English Teaching Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic: Teacher Issues and Challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the globe and every strata of community. Effects can be seen in almost all sectors, education being one of the sectors which was greatly impacted. UNICEF cited a number of 1.6 billion children of schooling age affected by the pandemic. Countries all over the world including Malaysia started working on alternatives to ensure that the learning of schooling children continues throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The approach chosen by the Malaysian Ministry of Education was to disseminate classes and lessons via online platforms otherwise known as the practice of e-learning. With existing issues of access and gaps in achievement between the rural and urban communities it was a point of interest to investigate how teachers in different contexts dealt with the e-learning initiative. In this study, the aim was to measure the attitude of the teacher, their level of technological literacy and the challenges that they face despite of their context. The study was conducted as an online survey involving all the English Teachers in the Limbang district with the total population of English teachers amounting to 103. The return rate of the survey generated 50 responses and the gaps in the research were bridged with a protocoled focus group discussion with 5 teachers. This study echoed the findings of previous studies and highlights pertinent issues which must be dealt with before e-learning can be a strong and viable alternative learning mode for Malaysians

Context-aware Status Updating: Wireless Scheduling for Maximizing Situational Awareness in Safety-critical Systems

In this study, we investigate a context-aware status updating system consisting of multiple sensor-estimator pairs. A centralized monitor pulls status updates from multiple sensors that are monitoring several safety-critical situations (e.g., carbon monoxide density in forest fire detection, machine safety in industrial automation, and road safety). Based on the received sensor updates, multiple estimators determine the current safety-critical situations. Due to transmission errors and limited communication resources, the sensor updates may not be timely, resulting in the possibility of misunderstanding the current situation. In particular, if a dangerous situation is misinterpreted as safe, the safety risk is high. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that quantifies the penalty due to the unawareness of a potentially dangerous situation. This situation-unaware penalty function depends on two key factors: the Age of Information (AoI) and the observed signal value. For optimal estimators, we provide an information-theoretic bound of the penalty function that evaluates the fundamental performance limit of the system. To minimize the penalty, we study a pull-based multi-sensor, multi-channel transmission scheduling problem. Our analysis reveals that for optimal estimators, it is always beneficial to keep the channels busy. Due to communication resource constraints, the scheduling problem can be modelled as a Restless Multi-armed Bandit (RMAB) problem. By utilizing relaxation and Lagrangian decomposition of the RMAB, we provide a low-complexity scheduling algorithm which is asymptotically optimal. Our results hold for both reliable and unreliable channels. Numerical evidence shows that our scheduling policy can achieve up to 100 times performance gain over periodic updating and up to 10 times over randomized policy.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, part of this manuscript has been accepted by IEEE MILCOM 2023 Workshop on QuAVo

Role of ICT in Higher Educational Administration in Uganda

The study was on the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in higher educational administration in Uganda. The study population comprised of four universities. Convenience sampling was used to obtain the sample size of 48 admininistrators from the population. The study aimed at identifying the roles of ICT in higher educational administration and a survey method was employed to investigate the study. Related literatures were reviewed from journals and past researches, data was collected using a well designed and validated questionnaire, the data was statistically analyzed and interpreted using weighted average and chi square test. The findings of this study revealed that ICT greatly enhanced educational administrator’s performance through improving cross communication at the managerial level, quick access to needed information, provides media and enhances information accuracy, analyzing data fast and effectively, their knowledge and skills a networked platform for collaborative work, motivates administrators through access to new information, for research purposes and enhances research skills of administrators, evaluation of staff and students is made easier, helps administrators in result processing, analyzes data quickly and accurately, reduces on workload, good and secure storage of information, improves coordination of tasks and activities. Therefore, the findings reveal that the proprietors of universities should procure more ICT facilities and equipment in order to ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness in all dimensions of educational administration

Practice of lifelong learning in technical and vocational education: A case of Islamic University of Technology

In a time of continuous economic, social and technological change, skills and knowledge become quickly out-of-date. People who have not been able to benefit from formal education and training must be given opportunities to acquire new skills and knowledge that will give them a second chance in life and at work. Providing all individuals with learning opportunities throughout their lives is an ambitious but necessary undertaking. An all- inclusive lifelong learning system calls for the mobilization of increased public and private resources for education and training and for providing individuals and enterprises with the incentives to invest in meeting their learning and skills development needs. This paper attempts to explore and present about Lifelong Learning in Technical and Vocational Education and its practice in Islamic University of Technology (IUT) which has a lot offer to the OIC member states and the world of work because it is responsive, flexible, promotes exchanges of ideas and it is set up in such a way that fosters teamwork as well as individual achievement and the immediate transfer of skills in the work setting that are playing a major role in the field of life long learning for the OIC member states

Personal non-commercial use only

ABSTRACT. Autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD) is an inflammatory thyroiditis that in some cases is characterized by lymphocytic infiltration of the thyroid gland, also referred to as chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis or Hashimoto thyroiditis. Hashimoto thyroiditis is one of the commonest causes of hypothyroidism. Hypothyroidism has been associated with osteoarthritis (OA) and inflammatory forms of arthritis and with several well defined connective tissue diseases, which in turn can cause arthritis. The presence of arthritis in patients with AITD with normal thyroid function is now being increasingly recognized. There is also considerable evidence to suggest that AITD is highly associated with fibromyalgia syndrome. We review the current literature on the rheumatologic manifestations of AITD and describe the features in its presentation that set it apart from other forms of autoimmune arthritis. (J Rheumatol First Release April 15 2012; doi:3899/jrheum.120022

Barriers and facilitators to implementing telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative analysis of interviews with cystic fibrosis care team members.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic forced cystic fibrosis (CF) care programs to rapidly shift from in-person care delivery to telehealth. Our objective was to provide a qualitative exploration of facilitators and barriers to: 1) implementing high-quality telehealth and 2) navigating reimbursement for telehealth services. METHODS: We used data from the 2020 State of Care CF Program Survey (n=286 U.S. care programs) administered in August-September to identify two cohorts of programs, with variation in telehealth quality (n=12 programs) and reimbursement (n=8 programs). We conducted focus groups and semi-structured interviews with CF program directors and coordinators in December 2020, approximately 9 months from onset of the pandemic. We used the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research to identify facilitators and barriers of implementation, and inductive thematic analysis to identify facilitators and barriers of reimbursement. RESULTS: Factors differentiating programs with greater and lower perceived telehealth quality included telehealth characteristics (perceived advantage over in-person care, cost, platform quality); external influences (needs and resources of those served by the CF program), characteristics of the CF program (compatibility with workflows, relative priority, available resources); characteristics of team members (individual stage of change), and processes for implementation (engaging patients and teams). Reimbursement barriers included documentation to optimize billing; reimbursement of multi-disciplinary team members, remote monitoring, and telephone-only telehealth; and lower volume of patients. CONCLUSIONS: A number of factors are associated with successful implementation and reimbursement of telehealth. Future efforts should provide guidance and incentives that support telehealth delivery and infrastructure, share best practices across CF programs, and remove barriers

Pyrolysis oil upgrading in high conversions using sub- and supercritical water above 400°C

The upgrading of pyrolysis oil to bio-fuel was investigated using sub- and supercritical water at 410 and 450 °C, with a high mass ratio of water to pyrolysis oil to ascertain the maximum yields that could be achieved. The results indicate that conversions increased with increasing pyrolysis oil to water mass ratio at high water ratio under supercritical water conditions at 410 °C, gave the highest products conversion of ∼91 wt.%, with 28 wt.% heavy oil recovered, ∼23 wt.% gas yield, 27 wt.% water generated and approximately 13–14 wt.% of light oil produced. Similar product conversion was obtained using biomass as a feedstock with slightly higher water mass ratio added into the reactor (R1:15), and slightly lower heavy oil yield was recovered (21 wt.%). Gas generation was observed to reach a maximum and then level off at ∼22–23 wt.% in near-supercritical water and supercritical water experiments at 410 °C. No further cracking of the heavy oil was observed for experiments at 450 °C, and an increase of 10 wt.% in the gas yield was observed when the temperature was increased to 450 °C (33 wt.%) from 410 °C (23 wt.%) with ∼7 wt.% of light oil produced and approximately 24 wt.% of water generated. The oxygen contents of the heavy oil recovered were ∼15–16% (for 410 and 450 °C), with H/C atomic values of 1.1. Similar overall conversions were achieved using tetralin with much lower solvent to oil ratios were needed and the liquid products had a slightly lower oxygen content (14%). The estimated hydrogen from water was estimated as ca. 0.3% at 410 and 450 °C in high conversions of pyrolysis oil experiments, and experiments with tetralin/1-methyl naphthalene provide evidence that a small amount of hydrogen was sufficient to achieve high product conversion, giving an increase of H element content from 7.0% to 7.3%

Association of in Utero Organophosphate Pesticide Exposure and Fetal Growth and Length of Gestation in an Agricultural Population

Although pesticide use is widespread, little is known about potential adverse health effects of in utero exposure. We investigated the effects of organophosphate pesticide exposure during pregnancy on fetal growth and gestational duration in a cohort of low-income, Latina women living in an agricultural community in the Salinas Valley, California. We measured nonspecific metabolites of organophosphate pesticides (dimethyl and diethyl phosphates) and metabolites specific to malathion (malathion dicarboxylic acid), chlorpyrifos [O,O-diethyl O-(3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridinyl) phosphoro-thioate], and parathion (4-nitrophenol) in maternal urine collected twice during pregnancy. We also measured levels of cholinesterase in whole blood and butyryl cholinesterase in plasma in maternal and umbilical cord blood. We failed to demonstrate an adverse relationship between fetal growth and any measure of in utero organophosphate pesticide exposure. In fact, we found increases in body length and head circumference associated with some exposure measures. However, we did find decreases in gestational duration associated with two measures of in utero pesticide exposure: urinary dimethyl phosphate metabolites [β(adjusted) = −0.41 weeks per log(10) unit increase; 95% confidence interval (CI), (−)0.75–(−)0.02; p = 0.02], which reflect exposure to dimethyl organophosphate compounds such as malathion, and umbilical cord cholinesterase (β(adjusted) = 0.34 weeks per unit increase; 95% CI, 0.13–0.55; p = 0.001). Shortened gestational duration was most clearly related to increasing exposure levels in the latter part of pregnancy. These associations with gestational age may be biologically plausible given that organophosphate pesticides depress cholinesterase and acetylcholine stimulates contraction of the uterus. However, despite these observed associations, the rate of preterm delivery in this population (6.4%) was lower than in a U.S. reference population

Inherited biotic protection in a Neotropical pioneer plant

Chelonanthus alatus is a bat-pollinated, pioneer Gentianaceae that clusters in patches where still-standing, dried-out stems are interspersed among live individuals. Flowers bear circum-floral nectaries (CFNs) that are attractive to ants, and seed dispersal is both barochorous and anemochorous. Although, in this study, live individuals never sheltered ant colonies, dried-out hollow stems - that can remain standing for 2 years - did. Workers from species nesting in dried-out stems as well as from ground-nesting species exploited the CFNs of live C. alatus individuals in the same patches during the daytime, but were absent at night (when bat pollination occurs) on 60.5% of the plants. By visiting the CFNs, the ants indirectly protect the flowers - but not the plant foliage - from herbivorous insects. We show that this protection is provided mostly by species nesting in dried-out stems, predominantly Pseudomyrmex gracilis. That dried-out stems remain standing for years and are regularly replaced results in an opportunistic, but stable association where colonies are sheltered by one generation of dead C. alatus while the live individuals nearby, belonging to the next generation, provide them with nectar; in turn, the ants protect their flowers from herbivores. We suggest that the investment in wood by C. alatus individuals permitting stillstanding, dried-out stems to shelter ant colonies constitutes an extended phenotype because foraging workers protect the flowers of live individuals in the same patch. Also, through this process these dried-out stems indirectly favor the reproduction (and so the fitness) of the next generation including both their own offspring and that of their siblings, alladding up to a potential case of inclusive fitness in plants