Differences of Analytical Thinking Skills on Biodiversity Material in Guided Inquiry Model with Conventional Class

This study aims to compare whether there are differences in analytical thinking skills between classes that use guided inquiry models and conventional classes that use discussion methods and to find out whether guided inquiry models can improve analytical thinking skills in class X SMA. This type of the research is a quasi experimental research that uses a pretest posttest control group design. The population of this research were students of class X SMA Negeri 1 Kalasan and class X SMA Negeri 1 Prambanan. The sample in this research were 4 classes with a total of 104 students. Sampling in this research was conducted by cluster random sampling. The results of the t test obtained the value of sig. (2-tailed) of 0.000, the probability value is less than 0.05, which means that there are differences in analytical thinking skills in the guided inquiry class and the conventional class. The gain score test results obtained a value of 0.71 with a high category, meaning that the use of the guided inquiry model can improve analytical thinking skills in class X SMA

Implementation Of Steller Application In Learning Writing Descriptive Text

This study aims to investigate of implementation of Steller application to improve students’ writing Descriptive text and students’ responses about Steller application in writing Descriptive text. This study employed Classroom Action Research (CAR) method proposed by Kemmis and McTaggart (1998, cited in Burns, 2009). This research consisted of two cycles and each cycle consisted of four steps, they were: planning, actin, observation, and reflection. Each cycle was conducted in two meetings. To collect and analyze the data, the researcher used observation, questionnaire, and test. The result of this research shows that using Steller application in learning writing Descriptive text can improve students’ writing Descriptive text. The improvement of students’ writing Descriptive text also supported by the achievement of students’ test score. The students’ mean score of pre cycle test was 63.32, the mean score of test in cycle 1 was 73.58 and the mean score of test in cycle 2 was 79.19. it means that score test of cycle 1 was higher than pre cycle test and score test of cycle 2 was higher than mean score of test in cycle 1. The students’ responses showed that they were interested in learning writing Descriptive txt, because it was easier for them to write, it increased their motivation in learning, and Steller application game the students easy steps to write Descriptive text. Therefore it can be concluded that the implantation of Steller application improves students’ writing Descriptive text significantly at tenth grade of SMA Pasundan Cikalongkulon Cianjur.

Ecological Marketing Practice and Issues of Agricultural Economic Sustainability: A Focus on Oil Firms’ Activities in Niger Delta

This study was carried out to examine the extent to which the ecological marketing practice of the oil firms: Shell BP, Agip Oil Company, and Elf Oil Company have improved agricultural economic wellbeing of the oil-bearing communities in Niger Delta. A descriptive survey research design was employed in this study. The population of the study was 37,965,391 drawn from Niger Delta States based on which a sample size of 400 respondents was determined using Taro Yamane’s sample size determination techniques at 0.5 percent level of significance. The purposive sampling procedure was employed to enable the researcher to select the representative sample elements of the population interest from the right respondents who have adequate knowledge of the study under investigation from the different strata that makes up the population of the study. A structured instrument for data collection containing twenty (20) item questions was used for the study. The face and content validation of the instrument was obtained through the judgment of experts. A test-retest method was used to determine the reliability of the instrument and the reliability index of .83 was obtained. The data collected for the study were analyzed using the mean score test and the percentage test method to answered the research questions; while the inferential statistics of the Z-score test was used to test the null hypothesis at .05 level of significance. Results obtained revealed that “Ecological marketing practice of the oil firms does not significantly improved agricultural economic poverty, agricultural market failure, agricultural economic frustration, and agricultural land limitation in the oil-bearing communities in Niger Delta”. The implication of this finding is that the oil firms’ ecological sustainability marketing activities was considered to lack the needed proactive improvement values which, if ethical based ecological effort is not adopted to create sustainable improvement; oil firms might experience unpredicted operational interruption by the oil-bearing communities. It was therefore, recommended that oil firms should consider employing proactive ecological marketing efforts in a more ethical and responsible manner to sustain the agricultural economic wellbeing of the oil-bearing communities.

Ecocide Activities and Oil Firms’ Ecological Marketing Practice: A Focus on Agricultural-Economic Sustainability in Niger Delta

This study was carried out to examine the extent to which the ecocide activities in Niger Delta have affected the ecological marketing practices of the oil firms: Shell BP, Agip Oil Company, and Elf Oil Company in the improvement of the agricultural economic wellbeing of the oil-bearing communities in Niger Delta. A descriptive survey research design was employed in this study. The population of the study was 37,965,391 drawn from Niger Delta States based on which a sample size of 400 respondents was determined using Taro Yamane’s sample size determination techniques at 0.5 percent level of significance. The purposive sampling procedure was employed to enable the researcher to select the representative sample elements of the population interest from the right respondents who have adequate knowledge of the study under investigation from the different strata that makes up the population of the study. A structured instrument for data collection containing twenty (20) item questions was used for the study. The face and content validation of the instrument was obtained through the judgment of experts. A test-retest method was used to determine the reliability of the instrument and the reliability index of .83 was obtained. The data collected for the study were analyzed using the mean score test and the percentage test method to answered the research questions; while the inferential statistics of the Z-score test was used to test the null hypothesis at .05 level of significance. Results obtained revealed that “Ecological marketing practice of the oil firms does not significantly improved agricultural economic poverty, agricultural market failure, agricultural economic frustration, and agricultural land limitation in the oil-bearing communities in Niger Delta”. The implication of this finding is that the oil firms’ ecological sustainability marketing activities was considered to lack the needed proactive improvement values which, if ethical based ecological effort is not adopted to create sustainable improvement; oil firms might experience unpredicted operational interruption by the oil-bearing communities. It was therefore, recommended that oil firms should consider employing proactive ecological marketing efforts in a more ethical and responsible manner to sustain the agricultural economic wellbeing of the oil-bearing communities.

A class of two-sample nonparametric statistics for binary and time-to-event outcomes

We propose a class of two-sample statistics for testing the equality of proportions and the equality of survival functions. We build our proposal on a weighted combination of a score test for the difference in proportions and a weighted Kaplan–Meier statistic-based test for the difference of survival functions. The proposed statistics are fully non-parametric and do not rely on the proportional hazards assumption for the survival outcome. We present the asymptotic distribution of these statistics, propose a variance estimator, and show their asymptotic properties under fixed and local alternatives. We discuss different choices of weights including those that control the relative relevance of each outcome and emphasize the type of difference to be detected in the survival outcome. We evaluate the performance of these statistics with small sample sizes through a simulation study and illustrate their use with a randomized phase III cancer vaccine trial. We have implemented the proposed statistics in the R package SurvBin, available on GitHub ( https://github.com/MartaBofillRoig/SurvBin ).

Genetic association tests in family samples for multi-category phenotypes

Background Advancements in statistical methods and sequencing technology have led to numerous novel discoveries in human genetics in the past two decades. Among phenotypes of interest, most attention has been given to studying genetic associations with continuous or binary traits. Efficient statistical methods have been proposed and are available for both types of traits under different study designs. However, for multinomial categorical traits in related samples, there is a lack of efficient statistical methods and software. Results We propose an efficient score test to analyze a multinomial trait in family samples, in the context of genome-wide association/sequencing studies. An alternative Wald statistic is also proposed. We also extend the methodology to be applicable to ordinal traits. We performed extensive simulation studies to evaluate the type-I error of the score test, Wald test compared to the multinomial logistic regression for unrelated samples, under different allele frequency and study designs. We also evaluate the power of these methods. Results show that both the score and Wald tests have a well-controlled type-I error rate, but the multinomial logistic regression has an inflated type-I error rate when applied to family samples. We illustrated the application of the score test with an application to the Framingham Heart Study to uncover genetic variants associated with diabesity, a multi-category phenotype. Conclusion Both proposed tests have correct type-I error rate and similar power. However, because the Wald statistics rely on computer-intensive estimation, it is less efficient than the score test in terms of applications to large-scale genetic association studies. We provide computer implementation for both multinomial and ordinal traits.

Ratio of asymptomatic COVID-19 cases among ascertained SARS-CoV-2 infections in different regions and population groups in 2020: a systematic review and meta-analysis including 130 123 infections from 241 studies

IntroductionAsymptomatic infection of SARS-CoV-2 may lead to silent community transmission and compromise the COVID-19 pandemic control measures. We aimed to estimate the rate of asymptomatic COVID-19 from published studies and compare this rate among different regions and patient groups.MethodsIn this systematic review and meta-analysis, electronic databases including Medline, Embase, PubMed and three Chinese electronic databases (Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure [CNKI], WanFang Data and China Science, and Technology Journal Database [VIP]) were searched for literature published from 1 November 2019 to 31 December 2020. Original investigations with sample size (or number of subjects) not less than five were included for further analyses. Subgroup analyses were conducted according to different study types, study periods, geographical regions and patient demographics. The STATA (V.14.0) command ‘metaprop’ was implemented to conduct a meta-analysis of the pooled rate estimates of asymptomatic infections with exact binomial and score test-based 95% confidence interval (CI).ResultsA total of 130 123 ascertained COVID-19 infections from 241 studies were included in this meta-analysis, including 31 411 asymptomatic infections. The overall rate of asymptomatic infections was 23.6% (18.5%–29.1%) and 21.7% (16.8%–27.0%) before and after excluding presymptomatic cases, respectively. Subgroup analysis showed that significantly higher in pregnant women (48.8%, 28.9%–68.9%), children (32.1%, 24.2%–40.5%), and studies reporting screening programmes (36.0%, 24.6%–48.1%) conducted on or after 1 March 2020 (42.5%, 33.4%–51.9%). In terms of geographical region, the rate was the highest in Africa (64.3%, 56.7%–71.6%), followed by America (40.0%, 27.4%–53.3%), Europe (28.1%, 19.0%–38.1%) and Asia (18.1%, 13.2%–23.5%).ConclusionWe approximated that one-fifth of COVID-19 infections are asymptomatic throughout the course of infection. Public health policies targeting these high-risk groups may be recommended to achieve early identification and more stringent containment of the pandemic.

MCKAT: a multi-dimensional copy number variant kernel association test

Background Copy number variants (CNVs) are the gain or loss of DNA segments in the genome. Studies have shown that CNVs are linked to various disorders, including autism, intellectual disability, and schizophrenia. Consequently, the interest in studying a possible association of CNVs to specific disease traits is growing. However, due to the specific multi-dimensional characteristics of the CNVs, methods for testing the association between CNVs and the disease-related traits are still underdeveloped. We propose a novel multi-dimensional CNV kernel association test (MCKAT) in this paper. We aim to find significant associations between CNVs and disease-related traits using kernel-based methods. Results We address the multi-dimensionality in CNV characteristics. We first design a single pair CNV kernel, which contains three sub-kernels to summarize the similarity between two CNVs considering all CNV characteristics. Then, aggregate single pair CNV kernel to the whole chromosome CNV kernel, which summarizes the similarity between CNVs in two or more chromosomes. Finally, the association between the CNVs and disease-related traits is evaluated by comparing the similarity in the trait with kernel-based similarity using a score test in a random effect model. We apply MCKAT on genome-wide CNV datasets to examine the association between CNVs and disease-related traits, which demonstrates the potential usefulness the proposed method has for the CNV association tests. We compare the performance of MCKAT with CKAT, a uni-dimensional kernel method. Based on the results, MCKAT indicates stronger evidence, smaller p-value, in detecting significant associations between CNVs and disease-related traits in both rare and common CNV datasets. Conclusion A multi-dimensional copy number variant kernel association test can detect statistically significant associated CNV regions with any disease-related trait. MCKAT can provide biologists with CNV hot spots at the cytogenetic band level that CNVs on them may have a significant association with disease-related traits. Using MCKAT, biologists can narrow their investigation from the whole genome, including many genes and CNVs, to more specific cytogenetic bands that MCKAT identifies. Furthermore, MCKAT can help biologists detect significantly associated CNVs with disease-related traits across a patient group instead of examining each subject’s CNVs case by case.

Efektivitas Pemanfaatan QGIS Dalam Pembuatan Peta Inventarisasi Perlengkapan Jalan

In the field of road traffic and transportation, road inventory activities are needed to monitor or monitor the condition of road equipment. The proper data collection will facilitate evaluation and supervision by managers or supervisors of traffic and road transportation. The data collection of road equipment inventory data can be compiled manually or electronically, which is integrated with the road equipment information system. One of the electronic data collections is by utilizing QGIS, which is one part of the Geographic Information System (GIS). This study aims to measure the effectiveness of using QGIS in making road equipment inventory maps using survey data and questionnaires to determine the difference between manual inventory data collection and WebGIS-based inventory data collection. Data analysis used SPSS calculation to test data validity, reliability, normality, Wilcoxon test and N-Gain Score test. From this data, it is found that the use of QGIS in road equipment inventory mapping has an average effectiveness of 60.26%, with the interpretation criteria being quite effective.

In the Covid-19 Pandemic, How Well did Zoom Cloud Meeting and Quizizz Media Perform?

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not the use of Zoom Cloud Meeting and Quiziz media had a substantial impact on students' interest in learning about literature. The participants in this study were 80 students who were enrolled in PGSD UST for the four semesters. This study is a quasi-experimental study that uses a questionnaire approach called the learning interest scale questionnaire to collect data with the help of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov analytical approach and the t-test. Based on the findings of the t-test, it was determined that t = 0.338 and p = 0.563 were significant. When this number was compared to a significance value of 0.05 for the one-score test, the p-value was found to be more than 0.05, indicating a statistically significant difference. Thus, classes taught using Zoom Cloud Meeting and Quizizz media have a higher level of enthusiasm in learning than programs taught using WAG medium (Whatsapp Group).