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

Image compression plays an important role in reducing the size and storage of data while increasing the speed of its transmission through the Internet significantly. Image compression is an important research topic for several decades and recently, with the great successes achieved by deep learning in many areas of image processing, especially image compression, and its use is increasing Gradually in the field of image compression. The deep learning neural network has also achieved great success in the field of processing and compressing various images of different sizes. In this paper, we present a structure for image compression based on the use of a Convolutional AutoEncoder (CAE) for deep learning, inspired by the diversity of human eye

Voting is an important procedure in democratic societies in different countries, including Iraq. Electronic voting (E-voting) is becoming more prevalent due to reducing administrative costs and burdens. E-voting systems have many restrictions that affect the electoral process. For example, fraud, tampering with ballot boxes, taking many hours to announce results, and the difficulty of reaching polling stations. Over the last decade, blockchain and smart contract technologies have gained widespread adoption in various sectors, such as cryptocurrencies, finance, banking, and most notably in e-voting systems. If utilized properly, the developer demonstrates properties that are promising for their properties, such as security, privacy, trans

Optical fiber chemical sensor based surface Plasmon resonance for sensing and measuring the refractive index and concentration for Acetic acid is designed and implemented during this work. Optical grade plastic optical fibers with a diameter of 1000μm were used with a diameter core of 980μm and a cladding of 20μm, where the sensor is fabricated by a small part (10mm) of optical fiber in the middle is embedded in a resin block and then the polishing process is done, after that it is deposited with about (40nm) thickness of gold metal and the Acetic acid is placed on the sensing probe.

The subject of an valuation of quality of construction projects is one of the topics which it becomes necessary of the absence of the quantity standards in measuring the control works and the quality valuation standards in constructional projects. In the time being it depends on the experience of the workers which leads to an apparent differences in the valuation.

The idea of this research came to put the standards to evaluate the quality of the projects in a special system depending on quantity scale nor quality specifying in order to prepare an expert system “ Crystal “ to apply this special system to able the engineers to valuate the quality of their projects easily and in more accurate ways.

In this paper, we have employed a computation of three technique to reduce the computational complexity and bit rate for compressed image. These techniques are bit plane coding based on two absolute values, vector quantization VQ technique using Cache codebook and Weber's low condition. The experimental results show that the proposed techniques achieve reduce the storage size of bit plane and low computational complexity.

Image registration plays a significant role in the medical image processing field. This paper proposes a development on the accuracy and performance of the Speeded-Up Robust Surf (SURF) algorithm to create Extended Field of View (EFoV) Ultrasound (US) images through applying different matching measures. These measures include Euclidean distance, cityblock distance, variation, and correlation in the matching stage that was built in the SURF algorithm. The US image registration (fusion) was implemented depending on the control points obtained from the used matching measures. The matched points with higher frequency algorithm were proposed in this work to perform and enhance the EFoV for the US images, since the maximum accurate matching po

Diyala Governorate has many unique and diverse geomorphological features that the region enjoys, which are among the attractions for natural tourism, as the natural environment is considered a maker of tourism. The importance of geomorphological aspects as components of natural tourism is due to their association with tourism and entertainment, as a result of the enjoyment of many geomorphological aspects of the beauty of its natural landscape on the one hand, and on the other hand, the association of these manifestations with different types of tourism activity. Any tourist area as it is the main factor for tourist attractions, such as the presence of the Hamrin hills, and sand dunes. Planning for the development of tourism activity in the