ASSESSMENT OF EMPLOYABILITY SKILLS ACQUISITION NEED FOR SELF-RELIANCE IN BUSINESS STUDIES AMONG GOVERNMENT JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS STUDENTS IN NIGER STATE

This study was conducted to assess the employability skills acquisition need for self-reliance in business studies among government junior secondary schools students in Niger State. The researchers raised two research questions for the study. In line with the research question, two null hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level if significant. A survey research design was used for the study. The area of this study consists of one government junior secondary schools from each local government in the state which comprise of twenty-five local government. A random sampling technique was used and the sample size for the study was two hundred and ten (210). A 4-point Likert scale used for the and the questionnaire was tagged as “Business Studies Skill Acquisition Questionnaire (BSSAQ)” containing twenty (20) statement items were used to collect data. To obtain the reliability coefficient of the measuring instrument, the instrument was pilot tested using some fifteen (15) selected junior secondary schools in Ilorin. The result obtained from the pilot study were then analyzed using Cranach alpha reliability coefficient statistical and the reliability index obtained was 0.88. The data collected on the twenty (20) statement items of the questionnaire were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions and t-test was used to test the null hypotheses formulated for the study. The study revealed among others, that a significant difference existed in the employability skills acquisition need for self-reliance in government junior secondary schools in Niger State. Based on the findings of this study, it was recommended that at junior secondary schools business studies contents should be well taught in other to encourage the acquisition of employability skills among the students of junior secondary schools in Niger state. Also, Business studies at the government junior secondary level should be encouraged through proper funding, and the provision of equipment for better acquisition of computer skills

Drag Reduction with Biopolymer-Synthetic Polymer Mixtures in Oil-Water Flows: Effect of Synergy

The search for lower cost materials that reduce pressure drop in fluid transport systems in oil and gas industries to conserve pumping energy is of paramount importance. Polymers are known to reduce pressure drop in pipeline oil-water flows in a process referred to as drag reduction (DR). The effect of partially hydrolysed polyacrylamide, polyethylene oxide, Aloe Vera mucilage and their mixtures as drag reducing polymers (DRPs) on pressure gradient (pressure drop; Δp) in pipeline oil-water flows were studied. The experiment was carried out in flow rig with 0.02-m diameter straight unplasticised polyvinylchloride (uPVC) pipe, two centrifugal pumps, control valves and two storage tanks. Tap water (ρ = 997 kg/m3 and µ = 0.89 cP) and diesel (ρ = 832 kg/m3 and µ = 1.66 cP) were used as the test fluid at ambient condition. The polymer mixture total concentration (MTC) of 30 and 400 ppm at different mixing proportion, mixture Reynolds number (Remix) and oil input volume were investigated. The results show increase in pressure gradient with increase in oil input volume in both single-phase water flow and oil-water flow before adding drag reducing polymers (DRPs). However, Δp decreased after adding DRPs with increase in Reynolds number (Re) or Remix and decrease in the oil-phase Re, and vice versa. The results further showed higher reduction in pressure drop by the polymer mixture than in each of the polymer used at the same conditions. The rigidness of the biopolymer was improved by adding synthetic polymers which resulted to increase in DR efficiency

A psychometric analysis of the Self-Efficacy Encouragement Questionnaire (SEEQ) in the university environment

AbstractThis article presents the theoretical construct of self-efficacy encouragement and then introduces a 14 items scale known as Self-efficacy Encouragement Questionnaire (SEEQ) that is developed to measure what degree university lecturers encourage students to develop their academic sense efficacy. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were used to explore the psychometric properties of the scale. 194 undergraduate students participated in the pilot study section while another 300 undergraduate students involved in the Confirmatory Factor Analysis test. The PCA attempts to answer the research question 1: What is the psychometric soundness of the self-efficacy encouragement questionnaire? The CFA aims to answer the research question 2: Do the self-efficacy encouragement hypothesized model fit the collected data from the UKM undergraduate students? The PCA and CFA results indicated that the Self-efficacy Encouragement Questionnaire (SEEQ) is an established instrument with acceptable validity and reliability and it justified to be used in other studies

Western, Religious or Spiritual: An Evaluation of Moral Justification in Large Language Models

The increasing success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in variety of tasks lead to their widespread use in our lives which necessitates the examination of these models from different perspectives. The alignment of these models to human values is an essential concern in order to establish trust that we have safe and responsible systems. In this paper, we aim to find out which values and principles are embedded in LLMs in the process of moral justification. For this purpose, we come up with three different moral perspective categories: Western tradition perspective (WT), Abrahamic tradition perspective (AT), and Spiritualist/Mystic tradition perspective (SMT). In two different experiment settings, we asked models to choose principles from the three for suggesting a moral action and evaluating the moral permissibility of an action if one tries to justify an action on these categories, respectively. Our experiments indicate that tested LLMs favors the Western tradition moral perspective over others. Additionally, we observe that there potentially exists an over-alignment towards religious values represented in the Abrahamic Tradition, which causes models to fail to recognize an action is immoral if it is presented as a "religious-action". We believe that these results are essential in order to direct our attention in future efforts.Comment: 16 pages total, 8 pages main pape

AugCSE: contrastive sentence embedding with diverse augmentations

Data augmentation techniques have been proven useful in many applications in NLP fields. Most augmentations are task-specific, and cannot be used as a general-purpose tool. In our work, we present AugCSE, a unified framework to utilize diverse sets of data augmentations to achieve a better, general-purpose, sentence embedding model. Building upon the latest sentence embedding models, our approach uses a simple antagonistic discriminator that differentiates the augmentation types. With the finetuning objective borrowed from domain adaptation, we show that diverse augmentations, which often lead to conflicting contrastive signals, can be tamed to produce a better and more robust sentence representation. Our methods achieve state-of-the-art results on downstream transfer tasks and perform competitively on semantic textual similarity tasks, using only unsupervised data.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000010241 - University of California, Berkeleyhttps://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.30/First author draf

A Novel Method for Analysing Racial Bias: Collection of Person Level References

Long term exposure to biased content in literature or media can significantly influence people's perceptions of reality, leading to the development of implicit biases that are difficult to detect and address (Gerbner 1998). In this study, we propose a novel method to analyze the differences in representation between two groups and use it examine the representation of African Americans and White Americans in books between 1850 to 2000 with the Google Books dataset (Goldberg and Orwant 2013). By developing better tools to understand differences in representation, we aim to contribute to the ongoing efforts to recognize and mitigate biases. To improve upon the more common phrase based (men, women, white, black, etc) methods to differentiate context (Tripodi et al. 2019, Lucy; Tadimeti, and Bamman 2022), we propose collecting a comprehensive list of historically significant figures and using their names to select relevant context. This novel approach offers a more accurate and nuanced method for detecting implicit biases through reducing the risk of selection bias. We create group representations for each decade and analyze them in an aligned semantic space (Hamilton, Leskovec, and Jurafsky 2016). We further support our results by assessing the time adjusted toxicity (Bassignana, Basile, and Patti 2018) in the context for each group and identifying the semantic axes (Lucy, Tadimeti, and Bamman 2022) that exhibit the most significant differences between the groups across decades. We support our method by showing that our proposed method can capture known socio political changes accurately and our findings indicate that while the relative number of African American names mentioned in books have increased over time, the context surrounding them remains more toxic than white Americans.Comment: Main paper is 9 page

Numerical investigation of vibrational properties and study of some selected physical properties of potassium chloride (KCl)

In this work, we investigate the vibrational properties of diatomic KCl lattice, the dispersion relation, density of states and the specific heat capacity were obtained using a quantum approach analytically, a simulated FOTRAN-90 code program was used to evaluate these properties numerically. The frequencies of the three normal modes at equal intervals of k = ±n π/a (wave vector), along the three symmetry directions [001], [011] and [111] of KCl lattice were calculated. The subroutine was designed to give the output in numerical values that can be drawn graphically using any form of graphical tools, and the result obtained shows an excellent agreement with the many results obtained from other means

AN EXPLORATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS EXAMINING MANDARIN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (MFL) LEARNERS’ SELF-EFFICACY AT MALAYSIAN PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES

Background and Purpose: Self-efficacy is one of the aspects of human behaviours related to performance in social cognitive theory. It has been studied in social sciences, education, and languages. There are a variety of self-efficacy scales available in the English and French languages to test one’s self-belief in their ability to learn the target language. To date, no self-efficacy scale catered to the unique characteristics of Mandarin as a foreign or third language (MFL). The objective of this study is to give practical recommendations on creating valid self-efficacy instruments of MFL and making judgments on factor extraction, factor rotation, and factor labelling based on the foreign language literature.   Methodology: This quantitative study gathered information through an administration of a survey. The multipart survey consists of the demographic information section and the MFL self-efficacy scales distributed to MFL learners in Malaysian public universities. Data were collected randomly from 614 participants studying MFL at three different levels. Items for MFL self-efficacy were examined using SPSS version 25.0 software. Findings: The final 13 MFL self-efficacy items were reduced to four factors with a total variance of 68.99%. The Promax rotation matrices revealed the presence of a simple four-factor structure, exhibiting the degree of strong factor loadings. The four factors were MFL Speaking, MFL Listening, MFL Reading, and MFL Writing.   Contributions: This research provides valid self-efficacy scales for MFL learning. The skill-based Scale could contribute to MFL teaching literature in the Malaysian context. Additionally, the study proposes future investigations which involve learning Mandarin with more emphasis on Chinese Characters.   Keywords: Mandarin as a foreign language, self-efficacy, exploratory factor analysis, non-native speaker, scale development.   Cite as: YanJu, S., Yusuf, M., YanMei, S., & Abdullah, H. (2023). An exploratory factor analysis examining Mandarin as a foreign language (MFL) learners’ self-efficacy at Malaysian public universities. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 8(2), 425-440. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol8iss2pp425-44

C02 Emissions and Economic Growth: A Panel Data Analysis Evidence from Developing African Countries

This paper tests the Environmental Kuznet Hypothesis using data from 23 African countries for the period 1980–2019   in the Pedroni approach to panel cointegration analysis. The evidence suggests that both real GDP and energy consumption have a substantial effect on CO2 emission in most countries studied though energy consumption has less effect. However, in most countries, as income increases, the level of emission declines consistently with the EKC hypothesis. However, the econometric result, their interpretation, and their likely policy implications have to be taken with caution since there is a high degree of heterogeneity among the countries in terms of energy consumption,  real income as well as  CO2 emissions. This is more so when the analysis of the trend in the growth of the three variables used in estimation and the estimated results of fully modified OLS show large divergence among countries. However, the study recommends that, since a great number of economies in the study buttressed the EKC, therefore, the current policy on growth and energy consumption may be pursued without necessarily affecting the quality of their environment. However, other countries should implement strong regulatory and market-based policies on highly energy-intensive sectors to reduce their current level of emissions and attain sustainable, environment-friendly growth

The Effect of Entrepreneurial Knowledge on the Third Age Entrepreneurial Intention

The retirement income is not large enough to satisfy Nigerian’s expectations for a better standard of living upon retirement, a phenomenon that made most retirees to experience painful declines in their standard of living after retirement leading to various socio-economic challenges for the retirees, thus, this study examines the effect of entrepreneurial knowledge in inducing the third age entrepreneurial intention.Using Stratified sampling method, 176 retired federal workers that attended the mandatory pre-retirement entrepreneurial training programmes which cut across the military, para military and civil retirees residing in Kwara and Kogi states of Nigeria were used for this study through self-administered questionnaires. The Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Model was employed to test the hypothesis.The result suggests a positive and significant relationship between entrepreneurial knowledge and entrepreneurial intention among the third age entrepreneurs, suggesting that entrepreneurial knowledge can simulate intention towards a later career in entrepreneurship among the retirees. However, it is found that despite the individual entrepreneurial intention and the decision to continue their labour force upon retirement, through entrepreneurship, most retirees still continue to remain doing nothing and jobless due to lack of financial capital, non-access to information and unfriendly government regulation. The study recommends that retiring individuals must embrace retirement planning through participation in cooperative society and involvement in early saving for retirement. In addition, Individuals should be encouraged to start business few years before retirement age to gain foundation necessary for business experience