Komunikasi budaya silang, kompetensi, pengajaran dan pembelajaran : satu analisis

This paper examines several issues related to intercultural communication competence and shared reality or inter-subjectivity when teaching in multicultural classrooms in Australia. Using the research method of personal narratives and autoethnography, it examines the challenges faced by lecturers and students in the classroom such as the use of different vocabulary, slang, idiom and keywords and the prior culture-specific knowledge required of both the lecturers and students. The paper also discusses how these challenges can be identified and addressed and how to prepare for future situations more effectively and in advance. It will be examined within the contexts of culturally responsive teaching, communicaiton competence, the hidden curriculum, instructional scaffolding, understanding and being open to other cultures and acknowledgement of the richness and relevance of multicultural students' varied experiences and social realities, from the point of view of the academic discipline of communication studies.

A critical evaluation and comparison of two formative measures of system quality using criterion variables

Evaluating the validity of formative variables has presented ongoing challenges for researchers. In this paper we use global criterion measures to compare and critically evaluate two alternative formative measures of System Quality. One model is based on the ISO-9126 software quality standard, and the other is based on a leading information systems research model. We find that despite both models having a strong provenance, many of the items appear to be non-significant in our study. We examine the implications of this by evaluating the quality of the criterion variables we used, and the performance of PLS when evaluating formative models with a large number of items. We find that our respondents had difficulty distinguishing between global criterion variables measuring different aspects of overall System Quality. Also, because formative indicators “compete with one another” in PLS, it may be difficult to develop a set of measures which are all significant for a complex formative construct with a broad scope and a large number of items. Overall, we suggest that there is cautious evidence that both sets of measures are valid and largely equivalent, although questions still remain about the measures, the use of criterion variables, and the use of PLS for this type of model evaluation.

Enhancing audio-haptic enabled novel dental training platform performance

Existing haptic and non-haptic dental simulators do not eliminate the problem of hand instability while using the haptic devices for training purpose. This paper reports an audio-haptic dental training platform, which uses a Hand Stability System to reduce the effect of nervousness and hand instability for trainee dental students. Maintaining the ease of implementation, application customizability and the cost factor, the proposed platform increases the training efficiency by enhancing the immersive haptic experience with hand stability. This haptic platform includes multiple angle viewing techniques, audio feedback and session recording for after action review. Trials using this preliminary platform reduced the effect of human nervousness and hand instability due to the customized design.

A review of the cost estimation issues in the tender preparation process in construction industry

Cost estimation process is undertaken to predict the total cost of the project. Studies indicate that one of the construction company failures in contracting is because of the uncertain, incorrect, and unrealistic cost estimation. Cost estimation process are heavily influenced by the complexity of the project, scale and scope of construction, market conditions, method of construction, site constraints, client’s financial position, buildability and the location of the project. However, there are other combinations factors that have not been studied thus far. Hence, this paper focuses on the review of other researchers’ findings in relation to cost estimation issues in the construction industry. Among the findings, it has been revealed that the cost estimation issues are related to accuracy, human factors, practical knowledge and insufficient cost data/information. The aim of this paper is to investigate these factors and determining other potential factors that may influence cost estimation process in the construction industry.

Does traditional security risk assessment have a future in information security?

The current information security standards still advocate the use of risk assessment in the prioritisation of security investments. However, prior research on the use of risk assessment methodologies in organisational security has shown that the use of the traditional monolithic risk assessment process described in the current risk management standard is simply not practical at the organisational level. This paper first examines the problems in performing a systematic risk assessment and then discusses the limitations of a traditional risk assessment. To address these limitations, this paper proposes splitting up the current monolithic risk assessment process. The result is an information security assessment framework that puts greater emphasis on situational awareness and allows for better decision making on the prioritization of security investments.

Targeting the mitochondrial electron transport chain in autism, a systematic review and synthesis of a novel therapeutic approach

Autism is a complex developmental disorder with an unknown etiology and without any curative treatment. The mitochondrial electron transfer chains play a major role in the production of ATP, and the generation and management of reactive oxidative stress (ROS). This paper is a systematic review of the role of the mitochondrial electron transport chain in autism, and a consequent hypothesis for treating autism is synthesized.

An electronic search with pre-specified inclusion criteria was conducted in order to retrieve all the published articles about the mitochondrial electron transport chain in autism. The two databases of PUBMED and Google Scholar were searched.

Automatic rule induction in Arabic to English machine translation framework

This chapter addresses the exploitation of a supervised machine learning technique to automatically induce Arabic-to-English transfer rules from chunks of parallel aligned linguistic resources. The induced structural transfer rules encode the linguistic translation knowledge for converting an Arabic syntactic structure into a target English syntactic structure. These rules are going to be an integral part of an Arabic-English transfer-based machine translation. Nevertheless, a novel morphological rule induction method is employed for learning Arabic morphological rules that are applied in our Arabic morphological analyzer. To demonstrate the capability of the automated rule induction technique, we conducted rule-based translation experiments that use induced rules from a relatively small data set. The translation quality of the hybrid translation experiments achieved good results in terms of WER.

Minimizing bounded uncertainty impact on scheduling with earliest start and due-date constraints via interval computation

Bounded uncertainty is a major challenge to real life scheduling as it increases the risk and cost depending on the objective function. Bounded uncertainty provides limited information about its nature. It provides only the upper and the lower bounds without information in between, in contrast to probability distributions and fuzzymembership functions. Bratley algorithm is usually used for scheduling with the constraints of earliest start and due-date. It is formulated as . The proposed research uses interval computation to minimize the impact of bounded uncertainty of processing times on Bratley’s algorithm. It minimizes the uncertainty of the estimate of the objective function. The proposed concept is to do the calculations on the interval values and approximate the end result instead of approximating each interval then doing numerical calculations. This methodology gives a more certain estimate of the objective function.

The factors that affect the cost estimation activities in the tender preparation process in the Malaysian construction industry

The possibility of winning the tender is subject to the cost estimation proposed by the contractors compared to the cost estimation prepared by the client’s representative. Studies indicated that one of the construction company failures in the tendering process is due to the uncertain, incorrect, and unrealistic cost estimation. Failure to provide a competitive cost estimation on time is the main reason the contractor is not successful in winning the tender, and will not be considered for the tender evaluation stage. The aim of this paper is to validate the key factors that affect the cost estimation activities in the tender preparation process. This paper describes the results of a pilot study, from a questionnaire survey on the factors that affect the cost estimation activities in the tender preparation process. The study shows the importance of all the factors in the cost estimation activities in the tender preparation process in terms of human factors, working culture, and information technology.

Securing recommendations in grouped P2P e-commerce trust model

In dynamic peer to peer (P2P) e-commerce, it is an important and difficult problem to promote online businesses without sacrificing the desired trust to secure transactions. In this paper, we address malicious threats in order to guarantee secrecy and integrity of recommendations exchanged among peers in P2P e-commerce. In addition to trust, secret keys are required to be established between each peer and its neighbors. Further, we propose a key management approach gkeying to generate six types of keys. Our work mainly focuses on key generation for securing recommendations, and ensuring the integrity of recommendations. The proposed approach presented with a security and performance analysis, is more secure and more efficient in terms of communication cost, computation cost, storage cost, and feasibility. © 2012 IEEE.