ABSTRACT This research aimed to study the impact of Spiritual Intelligence on Socialization Patterns of children among Omani spouses, and to verify the role of Marital Communication Skills as a mediator. It also aimed to measure: the level of spiritual intelligence, the quality of marital communication skills and the level of using socialization patterns with children. It also aimed to reveal the impact of spiritual intelligence on marital communication skills, and the impact of spiritual intelligence and marital communication skills on the patterns of socialization of children. A scale consisting of three variables was applied: spiritual intelligence as an independent variable and consisting of four dimensions: (spiritual practice, transcendence, balance, and self-awareness), marital communication skills as a mediating variable, and consisting of five skills: (ability to dialogue, ability to listen, ability to understand, solving marital problems, emotional expression), and socialization patterns as a dependent variable, and consisting of ten patterns: (accepting children, cooperation between family members, taking into consideration the inclinations of children, dialogue with children, children bearing responsibility, caring for children, equality between children, protection for children, consistency in treating children, moderation in treatment of children). The scale was applied to a random sample of (397) spouses Omani. SPSS program was used to find descriptive statistics. The Amos program was also used to conduct confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and path analysis. The results indicated that the structural model achieved the fit indices. It also proved the composite reliability, and both convergent and discriminant validity. The results also revealed that marital communication skills play role of a partial mediator in the relationship between spiritual intelligence and socialization patterns. Results showed that the level of spiritual intelligence was very high, the level of quality of marital communication skills was high, and the level of practicing socialization patterns with children was very high. The results also indicated a strong, direct, significant positive impact (0.655) of spiritual intelligence on marital communication skills, and a weak, direct, significant positive impact (0.314) of spiritual intelligence on socialization patterns. The results also showed a weak, direct, significant positive impact (0.371) of marital communication skills on socialization patterns. The research presented a set of recommendations to entities concerned with family development.

Vaccination has been proven to be an effective measure to prevent the spread of harmful diseases. Despite its efficacy, the moves towards vaccine hesitancy have been receiving global attention. Vaccine hesitancy issues have been openly discussed across major social media platforms including Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. The spread of vaccine hesitancy-related posts is propagated substantially, causing greater threats to public health. Consequently, various state-of-the-art machine learning techniques have been proposed to analyse vaccine-hesitant related posts in social media. One of the most recent approaches is the transfer learning method using a pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model. Despite vaccine hesitancy being a prevalent issue across multiple social media platforms, only a few studies have utilised data from multiple social media platforms to detect vaccine hesitancy. To address this research gap, the use of BERT as one of the new language representation models is adopted to train from a collection of vaccine hesitancy related data from multiple social media platforms. Moreover, this study employs the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Logistic Regression (LR) models and compare their performances against the BERT method. The objectives of this research are threefold; to establish a consolidated dataset from multiple social media sources for use in vaccine hesitancy detection, to evaluate the effectiveness of using mono-platform versus multi-platform vaccine hesitancy data on the performance of different machine learning models and to apply a transfer learning method using BERT in vaccine hesitancy detection. A collection of 193,023 labelled vaccine hesitant posts were aggregated from three (3) social media platforms which includes Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. The results demonstrate that the BERT model performs the best and achieved an F1-score of 0.93, while both the SVM and LR achieved F1-scores of 0.90 when detecting vaccine hesitancy from multiple social media platforms. Our proposed research also revealed that models trained with multi-platform data perform at least 15% better than models trained with mono-platform data when tested with multi-platform data.

Background: The potential use of Lepidium meyenii (maca) and marine collagen peptide (MCP) for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) symptoms has piqued researchers' curiosity. However, no research has been conducted to investigate how the combination of these two components may benefit the treatment of T2DM. Objectives: The study aimed to examine biochemical data in the pancreas and liver of T2DM rats and to link these findings with histological changes after treatments with a combination of maca and MCP in Blackbelt� coffee. Methodology: 36 male rats with diabetes induced by high-fat diet/streptozocin were used. Metformin (200 mg/kg), maca (100 mg/kg), MCP (4.5 g/kg), Maca/MCP� (Blackbelt� formulation), and Blackbelt� coffee (2.2 g/kg) were supplemented for 28 days. Fasting blood glucose (FBG) levels were intermittently monitored. Subsequently, assessments were conducted for fasting serum insulin, HOMA-IR, which quantifies insulin resistance, HOMA-B, which evaluates beta-cell function, and QUICKI to measure insulin sensitivity. Haematoxylin-eosin staining was employed to analyse histological alterations in the pancreas and liver. Results: After 4 weeks, treatment with metformin, maca, MCP, and Blackbelt� coffee led to significantly decreased FBG levels compared to week 0 (p<0.05). Only metformin showed a significant FBG decrease compared to the diabetic control (p<0.05). Rats treated with Blackbelt� coffee had notable insulin production (p<0.05). While all groups showed decreased HOMA-IR (p<0.05), metformin had the greatest reduction. Both metformin and Blackbelt� coffee groups exhibited significant increases in HOMA-B scores (p<0.05). Only metformin increased QUICKI values (p<0.05). Histological analysis revealed improved pancreatic health across all treatment groups, with Blackbelt� coffee showing significant enhancement in liver histology. Conclusion: Blackbelt� coffee has exhibited benefits for FBG levels, insulin resistance, and betacell function while surpassing metformin in insulin production and offering hepatoprotective effects. While promising for diabetes therapy, further research is needed to understand its coffee components and potential enhancements to the Maca/MCP� formulation.

This study investigates the relationship between self-regulated learning strategies and self-efficacy among Kulliyyah of Human Sciences IIUM undergraduate students. It also attempts to identify the common self-regulated learning strategies that students use during their study and identify the level of self-efficacy. Lastly, it also investigates if there is a re1ationship between self-regulated ]earning strategies and self-efficacy with the variables of gender, CGPA and major. The study utilizes two questionnaires. The first measures self-regulated learning strategies and the second questionnaire measures students' level of self-efficacy. A stratified random sampling was used to se1ect 293 undergraduate students from the Ku1liyyah of Human Sciences. Descriptive statistics, correlational ana1ysis and cross tabulation are used to analyze the data. Findings provide evidence that respondents frequently use some strategies like "keeping records and monitoring", "reviewing texts, notes and test" in their study with the majority of the students being at the moderate ]eve] of self-efficacy. The study also shows that there is a significant relationship between self-regulated learning strategies and self-efficacy. As for gender and CGPA they did not correlate significantly with self-regulated learning strategies, while major has significant relationship with self-regulated learning strategies. Finally, there is no significant relationship between self-efficacy and variables of gender and CGP A. In contrast, the ]eve] of self-efficacy has a significant relationship with majors.

Telecommunications remain one of the most strategic economic sectors that assume prominence in the current discourses on growth and integration of national economies and transnational production. An effective telecommunications system enables countries to achieve impressive socio-economic gains. However, the Nigerian telecommunications system under state monopoly has been characterized as grossly inefficient and financially a burden on the government, among others. The government has placed a conscious strategy towards regulatory reforms in the sector. The reforms emphasize on market opening by allowing entry of private and transnational operators into the country's telecommunications market, which will eventually lead to a transformation within the industry. This study attempts to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the transformation in Nigeria's telecommunications industry, with emphasis on the impact towards economic growth. The privatization policy in this sector that resulted in the emergence of private and transnational firms, led to telephone services being more easily accessible, cost effective and competitive amongst the operators. The central argument of this study is that a significant correlation exists between market competition and growth, showing Nigerian telecommunications has been positively affected by the new deregulation policy. The positive impact of deregulations was proven by the growth rate of the selected indicators that were arranged into two broad dimensions: economic and technological dimensions. The economic dimension focuses on some economic variables, namely the sector's investment growth rate and revenue percentage compared to GDP, while the technological dimension gives emphasis towards technological and ICT related indicators, to be precise, advanced telecommunications infrastructure and the emergence of new telecommunication services.

This dissertation presents a comprehensive study of the issue of talfiq (concoction) in Islamic banking contracts. Many people believe that Islamic banking is merely a replication of conventional banking and does not meet the spirit (maqasid) of shariah due to the similarities between Islamic finance products and conventional usurious products in their economic effects. The study is divided into five chapters, with the first chapter introducing the problem and the structure of the dissertation .The second chapter delves into the concepts of ijtihad, taq?ld, and ift??, clarifying the terms and conditions related to each concept. The third chapter provides a detailed explanation of the concept of talfiq and its types, as well as the difference between talfiq and other related terms in Islamic jurisprudence .The forth chapter discusses the emergence of Islamic banking and whether adopting an approach of h?lah in forming Islamic financial contracts is acceptable. It also explains why Islamic banks are forced to imitate conventional banking and the economic consequences of such imitation .The fifth chapter provides a critical analysis of the main Islamic financial contracts, including mur?baha, ig?rah muntahia bi’taml?k, and mush?rakah mutan?qisah. The study has adopted an inductive approach in gathering the related information. It also applied an analytic method to discuss the arguments and deduce its results. The study concludes that the main reason why Islamic banks are forced to imitate conventional ones is the banking system, where finance is connected with money creation. Therefore, adopting a different system that separates money creation from finance is necessary to provide authentic halal products.

The development of sports within the Malaysian sporting arena must be sustained in order to promote further growth and to achieve world-class status. In order to sustain the development in sports, there are various aspects that need to be taken into consideration besides introducing various mechanisms to improve the quality of performance of the athletes. At present the principal concern among the sporting community is that there are insufficient legal provisions providing for the protection of the rights of sportsperson. The Sports Development Act 1997 (Act 576) (referred as "SDA 1997") was passed in order to promote and facilitate the development and administration of sports in Malaysia. Development of sporting activities is dependant very much on the sportspersons themselves and if the welfare of the sportspersons is not taken care of, it may stultify development of sports in Malaysia. Thus, this dissertation seek to examine the problems faced by the sportspersons and to propose the necessary changes to improve the existing system in order to deliver better protection for the sporting community. The aims and objectives of this dissertation are to improve the existing legal measures promoting the protection of a sportspersons rights. Chapter one deals with the historical development of sports in Malaysia. Chapter two examines the contractual rights of a sportsperson and the shortcomings of the Malaysian system in providing the necessary protection for a sportsperson. Chapter three examines the extent of the tortious liability of a sports organisation in the event a sportsperson suffers injury in the course of representing the organisation in sporting events. Chapter Four examines the criminal liability of a sportsperson. Chapter Five examines the rights of a sportsperson guaranteed in the Federal Constitution. And chapter 6 is the concluding chapter where proposals for reforming the existing legislative measures are made.