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Efficient routing and data management in sensor networks using virtual cord routing (VCP)
No full textWe show the feasibility of efficient routing and service discovery in sensor networks using the Virtual Cord Protocol (VCP). Scalable and energy efficient data management is still a challenging topic in this domain. This problem domain is being addressed by recent Distributed Hash Table (DHT)-
based approaches for data management in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In general, such solutions can be classified in three main categories: real location based, virtual location
based, and location independent, whereby the most recent approaches for data management and routing in WSNs rely on virtual coordinat
مقياس الديمقراطية العربي 4
No full textيقوم هذا التقرير بتدقيق أحوال الديمقراطية في مجموعة من الدول العربية من خلال جمع و تحليل بيانات حول أربعين مؤشراً رئيسياً ذات علاقة بعملية التحول الديمقراطي تنقسم العديد من هذه المؤشرات الرئيسية إلى مؤشرات فرعية تغطي المجالات السياسية و الإقتصادية و الإجتماعية ذات العلاق
Information Technology as Cultural Heritage Preservation Tool
No full textAbstract
The task of cultural heritage preservation is a major endeavor that has political, economic and societal, in addition to the cultural implications. It requires the active participation of many stakeholders and needs to be founded on scientific grounds with attention to privacy/ethical issues. We argue that Information Technology, if utilized properly, can play an important role in the cultural heritage preservation by serving as a tool that can aid the process in many ways[7]. It allows better, cheaper and longer term preservation of archival material in digital form. This applies to printed matter as well as to multimedia objects (voice, pictures, video). The Internet allows access, independent of distance, both to reach the archival materials and to contribute objects. Access/modification can be controlled/regulated/monitored with minimal human effort. Virtual tours/exhibits, better annotation, and multilingual support can improve reachability to larger audiences. Presentation methods employing computer graphics/multimedia/Virtual Reality and GIS tools can help better querying and digestion of data. IT offers new cooperation possibilities in cultural heritage preservation such as crowd sourcing which helps the democratization of the process by allowing more people to contribute even in small ways, while still observing strict safeguards. Storage distribution and mirroring help smooth access and guard against interruptions/bottlenecks/failures, technical and otherwise; The open access culture of the Internet is an impediment to restrictive practices by custodians, while still giving the tools to preserve the privacy of individuals. Reductions in storage and bandwidth costs, better connectivity and the increase in computational power of devices and the ubiquitous nature of computing as well as the pervasiveness of multilingual tools for Information Retrieval are all factors that contribute to a better integration of IT resources into the cultural heritage preservation effort. IT, however, comes at a cost: better access also means more frequent malicious access attempts; misinterpreting the role of IT as an end rather than a tool and IT workers as policy setters rather than implementers; lax treatment of the real artifacts on the assumption that digital objects are a substitute; plus the usual failures that plague IT systems: deployment delays, bugs, unclear access rights management and the dominance of technical issues at the expense of scientific/cultural aspects of the work.
We argue that digital, or IT-enabled preservation of cultural heritage, is here to stay, due to its economic, technical, cultural and societal advantages[7,8]. We claim that in the Palestinian context IT may allow for preserving aspects of Palestinian Cultural Heritage, which are while endangered, may not be the focus of a critical mass of researchers/entities. Examples are: Palestinian Dialects, folk music/poetry and virtual reality models of destroyed population centers
Priority setting for the prevention and control of cardiovascular diseases: multi-criteria decision analysis in four eastern Mediterranean countries
No full textFouad,Fouad:American University of Beirut
Radwan,Al Ali:Syrian Center for Tobacco Studies
Aissi,Wafa:Objectives To explore the feasibility of using a simple
multi-criteria decision analysis method with policy makers/
key stakeholders to prioritize cardiovascular disease (CVD)
policies in four Mediterranean countries: Palestine, Syria,
Tunisia and Turkey.
Methods A simple multi-criteria decision analysis
(MCDA) method was piloted. A mixed methods study was
used to identify a preliminary list of policy options in each
country. These policies were rated by different policymakers/stakeholders against pre-identified criteria to
generate a priority score for each policy and then rank the
policies.
Results Twenty-five different policies were rated in the
four countries to create a country-specific list of CVD
prevention and control policies. The response rate was
100 % in each country. The top policies were mostly
population level interventions and health systems’ level
policies.
Conclusions Successful collaboration between policy
makers/stakeholders and researchers was established in this
small pilot study. MCDA appeared to be feasible and
effective. Future applications should aim to engage a larger, representative sample of policy makers, especially
from outside the health sector. Weighting the selected
criteria might also be assessed
Towards building linguistic ontology via cross-language matching
No full textMorgan,Candia:Institute of Education, University of LondonIn this paper, we introduce a methodology for
mapping linguistic ontologies lexicalized
across different languages. We present a
classification-based semantics for mappings of
lexicalized concepts across different
languages. We propose an experiment for
validating the proposed cross-language
mapping semantics, and discuss its role in
creating a gold standard that can be used in
assessing cross-language matching systems
Detecting protein atom correlations using correlation of probability of recurrence
No full textThe Dynamic Cross-Correlation Map(DCCM) technique has been used extensively to study protein dynamics. In this work, we introduce the use of the method of Correlation of Probability of Recurrence (CPR) as a complementary method to detect correlations between protein residue atoms. Time series of the distances of the Cα atoms
of the β-Lactamase Inhibitory protein(BLIP) from a reference position are analyzed using CPR and Mutual Information(MI). The results are compared to those provided by DCCM. In comparison to MI, CPR is found to detect more of the correlations present in DCCM. It is also able to detect a small number of significant correlations between distant residues that are not detected by DCC
Modified tournament harmony search for unconstrained optimisation problems
No full textKhaled Shambour,Moh’d:
Tajudin Khader,Ahamad:
Shambour,Qusai
Barriers to child abuse identification and reporting
No full textPediatrics
Rajeh Saifan,Ahmad:
AbuRuz,Mohannad:Child abuse is an increasing phenomenon globally and is divided into four dimensions: physical, sexual, emotional and negligence. As in all countries in the world, child abuse is underreported in Arab countries, including Palestine. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the potential barriers to child abuse identification and reporting by the Palestinian nurses. A total of 84 nurses from a major hospital in Ramallah city in Palestine constituted the sample of this study and returned the distributed questionnaire. The majority of the sample were young junior nurses holding BSc degrees. Interestingly, none of the nurses had received any training about child abuse. Almost 70% of nurses think that child abuse is a problem in the society, but that it is underreported due to different factors such as being concerned about child abuse identification, training about abuse identification, lack of time for identification of the abuse and child abuse not being considered a medical problem; these were the barriers most identified by the nurses. In conclusion, the presence of a well-organized system to deal with this phenomenon seems crucial. Protecting children from being abused is not the responsibility of a single agency or a governmental institution. Clear, concise and structured child protection policy is necessary to enable nurses to report and deal with abuse cases and to improve the effectiveness of reporting and caring for such cases
