Irrigation and phytolith formation:an experimental study

It has been proposed that phytoliths from archaeological sites can be indicators of water availability and hence inform about past agricultural practices (Rosen and Weiner, 1994; Madella et al., 2009). Rosen and Weiner (1994) found that the number of conjoined phytoliths fromcereal husks increased with irrigationwhile Madella et al. (2009) demonstrated that the ratio of long-celled phytoliths to short-celled phytoliths increased with irrigation. In order to further explore these hypotheses, wheat and barley were experimentally grown from 2005 to 2008 in three different crop growing stations in Jordan. Four different irrigation regimes were initially employed: 0% (rainfall only), 80%, 100%and 120% of the optimum crop water requirements, with a 40% plot being added in the second and third growing seasons. Each plot measured 5 m � 5 m and a drip irrigation system was used. Environmental variables were measured on a daily basis, and soil and water samples were taken and analysed at the University of Reading. Phytoliths from the husks of these experimentally grown plants were extracted using the dry ashing method. Results demonstrate that although the number of conjoined cells increases with irrigation, there were considerable intersite and inter-year differences suggesting that environmental variables other than water availability affect phytolith uptake and deposition. Furthermore, analytical experiments demonstrated that conjoined phytoliths are subject to change or breakage by external factors, making this methodology problematic to apply to archaeological phytolith assemblages that have an unknown taphonomic history. The ratio of long cells to short cells also responded to increased irrigation, and these forms are not subject to break up as are conjoined forms. Our results from the modern samples of durum wheat and six-row barley show that if an assemblage of single-celled phytoliths consists of over 60% dendritic long cells then this strongly suggests that the crop received optimum levels of water. Further research is needed to determine if this finding is consistent in phytolith samples from the leaves and stems, as suggested byMadella et al. (2009), and in other species of cereals. If this is the case then phytoliths are a valuble tool for assessing the level of past water availability and, potentially, past irrigation

Utility of surveillance blood cultures in patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation

Background Surveillance blood cultures are often obtained in hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) patients for detection of bloodstream infection. The major aims of this retrospective cohort study were to determine the utility of the practice of obtaining surveillance blood cultures from asymptomatic patients during the first 100 post-transplant days and to determine if obtaining more than one positive blood culture helps in the diagnosis of bloodstream infection. Methods We conducted a 17-month retrospective analysis of all blood cultures obtained for patients admitted to the hospital for HSCT from January 2010 to June 2011. Each patient’s clinical course, vital signs, diagnostic testing, treatment, and response to treatment were reviewed. The association between number of positive blood cultures and the final diagnosis was analyzed. Results Blood culture results for 205 patients were reviewed. Cultures obtained when symptoms of infection were present (clinical cultures) accounted for 1,033 culture sets, whereas 2,474 culture sets were classified as surveillance cultures (no symptoms of infection were present). The total number of positive blood cultures was 185 sets (5.3% of cultures obtained) and accounted for 84 positive culture episodes. Incidence of infection in autologous, related allogeneic and unrelated allogeneic transplants was 8.3%, 20.0%, and 28.6% respectively. Coagulase-negative staphylococci were the most common organisms isolated. Based on our application of predefined criteria there were 29 infections and 55 episodes of positive blood cultures that were not infections. None of the patients who developed infection were diagnosed by surveillance blood cultures. None of the uninfected patients with positive blood cultures showed any clinical changes after receiving antibiotics. There was a significant difference between the incidence of BSI in the first and second 50-day periods post-HSCT. There was no association between the number of positive blood cultures and the final diagnosis. Conclusion Surveillance blood cultures in patients who have undergone HSCT do not identify bloodstream infections. The number of positive blood cultures was not helpful in determining which patients had infection. Patients are at higher risk of infection in the first 50 days post-transplant period

Editorial

This special issue seeks papers that provide a convergent research perspective on business futures, i.e., research that draws on many disciplinary views and strives to establish fresh integrative frameworks and vocabularies. Addressing the difficulty of work culture and intelligent machines in a broad sense necessitates grappling with complicated issues such as motivation, cognition, machine learning, human learning, and system design, among others

Chebyshev Collocation Method for Parabolic Partial Integrodifferential Equations

An efficient technique for solving parabolic partial integrodifferential equation is presented. This technique is based on Chebyshev polynomials and finite difference method. A priori error estimate for the proposed technique is deduced. Some examples are presented to illustrate the validity and efficiency of the presented method

A Soft Computing Based Approach for Multi-Accent Classification in IVR Systems

A speaker's accent is the most important factor affecting the performance of Natural Language Call Routing (NLCR) systems because accents vary widely, even within the same country or community. This variation also occurs when non-native speakers start to learn a second language, the substitution of native language phonology being a common process. Such substitution leads to fuzziness between the phoneme boundaries and phoneme classes, which reduces out-of-class variations, and increases the similarities between the different sets of phonemes. Thus, this fuzziness is the main cause of reduced NLCR system performance. The main requirement for commercial enterprises using an NLCR system is to have a robust NLCR system that provides call understanding and routing to appropriate destinations. The chief motivation for this present work is to develop an NLCR system that eliminates multilayered menus and employs a sophisticated speaker accent-based automated voice response system around the clock. Currently, NLCRs are not fully equipped with accent classification capability. Our main objective is to develop both speaker-independent and speaker-dependent accent classification systems that understand a caller's query, classify the caller's accent, and route the call to the acoustic model that has been thoroughly trained on a database of speech utterances recorded by such speakers. In the field of accent classification, the dominant approaches are the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Of the two, GMM is the most widely implemented for accent classification. However, GMM performance depends on the initial partitions and number of Gaussian mixtures, both of which can reduce performance if poorly chosen. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a speaker-independent accent classification system based on a distance metric learning approach and evolution strategy. This approach depends on side information from dissimilar pairs of accent groups to transfer data points to a new feature space where the Euclidean distances between similar and dissimilar points are at their minimum and maximum, respectively. Finally, a Non-dominated Sorting Evolution Strategy (NSES)-based k-means clustering algorithm is employed on the training data set processed by the distance metric learning approach. The main objectives of the NSES-based k-means approach are to find the cluster centroids as well as the optimal number of clusters for a GMM classifier. In the case of a speaker-dependent application, a new method is proposed based on the fuzzy canonical correlation analysis to find appropriate Gaussian mixtures for a GMM-based accent classification system. In our proposed method, we implement a fuzzy clustering approach to minimize the within-group sum-of-square-error and canonical correlation analysis to maximize the correlation between the speech feature vectors and cluster centroids. We conducted a number of experiments using the TIMIT database, the speech accent archive, and the foreign accent English databases for evaluating the performance of speaker-independent and speaker-dependent applications. Assessment of the applications and analysis shows that our proposed methodologies outperform the HMM, GMM, vector quantization GMM, and radial basis neural networks

The professional and personal characteristics of basic school teachers in the Irbid / Jordan Kasbah from the teachers ’point of view Abstract

The study aimed to identify the professional and personal features of primary school teachers in the Irbid / Jordan Kasbah from the teachers ’point of view, and the study adopted the descriptive survey approach, and to achieve the objectives of the study, a questionnaire was developed to measure the professional and personal characteristics of school teachers and its validity and reliability were ascertained. 3670) male and female teachers, distributed among (1897) teachers, and (2773) female teachers, and the study sample consisted of (354) male and female teachers who were selected in the available way, and the results of the study showed that basic school teachers\u27 practice of professional and personal characteristics in the Irbid The teachers ’eyesight came with a (high) degree. The results revealed that there were no statistically significant differences in the occupational and personal characteristics of basic school teachers due to the variable (scientific qualification), and the presence of statistically significant differences in the variable (gender), and came in favor of (females), and the results also showed the presence of statistically significant differences in the practice of Basic school teachers have professional and personal characteristics attributed to the variable (years of experience) and the differences came in favor of (from 5 to less than 10 years). The researchers recommend the necessity of continuing professional and personal characteristics of basic school teachers in the Irbid city in general, by studying the causes and factors that enhance the level of Stick to it

Leaving the world for the sake of the world : Coptic monastic mission in the fourth and fifth centuries

Christian monasticism originated in Egypt and then spread to the rest of the Christian church. Coptic monks made a significant contribution to Christian theology and spirituality through their distinctive approach to the life of faith. This study by a Coptic monk analysis Coptic missionary spirituality as it flowered in the fourth and fifth centuries. Chapter 2 introduces the three main types of Coptic monasticism and the key figures in each of the three types. Chapter 3 describes the centripetal dimension of their mission, indicating how they attracted a wide.variety of people to a committed Christian life through their holiness, simplicity and humility. Chapter 4 discusses their "outreaching" mission of love: their preaching in harmony with the culture of people, their concern for the poor and oppressed, their healing miracles and exorcisms, their defense of the Orthodox faith against heresy. Chapter 5 summaries the findings of the study and identifies priorities for further research.M.Th. (Missiology)Department of Christian Spiritual Church History and Missiolog

التغير المناخي في العلاقات الدولية

هدف المقال تسليط الضوء على قضية التغير المناخي في العلاقات الدولية، من حيث فهم التغير المناخي والأسباب والآثار المترتبة عليه، وتحليل تأثير التغير المناخي على الدول، وتوضيح آليات التعاون الدولي، بالإضافة إلى استعراض الجهود الدولية للحد من الآثار السلبية للتغير المناخي، وعرض الاتفاقيات والمؤتمرات الدولية في مجال مكافحة التغير المناخي، وكيفية تفسير النظريات في العلاقات الدولية لقضية التغير المناخي وتأطيرها ضمن العلاقات الدولية. استخدمت الدراسة المنهج النوعي، وذلك من خلال المنهج الوصفي التحليلي الذي يصف ظاهرة التغير المناخي، وتحديد أسبابها مع التركيز على جهودالمجتمع الدولي لمواجهة هذه المشكلة، بالإضافة إلى المنهج التحليلي الذي يلعبه التغير المناخي في تعزيز التعاون الدولي. وقد توصلت الدراسة إلى أن التغير المناخي أصبح قضية تؤثر على النطاق العالمي، حيث ازدادت الكوارث الطبيعية مما شكل تهديداً مباشراً على البيئة والتوازن، وأن التغير المناخي أسهم في زيادة التوترات والنزاعات بين الدول، مما أدى إلى زيادة الهجرات البيئية، كما أكدت الدراسة على أهمية التعاون الدولي مثل الاتفاقيات والمؤتمرات، لتقاسم الأعباء بين الدول المتقدمة والنامية، كما أظهرت الدراسات تطور مفهوم الدبلوماسية البيئة، والدبلوماسية المناخية وسيلة لتعزيز التعاون الدولي في مواجهة الآثار السلبية للتغير المناخي The article aimed to shed light on and on issue Climate change In international relations, In terms of Understanding climate change, its causes and consequences, analyzing the impact of climate change on countries, and explaining the mechanisms of international cooperation, in addition to reviewing international efforts to reduce the negative effects of climate change, presenting international agreements and conferences in the field of combating climate change, how to interpret theories in international relations for the issue of climate change and framing it within international relations, the study used the qualitative approach, This is done through the descriptive analytical approach that describes the phenomenon of climate change, and determines its causes with a focus on the efforts of the international community to confront this problem, in addition to the analytical approach that climate change plays in enhancing international cooperation. The study concluded that climate change has become an issue that affects the global scale, as natural disasters have increased, posing a direct threat to the environment and balance, and that climate change has contributed to increasing tensions and conflicts between countries, which has led to an increase in environmental migrations. The study also stressed the importance of international cooperation, such as agreements and conferences, to share the burdens between developed and developing countries. Studies have also shown the development of the concept of environmental diplomacy, and climate diplomacy is a means of enhancing international cooperation in confronting the effects. Negative effects of climate chang