Failing the Masses: Buthaina Shabaan and the Public Intellectual Crisis

This article discusses the problematic and double-sided role of the public intellectual in the Syrian revolution, which started on March 15, 2011 and is still unfolding. When recently challenged by Syrians, the regime enforced its control by carrying out military operations against its own citizens, not without endorsement by a large portion of the population. The article follows the case of Buthaina Shabaan (b.1953-), the writer, professor, and advocate of the Syrian regime. While spurring the populace to embrace the possibility of democratic reform, this female intellectual has accepted—even embraced—the political control employed by an authoritarian one-party regime, which uses her as a representative of their supposed progressive and women’s liberation agendas. Shabaan has been playing a significant role in supporting and ultimately sustaining a totalitarian regime, compromising in the process the interests of women and even children, for whose cause she has long claimed to be a champion and a spokesperson. The shift of Shabaan from being a feminist to serving the propaganda of the regime has damaged her integrity as an intellectual. This shift requires not only a revisionary approach to the Western reception of her, but also an analysis of the way the Syrian people have perceived her role in undermining the revolution

Thermodynamic properties of an interacting hard-sphere Bose gas in a trap using the static fluctuation approximation

A hard-sphere (HS) Bose gas in a trap is investigated at finite temperatures in the weakly-interacting regime and its thermodynamic properties are evaluated using the static fluctuation approximation (SFA). The energies are calculated with a second-quantized many-body Hamiltonian and a harmonic oscillator wave function. The specific heat capacity, internal energy, pressure, entropy and the Bose-Einstein (BE) occupation number of the system are determined as functions of temperature and for various values of interaction strength and number of particles. It is found that the number of particles plays a more profound role in the determination of the thermodynamic properties of the system than the HS diameter characterizing the interaction, that the critical temperature drops with the increase of the repulsion between the bosons, and that the fluctuations in the energy are much smaller than the energy itself in the weakly-interacting regime.Comment: 34 pages, 24 Figures. To appear in the International Journal of Modern Physics

Fungal dysbiosis predicts the diagnosis of pediatric Crohn's disease

AIM: To investigate the accuracy of fungal dysbiosis in mucosa and stool for predicting the diagnosis of Crohn’s disease (CD). METHODS: Children were prospectively enrolled in two medical centers: one university hospital and one private gastroenterology clinic in the city of Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The children with confirmed diagnosis of CD by standard guidelines were considered cases, and the others were considered non-inflammatory bowel disease controls. Mucosal and stool samples were sequenced utilizing Illumina MiSeq chemistry following the manufacturer’s protocols, and abundance and diversity of fungal taxa in mucosa and stool were analyzed. Sparse logistic regression was used to predict the diagnosis of CD. The accuracy of the classifier was tested by computing the receiver operating characteristic curves with 5-fold stratified cross-validation under 100 permutations of the training data partition and the mean area under the curve (AUC) was calculated. RESULTS: All the children were Saudi nationals. There were 15 children with CD and 20 controls. The mean age was 13.9 (range: 6.7-17.8) years for CD children and 13.9 (3.25-18.6) years for controls, and 10/15 (67%) of the CD and 13/20 (65%) of the control subjects were boys. CD locations at diagnosis were ileal (L1) in 4 and colonic (L3) in 11 children, while CD behavior was non-stricturing and non-penetrating (B1) in 12 and stricturing (B2) in 3 children. The mean AUC for the fungal dysbiosis classifier was significantly higher in stools (AUC = 0.85 ± 0.057) than in mucosa (AUC = 0.71 ± 0.067) (P < 0.001). Most fungal species were significantly more depleted in stools than mucosal samples, except for Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. bayanus, which were significantly more abundant. Diversity was significantly more reduced in stools than in mucosa. CONCLUSION: We found high AUC of fungal dysbiosis in fecal samples of children with CD, suggesting high accuracy in predicting diagnosis of CD. Key Words: Fungiome, Mycobiome, Crohn’s disease, Inflammation, Saudi children Core tip: We found high accuracy of fungal dysbiosis in predicting diagnosis of Crohn’s disease (CD), a finding similar to bacterial dysbiosis. However, the higher area under the curve for the fungal dysbiosis classifier in stool (0.85 ± 0.057) than in mucosa (0.71 ± 0.067) (P < 0.001), contrasts with bacterial studies, suggesting higher accuracy of stool samples. Although the clinical application of this finding is limited at present by the high cost of fungal analysis, such information is important from a scientific viewpoint, to increase the understanding of the role of fungal flora in CD and to stimulate further studies.The authors extend their appreciations to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for funding this work through Research Group No [RGP-1436-007]. This work was also supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation [No. 409704] to Kirill Korolev) and by the startup fund from Boston University to Kirill Korolev. Simulations were carried out on Shared Computing Cluster at Boston University. Rajita Menon was partially supported by a Hariri Graduate Fellowship from Boston University. Harland Winter, MD received support from Martin Schlaff and the Diane and Dorothy Brooks Foundation. (RGP-1436-007 - King Saud University in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; 409704 - Simons Foundation; Boston University; Hariri Graduate Fellowship from Boston University; Diane and Dorothy Brooks Foundation)Published versio

Reading Our ‘Destiny in the World We Have Made’: Inscriptions and Incantations of Race in the Wake of the Christchurch Massacres

In the wake of colonial violence, how do we come to terms with its event while refusing the power exercised by these very terms? If race is an organising grammar upon which we must draw in articulating the very realities to which it consigns us, then what recourse does it leave us in disarticulating and remaking these realities? This article is a meditation on these questions in the context of the massacres at two Christchurch mosques, and the raced discourses which they occasioned. In exploring these discourses as raced, the emphasis here is on their temporal qualities: on race as the coding of the time and the place (or non-place) in history where its subjects belong. Against the legibility and transparency with which race interpellates its subjects, is there a magic in the opacity and poetics of speech through which we can rewrite our ‘destinies’ and reinvent ourselves

Distribution and determinants of tuberculosis in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from 2005 to 2012

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a public health threat in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) with many challenges that limit its prevention and control. To understand how to meet these challenges, this study calculated the TB incidence rates (IRs) in KSA from 2005 to 2012, which were stratified by nationality, sex, and administrative regions. Furthermore, laboratory capabilities were assessed by determining the proportion of laboratory-confirmed TB cases. The overall TB IRs decreased from 15.80/100,000 population in 2005 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 15.29–16.31] to 13.16/100,000 population in 2012 (95% CI = 12.74– 13.58). The IRs were greater for males than for females from 2009 to 2012. The IRs of non-Saudis were approximately two times those of Saudis during the study period. Mecca had greater IR during the study period compared with other regions [25.13/100,000 (95% CI = 24.7–25.56)]. Among non-Saudis, those from Indonesia and Yemen had the greatest proportion of TB cases (15.4% and 12.9%, respectively). Individuals <15 years of age comprised 14.2% of the TB cases. Employed non-Saudis had the greatest proportion of TB (32%), followed by unemployed Saudis (22.38%). The proportion of laboratory-confirmed cases of reported TB was 57% from 2005 to 2012. For effective prevention and control, TB screening should be implemented for non-Saudi workers at ports of entry and laboratory-screening capacity for TB should be evaluated

The Revenge Economy and the Problem of Unpayability

In Revenge Capitalism Max Haiven draws on a rich set of historical scholarship and theoretical traditions to formulate the concept of the revenge economy and outline its characteristics. Haiven also examines modes of social, political, and economic organisation that run counter to the revenge economy and explores the avenging imaginaries that underlie them. After highlighting some of the traditions that inform Haiven’s thesis, I focus on his engagement with different theories and arrangements of debt. I suggest that a distinguishing aspect of Haiven’s thesis is the way he reads debt as a fundamental principle of social and economic life. At the same time, I put this reading into conversation with our own context in Aotearoa New Zealand and suggest that a serious engagement with the institution and philosophy of utu is indispensable for both transforming debt relations as well as abolishing revenge capitalism

LEARNING BY DESIGN: THE TRANSFORMATIVE PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIENCE OF COLLEGE STUDENTS IN EXTENDING MONOMODAL TEXTS INTO MULTIMODAL

The architectonic shift in the semiotic, technology, and social environment paves the way to new perspectives of transformative pedagogies in multiliteracies and multimodal literacy for meaning-making through the configuration of gesture, space, image, sound, action, and various modes. Through a mixed-method explanatory sequential design, this study explores college students’ critical reading comprehension by changing a monomodal text into a multimodal one. In the redesigning process, a group of college students (n=4) were oriented to change a provided monomodal text into a multimodal text for the sake of understanding how the enactment of two different modes of a reading text contributes to enhancing college students’ (n= 47) critical reading and comprehension. To gauge the volume of students’ reflection, elaboration, and analytical thinking, in addition to re-enacting different modes such as visual, audio, linguistic, gestural, and spatial, which were tabulated by deploying a two-stage exam procedure. Moreover, the study captures the participants’ documents and interviews regarding experiencing the redesigning process and the two-stage exam. The second exam scores showed noticeable advancement in the students reading comprehension. Additionally, it demonstrated that students’ critical reading skills improved dramatically. The student designers expressed their motivation and interest in the redesigning process, in which they practiced and promoted their technological and literacy skills by working collaboratively. They also showed their confidence and positive impression about being responsible for their choices. They indicated that multimodality helped them achieve comprehension. Based on the results, the study offered some recommendations for research, transformative pedagogy, multimodal Literacy, curriculum design, and development

Finance, Financial Services, and Economics Growth How Does the Size of the Financial Sector and Different Types of Financial Services Impact Economic Growth?

This paper studies the relationship between finance, financial services, and economic growth. More particularly, this study attempts to answer the following two questions: What is the relationship between the size of the financial sector and economic growth? And how do different types of financial services impact economic growth? Understanding the dynamics between the financial sector and economic growth is extremely important from an intellectual as well as practical perspective. Intellectually speaking, it is safe to say that finance as a sector and financial services in general do not have a very good reputation in popular culture, especially in the post 2008 world. Hence, understanding the how finance impact economic growth will put the public opinion of finance to test. Practically speaking, understanding the relationship between finance and growth is extremely important from a public policy and regulatory perspective since finance has proven itself to be impactful and relevant after it sent the global economy into a the deepest recession in a century. If policy makers have insights on the relationship between finance and social wellbeing, they will be able to assess whether (1) this relationship is linearly positive or whether it diminishes at some point. If finance impacts society positively up to a point, policy makers will be able to create regulation that disincentives the size of the financial sector to grow beyond healthy levels. At the same time, if policy makers had insight on (B) which financial activities/services are more harmful to social welling than others, then they will be able to create an incentive system or a legal framework that encourages certain type of activities while limiting others

ELECTROMECHANICAL PRESSURE SENSORS BASED ON GRAPHENE: A REVIEW

Objective:&nbsp;This review explores the potential of graphene, a two-dimensional carbon allotrope, in revolutionizing pressure sensors. Graphene's exceptional electrical and mechanical properties enable significant advancements in sensitivity, dynamic range, response time, and flexibility, addressing limitations in traditional sensor technologies. Methods:&nbsp;The study examines the fundamental mechanisms of graphene-based pressure sensors, including piezoresistive, capacitive, and field-effect transistor (FET) mechanisms. A comparative analysis of conventional materials such as piezoelectric, metallic, silicon, and polymer-based materials is conducted to highlight their strengths and limitations. The integration of nanomaterials, particularly graphene, into sensor designs is reviewed, emphasizing their contributions to enhanced sensor performance. Results:&nbsp;Graphene-based sensors demonstrate superior sensitivity and miniaturization capabilities due to their high surface-to-volume ratio, tunable electrical conductivities, and mechanical resilience. Emerging applications in healthcare, electronics, and robotics validate the transformative impact of graphene on sensor technologies. Novelty: This review underscores the unique advantages of graphene over traditional materials, emphasizing its potential to address challenges related to sensitivity, response time, and durability in extreme conditions. Future research directions are proposed to overcome existing limitations and expand the scope of graphene-based sensors across diverse industries

Principally Dual Stable Modules

Another generalization of fully d-stable modules, in this paper was introduced. A module is principally d-stable if every cyclic submodule of it is d-stable. Quasi-projective principally d-stable module is fully d-stable. For  finitely generated modules over  Dedekind domains the two concepts (full and principal) d-stability of modules coincide. For regular modules over commutative rings, principal d-stability of modules is equivalent to commutativity and full d-stability of there endomorphism rings.   Keywords: fully( principally) d-stable module; quasi-projective, duo, regular module; Dedekind domain; endomorphism ring; hollow module; exchange property