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INVESTIGATING COLLEGE STUDENTS FORMAL VOLUNTEERING IN LEBANON
No full textVolunteering is an important aspect of the third sector and higher education institutions; however, this field is understudied. This thesis fills the gap in the scarcity of research on students volunteering in the region and explores the motivations behind student volunteering. To achieve this goal, the following objectives have been set: to define and operationalize the concept of volunteering, to describe the challenges and limitations of volunteering, and to explain and review the various volunteering perspectives in addition to establishing the study's theoretical framework. This thesis employs a mixed-method approach to understand both dimensions of volunteering at the volunteer and NGO levels. The research uses an online survey targeting sixty-three AUB students and interviews 11 key NGO directors and 1 key informant. The findings indicate that the main boosters of student motivation are a combination of altruistic reasons, career-related and social networks. A triangulation of theories of altruism, social capital, and social exchange best answers the research question. The survey revealed that higher education institutions such as AUB can play a crucial role in enhancing formal volunteering by providing students with resources and support to find suitable volunteer opportunities, promoting the value and benefits of volunteering, and creating opportunities for students to apply their skills and knowledge to the real world. Additionally, the interviews with NGO directors revealed that higher education institutions can foster relationships between neighborhood groups and regional institutions of higher learning and instill a culture of volunteering among university students. Overall, the findings suggest that volunteering is an integral part of the student experience that should be promoted by government and higher education institutions to create a community of youth volunteers and to provide the necessary resources and support for students to engage in meaningful volunteer opportunities that strengthen social cohesion
الناشطية في لبنان: إعادة تفكير في عصر الانهيار الاقتصادي والاجتماعي وفي سياق الجائحة
Get PDFتتبنى هذه الورقة منهجية شاملة للتحقيق في تأثير الانهيار الاقتصادي وقيود وباء كوفيد19- على الحراك في لبنان، مع التركيز بشكل خاص على حرية التعبير والحق في التجمع السلمي كمكونات رئيسة لها. من المنظور الوصفي والمعياري، تجري الورقة تحليلاً تجريبياً لتصوير طبيعة وظواهر الحراك خلال الأزمة. بعد ذلك، ُتقيِّم الورقة امتثال لبنان لإلتزاماته الدولية على النحو المبين في العهد الدولي الخاص بالحقوق المدنية والسياسية الذي يعتبر لبنان دولة مصادقة عليه. علاوة على ذلك، يتم تحليل الاعتراف الدستوري بهذه الحقوق داخل لبنان. بشكل عام، تتضمن المنهجية نهجاً نوعياً يشمل جمع البيانات من المصادر المتاحة للجمهور والمعرفة الموجودة، وتحليل الإطار الذي يحكم الحراك وتقييم التأثير على الحراك في خضم الأزمة.معهد الأصفري للمجتمع المدني والمواطنة، HuMEN
Multidisciplinary approach to community engagement in global public health research
No full textRecently, there has been a renewed interest in the role of community engagement in knowledge production and ethical issues such as ‘helicopter research’, indicating exploitative research activities of some researchers as well as short-term relationships with research communities especially in low- and middle-income countries. This approach is detrimental to both communities and the larger scientific community as this may breed mistrust. Major institutions such as the National Institute of Health and Care Research in the United Kingdom have highlighted the importance of community engagement as a tool to improve the reach, quality, and impact of the research by incorporating the voices and concerns of marginalized communities. Similarly, in its 2022 guidance, the American Society for Human Genetics (ASGH) highlights the need to address underrepresentation in genomics research through community engagement. Establishing ethical and meaningful long-term relationships can be challenging especially for researchers who are not members of the community or those from other countries. This article describes how ‘community-engaged research’ can address some ethical challenges in global public health in different cultural settings. Copyright: © 2023 Adeagbo O et al
The workplace social performance of family firms: a configurational approach
No full textPurpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the drivers for proactive workplace social performance in family firms through a configurational approach. Comparative research on family versus non-family firms and workplace social performance has produced mixed results. Consequently, several calls have been made to account for family business heterogeneity to understand better how family involvement in the business affects the workplace social performance. The authors respond to these calls by exploring the governance antecedents that can catalyze family firms’ workplace social performance. Design/methodology/approach: Using qualitative comparative analysis, the authors analyze 131 family firms from the STEP survey data. Findings: The authors find two governance configurations that lead to better family business workplace social performance. The first configuration is the combination of 100% family ownership, high family involvement in management and a mix of outside directors and family members on the board. The second configuration is the combination of less than 100% family ownership and low family involvement in management. Originality/value: The study builds on and extends the nascent work suggesting the integration of agency and stewardship theories. The authors show that these two theoretical approaches are able to not only coexist, but that they can also be complementary in helping to understand the unique workplace social behaviors of family firms. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited
Development and Challenges of Synthetic Retinoid Formulations in Cancer
No full textRetinoids represent a class of chemical compounds derived from or structurally and functionally related to vitamin A. Retinoids play crucial roles in regulating a range of crucial biological processes spanning embryonic development to adult life. These include regulation of cell proliferation, differentiation, and cell death. Due to their promising characteristics, retinoids emerged as potent anti-cancer agents, and their effects were validated in vitro and in vivo preclinical models of several solid and hematological malignancies. However, their clinical translation remained limited due to poor water solubility, photosensitivity, short half-life, and toxicity. The development of retinoid delivery formulations was extensively studied to overcome these limitations. This review will summarize some preclinical and commercial synthetic retinoids in cancer and discuss their different delivery systems. © 2023 Bentham Science Publishers
A Framework to Maximize Group Fairness for Workers on Online Labor Platforms
Get PDFAs the number of online labor platforms and the diversity of jobs on these platforms increase, ensuring group fairness for workers needs to be the focus of job-matching services. Risk of discrimination against workers occurs in two different job-matching services: when someone is looking for a job (i.e., a job seeker) and when someone wants to deploy jobs (i.e., a job provider). To maximize their chances of getting hired, job seekers submit their profiles on different platforms. Similarly, job providers publish their job offers on multiple platforms with the goal of reaching a wide and diverse workforce. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to maximize group fairness for workers 1) when job seekers are looking for jobs on multiple platforms, and 2) when jobs are being deployed by job providers on multiple platforms. We formulate each goal as different optimization problems with different constraints, prove most of them are computationally hard to solve and propose various efficient algorithms to solve all of them in reasonable time. We then design a series of experiments that rely on synthetic and semi-synthetic data generated from a real-world online labor platform to evaluate our framework. © 2023, The Author(s)
Treated Wastewater Reuse for Irrigation in Bekaa, Lebanon: Quality Assessment and Public Perception
Get PDFIn Lebanon, agriculture consumes 61% of the freshwater resources. In this sector, an estimated water supply-demand gap of 25% in 2020 is predicted to increase with the elevated and unmet water demand and the exacerbating pressure on the water supply. Despite having negligible, unregulated, and challenging water reuse practices, treated wastewater (TWW) is among the alternative water sources for irrigation to increase water availability and reduce the pressure on freshwater resources. However, its safe quality is of utmost concern and a prerequisite for water reuse, including farmers' and consumers' acceptability of this safe practice. Therefore, this study aims to determine the willingness of farmers in Zahle and Ablah, located in two water-scarce agricultural villages in the Bekaa governorate of Lebanon, and consumers from the general Lebanese communities toward safe TWW reuse in agriculture. It further characterizes the quality of TWW effluent from the Ablah and Zahle wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) for reuse in irrigation to evaluate their environmental and public health risks.
The results revealed that farmers in Zahle and Ablah, potential beneficiaries of the Zahle and Ablah WWTPs, and consumers from the general Lebanese population aged 18 years and above have a very high willingness to safely use (32/34 farmers) and accept the safe usage (245/256 consumers) of TWW for irrigation. Farmers' acceptance was incentivized by the economic benefits of safe reuse, while the consumers mostly care about the environmental benefits of this safe practice. Statistical analysis showed that the economic incentive to increase agricultural yield and environmental incentive to reduce water scarcity in Lebanon significantly increased the willingness of consumers to accept the irrigation of crops that have the lowest health risk category (WTU1) with safe TWW. Their perception of the lack of sustainable access to sufficient freshwater significantly increased the consumers’ acceptance of the irrigation of crops with an increased health risk (WTU2). As for their willingness to accept safe reuse for the highest health risk crops (WTU3), it was significantly correlated with their knowledge that safe TWW conserves fresh potable water.
The main barrier hindering safe water reuse among farmers and consumers is their lack of trust in the authorities in Lebanon to ensure safe quality effluents. This perception matches the reality due to the very restrictive and inconsistent quality effluent of the Zahle and Ablah WWTPs. Based on a 6-month monitoring period (Jan-March and June-August 2022), the quality was found to be only suitable to irrigate Category III crops with the highest degree of restriction. This restriction and variability are mainly influenced by chronic poor governance and the national economic crisis. Despite this severe restriction, some farmers in Zahle and Ablah are irrigating their crops with these water outlets irrespective of the guidelines. Farmers in Bekaa and across Lebanon are also indirect users of wastewater from the 70 to 75% of the national generated WW discharged untreated into water bodies. Hence, some farmers are not fully aware of the actual risks of irrigating with unsafe TWW or even WW (whether direct or indirect irrigation), but they also might not have another alternative because of the worsened water security issues. A major implementation barrier for safe water reuse in Lebanon identified in this study is the gap between the reality, in terms of the unsafe quality of TWW for reuse, the lack of trust in the authorities in ensuring its safety for irrigation, and weak law enforcement for safe discharge of TWW in surface water bodies, and the goal of an integrated WW treatment and safe reuse practices in agriculture.
On the other hand, TWW remains a sustainable alternative that can contribute to bridging the water gap in agriculture, among other interventions. The Zahle and Ablah effluents can be improved in quality to match the intended design abilities and capacities of the treatment plants upon improvement of the general economic and financial situation in the country or through donor support to allow normal operation and maintenance. Some technical recommendations are also proposed in this thesis, to be decided on upon further monitoring and investigation, complemented by some suggested recommendations at the irrigation level to mitigate the risks of a restrictive TWW quality based on the improved quality of the effluent. Most importantly, water reuse projects need to be regulated and enforced by a national policy and standards for TWWR. The Lebanese Standards Institution (LIBNOR) is currently developing those standards based on the FAO draft Lebanese guidelines. A water strategy addressing water reuse management and quality control is fundamental, along with developing effective and appropriate communication mechanisms. To strengthen the trust in the authorities, these initiatives should be based on a transparent and accountable participatory approach from the earliest stages and throughout the entire decision-making process. Lastly, customized awareness raising can further promote safe water reuse in agriculture. This thesis established the groundwork for a more in-depth investigation of water reuse management and implementation and shed some light on current problems of wastewater reuse in irrigation
A Portable Non-Invasive Electromagnetic Lesion-Optimized Sensing Device for the Diagnosis of Skin Cancer (SkanMD)
Get PDFThe article presented herein proposes an alternative skin cancer screening method that delivers non-invasive diagnosis and monitoring of skin lesions by leveraging electromagnetic waves with radio frequency technology and circuits. The proposed handheld device, named SkanMD, comprises a sensitive electromagnetic sensor, customized radio frequency wave analyzer circuits, and machine learning algorithms. The device is used in clinical studies that are performed on a total of 46 individuals that are composed of 18 patients with pre-diagnosed skin cancer, 10 individuals with benign nevi, 7 patients with arbitrary diseases, and 11 healthy individuals. These studies included the measurement of the reflection coefficient, S11, on multiple skin regions and recording the obtained complex values to build a Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based classification model. Due to the lesion-optimized sensor and the unified cross-patient classifier, our results differentiate between cancerous and non-cancerous skin lesions with a sensitivity that exceeds 92% and a specificity that exceeds 81.4%. These reported results are based on a limited population size study. They also demonstrate that SkanMD is a promising solution that could augment conventional diagnosis methods to greatly improve patient comfort and enable instantaneous and accurate diagnosis. © 2007-2012 IEEE
Gaussian limits for scheduled traffic with super-heavy tailed perturbations
Get PDFA scheduled arrival model is one in which the jth customer is scheduled to arrive at time jh but the customer actually arrives at time jh+ ξj , where the ξj ’s are independent and identically distributed. It has previously been shown that the arrival counting process for scheduled traffic obeys a functional central limit theorem (FCLT) with fractional Brownian motion (fBM) with Hurst parameter H∈ (0 , 1 / 2) when the ξj ’s have a Pareto-like tail with tail exponent lying in (0, 1). Such limit processes exhibit less variability than Brownian motion, because the scheduling feature induces negative correlations in the arrival process. In this paper, we show that when the tail of the ξj ’s has a super-heavy tail, the FCLT limit process is Brownian motion (i.e., H= 1 / 2), so that the heaviness of the tails eliminates any remaining negative correlations and generates a limit process with independent increments. We further study the case when the ξj ’s have a Cauchy-like tail, and show that the limit process in this setting is a fBM with H= 0 . So, this paper shows that the entire range of fBMs with H∈ [0 , 1 / 2] are possible as limits of scheduled traffic. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
Ultrasound-guided arterial cannulation in the paediatric population
Get PDFBackground: In arterial line cannulation in children and adolescents, traditional methods of locating the artery include palpation and Doppler auditory assistance. It is unclear whether ultrasound guidance is superior to these methods. This is an update of a review originally published in 2016. Objectives: To evaluate the benefits and harms of ultrasound guidance compared with traditional techniques (palpation, Doppler auditory assistance) for assisting arterial line placement at all potential sites in children and adolescents. Search methods: We searched CENTRAL, MEDLINE, Embase, and Web of Science from inception to 30 October 2022. We also searched four trials registers for ongoing trials, and we checked the reference lists of included studies and relevant reviews for other potentially eligible trials. Selection criteria: We included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) comparing ultrasound guidance versus other techniques (palpation or Doppler auditory assistance) to guide arterial line cannulation in children and adolescents (aged under 18 years). We planned to include quasi-RCTs and cluster-RCTs. For RCTs with both adult and paediatric populations, we planned to include only the paediatric population data. Data collection and analysis: Two review authors independently assessed the risk of bias of included trials and extracted data. We used standard Cochrane meta-analytical procedures, and we applied the GRADE method to assess the certainty of evidence. Main results: We included nine RCTs reporting 748 arterial cannulations in children and adolescents (under 18 years of age) undergoing different surgical procedures. Eight RCTs compared ultrasound with palpation, and one compared ultrasound with Doppler auditory assistance. Five studies reported the incidence of haematomas. Seven involved radial artery cannulation and two involved femoral artery cannulation. The people performing arterial cannulation were physicians with different levels of experience. The risk of bias varied across studies, with some studies lacking details of allocation concealment. It was not possible to blind practitioners in any case; this adds a performance bias that is inherent to the type of intervention studied in our review. Compared to traditional methods, ultrasound guidance probably causes a large increase in first-attempt success rates (risk ratio (RR) 2.01, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.64 to 2.46; 8 RCTs, 708 participants; moderate-certainty evidence) and probably causes a large reduction in the risk of complications such as haematoma formation (RR 0.26, 95% CI 0.14 to 0.47; 5 RCTs, 420 participants; moderate-certainty evidence). No studies reported data about ischaemic damage. Ultrasound guidance probably improves success rates within two attempts (RR 1.78, 95% CI 1.25 to 2.51; 2 RCTs, 134 participants; moderate-certainty evidence) and overall rate of successful cannulation (RR 1.32, 95% CI 1.10 to 1.59; 6 RCTs, 374 participants; moderate-certainty evidence). In addition, ultrasound guidance probably reduces the number of attempts to successful cannulation (mean difference (MD) −0.99 attempts, 95% CI −1.15 to −0.83; 5 RCTs, 368 participants; moderate-certainty evidence) and duration of the cannulation procedure (MD −98.77 seconds, 95% CI −150.02 to −47.52, 5 RCTs, 402 participants; moderate-certainty evidence). More studies are needed to confirm whether the improvement in first-attempt success rates is more pronounced in neonates and younger children compared to older children and adolescents. Authors' conclusions: We identified moderate-certainty evidence that ultrasound guidance for arterial cannulation compared with palpation or Doppler auditory assistance improves first-attempt success rate, second-attempt success rate and overall success rate. We also found moderate-certainty evidence that ultrasound guidance reduces the incidence of complications, the number of attempts to successful cannulation and the duration of the cannulation procedure. Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Cochrane Database of Systema ic Reviews published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. on behalf of The Cochrane Collaboration