The meanings attributed to Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) are shaped through complex negotiations within religious and socio-cultural frameworks, including those observed in Indonesia. Using a combined qualitative and quantitative (mixed methods)-ethnographic and survey approach, data from 109 students of religious tertiary institutions in East Kalimantan on their perspectives on FGM/C practices can be more comprehensively explored. The results of the study, which were analysed using the three principles of symbolic interactionism, showed that 72.5 per cent of religious college student families still practice FGM/C and 53.2 per cent stated that FGM/C practices are beneficial for women.  However, they are also willing, if

The article defines the relationship between the syntactic concept and the structural scheme of a sentence in modern scientific research from the standpoint of the linguistic cognitive approach; the definitions of the concepts “syntactic concept” and “structural scheme of a sentence” have been represented; a linguocognitive approach to the study of the structural schemes of a sentence through the prism of syntactic concepts has been proposed, which gives a new solution to the problem of the interaction of syntax and semantics; the mental and linguistic levels have been identified, as well as the principles of their interaction in the process of analysing the sentence.

John Updike’s use of setting in his fiction has elicited different and even conflicting reactions from critics, varying from symbolic interpretations of setting to a sense of confusion at his use of time and place in his stories.  The present study is an attempt at examining John Updike’s treatment of binary settings in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962) to reveal theme, characters’ motives and conflicts.  Analyzing Updike’s stories from a structuralist’s perspective reveals his employment of two different places and times in the individual stories as a means of reflecting the psychological state of the characters, as in “The Persistence of Desire”, or expressing conflicting views on social and political is

Several stress-strain models were used to predict the strengths of steel fiber reinforced concrete, which are distinctive of the material. However, insufficient research has been done on the influence of hybrid fiber combinations (comprising two or more distinct fibers) on the characteristics of concrete. For this reason, the researchers conducted an experimental program to determine the stress-strain relationship of 30 concrete samples reinforced with two distinct fibers (a hybrid of polyvinyl alcohol and steel fibers), with compressive strengths ranging from 40 to 120 MPa. A total of 80% of the experimental results were used to develop a new empirical stress-strain model, which was accomplished through the application of the parti

A genetic algorithm model coupled with artificial neural network model was developed to find the optimal values of upstream, downstream cutoff lengths, length of floor and length of downstream protection required for a hydraulic structure. These were obtained for a given maximum difference head, depth of impervious layer and degree of anisotropy. The objective function to be minimized was the cost function with relative cost coefficients for the different dimensions obtained. Constraints used were those that satisfy a factor of safety of 2 against uplift pressure failure and 3 against piping failure.
Different cases reaching 1200 were modeled and analyzed using geo-studio modeling, with different values of input variables. The soil wa

Mersing is one of the places that have the potential for wind power development in Malaysia. Researchers often suggest it as an ideal place for generating electricity from wind power. However, before a location is chosen, several factors need to be considered. By analyzing the location ahead of time, resource waste can be avoided and maximum profitability to various parties can be realized. For this study, the focus is to identify the distribution of the wind speed of Mersing and to determine the optimal average of wind speed. This study is critical because the wind speed data for any region has its distribution. It changes daily and by season. Moreover, no determination has been made regarding selecting the average wind speed used for w

      The aim of this research is to solve a real problem in the Department of Economy and Investment in the Martyrs establishment, which is the selection of the optimal project through specific criteria by experts in the same department using a combined mathematical model for the two methods of analytic hierarchy process and goal programming, where a mathematical model for goal programming was built that takes into consideration the priorities of the goal criteria by the decision-maker to reach the best solution that meets all the objectives, whose importance was determined by the hierarchical analysis process. The most important result of this research is the selection of the second pro

NeighShrink is an efficient image denoising algorithm based on the discrete wavelet
transform (DWT). Its disadvantage is to use a suboptimal universal threshold and identical
neighbouring window size in all wavelet subbands. Dengwen and Wengang proposed an
improved method, which can determine an optimal threshold and neighbouring window size
for every subband by the Stein’s unbiased risk estimate (SURE). Its denoising performance is
considerably superior to NeighShrink and also outperforms SURE-LET, which is an up-todate
denoising algorithm based on the SURE. In this paper different wavelet transform
families are used with this improved method, the results show that Haar wavelet has the
lowest performance among