Reconciling Hyphenated Identities: Muslim American Youth Reflect on College Life in the Midst of Islamophobia

Muslims make up more than 1.8 billion people of the world population and have been displaced globally in waves due to the political tension in their homeland. The tragedy of 9/11 forever changed the landscape of this nation for Muslim Americans and created hostility and fear. Islamophobia has been on the rise after the post 9/11 era, but due to the 2016 election cycle Muslim Americans have been placed under direct scrutiny. Muslim Americans were targeted and threatened with a Muslim registry and implemented a Muslim Ban to further ostracise them. The post 9/11 generation of Muslim American youth were the subjects of this study. The qualitative case study of UC Berkeley’s Muslim American college students focused on the impact as well as the responses of Islamophobia. The framework of this paper included the effects of Islamophobia on a macro-level such national policies, meso-level such as the local campus culture, and micro-level such as individual responses. This project documents the complex reconciliation process of Muslim American youth as they brilliantly negotiate their hyphenated identity. The study also highlights their experience both inside and outside the Muslim community. The testimonials of the respondents are articulate and unapologetic and provide unprecedented access and information about the challenges of a polycultural identity. The study also focuses on the protective factors such as the details of creating the grant funded Muslim Mental Health Initiative and other coping strategies. Ultimately this dissertation documents the process of reclaiming the honor and dignity of the Muslim community through means of political activisim, teaching research, publications and mental health services. It also directs scholars to further gaps in research among a burgeoning population of the post 9/11 generations to come

A Web 2.0-based collaborative learning to promote the practices of Islam as a way of life

The research aimed to design, develop and evaluate an innovative Web 2.0-based collaborative learning (CL) under the guidelines of design science research methodology (DSRM). The Islamic ethical system based on verses of the Quran and social constructionist theory as knowledge base, supports the design process. This is in response to the lesser amount of focus on the practical research methods in Islamic education. The developed information Technology artifact was used for two courses in IIUM. The findings of research show that the practical methodology of this study could provide opportunities for practical methodology of this study could provide opportunities for practice of Islam as a way of life or " Islamicisation". In addition, this study's ethical CL process in a social constructionist environment could promote critical thinking, use of knowledge and religious awareness of studnets that are the main goals of IIUM with Islamic education

Use of bioethanol byproduct for supplementary cementitious material production

Corn stover has the potential for use as a supplementary cementitious material (SCM) for concrete. The impact of distilled water and dilute acid pretreatments and post-treatments on the pozzolanic reactivity of corn stover ash (CSA) was studied. Additionally, the potential use of a bioethanol byproduct called high lignin residue (HLR) for SCM production was examined. Pretreated CSA and high lignin residue ash (HLRA) increased the early reactivity of cement paste when used as 20% replacement of cement in the system whereas unpretreated CSA was found to severely suppress the hydration reaction. The highest compressive strength was obtained from samples containing HLRA

Historical analysis of materials used in Iranian paper dyeing with special reference to the effect of henna dye on paper based on scientific analysis

During the Taimurid and Safawid periods the masters introduced a number of dyes for coloring paper for the purpose of calligraphy and paintings. Historical analysis was carried out to identify different dyes, shade of colors, and the application of techniques recommended in the paperdyeing process based on Persian historical treatises. Among the many dyes introduced by the masters, henna has been the most recommended, with a ratio of 1:10 henna and water. Scientific analysis was carried out in two stages to investigate the effect of henna on paper in a lower concentration than the advised ratio, followed by laboratory work to investigate the fungicidal properties of henna dye in the advised concentration. Our experiment showed that henna acts as a fungicide on aspergillus flavus only when the ratio of henna to water is higher than 1:10. The present study revealed the secret behind the henna concentration that has been stressed in historical recipes

A Combined Analytical Modeling Machine Learning Approach for Performance Prediction of MapReduce Jobs in Hadoop Clusters

Nowadays MapReduce and its open source implementation, Apache Hadoop, are the most widespread solutions for handling massive dataset on clusters of commodity hardware. At the expense of a somewhat reduced performance in comparison to HPC technologies, the MapReduce framework provides fault tolerance and automatic parallelization without any efforts by developers. Since in many cases Hadoop is adopted to support business critical activities, it is often important to predict with fair confidence the execution time of submitted jobs, for instance when SLAs are established with end-users. In this work, we propose and validate a hybrid approach exploiting both queuing networks and support vector regression, in order to achieve a good accuracy without too many costly experiments on a real setup. The experimental results show how the proposed approach attains a 21% improvement in accuracy over applying machine learning techniques without any support from analytical models

Collaborative learning, using Facebook's page and Groups

This study designed, developed and evaluated an ICT artifact, including Facebook's page and groups based on Cruz and Carvalho framework for practicing collaborative learning. All features utilized, be evaluated by observations, Facebook metrics and interviews based on activities and interactions amongst students and all users on Facebook with design science research methodology (DSRM). This study shows students and learners could practice collaborative learning and regulate their knowledge in this platform and enhance their performance and self-regulations