A Mediterranean of Relations for the Medieval Maghrib: Historiography in Question

References to relations between states, regions, communities and cultures have been a staple of historical thinking on the Mediterranean from the nineteenth century to the present day. Weathering changing academic trends and fashions, this vision of the Mediterranean has shaped the development of relevant historiographies, defining assumptions and approaches to an unrecognised extent. Focusing on the trajectory of this “Mediterranean of relations” in the historiography of the medieval Maghrib, this paper outlines some of the effects of its prevalence on the evolution of the concept of Mediterranean and argues for the inclusion of these considerations in the ongoing discussions around the medieval Mediterranean.     

A model for logistics systems engineering management education in Europe

This paper presents the need for a systems and process perspective of logistics. By defining logistics in this way a template for a logistics education course is developed. The template addresses functional, process and supply chain needs and has been developed by a number of university partners with core skills in different traditional disciplines. The template is currently being prototyped with the principle of 'gestalt' - the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts.     

Hope as a Mediator of Loneliness and Academic Self‐efficacy Among Students With and Without Learning Disabilities during the Transition to College

The transition to college often occasions excitement as well as elevated stress for students. The latter may be especially the case for those with learning disabilities (LD), who can encounter problems both socially and academically. This study follows students both with and without LD during the first month of college to explore the relationships between LD status and two outcomes: loneliness/social distress and academic self‐efficacy. In particular, we hypothesized that hope and optimism would mediate the relationship between LD status and these outcomes. The sample consisted of 344 first‐year undergraduates at the beginning of the academic year (Time‐1) and a month later (Time‐2). Results showed that LD status predicted Time‐2 levels of academic self‐efficacy and loneliness only indirectly, demonstrating that relationships between LD and loneliness as well as between LD and academic self‐efficacy are mediated by hope.     

All that glitters is not gold: Challenges of teacher and school leader licensure licensing system in Qatar

In 2001, the Government of Qatar began a comprehensive education reform (Education for a New Era) based on RAND's recommendations and options for building an educational system that would meet the country's changing needs. Nine years later, Qatar's educational landscape has significantly changed. Among these changes is the introduction of Professional Standards for teacher and school leaders and Qatar's first system for the registration and licensing of teachers and school leaders that are directly linked to the professional standards. This study seeks to analyze school leaders’ perspectives regarding the Qatar National Professional Standards for Teachers and School Leaders and the recently introduced accompanying licensure system. The study reports results from questionnaires addressed to 74 school leaders. These findings illuminate problematic issues and indicate that these policies use ambiguous terminology and procedures, ignore local educators’ input, and provide unrealistic expectations of society, lack consistency and created resistance on the part of educators. Discussion is provided that centers on the implications of importing educational products and the need to take into account the local culture in implementing these products.     

Science teachers’ interpretations of Islamic culture related to science education versus the Islamic epistemology and ontology of science

The debate about Islam and science extends to a debate about the relationship between Islam and science education. In this paper, I explore Egyptian teachers’ views of the relationship between science and religion within the Islamic context. Teachers’ key vision of the relationship between science and religion was that “religion comes first and science comes next. I will argue that teachers’ personal religious beliefs are among the major constructs that drive teachers’ ways of thinking and interpretation of scientific issues related with religion. Then, I discuss how teachers’ personal religious beliefs have been formed and influenced their pedagogical beliefs related to science and religion issues. Finally, I will argue, how we use the personal religious beliefs model as a framework of teaching/learning scientific issues related with religion within sociocultural (Islamic) context.      

Sequence-dependent rotation axis changes and interaction torque use in overarm throwing

We examined the role of rotation axes during an overarm throwing task. Participants performed such task and were asked to throw a ball at maximal velocity at a target. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the minimum inertia axis would be exploited during the throwing phases, a time when internal–external rotations of the shoulder are particularly important. A motion capture system was used to evaluate the performance and to compute the potential axes of rotation (minimum inertia axis, shoulder–centre of mass axis and the shoulder–elbow axis). More specifically, we investigated whether a velocity-dependent change in rotational axes can be observed in the different throwing phases and whether the control obeys the principle of minimum inertia resistance. Our results showed that the limbs’ rotational axis mainly coincides with the minimum inertia axis during the cocking phase and with the shoulder–elbow axis during the acceleration phase. Besides these rotation axes changes, the use of interaction torque is also sequence-dependent. The sequence-dependent rotation axes changes associated with the use of interaction torque during the acceleration phase could be a key factor in the production of hand velocity at ball release.     

Job-seeking behaviour and job outcomes among Lebanese university graduates in private and public universities

This study, based on a questionnaire administered to graduates of private and public universities in Lebanon (N = 652), links job procurement to job satisfaction and occupational attainment. Significant differences in job procurement methods are found between male and female graduates and between graduates from private versus public universities. Job satisfaction is only affected by the job procurement method. The level of occupational attainment is affected by gender and job procurement method.     

MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS OF STUDENT AND INSTRUCTOR/COURSE CHARACTERISTICS ON STUDENT RATINGS

Multilevel SEM was used to examine the extent to which student, instructor, and course characteristics affect student ratings. Data were gathered from 1867 students enrolled in 117 courses at a large teacher training college in Israel. Four alternative two-level models that differ in only the nature of the relationship among interest in the course subject, expected grade, and student ratings were tested. Two of the models were judged as less appropriate, one because it failed to support the spurious relationship assumed between expected grade and student ratings, and the other on grounds of poor model-data fit. The other two models were equally good both in terms of the model-data fit and the amount of variance in student ratings that is accounted for by each of them. Both models supported the mediation effect of expected grade in the relationship between interest in the course subject and student ratings.     

An auto-indexing method for Arabic text

This work addresses the information retrieval problem of auto-indexing Arabic documents. Auto-indexing a text document refers to automatically extracting words that are suitable for building an index for the document. In this paper, we propose an auto-indexing method for Arabic text documents. This method is mainly based on morphological analysis and on a technique for assigning weights to words. The morphological analysis uses a number of grammatical rules to extract stem words that become candidate index words. The weight assignment technique computes weights for these words relative to the container document. The weight is based on how spread is the word in a document and not only on its rate of occurrence. The candidate index words are then sorted in descending order by weight so that information retrievers can select the more important index words. We empirically verify the usefulness of our method using several examples. For these examples, we obtained an average recall of 46% and an average precision of 64%.     

A3CRank: An adaptive ranking method based on connectivity,content and click-through data

Due to the proliferation and abundance of information on the web, ranking algorithms play an important role in web search. Currently, there are some ranking algorithms based on content and connectivity such as BM25 and PageRank. Unfortunately, these algorithms have low precision and are not always satisfying for users. In this paper, we propose an adaptive method, called A3CRank, based on the content, connectivity, and click-through data triple. Our method tries to aggregate ranking algorithms such as BM25, PageRank, and TF-IDF. We have used reinforcement learning to incorporate user behavior and find a measure of user satisfaction for each ranking algorithm. Furthermore, OWA, an aggregation operator is used for merging the results of the various ranking algorithms. A3CRank adapts itself with user needs and makes use of user clicks to aggregate the results of ranking algorithms. A3CRank is designed to overcome some of the shortcomings of existing ranking algorithms by combining them together and producing an overall better ranking criterion. Experimental results indicate that A3CRank outperforms other combinational ranking algorithms such as Ranking SVM in terms of P@n and NDCG metrics. We have used 130 queries on University of California at Berkeley’s web to train and evaluate our method.