Socio-scientific issues provide a great platform to both engage students in scientific topics and assess their understanding of scientific concepts. Nancy R. Singer, Amy Lannin, Maha Kareem, William Romine, and Katie Kline report on the STEM Literacy Project, a three-year National Science Foundation grant that aimed to improve STEM teachers’ knowledge and integration of literacy in their classrooms. They describe teachers’ professional learning, scenario-based assessments and other strategies they incorporated in their STEM classrooms, and how writing enables students to understand real-world issues.

Recommendation systems are now being used to address the problem of excess information in several sectors such as entertainment, social networking, and e-commerce. Although conventional methods to recommendation systems have achieved significant success in providing item suggestions, they still face many challenges, including the cold start problem and data sparsity. Numerous recommendation models have been created in order to address these difficulties. Nevertheless, including user or item-specific information has the potential to enhance the performance of recommendations. The ConvFM model is a novel convolutional neural network architecture that combines the capabilities of deep learning for feature extraction with the effectiveness o

The security of message information has drawn more attention nowadays, so; cryptography has been used extensively. This research aims to generate secured cipher keys from retina information to increase the level of security. The proposed technique utilizes cryptography based on retina information. The main contribution is the original procedure used to generate three types of keys in one system from the retina vessel's end position and improve the technique of three systems, each with one key. The distances between the center of the diagonals of the retina image and the retina vessel's end (diagonal center-end (DCE)) represent the first key. The distances between the center of the radius of the retina and the retina vessel's end (ra

English allows for consonant sequences at the beginning of words, which poses a challenge for speakers of other languages, especially those whose native languages do not contain such sequences, such as Arabic. Therefore, this study aims to investigate students’ recognition and production of initial consecutive consonants in relation to gender, and the significance of the statistical differences between students in recognition and pronunciation of consecutive consonants. Consequently, a cohort of fifty-two Iraqi college students (18 males and 34 females) were selected as a sample. A multiple-choice test of two phases was used as a research instrument. The results showed that females outperformed males in recognizing and producing c

The development of microcontroller is used in monitoring and data acquisition recently. This development has born various architectures for spreading and interfacing the microcontroller in network environment. Some of existing architecture suffers from redundant in resources, extra processing, high cost and delay in response. This paper presents flexible concise architecture for building distributed microcontroller networked system. The system consists of only one server, works through the internet, and a set of microcontrollers distributed in different sites. Each microcontroller is connected through the Ethernet to the internet. In this system the client requesting data from certain side is accomplished through just one server that is in

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an age-related progressive and neurodegenerative disorder, which is characterized by loss of memory and cognitive decline. It is the main cause of disability among older people. The rapid increase in the number of people living with AD and other forms of dementia due to the aging population represents a major challenge to health and social care systems worldwide. Degeneration of brain cells due to AD starts many years before the clinical manifestations become clear. Early diagnosis of AD will contribute to the development of effective treatments that could slow, stop, or prevent significant cognitive decline. Consequently, early diagnosis of AD may also be valuable in detecting patients with dementia who have n

Arabic text categorization for pattern recognitions is challenging. We propose for the first time a novel holistic method based on clustering for classifying Arabic writer. The categorization is accomplished stage-wise. Firstly, these document images are sectioned into lines, words, and characters. Secondly, their structural and statistical features are obtained from sectioned portions. Thirdly, F-Measure is used to evaluate the performance of the extracted features and their combination in different linkage methods for each distance measures and different numbers of groups. Finally, experiments are conducted on the standard KHATT dataset of Arabic handwritten text comprised of varying samples from 1000 writers. The results in the generatio

It has been shown recently that there is a need to design smart structures, such as smart houses, in order to be controlled in different ways. That will be in high demand due to its usefulness for some people who are incapable of reaching some control units that require direct interaction with human beings. In this paper, we propose and develop a new enhanced electroencephalography (EEG)-based smart structure setup that can be utilized to assist people, with or without disorders, to control devices in an easy and comfortable way. Ten people of a wide range of ages (20–65) and both genders actively participated in this research. Consequently, eight EEG channels are employed in this study to cover most of the brain’s regions, and the prot

This study assessed the advantage of using earthworms in combination with punch waste and nutrients in remediating drill cuttings contaminated with hydrocarbons. Analyses were performed on day 0, 7, 14, 21, and 28 of the experiment. Two hydrocarbon concentrations were used (20000 mg/kg and 40000 mg/kg) for three groups of earthworms number which were five, ten and twenty earthworms. After 28 days, the total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) concentration (20000 mg/kg) was reduced to 13200 mg/kg, 9800 mg/kg, and 6300 mg/kg in treatments with five, ten and twenty earthworms respectively. Also, TPH concentration (40000 mg/kg) was reduced to 22000 mg/kg, 10100 mg/kg, and 4200 mg/kg in treatments with the above number of earthworms respectively. The p