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Edutainment Tendencies among EFL Learners at the University of Halabja\ Department of English Language
No full textIn recent years, the concept of edutainment has been introduced to the field of education. It is a blended word which has been formed from education and entertainment. The lion aim of this blending is to enhance the process of education through entertainment materials. The researchers have applied this concept to investigate students’ tendencies to use various entertaining materials in their learning process at the University of Halabja\ department of English language for the academic year (2018-2019). The aim of this study is to expose the value and need of edutainment in the process of learning among these students. To achieve this goal, the researchers grounded a theoretical background about some diverged entertainment devices and their impacts on students' learning achievements. Then, formed an academic questionnaire to detect the scope of the use of entertainment sources by these students and the knock of them over their learning achievements. At the end, they analyzed and sieved the results of this questionnaire and concluded the study with their proper recommendations
A Pragmatic Analysis of Some Quranic Verses in Light of Grice's Cooperative Principle
No full textThe present paper is an attempt to evaluate the applicability of Grice’s Co-operative Principle and Conversational Maxims, as one of the outstanding models in Pragmatics, to some selected Quranic conversations. Grice’s model is regarded as template for the flow of conversations and interactions held between people. Quran, as a Holy Text in Islam, contains many speech events, i.e., situations wherein conversations take place. In the stories narrated in Quran, there are situations in which, as the ordinary life of the human beings, participants converse with one another. In this study , the researchers examine the applicability of the conversation model of Grice to the Quranic conversations. To this end, the researchers have quoted some verses from Quran, first in Arabic along with their translations in English , and analysed them in light of Grice’s model of conversation analysis. Findings indicate that in the Quranic conversations there are occasions where the maxims of conversation are observed and in some other cases not observed. This fact attests the universality of Grice’s model
Assessing the Effectiveness of the Central Bank of Iraq in Managing Foreign Reserves (2005-2017)
No full textإن إدارة الأحتياطيات الأجنبية من المواضيع المهمة لأن تحقيق مستوى ملائم وآمن من هذه الأحتياطيات يساهم في المحافظة على الأستقرار الداخلي والخارجي، وذلك عن طريق تأمين الأستقرار في المستوى العام للأسعار والمحافظة على قيمة العملة المحلية لمنع هروب رؤوس الأموال الى الخارج . بالأضافة الى دورها في مواجهة الصدمات والأزمات الخارجية. أي أن حجم الأحتياطيات الآمنة يعتبر صمام الامان للأقتصاد تجاه الأزمات الداخلية والخارجية التي يمكن ان يتعرض لها الأقتصاد.
أثبت البحث فاعلية البنك المركزي العراقي في إدارة الأحتياطيات الأجنبية للمدة (2005-2017) من خلال تحقيق هدفين في آن واحد والمتمثل بالمحافظة على الحجم الكافي والملائم من هذه الأحتياطيات وفق المعايير والمؤشرات الدولية المعتمدة من جهة، بالاضافة الى المحافظة على استقرار المستوى العام للأسعاروتخفيض معدلات التضخم، من خلال إستقرار سعر صرف العملة المحلية ، وهو أحد مؤشرات الأستقرار الأقتصادي، من جهة أخرى .The management of foreign reserves is an important issue because achieving an appropriate and secure level of these reserves contributes to maintaining internal and external stability by ensuring stability in the general level of prices and maintaining the value of the local currency to prevent the flight of capital abroad. In addition to its role in the face of shocks and external crises. That is, the size of the safe reserves is considered the safety valve for the economy towards the internal and external crises that the economy can face.
The research proved the effectiveness of the Central Bank of Iraq in the management of foreign reserves for the period (2005-2017) by achieving two objectives at the same time, which is to maintain adequate and appropriate size of these reserves in accordance with international standards and indicators adopted on the one hand, in addition to maintaining the stability of the general level of prices and reducing inflation rates , Through the stability of the local currency exchange rate, which is one of the indicators of economic stability, on the other
Code-switching as Identity Marker: A Sociolinguistic Study of Kurdish EFL University Students
No full textBeing able to know English along with a mother tongue would inevitably lead into code-switching. Whether intentional or unintentional, it is revealing to investigate codeswitching among English EFL learners. This study, however, focuses specifically on the issue of learner’s identity with codeswitching. Language as identity expresser, or even identity maker, is thought to be strongly connected with identity. This study targets Kurdish EFL students at university level to mainly investigate the reason(s) for code-switching between their mother tongue and English as a foreign language. To this end, quantitative data, through a questionnaire, has been collected. The model adopted for designing the questions is based on a well-known theory by Bloom and Gumperz (1972) known as ‘situational codeswitching’. This study hypothesizes that Kurdish EFL learners code switch from English to Kurdish due to the lack of knowledge in English, or they do code switch from Kurdish to English to mark a different identity, which is the major focus of this study. To validate or refute these claims, the data collected for this paper has been qualitatively verified to reach some conclusions
Woman’s Identity vs. Beauty Ideals: A Comparative Study of Selected Contemporary Novels
No full textCultural notions about woman’s identity play a role in woman self-acceptance and self- worth. Generally speaking, these ideas affected women since they have shaped their feelings of worth and beauty. Nowadays pursuit of beauty ideal has become one of the problematic issues to meet particular standards. Moreover, the development of selfhood is influenced by the mirror of the society. Ethnicity, body shape, skin colour, age, and wrinkles are various forms of society standards of beauty which some women shape their identities by modifying accordingly. Thus, beauty ideals become a form of restriction and enslavement because women are forced to follow and sometimes suffer to have the sense of belonging. Three novels are selected in this paper to study the problematic issue of what is meant by beauty ideal. Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of the Face (1994) depicts the suffering of a woman who has a struggle with jaw cancer since early childhood. Surviving the cancer means removing part of her jaw which causes the tragedy of her life. Zadie Smith’s The White Teeth (2000) is a work about the postcolonial society of London where Irie considers herself British despite her dark skin due to her Jamaican roots. White skin is one of the ideals of beauty according to the British standard. Ellen Hopkins’ Perfect (2011) is a novel in which the writer asks the question who defines the word ‘perfect’, the question is asked through Kendra whose dream is to be a model and a star
The Significance of Research Methods with Reference to Language Education in Higher Education
No full textThis research paper investigates the significance of research in language education in the higher education sector. For this purpose, the researcher conducted a case study with twenty 4th year students studying English at the University of Human Development (UHD), Iraqi Kurdistan Region. They were selected based on purposive sampling. The participants were invited to respond to a questionnaire that was created and piloted by the researcher. They were also requested to take part in a structured interview. The findings show that the nature of research methods for 4th year students across higher education is complex and elusive. The findings also show that most of the students almost have the same problems and they have similar views on their final project as they started at the beginning of the final year of the academic year (2018-2019) at the University of Human Development
The State of the Art in Feature Extraction Methods for EEG Classification
No full textEpileptic seizure is a neurological disease that is common around the world and there are many types (e.g. Focal aware seizures and atonic seizure) that are caused by synchronous or abnormal neuronal activity in the brain. A number of techniques are available to detect the brain activities that lead to Epileptic seizures; one of the most common one is Electroencephalogram (EEG) that uses visual scanning to measure brain activities generated by nerve cells in the cerebral cortex. The techniques make use of different features detected by EEG to decide on the occurrence and type of seizures. In this paper we review EEG features proposed by different researches for the purpose of Epileptic seizure detection, also analyze, and compare the performance of the proposed features
Employing Data Mining Techniques for Predicting Opioid Withdrawal in Applicants of Health Centers
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Addiction to narcotics is one of the greatest health challenges in today’s world which has become a serious threat for social, economic, and cultural structures and has ruined a part of an active force of the society and it is one of the main factors of growth of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis. Today, addiction is known as a disease and welfare organization, and many of the dependent centers try to help the addicts treat this disease. In this study, using data mining algorithms and based on data collected from opioid withdrawal applicants referring to welfare organization, a prediction model is proposed to predict the success of opioid withdrawal applicants. In this study, the statistical population is comprised opioid withdrawal applicants in a welfare organization. This statistical population includes 26 features of 793 instances including men and women. The proposed model is a combination of meta-learning algorithms (decorate and bagging) and J48 decision tree implemented in Weka data mining software. The efficiency of the proposed model is evaluated in terms of precision, recall, Kappa, and root mean squared error and the results are compared with algorithms such as multilayer perceptron neural network, Naive Bayes, and Random Forest. The results of various experiments showed that the precision of the proposed model is 71.3% which is superior over the other compared algorithms
An Interactive and Predictive Pre-diagnostic Model for Healthcare based on Data Provenance
Get PDFThe future of healthcare may look completely different from the current clinic-center services. Rapidly growing and developing technologies are expected to change clinics throughout the world. However, the healthcare delivered to impaired patients, such as elderly and disabled people, possibly still requires hands-on human expertise. The aim of this study is to propose a predictive model that pre-diagnose illnesses by analyzing symptoms that are interactively taken from patients via several hand gestures during a period of time. This is particularly helpful in assisting clinicians and doctors to gain better understanding and make more accurate decisions about future plans for their patients’ situations. The hand gestures are detected, the time of the gesture is recorded and then they are associated to their designated symptoms. This information is captured in the form of provenance graphs constructed based on the W3C PROV data model. The provenance graph is analyzed by extracting several network metrics and then supervised machine-learning algorithms are used to build a predictive model. The model is used to predict diseases from the symptoms with a maximum accuracy of 84.5%
Suspected Protective Effect of Eruca Sativa Leaves Extract on Sperm Abnormalities in Male Albino Mice Treated with Hypericum triqutrifolium aqueous crude extract
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This study was carried out to evaluate the effect of Eruca sativa on the cytotoxic effect of Hypericum triquetrifolium on sperm abnormalities in albino mice. Leaves of E. sativa and aerial parts of H. triquetrifolium were dried in shade and grinded and their aqueous extracts were used for the treatments to study their effect on sperm morphology. Treated groups were injected with a single dose of 38 mg/kg body weight (BW) of Hypericum subcutaneously, while the Eruca groups were orally administered with 250 mg/kg BW twice/week for 2 weeks. After the exposure of H. triquetrifolium, the frequency of abnormal sperms showed a highly significant induction of sperm abnormalities; separated head from tail sperms, swollen head, hookless, defective head, and hook. However, the Eruca group showed no obvious abnormalities in sperm morphology, while in cotreatment with both Eruca and Hypericum (H/E) groups, there was an extremely significant decrease (P < 0.0001) in the abnormal sperms. In conclusion, it appeared that E. sativa could prevent or at least minimize the damages that Hypericum toxins would make on the sperm morphology significantly