343 research outputs found
The formation of the classical tafsīr tradition : the Qurʼān commentary of al-Thaʻlabī (d. 427/1035) by Walid A. Saleh.
No full text"This work is both an introduction to the genre of classical tafsir and a detailed study of one of its major architects, al-Thalabi (d. 427/1035). The book offers a detailed study of the hermeneutical principles that governed al-Thalabi's approach to the Quran, principles which became the norm in later exegetical works. It is divided into three main sections: the first outlines the life and times of the author; the second is a detailed study of his major exegetical work, al-Kashf; the third charts a brief history of the genre of tafsir through documenting the reactions of later exegetes to al-Kashf. This work brings together material never examined before and tries to offer anew way of understanding the history of classical Quran exegesis."--Jacket.Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-259) and indexes."This work is both an introduction to the genre of classical tafsir and a detailed study of one of its major architects, al-Thalabi (d. 427/1035). The book offers a detailed study of the hermeneutical principles that governed al-Thalabi's approach to the Quran, principles which became the norm in later exegetical works. It is divided into three main sections: the first outlines the life and times of the author; the second is a detailed study of his major exegetical work, al-Kashf; the third charts a brief history of the genre of tafsir through documenting the reactions of later exegetes to al-Kashf. This work brings together material never examined before and tries to offer anew way of understanding the history of classical Quran exegesis."--Jacket
Extracellular Microvesicles as a Novel Biomarker for Wound Healing
Get PDFIntroduction: Wound healing is a sophisticated dynamic process that involves complex coordination among a variety of resident cells in a suitable extracellular environment. Chronic wounds are defined as wounds that fail to heal within a period of 3 months. Negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) is a closed suction drainage system is used to enable mass transport of fluid from the body as an adjunct to surgical procedures. (Oasis-ultra) is a triple layer extracellular matrix containing different types of glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) like heparin sulfate, hyaluronic acid and chondroitin sulfate. In addition, it has adhesion molecule such as fibronectin and laminin along with various growth factors. Extracellular vesicles, (EVs); microvesicles and exosomes are a diverse family of membrane bound vesicles laden with various proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids that cells release to the extracellular environment. EVs play a crucial role in cell to cell communication, as they carry signaling molecules, like lipids, proteins, mRNAs, and miRNAs. We hypothesize that there is a correlation between the concentration of EMVs and the percentage of wound healing in treated chronic wounds and the healing percentage will be enhanced by the combination of Oasis ultra and NPWT. A prospective, multi-centered, randomized, single-blinded clinical trial that permitted by the Ethics Committee of the Copernicus was conducted to study whether the combination of Oasis ultra and NPWT will enhance the healing of chronic wounds when compared with only NPWT, to measure the concentration of EMVs in the collected wound fluids and correlate it with the percentage of wound healing and to analyze the extracellular microvesicles composition to look for growth factors, chemokines and cytokines that play role in the wound healing Material and Methods: Wound fluid samples obtained from 14 patients with stage IV trunk pressure ulcers. The patients were divided in two groups (7 in each group, n=7): control group on negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) alone & study group with NPWT plus Oasis Ultra dressing. NPWT was replaced two times a week, and Oasis Ultra was applied once weekly for all subjects. Wound size was measured every week and healing percentage was calculated for the whole 12 weeks of the study. A canister of NPWT device (wound VAC) was collected from the patients every four weeks of the study and brought to the lab where a hole was made in the canister by using a drill to drain the fluids. Protease inhibitor added to the fluid before the fluid stored in a -80°C freezer. EMVs were isolated using Differential Ultracentrifugation methods, and EMVs concentration in wound fluid was measured by Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis machine (Nanosight). EMVs were analyzed for cytokines and growth factors using BioPlex Pro cytokine assays after determining protein concentration using Bradford assay. Results: Our data showed that overall healing percentage in the study group after 12 weeks of study was ~ 89% as compared with the control group, which was ~ 52% (P \u3c 0.05). Further, to examine the correlation between EMVs and wound healing percentage, simple linear regression was conducted using SPSS and Prism pad soft wares. The data showed that there is a strong positive correlation between EMVs concentrations in wound fluid and the healing percentage, the R-square was 0.66, and (P = 0.05). The study group shows high levels of intravesicular concentration of pro-healing cytokines and low levels pro-inflammatory cytokines; however, control group shows high levels of intravesicular concentration of pro-inflammatory cytokines and low levels of pro-healing cytokine. Conclusion: Our clinical trial demonstrates that using Oasis-Ultra combined with NPWT hasten the healing percentage in stage IV pressure ulcers. There is a correlation between EMVs concentration in wound fluid and the healing percenta..
Adapting authoritarianism: institutions and co-optation in Egypt and Syria
No full textThis PhD thesis compares Egypt and Syria’s authoritarian political systems. While the tendency in social science political research treats Egypt and Syria as similarly authoritarian, this research emphasizes differences between the two systems with special reference to institutions and co-optation. Rather than reducibly understanding Egypt and Syria as sharing similar histories, institutional arrangements, or ascribing to the oft-repeated convention that “Syria is Egypt but 10 years behind,” this thesis focuses on how events and individual histories shaped each states current institutional strengthens and weaknesses. Specifically, it explains the how varying institutional politicization or de-politicization affects each state’s capabilities for co-opting elite and non-elite individuals.
Beginning with a theoretical framework that considers the limited utility of democratization and transition theoretical approaches, the work underscores the persistence and durability of authoritarianism. Chapter two details the politicized institutional divergence between Egypt and Syria that began in the 1970s. Chapter three and four examines how institutional politicization or de-politicization affects elite and non-elite individual co-optation in Egypt and Syria. Chapter five discusses the study’s general conclusions and theoretical implications.
This thesis’s argument is that Egypt and Syria co-opt elites and non-elites differently because of the varying degrees of institutional politicization in each governance system. Rather than view one country as more politically developed than the other, this work argues that Syria’s political institutions are more politicized than their Egyptian counterparts. Syria’s political arena is, thus, described as politicized-patrimonialism. Syria’s politicized-patrimonial arena produces uneven co-optation of elites and non-elites as they are diffused through competing institutions. Conversely, the Egyptian political arena remains highly personalized as weak institutions and individuals are manipulated and molded according to the president’s ruling clique. This is referred to as personalized-patrimonialism. As a consequence, Egypt’s political establishment demonstrates more flexibility in ad hoc altering and adapting its arena depending on the emergence of crises.
This study’s theoretical implications suggest that, contrary to modernization and democratization theory’s adage that institutions lead to a political development, politicized institutions within a patrimonial order actually hinder regime adaptation because consensus is harder to achieve and maintain. It is within this context that Egypt’s de-politicized institutional framework advantages its top political elite. In this reading of Egyptian and Syrian politics, Egypt’s personalized political arena is more adaptable than Syria’s. These conclusions do not indicate that political reform is a process underway in either state
Performance Analysis of Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Systems
Get PDFSolar energy is one of the most promising renewable resources that can be used to produce electric energy through photovoltaic process. A significant advantage of photovoltaic (PV) systems is the use of the abundant and free energy from the sun. However, these systems still face major obstacles that hinder their widespread use due to their high cost and low efficiency when compared with other renewable technologies. Moreover, the intermittent nature of the output power of PV systems reduces their reliability in providing continuous power to customers. In addition, the fluctuations in the output power due to variations in irradiance might lead to undesirable performance of the electric network. The support of governments, electric utilities, researchers and consumers is the key to overcoming the aforementioned obstacles and enhancing the maturity of the technology in this field.
The primary objective of the research proposed in this thesis is to facilitate increasing the penetration levels of PV systems in the electric network. This can be achieved by quantifying and analyzing the impacts of installing large grid-connected photovoltaic systems on the performance of the electric network accurately. To achieve this objective, the development of a new and intelligent method is introduced. The method utilizes the available data efficiently to produce accurate realistic results about the performance of the electric network without overestimating or underestimating the impacts of the PV system. The method utilizes historical environmental data collected over a number of years to estimate the profile of the output power of the PV system. In addition, the method considers the actual data of the electric network. Hence, the interaction between the output power of the PV system and the electric network components can be simulated to identify the possible operational problems.
After identifying the operational problems that might arise due to installing PV systems, especially due to power fluctuations, different strategies that can mitigate these problems are studied in detail. These strategies include installation of energy storage devices, use of dump loads, and operation below the maximum power point. Upon studying the mitigation strategies, their economical aspects are investigated. The economical aspect is crucial for PV systems because of their high cost, which is reflected on the price of the energy produced by them.
The presented research integrates techniques from different fields of engineering such as data mining, mathematical optimization and power systems. This research is expected to contribute to the advancement of PV technology by introducing methods that will help in carrying out in-depth evaluation of the performance of PV systems and providing feasible solutions to the operational problems that might arise from the installation of these systems
Book review: shadows of the holy land - Fred Halliday reviews more chapters in a long saga
No full textAuthor reviews: Nicholas Bethell, "The Palestine triangle"; Nathan Weinstock, "Zionism: false Messiah"; Jacob Landau, "Abdul-Hamid's Palestine"; I.F. Stone, "Underground to Palestine"; Walid Kazzila, "Palestine in the Arab dilemma"; Molly Izzard, "The Gulf
Ethnic identity, political identity and ethnic conflict: simulating the effect of congruence between the two identities on ethnic violence and conflict
Get PDFThis thesis outlines and presents an alternative hypothetical process to the emergence of ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflicts, rather than being dependent upon pre-existing 'ancient hatreds', are instead the result of a congruence between ethnic and political identity which grants individuals the ability to use ethnicity to identify and eliminate political threats. This hypothesis is formed by the examination of three case studies of ethnic conflict: Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Croatia. This hypothesis is then formalised and tested using an agent based simulation in which agent interactions are dependent upon ethnic and political identity and the congruence between the two. As predicted there was a strong positive correlation between how accurately ethnic identity reflected political identity and the level of ethnically motivated violence in the simulation, although the relationship was not linear. Furthermore the effect of a shift in congruence was found to be roughly comparable to the effect of initialising agents with a moderate level of pre-existing ethnic antagonism
Exploring Author Context for Detecting Intended vs Perceived Sarcasm
Get PDFWe investigate the impact of using author context on textual sarcasm detection. We define author context as the embedded representation of their historical posts on Twitter and suggest neural models that extract these representations. We experiment with two tweet datasets, one labelled manually for sarcasm, and the other via tag-based distant supervision. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on the second dataset, but not on the one labelled manually, indicating a difference between intended sarcasm, captured by distant supervision, and perceived sarcasm, captured by manual labelling.<br/
A Decentralized Coordination Strategy for Voltage Regulation of Active Distribution Networks
No full textThis paper presents a fully decentralized coordination
strategy based on Multi-Agent System (MAS) for voltage
regulation in active distribution networks (ADNs). The strategy
is based on coordinating the operation of Distributed Generators
(DGs) and On-Load Tap Changer (OLTC) to maintain the bus
voltages within acceptable limits. The strategy attempts to
maximize the use of the renewable based DGs while minimizing
the operation of the OLTC. Several case studies are presented to
show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed strategy
Exploring Author Context for Detecting Intended vs Perceived Sarcasm
Get PDFWe investigate the impact of using author context on textual sarcasm detection. We define author context as the embedded representation of their historical posts on Twitter and suggest neural models that extract these representations. We experiment with two tweet datasets, one labelled manually for sarcasm, and the other via tag-based distant supervision. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on the second dataset, but not on the one labelled manually, indicating a difference between intended sarcasm, captured by distant supervision, and perceived sarcasm, captured by manual labelling.<br/
Art and political dissent in postwar Lebanon: Walid Sadek's fi annani akbar min bikasu [bigger than picasso]
No full textTaking Walid Sadek's fi annani akbar min bikasu [bigger than picasso] as its starting point, this article examines relations of art and politics in post-civil war Lebanon. A tiny and inexpensive paperback related to Picasso unfolds into a work of art that raises questions about the place of art and political dissent. After situating bigger than picasso in the context of contemporary book art and artistic practices of the postwar generation in Lebanon, the article focuses on the juxtaposition of text and image. By placing narratives of art vandalism next to the image of a monument dedicated to the late Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad, bigger than picasso playfully and provocatively breaks with political taboos at a time when the silence about the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) and about Lebanese-Syrian relations was met with increasing anxiety. At the same time, the work makes room for aesthetic inquiries, exploring new possibilities of art at the margins of cultural production. The article concludes that bigger than picasso brings to the fore the discrepancy between public monumentality and artistic practices, which in finding ways around political violence and censorship have recourse to ephemeral and private spheres, and holds unexpected meanings in ever-changing political circumstances. 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