Archives-December 

The United Nations Charter and the actual practice of states in the past years have stressed on the importance of the role of regional organizations in maintaining international peace and security. On the other hand, The United Nations and the Security Council alone cannot deal with international crises. Thus, the cooperation between the United Nations and regional organizations could solve regional and even global crises. Middle East is of strategic importance because of the historical and cultural background and having oil reserves. This area has been the center of major crisis in two the past decades. Experience has shown that the presence of trans-regional powers or building up international coalitions in the absence of regional powers will not help to resolve the crisis in the region. Considering the accepted roles of regional organizations in maintaining international peace and security in the region by the UN Charter, using the potential of regional organizations such as the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation seems necessary. However, due to the inefficiency of some of these organizations, the establishment of regional organizations with special competence in the area of peace and security in the Middle East could also be pursued by region countries.

A novel framework for object – based video inpainting is presented in this paper. To complete an object, first samples a 3-D volume of the video into directional spatio – temporal slices, and then performs patch-based image inpainting to repair the partially damaged object in the 2-D slices. The slices are combined to obtain a sequence of virtual contours of the damaged object. The virtual contours and a posture sequence retrieval technique are then used to retrieve the most similar sequence of object postures in the available non-occluded postures. Key-postures selection and indexing are used to reduce the complexity of posture sequence. A synthetic posture generation scheme that enriches the collection of key-postures so as to reduce the effect of insufficient key-postures.

Demotivation, as important concept in psychology, is in fact the dark side of motivation. Research into foreign language learners? demotivation for their weaknesses in translation practice has not been touched by the translation scholars. To this end, the researchers distributed an open-ended questionnaire to 112 students majoring in translation studies at Ghuchan Azad University and Mashhad Imam Reza University. Having categorized the responses, they found that the most commonly cited factors included lack of job (0.24), teaching method (0.20), a boring task (0.12), teacher feedback (0.10), insufficient knowledge of vocabulary (0.8), and lack of group work (0.5). No effect on general English, confusion in translation courses, and lack of concentration were the least commonly mentioned factors. The factors show that students need extrinsic motivation or instrumental motivation to pursue their studies or at least to exert enough effort and perseverance in their courses.

In this era of global economic competition, universities play a dynamic role. Universities are no longer restricted to conventional activities. University needs to interact with industry as it plays an imperative role to foster progress and development of the nation. University-industry partnership (UIP) has become a dominant factor in technology and knowledge transfer through various channels. The aim of present study was to investigate the opinion of university faculty and researchers on partnership between university and industry. This research aimed at finding (i) the need of university-industry partnership (ii) the factors that hinder university-industry partnership, (iii) the roles universities are playing in research partnerships in general, and (iv) the means to increase university-industry partnership. It was hypothesized that academics are directly associated with industries. A questionnaire, consisting of 21 items on 5 point likert scales was developed to determine the opinion of 40 university faculty members and 10 researchers. The findings reveal the distinctive importance of high quality educational programs, industrial practice, research and development, internship and workshops, international attractiveness, flow of knowledge, and entrepreneurial spirit associated with UIP. The study concludes that universities are significantly associated with industries and research and development, publication, licensing and technological advancement paved important stone in UIP.

A centrality measure has been proposed considering the directionality of power flow of future smart grid. Applicability of the proposed method has been evaluated in several standard IEEE test systems. Various comparisons are shown between impacts of removal of critical nodes found from two different models: nondirectional and bidirectional. Larger impact of removing critical nodes found from bidirectional flow model shows the utility of the proposed method. Measures of impacts considered are changes in path length, loss of connectivity and load lost during cascade.

Today the term big data draws a lot of attention. Big data is the new technology that enables an organization to take advantage of the natural resource of big data. Organizations store up huge amounts of information, they can mine those databases to discover subtle patterns, correlations, or relationships that human brains can’t perceive on their own because the scales involved are beyond our ability to process. Big data is a hot topic in the market today and attracted a lot of attention from retail, automotive, and manufacturing industry, government as well as academia. This paper introduces several enhancements in big data over data mining and relational database. Finally, I discuss the urgency of big data processing in cloud computing environments.

Dredged sediments cause serious problems for managers of the port of Oran due to lack of storage areas on land, so the solution chosen is a dumping at sea. The present study is based on the characterization of sediments collected from different docks of the port of Oran. Results obtained have allowed delineating two areas of contamination. Contaminated sediments are dangerous wastes. For sediments contaminated with organic and inorganic pollutants, the chemical treatment with a phosphate is proposed for a reuse as sand in mortars. The results led to the conclusion of the technical feasibility of this solution.

This study provides a small scale survey of English verbs that can take cognate objects (CO) both in Pakistani and British fictions in English language. Frequencies of the verbs along with cognate object constructions occurring in Pakistani English fiction (PEF) and British English fiction (BEF) have been compared and analyzed using AntConc 3.2.2w (windows) 2008. Several syntactic properties of cognate objects have also been investigated: such as the ability to take modifier, possibility of the cognate objects to be used as pronouns (it – pronominalization) have also been verified in cognate object constructions (COC) in Pakistani as well as in British English varieties. Focus of the study is on the characteristics of English verbs. It has been found that cognate object constructions are used less in PEF as compared to their presence in BEF. Proving the fact that cognate object constructions as the complex sentence structure. As English is not the native language of Pakistan, so the writers usually avoid the usage of cognate object constructions in PEF. The study establishes Pakistani English as an independent variety using its own distinctive linguistic features.

The comparative nutritional values of bambara nut obtained from major market in Minna, Niger State, Nigeria were determined using standard analytical methods. The parameters investigated in proximate composition include protein, fat, fibre, moisture, carbohydrate and ash contents, The moisture content values ranged from 2.86±0.22 – 3.43±0.31%; crude protein 29.83±0.11 – 31.20±0.52%; crude fat 7.21±0.03 - 8.09±0.34% and ash content 3.20±0.17 - 5.98±0.40%; crude fibre 3.76±0.03 – 4.70±0.09 and total carbohydrate 48.82±0.16 – 51.56±0.21 % for bambara nut from the three markets respectively. The three samples contain reasonable amount of essential minerals such as Potassium, Sodium, Phosphorus, Calcium, Copper, Manganese, Iron and Zinc while Lead content was below the detection limits. Base on the mineral contents obtained from this work, it shows that, these samples can be use to meet the daily recommended intake value for man and his animal. This study therefore suggested that bambara nut can serve as a reliable foodstuff which can provide the basic nutrient we need in our body.

Bicycle is recognized as a transportation solution helping to improve various environmental, economical and social aspects. A variety of bicycle design and setups for utility are used to carry personal belongings, groceries, children and much more. One particular utility bicycle is the folding bicycle. Its design allows users to easily transport the bicycle using less space when the bicycle is “folded” in to a compact size. When using a folding bicycle with a bicycle-transit journey, it allows individuals ability to board transit vehicles. The versatility of a folding bicycle is also appropriate for air travel and for when inadequate parking and bicycle theft is a significant concern.