Fan Noli University

The proposed paper on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) advances its impact on writing and reading processes in teaching English literature at Fan S. Noli University, Korçë, Albania. AI has drastically changed the way college students read and critisize literature. Using algorithms and AI platforms to help generate and examine literary texts, this study investigates students’ changes in writing and their attitudes toward literary texts. The student responses are central also to the analysis, as they offer insight into how students cope with and experienced change with technology in the study of literature. By analyzing these responses and their implications in detail, this study identifies the difficulties and opportunities that arise from the introduction of AI in a university context. Such research will serve as additional evidence for digitally oriented teaching methodologies and disciplinary agendas by contributing data on stylistics, literary scour, and student responses as mediated by AI writing assistants. The suggested research explores the challenges and opportunities that AI technology presents for literature education which can assist teachers to grab the attention of students and promote critical thinking. Therefore, the investigation carried out in this paper gives meaningful insight into the implications of AI technology on university literature studies and furthers research within the field.

Risk is ubiquitous, and entrepreneurs face it daily. In this study “risk” refers to the negative impacts on businesses. The research was conducted in the Korçë District, Albania, to gauge farmers' perceptions of risk factors. The study aims to identify these factors, assess their severity, and propose strategies for their management. The objectives include understanding and analyzing risks in production, marketing, financing, law enforcement, and human resources management. Through a combination of matrix analysis and the multi-factorial linear regression method, the study concluded that farmers' perceptions did not align with the regression results. The research findings indicated that farmers need to address several key challenges: hail, frost, low prices, difficulties in accessing the market, understanding and implementing laws, meeting financial obligations, lack of funding resources, low profits, and labor shortages. This research contributes valuable insights into agricultural risk management, benefitting local farmers, scientific researchers, and policymakers at both regional and national levels.

The paper presents the most comprehensive and large-scale global study to date on how higher education students perceived the use of ChatGPT in early 2024. With a sample of 23,218 students from 109 countries and territories, the study reveals that students primarily used ChatGPT for brainstorming, summarizing texts, and finding research articles, with a few using it for professional and creative writing. They found it useful for simplifying complex information and summarizing content, but less reliable for providing information and supporting classroom learning, though some considered its information clearer than that from peers and teachers. Moreover, students agreed on the need for AI regulations at all levels due to concerns about ChatGPT promoting cheating, plagiarism, and social isolation. However, they believed ChatGPT could potentially enhance their access to knowledge and improve their learning experience, study efficiency, and chances of achieving good grades. While ChatGPT was perceived as effective in potentially improving AI literacy, digital communication, and content creation skills, it was less useful for interpersonal communication, decision-making, numeracy, native language proficiency, and the development of critical thinking skills. Students also felt that ChatGPT would boost demand for AI-related skills and facilitate remote work without significantly impacting unemployment. Emotionally, students mostly felt positive using ChatGPT, with curiosity and calmness being the most common emotions. Further examinations reveal variations in students’ perceptions across different socio-demographic and geographic factors, with key factors influencing students’ use of ChatGPT also being identified. Higher education institutions’ managers and teachers may benefit from these findings while formulating the curricula and instructions/regulations for ChatGPT use, as well as when designing the teaching methods and assessment tools. Moreover, policymakers may also consider the findings when formulating strategies for secondary and higher education system development, especially in light of changing labor market needs and related digital skills development.

Albanian and Romanian display a specific Genitival Phrase structure which is unique among Balkan’s languages. It is characterized by the presence of a genitive marker, traditionally called ‘genitival article’, that follows the head noun. The goal of the present paper is twofold: on the one hand, it focuses on the origin and the syntactic role the genitival article has within GenP. On the other hand, this paper compares the Genitival Phrase of Albanian to that of Romanian in order to show similarities and differences in both their morphological and syntactic structure.

The aim of this research is to highlight the role of collaboration through the implementation of group work techniques for children with special needs, compared to other techniques that focus on individual work. The objectives of this paper include: exploring various strategies that prioritize group work, highlighting children’s areas of achievement during the implementation of group work techniques, and evaluating their influence on meeting the standards for children with special needs, among other aspects. Furthermore, this paper includes a comparative analysis of the use of group work techniques versus individual work techniques, emphasizing their respective advantages and disadvantages. The methodology applied in this paper is a combination of qualitative methods, consisting of a literature review on the aforementioned issues, as well as quantitative methods, which focus on the analysis and interpretation of the data collected from the study. The instrument for gathering these data is a questionnaire for teachers, composed of 17 testable items, divided in two main sections: General information about the teachers and data on the techniques and strategies used in the classroom.

In 1991 students filled the squares of Tirana under the slogans “We want Albania like Europe” , only few of them would have imagined that after 32 years from the fall of the communist regime, Albania would still be waiting to be part of the European family. The most optimistic thought that, once the regime fell, freedom and democracy would triumph and the integration process would take only a few years. As for the rest, this process would take time, but even for the pessimists it would never pass 2020. The challenges of Albanian integration in EU, from 1991 to 2006, have been different and often the progress of undertaken reforms within the framework of the European integration has been slow and not at the required level. This slowness is often reflected in the European Commission reports or in declarations of different summits. This phenomenon reflects the limited culture in the state-building and that of political dialogue, which comes as a result of a strong isolation period, almost half a century under the communist dictatorship. Between 1991 and 2006, the Albanian governments received financial and human resources from European organizations to help them abandon this self-centered strategy. This paper is written within the framework of International Visegrad Fund (IVF) Research Grand Programme of 2022, which involved consulting a significant number of archival papers in the European Union’s Historical Archive in Florence, Italy.

This study discusses the micro‐level structural details of Cichorieae pollen sources elucidated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and explains their symmetry and morphometry. The in‐depth knowledge from the electron ultrastructure of Asteraceae pollen has provided insights into enhanced pollen morphology, and the antimicrobial significance of species under study presents novel avenues for their natural defense mechanisms in the development of antimicrobial agents. In this research, both quantitative and qualitative features of pollen were examined. The pollen grains are prolate‐spheroidal and oblate‐spheroidal in shape, characterized by a maximum polar diameter of 55.6–61.0 μm and a maximum equatorial distance of 68.3–74.4 μm. SEM reveals various configurations such as echinate perforate‐tectate, psilate, and echino‐lophate perforate. The Cichorieae species have significant antimicrobial efficacy and are promising sources for the development of novel antimicrobial drugs with potential implications in pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. SEM analysis of Cichorieae pollens has provided remarkable insights into their unique structures, revealing diverse shapes and surface ornamentations, which can be used for accurate Asteraceae species identification. Research Highlights SEM provides unique pollen surface structures and patterns of Chicory pollen grains. Chemical composition of Chicory botanical sources provides valuable information on their potential as antimicrobial agents. SEM imaging reveals specialized fenestrate grain structures of taxonomic importance.

Ethnobiologists have emphasized the importance of plant local names as repositories of traditional knowledge to understand how communities recognize and use plants known to them, while linguists and anthropologists have illustrated them with examples of the semantic motivation of plant names in the language of these communities. The paper aims to analyse the naming patterns of some Albanian plants as a reflection of the religion in the language image of the world. Analysing some components of the culture and traditional knowledge used in relation to plant naming, perceptions and categorization of the religious world in plant names were investigated. In order to categorize their meaning in the relevant lexical field, a vast corpus of plants with religious attributes in their names were selected from several thematic and explanatory dictionaries. Based on the concept that the image of the world is a picture of everything that exists as an integral and multifaceted structure, reflected in the language in names that come from centuries of experience, the names of plants give us a view into community's way of life. Religion has always been an important part of people identity within a certain culture and it is expressed or mirrored in the names of plants due to similarities or usage.

The bootstrap proposed by Efron (1979) resulted a useful method in estimating the distribution of an estimator or a test statistic by resampling the data in the case of independent and identically distributed observations. Although it was not as effective in the case of dependent data as in the case of independent and identically distributed data, an adaptation was obtained using the block bootstrap. The block bootstrap consists in dividing the data into blocks of observations and then resampling these blocks with replacement. When resampling periodic data, we must take in consideration the periodicity present. Periodically correlated time series and in particular those related with PAR processes have been object of many recent studies due to numerous applications in real data problems. The aim of this paper is to use a block bootstrap procedure proposed, Block Bootstrap of the Residuals, in the case of PAR (Periodic Autoregressive) models. The results obtained in the case of estimating the coefficients in a PAR model studied are very good and are characterized by small values of Bias, Mean Squared Error and Standard Deviation. Also the bootstrap estimations obtained are closer to the true values than the usual classic point estimations.

The migration is a form of mobility that is carried out in many ways, in different times and different distances. In the migration process, apart from the motives, the distance and the place are important. Today, thanks to traffic systems, the migration flows tend to become more and more massive and global. Also, the culture and economy in the globalization process is distributed widely, motivating even more international migration. On the other hand, human migration can contribute to economic and cultural globalization. The migratory movements have traditionally played a very important role in developing and distributing the population all over the world. But what are the causes, consequences and strategies of Albanian migration after 1990? The used methodology consists of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The migration of Albanians has played an important role in demographic developments in Albania after 1990 and is one of the biggest problems of the country. In these conditions, it is imperative that in all the projects and strategies that were developed for Albania, to take into account the changes and effects that the migration process brings in different spatial ranges.

The aim of this paper is to explore Albanian social media discussion threads, prioritizing the way women are portrayed. The development of social media discourse has been empowered through the increasing influence of digital media, permeating all areas of life recently. ‘Privacy is no longer a social norm’, and intentional abuse of media-derived power has led to malicious intentions infiltrating online social media discourse, threatening loyal and straightforward communication, and giving rise to denigration, negativity, and dismay. Based on the current view of scholars in the field of language and digital communication that text-based studies need to move forward by incorporating other modes of communication and the fact that all human communication is, after all, multimodal, we intend to bring examples to illustrate the choice of language and images by Albanians in online social media in reaction to current popular events. The common thread that unites all examples is related to the depiction of females, unfortunately, in derogatory terms, and gendered culpability. It is hoped that the paper will raise awareness about such dominating problematic approaches toward females in Albania, as manifested in the language used.

The demographic transition means the transition from a traditional mode of demographic balance with high mortality and fertility, to a different mode of balance (modern) with low mortality and fertility throughout the course of the modernization of demographic processes. The demographic transition is associated with changing the indicators of population reproduction and the demographic balance regime. It is a process that the population of every country goes through. What is the demographic transition model based on historical stages? What are the global population trends? What are the characteristics of the demographic transition in Albania? The methods used in this manuscript are those of analysis, synthesis, comparison, etc. The demographic transition model has a global historical-geographical analysis value as it provides a global population assessment trend. The global population trend is towards the phenomenon of aging through decline or birth control and includes both central and semi-central countries. The analysis of the overpopulation in the territory has in essence the interventions by means of different measures to regulate the demographic regimes in function of the well-being of the population. In Albania, the transition has been accompanied by a large drop in births and high emigration. The time has come for this transition to be treated with priority as it affects the country’s economy and its perspective.

The economic situation of a country can be explained through a dynamism of a group of indicators and factors that affect the continuity trend flow of economic growth. Also, the historical aspect is one of the most meaningful factors defining a country’s development stage. Although the indication of the social and political conditions, unpredictable situations like the Covid-19 pandemic have negatively affected the economy’s growth trend. However, to evaluate the overall economic situation is necessary to consider an evaluation basis that will lead to the tendency of the living standard. The study is undertaken for the Albanian case, a country in transition based on its economic development, from 1991 to 2021. The key assessment factor considered in this study is the GDP, as one of the most meaningful evaluators of the living standard. After analyzing the Albanian economy by considering the historical phases of the economic development of this country, there is a created model for identifying the potential relations between the Gross Domestic Product, Consumption Expenditures, Trade Balance, and Foreign Direct Investments for explaining the actual living standard and generating its forecast for upcoming years. At the end of the study are given the results and the recommendations.

In this work, we investigate the possibility of observing quasars, particularly lensed quasars, by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman). To this aim, based on the capabilities of the Roman Space Telescope and the results from the quasar luminosity function (QLF) in the infrared band of the Spitzer Space Telescope imaging survey, we calculated the number of quasars expected to be in its field of view. In order to estimate the number of lensed quasars, we develop a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the probability that a quasar is lensed once or more times by foreground galaxies. Using the mass–luminosity distribution function of galaxies and the redshift distributions of galaxies and quasars, we find that 1 per 180 observed quasars will be lensed by foreground galaxies. Further on, adopting a singular isothermal sphere (SIS) model for lens galaxies, we calculate the time delay between lensed images for single and multiple lensing systems and present their distributions. We emphasize that detailed studies of these lensing systems will provide a powerful probe of the physical properties of quasars and may allow testing the mass distribution models of galaxies in addition to being extremely helpful for constraining the cosmological parameters.

The research relevance on Codling moth peculiarities is predefined by it being a main threat to apple culture. The sensitivity of apple cultivars that have been planted so far and continue to be planted to this pest diverges in different cultivars. The research aims to determine the main elements of Cydia Pomonella control using sex pheromones and environmentally friendly insecticides. To achieve the goal, an experiment was conducted in the village of Dvoran in the Korcha region on three apple cultivars: Golden Delicious, Star King, and Granny Smith. On the trees of these varieties, traps with sex pheromones were used and environmentally friendly insecticides were utilised. The study found that using sex pheromone traps to monitor Cydia Pomonella is simple and less expensive for apple growers. The Spinosad medicine is the most effective in terms of protection against the pest, the second being Indoxacarb. Golden Delicious and Granny Smith cultivars had the lowest level of pest infestation, while the Star King cultivar was the most affected by Cydia Pomonella. It has also been established that apple fruits do not contain toxic residues, and the ecosystem remains clean. Additionally, the use of sex pheromones can be part of an integrated pest management approach that combines different control methods to sustainably manage pest populations in gardens. The practical significance of the obtained results is that they provide apple growers with a safe and effective method of controlling Cydia pomonella populations in their orchards. In addition, the scientific basis for the use of sex pheromones as a method of pest control can contribute to the implementation of sustainable control methods in apple production

The environmental situation in the world is only getting worse every year. This is caused by an increase in air pollution, wastewater pollution, wood burning, and others. Since 2013, ammonia emissions by European Union companies have increased significantly. This was facilitated, among other things, using synthetic pesticides. That is why the transition of agriculture to organic farming standards can be considered a good alternative. The aim of the study was to analyse the effectiveness of combining known organic pesticides in one biogeocenosis. A combined treatment of the vegetable crop Brassica oleracea with such biological pesticides as Bacillus thuringiensis and pyrethrin, combined with mass pest trapping, is proposed in the research. When combining these three approaches, the efficiency was 93%. The total crop yield was 27 tons/ha, while the area of the field where pheromone and yellow sticky traps were used had a yield of 34 tons/ha. These methods were effective against the following pests: Ceutorhynchus rapae, Aleyrodes proletella, and Brevicoryne brassicae. Leaf damage was reduced by 93% on average during the study period when using the combined approach. During the two-year research, it was possible to neutralize 1882 insects by mass trapping and find out that the largest number of Ceutorhynchus rapae affect the crop in May and August, but the use of pheromone traps is most effective in October. The combination of individual methods increased the effectiveness of each method due to the synchronized impact on different pests. Increasing vegetable yields in Albania in the future can also solve the problem of hunger in countries with unfavourable climatic conditions by increasing the export of these crops

Elements of geodiversity evaluated for scientific value should be protected, conserved and promoted as potentially important for geotourism. The Divjakë-Karavasta National Park is a large natural area that comprises six geosites along the Adriatic coastline of Albania. Geosites are elements of the geosphere that should be preserved for geoeducation of the present and future generations, in view of the fact that they yield significant data on Earth’s history. By means of the Geosite Assessment Method (GAM) and the SPSS program (version 20), we have analysed the geotouristic values of the Divjakë-Karavasta geosites and interpreted the importance of each subindicator. A correlation analysis, performed through SPSS and Pearson’s correlation coefficient as a test statistics, has been carried out as well. The Pearson’s cor�relation coefficient reflects the strong relationship between the scientific/educational values (i.e., representativeness and scientific knowledge) and touristic values (promotion, number of visitors, interpretative panels, hostelry services, restaurant services, touristic infrastructure). These coefficients express the importance of the dependence of additional values in the development of geotourism at protected sites.

Background and aim: There are controversial data in literature regarding the influence of abdominal and pelvic surgery on the onset of gastrointestinal symptoms. The aim of this study was to assess whether women who had a C-section (cesarean section) are more likely to develop irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) early after delivery than those who have given birth naturally. Method: A cross-sectional study investigated women who had undergone C-section and were compared with a control group of women who had natural delivery. Data were obtained from Maternity Ward of Korce Hospital, in Albania. We conducted a telephone interview based on a questionnaire containing items to diagnose IBS based on the Rome IV criteria. The interviews were conducted 9 to 12 months after delivery. Results: The prevalence of IBS in both groups taken together 4.6%. In the C-section group, prevalence of IBS was 4.3%, while in the control group it was 5.2%. All the patients with IBS had subtype with predominance of constipation. The RR 0.814 (CI 95%, 0.1423-4.66) does not confirm the hypothesis that C-section may induce early onset of IBS more often than natural birth. Conclusion: The prevalence of IBS was (4.6%), within the known range of the Rome Foundation Global Study. Delivery by C-section does not have a role in developing IBS symptoms more than delivery by natural way in this group of Albanian women.