This study aims to identify the relationship between boundary work tactics (behav-ioral, temporal, physical and communicative) and work-family conflict among work-ing women. A survey methodology was used in this study. This research involves the utilisation of questionnaire which was administered among one-hundred and three (103) working women currently working in a selected organisation. This study was conducted in a selected private organisation in Kuching, Sarawak. The relationship between boundary work tactics and work-family conflicts was analyzed using the Pearson’s correlation analysis test. The results of this study revealed that there is a significant relationship between behavioral tactics, temporal tactics, and communica-tive tactics with work-family conflict. Hence, from this study, the organisation can implement more strategic tactics to reduce work-family conflicts when the working women are challenged to balance responsibilities between their work and family.
This study aimed to explore the influence of adult attachment on relationship quality among parents having children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). A correlational research design was used to achieve the research objectives. Sixty eight parents of children with ADHD participated in this study. Two measures were used in this study: the Experience in Close Relationship (ECR) and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS). The findings indicated that when the anxiety attachment level of the participants was high, the marital satisfaction was low.The findings of this study can make a contribution to those focusing on conflict resolution and marital quality with a deeper understanding on the interpersonal problems in the relationship from attachment theory perspectives. It is suggested that a longitudinal research be conducted in the future with both groups of clinical and community in order to explore how attachment variables can predict relationship adjustment and child adjustment overtime.
MeSH terms: Adult; Anxiety; Anxiety Disorders; Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity; Child; Humans; Marriage; Parents; Personal Satisfaction; Negotiating
Medical nutrition therapy (MNT) is a key component of diabetes management. The importance of balancing macronutrients, reducing carbohydrate load, lowering glycemic index, and implementing an overall healthy dietary pattern are emerging as better approaches for MNT in diabetes. Recent research points to improved glycemic control, reduction in body weight, and improvement in many cardiovascular risk factors when these approaches are provided by registered dietitians or health care providers. This review article discusses the current evidence about the role of sensible nutrition in diabetes management. Specific eating plans for weight reduction and for patients with type 1 diabetes are also discussed.
Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is generalized term that encompasses a diverse group of cancers that includes tumours of the oral cavity (OSCC), oropharynx (OPSCC) and nasopharynx (NPC). Genetic alterations that are common to all HNSCC types are likely to be important for squamous carcinogenesis. In this study, we have investigated the role of the homeodomain-only homeobox gene, HOPX, in the pathogenesis of HNSCC. We show that HOPX mRNA levels are reduced in OSCC and NPC cell lines and tissues and there is a general reduction of HOPX protein expression in these tumours and OPSCCs. HOPX promoter methylation was observed in a subset of HNSCCs and was associated with a worse overall survival in HPV negative tumours. RNAseq analysis of OSCC cells transfected with HOPX revealed a widespread deregulation of the transcription of genes related to epithelial homeostasis and ectopic over-expression of HOPX in OSCC and NPC cells inhibited cell proliferation, plating efficiency and migration, and enhanced sensitivity to UVA-induced apoptosis. Our results demonstrate that HOPX functions as a tumour suppressor in HNSCC and suggest a central role for HOPX in suppressing epithelial carcinogenesis.
MeSH terms: Carcinoma, Squamous Cell/genetics*; Carcinoma, Squamous Cell/pathology; DNA Damage; Head and Neck Neoplasms/genetics*; Head and Neck Neoplasms/pathology; Homeostasis; Humans; Promoter Regions, Genetic; RNA, Messenger/genetics; Transcription, Genetic; Down-Regulation; Gene Expression Regulation, Neoplastic; Genes, Tumor Suppressor*; Homeodomain Proteins/genetics*; DNA Methylation; Tumor Suppressor Proteins/genetics*; Cell Line, Tumor
Co (II) complex (CMLA) was investigated to evaluate the rate of wound healing in rats. Animals were placed into four groups: gum acacia, Intrasite gel, 10 and 20 mg/ml of CMLA. Wounds were made on the dorsal neck area, then treated with Intrasite gel or CMLA; both of these treatments led to faster healing than with gum acacia. Histology of the wounds dressed with CMLA or Intrasite gel displayed a smaller scar width, required less time to heal and showed more collagen staining and fewer inflammatory cells in comparison to wounds dressed with the vehicle. Immunohistochemistry for Hsp70 and TGF-β showed greater staining intensity in the treated groups compared to the vehicle group. Bax staining was less intense in treated groups compared to the vehicle group, suggesting that CMLA and Intrasite gel provoked apoptosis, responsible for the development of granulation tissue into a scar. CD31 protein analysis showed that the treated groups enhanced angiogenesis and increased vascularization compared to the control group. Furthermore, a significant increase in the levels of GPx and SOD and a decrease in MDA were also observed in the treated groups. This results suggest that CMLA is a potentially promising agent for the wounds treatment.
Tuberculous meningitis (TBM) causes significant morbidity and mortality. The primary objective was to re-examine the concept of "TB zone" and "ischaemic zone" in cerebral infarction in patients with tuberculous meningitis. The secondary objective was to evaluate cerebral infarction, vasculitis and vasospasm in tuberculous meningitis infections. Between 2009 and 2014, TBM patients were recruited. Neuroimaging was performed and findings of cerebral infarction, vasculitis and vasospasm were recorded. Infarcts were classified based on arterial supply and Hsieh's classification. Fifty-one TBM patients were recruited of whom 34 patients (67%) had cerebral infarction. Based on Hsieh's classification, 20 patients (59%) had infarcts in both "TB zone" and "ischaemic zones". 12 patients (35%) had infarcts in "ischaemic zone" and two (6%) patients had infarcts in "TB zone". In terms of vascular supply, almost all patients (35/36) had infarcts involving perforators and cortical branches. 25 patients (73%) and 14 patients (41%) had infarcts supplied by lateral lenticulostriate and medial lenticulostriate arteries respectively. 15 patients (37%) had vasculitis. Vasospasm was present in six patients (15%). 29 patients (85%) with cerebral infarction also had leptomeningeal enhancement (p = 0.002). In summary, infarcts involved mainly perforators and cortical branches, rather than "TB zone" versus "ischaemic zone".
The purpose of this study is to assess the relative fairness of selected educational accommodations provided to peers who have disabilities. This study utilized two scales developed by Upton (2000) which quantifies the relative fairness that students perceive towards the provision of selected educational accommodations. The findings of this study yielded evidence to support that level of education at a university level might have an influence on the students’ perceptions about educational accommodations offered to the students with disabilities. These surveys were distributed to around 409 students at a mid-size southern public university in the United States. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are provided.
This study aims to examine the relationship between mentoring program, personality and mentee outcomes. One hundred respondents from different faculties in one of the universities in East Malaysia were involved in this study. Pearson Correlation was employed to determine the relationship between mentoring program and mentee outcomes, personality and mentee outcomes, mentoring program and psychological and emotional support. The results showed that there was a significant relationship between mentoring program and mentee outcomes. Multiple Regressions was used to assess whether personality act as a moderator between mentoring program and mentee outcomes. The findings indicated that personality moderates the relationship between mentoring program and mentee outcomes. The findings of this research are beneficial for mentoring program in universities in Malaysia, especially, in ensuring better mentoring outcomes. Implication of this research on organization and individuals was also discussed.
This study aims to identify employee perceptions of perceived fairness in performance appraisal system and work performance as the performance appraisal system is crucial to evaluate employees’ performance in every organization; public or private. A private Oil & Gas company in Miri, Sarawak was chosen for this study. Quantitative research method was employed in this study, and closed-ended questionnaires were used to collect data from respondents. Statistical analysis using One Way ANOVA, Pearson correlation, and Independent sample t-test were used to test the hypotheses. The findings showed that there were no significance differences between the selected demographic factors (age, gender, duration of service, highest educational level, and rank) in performance appraisal system and the work performance. Also, there was a significant relationship between the rating accuracy in the performance appraisal system and work performance. Besides that, there was a significant relationship between employee perceptions of leadership styles in decision making in the performance appraisal system and work performance. The findings also showed that employees are concerned with the evaluation and rating given by their supervisor because the outcomes of the performance appraisal will influence their career development in the organization. Thus, performance appraisal system is crucial in increasing the work performance of employees and organization. Organizations should emphasize the role of the performance appraisal system practiced in their organizations and recognize that it is important in improving employees’ performance. Future researchers are encouraged to explore further on the performance appraisal elements that have not been investigated in this study, and conduct the research with a bigger population and sample size.
This study aims to investigate competency profiling and determine if technological change act as a mediator in the relationship between the identified factors and employee competency in selected industries in Kuching, Sarawak. It is also to develop the best fit model based on the variables selected. The four identified variables are teamwork, organizational culture, change management, and technological change. The sample of this study were 302 respondents selected through a simple random sampling. The findings showed that there is a positive effect between teamwork, organizational culture, change management, and technological change as mediator towards employee competency. This study provides positive implications, such as, improving competency process in organizational setting, improving policy and related action plan regarding human resource practices on competency.
This study aims to determine the relationship between working arrangements and quality of work life (QWL) among academicians in a selected public institution of higher learning in Kuching, Sarawak. A survey methodology was used in this study. This research involves the utilization of questionnaire which was administered among one-hundred and fifty (151) academicians currently working in a selected public institution in Kuching, Sarawak. The relationship between flexible working arrangements and quality of work life was analyzed using the Pearson’s Correlation analysis test. The results of this study revealed that there is a significant relationship between long working arrangement and flexible working arrangements with QWL. Hence, if organizations are concerned about developing their human resources and gaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace, it is necessary that they attend to one of their most precious assets, namely, their human resources by practicing flexible working arrangements.
evaluating training effectiveness based on Kirkpatrick’s criteria of training reactions, learning, behavior change, and overall results. In recent years, in-depth review of Kirkpatrick’s criteria for training evaluation by theorists and researchers resulted in renewed interest in possible underlying dimensions and more operationalized measures of these factors. In this study, a hypothesized model is proposed to explain the effects of training reactions on learning outcomes and training transfer. Path analysis is carried out on data collected from 118 participants of a training course on operational housekeeping to examine the validity of the proposed model. Training reactions is considered in terms of affective reactions and utility reactions, and learning is considered in terms of declarative learning and application-based learning. Moderate effects between affective reactions, declarative learning, and training transfer are observed; while the links between affective reactions and utility reactions, and between declarative learning and application-based learning appeared to be more significant.
This qualitative study explored the differences in the interpretation of “negative life
events” and the coping style among male and female young adults aged 21-25 in a
highly collective community of Borneo. In-depth interviews were deployed, and pattern
saturated at 5 males and 5 females. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Finding
shows that both gender, males and females, were most affected by self-image and
identity crisis, implicating sensitivity for social acceptance/rejection, academic bullying,
and friendship, family and and financial issues. Females were significantly affected by
friendship problems and tended to deal with it using emotional-focused coping, such as,
emotional release, whereas males reported rejection/one-sided love problems and tended
to cope using action-focused coping style, such as, confronting, as well as action-focused
release, such as, playing games. While the findings support the universal findings in
the male-female differences in coping with negative events, this study found a unique
difference in the coping style of the males to those of the lesser cohesive community -
males in this community were found to be celebrating sharing of problems and emotional
discomfort with close friends and family, as much as the females. This study suggests
that careful considerations need to be given when generalizing the theory of emotional
and social disconnectedness, in males in crisis in the highly cohesive community. Future
research using mixed methodology can further explain the nature and generalizability
of in-crisis males’ emotional and social connectedness in cohesive community, using a
larger sample. Findings from this research would be useful to understand how our male
and female youngsters in highly collective communities perceive life issues, and the
pattern they choose in coping, and further assist in designing effective youth assistance
and development programs.
This study aimed to investigate the reliability (psychometric properties) of the metacognitive strategies questionnaire piloted on Pakistani engineering students of QUEST, Nawabshah. The questionnaire had four parts including demographic, reading comprehension, metacognition, and scaffolding having 53 questions that were tested on 37 first year engineering students. The Cronbach’s Alpha reliability was measured through SPSS 17. The results showed that the Cronbach’s Alpha reliability concerning reading comprehension ranged from .826-.842, metacognitive strategies ranged from.830-.839, and the reliability of scaffolding ranged from .829-.837. Therefore, the results from the pilot study showed that the questionnaire needed to be used without any modification in the actual study.
Eyewitnesses typically talk about the traumatic events that they have experienced based on their memory. This research aimed to investigate differences between emotional and factual retelling of eyewitness in terms of memory accuracy and error. Participants watched a traumatic robbery video and were instructed to recall the events in detail. Participants were divided into three retelling conditions where they: a) discussed the robbery in a factual way, b) focused on discussing their emotional response, and c) performed unrelated tasks. Results showed that eyewitnesses who talked about their emotion recalled less detailed memories and made more errors in free recall while eyewitnesses who focused on factual detail seem to be able to maintain their memory accuracy of the event.
Nowadays, intelligent vehicles have received a considerable attention among the
researchers to reduce the number of collisions and road accidents. One of the
challenging tasks for these vehicles is road lane detection or road boundaries
detection. In this research, a lane detection algorithm was developed to detect the
right and left lane markers on the road by using two cameras which act as a stereo
vision for the system. It is based on edge detection by using Canny Edge Detection to
reduce unnecessary data on the images and to perform features recognition for the
lane. After the features has been extracted, the algorithm is followed by Hough
Transform method to generate the detected lines on the image obtained from the
stereo vision camera. The algorithm has to work in different environment to be used
in real world applications. The stereo vision algorithm is implemented to generate
disparity map of area. This helps to gain more information on environment, such as the
estimated distance of the lines, the distance of the vehicle to the turns. The experiment
result shows the detection of right and left lane on the road with disparity map to
determine an estimate of the distance of detected lanes from the stereo vision camera.
MeSH terms: Accidents; Algorithms; Attention; Photography; Research; Research Personnel
Piano technique is one of the main part of piano playing. Some researches had
attempted to unveil the technique of virtuoso pianists using technologies. These
researches employ different types of sensors in order to capture motion data of piano
playing. However, one area in this research had been under-represented, which is
finger position and pressure measurement applied by the musician while playing the
musical instrument. Research that embark on this area faced a common problem, the
sensors used in these research are directly in contact with the pianist, which causes a
change of piano playing experience. Since piano playing consists of very delicate
interaction between the pianist and the piano, such change of experience may affect
the pianist’s performance. These sensors are considered to be intrusive to the piano
playing experience. Concluding the challenges faced by current technologies, a nonintrusive
sensor is proposed and the circuit design of the sensor is discussed in this
paper.
Energy consumption of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is an important aspect in
the design requirement. This is especially true in a situation where WSN is being
operated in isolated areas and thus relying on batteries due to unavailability of power
infrastructure. Since energy efficiency is the main concern in the deployment of WSN,
the sensor node must keep track of the charge that is left in the battery, commonly
referred as the State of Charge (SoC). To prevent the discontinuation of the operation
of the sensor node from power cut off, it is important to find an analytic model for
the battery’s state of charge. In this paper, an optimized structure of Multi-Layer
Perceptron (MLP) is utilized to obtain a model of the battery state-of-charge in
wireless sensor nodes. Results show the suitability of the method that produces
accurate and simple models, capable of being implemented even in low cost and very
constrained real motes.
Computer vision is applied in many software and devices. The detection and
reconstruction of the human skeletal structure is one of area of interest, where the
camera will identify the human parts and construct the joints of the person standing in
front. Three-dimensional pose estimation is solved using various learning approaches,
such as Support Vector Machines and Gaussian processes. However, difficulties in
cluttered scenarios are encountered, and require additional input data, such as
silhouettes, or controlled camera settings. The paper focused on estimating the threedimensional
pose of a person without requiring background information, which is
robust to camera variations. Each of the joint has three-dimensional space position and
matrix orientation with respect to the sensor. Matlab Simulink was utilized to provide
communication tools with depth camera using Kinect device for skeletal detection.
Results on the skeletal detection using Kinect sensor is analysed in measuring the
abilities to detect skeletal structure accurately, and it is shown that the system is able
to detect human skeletal performing non-complex basic motions in daily life.
MeSH terms: Computers; Humans; Software; Normal Distribution; Support Vector Machine; Orientation, Spatial
Phishing detection is a momentous problem which can be deliberated by many
researchers with numerous advanced approaches. Current anti-phishing mechanisms
such as blacklist-base anti-phishing, Heuristic-based anti-phishing does suffer low
detection accuracy and high false alarm. There is need for efficient mechanism to
protect users from phishing websites. The purpose of this study is to investigate the
capability of 6 machine learning algorithms i.e. Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Support
Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Logistic Regression
(LR) and Naïve Bayes (NB) to classify phishing and non-phishing websites. These
algorithms were trained with two different groups of training in WEKA environment
and then were tested in terms of accuracy, precision, TP rate, and FP rate on a 3
different sets of dataset which contains dissimilar portion of phishing and non-phishing
instances. Results presented that Naïve Bayes classifier has better detection accuracy
between other classifiers for predicting phishing websites while Multi-Layer
Perceptron gave worst result in terms of detection accuracy. The result also showed
that Support Vector machine has better FP rate between other classifier. In addition,
Random Forest, Decision Tree, and Naïve Bayes can classify all phishing websites as
phishing correctly. It means that TP rate is 100% for these classifiers. In conclusion this
paper suggests using NB as the best classifier for predicting phishing and non-phishing
websites.