Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sustainable Reporting and Profitability of Quoted Firms in Nigeria: A Multi-Dimensional Panel Data Study

This paper used cross sectional data to examine the effect of sustainable reporting on the profitability indicators of Nigeria quoted firms between 2008-2017. Data was sourced from financial statement of the firms. Twenty firms were selected from the population of quoted firms in Nigeria. Return on equity, earnings per share and return on investment were proxy for profitability while sustainable reporting was proxied by economic, social, environmental and corporate governance disclosure. The panel data model was tested using the Hausman test. Model one and two validated the fixed effect while model three validated the random effect. The results found that economic disclosure and social disclosure have positive but insignificant effect on return on equity of the selected firms while environmental and corporate governance disclosure have negative and insignificant effect on return on equity, all the predictor variables have positive and insignificant effect on earnings per share of the firms and that economic, social and environmental disclosure have positive effect on return on investment while corporate governance disclosure have negative effect on return on investment of the selected firms in Nigeria. We recommend that operating environment of the firms should be well examined and policies should be advanced to manage factors such as economic, social, environmental and corporate governance disclosures to leverage the environmental challenges and enhance profitability, companies should ensure strict compliance to all forms of sustainability reporting.
Psychological, social, and environmental predictors of physical activity among older adults: The socio-ecological approach using structural equation modeling analysis

Background: Older people are vulnerable groups whose physical activity (PA) guarantees their health. Considering the low level of PA and the role of various factors, this study was designed to investigate the level of PA and its determinants using the socio-ecological approach. Material and methods: In 2016, a random sample of 340 older people in urban areas of the Maku county, West Azerbaijan province, Iran, were recruited to complete PASE (Physical Activity Scale for the Elderly) and a socioecological approach–based questionnaire. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted by Stata. Results: The mean PA in our study was very low (94.02 ±3.41), and 50% of the participants had insufficient PA. The socio-ecological approach suggested that family support of the social level strongly affects PA (β = 2.79). Moreover, the psychological level had direct effects on PA (β = 2.79). The environmental level had effects on PA in a reverse direct as well as an indirect way (β = -2.09). Conclusions: The socio-ecological approach was found to be helpful in categorizing the determinant factors of PA among Iranian older people. Future research should focus on designing social support and self-efficacy interventional programs with a multilevel approach aiming at PA promotion among elder.
The Relationship Between High-Level Violin Performers’ Movement and Evaluators’ Perception of Musicality

The purpose of this study was to examine possible relationships between the extent of high-level violin performers’ movement during performance and evaluators’ perceptions of their musicality. Stimuli were 10 excerpts of solo violin performances from the 2015 Tadeusz Wronski International Violin Competition for Solo Violin, selected to convey high and low amounts of performer movement. Participants were undergraduate music majors (N = 274) divided into three groups by experimental conditions: visual-only (n = 109), audio-only (n = 78), or audio-visual (n = 87). Analysis demonstrated that performers exhibiting high movement were perceived as more musical than performers exhibiting low movement. The findings suggest that even accomplished musicians are subject to evaluation biases based on stage presence and physical behaviors such as movement.
Fostering Students’ Reading Comprehension Ability through Directed Reading Thinking Activities (DRTA) Strategy

The current curriculum school reform in Indonesia supported the students to be a critical thinker in the sense that the students become a centered of teaching instruction in the school life. This changing becomes a new demand for the teacher as an educator to facilitate their learners with teaching aids practices that adjust learners to be actively participate in the classroom. Thus, this study used Directed Reading Thinking Activities (DRTA) to reveal the effectiveness of this strategy on the students’ reading comprehension teaching. A quasi-experimental research design with pretest and posttest was used in this study. Two classes were randomly selected as the sample of this research. They are class 8C which used Directed Reading Activities (DRA) as the control group, while class 8H becomes the experimental group which used Directed Reading Thinking Activities (DRTA). Independent and dependent (paired) sample t-tests were used to analyze the data. The research finding showed: 1) there were no significant differences of posttest score among the students taught by using DRTA and those taught by using DRA strategy in reading comprehension teaching, 2) there were significant effects of using DRTA in reading comprehension teaching for grade eight students. DRTA strategy was believed to give more contribution (82%) than DRA strategy which contributed only 77%. In conclusion, DRTA was effective strategy in reading comprehension teaching.
Syntactic Prediction in Sentence Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements

The current study was conducted to examine syntactic prediction and structural representation of Chinese coordinate structure during the process of Chinese sentence comprehension. We recorded the eye movements of each participant by using SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) iView Hi-Speed system while they were seated in front of a monitor (resolution of 1024 × 768 pixel). Sixty native speakers of Chinese were recruited, and were paid for their participation. All of them were native speakers of Mandarin Chinese who had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. The experiment materials were composed by 24 critical sentences and other 60 filler sentences. A 2 × 2 factorial design was adopted, with syntactic prediction and temporal ambiguity as within-participant variables. The results from four reading time measures, including the first fixation duration, first pass reading time, go-past time as well as the percent regressions, showed that syntactic prediction could facilitate the processing of Chinese coordinate sentence with local ambiguity. For both types of ambiguous sentences, the occurrence of the word "either" could greatly reduced the time of first fixation duration, first pass reading, go-past, and percent regressions on the critical region and the spillover region, although there was no significant influence of syntactic prediction on the NP region. As revealed by the statistic analysis, there was a significant interaction between these two experimental variables. Moreover, the manipulation of temporal ambiguity was also significant when syntactic prediction was unavailable but not when syntactic processing could be successfully predicted. In contrast with the results of previous English studies, the present study demonstrates that syntactic prediction can facilitate Chinese sentence comprehension and help people deal with ambiguous syntactic constituents. Therefore, in our study, when readers met the sentences with syntactic prediction, they would adopt the sentence-coordination analysis. However, if the sentences were not predicated, they would prefer the NP-coordination analysis and treated the second NP as part of the direct object rather than as the subject of a clause.
An interpersonal perspective of perceived stress: Examining the prosocial coping response patterns of stressed managers

J Organ Behav. 2019;1–18. Summary We adopt an interpersonal perspective and examine the adaptive effects of managers' perceived stress on their behavior towards subordinates. Drawing from the transactional model of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), we advance a model that highlights the propensity for stressed managers to engage in prosocial coping behaviors towards their employees, which in turn are related to lower levels of turnover and higher levels of job performance. We tested our predictions in a sample of 281 employees and their 53 managers working in a clothing retailer in Turkey. Consistent with predictions, we found positive effects of managers' perceived stress on their prosocial coping behaviors and employee outcomes. Managers' perceived stress was positively related to sharing credit with employees for managers who held positive implicit prototypes about employees. Results also indicated that managers' perceived stress was positively related to sharing knowledge with their subordinates regardless of implicit follower prototypes. Both sharing credit and sharing knowledge, in turn, were related to turnover intentions and actual turnover, and sharing credit was related to job performance. This study extends past work by adopting an interpersonal perspective of stress and demonstrating that managerial stress can have positive effects on employee outcomes via prosocial coping behaviors.
Analysis of Bullying Case Problem in Junior High School

Bullying is one of the most serious acts of school violence for educators, parents, and the public. According to the National Commission for Child Protection, incidences of bullying increase every year, in 2015 the number of bullies increased by 39%. The aim of this research is to describe the condition of bullying behavior among students in schools. The data were collected from 208 samples of junior high school students. A univariate analysis was conducted to show respondent characteristics and a description of the questionnaire results per-statement points was included. The results of the research showed that most bullying perpetrators were senior students as much as 87 respondents (41.8%), 34 respondents (16.3%) had become bullies, and 67 respondents (32.2%) had become victims of bullying. The majority of bullying incidents were in the lowest category, which was as many as 197 respondents (94.7%). The highest impact of bullying felt by the respondents was hurt feelings, which was as many as 93 respondents (44.7%). This research can further be a reference for schools to develop anti-bullying policies for dealing with bullying.
Postural stability: assessment of auditory input in normal hearing individuals and hearing aid users

Abstract Purpose: Dizziness is the most common complaint of patients over 65 years consulting a physician. Presbyacusis affects 65% of Canadians aging 70–79. The inner ear is responsible for both hearing and postural stability. However, the interactions between auditory information and the maintenance of postural balance have not been widely studied. The aim of this study is to evaluate and compare the effect of auditory input on postural stability for normal hearing subjects versus hearing-aid users. Methods: The effect of auditory input on postural stability was assessed with and without earplugs in normal subjects, and in adult hearing users with and without hearing aids. Balance tests (Romberg on foam and Tandem stance) were performed in the presence of a point-source of noise in both groups. Results: Normal individuals’ balance performance was not affected by the absence of auditory input. However, hearing aid users had significantly better balance with hearing aids on for the Romberg test (v = 36, p = .014), and for the Tandem test (v = 44, p = .012). Conclusion: Auditory input does not seem to have an effect on postural stability in normal hearing individuals. However, hearing aid users had a significant improvement in the presence of an auditory input.
EFFECTS OF MANAGERS’ INDIVIDUAL INNOVATIVE BEHAVIOR TENDENCIES AND BUSINESS INNOVATION ON NON-FINANCIAL BUSINESS PERFORMANCE

Innovation globally gains its speed day by day and is now seen as the key to progress and development. In recent years, innovation in firms has showed a necessity of individual innovativeness. This necessity of innovative individuals is seen as a significant responsibility of hotel managers. Both individual innovative tendencies of managers and business innovation are of importance for the survival of the firms as well as competitive rivalry resulting in better performance. Thus, this study aims to find out the effects of managers’ innovative behaviour tendencies and business innovation on the non-financial business performance. A questionnaire survey was conducted on 22 five-star city hotels located in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. Factor, regression and correlation analyses were used to test the study hypotheses. The findings showed that the "resistance to change" dimension of managers’ individual innovative behaviour tendencies has a negative effect on the non-financial business performance while the dimensions of “leadership in ideas”, “openness to experience” and risk-taking” did not produce any effect on the non-financial business performance. The study also found that the hotels follow “customer focused” innovation, which shows the customers are at the centre of all the hotel operations. The study further showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between managers’ individual innovative behaviour tendencies and business innovation.
Students’ Smoking Abstinence Self-efficacy toward Early Maladaptive Schemas

Introduction: Smoking abstinence self-efficacy is a factor that plays a key role in preventing addiction or its revival tendency after quitting. This study attempted to analyze the relationship between the early maladaptive schemas and smoking abstinence self-efficacy among the sophomore high school students in the city of Gorgan, Iran. Methods: This was a descriptive study and its population (n= 9955) included all second grade high school students in the city of Gorgan in the school year 2015-2016. The multi- stage cluster sampling method was used to select 369 participants. The required data were collected using the maladaptive schema questioners and the smoking abstinence self-efficacy questionnaire. Pearson correlation and Multi- variable regression methods were also used to analyze data. Results: The results of the current study indicated a significant, yet reverse relationship of the early maladaptive schemas with smoking abstinence self-efficacy. Furthermore, 51 percent change in self-efficacy variance is derived from the components of early maladaptive schemas. Among components of the early maladaptive schemas, components of the abandonment / alienation, the strongest predictor was students smoking abstinence self-efficacy. Conclusion: Early self- efficacy schemas are among the individual and psychological causes with especial importance in studies on smoking dependency and its consumption. Such early schemas lead to biases in an individual’s interpretation of the events. These biases are represented as distorted attitudes, false speculations, unrealistic aims and perspectives, and high- risk behaviors such as smoking.
Let There be Variance: Individual Differences in Consecutive Self–Control in A Laboratory Setting and Daily Life

The large body of research used to support ego–depletion effects is currently faced with conceptual and replication issues, leading to doubt over the extent or even existence of the ego–depletion effect. By using within–person designs in a laboratory (Study 1; 187 participants) and an ambulatory assessment study (Study 2; 125 participants), we sought to clarify this ambiguity by investigating whether prominent situational variables (such as motivation and affect) or personality traits can help elucidate when ego depletion can be observed and when not. Although only marginal ego–depletion effects were found in both studies, these effects varied considerably between individuals, indicating that some individuals experience self–control decrements after initial self–control exertion and others not. However, neither motivation nor affect nor personality traits such as trait self–control could consistently explain this variability when models were applied that controlled for variance due to targets and the depletion manipulation (Study 1) or days (Study 2) as well as for multiple testing. We discuss how the operationalization and reliability of our key measures may explain these null effects and demonstrate that alternative metrics may be required to study the consequences of the consecutive exertion of self–control. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology
Brazilian state-agribusiness relations within global processes of regulatory formation below the corporate food regime

The thesis examines the structural conditionings which have given rise to contemporary Brazilian state-agribusiness relations, and focuses on these actors ́ joint cooperation within different global processes of agricultural regulatory formation. With conceptual point of departure in the Food Regime literature, the thesis initially evaluates the impact of the global food regime transformation upon the Brazilian agricultural sector, in conjunction with other structural changes within the domestic economy towards the end of the 20th century. The sectorial rearrangement and concomitant internationally oriented cooperation between Brazilian public institutions and agribusiness is approached through analysis of the economic and institutional changes in this period. The subsequent part of the thesis focuses on the dimension of agency, and scrutinizes the joint public-private engagement within different global arenas of regulatory formation from the dawn of the new millennium. Through inclusion of different perspectives from within the general field of Political Economy, this part evaluates the interactional modalities between state and agribusiness with the goal of approximating a broader conception of this relationship as part of Brazil ́s insertion within the contemporary global economy.
Social Equity in Professional Codes of Ethics

Social equity is a principle of public administration ethics and is reflected in numerous professional organizations’ codes of ethics. This piece examines social equity as an ethical imperative of public administration by examining the purposes of codes, surveying the meanings of social equity, and exploring how social equity is present in 10 codes, with particular focus on the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). Reflections are offered on social equity as an ethical principle of the field.
Semantic Search on Text and Knowledge Bases

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the broad area of semantic search on text and knowledge bases. In a nutshell, semantic search is "search with meaning". This "meaning" can refer to various parts of the search process: understanding the query instead of just finding matches of its components in the data, understanding the data instead of just searching it for such matches, or representing knowledge in a way suitable for meaningful retrieval.Semantic search is studied in a variety of different communities with a variety of different views of the problem. In this survey, we classify this work according to two dimensions: the type of data text, knowledge bases, combinations of these and the kind of search keyword, structured, natural language. We consider all nine combinations. The focus is on fundamental techniques, concrete systems, and benchmarks. The survey also considers advanced issues: ranking, indexing, ontology matching and merging, and inference. It also provides a succinct overview of fundamental natural language processing techniques: POS-tagging, named-entity recognition and disambiguation, sentence parsing, and distributional semantics.The survey is as self-contained as possible, and should thus also serve as a good tutorial for newcomers to this fascinating and highly topical field.
Business English Majors’ Employment of Reading Strategies in Terms of Reading Anxiety

This study was to investigate the reading strategies employed by the Business English majors in relation to their levels of reading anxiety. The participants were 926 Business English majors from 6 universities in southwest China. The Business English reading strategy questionnaire, the reading anxiety questionnaire and the Business English reading comprehension test were used to collect the data. The results showed that the Business English majors’ reading anxiety had significant negative influence on their use of reading strategies. The less anxious students reported significantly greater use of reading strategies than the more anxious students. In addition, the students with different anxiety levels had significant variations in the choices of individual reading strategies. Keywords—reading strategies, reading anxiety, reading proficiency, Business English majors
Values, Voice and Venerability: an exploration of later-life learners' perceptions of quality in informal class-based learning

This empirical inquiry explored the views of older adult learners with regards to the factors contributing to ‘quality’ in informal, class-based later-life learning. Growing evidence from research in fields such as health, psychology and neuroscience, have identified learning as contributing to the wellbeing of those in later life as well as offering protection from cognitive decline (Field, 2009; Frith, 2011). However, there has been little research focusing on the qualities of informal later-life learning that are valued by older learners. Using a critical geragogical lens, whereby the perceptions of later-life learners are privileged, I adopted a mixed-method approach to elicit the views of later-life learners. Using a three-phase sequential methodology involving an exploratory Feasibility Study, followed by the main study comprising a series of focus groups, a follow-up questionnaire and participant observations, I explored older learners’ experiences of perceived ‘quality’ learning environments in which access to wider benefits could, potentially, be maximised. In doing so, a ‘Quality Cirque’ theoretical model for quality informal later-life learning emerged. The study identified three key stakeholders in the provision of ‘quality’ informal later-life learning – the tutor or facilitator, the learning organisation and the learners themselves. Twenty-eight specific characteristics of quality associated with these stakeholders were identified, clustered around four dimensions of learning. The consistency and strength of the participant responses highlighted how informal learning could, and should, be enhanced through the adoption of simple strategies to enable and enhance the quality of later-life learning. As a case study, it offers potential, vicarious significance for other providers, suggests some key messages regarding later-life learning practices for policy makers and furthermore points to the need for future research that is focused on developing quality provision in informal, class-based later-life learning.