American University in Cairo New York Office

Uncertain times require prompt reflexes to survive and this study is a collaborative reflex to better understand uncertainty and navigate through it. The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic hit hard and interrupted many dimensions of our lives, particularly education. As a response to interruption of education due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this study is a collaborative reaction that narrates the overall view, reflections from the K12 and higher educational landscape, lessons learned and suggestions from a total of 31 countries across the world with a representation of 62.7% of the whole world population. In addition to the value of each case by country, the synthesis of this research suggests that the current practices can be defined as emergency remote education and this practice is different from planned practices such as distance education, online learning or other derivations. Above all, this study points out how social injustice, inequity and the digital divide have been exacerbated during the pandemic and need unique and targeted measures if they are to be addressed. While there are support communities and mechanisms, parents are overburdened between regular daily/professional duties and emerging educational roles, and all parties are experiencing trauma, psychological pressure and anxiety to various degrees, which necessitates a pedagogy of care, affection and empathy. In terms of educational processes, the interruption of education signifies the importance of openness in education and highlights issues that should be taken into consideration such as using alternative assessment and evaluation methods as well as concerns about surveillance, ethics, and data privacy resulting from nearly exclusive dependency on online solutions.

The revolutionary potential of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has been met with much skepticism, particularly in terms of the quality of learning offered. Believing that a focus on learning is more important than a focus on course completion rates, this position paper presents a pedagogical assessment of MOOCs using Chickering and Gamson's Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education and Bloom's taxonomy, based on the author's personal experience as a learner in four xMOOCs. Although most xMOOCs have similar characteristics, the author shows that they are not all offered in exactly the same way, and some provide more sound pedagogy that develops higher order thinking, whereas others do not. The author uses this evaluation, as well as reviews of other xMOOCs in the literature, to glean some good pedagogical practices in xMOOCs and areas for improvement.

The estimation of unwanted fertility is a major objective of demographic surveys, including DHS surveys conducted in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Levels and trends in unwanted fertility are important input to the formulation of population policy and the evaluation of family planning programs. Yet existing methods for estimating unwanted fertility are known to be defective, among other reasons because they rely on subjective data whose validity and reliability are questionable. In this article, we propose a new estimator of unwanted fertility-the "aggregate prospective estimator"--so named because it depends on the stated preference for another child at the time of the survey, the fertility-desires item consistently shown to possess the highest validity and reliability. Under reasonable assumptions, the aggregate prospective estimator produces less biased estimates of unwanted fertility than the most widely used existing methods. The new estimator has the limitation of generating only aggregate-level estimates, but such estimates are the primary data for policy formulation and program evaluation. The new estimator is presented in this article, along with an evaluation of its underlying assumptions and its sensitivity to several sources of error. In an illustrative application to recent DHS data from six countries, the new estimator yields substantially higher estimates of unwanted fertility than existing methods in all six countries.

It is no secret that pornographic material is now a one-click-away from everyone, including children and minors. General social media networks are striving to isolate adult images and videos from normal ones. Intelligent image analysis methods can help to automatically detect and isolate questionable images in media. Unfortunately, these methods require vast experience to design the classifier including one or more of the popular computer vision feature descriptors. We propose to build a classifier based on one of the recently flourishing deep learning techniques. Convolutional neural networks contain many layers for both automatic features extraction and classification. The benefit is an easier system to build (no need for hand-crafting features and classifiers). Additionally, our experiments show that it is even more accurate than the state of the art methods on the most recent benchmark dataset.

Integrated solid waste management (SWM) in developing countries like Egypt has traditionally focused on organizational and technical concerns. However, this approach neglects the many activities and actors that waste management comprises. A new paradigm of SWM is needed which must extend the technical model to tackle a range of problems associated with waste management in order to achieve socially and environmentally responsible waste management.

Recently there has been a flurry of research on the use of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) in wireless networks to create smart radio environments. In a smart radio environment, surfaces are capable of manipulating the propagation of incident electromagnetic waves in a programmable manner to actively alter the channel realization, which turns the wireless channel into a controllable system block that can be optimized to improve overall system performance. In this article, we provide a tutorial overview of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) for wireless communications. We describe the working principles of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and elaborate on different candidate implementations using metasurfaces and reflectarrays. We discuss the channel models suitable for both implementations and examine the feasibility of obtaining accurate channel estimates. Furthermore, we discuss the aspects that differentiate RIS optimization from precoding for traditional MIMO arrays highlighting both the arising challenges and the potential opportunities associated with this emerging technology. Finally, we present numerical results to illustrate the power of an RIS in shaping the key properties of a MIMO channel.

The world that we are living in is experiencing a foundational revolution. Artificial intelligence and automation are substituting human tasks and altering the skills and expertise that companies are looking for. Workplaces are changing. Even more, the nature of work is changing. Is technological change a blessing or a curse? What impact will the persistent increase in usage of technology and artificial intelligence have on where we work and how we work? All these are eminent questions that need to be clarified. This paper discusses how this change is happening and explores the reasons behind this change.

This article attempts to develop the abandoned occasionalist model of causation into a credible present-day theory. If objects can never exhaust one another through their relations, it is hard to know how they can ever interact at all. This article handles the problem by dividing objects into two kinds: the real objects that emerge from Heidegger’s tool-analysis and the intentional objects of Husserl’s phenomenology. Each of these objects turns out to be split by an additional rift between the object as an enduring unit and its plurality of traits. This explains Heidegger’s notorious ‘fourfold’ model of the thing. This article shows that Heidegger’s Geviert must be reinterpreted as a system of four tensions that can be identified as time, space, essence, and eidos. Time and space can no longer be left as peerless dimensions of the cosmos. Instead, they are shown to arise from the tensions between things and their qualities. And for this reason they are joined by essence (in the classical sense of the term) and eidos (in Husserl’s sense, not Plato’s) as two out of four basic features of the fabric of the world.

The increasing levels of global warming, depleting sources of fossil fuels and increasing energy costs are all having a large detrimental effect on today's society. Many efforts are being made to try and increase energy efficiency all over the world. One of the major problems is unnecessary and excessive energy utilisation. This problem has been identified by Loughborough University and they are making efforts to try and reduce energy wastage. One of their strategies, used up until recently, involved increasing energy awareness within students in halls of residence by means of a reward system called the Residential Halls Energy Efficiency League (Imago Services, Loughborough Students Union, Estates Services 2006). This scheme managed to reduce energy consumption by up to 10%, saving an estimated £9000 in only 52 days. Can those results be improved by targeting students more specifically? How much energy can be saved by increasing energy awareness?

Looking at developing countries, it is obvious that most of them fall behind the rest of the world in terms of development due to several reasons such as poverty, illiteracy and poor economic conditions in general. In terms of information and communication technology evolution which has been transforming the world since the early 1980s, the developing world lags behind on this front too. Citizens of developing nations can not afford to buy their own personal computers, and if they did, they can not buy additional peripherals and tools required to capitalize on the advantages that information technology can bring to individuals, organizations and the society at large. Moreover, the information and communication technology infrastructure on the ground does not enable developing countries to realize the benefits that could also be obtained through the Internet and the World Wide Web within the newly emerging digital economy. This paper reports the findings of a market study 1 that covers the perception of the Internet in general and Internet cafes in specific to the local community in Egypt. The study focused on two major research issues; the assessment of the perception of the community of the usefulness of Internet cafes in information and communication technology awareness and diffusion and the feasibility of establishing an Internet Cafe from an investment perspective in the context of the marketplace in Egypt.

Seega is an ancient Egyptian two-phase board game that, in certain aspects, is more difficult than chess. The two-player game is played on either a 5 × 5, 7 × 7, or 9 × 9 board. In the first and more difficult phase of the game, players take turns placing one disk each on the board until the board contains only one empty cell. In the second phase players take turns moving disks of their color; a disk that becomes surrounded by disks of the opposite color is captured and removed from the board. We have developed a Seega program that employs co-evolutionary particle swarm optimization in the generation of feature evaluation scores. Two separate swarms are used to evolve White players and Black players, respectively; each particle represents feature weights for use in the position evaluation. Experimental results are presented and the performance of the full game engine is discussed.

The analysis of value chains has augmented our knowledge on the complexities, inter-linkages, distributional benefits, and institutional arrangements of production and marketing channels in developing countries. However, the analysis remains relatively qualitative and case-specific, with limited ability to rank or assess the impact of alternative interventions or to analyze sufficiently the complex market dynamics and feedbacks present in livestock systems. This paper offers insights on ways to improve the analytical rigor of the value chain methodology that combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

The Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) has been used as a variance-reduction estimation tool for an efficient sampling-based variability analysis of analog circuits. For a certain estimation confidence interval, a lower number of LHS samples is needed than that of Monte Carlo due to the estimation variance reduction. In this paper, an analysis of variance decomposition of the indicator function, the yield function, reveals strong contribution of interactive terms in the variance of the yield function, leading to limited performance gain of the traditional LHS sampling. In order to improve its efficiency, two correlation-controlled LHS methods are developed to reduce the required number of LHS samples for analog circuit yield estimation.

Abstract We give strengthened versions of the Herwig–Lascar and Hodkinson–Otto extension theorems for partial automorphisms of finite structures. Such strengthenings yield several combinatorial and group-theoretic consequences for homogeneous structures. For instance, we establish a coherent form of the extension property for partial automorphisms for certain Fraïssé classes. We deduce from these results that the isometry group of the rational Urysohn space, the automorphism group of the Fraïssé limit of any Fraïssé class that is the class of all ${\cal F}$ -free structures (in the Herwig–Lascar sense), and the automorphism group of any free homogeneous structure over a finite relational language all contain a dense locally finite subgroup. We also show that any free homogeneous structure admits ample generics.

In this paper, a method is proposed to accurately estimate the power yield, considering process-induced temperature and supply voltage variations. Process variations impose statistical behavior on the temperature and leakage current. This, in turn, impacts the IR drops due to the variations in the current, drawn off the power grid. By considering the process-induced statistical profile of the temperature and V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">dd</sub> , the power yield is estimated for a chip. This helps check the robustness of the circuits early in the design process. The experimental results on the ISCAS89 benchmarks indicate a significant yield loss, if the statistical measures of the temperature and voltage drop are ignored. Monte Carlo simulations verify the accuracy of the developed methodology.

Trustful behavior was defined in terms of the consecutive numbers of matching-to-sample problems worth money that each subject worked during sessions that ended in an equitable distribution. Two stages of acquisition are inherent in this definition; the first stage requires acquisition of an equitable method of distributing reinforcers (cooperation) to show that the within-session deviations (trust) from equity that develop during the second stage are temporary and are not part of an inequitable method of distributing reinforcers. Previous research has indicated that a contingency to trust is necessary to override the aversiveness of the inequity inherent in trusting and to produce consistent and maximal trust (half of the problems worked consecutively by each subject). The present experiment examined such a contingency. The trust contingency was an increased requirement for changing the direction of problem allocation. Only the subject who had been allocated a problem could change that allocation, by pulling a lever 45 or more times. On the other hand, no separate responses were required to allow the person who worked the last problem to also work the next one (passive trust). Hence, giving a problem was the only way to increase the distribution of problems to the other person and hence prevent oneself from receiving all of the reinforcers. All eight pairs of subjects cooperated from the outset. Trusting behavior developed for all four pairs exposed to the contingency to trust and expanded to maximal levels by the second session for three of the four pairs.

Abstract This article uses a multigenerational lens to address the tangible and intangible embodiments of the US-Saudi oil empire in the lives of the three sister authors. This multisited intimate geography of empire challenges national categories and recognizes that mixing and migrations, forced or desired, shape and define all families. It explores the look, feel, and sounds of lifeworlds in the US imperial outpost of Aramco using an immense archive of family photographs and Fadia Basrawi’s memoir, Brownies and Kalashnikovs: A Saudi Woman’s Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut (2009). It considers the geopolitics of oil and the worlds it produced in the intimate relations and domestic quarters of the Aramco oil camp in the 1950s and 1960s, in the authors’ childhoods in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, which also involved US imperialism, and as embodied in their lives at present.

Coupling capacitive voltage transformers behave as low pass filters which reject the high frequencies associated with voltage signals, so the effect of HIF on voltage signals is neglected. In addition, using series capacitors (SCs) equipped with metal oxide varistors (MOVs) increases the protection relaying problems and complicates the trip decision. This paper presents a high impedance fault detection algorithm for maximum trip time required of 3/4 cycle. The proposed scheme implemented on two different models of HIF in extra high voltage double-ended transmission lines with series capacitors at the middle of the line. The scheme recognizes the distortion of the voltage waveforms caused by the arcs usually associated with HIFs. The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based analysis, yields three phase voltages in high frequency range which are fed to Clarke's transformation to produce ground and aerial modes voltage components for pattern recognition. The classifier is based on an algorithm that uses recursive method to sum the absolute values of high frequency signals generated over one cycle and shifts one sample. Characteristics of the proposed scheme are fully analyzed by extensive ATP/EMTP simulation studies that clearly reveal that the proposed method can accurately detect HIFs in EHV transmission lines and does not affected by different fault conditions such as fault distance and fault inception angle.

(2008). Lernen and Learning Styles: A Comparative Analysis of the Learning Styles of German Adolescents by Age, Gender, and Academic Achievement Level. European Education: Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 23-45.

New approaches to contentious politics -- The context of mobilization -- Repertoires of contention -- Political attitudes of youth activists -- Mobilization networks -- Activism and contentious politics in Bahrain, Algeria, Jordan and Morocco