This study aims to develop, assess the feasibility of, and evaluate the effectiveness of a web-based chatbot, TemanKarir, for measuring vocational high school students’ career readiness. The research employed a Research and Development (R&D) method using the ADDIE development model, which consists of five stages: analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. The chatbot was developed using the Botpress platform and integrated with Google Sheets, WordPress, the Telegram Bot API, and QuickChart. The assessment instrument was based on the Employability Skills Framework and comprised 75 items across nine skill dimensions. All items demonstrated strong content validity (Aiken’s V = 0.75–1.00), satisfactory item validity (r = 0.339–0.813), and high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.985). The participants included two content experts, two media experts, and 50 Grade XI vocational high school students. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistical techniques based on a four-point Likert scale and software quality evaluation criteria from the ISO/IEC 25010 standard. The results indicate that: (1) the TemanKarir chatbot was successfully developed with key features, including career readiness assessment, automated feedback, result summaries for guidance counselors, and follow-up guidance recommendations; (2) the chatbot was rated as highly feasible based on evaluations by content experts (mean score = 3.62) and media experts (mean score = 3.52); and (3) the chatbot demonstrated high effectiveness as an assessment tool, with strong scores for effectiveness (3.57), efficiency (3.58), and user satisfaction (3.56). Overall, the findings confirm that the TemanKarir chatbot is both feasible and effective for assessing vocational high school students’ career readiness and contributes positively to their career development processes.
هدف: پژوهش حاضر با هدف بررسی نقش میانجی انسجام خود در رابطه بین غنیسازی کار–خانواده و ساختار خانواده با شادکامی زناشویی انجام شد. روش: روش پژوهش توصیفی از نوع همبستگی بود. جامعه آماری شامل کلیه معلمان زن متأهل ناحیه ۴ آموزشوپرورش مشهد در سال تحصیلی 1403-1402 بود که از میان آنها ۳۰۰ نفر به روش نمونهگیری در دسترس انتخاب شدند. ابزارهای گردآوری دادهها شامل پرسشنامههای شادکامی زناشویی، انسجام روانی، غنیسازی کار–خانواده و ساختار خانواده بود. دادهها با استفاده از ضریب همبستگی پیرسون و تحلیل معادلات ساختاری در نرمافزارهای SPSS22 و Smart PLS3 تحلیل شدند. یافتهها: نتایج نشان داد همبستگی و انطباقپذیری ساختار خانواده تأثیر مستقیم معناداری بر شادکامی زناشویی دارند، اما غنیسازی کار–خانواده فاقد تأثیر مستقیم معنادار است. همچنین، انسجام خود نقش میانجی معناداری در رابطه میان غنیسازی کار–خانواده و همبستگی خانواده با شادکامی زناشویی ایفا کرد، اما در رابطه انطباقپذیری خانواده با شادکامی زناشویی نقش میانجی نداشت.نتیجهگیری: با توجه به نقش انسجام روانی در ارتقای شادکامی زناشویی، پیشنهاد میشود برنامههای آموزشی برای تقویت مهارتهای روانشناختی و حمایت از همبستگی خانواده و غنیسازی کار–خانواده طراحی و اجرا شود.
Background: In South Africa, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is often promoted as a means to enhance employability. However, dominant policy frameworks tend to emphasise economic outcomes and labour market alignment, often neglecting the pedagogical dimensions crucial for empowering students.
Objectives: This article aimed to critique the structural limitations of policy-driven TVET reforms and to foreground the importance of pedagogical transformation. It examined how critical, humanising pedagogies – drawing on Paulo Freire’s problem-posing approach – could bridge the gap between macro-level policy and micro-level teaching and learning experiences.
Methods: The article employed a critical interpretive approach, informed by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and Stephanie Allais’s structural critique of qualifications frameworks. Empirical data were drawn from a participatory action research (PAR) study involving 15 TVET graduates, whose post-study experiences illuminated the interplay between policy, pedagogy and career development.
Results: Findings revealed that policy reforms alone were insufficient to achieve transformative outcomes. Graduates described how rigid, standardised curricula and competency-based assessments limited their agency and failed to prepare them for meaningful, adaptable and socially relevant careers. The data highlighted the need for dialogical, inclusive pedagogical practices that respond to students’ lived realities.
Conclusion: Reimagining TVET requires more than structural reform – it demands pedagogical transformation rooted in student voice, critical engagement and social justice. Without this shift, TVET risks reinforcing existing inequalities rather than empowering students to access decent work and live dignified lives.
Contribution: This article contributes to vocational education scholarship by offering a Freirean critique of South African TVET policy and pedagogy. It highlights the significance of linking structural reform to pedagogical change and argues for student-centred, participatory approaches that foster critical consciousness and career agency.
Vocational guidance. Career development, Social Sciences
The COMPARE Ecosystem aims to improve the compatibility and benchmarking of open-source products for robot manipulation through a series of activities. One such activity is the development of standards and guidelines to specify modularization practices at the component-level for individual modules (e.g., perception, grasp planning, motion planning) and integrations of components that form robot manipulation capabilities at the pipeline-level. This paper briefly reviews our work-in-progress to date to (1) build repositories of open-source products to identify common characteristics of each component in the pipeline, (2) investigate existing modular pipelines to glean best practices, and (3) develop new modular pipelines that advance prior work while abiding by the proposed standards and guidelines.
Drug development is a critical but notoriously resource- and time-consuming process. In this manuscript, we develop a novel generative artificial intelligence (genAI) method DiffSMol to facilitate drug development. DiffSmol generates 3D binding molecules based on the shapes of known ligands. DiffSMol encapsulates geometric details of ligand shapes within pre-trained, expressive shape embeddings and then generates new binding molecules through a diffusion model. DiffSMol further modifies the generated 3D structures iteratively via shape guidance to better resemble the ligand shapes. It also tailors the generated molecules toward optimal binding affinities under the guidance of protein pockets. Here, we show that DiffSMol outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. When generating binding molecules resembling ligand shapes, DiffSMol with shape guidance achieves a success rate 61.4%, substantially outperforming the best baseline (11.2%), meanwhile producing molecules with novel molecular graph structures. DiffSMol with pocket guidance also outperforms the best baseline in binding affinities by 13.2%, and even by 17.7% when combined with shape guidance. Case studies for two critical drug targets demonstrate very favorable physicochemical and pharmacokinetic properties of the generated molecules, thus, the potential of DiffSMol in developing promising drug candidates.
Tariq Berrada Ifriqi, Adriana Romero-Soriano, Michal Drozdzal
et al.
Guidance techniques are commonly used in diffusion and flow models to improve image quality and input consistency for conditional generative tasks such as class-conditional and text-to-image generation. In particular, classifier-free guidance (CFG) is the most widely adopted guidance technique. It results, however, in trade-offs across quality, diversity and consistency: improving some at the expense of others. While recent work has shown that it is possible to disentangle these factors to some extent, such methods come with an overhead of requiring an additional (weaker) model, or require more forward passes per sampling step. In this paper, we propose Entropy Rectifying Guidance (ERG), a simple and effective guidance method based on inference-time changes in the attention mechanism of state-of-the-art diffusion transformer architectures, which allows for simultaneous improvements over image quality, diversity and prompt consistency. ERG is more general than CFG and similar guidance techniques, as it extends to unconditional sampling. We show that ERG results in significant improvements in various tasks, including text-to-image, class-conditional and unconditional image generation. We also show that ERG can be seamlessly combined with other recent guidance methods such as CADS and APG, further improving generation results.
Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is an essential mechanism in contemporary text-driven diffusion models. In practice, in controlling the impact of guidance we can see the trade-off between the quality of the generated images and correspondence to the prompt. When we use strong guidance, generated images fit the conditioned text perfectly but at the cost of their quality. Dually, we can use small guidance to generate high-quality results, but the generated images do not suit our prompt. In this paper, we present $β$-CFG ($β$-adaptive scaling in Classifier-Free Guidance), which controls the impact of guidance during generation to solve the above trade-off. First, $β$-CFG stabilizes the effects of guiding by gradient-based adaptive normalization. Second, $β$-CFG uses the family of single-modal ($β$-distribution), time-dependent curves to dynamically adapt the trade-off between prompt matching and the quality of samples during the diffusion denoising process. Our model obtained better FID scores, maintaining the text-to-image CLIP similarity scores at a level similar to that of the reference CFG.
چکیده:هدف: پژوهش حاضر با هدف بررسی رابطه بین عدالت ادراک شده و رفتارهای فرانقشی با تأکید بر نقش میانجی انعطافپذیری شناختی در کارکنان شرکت مخابرات ایران انجام شد. این مطالعه با استفاده از مدلیابی معادلات ساختاری، به دنبال تبیین مکانیسمهای روانشناختی مؤثر بر رفتارهای فرانقشی کارکنان در محیطهای سازمانی بود.روش: روش پژوهش توصیفی-همبستگی با رویکرد مدلیابی معادلات ساختاری بود. جامعه آماری شامل کلیه کارکنان شرکت مخابرات ایران بود که تعداد ۳۹۳ نفر با روش نمونهگیری در دسترس انتخاب شدند. دادهها با استفاده از پرسشنامه عدالت سازمانی ادراک شده کالکیت (2001)، پرسشنامه رفتارهای فرانقشی ارگان (1988)، و پرسشنامه انعطافپذیری شناختی دنیس و وندر وال (2010) جمعآوری شد. تحلیل آماری داده ها به روش مدل یابی معادلات ساختاری و با استفاده از نرمافزارSPSS 26 و 24AMOS انجام شد.یافته ها: نتایج نشان داد که عدالت ادراک شده رابطه مثبت و معناداری با رفتارهای فرانقشی دارد. همچنین، انعطافپذیری شناختی به عنوان متغیر میانجی، تأثیر مثبت و معناداری در این رابطه نشان داد. شاخصهای برازش مدل حاکی از برازش مطلوب مدل پیشنهادی بود.نتیجه گیری: یافتههای این پژوهش بر اهمیت عدالت سازمانی و انعطافپذیری شناختی در ارتقای رفتارهای فرانقشی تأکید دارد. این نتایج میتواند به مدیران سازمانها در طراحی برنامههای بهبود عدالت ادراک شده و تقویت انعطافپذیری شناختی کارکنان کمک کند، که در نهایت منجر به افزایش مشارکت و بهرهوری سازمانی میشود. این مطالعه چارچوبی نظری برای پژوهشهای آینده در حوزه رفتار سازمانی فراهم میکند.
Background: South African learners need more career preparation, as it provides a sense of control in the current economic climate of high unemployment, as confirmed by the business sector.
Objective: The intentions of this study were to gain an understanding of the manner in which learners make use of career adaptability as a scaffold to prepare for the workplace, as well as the way African proverbs assist learners with thinking critically and deconstructing the career adaptability construct.
Method: The study was an exploratory case study with 20 Grade 11 black African learners from an urban government secondary school in the Gauteng province, South Africa.
Results: The study confirmed that scaffolding the career adaptability construct to career construction encouraged learners to think critically about their career planning strategies.
Conclusion: The results demonstrated the extent to which the career adaptability construct functioned as a teaching scaffold during learners’ career preparation activities.
Contribution: This study was undertaken to understand how learners plan for careers in the 21st-century world of work. The career adaptability construct was explicitly chosen to explore the potential possibilities for supporting learners and function as an instructional scaffold in the career path development process. The study can potentially add value to career education in all South African schools.
Vocational guidance. Career development, Social Sciences
Tatiana Chakravorti, Sanjana Gautam, Sarah M. Rajtmajer
Many fields of science, including Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), have heightened introspection in the wake of concerns around reproducibility and replicability of published findings. Notably, in recent years the HCI community has worked to implement policy changes and mainstream open science practices. Our work investigates early-career HCI researchers' perceptions of open science and engagement with best practices through 18 semi-structured interviews. Our findings highlight key barriers to the widespread adoption of data and materials sharing, and preregistration, namely: lack of clear incentives; cultural resistance; limited training; time constraints; concerns about intellectual property; and data privacy issues. We observe that small changes at major conferences like CHI could meaningfully impact community norms. We offer recommendations to address these barriers and to promote transparency and openness in HCI. While these findings provide valuable and interesting insights about the open science practices by early career HCI researchers, their applicability is limited to the USA only. The interview study relies on self-reported data; therefore, it can be subject to biases like recall bias. Future studies will include the scope to expand HCI researchers from different levels of experience and different countries, allowing for more justifiable examples.
This paper focuses on developing a bearings-only measurement-based three-dimensional window traversal guidance method for quadrotor Uninhabitated Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The desired flight path and heading angles of the quadrotor are proposed as functions of the bearing angle information of the four vertices of the window. These angular guidance inputs employ a bearing angle bisector term and an elliptic shaping angle term, which directs the quadrotor towards the centroid of the window. Detailed stability analysis of the resulting kinematics demonstrates that all quadrotor trajectories lead to the centroid of the window along a direction which is normal to the window plane. A qualitative comparison with existing traversal methodologies showcases the superiority of the proposed guidance approach with regard to the nature of information, computations for generating the guidance commands, and flexibility of replanning the traversal path. Realistic simulations considering six degree-of-freedom quadrotor model and Monte Carlo studies validate the effectiveness, accuracy, and robustness of the proposed guidance solution. Representative flight validation trials are carried out using an indoor motion capture system.
This study investigated the distribution of MBTI personality types among physics undergraduates at Zhejiang University and analyzed their career aspirations, family income and mental health status. A comprehensive survey of 68 questions, including 52 multiple-choice questions and 16 short-answer questions, assessed various personality traits and their correlation with academic intent and emotional state. The results showed that INTJ and INTP personality types showed the most significant tendency to pursue academic research. They usually come from middle and above-class backgrounds. Notably, these two personality types accounted for about 41\% of the total surveyed population, while NT types combined accounted for about 58\%. This indicates that although NT personality is more suitable for academic research, students with introverted tendencies are more suitable. Research has further shown that people with ISTJ personalities often exhibit unexpectedly strong academic interests. In addition, individuals who aspire to enter academia generally maintain a stable state of mind, as evidenced by their consistent work efficiency in the face of personal challenges. Interestingly, although some aspiring academics come from financially stable families, most have encountered financial constraints. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of how personality traits and socioeconomic factors influence the academic career paths of physics students.
Kristine Joy D. Magallanes, Mark Brianne C. Carreon, Kristalyn C. Miclat
et al.
The integration of information and communication technology (ICT) has become increasingly vital across various educational fields, including physical education (PE). This study aimed to evaluate the proficiency levels of PE teachers in using various ICT applications and to examine the relationship between the perceived importance of ICT proficiency for teaching and learning, career advancement, and actual proficiency among Senior High school PE teachers in the municipality of Mexico, Pampanga. This study employed a quantitative descriptive approach. PE teachers from the municipality of Mexico, Pampanga, were selected as the respondents. This study used a two-part survey. The first section collected demographic data, such as age, gender, rank/position, and years of teaching experience, and the second section assessed ICT skill levels and the perceived importance of ICT in teaching, learning, and career progression. The results revealed that the majority of PE teachers had access to ICT resources. However, their proficiency levels with these tools varied significantly. Factors such as age, teaching experience, and professional position were found to significantly influence teachers proficiency and their perceptions of the benefits of ICT integration in PE instruction. The study provided a glimpse of the current state of ICT integration among Senior High school PE teachers in Mexico, Pampanga, Philippines. This also highlights areas of improvement. The study suggests that policymakers, administrators, and training program developers should focus on enhancing the ICT proficiency of PE teachers to improve teaching practices and student engagement. Enhancing the ICT proficiency of PE teachers is recommended to foster better teaching experiences, increase student engagement, and promote overall educational outcomes.
We found that enforcing guidance throughout the sampling process is often counterproductive due to the model-fitting issue, where samples are 'tuned' to match the classifier's parameters rather than generalizing the expected condition. This work identifies and quantifies the problem, demonstrating that reducing or excluding guidance at numerous timesteps can mitigate this issue. By distributing a small amount of guidance over a large number of sampling timesteps, we observe a significant improvement in image quality and diversity while also reducing the required guidance timesteps by nearly 40%. This approach addresses a major challenge in applying guidance effectively to generative tasks. Consequently, our proposed method, termed Compress Guidance, allows for the exclusion of a substantial number of guidance timesteps while still surpassing baseline models in image quality. We validate our approach through benchmarks on label-conditional and text-to-image generative tasks across various datasets and models.
با توسعۀ کارآفرینی، فرصتهای اقتصادی تازهای ظهور یافته و کسب و کارهای جدیدی پدید آمده است. محققان معتقدند که فعالیتهای کارآفرینی توسط زنان، نقش برجستهای در سلامت اقتصاد ملتها دارد. زنان در زمان کوتاهی توانستند با ورود به عرصه کسب و کار تحولات عظیمی در توسعه اقتصادی کشورها ایجاد کنند. هدف این پژوهش، بررسی نقش مهارتهای شخصی و کارآفرینی جهت تبدیل شدن از کارآفرینی ترکیبی به کارآفرینی تمام وقت با تاکید بر نظریه یادگیری تجربی میباشد. روش پژوهش بر حسب هدف، کاربردی و بر اساس گردآوری دادهها پیمایشی است. جامعه آماری پژوهش، زنان کارآفرین فعال در استان مازندران است که 70 نفر به روش نمونهگیری در دسترس انتخاب شدند. ابزار پژوهش پرسشنامه استاندارد برگرفته از پژوهش Ferreira (2020) بوده است. روش تحلیل داده ها، مدل معادلات ساختاری با استفاده از نرمافزار SmartPLS میباشد. نتایج نشان داد یادگیری تجربی بر مهارتهای شخصی، مهارتهای کارآفرینی و انتقال از کارآفرینی ترکیبی به کارآفرینی تمام وقت تاثیر دارد. مهارتهای شخصی و مهارتهای کارآفرینی بر انتقال از کارآفرینی ترکیبی به کارآفرینی تمام وقت تاثیر دارد. مهارتهای شخصی و مهارتهای کارآفرینی درارتباط بین یادگیری تجربی و انتقال از کارآفرینی ترکیبی به کارآفرینی تمام وقت نقش واسطهای دارد. بنابراین، در این خصوص پیشنهاد میگردد که به زنان کارآفرین ترکیبی آموزشهای لازم به منظور ایجاد دانش و مهارتهای شخصی و کارآفرینی قبل از ورود به کارآفرینی تمام وقت ارائه گشته و باعث توسعه شایستگیهای آنان گردد.
Vocational guidance. Career development, Agriculture (General)
Rauna K. Haitembu, Emilia N. Mbongo, Anthony Brown
Background: Previous research about transgender people’s workplace experiences has confirmed intense levels of discrimination and prejudice. There is a particular silence on trans people’s experiences in the job interview.
Objective: The objective of this study was to explore how transgender people are dealt with in job interviews.
Method: This single case-study approach explore the experiences of transgender youth in presenting for a job interview. An in-depth semi-structured interview was the primary data-collection method. Content analysis was applied to the data and yielded a discussion focusing on the various job interview experiences affecting perceived discrimination, career aspirations and personal well-being.
Results: This study describes how Selma, a transgender woman, was subjected to overt discrimination based on her gender expressions considered incongruent with expected norms. Her feminine voice and mannerisms resulted in her being ridiculed and humiliated during the interview process. In some instances, the interview process was interrupted in a hostile manner to confirm whether she was a man or a woman or to pressure her to speak like a man. This study suggests that the Namibian labour market insists on compulsory cis-heteronormative embodiment.
Conclusion: This study calls for awareness training about transgender people and workplace inclusivity. It also recommends that employers develop and implement a post-interview feedback tool to explore invited interviewees’ experiences.
Contribution: This study highlights how job interviews, as an entry requirement to the job market, are riddled with prejudices, stereotypes of and discrimination towards transgender people.
Vocational guidance. Career development, Social Sciences
This implementation guidance focuses on carbon removal and sequestration via wood harvesting and storage (WHS), a process where woody biomass, with the embedded carbon, is stored for long timescales in shallow geologic storage. The engineering structure designed to ensure such durable storage by preventing biomass decomposition is called a Wood Vault. This guidance contains the requirements for a basic Wood Vault project, and is intended to aid project developers, verifiers, and registries in this space. It describes a set of requirements that govern the end-to-end process of carbon removal and sequestration. This includes carbon accounting, wood sourcing via wood residual (WR) utilization, Wood Vault construction and maintenance, as well as processes for monitoring, verification, and credit issuance. Carbon accounting requirements include baseline, or counterfactual specification, and full life cycle analysis (LCA) within a specified process boundary. For the vault itself, the guidance describes a buried vault with the burial chamber covered by a layer of low permeability material to create anoxic condition. Other types of vaults can also be used to adjust to local environmental, transport, and economic constraints. Monitoring and verification requirements include in-situ sensors, gas sampling, sample excavations, and site maintenance. This guidance also contemplates land ownership and legal assurances, as well as environmental and societal impact assessments. The implementation guidance concludes with recommendations regarding auditing, certification and carbon credit issuance.
Elite civil servants may come and go between the public and private sectors throughout their career, a process of particular interest for the public and social scientists. However, data to document such processes are rarely completely available: we need inference tools that can account for many missing values. We consider public-private paths of elite French civil servants and introduce binary Markov switching models with Bayesian data augmentation. Our procedure relies on two complementary data sources: (1) detailed observations of some individual trajectories obtained from LinkedIn; (2) less informative ``traces'' left by all individuals in the administrative record, which we model for missing data imputation. This model class maintains the properties of hidden Markov models and enables a tailored sampler to target the posterior, yet allows for varying parameters across individuals and time. By integrating the two sources, we can consider the whole population rather than just a sample, and avoid the biases that would stem from using only a single source. We demonstrate this allows to properly test substantive hypotheses on career paths across a variety of public organizations. We notably show that the probability for ENA graduates to exit the public sector has not increased since 1990, but that the probability they return has increased. We identify three clusters of organizations, with distinct patterns of public-private behaviors.
Arpit Bansal, Hong-Min Chu, Avi Schwarzschild
et al.
Typical diffusion models are trained to accept a particular form of conditioning, most commonly text, and cannot be conditioned on other modalities without retraining. In this work, we propose a universal guidance algorithm that enables diffusion models to be controlled by arbitrary guidance modalities without the need to retrain any use-specific components. We show that our algorithm successfully generates quality images with guidance functions including segmentation, face recognition, object detection, and classifier signals. Code is available at https://github.com/arpitbansal297/Universal-Guided-Diffusion.
AbstractThe incidence of app-based gig work is expanding rapidly in developed global north countries. Many app-based gig workers are migrants from developing global south countries searching for a better life in their resettlement countries. App-based gig work, however, is insecure, irregular and potentially precarious. Access to decent work is vital for migrants’ integration after resettlement and also their career development. In the context of the decent work agenda, this article explores the intersections of migration, app-based gig work, and southern migrants’ career development in the global north and considers the implications for career practice and research.