Learning style preference and critical thinking perception among engineering students

Engineering education plays a vital role towards modernization of world. Therefore, engineering students need to be nurture with multiple skills like learning preferences and critical thinking skills. This study has been conducted to identify the learning style preferences and critical thinking perception of the engineering students from three programs electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and civil engineering at Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM), Johor. Survey research design was applied in this study. The quantitative data was collected by two questionnaires Index of Learning Styles (ILS) that is based on Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model (FSLSM) and Critical Thinking Skills (CTS) questionnaire which consists of analysis, evaluation, induction and deduction in terms of problem solving and decision making. A total of 315 final year engineering students were participated in this study. Data was analyzed in descriptive and inferential statistics involving tests Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Pearson Correlation and linear regression. The study discovered that engineering students are preferred to be visual learners (83.80%). Visual learning style denotes FSLSM input dimension and visual learners learn best by diagrams, charts, maps and graphical presentations. This study also found that engineering students possess critical thinking perception in all dimensions. However, there is no statistical significant difference of learning style found among engineering programs as “p” value found 0.357. Whereas, there is statistical significant critical thinking difference found among engineering programs as “p” value found 0.006. Lastly, findings revealed that there is no significant relationship found between learning styles and critical thinking skills. The study findings suggested that providing preferred learning style (visual learning style) in classroom will enhance students’ academic achievement and increase their cognitive level. This study might serve as a guideline for educators to facilitate learners to enhance their learning and thinking for better outcomes in academia as well as in workplace

Constraints and opportunities facing women entrepreneurs in developing countries: a relational perspective

Purpose: this purpose of the paper to examine the interplay of constraints and opportunities affecting female entrepreneurship in developing countries. The paper integrates salient micro- and macro-level perspectives and provides a rounded account of opportunities and constraints as part of a holistic interdependent system.Design/methodology/approach: the paper adopts an integrative multi-level research design and an interpretive research methodology, capitalizing on in-depth interviews with ten women entrepreneurs to explore their perceptions and interpretations of constraints and opportunities facing female entrepreneurship in the Lebanese context.Findings: the findings presented in this paper clearly illustrate the relevance of micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors in entrepreneurship research and the usefulness of integrating multiple lens and units of analysis to capture the complexity of the women entrepreneurship experience in any particular context.Originality/value: the value added of this research lies in adapting a framework recently popularized in the context of diversity management for use in entrepreneurship research, helping to capture in turn the dynamic interplay of multiple levels of analysis and objective/subjective factors influencing female entrepreneurshi

A Distributed Method for Trust-Aware Recommendation in Social Networks

This paper contains the details of a distributed trust-aware recommendation system. Trust-base recommenders have received a lot of attention recently. The main aim of trust-based recommendation is to deal the problems in traditional Collaborative Filtering recommenders. These problems include cold start users, vulnerability to attacks, etc.. Our proposed method is a distributed approach and can be easily deployed on social networks or real life networks such as sensor networks or peer to peer networks

Characterization of whole-body vibration for monorail passenger ride comfort

Train travel has always been a major mode of public transport in developed countries. In the inner cities monorails are often used, which are operated at elevated rail or beam, the main advantage being traffic interactions can be minimized while maintaining its original landscape. Ride comfort is the basic requirement for every passenger in all kind of public transports. In monorail, vibration is considered as major factor of discomfort, it transmitted to human body, which contribute many health issues. The aim of this study was to evaluate the whole-body vibration transmission and the effects to the monorail passengers. There were total of twenty-four experiments conducted in a two-car train monorail on its complete line from Kuala Lumpur Sentral to Titiwangsa stations. Human vibration meter (HVM-100) with tri-axial accelerometer pad was used to measure the WBV of passengers and International Standards Organization (ISO) 2631-1: 1997 was used for analysis. The experimental results show that the daily vibration exposure 0.81 m/s2 was higher than the action value 0.5 m/s2 of the standard during peak operation and 0.82 m/s2 during off-peak operation. The health effect was measured 9.90 m/s1.75 during peak operation and 9.94 m/s1.75 during off-peak operation; both values are observed in moderate health effect zone as per standard (8.5 m/s1.75 to 17 m/s1.75). Moreover, the passenger ride comfort was measured, it was found to be fairly-uncomfortable at rear bogie and not-uncomfortable at center of car. The statistical analysis has proven the significance of orientation, location and operating hours by significant value p = 0.000 (i.e. p < α) with 29.5% of the variance has been accounted between groups. This provides justification to standardization of proper priority seating zone. The findings of this study can assist in the standard specification for seating design of monorail. The statistical analysis shows that all results are statistically significant for orientations, locations as well as operations

Active fluids at circular boundaries: Swim pressure and anomalous droplet ripening

We investigate the swim pressure exerted by non-chiral and chiral active particles on convex or concave circular boundaries. Active particles are modeled as non-interacting and non-aligning self-propelled Brownian particles. The convex and concave circular boundaries are used as models representing a fixed inclusion immersed in an active bath and a cavity (or container) enclosing the active particles, respectively. We first present a detailed analysis of the role of convex versus concave boundary curvature and of the chirality of active particles on their spatial distribution, chirality-induced currents, and the swim pressure they exert on the bounding surfaces. The results will then be used to predict the mechanical equilibria of suspended fluid enclosures (generically referred to as 'droplets') in a bulk with active particles being present either inside the bulk fluid or within the suspended droplets. We show that, while droplets containing active particles and suspended in a normal bulk behave in accordance with standard capillary paradigms, those containing a normal fluid exhibit anomalous behaviors when suspended in an active bulk. In the latter case, the excess swim pressure results in non-monotonic dependence of the inside droplet pressure on the droplet radius. As a result, we find a regime of anomalous capillarity for a single droplet, where the inside droplet pressure increases upon increasing the droplet size. In the case of two interconnected droplets, we show that mechanical equilibrium can occur also when they have different sizes. We further identify a regime of anomalous ripening, where two unequal-sized droplets can reach a final state of equal sizes upon interconnection, in stark contrast with the standard Ostwald ripening phenomenon, implying shrinkage of the smaller droplet in favor of the larger one.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure

Primal Recovery from Consensus-Based Dual Decomposition for Distributed Convex Optimization

Dual decomposition has been successfully employed in a variety of distributed convex optimization problems solved by a network of computing and communicating nodes. Often, when the cost function is separable but the constraints are coupled, the dual decomposition scheme involves local parallel subgradient calculations and a global subgradient update performed by a master node. In this paper, we propose a consensus-based dual decomposition to remove the need for such a master node and still enable the computing nodes to generate an approximate dual solution for the underlying convex optimization problem. In addition, we provide a primal recovery mechanism to allow the nodes to have access to approximate near-optimal primal solutions. Our scheme is based on a constant stepsize choice and the dual and primal objective convergence are achieved up to a bounded error floor dependent on the stepsize and on the number of consensus steps among the nodes

Information-seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

Purpose – The study examines two aspects of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers including methods applied for keeping up-to-date and methods used for finding articles. The relationship between academic status and research field of users with their information seeking behaviour was investigated. Methodology/approach – Data were gathered using a questionnaire survey of PhD students and staff of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London; 114 people (47.1 per cent response rate) participated in the survey. Findings – The study reveals differences among subfields of physics and astronomy in terms of information-seeking behaviour, highlights the need for and the value of looking at narrower subject communities within disciplines for a deeper understanding of the information behaviour of scientists. Originality/value – The study is the first study to deeply investigate intradisciplinary dissimilarities of information-seeking behaviour of scientists in a discipline. It is also an up-to-date account of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers