What influences students to choose the elementary education major : the case of Cyprus

The purpose of this study was to identify and compare the factors that have motivated third and fourth year students at the University of Cyprus to choose the elementary school teaching profession. The sample consisted of 176 students that were studying elementary education during the Fall of 1995. The questionnaire was administered to all students that were enrolled in certain elementary education classes which were selected randomly. Responses to the questionnaire items were factored using the principal components analysis with varimax rotation. Six factors were retained and they accounted/or 63.3 percent of the variance. The first factor was accounted for 18.3 percent of the variance in the six factor solution. Items in this factor with loadings greater than 0.50 concerned the students' ideas about: love of teaching, love of the teaching / learning process, love of working with young children, and inborn talent for teaching. This factor was called 'internal motives'. The second/actor accounted for 15.3 percent of the variance and included items describing vacations, immediate employment, job possibilities, secure job, and fringe benefits, and was called 'job benefits'. The third factor accounted for 9.7 percent of the variance and was called 'status of the profession'. The fourth factor accounted for 8.3 percent of the variance and was called 'relatives' influences'. The fifth and sixth factor accounted for 6.4 and 5.3 per.cent of the variance respectively and were called 'external motives' and 'teacher influence'.peer-reviewe

Performance evaluation of flooding in MANETs in the presence of multi-broadcast traffic

Broadcasting has many important uses and several mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) protocols assume the availability of an underlying broadcast service. Applications, which make use of broadcasting, include LAN emulation, paging a particular node. However, broadcasting induces what is known as the "broadcast storm problem" which causes severe degradation in network performance, due to excessive redundant retransmission, collision, and contention. Although probabilistic flooding has been one of the earliest suggested approaches to broadcasting. There has not been so far any attempt to analyse its performance behaviour in MANETs. This paper investigates using extensive ns-2 simulations the effects of a number of important parameters in a MANET, including node speed, pause time and, traffic load, on the performance of probabilistic flooding. The results reveal that while these parameters have a critical impact on the reachability achieved by probabilistic flooding, they have relatively a lower effect on the number of saved rebroadcast packets

Renormalization-group improved fully differential cross sections for top pair production

We extend approximate next-to-next-to-leading order results for top-pair production to include the semi-leptonic decays of top quarks in the narrow-width approximation. The new hard-scattering kernels are implemented in a fully differential parton-level Monte Carlo that allows for the study of any IR-safe observable constructed from the momenta of the decay products of the top. Our best predictions are given by approximate NNLO corrections in the production matched to a fixed order calculation with NLO corrections in both the production and decay subprocesses. Being fully differential enables us to make comparisons between approximate results derived via different (PIM and 1PI) kinematics for arbitrary distributions. These comparisons reveal that the renormalization-group framework, from which the approximate results are derived, is rather robust in the sense that applying a realistic error estimate allows us to obtain a reliable prediction with a reduced theoretical error for generic observables and analysis cuts

Probing the top-quark width through ratios of resonance contributions of e+e−→W+W−bbˉe^+e^-\rightarrow W^+W^-b\bar{b}

We exploit offshell regions in the process $e^+e^-\rightarrow W^+W^-b\bar{b}$ to gain access to the top-quark width. Working at next-to-leading order in QCD we show that carefully selected ratios of offshell regions to onshell regions in the reconstructed top and antitop invariant mass spectra are, \emph{independently} of the coupling $g_{tbW}$, sensitive to the top-quark width. We explore this approach for different centre of mass energies and initial-state beam polarisations at $e^+e^-$ colliders and briefly comment on the applicability of this method for a measurement of the top-quark width at the LHC.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures, 2 table

Resummation and Matching of bb-quark Mass Effects in bbˉHb\bar{b}H Production

We use a systematic effective field theory setup to derive the $b\bar{b}H$ production cross section. Our result combines the merits of both fixed 4-flavor and 5-flavor schemes. It contains the full 4-flavor result, including the exact dependence on the $b$-quark mass, and improves it with a resummation of collinear logarithms of $m_b/m_H$. In the massless limit, it corresponds to a reorganized 5-flavor result. While we focus on $b\bar{b}H$ production, our method applies to generic heavy-quark initiated processes at hadron colliders. Our setup resembles the variable flavor number schemes known from heavy-flavor production in deep-inelastic scattering, but also differs in some key aspects. Most importantly, the effective $b$-quark PDF appears as part of the perturbative expansion of the final result where it effectively counts as an $O(\alpha_s)$ object. The transition between the fixed-order (4-flavor) and resummation (5-flavor) regimes is governed by the low matching scale at which the $b$-quark is integrated out. Varying this scale provides a systematic way to assess the perturbative uncertainties associated with the resummation and matching procedure and reduces by going to higher orders. We discuss the practical implementation and present numerical results for the $b\bar{b}H$ production cross section at NLO+NLL. We also provide a comparison to the corresponding predictions in the fixed 4-flavor and 5-flavor results and the Santander matching prescription. Compared to the latter, we find a slightly reduced uncertainty and a larger central value, with its central value lying at the lower edge of our uncertainty band.Comment: 54 pages, 16 figures. Final version to be published in JHEP (one ref added

Knowledge and perceptions about hepatitis C among police undertaking training at the Western Australia Police Academy

Hepatitis C (HCV) is a significant health issue in Australia with approximately 90% of new cases attributed to injecting drug use (IDU). With no vaccination for this infection it is important that preventive methods are utilised to reduce the likelihood of it being transmitted from the IDU community into the wider community. Research has suggested that people\u27s beliefs, which are influenced by the knowledge they have, play an important role in influencing the action people take in protecting and promoting their health. While there are numerous studies which have measured the HCV-related knowledge and perceptions of other professions in the community, there did not appear to be research specifically focusing on police. Due to the nature of front-line policing, officers are considered to be at an elevated risk of exposure to HCV. This study investigated the knowledge and perceptions about HCV among a sample of Western Australian (WA) police in training. The sample comprised of 150 pre-service police officers who were undergoing training at the WA Police Academy. There were 121 (80%) Police Recruits and 25 (17%) Cadets included in the sample (4 respondents did not report their role at the Academy). Two thirds of the sample was male and the majority aged between 17 and 27 years. Overall, the results from this study suggested the knowledge of the pre-service police who participated in this research about HCV, was relatively poor. The majority did, however, believe there was a risk of exposure to HCV while working in the community, both for police officers in general (91 %) and for themselves personally (83%). Participants reporting their highest level of education to be secondary school were more likely to perceive themselves to personally be at risk of exposure while on duty than those with a university qualification. Similarly, Police Recruits were more likely to report a personal perceived risk than Cadets. Although the pre-service police were reported to have received some HCV-related training, only 45% of respondents recalled receiving this training. The results from this study uncovered the need for review of the content and delivery of the HCV-related training provided at the WA Police Academy. As this was a small nonrandomised exploratory study the findings cannot be generalised and any further research conducted with this group should ideally utilise a larger randomised sample and utilise a valid and reliable data collection instrument

The education effect on income across two generations in EU welfare states

Αξιοποιώντας μικροδεδομένα της EU-SILC του 2011 και χρησιμοποιώντας τεχνικές παλινδρόμησης σε τέσσερα κράτη πρόνοιας της ΕΕ (δηλ. Ελλάδα, Γαλλία, Ιρλανδία και Σουηδία), το άρθρο αυτό καταδεικνύει τη μειούμενη επίδραση της εκπαίδευσης στα εισοδηματικά επιτεύγματα μεταξύ δύο γενεών. Το εύρημα αυτό θέτει υπό αμφισβήτηση το κύριο επιχείρημα του κυρίαρχου ακαδημαϊκού και πολιτικού λόγου γύρω από τον πρωτεύοντα ρόλο της εκπαίδευσης για την άντληση εισοδήματος. Αντίθετα, το άρθρο αυτό τονίζει τη σημασία άλλων παραγόντων για την ερμηνεία των εισοδηματικών επιτευγμάτων, όπως η κοινωνική διασυνδεσιμότητα. Η τελευταία μπορεί να παράγει ή να αναπαράγει την ανισότητα εφόσον τα άτομα αποκτούν πρόσβαση σε ισχυρές θέσεις μέσω της χρήσης των κοινωνικών συνδέσεων. Έτσι, οι ανώτερες κοινωνικές τάξεις με εκτεταμένη κοινωνική δικτύωση διατηρούν τα κοινωνικά προνόμια μεταξύ των γενεών παρά το επιχείρημα ότι η σύγχρονη κοινωνία επιδεικνύει υψηλή κοινωνική κινητικότητα που επιτυγχάνεται μέσω της επίσημης εκπαίδευσης.By utilizing EU-SILC 2011 microdata and employing regression techniques in four EU welfare states (i.e., Greece, France, Ireland and Sweden), this paper demonstrates the diminishing education effect on income attainments between two generations. This finding puts into doubt the main argument of the mainstream academic and political discourse over the prominent role of education for income acquisition. Instead, this paper stresses the importance of other factors explainingincome attainments, such as social interconnectivity. The latter can produce or reproduce inequality as long as people gain accessto powerful positions through the usage of social connections. Thus, the upper social classes with extended social networking preserve their social privileges across generations despite the argument that the contemporary society boasts high social mobility attained through formal education

Performance evaluation of adjusted probabilistic broadcasting in MANETs

Appropriate use of a probabilistic broadcasting method in MANETs can decrease the number of rebroadcasts, and as a result reduce the opportunity of contention and collision among neighbouring nodes. In this paper we evaluate the performance of adjusted probabilistic flooding by comparing it to "simple" flooding as used with the ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol as well as a fixed probabilistic approach. The results reveal that the adjusted probabilistic flooding exhibits superior performance in terms of both reachability and saved rebroadcast