Straightforward Form Research Articles

Discrete Joint Random Variables in Fréchet-Weibull Distribution: A Comprehensive Mathematical Framework with Simulations, Goodness-of-Fit Analysis, and Informed Decision-Making

This paper introduces a novel four-parameter discrete bivariate distribution, termed the bivariate discretized Fréchet–Weibull distribution (BDFWD), with marginals derived from the discretized Fréchet–Weibull distribution. Several statistical and reliability properties are thoroughly examined, including the joint cumulative distribution function, joint probability mass function, joint survival function, bivariate hazard rate function, and bivariate reversed hazard rate function, all presented in straightforward forms. Additionally, properties such as moments and their related concepts, the stress–strength model, total positivity of order 2, positive quadrant dependence, and the median are examined. The BDFWD is capable of modeling asymmetric dispersion data across various forms of hazard rate shapes and kurtosis. Following the introduction of the mathematical and statistical frameworks of the BDFWD, the maximum likelihood estimation approach is employed to estimate the model parameters. A simulation study is also conducted to investigate the behavior of the generated estimators. To demonstrate the capability and flexibility of the BDFWD, three distinct datasets are analyzed from various fields, including football score records, recurrence times to infection for kidney dialysis patients, and student marks from two internal examination statistical papers. The study confirms that the BDFWD outperforms competitive distributions in terms of efficiency across various discrete data applications.

Design of C2S-CS low-calcium system for synergistic improvement of CO2 sequestration capacity and mechanical properties

Low-calcium minerals exhibit significant potential as energy-efficient binder clinker materials, characterized by reduced emissions and enhanced carbon sequestration through accelerated carbonation curing. However, traditional low-calcium binders typically utilize one or two minerals in a straightforward compound form as clinker, resulting in elevated costs, excessive resource consumption, and suboptimal performance. This study developed a novel C2S-CS low-calcium system that integrated γ-C2S, β-C2S, and CS in specific proportions based on their characteristics, utilizing Simplex-centroid designs. Contour maps achieved to assess relationship between performance and mineral composition, while interaction mechanisms were investigated through carbonation products and reaction heat analysis. Furthermore, optimum proportion range of C2S-CS system can be synthesized efficiently and environmentally from solid waste wollastonite tailings in a single step. The results demonstrated that the designed system achieved synergistic improvements in CO2 sequestration capacity and mechanical properties. After 24 h of carbonation curing, it attained a compressive strength of 129 MPa, sequestered 217 kg/t CO2, and exhibited satisfactory durability. This study provides valuable insights for the practical production of low-calcium binders and reveals opportunities for developing sustainable building materials for eco-friendly construction.

A Comprehensive Review of Coptidis Rhizoma and Magnoliae Officinalis Cortex Drug Pair and Their Chemical Composition, Pharmacological Effects and Pharmacokinetics Analysis.

Herbal pairs are unique combinations of two relatively fixed herbs that are used in clinical practice. This is the most fundamental and straightforward form of multiple herbal treatment that aims to attain specific efficacy through unique methods. Coptidis Rhizoma ("Huanglian" in Chinese) and Magnoliae Officinalis Cortex ("Houpo" in Chinese) which are commonly used in combination and could also be used as important components of other prescriptions to treat damp-heat dysentery, splenic and stomach disorders, and qi stagnation in clinical practice. However, there is currently no summary on the compatibility of Huanglian and Houpo about traditional use, phytochemistry, and pharmacological activity. It was found the combination or separate extraction of the two drugs may affect the main active components, and new components may be produced after the combined extraction. At the same time, Huanglian and Houpo herb pair exhibited antiviral, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and other pharmacological effects. At present, research mainly focuses on the indicator components of Huanglian and Houpo, such as berberine, magnolol, and magnolol. The models used for pharmacological validation are limited, mainly including ulcerative colitis, pneumonia, bacterial infections, etc. In order to verify the pharmacological activity of the combination of Huanglian and Houpo, it is necessary to try more in vitro and in vivo models. It's still need to study the compatibility mechanism of the Huanglian and Houpo drug pair, including but not limited to the interactions between different components and the impact of compatibility on efficacy, bioequivalence studies, and the impact of different dosage forms on pharmacokinetics in the future. It's believed that the systematic review provided comprehensive information for the study of Huanglian-Houpo drug pair, which will help highlight the importance of the Huanglian-Houpo herb pair and provide some clues for future research on this herb pair.

Strong Stability Preserving Two-Derivative Two-Step Runge-Kutta Methods

In this study, we introduce the explicit strong stability preserving (SSP) two-derivative two-step Runge-Kutta (TDTSRK) methods. We propose the order conditions using Albrecht’s approach, comparing to the order conditions expressed in terms of rooted trees, these conditions present a more straightforward form with fewer equations. Furthermore, we develop the SSP theory for the TDTSRK methods under certain assumptions and identify its optimal parameters. We also conduct a comparative analysis of the SSP coefficient among TDTSRK methods, two-derivative Runge-Kutta (TDRK) methods, and Runge-Kutta (RK) methods, both theoretically and numerically. The comparison reveals that the TDTSRK methods in the same order of accuracy have the most effective SSP coefficient. Numerical results demonstrate that the TDTSRK methods are highly efficient in solving the partial differential equation, and the TDTSRK methods can achieve the expected order of accuracy.

The challenge of generating lasting mucosal anti-viral sterilising immunity

The challenge of generating lasting mucosal anti-viral sterilising immunity Achieving sterilising immunity is often challenging and sometimes even impossible. This article gives a glimpse into the concepts behind and highlights some recent advances and challenges. In its essence, sterilising immunity describes the removal of a virus from the host before it can replicate, and this kind of immunity would be the preferred outcome for vaccination as it efficiently limits the infection of the individual and the spread of disease within the community. A typical viral infection goes through a four-step cycle: first, the virus attaches to and enters a host cell; second, it copies its genetic material; third, it assembles new viral particles; and finally, it detaches to infect new cells. In its most straightforward form, sterilising immunity is achieved by the neutralisation of the infectious potential in the first step, (Wahl and Wardemann, Immunity, 2022) followed by their removal.

Semiclassical resolution of the black hole singularity inspired in the minimal uncertainty approach

We propose a new lapse function that simplifies the Hamiltonian constraint, describing the interior of the black hole in terms of the Ashtekar-Barbero variables, into a more straightforward form. The new Hamiltonian leads to different equations of motion than those found in the literature, but through a suitable transformation between temporal parameters, it is found that such a choice leads us to the classical solutions of the Schwarzschild metric, still preserving the physical singularity. In order to resolve this singularity, and inspired by the minimal uncertainty approach, we modify the classical algebra between the dynamic variables of the model, imposing an effective dynamics within the black hole. As a consequence, one of the dynamic variables, denoted by pb, acquires a minimum value at the singularity t=0, and on the other hand, the variable related to the radius of the 2-sphere, pc, leads to the resolution of the classical singularity of the black hole by replacing it with a bounce that connects the interior of the black hole with the interior of the white hole. This bounce occurs in the Planck-scale region, where a new event horizon manifests. Upon crossing this horizon, the nature of the interval changes from spatial to temporal outside the white hole.

Schlock Value and the Politics of Fiasco

This article tracks the ways citizens in the People's Republic of China have come to manage the banality of state violence and impunity by turning common political failures into a distinctive politics of fiasco. As a mode of civilian engagement with officialdom in contemporary China, this kind of politics is a departure from the usual straightforward forms of popular resistance, as typified by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest. Fiasco is not just any kind of failure. It is a kind of flop with performative flair, where repeated malfunctions and blunders escalate in often ludicrous and humiliating fashion to turn once earnest and serious projects in feel‐bad dramas of inescapable failure. As such, this form of politics casts a renewed light on the aesthetic and affective dimensions of citizen–state struggles, especially among those that persist in confronting failures of justice under authoritarian conditions of political non‐crisis.

Connecting the dots: interprofessional collaboration in caring neighbourhoods, a pilot study

Introduction: There is an increasing need for interprofessional collaboration (IPC) in the community, in order to ensure personcentered care for those with a care need. In Belgium, the Flemish government committed to support this through the creation of Primary Care Zones (PCZ) and a pilot-program of Caring Neighbourhoods (CN). The PCZ's mission is to get the diverse group of primary care professionals at the community level to work together. CN’s work on this community level and aim to allow residents to stay in their familiar surroundings for as long as possible and have low-threshold access to care and support. The aim of our research is finding a method to enhance IPC in CN’s.
 Methods: Our practice-based scientific research sought to answer the question: How can professionals in care and wellbeing create interventions to enhance IPC? We conducted action research and innovation labs with a group of participants (n=5) from different organizations in health and welfare work within the Brederode neighbourhood in Antwerp South. The aim of this innovationlab was to facilitate co-creation of initiatives to improve communication and collaboration. Before starting the innovationlab sessions, a context analysis was conducted in which a.o. geography, socio-cultural context, socio-economic context of the neighbourhood was mapped. The innovation labs were built using the model of design thinking. One physical session was organized, followed by four online sessions. After going through the design thinking process, a focus group took place to reflect on the whole process.
 Results: At the start of our research project, the IPC in the PCZ was very limited. We found that participants in PCZ Antwerp Centre knew little about each other’s tasks and way of working. Therefore, people with certain care needs are not helped in the way they should have been. The participants express an increased communication between them, regarding residents in their neighbourhood. The method of innovation labs proved to be a valid way to enhance IPC. The structure of this methodology was perceived as a clear and straightforward form to facilitate bottom-up initiatives. Their knowledge of each other's tasks and opportunities to work together has led to the onset of IPC. During our research, the following limitations were encountered: a shortage of personnel, the noncommittal nature of IPC, time investment and large staff turnover of people in crucial positions were detected as contributing factors why there is no IPC in the community of Brederode neighbourhood.
 Discussion: We observed an increased need for tools and facilitation that encourage IPC to move towards CN. Organizations and individual primary care professionals benefit from the developed E-book when aiming to improve interprofessional cooperation on a community level.
 Conclusion: By using the methodology of our innovation labs, the participants expanded their network, improved their communication and mapped structural problems in IPC.

Optimal intensity measure selection and probabilistic seismic demand model of pile group supported bridges in sandy soil considering variable scour effects

Scour of pile group foundations is a common hazard for cross-river bridges and can produce considerable damage to piles in earthquake-prone regions. The fragility-based performance assessment for pile group supported bridges subjected to earthquake and scour hazards has drawn increasing attention from engineering practice and academic communities. Such assessment requires numerical models that are computationally efficient and accurate in describing the mechanical behavior associated with the complex soil-pile interaction of these soil-bridge systems. Additionally, selecting an optimal ground motion intensity measure (IM) is generally required for such assessments. However, modeling the pile group effect for seismically excited pile groups and the optimal IM for the scoured bridges have not been well addressed in previous related studies. To this end, a practical pile group effect modeling approach is adopted in this study and validated by a set of shake table tests on scoured pile group bridge available in the literature. Based on the validated numerical modeling approach for the soil pile interaction, a series of coupled soil-bridge models are generated considering the structural and soil parameter uncertainty and analyzed in the OpenSees platform. The optimal IM for various engineering demand parameters (EDPs) is identified from thirty-nine scalar IM candidates through the criteria of efficiency, practicality, sufficiency, and hazard computability. Finally, a straightforward form of probabilistic seismic demand model (PSDM), incorporating the effect of scour depth changes, is developed for pile group supported bridges. Results show that the increase of scour depth significantly increases the curvature demand of a pile group and statistically reduces the embedded depth of the belowground plastic hinge of the pile shaft. The rank of optimal IM candidates directly depends on the selection criteria of an optimal IM and the selection of EDP. In addition, the scour depth slightly affects the rank of optimal IMs. Generally, VSI, PGV, and Sv,1.0 are recommended for the probabilistic seismic demand analysis of pile group supported bridges in sandy soils with scour potentials.

Closed-form design solutions for parallelogram hollow structural sections under bending scenarios

Parallelogram shaped sections are compelling candidates for structural boundary members to accommodate transitions at corners and to cater for architectural aesthetics. Generally, parallelogram shaped sections possess no axis of symmetry and therefore require careful design considerations in engineering practice. However, there is limited information on this topic in the literature. This paper examined the behaviour of parallelogram shaped hollow structural sections subjected to bending moments. Closed-form solutions were derived for two types of parallelogram shaped sections (i.e., parallelogram sections and parallelogram hollow structural sections), including equations of moment inertia, general flexure equations, and equations of neutral axis. Toward practical applications, two common loading conditions were discussed, and design equations for the yield moment and plastic moments were formulated. Furthermore, the stresses at the vertices of the parallelogram were rewritten in a straightforward form as the product of a stress factor and the stress of a rectangular section. Finite element (FE) models verified by test results in the literature were developed to enable a parametric study, and the correlation among test results, FE data, and predictions by equations justified the adequacy of the proposed theoretical model and the corresponding closed-form solutions. The findings in this work show that the aspect ratio and inclination angle have a major influence on the section properties and stress distribution of parallelogram sections, whereas parallelogram hollow structural sections are further affected by an additional factor known as the shape constant. Parallelogram shaped sections may produce much greater stresses than rectangular sections under the same moments.

Void fraction measurement and calculation model of vertical upward co-current air–water slug flow

The focus of this paper is on the measurement and calculation model of void fraction for the vertical upward co-current air–water slug flow in a circular tube of 15 mm inner diameter. High-speed photography and optical probes were utilized, with water superficial velocity ranging from 0.089 to 0.65 m·s −1 and gas superficial velocity ranging from 0.049 to 0.65 m·s −1 . A new void fraction model based on the local parameters was proposed, disposing the slug flow as a combination of Taylor bubbles and liquid slugs. In the Taylor bubble region, correction factors of liquid film thickness C δ and nose shape C Z* were proposed to calculate α TB . In the liquid slug region, the radial void fraction distribution profiles were obtained to calculate α LS , by employing the image processing technique based on supervised machine learning. Results showed that the void fraction proportion in Taylor bubbles occupied crucial contribution to the overall void fraction. Multiple types of void fraction predictive correlations were assessed using the present data. The performance of the Schmidt model was optimal, while some models for slug flow performed not outstanding. Additionally, a predictive correlation was correlated between the central local void fraction and the cross-sectional averaged void fraction, as a straightforward form of the void fraction calculation model. The predictive correlation showed a good agreement with the present experimental data, as well as the data of Olerni et al. , indicating that the new model was effective and applicable under the slug flow conditions.

Modeling the Incomes of the Upper-Class Group in Malaysia using New Pareto-Type Distribution

The new Pareto-type distribution has been previously introduced as an alternative to the conventional Pareto distribution in modeling income distribution. It is claimed to provide better flexibility for mathematical simplicity of probability functions and has a more straightforward mathematical form. In this study, the new Pareto-type distribution is used to model the income of the Malaysian upper-class group. The threshold is determined using the fixed proportion technique and the maximum likelihood estimator method is used to estimate the shape parameter. Then, the goodness-of-fit of the fitted new Pareto model is measured using the coefficient of determination, R2 and Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistics. We also measure the income inequality among the Malaysian top income earners using the Lorenz curve, Gini and Theil indices based on the fitted new Pareto model. Finally, the new Pareto distribution is compared to alternative distributions to analyze which model can give the best fit for the data. Our analysis shows that the Pareto type-1 and the new Pareto models are well fitted to the top income data for all years considered. However, the new Pareto model provides better flexibility which covering more incomes in the upper tail of the distribution than the Pareto type-1 model.

Theoretical and experimental analysis of the von Mises truss subjected to a horizontal load using a new hyperelastic model with hardening

The von Mises truss has been widely studied in the literature because of its numerous applications in multistable and morphing structures. The static equilibrium of this structure was typically addresses by considering only geometric nonlinearities. However, Falope et al. (2021) presented an entirely nonlinear solution in finite elasticity and demonstrated that material nonlinearities play an important role in the prediction of both snap-through and Euler buckling. In such work, the von Mises truss was subjected to a vertical load and thus the system was symmetric and the deformations were relatively small. The present contribution extends the investigation to the case of a horizontal load, which is much more complex due to asymmetry and very large deformations. Since most rubbers employed in technological applications exhibit hardening under large stretches, we propose a new hyperelastic model capable of reproducing this behavior. The advantage of such model compared to the ones available in the literature is that the equilibrium solution maintains a straightforward mathematical form, even when considering compressibility of the material. In addition, in this work we present a new formulation in nonlinear elasticity to predict Euler buckling. The formulation takes into account shear deformation. The analytical prediction agrees well with both finite element (FE) and experimental results, thus demonstrating the accuracy of the proposed model.

Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left's Resistance to the Vietnam War by Ted Glick

Reviewed by: Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left's Resistance to the Vietnam War by Ted Glick Eric Martin Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left's Resistance to the Vietnam War. By Ted Glick. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2020. 203 pp. $20.00. "I believe that we can change the world. I really do." These words close the stirring personal testimony and valuable historical documentation of the Catholic Left in Ted Glick's Burglar for Peace. Told with first-hand stories, journals, old letters, and court transcripts of many who made up the draft board raid movement to stop the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Glick's book acts as a memoir of a period in his life as well as a snapshot of the American Catholic underground's most visible offensive against the war. Compelled to action in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Glick threw himself into the campaign of Bobby Kennedy before turning to what became known as "the ultra resistance." His first action came in 1970 with the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives group of eleven, including two nuns and four priests, who destroyed thousands of draft files. He provides details that are rarely noted about these [End Page 65] actions, such as how they broke in (planting someone at the top of the stairs during the day who would open a door after closing) or cased the buildings (having fake couples in a parked car observe late-night light patterns in the building for weeks ahead of the action). This allows for the movement's dramatic lore of theft, liturgical pyres, and prison witnesses to be complemented with the tedium of long hours in preparation, captured in poems Glick wrote while hiding in the building. "The sun is coming down slowly, casting window frame shadows upon the wall a half flight down. We wait for the time" (33). Accounts like these let us see more clearly the ingredients that made up the splashy morning headlines. Among recent releases on major figures in the movement like John Loughery and Blythe Randolph's Dorothy Day, Bill Wylie-Kellermann's Celebrant's Flame (on Dan Berrigan), and William Marling's Christian Anarchist (on Ammon Hennacy), Glick's book is a refreshing view from one of the many lesser-known voices in the Catholic Left. One of its significant contributions is providing detailed court transcriptions not just of those in the movement but also of their interrogations of the FBI on the stand, giving space to the words of unfamiliar names along with the attention given to Liz McAlister and the Berrigans. Teachers looking for concrete descriptions of what resistance in the Catholic Left entailed will find Glick's treatment of lengthy prison fasts and solitary confinement to be valuable resources for undergraduate students, laid out in straightforward journal form. For those looking beyond the canon for treatments of the Catholic Left (from someone who was not Catholic and details reasons for leaving the movement), nonviolence in the American anti-war movement, or a convicting call to action in our present from a veteran in peaceful rebellion, Burglar for Peace is, to borrow from Glick's opening words in the preface, a way to "find oneself going deeper and deeper" (xiii). Eric Martin University of California, Los Angeles Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society

A REVIEW ON ECOFRIENDLY POLYMERS AND THEIR POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS IN BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES

Eco-friendly polymers are biodegraded by microorganisms, making it easy to transform them into safer, more straightforward forms. These biodegradable materials can be used in a variety of industries, including medicine, agriculture, drug release research, food and medication packaging, and articial skin grafts. It prevents environmental accumulation and cannot result in pollution of the land, air, or water.

Design, Modeling, and Model-Free Control of Permanent Magnet-Assisted Synchronous Reluctance Motor for e-Vehicle Applications

This paper describes the model-free control approaches for permanent magnet-assisted (PMa) synchronous reluctance motors (SynRMs) drive. The important improvement of the proposed control technique is the ability to determine the behavior of the state-variable system during both fixed-point and transient operations. The mathematical models of PMa-SynRM were firstly written in a straightforward linear model form to show the known and unknown parts. Before, the proposed controller, named here the intelligent proportional-integral (iPI), was applied as a control law to fix some unavoidable modeling errors and uncertainties of the motor. Lastly, a dSPACE control platform was used to realize the proposed control algorithm. A prototype 1-kW test bench based on a PMa-SynRM machine was designed and realized in the laboratory to test the studied control approach. The simulation using MATLAB/Simulink and experimental results revealed that the proposed control achieved excellent results under transient operating conditions for the motor drive’s cascaded control compared to traditional PI and model-based controls.

The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study by, Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

Reviewed by: The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study by, Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan Ana Quiring Sagner Buurma, Rachel, and Laura Heffernan. 2021. The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. $95.00 hc. $30.00 sc. 320 pp. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan's The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study is an ambitious new disciplinary history that reframes the study of literature through its pedagogy. Built on exhaustive and wide-ranging archival research, this monograph traces major methodological developments in literary studies through their manifestations in the classroom. By locating the origins of disciplinary lodestars from New Criticism to the digital humanities in their classroom lives, Sagner Buurma and Heffernan revise conventional wisdom about strict hierarchies of intellectual value in those fields. The result is an illuminating refiguring of the discipline, one that follows scholarly ambitions to their interpersonal, workaday implementations. In their emphasis on pedagogy, Sagner Buurma and Heffernan aim to deflate longstanding intellectual battlegrounds. Rather than reiterating conventional wisdom about the wars between scholars and critics, formalists and historicists, or Marxists and psychoanalysts, the authors explore teacherly archives that demonstrate the integration of many methods of literary analysis in the classroom. In a related move, they identify longer histories for many disciplinary developments we perceive as newfangled. Women instructors like Caroline Spurgeon and Josephine Miles, they write, used [End Page 163] the classroom as the original digital humanities supercomputers. J. Saunders Redding, the first endowed Black professor of literary criticism in the Ivy League, introduced Black authors into his survey syllabi long before the advent of critical race studies in the 1970s. Each revelation arrives with abundant archival evidence—syllabi, lesson plans, dedications to students, course descriptions, and worksheets—that have rarely been read before. In consequence, The Teaching Archive gives an abundant and heterogenous history of the discipline. The compilation of this vast pedagogical archive ultimately produces an antihegemonic argument as well. Sagner Buurma and Heffernan follow discipline-defining teaching far outside the confines of Oxbridge and the Ivy League. Many pedagogues shaped the future of literary studies in community colleges, women's colleges, and historically Black colleges. Even T. S. Eliot, the most famous name here, derived the inspiration for his canon-forming scholarship from his time teaching working-class adult students at Yorkshire and London extension schools. Foregrounding these figures supplies highly straightforward form of political argument; turning to the teaching archive in the most open-ended way produces a far more diverse and decentralized discipline than many existing studies allege. The Teaching Archive's seven chapters take the reader chronologically through seven decades of the twentieth century, featuring one or two teachers in each chapter. The first chapter, on English early modern scholar Caroline Spurgeon, benefits from Spurgeon's elegantly bound teaching notes. Spurgeon's work reinforces one of the authors' primary arguments, that the classroom is the primary site of critical meaning-making. "Spurgeon and others like her," they write, "invited their students to plunge into the center of scholarly research by reading and interpreting the sources for themselves" (28). Spurgeon also presaged data collection in the digital humanities by recruiting her students to help her collect all of Shakespeare's metaphors into her last book, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us. This work demonstrates her interest in making this most canonical writer, "temporarily, into an everyday man walking around in the world" (39). Subsequent chapters on Eliot, I. A. Richards, and Edith Rickert explore the development and testing of canonical texts in the classroom. The Teaching Archive considers Eliot's perhaps surprising receptiveness to his students' interests, as he amended his syllabi to [End Page 164] pursue their preferred texts. Richards, for his part, experimented with the teaching of literary judgment and evaluation, "how to read a poem and judge its merits" (67). Rickert taught her students to use quantitative methods on classic poetry, graphing scansion and imagery, placing her in continuity with the quantitative methods put forth by Spurgeon. The Teaching Archive moves into midcentury with the fourth chapter on J. Saunders Redding. He responded to many decades of segregated reading...

Vicki Funk's legacy continues – The IAPT Small Collections Grant

Vicki Funk's legacy continues – The IAPT Small Collections Grant

Learning from a distance during a pandemic outbreak: Factors affecting students' acceptance of distance learning during school closures due to COVID-19

Distance learning has become the only solution for learning in the current Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. A more straightforward form of distance learning with the utilization of telepresence and cloud-based productivity tools was apparent in many institutions. The present study investigated this phenomenon and ask, “What factors affect students’ acceptance of distance learning during school closures due to COVID-19?”. An extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology was employed to answer the research question, with 156 students participating in the study. The result revealed that Effort Expectancy (EE) has the biggest effect on students’ acceptance of distance learning during school closures (β=0.372, p<0.001). Additionally, the extended variable of Socia l Presence (SP) was also showing great effects on students' acceptance (β=0.296, p<0.001). However, one of the UTAUT constructs, Facilitating Conditions, was found to have no effect on students' acceptance. Practical implications for schools and distance learning program managers were discussed to provide insight on improving a distance learning program. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on learning technologies as well as on how society, especially in the educational sector, should continue despite the current pandemic crisis.

INVESTIGATING THE USE OF ARTICLE ON SHERLOCK HOLMES: A STUDY IN SCARLET BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

Understanding the linguistic and literature pattern is essential for EFL students. The readers would know how to correctly use the part of speech in literature and the educational context. There are many types of speech, such as an article or known as a determiner. The article is a member of speech used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of noun phrases' references.Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character that was created by a Scottish writer named Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes is describing the prototype of the modern mastermind detective. In each novel, there is no doubt if the researcher will use one part of speech that dominates his/her novel. Whether it can be a verb, adjective, adverb, and even a straightforward form from the part of speech such as article or determiner, here, the researcher chooses to identify the use of an article in the novel Sherlock Holmes: A Study In Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle because researcher believes that study on the using of an article in a novel is still in short contact.