The Usefulness of Explicit Grammar Teaching: An lnvestigation of Syntactic Satiation Effects and Acceptability Judgements in Libyan EFL Contexts.

This study explores the possibility that techniques based on ‘syntactic priming’, a tendency to produce utterances with structures individuals have recently been exposed to, and ‘syntactic satiation’, which leads individuals to judge previously unacceptable utterances as acceptable, can be used to evaluate second language teaching methods. This is based on the assumption that the more robust an individual’s linguistic intuitions, the less susceptible they are to priming or satiation effects. An experimental methodology was developed and used to compare the effectiveness of the explicit (‘Grammar Translation’) method currently used to teach English in Libyan universities with an implicit (‘Direct’) method. Both methods present only positive evidence, i.e. what are assumed to be grammatical forms, and do not present what are assumed to be ungrammatical forms. The study assumed a ‘Principles and Parameters’ approach on which second language learning involves setting or resetting parameters to those relevant to the language being acquired. It focused on the ‘verb raising parameter’, which has different settings in Arabic and English, and on yes-no questions and adverb placement, whose structures are partly determined by the setting of this parameter. One group of participants was taught using the explicit method and one using the implicit method. After teaching, each group was exposed to activities designed to induce priming and satiation. For yes-no questions, the results showed robust intuitions for both groups. For adverb placement, they showed susceptibility to priming and satiation effects for the group taught using the implicit method. The findings are limited in what they suggest about the two teaching methods but they showed that both methods were effective in teaching these forms. They confirm that priming and satiation effects can arise in a second language and suggest that activities designed to induce these effects could provide a way of evaluating particular teaching methods

A Novel Image Encryption Using an Integration Technique of Blocks Rotation Based on the Magic Cube and the AES Algorithm

In recent years, several encryption algorithms have been proposed to protect digital images from cryptographic attacks. These encryption algorithms typically use a relatively small key space and therefore, provide safe, especially if they are of a dimension. In this paper proposes an encryption algorithm for a new image protection scheme based on the rotation of the faces of a Magic Cube. The original image is divided into six sub-images and these sub-images are divided amongst a number of blocks and attached to the faces of a Magic Cube. The faces are then scrambled using rotation of the Magic Cube. Then the rotated image is fed to the AES algorithm which is applied to the pixels of the image to encrypt the scrambled image. Finally, experimental results and security analysis show that the proposed image encryption scheme not only encrypts the picture to achieve perfect hiding, but the algorithm can also withstand exhaustive, statistical and differential attacks

Investigating the actin regulatory activities of Las17, the WASp homologue in S. cerevisiae

Clathrin mediated endocytosis (CME) in S. cerevisiae requires the dynamic interplay between many proteins at the plasma membrane. Actin polymerisation provides force to drive membrane invagination and vesicle scission. The WASp homologue in yeast, Las17 plays a major role in stimulating actin filament assembly during endocytosis. The actin nucleation ability of WASP family members is attributed to their WCA domain [WH2 (WASP homology2) domain, C central, and A (acidic) domains] which provides binding sites for both actin monomers and the Arp2/3 complex. In addition, the central poly-proline repeat region of Las17 is able to bind and nucleate actin filaments independently of the Arp2/3 complex. While Las17 is a key regulator of endocytic progression and has been found to be phosphorylated in global studies, the mechanism behind regulation of Las17 actin-based function is unclear. Therefore, the aims of this study were to investigate the post-translation modification of Las17 by phosphorylation, and to determine how this modification impacts on Las17 function both in vivo and in vitro

Phosphorylation of the WH2 domain in yeast Las17/WASP regulates G-actin binding and protein function during endocytosis

Actin nucleation is the key rate limiting step in the process of actin polymerization, and tight regulation of this process is critical to ensure actin filaments form only at specific times and at defined regions of the cell. WH2 domains are short sequence motifs found in many different actin binding proteins including WASP family proteins which regulate the actin nucleating complex Arp2/3. In this study we reveal a phosphorylation site, Serine 554, within the WH2 domain of the yeast WASP homologue Las17. Both phosphorylation and a phospho-mimetic mutation reduce actin monomer binding affinity while an alanine mutation, generated to mimic the non-phosphorylated state, increases actin binding affinity. The effect of these mutations on the Las17-dependent process of endocytosis in vivo was analysed and leads us to propose that switching of Las17 phosphorylation states may allow progression through distinct phases of endocytosis from site assembly through to the final scission stage. While the study is focused on Las17, the sole WASP family protein in yeast, our results have broad implications for our understanding of how a key residue in this conserved motif can underpin the many different actin regulatory roles with which WH2 domains have been associated

Metaphor Detection in Poems in Misurata Arabic Sub-Dialect : An LSTM Model

Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Arabic is witnessing an increasing interest in investigating different topics in the field. One of the topics that have drawn attention is the automatic processing of Arabic figurative language. The focus in previous projects is on detecting and interpreting metaphors in comments from social media as well as phrases and/or headlines from news articles. The current project focuses on metaphor detection in poems written in the Misurata Arabic sub-dialect spoken in Misurata, located in the North African region. The dataset is initially annotated by a group of linguists, and their annotation is treated as the seed data used in the project. Moreover, the verses in the dataset are annotated by layman native speakers of the sub-dialect who are not acquainted with the rhetorical principles of this kind of poetry. The model applied in the project is built on the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture. The aim is to compare the performance of the model to the performance of human annotators who are not experts in the Arabic figurative language used in poetry. The results show that the model outperforms the output provided by the human annotators and scores a higher score of 79%. In addition, the model scores an 80.7 % accuracy score in predicting metaphors from unseen blind data. Since Arabic sub-dialects are acquired as a native language, it becomes important to develop NLP models that can be trained on these informal varieties of Arabic in order to fulfill many tasks such as auto-correction, machine translation, dialogue systems, and sentiment analysis among others

A New Image Scrambling Technique using Block Rotation Algorithm based on Rubik’s Cube

Background:. Image scrambling is a useful approach to secure the image data by scrambling the image into an unintelligible format. The relationship among the adjacent pixels of image is very high. Also, Most image scrambling algorithms apply one iteration level scrambling that cause a high possibility of occurs the weakness of visual leakage on the image scrambling algorithm which can be reflected by the corresponding scrambled image. Objectives: the objective of this paper is to develop a new efficient image scrambling algorithm by using the Rotation technique in order to break the relationship among image elements (pixels). Thus, to develop an efficient scheme to generate non fixed iteration in the image scrambling algorithm in order to eliminate the problem of visual leakage. Results: The results show that the correlation between image elements has been significantly decreased using the proposed technique, and higher entropy has been achieved. Furthermore, implies a high similarity and a good quality of the retrieved image compared to the original image. Conclusion: This paper proposes a new scramble algorithm which can be produced by a series of rotation the rows and the columns into six sub-image that attached to the faces of the virtual Rubik’s cube. The first part of the algorithm aims to build a rotation table using hash function within scramble phase and descramble phase to generate a scrambled (rotated) image and the retrieved image. The second part of the algorithm uses the rotation table resulted from the first part of the algorithm to generate newly rotated image (Scrambled) in which the rows and the columns of the original image are rotated after divide it to six sub-image and attach then to the faces of the virtual Rubik’s cube . This makes the scrambled images difficult to decode thus providing a high level of security protection for the images. The algorithm can be applied in the real-time applications since it is a straightforward process and easily implemented

A New Image Scrambling Approach using Block-Based on Shifted Algorithm

Image scrambling is a useful approach to secure the image data by scrambling the image into an unintelligible format. This paper proposes a new scramble algorithm which can be produced by a series of shifting the rows and the columns. The first part of the algorithm aims to build a shifted table using hash function within scramble phase and descramble phase to generate an scrambled (shifted) image and the retrieved image. The second part of the algorithm uses the shifted table resulted from the first part of the algorithm to generate newly shifted image (Scrambled) in which the rows and the columns of the original image are shifted. This makes the scrambled images difficult to decode thus providing a high level of security protection for the images. The results show that the correlation between image elements has been significantly decreased using the proposed technique, and higher entropy has been achieved. Furthermore, implies a high similarity and a good quality of the retrieved image compared to the original image. The algorithm can be applied in the real-time applications since it is a straightforward process and easily implemented

A Novel Reversible Data Hiding Technique with High Capacity and Less Overhead Information

In this paper, a new reversible image hiding scheme based on histogram shifting for grayscale images is proposed. As is known, the payload storage of histogram-based reversible data hiding is impacted by the overhead information of the pixel positions that have to be embedded in a cover image. To solve this problem, the cover image is divided into two parts, namely the Most Significant Part (MSP) and the Least Significant Part (LSP), secret data is hidden by shifting the histogram of the most significant part. To increase the payload of embedded data in a cover image, the proposed algorithm reduces the number of bits that represent the secret data without any corruption of that secret data. In addition, overflow and underflow problems are prevented by categorization of the histogram into three categories. According to the experimental results, the cover image is recovered correctly. A higher hiding capacity can be obtained and a good quality marked image is preserved when the proposed scheme is applied to hide the secret data by shifting the histogram of the most significant part instead of hiding by shifting the histogram of the whole cover image