Design and Development of English Learning Facebook Application based on Platform as a Service (PaaS) by using Smart Gamification

Social networking sites like Facebook are not just an element of passing time but a platform for learning as well. The goal of this paper is to show the effectiveness of a Facebook application named 201C;Wishdom201D; to teach English language based on cloud platform. This application tries to introduce English language in an authentic and communicative manner to the students, where they have to assume different roles (i.e. avatar) to achieve a particular goal. For that purpose they communicate with the other avatar and participate in several quizzes. This study shows the performance of a group of students who played 201C;Wishdom201D; game and take a quiz as a part of their assessment. Their performance has been presented to show their success rate in learning English. The performance of the application is also measured based on Facebook Graph API. In addition, platform as a service (PaaS) of cloud computing from Heroku has been integrated to host the application and its compatibility is checked in this study

Ban smoking during Ramadan

REMEMBER once, as I was about to enter a mosque in Penang, I saw the imam smoking hurriedly before he walked in to lead the Zohor prayer. At a masjid in Kuala Lumpur, as I stood in a saf (prayer row) to perform the solat, a smoker stood beside me. I suspected that, like the imam in Penang, this man also had a few puffs before entering the masjid as I could detect the strong cigarette odour. I was irritated and distracted by the smell permeating from him. It was difficult to concentrate. I encounter this often at other masjid. Once, I saw a man in uniform on a motorbike having a puff before riding away. Another incident was when I was at a clinic and could smell smoke from the counter employee. Don’t get me started on public toilets because some smell strongly of smoke despite no smoking signs. I have seen fathers smoking in family cars, exposing family members to secondhand smoke. I have seen teens smoking secretly at school compounds or toilets

Feminism as Islamophobia: a review of misogyny charges against Islam

One important feature of Islamophobia is to caricature Islam as misogynistic and oppressive to women and thus to advance imperialist hegemony. This “gendered Islamophobia” stigmatizes the religion even though, compared to other world religions, its treatment of women is arguably preferable and more enlightened. Historically, one treasonous use of feminism has been to misappropriate it in order to serve colonial interests and support imperialist wars of occupation that repress subjugated people including women and children. This article argues that ignorance about, and prejudice against, Islam contribute to portraying it as a misogynistic creed. Wrong notions of Islam lead many feminists in Muslim societies to denigrate Islamic teachings and borrow Western ideas to advance women’s causes. Lampooning Islam and replicating Western feminist ideas in Muslim lands have served neither women nor feminism. Such feminist tendencies rather give a bad name to the women’s rights movement and fuel controversy, anger and resentment among Muslims

Estimation of RFID Tag Population Size by Gaussian Estimator

Radio Frequency IDenti cation (RFID) systems are prevalent in all sorts of daily life endeavors. In this thesis we propose a new method to estimate RFID tag population size. We have named our algorithm Gaussian Estimation of RFID Tags, namely, GERT. We present GERT under both {0,1} and {0,1,e} channel models, and in both cases the estimator we use is a well justi ed Gaussian random variable for large enough frame size based on Central Limit Theorem for triangular arrays. The most prominent feature of GERT is the quality with which it estimates a tag population size. We support all the required approximations with detailed analytical work and account for all the approximation errors when we consider the overall quality of the estimation. Our simulation results agree well with analytical ones. GERT, based on standardized frame slotted Aloha protocol, can estimate any tag population size with desired level of accuracy using fewer number of frame slots than previously proposed algorithms

How muslims trivialize the Qur'an

The physical desecration of the Qur’an is a grave sin, but trivializing it is also a serious offence. Muslims certainly do not disrespect their holy book tangibly and physically. Their obvious reverence to the scripture and extreme caution when handling it are paradigmatic, as most of them wrap and place it on a raised surface in the house or in places of worship. However, they manifest, perhaps unaware, their conceptual irreverence for the sacred book in two ways: using it for lesser purposes and splitting it into pieces, which may amount to trivializing it

The bluestocking salons of eighteenth-century Britain

While pre-eighteenth-century British women writers mingled among acquaintances in what Margaret Ezell terms “coterie circles”, bluestocking women made one step ahead. They enjoyed a greater space and their gender-neutral gatherings placed them on a complementary equivalence with men in literary discussions. Emphasizing this aspect of bluestocking intellectual life, Bridget Hill, in Eighteenth-century Women: An Anthology, states that bluestocking women “not only insisted on their ability to converse on equal terms with men, but in their salons demonstrated such ability and received public recognition for their intellectual attainments and their conversational wit.

Intimate revelations: conversations among “evil” women in Rokeya’s Padmarag

Rokeya creatively demonstrates in Padmarag (1924) the socially embedded association of women with evil. She brings together a group of women on the premises of Tarini Bhaban in order to explore their psychological terrain, as they share with each other previously untold memories and document their experiences of patriarchal oppression and domestic abuse. Through their reminiscences and memories, Rokeya lays bare the angst of women in a patriarchal social order that silences and suppresses them. Beyond the premise of sisterhood at Tarini Bhaban, in one way or another, most of these women are considered “evil” in society as a whole. For example, Saudamini is a stepmother with no biological children of her own and is regarded as a dakini (witch) and rakshasi (a female demon). Other women of Tarini Bhaban have received comparable tags from society and experienced similar victimization. Based on the representation of “evil” women in the novel, in this article I will discuss their stories and examine some of the contributing factors to their victimization and characterization as wicked in the context of early twentieth-century Bengal

English literary studies: including Islamic perspectives in pedagogy and practice

Proponents of the integration of Islam into English literary studies seek, by way of presenting Islamic worldviews in relation to the life-worlds that English texts presumably promote, to inform (Muslim) students and practitioners of the subject about possible untoward influences in order to help them withstand cultural captivity and lifestyle effects. This is part of the wider concept of integrating Islam into human knowledge, which functions across a broad range of subject areas and generally refers to a method of looking at academic disciplines from Islamic perspectives and enlightening the reader about relevant Islamic teachings. Based on this theoretical premise, in this article I focus on the need for and three important ways of teaching English literature: inculcating Islamic/moral values, identifying predominant themes and ideas inherent in literary texts and looking at them from Islamic perspectives, and reforming the curriculum

What do your lockdown reading habits reveal?

The days of COVID-19 have given many of us mental space to introspect and to think clearly and differently. Perhaps it is important to remind people of all persuasions of the benefits of reading that can remedy boredom and overcome anxiety. Reading can be a good way to spend spare time. It is a panacea for the ennui of the educated, especially during the lockdown period. In most cases, readers do not have to follow any schedule and can consult reading materials in their own time and space

Rokeya from a comparative literary perspective

IN MY doctoral study titled Introducing Rokeya’s Plural Feminism (University of Portsmouth, 2007), I sought to unearth the rich treasure of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s (1880–1932) feminist writing and to compare it with that of two established English feminist writers, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), and two postcolonial ones Attia Hosain (1913-98) and Monica Ali (1967). My comparative study aimed at introducing Rokeya and her work to a wide-ranging readership and at revealing the relevance of her overarching feminist ideas to international feminisms beyond the borders of the South Asian subcontinent