Recollecting Identity: Food, Culture, Space and Place in the Street Markets of Hong Kong

The research investigates the importance of culture and placemaking in defining food urbanism in Hong Kong with a culture at risk of disappearing. Considering current revitalization projects and the removal of local street markets, the research analyzes food urbanism through the lens of food and culture, in relationship to space and place. Focusing on the street markets and its disappearance over the years, the research looks at understanding food urbanism as a cultural structure. The project provides an insight to the establishment of street markets throughout history, placing importance on its relationship to the cultural and placemaking aspects of food urbanism

Linking theory and practice : the case of TESL trainee teachers / Siti Salina Ghazali and Lee Lai Fong

The purpose pf this study was to investigate the TESL trainee teachers; insights on the link between theory and practice. This study also sought to find out how they viewed the effectiveness of the teacher preparation programme in terms of preparing them for teaching secondary school students. The study involved 79 TESL Part 7 and 8 trainee teachers from the Faculty of Education, UiTM selected through purposive sampling procedure. This in-depth study adopted both quantitaive and qualititative methods to ensure a wide coverage of areas and detailed explanations pf those area be gathered

Money Attitude and Socio-Demographic Factors as Determinants of University Students’ Spending Behavior in Shah Alam, Malaysia

ABSTRACTNowadays, uncontrollable spending habit towards Malaysian young generations are becoming progressively. They have a tendency to have less value of money compared to the elder generations in spending their money. Since the cost of living in Malaysia has improved remarkably, the young generations enjoyed spending their money heavenly, therefore Malaysia faced changes in lifestyle and spending trend. This study proposes to investigate the relationship between money attitude and socio-demographic as determinants of college students’ spending behaviours. As such, the correlation between money attitude factors (power-prestige, distrust, retention-time and anxiety) and spending behaviours among Malaysian college students is a topic worthy of further exploration. At the same time, this study also attempts to explore whether college students’ spending behaviours are affected by their socio-demographic factors such as gender, age. The sample of this study consists of 176 students from three different universities in the Shah Alam area i.e University Selangor (UNISEL), University Management Science (MSU) and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UiTM). The regression analysis showed that there were only two factors of money attitude (power-prestige, and anxiety) that had a significant effect on spending behaviour among these universities’ students. However, from the analysis, it can be revealed that none of the socio-demographic factors had a significance (more than 0.05) towards the spending behaviour of the students. Thus, age (positive result) is the most influenced factor of the students’ spending behaviour. Consequently, several suggestions have been put forward and hoped that it will assist students in managing their fund effectivel

Real-time pre-placed marker-less square-ROI verification system based on contour-corner approach for breast augmentation

This paper aims to enhance the current contour and corner detection approach by applying smoothing and adaptive thresholding techniques to the stream input and then use subpixel corner detection to obtain better and more accurate interest point. There are two main steps involved in AR application, first - detect and extract local features and second – visualization and rendering. Our focus is the first part of the whole operation – features. We proposed marker-less approach as to avoid the needs to prepare the target environment and to make our approach more flexible. The proposed method starts with first getting an input from the real environment through a camera as visual sensor. On receiving an input image, the proposed system will process the image, finds and detects strong interest point from the ROI by applying enhanced contour-corner detection. From the ROI, features such as number of corners and vertices can be extracted and later can be used to determine a marker. For testing purposes, a mannequin as an input is used. Based on the experiment, the proposed method manage to capture the environment, convert captured frame into grey-scale image, detect corners and contours and also able to identify and verify a marker

An estimate of the chiral condensate from unquenched lattice QCD

Using the parameters in the chiral Lagrangian obtained by MILC from their unquenched lattice QCD calculations with 2+1 flavours of sea quarks, I estimate (2 GeV)/n_f = -(259 \pm 27 MeV)**3 in the MS_bar scheme. I compare this value to other determinations.Comment: 8 pages. No figures. Version published in Phys.Lett.B. No change in results, but some parts of the text changed. Additional references adde

Modulation Techniques for Biomedical Implanted Devices and Their Challenges

Implanted medical devices are very important electronic devices because of their usefulness in monitoring and diagnosis, safety and comfort for patients. Since 1950s, remarkable efforts have been undertaken for the development of bio-medical implanted and wireless telemetry bio-devices. Issues such as design of suitable modulation methods, use of power and monitoring devices, transfer energy from external to internal parts with high efficiency and high data rates and low power consumption all play an important role in the development of implantable devices. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on various modulation and demodulation techniques such as amplitude shift keying (ASK), frequency shift keying (FSK) and phase shift keying (PSK) of the existing wireless implanted devices. The details of specifications, including carrier frequency, CMOS size, data rate, power consumption and supply, chip area and application of the various modulation schemes of the implanted devices are investigated and summarized in the tables along with the corresponding key references. Current challenges and problems of the typical modulation applications of these technologies are illustrated with a brief suggestions and discussion for the progress of implanted device research in the future. It is observed that the prime requisites for the good quality of the implanted devices and their reliability are the energy transformation, data rate, CMOS size, power consumption and operation frequency. This review will hopefully lead to increasing efforts towards the development of low powered, high efficient, high data rate and reliable implanted devices

The Incidence and Clinical Implication of Sputum with Positive Acid-Fast Bacilli Smear But Negative in Mycobacterial Culture in a Tertiary Referral Hospital in South Korea

Although it is not rare to find sputum that is positive acid-fast bacilli (AFB) smear but subsequent culture fails to isolate mycobacteria in clinical practice, the incidence and clinical implication of those sputa from new patients has not been clearly elucidated. The aim of this study was to determine the incidence and clinical implication of sputum with positive AFB smear but negative in mycobacterial culture. All sputa that were positive AFB smear requested during diagnostic work up for new patients visiting Seoul National University Hospital from 1 January 2005 through 31 December 2006 were included. Sputa producing a positive AFB smear but negative mycobacterial culture were classified into one of four categories: laboratory failure to isolate mycobacteria, false positive AFB smear, pathogen may show a positive AFB smear other than mycobacteria, and indeterminate results. Out of 447 sputa with a positive AFB smear, 29 (6.5%) failed to culture any organism. Among these 29 sputa, 18 were caused by laboratory failure to isolate mycobacteria, six were false positive smears, and five indeterminate. Although most sputum with a positive AFB smear but negative culture could be classified as a laboratory failure, clinicians should consider the possibility of false positive AFB smear

Metaphoric drawing narrative career counselling: Teaching work value and career identity statuses via experiential learning method

Metaphoric cards as a tool in counselling sessions are getting more scholarly attention in the fields of career counselling and education. In general, metaphoric cards consist of visual image that depicted daily life events and human expressions which are used as an alternative form of expression other than verbal communication. This paper aims to introduce metaphorical drawing as the experiential learning method in teaching narrative career counselling course. This is a qualitative study consists of metaphorical drawing and written reflection with six participants by using thematic analysis research method. The metaphorical drawing results revealed that, two new themes had been emerged in the exploration of work value and identity status. The results showed that some but not all participants benefited from the metaphorical drawing session to fully express their identity statuses. However, the combination of written reflection and verbal explanation of the metaphorical drawing did help the participants to convey their identity concern. In conclusion, metaphorical drawing session could be adopted in counsellor education to promote more understanding of narrative counselling technique and also in teaching work value and career identity status. For future research, it is important to look into how metaphorical technique can be introduced to school students in understanding their career choices

BRCA2 polymorphic stop codon K3326X and the risk of breast, prostate, and ovarian cancers

Background: The K3326X variant in BRCA2 (BRCA2*c.9976A>T; p.Lys3326*; rs11571833) has been found to be associated with small increased risks of breast cancer. However, it is not clear to what extent linkage disequilibrium with fully pathogenic mutations might account for this association. There is scant information about the effect of K3326X in other hormone-related cancers. Methods: Using weighted logistic regression, we analyzed data from the large iCOGS study including 76 637 cancer case patients and 83 796 control patients to estimate odds ratios (ORw) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for K3326X variant carriers in relation to breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer risks, with weights defined as probability of not having a pathogenic BRCA2 variant. Using Cox proportional hazards modeling, we also examined the associations of K3326X with breast and ovarian cancer risks among 7183 BRCA1 variant carriers. All statistical tests were two-sided. Results: The K3326X variant was associated with breast (ORw = 1.28, 95% CI = 1.17 to 1.40, P = 5.9x10- 6) and invasive ovarian cancer (ORw = 1.26, 95% CI = 1.10 to 1.43, P = 3.8x10-3). These associations were stronger for serous ovarian cancer and for estrogen receptor–negative breast cancer (ORw = 1.46, 95% CI = 1.2 to 1.70, P = 3.4x10-5 and ORw = 1.50, 95% CI = 1.28 to 1.76, P = 4.1x10-5, respectively). For BRCA1 mutation carriers, there was a statistically significant inverse association of the K3326X variant with risk of ovarian cancer (HR = 0.43, 95% CI = 0.22 to 0.84, P = .013) but no association with breast cancer. No association with prostate cancer was observed. Conclusions: Our study provides evidence that the K3326X variant is associated with risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers independent of other pathogenic variants in BRCA2. Further studies are needed to determine the biological mechanism of action responsible for these associations

Anisotropy studies around the galactic centre at EeV energies with the Auger Observatory

Data from the Pierre Auger Observatory are analyzed to search for anisotropies near the direction of the Galactic Centre at EeV energies. The exposure of the surface array in this part of the sky is already significantly larger than that of the fore-runner experiments. Our results do not support previous findings of localized excesses in the AGASA and SUGAR data. We set an upper bound on a point-like flux of cosmic rays arriving from the Galactic Centre which excludes several scenarios predicting sources of EeV neutrons from Sagittarius $A$. Also the events detected simultaneously by the surface and fluorescence detectors (the `hybrid' data set), which have better pointing accuracy but are less numerous than those of the surface array alone, do not show any significant localized excess from this direction.Comment: Matches published versio