Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parenting Stress in Families of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Roles of the Extended Family

OBJECTIVE: This study focused on the role of extended family in mitigating the stress experienced by parents of children with autism and the possible challenges of involving them, especially in modern Nigerian society. The study identified the sources of stress for parents of children with autism, and considered location and family size factors in stress experienced by parents, the role of the extended family in mitigating the stress and the challenges that may inhibit the involvement of the extended family. METHOD: The study adopted a descriptive survey research design and was carried out in South East, Nigeria. All parents and guardians of children with autism in the three special needs schools that cater for children with autism in the two selected states were used for the study. Data was collected using a self-report questionnaire with 36 items to elicit information on the sources of stress for parents and the role of the extended family in mitigating the stress. A semi-structured 26 items interview schedule adapted from Smithfield’s (2011) parents of children with autism questions covering the child's behaviour, parent's feelings, and role of the extended family was also used to generate firsthand information on the issues raised and to complement data collected through the self-report questionnaire. There was a researcher observation guide for monitoring progress in the study. Mean and standard deviation was used to answer the research questions while regression analysis, t-test and Analysis of variance were used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. RESULTS: The findings revealed that parents of children with autism experience stress that is hinged basically on the behaviour of the children. Family size does not influence parents’ stress experience but location does. Some parents receive child care and/or financial help sometimes from extended family members. CONCLUSION: Parents of children with autism face a lot of stress that is hinged basically on the behaviour of the children. Some of the rural parents, however, have the opportunity of getting help sometimes from extended family members since special need schools are not located in their area or even nearby. The extended family relations sometimes offer financial help but from all indications, the modern urbanization has really eroded their help. Family size does not influence parents’ stress experience and role of extended family but location does.
The Epigenetics Changes In Childhood Solid Cancer: A Review

Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene expression that do not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence. It is a change in phenotype without changing in genotype which in turn affects how cells read the genes. The epigenetic change is a regular occurrence but can also be influenced by several factors including age, environment, lifestyle, and disease state. It may have damaging effects that result in diseases like cancer. At least three systems including DNA methylation, histone modification and RNA-associated gene silencing are currently considered to initiate and sustain epigenetic change. New and ongoing research is continuously uncovering the role of epigenetics in a variety of diseases including in childhood solid cancer such as Ewing sarcoma, neuroblastoma, Wilms tumours, brain tumours and rhabdomyosarcoma. A better understanding of epigenetic changes in childhood cancers can guide towards future therapy and diagnosis. Please download the full paper by clicking on the PDF file below.
Towards barrier-free counselling for sexual/gender minorities and sex workers in rural Tasmania

Aims: This paper combines a service review and proposed research and, thus, has two aims: to present a model of successful service delivery regarding the development of barrier-free counselling and to present the design of in-progress doctoral research that has been informed by this clinician’s practice. Sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) and sex workers (SWs) in rural or remote (R/R) Tasmania are the focus.Clinical practice approach: Common barriers to accessing mental health services were identified in clinical practice through a service review that included observation and client consultation. Barriers were addressed and enablers enacted to support the biopsychosocial realities of marginalised people in R/R Tasmania. Support consists of inclusive, intersectional, sex-positive counselling; free/reduced-cost counselling; after-hours appointments; all-ages counselling; client-determined settings for service; and outreach support. Practice-based and anecdotal evidence suggested reductions in severity of mental ill health; alienation caused by stigma and minority stress; and likelihood of negative health indicators (excessive drug use, self-harm, suicide). Doctoral research methods: The PhD, a nexus between practice and research, is occurring between March 2018 and March 2021. The research will follow a mixed-methods design that is commencing with systematic literature reviews on the barriers, uptakes, enablers of mental health and related services for SGMs and SWs. The focus will then narrow in on SGMs and SWs in R/R Tasmania, specifically, with an online survey and in-depth, one-on-one interviews. The publication of papers based on research findings as well as presentations to other counsellors and services will occur to promote barrier-reducing approaches to direct practice support.Relevance: This approach will give marginalised people in R/R Tasmania a voice in the nature and direction of their mental-health care to improve outcomes and wellbeing. The research will generate vital data that is currently lacking on these populations in this region. It will also provide improvement opportunities for service providers and users alike through the development of health access standards.Conclusion: Improving the mental health of SGMs and SWs in R/R Tasmania through access to barrier-free or barrier-reduced counselling has the potential to improve individual lives, lessen the burden of negative and compounding health impacts, and provide these populations with the inalienable human rights that have been restricted or denied.
Analyzing and modeling groups

OF THE DISSERTATION Analyzing and Modeling Groups by Jinyun Yan Dissertation Director: S. Muthukrishnan A group is a collection of humans. Members within a group often share certain characteristics, interests and preferences, along with their individual differences. Such collections of members lead to interesting collective behavior. In this work, we analyze and model the behavior of groups when part of three real-world applications: group recommendation, personalized search and reference group identification. Group recommendation is a variation of the classical problem of recommending items, but where the client is a group rather than an individual. We are interested in the setting where individuals, part of the same group or not, interact regularly with the recommender system. There are two challenges in group recommendation in this setting: 1) historical information about member and group is often missing; 2) members’ presence when they ask for a recommendation may be different at different times. We formulate this problem as a group multi-armed bandit problem and design policies for two types of group feedback. We develop a demo system to collect member and group feedback on recommendations to group events and observe the existence of member influence when the group wants to reach consensus. Personalized search results rely heavily on individuals’ search and click history. However, a large portion of queries submitted by users each day is new. It is hard to improve search relevance on these queries. We analyzed queries and clicks at group
Outlier Mining Based on Spatial Constraint

Major drawbacks of existing spatial outlier detection algorithms are that the spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity of spatial objects aren’t considered,normal objects tend to be falsely detected as spatial outliers or true spatial outliers tend to be ignored. We define neighborhood distance to overcome spatial autocorrelation constraint and defined spatial local outlier factor (SLOF)to overcome spatial heterogeneity constraint. SLOF captures the local behavior of datum in their spatial neighborhood. SLOF-based algorithm of spatial outlier detection can successfully find local spatial outliers which appear to be meaningful,but can otherwise not be identified with existing approaches. The experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms other existing algorithms in detection accuracy,user dependency and efficiency.
Efficient Implementation of Concurrent Data Structures on Multi-core and Many-core Architectures

Synchronization of concurrent threads is the central problem in order to design efficient concurrent data-structures. The compute systems widely available in market are increasingly becoming heterogeneous involving multi-core Central Processing Units (CPUs) and many-core Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This thesis contributes to the research of efficient synchronization in concurrent data-structures in more than one way. It is divided into two parts. In the first part, a novel design of a Set Abstract Data Type (ADT) based on an efficient lock-free Binary Search Tree (BST) with improved amortized bounds of the time complexity of set operations - Add, Remove and Contains, is presented. In the second part, a comprehensive evaluation of concurrent Queue implementations on multi-core CPUs as well as many-core GPUs are presented. Efficient Lock-free BST -To the best of our knowledge, the lock-free BST presented in this thesis is the first to achieve an amortized complexity of O(H(n)+c) for all Set operations where H(n) is the height of a BST on n nodes and c is the contention measure. Also, the presented lock-free algorithm of BST comes with an improved disjoint-access-parallelism compared to the previously existing concurrent BST algorithms. This algorithm uses single-word compare-and-swap (CAS) primitives. The presented algorithm is linearizable. We implemented the algorithm in Java and it shows good scalability. Evaluation of concurrent data-structures - We have evaluated the performance of a number of concurrent FIFO Queue algorithms on multi-core CPUs and many-core GPUs. We studied the portability of existing design of concurrent Queues from CPUs to GPUs which are inherently designed for SIMD programs. We observed that in general concurrent queues offer them to efficient implementation on GPUs with faster cache memory and better performance support for atomic synchronization primitives such as CAS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to evaluate a concurrent data-structure on GPUs.
Book Review: Kirstin M. S. Bezio and Kimberly Yost (eds.) Leadership, Popular Culture and Social Change

Browder, R. E. , Aldrich, H. E. , & Bradley, S. W. (2019). The emergence of the maker movement: Implications for entrepreneurship research. Journal of Business Venturing, 34, 459–476. Courpasson, D. (2017). The politics of everyday. Organization Studies, 38, 843–859. De Vaujany, F. -X. , Dandoy, A. , Grandazzi, A. , & Clegg, S. R. (2018). Breaking the waves: Practicing phenomenologically simultaneity in management research. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2018, 14336. Fine, G. A. (2014). The hinge: Civil society, group culture, and the interaction order. Social Psychology Quarterly, 77, 5–26. Garrett, L. E. , Spreitzer, G. M. , & Bacevice, P. A. (2017). Co-constructing a sense of community at work: The emergence of community in coworking spaces. Organization Studies, 38, 821–842. Goldfarb, J. C. (2006). The politics of small things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lallement, M. (2015). L’âge du faire : Hacking, travail, anarchie. Paris: Seuil. Mauss, M. (1979). Sociology and psychology: Essays. London; Boston: Law Book Company of Australasia. Mitev, N. , de Vaujany, F. -X. , Laniray, P., Bohas, A. , & Fabbri, J. (2018). Co-working spaces, collaborative practices and entrepreneurship. In K. Riemer, S. Schellhammer, & M. Meinert (Eds.), Collaboration in the digital age: How technology enables individuals, teams and businesses (pp. 15–44). Cham, Switzerland: Spring Publications, Inc.
Database of Binaural Room Impulse Responses of an Apartment-Like Environment

We present a database of binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) measured in an apartment-like environment. The BRIRs were captured at four different sound source positions, each combined with four listener positions. A head and torso simulator (HATS) with varying head-orientation in the range of ±78 • with 2 • resolution was used. Additionally, BRIRs of 20 listener positions along a trajectory connecting two of the four positions were measured, each with a fixed head-orientation. The data is provided in the Spatially Oriented Format for Acoustics (SOFA) and it is freely available under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-4.0) license. It can be used to simulate complex acoustic scenes in order to study the process of auditory scene analysis for humans and machines.
A Novel Mode Decision Algorithm Based on H.264

Variable coding modes are used in H.264,which makes the mode selection a time-consuming component. To improve this situation, we first the concept of mode reference aggregate a mode reference aggregate decision algorithm is proposed based on region forecast. This method can significantly reduce the number of candidate mode,thus simplifying the procedure of mode decision. Experimental results show that the algorithm can increase the encoding speed significantly with negligible PSNR drop and bit-rate increase.
A STUDY OF SERVANT LEADERSHIP PRACTICES AND THE IMPACT ON ENGLISH LEARNERS IN CALIFORNIA PUBLIC SCHOOLS

The primary objective of this study was to determine if a positive correlation between servant leadership practices and the success of English learners in California public schools exists. Robert Greenleaf’s (1977) servant leadership theory and Dr. Lori Olsen’s (2010) research on Long-term English Language Learners guide the research and theoretical framework of the study. Seminal research on leadership theories are reviewed in order to provide insight and understanding on the influence and role leaders have on followers. These theories were delimited to: transformational, transactional, participative, and servant leadership. Research and data for English learners in the United States and California was presented. In addition, this study reviewed the new California English Language Proficiency Exam (ELPAC) and the implications for English language learners, as well as the urgency for principals to ensure the needs of English learners, are a key priority. The researcher hypothesized that schools with principals who were considered servant leaders would have higher rates of reclassified English Language Learners, versus principals who applied other leadership styles. A mixed method was used to analyze the research findings. Participants in this study completed the Servant Leadership Survey (SLS) developed by Dirk van Dierendonck and Inge Nuijten (2010), which was adapted and modified by the researcher, replacing the word “manager” with “principal. ” Participants who opted for an interview were randomly selected and interviewed. The conclusion of the study presents the findings of the research, the impact leaders have on school priorities, and the lessons learned by the researcher in her first year as a principal.
“Holocaust Denial on Trial”: An Analysis of Deborah Lipstadt’s Approach

Analysing the methods of countering Holocaust denial in a comparative manner proves a most helpful platform to assess historical methodology and practice. This research seeks to evaluate the differing agendas and perspectives between historical and legal approaches to refuting Holocaust denial from the David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt libel trial. This research finds that the Irving v. Penguin defence team effectively used the court as a framework to test Irving’s historical methods of evidence manipulation against the historical record. It is argued that this legal framework and the process of arbitration in law increases the accountability of historical writing, as exemplified in the four historian’s expert reports presented for the defence. Based on these reports, the Irving v. Penguin case has further practical application for wider historical research practices, as the historian’s ability to produce verifiable and justifiable conclusions are defended. This research contributes to the knowledge of methods and approaches of countering Holocaust denial and provides a basis to assess the unique and, at times, inter-dependent relationship between history and law, in its use of historical material evidence. The three approaches to Holocaust denial investigated in this research are: Deborah Lipstadt’s methods and assumptions, the methods of the defence barristers of Irving v. Penguin and the methods of the four professional historians as expert witnesses appearing in court. The trial’s focus on Irving’s methods, centralised Irving’s political agenda and delegitimising his reputation as an historian. Thus, the Irving v. Penguin trial is analysed as a case which clarifies the parameters of acceptable historical scholarship. Research into methods of countering the denial opens-up windows of analysis into the ways that historians can respond to wider phenomenon like negationism. This research provides helpful lines of enquiry to understand the wider issues of truth, verification and falsification of historical evidence.
The concept of “Stalking” and its relevance to the existing phenomena of internet and social media

Stalking has been variously defined by researchers and legal systems around the world. Generally, two accepted elements of stalking are (i) repetitive conduct by the perpetrator that (ii) induces a concern of harm to self in the victim. [1] The conduct of the perpetrator can involve various methods (tactics) and patterns of use. Well‐known tactics include surveillance (follow, watch, wait, etc.), life invasion (calling up, messaging, entering premises, bothering acquaintances of victim, etc.), intimidation (implicit or explicit threats to victim and their close ones, damage to property, etc.), and attack (ruining reputation, road rage, sexual assault, etc.). The pattern of stalking can be elaborated by the duration of stalking, intensity (number of different tactics and locations the stalker employs), and its frequency. Stalkers often deceive the victim’s family and friends to divulge information of the victim as a part of their surveillance strategy (proxy stalking). The awareness of being under surveillance generates anxiety in the victim, thereby stalkers can pose a threat without even uttering a word. [2] Studies have shown that anxiety experienced by the victims is significantly correlated with surveillance, pursuit, and threat tactics used by the stalker. [3] Stalking can involve public humiliation, interference at work, and leisure activities (life sabotage) and on many occasions can involve the victims’ family members, friends, and colleagues (collateral victims). Victims can feel incapable, inadequate, and frustrated. [4] Nearly 30%–60% of stalking victims have reported threat of assault by the stalker, while lesser number of victims have reported actual assault. [5] However, it also needs to be kept in perspective that about 2% of the victims may not actually have been stalked (false victimization syndrome). [5]
Can digital badges strengthen religious ethnic-cultural identity in a religious education setting?

ABSTRACT Through interviews with student participants and evidence submitted to earn digital badges, a number of indicators suggest that a religious school’s digital badges can provide opportunity to strengthen religious identity. In particular, student interviews and evidence supplied for the completion of learning objectives for digital badges indicate increases of religious salience (compared to secular practices), religious commitment within a community, and self-esteem based on religious identity. Recommendations are made for ongoing and future religious badge implementations on how to strengthen religious identity while meeting the requirements of authentic, quality assessments.
How is Social Capital Associated with Perception of AI

Numerous studies over the past 30 years have examined the relationship between social capital (SC) and information and communication technology (ICT). However, few studies have examined the association between artificial intelligence (AI) and SC. This study addresses this gap using a Web survey (N=5000) carried out in the Tokyo metropolitan area in Japan in 2018. The survey included questions on ICT literacy and SC (networks, trust, norms of reciprocity), as well as questions on perceptions of AI including its impact on society. (cid:16076) The author found a statistically significant positive association between cognitive SC (trust and norms of reciprocity) and positive perceptions of AI. However, the impact of structural SC (networks) on AI perceptions was either nonexistent or negative. Structural SC created by group participation, as well as contact with others, including those in the workplace, does not create positive perceptions of AI, and could even be a source of negative perceptions of AI. Cognitive SC may function as a promoter of AI, while structural SC may function as a precaution to AI (cid:18442) Both types of SC might assume important roles for the smooth transition to the AI era.
Flooding Control in Named Data Networking

ABSTRACT With the advancement of information and communication technology and proliferation of smart devices, an enormous amount of contents is being added to the Internet every minute. Efficient routing procedures have a crucial role to navigate through all contents with minimal overhead. Named Data Networking (NDN) is the new paradigm to meet up the new requirements and challenges of current Internet. However, NDN routing is mainly based on controlled Interest flooding which depends on the hop-count field in NDN Interest packet. Current hop-count update procedure reduces the hop count by a single hop at each routing node. Subsequently, flooding arises question on the ability of NDN to manage the data explosion. Second, a redundant copy of specific contents may increase the possibility of congestion. In this paper, we propose two schemes to alleviate flooding and congestion. First, we describe a novel hop-count update procedure using a history database called Info-Base. Next, we propose an extension to Link State Routing for NDN to avoid congestion caused by the redundant copy of data in the network. Our simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce flooding up to 30% while maintaining proper hit ratio.
Happiness and Spirituality: An Empirical Analysis using Divine Perspectives in Pakistan

Happiness is the center of discussion among philosophers, theologians, psychologists and more recently among economists from past few decades. Easterlin (1974) claimed that money alone cannot buy happiness, factors such as social interactions, socio-demographic factors, religion and personal values influence happiness. Abundant literature has been produced on spirituality by philosophers and scholars of different religions, however, spirituality-happiness literature from Islamic point of view and particularly in the case of Muslim society is largely ignored. This study analytically explores and empirically tests the relationship between spirituality and happiness using Divine Economics Framework in case of 5 districts of Azad Kashmir (Pakistan), collected through Divine Economics Survey 2013. Findings of the study show that spirituality intrinsically matters in producing wellbeing and happiness.