Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SELF-EFFICACY DURING EXPOSURE – CHILD (SEE-C) MEASURE: A PILOT STUDY

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) with exposure is an effective treatment for anxiety disorders but involves acute discomfort, rendering treatment engagement a challenge. Willingness to engage in exposure is of interest, because a child has to willingly approach a feared stimulus. This preliminary study investigated child engagement during exposures in CBT for anxiety disorders, with the development, validation, and field testing of a measure of self-efficacy over three time points. The measure, Self-Efficacy During Exposure-Child (SEE-C), is a 9-item, self-report measure of self-efficacy during exposure for youth 8-17 years old. A sample of eight reviewers at least 2-years post licensure (M = 14.06; SD = 4.71) with expertise in CBT for childhood anxiety provided feedback on the SEE-C’s face and content validity. Field testing included a sample of 24 child-parent dyads recruited from an anxiety clinic in the Northeast U.S. Child-parent dyads were asked to complete measures of child selfefficacy; child anxiety symptoms; and child school, social, and family functioning. Children were also asked to complete a measure of motivation. Analyses revealed the SEE-C to demonstrate significant increases in child self-efficacy, reductions in child anxiety symptoms, and increases in social and family functioning over treatment. Internal consistency of the SEE-C was acceptable to excellent, and exploratory principle component analysis suggested a three-factor solution, with loadings ranging from 0.5 to 0.9. The SEE-C adds to the literature as the first measure of child self-efficacy designed for use during exposure in CBT for anxiety. Findings provide insight into those factors that contribute to a child’s engagement during exposure. Reported effect sizes are promising and warrant greater investigation of the SEE-C’s utility.
HOW SPIRITUAL VALUE AND SPIRITUAL WELLBEING FROM ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVE AS AN ALTERNATIVE OF AGENCY PROBLEM

Agency problem arise because of conflict of interest between managers as an agent and organization’s owner as a principal. It impact to misuderstanding or misperception between agent and pricipal. Conflict of interest also arise in goverment institutional, where agent (employee) can’t conduct as a principal’s (goverment) representative, because of agent self interest. It influences to employee unethical behavior in work place, such as power abused, corruption, employee indiscipline, etc. The purpose of this study is to explain how spiritual value and spiritual well-being from Islamic Prespective as an alternatif of agency problem. It concern on how spiritual value and Habluminannas spiritual well-being influence agency problem. In Islamic perspective, spirituality in the work place is the dominant factor to shapes employee’s character. Because in Islamic perspective, employee must behave according ethical requirements and spiritual binding based on Quran and hadist. In the other side, employee wellness influence quality of work. One indicators of employee wellness is spiritual well-being. It relates to religious aspect of individu which explain how an individu interact with social environment, called Habluminannas spiritual well being. For example give salam (say hello), helping others, caring with other etc. Goverment Institutional which used Islamic value in core activity was selected to be area from this study. Data was colected from the employees who have been mandatory to manage financial institutional. This study used quesionare with modified indicators from Reaves to measure spiritual value and developed indicator to measures Habluminannas spiritual well-being and agency problems. This study proposed there is relationship between spiritual value with agency problem and spiritual value and habluminannas spritual well-being and there isn’t relationship between spritual well-being with agency problem. Keyword: agency problem, Islamic perspective, spiritual value, religious, Habluminannas spiritual wel-being.
Simulations, Games, and Learning

Most of us begin a discussion of games with some discomfort and with an incomplete experience base. For many educators, the term “game” conjures up a mental image of playing cards or a game like Jeopardy. These “casual games” are brief (five minutes to two hours) and simplistic. Today’s games are complex, take up to 100 hours, require collaboration with others, and involve developing values, insights, and new knowledge. They are immersive virtual worlds that are augmented by a more complex external environment that involves communities of practice, the buying and selling of game items, blogs, and developer communities. In many ways, games have become complex learning systems.
Complex-Valued Neural Networks: Learning Algorithms and Applications

Complex-valued data arise in various applications, such as radar and array signal processing, magnetic resonance imaging, communication systems, and processing data in the frequency domain. To deal with such data properly, neural networks are extended to the complex domain, referred to as complex-valued neural networks (CVNNs), allowing the network parameters to be complex numbers and the computations to follow the complex algebraic rules. Unlike the real-valued case, the nonlinear functions in the CVNNs do not have standard complex derivatives as the Cauchy-Riemann equations do not hold for them. Consequently, the traditional approach for deriving learning algorithms reformulates the problem in the real domain which is often tedious. In this thesis, we first develop a systematic and simpler approach using Wirtinger calculus to derive the learning algorithms in the CVNNs. It is shown that adopting three steps: (i) computing a pair of derivatives in the conjugate coordinate system, (ii) using coordinate transformation between real and conjugate coordinates, and (iii) organizing derivative computations through functional dependency graph greatly simplify the derivations. To illustrate, a gradient descent and LevenbergMarquardt algorithms are considered. Although a single-layered network, referred to as functional link network (FLN), has been widely used in the real domain because of its simplicity and faster processing, no such study exists in the complex domain. In the FLN, the nonlinearity is endowed in the input layer by constructing linearly independent basis functions in addition to the original variables. We design a parsimonious complex-valued FLN (CFLN) using orthogonal least squares (OLS) method, where the basis functions are multivariate polynomial terms. It is observed that the OLS based CFLN yields simple structure with favorable performance comparing to the multilayer CVNNs in several applications. It is well known and interesting that a complex-valued neuron can solve several nonlinearly separable problems, including the XOR, parity-n, and symmetry detection problems, which a real-valued neuron cannot. With this motivation, we perform an empirical study of classification performance of single-layered CVNNs on several real-world benchmark classification problems with two new activation functions. The experimental results exhibit that the classification performances of single-layered CVNNs are comparable to those of multilayer real-valued neural networks. Further enhancement of discrimination ability has been obtained using the ensemble approach. I dedicate this dissertation to my parents
THE ROLE OF SHORT VOWELS AND CONTEXT IN THE READING OF ARABIC,: COMPREHENSION AND WORD RECOGNITION OF HIGHLY SKILLED READERS

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of short vowels in reading Arabic for skilled Arab adult readers. Previous studies claimed that the presence of short vowels (and diacritics) has a facilitative role in the reading of Arabic. That is, adding short vowels to the consonants facilitates the reading comprehension and reading accuracy of both children and skilled adult Arab readers. Further, those studies claimed that the absence of short vowels (and diacritics) and context makes reading Arabic impossible. But these studies did not manipulate the short vowels and diacritics to the degree that would isolate the short vowels effect. Nor did they take into account the level of reading involved: text, sentence, and word. That is, on a text level, assessing the role of short vowels should take into account the text level in terms of word frequency; on a sentence level, the structure of the sentence- garden-path versus non-garden-path-; and finally, on a word level the type of word, homographic versus nonhomographic. Thus, the study described in the following pages was designed with three tasks to assess the role of short vowels in relation to each level: the text frequency, the garden-path structure, and the homography aspect of the word. In general, the results showed that the presence or absence of short vowels and diacritics in combination do not affect the reading process, comprehension, and accuracy of skilled adult Arab readers. However, only in a word-naming task, the absence of short vowels and context prevented the skilled adult Arab reader from choosing the right form of the heterophonic homographic word. Further, according to the findings, at the absence of short vowels and diacritics in combination, the role of context in Arabic is still limited to the heterophonic homographic words. In sum, the results demonstrated that the only variable that affects the reading process of Adult Arab skilled readers is the word frequency. Justification for such effects and recommendations for pedagogical purposes and future research are suggested.
An efficient algorithm for the parameter extraction of 3-D interconnect structures in the VLSI circuits: domain-decomposition method

In this paper, the domain-decomposition method (DDM) has been used to extract the capacitance matrices of multilayered three-dimensional (3-D) interconnects in very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits. Different subdomains are analyzed separately, so the most efficient method can be chosen for every subdomain. Therefore, the DDM can greatly reduce the algorithm complexity and provide a good platform for the development of combining methods. Numerical results show that the computing time and memory size used by the DDM are more than ten times less than those used by Ansoft's Maxwell SpiceLink-and more importantly, they are unrelated to the thickness of the pure dielectric layers.
ESTIMATION FINANCIAL INFORMATION MANIPULATION BY NEGATIVE BINOMIAL HURDLE MODEL

Manipulation is one of the important issues in securities markets because manipulative actions send false signals to investors and make them buy or sell securities. There are different types of manipulations that can deceive investors, one type of which called financial information manipulation. Manipulators, who use this kind of manipulation, distort information on financial statements in order to give false information about the prospects of the issuing firms. The aim of the manipulators is to deceive the investors and gain advantage at their expense. In this study, it is aimed to develop an appropriate model in order to determine the factors affecting the number of companies which has published false financial statements at Istanbul Stock Exchange in 2010 year. Zero-inflated count data is analyzed with Negative Binomial Hurdle Model in order to determine the effective financial ratios.
Welfare Benefits in Highly Decentralized Fiscal Systems: Evidence on Interterritorial Mimicking

This paper analyzes the determinants of welfare benefit levels within a highly fiscally decentralized context. More specifically, we analyze the role of mimicking as a driver of the institutional design of subnational government policies in the absence of federal co-ordination and financing. Empirically we focus on the welfare benefit programs of Spanish regional governments during the period 1996-2015. Our results strongly support the significant role played by mimicking: regional public agents observe what their peers are doing and act accordingly, and this takes place even in a context of low mobility of households. Moreover, we find evidence of vertical externalities: even in a completely decentralized framework, regions consider the benefits set by the central government as a benchmark when determining their own welfare benefit levels.
Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices on First Aid Measures among Senior School Prefects in Galle Education Division, Sri Lanka

First aid is needed in daily life at any situation. So every citizen shares a responsibility of having basic first aid knowledge and practices. First aider should be able to assess, provide care and direct to appropriate medical care. This study was planned to assess knowledge, attitudes and practices on first aid among senior school prefects in relation to the gender and previous exposure to first aid training. A descriptive cross sectional study was undertaken in two selected schools out of five girls’ schools and five boys’ schools in Galle educational division which are already having first aid trainings. All senior prefects in the two schools were eligible for the study. Data were collected using an interviewer administered questionnaire which contain both open ended and closed ended questions under four parts (Part 1-Socio-demographic data, Part 2knowledge on first aid, part 3-attitudes on first aid, part 4 practical scenarios on first aid). There were 66 senior prefects; 35 males and 31 females. All of them had heard the term of “First aid”. However, primary assessment in first aid (DRABC-Danger, Response, Airway, Breathing, and Circulation) was known to 17 (10 males and 7 females) subjects. Nearly 70% (25 males, 22 females) heard the term “cardiopulmonary resuscitation”. But of them only 12 males and 5 females were able to mention the ratio of chest compressions to rescue breaths as 30:2. There was positive attitude towards first aid as the mean ± SD score was 24.23±2.4 out of 30 marks. Nearly 3/4 of them had the view of having first aid in their school curriculum and wants to improve their first aid knowledge and practices. Overall, there were significant difference in attitudes of females than males (p=0.04). Overall mean ±SD value that was scored for the practices section was 4.53±1.48. Only 9 individuals, each from both schools were able to obtain scores over 5 out of 10. There was a significant effect of previous first aid education on knowledge (χ2=13.08, p<0.05), attitudes (χ2=6.52, p<0.05) and practices (χ2=11.47, p<0.05) of senior prefects. Though there were positive attitudes towards learning first aid, the knowledge and practices on first aid was insufficient among senior prefects of Galle educational division. Keywords— KAP, First aid, senior prefects
Atomically thin α-In2Se3: an emergent two-dimensional room temperature ferroelectric semiconductor

Room temperature ferroelectric thin films are the key element of high-density nonvolatile memories in modern electronics. However, with the further miniaturization of the electronic devices beyond the Moore’s law, conventional ferroelectrics suffer great challenge arising from the critical thickness effect, where the ferroelectricity is unstable if the film thickness is reduced to nanometer or single atomic layer limit. Two-dimensional (2D) materials, thanks to their stable layered structure, saturate interfacial chemistry, weak interlayer couplings, and the benefit of preparing stable ultra-thin film at 2D limit, are promising for exploring 2D ferroelectricity and related device applications. Therefore, it provides an effective approach to overcome the limitation in conventional ferroelectrics with the study of 2D ferroelectricity in van der Waals (vdW) materials. In this review article, we briefly introduce recent progresses on 2D ferroelectricity in layered vdW materials. We will highlight the study on atomically thin α-In2Se3, which is an emergent ferroelectric semiconductor with the coupled in-plane and out-of-plane ferroelectricity. Furthermore, two prototype ferroelectric devices based on ferroelectric α-In2Se3 will also be reviewed.
Integration or Separation? Addressing Religious and Spiritual Issues in Multicultural Counseling: A National Survey of College Counselors

Given contemporary ethical concerns, we conducted a national survey of 216 college counselors’ perceptions of integrating religious and spiritual issues in multicultural counseling and counselor education. Using cluster analysis, we identified four patterns of commitments to multiculturalism and religiosity. Respondents demonstrated ethical bracketing, as they considered religious and spiritual issues favorably within the framework of multicultural counseling, irrespective of their personal commitments to those topics. Counselors can openly address spiritual and religious
Comparison of Neuro-fuzzy Networks for Classification Fingerprint Images

Comparison of Neuro-fuzzy Networks for Classification Fingerprint Images Classification means to assign a given fingerprint to one of the existing classes already recognized in the literature. A search over all the fingerprints in the database takes a long time, so thegoal is to reduce the search time and computational complexity by choosing an appropriate subset of database for search. Classifying a fingerprint images is and will remain a challenging problem in pattern recognition, due to the minimal interclass variability and maximal intra-class variability.
Depth maps created from blur information using images with focus at near and at far

A method of producing depth maps for depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) of stereoscopic views is proposed and tested. The method is based on depth-from-defocus techniques, utilizing two original images, one with the camera focused at a near point and the other with it focused at a far point in the captured scene to produce depth maps from blur at edge locations. It is assumed that the level of blur at an edge reflects the distance it is from the focused distance. For each image, estimates of the level of blur edges at local regions are obtained by determining the optimal scale for edge detection based on a luminance gradient. An Edge-Depth map is then obtained by evaluating differences in blur for corresponding regions in the two images. This is followed by an additional process in which regions in the Edge-Depth map that have no depth values are filled to produce a Filled-Depth map. A group of viewers assessed the depth quality of a representative set of stereoscopic images that were produced by DIBR using the two types of depth maps. It was found that the stereoscopic images generated with the Filled-Depth and the Edge-Depth maps produced depth quality ratings that were higher than those produced by their monoscopic, two-dimensional counterparts. Images rendered using the Filled-Depth maps, but not the Edge-Depth maps, produced ratings of depth quality that were equal to those produced with factual, full depth maps. A hypothesis as to how the proposed method might be improved is discussed.
An Investigation of Students’ Acceptance of Moodle in a Blended Learning Setting Using Technology Acceptance Model

Moodle and other web-based learning systems have become very popular in higher education. Their success will not be achieved if students fail to use such systems. The present study investigates university student’s attitudes regarding the use of Moodle. Forty-seven students from a Moroccan university were involved in the study. The students attended a course in a blended learning environment. The technology acceptance model was used to assess their acceptance of the e-learning system. Structural equation modeling was employed with SmartPLS program to explain the students’ acceptance of the system. Data showed that technology acceptance model is still a solid theoretical model whose validity can extend to blended learning settings. The results point to the significant importance of computer self-efficacy and perceived usefulness in accounting for attitude and Moodle usage. Implications of the findings and limitations along with future research directions are also discussed.
CODE SWITCHING AS A COUNTENANCE OF LANGUAGE INTERFERENCE: THE CASE OF THE EFIK BILINGUAL

Bilinguals often switch between their two languages in the middle of a conversation. Spolsky (1998) says, code-switches can take place between or even within sentences, involving phrases or words or even part of words. The switching of words is the beginning of borrowing, which occurs when the new word becomes more or less integrated into the second language. In this paper, we examine the experience and countenance of the Efik bilingual in terms of language interference. This interference is as a result language contact – for this paper - Efik and English languages. We are looking at it from two axes: the sociolinguistic ambience and the morphosyntactic perspective. We are using both the Think Tank and the Lexical Functional Grammar-LFG theories respectively, to analyze the data. The theories have aided the discovery that the study of Interference, which has to do with the transference of elements of one language to another at various linguistic levels, is what leads to the high incidences of code switching by bilinguals. Amongst other findings discussed in this paper, we have found out that when code switching is to compensate for language difficulty, it may be viewed as interference and when it is used as a sociolinguistic tool, it is not.
Promoting voter registration: the effects of low-cost interventions on behaviour and norms

Abstract We report two studies investigating whether, and if so how, different low-cost interventions affect voter registration rates. Low-cost message-based interventions are increasingly used to promote target behaviours. While growing evidence shows that such ‘nudges’ often significantly impact behaviour, understanding of why interventions work or fail in particular contexts remains underdeveloped. In a natural field experiment conducted before the 2015 UK general election, we varied messages on a postcard sent by Oxford City Council to unregistered students encouraging them to join the electoral register. Our primary finding from the field study is that just one of our interventions – a reminder that people failing to register may be fined – has a significant positive impact. Offering small monetary rewards to register instead has a negative but insignificant effect. In a second study, using an online experiment we identify a particular mechanism explaining the influence of this intervention. Specifically, we show that our interventions have divergent effects on perceptions of the normative appropriateness of registering: emphasising that failing to register is punishable by law strengthened the perception that one ought to register, while offering monetary inducements for registering weakened the perception that doing so is an action already expected within society.