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.
Free-Space Optical (FSO) can provide high-speed communications when the effect of turbulence is not serious. However, Space-Time-Block-Code (STBC) is a good candidate to mitigate this seriousness. This paper proposes a hybrid of an Optical Code Division Multiple Access (OCDMA) and STBC in FSO communication for last mile solutions, where access to remote areas is complicated. The main weakness effecting a FSO link is the atmospheric turbulence. The feasibility of employing STBC in OCDMA is to mitigate these effects. The current work evaluates the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) performance of OCDMA operating under the scintillation effect, where this effect can be described by the gamma-gamma model. The most obvious finding to emerge from the analysis
... Show MoreBackground: Scientific education aims to be inclusive and to improve students learning achievements, through appropriate teaching and learning. Problem Based Learning (PBL) system, a student centered method, started in the second half of the previous century and is expanding progressively, organizes learning around problems and students learn about a subject through the experience of solving these problems.Objectives:To assess the opinions of undergraduate medical students regarding learning outcomes of PBL in small group teaching and to explore their views about the role of tutors and methods of evaluation. Type of the study: A cross-sectional study.Methods: This study was conducted in Kerbala Medical Colleges among second year students
... Show MoreThis study aims at shedding light on the linguistic significance of collocation networks in the academic writing context. Following Firth’s principle “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” The study intends to examine three selected nodes (i.e. research, study, and paper) shared collocations in an academic context. This is achieved by using the corpus linguistic tool; GraphColl in #LancsBox software version 5 which was announced in June 2020 in analyzing selected nodes. The study focuses on academic writing of two corpora which were designed and collected especially to serve the purpose of the study. The corpora consist of a collection of abstracts extracted from two different academic journals that publish for writ
... Show MoreBlockchain has garnered the most attention as the most important new technology that supports recent digital transactions via e-government. The most critical challenge for public e-government systems is reducing bureaucracy and increasing the efficiency and performance of administrative processes in these systems since blockchain technology can play a role in a decentralized environment and execute a high level of security transactions and transparency. So, the main objectives of this work are to survey different proposed models for e-government system architecture based on blockchain technology implementation and how these models are validated. This work studies and analyzes some research trends focused on blockchain
... Show MoreDipeptidyl peptidase-4 DPP-4 inhibition has remained one of the most established ways in treating type 2 diabetes mellitus. Therefore, the development of improved DPP-4 inhibiters is consideredan essential strategy in the design of antidiabetic drugs. In the present study, a structure-based virtual approach was considered to design and evaluate new sitagliptin analogues with improved binding stability and pharmacokinetic properties. A virtual library consisting of 15,034 different compounds was created and then screened using a hierarchical Glide docking protocol (HTVS, SP, and XP). Using integrated computational analyses, the top ranked compounds were further assessed. Based on ADMET predictions, MM-GBSA binding free energy
... Show MorePolyaniline Multi wall Carbon nanotube (PANI/MWCNTs) nanocomposite thin films have been prepared by Plasma jet polymerization at low frequency on glass substrate with preliminary deposited aluminum electrodes to form Al/PANI-MWCNT/Al surface-type capacitive humidity sensors, the gap between the electrodes about 50 μm and the MWCNTs weight concentration varied between 0, 1, 2, 3, 4%. The diameter of the MWCNTs was in the range of 8-15 nm and the length 10-55 μm. The capacitance-humidity relationships of the sensors were investigated at humidity levels from 35 to 90% RH. The electrical properties showed that the capacity increased with increasing relative humidity, and that the sensitivity of the sensor increases with the increase of the
... Show MoreThe design and implementation of an active router architecture that enables flexible network programmability based on so-called "user components" will be presents. This active router is designed to provide maximum flexibility for the development of future network functionality and services. The designed router concentrated mainly on the use of Windows Operating System, enhancing the Active Network Encapsulating Protocol (ANEP). Enhancing ANEP gains a service composition scheme which enables flexible programmability through integration of user components into the router's data path. Also an extended program that creates and then injects data packets into the network stack of the testing machine will be proposed, we will call this program
... Show MoreInformation processing has an important application which is speech recognition. In this paper, a two hybrid techniques have been presented. The first one is a 3-level hybrid of Stationary Wavelet Transform (S) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (W) and the second one is a 3-level hybrid of Discrete Wavelet Transform (W) and Multi-wavelet Transforms (M). To choose the best 3-level hybrid in each technique, a comparison according to five factors has been implemented and the best results are WWS, WWW, and MWM. Speech recognition is performed on WWS, WWW, and MWM using Euclidean distance (Ecl) and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). The match performance is (98%) using DTW in MWM, while in the WWS and WWW are (74%) and (78%) respectively, but when using (
... Show MoreThe 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
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