The significance of pauses in EFL listening comprehension tests

Many EFL (English as a Foreign Language) listening comprehension tests use multiple-choice formats. How well such tests are devised is a crucial issue in EFL assessment and instruction. An important aspect of such tests is the time interval between items. Pauses between items are highly significant because they affect the processing of oral linguistic data and EFL learners require time to focus on form, as suggested by Krashen's Monitor Model. The present study examines the effects of variation in time interval between test items on the performance of a group of EFL learners studying English for a BA degree at an Iranian institution of higher education. Twenty-nine undergraduate students in a listening comprehension class took part in the study. Data were collected on their beginning proficiency and listening ability. As part of their course, the learners also took three parallel listening comprehension tests developed by the National Test Center of the institution (the central branch of the University Of Payame-Noor). These three listening tests were modified and the tapes were rerecorded to include 10- 30-, and 60-second intervals between items. The analysis of variance between their performances on the tests indicated that the length of time interval between items was a very significant factor. Students performed significantly better on the test with 30-second intervals between items. The findings of the study sensitize EFL teachers to plan for the assessment of listening performance. They also contribute to arguments about the depth of linguistic processing and the issue of time in EFL listening comprehension

Security Enhancement of Route Optimization in Mobile IPv6 Networks

Mobile IPv6 is an IP-layer protocol that is designed to provide mobility support.It allows an IPv6 node to arbitrarily change its location in the IPv6 network while maintaining the existing connection by handling the change of addresses at the Internet layer. Route optimization is standard in Mobile IPv6 to eliminate inefficient triangle routing. Several methods were proposed to secure route optimization. Return routability was adopted by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with its security protocol based on RFC 3775. Return routability is an infrastructureless, lightweight procedure that enables a Mobile IPv6 node to request another IPv6 node to check and test the ownership of its permanent address in both home network and current visited network. It authorizes a binding procedure by the use of cryptographically token exchange. However, return routability protocol in route optimization is to protect messages and is not able to detect or prevent an attacker which tampers against data. In this thesis, focus is given on Mobile IPv6 route optimization test-bed with enhanced security in terms of data integrity. The proposed method can be performed on top of the return routability procedure to detect and prevent Man-In-The-Middle attack by using encryption if any attack is detected. This also eliminates the additional delay compared to using encryption from the beginning of a connection. A real-time experimental test-bed has been set up, which is comprised of hardware, software and network analysis tools to monitor the packet flow and content of data packets. The test-bed consists of four computers acting as Mobile Node, Home Agent, Correspondent Node, and Router, respectively. To ensure the accuracy and integrity of the collected data, the Network Time Protocol (NTP) was used between the packet generator (Mobile Node) and packet receiver (Correspondent Node) to synchronize the time. The results show that the proposed method is able to work efficiently, maintaining 99% data security of route optimization in Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) networks. The overall data integrity (by means of security) is improved 72% compared to existing MIPv6 by at a cost of 0.1 sec added overall delay, which is within the tolerable range by the network

An Analytical Study of the Khalafallah's Qur'anic Political Thoughts

Throughout Islamic history, there have been various theories about the relationship between religion and politics, from disagreement to controversy. This debate has also come to the attention of scholars in the modern era after the important event of the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate. Dr. Mohammed Ahmed Khalafallah, as one of the New Mu'tazilis, rejected the relationship in this area, With the layout of the "worldly government" theory. He considered Islam a cultural element Referring to the historical origin of the meanings of the political terminology and neglect the Qur'anic-political theories, the Qur'an being devoid of new political terms and acknowledging the disapproval of the confluence of religion and state in the sacred text with the Shari'ah, He considers the government based on the council (democracy) and his legitimacy depends on it. And by explaining the difference between the "Prophet's position" and the "political power of the Prophet" based on the Qur'an and history, the Prophet's government introduces a civil (not religious) phenomenon that will not continue thereafter. The present study, by descriptive-analytical method, seeks to find out the causes of such ideas in Khalafallah and to explain the impact of three factors of political developments (caliphate crisis - colonialism), scientific (renewal of religious heritage) and cultural (defending Islam and the Prophet (pbuh) against the Western notion) address his thinking

Professional Identity Construction Issues in Becoming an English Teacher

AbstractTeachers’ professional identity construction (TPI) is how teachers define their professional roles and integrate them with personal roles while becoming and being a teacher. TPI is influenced by various factors and conditions both inside and outside the classroom. The present paper reports a study of TPI in relation to prospective English teachers currently learning English at Iranian tertiary level of education. The study attempted to summarize the main findings of recent studies of teachers’ professional identity. These findings were classified under three categories: a) the construction of TPI, b) the characteristics of TPI, and c) practicing teachers’ narration of TPI., the major factors affecting TPI were also summarized in four categories, based on the related literature: 1) historical factors, 2) sociological factors, 3) psychological factors, and 4) cultural factors related to perceptions and notions of professional community. Informed by these ideas, the study presents findings of a survey of TPI issues reported by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) student teachers. 47 randomly selected student teachers in their senior undergraduate or graduate studies in EFL in a major university in central Iran responded to a five-point, Likert-scale, researcher-made questionnaire on TPI. The initial analyses of their responses, strengthened by follow-up focus-group interviews with eight of these participants, revealed that student teachers expected more support given from the authorities, sought for more cultural knowledge of English-speaking countries, expected a lax attitude toward the use of the Internet, audio-visual materials, and multicultural reading and writing materials. They would like to be equipped with more communicative teaching techniques and more power to develop up-to-date materials. This study have some implications for teacher education programs in Iran

INVESTIGATING MANAGEMENT OF WASTE IN GOVERNMENTAL MEDICAL AND HYGIENIC CENTERS OF FARASH BAND'S CITY

Introduction: Growth of urbanization has led to changes in production and components of nosocomial wastes and proper management of repelling solid wastes is an issue that has direct relationship to health and infection's control in society. Although the numbers of these materials are low, but can cause lots of dangers. This study has been done with the aim of determining quantity and quality and also condition of management of wastes at medical and hygienic centers in year 94. Methodology: In this descriptive-sectional study that performed at governmental hygienic and medical centers of Farash Band, productive wastes divided into 3 main groups and the condition of wastes management was also investigated on the basis of prepared check list from management's regulation of nosocomial wastes. By using panel regression, the effect of various variables on rate of infectious wastes and all the productive and nosocomial wastes was analyzed. Results: Findings of study showed that productive wastes are related to the numbers of referred people and are more than other hygienic and medical centers in hospitals. Although a meaningful relation between the rate of productive and infectious wastes and the numbers of referred people has not been observed, but the rate of productive and infectious waste in hospitals was more than other centers and it was statistically meaningful. Conclusion: Daily productions of thousands tons of waste in different areas (of country) and all kinds that they have according to pollution, are an issues that considering population's growth and development of industry and technology should be placed at up to hygiene and environment's plans of the country. According to the importance of this issue, at first items about hygienic dangers, type and the rate of waste and then collection and excretion systems should be noticed

Leveraging Optimal Transport for Enhanced Offline Reinforcement Learning in Surgical Robotic Environments

Most Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are traditionally studied in an active learning setting, where agents directly interact with their environments, observe action outcomes, and learn through trial and error. However, allowing partially trained agents to interact with real physical systems poses significant challenges, including high costs, safety risks, and the need for constant supervision. Offline RL addresses these cost and safety concerns by leveraging existing datasets and reducing the need for resource-intensive real-time interactions. Nevertheless, a substantial challenge lies in the demand for these datasets to be meticulously annotated with rewards. In this paper, we introduce Optimal Transport Reward (OTR) labelling, an innovative algorithm designed to assign rewards to offline trajectories, using a small number of high-quality expert demonstrations. The core principle of OTR involves employing Optimal Transport (OT) to calculate an optimal alignment between an unlabeled trajectory from the dataset and an expert demonstration. This alignment yields a similarity measure that is effectively interpreted as a reward signal. An offline RL algorithm can then utilize these reward signals to learn a policy. This approach circumvents the need for handcrafted rewards, unlocking the potential to harness vast datasets for policy learning. Leveraging the SurRoL simulation platform tailored for surgical robot learning, we generate datasets and employ them to train policies using the OTR algorithm. By demonstrating the efficacy of OTR in a different domain, we emphasize its versatility and its potential to expedite RL deployment across a wide range of fields.Comment: Preprin

The Effects of Task Complexity on English Language Learners’ Listening Comprehension

This article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of manipulating task performance conditions on listening task performance by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The study was designed to explore the effects of changing complexity dimensions on listening task performance and to achieve two aims: to see how listening comprehension task performance was affected and to investigate possible overlaps between EFL learners’ perceptions of task difficulty and hypothesized task complexity. A purposive sample of 54 first-year EFL learners randomly assigned to two parallel conversation classes in an English department of a major public university participated in the study and performed listening tasks in a language lab. The instruments used for data collection were seven tasks taken from a TOEFL Test Preparation Kit, each followed by listening comprehension questions and an item on the participants’ personal perception of the difficulty of the task. During counter-balanced administrations, the tasks were manipulated for one of the four dimensions of task difficulty (adequacy, immediacy, perspective, and prior knowledge). The resulting data included the participants’ perception of difficulty as well as their performance scores under less complex and more complex conditions. One-sample T-test and correlation analyses of the data revealed that for all of the four complexity dimensions, the hypothesized less complex task condition led to better learner performance. The correlation between learner-assigned difficulty score for the task at hand and theoretical task complexity level was significant only for the immediacy dimension (r=-0.67, p<.05). The results offer support for task complexity frameworks, raise doubts about learners’ perceptions of tasks, and imply possibilities for task manipulation in language learning contexts

A Survey of Imitation Learning: Algorithms, Recent Developments, and Challenges

In recent years, the development of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) systems has been nothing short of remarkable. As these systems continue to evolve, they are being utilized in increasingly complex and unstructured environments, such as autonomous driving, aerial robotics, and natural language processing. As a consequence, programming their behaviors manually or defining their behavior through reward functions (as done in reinforcement learning (RL)) has become exceedingly difficult. This is because such environments require a high degree of flexibility and adaptability, making it challenging to specify an optimal set of rules or reward signals that can account for all possible situations. In such environments, learning from an expert's behavior through imitation is often more appealing. This is where imitation learning (IL) comes into play - a process where desired behavior is learned by imitating an expert's behavior, which is provided through demonstrations. This paper aims to provide an introduction to IL and an overview of its underlying assumptions and approaches. It also offers a detailed description of recent advances and emerging areas of research in the field. Additionally, the paper discusses how researchers have addressed common challenges associated with IL and provides potential directions for future research. Overall, the goal of the paper is to provide a comprehensive guide to the growing field of IL in robotics and AI.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Evaluación del grado de resiliencia física de Babol contra los terremotos

The management of natural disasters requires understanding their essence, making accurate assessments, planning, and providing appropriate solutions. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the physical resilience of the 22 neighborhoods of Babol located in the north of Iran against earthquakes. The methodology of this applied research study is descriptive-analytical. In this regard, by initially studying similar national and international studies, using the expert opinion of seismology and urban planning specialists and interviewing experienced urban managers in the field of crisis management, 30 effective indices on physical resilience against earthquake risk were extracted. Then, using analytic functions of GIS software and multi-criteria models including AHP, TOPSIS, VIKOR and COPRAS, the physical resilience of Babol against earthquakes was evaluated. Then, in order to obtain accurate results, using the integration models including the Statistic, BORDA and COPELAND, the physical resilience of Babol's 22 neighborhoods was evaluated. The analysis of the final GIS maps shows that neighborhoods 2, 3, 4, 5, and 11 have very high physical resilience and neighborhoods 6, 8, 10, 12 and 14 have very low physical resilience against earthquakes.La gestión de desastres naturales requiere comprender su esencia, realizar evaluaciones precisas, planificar y brindar soluciones adecuadas. El propósito de este estudio es evaluar la resiliencia física de los 22 barrios de Babol ubicados en el norte de Irán frente a terremotos. La metodología de este estudio de investigación aplicada es descriptiva-analítica. En este sentido, mediante el estudio inicial de estudios similares nacionales e internacionales, utilizando la opinión experta de especialistas en sismología y planificación urbana y entrevistando a gestores urbanos experimentados en el campo de la gestión de crisis, se extrajeron 30 índices efectivos de resiliencia física frente al riesgo sísmico. Luego, utilizando funciones analíticas de software GIS y modelos multicriterio incluyendo AHP, TOPSIS, VIKOR y COPRAS, se evaluó la resiliencia física de Babol frente a terremotos. Luego, con el fin de obtener resultados precisos, utilizando los modelos de integración incluyendo la Estadística, BORDA y COPELAND, se evaluó la resiliencia física de los 22 barrios de Babol. El análisis de los mapas GIS finales muestra que los barrios 2, 3, 4, 5 y 11 tienen una resistencia física muy alta y los barrios 6, 8, 10, 12 y 14 tienen una resistencia física muy baja frente a los terremotos