Spare capacity modelling and its applications in survivable iP-over-optical networks

As the interest in IP-over-optical networks are becoming the preferred core network architecture, survivability has emerged as a major concern for network service providers; a result of the potentially huge traffic volumes that will be supported by optical infrastructure. Therefore, implementing recovery strategies is critical. In addition to the traditional recovery schemes based around protection and restoration mechanisms, pre-allocated restoration represents a potential candidate to effect and maintain network resilience under failure conditions. Preallocated restoration technique is particularly interesting because it provides a trade-off in terms of recovery performance and resources between protection and restoration schemes. In this paper, the pre-allocated restoration performance is investigated under single and dual-link failures considering a distributed GMPLSbased IP/WDM mesh network. Two load-based spare capacity optimisation methods are proposed in this paper; Local Spare Capacity Optimisation (LSCO) and Global Spare Capacity Optimisation (GSCO)

Service level agreement framework for differentiated survivability in GMPLS-based IP-over-optical networks

In the next generation optical internet, GMPLS based IP-over-optical networks, ISPs will be required to support a wide variety of applications each having their own requirements. These requirements are contracted by means of the SLA. This paper describes a recovery framework that may be included in the SLA contract between ISP and customers in order to provide the required level of survivability. A key concern with such a recovery framework is how to present the different survivability alternatives including recovery techniques, failure scenario and layered integration into a transparent manner for customers. In this paper, two issues are investigated. First, the performance of the recovery framework when applying a proposed mapping procedure as an admission control mechanism in the edge router considering a smart-edge simple-core GMPLS-based IP/WDM network is considered. The second issue pertains to the performance of a pre-allocated restoration and its ability to provide protected connections under different failure scenarios

Evaluation of the Surgical and Pharmacological Treatment of Diabetic Foot Infection: A Retrospective Study

BACKGROUND: Diabetic foot infection is a major cause of patient disabilities and lowers limb amputations, with high treatment costs and hospitalisation requirements. AIM: Aim of this study was to evaluate surgical wound care plus antibiotic effects in the treatment of mild and moderate diabetic foot infections. METHODS: This retrospective study involved 60 patients with diabetic foot infections with or without osteomyelitis. The patients were categorised as group 1 mild and group 2 moderate. Both groups were treated using local wound debridement and the systemic administration of antibiotics. Group 1 (16) patients were treated with two regimens of oral antibiotics in two regimens, A (amoxicillin/clavulanate + metronidazole) and B (clindamycin + metronidazole), for 10-14 days. Group 2 (42) patients were treated with oral plus intravenous antibiotics in two regimens, A (ampicillin + cloxacillin + metronidazole) and B (lincomycin + metronidazole), for 6 weeks. The patients followed-up with local wound care specialists for 3 months to evaluate the treatment outcomes (cure, improvement, or failure). RESULTS: Group 1 had an 80% cure rate under regimen A and a 100% cure rate under regimen B. Group 2 regimen A patients had a 61.5% cure rate and 11.53% improved, while regimen B patients had a 68.75% cure rate and 12.5% improved. Failure in both regimens was 23.8% in 20 patients with osteomyelitis, while 35% were cured and 20% improved during the study period. CONCLUSION: Local surgical wound care for 3 months with antibiotic regimens for 6 weeks resulted in good response and cure rates, with lower costs and fewer instances of hospitalisation. Intravenous lincomycin and oral metronidazole achieved higher cure responses for moderate diabetic foot infections

The potential for liquid biopsies in the precision medical treatment of breast cancer.

Currently the clinical management of breast cancer relies on relatively few prognostic/predictive clinical markers (estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, HER2), based on primary tumor biology. Circulating biomarkers, such as circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) or circulating tumor cells (CTCs) may enhance our treatment options by focusing on the very cells that are the direct precursors of distant metastatic disease, and probably inherently different than the primary tumor's biology. To shift the current clinical paradigm, assessing tumor biology in real time by molecularly profiling CTCs or ctDNA may serve to discover therapeutic targets, detect minimal residual disease and predict response to treatment. This review serves to elucidate the detection, characterization, and clinical application of CTCs and ctDNA with the goal of precision treatment of breast cancer

Towards a model for monitoring public services projects in Saudi Arabia

Information and communication technology (ICT) has been adopted by many governments around the world in the form of e-government to facilitate service delivery to the public. Saudi Arabia is an example of such a country that has adopted technology with these aims, but there is a failure in enabling the engagement of citizens with government to deliver public services projects with assured quality standards. The failings are blamed on the system's lack of support for stakeholder oversight. In light of these inadequacies, more effective monitoring of project construction and project implementation is required in order to improve public service quality from a long-term perspective. Fixes have been proposed to the lack of two-way communication between citizens and the government by inviting feedback from citizens through social media and other communication channels, however, a cohesive overarching model that enables the engagement of citizens with government projects has yet to be devised. There is a clear need for a model that can be applied to design official systems to facilitate consultation between the government and the public and to invite feedback from key stakeholders throughout each stage of the project lifecycle. This paper proposes a conceptual model to facilitate citizens in monitoring the quality of public services and the progress of public service projects. It is designed based on an in-depth analysis of the available systems on the market, e-participation studies and theoretical work presented in the literature. The paper also recommends technologies and features that will facilitate the implementation of the model in different contexts

Enhancing BER performance limit of BCH and RS codes using multipath diversity

Modern wireless communication systems suffer from phase shifting and, more importantly, from interference caused by multipath propagation. Multipath propagation results in an antenna receiving two or more copies of the signal sequence sent from the same source but that has been delivered via different paths. Multipath components are treated as redundant copies of the original data sequence and are used to improve the performance of forward error correction (FEC) codes without extra redundancy, in order to improve data transmission reliability and increase the bit rate over the wireless communication channel. For a proof of concept Bose, Ray-Chaudhuri, and Hocquenghem (BCH) and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes have been used as FEC to compare their bit error rate (BER) performances. The results showed that the wireless multipath components significantly improve the performance of FEC. Furthermore, FEC codes with low error correction capability and employing the multipath phenomenon are enhanced to perform better than FEC codes which have a bit higher error correction capability and did not utilise the multipath. Consequently, the bit rate is increased, and communication reliability is improved without extra redundancy

Fatwas and Fags: Violence and the Discursive Production of Abject Bodies

A recent New York Times article sports the headline, Iraq’s Newly Open Gays Face Scorn and Murder, and describes the violent backlash against the growing “gay subculture” that arose in the wake of the United States’s security interventions in Iraq. Such rhetoric establishes gay as a nascent community, rendered undeniably visible by violence and threats of physical harm. This visibility is typified by the political work of Iraqi LGBT, an Iraqi-led United Kingdom based organization that advocates for equal rights within Iraq. Although activist discourses express outrage that the killings remain largely unaddressed in spite of democratic rule, violence is not actually incongruous with the current juridico-democratic structures installed by the United States in Iraq. In 2005, Ayatollah Sistani, an independent religious scholar with a considerable base of Shiite supporters in Iraq, issued a fatwa on his website, www.sistani.org, that condemned al-lowat, a term later translated by activist groups and news media as “homosexual” or “gay.” The fatwa, an interpretation of the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammed’s teachings, has the potential to define everyday practices and modes of being for that religious leader’s followers. Although any Muslim can technically follow any fatwa, the norms and practices of their particular community will determine whether they carry it out. While Western media gravitated toward this fatwa as the primary cause of the violence directed against homosexuality, Human Rights Watch, which recently published an extensive report on the violence, could find no direct causal link between the fatwa and the violence. The report acknowledges that in late 2005, the website, which showcased the fatwa in question in this Article, responded to a question asking “what is the judgment for sodomy?” by calling it forbidden and calling for punishment. However, the report relates that “[The fatwa] received little or no notice in the Iraqi press.” Rather, the report cites testimony that attributes the predominance of the violence to the Mahdi Army who “[turned] its attention at irregular intervals since 2004 to what it saw as sexual immorality in Iraq.” In the case of contemporary Iraq, both Sistani’s religious exegesis and the Mahdi Army’s rhetoric reflect a trajectory of conservative morals around sexuality that emerged with the rise of Islamism in the late 1970’s and which came about as a result of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. However, religious rhetoric cannot simply bear the responsibility for propagating violence. Instead, such rhetoric reflects what Raymond Williams termed “structures of feeling” or affect: tropes of emotion that inhabit and reflect lived experiences. In Williams’s estimation, structures of feeling, rather than world view or ideology, are concerned with “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt.” The fatwa, rife with its condemnation of homosexuality, was issued in the political and juridical context of the Iraqi democratic transition. In this environment, the fatwa’s very rhetoric operates affectively to produce and regulate anxieties around sexuality, morality and national identity

THE EFFECTS OF NATURAL RESOURCE DEPENDENCE AND DEMOCRACY ON THE INCREMENTAL BUDGETING THEORY AND PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM WITHIN A BUDGETARY CONTEXT

I contribute to the literature by providing additional factors that could affect the incremental budgeting theory and punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) within a budgetary context. Because of the fluctuation in the price of natural resources, I argue that dependence on natural resources could lead to less stable budgets than ones not dependent on natural resources. I also argue that democracy is another source that leads to stability in the budget, relative to countries that are not democratic. I theorize that countries with no democracy and heavy dependence on natural resources will have budgets with more volatility than the rest of the countries. Most of the extant literature focuses on countries that are democratic and not dependent on natural resources. My theory expects these to have the most stable budgets. I extend the literature by comparing the Kuwaiti National Budget (dependent on natural resources and not democratic) to the U.S. Federal Budget (democratic and not dependent on natural resources). The results of all tests are consistent with the expectations of the theory that countries with no democracy and heavy dependence on natural resources have less incremental budgets than nations that are democratic and not dependent on natural resources

Assessment of different trophoblast cell lines as in vitro models for trophoblast development -

Thesis. M.Sc. American University of Beirut. Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Physiological Sciences. Faculty of Medicine 2015. W 4 B268a 2015Advisor: Dr. Georges Daoud, Assistant Professor, Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Physiological Sciences. Faculty of Medicine ; Co-advisor:Dr. Wassim Abou-Kheir, Assistant Professor, Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Physiological Sciences. Faculty of Medicine ; Committee members: Dr. Abdo Jurjus, Professor, Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Physiological Sciences. ; Dr. Assaad Antoine Eid, Associate Professor, Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Physiological Sciences.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 39-46)Background: The placenta is a temporary organ during pregnancy that is involved in insuring optimal growth and development of the fetus. Since the 1980s, there has been a growing interest in the isolation of villous trophoblasts from human placenta for primary culture. Although very interesting, isolated primary trophoblasts have the disadvantage of being extremely difficult to maintain in culture which motivated investigators to generate villous and extravillous trophoblastic cell lines. Nevertheless, when aspiring to extrapolate results they obtain in the trophoblastic cell lines, the scientific community must be cautious as to whether these cell lines are truly representative of the physiologic setting. Aim: Our study raises questions regarding the validity of using the choriocarcinoma cell lines (BeWo, JEG-3, JAR) vs. the extravillous cell line (HTR-8-SVneo) as in vitro model systems for human trophoblast studies.Methods: Immunofluorescence staining was used to investigate the expression of CK7, E-cadherin and vimentin in BeWo, JEG-3, JAR and HTR-8-SVneo cell lines. RT-PCR allowed the measurement of mRNA levels of CK7, EpCAM and vimentin in BeWo, JEG-3, JAR and HTR-8-SVneo while western blots assessed the protein expression of CK7, E-cadherin and vimentin in BeWo, JEG-3, JAR and HTR-8-SVneo.Results: BeWo, JEG-3 and JAR cell lines all expressed CK7, E-cadherin and EpCAM and did not express vimentin while HTR-8-SVneo cell line showed lower expression of CK7 and E-cadherin and expressed vimentin. Additionally, two populations were observed in HTR-8-SVneo cell line: a CK7+-Vimentin- population vs. CK7--Vimentin+ population.Conclusion: Our study indicated that even though BeWo, JEG-3 and JAR cell lines have proved to be epithelial trophoblastic cell lines, HTR-8-SVneo has been disqualified in that regard and results based on this cell line should be controlled in primary trophoblast models

Evaporation and Potential Evapotranspiration in Central Iraq

The principal objectives of this study were to compare several formulas for estimating pan evaporation and evapotranspiration and to derive new formulas or modify existing formulas that will better fit the data for central Iraq. Computed evaporation was compared with measured evaporation by determining the differences and the ratios. The pan evaporation formulas were also compared by expressing them all in the form Ev = K CRCTCWCHCDTCSCMThree pan evaporation formulas were modified. For the Meyer and Utah formulas, the constants were changed and expressions were derived for monthly coefficients. For the Blaney-Criddle formula, an expression for k was derived in which k is a function of the mean temperature, wind velocity, and the month. For potential evapotranspiration, two formulas were modified to give reasonable values for January and July. For the Blaney- Criddle formula, an expression for k was derived in which k is a function of ternperature. Grassi\u27s formula 3a, which expresses evapotranspiration as a function of pan evaporation, was rnodified by deriving a new expression for the temperature coefficient. From these rnodified forrnulas, potential evapotranspiration and pan evaporation can be estimated from climatic data without applying any judgrnent factor, as is ordinarily necessary in using the Blaney-Criddle formula