A Pioneer in the Field of Humanitarian Mine Action: Mine Clearance Planning Agency (MCPA)

The Mine Clearance Planning Agency (MCPA) aims to effectively contribute to humanitarian mine action and advocacy activities in Afghanistan and other landmine-infested countries in order to make the hometowns of refugees and displaced people land-mine free and to implement essential rehabilitation and development activities in mine-affected communities

Center for International Rehabilitation

On 7 March 2006, the Government of National Unity in Sudan with assistance from the United Nations Development Programme–Sudan officially launched the country’s National Mine Action Authority at Friendship Hall, in Khartoum, Sudan. The new NMAA gathers the other mine-action entities in the country under its umbrella and represents Sudan’s commitment to confronting and eventually eliminating its landmine and explosive remnants of war problem

Demining Technologies

Humanitarian mine clearance is a new phenomenon in the world. Therefore, well-coordinated and concrete steps need to be taken at international levels to address this issue. The Humanitarian mine-clearance technology has evolved at organizational, regional, and national levels in various parts of the world. However, at the international level, very little has been done so far to learn from these individual but practical lessons. The current effort s to develop humanitarian mine-clearance technology is either not coordinated or is poorly coordinated with field-level requirements. Efforts are required to organize the humanitarian mine-clearance technology at the international level and to develop international-level criterion, procedures, and standards that could enhance the effectiveness, cost efficiency, reliability, and safety of humanitarian mine clearance

Landmine Impact Survey in the Republic of Yemen

The Republic of Yemen is located in the Middle East, bordering Saudi Arabia to the north, Oman to the northeast, the Gulf of Aden to the south and the Red Sea to the west with an area of 550,000 square kilometers and a population of approximately 15 million. The country is divided into 19 administrative units, called governorates. Landmines in Yemen were laid as a result of several separate conflicts over a period of about 30 years, starting during the 1962—1975 conflicts between the Republicans and Royalists in the north. In addition, landmines were laid during the 1963—1967 war of independence in the south and during the leftist guerrilla war in the central governorates during 1970—1983. A large number of landmines were also laid in six governorates in southern Yemen during the 1994 war of cessation

Particle swarm optimization based multilevel MRI compression using compressive sensing

A multilevel compression method, for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images, is presented in this paper. First, the image is segmented into frames of equal size. Then, the sparsity of each frame is computed. Based on the sparsity index value, each frame is compressive sensing (CS) compressed/reconstructed at one level of four. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to optimize the amount of information to be used in the CS reconstruction process, and to optimize the sparsity thresholds, that separate the different compression levels. Two-dimensional sigmoid function is suggested as a fitness function for the PSO. Six MRI images are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show considerable gain in both peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and compression level (CL), when compared to single level compression, which is commonly considered in the literature

Betting Big on CPEC

With the launch of the China- Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), one fundamental question to ask is if this ambitious project will transform Pakistan and boost China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In this article, the authors assess the potential and prospect of CPEC in terms of its various opportunities and constraints and examine the economic potentials and social impacts of CPEC from the Pakistani national perspective using a subnational and local lens as well as from the Chinese vantage point and draw the broad implications of this two-sided analysis of CPEC toward a preliminary policy oriented conclusion

Intramuscular Route of Administration Increases Potency in Eliciting Cocaine-Induced Behavioral Sensitization

Background: Cocaine is the number one abused psychostimulant drug that reaches addiction criterion in the US. In animals, repeated administration of cocaine results in behavioral sensitization which is thought to represent adaptations in the mesolimbic dopamine neural circuitry, the reward pathway. Cocaine-induced behavioral sensitization is evident in rodents and quail when cocaine is administered intraperitoneally (IP). Objective: The purpose of the current study was to investigate dose-dependent and temporal effects of acute and chronic intramuscular (IM) administration of cocaine in male quail. Method: After habituation to the test chambers, male quail received an IM injection of saline, 3 or 10 mg/kg cocaine and were immediately placed in the chambers. Distance traveled (in meters) was recorded in 5 min time bins for 30 min. Testing was conducted once per day for ten days with each subject receiving the same treatment throughout the experiment. Other behaviors including pecking, preening, and feather fluffing were measured. Results: Cocaine-induced behavioral sensitization and tolerance were evident at relatively low doses of IM cocaine. Dose-dependent effects were evident. IM cocaine also reduced feather fluffing, a behavior that typically occurs during hypothermia. Conclusion: The findings replicated and extended previous research with pigeons and suggested that IM administration of cocaine may be a relatively potent route of administration. Potency of drugs of abuse may be related to the bioavailability of a drug and its addictive properties. Thus, studying drugs of abuse using an IM route of administration may be useful in drug addiction research

Preliminary evaluation of a “formulation-driven cognitive behavioral guided self-help (fCBT-GSH)” for crisis and transitional case management clients

BACKGROUND: Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is found to be effective for common mental disorders and has been delivered in self-help and guided self-help formats. Crisis and transitional case management (TCM) services play a vital role in managing clients in acute mental health crises. It is, therefore, an appropriate setting to try CBT in guided self-help format. METHODS: This was a preliminary evaluation of a formulation-driven cognitive behavioral guided self-help. Thirty-six (36) consenting participants with a diagnosis of nonpsychotic illness, attending crisis and the TCM services in Kingston, Canada, were recruited in this study. They were randomly assigned to the guided self-help plus treatment as usual (TAU) (treatment group) or to TAU alone (control group). The intervention was delivered over 8–12 weeks. Assessments were completed at baseline and 3 months after baseline. The primary outcome was a reduction in general psychopathology, and this was done using Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation – Outcome Measure. The secondary outcomes included a reduction in depression, measured using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, and reduction in disability, measured using the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0. FINDINGS: Participants in the treatment group showed statistically significant improvement in overall psychopathology (P<0.005), anxiety and depression (P<0.005), and disability (P<0.005) at the end of the trial compared with TAU group. CONCLUSION: A formulation-driven cognitive behavioral guided self-help was feasible for the crisis and TCM clients and can be effective in improving mental health, when compared with TAU. This is the first report of a trial of guided self-help for clients attending crisis and TCM services

An adaptive reliable multicast protocol in ad hoc networks

Multicasting is an essential service for ad-hoc wireless networks. In multicast communication, many reliable multicast schemes were studied in order to overcome packet losses in the network. This paper describes our effort to build a Source Tree Reliable Multicast protocol for ad-hoc networks (STRM). STRM provides the delivery of an ordered contiguous sequence of data packets from one sender to many receivers in an ad-hoc network. It is designed to support applications based on bulk data transfer, like files, images and software packages. The core to its support of node mobility, and also what makes the protocol unique, is the dynamic selection of a sub set of 1-hop neighbors from the sender as its Forward Servers (FSs). The key idea behind selecting this sub set 1-hop neighbors is to forward the retransmit lost data packets that needed by some receivers to achieve higher throughput and to receive the ACK packet from receivers to avoid the ACK-implosion problem inherent in any reliable multicast scheme. Finally, simulation results show that the protocol has high delivery ratio and low end-to-end delay comparing with ReMHoc protocol