EXPLORING ENGLISH INSTRUCTORS\u27 PERCEPTIONS AND ACTUAL PRACTICES REGARDING THE STRATEGIES USED IN TEACHING AND ASSESSING WRITING IN THREE TERTIARY EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS IN THE SULTANATE OF OMAN

The aim of this study was to explore the perceptions and practices of ESL/EFL instructors in teaching and assessing writing in three tertiary educational institutions in the Sultanate of Oman (Al Buraimi University College, University of Buraimi, and Sohar University). The researcher used the quantitative and qualitative methods in the study. The data was gathered through a questionnaire (n=147), 15 interviews (n=15), and 18 classroom observations (n=10). The findings of this study revealed that the majority of ESL/EFL instructors believe in and practice aspects of the process- and product-oriented approaches for teaching academic writing in Oman. Many ESL/EFL instructors believe in teaching vocabulary that students may use in their assigned writing and equally they believe in teaching students different genres and/or texts. Other common strategies that ESL/EFL instructors agreed on were generating ideas about the assigned topic before the start of the task and asking students to make a pre-writing plan. ESL/EFL instructors do believe in portfolios and written essays as tools to assess students writing, which are also practiced in their classroom. However, their belief contradicted their practice in areas like: making students write individually or in group, or both; using analytic or holistic rubrics, or both; and assessing content or grammar first, or both. One of the main recommendations that the researcher addressed to the ESL/EFL instructors is that their choices of writing strategies should be based on students\u27 needs. There should be a balance between the students need to meet the learning outcomes and helping students to communicate creatively in English. This is by vii replacing the traditional exams with more creative and authentic process of writing. Also, the researcher addressed the Omani institutions of Higher Education to keep the writing classes manageable for ESL/EFL writing instructors. Furthermore, the researcher recommended that the learning outcomes must not only be idealistic, but also realistic. The standards for evaluation must be accessible for the ESL/EFL students in Omani Colleges and Universities. They must be challenging without being off-putting. The last recommendation was addressed to Omani researchers who are led by the Sultan Qaboos University, to set up a national, updated and comprehensive databas

Study of Fuzzy Logic-based Controller for Diff-Serv Bandwidth Broking

Combining both voice and data on the same network infrastructure results in need for an advanced network which is to be simple and scalable.  This resulted in new approach for Ethernet where Differentiated Service (Diff-Serv) is introduced. This is taken into consideration as well as QoS as a way of providing class of service to end users. Therefore, optimizing available bandwidth efficacy is one of the goals of this work which is centered on investigating the impact of crucial factors on performance of implementing a fuzzy logic controller. These factors can be external or internal and will be manipulated by Fuzzy Logic controller that will work as bandwidth broker to give each user his optimal Code Point (CP). In this work, the CP will not only consider packet loss rate as external factor  to check the congestion, but it will also consider the internal factors which are a combination of both service-level agreement (SLA) and the type of application being used. This CP will be marked in the transmitted packets, and then the router will check that and will treat it as agreed between user and administrator

Reduced graphene oxide uwb array sensor : High performance for brain tumor imaging and detection

A low cost, with high performance, reduced graphene oxide (RGO) Ultra-wide Band (UWB) array sensor is presented to be applied with a technique of confocal radar-based microwave imaging to recognize a tumor in a human brain. RGO is used to form its patches on a Taconic substrate. The sensor functioned in a range of 1.2 to 10.8 GHz under UWB frequency. The sensor demonstrates high gain of 5.2 to 14.5 dB, with the small size of 90 mm × 45 mm2, which can be easily integrated into microwave imaging systems and allow the best functionality. Moreover, the novel UWB RGO array sensor is established as a detector with a phantom of the human head. The layers’ structure represents liquid-imitating tissues that consist of skin, fat, skull, and brain. The sensor will scan nine different points to cover the whole one-sided head phantom to obtain equally distributed reflected signals under two different situations, namely the existence and absence of the tumor. In order to accurately detect the tumor by producing sharper and clearer microwave image, the Matrix Laboratory software is used to improve the microwave imaging algorithm (delay and sum) including summing the imaging algorithm and recording the scattering parameters. The existence of a tumor will produce images with an error that is lower than 2 cm

5.8 GHz circularly polarized rectangular microstrip antenna arrays simulation for point-to-point application

In this paper, the design and simulation of rectangular microstrip antenna arrays for improving antenna gain is performed for point-to-point application. The circular polarization is proposed to restrict the limitation of linear polarization which is less reliable in base station antenna. The circular polarization antenna is made to allow the receiver constantly to receive the power at any wave angle and make the transmission between two antennas are more constant. The proposed design is composed of four elements microstrip antenna with an array configuration operating at 5.8 GHz. Each element is constructed from four truncated arrays radiating elements and an inclined slot on each patch which capable to achieve circular polarized capability. The design of the 2x1 and 2x2 of rectangular microstrip array antenna was implemented from the design of single rectangular patch antenna as the basic building element. The designed 2x1 and 2x2 array were fed by microstrip transmission line which applied a technique of quarter wave impedance matching. The antenna design was etched on Rogers RT 5880 substrate with 2.1 and 1.53 mm of dielectric constant and thickness respectively. All the designed structure were simulated in CST software. The main results of the designed antennas were compared in terms of gain, axial ratio and return loss. Based on the return loss simulation results, the designed antennas resonated exactly at the desired resonant frequency of 5.8 GHz which indicates good antenna designs. Compared to the single patch antenna having an antenna gain of 8.26 dB, the 2x1 and 2x2 arrays achieved a gain of 10.24 dB and 13.29 dB respectively. The results show that the designed rectangular microstrip antenna arrays have an improved gain performance over the single patch antenna

Evaluating Candidate Answers Based on Derivative Lexical Similarity and Space Padding for the Arabic Language

Part 1: Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), Internet of Things (IoT)International audienceCharacter difference represents one of the most common problems that can be occurred when students try to answer questions of fill in the gaps or one-word answer that is needed mostly to one word as the answer. To improve the evolution of the student answer using Hamming distance, we proposed Hamming model tried to solve the drawbacks of the standard Hamming model by applying the stemming approach to achieve derivative lexical similarity and applying the space padding to deal with unequal lengths of the texts

Fluoren-9-one oxime

In the title molecule, C13H9NO, the fluorene system and the oxime group non-H atoms are essentially coplanar, with a maximum deviation from the fluorene mean plane of 0.079 (2) Å for the oxime O atom. A short intramolecular C—H...O generates an S(6) ring. In the crystal, molecules related by a twofold screw axis are connected by O—H...N hydrogen bonds, forming [100] chains Within these chains, molecules related by a unit translation along [100] show π–π stacking interactions between their fluorene ring systems with an interplanar distance of 3.347 (2) Å. The dihedral angle between the fluorene units of adjacent molecules along the helix is 88.40 (2)°. There is a short C—H...π contact between the fluorene groups belonging to neighbouring chains

Gene Expression-Based Cancer Classification for Handling the Class Imbalance Problem and Curse of Dimensionality

Cancer is a leading cause of death globally. The majority of cancer cases are only diagnosed in the late stages of cancer due to the use of conventional methods. This reduces the chance of survival for cancer patients. Therefore, early detection consequently followed by early diagnoses are important tasks in cancer research. Gene expression microarray technology has been applied to detect and diagnose most types of cancers in their early stages and has gained encouraging results. In this paper, we address the problem of classifying cancer based on gene expression for handling the class imbalance problem and the curse of dimensionality. The oversampling technique is utilized to overcome this problem by adding synthetic samples. Another common issue related to the gene expression dataset addressed in this paper is the curse of dimensionality. This problem is addressed by applying chi-square and information gain feature selection techniques. After applying these techniques individually, we proposed a method to select the most significant genes by combining those two techniques (CHiS and IG). We investigated the effect of these techniques individually and in combination. Four benchmarking biomedical datasets (Leukemia-subtypes, Leukemia-ALLAML, Colon, and CuMiDa) were used. The experimental results reveal that the oversampling techniques improve the results in most cases. Additionally, the performance of the proposed feature selection technique outperforms individual techniques in nearly all cases. In addition, this study provides an empirical study for evaluating several oversampling techniques along with ensemble-based learning. The experimental results also reveal that SVM-SMOTE, along with the random forests classifier, achieved the highest results, with a reporting accuracy of 100%. The obtained results surpass the findings in the existing literature as well