With the premise that effective use of online instructional practices is of vital importance in classrooms, the current study aimed to examine the effects of using Moodle applications to develop instructors’ skills in designing electronic tests at Dhofar University. The sample of this study consisted of (25) instructors participated in the experimental group. The researchers implemented a quasi-experimental design with one group pre- and post-test; in addition, an observation card was implemented to measure the target skills related to test design. The research instruments were subjected to validity and reliability measures to ensure valid and reliable data and results. The study results showed that those instructors who participated i

This study aimed at evaluating the torsional capacity of reinforced concrete (RC) beams externally wrapped with fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) materials. An analytical model was described and used as a new computational procedure based on the softened truss model (STM) to predict the torsional behavior of RC beams strengthened with FRP. The proposed analytical model was validated with the existing experimental data for rectangular sections strengthened with FRP materials and considering torque-twist relationship and crack pattern at failure. The confined concrete behavior, in the case of FRP wrapping, was considered in the constitutive laws of concrete in the model. Then, an efficient algorithm was developed in MATLAB environment t

Research was conducted to study the effect of proline and aspirin with 10 and 20 ppm on seed germination and seedling growth of Lycopersicon esculentumand the effect of surface growthof Fusarium oxysporum.The results showed that the proline and aspirin effected significantly to decreased percentage of seed germination, acceleration of germination, promoter indicator, elongation speed of radical and plumule and also the infection percentage of seed decay and surface growth of Fusarium oxysporumwas reduced significantly.

In this paper, the goal of proposed method is to protect data against different types of attacks by unauthorized parties. The basic idea of proposed method is generating a private key from a specific features of digital color image such as color (Red, Green and Blue); the generating process of private key from colors of digital color image performed via the computing process of color frequencies for blue color of an image then computing the maximum frequency of blue color, multiplying it by its number and adding process will performed to produce a generated key. After that the private key is generated, must be converting it into the binary representation form. The generated key is extracted from blue color of keyed image then we selects a c

In this study water quality index (WQI) was calculated to classify the flowing water in the Tigris River in Baghdad city. GIS was used to develop colored water quality maps indicating the classification of the river for drinking water purposes. Water quality parameters including: Turbidity, pH, Alkalinity, Total hardness, Calcium, Magnesium, Iron, Chloride, Sulfate, Nitrite, Nitrate, Ammonia, Orthophosphate and Total dissolved solids were used for WQI determination. These parameters were recorded at the intakes of the WTPs in Baghdad for the period 2004 to 2011. The results from the annual average WQI analysis classified the Tigris River very poor to polluted at the north of Baghdad (Alkarkh WTP) while it was very poor to very polluted in t

A hand gesture recognition system provides a robust and innovative solution to nonverbal communication through human–computer interaction. Deep learning models have excellent potential for usage in recognition applications. To overcome related issues, most previous studies have proposed new model architectures or have fine-tuned pre-trained models. Furthermore, these studies relied on one standard dataset for both training and testing. Thus, the accuracy of these studies is reasonable. Unlike these works, the current study investigates two deep learning models with intermediate layers to recognize static hand gesture images. Both models were tested on different datasets, adjusted to suit the dataset, and then trained under different m

Effluent from incompetent wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) contains a great variety of pollutants so support water treatments are essential. The present work studies the removal of phosphate species from aqueous solutions by adsorption on to spherical Calcined Sand -Clay mixture (CSCM) used a natural, local and low-cost adsorbent. Batch experiments were performed to estimate removal efficiency of phosphate. The adsorption experiments were carried out as function of pH, dose of adsorbent, initial concentration, temperature and time of adsorption. The efficient removal was accomplished for pH between 10 and 12. The experimental results also showed that the removal of phosphate by (CSCM) was rapid (the % removal 98.9%, 92%, 90%, 89% in 6

Nowadays, Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs) have found many applications as industry, transportation, inspection, and other fields. Therefore, the trajectory tracking control of the nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots have an important problem. This work focus on the application of model-based on Fractional Order  PI^aD^b (FOPID) controller for trajectory tracking problem. The control algorithm based on the errors in postures of mobile robot which feed to FOPID controller to generate correction signals that transport to  torque for each driven wheel, and by means of dynamics model of mobile robot these torques used to compute the linear and angular speed to reach the desired pose. In this work a dynamics model of

Improving students’ use of argumentation is front and center in the increasing emphasis on scientific practice in K-12 Science and STEM programs. We explore the construct validity of scenario-based assessments of claim-evidence-reasoning (CER) and the structure of the CER construct with respect to a learning progression framework. We also seek to understand how middle school students progress. Establishing the purpose of an argument is a competency that a majority of middle school students meet, whereas quantitative reasoning is the most difficult, and the Rasch model indicates that the competencies form a unidimensional hierarchy of skills. We also find no evidence of differential item functioning between different scenarios, suggesting