Using Multimedia Interactive Grammar to Enhance Possessive Pronouns Among Year 4 Pupils

This study was designed to improve the students' grammar specifically in possessive pronouns using Multimedia Interactive Grammar (MIG) as a teaching and learning strategy. The participants of the study were Year 4 pupils from a primary school and the researcher was the teacher who conducted the action research in the classroom and the cycle of the intervention had been done once. The data collected were tests, supported with interview and teacher's reflective journal. Improvement was shown based on the data obtained as there was an increase of scores in the second test compared to first test. Moreover, it was found that MIG was able to enhance pupils' understanding, motivation and promote fun learning in the classroom. The results of the study indicated pupils' positive behaviors and responses towards the use of MIG in learning grammar

Corrigendum: The presence of microplastics in commercial salts from different countries

This is the final version. Available from Springer Nature via the DOI in this recordThe article to which this is the corrigendum is in ORE at http://hdl.handle.net/10871/27394This corrects the article published in Scientific Reports Vol. 7, article 46173; published online: 06 April 2017; updated: 26 June 2017 DOI: 10.1038/srep46173

Inspection and Evaluation of a Bridge Deck Partially Reinforced With GFRP Rebars

The corrosion of steel can be a significant problem in bridge decks in which the reinforcing and prestressing steel are accessible to deicing salts and combinations of moisture, temperature and chlorides through cracks, leading to concrete deterioration and loss of serviceability. Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) rebars have emerged as one alternative to steel reinforcement in corrosive environments. The objective of this study is to evaluate the cracks formed on a bridge deck that is partially reinforced with glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) rebars. The bridge constructed in 1997 is in Bourbon County, KY, on US460 over the Rogers\u27 Creek. Its deck is partially reinforced with GFRP rebars in place of epoxy coated steel rebars. The bridge has been monitored for cracks over a period of two years from June 1998 to July 2000. The maximum measured crack width of 0.013 in (0.3 mm) in the GFRP reinforced section meets the maximum allowed by ACI (Section 10.6) and AASHTO (Section 8.16.8.4) specifications in steel reinforced structures for exterior exposure

The presence of microplastics in commercial salts from different countries

This is the final version of the article. Available from Springer Nature via the DOI in this record.The corrigendum to this article is in ORE at http://hdl.handle.net/10871/34751The occurrence of microplastics (MPs) in saltwater bodies is relatively well studied, but nothing is known about their presence in most of the commercial salts that are widely consumed by humans across the globe. Here, we extracted MP-like particles larger than 149 μm from 17 salt brands originating from 8 different countries followed by the identification of their polymer composition using micro-Raman spectroscopy. Microplastics were absent in one brand while others contained between 1 to 10 MPs/Kg of salt. Out of the 72 extracted particles, 41.6% were plastic polymers, 23.6% were pigments, 5.50% were amorphous carbon, and 29.1% remained unidentified. The particle size (mean ± SD) was 515 ± 171 μm. The most common plastic polymers were polypropylene (40.0%) and polyethylene (33.3%). Fragments were the primary form of MPs (63.8%) followed by filaments (25.6%) and films (10.6%). According to our results, the low level of anthropogenic particles intake from the salts (maximum 37 particles per individual per annum) warrants negligible health impacts. However, to better understand the health risks associated with salt consumption, further development in extraction protocols are needed to isolate anthropogenic particles smaller than 149 μm

Critical-Path Aware Scheduling for Latency Efficient Broadcast in Duty-Cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

Minimum latency scheduling has arisen as one of the most crucial problems for broadcasting in duty-cycled Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Typical solutions for the broadcast scheduling iteratively search for nodes able to transmit a message simultaneously. Other nodes are prevented from transmissions to ensure that there is no collision in a network. Such collision-preventions result in extra delays for a broadcast and may increase overall latency if the delays occur along critical paths of the network. To facilitate the broadcast latency minimization, we propose a novel approach, critical-path aware scheduling (CAS), which schedules transmissions with a preference of nodes in critical paths of a duty-cycled WSN. This paper presents two schemes employing CAS which produce collision-free and collision-tolerant broadcast schedules, respectively. The collision-free CAS scheme guarantees an approximation ratio of in terms of latency, where denotes the maximum node degree in a network. By allowing collision at noncritical nodes, the collision-tolerant CAS scheme reduces up to 10.2 percent broadcast latency compared with the collision-free ones while requiring additional transmissions for the noncritical nodes experiencing collisions. Simulation results show that broadcast latencies of the two proposed schemes are significantly shorter than those of the existing methods

A performance comparison of the contiguous allocation strategies in 3D mesh connected multicomputers

The performance of contiguous allocation strategies can be significantly affected by the distribution of job execution times. In this paper, the performance of the existing contiguous allocation strategies for 3D mesh multicomputers is re-visited in the context of heavy-tailed distributions (e.g., a Bounded Pareto distribution). The strategies are evaluated and compared using simulation experiments for both First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) and Shortest-Service-Demand (SSD) scheduling strategies under a variety of system loads and system sizes. The results show that the performance of the allocation strategies degrades considerably when job execution times follow a heavy-tailed distribution. Moreover, SSD copes much better than FCFS scheduling strategy in the presence of heavy-tailed job execution times. The results also show that the strategies that depend on a list of allocated sub-meshes for both allocation and deallocation have lower allocation overhead and deliver good system performance in terms of average turnaround time and mean system utilization

A Comparative Study Of The Psycho-Social Profile Of Drug Using And. Non-Drug Using. School Children.

Studies conducted by the National Drug Research Centre during 1976/1977 have shown that 11.5% of 16,166 school children surveyed have had some experience with the non-medical use of drugs and that a trend towards multiple drug use was becoming evident. In addition to this, epidemiological studies conducted by the Centre also showed that 30% of the addicts started using drugs before reaching the age of 19 (Navaratnam, 1981). In the same study, based on the data collected from the upper secondary schools in Penang State, it was found that 13.7% of the upper secondary school students aged 16 to 18 years were drug users