MOOCs in Omani Higher Education Institutions: Use and Popularity

Due to the rapid influence of technology on the teaching-learning process, both instructors and students alike are expected to keep abreast of the perpetual developments in the field of education. The introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (Henceforth MOOCs), as one form of e-learning, has made skyrocketing changes in the manner and availability of education provided to mass numbers of learners all the world, including Arab countries. The use of MOOCs in Oman is relatively new, and thus it appears to be unbeknown to a large segment of undergraduate students. The study beforehand, therefore, is meant to explore Omani undergraduate students’ awareness of MOOCs both locally and globally via the use a self-administered questionnaire targeting three main academic institutions in Oman with a total number of 306 participants. In-depth scrutiny of the obtained data evidently shows that unfamiliarity of MOOCs among Omani undergraduate students is significantly high, a fact reflected in the high percentage of those oblivious of its existence (88.89%) as opposed to those (11.11 %) who are familiar with MOOCs. Lack of publicity of these platforms in the Omani academic institutions and the academic community in general, among several other reasons, stand behind such unawareness of these platforms

Educational Games in Elementary Education: Unlocking the Potentials

The advent of technology has made big strides in the development of humans’ life in different spheres. The integration of technology in education has introduced other teaching methods that could improve and emulate the traditional way of teaching. The use of educational games is a by-product of integrating technology into teaching to enhance teaching methods and students’ performance. This study, hence, aims to evaluate the effect of using educational games in teaching mathematics to second-graders in a Palestinian school using a quasi-experimental approach. Thirty male and female second-graders from Al Aqsa Integrated School, Kuala Lumpur, were the targeted sample. The sample was divided into an experimental group and a control group. A selected educational game was used to explain mathematics lessons, namely addition within 99 or 999, to the experimental group. The same content was taught to the students in the control group using the traditional method. Findings showed that teaching mathematics via educational games was significantly effective in improving students’ achievement in the experimental group compared to the achievement of their counterparts taught via the traditional method. These findings provide evidence that educational games could substantially improve primary second-grade students’ skills in mathematics compared to the traditional teaching method

Hydrocarbon Identification Through Acoustic Impedance and Elastic Impedance Cross-Correlation Using Constrained Sparse Spike Inversion Method

Among other interpretation methods used in oil and gas industries, seismic inversion has become a method widely practiced to get better understanding on the subsurface condition. By combining seismic and well log data and applying certain workflow, information regarding hydrocarbon distribution presented in the form of impedance section. Using constrained sparse spike inversion, a generated low frequency model was use as input for inversion process to obtain acoustic impedance and elastic impedance variation based on seismic and low frequency data from well log data. To enhance the difference between sand and shale presence, the gamma ray distribution between acoustic impedance (AI) and elastic impedance (EI) generated from the inversion process are cross-correlated. Based on the cross plot, gas sand bodies detected in the area was mapped

Mapping human serum induced gene networks as a basis for the creation of biomimetic periosteum for bone repair

The periosteum is a highly vascularised, collagen-rich tissue that plays a crucial role in directing bone repair. This is orchestrated primarily by its resident progenitor cell population. Indeed, preservation of periosteum integrity is critical for bone healing. Cells extracted from the periosteum retain their osteochondrogenic properties and as such are a promising basis for tissue engineering strategies for the repair of bone defects. However, the culture expansion conditions, and the way in which the cells are reintroduced to the defect site are critical aspects of successful translation. Indeed, expansion in human serum and implantation on biomimetic materials has previously been shown to improve in vivo bone formation. As such, this study aimed to develop a protocol to allow for the expansion of human periosteum derived cells (hPDCs) in a biomimetic periosteal-like environment. The expansion conditions were defined through the investigation of the bioactive cues involved in augmenting hPDC proliferative and multipotency characteristics, based on transcriptomic analysis of cells cultured in human serum. Master regulators of transcriptional networks were identified and an optimised periosteal derived-growth factor cocktail (PD-GFC; containing β-Estradiol, FGF2, TNFα, TGFβ, IGF-1 and PDGF-BB) was generated. Expansion of hPDCs in PD-GFC resulted in serum mimicry with regards to the cell morphology, proliferative capacity and chondrogenic differentiation. When incorporated into a 3D collagen-type-1 matrix and cultured in PD-GFC, the hPDCs migrated to the surface that represented the matrix topography of the periosteum cambium layer. Furthermore, gene expression analysis revealed a downregulated Wnt and TGFβ signature and an upregulation of CREB, which may indicate the hPDCs are recreating their progenitor cell signature. This study highlights the first stage in the development of a biomimetic periosteum which may have applications in bone repair

Strict coherence on many valued-events

We investigate the property of strict coherence in the setting of many-valued logics. Our main results read as follows: (i) a map from an MV-algebra to [0,1] is strictly coherent if and only if it satisfies Carnap\u2019s regularity condition, and (ii) a [0,1]-valued book on a finite set of many-valued events is strictly coherent if and only if it extends to a faithful state of an MV-algebra that contains them. Remarkably this latter result allows us to relax the rather demanding conditions for the Shimony-Kemeny characterisation of strict coherence put forward in the mid 1950s in this Journal

ActiveStereoNet: End-to-End Self-Supervised Learning for Active Stereo Systems

In this paper we present ActiveStereoNet, the first deep learning solution for active stereo systems. Due to the lack of ground truth, our method is fully self-supervised, yet it produces precise depth with a subpixel precision of $1/30th$ of a pixel; it does not suffer from the common over-smoothing issues; it preserves the edges; and it explicitly handles occlusions. We introduce a novel reconstruction loss that is more robust to noise and texture-less patches, and is invariant to illumination changes. The proposed loss is optimized using a window-based cost aggregation with an adaptive support weight scheme. This cost aggregation is edge-preserving and smooths the loss function, which is key to allow the network to reach compelling results. Finally we show how the task of predicting invalid regions, such as occlusions, can be trained end-to-end without ground-truth. This component is crucial to reduce blur and particularly improves predictions along depth discontinuities. Extensive quantitatively and qualitatively evaluations on real and synthetic data demonstrate state of the art results in many challenging scenes.Comment: Accepted by ECCV2018, Oral Presentation, Main paper + Supplementary Material

Evaluation of different levels of feeding and their effects on growth and FCR in grower rainbow trout in fiberglass tanks under the condition of brackish water in Bafgh station

The objective of this study was to evaluate 4 levels of feeding defined as 1.ad libitum to satiation, 2.Standard feeding (based on fish size and water temperature), 3.10% less than that of standard feeding and 4.10% more than that of standard feeding on growth, feed conversion rate (FCR) and carcass quality of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) reared in 12 aerated flow-through fiber glass tanks (2500l rearing volume, n=150 fish per tank, body weight average 45 g) comprised of 3 replicates under the condition of brackish water (salinity 8.4 g/l) in Bafgh Fisheries Research Station in center of Iran. The increase in average body weight (BW) and size of fish in different feeding groups was significantly different (P<0.01) during the experiment (101 days) and the highest average BW and size increase occurred in the group fed ad libitum to satiation. On the contrary, FCR (average ±SE: 1.27±0.09) in this group was statistically lower than that of the other groups (P<0.01). The chemical composition of carcass was significantly influenced by the level of feeding (P<0.01) and the percent of moisture, crude protein and ash was the lowest in the group fed ad libitum to satiation while the crude fat percent in this group was the highest of all. According to the results obtained in this study, an ad libitum feeding regime is suggested for rainbow trout production in fish culture systems of central desert regions in Iran under the condition of brackish water. However, further investigations are needed to draw firm conclusions, especially in earth pond cultures with different conditions, enriched in live food

Investigating the effects of arginine methylation inhibitors on microdissected brain tumour biopsies maintained in a miniaturised perfusion system

Arginine methylation is a post-translational modification that consists of the transfer of one or two methyl (CH3) groups to arginine residues in proteins. Several types of arginine methylation occur, namely monomethylation, symmetric dimethylation and asymmetric dimethylation, which are catalysed by different protein arginine methyltransferases (PRMTs). Inhibitors of PRMTs have recently entered clinical trials to target several types of cancer, including gliomas (NCT04089449). People with glioblastoma (GBM), the most aggressive form of brain tumour, are among those with the poorest quality of life and survival of anyone diagnosed with cancer. There is currently a lack of (pre)clinical research on the possible application of PRMT inhibitors to target brain tumours. Here, we set out to investigate the effects of clinically-relevant PRMT inhibitors on GBM biopsies. We present a new, low-cost, easy to fabricate perfusion device that can maintain GBM tissue in a viable condition for at least eight days post-surgical resection. Theminiaturised perfusion device enables the treatment of GBM tissue with PRMT inhibitors ex vivo, and we observed a two-fold increase in apoptosis in treated samples compared to parallel control experiments. Mechanistically, we show thousands of differentially expressed genes after treatment, and changes in the type of arginine methylation of the RNA binding protein FUS that are consistent with hundreds of differential gene splicing events. This is the first time that cross-talk between different types of arginine methylation has been observed in clinical samples after treatment with PRMT inhibitors

Tuning of Adaptive Weight Depth Map Generation Algorithms Exploratory Data Analysis and Design of Computer Experiments (DOCE)

In depth map generation algorithms, parameters settings to yield an accurate disparity map estimation are usually chosen empirically or based on un planned experiments -- Algorithms' performance is measured based on the distance of the algorithm results vs. the Ground Truth by Middlebury's standards -- This work shows a systematic statistical approach including exploratory data analyses on over 14000 images and designs of experiments using 31 depth maps to measure the relative inf uence of the parameters and to fine-tune them based on the number of bad pixels -- The implemented methodology improves the performance of adaptive weight based dense depth map algorithms -- As a result, the algorithm improves from 16.78% to 14.48% bad pixels using a classical exploratory data analysis of over 14000 existing images, while using designs of computer experiments with 31 runs yielded an even better performance by lowering bad pixels from 16.78% to 13