Search results for: low language proficiency

Authors: Cissy Li

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Mentorship is a commonly used strategy for career development that has obvious benefits for students in undergraduate pre-service teacher training programs. In contrast to teaching practicum, which generally involves pedagogical supervision and performance evaluation by teachers, mentorship is more focused on sharing experiences, supporting challenges, and nurturing skills in order to promote personal and professional growth. To empower pre-service teachers and prepare them for potential challenges in the context of local English language teaching (ELT), an alumni mentoring program was established in the framework of communities of practice (CoP), with the mentors being in-service graduates working in local schools and mentees being students on the teacher-training programme in a Hong Kong university. By triangulating audio transcripts of mentoring sessions delivered by three top mentors with data from questionnaire responses and mentor logs, this paper examines the mentoring styles of the three best mentors from the metadiscursive perspective. It was found that, in a community of practice, mentors who may seem to enjoy a relative more dominant position, in fact, had to strategically and pragmatically employ metadiscursive resources to manage relationships with the mentees and organize talks in the mentoring process. Other attributing factors for a successful mentoring session include mentor personality and prior mentorship experiences, nature of the activities in the session, and group dynamics. This paper concludes that it is the combination of all the factors that constitute a particular mentoring style. The findings have implications for mentoring programs in teacher preparation.

Keywords: mentoring, teacher education, mentoring style, metadiscourse

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Authors: Kusmayadi Ita Nursita, Sundoro Ali

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Cleft lip and palate are one of the most common congenital abnormalities in the face. It could happen to anyone, but mostly affect Asian population including Indonesia. Factors that influence the occurrence of cleft lip and palate vary from genetic to environmental factors. Children with cleft lip and palate will often have various problems such as airway disorders, eating disorders, speech and language developmental disorders, hearing disorders and psycho-social disorders, one of which is caused by appearance disorders. During his life, the child will experience multidisciplinary surgery and non-surgical treatment and can be accompanied by a psychological and financial burden on himself and his family. In Indonesia, there are no detailed scientific data on the prevalence and characteristic of cleft lip and palate patients. It was mainly caused by the absence of a national level organization, differences in geographical location, and the absence of national guidelines. This study aimed to describe the characteristic and prevalence of cleft lip and palate patients in Bandung Cleft Lip and Palate Center from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2017. A total of 560 patients were included in the study. The highest percentage of cases are left unilateral cleft lip and palate with higher number of female patient and labioplasty as the most often surgical procedure to be conducted in Bandung Cleft Lip and Palate Center. In order to improve quality of life in patients with cleft lip and palate, early recognition and early treatment based on actual comprehensive data should be conducted. The data from Bandung Cleft Lip and Palate Center as one of the largest center of cleft lip and palate in West Java Indonesia hopefully could provide a big step of further comprehensive data collection in Indonesia and for the better overall management of cleft lip and palate in the future.

Keywords: cleft lip, cleft palate, characteristic, prevalence

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Authors: Prapaipan Phingchim

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The number of women approaching menopausal age in Thailand is increasing, making menopause an important health topic. In order to understand Thai women's different ways of interpreting menopausal experiences and the way they construct meaning relating to menopause, it is necessary to include the context in which meaning is constructed as well as the background of cultural attitudes to menopause existing in the Thai society. The aim of this study was to describe different discourses on menopause in Thailand that present themselves to menopausal women through the use of language and to analyze linguistic strategies used to represent such identity. This study adopts discourse theory and a close pragmatic analysis to examine the discursive construction of menopause for Thai women. Two hundreds and fifteen pieces of text under the heading or subject of `menopause' or `becoming a middle-aged woman', published from 2010 to 2019, were included. All material was addressed to Thai women, and consisted of booklets and informational material, articles from newspapers and magazines and popular science books. Five different discourses on menopause were identified: the biomedical discourse; the health-promotion discourse; the consumer discourse; the alternative discourse; and the feminist/ critical discourse. The biomedical discourse on menopause was found to be dominant, but was expanded or challenged by other discourses by offering different scopes of action and/or resting on different fundamental values. The discourses constructed and positioned individual women differently; thus, the women's position varied noticeably from one discourse to another. There are seven major linguistic strategies used to construct those identities. That is, lexical selection, presupposition manipulation, presupposition denial, the use of implication, the use of passive construction, using the cause and effect sentence structure, and rhetoric questions.

Keywords: discourse analysis, discursive construction, menopause, Thai women

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Authors: Ngo Thi Thanh Mai, Nguyen Thu Ha, Frances Crawford

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The demand for developing international social work field education is on the rise. Global foreign universities have considered international collaboration and cross-cultural perspective as an essential part of their social work training curriculum. International placement program at Faculty of Social Work (FSW), Hanoi National University of Education (HNUE) has met the need of international social work students, as well as the institutions involved in achieving social work professional social work knowledge in the Vietnamese context. This program has also lead to a long-term collaboration between HNUE and several global institutions in developing social work education, research and practice skill. This paper focuses on the benefits and challenges of students who involved in the global placement programme at Faculty of Social Work (FSW), Hanoi National University of Education (HNUE) and content of international field education provided to the international students based on the experience of the authors. Study results indicated that the participants have opportunity them to explore a new culture and social work system abroad especially in the Vietnamese context. However, there are still difficulties that international students have to face during different phases of the exchange process such as language and communication barriers, cultural value differences, insufficient support and supervision during placement. Basing on these results, the authors intend to propose some recommendations to enhance the programme activities such as pre-departure orientation, support and supervision during placement, cultural exchange and follow-up activities.

Keywords: social work education, social work, international placement, field placement, Vietnam

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Authors: Camille Charlebois-Plante, Marie-Ève Bourassa, Gaelle Dumel, Meriem Sabir, Louis De Beaumont

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To the extent of our knowledge, there has been little interest in the chronic effects of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) on cognition during normal aging. This is rather surprising considering the impacts on daily and social functioning. In addition, sustaining a mTBI during late adulthood may increase the effect of normal biological aging in individuals who consider themselves normal and healthy. The objective of this study was to characterize the persistent neuropsychological repercussions of mTBI sustained during late adulthood, on average 12 months prior to testing. To this end, 35 mTBI patients and 42 controls between the ages of 50 and 69 completed an exhaustive neuropsychological assessment lasting three hours. All mTBI patients were asymptomatic and all participants had a score ≥ 27 at the MoCA. The evaluation consisted of 20 standardized neuropsychological tests measuring memory, attention, executive and language functions, as well as information processing speed. Performance on tests of visual (Brief Visuospatial Memory Test Revised) and verbal memory (Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and WMS-IV Logical Memory subtest), lexical access (Boston Naming Test) and response inhibition (Stroop) revealed to be significantly lower in the mTBI group. These findings suggest that a mTBI sustained during late adulthood induces lasting effects on cognitive function. Episodic memory and executive functions seem to be particularly vulnerable to enduring mTBI effects.

Keywords: cognitive function, late adulthood, mild traumatic brain injury, neuropsychology

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Authors: Chul Lee, Seoae Cho, Erich D. Jarvis, Heebal Kim

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Vocal learning, the ability to imitate vocalizations based on auditory experience, is a homoplastic character state observed in different independent lineages of animals such as songbirds, parrots, hummingbirds and human. It has now become possible to perform genome-wide molecular analyses across vocal learners and vocal non-learners with the recent expansion of avian genome data. It was analyzed the whole genomes of human and 48 avian species including those belonging to the three avian vocal learning lineages, to determine if behavior and neural convergence are associated with molecular convergence in divergent species of vocal learners. Analyses of 8295 orthologous genes across bird species revealed 141 genes with amino acid substitutions specific to vocal learners. Out of these, 25 genes have vocal learner specific genetic homoplasies, and their functions were enriched for learning. Several sites in these genes are estimated under convergent evolution and positive selection. A potential role for a subset of these genes in vocal learning was supported by associations with gene expression profiles in vocal learning brain regions of songbirds and human disease that cause language dysfunctions. The key candidate gene with multiple independent lines of the evidences specific to vocal learners was DRD5. Our findings suggest cAMP-based learning pathway in avian vocal learners, indicating molecular homoplastic changes associated with a complex behavioral trait, vocal learning.

Keywords: amino acid substitutions, convergent evolution, positive selection, vocal learning

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Authors: Jyoti Ranjan Sahoo

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Communication is a social phenomenon which mediates to our everyday life and it creates, maintains, builds, circulates, and propagates for a common identity the society. The symbolic forms of communication such as aural, sounds, oral expressions, signs, and language as means of communication are being used in everyday life in helping to identify as construction of social reality. These symbolic forms of communication are treated as the social process in everyday life. Therefore, there is an intrinsic relationship between communication and culture to understand media life for village communities. Similarly, the interface of communication with social life is reflected upon it’s formulation of the notions of social structure and culture. It has been observed that there is an overlapping and new phenomenonal change of media life among marginalized communities in general and village communities in particular. Therefore, this paper is an outcome of decadal stock of literature and an empirical investigation on understanding of communication in a tribal village in India. It has examined the idea of American scientist Edward T. Hall “the culture is communication, and the communication is culture” in village society on understanding media life. Thus, the Harold Innis’s theoretical idea of “communication” has been critically examined in these contexts since author tries to explore and understand the inter-disciplinarity on understanding media life through communication and culture which is embedded in socio-cultural life bearing on epistemological and ontological implications. The paper tries to explore and understand the inter-disciplinary and historical trajectories of communication embedded with other social science disciplines; and also tries to map these studies relevant for the future directions and engagement which would have bearing on epistemological and ontological implications in the field of media and communication.

Keywords: culture, communication, history, media, oral, tradition

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Authors: Seyhan Karaçavuş, Bülent Yılmaz, Ömer Kayaaltı, Semra İçer, Arzu Taşdemir, Oğuzhan Ayyıldız, Kübra Eset, Eser Kaya

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In this study, our goal was to perform tumor staging and subtype determination automatically using different texture analysis approaches for a very common cancer type, i.e., non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC). Especially, we introduced a texture analysis approach, called Law’s texture filter, to be used in this context for the first time. The 18F-FDG PET images of 42 patients with NSCLC were evaluated. The number of patients for each tumor stage, i.e., I-II, III or IV, was 14. The patients had ~45% adenocarcinoma (ADC) and ~55% squamous cell carcinoma (SqCCs). MATLAB technical computing language was employed in the extraction of 51 features by using first order statistics (FOS), gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), gray-level run-length matrix (GLRLM), and Laws’ texture filters. The feature selection method employed was the sequential forward selection (SFS). Selected textural features were used in the automatic classification by k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) and support vector machines (SVM). In the automatic classification of tumor stage, the accuracy was approximately 59.5% with k-NN classifier (k=3) and 69% with SVM (with one versus one paradigm), using 5 features. In the automatic classification of tumor subtype, the accuracy was around 92.7% with SVM one vs. one. Texture analysis of FDG-PET images might be used, in addition to metabolic parameters as an objective tool to assess tumor histopathological characteristics and in automatic classification of tumor stage and subtype.

Keywords: cancer stage, cancer cell type, non-small cell lung carcinoma, PET, texture analysis

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Authors: Youmen Chaaban, Maha Ellili-Cherif

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The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of teachers’ individual characteristics and perceptions of environmental factors that impact their technology integration into their EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms. To this end, a national survey examining EFL teachers’ perceptions was conducted at Qatari Independent schools. 263 EFL teachers responded to the survey which investigated several factors known to impact technology integration. These factors included technology availability and support, EFL teachers’ perceptions of importance, obstacles facing technology integration, competency with technology use, and formal technology preparation. The impact of these factors on teachers’ and students’ educational technology use was further measured. The analysis of the data included descriptive statistics and a chi-square analysis test in order to examine the relationship between these factors. The results revealed important cultural factors that impact teachers’ practices and attitudes towards technology in the Qatari context. EFL teachers were found to integrate technology most prominently for instructional delivery and preparation. The use of technology as a learning tool received less emphasis. Teachers further revealed consistent perceptions about obstacles to integration, high levels of confidence in using technology, and consistent beliefs about the importance of using technology as a learning tool. Further analyses of the factors impacting technology integration can assist with Qatar’s technology advancement and development efforts by indicating the areas of strength and areas where additional efforts are needed. The results will lay the foundation for conducting context-specific professional development suitable for the needs of EFL teachers in Qatari Independent Schools.

Keywords: educational technology integration, Qatar, EFL, independent schools, ICT

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Authors: Xinchen Zhu

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In the history of Chinese-language film, female stars’ acting is connected with issues of national ideology, consumerism, and sexual politics. In the 1980s, Taiwan entered a period of ‘soft authoritarianism’ in which the economy prospered politics became more democratic, and mass culture became more diverse. Film censorship was more flexible and sexual scenes were increasingly shown on screen. Female stars’ bodies were eroticized and commercialized through sexual and nude scenes and, by challenging conservative film censorship and social taboos, became the focus of mass media. This article will explore how discourses in mass media constructed the erotic images of female stars and, conversely, impacted film censorship, filmmakers and film actresses in 1980s’ Taiwan. This article will regard the eroticized female film stars’ acting as a ‘field’ of internal interaction and continuous reproduction, where the ideology of male dominance and voices of female film stars conflict with each other. Based on textual analysis of female stars’ sexual acting and the debate in mass media, the argument is that the eroticized female bodies were gazed upon on and off the screen. In the discourses of mass media, the artistry of actresses’ erotic acting was not only ignored, devalued and delegitimized, these stars were also labelled as ‘undressed star’ or ‘nude star’ and construed as victims of the film industry. However, the female stars were able to speak through mass media platforms, emphasizing their efforts in erotic acting and highlighting modern female subjectivity.

Keywords: sexual scenes, Taiwan female stars, erotic acting, discourses in mass media, female subjectivity

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Authors: Ya-Hsuan Wang

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This project of intercultural education aimed to explore pluricultural people’s interpretation and evaluation of the transnational community in Taiwan. Based on transnationalism and transculturalism, this study concerns the human right issues for immigrants and pluricultural people. Research participants as immigrants in Taiwan were asked about their typical thinking styles in the transnational community, their cultural integration in terms of transnational behaviors, and their collective memory of the transnational community. Interview questions included what key factors were involved in their identity negotiation, what roles the transnational community and collective memory would be for their identity negotiation and what were the positive or negative aspects impacting cross-border identity. Based on the experiences of pluricultural people and transnational communities, this project expected to enhance the depth and width of developing transcultural knowledge in textbook reform on History in K-12 schools. It is to transform cross-border identity into knowledge embedded with local culture in response to globalization and localization. The purpose of this paper is to portrait the cross-cultural practice of transnational community for Taiwan’s immigrants. It is to report their external socio-cultural expectation of ethnic economics, to understand their internal life course of national identity, and to clarify transnational community in relation to their cross-border identity. In conclusion, the cross-cultural practice of transnational community combined the external contexts such as ethnic economic interaction among transnational communities, social report and ethnic industry, and the internal contexts such as ethnic identity, language use, and collective memory in ethnic history.

Keywords: cross-cultural practice, immigrants, pluricultural people, transnational community

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Authors: Giovana Nunes Inocêncio

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The professional and technological education (EPT) plays a pivotal role in equipping students for specialized careers, and it is imperative to establish a framework for efficient data exchange among educational institutions. The primary focus of this article is to address the pressing need for document interoperability within the context of EPT. The challenges, motivations, and benefits of implementing interoperability standards for digital educational documents are thoroughly explored. These documents include EPT completion certificates, academic records, and curricula. In conjunction with the prior abstract, it is evident that the intersection of IT governance and interoperability standards holds the key to transforming the landscape of technical education in Brazil. IT governance provides the strategic framework for effective data management, aligning with educational objectives, ensuring compliance, and managing risks. By adopting interoperability standards, the technical education sector in Brazil can facilitate data exchange, enhance data security, and promote international recognition of qualifications. The utilization of the XML (Extensible Markup Language) standard further strengthens the foundation for structured data exchange, fostering efficient communication, standardization of curricula, and enhancing educational materials. The IT governance, interoperability standards, and data management critical role in driving the quality, efficiency, and security of technical education. The adoption of these standards fosters transparency, stakeholder coordination, and regulatory compliance, ultimately empowering the technical education sector to meet the dynamic demands of the 21st century.

Keywords: interoperability, education, standards, governance

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Authors: Latif Yanar, Muharrem Kaçan

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In this study, an Analytic Hierarchy Process and Analytic Network Process Decision Support System (DSS) model for determination of a navy base place in another country is proposed together with a decision support software (DESTEC 1.0) developed using C Sharp programming language. The proposed software also has the ability of performing the fuzzy models (Fuzzy AHP and Fuzzy ANP) of the proposed DSS to cope with the ambiguous and linguistic nature of the model. The AHP and ANP model, for a decision support for selecting the best place among the alternatives, including the criteria and alternatives, is developed and solved by the experts from Turkish Navy and Turkish academicians related to international relations branches of the universities in Turkey. Also, the questionnaires used for weighting of the criteria and the alternatives are filled by these experts.Some of our alternatives are: economic and political stability of the third country, the effect of another super power in that country, historical relations, security in that country, social facilities in the city in which the base will be built, the transportation security and difficulty from a main city that have an airport to the city will have the base etc. Over 20 criteria like these are determined which are categorized in social, political, economic and military aspects. As a result all the criteria and three alternatives are evaluated by different people who have background and experience to weight the criteria and alternatives as it must be in AHP and ANP evaluation system. The alternatives got their degrees all between 0 – 1 and the total is 1. At the end the DSS advices one of the alternatives as the best one to the decision maker according to the developed model and the evaluations of the experts.

Keywords: analytic hierarchical process, analytic network process, fuzzy logic, naval base place selection, multiple criteria decision making

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Authors: K. R. Mukuna

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Teachers are faced many challenges in the South African rural schools such as stress, depression, lack of resources, poor working relationships, inflexible curriculum etc. These could affect their wellbeing and effectiveness at the workplace. As a result, the study had a significance in the teacher’s lives, and community due teachers worked under conditions that are unfavourable to perform their jobs effectively. Despite these conditions, they still managed to do their jobs and the community is uplifted. However, this study aimed to explore factors that enable teachers to cope with workplace adversities at a rural school district in the Free State Province. It adopted a qualitative case study as a research design. Semi-structured interviews and colleges had employed as tools to collect data. Ten participants (n=10; 5 males and 5 females) were selected through purposive and convenience sampling. All participants selected from a South African rural school. Sesotho culture was their home language, and most of them had 5 years of teaching experiences. The thematic findings revealed that they developed abilities to cope with and adjust to the social and cultural environment. These included self-efficacy, developing problem-solving skills, awareness of strengths and asserts, self-managing of emotions, and self-confidence. This study concluded that these psychosocial factors contributed to coping with teacher’s diversities, and effectively stabilized their wellbeing in the schools.

Keywords: psychosocial factors, teachers counselling, teacher stress, workplace adversity, rural school, teachers’ wellbeing, teachers’ resilience, teachers’ self-efficacy, social interaction

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Authors: Kldiashvili Ekaterina, Burduli Archil, Ghortlishvili Gocha

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Introduction – Medical information system (MIS) is at the heart of information technology (IT) implementation policies in healthcare systems around the world. Different architecture and application models of MIS are developed. Despite of obvious advantages and benefits, application of MIS in everyday practice is slow. Objective - On the background of analysis of the existing models of MIS in Georgia has been created a multi-user web-based approach. This presentation will present the architecture of the system and its application for image based second opinion consultations. Methods – The MIS has been created with .Net technology and SQL database architecture. It realizes local (intranet) and remote (internet) access to the system and management of databases. The MIS is fully operational approach, which is successfully used for medical data registration and management as well as for creation, editing and maintenance of the electronic medical records (EMR). Five hundred Georgian language electronic medical records from the cervical screening activity illustrated by images were selected for second opinion consultations. Results – The primary goal of the MIS is patient management. However, the system can be successfully applied for image based second opinion consultations. Discussion – The ideal of healthcare in the information age must be to create a situation where healthcare professionals spend more time creating knowledge from medical information and less time managing medical information. The application of easily available and adaptable technology and improvement of the infrastructure conditions is the basis for eHealth applications. Conclusion - The MIS is perspective and actual technology solution. It can be successfully and effectively used for image based second opinion consultations.

Keywords: digital images, medical information system, second opinion consultations, electronic medical record

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Authors: Yuban Sebastian Cuartas-Agudelo, Sandra Marcela López-Hincapié, Vivianna Alexandra Garrido-Altamar, María de los Ángeles Rodríguez-Gázquez, Camilo Ruiz-Mejía, Lina María Martínez-Sánchez, Gloria Inés Martínez-Domínguez, Luis Eduardo Contreras, Felipe Eduardo Marino-Isaza

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Introduction: Doping is a prohibited practice in competitive sports with potential adverse effects; therefore, it is crucial to describe the attitudes of athletes towards this behavior and to determine which o these increase the susceptibility to carry out this practice. Objective: To determine the attitude of high-performance athletes towards doping in a sports institute in the city of Medellin, Colombia. Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study during 2016, with a sample taken to convenience consisting of athletes over 18 years old enrolled in a sports institute of the city of Medellin (Colombia). The athletes filled by themselves the Petroczi and Aidman questionnaire: Performance Enhancement Attitude Scale (PEAS) adapted to the Spanish language by Morente-Sánchez et al. This scale has 17 items with likert answer options, with a score ranging from 1 to 6, with a higher score indicating a stronger tendency towards doping practices. Results: 112 athletes were included with an average age of 21.6 years old, a 60% of them were male and the most frequent sports were karate 17%, judo 12.5% and athletics 9.8%. The average score of the questionnaire was 35.5 points of a 102 possible points. The lowest score was obtained in the following items: Is Doping necessary 1,4 and Doping isn’t cheating, everyone does it 1,5. Conclusion: In our population, there is a low tendency towards doping practices.

Keywords: sports, doping in sports, athletic performance, attitude

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Authors: Daniel Pinheiro Da Silva Junior, Aline Paes, Daniel De Oliveira, Christiano Lacerda Ghuerren, Marcio Duran

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The Courts of Accounts are institutions responsible for overseeing and point out irregularities of Public Administration expenses. They have a high demand for processes to be analyzed, whose decisions must be grounded on severity laws. Despite the existing large amount of processes, there are several cases reporting similar subjects. Thus, previous decisions on already analyzed processes can be a precedent for current processes that refer to similar topics. Identifying similar topics is an open, yet essential task for identifying similarities between several processes. Since the actual amount of topics is considerably large, it is tedious and error-prone to identify topics using a pure manual approach. This paper presents a tool based on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to assists in building a labeled dataset. The tool relies on Topic Modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation to find the topics underlying a document followed by Jensen Shannon distance metric to generate a probability of similarity between documents pairs. Furthermore, in a case study with a corpus of decisions of the Rio de Janeiro State Court of Accounts, it was noted that data pre-processing plays an essential role in modeling relevant topics. Also, the combination of topic modeling and a calculated distance metric over document represented among generated topics has been proved useful in helping to construct a labeled base of similar and non-similar document pairs.

Keywords: courts of accounts, data labelling, document similarity, topic modeling

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Authors: Shrutisingh Tomar, Madhu Sharan

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It has been an undisputed fact that the culture of a nation has always been reflected in its practice, visual content and in forms of its oral traditions. Regional and communal costumes in India since ancient times have worked as a strong repository for its people to comprehend not only the locality but also the community of the wearer. Such a strong visual language apparently was ordained to communicate basic details about the person such as age, marital status, and socio-cultural status. Most of the fragments of this visual vocabulary have been intensively investigated, recorded, diversified and revived, while a limited range of these has died a slow death. Some of the rare existent kinds of such threads have survived as a mainstream article of clothing: simpler, apparent and a product for daily life yet unique in their own kind. The paper intends to consider and elaborate the investigated repository pertinent to the Pacchedi weaving tradition of Gujarat. The research involved field surveys across seven districts of the two states of India namely Gujarat and Rajasthan. Ethnographic interviews, observations, recording of oral histories and archival research was conducted through multi-timed and multi-cited studies between from the year 2012 to 2015. The results include varied forms of Pacchedi based on the sartorial expressions in the male costume. The characteristic features of these textiles were accorded by the sumptuous use of brocaded cross borders and weft heavy ends along with the details on the languishing fabrication procedure.

Keywords: handloom weaving, material culture, sartorial expressions and vernacular textile craft

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Authors: Samar Mohamed Magdy Abdelrahim

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This study is an attempt to investigate the phenomenon of code-switching that takes place between Arabic and English in social discourse among high, well-educated, and young people in Egypt. The study aims at digging deeper to extract the trigger factors of such occurrences, namely when people encounter embarrassing situations in their daily conversations. Nowadays, most young Egyptians tend to use English words in certain situations that might make them feel embarrassed. To disguise their feelings and soften the impact of these words in the context, they code-switch (CS) from Arabic into English. To obtain accurate results, the study utilized a quantitative analysis approach that combines personal observations and a questionnaire to examine the phenomenon appropriately. The questionnaire was designed to categorize different types of embarrassing topics to be evaluated by participants. These topics include certain parts of the human body, types of clothes, taboo words, and specific medical conditions. Many studies have examined the use of CS as a prestigious way of communicating and expressing solidarity between Arabic and English. Other studies have dealt with switches that take place in classrooms. However, not many studies have paid attention to this angle of CS, especially in Egypt. The results conclude that gender and the circumstances that surround the conversation are essential factors of CS since females tend to switch codes more than males in embarrassing situations. According to the study, CS serves the socio-pragmatic function in terms of helping young, well-educated bilinguals express themselves in a second language that would be distressing in the first.

Keywords: code-switching, embarrassment, Arabic, English

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Authors: Derejaw Lake Melie, Alemu Kumlachew Tegegne

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The increasing prevalence of social media in Ethiopia has exacerbated societal challenges by fostering the proliferation of negative emotional posts and comments. Illicit use of social media has further exacerbated divisions among the population. Addressing these issues through manual identification and aggregation of emotions from millions of users for swift decision-making poses significant challenges, particularly given the rapid growth of Amharic language usage on social platforms. Consequently, there is a critical need to develop an intelligent system capable of automatically detecting and categorizing negative emotional content into social, religious, and political categories while also filtering out toxic online content. This paper aims to leverage sentiment analysis techniques to achieve automatic detection and filtering of negative emotional content from Amharic social media texts, employing a comparative study of deep learning algorithms. The study utilized a dataset comprising 29,962 comments collected from social media platforms using comment exporter software. Data pre-processing techniques were applied to enhance data quality, followed by the implementation of deep learning methods for training, testing, and evaluation. The results showed that CNN, GRU, LSTM, and Bi-LSTM classification models achieved accuracies of 83%, 50%, 84%, and 86%, respectively. Among these models, Bi-LSTM demonstrated the highest accuracy of 86% in the experiment.

Keywords: negative emotion, emotion detection, social media filtering sentiment analysis, deep learning.

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Authors: Muhammad Shahzad Iqbal, Zobia Sarwar, Salah-ud-Din

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Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) belongs to the genus Tospoviruses (family Bunyaviridae). It is one of the most devastating pathogens of tomato (Solanum Lycopersicum) and heavily damages the crop yield each year around the globe. In this study, we retrieved 329 mature miRNA sequences from two microRNA databases (miRBase and miRSoldb) and checked the putative target sites in the downloaded-genome sequence of TSWV. A consensus of three miRNA target prediction tools (RNA22, miRanda and psRNATarget) was used to screen the false-positive microRNAs targeting sites in the TSWV genome. These tools calculated different target sites by calculating minimum free energy (mfe), site-complementarity, minimum folding energy and other microRNA-mRNA binding factors. R language was used to plot the predicted target-site data. All the genes having possible target sites for different miRNAs were screened by building a consensus table. Out of these 329 mature miRNAs predicted by three algorithms, only eight miRNAs met all the criteria/threshold specifications. MC-Fold and MC-Sym were used to predict three-dimensional structures of miRNAs and further analyzed in USCF chimera to visualize the structural and conformational changes before and after microRNA-mRNA interactions. The results of the current study show that the predicted eight miRNAs could further be evaluated by in vitro experiments to develop TSWV-resistant transgenic tomato plants in the future.

Keywords: tomato spotted wild virus (TSWV), Solanum lycopersicum, plant virus, miRNAs, microRNA target prediction, mRNA

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Authors: Jack Johnstone

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This research presents postcolonial translation as an approach to eradicate traces of colonialism in former colonies. An example of demonstrating postcolonial translation in the Indonesian context is in Hasan Aspahani's Chairil, a biographical narrative and history book based on the personal life of a well-known Indonesian poet and writer, Chairil Anwar (1922-1949) in Dutch occupied Indonesia. This postcolonial translation approach has been applied in the first five chapters on his early years under Dutch colonization, in an attempt to show a postcolonialised TT. This approach aims to demonstrate the postcolonial refutation of the Dutch colonial language to convey the Indonesian setting to target readers. It is also designed to explicate the summary of the book as well as my attempt to apply postcolonial translation as a strategy to reject the Dutch colonial terms in this book. The data conveys 26 important examples of the ST and TT, in consideration of the chosen three factors of culture, forced-Europeanisation, and cross-genre between a biographical narrative and history under categories of Cultural Bound Objects, Politics and Place. However, the 10 selected examples will be analyzed in the Analysis Chapter, which are discussed at word, sentence, and paragraph level. As well, the translation strategies used, namely retention, substitution and specification on four main examples, on the methods utilized to achieve a postcolonialised translation that attempts to 1) examine the way the alteration of the TT can affect the message portrayed within the ST, 2) show the notion of disagreement between the Dutch colonizers and colonized Indonesians on their views on the way Indonesia should be governed and 3) present a translation that reverses the inequality between the superior colonials and inferior Indigenous Indonesians during the Dutch colonial era.

Keywords: Chairil, Dutch colonialism, Indonesia, postcolonial translation

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Authors: Ejikeme Johnson Kanu

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This research explores the environmental justice of host communities in south-eastern Nigeria whose source of livelihood has been destroyed due to oil exploitation. Environmental justice scholarship in the area often adopts Western liberal ideology from a more macro level synthesis (Niger Delta). This study therefore explored the sufficiency or otherwise of the adoption of Western liberal ideology in the framing of environmental justice (EJ) in the area which neglects the impact of colonialism and cultural domination. Mixed archival research supplemented by secondary analysis guided this study. Drawing from data analysis, the paper first argues that micro-level studies are required to either validate or invalidate the studies done at the macro-level (Niger Delta) which has often been used to generalise around environmental injustice done within the host communities even though the communities (South-eastern) differ significantly from (South-south) in terms of language, culture, socio-political and economic formation which indicate that the drivers of EJ may differ among them. Secondly, the paper argues that EJ framing from the Western worldview adopted in the study area is insufficient to understand environmental injustice suffered in the study area and there is the need for environmental justice framing that will consider the impact of colonialism and nonrecognition of the cultural identities of the host communities which breed environmental justice. The study, therefore, concludes by drawing from decolonial theory to consider how the framing of EJ would move beyond the western liberal EJ to Indigenous environmental justice.

Keywords: environmental justice, culture, decolonial, nonrecognition, indigenous environmental justice

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Authors: Yahya Almurtadha, Mukhtar Ghaleb, Ahmed M. Shamsan Saleh

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The world witnessed a fierce attack from the Covid-19 virus, which affected public life socially, economically, healthily and psychologically. The world's governments tried to confront the pandemic by imposing a number of precautionary measures such as general closure, curfews and social distancing. Scientists have also made strenuous efforts to develop an effective vaccine to train the immune system to develop antibodies to combat the virus, thus reducing its symptoms and limiting its spread. Artificial intelligence, along with researchers and medical authorities, has accelerated the vaccine development process through big data processing and simulation. On the other hand, one of the most important negatives of the impact of Covid 19 was the state of anxiety and fear due to the blowout of rumors through social media, which prompted governments to try to reassure the public with the available means. This study aims to proposed using Sentiment Analysis (AKA Opinion Mining) and deep learning as efficient artificial intelligence techniques to work on retrieving the tweets of the public from Twitter and then analyze it automatically to extract their opinions, expression and feelings, negatively or positively, about the symptoms they may feel after vaccination. Sentiment analysis is characterized by its ability to access what the public post in social media within a record time and at a lower cost than traditional means such as questionnaires and interviews, not to mention the accuracy of the information as it comes from what the public expresses voluntarily.

Keywords: deep learning, opinion mining, natural language processing, sentiment analysis

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Authors: Vidyarini Dwita, Rebecca Fanany

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This study will discuss the growth of the market for smartphone technology in Indonesia. This country, with the world’s fourth largest population, has a reputation as the social media capital of the world, and this reputation is largely justified. The penetration of social media is high in Indonesia which has one of the largest global markets. Most Indonesian users of Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms access the sites from their mobile phones. Indonesia is expected to continue to be a major market for digital mobile devices, such as smartphone and tablets that can access the internet. The aim of this study to describe the way responses of Indonesian consumers to smartphone advertising using English and Indonesian will impact on their perceptions of the prestige and product image of the advertised items and thus influence consumer intention to purchase the item. Advertising for smartphones and similar products is intense and dynamic and often draws on the social attitudes of Indonesians with respect to linguistic and cultural content and especially appeals to their desire to be part of global mainstream culture. The study uses a qualitative method based on in-depth interviews with 30 participants. Content analysis is employed to analyse the responses of Indonesian consumers to smartphone advertising that uses English and Indonesian text. Its findings indicate that consumers’ impressions of English and Indonesian slogans influence their attitudes toward smartphones, suggesting that linguistic context plays a role in influencing consumer purchases.

Keywords: consumer purchases, marketing communication, product image, smartphone advertising, sociolinguistic

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Authors: Muhammad Sheeraz

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Literary responses to various forms of local and international oppressions can be found in all major Pakistani languages and their academic study is crucial to understand the local creative and critical mind. However, most of them have not yet received as much of scholarly attention as has the Anglophone Pakistani literature of this kind. One of the reasons for this indifference is that resistance literature is usually mistaken as incidental work produced in haste and thus not a serious subject or high art worthy of being considered critically. Literary criticism in the English language did not include this Urdu resistance literature because most of it has not yet been translated into English, and scholars proficient in Urdu and producing critical works in English have contented themselves to the critique of a few prominent writers of Urdu, for instance, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Saadat Hassan Manto. While there is no denying the fact that they hold a significant position in Pakistani literature, the tradition of resistance is in no way limited to them. Bringing to the limelight other resistant voices from Urdu fiction, this qualitative research employs Barbara Harlow’s framework of postcolonial resistance literature to explore the strategy of silencing as used in twenty three short stories written between the military regime of Zia ul Haq (1977-1988) in Pakistan. The study shows that the writers of these Urdu short stories have not only recorded various tools of silencing employed by the oppressors but also represented various kinds of silences that were observed in the society. Moreover, they have also depicted how this silencing was dealt with by the writers and intellectual of the time. Thus, in the light of the analysis, it can be safely said that Urdu resistance literature notices, recounts, and theorizes silencing and silences within the local sociopolitical condition.

Keywords: resistance literature, Urdu short fiction, Zia ul Haq, postcolonialism

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Authors: René Haarhoff

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Consumers are constantly reminded of their responsibility towards the environment in a world where words such as global warming, carbon footprint, recycling or ‘green’’ everything has become common language. What was previously considered to be ordinary practices are in many instances frowned upon today and consumers are expected to individually contribute towards a greener mother earth. However unused recycle bins, single travelers in luxury cars, busy airports and vast deforested areas for new developments tell another story. The question arises whether the everyday man in the street really takes the responsibility to balance the three pillars of sustainability: the planet, its people and profit. Undeniably our activities impact on the environment where a healthy economy is needed in a fast paced global environment. The situation is further gloomed in instances where the consumer has paid for inclusive services which directly impacts on the environment. A prime example of this is the tourism industry: accommodation establishments or resorts include clean, daily washed towels and bedding, large bath tubs, inclusive use of electricity and water to name a few. This research evaluates environmentally friendly practices consumers follow at home and also when on holiday. Respondents at Bloemfontein airport, often using tourism products were included in the study. Results reveal that the majority of respondents state that they are concerned about the environment yet when questioned on donation towards endangered species, switching off lights in hotel rooms or using water sparingly a significant difference in results are evident. From the research results it is evident that consumers do not practice what they preach towards a greener environment.

Keywords: green, environment, consumer, tourism, sustainable practices

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Authors: Elad Vashdi

Abstract:

It is common to find speech deficit among children diagnosed with Autism. It can be found in the clinical field and recently in research. One of the DSM-V criteria suggests a speech delay (Delay in, or total lack of, the development of spoken language), but doesn't explain the cause of it. A common perception among professionals and families is that the inability to talk results from the autism. Autism is a name for a syndrome which just describes a phenomenon and is defined behaviorally. Since it is not based yet on a physiological gold standard, one can not conclude the nature of a deficit based on the name of the syndrome. A wide retrospective research (n=270) which included children with motor speech difficulties was conducted in Israel. The study analyzed entry evaluations in a private clinic during the years 2006-2013. The data was extracted from the reports. High percentage of children diagnosed with Autism (60%) was found. This result demonstrates the high relationship between Autism and motor speech problem. It also supports recent findings in research of Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) occurrence among children with ASD. Only small percentage of the participants in this research (10%) were diagnosed with CAS even though their verbal deficits well fitted the guidelines for CAS diagnosis set by ASHA in 2007. This fact raises questions regarding the diagnostic procedure in Israel. The understanding that CAS might highly exist within Autism and can have a remarkable influence on the course of early development should be a guiding tool within the diagnosis procedure. CAS can explain the nature of the speech problem among some of the autistic children and guide the treatment in a more accurate way. Calculating the prevalence of CAS which includes the comorbidity with ASD reveals new numbers and suggests treating differently the CAS population.

Keywords: childhood apraxia of speech, Autism, treatment, speech

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Authors: Azidah Abu Ziden, Adu Ifedayo Emmanuel

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This study investigated the optical board as an artificial technology for peer teaching in a Nigerian university. A design and development research (DDR) design was adopted, which entailed the planning and testing of instructional design models adopted to produce the optical board. This research population involved twenty-five (25) peer-teaching students at a Nigerian university consisting of theatre arts, religion, and language education-related disciplines. Also, using a random sampling technique, this study selected eight (8) students to work on the optical board. Besides, this study introduced a research instrument titled lecturer assessment rubric containing 30-mark metrics for evaluating students’ teaching with the optical board. In this study, it was discovered that the optical board affords students acquisition of self-employment skills through their exposure to the peer teaching course, which is a teacher training module in Nigerian universities. It is evident in this study that students were able to coordinate their design and effectively develop the optical board without lecturer’s interference. This kind of achievement in this research shows that the Nigerian university curriculum had been designed with contents meant to spur students to create jobs after graduation, and effective implementation of the readily available curriculum contents is enough to imbue students with the needed entrepreneurial skills. It was recommended that the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) must discourage the poor implementation of Nigerian university curriculum and invest more in the betterment of the readily available curriculum instead of considering a synonymously acclaimed new curriculum for regurgitated teaching and learning process.

Keywords: optical board, artificial technology, peer teaching, educational technology, Nigeria, Malaysia, university, glass, wood, electrical, improvisation

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Authors: Finley Lawson

Abstract:

The triune nature of God is one of the most complex doctrines of Christianity, and its complexity is further compounded when one considers the incarnation. However, many of the difficulties and paradoxes associated with our idea of the divine arise from our adherence to reductionist ontology. In order to move our theological discourse forward, in respect to divine and human nature, a holistic interpretation of our profession of faith is necessary. The challenge of a holistic interpretation is that it questions our ability to make any statement about the genuine, ontological individuation of persons (both divine and human), and in doing so raises the issue of whether we are, ontologically, bound to descend in to a form of pan(en)theism. In order to address the ‘inevitable’ slide in to pan(en)theism. The impact of two forms of holistic interpretation, Boolean and Non-Boolean, on our concept of personhood will be examined. Whilst a Boolean interpretation allows for a greater understanding of the relational nature of the Trinity, it is the Non-Boolean interpretation which has greater ontological significance. A Non-Boolean ontology, grounded in our scientific understanding of the nature of the world, shows our quest for individuation rests not in ontological fact but in epistemic need, and that it is our limited epistemology that drives our need to divide that which is ontologically indivisible. This discussion takes place within a ‘methodological’, rather than ‘doctrinal’ approach to science and religion - examining assumptions and methods that have shaped our language and beliefs about key doctrines, rather than seeking to reconcile particular Christian doctrines with particular scientific theories. Concluding that Non-Boolean holism is the more significant for our doctrine is, in itself, not enough. A world without division appears much removed from the distinct place of man and divine as espoused in our creedal affirmation, to this end, several possible interpretations for understanding Non-Boolean human – divine relations are tentatively put forward for consideration.

Keywords: holism, individuation, ontology, Trinitarian relations

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