Search

This article investigates the effect that students and peers, their behaviours, and the way classes are practically and physically taught affect teachers’ motivation and job satisfaction in a Saudi Arabian context. A lack of trained teachers, unawareness of the cultural differences between their home country and that of Saudi Arabia, and the lack of training and induction in their working life, means it may be difficult to integrate into the workplace and, indeed, society. This has a knock on effect on their personal and professional lives, and added to the somewhat perplexing attitudes of some students and peer teachers, who for reasons including non-compliance, unwillingness and demotivation among students, as well as peer teachers who were perceived as poor, untrained and uncooperative, can make time at work within the Kingdom difficult, unrewarding and lonely. This results in many teachers feeling unappreciated, demotivated and demoralised, and they have little satisfaction in the job they are doing.

Purpose: This article is focused on the high attrition rate of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It looks into the possible reasons that cause teachers to leave the country or the profession after spending a short time there, based on data collected from EFL teachers from across the Kingdom. Approach/Methodology/Design: This study used a mixed methods enquiry design, initially carried out through semi-structured interviews in a qualitative manner. Five teachers who worked in various higher education institutes across the Kingdom were interviewed and questioned about various aspects of their professional life as a teacher in the KSA. Those interviews were subsequently analysed to create questionnaires which were then administered to a sample of 20 teachers. The returned questionnaires were analysed and reported in numerical charts for ease of visual clarity. The lower the figure, the less motivation or satisfaction there was in the field. Findings: NEST attrition rates in Saudi Arabia are abnormally high due to a serious lack of cultural training by management and/or provider, poor induction once a teacher arrives in country and culture. NNEST attrition rates are more aligned to professional reasons, as they feel they are treated poorly by comparison with their NEST counterparts: lower wages, fewer promotion opportunities, not being taken as seriously by students and employers, and sudden discontinuance of contracts among the main reasons for NNESTs leaving their posts. Practical Implications: The study makes suggestions as to how teachers’ needs might be addressed in order to reduce the outflow of professional teachers from Saudi Arabia. Originality/value: There is very little continuity in teaching due to large numbers of teachers exiting the Kingdom after a very short period of time. NEST attrition rates in Saudi Arabia are abnormally high due to a number of reasons.

Optimal scale selection for image segmentation is an essential component of the Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) and interpretation. An optimal segmentation scale is a scale at which image objects, overall, best represent real-world ground objects and features across the entire image. At this scale, the intra-object variance is ideally lowest and the inter-object spatial autocorrelation is ideally highest, and a change in the scale could cause an abrupt change in these measures. Unsupervised parameter optimization methods typically use global measures of spatial and spectral properties calculated from all image objects in all bands as the target criteria to determine the optimal segmentation scale. However, no studies consider the effect of noise in image spectral bands on the segmentation assessment and scale selection. Furthermore, these global measures could be affected by outliers or extreme values from a small number of objects. These issues may lead to incorrect assessment and selection of optimal scales and cause the uncertainties in subsequent segmentation and classification results. These issues become more pronounced when segmenting hyperspectral data with large spectral variability across the spectrum. In this study, we propose an enhanced method that 1) incorporates the band's inverse noise weighting in the segmentation and 2) detects and removes outliers before determining segmentation scale parameters. The proposed method is evaluated on three well-established segmentation approaches – k-means, mean-shift, and watershed. The generated segments are validated by comparing them with reference polygons using normalized over-segmentation (OS), under-segmentation (US), and the Euclidean Distance (ED) indices. The results demonstrate that this proposed scale selection method produces more accurate and reliable segmentation results. The approach can be applied to other segmentation selection criteria and are useful for automatic multi-parameter tuning and op

The recent advances in hardware and software related to distributed smart sensing have opened unprecedented opportunities for building effective solutions to applications, such as object detection, tracking and recognition for surveillance, mobile medical imaging, distributed video monitoring/retrieval, gesture recognition, etc.

The recent advances in hardware and software related to distributed smart sensing have opened unprecedented opportunities for building effective solutions to applications, such as object detection, tracking and recognition for surveillance, mobile medical imaging, distributed video monitoring/retrieval, gesture recognition, etc.

Lubricants which contain a polymeric thickener will often display a second Newtonian plateau in measured flow curves. Like other manifestations of shear-dependent viscosity, this shear response will lead to an inaccurate prediction when the classical film-thickness formulas are employed. A correction formula has been developed from numerical experiments for a range of parameters of the double-Newtonian modified Carreau equation. The parameters of this shear-thinning model were selected from measurements for real lubricants obtained in Couette viscometers and a capillary viscometer. In addition, a full EHL film thickness formula has been derived from the same numerical experiments. The correction formula and the full formula were successfully validated using published film thickness data and published viscosity data for an EHL reference liquid, a polymer solution. Clearly, viscometer measurements of shear-dependent viscosity which contain the inflection leading to the second Newtonian are essential for a film-thickness calculation when a high-molecular-weight component of the lubricant is present.

OBJECTIVE We compared South Asians with four other racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. to determine whether sociodemographic, lifestyle, or metabolic factors could explain the higher diabetes prevalence and whether insulin resistance and b-cell dysfunction oc

OBJECTIVE We compared South Asians with four other racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. to determine whether sociodemographic, lifestyle, or metabolic factors could explain the higher diabetes prevalence and whether insulin resistance and b-cell dysfunction oc

The elastohydrodynamic (EHD) regime of lubrication is responsible for the generation of a protective film and the transfer of shear across concentrated contacts in many machine elements including bearings, cams and gears. It is now understood that small scale EFiD plays a major role in the boundary lubrication of rough surfaces. Many high pressure metal working operations share the pressure and kinematics of elastohydrodynamics. A complete solution of the EHD problem, however, requires a thorough knowledge of the lubricant constitutive behavior and the attending properties as flinctions of temperature and pressure. The Newtonian assumption alone is inadequate.

Free to read The materials released in vitro by the tissue-parasitic larval stages of the large roundworm of man, Ascaris lumbricoides, were analysed by radio-iodination, immunoprecipitation, and SDS-PAGE. The antigens were found to be heterogeneous, ranging in molecular weight from 14 to 410 kD, and were found to alter radically during the parasites' migration to the lungs. The antigens secreted by the infective and lung-stage larvae of the pig homologue, Ascaris suum, were compared with those of the human worms. This revealed a remarkable degree of homology between the products of the two, at both the molecular and immunological levels. The two species could be discriminated, however, on the basis of the SDS-PAGE profiles of the antigens secreted by both developmental stages of the parasites examined. Finally, antiserum to the canine ascarid infective to man, Toxocara canis, was found to precipitate a significant proportion of Ascaris-secreted molecules. These studies, therefore, confirm the potent antigenicity of excretory/secretory materials, and their potential for use in immunodiagnosis, but predict serious difficulties for seroepidemiology and the specific detection of ascariasis in man.

The cosmopolitan nematode parasites Ascaris lumbricoides, Ascaris suum, and Toxocara canis are closely related phylogenetically, and are all pathogenic to man. In the case of the latter, the antigens released by the tissue-invasive parasitic larvae in vitro ('excretory/secretory' or 'ES' antigens) are routinely used for serodiagnostic purposes. Here we have found, using radioimmunoprecipitation with defined rabbit antiserum, and SDS-PAGE, that there is a significant antigenic similarity between the secreted and somatic antigens of the three nematodes, and have characterized cross-reactive components. Among these is a 14 kD internal protein which has a homologue in all three parasites. This molecule is the subject of an IgG antibody response in Ascaris infection, but there is no measurable response to it in toxocariasis. Lastly, using quantitative immunofluorescence, the antigens exposed on the surface of intact, living, larvae were found to be cross-reactive or specific depending on the developmental stage of the parasites. This means that the surface of tissue-invasive Ascaris larvae bears stage-specific epitopes.

The materials released in vitro by the tissue-parasitic larval stages of the large roundworm of man, Ascaris lumbricoides, were analysed by radio-iodination, immunoprecipitation, and SDS-PAGE. The antigens were found to be heterogeneous, ranging in molecular weigth from 14 to 410 kD, and were found to alter radically during the parasites' migration to the lungs. The antigens secreted by the infective and lung-stage larvae of the pig homologue, Ascaris suum, were compared with those of the human worms. This revealed a remarkable degree of homology between the products of the two, at both the molecular and immunologcal levels. The two species could be discriminated, however, on the basis of the SDS-PAGE profiles of the antigens secreted by both developmental stages of the parasites examined. Finally, antiserum to the canine ascarid infective to man, Toxocara canis, was found to precipitate a significant proportion of Ascaris-secreted molecules. These studies, therefore, confirm the potent antigenicity of excretory/secretory materials, and their potential for use in immunodiagnosis, but predict serious difficulties for seroepidemiology and the specific detection of ascariasis in man.

The cosmopolitan nematode parasites Ascaris lumbricoides, Ascaris suum, and Toxocara canis are closely related phylogenetically, and are all pathogenic to man. In the case of the latter, the antigens released by the tissue-invasive parasitic larvae in vitro ('excretory/secretory' or 'ES' antigens) are routinely used for serodiagnostic purposes. Here we have found, using radioimmunoprecipitation with defined rabbit antiserum, and SDS-PAGE, that there is a significant antigenic similarity between the secreted and somatic antigens of the three nematodes, and have characterized cross-reactive components. Among these is a 14 kD internal protein which has a homologue in all three parasites. This molecule is the subject of an IgG antibody response in Ascaris infection, but there is no measurable response to it in toxocariasis. Lastly, using quantitative immunofluorescence, the antigens exposed on the surface of intact, living, larvae were found to be cross-reactive or specific depending on the developmental stage of the parasites. This means that the surface of tissue-invasive Ascaris larvae bears stage-specific epitopes.