The paper aimed at investigating MA candidate's views towards the entry exam and the graduate program in the department of English in the School of Languages at the Libyan Academy. This was part of the effort to reform and improve the learning/teaching process in the department. A questionnaire was distributed to 157 candidates who attended the entry exam held on November 2014 to admit students for the academic year 2015. Results show overall satisfaction with both the entry exam and the MA program. However, some critical remarks and suggestions were given. Most of these remarks and suggestions argue for making more effort to improve the quality of the entry exam to make it fairer, more valid and more reliable. The ultimate goal is to have a more effective way of measuring students' qualifications required to join the MA program

Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. israelensis is the most important biological insecticide for the control of mosquito vectors of disease. This bacterium produces toxins during sporulation that cause larval death by lysis of cells in their midgut. The pBtoxis plasmid of B. thuringiensis subsp. israelensis encodes all the mosquitocidal toxins and a number of other coding sequences. The plasmid also carries potential germination genes organised in a single ger operon. Comparison of the germination responses of spores from strains with and without pBtoxis revealed that this plasmid could promote activation of the spores under alkaline conditions but not following heat treatment. Introduction of the ger operon on a recombinant plasmid to the plasmidless strain established this operon as the first with an identified role in alkaline activation.

The paper presents studies on experimental investigation of beam-to-column joint behaviour in standard and exceptional events situations. This assessment is done to form a picture of the general the behavior of full scale frameworks at both the level of the global behavior of the framework, in terms of its load-displacement characteristic, and of the local behavior of joints in terms of their moment-rotation characteristics, and evaluates details about the interaction of the joint elements and how they work together in a balanced manner, during exceptional events, this study concerns the joints which are subject to the collapse and also includes the behavior of joints in the neighborhood of the collapse. The intricacy of such investigations appear from nonlinear effects associated with the outlook of joint behavior or functioning, such as structural shortcomings, large displacements and rotations, inelastic properties of steel and concrete materials, the effects between steel and concrete, and slip between concrete and structural steel, through others. The paper addresses these problems using two types of joints flush and extended end-plate with four and eight bolts and provides recommendations and reasoning for the behavioral techniques for the evaluation of joint moment-rotation response when exposed to negative and positive moments together.

The paper presents studies on experimental investigation of beam-to-column joint behavior in standard and exceptional events situations. This assessment is done to form a picture of the general the behavior of full scale frameworks at both the level of the global behavior of the framework, in terms of its load-displacement characteristic, and of the local behavior of joints in terms of their moment-rotation characteristics, and evaluates details about the interaction of the joint elements and how they work together in a balanced manner, during exceptional events, this study concerns the joints which are subject to the collapse and also includes the behavior of joints in the neighborhood of the collapse. The intricacy of such investigations appear from nonlinear effects associated with the outlook of joint behavior or functioning, such as structural shortcomings, large displacements and rotations, inelastic properties of steel and concrete materials, the effects between steel and concrete, and slip between concrete and structural steel, through others. The paper addresses these problems using two types of joints flush and extended end-plate with four and eight bolts and provides recommendations and reasoning for the behavioral techniques for the evaluation of joint moment-rotation response when exposed to negative and positive moments together.