The Congruity/Incongruity of EFL Teachers’ Beliefs about Listening Instruction and their Listening Instructional Practices

While research on EFL teachers’ beliefs and the realization of these beliefs in their classroom practices has recently gained momentum in the field of applied linguistics, the study of teachers’ beliefs as they relate to listening has received insufficient attention in the literature. This study was conducted to investigate Iranian EFL teachers’ beliefs about listening and their beliefs-driven instructional practices. To this end, a listening beliefs questionnaire was administered to a total of 85 teachers (BA= 49, MA= 36), followed by classroom observation of 12 teachers (6 teachers per group) who were given an audio to teach. The results revealed that there was no significant difference between BA and MA teachers regarding their listening beliefs and beliefs-driven practices. The results of the Phi coefficient of correlation indicated that there was no significant relationship between teachers’ beliefs about listening instruction and their listening instructional practices. Furthermore, the results of the interview showed that time, besides other impediments, was the major obstacle for teachers to actualize their listening beliefs. The implications of the study for teacher education are discussed

Co-Authorship patterns and Topic Networks in the Scientific Publication of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences

Introduction: Scientific co-operation is a process in which two or more authors share their resources and talents with the aim of creating a shared work. One of the forms of scientific co-operation is co-authorship that involves the production of a scientific output by several collaborative researchers and scholars. This research has been designed to map out co-authorship networks in the Hamadan University of Medical Sciences researches indexed in the Web of Science from 2012 to 2016, and analyzes scientific collaboration and co-authorship networks in this university. Method: The present study is an applied study which has been carried out using the scientometric indicators and social network analysis. The statistical population of this research consisted of all the scientific articles that at least one of the authors of referred to the Hamadan University of Medical Sciences as the affiliation and indexed in the Web of Science from 2010 to 2016. In so doing, the network analysis technique and the software on Citespace and Gephi were run to analyze and visualize co-authorship networks. Furthermore, the software on HISTCITE was used for data analysis. Findings: All articles related to Hamadan University of Medical Sciences during the years 2012 to 2016, based on a search on the Web of Science, have 838 records. The dominant co-authorship pattern in these years is the 4 and 5 authors with 171 articles and 20.41%. The mean number of authors or collaboration index in the period considered was 5.51, the degree of Collaboration was 0.99 and the Collaborative Coefficient was 0.759. Poorolajal, Alikhani and Shahidi were the most prolific authors. Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University and Islamic Azad University were the most prolific organizations. The greatest collaboration of Iranian researchers has been with Switzerland. Saidijam, Mahjub, Mehdizadeh, and Moghimbeigi have alloacated the highest betweenness centrality, whereas Saidijam, Mahjub, Hajilooi, and Khazaei have allocated the highest degree centrality. Conclusion: The scientific production of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences during the period from 2012 to 2016 has grown dramatically, and collaborative research at this university is growing at an appropriate level. In this study, the degree of Collaboration and the co-operation rate are high which indicates that here is a great deal of interest in co-authorship and co-operation among researchers of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, and it is relatively unlikely to see single-authorship, which reflects the willingness of individuals to co-authorship

Modeling triplet spike-timing-dependent plasticity using memristive devices

Triplet-based spike-timing-dependent plasticity (TSTDP) is an advanced synaptic plasticity rule that results in improved learning capability compared to the conventional pair-based STDP (PSTDP). The TSTDP rule can reproduce the results of many electrophysiological experiments, where the PSTDP fails. This paper proposes a novel memristive circuit that implements the TSTDP rule. The proposed circuit is designed using three voltage (flux)-driven memristors. Simulation results demonstrate that our memristive circuit induces synaptic weight changes that arise due to the timing differences among pairs and triplets of spikes. The presented memristive design is an initial step toward developing asynchronous TSTDP learning architectures using memristive devices. These architectures may facilitate the implementation of advanced large-scale neuromorphic systems with applications in real-world engineering tasks such as pattern classification

Investigating the Relationship between Perceived Organizational Support and Organizational Trust

The present research aims to determine relationship between perceived organizational support and organizational trust. It was a descriptive correlation study. The statistical population of the research included all female teachers of high schools of district 4 of Isfahan City. Organizational support questionnaire developed by Eisenberger et al. (1986) and Sashkin's organizational trust questionnaire (1988) were instruments used in this research. 1986questionnaire. For organizational trust questionnaire, alpha was equal to 0.90 and for perceived organizational support, it was equal to 0.83. The results showed that there is a significant relationship between perceived organizational support and organizational trust. Furthermore, the results showed that there are significant relationships between perceived organizational support and 10 dimensions of organizational trust except for manager’s honesty for predicting future results

Can nurse teachers manage student incivility by guided democracy? A grounded theory study

Method In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted using theoretical and purposive sampling. Constant comparative analysis was used for data analysis.Results The results include four main categories; (1) deterioration of learning; (2) dominant individual and organisational culture; (3) guided democracy; and (4) movement toward professionalism. Guided democracy is recognised as the main basic psychosocial process for incivility management.Conclusions Incivility management is pursued to help learners develop professional performance. As indicated by the results of the present study, guided democracy is an effective strategy for incivility management in nursing education

Illegible Text to Readable Text: An Image-to-Image Transformation using Conditional Sliced Wasserstein Adversarial Networks

Automatic text recognition from ancient handwritten record images is an important problem in the genealogy domain. However, critical challenges such as varying noise conditions, vanishing texts, and variations in handwriting make the recognition task difficult. We tackle this problem by developing a handwritten-to-machine-print conditional Generative Adversarial network (HW2MP-GAN) model that formulates handwritten recognition as a text-Image-to-text-Image translation problem where a given image, typically in an illegible form, is converted into another image, close to its machine-print form. The proposed model consists of three-components including a generator, and word-level and character-level discriminators. The model incorporates Sliced Wasserstein distance (SWD) and U-Net architectures in HW2MP-GAN for better quality image-to-image transformation. Our experiments reveal that HW2MP-GAN outperforms state-of-the-art baseline cGAN models by almost 30 in Frechet Handwritten Distance (FHD), 0.6 on average Levenshtein distance and 39% in word accuracy for image-to-image translation on IAM database. Further, HW2MP-GAN improves handwritten recognition word accuracy by 1.3% compared to baseline handwritten recognition models on the IAM database

PROCJENA ČVRSTOĆE I PETROFIZIČKIH SVOJSTAVA ANHIDRITNE KROVINE NA TEMELJU PROMJENJIVIH OPTEREĆENJA I RAČUNALNE TOMOGRAFIJE

Underground gas storage (UGS) in depleted reservoirs affects caprock properties. The resemblance of Qom anhydrite outcrop with cutting obtained from a 2629 m depth was confirmed using X-ray diffraction (XRD) results and scanning electron microscope (SEM) tests. The anhydrite specimens unconfined compressive strength (UCS) changed under static cyclic loading conditions, and also petrophysical properties, such as porosity and permeability altered under 10, 20, and 30 cycles of loading. The magnitude of loading ranged from 30 to 43% of intact anhydrite UCS. The loading rate used for cyclic loading tests was 0.004 mm/s. The samples’ UCS decreased between 3.5 to 23.9% under cyclic loading conditions. The study of specimens computed tomography (CT) imaging with porosity and permeability indicated the growth of cracks, the cracks did not initiate in all lengths of specimens, hence the incremental increase in porosity did not increase the permeability of specimens. Even being under cyclic loads, the permeability of specimens stayed lower than 10-15 m2 (0.001 mD) but the trend of pressure versus time for measuring permeability shows a higher drop in pressure due to changes in permeability. The study indicated that the CT imaging results are in good accordance with petrophysical findings.Podzemno skladište plina smješteno u iscrpljenim ležištima utječe i na svojstva krovine. Sličnost između anhidrita Qom uzorkovanoga na površinskome izdanku te iz krhotina dobivenih s 2629 m dubine opisana je na temelju rezultata difrakcije x-zraka i skeniranja elektroničkim mikroskopom. Maksimalna jednoosna tlačna čvrstoća uzorka anhidrita mijenja se u uvjetima statičkih, promjenjivih, cikličkih opterećenja, pri čemu dolazi i do promjene petrofizičkih svojstava poput šupljikavosti i propusnosti, npr. tijekom 10, 20 i 30 ciklusa. Magnituda opterećenja bila je u rasponu od 30 do 43% maksimalne tlačne čvrstoće anhidrita, dok je intenzitet opterećenja kod cikličkih testova iznosio 0,004 mm/s. Kod ispitivanih uzoraka zamijećeno je smanjenje maksimalne tlačne čvrstoće u rasponu od 3,5 do 23,9% pri različitim uvjetima promjena opterećenja. Proučavanjem šupljikavosti i propusnosti uzoraka i snimki računalne tomografije vidljiv je porast broja pukotina u uzorku, pri čemu je uočeno da do stvaranja pukotina nije došlo uzduž cijeloga uzorka, kao što niti porastom šupljikavosti nije došlo do rasta propusnosti. Iako su uzorci bili izloženi cikličkim opterećenjima, propusnost uzoraka ostala je manja od 10-15 m2 (0,001 mD). Proučavanjem promjene tlaka u vremenu uočen je veći pad tlaka zbog promjene propusnosti uzorka. Rezultati istraživanja upućuju na dobro podudaranje podataka dobivenih snimkama računalne tomografije i rezultata petrofizičkih ispitivanja