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.
In this study, silica-graphene oxide nano–composites were prepared by sol-gel technique and deposited by spray pyrolysis method on glass substrate. The effect of changing the graphene/silica ratio on the optical properties and wetting of these nano–structures has been investigated. The structural and morphological properties of the thin films have been studied by x-ray diffraction spectroscopy (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM), energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and atomic force microscope (AFM). XRD results show that silica structures present in the synthesized films exhibit amorphous character and there is a poor arrangement in graphene plates al
In this work, the performance of single-mode optical fibers (SMFs) for ultraviolet (UV) radiation monitoring and dosimetry applications is presented. In particular, this work will focus on the Radiation-Induced Absorption (RIA) phenomena in the Near-Infrared domain (NIR). Such phenomena play a very important role in the sensing mechanism for SMF. Single mode fibers with a diameter of 50 µm were used for this purpose. These fibers were dipped into germanium (Ge) solution with different concentrations (1, 3, and 5 wt%) to produce the sensing part of the sensor. For all optical fiber sensors under investigation, the results indicated the dependence of the RIA on the applied UV radiation energy. Also, a redshi
... Show MoreThis paper proposes a completion that can allow fracturing four zones in a single trip in the well called “Y” (for confidential reasons) of the field named “X” (for confidential reasons). The steps to design a well completion for multiple fracturing are first to select the best completion method then the required equipment and the materials that it is made of. After that, the completion schematic must be drawn by using Power Draw in this case, and the summary installation procedures explained. The data used to design the completion are the well trajectory, the reservoir data (including temperature, pressure and fluid properties), the production and injection strategy. The results suggest that multi-stage hydraulic fracturing can
... Show MoreCalculating the Inverse Kinematic (IK) equations is a complex problem due to the nonlinearity of these equations. Choosing the end effector orientation affects the reach of the target location. The Forward Kinematics (FK) of Humanoid Robotic Legs (HRL) is determined by using DenavitHartenberg (DH) method. The HRL has two legs with five Degrees of Freedom (DoF) each. The paper proposes using a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to optimize the best orientation angle of the end effector of HRL. The selected orientation angle is used to solve the IK equations to reach the target location with minimum error. The performance of the proposed method is measured by six scenarios with different simulated positions of the legs. The proposed
... Show MoreOne of the primary problems in internet is security, mostly when computer utilization is increasing in all social and business areas. So, the secret communications through public and private channels are the major goal of researchers. Information hiding is one of methods to obtain a security communication medium and protecting the data during transmission.
This research offers in a new method using two levels to hide, the first level is hiding by embedding and addition but the second level is hiding by injection. The first level embeds a secret message in one bit in the LSB in the FFT and the addition of one kashida. Subtraction of two random images (STRI) is RNG to find positions for hiding within the text. The second level is the in
This paper presents a meta-heuristic swarm based optimization technique for solving robot path planning. The natural activities of actual ants inspire which named Ant Colony Optimization. (ACO) has been proposed in this work to find the shortest and safest path for a mobile robot in different static environments with different complexities. A nonzero size for the mobile robot has been considered in the project by taking a tolerance around the obstacle to account for the actual size of the mobile robot. A new concept was added to standard Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for further modifications. Simulations results, which carried out using MATLAB 2015(a) environment, prove that the suggested algorithm outperforms the standard version of AC
... Show MoreRecently, wireless communication environments with high speeds and low complexity have become increasingly essential. Free-space optics (FSO) has emerged as a promising solution for providing direct connections between devices in such high-spectrum wireless setups. However, FSO communications are susceptible to weather-induced signal fluctuations, leading to fading and signal weakness at the receiver. To mitigate the effects of these challenges, several mathematical models have been proposed to describe the transition from weak to strong atmospheric turbulence, including Rayleigh, lognormal, Málaga, Nakagami-m, K-distribution, Weibull, Negative-Exponential, Inverse-Gaussian, G-G, and Fisher-Snedecor F distributions. This paper extensive
... Show MoreA Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA 2) approach for solving the multi-objective Environmental / Economic Power Dispatch (EEPD) problem is presented in this paper. In the past fuel cost consumption minimization was the aim (a single objective function) of economic power dispatch problem. Since the clean air act amendments have been applied to reduce SO2 and NOX emissions from power plants, the utilities change their strategies in order to reduce pollution and atmospheric emission as well, adding emission minimization as other objective function made economic power dispatch (EPD) a multi-objective problem having conflicting objectives. SPEA2 is the improved version of SPEA with better fitness assignment, density estimation, an
... Show MoreA variety of new phenolic Schiff bases derivatives have been synthesized starting from Terephthaladehyde compound, all proposed structures were supported by FTIR, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR, Elemental analysis, some derivatives evaluated by Thermal analysis (TGA).
In this paper a method to determine whether an image is forged (spliced) or not is presented. The proposed method is based on a classification model to determine the authenticity of a tested image. Image splicing causes many sharp edges (high frequencies) and discontinuities to appear in the spliced image. Capturing these high frequencies in the wavelet domain rather than in the spatial domain is investigated in this paper. Correlation between high-frequency sub-bands coefficients of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is also described using co-occurrence matrix. This matrix was an input feature vector to a classifier. The best accuracy of 92.79% and 94.56% on Casia v1.0 and Casia v2.0 datasets respectively was achieved. This pe
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