Combat New Normal Life and Remote Emergency Learning During Pandemic Crisis: A Perspective from Public Universities Students

The Bangladeshi education system has resorted to a virtual emergency mode of learning in order to sustain teaching and learning practices in educational institutions, providing a quick fix to the challenges. From the perspective of public university students, the researcher employed a qualitative study approach to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on tertiary education in Bangladesh. The primary data was collected via a well-designed online questionnaire, which was completed by 150 persons. Public universities in Bangladesh use virtual platforms to deliver online classes. University facilities and infrastructure, a robust national data infrastructure, appropriate computer devices, and excellent and affordable data services for students are all required for online instruction. The goal of the study is to determine the practicality and applicability of online education, as well as how students deal with the risk of Covid-19. This research identified a number of unanticipated disruptions in students' learning, as well as a drop in excitement and study hours, difficulty with student-teacher interactions, and a variety of physical, emotional, and financial issues associated to academic studies. According to the research, the most typically mentioned issues by students include network and facility-related hurdles, as well as personal and socio-psychological challenges. A lack of technological infrastructure, a high cost of internet, a slow internet connection, a family's financial difficulty, and student mental strain were also recognized as important impediments to online education by the majority of students. The study presented several recommendations to policymakers based on the findings to help them overcome the challenges of online classrooms in the future. Keywords: Emergency virtual learning, online class, network, psychological stress, academic fear, Covid-19, Tertiary level. DOI: 10.7176/JEP/12-24-10 Publication date:August 31st 202

農業部門と非農業部門の発展に関する経済地理学的分析: バングラデッシュの農村地帯に関する事例研究

公共政策プログラム / Public Policy Program政策研究大学院大学 / National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies論文審査委員: 大塚 啓二郎（主査）, Kaliappa P. Kalirajan, Wade Pfau, Jonna P. Estudillo, 藤田 幸一（京都大学

Evaluation of Traffic Speed Deflectometer for Pavement Structural Evaluation in Louisiana

Many state agencies have recognized the importance of incorporating pavement structural conditions in the selection of maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) strategies along with functional indices. To measure in-service pavement structural capacity, surface deflection under a defined load has been typically used. The Rolling Wheel Deflectometer (RWD) and Traffic Speed Deflectometer (TSD) have emerged as continuous pavement deflection-measuring devices as they operate at traffic speed and reduces lane closure and user delays. The research objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of using TSD measurements at the network-level for pavement conditions structural evaluation in Louisiana. To achieve the objectives of the study, TSD and Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) measurements were collected in District 05 of Louisiana and data were available from experimental programs conducted at the MnROAD research test facility and in Idaho. TSD measurements were compared with FWD deflection measurements to evaluate the level of agreement and difference between the two devices. Based on this evaluation, an SN predictive model was developed and validated to assess the structural conditions of in-service pavements based on TSD measurements. The model was then used to identify structurally sound and structurally deficient in-service pavements. This study also assessed whether the use of surface indices only or the declining rates of these indices to identify structurally damaged sections is feasible instead of relying on RWD and TSD estimated pavement structural indices. Based on the results of the analysis, it is concluded that the deflection reported by both FWD and TSD for the same locations are statistically different, which was expected given the differences in loading characteristics and load type between the two devices. It is also concluded that surface roughness has a notable effect on the TSD field measured deflections. The present study successfully developed and validated a model to predict in-service SN based on TSD deflections at 0.01-mile intervals of a road section. Core samples showed that the sections that were predicted to be structurally deficient from the model suffered from asphalt stripping and debonding problems. Yet, some of these sections were in very good conditions according to their functional indices. Findings suggest that structural deficiency, rates of deterioration, and surface indices were correlated to a certain extent. Yet, surface indices cannot be used as a reliable predictor of structural capacity. For RWD tested sections, the most accurate surface index, which was the alligator cracking surface index, erroneously identified 35% of structurally sound sections as structurally deficient and 51.5% of structurally deficient sections as structurally sound. Similar results were also obtained for the TSD tested sections. The cost implication associated with misinterpreted sections from functional indices was investigated. The incorporation of structural indices is expected to provide significant savings to state agencies

Design of Multi-Layered Lenses for Resolusion Enhancement

Lenses are important optical device having numerous applications in our day-to-day life. As the conventional lenses, we use concave or convex lenses. These lenses are made with natural materials and the image quality imperfect. Furthermore, they are bulky, and design is complex. Consequently, mass production is difficult. The shapes of entrance and exit faces of lenses has impact on its imaging capability. The Lens material also play a vital role for reconstructing the image. Flat lenses can be considered as a good alternative of the conventional lenses. One of the advantages of this Flat lenses is that it can restore both the propagating and evanescent waves in the image plane. The conventional lenses only restore the information contained by the propagating waves and the evanescent waves that contains small subwavelength information of the object decays in the image plane. Flat Lenses are preferable in terms of image quality

Social Media and Electoral Campaigns: A Study of 2013 General Elections in Punjab

Social Media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, IMO, Twitter and Viber have become famous social interaction forums among all age groups in Pakistan. Social media websites remained the most common platform for the exchange of political ideas and political awareness, consequently influencing political mobilization and bringing change in the political setup of Punjab. This study evaluates the impact of social media on molding the behaviors of voters during the general elections in 2013.The aim was to quantify how social media websites affected political mobilization and altered the Pakistani political setup. The findings are based on a survey conducted amongst the population of Punjab belonging to different age groups, gender, profession, qualification, and localities. Significant correlations were found among different variables i.e. gender, age, profession and locality of the participants. This paper suggests that social media has affected the young population most in Pakistan and helped alter the politicalbehavior of voters

Ultra-Wideband Radar-Based Activity Recognition Using Deep Learning

With recent advances in the field of sensing, it has become possible to build better assistive technologies. This enables the strengthening of eldercare with regard to daily routines and the provision of personalised care to users. For instance, it is possible to detect a person’s behaviour based on wearable or ambient sensors; however, it is difficult for users to wear devices 24/7, as they would have to be recharged regularly because of their energy consumption. Similarly, although cameras have been widely used as ambient sensors, they carry the risk of breaching users’ privacy. This paper presents a novel sensing approach based on deep learning for human activity recognition using a non-wearable ultra-wideband (UWB) radar sensor. UWB sensors protect privacy better than RGB cameras because they do not collect visual data. In this study, UWB sensors were mounted on a mobile robot to monitor and observe subjects from a specific distance (namely, 1.5–2.0 m). Initially, data were collected in a lab environment for five different human activities. Subsequently, the data were used to train a model using the state-of-the-art deep learning approach, namely long short-term memory (LSTM). Conventional training approaches were also tested to validate the superiority of LSTM. As a UWB sensor collects many data points in a single frame, enhanced discriminant analysis was used to reduce the dimensions of the features through application of principal component analysis to the raw dataset, followed by linear discriminant analysis. The enhanced discriminant features were fed into the LSTMs. Finally, the trained model was tested using new inputs. The proposed LSTM-based activity recognition approach performed better than conventional approaches, with an accuracy of 99.6%. We applied 5-fold cross-validation to test our approach. We also validated our approach on publically available dataset. The proposed method can be applied in many prominent fields, including human–robot interaction for various practical applications, such as mobile robots for eldercare.publishedVersio

バングラデシュ ２ヒンシュ ノ コムギ ノ セイチョウ、 シュウリョウ オヨビ ハ ノ ガス コウカン ソクド ニ タイスル オゾン ト エンガイ ノ タンドク オヨビ フクゴウ エイキョウ ニ カンスル ジッケンテキ ケンキュウ

博士（農学)東京農工大

Expressions of Grief and Change in the Poetry Projects of Bereaved VCU Students

A large proportion of college students, (40%) have experienced the death of someone close to them (Holland, Currier, & Neimeyer, 2006), but little is known about how college students experience and cope with loss. Expressive writing has been posited as a method for dealing with traumatic experiences (Pennebaker, 1997), but its use with the bereaved has been called into question (Stroebe, Schut, & Stroebe, 2006). A stress management course at VCU allows students to complete loss-focused writing exercises, including acrostic “alphabet poems” for course credit. The current study aims to test the hypothesis that stages of grief (based on Rando’s (1993) popular “six R’s” theory) are expressed by college students in these writing exercises. A further hypothesis was that student would show progress through the stages from the beginning of their exercises to the end. Eighty undergraduate students completed a writing assignment. Students were allowed to focus their writing efforts on any type of loss experience, not just a loss due to the death of a loved one. Of these, 56 students (mean age: 21.9 years; 80% female; 33.9% African American, 32.1% Caucasian, 12.5% Asian and Latino, respectively) completed an end-of-semester feedback survey regarding the usefulness of these exercises (a 70% return rate), and 48 produced code-able alphabet poem writing projects. Two teams of two undergraduate students are independently coding the alphabet poems using a coding scheme based on Rando’s “six R’s” theory of grief. Rando’s theory suggests that the bereaved complete six processes while grieving: Recognizing the loss, reacting to it, recollecting/reexperiencing it, and finally relinquishing it, readjusting to the outside world, and reinvesting in new relationships. As we read through each poem, we analyze each line or set of lines and decide whether or not it represents one of the stages. We then compare our codes with our teammate for agreement, and have a graduate student supervisor act as tie-breaker. So far, we have found many examples emotions and of Rando’s six stages in each of the poems we have coded. Recognizing the loss, reacting to it (with negative and positive emotions) and recollecting the loss are the most common stages expressed in the poems coded so far. Most of the poems show some kind of a change in stage expression by the end of the poem. The last two stages showed up in several of the poems analyzed. We have also noted that poems tend to progress from showing the first few stages in the first half, and the last three stages in the second half of each poem. These findings suggest that qualitative analysis of expressive and creative writing processes can be a useful window into the college student grieving process. Future studies should examine how poems that progress through all or most of the stages differ from those that do not on outcomes such as grief severity.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/uresposters/1059/thumbnail.jp