A finite difference solution to a mixed boundary value problem for Laplace's equation

Finite difference solution to mixed boundary value problem for Laplace equatio

Relationship between Organisational Roles and Communication Climate with Burnout among Teachers in Selected Secondary Schools in Klang District

This study was conducted to determine the extent of burnout experienced by teachers in secondary schools in Klang District as well as to examine the relationship between organisational communication factors and burnout. Simple random sampling was used to select three secondary schools from three different clusters of schools in the Klang District. A total of 136 teachers from these three schools participated in this study. The study used self-administered questionnaires as the research instrument. The data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Inferential statistics such as Pearson Correlation and T -test were used to answer the research questions and test the hypotheses. A significance level of 0.05 was used. This study discovered that the teachers experienced moderate level of burnout. The perceived organisational roles and communication climate among teachers within the selected schools were generally moderate. Organisational roles were the mam source of burnout. These stressors include role conflict and role ambiguity. Non-conducive communication climate also contributed toward burnout. Burnout had significant positive relationship with organisational roles and significant negative relationship with communication climate respectively. This study recommended that organisational roles and communication climate should be given serious attention by the school administration whereby interaction in the workplace should enhance conducive communication climate and reduce the extent of role conflict and role ambiguity experienced by teachers. The administrators should share their ideas, suggestions and decisions through open discussions and agreement with teachers in order to help reduce role conflict and role ambiguity among teachers. There is a need for administrators to provide social support to teachers to buffer the negative effects of role conflict and role ambiguity on job satisfaction in order to tackle the problem of burnout among teachers. It is recommended that future research on burnout focus on teachers In different settings such as preschools, primary schools and secondary schools across the country. Teachers from other types of schools such as smart schools, vocational schools and boarding schools may also be focused. A comparative study of burnout among teachers from Malay, Chinese and Tamil primary schools can be conducted in order to better understand the occurrence of the phenomena of burnout. Burnout studies can also be conducted using interviews and observation methods besides administering questionnaires

Credit Spread Dynamics: Evidence from Latin America

This paper examines the behaviour of credit spreads on key sovereign issuers from the Latin American region, which accounts for more than one third of international bond issues by developing, or emerging, markets. Since the late 1990s, credit spreads on Latin American issues have declined broadly inline with those in other emerging markets. Recent empirical analysis has explained this phenomenon by identifying critical macroeconomic factors, including the reduction in systematic risk in individual markets, although the structural models from the theoretical finance literature also predict the importance of key default and interest rate variables. This contribution adds to the understanding of these issues by investigating the application of structural models to the Latin American setting, one historically characterized by excessive volatility and susceptibility to episodes of default.credit spreads, long-run dynamics, Latin America, sovereign bonds, cointegration

The ethnographic descriptions of Indonesian domestic workers in selected Malaysian middle class homes: case study in Klang, Selangor

Migrant workers began flooding the labour market of the country since the Malaysian economy achieved rapid growth rates, particularly in the late 1980s. The transition of change towards becoming an industrial country has also changed the family system in Malaysia. These changes have led to a new pattern of life among women to go out to work. This increased female participation in the workforce together with the expansion of the middle class households, led to an immediately heightened demand for migrant domestic workers in Malaysia towards the end of 20th century. Most of the demand for live-in maids is being met from neighbouring Indonesia. Though maids are foreigners and considered as strangers, they are accepted as a part of the households by the host families. Naturally, these maids bring along their cultural values, norms and beliefs into the Malaysian homes of different ethnicities. In the process of communication and interaction, they will experience cultural differences. Therefore, it is the intention of this paper to highlight the cross-cultural experiences of Indonesian maids as well as the host families in the process of adaptation within the households specifically in the aspect of cooking and food preparation. Fifteen local families who employed Indonesian maids in their homes were interviewed intensively to obtain responses for this study. In this paper, the researcher hopes to provide insights that both the employers’ families and their maids do influence each other culturally within the household context which lead to different degree of social adjustment process and eventually establish various patterns of cross cultural relationship between them

Characteristics of positive cloud to ground flashes in Malaysia and correlation with cloud top height

Positive cloud to ground (CG) flashes lowers positive charges from cloud to ground. Positive CG grasps more attention since they are highly allied with severe thunderstorms. Positive CG is known to account only approximately 10% out of all CG flashes. The positive CG can be compared with negative CG, IC (intra cloud) and NBE (narrow bipolar event) flashes. The experimental setup to capture the electric field produced by the lightning flashes has taken place at UTeM Melaka. The measurement setup consists of 2 parallel plates, buffer circuit, antenna, high speed camera, GPS, Picoscope digitizer, and computer. The NBE, preliminary breakdown pulses, and first return stroke are included in this process. From the recorded data, very few positive CG have been captured. This is because the occurrence of positive CG is very less in low latitude countries due to the absence or very less anvil shape of the clouds. It is found that the occurrence of positive CG is very less about which is approximately 1.275% by average in two days and the cloud top height is about 13km to 14 km during the occurrence of positive CG

THE CREDIT RISK DYNAMICS OF INTERNATIONAL BONDS

The objective of this paper is to test how market-determined local-, global- and USbased factors explain the behaviour of Indonesian credit spreads. Using a specific asset class of bonds issued in the international market by the Indonesian government, this paper provides evidence confirming the importance of major local and global macroeconomic variables in pricing risky debt issued by Indonesia. Using US dollar– denominated bonds ranging from shorter- to longer-maturity groups, this study provides insights into the role of these determinants in the pricing process. Given the implications for pricing and risk management, the evidence from this study is important for investors, policymakers, and issuers

RDF data evolution: efficient detection and semantic representation of changes

ABSTRACT Many RDF data sources are constantly changing for both data and vocabulary (ontology) levels. Many integration tasks are impacted by these changes. In this context, it is important to develop approaches to detect and represent these changes. Many studies have focused on the detection, the representation and the management of changes at the ontology level. In this paper, we present an approach which allows to detect and represent elementary and complex changes that can be detected when we focus only on the data level. A first experiment was conducted on different versions of DBpedia

Evidence of price discovery on the Indonesian stock exchange

The Indonesian stock market is emerging and very little is known about price discovery mechanisms. This paper addresses this research gap by compiling and utilizing a unique stock-level dataset (consisting of 342 stocks) to examine existence and behaviour of price discovery processes. Using the Indonesian sectoral spot price index, and the Bloomberg Markit iTraxx Asia and the CDX high yield index, we test for price discovery. Our findings suggest that pricing behaviour on Indonesian stock exchange is contributed by the credit risk market. We also note that our findings are robust to a different measure of credit risk

Single-nucleotide polymorphism, linkage disequilibrium and geographic structure in the malaria parasite Plasmodium vivax: prospects for genome-wide association studies

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The ideal malaria parasite populations for initial mapping of genomic regions contributing to phenotypes such as drug resistance and virulence, through genome-wide association studies, are those with high genetic diversity, allowing for numerous informative markers, and rare meiotic recombination, allowing for strong linkage disequilibrium (LD) between markers and phenotype-determining loci. However, levels of genetic diversity and LD in field populations of the major human malaria parasite <it>P. vivax </it>remain little characterized.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We examined single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and LD patterns across a 100-kb chromosome segment of <it>P. vivax </it>in 238 field isolates from areas of low to moderate malaria endemicity in South America and Asia, where LD tends to be more extensive than in holoendemic populations, and in two monkey-adapted strains (Salvador-I, from El Salvador, and Belem, from Brazil). We found varying levels of SNP diversity and LD across populations, with the highest diversity and strongest LD in the area of lowest malaria transmission. We found several clusters of contiguous markers with rare meiotic recombination and characterized a relatively conserved haplotype structure among populations, suggesting the existence of recombination hotspots in the genome region analyzed. Both silent and nonsynonymous SNPs revealed substantial between-population differentiation, which accounted for ~40% of the overall genetic diversity observed. Although parasites clustered according to their continental origin, we found evidence for substructure within the Brazilian population of <it>P. vivax</it>. We also explored between-population differentiation patterns revealed by loci putatively affected by natural selection and found marked geographic variation in frequencies of nucleotide substitutions at the <it>pvmdr-1 </it>locus, putatively associated with drug resistance.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These findings support the feasibility of genome-wide association studies in carefully selected populations of <it>P. vivax</it>, using relatively low densities of markers, but underscore the risk of false positives caused by population structure at both local and regional levels.</p> <p>See commentary: <url>http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/8/90</url></p

A numerical study of 2D integrated RBFNs incorporating Cartesian grids for solving 2D elliptic differential problems

This article reports a numerical discretization scheme, based on two-dimensional integrated radial-basis-function networks (2D-IRBFNs) and rectangular grids, for solving second-order elliptic partial differential equations defined on 2D nonrectangular domains. Unlike finite-difference and 1D-IRBFN Cartesian-grid techniques, the present discretization method is based on an approximation scheme that allows the field variable and its derivatives to be evaluated anywhere within the domain and on the boundaries, regardless of the shape of the problem domain. We discuss the following two particular strengths, which the proposed Cartesian-grid-based procedure possesses, namely (i) the implementation of Neumann boundary conditions on irregular boundaries and (ii) the use of high-order integration schemes to evaluate flux integrals arising from a control-volume discretization on irregular domains. A new preconditioning scheme is suggested to improve the 2D-IRBFN matrix condition number. Good accuracy and high-order convergence solutions are obtained