Israeli public diplomacy toward the United States: a network and narrative approach     

Fatemeh Shafiee Sarvestani  Saied Reza Ameli  Foad Izadi 《亚洲交流杂志》2019,29(2):181-200

Israel’s public diplomacy efforts in the U.S. are aimed at garnering American public support for Israeli foreign policy. This study aims to identify the networks of Israeli public diplomacy toward the United States. Using the theoretical frameworks of networked public diplomacy and strategic narrative, the authors try to understand how network strategy is used and information is circulated to create a strategic narrative. Therefore, the two methods of social network analysis and qualitative content analysis are applied to identify the networks of Israeli public diplomacy in the United States and the content produced by it. The study finds that in Israel’s public diplomacy model, the networking method stands in contrast to its government-oriented strategic narrative. Thus, new forms of communication are applied to conduct old strategies. The research identifies four types of actors who apply new public diplomacy techniques and dissects the strategic narrative they employ to affect the American public in the service of Israeli interests. Despite the effort to apply new forms of public diplomacy, strategic narrative production and dissemination remain highly governmental and closed, which is indicative of the persistence of old forms of public diplomacy.  相似文献   

Implementing vertical and horizontal engineering students’ integration and assessment of consequence academic achievement     

Sarim Al-Zubaidy  Reza Dashtpour 《European Journal of Engineering Education》2012,37(4):383-396

Recent scholarship references indicate that integration of the student body can result in an enhanced learning experience for students and also greater satisfaction. This paper reports the results of a case study whereby mechanical engineering students studying at a newly established branch campus in Dubai of a British university were exposed to vertical and horizontal integration. Different activities have been embedded to ensure that students integrated and worked together with their peers and colleagues at different levels. The implemented processes and practices led to improved academic achievements, which were better than those of a similar cohort of students where no effort had been made to integrate. The analysis revealed that cooperative learning and the degree of academic support provided by teachers are positively and directly correlated with academic as well as the students’ own sense of personal achievement. The results are discussed in light of previous research and with reference to the cultural context of the study.  相似文献   

Barriers of the development of web-based training in agricultural higher education system in Iran: A case study of Hamadan Bu Ali Sina University,Iran     

Heshmatollah?SaadiEmail author  Khalil?Mirzayi  Reza?Movahedi 《Education and Information Technologies》2016,21(1):53-70

Recently, higher education systems seek to use network-based and Internet-based information technologies in education, teaching and learning. E-learning in Iran higher education system has been started since 2003, however, its development has been very slow. The present study is a survey research. The participants of the study are faculty members, graduates and PhD students in Agriculture in Bu Ali Sina University. Total number of participants were analyzed (n?=?500). The accuracy of indicators and items in the questionnaire (face validity) has been confirmed by specialists. A questionnaire was used to collect data. Reliability was calculated by using Cronbach Alpha. In this study, Factor analysis is used to achieve the key factors. The results show that deficiency of executives, lack of learners’ motivation, infrastructural barriers, restriction of credit, and software and hardware limitations are the main problems in the development of web-based training. At the end of the article, some recommendations are presented aiming to accelerate electronic training in Iran’s higher education system.  相似文献   

Defending recommender systems by influence analysis     

Mohammad Amin Morid  Mehdi Shajari  Ali Reza Hashemi 《Information Retrieval》2014,17(2):137-152

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a popular method for personalizing product recommendations for e-commerce applications. In order to recommend a product to a user and predict that user’s preference, CF utilizes product evaluation ratings of like-minded users. The process of finding like-minded users forms a social network among all users and each link between two users represents an implicit connection between them. Users having more connections with others are the most influential users. Attacking recommender systems is a new issue for these systems. Here, an attacker tries to manipulate a recommender system in order to change the recommendation output according to her wish. If an attacker succeeds, her profile is used over and over again by the recommender system, making her an influential user. In this study, we applied the established attack detection methods to the influential users, instead of the whole user set, to improve their attack detection performance. Experiments were conducted using the same settings previously used to test the established methods. The results showed that the proposed influence-based method had better detection performance and improved the stability of a recommender system for most attack scenarios. It performed considerably better than established detection methods for attacks that inserted low numbers of attack profiles (20–25 %).  相似文献