Education has always been considered as the linchpin for a country’s economic and social development. The dropout rate in schools especially in third-world countries has always been a problematic issue and the situation has further been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study primarily aims at studying the factors affecting the school dropout rate during pandemic. Lockdown is the first step that any country starts to adopt for the safety of its general public. This severely affects the masses’ financial conditions, especially for the parents of students at risk, as the dropout rate increases with financial pressures. The slogan “stay home stay safe” has further aggravated the fear of the parents to send their children out and attend schools. The data for the study was collected from twenty public and private schools of two divisions, including seven districts of the province of Punjab, Pakistan, using interviews of policymakers, parents of dropouts, teachers, and students. The study is corollary to several issues already highlighted in various other articles to transpire the details of drop-out rates in developing countries in general and Pakistan in particular. The study revealed financial conditions, lockdown effects, mode of learning, government policies, fear of death, the psyche of the parents, socio-cultural effects, the role of teachers and administrators, most affected level, contributory factors were amongst the major factors. Finally, the study will analyze the effects of dropout and will help suggest measures to control the dropout rate in Pakistan in particular and third world countries in general.

Language forms the medium of communication through verbal and nonverbal means which help to develop understanding. The communication and pedagogy are part and parcel of each other as well as the teaching process. The aims of teaching could not be achieved without better communication between teacher and students. The present study was thus planned to analyze the effect of PEELI (Punjab Education and English Language Initiative) training on communication skills of primary school teachers. The findings showed that the educators recruited in 2017 and 2018 have found PEELI interesting and innovative. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four dimensions of communication. PEELI training has assisted them in enhancing speaking and writing skills of learners. However, they feel difficulty in developing and interacting learners in listening and reading. They look for more modules and sessions to be organized to cover all the four aspects of communication to develop better interaction with learners. It is recommended to overcome the drawbacks in future training policies thus to bridge the communication gaps between teachers and students of primary schools.

This study aimed at investigating the Effectiveness of Mantle of the Expert in creative thinking Skills among the 7th Graders. The study conducted on a sample of 7th Graders at Kober Secondary Boys School and Upper Kober Elementary Girls School. The study sample consisted of (100) students split into two groups (experimental and control). The researcher adopting the Torrance test for creative thinking the verbal image “A” by examining the tests used in the Ristow study (1988), Edwards and Baldov (1987) study, and designing a teacher book for the (engineering and measurement) unit according to the integration between the strategies of the mantle of the expert and role playing. This study adopted quasi-experimental design. It included two groups (experimental and controlled) in two branches (males and females) for each group. The controlled group was taught by using the traditional method whereas the experimental group by the mantle of the expert. The data analyzed using (ANCOVA) test to measure the differences in the development of creative thinking between the control and experimental groups. The Conclusions showed that there are statistically significant differences in the mean scores of the creative thinking test due to the way, gender and interaction between them. Based on the Conclusions of the study, the researcher recommends the need to use the mantles of the expert in the teaching of mathematics.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one of the most commonly used measures for the implicit assessment of preferences and attitudes. Nevertheless, the meaning of the IAT effect remains unclear. Since the IAT is based on the speed and accuracy with which different stimuli are categorized in the category to which they belong, the sense of the IAT measure is strongly related to the functioning of the stimuli used to represent the categories. Thus, a model providing a fine-grained analysis at both respondents and stimuli levels would help in clarifying and interpreting the IAT measure. By applying Linear Mixed Effects Models to IAT accuracy and time responses, this study aims to present a modeling framework for IAT data resulting in such a detailed analysis at both respondents and stimuli levels. The proposed models provide a detailed picture of the contribution of each stimulus to the IAT effect, allowing for the identification of malfunctioning stimuli that can be eliminated or substituted to obtain better performing IATs. Additionally, the detailed information on respondents’ performance yields a better understanding of the classic measure of the IAT effect (i.e., the D score). Implications of the results and future research directions, also implying different implicit procedures, are discussed

Despite an increased level of females’ participation in sports, the media coverage is still very low and inadvertently the use of female athletes as product endorsers has received limited attention. The purpose of this study is to provide an empirical insight into the frequency and nature of portrayals of female athlete endorsers in UK Sports Magazine by replicating Grau et al (2007)’s earlier study carried out in USA over ten years ago. Results of the content analysis indicate that females are seldomly featured as brand endorsers, female in team sports and from black ethnic minority group are less likely to be featured as brand endorsers. The study offers theoretical knowledge and practical implication for managers to ensure female athletes are well positioned and given the opportunity to be commercially viable.

In this study, we explore motherhood as an interactionally emergent identity category which speakers simultaneously construct and lay claim to in talk, and as a category which is imbued with moral expectations of how its incumbents should behave. We analyse 18 chid-centric debates from British daytime television talk show This Morning. We use Membership Categorisation Analysis to explore how, and to what effect, women deploy claims to motherhood. We report 3 main findings; (i) Speakers routinely quantify their motherhood credentials as they develop rights to be heard on child-centric matters; (ii) Speaking as a mother habitually trumps the arguments offered by other speakers, including those with professional expertise; (iii) Any challenge to essentialist norms of motherhood become accountable concerns for speakers. We conclude that whilst there is power in motherhood insomuch as it vests women with expertise and elevates their rights to be heard on child-centric matters, the speakers in our study of mainstream debates about child-centric issues nevertheless construct motherhood in a manner which (re)produces and elevates essentialised notions of gender.

Developing collaborative and cooperative research across academic disciplines and university administrative boundaries can be a challenge. In an attempt to understand and propose solutions to this challenge, the authors of this paper set out to: test an innovative combination of methods to generate and evaluate ideas and strategies; and to write about the findings using collaborative online methods. During this process Universities in the UK moved to online working and so the authors completed this paper through entirely online means. The authors - a team of academic researchers from the University of Wolverhampton - came together in sessions designed as a hybrid of World Café and Delphi technique approaches to discuss challenges and solutions. The findings were written up drawing on insights from the use of massively authored papers (also known as ‘massively open online papers’, MOOPs), and online tools to enable remote collaboration. This paper presents details of the process, the findings, and reflections on this collaborative and cooperative exercise. That this paper was written using the methods discussed within it, highlights the value and success of the approach. In light of the current Coronavirus pandemic and the increased need to work remotely, this paper offers academics useful strategies for meaningful and productive online collaboration.

Cracks considerably reduce the life span of pavement surfaces. Currently, there is a need for the development of robust automated distress evaluation systems that comprise a low-cost crack detection method for performing fast and cost-effective roadway health monitoring practices. Most of the current methods are costly and have labor-intensive learning processes, so they are not suitable for small local-level projects with limited resources or are only usable for specific pavement types. This paper proposes a new method that uses an improved version of the weighted neighborhood pixels segmentation algorithm to detect cracks in 2-D pavement images. This method uses the Gaussian cumulative density function as the adaptive threshold to overcome the drawback of fixed thresholds in noisy environments. The proposed algorithm was tested on 300 images containing a wide range of noise representative of different noise conditions. This method proved to be time and cost-efficient as it took less than 3.15 seconds per 320 × 480 pixels image for a Xeon (R) 3.70 GHz CPU processor to determine the detection results. This makes the model a perfect choice for county-level pavement maintenance projects requiring cost-effective pavement crack detection systems. The validation results were promising for the detection of low to severe-level cracks (Accuracy = 97.3%, Precision = 79.21%, Recall= 89.18% and F1 score = 83.9%).

Key contributions include 1) analytical dollar-denominated comparisons between blockchain/metaverse assets and fiat-denominated traditional markets, 2) comparative analysis of blockchain ecosystems both theoretically and empirically, and 3) demonstration of topic relevance to international relations, international political economy, and international development. The paper exploits public deep-order-book auction markets, allowing tick-to-tick observation of values of underlying assets (reminiscent of the early CRSP papers at Chicago), tethering the analysis to real prices paid in real markets.

Based on 15 years of online experience and research dealing with SEO, social media and brand positioning the doctorate dissertation emerged. Doctorate dissertation (DBA) titled: “Company Generated Problem-Solving Content on Social Media (SM) and Online Brand Equity: Designing and Testing a Model for Its Effectiveness” deals with online model development using professional value added content with a purpose to aid small and mid-sized enterprises promote their brands online. The four year research period from 2012 to 2016, followed company “Naton HR” as the main research subject using dissertation model to position its brand online. Data was collected and the model confirmed. The importance of professional content and its positive effect on brand visibility and business performance has become an exceedingly important marketing issue. To date, there has been limited empirical literature on professional “content type” in social media (SM). However, there is consensus among researchers that content has a positive effect on brand exposure, and, in fact, results in improved company sales.

The aim of this paper is to epitomize on the outcomes of the skill gap questionnaire of Management Information Systems (MIS) alumni from Ahlia University, Bahrain. This study evaluated the importance of the job skills and the skill gaps which are associated with 58 technical and non-technical (soft) skills. These skills were assembled into five classifications in relevance with prior literature. The outcomes of this study can help instructors in the MIS programs of the higher education institutions to improve the MIS curricula, hence the programs, as per the current needs of MIS graduates.

The cross-sectional study results reveal the importance of kawaii among Japanese women and positive aspects in consuming cute items; for working women, it was found, kawaii products help in dealing with stress and serve as a momentary gateway from the harsh world of everyday life to a romanticized world of one’s childhood and for younger women serve as a fashion statement.

Flaxman et al. (Nature, 8 June 2020, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2405-7, 2020) infer that non-pharmaceutical interventions conducted by several European countries considerably reduced effective reproduction numbers and saved millions of lives. We show that their method is ill-conceived and that the alleged effects are artefacts. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom?s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.

Abstract This research reports how families forged their pathway towards a ‘Benefit Mindset’ self-transformation. This resulted in parents creating a peer network, taking steps to pursue their development and to share their learning about empowerment and flourishing as they work in parallel to create better outcomes for their children with disability. Twenty-three participants (11 couples and 1 mother) raising children with disability or developmental delays attended the Now and NextTMprogram, which pioneered the integration of Positive Psychology in the disability sector. This disruptive program was launched in New South Wales in 2015 by two professionals with lived experience and evolved through co-design with the 300 families that have since completed the program (Mahmic & Janson, 2018). As participants grew their individual empowerment, hope and collective capacity, their vision to support other families and the collective mindset to make it happen emerged. These families recognised that the missing link in partnerships between professionals and families is their accountability in building their leadership. Participants learnt about identifying their signature strengths and putting them to work to build their family leadership. This research extends the concept of Benefit Mindset proponed by Buchanan and Kern (2017) about individuals to a group space by detailing how their Collective Benefit Mindset emerged.

Digital gamification is becoming more prevalent in higher education, yet a research gap regarding the socio-material imbrications arising from this pedagogical practice and its relationship to lecturer professional subjectivities was discovered. This presentation reports on data from a larger qualitative study conducted in a Middle Eastern tertiary institution where the use of Kahoot! is commonplace. Semi-structured interviews with lecturers from varied academic disciplines and observations of live sessions were conducted. The socio-material narrative analysis revealed the lecturers’ subjectivities as inspirational performers, arising both from their social self-presentations and the embedded digital materiality of the Kahoot! platform. The study contributes to the expanding body of socio-material research in higher education and concludes by suggesting that future studies should attend to both the social and materially produced aspects of lecturer subjectivities in gamification.

Male same-sex intimate partner violence is a preventable and serious social problem worldwide, including in the United States. Conflicting data sets posit that members of the LGBT community are at higher risk to be perpetrators and victims of intimate partner violence. The current and rapid ascendency of the COVID-19 virus has thrust the United States into uncharted territory concerning shelter-in-place orders, which may be construed as quarantines. In addition, the current panic level of many individuals in the United States has contributed to food and supply hoarding and has increased the stress level of many Americans. These shelter-in-place orders can provide catastrophic results for those that are in a relationship that is rife with domestic violence. The potential for risk of abuse is compounded by not just staying at home with the abuser, but also thwarting crucial social supports who cannot be in close proximity or who are only accessible through phone calls or texts. Moreover, mental health practitioners are now utilizing tele-medicine that does not guarantee confidentiality or protection for the victims, further enabling hopelessness for the abused. It is urgent that we address this situation in the social literature.

Comparing the mode of health crisis management in the four distinct jurisdictions of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United Kingdom, this article considers how varying trust-transparency mixes provide the context for understanding the public governance of the Covid 19 pandemic. The case of Covid 19 illustrates a trust-transparency paradox, whereby trust requires transparency (witness the reaction to early attempts in China to deny the virus and control information), but transparency can undermine trust (insofar as it focuses attention on the malfunctioning of liberal democracies and their uneven management of the crisis). Trust (inter-personal, civil society, political) is key to controlling the virus in the immediate sense, while transparency (and openness) is the precondition for a longer term resilient and sustainable policy response. The relationship between transparency and trust makes most sense in the context of open societies, where these concepts can be meaningfully investigated and correlated. The task of disinterested political leadership falls particularly on the shoulders of the main democracies that should work to guarantee global health governance.

Social media enabled teaching learning. Now the updated and revised manuscript is attached herewith.