165 research outputs found
The ability of Islamic Religious Education to deliver Citizenship Education in elementary schools in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
This empirical study endeavours to shed light on the ability of Islamic Religious Education to deliver Citizenship Education in elementary schools (pupils aged 13 to 15) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The aims of the study are to explore teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that Saudi citizens need in the 21st century. As part of this, it investigates the views of Social Studies and Islamic Religious Education teachers and students with a view to understanding where in the curriculum they think Citizenship Education should best occur. The study identifies and explores the challenges and opportunities of including Citizenship Education within both Islamic Religious Education and Social Studies. The merits of each approach are discussed. There then follows a series of recommendations regarding the sort of changes to the curriculum that may be required.
The research underpinning this study followed a mixed-method approach. It employed an closed-ended questionnaire with two parts of open questions completed by over 266 students (ages 13 to 15), and 20 Islamic Religious Education and 20 Social Studies teachers. Semi-structured interviews were also undertaken with nine students, and nine Islamic Religious Education and nine Social Studies teachers.
The findings from this study indicate that participants linked many of the knowledge components, skills, values and attitudes associated with Saudi citizenship to the Islamic religion. Responses from the participants indicate that students’ voices are absent in school, as they are anxious about expressing their opinions and believe their sole purpose for coming to school is to acquire knowledge. In addition, this study provides evidence of different views amongst the participants that reflect current tensions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia regarding tolerance, outside influences, faith and extremism. Many students, for example, appeared to be intolerant towards other faiths or ideas, which is arguably not in accordance with the Islamic religion.
The study argues that, as it is currently taught, Citizenship Education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can be perceived as limited in comparison to Western conceptions of Citizenship Education, and that it is not meeting the needs of future Saudi citizens. The study proposes that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia needs to change its education system to keep pace with change in the wider world and within Saudi society, and concludes by making recommendations for such change and for future research in Islamic Religious Education and Citizenship Education
Integrating Form and Meaning: A Multi-Task Learning Model for Acoustic Word Embeddings
Models of acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) learn to map variable-length spoken
word segments onto fixed-dimensionality vector representations such that
different acoustic exemplars of the same word are projected nearby in the
embedding space. In addition to their speech technology applications, AWE
models have been shown to predict human performance on a variety of auditory
lexical processing tasks. Current AWE models are based on neural networks and
trained in a bottom-up approach that integrates acoustic cues to build up a
word representation given an acoustic or symbolic supervision signal.
Therefore, these models do not leverage or capture high-level lexical knowledge
during the learning process. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning
model that incorporates top-down lexical knowledge into the training procedure
of AWEs. Our model learns a mapping between the acoustic input and a lexical
representation that encodes high-level information such as word semantics in
addition to bottom-up form-based supervision. We experiment with three
languages and demonstrate that incorporating lexical knowledge improves the
embedding space discriminability and encourages the model to better separate
lexical categories.Comment: Accepted in INTERSPEECH 202
Cross-Domain Adaptation of Spoken Language Identification for Related Languages: The Curious Case of Slavic Languages
State-of-the-art spoken language identification (LID) systems, which are
based on end-to-end deep neural networks, have shown remarkable success not
only in discriminating between distant languages but also between
closely-related languages or even different spoken varieties of the same
language. However, it is still unclear to what extent neural LID models
generalize to speech samples with different acoustic conditions due to domain
shift. In this paper, we present a set of experiments to investigate the impact
of domain mismatch on the performance of neural LID systems for a subset of six
Slavic languages across two domains (read speech and radio broadcast) and
examine two low-level signal descriptors (spectral and cepstral features) for
this task. Our experiments show that (1) out-of-domain speech samples severely
hinder the performance of neural LID models, and (2) while both spectral and
cepstral features show comparable performance within-domain, spectral features
show more robustness under domain mismatch. Moreover, we apply unsupervised
domain adaptation to minimize the discrepancy between the two domains in our
study. We achieve relative accuracy improvements that range from 9% to 77%
depending on the diversity of acoustic conditions in the source domain.Comment: To appear in INTERSPEECH 202
An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Self-supervised Discrete Representations of Speech
Self-supervised representation learning for speech often involves a
quantization step that transforms the acoustic input into discrete units.
However, it remains unclear how to characterize the relationship between these
discrete units and abstract phonetic categories such as phonemes. In this
paper, we develop an information-theoretic framework whereby we represent each
phonetic category as a distribution over discrete units. We then apply our
framework to two different self-supervised models (namely wav2vec 2.0 and XLSR)
and use American English speech as a case study. Our study demonstrates that
the entropy of phonetic distributions reflects the variability of the
underlying speech sounds, with phonetically similar sounds exhibiting similar
distributions. While our study confirms the lack of direct, one-to-one
correspondence, we find an intriguing, indirect relationship between phonetic
categories and discrete units.Comment: Accepted in Interspeech 202
Rutin ameliorates carbon tetrachloride (CCl4)-induced hepatorenal toxicity and hypogonadism in male rats
Rutin, a food derived-polyphenolic bioflavonoid, has been acknowledged for several health benefits. This study aims to explore the ameliorative effects of rutin against carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) toxicity in male rats. Adult male rats were given either CCl4 (30% in olive oil, 3 ml/kg b.w. intraperitoneally) alone or in combination with rutin (70 mg/kg intragastrically) twice a week for 4 weeks. Our data showed that rutin mitigated CCl4 hepatorenal damage, as indicated by diagnostic markers (i.e., transaminases, alkaline phosphatase, total bilirubin, total protein, albumin, urea, uric acid and creatinine), and histopathological findings. In addition, CCl4 induced profound elevation of free radical generation and oxidative stress, as evidenced by increasing lipid peroxidation and reducing catalase, superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase activities in liver, kidney and testicular tissues; these effects were suppressed by coexposure with rutin. Moreover, the increase in the levels of serum triglycerides, cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and very-low-density lipoprotein cholesterol induced by CCl4 was effectively counteracted by rutin. The decrease in the level of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol in the CCl4 group was also counteracted by rutin treatment. Interestingly, the decreased levels of hormonal mediators associated with sperm production, including serum testosterone, luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone, and the impaired sperm quality induced by CCl4 were reversed by rutin. Data from the current study clearly demonstrated that rutin supplementation could at least partly overcome CCl4-induced hepatotoxicity, nephrotoxicity and reproductive toxicity by antioxidant and antidyslipidemic effects
Recommended from our members
Sequencing, Analysis, and Annotation of Expressed Sequence Tags for Camelus dromedarius
Despite its economical, cultural, and biological importance, there has not been a large scale sequencing project to date for Camelus dromedarius. With the goal of sequencing complete DNA of the organism, we first established and sequenced camel EST libraries, generating 70,272 reads. Following trimming, chimera check, repeat masking, cluster and assembly, we obtained 23,602 putative gene sequences, out of which over 4,500 potentially novel or fast evolving gene sequences do not carry any homology to other available genomes. Functional annotation of sequences with similarities in nucleotide and protein databases has been obtained using Gene Ontology classification. Comparison to available full length cDNA sequences and Open Reading Frame (ORF) analysis of camel sequences that exhibit homology to known genes show more than 80% of the contigs with an ORF>300 bp and ~40% hits extending to the start codons of full length cDNAs suggesting successful characterization of camel genes. Similarity analyses are done separately for different organisms including human, mouse, bovine, and rat. Accompanying web portal, CAGBASE (http://camel.kacst.edu.sa/), hosts a relational database containing annotated EST sequences and analysis tools with possibility to add sequences from public domain. We anticipate our results to provide a home base for genomic studies of camel and other comparative studies enabling a starting point for whole genome sequencing of the organism
Sequencing, Analysis, and Annotation of Expressed Sequence Tags for \u3ci\u3eCamelus dromedarius\u3c/i\u3e
Despite its economical, cultural, and biological importance, there has not been a large scale sequencing project to date for Camelus dromedarius. With the goal of sequencing complete DNA of the organism, we first established and sequenced camel EST libraries, generating 70,272 reads. Following trimming, chimera check, repeat masking, cluster and assembly, we obtained 23,602 putative gene sequences, out of which over 4,500 potentially novel or fast evolving gene sequences do not carry any homology to other available genomes. Functional annotation of sequences with similarities in nucleotide and protein databases has been obtained using Gene Ontology classification. Comparison to available full length cDNA sequences and Open Reading Frame (ORF) analysis of camel sequences that exhibit homology to known genes show more than 80% of the contigs with an ORF\u3e300 bp and ~40% hits extending to the start codons of full length cDNAs suggesting successful characterization of camel genes. Similarity analyses are done separately for different organisms including human, mouse, bovine, and rat. Accompanying web portal, CAGBASE (http://camel.kacst.edu.sa/), hosts a relational database containing annotated EST sequences and analysis tools with possibility to add sequences from public domain. We anticipate our results to provide a home base for genomic studies of camel and other comparative studies enabling a starting point for whole genome sequencing of the organism
- …