The Omani socio-cultural context, the mono-gender educational system in schools, and the learning environment at the higher educational institutions significantly affect learners' self-efficacy and academic achievement in the mixed-gender EFL classroom. Different studies have revealed both positive and negative implications of mixed-gender classrooms, especially for those who came from a mono-gender learning environment. The adjustment phase for the tertiary learners from school to the university is not only crucial but also significant for the continuation of higher education. The effects of (...) socio-cultural factors on self-efficacy and academic achievement have not been studied in depth, particularly in eastern countries. So, the current study aimed at investigating the role of gender, learning background, socio-cultural circumstances, and the effect of the learning environment on EFL learners' self-efficacy and their academic achievement within the scenario of the prevailing culture and traditions in the Dhofar Region. To conduct this study, mixed research methods have been adopted to investigate the perceptions of both teachers and learners. The sample of the study consists of 117 EFL learners ranging between 18–22 years of age and 25 EFL teachers ranging between 35–60 years of age. We used separate surveys for students and the teachers and interviewed students and teachers on a random basis. The results demonstrate that both genders were comfortable in segregated classes. The results also reveal that female learners were active learners and better performers than male learners in the school learning environment. The students reported that social restrictions discouraged them from mixing with the opposite gender in classroom activities and oral discussions. Most teachers believe that, compared to male learners, female learners performed better and were more engaged and responsive to different learning situations. The study found that there were statistically significant differences between both genders in terms of the effects of socio-cultural environment, self-efficacy, and the learning environment. Female learners were better than male learners in mono-gender schools, and they have higher self-efficacy than male students at the university. In conclusion, EFL teachers should consider the socio-cultural context, learners' learning background, and other challenges of learners to bring out positive outcomes in a mixed-gender classroom. (shrink)

This article presents a kind of unconventional attempt to show the logical and philosophical defect faced by any attempt of criticizing or even questioning the principle of causality. The main focus in this article is the attempt of David Hume, regarding its broad impact on atheists and materialists, and because it summarized all that has been said or is said about the apparent criticisms of this principle and its implications like the rejection and doubt in the proofs of (...) divine existence. It has been shown in the article that the application of the principle of causality is a basis not only for the knowledge but also for the skepticism and for being aware of the ignorance. So, whoever apparently and verbally claims that he does not believe in this principle could never doubt or say that he doesn't know, and even such a recognition would be impossible without employing the principle. Therefore, the atheistic and agnostic stances are logically invalid. (shrink)

The theoretical understanding of e-commerce has received much attention over the years; however, relatively little focus has been directed towards e-commerce ethics, especially the SMEs B2B e-ecommerce aspect. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop and empirically test a framework that explains the impact of SMEs B2B e-commerce ethics on buyer repurchase intentions and loyalty. Using SEM to analyse the data collected from a sample of SME e-commerce firms in Egypt, the results indicate that buyers’ perceptions of supplier (...) ethics construct is composed of six dimensions and strongly predictive of online buyer repurchase intentions and loyalty. Furthermore, our results also show that reliability/fulfilment and non-deception are the most effective relationship-building dimensions. In addition, relationship quality has a positive effect on buyer repurchase intentions and loyalty. The results offer important implications for B2B e-commerce and are likely to stimulate further research in the area of relationship marketing. (shrink)

Lorsque la vie apparaît comme une oeuvre d'art au plein sens du terme, elle est alors portée par ce geste d'invention de soi, geste de résistance qui déplace les lignes de force, qui vise la récupération du monde à travers une subjectivité révolutionnaire. Une des caractéristiques fondamentales de l'homme est l'altérité et l'étrangeté. Exposé à l'inconnu, il est amené à déployer son existence au-delà d'une origine ou d'un foyer. Il est acculé à puiser en lui des ressources insoupçonnées pour faire (...) face aux turbulences de l'être. Cela confère une liberté de mouvement que donnent à voir des trajectoires d'hommes exceptionnels dotés d'un courage et d'une puissance de pensée pour tracer de nouveaux chemins. Cela ne va pas sans crise de l'intériorité, sans destruction des frontières de la subjectivité faisant de l'homme un étranger sans repos et sans assise. Mais c'est dans l'échappée à la tyrannie du même que la mutation survient avec une conscience ouverte aux réalités les plus étrangères. A ce niveau se situe la lutte perpétuelle dont parle Nietzsche qui vise une transformation radicale de l'individualité. Le regard de l'étranger se situe dans cette ligne de fuite qui bouleverse les modalités du voir, propulsant l'âme vers des horizons stupéfiants à travers une puissance de la pensée où le sujet est désormais porté par l'infini de l'être. (shrink)

Can politics be studied scientifically, and if so, how? Assuming it is impossible to justify values by human reason alone, social science has come to consider an unreflective relativism the only viable basis, not only for its own operations, but for liberal societies more generally. Although the experience of the sixties has made social scientists more sensitive to the importance of values, it has not led to a fundamental reexamination of value relativism, which remains the basis of contemporary social science. (...) Almost three decades after Leo Strauss's death, Nasser Behnegar offers the first sustained exposition of what Strauss was best known for: his radical critique of contemporary social science, and particularly of political science. Behnegar's impressive book argues that Strauss was not against the scientific study of politics, but he did reject the idea that it could be built upon political science's unexamined assumption of the distinction between facts and values. Max Weber was, for Strauss, the most profound exponent of values relativism in social science, and Behnegar's explication artfully illuminates Strauss's critique of Weber's belief in the ultimate insolubility of all value conflicts. Strauss's polemic against contemporary political science was meant to make clear the contradiction between its claim of value-free premises and its commitment to democratic principles. As Behnegar ultimately shows, values--the ethical component lacking in a contemporary social science--are essential to Strauss's project of constructing a genuinely scientific study of politics. (shrink)

This paper attempts an historical analysis of a dream of the physicist George Gamow recorded shortly before his death in 1968. The dream is contextualized through Gamow's extended scientific work and popular scientific efforts, and in light of enduring preoccupations with the notion of a complete science. The analysis extends to an examination of the relationship of the dream to dreaming practices and deliberations apart from Gamow’s, as evident in the relationship and collaboration between the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and C. (...) G. Jung. (shrink)

Throughout this research, imposing the training of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to play tic-tac-toe bored game, by training the ANN to play the tic-tac-toe logic using the set of mathematical combination of the sequences that could be played by the system and using both the Gradient Descent Algorithm explicitly and the Elimination theory rules implicitly. And so on the system should be able to produce imunate amalgamations to solve every state within the game course to make better of results (...) of winnings or getting draw. (shrink)

The two potential public spaces of political expression in the city, the mosque and the plaza, were denied their civic function for anywhere between thirty and fifty years of despotic rule across the Arab world depending on the country. Abrupt and violent revolts sometimes managed to stage their protests in one or the other for a short moment, but the reprisal of the regime was usually swift and ruthless.

Changes in the past two decades of goals for science education in schools have induced new orientations in science education worldwide. One of the emerging complementary approaches was the science-technology-society (STS) movement. STS has been called the current megatrend in science education. Others have called it a paradigm shift for the field of science education. The success of science education reform depends on teachers' ability to integrate the philosophy and practices of current programs of science education reform with their existing (...) philosophy. Thus, when considering the STS approach to science education, teacher beliefs about STS implementation require attention. Without this attention, negative beliefs concerning STS implementation and inquiry learning could defeat the reform movements emphasizing STS. This article argues the role of STS in science education and the importance of considering science teachers' beliefs about STS in implementing significant reforms in science education. (shrink)

: Mu1ammad Taqiyy al-Dīn al-Maqrīzī is undoubtedly the historian with the most expansive repertoire of the entire fifteenth century Arabic historiography. His al-Mawā’iẓ wa-l-i’tibār bi-dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa-l-āthār, in particular, is a unique achievement, which manages to present a general historical discourse through the chronicling of buildings and topography. This unprecedented book, this paper argues, may have benefited from the author’s extended association with Ibn Khaldūn, the great interpreter of the notion of ’umrān. Ibn Khaldūn was al-Maqrīzī’s revered teacher for at (...) least thirty years. He seems to have influenced his pupil’s thinking about the city as the domain of civilization in two ways: analytical, that is to look for causes and effects behind events and appearances, and interpretive, that is to see in the urban and architectural history of the city the illustration of the underlying civilizational cycle. In the Khiṭaṭ, al-Maqrīzī seems to have applied his master’s theory to a concrete example – the city of Cairo – and drew from it pronounced moral lessons on the decline he was observing in the Mamlūk sultanate. This is probably why the Khiṭaṭ’s influence has endured for more than five centuries: a tribute to its author’s ardent passion and filial affinity with his city and country, as well as his interpretive framework, which he probably absorbed from Ibn Khaldūn. (shrink)

The Road Inns in Bilād al-Shām. By Katia Cytryn-Silverman. BAR S2130. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010. Pp. vi + 290, illus. £58.

As future citizens, students must make decisions requiring an understanding of the interaction of science and technology and its interface with society. STS education has been strongly identified with meeting this goal, but putting theory into practice has so far been difficult. This article asks, “What are the challenges influencing science teachers to implement STS education in the science classroom?” The author investigated using a mixed method research technique incorporating multiple sources of qualitative and quantitative data (questionnaire, interviews, field notes, (...) and classroom observations). Constraints a fecting teachers' practices in teaching science through STS education were identified and can be categorized into impersonal, interpersonal, and personal constraints. Findings indicated interactions within and between external and internal constraints. Suggestions are made for implementing change in various aspects of science teacher education. (shrink)

In this paper an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model, for predicting the category of a tumor was developed and tested. Taking patients’ tests, a number of information gained that influence the classification of the tumor. Such information as age, sex, histologic-type, degree-of-diffe, status of bone, bone-marrow, lung, pleura, peritoneum, liver, brain, skin, neck, supraclavicular, axillar, mediastinum, and abdominal. They were used as input variables for the ANN model. A model based on the Multilayer Perceptron Topology was established and trained using (...) data set which its title is “primary tumor” and was obtained from the University Medical Centre, Institute of Oncology, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia Test data evaluation shows that the ANN model is able to correctly predict the tumor category with 76.67 % accuracy. (shrink)

La discapacidad ha sido concebida a lo largo del tiempo de diferentes modos, lo cual fue ocasión para que algunos autores construyeran modelos para explicar ciertas praxis en torno al tema. Este artículo traza un recorrido desde el primer modelo hasta la actualidad. A su vez propone un nuevo, el Modelo de Comunicación y Reconocimiento Legítimo de la Discapacidad (MCRLD), el cual se caracteriza por un cambio de paradigma: pasar de la inclusión al reconocimiento. Para fundamentar esto, se presentan sus (...) tres categorías: reconocimiento, distancia y vulnerabilidad. También se expondrán las diferentes teorías y conceptos que lo sustentan. El propósito del MCRLD es profundizar en la idea del empoderamiento de las personas con discapacidad como parte de la diversidad de la sociedad, acortando brechas históricamente construidas y aún vigentes. (shrink)

Comment penser les processus d’interactions culturelles? L’analyse du monde arabe est réduite trop souvent à l’analyse conjoncturelle de ces relations, elle contient trop souvent en elle-même un chauvinisme de l’universel. En effet, la force de l’idéologie de l’immédiateté, c’est sa capacité à domestiquer notre point de vue. Cela présuppose que la confiance commune de sujet connaissant est si forte que notre lecture de l’immédiat est corrélée par une analyse aussi rapprochée en termes de temps que l’événement lui-même et son commentaire. (...) Et pourtant bien que notre savoir se réduise en qualité de pensée, nous n’avons aucune difficulté pour dire que nous savons. Mais que savons-nous au juste à propos des relations de l’interculturalité pratique? Comment penser sans narcissisme idéologique ou ethnocentrisme scolastique, les cultures politiques extra-occidentales? Pour cela, il s’agit de se défaire du prisme des aires culturelles et de reposer à nouveau la question de l’expérience de l’universel. (shrink)

Comment penser les processus d’interactions culturelles? L’analyse du monde arabe est réduite trop souvent à l’analyse conjoncturelle de ces relations, elle contient trop souvent en elle-même un chauvinisme de l’universel. En effet, la force de l’idéologie de l’immédiateté, c’est sa capacité à domestiquer notre point de vue. Cela présuppose que la confiance commune de sujet connaissant est si forte que notre lecture de l’immédiat est corrélée par une analyse aussi rapprochée en termes de temps que l’événement lui-même et son commentaire (...) (par exemple les termes antagonistes : « Occident versus Orient », « guerre de civilisations »). Et pourtant bien que notre savoir se réduise en qualité de pensée, nous n’avons aucune difficulté pour dire que nous savons. Mais que savons-nous au juste à propos des relations de l’interculturalité pratique? Comment penser sans narcissisme idéologique ou ethnocentrisme scolastique, les cultures politiques extra-occidentales? Pour cela, il s’agit de se défaire du prisme des aires culturelles et de reposer à nouveau la question de l’expérience de l’universel. (shrink)

Buildings energy consumption is growing gradually and put away around 40% of total energy use. Predicting heating and cooling loads of a building in the initial phase of the design to find out optimal solutions amongst different designs is very important, as ell as in the operating phase after the building has been finished for efficient energy. In this study, an artificial neural network model was designed and developed for predicting heating and cooling loads of a building based on a (...) dataset for building energy performance. The main factors for input variables are: relative compactness, roof area, overall height, surface area, glazing are a, wall area, glazing area distribution of a building, orientation, and the output variables: heating and cooling loads of the building. The dataset used for training are the data published in the literature for various 768 residential buildings. The model was trained and validated, most important factors affecting heating load and cooling load are identified, and the accuracy for the validation was 99.60%. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence, in press. Abstract: For some time we have been developing, and have had significant practical success with, a time-sensitive, contradiction-tolerant logical reasoning engine called the active logic machine (ALMA). The current paper details a semantics for a general version of the underlying logical formalism, active logic. Central to active logic are special rules controlling the inheritance of beliefs in general (and of beliefs about the current time in particular), very tight controls on what can be derived from direct (...) contradictions (P &￢P), and mechanisms allowing an agent to represent and reason about its own beliefs and past reasoning. Furthermore, inspired by the notion that until an agent notices that a set of beliefs is contradictory, that set seems consistent (and the agent therefore reasons with it as if it were consistent), we introduce an “apperception function” that represents an agent’s limited awareness of its own beliefs, and serves to modify inconsistent belief sets so as to yield consistent sets. Using these ideas, we introduce a new definition of logical consequence in the context of active logic, as well as a new definition of soundness such that, when reasoning with consistent premises, all classically sound rules remain sound in our new sense. However, not everything that is classically sound remains sound in our sense, for by classical definitions, all rules with contradictory premises are vacuously sound, whereas in active logic not everything follows from a contradiction. (shrink)

In a detailed and spirited critique, Professor James M. Humber has found my defence of the ontological argument unconvincing. Humber's case rests upon his claim that my ‘error’ is due to my ‘having accepted an incorrect definition of “physically necessary being” … ’. Now I do indeed claim that God must be conceived as a factuall necessary being, i.e. as eternally independent. I take the notion of God's aseity or eternal independence to be relatively straightforward and uncontroversial; it is accepted (...) as an essential component of the concept God by many philosophers who also insist that there is no acceptable form of demonstrative theism. Thus, it is widely held that ‘God is a factually necessary being’ does not imply ‘God is a logically necessary being’; that God is eternally independent does not imply that he exists in all possible worlds. But it is precisely this view that I have argued is incorrect. While I concur that there is an intelligible concept of God as factually necessary, I deny that the existence of such a being is logically contingent, a mere matter of empirical fact. Indeed, a rigorous inspection of the concept of an eternally independent being reveals that whether that concept is instantiated, i.e. whether there exists a being exemplifying that concept, is knowable a priori . My claim is in fact stronger than this. I argue that the existence of an eternal, independent, omniscient and omnipotent being is demonstrable by conceptual analysis. It is Humber's contention that my alleged demonstration of God's existence crumbles upon the discovery of the unacceptability of my definition of ‘factually necessary being’. Let us see. (shrink)

This article examines the cultural meanings of suicide, self-sacrifice, military and terrorist violence in the context of contemporary Israel, Palestine and the U.S. ‘War on Terror’. Notions of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘suicide’, employed in the anthropological and sociological literature, are evaluated with regard to these materials using a theoretical framework for interpreting violent acts as part of cultural expression and as critically linked to collective imagination and memory. This theoretical approach is then also deployed to re-examine other apparently unintelligible forms of (...) violence, such as school-shootings, serial-killing in the U.S., as well as ethnic-cleansing and community violence elsewhere. (shrink)

The goal of this note is to bring into wider attention the often neglected important work by Bertrand Russell on the foundations of physics published in the late 1920s. In particular, we emphasize how the book The Analysis of Matter can be considered the earliest systematic attempt to unify the modern quantum theory, just emerging by that time, with general relativity. More importantly, it is argued that the idea of what I call Russell space, introduced in Part III of that (...) book, is more fundamental than quantum theory, general relativity, and quantum gravity since the topological ordinal space proposed by Russell would naturally incorporate into its very fabric the emergent nature of spacetime by deploying event assemblages, and not spacetime or particles, as the fundamental building blocks of the world. (shrink)

This Paper combines interval- valued neutrouphic sets and rough sets. It studies roughness in interval- valued neutrosophic sets and some of its properties. Finally we propose a Hamming distance between lower and upper approximations of interval valued neutrosophic sets.

We investigate the fundamental relationship between philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of nature, arguing for a position in which the latter encompasses the former. Two traditions are set against each other, one is natural aesthetics, whose covering philosophy is Idealism, and the other is the aesthetics of nature, the position defended in this article, with the general program of a comprehensive philosophy of nature as its covering theory. Our approach is philosophical, operating within the framework of the ontology of the (...) process of the production of art, especially the views of Antonin Artaud, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari. We interrogate Dilthey and Worringer while outlining an ontology of art based on the production of nonhuman images and a nonpersonal experiential field of nature. (shrink)

A perspective is provided on how to move beyond postmodernism while struggling to do philosophy in the twenty-first century. The ontological structures of time, history, and mathematics are analyzed from the vantagepoint of the Heideggerian theory of nonspatial Fold.

The liver is the human body’s mandatory organ, but detecting liver disease at an early stage is very difficult due to the hiddenness of symptoms. Liver diseases may cause loss of energy or weakness when some irregularities in the working of the liver get visible. Cancer is one of the most common diseases of the liver and also the most fatal of all. Uncontrolled growth of harmful cells is developed inside the liver. If diagnosed late, it may cause death. Treatment (...) of liver diseases at an early stage is, therefore, an important issue as is designing a model to diagnose early disease. Firstly, an appropriate feature should be identified which plays a more significant part in the detection of liver cancer at an early stage. Therefore, it is essential to extract some essential features from thousands of unwanted features. So, these features will be mined using data mining and soft computing techniques. These techniques give optimized results that will be helpful in disease diagnosis at an early stage. In these techniques, we use feature selection methods to reduce the dataset’s feature, which include Filter, Wrapper, and Embedded methods. Different Regression algorithms are then applied to these methods individually to evaluate the result. Regression algorithms include Linear Regression, Ridge Regression, LASSO Regression, Support Vector Regression, Decision Tree Regression, Multilayer Perceptron Regression, and Random Forest Regression. Based on the accuracy and error rates generated by these Regression algorithms, we have evaluated our results. The result shows that Random Forest Regression with the Wrapper Method from all the deployed Regression techniques is the best and gives the highest R2-Score of 0.8923 and lowest MSE of 0.0618. (shrink)

We reflect on the nature of art, the creative process, and the connection between art and philosophy.

We develop a series of theses on the philosophical aesthetics of design art. A sketch of an outline of a theory of objects is drawn from within a naturalistic worldview, that of abstract materialism and the general, still ongoing, quest to build a comprehensive philosophy of nature encompassing not only the physical world, but also culture, art, and politics.

In this research paper, the graph of the bipolar single-valued neutrosophic set model (BSVNS) is proposed. The graphs of single valued neutrosophic set models is generalized by this graph. For the BSVNS model, several results have been proved on complete and isolated graphs. Adding, an important and suitable condition for the graphs of the BSVNS model to become an isolated graph of the BSVNS model has been demonstrated.

Purpose Moor designated two major problem sources typifying the social and ethical implications of computer technologies, namely, “policy vacuum” and “conceptual muddles.” Motivated by Moor’s seminal definition and Floridi’s conceptualization of information and communication technologies as re-ontologizing technologies, this study aims to explore Omani undergraduates’ cognition regarding ICT ethics. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a grounded theory approach for the constant comparative thematic analysis, the constituents of ICT ethics-related cognition among undergraduates and influencing factors were scrutinized. Qualitative data were gathered via focus group (...) discussions with undergraduates and interviews with academics and information systems professionals at Sultan Qaboos University. Findings In total, 10 thematic categories revolving around a core category, constructing conceptual perceptions of and attitudes toward the realms constituting ICT ethics using an ontological, object-oriented approach, emerged from the comparative analysis. Undergraduates were found to adopt an applied approach when defining professional ICT ethics codes and policies, with a particular focus on information privacy and integrity. Research limitations/implications This qualitative study was conducted at a single research site. This may restrict the generalizability of the findings. Postgraduates were not considered when designing this qualitative inquiry. Originality/value The findings of the study hold theoretical and methodological significance with regard to ICT ethics-related cognition in the era following the fourth industrial revolution by sustaining feminist ethics in this research. Ultimately, the study developed a substantive theory scrutinizing the constitutive elements of ICT ethics-related cognition among Generation Z. (shrink)