SORER - Somali Research and Education Repositor
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DataCite - Assigning DOIs for FAIR research outputs
Full text linkThe presentation introduces DataCite, its memberships and its Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
IMPACT OF LAND DEGRADATION ON RURAL DEVELOPMENT
Full text linkAbstract:
Land degradation is a global issue, with profound implications worldwide on biodiversity, eco-safety, poverty eradication, socio-economic stability and sustainable development. It is caused by multiple factors, including extreme weather conditions, hefty rain and drought and human actions that degrade the quality of soils affecting food production, livelihoods and the production and provision of other ecosystem goods and services. The deterioration in land quality, its topsoil, vegetation cover, or water resources is usually caused by natural hazards, primary causes, and underlying causes. Natural dangers are the conditions of the physical environment that lead to extraordinary degeneration dangers, for instance, steep inclines as a hazard for water depletion. Direct causes are inappropriate land use and inappropriate land management practices, for example, the cultivation of steep slopes without measures for soil conservation. Underlying causes are why these problematic archetypes of land use and management are exercised; for instance, the inclines may be planted because the landless poor require food, and preservation standards are not put in place because these farmers lack security of tenure. There is a difference, albeit with overlap, between inappropriate land use and inappropriate land management practices. Inappropriate land use refers to a situation where land is utilized in an environmentally improper manner in terms of sustainability.
On the other hand, inappropriate land management regards land use in ways that could be characterized as sustainable if properly managed but where the necessary procedures are not followed. An excellent example is when there is a failure to adopt soil preservation stratagems where deemed necessary. Improper land management also refers to land use, which is ecologically sustainable under the low intensity of usage but in which the management becomes inappropriate at higher intensifies. Other examples are shifting cultivation and the grazing of semi-arid rangelands, for instance, avoiding irrigation water from the river during the first three weeks of river flow after a long period of drought, reducing the usage of chemical fertility and pesticides and avoiding herbicides. The government should promote social awareness to curtail deforestation and human activities that contribute to land degradation. We need to create social awareness, particularly amongst the farmers, on clean up plastic waste in the farms and avoid using plastics or reducing the single-use of plastic and enabling its reuse
Knowledge and Perception of COVID-19, Prevalence of Pre-Existing Conditions, and Access to Essential Resources and Health Services in Somali IDP Camps
Full text linkBackground:
Three million internally displaced Somalis live in overcrowded settlements with weakened infrastructure, insufficient access to WASH facilities, and inaccessible health services.This vulnerable population is especially susceptible to COVID-19, which is expected to have worsened health outcomes and exacerbate existing structural challenges in the implementation of public health measures. This study examines knowledge of COVID-19, self-reported prevalence of preexisting conditions, and access to essential health services among residents of internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Somalia.
Methods:
A descriptive, cross-sectional survey design assessing demographics, current health profiles, knowledge and perceptions of COVID-19, and access to resources was used. 401 Somali IDP camp residents completed the survey.
Results:
Though 77% of respondents reported taking at least one COVID-19 preventative public health measure, respondents reported a severe lack of access to adequate sanitation, an inability to practice social distancing, and nearly universal inability to receive a COVID-19 screening exam. Questions assessing knowledge surrounding COVID-19 prevention and treatment yielded answers of “I don’t know” for roughly 50% of responses. The majority were not familiar with basic information about the virus or confident that they could receive medical services if infected. Those who perceived their health status to be “fair,” as opposed to “good,” showed 5.69
times higher odds of being concerned about contracting COVID-19. Respondents who felt more anxious or nervous and those who introduced one behavioral change to protect against COVID-19 transmission showed 10.16 and 5.20 times increased odds of being concerned about disease contraction, respectively.
Conclusion:
This study highlights immense gaps in the knowledge and perceptions of COVID-19 and access to treatment and preventative services among individuals living in Somali IDP camps. A massive influx of additional resources is required to adequately address COVID-19 in Somalia, starting with educating those individuals most vulnerable to infection
Somali Business Review 2015
No full textThe businesses are changing and growing faster, there are a lot of people who are coming back to the country to start out their businesses, a lot of businesses were started in different sectors, and markets are looking to be busy for serving the customers. Even though the unemployment of the country is high, as there are a lot of unemployed individuals, Some organizations are helping out the youth to start and operate their businesses to fight with the unemployment by providing training and grants these caused a lot of youth to improve their livelihoods and get a source of income. Given that Somalia has been at war from the early nineties, the water division infrastructure is broken down and will have to be rebuilt and reformed to serve the people of Somalia. There are opportunities in the supplying water sector materials range from small hand well digging to complex drilling borehole of services, to take advantage from the opportunities in the market for the water sector materials, it’s good to get the stocks needed for the water supply. In this issue covers articles that address business opportunities focusing on some sectors of the market and the new technologies used for the businesses to enhance their recording. Islam is a religion presenting a system for the welfare of the society and prohibits a system where people earn income without putting work or efforts so we provided an article about the Wisdom Behind Elimination of Riba in Financial transactions
A Somali Speaking Mobility Aid for Blind and Visually Impaired People
No full textAbstract
People with disabilities, specially the blind have major difficulties in moving alone so they usually depend on others. The primary tools they used for movement is the traditional walking stick to detect objects on their ways. Smart sticks, also known as walking canes, or ultra-cane came as a proposed solution to enable blind to identify the world around them more conveniently. Somali people with disabilities suffer more than their worldwide counterparts because of the scarcity of smart mobility aids that they can easily adopt and understand.
In this work, we propose and implement a Somali language speaking smart stick for the visually impaired people to improve their mobility and independence in their daily life. This tool is especially useful for those who have difficulty in comprehending vibration features provided by some smart sticks. The stick can detect objects in the range of between 2 cm to 200 cm. When an object is detected, a sound from the SD Card Module through the airphone will alert the user (in Somali Language), about the object to safely avoid it. A moisture sensor to detect the water and LDR to detect light and dark situations are also provided. C++ programming language was used to implement features in the stick. Our new mobility aid was tested by blind and showed their appreciation and recommended it development to commercial or full usage stage
Collecting Targeted Information About Covid-19 From Research Papers By Asking Questions Based On Natural Language Processing
Full text linkIn the general framework of knowledge discovery, different techniques were used for information extraction from multi-label documents. As the world is currently facing COVID-19, it has made it more important than ever to have such knowledge extraction from previous documents. Therefore, Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be an essential model for tackling such an issue. By taking into consideration that having such a model plays an essential role to generate new insights in support of the ongoing fight against this infectious disease. This work introduces a sophisticated model that is able to read data from various articles about COVID-19, and finally give the most appropriate answer to the questions asked in order to gain insight information automatically. The model is applied to the COVID-19 open research dataset challenge (CORD-19) that’s has caught the attention of many researchers and it contains over 400,000 scholarly articles. The result of the proposed model has shown a good achievement, as it is explained in the result section. It was found that NLP is a good choice for tackling this global pandemic for information extraction and it contributes a new insight in support of the ongoing fight against this infectious disease. research dataset challenge (CORD-19) that has over 400,000 scholarly articles about COVID-19, SARS, CoV-2, and related coronavirus. It is a free dataset for researchers to apply to the field of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence techniques to find out new information that will make it easier to take part in the efforts against coronavirus. It is crucial to have a system that can enable easier extraction of the information needed from multiple articles using Natural Language Processing [3]. It will play an important role in facilitating the search process related to knowledge discovery as well as search engines. BERT, which is one of the models used in the retrieve automatic answer from documents, will be the one selected for this work. Finally, the required answers will be retrieved from a wide range of documents. This, as mentioned earlier, is important in contributing to the fight against COVID-19, as it will make it easier for researchers to find the information needed, and not waste time reading each article
Digital Transformation and Public Service Delivery
No full textEng. Abdikarim Mohaidin Ahmed, the Director for International Cooperation, SIMAD University delivered this presentation as a keynote speech at the 5th Annual Conference of the Somali Network Operators' Group (SomNOG
On the Robust Parameter Estimation Method for Linear Model with Autocorrelated Errors in the Presence of High Leverage Points and Outliers in the Y-Direction
Full text linkIn the existence of autocorrelation problems, the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates become incompetent. The Cochrane - Orcutt Prais -Winsten iterative method (COPW) is the most widely used remedial measure to rectify this problem.
However, this iterative procedure is based on the OLS estimates, which are not resistant and easily influenced by high leverage points (outliers in the -direction) and outliers in they-direction. The COPW based on the MM estimator is developed to remedy both problems of autocorrelation and high leverage points. Nevertheless, the MM estimator does not perform well in the presence of bad leverage points. In this paper, we propose to improvise the Cochrane-OrcuttPrais-Winsten iterative method based on the GM6 estimator so that autocorrelated errors and high leverage points can be rectified. The performance of the COPW-GM6 is scrutinized widely by Monte Carlo simulation and real examples. The results of this study show that the COPW-GM6 is more efficient than the COPW and COPW-MM
An intelligent Somali language chatbot serving as an online admission help desk
No full textAbstract
Communicating with potential candidates of a university or a college is traditionally conducted manually, and it is a highly time and resources consuming. To communicate with candidates on a one-to-one basis is highly appreciated but that would require members of the academic staff to spend several hours to deal with individual students. So, it would be useful to reduce these costs and time. This paper aims to reduce the burden on the admission offices by developing a convincing chatbot that would interact and communicate with candidates in Somali language. Furthermore, Users interact with a social media account. Machine learning algorithms have been developed for the purpose and thousands of question and answer pairs have been gathered as a training set for the system with the consultation of the top admission staffers at JUST. The proposed system has been tested and set up for running on the Heroku Cloud Server and telegram bot is serving as an interface for the users to interact with
The Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on Higher Education Case Study Private Universities in Mogadishu, Somalia
Full text linkAbstract
The study's main objective is to investigate the effect of COVID-19 on the higher education institutions in Mogadishu-Somalia. The duration of the research was fifteen days, engaging two hundred respondents. The result shows that most educational foundations, namely 56%, were closed during the initial stages of the pandemic as per the government guidelines. According to the data, 22.5% of higher education institutions were partially closed and reported significant disruptions. On the other hand, 13% of higher education establishments were open for business and took no measures to deal with COVID-19. Most respondents in the study, 126 (66.7%), utilized Zoom meetings to conduct classes and other activities, while 40 (21.2%) used Google study hall. The main constraints that internet classes faced include fewer personal meetings between the lecturers and students. Also, internet learning does not permit students to seek more clarification during the lessons. The challenge is to make the internet available to all students