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محددات ربحية البنوك : دروس من البنوك الفلسطينية
No full textThe thesis investigates the impact of banks’ internal characteristics on profitability of banks
operating in Palestine over the period 2009-2014. The study is motivated by the peculiarity of the
Palestinian context and aims to explain the continuous profitability trends of the banking sector.
The results of the OLS regression show that Palestinian banks’ profitability is positively associated
with deposit to asset ratio, lending rate and bank size. However, high exposure to credit risk
decreases the level of profitability.
The findings imply that banks can adopt policies to attract deposits at low cost to reduce the costs
associated with other sources of funds. Since lending rate is positively associated with profits, banks
can maximize the use of available funds by granting loans to boost profitability. The presence of
information dissemination institutions, public credit registries and private credit bureau enhances the
screening process for banks in assessing potential borrowers, which essentially enhances the loan
quality and reduces the default rates. This eventually improves banks performance. Furthermore, an
ample horizon exists for banks operating in Palestine to grow and expand in terms of asset base,
branch network and customer portfolio. This expansion enables banks to reap the benefits of larger
size as a result of economies of scal
Women's health in the Occupied Palestinian territory: Self-rated health of 15-54 year old women
No full textUsing adaptive model predictive technique to control underactuated robot and minimize energy consumption
Get PDFMechanical Engineering
Seliger,Guenther:
Abu Hanieh,Ahmed
A strategic perspective of social enterprise sustainability
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of sustainability from a strategic perspective by looking at two case studies that managed to thrive and grow. Drawing on 11 in-depth interviews, the paper explores how the phenomenon plays out and how strategic practices are carried out in their local exchange contexts, rising above mundane challenges, and ending up improving the economic and social capacities of their communities. The paper contends that social enterprise sustainability is grounded in understanding the impact of contextual, organisational and individual spheres that correspond to three strategic ex-ante enablers: stakeholder orientation, relationship-oriented organisation, and entrepreneurial behaviour; all of which have had valuable contributions towards the upkeep of the enterprise. The study demonstrates that sustainability of social enterprises in a constrained environment is a function of a continuous entrepreneurial activity and the effective use of social and business models. Beyond its direct contribution to the literature on social enterprise in developing countries, the paper offers a practical framework that underlines the dynamism of a sustainable social enterprise while emphasising key managerial and marketing concepts. It concludes with a number of recommendations for policy and practice as to how to enhance the contribution of management and marketing concepts to sustainable social enterprises
A-RSA : augmented RSA
No full textToday, RSA algorithm is the most widely used public-key cryptosystem around the world. It is used for security in everything from online shopping to cell phones. However, the basic RSA is not semantically secure, i.e., encrypting the same message more than once always gives the same ciphertext. For this reason, the basic RSA is vulnerable to set of indirect attacks, such as known plaintext, chosen plaintext, timing, common modulus, and frequency of blocks (FOB) attacks. Moreover, RSA is known to be much slower than the standards symmetric key encryption and it does not used for encrypting large data. In
this paper, we design and implement a swift and secure variant of RSA based on Rabin and Huffman coding called Augmented RSA (A-RSA) to solve aforementioned limitations of the basic
RSA. A new additional randomization component r is added in A-RSA. This component is encrypted by Rabin algorithm to improve the security level of RSA against the indirect attacks and make RSA semantically secure. Moreover, A-RSA makes the factorization problem harder, since the attackers need to break the factorization of large numbers for both RSA and Rabin. Besides, employing Huffman Coding compression in ARSA prevents FOB attack and speeds up the execution time for
the A-RSA. Our testing results over set of file sizes of 1MB, 2MB, 3MB, to 10 MB show that A-RSA’s average execution time is equal to 0.55 of the average execution time of the basic RSA
in encryption process and 0.01 in decryption process. Also, we found that RSA system increases the size of ciphertext by 1% compared to the original file size, while the average size of A-RSA
files is equal 0.46 of its original siz
Tools for internationalizing higher education in developing countries
No full textThe global nature of modern economy is reflecting heavily on higher education. Graduates are frequently finding employment in areas outside their home countries, and universities are targeting students away from their main campuses and integrating away-from-campus experiences into their programs. Producing graduates able to compete on the global scale is essential to modern tertiary education in all countries. Exposing students to modern trends in tech-nology and diverse approaches to pedagogy figures high on the priority list of prominent schools. Higher educational institutions with limited resources are at a disadvantage here. In poorer countries, sending students out in large numbers may not be practical for economic, political and cultural reasons. In this paper we talk about a suite of initiatives tailored to help bring international education to local students at affordable cost in a developing country context. The measures include internationalizing curriculum and quality assurance practices, offering programs for international students to visit, learn and volunteer in interaction with local students and communities and recruiting prominent scholars from international universities and major corporations to teach courses to local students. Another tool is that of joint programs, graduate and undergraduate, with regional and international schools. The measures can be viewed not only as internationalization tools but also as ways to close the gaps in areas of weaknesses at the national level. Indicators of success for these initiatives include follow-up action such as local student/faculty stays abroad, joint work on capstone projects and graduate degrees, subsequent joint research programs, international accreditation and the level of future interest in similar initiatives.
We report in some detail on a suite of initiatives aimed at exposing our students to international education in a cost effective manner; on the academic restructuring introduced to make student and faculty participation in international activities fit well into regular academic commitments, the challenges faced and solutions devised, the degree to which the goals were achieved and the sustainability of the effort in a resource limited environment of a third world country
Management of soil and terrestrial resources as affected by urban encroachment : a case study in Ramallah, al-Bireh, Bituniya metropolitan
No full textيعد الزحف العمراني على الموارد الأرضية مشكلة ذات تأثيرات سلبية على البيئة، وقد هدفت هذه الدراسة إلى تحدید تأثیرالتمدد العمراني على الموارد الأرضية التربة و الصخور في ميتروبوليتان رام الله و البيرة و بيتونيا من حيث دراسة أهم الموارد التي تتعرض لها، بالإضافة إلى دراسة الإنجراف و تشكل الفيضانات الناتج عن التمدد العمراني وما يصاحبه من تأثير على المواد الأرضي
The effect of reading-to-write approach on EFL undergraduate essay writing
No full textThis paper attempts to investigate the effect of pre-writing reading on the undergraduate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ performance in academic writing. Specifically, the main aim of the study is to examine whether the employment of ‘reading-to-write approach’ improves the university learners’ essay writing at home situation. It also tries to check if the suggested approach makes any difference in the target group’s writing. Control group and experimental group research design was used to examine the difference between the two groups and to determine if the suggested approach could make any significance statistically. The two groups sat for pretest and posttest in cause and effect essay writing. To compare the performance of the two groups in the posttest, an Independent Sample T-test was used. The results of the posttest indicate that there is a noteworthy improvement of the experimental group’s essay writing. In addition, the study used grading rubric as criteria to assess the population’s performance in the major components of academic essay writing. The study findings show that the learners’ literacy is a major concern for the students as evident in the lack of reasonable ideas in their writing. Additionally, the paper is a genuine call to foster reading habits that would eventually develop academic writing.Sel-funde
Curras : an annotated corpus for the Palestinian Arabic dialect
No full textIn this article we present Curras, the first morphologically annotated corpus of the Palestinian Arabic dialect. Palestinian Arabic is one of the many primarily spoken dialects of the Arabic language. Arabic dialects are generally under-resourced compared to Modern Standard Arabic, the primarily written and official form of Arabic. We start in the article with a background description that situates Palestinian Arabic linguistically and historically and compares it to Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic in terms of phonological, morphological, orthographic, and lexical variations. We then describe the methodology we developed to collect Palestinian Arabic text to guarantee a variety of representative domains and genres. We also discuss the annotation process we used, which extended previous efforts for annotation guideline development, and utilized existing automatic annotation solutions for Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic. The annotation guidelines and annotation meta-data are described in detail. The Curras Palestinian Arabic corpus consists of more than 56K tokens, which are annotated with rich morphological and lexical features. The inter-annotator agreement results indicate a high degree of consistency.Curras project, funded by the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education,
Scientific Research Counci