A Smart “Cairo” in the Making: A Strategic Approach towards a Better Quality of Life

Smart Cities is a term used to describe a development based on information and communication technologies. ‘A Smart Community is a community that has made a conscious effort to use information technology to transform life and work within its region in significant and fundamental, rather than incremental ways. In the last two decades, the Smart Cities movement, spearheaded by software and hardware companies has injected advanced technology into the mix. European, Far Eastern and American initiatives are witnessed to implant infrastructures and develop communities that cope with and verify the concept. It is believed that “Smart city” as a concept has been introduced as a strategic method to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework and to highlight the growing importance of Information and Communication Technologies, social and environmental capital in profiling the competitiveness of cities. The significance of these two later assets - social and environmental capital - itself goes a long way to distinguish smart cities from their more technology-laden counterparts, drawing a clear line between them and what goes under the name of either digital or intelligent cities. In Egypt, it seems almost impossible to adopt such a concept due to the multi-layered and multifaceted urban and sociocultural problems altogether. A closer look at our capital Cairo and its over-population, over-densification, deteriorated urbanism and pollution brings a doubt about the possibility that it can ever be listed as a “smart city”. The answer was an attempt to create independent self-sufficient cities and compounds as a prologue to embedding smart infrastructure and to develop smart social and environmental communities. For that, several fully-fledged communities, creating comprehensive integrated residential schemes within the New Cairo plan were launched. One of those was El-Rehab city, covering an area of 10 million m2 to accommodate 200,000 residents. The city has its own transportation system and infra structures, as well as its own facilities including educational, medical, commercial, sports club, recreational and maintenance facilities. After its success, “Madinaty” was ten times a larger city. With international standards, intended to act as a modern extension to New Cairo. Pivoted on the existence of educational institutions, the city includes hospitals, business centers, hotels, sports and social clubs, household services, and entertainment facilities, which meet the day-to-day needs of its inhabitants. The city has several innovative and unique services on its fringes, which caters to the needs of nearby towns and even to the needs of the inhabitants of Greater Cairo. These services include: water sports areas, shopping centers, and varied educational institutions. Can those cities be considered „smart“? Are they really planned smart? What features of smartness do they posses? How do their residents perceive them? Can they put Cairo on the list of smart cities by hook or by crook? Do they pave the way ahead of planning smart cities in Egypt? What, then are the criteria of Egyptian smart cities to be? The paper at hand aims at answering those questions. It examines the concept within the Egyptian context with the aim of debating its validity and the liability of its application of its underlying implications in the developing countries. The objective is to propose local vision of smart cities in Egypt. The methodology is based on reviewing the concept of smart city and its various applications. Then an evaluation of the experiment of “Madinaty” city will be undertaken in lights of the elected dominant principles of the concept. It is expected that the discussion of the findings will set new norms on how to “plan it smart” in Egypt

Methadone maintenance : treatment as social control

Thesis. 1976. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.Microfiche copy available in Archives and Rotch.Bibliography: leaves 72-74.by Regionald [sic] Joseph Williams.M.C.P

The Ithacan, 1964-10-30

https://digitalcommons.ithaca.edu/ithacan_1964-65/1004/thumbnail.jp

Improvement of maritime education in Iran

“IMPROVEMENT OF MARITIME EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN IRAN TOWARDS THE RATIFICATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF STCW CONVENTION \ International conventions which Iran is a party to, are : - Safety of life at sea (SOLAS) I960 - Load line CLL) 1966 - Tonnage Measurement 1969 - Fund 1971 But there are a number of international codes,conventions, and other instruments related directly or indirectly to maritime education and training to which Iran is not a party . Such instruments are those adopted by I.L.O, I.T.U, and I.M.O,. It is very difficult to deal in detail with specific requirements of all conventions concerned. Furthermore , it is not intended nor within purpose of this project to go into details of those instruments, therefore it is appropriate to deal excusively with the 1978 STCW Convention as the title of this paper indicates. Iran could not attended the International Conference on Training and Certification of sea fareres held in London in 1978.A first step towards ratification of the STCW 1978 Convention is that, in the revised Iranian Maritime iii Code,the STCW Convention and the compliance with its requirements has been mentioned and accepted in principle. So the aim of this paper is to discuss all technical requirements of the convention. Also, I will try to touch on some of the associated policy ,administration , and organisational implementions, invalved in the preparation of the required means and instruments, one by one and I will go through the ratification and implementation process of the-STCW Convention. Once Iran ratifies the STCW Convention there will be a total fundemental change of its training system and certificate structure to be more in line with that of the Convention.Among others the trading limits will be revised to constitute two trading limits namely :near coastal and unrestricted . In this paper , an attempt has been made to plan and recommend a suitable procedure from the begining of the ratification of the convention to the mandatory requirements and courses to compLy with the STCW Convention and drafting of the subsidiary (relevant) legislation

Development of a Decision Making Model for the Assessment of Electricity Demand Side Management in the State of Kuwait

Kuwait’s per capita electrical energy consumption is among the largest in the world, reaching 13,663 kWh per person in 2011. The electricity demand in Kuwait is increasing, which requires additional investments in power generation. A particular challenge in Kuwait is the peak demand in summer, when extreme heat increases air conditioning loads. Peak demand reached 11,220 MW in 2011, with a fast growth rate averaging 5.6% over the last decade and a maximum production capacity of around 14,720 MW. It is not possible to cope with this demand simply by increasing generation capacity. Therefore, the only alternative available to Kuwait is to control electricity demand via demand-side management. The main objective of this research is to assess and select the optimal demand- side management (DSM) technologies for buildings in the governmental sector (office, religious and school buildings) and to investigate the key factors in the evaluation process. To achieve the research objective, a model was proposed using multi-criteria decision-making techniques to enable the forecasting and comparison of DSM alternatives that are suitable for buildings. The developed model includes environmental, economic, technical and social considerations. The research methodology is based on three main phases. Phase 1: Data collection through a mail questionnaire that was sent to 42 experts for the identification of criteria and demand-side management alternatives. Phase 2: Screening and narrowing of the data collected in Phase 1 using a set of questionnaires, including the identification of potential DSM alternatives and criteria suitable for further analysis. This phase was performed through the Delphi process, taking into consideration the opinions of 28 experts. Phase 3: Use of Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques, namely the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP), to evaluate and rank the identified DSM alternatives and criteria. This was done using pairwise comparisons of 17 experts to evaluate the criteria and alternatives for the buildings (office, religious and school). The research showed that the experts identified six alternative technologies and five criteria for the selection and evaluation of governmental buildings (office, religious and school). After performing the three phases of this research project, a set of criteria and alternatives were ranked based on the information gathered from every group of experts. It was found that reduction in consumption, capital cost and ease of implementation were the three most recommended criteria for the selection of DSM technologies in Kuwait government buildings while high efficiency lighting and programmable thermostats were identified as the most recommended DSM technologies for these buildings. An important aspect of this research is that unlike engineering approaches which sometimes depend on expensive test equipment or, often for building design, expensive computer modelling exercises, the proposed framework can be easily adopted by anyone without any significant financial cost. The FAHP approach was also tested and its results compared with those of AHP. There was a slight difference between using AHP and FAHP in terms of ranking the criteria and alternatives but that the difference barely affects the ranking. It was found that the AHP provides a convenient MCDM approach for solving the complex problem of selecting the optimal DSM options for buildings. The contributions of this thesis are the development of a novel framework for systematic selection and ranking of DSM technologies in different types of buildings using the Delphi method and AHP; the identification of the most important DSM technologies and criteria for their selection for three types of governmental buildings in Kuwait; and establishing that results from using AHP and FAHP for the selection of appropriate DSM measures in these buildings are almost identical, so use of AHP is likely to be sufficient in most building studies of this type

I Was Not Sick and I Didn\u27t Need to Recover : Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT) as a Refuge from Criminalization

Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT) has been undergoing a cultural and epistemological shift away from an approach that emphasized client stabilization and a reduction of social harms towards one grounded in values associated with the recovery movement. These changes include promoting a view of addiction grounded in the disease model as well as efforts to make abstinence and ancillary services such as recovery coaching/counseling, programs emphasizing proper citizenship, and concern for clients’ spirituality necessary parts of the program. As such, the increasing use of recovery as the dominant conceptual framework for MMT represents a change in how methadone, MMT, and those who use it are socially constructed. Recovery, which is based on theories of addiction-as-disease, is seen by some as a means to restore MMT to its rightful position as a medically-based treatment for addiction and a way to remove stigma from individuals on the program. Others believe that the shift will act as a form of social control by pathologizing drug use/users and obscuring the role of structural forces (criminalization) in the harms experienced by drug users. Moreover, by constructing PWUD’s choice to attend MMT as unrelated to the ways that they are oppressed under criminalization, the recovery discourse depoliticizes drug treatment issues, and, as such, implicitly supports the status quo criminalization of PWUD. This dissertation uses qualitative interviews and ethnographic methods to examine: how the shift towards recovery affects issues of agency and control among individuals on MMT; how it influences debates over methadone’s role as a form of drug treatment; and how addiction more generally is being constructed by the recovery discourse. Results demonstrate that despite MMT’s institutional focus on recovery, most participants linked their use of MMT to the structural-legal context of prohibition/criminalization rather than through the narrative of the recovery model. Responses also suggested the recovery model functions in part to obscure the role of criminalization in the harms PWUD experience in favor of a model based on individual pathology. Thus, in contrast to the recovery model, MMT cannot be understood outside of the structural context of criminalization and the War on Drugs which shape illegal drug use as a difficult and dangerous activity, and consequently position MMT as a way to moderate or escape from those harms

Castorena v. General Elec. Clerk\u27s Record v. 6 Dckt. 35123

https://digitalcommons.law.uidaho.edu/idaho_supreme_court_record_briefs/1074/thumbnail.jp