Intergenerational effects of war trauma among Palestinian families mediated via psychological maltreatment

We tested the hypothesis that intergenerational effects of parents’ war trauma on offspring's attachment and mental health are mediated by psychological maltreatment. Two hundred and forty children and their parents were sampled from a war-prone area, Gaza, Palestine. The parents reported the number and type of traumatic experiences of war they had had during their lifetime before the child's birth and during a current war when the child was 10–12 years old. The children reported their war traumas, experiences of psychological maltreatment, attachment security, and symptoms of posttraumatic stress (PTSS), depression, and aggression. The direct and indirect intergenerational effects of war trauma were tested in structural equation models. The hypotheses were confirmed for father's past war exposure, and disconfirmed for mother's war exposure. The father's past war trauma had a negative association with attachment security and positive association with the child's mental health problems mediated by increased psychological maltreatment. In contrast, the mother's past war trauma had a negative association with the child's depression via decreased psychological maltreatment. The mother's current war trauma had a negative association with the child's depression and aggression via decreased psychological maltreatment. Among fathers, past war exposure should be considered as a risk factor for psychological maltreatment of children and the associated attachment insecurity and mental health problems. Among mothers, war exposure as such could be given less clinical attention than PTSS in the prevention of psychological maltreatment of children.     

Intelligent fuzzy spelling evaluator for e-Learning systems

Evaluating Learners’ Response in an e-Learning environment has been the topic of current research in areas of Human Computer Interaction, e-Learning, Education Technology and even Natural Language Processing. The current paper presents a twofold strategy to evaluate single word response of a learner in an e-Learning environment. The response of the learner to be evaluated would consist of errors committed due to lack of knowledge and also out of inadvertent mistakes committed while typing the answers. The proposed system benevolently considers such errors and still marks the learner partially. The feature incorporated in this work adds the human element to the mechanised system of evaluation and assessment in an e-Learning environment.     

Equity Gains in Bangladesh Primary Education

Although equity is a desirable objective of any form of development intervention, including education, not many studies dwell upon this important area. Information on related trends is even more rare. This essay uses field-level data from Bangladesh to examine equity levels and trends in primary education, including enrolment and quality of learning, focusing on equity for different gender, urban or rural, economic and ethnic groups. The study shows that while some disparity between girls and boys has been eliminated, girls are still far behind boys in terms of learning achievement. Children belonging to poorer families and ethnic minority groups lag behind the respective dominant groups in terms of both enrolment and learning achievement. At the same time, there have been some improvements for hitherto excluded groups such as rural girls and children of the poor. These changes are attributed mainly to 'positive discriminatory' steps taken by the government and non-governmental organizations in favour of such groups. If this trend continues, Bangladesh can look forward to establishing itself as a more equitable society than it is now.     

Raising Basic Education Levels in Rural Bangladesh: The Impact of a Non-formal Education Programme

Based on the concept of "basic education" from the Declaration of the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA, Jomtien 1990), this paper explores the impact of the non-formal education programme (NFPE) of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) in the achievement of basic education for rural Bangladeshi children. Using an instrument developed previously in Bangladesh, three groups with different educational experiences were assessed: (1) children who attended BRAC's NFPE; (2) those attending formal school; (3) children who had never attended school. A total of 720 randomly selected children, who live in five rural areas of Bangladesh were assessed in this study. Of the four components of basic education, BRAC children did significantly better in life skills and writing than their peers in formal schools. Equal performance was observed in reading and numeracy. Although the children who had never attended school in general did poorly, some had developed life skills knowledge and more than half had acquired numeracy skills. This study concludes that BRAC's education programme has a positive impact on basic education in rural Bangladesh.     

Level and Trend of Basic Education of Children in Bangladesh: 1993-1998

Using data generated through two nationally representative sample surveys, this paper explores the trends in the level of basic education of Bangladeshi children. The instrument used for the purpose was based on the Declaration of the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA, Jomtien, 1990). The findings reveal that the level of 'basic education' increased very slowly, 26.7% in 1993 to 29.6% in 1998, less than one percentage point per year. Statistically significant improvement was observed in 'life skills knowledge' and 'writing skills', but not in 'reading' or 'numeracy'. Girls progressed in 'reading', 'writing' and 'life skills', while the boys in 'writing' and 'life skills'. Over the period, the level improved for rural children but decreased for urban children. Bangladesh falls much behind the targets of the Jomtien Conference in 1990; it will have to wait until 2093 AD to reach the WCEFA goal. The country has made good progress in increasing the access to primary education, but a massive drive is necessary to improve the quality of education.     

Ziegler–Natta polymerization and the remaining challenges

Polymers have become indispensable in the 21st century, and today we cannot imagine life without them. However, till around the beginning of the last century, the science of polymers was considered a very primitive discipline, and majority of the scientific community did not believe that polymers even existed. Hermann Staudinger, among others, fought a long battle to convince the scientific community that polymers are real and that they are long chain molecular entities. Building on this rational bedrock of polymer science, Prof. Karl Ziegler laid the foundation of ethylene polymerization. As outlined by Dr. Sivaram in his articles on Ziegler and Natta, careful observations and systematic analyses of serendipitous results enabled Ziegler to deveop the enormously significant ‘Mülheim atmospheric polyethylene process’. A decade later, Cossee and Arlman revealed the mechanism of this polymerization reaction, which is called ‘insertion polymerization’. Insertion polymerization is popularly known as the ‘Ziegler–Natta polymerization’, in recognition of its founding fathers. Today, the world produces about 180 million tons of polyolefins annually, and polyethylene or polythene has become a household name.In this article, I shall present an overview of Ziegler–Natta polymerization. I will highlight the mechanism of this reaction, and outline the progress made in the last seven decades using some real-world examples. The last part of this artificle will take a stock of the unresolved challenges posed by Ziegler–Natta polymerization, briefiy discuss current solutions, and reiterate the enormous potential of this seventy-year-old reaction to meet contemporary challenges.     

Simulation and analysis of resin flow in injection machine screw

A method with simulation and analysis of the resin flow in a screw is presented to ease the control of some problems that may affect the efficiency and the quality of the product among existing screws in an injection machine. The physical model of a screw is established to represent the stress, the strain, the relationship between velocity and stress, and the temperature of the cells. In this paper, a working case is considered where the velocity and the temperature distributions at any section of the flow are obtained. The analysis of the computational results shows an ability to master various parameters depending on the specifications.