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Purpose – This study aims at finding out the implementation of English for specific purposes (ESP) course and identifying the challenges faced by English lecturers in designing an ESP course for first-year students in the Engineering Faculty of Malikussaleh University.

Methodology – This study implements qualitative research through interviews as a means of data collection.

Findings – This study addresses the application of an ESP course and identifies the challenges appeared during the stages of designing. The study reveals that an ESP course is not completely implemented. In fact, the course provided little ESP contents. The paper also reveals that, in terms of challenges, each stage of design presents its own challenge. To design an ESP course involves five crucial stages, that is, needs analysis, syllabus, material, teaching, and evaluation. Teachers encounter challenges as the design process takes place.

Research Limitations/Implications – The present study provides an account of how English teachers view challenges in implementing a complete ESP course. However, further research should be conducted to discover the possibility of application of ESP course in national universities in Indonesia.

Practical Implications – This paper offers solutions in order to make the implementation of ESP course feasible in the university.

Originality/Value – There have not been any research in ESP application for engineering students in Malikussaleh University.

Intelligent and connected vehicle technology is in the ascendant. High-level autonomous driving places more stringent requirements on the accuracy and reliability of environmental perception. Existing research works on multitarget tracking based on multisensor fusion mostly focuses on the vehicle perspective, but limited by the principal defects of the vehicle sensor platform, it is difficult to comprehensively and accurately describe the surrounding environment information.

In this paper, a multitarget tracking method based on roadside multisensor fusion is proposed, including a multisensor fusion method based on measurement noise adaptive Kalman filtering, a global nearest neighbor data association method based on adaptive tracking gate, and a Track life cycle management method based on M/N logic rules.

Compared with fixed-size tracking gates, the adaptive tracking gates proposed in this paper can comprehensively improve the data association performance in the multitarget tracking process. Compared with single sensor measurement, the proposed method improves the position estimation accuracy by 13.5% and the velocity estimation accuracy by 22.2%. Compared with the control method, the proposed method improves the position estimation accuracy by 23.8% and the velocity estimation accuracy by 8.9%.

A multisensor fusion method with adaptive Kalman filtering of measurement noise is proposed to realize the adaptive adjustment of measurement noise. A global nearest neighbor data association method based on adaptive tracking gate is proposed to realize the adaptive adjustment of the tracking gate.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of product knowledge, perceived quality, perceived risk and perceived value on customers’ intention to invest in Islamic Banks. This study specifically examines an Islamic bank’s term deposits.

Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data collected from 217 customers of an Islamic bank in Indonesia using an online survey.

This study highlights the central and dual roles of perceived risk as both the independent and the intervening variable that mediates the relationship between product knowledge and Muslim customer intention to invest in an Islamic bank’s term deposits.

This study only investigates term deposits as one type of investment in Islamic banks. This study contributes to the literature by examining the role of product knowledge, perceived quality, perceived risk and perceived value on Muslim customer intention to invest in Islamic term deposits.

The results of this study highlight the requirement for Islamic banks to educate customers to improve the depositors’ product knowledge because Muslim customers’ risk and value perception and intention are strongly influenced by product knowledge.

The investigation of perceived risk is particularly relevant for Islamic financial products because of the inherent nature of risk sharing in Islamic finance. This study investigates the role of product knowledge in influencing the Muslim customers’ perception of risk, quality, value and their intention to invest in Islamic bank term deposits. Ideally, the profit loss sharing concept (PLS) should be applied; however, in this context, revenue sharing is applied because of Indonesia’s central bank regulation.

Although previous studies have examined the influence of celebrity involvement in behavioural intentions, the role of celebrity dimensions such as attraction, self-expression and centrality in influencing tourists’ intention in the context of developing countries such as Tanzania remains largely unaddressed. This study, therefore, examined the relationship between celebrity involvement and domestic tourists' intentions to visit tourist attractions, attitude being the mediating variable.

A questionnaire was self-administered on a convenient sample of 279 domestic tourists in the Tanzania’s four largest regions, namely, Dar es Salaam, Mbeya, Arusha and Mwanza. Employing a quantitative research approach, structural equation modelling was performed to test the cause-and-effect relationships between celebrity involvement and tourists’ intentions before testing the mediating role of attitude in such a relationship. Confirmatory factor analysis was also performed to test the measurement models.

Attraction emerged to be the main determinant of the celebrity dimension that significantly influenced domestic tourists’ travel intentions, whereas attitude partially mediates such a relationship. Moreover, Bongo Fleva musicians, particularly Diamond Platnumz, one of the leading celebrities in this genre, were found to influence most of the respondents’ travel intentions – he posted a picture on his Instagram account of him touring the Serengeti National Park.

The study focused on domestic tourists residing in four of the Mainland Tanzania’s largest regions, hence excluding those residing on the islands of Unguja and Pemba. Due to cultural differences, including the islands not only could unleash new perspectives on celebrity involvement dimensions but also could have introduced new determinants of travel intentions.

This study offers guidance to tourism businesses on designing their marketing campaigns that they should harness celebrity’s attractive qualities effectively. The focus should be directed not only towards linking destinations with celebrities but also on stimulating positive perception of those destinations, aligning with the attitudes of their followers.

The study has set out a new perspective for researchers, practitioners and tourism businesses to refine their promotional strategies and for academicians to gain a deeper understanding of visitor behavioural intention dynamics.

This study has proposed and verified that attraction is a dominant determinant compared to self-expression and centrality in explaining tourists’ travel intentions and attitudes, which play a significant role in explaining such a relationship. Although the study employed a modified theory of planned behaviour in a celebrity involvement study, the findings have broadened the understanding and its applicability in the context of a developing country.

COVID-19 cases in Indonesia continue to increase and spread. This article aims to analyse the Indonesian government policies as a response in dealing with COVID-19.

This article is a narrative analysis with the approach of a systematic literature review.

This article found that the Indonesian government responded slowly to the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of its spread in March 2020. The government then issued some policies such as physical distancing, large-scale social restriction (PSBB - Pembatasan Sosial Berskala Besar) and social safety net. These policies will only work if the society follows them. The society could be the key to success of those policies, either as the support or the obstacles.

This policy analysis with literature review, conducted from March to July 2020 in Indonesia, provides experiences and knowledge in how to respond to the dynamic problems of public policy in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak, especially in the context of a developing country.

The novelty of the article lies in the unique policy response in a diverse society. It suggests that the policymakers should pay more attention to the society’s characteristics as well as the mitigation system as a preventive measure and risk management to make clear policy in the society.

Transportation infrastructure asset management has long been an active but challenging problem for agencies, which urges to maintain a good state of their assets but faces budgetary limitations. Managing a network of transportation infrastructure assets, especially when the number is large, is a multifaceted challenge. This paper aims to develop a life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) based transportation infrastructure asset management analytical framework to study the impacts of a few key parameters/factors on deterioration and life-cycle cost. Using the bridge as an example infrastructure type, the framework incorporates an optimization model for optimizing maintenance, repair, rehabilitation (MR&R) and replacement decisions in a finite planning horizon.

The analytical framework is further developed through a series of model variations, scenario and sensitivity analysis, simulation processes and numerical experiments to show the impacts of various parameters/factors and draw managerial insights. One notable analysis is to explicitly model the epistemic uncertainties of infrastructure deterioration models, which have been overlooked in previous research. The proposed methodology can be adapted to different types of assets for solving general asset management and capital planning problems.

The experiments and case studies revealed several findings. First, the authors showed the importance of the deterioration model parameter (i.e. Markov transition probability). Inaccurate information of p will lead to suboptimal solutions and results in excessive total cost. Second, both agency cost and user cost of a single facility will have significant impacts on the system cost and correlation between them also influences the system cost. Third, the optimal budget can be found and the system cost is tolerant to budge variations within a certain range. Four, the model minimizes the total cost by optimizing the allocation of funds to bridges weighing the trade-off between user and agency costs.

On the path forward to develop the next generation of bridge management systems methodologies, the authors make an exploration of incorporating the epistemic uncertainties of the stochastic deterioration models into bridge MR&R capital planning and decision-making. The authors propose an optimization approach that does not only incorporate the inherent stochasticity of bridge deterioration but also considers the epistemic uncertainties and variances of the model parameters of Markovian transition probabilities due to data errors or modeling processes.

This study aims to determine the effect of aromatherapy used in reducing the pain caused by fistula puncture in hemodialysis patients.

In this study, the effect of aromatherapy application on fistula puncture was analyzed and carried out by scanning the relevant literature. The literature review was conducted between August and October 2020. While reviewing the literature, the authors used “aromatherapy,” “pain,” “fistula,” “puncture,” “hemodialysis” keywords and various combinations of these; moreover, Google scientist, Pubmed, Cochrane, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, Medline and Ovid databases and studies, which were conducted in the last 10 years were reviewed. As a result of the literature review, 1183 studies were reached and seven of them were included in the study by taking the inclusion criteria into account.

The randomized controlled studies are six studies and nonrandomized controlled experimental 1 study were added to the scope of the study and seven studies were included in the sample. In these studies, personal information forms developed by the researchers as data collection tools and the VAS scale, Numerical pain rating, the numeric rating scale were used to evaluate pain.

It has been determined that aromatherapy application in hemodialysis patients has positive effects on reducing pain due to puncture fistula intervention.

This study provides reduction or elimination of fistula needle insertion pain in hemodialysis patients.