The data were gathered from Common Core assessments administered three times per year to second grade students. Assent permission had been secured, per IRB agreement, from fifty-one parents. Their children were divided into two groups: those having had exposure to Visual Phonics in first grade, and those who did not. Data analysis, using both descriptive and interpretive statistics, did not show any significant difference between the mean scores for the two groups across three assessment periods. Effect size also was generally small to moderate.

This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of 2010 Census Population and Household Tables (Final), to assess governorate wise variations in home ownership, type of living accommodations and housing infrastructure - material used for construction, electricity, water and sewage facilities. The data published by the Ministry of Economics and Planning in its “Population and Housing, 2010 Census” analyzed in detail using SPSS20, applying statistical methods such as, cross tabulations and chi-square; mean and standard deviation; and One-Way ANOVA. Governorates classified into small, medium and large, according to the number of Saudi persons, have been analyzed across 13 regions quantifying homeownership status. Further governorates are classified according to the percentage of owning homes in order to analyze the type of living accommodations, built up material of housing, source of electricity, water and sewage facilities.

This study addresses the challenge of disappearing green space within the Federal Capital City (FCC) of Nigeria. The study investigates the multiplicity of factors which contribute to the disappearance of the green spaces and conclusively suggests an approach to conserving the green spaces with the surging urbanization in view.

Data pertaining to 1974, 1992, 2004 and 2010 Censuses in Saudi Arabia was collected. Some reviews and literature on population ageing in Saudi Arabia as well as Facebook usage obtained. Statistics pertaining to Saudi population was utilized. Aged population in 2010 estimated by assuming the annual growth rate of 1974-2004.

This chapter mines the literature to bring out the richness and heterogeneity of Chinese rock. The first part charts the geography of music as the intersection of situated material space and networked topology. Chinese rock thus assembles disparate elements from the two wests: the capitalist-west and, the western China of the silk roads. The second part addresses the live rock scenes that has mushroomed in cities, some as forces of dissenters, some as state-sanctioned role models, or, as a hybrid form of both.

This paper reviews the human-robot interaction literature in the scope of recent technological progress. It gives various examples of emerging human-robot interaction and calls upon a re-definition of the interaction concept.

Structured Abstract: Purpose: To examine trends in the use of advertising appeals by banks in the UK advertising mortgages, based on a content analysis of the newspaper advertisements of banks, using a coding system to enable an observation of the content of communication and its categorisation, in order to observe trends and frequencies, make comparisons and deduce meanings. Design/methodology/approach: Mortgage advertisements in 9 National newspapers over twelve consecutive months were content analysed. The advertising appeals, advertisement size, colour and targeted consumers were observed and analysed by two independent coders. Intercoder reliability was assessed using Cohen’s Kappa. Findings: Rates of borrowing and for comparisons were generally presented in UK Mortgage advertisements, first-time buyers were however targeted differently with emotionally appealing advertisements in colourful large advert sizes while advertisements targeted towards existing home owners were printed in single colours and in smaller advert sizes. Social implications: As the demand for new homes continues to grow in UK, decisions regarding mortgage advertising strategies are critical. It is expected that advertisers will provide first-time buyers, in particular, with relevant information which are truthful, clear, fair and not misleading. It is important that consumers are aware of these rates and charges and do not find themselves caught up in the euphoria of easy and cheap loans from the lenders, which they might not be able to repay. Originality/value: Perhaps the first attempt at analysing mortgages advertisements in newspapers in the UK, post the global financial crisis. Most previous studies have confined themselves to magazine advertisements.

Abstract Background: Despite the increasing uptake of family capacity-building theory in past decades, there is a dearth of practical tools to support its implementation in Early Intervention, alongside traditional discussion or assessment-based goal setting. We therefore expanded on earlier co-design with parents raising a child with disability or developmental delay, and tested a practitioner experiential training. Method: Thirty practitioners trained with a new tool, designed to engage participants to create an inspiring vision from which they develop authentic goals for their child, their family and/or themselves, and visualise their active part in achieving their goals. Results: Practitioners rated this experience favourably and registered significant training impact and post-training increases in empowerment. Conclusions: Training to facilitate such novel visioning and planning experiences offers practitioners a unique opportunity to build family capacity, disrupting a recognised power imbalance by empowering families with agency and setting the foundations for more effective family-driven relationships with practitioners.

In this review article, I have located the trajectory of development of the notion of literary archeology and the third relation of comparative literature, compared to influence and parallel ones, expounded by him in his newly published book in 2016, The Third Notion of Comparative Literature: the Possibility of Literary Archeology. My research shows that he has conceived this notion more than a decade ago and it’s the result of his lifetime endeavor on comparative literature in East Asia. I have employed almost all his monographs to trace the gradual formation of his ideas with two books as the focus, The Third Notion of Comparative Literature: the Possibility of Literary Archeology and The Image of Willow: The Material Exchange and the Ancient Chinese and Japanese Literature. The former aims to construct the theory of literary archeology as a renovated subject matter and the latter is composed of the case studies on willow which provide abundant evidence to illustrate his point.

This study interrogates the participation of private security companies in crime control in Nigeria, with focus on the challenges militating against their performance in security provisioning. The police are the statutory agency invested with the powers of ensuring the security of lives and property of citizens in Nigeria. The rising incidence of crimes such as kidnapping, armed robbery, murder, terrorism, and human trafficking among others has demonstrated that the police have failed in providing the required protection for the citizens. The paper argues that the apparent inability of the police to adequately provide protection for all citizens provided the nucleus for individuals to search for alternative security provisioning, which culminated in the emergence of private security companies in crime control in Nigeria. The study contends that since the emergence of private security companies into the theatre of security provisioning, they have played critical role in ensuring security; thereby complementing the efforts of the police. However, they are confronted with certain challenges which militate against their performance. Some of the challenges include: lack of firearms, lack of supervision and lack of cooperation from the police among others. The study recommends among others: establishment of a security institute, improved synergy with the police, and government recognition of the private security sector.

Sam Seldon’s The Lonely Londoners depicts an emergent collectivity of black immigrants who lead literally and metaphorically subterranean lives in 1950s Britain. Against the backdrop of a city undergoing an ambivalent transition from colonial metropole to postmodern cosmopolis, Seldon’s “boys” remain largely inscrutable to and estranged from not only white Londoners but also one another. Critics have associate a depoliticized preoccupation with the everyday and eschewal of critical consciousness in Seldon’s work with widely critiqued features of Anglophone modernism. The present analysis suggests several reasons why political collectivity remains elusive to Seldon’s black male immigrant characters. Specifically, they face discriminatory access to the labor market and social services, loci of possible solidarity with working-class white Londoners where formal political resistance might be coordinated. These systemic pressures combined with an atmospheric racism cause many of the boys to internalize the racialist, individualist, consumerist, and heterosexist attitudes and behaviors of the dominant white culture, which they adopt as survival strategies, in effect undermining black group identity and cohesion. If a note of optimism is to be sounded amid the many challenges to inter- and intraracial community the novel presents, it is in the potential undoing of black cultural nationalism that cultural theorist Paul Gilroy sees as a crucial step in the making of an egalitarian, convivial postcolonial world. The novel contests the homogenizing impulses of essentialist identity politics by portraying the heterodox, sometimes paradoxical, affinities that emerge between characters and communities.