Genetic and environmental correlates of Tourette Syndrome

Tourette Syndrome is a heritable neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by motor and vocal tics. Decades of research also implicate environmental factors in the occurrence of tics; most notable are complications during and around pregnancy. In this thesis I aimed to further our understanding of the genetic and environmental causes of tics. To this end, I have used data from the ongoing Tourette International Collaborative Genetics (TIC Genetics; http://tic-genetics.org/) study and data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). The TIC Genetics study is a large international multicenter study led by clinicians and researchers in the field of Tourette and the ALSPAC study is a population-based birth cohort designed to understand the environmental and genetic determinants of health and development. I found no evidence for the involvement of single genes in tics but rather that an aggregate score of many signals across the genome, a polygenic risk score, is associated with tics. I also found that tics along a spectrum from non-clinical to clinical levels share a similar genetic background. Regarding the environmental factors, I found that a cumulative score of pregnancy complications better captures risk for tics rather than single pregnancy complications. Furthermore, I studied the polygenic risk score and the pregnancy complications together and found that the analyses of both factors better capture the risk for tics compared to studying them separately. The studies in this thesis highlight the importance and benefits of studying environmental and genetic risk factors jointly in understanding the causes of tics

Involvement of People in the Design of Community Building in Developing Countries

Although public participation concept or technique to enhance and /or influence decision making is a fact of life in many governments nowadays and has been used by many industries to improve their products and increase end-users satisfaction, it is still new to the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. The extent to which participation should occur and the role that it plays still remains uncertain in the AEC industry. Participation has been the predominant conception for many years by many researchers. In practice, this has meant that public participation often has occurred late in the planning process. This research will focus on the involvement of people in the design process of community buildings in developing countries. During the last five decade, many community buildings were built and many of these buildings did not performed well as planned. Many of these problems in were related to design, hence the choice of architectural design of these buildings for this research. If the end-users of these buildings were involved in the planning and design stages, many of these problems would not occur. Thus, the aim of this research is to develop a conceptual framework to involve the public in the design of community buildings in developing countries. A thorough review of previous works related to the public participation in the design of community buildings has been conducted as part of this research. The review revealed most of these works in this area were done on developed countries and no research works were conducted on developing countries so far

Service Quality Delivery of Benadir Local Government in Somalia

Purpose: In today’s competitive and rapidly moving world, local governments lose so many citizens because of the poor quality of public services they provide for these products, because of the quality and/or lack of products and the lack of ability to provide quality service. The purpose of this study is to examine the service quality delivery of the Benadir local government in Somalia.    Theoretical framework: This research studied the degree service quality delivery offered of the Benadir local government in Somalia. Service quality has been defined as a difference between customers' service perception and expectations.   Methodology: To achieve the objectives of this study, data was collected through online questionnaire from a sample of 354 major customers of the Benadir local government in Mogadishu-Somalia. These respondents were selected using convenient random sampling method. The data collected from the online questionnaire were analyzed using Descriptive Statistical tools such as compute, percentage, mean, and standard deviation.   Findings: The results of this study indicate that the three out five dimensions of level quality service delivery (reliability, responsiveness, and assurance) have slightly positive satisfied and except two elements empathy and tangibility have negative satisfied with customers' expectations and perception. Furthermore, customers were most a little satisfied with the three dimensions of service quality delivery by the Benadir local administration in Mogadishu-Somalia. On the contrary, customers were negative satisfied with tangibility and empathy dimensions of service quality.   Research limitation/ implication: The researcher forwards some recommendations for the Benadir local government in Somalia. In order to improve the level of citizen satisfaction in terms of quality service delivery offered by the Benadir local government in Somalia, the Benadir local government should come up with policies and programs that prioritize the level of citizen satisfaction and should develop and contribute the level client expectation and perception of dimensions quality service delivery by the Benadir local government in Somalia, the Benadir local government should make the information easily obtainable and can get prompt service delivery by the citizens, therefore, the study recommends that a strategy should be put in place to gain these benefit. The limitations faced by the study included time constraints and limited resources taken to complete the study.   Originality/Value: This investigation differs from previous explores as it examines the influence of level service quality delivery in Benadir local government on outcomes and operations in particular. Furthermore, this study is specifically based on the Benadir Regional Government