Study on the Health Status of Coastal People in Bangladesh After Cyclone Sidr and Aila

Bangladesh is recognized as one of the high-risk countries in the world that is prone to natural disasters. Due to its geographical location, topography, high population density, poverty and lower adaptive competence it is considered to be highly vulnerable to natural disasters in the world. This study was devised following the super cyclone Sidr that hit Bangladesh in November 2007 and cyclone Aila that hit in May 2009 to assess the impact of extreme weather event like cyclone on health of the coastal population of Bangladesh. A total of approximately 1000 households were selected by using the multistage cluster sampling technique from both villages. The study result shows that diarrheal, skin disease and mental health problems increased after the cyclones. The multivariable analysis shows that age of the respondents, gender, monthly income and educational level of the household heads and number of living children in the family have statistically significant effect on causing health problems before and after the cyclone Sidr and Aila. It can be concluded that extreme weather events like cyclones Sidr and Aila making the lives of the coastal people more difficult and also it increases the vulnerability in the society for poor people, elderly, children and women. Since this is a fairly unexplored research area, more empirical research work is needed to establish the impact of extreme weather events on health of the coastal people in Bangladesh

Evaluation of Spam Impact on Arabic Websites Popularity

The expansion of the Web and its information in all aspects of life raises the concern of how to trust information published on the Web especially in cases where publisher may not be known. Websites strive to be more popular and make themselves visible to search engines and eventually to users. Website popularity can be measured using several metrics such as the Web traffic (e.g. Website: visitors\u27 number and visited page number). A link or page popularity refers to the total number of hyperlinks referring to a certain Web page. In this study, several top ranked Arabic Websites are selected for evaluating possible Web spam behavior. Websites use spam techniques to boost their ranks within Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Results of this study showed that some of these popular Websites are using techniques that are considered spam techniques according to Search Engine Optimization guidelines

A Novel Root Based Arabic Stemmer

Stemming algorithms are used in information retrieval systems, indexers, text mining, text classifiers etc., to extract stems or roots of different words, so that words derived from the same stem or root are grouped together. Many stemming algorithms were built in different natural languages. Khoja stemmer is one of the known and widely used Arabic stemmers. In this paper, we introduced a new light and heavy Arabic stemmer. This new stemmer is presented in this study and compared with two well-known Arabic stemmers. Results showed that accuracy of our stemmer is slightly better than the accuracy yielded by each one of those two well-known Arabic stemmers used for evaluation and comparison. Evaluation tests on our novel stemmer yield 75.03% accuracy, while the other two Arabic stemmers yield slightly lower accuracy