Human milk contains an abundant supply and diverse array of oligosaccharides that are known to impart significant health benefits to the nursing infant including establishment and maintenance of a healthy gut microflora, immune development and protection against gastro intestinal infections. When breastfeeding is not possible or insufficient, infant formulas are commonly used as an alternative. However, limited information is available about the presence of naturally occurring oligosaccharides in these infant formulas and their likely health benefits. The present study examined the presence of naturally occurring oligosaccharides in commercial goats’ milk-based stage 1 and stage 2 infant formulas and their prebiotic and anti-infection properties. LC/MS was used to detect and quantify oligosaccharides and their prebiotic potential was assessed by their ability, at concentrations present in reconstituted ready-to-use infant formula, to promote the growth of Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis BB12, B. longum BB536, Lactobacillus acidophilus 4461 and L. casei 2607 in vitro. For anti-infection properties, the ability of goat milk oligosaccharides to prevent the adhesion of Escherichia coli NCTC 10418 and a Salmonella typhimurium isolate to Caco-2 cells was investigated. The results showed the presence off ourteen quantifiable oligosaccharides instage1andstage2goats’milk-basedinfantformula.Thiswassimilartothenumberofoligosaccharidesdetectedinthefreshgoats’milk.Of these, five were structurally similar to those foundinhumanmilk.Theseoligosaccharideswereshowntosignificantlyenhancethegrowthof bifidobacteria and lactobacilli and reduce the adhesion of E. coli NCTC 10418 and S. typhimurium to Caco-2 cells. Together, these results suggest that oligosaccharides naturally present in goats’ milk-based infant formula exhibit strong prebiotic and anti-pathogen adhesion properties and may confer gut health benefits to infants.

ABSTRACT

Lately, there has been a greater focus on oral competence. Therefore, Communicative Approach has been adopted by the ministry of education in Libya as a method upon which the curriculum of secondary stage has been based. It is an attempt to improve students' oral proficiency. The success of any English course depends on several factors; the most important of which is the teaching methodology used by the teacher in the classroom. This study aims at investigating to what extent Libyan secondary school teachers are competent in implementing the principles of the Communicative Approach upon which the syllabus has been based, and whether they are capable of achieving the intended objectives of this approach. Two methods have been used to obtain the data in this study. They were classroom observation and a written questionnaire. Classroom observation was conducted to observe teachers’ performance inside the classroom and the written questionnaire was used to collect data about the teachers’ attitude to the Communicative Approach. The results obtained revealed that the subject’s behaviour does not meet the principles and techniques of the Communicative Approach. The results also showed that Libyan teachers are incompetent in implementing the principles and techniques of this approach. There are several reasons behind this failure. Most of them have not received adequate training programs related to the Communicative Approach. They face many problems which obliges them to resort to the traditional teaching methods.

Age prediction is an active study field that can substantially affect many computer vision problems like object recognition. In this paper, an accurate system with extensive experiments is proposed to provide an efficient and accurate approach for age range prediction of people from their facial images. Histogram Equalization technique is used to reduce the illumination effects on all facial images taken from FG-NET and UTD aging databases, and image resizing is used to unify all image sizes. Moreover, Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) are used to extract the features of these images. Then, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) are used for the classification processes. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, both Leave-One-Out (LOO) and Confusion Matrix (CM) are used. The extensive and intensified experiments improved the age range predicting performance up to 98.6%.

This study reviewed using peer correction as a teaching technique in dictation exercise and explored the attitude of second year university students studying health sciences in the Colleague of Health Sciences in Gharyan towards peer correction. More than seventy students participated in this study. The study participants exposed to lecturer's feedback and colleague's feedback and their attitudes towards both techniques were measured by using a questionnaire. The results revealed that the majority of the questionnaire respondents preferred their dictation exercise to be corrected by their lecturer, while a small number of the respondents favoured their colleagues' feedback. The participants gave many reasons behind their preferences. These reasons were discussed in relation to the advantages and limitations of peer correction presented in the literature review. It seems that preparation, both psychologically and linguistically, is needed before applying peer correction to get the hopeful benefit of this teaching technique.

Key words: peer correction, lecturer' feedback, teaching technique