Democracy in the Arab world

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On Income Inequality and Poverty in Egypt: Is Prosperity Immoral?

There are varying perspectives on, and divergent solutions to, the phenomena of income inequality and poverty. There seems to be polarizing views on both of these sensitive topics. One side of the argument believes income inequality should in itself be mitigated through redistribution measures, while the other argues that this should not be the focus of policy makers, as it deters them from facing the more pressing issue facing society – which is absolute poverty. The relationship between income inequality, poverty, and citizen well-being in Egypt is one that warrants further research, and this paper aims to fill this lacuna. After analyzing the empirical data through quantitative tools, this paper shows that the relationship between these variables is rather blurred in the country, and that a decrease in Gini levels for instance are not necessarily a cause for celebration. Qualitative research was also conducted, and showcased that the sentiment of policy makers and policy influencers in Egypt was rather clear. Interviewees painted a vivid picture regarding the fact that income inequality should not be the focus of the government, rather the focus should be on absolute poverty – albeit through a multidimensional lens. There is indeed a massive effort in Egypt in order to drive down the poverty rates in the country, and these efforts have also been reflected upon in this research piece. However, there is room for additional measures, and this paper proceeds to provide a number of suggested policy tools that may help drive down these persistently high poverty rates in Egypt, rather than dwell on the incomes of the wealthy. Recommendations of this research are to 1) establish a national committee that is tasked with reducing multidimensional poverty in Egypt; 2) supplement income poverty with a multidimensional poverty index; 3) define equality of opportunity and then champion it across the board; 4) support primary economic sectors in Egypt; 5) heavily engage the private sector; 6) foster a culture of entrepreneurship; and 7) augment the labor force via including women

Bipolar versus fixed-head hip arthroplasty for femoral neck fractures in elderly patients

Between 2002 and 2007, fifty elderly patients with displaced femoral neck fractures were treated with hip replacement at Emergency Hospital, Mansoura University. Patients were randomly selected, 25 patients had either cemented or cementless bipolar prosthesis, and another 25 patients had either cemented or cementless fixed-head prosthesis. There were 34 women and 16 men with an average age of 63.5 years (range between 55 and 72 years). All patients were followed up both clinically and radiologically for an average 4.4 years (range between 2 and 6 years). At the final follow-up, the average Harris hip score among the bipolar group was 92 points (range between 72 and 97 points), while the fixed-head group was 84 points (range between 65 and 95 points). Radiologically, joint space narrowing more than 2 mm was found in only 8% (2 patients) among the bipolar group, and in 28% (7 patients) of the fixed-head group. Through the follow-up period, total hip replacement was needed in two cases of the bipolar group and seven cases of the fixed-head group. Bipolar hemiarthroplasty offered a better range of movement with less pain and more stability than the fixed-head hemiarthroplasty in elderly patients with displaced femoral neck fractures

Effects of magnetic water and feeding rate on growth performance and immunity of Nile Tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus)

Objective: The present study was designed to investigate the effect of magnetic water treatment technique and different feeding rates on growth performance, feed utilization, water quality parameters, chemical composition and intestinal histomorphometric parameters of monosex Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus).Design: Experimental study with a factorial design.Fish: A total of 2880 apparently healthy monosex Nile tilapia (O. niloticus) with an average initial body weight of 69.86 ± 0.8 g were randomly distributed into 18 concreate ponds.Procedures: Experimental fish were fed on commercial diet (30.1% protein and 4600 Kcal GE/kg diet) based on three levels of feeding rate 3, 4 and 5% from fish biomass for both treated and control groups. Water was treated with magnetic waves at 0.2 Tesla (Tesla= 2000 Gauss) compared to the control group water (zero Tesla). Growth performance parameters, feed utilization, chemical composition and intestinal morphometric analysis were calculated in all groups at the end of the experiment after eight weeks.Results: The results indicated that growth performance, feed utilization and intestinal histomorphometric analyses improved significantly (P<0.01) in magnetic water groups compared to control groups at the three levels of feeding rate. In addition, water physicochemical parameters including Ammonia (NH4), Nitrate (NO3), Nitrite (NO2), PH and dissolved oxygen (DO) significantly improved in magnetic water treated groups at the three feeding rate levels.Conclusions and clinical relevance: In conclusion, magnetic treatment of water could improve water quality parameters, fish growth performance, feed utilization, and intestinal histomorphometric analyses at different feeding rate

A New Approach to CNC Programming of Plunge Milling

ABSTRACT A New Approach to CNC Programming of Plunge Milling Sherif Abdelkhalek, PhD. Concordia University, 2013. In current industrial applications many engineering parts are made of hard materials including dies, mold cavities and aerospace parts. Manufacturing these types of parts is classified as pocket milling. By using the regular machining methods, pocket milling takes a long time accompanied by high cost. Plunge milling, is a new machining strategy that has proven to have an excellent performance in the rough machining of hard materials. In plunge milling, the cutter is fed in the direction of the spindle axis, with the highest structural rigidity which showed a very interesting performance in removing the excess material rapidly in the rough operations. Mainly, according to the previous researchers, two directions are adopted to improve the efficiency of the plunge milling process. First, to reduce the cutting forces and increase chatter stability which attracts the majority of the researchers. Second, to optimize the tool path planning which has less attention. Therefore, in the first part of the research, a new practical approach is established in optimized procedures to generate the tool paths for plunge milling of pockets, even for these with free-form boundaries and islands. This innovative approach is proposed as follows: (1) fill a pocket with minimum number of specified radii circles which are tangent to each other and/or the pocket boundary without overlapping by building an algorithm using the maximum hole degree (MHD) theory for solving the circle packing problem. (2) cover the areas left between the non-overlapped circles by the same used specified radii. Finally, solve the travelling sales man problem (TSP) for the circles with the same radii by using the simulated annealing algorithm. According to the results, this approach significantly advances the tool path planning technique for pockets plunge milling. In the second part of the research, a new algorithm is proposed to calculate the global solution for constraint polynomial functions by using subtractive clustering which makes the results more accurate and faster to be obtained. This part is extremely useful to calculate the depth of cut for each plunging place in case of having a polynomial surface as a bottom of the machined pocket with high accuracy, and less calculation time to avoid gauging between the tool and the bottom surface. The polynomial function can be classified according to the number of variables. In the proposed research, the functions with one and two variables have more importance because they graphically represent curves and surfaces which are the cases under study. Since the polynomial function under study can be represented graphically according to the number of the variables, the change in the function’s shape can be detected by the feature recognition. The feature recognition is done for the function’s shape by calculating the surface or curve curvature at the data points. The main procedure is; (1) identifying the entire features of the objective function which are classified according to the curvature as convex, concave, plane, and hyperbolic, (2) applying the sub-clustering technique for convex and concave regions to find the approximated centers of these regions, and eventually, (3) the clusters’ centers are calculated and used as initial points for local optimization technique which gives the local critical point for each region. The local minima are calculated, the global minimum is the minimum of the local minima

Growth performance and biochemical composition of nineteen microalgae collected from different Moroccan reservoirs

Macro- and microalgae have recently received much attention due to their valuable chemical constituents. In order to increase existing data, the authors studied nineteen microalgae species isolated from different reservoirs in the Fez region (northern Morocco), undertaking experiments to determine for each species the specific growth rate, their total amounts of proteins, carbohydrates and lipids and the influence of the growth phase on these chemical constituents. Conditions of cultivation were as follows: light intensity equal to 300 μmol photons m-2 s-1, with a temperature regime of 25/20°C (day/night) and a 16/8 (light/dark) photoperiod cycle. The growth rates of the nineteen studied species of microalgae showed a wide variation between species, ranging from 0.27 g l-1 d-1 for Chlamydomonas ovalis to 3.64 g l-1 d-1 for Chlorococcum wemmeri. Protein, carbohydrate and lipid contents varied greatly between taxa and within genera. Ankistrodesmus falcatus, Chlamydomonas ovalis, Chlorococcum sp., Hyaloraphidium contortum, Scenedesmus protuberans, and Synechocystis aquatilis tended to synthesize proteins, the concentrations exceeding 20% dry weight (DW). Ankistrodesmus falcatus, Ankistrodesmus sp., Chlorococcum wemmeri, Coenocystis sp., Isocystis sp., Lyngbya bergei, Oscillatoria amphibia, Polytoma papillatum, Scenedesmus protuberans, Scenedesmus sp. and Synechocystis aquatilis showed a high capacity for lipid storage, greater than 20% DW. For carbohydrate contents, only Scenedesmus protuberans and Scenedesmus quadricauda showed an excessive level compared to other scanned species with 29.21% and 24.76% DW, respectively