Digital Commons Network^™

The Status Of School Libraries In Migori County, Kenya, Cary Francis Ouma, Joel Nakitare

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Whereas there is a general appreciation of libraries' role in educational performance and literacy development among learners, the status of school libraries still needs to improve. The struggle to secure a workable school library policy in Kenya is far from won. This study investigated the status of school libraries in Migori County by analyzing available resources and giving a framework for their development. Data was collected using questionnaires and Interviews in schools drawn from all the eight sub-counties in the county. The data was analyzed thematically based on parameters that define successful school libraries to arrive at study conclusions. They …

Why To Choose Librarian As A Profession? Exploring Career-Choice Motivation Among Library Science Students In Tamil Nadu, Govindarajan R, Dhanavandan S

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Background:

The demands for professional librarians are changing every day. In Indian scenario, the Librarians used to work in government, academic and research institutions. This study aims to investigate about to explore the career choice motivation among library and information science students in Tamil Nadu.

Methodology:

The study design is cross-sectional and convenience sampling method is adopted. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data. SPSS 18 PASW Statistical package was used for statistical analysis. Frequencies, percentages, t- test, ANOVA test were used in the study.

Findings:

A total of 277 students from six universities in Tamil Nadu, India were …

Debut Online Library Registration At The Federal University Of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria, Patrons’ Opinions Survey And The Good News, Olufunmilayo I. Fati

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Introducing a self-service online library registration to a higher educational institution presents an opportunity for technology adoption evaluation, which may be useful to other institutions. This paper presents the experience of the deployment of online library registration built on koha library management software (KLMS), to ‘Nimbe Adedipe Library, Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Nigeria. The system was built on Koha Circulation module and before it was commissioned, it was presented to three categories of prospective users for observations. Firstly, to the members of library’s automation department’s staff, then to the library management which also includes the Readers’ Services Librarian, and …

Healthy Lifestyles And Job Performance Of Academics: A Theoretical Perspectives, Idayat Odunola Agboola Mrs, Chinyere Nkechi Ikonne Dr

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The health related lifestyle behavior has been neglected in Nigerian Universities and as such causing deaths among the lecturers. Living a healthy lifestyle could reduce heart diseases, blood pressure and diabetes. The study adopted survey method. The population of the study was 5,310 lecturers across the six Federal Universities in South West, Nigeria. From the population, 372 were sampled. Structured questionnaire were used to collect data. From the 372 copies of questionnaire distributed; 278 were returned which gave 75% response rate. Data were analyzed using percentages, mean, standard deviation as well as relationship. Findings revealed that all information gathered on …

Indian Research Output In Immunology And Microbiology 2012-2016: A Scientometric Study, Jyoti Rana Ph.D. Scholar, Rakesh Kumar Bhatt Associate Professor

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Background: The study examines India’s research productivity in immunology and microbiology during 2012-2016, depending on various parameters, including India’s annual average research growth rate, institutional output profile of institutions and profiles of some of the most productive authors.

Aim: The focus of this study is to analyze performance of India’s research output in immunology and microbiology, the quality and productivity of major institutions participating in research in microbiology and immunology and the productivity and quality of leading authors in research in immunology and microbiology.

Methods: The study in the area of immunology and microbiology using 5 years publications data from …

User Awareness Program In The Rural Libraries Of Dibrugarh And Sivasagar: A Study, Anurag Borpatra Gohain

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The aim of the study is to find out the user awareness programs that are being organized by the rural libraries of the selected districts of Assam. The result shows that the rural libraries are in the miniature stage regarding user awareness program due to the poor financial condition.

Citation Analysis Of Doctoral Students Dissertations Of Philippine Women's University School Of Education: Tool For Collection Development, Carmina G. Joson

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The study analyzed the citations used by doctoral students of PWU School of Education in their dissertations that were completed from Academic Year 2007 to 2017. The study utilized bibliometrics research design for the 86 doctoral dissertations that generated 6,230 citations. Said citations were used to determine the referencing behavior of PWU School of Education doctoral students in terms of publication age, format, type, authorship, origin and the availability of cited materials. The findings showed that majority of PWU doctoral students preferred to utilize foreign electronic information sources that are currently published. Periodicals are the most cited type of materials …

Collaborative Fall Detection Using Smartphone And Kinect, Xue Li, Lanshun Nie, Hanchuan Xu, Xianzhi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Humanfall detection has attracted broad attentions as sensors and mobile devices are increasingly adopted in real-life scenarios such as smart homes. The complexity of activities in home environments pose severe challenges to the fall detection research with respect to the detection accuracy. We propose a collaborative detection platform that combines two subsystems: a threshold-based fall detection subsystem using mobile phones and a support vector machine (SVM)-based fall detection subsystem using Kinects. Both subsystems have their respective confidence models and the platform detects falls by fusing the data of both subsystems using two methods: the logical rules-based and D-S evidence fusion …

A Distributed Intrusion Detection Model Via Nondestructive Partitioning And Balanced Allocation For Big Data, Xiaonian Wu, Chuyun Zhang, Runlian Zhang, Yujue Wang, Jinhua Cui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There are two key issues in distributed intrusion detection system, that is, maintaining load balance of system and protecting data integrity. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new distributed intrusion detection model for big data based on nondestructive partitioning and balanced allocation. A data allocation strategy based on capacity and workload is introduced to achieve local load balance, and a dynamic load adjustment strategy is adopted to maintain global load balance of cluster. Moreover, data integrity is protected by using session reassemble and session partitioning. The simulation results show that the new model enjoys favorable advantages such as …

Simulation-Based Security Of Function-Hiding Inner Product Encryption, Qingsong Zhao, Qingkai Zeng, Ximeng Liu, Huanliang Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Functional encryption (FE) [1,2] is a modern type of encryption scheme that extends several previous notions and allows tremendous flexibility in controlling and computing on encrypted data. FE enables an authority to derive constrained decryption keys that are used by a user to obtain specific functions of encrypted messages. Informally, the authority generates a secret key skf for a function f from a master secret key. Then, the user can only learn f(x) from a ciphertext Enc(x) with skf and reveal nothing else about x.

Calcium Signaling In The Ventricular Myocardium Of The Goto-Kakizaki Type 2 Diabetic Rat, L. Al Kury, M. Smail, M. A. Qureshi, V. Sydorenko, A. Shmygol, M. Oz, J. Singh, F. C. Howarth

All Works

© 2018 L. Al Kury et al. The association between diabetes mellitus (DM) and high mortality linked to cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a major concern worldwide. Clinical and preclinical studies have demonstrated a variety of diastolic and systolic dysfunctions in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) with the severity of abnormalities depending on the patients' age and duration of diabetes. The cellular basis of hemodynamic dysfunction in a type 2 diabetic heart is still not well understood. The aim of this review is to evaluate our current understanding of contractile dysfunction and disturbances of Ca2+ transport in the Goto-Kakizaki …

Concepções Pessoais De Competência E Rendimento Acadêmico: Estudo Longitudinal No Ensino Secundário Português, Joana Stocker, Luisa Faria

All Works

Do personal conceptions of competence (PCC) influence academic achievement and/or academic achievement influences PCC? In this context we sought to examine the relationship between PCC (personal conceptions of intelligence, causal attributions, self-concept, self-efficacy and emotional competence) and academic achievement throughout secondary school in Portugal. With this aim, the Composite Questionnaire of Perceived Competence (162 items) was administered to a sample of 433 students, 52.8% girls, aged between 14 and 18 years (M=15.3; SD=.63), in a three-wave longitudinal design separated by a gap of one year. Overall, the results evidenced reciprocal relationships: the achievement in the first year influenced PCC in …

Detecting Fake News In Social Media Networks, Monther Aldwairi, Ali Alwahedi

All Works

© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Fake news and hoaxes have been there since before the advent of the Internet. The widely accepted definition of Internet fake news is: fictitious articles deliberately fabricated to deceive readers'. Social media and news outlets publish fake news to increase readership or as part of psychological warfare. Ingeneral, the goal is profiting through clickbaits. Clickbaits lure users and entice curiosity with flashy headlines or designs to click links to increase advertisements revenues. This exposition analyzes the prevalence of fake news in light of the advances in communication made possible by the emergence …

A Generalized Deep Learning-Based Diagnostic System For Early Diagnosis Of Various Types Of Pulmonary Nodules, Ahmed Shaffie, Ahmed Soliman, Luay Fraiwan, Mohammed Ghazal, Fatma Taher, Neal Dunlap, Brian Wang, Victor Van Berkel, Robert Keynton, Adel Elmaghraby, Ayman El-Baz

All Works

© The Author(s) 2018. A novel framework for the classification of lung nodules using computed tomography scans is proposed in this article. To get an accurate diagnosis of the detected lung nodules, the proposed framework integrates the following 2 groups of features: (1) appearance features modeled using the higher order Markov Gibbs random field model that has the ability to describe the spatial inhomogeneities inside the lung nodule and (2) geometric features that describe the shape geometry of the lung nodules. The novelty of this article is to accurately model the appearance of the detected lung nodules using a new …

Media Narratives Of Gender In The Contentious Conservative Age Of Trump, Pam Creedon

All Works

© 2018 Taylor & Francis. Trump’s (s)election 1 has reinvigorated feminism around the globe. He has ignited the fourth wave of feminism - a “rebirth” of the movement for equality, gender equity, and the abolishment of discrimination. 2 Jodi Enda, assistant managing editor for special projects at CNN Politics, described Trump’s election as both the best and worst time for the future of feminism: The election of a president whom detractors view as misogynistic and backward-thinking has done nothing less than spark a wholesale resurgence of feminism. His defeat of the first woman who might have been president - coupled …

Non-Technical Skills Assessment Scale In Nursing: Construction, Development And Validation, Sara Martins Pereira Pires, Sara Otília Marques Monteiro, Anabela Maria Sousa Pereira, Joana Novaes Machado Stocker, Daniela De Mascarenhas Chaló, Elsa Maria De Oliveira Pinho De Melo

All Works

© 2018 Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem. The introduction of non-technical skills during nursing education is crucial to prepare nurses for the clinical context and increase patient safety. We found no instrument developed for this purpose. Objectives: to construct, develop and validate a non-technical skills assessment scale in nursing. Method: methodological research. Based on the literature review and experience of researchers on non-technical skills in healthcare and the knowledge of the principles of crisis resource management, a list of 63 items with a five-point Likert scale was constructed. The scale was applied to 177 nursing undergraduate students. Descriptive statistics, correlations, internal …

American Universities In The Middle East: A Student’S Perspective, Linda Smail, Ginger Silvera

All Works

© 2018 The Author(s). Many American universities located in the Middle East try to offer the stamp of higher quality in education that the United States provides and delivers. These institutions are doing an incredible job of providing opportunity for youths of that region to obtain an American education. However, these universities bear the stereotype that they are not applying a genuinely American-style teaching system and methods, but rather an Arabic style with an American name. The research question asks to which extent this stereotype is true. The purpose of the study is to determine if there is/are relationship(s) among …

Dictionary Learning With Structured Noise, Pan Zhou, Cong Fang, Zhouchen Lin, Chao Zhang, Y. Edward Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, lots of dictionary learning methods have been proposed and successfully applied. However, many of them assume that the noise in data is drawn from Gaussian or Laplacian distribution and therefore they typically adopt the 2 or 1 norm to characterize these two kinds of noise, respectively. Since this assumption is inconsistent with the real cases, the performance of these methods is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel dictionary learning with structured noise (DLSN) method for handling noisy data. We decompose the original data into three parts: clean data, structured noise, and Gaussian noise, and then characterize them …

Securing Display Path For Security-Sensitive Applications On Mobile Devices, Jinhua Cui, Yuanyuan Zhang, Zhiping Cai, Anfeng Liu, Yangyang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While smart devices based on ARM processor bring us a lot of convenience, they also become an attractive target of cyber-attacks. The threat is exaggerated as commodity OSes usually have a large code base and suffer from various software vulnerabilities. Nowadays, adversaries prefer to steal sensitive data by leaking the content of display output by a security-sensitive application. A promising solution is to exploit the hardware visualization extensions provided by modern ARM processors to construct a secure display path between the applications and the display device. In this work, we present a scheme named SecDisplay for trusted display service, it …

Efficient And Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Calculation Of Rational Numbers, Ximeng Liu, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Robert H. Deng, Rongxing Lu, Jian Weng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a framework for efficient and privacy-preserving outsourced calculation of rational numbers, which we refer to as POCR. Using POCR, a user can securely outsource the storing and processing of rational numbers to a cloud server without compromising the security of the (original) data and the computed results. We present the system architecture of POCR and the associated toolkits required in the privacy preserving calculation of integers and rational numbers to ensure that commonly used outsourced operations can be handled on-the-fly. We then prove that the proposed POCR achieves the goal of secure integer and rational …

Hybrid Privacy-Preserving Clinical Decision Support System In Fog-Cloud Computing, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng, Yang Yang, Ngoc Hieu Tran, Shangping Zhong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a framework for hybrid privacy-preserving clinical decision support system in fog cloud computing, called HPCS. In HPCS, a fog server uses a lightweight data mining method to securely monitor patients' health condition in real-time. The newly detected abnormal symptoms can be further sent to the cloud server for high-accuracy prediction in a privacy-preserving way. Specifically, for the fog servers, we design a new secure outsourced inner-product protocol for achieving secure lightweight single-layer neural network. Also, a privacy-preserving piecewise polynomial calculation protocol allows cloud server to securely perform any activation functions in multiple-layer neural network. Moreover, …

Smartwatch-Based Early Gesture Detection & Trajectory Tracking For Interactive Gesture-Driven Applications, Tran Huy Vu, Archan Misra, Quentin Roy, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The paper explores the possibility of using wrist-worn devices (specifically, a smartwatch) to accurately track the hand movement and gestures for a new class of immersive, interactive gesture-driven applications. These interactive applications need two special features: (a) the ability to identify gestures from a continuous stream of sensor data early–i.e., even before the gesture is complete, and (b) the ability to precisely track the hand’s trajectory, even though the underlying inertial sensor data is noisy. We develop a new approach that tackles these requirements by first building a HMM-based gesture recognition framework that does not need an explicit segmentation step, …

Integrated Reward Scheme And Surge Pricing In A Ride Sourcing Market, Hai Yang, Chaoyi Shao, Hai Wang, Jieping Ye

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Surge pricing is commonly used in on-demand ride-sourcing platforms (e.g., Uber, Lyft and Didi) to dynamically balance demand and supply. However, since the price for ride service cannot be unlimited, there is usually a reasonable or legitimate range of prices in practice. Such a constrained surge pricing strategy fails to balance demand and supply in certain cases, e.g., even adopting the maximum allowed price cannot reduce the demand to an affordable level during peak hours. In addition, the practice of surge pricing is controversial and has stimulated long debate regarding its pros and cons. In this paper, to address the …

User-Friendly Deniable Storage For Mobile Devices, Bing Chang, Yao Cheng, Bo Chen, Fengwei Zhang, Wen-Tao Zhu, Yingjiu Li, Zhan. Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile devices are prevalently used to process sensitive data, but traditional encryption may not work when an adversary is able to coerce the device owners to disclose the encryption keys. Plausibly Deniable Encryption (PDE) is thus designed to protect sensitive data against this powerful adversary. In this paper, we present MobiPluto, a user-friendly PDE scheme for denying the existence of sensitive data stored on mobile devices. A salient difference between MobiPluto and the existing PDE systems is that any block-based file systems can be deployed on top of it. To further improve usability and deniability of MobiPluto, we introduce a …

Assessment Of The Neuroprotective Efficacy Of Poly-Arginine-18 (R18) Peptides In A Pre-Clinical Model Of Perinatal Hypoxic-Ischaemic Encephalopathy (Hie), Adam Edwards

Theses

Hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy (HIE) is one of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity in infants, globally. This disorder eventuates following a reduction in oxygenated cerebral blood flow to the foetus in utero, leading to excitotoxic-mediated brain cell (e.g. neuron, glia and glial progenitor cell) death. Currently, there is no clinically appropriate neuroprotective treatment to reduce acute brain injury following HIE. Recent studies have demonstrated that poly-arginine and cationic arginine-rich peptides (CARPs; e.g. R18: R = arginine residues) exhibit potent neuroprotective properties in both in vitro and adult animal models of ischaemia, and therefore have the potential to be developed into …

Online/Offline Traceable Attribute-Based Encryption [In Chinese], Kai Zhang, Jianfeng Ma, Junwei Zhang, Zuobin Ying, Tao Zhang, Ximeng Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based encryption (ABE), as a public key encryption, can be utilized for fine-grained access control. However, there are two main drawbacks that limit the applications of attribute-based encryption. First, as different users may have the same decryption privileges in ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption, it is difficult to catch the users who sell their secret keys for financial benefit. Second, the number of resource-consuming exponentiation operations required to encrypt a message in ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption grows with the complexity of the access policy, which presents a significant challenge for the users who encrypt data on mobile devices. Towards this end, after proposing …

Extinguishing Cue-Controlled Reward Choice: Effects Of Pavlovian Extinction On Outcome-Selective Pavlovian-Instrumental Transfer, Tina Seabrooke, Pelley Me Le, Alexis Porter, Chris J. Mitchell

School of Psychology

Outcome-selective Pavlovian-instrumental transfer (PIT) refers to the finding that presenting Pavlovian predictors of outcomes can enhance the vigor of instrumental responding for those same outcomes. Three experiments examined the sensitivity of outcome-selective PIT to Pavlovian (stimulus-outcome) extinction. In Experiment 1, participants first learnt to perform different instrumental responses to earn different outcomes. In a separate Pavlovian training phase, certain stimuli were established as Pavlovian signals of the different outcomes. Some of these Pavlovian stimuli were then extinguished (they were presented alone, without any outcome), while others were not. A final transfer test measured the extent to which these Pavlovian cues …

Export Market Destination And Performance: Firm-Level Evidence From Sub-Saharan Africa☆, Ousmanou Njikam

Journal of African Trade

This paper uses a novel manufacturing firm-level survey data in 19 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries to explore the linkages among a number of export-market destinations (e.g., China, India, other Asia, EU, US, MENA, SSA excluding South Africa, and South Africa) and performance. The paper also examines differences between exporters and non-exporters performance and assesses self-selection. We find superior characteristics of exporters relative to non-exporters. Size, foreign ownership and past export experience enhance the propensity to export while continuing exporters outperform switching ones. Export destination matters: exporting to China leads to improvements in total factor productivity (TFP); India destination enhances the …

Aid For Trade And Africa’S Trade Performance: Evidence From Bilateral Trade Flows With China And Oecd Countries☆, Adugna Lemi

Journal of African Trade

The optimism surrounding aid for trade (AfT) led scholars and practitioners to probe its link with trade performance of aid-recipient countries in Africa. In the absence of formal evaluation guidelines, most previous studies, using aggregate data, have looked into the impacts of AfT on exports and imports and found results consistent with the stated objectives of AfT. The present study investigates the nature of the link for the case of African countries using disaggregated AfT data from China and OECD member countries. The results show that flows of OECD aid to all sectors and to economic infrastructure have increased both …

Understanding Crude Oil Import Demand Behaviour In Africa: The Ghana Case, George Marbuah

Journal of African Trade

As in many African countries, crude oil importation is a major drain on the economy of Ghana. We estimate short-run and long-run import demand models for crude oil using data over the period 1980–2012. Results show that demand for crude oil is price inelastic in the short-run but elastic in the long-run. Other important drivers of crude oil import are the real effective exchange rate, domestic oil production and population growth. Income is found to be the strongest driver of crude oil demand. Policy implications of our results are presented.