The Effectiveness of Scientific Stations Strategy in Achievement of the Seventh Grade Students in Dictation

The study aims to examine  the effectiveness of using the “scientific stations strategy” for grade seven students,  achievement in dictation in the Sultanate of Oman. In order to achieve this, the researchers prepared an achievement test and a guideline for   executing the strategy. The tool was checked for validity by a panel of area experts.  The reliability of the test was 0.84 as determined by Cronbach’s Alpha. The study sample consisted of two groups, where 24 female students  were taught dictation according to the scientific stations strategy, and 18 students were taught by the conventional method. The results of the post test showed that there is a statistically  significant difference in the mean scores between the two groups, in favour of the experimental group. Based on  these results, the researchers recommended making use of the science stations strategy by training teachers to use it in teaching dictation and in other language areas

Trading of cloud of things resources

Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) continue to emerge as revolutionary paradigms to support wide range of real world scenarios. They promise benefits for increasing number of applications, including health, smart cities, smart homes, smart logistics, video surveillance, energy and environmental monitoring. Independent deployments of each technology have issues that can be resolved partially or fully by integrating Cloud and IoT. This integration forms a new paradigm that is called Cloud of Things (CoT)supporting Everything as a Service (XaaS) service model. Despite the issues integration resolves, the integrated services will suffer from issues that Cloud and IoT offerings previously encountered. This includes interoperability, ambiguous SLAs, QoS, elasticity and reliability concerns. This paper argues that commoditising CoT resources will help resolving these issues. This paper aims to; 1) review the state-of-the-art in CoT literature 2) propose a conceptual model for CoT marketplace and its basic trading processes

Modified Le Fort I Osteotomy and Genioplasty for Management of Severe Dentofacial Deformity in β-Thalassaemia Major: Case report and review of the literature

β-thalassaemia major is an autosomal recessive form of haemoglobinopathy that is characterised by complete lack of production of the β-chains resulting in multiple complications that include severe anaemia, failure to thrive and skeletal abnormalities. Facial deformities induced by β-thalassaemia major are rare and are very challenging to treat from a surgical point of view. We report a 33-year-old female patient with β-thalassaemia major who presented to the Dental & Maxillofacial Surgery Department, Sultan Qaboos University Hospital, Muscat, Oman, in 2017 with gross dentofacial skeletal deformity contributing to her psychosocial issues. The facial deformity was corrected surgically by excision of the enlarged maxilla, modified Le Fort I osteotomy and advancement genioplasty. This case highlights the pre-operative preparation, surgical management, encountered complications and treatment outcome within 24 months of follow-up.Keywords: Beta-Thalassaemia; Thalassaemia Major; Cooley's Anemia; Le Fort Osteotomy; Genioplasty; Dentofacial Deformities; Case Report; Oman

Investigating the Association between Organizational Differences and the Implementation of ISO 9001:2000

Abstract This paper reports on the results of a study investigating the issue of whether aspects relating to the implementation of ISO 9001:2000 quality management standard differ according to organization size or sector type. Data required for this study were collected from 42 randomly selected organizations of different size and sector type operating in the Sultanate of Oman. The results show that there is no strong evidence to suggest that the motives for implementation, the process and cost of achieving certification, the perceived benefits, and the shortcomings differ significantly according to organization size or sector type. The main outcome of this study is that the issue of organization size or sector type should not be a factor in deciding upon certification

Antiglycation and Antioxidant Activities and HPTLC Analysis of Boswellia sacra Oleogum Resin: The Sacred Frankincense

Purpose: To evaluate antiglycation and antioxidant activities as undertake HPTLC analysis of Boswellia sacra resin.Methods: Sub-fractionation of the crude methanol extract of Hougari regular (HR) grade resin of Boswellia sacra was carried out by vacuum liquid chromatography. Free radical scavenging and antiglycation activities of sub-fractions were characterized in order to assess their anti-aging properties. Furthermore, high performance thin layer chromatography (HPTLC) analysis of Boswellia sacra resins was also carried out.Results: Polar fractions of the extract obtained exhibited the highest antiglycation activity while nonpolar fractions showed more than 50 % inhibition in superoxide anion scavenging assay. Scavenging activity of reactive oxygen species results indicate that non-polar sub-fractions showed > 50 % inhibition, except Shabi frankincense (SF) oil which showed 33 % inhibition. Dichloromethane (CH2Cl2) fraction, 40 % dichloromethane (CH2Cl2)/n-hexane sub-fraction, and SF oil showed moderate activity in di(phenyl)-(2,4,6-trinitrophenyl)iminoazanium (DPPH) assay. Furthermore, HPTLC analysis indicates the presence of 11-keto-β-boswellic acid (KBA) and 3-O-acetyl-11-keto-β-boswellic acid (AKBA) along with some other terpenoids.Conclusion: Various sub-fractions of Boswellia sacra exert effective antiglycation and antioxidant activities. The extracts should be studied further for possible formulation into pharmaceutical products.Keywords: Frankincense, Boswellia sacra, Terpenoids, HPTLC, Antioxidant, Antiglycatio

Enabling exclusive shared access to Cloud of Things resources

Cloud of Things (CoT) is an emerging paradigm that integrates Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT). CoT is constrained by the limited computing capabilities of IoT resources and the costly investment required to deploy IoT infrastructure. Despite the support of existing CoT implementations to various applications, IoT physical resources are still computationally limited and cannot to be shared as other Cloud resources yet. This paper proposes a new approach to improve shared access to IoT resources. The new approach relies on optimising resource trading of IoT resources to enable exclusive access to allocated resources at a given time. A generic architecture is proposed to support the proposed approach along with notations required to commoditise IoT resources. A case study of multiple application uses is presented. Simulations are carried out to evaluate the feasibility of the approach using three optimisation techniques. The evaluation of the proposed approach includes optimising the cost of resource allocation, different QoS metrics and the coverage of IoT resources

An evaluation of optimisation approaches in Cloud of Things resource trading

Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) have evolved to meet the requirements of many real-world applications. Many of these requirements cannot be fulfilled by using either technology separately. In order to fulfil such diverse requirements, the integration of Cloud Computing and IoT is emerging as a new paradigm called Cloud of Things (CoT). CoT is expected to host heterogeneous resources and fulfil complex requirements of resource providers and consumers. This complexity poses a real challenge for resource allocation in CoT. To tackle this challenge, resource allocation is described as a trading optimisation problem and utility functions are used to rank candidate resource allocation assignments. The contributions of this paper are 1) introducing vocabularies needed for trading CoT resources 2) proposing a marketplace system architecture to enable efficient trading of CoT resources 3) examining the use of different utility functions to rank candidate resource assignments 4) performing simulations to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach using three optimisation algorithms

Phytochemicals as Potential Epidrugs in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Type 2 diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) prevalence has significantly increased worldwide in recent years due to population age, obesity, and modern sedentary lifestyles. The projections estimate that 439 million people will be diabetic in 2030. T2DM is characterized by an impaired ß-pancreatic cell function and insulin secretion, hyperglycemia and insulin resistance, and recently the epigenetic regulation of ß-pancreatic cells differentiation has been underlined as being involved. It is currently known that several bioactive molecules, widely abundant in plants used as food or infusions, have a key role in histone modification and DNA methylation, and constituted potential epidrugs candidates against T2DM. In this sense, in this review the epigenetic mechanisms involved in T2DM and protein targets are reviewed, with special focus in studies addressing the potential use of phytochemicals as epidrugs that prevent and/or control T2DM in vivo and in vitro. As main findings, and although some controversial results have been found, bioactive molecules with epigenetic regulatory function, appear to be a potential replacement/complementary therapy of pharmacological hypoglycemic drugs, with minimal side effects. Indeed, natural epidrugs have shown to prevent or delay the T2DM development and the morbidity associated to dysfunction of blood vessels, eyes and kidneys due to sustained hyperglycemia in T2DM patients.This work was supported by CONICYT PIA/APOYO CCTE AFB170007. NC-M acknowledges the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the Horizon 2020 Program (PTDC/PSI-GER/ 28076/2017)

X-ray tomography of the aerospace products

Currently, non-destructive methods are increasingly being used to inspect the critical components in different branches of industry. Special focus is on the usage of high-energy X-ray microtomography used to inspect large objects with high density. This method provides high accuracy and a possibility to measure the internal and external dimensions of the test sample without its destruction. It allows obtaining the information about internal defects and damages as well as manufacturing and assembling quality. This article describes a tomographic study of a medium-size high-density sample with a resolution about of 70 microns

Oxide Activated Carbon for Seawater Desalination Using Solar Energy

Desalination of seawater is the efficient process and a viable solution for water shortage problem. One of the latest possible solution with less energy consumption is the use of activated carbon for the desalination process. In this work activated carbon was produced from palm trees trunk. The preparation of the activated carbon was done by two steps process. The first step was the pyrolysis for two hours at 700 °C under nitrogen gas flow of 150 ml/min. The next step was the physiochemical activation using potassium hydroxide (1:1) under nitrogen and carbon dioxide gas flow of 150 m/min for two hours. The prepared activated carbon was analyzed using SEM, EXD and XRD to study the surface area, the porosity and the chemical composition. The application of the activated carbon in the desalination process was done by initially oxidizing the AC to use it for the reduction of the boiling point of the seawater followed by the desalination. This was supported with the use of a solar panel to provide the required energy for evaporation. The prepared activated carbon in this study was used to produce fresh water by the desalination of seawater based on environmentally safe and lower energy cost method, which is a promising technique that can overcome the shortcomings of the current used technologies