Teachers' perceptions of student engagement and active learning implementation in a national private school in Egypt: laying the foundation for the 21st century skills

This study explored teachers' perceptions of active learning implementation focusing on the challenges and opportunities they face to effectively implement active learning in a low-income private school in Giza, Egypt. A qualitative case study was utilized to understand teachers' lived experiences implementing students’ active learning. The study was guided by five research questions: (1) How do teachers perceive the implementation of active learning as a pedagogical approach? (2) What challenges and opportunities do they face when implementing active learning? (3) How does students active learning impact collaboration among teachers? (4) Do teachers feel supported in implementing active learning? Why or why not? (5) What supports do teachers and administrators believe are needed for active learning to succeed? The study involved triangulating between the data collected through classroom observations and in-depth semi-structured one-on-one interviews. The data analysis led to four main findings to support the effective implementation of active learning. First, teachers need a supportive, flexible school leader to lead the vision for the efficient implementation of active learning while facilitating solutions for possible challenges. Second, offering teachers professional development opportunities that are tailored to their needs is essential for their ability to nurture their pedagogical approach for implementing active learning. Third, many teachers need more support in developing a collective understanding of PBL as a pedagogical approach that utilizes students active learning and its requirements while having a sense of agency in constructing a definition that is relevant to their context. Fourth, teachers’ understanding of active learning seemed to focus more on the engagement with the content rather than collaborative peer-to-peer engagement. This study contributes to the educational field by providing a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence pedagogical change in low-income settings in Egypt specifically, and in the Global South more broadly. Moreover, the study highlights the importance of the school leadership role in the effective implementation of active learning

Blind Image Quality Assessment for Face Pose Problem

No-Reference image quality assessment for face images is of high interest since it can be required for biometric systems such as biometric passport applications to increase system performance. This can be achieved by controlling the quality of biometric sample images during enrollment. This paper proposes a novel no-reference image quality assessment method that extracts several image features and uses data mining techniques for detecting the pose variation problem in facial images. Using subsets from three public 2D face databases PUT, ENSIB, and AR, the experimental results recorded a promising accuracy of 97.06% when using the RandomForest Classifier, which outperforms other classifier

Lethal BCG-osis in the context of superficial urothelial bladder carcinoma, diagnosed in autopsy

AbstractIntra-vesicular Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) immuno-therapy is a cornerstone in the treatment of superficial bladder carcinoma. However, it can rarely cause BCG-osis, a systemic infection, potentially fatal. A case of a 73year old man, diagnosed with superficial urothelial bladder carcinoma five months ago, who died with clinical features of septic shock one day after BCG therapeutic maintenance infusion, is presented. The cause of death, BCG-osis, was revealed during autopsy

Identifying Influential Users on Twitter: A Case Study from Paris Attacks

Due to the spread of technology and world wide web, Online Social media invaded every home in the world; hence, the analysis of such networks became an important yet challenging case of study for researchers. One of the most interesting fields of study in social network analysis is identifying influential users who are important actors in online social networks by having an impact on others. This work investigates the problem of identifying influential users on Twitter. Since Twitter is a user-friendly interactive platform, it became an apparent competitor to other social medias as far as user interaction. Twitter is browsed by a variety of users, the most important are the most influential ones among them all. In order to identify influential users, a data set was collected between December 2015 and March 2016 reflecting real tweets from the top trendy hashtags on Twitter. In this paper, different measures are used such as Influence Measures, Centrality Measures and Activity Measures. In addition, Association Rule Learning has been used to detect relationships between users. After identifying the influential users from Association Rule Learning, these influential users were compared to the results of the abovementioned measures. The results of this study indicate that identifying influential users from Association Rule Learning and validating these identified users with the results of Influence Measures is an efficient method for detecting the influence of users on online social networks

Smodels A – A System for Computing Answer Sets of Logic Programs with Aggregates

In [2], we presented a system called ASP-CLP for computing answer sets of logic programs with aggregates. The implementation of ASP-CLP relies on the use of an external constraint solver (ECLiPSe) to deal with aggregate literals and requires some modifications to the answer set solver used in the experiment (SMODELS). In general