Quality and employability in higher education: the case of Saudi Arabia.

Modem higher education is a cooperation of stakeholder s. Its development should be viewed only in terms of curricula quality and graduates employability. Because the Saudi system is relatively new and grows rapidly, while confronted with traditions and difficulties, neither of the above objectives is distinctly accomplished to fully fulfil the ambition of national growth. This thesis critically investigated the approach of Saudi Universities. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was employed for this purpose. Subjects were from King Saud University, including students, graduates, teaching staff, and academic managers. Shortage in pertinent information made the research heavily dependent on fieldwork data. The main focus was on factors responsible for defects in quality and employability. The correlation between these two issues provided a better understanding of undergraduate education, including assessment of Student's learning, especially when the latter is taken as an indicator of the former. The findings suggest a need for change in the Saudi higher education system to bring about Substantive incorporation of packages of general skills, including employability skills, and modularisation in its programmes. However, this approach must not be adopted at the expense of either subject matter or Saudi culture. Integration of the above three elements into study courses is an ideal preference from the participant's Standpoints. Recommendations were forwarded to aid and improve the introduction of these new thoughts. But their prompt qualification is likely to be a matter of a more definitive decision. In Saudi Arabia, there is a demand for an extra academic provision to accommodate the change besides expected increase in student numbers, institutions expansion and disciplinary diversification. Finally, elimination of gender distinction is a real challenge. This obstacle does not seem to be reconcilable with Islamic principles as well as with the pervading and rapidly changing higher education demands

The quaternionic commutator bracket and its implications

A quaternionic commutator bracket for position and momentum shows that the quaternionic wave function, \emph{viz.} $\widetilde{\psi}=(\frac{i}{c}\,\psi_0\,,\vec{\psi})$, represents a state of a particle with orbital angular momentum, $L=3\,\hbar$, resulting from the internal structure of the particle. This angular momentum can be attributed to spin of the particle. The vector $\vec{\psi}$, points along the direction of $\vec{L}$. When a charged particle is placed in an electromagnetic fields the interaction energy reveals that the magnetic moments interact with the electric and magnetic fields giving rise to terms similar to Aharonov-Bohm and Aharonov-Casher effects.Comment: 8 page

Phase Space description of Nonlocal Teleparallel Gravity

We study cosmological solutions in nonlocal teleparallel gravity or $f(T)$ theory, where $T$ is the torsion scalar in teleparallel gravity. This is a natural extenstion of the usual teleparallel gravity with nonlocal terms. In this work the phase space portrait proposed to describe the dynamics of an arbitrary flat, homogeneous cosmological background with a number of matter contents, both in early and late time epochs. The aim was to convert the system of the equations of the motion to a first order autonomous dynamical system and to find fixed points and attractors using numerical codes. For this purpose, firstly we derive effective forms of cosmological field equations describing the whole cosmic evolution history in a homogeneous and isotropic cosmological background and construct the autonomous system of the first order dynamical equations. In addition, we investigate the local stability in the dynamical systems called "the stable/unstable manifold" by introducing a specific form of the interaction between matter, dark energy, radiation and a scalar field. Furthermore, we explore the exact solutions of the cosmological equations in the case of de Sitter spacetime. In particular, we examine the role of an auxiliary function called "gauge" $\eta$ in the formation of such cosmological solutions and show whether the de Sitter solutions can exist or not. Moreover, we study the stability issue of the de Sitter solutions both in vacuum and non-vacuum spacetimes. It is demonstrated that for nonlocal $f(T)$ gravity, the stable de Sitter solutions can be produced even in vacuum spacetime.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, title changed, version accepted for publication in European Physical Journal

A new English–Arabic parallel text corpus for lexicographic applications

Bilingual lexicographers, translation specialists and English teachers in the Arab world do not have access to computerized corpora of parallel texts for the English–Arabic language pair. This project has been carried out to meet this requirement by establishing the first general parallel corpus of English texts and their Arabic translations. The first phase of the project involved the selection of general source texts having appropriate lexical and stylistic features. The chosen source texts deal with a variety of topics such as the environment, globalization, psychology, history, politics, drama, etc. Their Arabic translations were taken from The World of Knowledge series published by the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL) in Kuwait. Keywords: parallel corpus, lexicography, translation, bilingual dictionary, collocations, alignment, synonyms, derivatives, antonyms, glossary, frequenc