John Updike’s use of setting in his fiction has elicited different and even conflicting reactions from critics, varying from symbolic interpretations of setting to a sense of confusion at his use of time and place in his stories.  The present study is an attempt at examining John Updike’s treatment of binary settings in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962) to reveal theme, characters’ motives and conflicts.  Analyzing Updike’s stories from a structuralist’s perspective reveals his employment of two different places and times in the individual stories as a means of reflecting the psychological state of the characters, as in “The Persistence of Desire”, or expressing conflicting views on social and political is

The meanings attributed to Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) are shaped through complex negotiations within religious and socio-cultural frameworks, including those observed in Indonesia. Using a combined qualitative and quantitative (mixed methods)-ethnographic and survey approach, data from 109 students of religious tertiary institutions in East Kalimantan on their perspectives on FGM/C practices can be more comprehensively explored. The results of the study, which were analysed using the three principles of symbolic interactionism, showed that 72.5 per cent of religious college student families still practice FGM/C and 53.2 per cent stated that FGM/C practices are beneficial for women.  However, they are also willing, if

The interest of many companies has become dealing with the tools and methods that reduce the costs as one of the most important factors of successful companies, and became the subject of the attention of many economic units because of the impact on the profits of company, and since the nineties of the last century the researchers and writers gave great attention to this subject, especially in light of the large competition and rapid developments in cost management techniques, as well as the wide and significant change in production methods that have been directed towards achieving customer satisfaction, all this and more driven by economic units in all sectors whether it is service or productivity to find methods that would reduc

Survivin, a member of inhibitor of apoptosis family is increasingly used as a target for cancer therapy design because it has a key role in cell growth and inhibition of cell apoptosis. Also it can be used as a biomarker for targeting cancer because it is found in almost all cancer but not normal cells. Our strategy was to design (computationally) a molecule to be used as survivin inhibitor. This molecule was named lead10 and was used furthermore to find (virtually) existing drugs with a good survivin inhibition activity.

Abstract: Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a significant field in computational linguistics as it is indispensable for many language understanding applications. Automatic processing of documents is made difficult because of the fact that many of the terms it contain ambiguous. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) systems try to solve these ambiguities and find the correct meaning. Genetic algorithms can be active to resolve this problem since they have been effectively applied for many optimization problems. In this paper, genetic algorithms proposed to solve the word sense disambiguation problem that can automatically select the intended meaning of a word in context without any additional resource. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a col

In this study, dynamic encryption techniques are explored as an image cipher method to generate S-boxes similar to AES S-boxes with the help of a private key belonging to the user and enable images to be encrypted or decrypted using S-boxes. This study consists of two stages: the dynamic generation of the S-box method and the encryption-decryption method. S-boxes should have a non-linear structure, and for this reason, K/DSA (Knutt Durstenfeld Shuffle Algorithm), which is one of the pseudo-random techniques, is used to generate S-boxes dynamically. The biggest advantage of this approach is the production of the inverted S-box with the S-box. Compared to the methods in the literature, the need to store the S-box is eliminated. Also, the fabr

As s widely use of exchanging private information in various communication applications, the issue to secure it became top urgent. In this research, a new approach to encrypt text message based on genetic algorithm operators has been proposed. The proposed approach follows a new algorithm of generating 8 bit chromosome to encrypt plain text after selecting randomly crossover point. The resulted child code is flipped by one bit using mutation operation. Two simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach including execution time of encryption/decryption and throughput computations. Simulations results prove the robustness of the proposed approach to produce better performance for all evaluation metrics with res

When scheduling rules become incapable to tackle the presence of a variety of unexpected disruptions frequently occurred in manufacturing systems,  it is necessary to develop a reactive schedule which can absorb the effects of such disruptions. Such responding requires efficient strategies, policies, and methods to controlling production & maintaining high shop performance. This can be achieved through rescheduling task which defined as an essential operating function to efficiently tackle and response to uncertainties and unexpected events. The framework proposed in this study consists of rescheduling approaches, strategies, policies, and techniques, which represents a guideline for most manufacturing companies operatin