poor” has become increasingly widespread in academic and policy circles. Based on the methodology of Ravallion and Chen (2003), Kakwani and Pernia (2000) and Kakwani, Khandker, and Son (2003) using grouped data, the paper generates three indices to test whether distributional changes were indeed pro-poor during the period (1990-2008). Another issue is whether pro-poor judgments should be correlative with the size of the middle class. The paper presents the evolution of middle class in Egypt using different thresholds. The middle class in Egypt has followed the path of bulging in size under a certain threshold even if growth was not pro-poor growt

IMPACT OF DESIGN THINKING ON CONCEPTUAL DESIGN IN INTERIOR DESIGN STUDIO COURSES

Design thinking has gained prominence in teaching interior design studio courses. Exploring the applications of design thinking can help interior design students understand the complexity and importance of conceptual design, while also supporting their discovery of unique design approaches and innovative design solutions. This paper provides a review of literature on design thinking and design education, examining the factors that imply influence on design thinking application in interior design studio courses. This paper also discusses the impact of design-thinking applications on the design process, as well as its influence on conceptual design development within the context of interior design undergraduate education

Le figement dans le discours argumentatif de l'enfant

International audienceSelon Kendon 1980, les gestes iconiques et métaphoriques ont généralement trois phases - la préparation, Stroke, et la rétraction. Dans mon étude, j'ajoute deux choses : 1. La phase de préparation se divise en deux phases commençant par une phase verbale et puis une phase coverbale. 2. la phase Stroke (phase de clôture) : c'est où s'effectue le figement postural et où se trouve la combinaison entre le rhème et le growth point (le moment clé), ce que j'ai appellé : le pointage par les mots. Dans mon étude expérimentale, j'explique comment dans l'argumentation, l'enfant est sur la défensive et se voit comme informateur, pas plus, alors que dans la narration, il y a une anticipation de partage. Dans l'argumentation, l'enfant est dans son propre champ et il doit d'abord le défendre et le consolider et renforcer ses arguments, ce qui explique le Growth point et le moment où il se situe. Le figement postural effectué simultanément avec le Growth point témoigne de l'engagement de l'enfant, ce que nous pouvons appeler '' le pic argumentatif ''. Ainsi j'ai donné à ce figement postural comme nom : le pointage par les mots, car c'est au moment de ce figement postural que l'enfant veut pointer le mot clé de son énoncé et montrer ainsi ce qui l'intéresse. Mon étude expérimentale s'appuie sur le contraste comme moyen pour la description référentielle dans le discours de l'enfant. Le corpus est basé sur quatre enfants entre quatre à six ans ayant tous le français comme langue maternelle. A l'aide des vidéos et du logiciel Win pitch (analyseur de la parole en temps réel ), j'ai pu analysé la manière dont l'enfant procède pour la description référentielle des choses. Ainsi, j'ai pu tirer quelques observations générales : Dans le pointage par les mots: le phénomène Comme ça avec le pointage des mots, la plupart des gestes référentiels s'effectuent avec les deux mains avec une symétrie bien précise. quand il s'agit de valeur illustrative du geste référentiel, le plus souvent l'enfant utilise le mot Comme ça: 1. Sans comme ça: un mot est pointé 2. Avant le mot comme ça: un mot est pointé. S'il s'agit d'une vraie description avec les mains, le mot clé vient avant le mot comme ça. 3. Le mot comme ça ( seul ): c'est ce mot même Comme ça qui est pointé. 4. Après le mot comme ça : Si ce geste référentiel à valeur illustratif nécessite une onomatopée, c'est cette onomatopée même qui est pointé et elle vient toujours après le mot comme ça.. Deux fonctions vont simultanément en effectuant le geste de pointage coverbal : soit une fonction déictique et une fonction expressive et de cadrage, soit une fonction déictique et une fonction syntaxiques ou de structuration, soit une fonction déictique et une fonction interactive. Concernant le figement : - Si le regard se dirige vers l'écouteur avant le Figement Il y a discordance et rupture. - Si le regard se dirige vers l'écouteur après le Figement Il y a consensus, convergence, argumentation. - Si le regard se dirige vers l'écouteur au moment du Figement il y a différentiation et égocentrage.  Bibliographie : - David McNeill, 2005 "Gesture and thought ". Pages 31- 45 Adam Kendon 2004 " Gesture: visible action as utterance " - McNeil, D. 2000. " Language and gesture " Cambridge University Press. - Brigaudiot M. & Danon-Boileau L., 2002, La naissance du langage dans les deux premières années, Paris, PUF : 58-62. - TOMASELLO, M. 2007. " A New Look at Infant Pointing " Child development, Volume 78, Number 3, Pages 705 - 722

Hand control of bipedal balance in quiet standing: implementations for lower extremity exoskeleton

Maintaining stable posture is important for humans, even though it is challenging because of our bipedal structure. One of the main balance related disorders is paraplegia due to spinal cord injury. People with a complete spinal cord injury have motor and sensory impairment that greatly reduces the ability to move their lower extremities. In recent years, lower extremity exoskeletons that apply torques generated by motors to the joints of the person have helped to them stand and walk. This research is a part of an extended project to build a new exoskeleton for use by individuals with paraplegia due to motor complete spinal cord injury. The goal of the project is to develop a device with an intuitive control mechanism capable of generating real time gait and balance. Commercial exoskeletons have achieved great steps regarding restoring ambulation. On the other hand, most of them do not actively support bipedal balance. In addition, commercially available exoskeletons except the REX need crutches to balance for people with motor complete paraplegia. The NJIT TREKKER, our laboratory’s research exoskeleton, suggests a novel, human-robot interface strategy that allows users to completely control and feel the trajectories of their exoskeleton-assisted feet, and be able to walk with considerably greater independence. The first study to develop TREKKER was performed before where a trekking pole was attached to each foot of a biped robot. Subjects controlled the trajectory of the foot of the biped by applying small forces to the trekking poles. The study proved that hands can produce trajectories similar to human foot trajectories when provided with haptic and visual feedback. If the hands and arms are effective surrogates for expressing ambulation, can they also be surrogates for natural balance in quiet standing? This is the main question that this dissertation answers. Importantly, this dissertation considers the ability of the arms and hands to make rapid adjustments to the center of pressure (COP) that will follow the center of mass (COM) and allow the person to retain balance to achieve this aim a perturbing system was constructed to study human body response to perturbations. Special shoes with small blocks attached to their soles were designed to study the capability of human body to adapt to base of support (BOS) reduction, and two special platforms with shoes on Pivots and two trekking poles attached to them were designed to study the effectiveness of using trekking poles. The pivots were used to eliminate the use of ankle strategy to retain balance by non-disabled subjects. In this study, subjects were asked to stand in front of the perturbing system and within the motion capture system’s field of view, then they were perturbed with at seven different forces with and without visual feedback in three different experiments: using regular shoes, the shoes with small blocks attached to their soles, and the shoes with pivots and trekking poles. Biomechanical parameters were studied to assess balance in A/P plane in each of the three experiments. The results suggest that the use of trekking poles is a viable approach to maintain balance during quiet standing. The main conclusion of this study is that using trekking poles is a good approach to maintain balance in quiet standing and as a response to small perturbations. Statistical analysis of SI, error signal peaks, and correlations comparing Pivots experiment to Regular experiment support this hypothesis. In addition, the high correlation coefficients between COM and COP of quiet standing on Pivots and in Pivots experiment with perturbations, and the high correlation coefficients of the correlation between COP and the trekking poles trajectories indicates that the trekking poles are working as a surrogate to the ankle joint. It is concluded that using the trekking poles, though the response to perturbations does not match the biological response, is good enough to maintain balance in quiet standing and perturbed quiet standing especially for small perturbations

Developing design process model and measuring acceptance of polytechnic cooperative e-retail website

Research on the process model of e-retail web design using Content Management System (CMS) remains scarce. CMS is one way of developing website quickly, with less cost and usage of IT expertise. Researchers mostly focus on identifying the significant relationship towards particular website especially on web design and suggest for practical implementation. Previous studies on web development are on the architecture of CMS while the use of CMS attracts little interest among researchers. Only a number of researchers concentrate on the process development of e-retail website especially using CMS. To fill the practical gap, this research proposed a process model of e-retail website through SDLC and extended the model with the introduction of internet marketing. It was tested in the development of a e-retail website. Each stage is discussed in details along the way of the web development. After the website was successfully developed, this research examined the acceptance of e-retail website by measuring consumers’ behavioural intention and actual usage using Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). In addressing the theoretical gap, this research provides an empirical test of three forms of self-efficacy (Computer Self-efficacy, Internet Self-efficacy, and Online Shopping Self-efficacy) and anxiety (Computer Anxiety, Internet Anxiety, and Online Shopping Anxiety) towards behavioural intention to shop online. The research subjects were 91,830 polytechnic students from 33 polytechnics in Malaysia. A total of 357 fulltime polytechnic students from five polytechnics in Malaysia have been involved in this research. From a list of students’ name, self-administered survey questionnaires were distributed at response rate of 77.8%. Correlation and Multiple Regression were used to test the significant relationship while Hierarchical Regression was used to test the moderator of gender. The research reveals that Performance Expectancy, Social Influence, Facilitating Condition and Online shopping Self-Efficacy are found to have significant effect on students Behavioural Intention to use polytechnic co-operative eretail business. E-retailer needs to encourage the potential customer to make on-line purchasing because it is no longer a norm against the use of the Internet and computer. The process model is readily transferable to another website so that it describes as sufficient for use. The future research shall apply the extended UTAUT in different subject (adult) and the process model shall extend until the Return on Investment (ROI)

Participant Observation in a Case Study on Web Design Process of E-retail Website

Studies on developing models for e-retail implementation for consumer co-operative business are very scarce. Co-operative businesses appear to be anxious about going into online retailing since Malaysian Internet shopping is still new, customers are not very familiar and skeptical towards online shopping. Consequently a case study (participant observation) will be undertaken in this study to accomplish main aim in implementation Content Management System (CMS) in developing design process of consumer co-operative website. Web design process model by Kiatruangkrai et al. (2010) and Goi(2007a) have been the foundation guideline in designing the website. Package selection web based application has been used in design stage which can easily help non professional web developer to design their online shopping website. As a conceptual paper, this research is limited to literature and prior research. It offers the benefit to new direction for further research on web design process model. This paper provides researcher with a proposed model of web design process. The proposed model should also be tested in relation with e retail business

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF MS ISO 9001:2000 QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM WITHIN CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY IN MALAYSIA

Construction sector is well known for its poor management system and it is mainly due to the involvement of large amount of paper works. The application of the Malaysia Standard, MS ISO 9001:2000 standard series has become a common trend among the organization in quality management issue. However, the implementation ofMS ISO 9001:2000 standard series in construction industry context in Malaysia is still a small issue compared to the others issue. The objectives of this research are to examine the awareness, level of the implementation and perception towards this implementation of MS ISO 9001:2000 QMS in construction industry context in Malaysia. Survey-based methodology was applied through this study. The population sample was focused on the MS ISO certified contractor firms and non MS ISO contractor firms in the Peninsular Malaysia. The sampling method concentrated on contractor firms of Class A, B and C. A field study has been executed and surveyed using questionnaire has been carried out. In total, 39 respondents replied the questionnaire. 90% of the respondents are aware with implementation of MS ISO 9001:2000. The perception and level of practices ofMS ISO 9001:2000 QMS were also identified using the Index Average. Most of the respondents agreed to the perception as given in the questionnaire and the practices of MS ISO 9001:2000 QMS are in high extend in their business routine. As for the conclusion, all the objectives of the research were achieved whereby the awareness, perception and level of practices were identified during the study. It is hoped that the study will contribute as a step towards enhancing the extension of construction work practices within MS ISO 9001:2000 QMS in Malaysia

Background-oriented schlieren (BOS) for scramjet inlet-isolator investigation

Background-oriented Schlieren (BOS) technique is a recently invented non-intrusive flow diagnostic method which has yet to be fully explored in its capabilities. In this paper, BOS technique has been applied for investigating the general flow field characteristics inside a generic scramjet inlet-isolator with Mach 5 flow. The difficulty in finding the delicate balance between measurement sensitivity and measurement area image focusing has been demonstrated. The differences between direct cross-correlation (DCC) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) raw data processing algorithm have also been demonstrated. As an exploratory study of BOS capability, this paper found that BOS is simple yet robust enough to be used to visualize complex flow in a scramjet inlet in hypersonic flow. However, in this case its quantitative data can be strongly affected by 3-dimensionality thus obscuring the density value with significant errors

Exploring the Possibility of Implementing Telecommuting at University Utara Malaysia

Global technology has quickly progressed to provide more accessible business modes of Communication. The image of the traditional workplace as a particular place to go to work is being replaced with employees working wherever they can be most efficient and productive, whether at home, on a plane, on the road, or a telework center. The availability of affordable technology has been one of the major contributors to the “any time, any place” telecommuting trend. The purpose of this study is investigate the possibility of the implementation of the teleworking at University Utara Malaysia (UUM), the suitable selection job criteria, the suitable technology needed to support this new mode of business, the employee perception of willingness to telecommute, and top management support, to investigate the possibility of a lecture job to be a telecommute, we adopt Jack Nilles Job task analysis, for the technology factor, data will be collected through content analysis, structured interview will be done with top management to determine their willingness to implement this program, and questionnaire will be used to identify the UUM lecturers willingness to telecommute. This study found that technology factor is available, people are willing to telecommnute, lecturer job is suitable, and management is agreeable, so people can enjoy telecommuting benefits if there is an established policy and regulations that allow them to telecommute