Ethical issues in e-learning.

E-Iearning is becoming a fast growing sector of higher education. Although there are many advantages of e-Iearning, yet there are some ethical issues related to e-Iearning. This paper provides a general overview of such ethical issues. It also provides some strategies to overcome them

Massively Parallel Video Networks

We introduce a class of causal video understanding models that aims to improve efficiency of video processing by maximising throughput, minimising latency, and reducing the number of clock cycles. Leveraging operation pipelining and multi-rate clocks, these models perform a minimal amount of computation (e.g. as few as four convolutional layers) for each frame per timestep to produce an output. The models are still very deep, with dozens of such operations being performed but in a pipelined fashion that enables depth-parallel computation. We illustrate the proposed principles by applying them to existing image architectures and analyse their behaviour on two video tasks: action recognition and human keypoint localisation. The results show that a significant degree of parallelism, and implicitly speedup, can be achieved with little loss in performance.Comment: Fixed typos in densenet model definition in appendi

Student Teachers’ Perceptions about Their Experiences in a Student Centered Course

There is a growing need to provide curricula that meets the changing needs of students in higher education. To trainpre-service teachers according to the demands of the new educational contexts, the move from teacher-centered curricula to learning-centered curricula is a must. The aim of this research is to examine the currently used  curriculum of EGIT 450 Student Centered Education (SCE) course to highlight suggestions for a better design and implementation of the SCE approach. A qualitative paradigm was used with an interpretive methodology. The participants of the study were the 37 third year undergraduate students enrolled in the course at one of the tertiary institutions in North Cyprus. Qualitative data were collected through end-of-the-semester reflective essays and analyzed through content analysis method. The findings revealed that SCE methodology helped improve student teachers’ cognitive skills via holding an active role and their affective skills through group work activities emphasizing its effect on permanent learning and learning how to learn. Participants also pointed out the difficulty and complexity of the roles expected from the teacher and learners individually and cooperatively. The inefficiency of some of the teaching-learning activities, physical characteristics of the classroom setting and duration of the allocated time for the activities were among the weak aspects of the course.Keywords: affective skills, course design, cognitive skills, curriculum design, student centered educatio

Novel mechanism to improve Hadith classifier performance

Abstract— Muslims believe that the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad (SAAW) is the second of the two revealed fundamental sources of Islam, after the Holy Qur'an. Hadith provides a Gold Standard "ground truth" for Artificial Intelligent (AI) knowledge extraction and knowledge representation experiments. In the present study, the extracted Islamic knowledge represented the focal point of the research; three famous books in Hadith science framed the corpus of the study. This study attempted to explore new approach to classify Hadith using a combination of the expert system and data mining techniques to classify Hadith according to its validity degree (Sahih, Hasan, Da'eef and Maudo'), the proposed Hadith Classifier model was built through learning process, Decision Tree (DT) classifier modeling had been represented by the tree structure model, and the attributes of the instances originally were obtained from the source books. Whilst some attributes were indicated as null values, or missing values. A novel mechanism called missing data detector (MDD) was employed to handle these missing data. This mechanism simulated the Isnad verification methods in Hadith science. The results of the research were compared with the resource books, concurrently with the point of view of the experts in the Hadith science. The findings of the research showed that the performance of DT Hadith classifier had significant effect with MDD, the CCR was sharply increased from (50.1502 %) to (97.597%) Furthermore, the favorable obtained results indicated that the DT Modeling is a viable approach to classify Hadith due to the ease of rules induction and results interpretation

The effect of external factors on the students' acceptance of virtual learning.

The rapidly growing popularity of E-Learning has introduced new terms to education, as virtual learning. The success of a virtual learning environment (VLE) depends on a considerable extent of student acceptance and use of such an e-Iearning system. The current study introduces an overview of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Furthermore, it builds a conceptual model to explain the differences between individual students in the level of acceptance and use of a VLE. This model is an extension of TAM. The primary findings of the study show that perceived of peer encouragement (PPE) has direct influence on the students' attitude to use virtual learning. Computer self-efficacy (CSE) and enjoyment (EN) have direct effect on the students' intention to use virtual learning, whilst, the cultural factor (CF) has indirect effects mediated by TAM

Manpower model for human resource planning management

Human resource planning has traditionally been used by organizations to ensure that the right person is in the right job at the right time. The increasing of environmental instability, demographic shifts, changes in technology, and heightened international competition are changing the need for and the nature of human resource planning in leading organizations. Therefore, it is required to have a appropriate tool to assist management in order to present overview and visibility of manpower numbers by deciding the effect of variables on the optimal level of manpower force. This tool shall be the one-stop information gateway for users to achieve

Çevreye İlişkin Bir Tutum Ölçeği Geliştirme Çalışması

The purpose of this study is to develop a valid and reliable Likert- type scale to measure the attitudes of pre-service teachers toward the environment. A 30-item draft attitude scale was applied to 366 pre-service teachers who had attended fundamental physics, chemistry and biology courses (some of them had attended ecology courses) at the Education and Science- Art Faculties at Dicle University during 2002- 2003 spring term. To test the validity of the scale and find out its sub-dimensions, a factor analysis was used and five sub-dimensions were found. The first dimension measured anxiety, the second dimension measured enjoyment, the third dimension measured participation, the fourth dimensions measured the importance of the environment and fifth measured the students’ interest for environmental education. The Kaiser-Meyer- Olkin (KMO) value was 0.84 and the Barlett Test value was 1124.6. The reliability Cofficient (Cronbach alpha) for the whole scale was found to be 0.88. The Cronchbach alpha values for the sub- dimensions were 0.74, 0.77, 0.64, 0.66, and 0.53 respectively.Bu çalışmanın amacı, öğretmen adaylarının çevreye ilişkin tutumlarını belirleyen geçerli ve güvenilir Likert tipi bir tutum ölçeği geliştirmektir. 30 maddeden oluşan tutum ölçeği taslağı, 2002-2003 öğretim yılının ikinci yarıyılında Dicle Üniversitesi, Eğitim ve Fen -Edebiyat fakültelerinde öğrenim gören ve temel fizik, temel biyoloji ile temel kimya (bazıları çevre bilimi) derslerini okumuş olan 366 öğretmen adayına uygulanmıştır. Testin geçerliğini belirlemek ve alt boyutlarını bulmak için faktör analizi uygulandı ve beş alt boyut bulundu. Birinci boyut kaygıyı, ikinci boyut hoşlanmayı, üçüncü boyut katılmayı, dördüncü boyut çevre eğitiminin önemini ve beşinci boyut ise çevre eğitimine olan öğrenci ilgisini ölçmektedir. Ölçeğin KMO (Kaiser- Meyer- Olkin) değeri 0,84, Barlett Testi değeri ise 1124,6 olarak bulunmuştur.Ölçeğin bütünü için hesaplanan güvenirlik katsayısı (Cronbach Alpha) değeri 0,88, alt boyutlar için ise sırayla 0,74, 0,77, 0,64, 0,66, 0,53 olarak bulunmuştur

Self-assembling nanoparticles containing dexamethasone as a novel therapy in allergic airways inflammation.

Nanocarriers can deliver a wide variety of drugs, target them to sites of interest, and protect them from degradation and inactivation by the body. They have the capacity to improve drug action and decrease undesirable systemic effects. We have previously developed a well-defined non-toxic PEG-dendritic block telodendrimer for successful delivery of chemotherapeutics agents and, in these studies, we apply this technology for therapeutic development in asthma. In these proof-of-concept experiments, we hypothesized that dexamethasone contained in self-assembling nanoparticles (Dex-NP) and delivered systemically would target the lung and decrease allergic lung inflammation and airways hyper-responsiveness to a greater degree than equivalent doses of dexamethasone (Dex) alone. We found that ovalbumin (Ova)-exposed mice treated with Dex-NP had significantly fewer total cells (2.78 ± 0.44 × 10(5) (n = 18) vs. 5.98 ± 1.3 × 10(5) (n = 13), P<0.05) and eosinophils (1.09 ± 0.28 × 10(5) (n = 18) vs. 2.94 ± 0.6 × 10(5) (n = 12), p<0.05) in the lung lavage than Ova-exposed mice alone. Also, lower levels of the inflammatory cytokines IL-4 (3.43 ± 1.2 (n = 11) vs. 8.56 ± 2.1 (n = 8) pg/ml, p<0.05) and MCP-1 (13.1 ± 3.6 (n = 8) vs. 28.8 ± 8.7 (n = 10) pg/ml, p<0.05) were found in lungs of the Dex-NP compared to control, and they were not lower in the Dex alone group. In addition, respiratory system resistance was lower in the Dex-NP compared to the other Ova-exposed groups suggesting a better therapeutic effect on airways hyperresponsiveness. Taken together, these findings from early-stage drug development studies suggest that the encapsulation and protection of anti-inflammatory agents such as corticosteroids in nanoparticle formulations can improve efficacy. Further development of novel drugs in nanoparticles is warranted to explore potential treatments for chronic inflammatory diseases such as asthma

Radiation Patterns Account of a Circular Microstrip Antenna Loaded Two Annular

In this paper, theoretical study of circular microstrip antenna loaded two annular (CMSAL2AR) and calculation of the radiation pattern using principle equivalence with moment of method formulation of electromagnetic radiation in this these based on the bodies of revolution (BoR), which are generated by revolution a planar curve about an axis called axis of symmetry to solving the electric fields integral equation (EFIE) and magnetic field integral equation (MFIE). To find an unknown electric current density  on the conductor surface ,and both unknowns electric and magnetic density  current on the dielectric surface which are  responsible for the generation of far fields radiation in the space for the components (Eθ ,Eφ) ,the surface currents was represented by a set of basis functions that give the Fourier series because the body has a circular symmetry property and then select a set of weighted  functions to find a linear system by using.......