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Preparing course timetables for universities is a search problem with many constraints. Exhaustive search techniques in theory can be used to develop course timetables for academic departments, but unfortunately these techniques are computation intensive, since the search space is very large and therefore are impractical. In this paper, Genetic Algorithms (GA’s) are utilized to build an automated course timetable system. The system is designed for any academic department. The proposed timetabling system requires minimal effort from the administration staff to prepare the course timetable. Moreover, the prepared course timetable considers faculties’ desires, students' needs and available resources, such as classrooms and laboratories with optimal utilization. The proposed timetabling process was divided into three stages. The first stage is the data collection stage. In this stage, the administrative staff; usually the head of the department, is responsible for preparing the required data, such as the names of the faculty personnel and their desires of courses and laboratories ordered with some priority scheme. Number and type of theoretical and practical courses are also fed to the system based on some statistics about student numbers and previous course timetable history. The system is also fed with number of lecture rooms allocated for the department and number of labs with information about theoretical courses they are able to serve. In the second stage, the program generates an initial set of suggested schedules (chromosomes). Each chromosome represents a solution to the problem, but usually is not satisfactory. Finally, the proposed timetabling system starts the search for a good solution that satisfies best interests of the department according to a cost function. GA is applied in search for a satisfactory course timetable based on a pre-defined criterion. The system has been developed and tested utilizing benchmarked datasets developed by an international timetabling competition (ITC2007) and for the Computer Engineering Department at Yarmouk University. In both cases, the algorithm showed very satisfactory results.

The aim of this study is to explore the rhetorical feature(s) used by the ousted Arab Presidents most in their public appearances during the so-called \"Arab Spring\". In order to achieve this objective, a number of their speeches at the time were assessed critically from the standpoint of Austin's and Searle's Speech Act Theory. Upon working out all the explicatures (linguistically inferred meanings) and the implicatures (contextually inferred meanings) of the original (Al-Jarrah, et al. 2018), it turned out to us that although the five speech acts (i.e. Directives, Representatives, Commissives, Expressives, and Declarations) were all used, though disproportionately, warning (one type of Directives) was used the most. The reason for this is probably related to the set of circumstances (both social and psychological) that were prevailing in the countries of those presidents at the time of the speeches under current scrutiny. Given the claim that human cognitive activities cannot be detached from the social context where they take place (see Vygotsky 1978; 1986), I intend to show how those texts interacted with their social and cultural contexts to yield the optimal psychological impact on their audiences.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a worldwide health problem caused by resistance to insulin action. This chronic debilitating diseaseis preceded by a stage, known as prediabetes, in which a healthy lifestyle can delay the disease. The discovery of biochemical changes in prediabetes is important to identify individuals at risk of developing T2DM and in explaining disease pathogenesis. Adiponectin is secreted by fat cells and is linked with insulin resistance. Adiponectin levels are dysregulated in prediabetic subjects. This relationship had not been tested in Jordan. We recruited 130 subjects with prediabetes and 130 control subjects. We measured serum levels of adiponectin and genotyped subjects for three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the ADIPOQ gene; rs266729, rs1501299 and rs2241766. In multivariate analysis, we found that serum adiponectin lowers the risk of prediabetes (p = 0.002; odds ratio (OR), 0.764; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.646–0.905). The rs1501299 SNP of the ADIPOQ gene was associated with prediabetes in our population (p = 0.041). Specifically, in multivariate analysis, the GT genotype of rs1501299 increased the risk of prediabetes (p = 0.010; OR, 2.350; 95% CI, 1.231–4.486) as well as the TT genotype (p = 0.006; OR, 4.774; 95% CI, 1.551–14.693). Our findings indicate that serum adiponectin and SNPs in the ADIPOQ gene are associated with prediabetes in Jordan.

This study aims to identify the impact of distance learning in the education economics; to achieve this purpose the study followed the descriptive method. A questionnaire was developed and distributed for (145) faculty members from the faculties of economics, administrative sciences, computer science and information technology in the private and public Jordanian universities. The results show that distance-learning effect the economics of education in a high degree and the rationale of distance learning on economic came in a high degree. The results also shows that there are no significant differences in the impact of distance learning in the economics education from the faculty member's point of view in both the private and public Jordanian universities. Finally, the study illustrated that related to gender variable, and the academic qualification of the participant's behavior toward distance learning in the education economics.

This research paper investigates and analyzes the contextual and pragmatic functions of the imperative in Jordanian Arabic ( ) . Concisely, it sheds light on the relationship between the addresser and the addressee on the one hand and the context in which the imperative is used on the other. As for data collection, two instruments were used in this study: 1) observation of naturally occurring language, and 2) a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) modified from Beebe and Cummings (1990). Based on the data gathered by the two instruments, it turned out that there are three main semantic formulas through which the imperative is communicated in Jordanian Arabic. These are (1) direct imperative verbs, (2) declaratives, and (3) interrogatives. The choice of the semantic formula is constrained by a whole set of competing forces such as the status of the interlocutors, the setting, etc. Accordingly, the researchers were able to detect twenty pragmatic functions of the imperative in Jordanian Arabic.

objective: The current study assessed the prevalence and severity of somatic symptoms, depression and anxiety among students at the Arabian Gulf University. Comparison of symptoms was between Year 2 and Year 6 medical students. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study using a convenient sample size of (N=160) where n=80 from Year 2 and n=80 from Year 6. Assessment involved a socio demographic and three self-report questionnaires. The Patient Health Questionnaire-15 (PHQ-15) for detection of somatic symptoms, Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) for detection of depression symptoms and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) to detect generalized anxiety disorder. Results: Somatic symptoms were the highest among medical students with a prevalence of 46%. Anxiety symptoms came second with a prevalence of 39.4%. The levels of moderate to severe depression symptoms were the lowest with a prevalence of 18.8%. No statistically significant differences were obtained between groups. However, Year 2 students reported higher levels of somatic symptoms while Year 6 students reported higher anxiety; depression symptom levels were identical in both years. Female students reported higher levels of all three symptoms compared to males (p< 0.05). Conclusion: Medical students had moderate levels of somatic and anxiety symptoms and low levels of depression symptoms.