Unavailability Of Resources Research Articles

Scenario-based preferences modeling to investigate port initiatives resilience

• Scenario-based preference modeling was used for testing port system resilience. • The model describes the influence of different scenarios on the port initiatives. • The approach ranks initiatives in each scenario based on level of importance. • The most disruptive scenario was S 3 (economic crisis). • S 5 (compelling circumstance) was the least disruptive scenario. Port systems are sensitive and complicated, yet they are subject to various forms of disruptiveness. Therefore, during the port life cycle, the port can be exposed to unexpected crises that include economic meltdowns, inappropriate designs, and the unavailability of resources. Scenario-based preference modeling was designed to define the nature of the system resilience in Mubarak Al-Kabeer Port (MKP), Kuwait. The model described the influence of different scenarios on the port initiatives among a set of criteria. The initiatives in each scenario were ranked based on their level of importance. Results showed that the most disruptive scenario was s 3 (economic crisis), while s 5 (compelling circumstance) was the least disruptive scenario. The results also revealed that the most robust and highly prioritized initiatives were x 1 (soil treatment for the main road construction and MKP harbor) and x 25 (maintenance of the connecting channel —the channel links MKP to Khor Abdullah).

Factors affecting data quality of health management information system at township level, Bago region, Myanmar

Background: Health information from Health management information system (HMIS) is the core essential operator for strengthening the health system. The effectiveness of the Myanmar health system is challenged by the poor-quality assurance of healthcare data. Methods: The aim of the quantitative study was to evaluate the township HMIS to assess the factors affecting the data quality assurance through three main aspects; organizational, technical, and behavioral. In this cross-sectional study, eight townships from four districts in Bago Region were randomly picked. Under these townships, from a random sample of 117 public health facilities altogether, 273 public health professionals (PHPs) were culled and 291 HMIS registers and 1270 HMIS monthly reports were reviewed. The researchers applied the PRISM tools developed for assessing district and facility HMIS. SPSS assisted the researchers in computing the frequencies and percentages, practicing cross-tabulation, and analyzing bivariate statistics using the Cox proportional hazards model.Results: Out of 281 PHPs invited, 273 were likely to participate in this study. The overall prevalence of the HMIS data quality was 30.4%. Poor data quality assurance was associated with the burden of workload (95%CI-1.16-2.91), poor management ability of the supervisors (95%CI-1.22-2.54), weak handover practice of the HMIS document (95%CI-1.65-2.22), and unavailability of HMIS resources (95%CI-1.12-2.45). The statistically significant relationships were found between low-quality data and some technical factors such as inexpertness for data analysis (95%CI-1.14-2.19), over-workload of paper-based HMIS (95%CI-1.21-2.44), differences between information systems (95%CI-1.22-2.81), and multiple reporting (95%CI-1.64-2.36). There were significant associations between the unacceptable data quality and the human factors such as lower scores of perceived confidences (95%CI-1.18-2.29), competence (95%CI-1.17-2.77), and promotion of the culture of information (95%CI-1.09-2.33).Conclusions: Current township HMIS data quality is unacceptable. It is necessary to strengthen several factors relating to organization, technology and behaviors of HMIS and to develop the effective township-level strategic plan for improving data quality.

Dynamic Task Placement for Deadline-Aware IoT Applications in Federated Fog Networks

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), fog computing has become an enticing concept for supporting delay-sensitive tasks by offering versatile and convenient computing and communication services to the end users, in conjunction with cloud services. Most of the existing research mainly draws attention to the communication delay minimization and completion time reduction in the hierarchical fog networks without giving the priority to select the suitable computing device during failure or resource unavailability of the current computing devices. By motivating the above-mentioned challenges, in this article, we propose a deadline-aware dynamic task placement (DDTP) strategy to offload and place the tasks to a suitable computing device in fog networks. In this context, we design a new federated fog framework consisting of several fog clusters in which the cluster head, termed as master fog node, acts as a fog controller that controls and manages the data distribution among the other fog nodes, termed as slave fog nodes. The proposed DDTP strategy selects the suitable computing device for each incoming task as per the deadline and ensures to meet the deadline constraints of the tasks using a dynamic task allocation policy. Finally, a dispatch-constrained offloading policy is developed to reassign the failed tasks to the available fog nodes in the network. Comprehensive simulation results depict the efficiency of the proposed strategy over the existing baseline algorithms in terms of various performance matrices.

Lecturer Support in the Implementation of a New Curriculum During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The objective of the study was to assess the support provided to lecturers in the implementation of a new curriculum during the COVID-19 pandemic to suggest early intervention strategies that address resources and knowledge deficiency gaps that have a negative impact on curriculum implementation. A survey design was used in the study. A representative sample of 30 lecturers was randomly selected from 5 Faculty of Natural Resources Management and Agriculture departments to complete the questionnaire between June and July 2020. The majority of the lecturers agreed that they were involved in the curriculum development. There was affirmation on the issue of professional development, leadership’s support for lecturers’ curriculum implementation and adequate time for curriculum implementation. Similarly, there was collaboration between university leadership and lecturers to plan curriculum implementation. On the contrary, funds for research necessary for curriculum implementation, instructional materials and supplies and technological resources were not adequately supplied. Hence, the paper becomes critical as it highlights the unavailability of technological resources which play a crucial role in online teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scientific Literacy: To days Necessity

This era of the 21st century has been termed as the digital age because in this era the changes taking place in the living conditions of human beings have been such that the digital society has been born. The pace of developmental change in this digital society is so fast that keeping pace with it is a challenging task. In this digital world scientific literacy is very important factor.. In this research we found that urban students are leading in the comparison of rural students and girls are moving faster than boys. It is required to improve scientific literacy in rural area and hurdle is lack of supply of electricity and unavailability of resources.

Study on Performance Factors of Public Building Construction Project in Assosa Zone

Construction industry is highly competitive and a job creator for a different groups of expertise such as owners, consultants, contractors and other shareholders. General objectives is to assess the effects of issues determining the presentation of public building construction project in Assosa Zone. The research was used quantitative design; the data was collected from owners, consultants, and contractors using questionnaires and interviews. The performance problems of which the respondents were asked to rank each according to the five-point Likert scale. The results of this research identified 74 factors influencing the performance of public building construction project. From among factors escalation of material prices, unavailability of resources as planned through project duration, sequencing of work according to schedule, differentiation of currency prices, leadership skills of project manager, are the top five significant factors in Assosa zone. To accomplish the public building construction project without delay the clients should hire a specialized engineer and the consultant should give training for the project organization. The contractors should be using the qualified employees with good experience to avoid any problems during construction of the project.

The Impact of Empowering Principals on Students' Performance in the Final Exams – An Educational Perspective

In addition to classroom management, school management plays a vital role in the success or failure of schools (as establishments or educational firms) and students’ performance in general. This paper discusses several issues that were put under seven different subtitles starting with “The Transformations of Principals Roles in Iraq” and ending with “Recommendations” for further studies or research in this regard. It (the paper) focusses on the importance of empowering principals and school leaders through providing them with more freedom in decision making. Also, the paper pinpoints how much control we need to have on this freedom. Some of the roles played by principals, in addition to the required qualities, skills and capacities that school principals need to have or acquire if they want to run their buildings (schools) in an effective and an influential way will be tackled in the fourth part (issue) of the paper. These roles, skills and capacities will be highlighted in light of their impact on students’ performance in classrooms and in the results of the end of year exams. The questionnaire part of the paper describes the results of the questionnaire (in which a limited number of school leaders participated) and their analysis. The last two parts of the paper describe the challenges that accompanied writing this paper like: the unavailability of resources as it was a bit hard to find resources tackling the issue of principalship and leadership in schools in our libraries, therefore, most of the paper was written according to the American and Australian literature in this field. Also, not many principals agreed to participate in the questionnaire because they thought that it contains an implicit criticism to the current educational system that’s why I kept the identity of the participants unknown.

Event-Argument Linking in Disaster Domain

Linking event triggers with their respective arguments is an essential component for building an event extraction system. It is challenging to link event triggers with the corresponding arguments triggers when the sentence contains multiple events and arguments triggers. The task becomes even more challenging in a low-resource setup due to the unavailability of natural language processing resource and tools. In this paper, we study the event-argument linking task based on disaster event ontology in a low resource setup. We use BERT and non-BERT-based deep learning models in both monolingual and cross-lingual event-argument linking task.We also perform an ablation study of various features like position embeddings (PE), position indicator (PI), and segment ID (SI) to understand their contribution to performance improvement in non-BERT-based models. Using three different languages viz. Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi, we compare the results with multilingual BERT-based deep neural models in both monolingual and cross-lingual scenarios. We observe that the multilingual BERT-based model outperforms the best performing non-BERT-based model in cross-lingual settings. But in monolingual settings, the performance is similar in Hindi and Bengali datasets and slightly better in Marathi dataset. We choose the disaster domain due to its social implications. Our current experiments can be helpful in mining important information related to disaster events from news articles and building event knowledge graphs in low-resource languages.

Development of a Fast Fourier Transform-based Analytical Method for COVID-19 Diagnosis from Chest X-Ray Images Using GNU Octave.

Many artificial intelligence-based computational procedures are developed to diagnose COVID-19 infection from chest X-ray (CXR) images, as diagnosis by CXR imaging is less time consuming and economically cheap compared to other detection procedures. Due to unavailability of skilled computer professionals and high computer architectural resource, majority of the employed methods are difficult to implement in rural and poor economic settings. Majority of such reports are devoid of codes and ignores related diseases (pneumonia). The absence of codes makes limitation in applying them widely. Hence, validation testing followed by evidence-based medical practice is difficult. The present work was aimed to develop a simple method that requires a less computational expertise and minimal level of computer resource, but with statistical inference. A Fast Fourier Transform-based (FFT) method was developed with GNU Octave, a free and open-source platform. This was employed to the images of CXR for further analysis. For statistical inference, two variables, i.e., the highest peak and number of peaks in the FFT distribution plot were considered. The comparison of mean values among different groups (normal, COVID-19, viral, and bacterial pneumonia [BP]) showed statistical significance, especially when compared to normal, except between viral and BP groups. Parametric statistical inference from our result showed high level of significance (P < 0.001). This is comparable to the available artificial intelligence-based methods (where accuracy is about 94%). Developed method is easy, availability with codes, and requires a minimal level of computer resource and can be tested with a small sample size in different demography, and hence, be implemented in a poor socioeconomic setting.

Challenges of Patient-centered Care among the Health Workers of Private Hospitals: A Qualitative Perspective from Islamabad, Pakistan

This qualitative study identifies social factors that lead to challenges for healthcare workers in the process of Patient-centered Care (PCC), which is comparatively a new approach in the healthcare industry of Pakistan and is deemed as the epitome of quality care. Although it is more common in developed countries, and in the past few decades private hospitals in Pakistan are also adopting this methodology. Qualitative data collection tools and techniques including key-informants, non-participant observation, rapport development, semi-structured interview guides, purposive sampling, and in-depth interview technique were applied for data collection of this study. The ethical issues were truly ensured during this study. This research emphasizes the non-medical factors of health care which make up a significant proportion of quality healthcare service. Non-medical factors include; effective communication, empathy, adequate knowledge of patient inclusion, etc. The findings of this study claim that most of the medical staff in Islamabad are unable to include such practices due to unavailability of resources, time, and training — thus impeding Patient-Centered Care.&nbsp; A leading reason for the status quo is the soaring number of medical colleges with questionable merits and quality. A qualitative exploratory approach was utilized to pinpoint the major social/non-medical factors that can adversely affect the experiences of a patient. This comprehensive study can be of profound assistance to hospitals and academia to understand the growing concept and challenges of patient-centered care.

Barriers to Technology Integration in Teaching English as a Second Language among English Educators in Pakistan

The integration of information and communication technology is becoming a must for todays’ English as a second language teaching. Of late, worldwide situations and proven effectiveness have made technology integration necessary for educators to move with the flow. However, technology integration for English as a second language teaching environment among English educators in Pakistan is questionable. Therefore, this study aims to find out the barriers English language educators face in integrating technology in their teaching environments in the country. The study employed a mixed-method research design to collect data via an online questionnaire and interview protocols. The samples consist of 39 tertiary-level Pakistani ESL educators who responded to the online survey, and eight were chosen as interviewees. The findings revealed the unavailability of technology resources and lack of computer knowledge and skills training as part of the educators’ professional development as the core barriers to the technology-integration teaching in the country. The study calls for rigorous development and implementation of technology-based facilities and resources from the local authorities to be made available for the educators to incorporate in their English language teaching environments. The research also advocates for more intensive upskilling technology-based training for the educators as part of their continuous professional development programmes.

Evidential representation of using the modern devices and decisionmaking feasibility in Pakistan

In the long run of modernity and technicality, the use of smart appliances in every field of life has been the need and demand of the era. The evidential representation by using modern devices is permissible in various developed judiciary cultures of the world. Pakistani courts and the judiciary system are also adopting modern devices to present the evidence in the courts for authentic decision-making. The articles and sections of Qanun-e-Shahadat order, 1984 and Electronic Certification Accreditation Council under Section 18 clarified using modern technologies to present the evidence in the courts with state and religion's perspectives of acceptability. The study descriptively demonstrated various types of modern devices use for evidential representation of offenders data; press reports and press clips, fax, email and internet evidence, cell phones, computer-related data, audio recordings, photographs and screenshots, video films and video cassettes, CCTV footage, polygraphy test and DNA test. In each type of modern evidential representation, the registered, recorded and solved cases have also been mentioned as proof of modern devices application in court decision-making feasibility. The study found that the unapproached low-class sector of society feels reluctant to rely on and use modern devices for court hearings and decision-making due to unawareness and unavailability of modern resources. There is also the issue of some insecurities and inadequacies of using modern devices as evidential representation because of editing, cropping and regenerating the duplicate evidence that could not be verified due to lack of technical flaws and advancement of computerized technology.

Task shifting approach led by general practitioners to improve maternal and reproductive health care: Experience of rural Nepal.

Task shifting approaches have been the key strategies around the world to reduce maternal, neonatal, and reproductive morbidity as well as mortality. In resource-limited settings, access to those care is severely constrained by the unavailability of trained human resources. General practitioners (GPs) are the cornerstone of peripheral hospitals in Nepal to deliver accessible required basic health care including life-saving surgeries. The analysis identifies task shifting activities like anesthesia, antenatal ultrasonography, safe abortion services, collaborative mental health care, and handling of complicated vaginal delivery led by GPs to midwives, doctors, and paramedics at district-level hospitals to improve maternal and reproductive care. Findings indicated improved access to maternal and reproductive health services without compromising outcomes. However, several barriers were found to better support their practice.

Pharmacovigilance in Pakistan: A Peek into the Future Prospects

Pharmacovigilance in Pakistan: A Peek into the Future Prospects

БІЗНЕС-КЛІМАТ РЕГІОНУ ЯК ЧИННИК ЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ СТІЙКОГО ЕКОНОМІЧНОГО ЗРОСТАННЯ

Despite a number of reforms, Ukraine has not created the necessary environment to stimulate entrepreneurial activity, active investment inflows and economic growth in the regions. The article analyzes the assessment of the business environment of Ukraine according to different world ratings and comparative assessment of the business environment of Ukraine and other countries. Risks for the development of the business environment in Ukraine have been identified. An assessment of the interdependence between the quality of the business environment in the regions of Ukraine and the growth rate of GRP. The analysis of regional features of the quality of the business environment in Ukraine shows positive changes in all regions in terms of ease of business registration, land registration, connection to the grid and difficulties with paying local taxes and the development of electronic services. However, the achieved results have not yet been converted into a stable dynamics of economic growth and increasing the level of Ukraine's competitiveness in the world economy. Among the main problems of business environment development are low level of protection of intellectual property and property of business entities, inefficiency of the judicial system in Ukraine, low level of financial and investment freedom of business, unavailability of credit resources for starting and conducting business. Interregional comparisons of the business environment and economic growth of Ukraine's regions prove that the leading regions in terms of economic growth are characterized by a relatively higher quality of business climate, moreover, in recent years they have increased their position in the regional ranking of ease of doing business. At the same time, the largest group of regions in Ukraine, which still manages to maintain a positive pace of economic development, are outsiders in terms of both the quality of the business climate and the loss of ranking positions. The most difficult situation with the business environment has developed in such industrial regions as Zaporizhia, Poltava, Kharkiv regions. That is, the regions, which have always focused on large enterprises in the industrial sector, have not yet been able to refocus on supporting entrepreneurship and stimulating entrepreneurial activity.

Dissemination of Disaster Communication and Information via Instagram @bpbdkaro

The social media Instagram @bpbdkaro as a source of communication and disaster information dissemination in the Karo community is no longer active. The purpose of this study was to find a disaster communication planning model in the communication and information dissemination process from the Karo Regency Regional Disaster Management Agency (BPBD) to the community through the Instagram @bpbdkaro social media account. This study uses qualitative evaluation research methods, data collection techniques with Focus Group Discussion and interviews with Instagram managers, the Head of Planning for the Regional Disaster Management Agency (BPBD), and field observations. Quantitative evaluation method with data collection techniques is carried out online through Google Form to 50 people who use social media randomly. The evaluation results show that Instagram social media is used by the majority of respondents (28%) as the main source of searching for disaster information in Karo, but @bpbdkaro social media is not active because the Karo Regency BPBD does not dare to face negative comments from the community and the unavailability of human resources to manage it. This causes the dissemination process of disaster communication and information through social media Instagram @bpbdkaro not going well to achieve the goal due to the lack of elements of communication planning. The results of the evaluation of researchers with BPBD Karo Regency have carried out communication planning referring to the Cutlip and Center planning theory by covering elements of fact determination, planning, communication, and evaluation. The theoretical new findings in this study provide additional elements of communication competence and resources in the Cutlip and Center Communication Planning Model. The substance of this research contributes in the form of recommendations for communication planning models for the dissemination of disaster communication and information through social media.

Investigating the Effects of E-Learning as a Method of Curriculum Dissemination for Rural TVET College Students

The study investigates the effects of e-learning as an alternative form of curriculum dissemination for rural Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) college students. This study adopted connectivism theory, which enabled lecturers to reflect and adapt to how learning has changed and the accompanying implications of designing the spaces and structures to the current mode of learning. The researcher made use of two research methods to gather data; phone interviews and questionnaires. The data was analyzed using thematic analysis and the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Version 20.0, Office Word format. The results indicated that the unavailability of technological resources, lack of financial support from single parents’ side due to socio-economic factors, and child-headed families hinder the correct implementation of e-learning and make it difficult to reach its objectives.

Assessment of Community Pharmacy Professionals' Attitude and Perception Towards Ethical Issues in Amhara Region, Ethiopia: A Cross-Sectional Survey 2020.

PurposeThe objective of this study was to assess the attitude and perception of community pharmacy professionals’ towards ethical issues.MethodsWe have undertaken a cross-sectional study among community pharmacy professionals in three selected towns (Gondar, Bahir Dar, and Debra Markos) of Amhara region in Ethiopia from February to March 2020. All community pharmacy professionals who were giving services during the data collection period were the study population. We used a pretested, semi-structured questionnaire developed from a review of previous study. Epi-info 7.1 was used for data entry, and SPSS version 20 was used for data analysis. Logistic regression was done, and a variable with a p-value < 0.05 with 95% confidence interval was considered to be associated with outcome variable.ResultsA total of 305 community pharmacy professionals participated in the study with a response rate of 95.3%. About 252 (82.6%) of respondents received education regarding professional ethics. Majority (89.8%) of the participants had ever accessed ethical information at their work site. Only 145 (47.5%) participants had ever recorded ethical issues in their working site. The most common reasons that obstruct to explain ethical issues to customers were shortage of time (85.9%), unavailability of reliable resources (40.0%), and poor ethical knowledge (37.7%). The reporting rate of respondents is less than 50% for most ethical scenarios. Sex, age, educational status, work experience, number of customers per day, working site, information about ethics, and training about ethics were observed to have a significant association with attitude and perception of community pharmacy professionals towards ethical issues.ConclusionCommunity pharmacy professionals had poor attitude and perception towards ethical issues. Interventions should be devised to uphold ethical awareness of community pharmacy professionals. A large-scale study is also recommended.

DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED IN TEACHING AGRICULTURE AS A CORE PART OF T.L.E. IN THE PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLSIN GUINOBATAN, ALBAY

This study was conducted to determine the difficulties encountered in teaching Agriculture as a core part of Technology and Livelihood Education (TLE) in the Public Secondary Schools in Guinobatan, Albay. It discussed the profiles of 10 Agriculture teachers, the activities being conducted, the difficulties encountered, the extent of difficulty, the solutions applied by the teachers to address the difficulties encountered in line with classroom instruction and practical agriculture, and the proposed solutions to address the difficulties encountered. The study made used of questionnaire - checklist and rating scale as the instrument in data gathering. The data gathered were subjected to statistical analysis using frequency count, percentage and weighted mean to analyze the data obtained. The activities conducted by the Agriculture teachers during classroom instruction include oral recitation, paper and pencil test, and group activity. During practical agriculture, Horticulture teachers let their students plant crops but it was found out that none of them ever conducted soil sampling activity. For Animal Production, it was revealed that the activities conducted by the teachers were mere familiarization rather than actual demonstration of the subject. Moreover, teachers encountered numerous difficulties that serve as hindrances in their teaching profession. The difficulties they encountered during classroom instruction were the unavailability of resources, short time allotment, financial constraints and inability of the students to understand the lesson. On the practical agriculture, teachers encountered difficulties because of short time allotment, financial constraints in providing the needed materials to be used for hands-on laboratory, and lack of land, farm tools, equipment and facilities to support the practical aspects of the subject. As teachers, they applied solutions to address the difficulties encountered by consulting the principal/department head with regards to the unavailability of learning resources and farm resources. Teachers also used different teaching strategies so that slow learners can cope up in the class discussion and they extend time for hands-on laboratory.

Time-centric and resource-driven composition for the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT), one of the fastest growing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), is playing a major role in provisioning contextualized, smart services to end-users and organizations. To sustain this role, many challenges must be tackled with focus in this paper on the design and development of thing composition. The complex nature of today’s needs requires groups of things, and not separate things, to work together to satisfy these needs. By analogy with other ICTs like Web services, thing composition is specified with a model that uses dependencies to decide upon things that will do what, where, when, and why. Two types of dependencies are adopted, regular that schedule the execution chronology of things and special that coordinate the operations of things when they run into obstacles like unavailability of resources to use. Both resource use and resource availability are specified in compliance with Allen’s time intervals upon which reasoning takes place. This reasoning is technically demonstrated through a system extending EdgeCloudSim and backed with a set of experiments.