CHALLENGES FACED BY STUDENTS IN STUDYING TARKÎB WITH ZOOM PLATFORM DURING PANDEMIC

This paper discusses the difficulties of Arabic department students when dealing with Tarkîb al-Marfû’ât subject and the using of Zoom/forced technology due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Using the qualitative approach, this paper aimed to explore whether students were negatively impacted by switch of learning mode to online. Interviews were conducted to nine students who live in remote areas, and it revealed that those students experienced delay in learning the subject due to their lack of the internet availability. Teaching activities were not optimal due to signal interference so that the exposure to the relevant material was not comprehensive. Moreover the students also lacked understanding to the subject because of the specific difficulty level of the subject. The students missed additional explanations and material from the lecturer, even equipped examples. This paper contributes to educational policies in the ways Indonesian government addresses distance learning for students in Islamic higher education.

Difficulties of Young Adults With Dyslexia in Reading and Writing Numbers

Letters and numbers are different domains, and their differentiation increases with schooling. It has nonetheless been argued that reading alphabetic and numerical materials partly involves the same processes, even in adults. Whether individuals with dyslexia have difficulty reading and writing numbers remains to be established. This study examined this issue in a group of 30 young adults with a diagnosis of dyslexia, without any concurrent specific difficulty in processing quantities compared with a typically developing group matched for gender, age, university attended and course of studies, and approximate calculation ability. The results showed that adults with dyslexia also have severe difficulty in reading and writing numbers. It emerged that their number reading speed correlated moderately with word reading speed. We concluded that dyslexia is specifically related with difficulties in reading and writing not only alphabetic material, but also numerical material. Our findings suggest that these abilities should be considered more carefully when assessing and supporting individuals with dyslexia.

Detection of methane fugitive emissions using drones

Detecting methane fugitive emissions from infrastructures is an important task for the oil and gas industry safety and asset management. The current methodology relies on driving surveys using vehicles equipped with different sensors. However, this approach has limitations due to the technical characteristics of the commercially available methane detectors and the specific difficulty for a vehicle to safely and reliably cover certain terrains. Additionally, for an extended asset network like pipelines, the gathering of data relies on long distance driving and sometimes in remote areas. Terra Sana Consultants Pty Ltd (TSC) developed an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone, mounted with a laser sensor able to detect surface fugitive emissions associated with oil and gas operations and clearly geo-reference methane emission. This technology enables a more targeted risk assessment approach with the objectives to improve the emission flux calculations across the scale of a typical oil and gas site thus reducing uncertainty and to thereby plan meaningful remediation actions.

Prevalence and Predictors of Sexual Difficulties and Associated Distress Among Partnered, Sexually Active Older Women in Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and Portugal

There has been little comparative, cross-cultural research on sexual difficulties and associated distress, and factors associated with these, among older women. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate prevalence rates of sexual difficulties, distress related to these difficulties, and associated sociodemographic, relational, and health factors, among sexually active older women (60–75 years) in committed relationships across four European countries (Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and Portugal). These data could inform us about what differentiates women who do and do not experience distressing sexual difficulties and facilitate the identification of older women who might benefit from clinical interventions as well as the development of new interventions. In total, 1057 women (357 Norwegian; 322 Danish; 237 Belgian; 141 Portuguese) completed a cross-sectional questionnaire assessing six sexual difficulties—vaginal dryness, orgasmic difficulties, lacking interest in sex, lacking enjoyment in sex, pain during sex, and no excitement/arousal during sex—and associated distress. We found a high prevalence of sexual difficulties lasting 3 months or longer in the past year (between 23.5 and 50.2%, depending on the specific difficulty). With the exception of vaginal dryness and pain during sex, however, the majority of women reporting sexual difficulties (50.0% to 86.1%, depending on the specific difficulty) reported no or mild distress. There were relatively few cross-country differences, either in the prevalence of sexual difficulties or related distress. Few sociodemographic or health variables were associated with distressing sexual difficulties, but higher sexual intimacy, higher emotional intimacy, and better mental health were associated with less distress about some sexual difficulties. The findings underline the importance of healthcare professionals asking older women about sexual function and especially associated distress, and suggest that careful attention to the psychological and relationship context of these sexual difficulties is needed, as these could be important targets in the treatment process.

Dyslexia Diagnosis by EEG Temporal and Spectral Descriptors: An Anomaly Detection Approach

Diagnosis of learning difficulties is a challenging goal. There are huge number of factors involved in the evaluation procedure that present high variance among the population with the same difficulty. Diagnosis is usually performed by scoring subjects according to results obtained in different neuropsychological (performance-based) tests specifically designed to this end. One of the most frequent disorders is developmental dyslexia (DD), a specific difficulty in the acquisition of reading skills not related to mental age or inadequate schooling. Its prevalence is estimated between 5% and 12% of the population. Traditional tests for DD diagnosis aim to measure different behavioral variables involved in the reading process. In this paper, we propose a diagnostic method not based on behavioral variables but on involuntary neurophysiological responses to different auditory stimuli. The experiments performed use electroencephalography (EEG) signals to analyze the temporal behavior and the spectral content of the signal acquired from each electrode to extract relevant (temporal and spectral) features. Moreover, the relationship of the features extracted among electrodes allows to infer a connectivity-like model showing brain areas that process auditory stimuli in a synchronized way. Then an anomaly detection system based on the reconstruction residuals of an autoencoder using these features has been proposed. Hence, classification is performed by the proposed system based on the differences in the resulting connectivity models that have demonstrated to be a useful tool for differential diagnosis of DD as well as a method to step towards gaining a better knowledge of the brain processes involved in DD. The results corroborate that nonspeech stimulus modulated at specific frequencies related to the sampling processes developed in the brain to capture rhymes, syllables and phonemes produces effects in specific frequency bands that differentiate between controls and DD subjects. The proposed method showed relatively high sensitivity above 0.6, and up to 0.9 in some of the experiments.

Lazy or Dyslexic: A Multisensory Approach to Face English Language Learning Difficulties

An investigation was conducted to help weak academic English learners in a public high school in Colombia, as they seemed to be facing a learning specific difficulty called dyslexia. A focus group of ten students from ninth and tenth grade was the beneficiaries of the design, implementation, and assessment of five multisensory activities to help students decrease their struggles while learning the foreign language (English). For the present action research, five activities were applied during two academic terms (six months) where students were taught verbs, grammar rules, question words, and minimal pairs to help them do better while reading. Outcomes showed that low academic students tend to have a better performance when teachers target multisensory activities to assist them in their learning process related to grammar within the English sessions. Color-coded activities help low achieving students to exercise and remember more easily as senses are engaged while learning, reading exercises are better approached if their workload is split into smaller quantities compare to regular learners.

En Marche! – nowy ruch czy nowa partia?

En Marche! – New Political Movement or New Party? The Program and the Structure In the face of the emergence of new political movements and political parties, clearly defining these formations has emerged as a specific difficulty. The subject of the article is the La République En Marche! It came up as a movement, then transformed into a political party, gaining in popularity and securing victories in the parliamentary elections. The aim of the paper is to present the genesis and transformations within this organization and its present program. An attempt will also be made to answer the question – whether in the case of En Marche! we can talk about a new political movement, a new political party or a hybrid political organization that combines the elements of both the movement and the party.

Midlife - Maturity and Creativity

Midlife is an age of crisis according to many authors, as it sets the subject up against the inevitability of the ageing process, loss, and the limitedness of life. Most authors view midlife as an age of crisis where everything can be staked back into the game. But some other authors have highlighted how midlife is characterised by a new burst of creativity, by new object investments and by a redressing of the balance between narcissism (which decreases) and object investments for which a larger share of the libido becomes available. The Author thinks that it seems worthwhile to make a distinction between midlife, as indicative of a phase of life, and maturity, construed as a psychic position which is relatively independent of age. Therefore, she explores the creativity area of the trans-generational transmission, quoting some psychoanalysts and poets, and introducing a clinical example of the mourning process for losses inherent in the passing of time and the development of tolerance capacities to deal with a change in the balance between the libido and narcissism. Then the Author affords a specific difficulty in transmitting a trans-generational mandate, when the treatment concerns cases of severe trauma, like victims of collective trauma and mass murders. What can be transmitted in these cases if the psychological concatenation between the generations is interrupted and breaks down? How can it be linked up again? The story and re-elaboration by Henri Parens is brought as an example to be studied and commented.

Emotional processing of ironic vs. literal criticism in autistic and non-autistic adults: Evidence from eye-tracking

Typically developing (TD) adults are able to keep track of story characters’ emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. (2017) showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing. We examined these processes in autistic adults, since previous research has demonstrated socio-emotional difficulties among autistic people, which may lead to problems processing irony and its related emotional processes despite an intact ability to integrate language in context. We recorded eye movements from autistic and non-autistic adults while they read narratives in which a character (the victim) was either criticised in an ironic or a literal manner by another character (the protagonist). A target sentence then either described the victim as feeling hurt/amused by the comment, or the protagonist as having intended to hurt/amused the victim by making the comment. Results from the non-autistic adults broadly replicated the key findings from Filik et al. (2017), supporting the two-stage account. Importantly, the autistic adults did not show comparable two-stage processing of ironic language; they did not differentiate between the emotional responses for victims or protagonists following ironic vs. literal criticism. These findings suggest that autistic people experience a specific difficulty taking into account other peoples’ communicative intentions (i.e. infer their mental state) to appropriately anticipate emotional responses to an ironic comment. We discuss how these difficulties might link to atypical socio-emotional processing in autism, and the ability to maintain successful real-life social interactions.