A secure authentication protocol for IP-based wireless sensor communications using the location/ID split protocol (LISP)

The future of the Internet of Things (IoT) involves a huge number of node devices such as wireless sensors that can communicate in a machine-to-machine pattern, where devices will be globally addressed and identified. As the number of connected devices increased, the burden on the network infrastructure and the size of the routing tables and the efficiency of the current routing protocols in the Internet backbone increased as well. Recently, an IETF working group, along with the research group at Cisco, are working on a Locator/ID Separation Protocol as a routing architecture that provides new semantics for IP addressing, in order to simplify routing operations and improve scalability in the future of the Internet such as the IoT. In the light of the previous issue; this paper proposes an efficient security authentication and a key exchange scheme that is suited for Internet of things based on Locator/ID Separation protocol. The proposed protocol method meets practicability, simplicity, and strong notions of security. The protocol is verified using Automated Validation Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) which is a push button tool for the automated validation of security protocols and the achieved results showed that they do not have any security flaws

Energy Threshold-based Cluster Head Rotation for Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

 يمثل ترشيد استهلاك الطاقة في شبكات المتحسس اللاسلكي مسألة اساسية لكون عمر الشبكة يعتمد كليا على الطاقة المتوفرة عادة في اجهزة المتحسسات. في هذه المقالة تم اقتراح بروتوكولا للارسال مبني على اساس العنقدة غير المتساوية حيث يأخذ بنظر الاعتبار متغييرات الطاقة والمسافة والكثافة في تحديد راس كل مجموعة (عنقود). وكذلك يكون حجم العناقيد غير متساو وفقا لمتغرات المسافة والطاقة والكثافة. مضافا الى ان رؤوس العناقيد لا يتم تغييرها في كل دورة ما لم يصل مستوى الطاقة فيها الى حد معين من الطاقة. ولقد بينت نتائج المحاكاة الى ان كفاءة البروتوكول المقترح تحقق تحسسنا في ترشيد الطاقة.Energy efficiency represents a fundamental issue in WSNs, since the network lifetime period entirely depends on the energy of sensor nodes, which are usually battery-operated. In this article, an unequal clustering-based routing protocol has been suggested, where parameters of energy, distance, and density are involved in the cluster head election. Besides, the sizes of clusters are unequal according to distance, energy, and density. Furthermore, the cluster heads are not changed every round unless the residual energy reaches a specific threshold of energy. The outcomes of the conducted simulation confirmed that the performance of the suggested protocol achieves improvement in energy efficiency

Impact of stress on absenteeism at divisional secretariats: a study at Ampara district

The aim of the study was to investigate the impact of Stress on Absenteeism in the divisional secretariats of Ampara District in Sri Lanka and which factors highly influence to develop stress in the organizations. A hypothesis was developed using deductive approach. The study was conducted by using a convenience sample of whole eight divisional secretariats in Ampara District in Sri Lanka. Type of investigation was correlational and it was crosssectional on time horizon. The unit of analysis was organizational level: each firm. Non managerial employees served as respondents on behalf of the firm. Measures of the study were of good quality after assuring reliability and validity. Data were collected from 80 respondents which was 100% response rate. In order to test the hypothesis that was concerned with relationship between perceived level of stress and perceived degree of employees' absenteeism the Pearson Product-Moment Correlation technique was applied. The results of the study showed a significant and positive relationship between perceived level of stress and perceived degree of absenteeism in Sri Lanka. Found relationship was strong (correlation coefficient was .548 that was significant at 0.01 level) implying that a divisional secretariat should adopt an effective working environment to reduce the level of stress so as to decline absenteeism

The Effect of the Use of the Strategy of the Debate in the Skill of Evaluating the Arguments of Students in the First Grade Average Schools of Distinguished in Biology

هدف البحث الى الكشف عن اثر استخدام ستراتيجية المناظرة في مهارة تقويم الحجج لدى طلاب الصف الاول المتوسط لمدارس المتميزين في مادة علم الاحياء, ولغرض تحقيق هذا الهدف قام الباحثان ببناء اداة البحث وهي اختبار مهارة تقويم الحجج تكون بصورته النهائية من (19) موقفاً تعليمياً  تليه ثلاثة بدائل (حجج) جميعها صحيحة لكنها متفاوتة في قوتها لمعلومات بيولوجية عامة خارج مادة الكتاب المدرسي المقرر, وتمت مراعاة معامل الصدق والثبات في بناء الاداة, حيث بلغ معامل الثبات باستخدام معامل الفا كرونباخ (0.75) وهو معامل ثبات جيد, كما تمثل مجتمع البحث بطلاب الصف الاول المتوسط لمدارس المتميزين في محافظات الفرات الاوسط وهي (مركز محافظة القادسية, قضاء الشامية, بابل, النجف الاشرف, كربلاء المقدسة) والبالغ عددهم (377) طالب, حيث شملت عينة البحث طلاب الصف الاول لمدارس المتميزين في مركز محافظة القادسية. اظهرت النتائج تفوق ستراتيجية المناظرة على الطريقة الاعتيادية في التدريس في جعل موقف الطالب اكثر فاعلية واكثر قدرة على التفكير, فضلاً عن ذلك انها تجعله يكتشف الكثير من مهارات الاستكشاف, والاستماع الى وجهات النظر, ويعمل على تطبيقها عملياً, كما ان الطلاب اصبحت لديهم القدرة على تقويم الحجج العلمية المتضمنة في الكتاب المقرر لمادة علم الاحياء لمدارس المتميزين. وفي ضوء نتائج البحث قدم الباحثان بعض التوصيات والمقترحات.The research seeks to identify the Effect of using the debate strategy in the skill of evaluating the arguments among the students of the first grade intermediate schools of distinct students in biology. The research was determined by the students of the first intermediate schools of distinct students of the Middle Euphrates provinces, which included (the center of the province of Qadisiyah , the district of Shamia, Babylon, Najaf, holy Karbala), and their number(377) students, the researcher choose the semi-controlled experimental  design, and selected the secondary school for boys in the Directorate of Education of Al- Qadisiyah. The researcher prepare tool for this design, was to test the skill of evaluating the arguments, which consisted of (19) items in its final form distributed over three alternatives. , Where they were verified the validity by the coefficient of difficulty and discrimination, and reliability using Kronbach's Alpha as (0.75). The result were: The students of the experimental group outweigh the students of the control group in the test of the skill of evaluating arguments. In light of the research results, the researcher recommended some recommendations

Code-Switched Urdu ASR for Noisy Telephonic Environment using Data Centric Approach with Hybrid HMM and CNN-TDNN

Call Centers have huge amount of audio data which can be used for achieving valuable business insights and transcription of phone calls is manually tedious task. An effective Automated Speech Recognition system can accurately transcribe these calls for easy search through call history for specific context and content allowing automatic call monitoring, improving QoS through keyword search and sentiment analysis. ASR for Call Center requires more robustness as telephonic environment are generally noisy. Moreover, there are many low-resourced languages that are on verge of extinction which can be preserved with help of Automatic Speech Recognition Technology. Urdu is the $10^{th}$ most widely spoken language in the world, with 231,295,440 worldwide still remains a resource constrained language in ASR. Regional call-center conversations operate in local language, with a mix of English numbers and technical terms generally causing a "code-switching" problem. Hence, this paper describes an implementation framework of a resource efficient Automatic Speech Recognition/ Speech to Text System in a noisy call-center environment using Chain Hybrid HMM and CNN-TDNN for Code-Switched Urdu Language. Using Hybrid HMM-DNN approach allowed us to utilize the advantages of Neural Network with less labelled data. Adding CNN with TDNN has shown to work better in noisy environment due to CNN's additional frequency dimension which captures extra information from noisy speech, thus improving accuracy. We collected data from various open sources and labelled some of the unlabelled data after analysing its general context and content from Urdu language as well as from commonly used words from other languages, primarily English and were able to achieve WER of 5.2% with noisy as well as clean environment in isolated words or numbers as well as in continuous spontaneous speech.Comment: 32 pages, 19 figures, 2 tables, preprin

Influence of Lifestyle and Cultural Values on Impulse Buying Behavior

The aim of research is to analyze the influence of life styles and cultural values on the impulse buying behavior of Pakistani university students and professionals in different organizations.  For collection of data, survey technique was used from the students of different universities and organizations by adopting the convenient sampling technique.  For analyzing the group differences between the variables of lifestyles and cultural values on impulse buying behavior, it was found that only gender role has the significant differences between male and female students and professionals on the impulse buying behavior. For analyzing the relationships among the variables of life style and cultural values, it was found that significant relationship exists among all the variables.  The study also shows that variables of life style and cultural values such as, life satisfaction, security, financial satisfaction, gender role and in-group contact predict the influence on impulse buying behavior of the Pakistani students and professionals. Keywords: Cultural values, Impulse buying behavior, Financial satisfactio