The reflection of Euro- Mediterranean historical culture on contemporary architecture in Alexandria

During the past thirty years, interest in vernacular and traditional architecture all over the world has grown rapidly and in diverse directions. Architects and all those concerned with the building industry started to realize that buildings at their new current status does not fit properly with their environments in its global term. They realized how most traditional architecture met the needs of the local, worked with the environment and added to the value and culture of their place. Scholars and architects now apply the term "vernacular architecture" to traditional buildings, and “Neo-Vernacular” to concepts that aims to advance recognition and application of vernacular architecture traditions worldwide. Although not all vernacular architecture is climatically responsive, as sometimes social and cultural aspects dominate and govern the needs from climate. However, it is considered more indigenous to a particular place along with its climate. This paper is concerned with the traditional architecture and heritage of Alexandria’s buildings, skyline and facades along the Mediterranean coastal line. This is discussed through an analysis carried out on the buildings of the coastal line of Alexandria, and the timeline influence upon their Architecture

Carry Trade with Maintained Currencies - A Risk and Return Analysis for the Egyptian Pound

The forward premium puzzle in the exchange rate market, resulting from the deviation and failure of interest rate parity, has awakened the interest of speculators to perform carry trade activities. Across literature the main risk associated and measured for carry trade has been the exchange rate risk and crash risk related to the relevant currencies used. But within the literature, the influence of maintained currencies on the carry trade results has not yet been covered. This paper analyzes the potential performance and the risk of carry trade strategies within a maintained exchange rate regime. For this analysis an empirical study of carry trade strategies applied between the EGP and other currencies has been used and compared to those with the USD as an example for a maintained exchange rate. Our risk and return analysis clearly shows a combination of high return and low risk for the maintained currency carry trade.Carry Trade Performance, Uncovered Interest Parity, Maintained Exchange Rates, Value at Risk

Drug Delivery to Solid Tumors via Polymeric Nanoparticles

A main challenge in chemotherapy is to deliver an anti-cancer drug selectively to tumor and avoid off-target exposure to other body tissues and organs. Nanoparticles (NPs) have been considered a promising approach for tumor drug delivery, with popularity attributable to the famous “Enhanced Permeability and Retention effect”, where small particles enter tumor tissues through leaky vasculature and be retained there. Currently, the phagocytic clearance of NPs is avoided by coating NP surface with Polyethylene glycol (PEG). Although successful in prolonging NPs circulation, PEG prevents proper interaction of NPs with the target cells, known as “PEG dilemma”. Low molecular weight chitosan (LMWC) can function as a hydrophilic pH-sensitive alternative stealth coating for NPs. The LMWC-coated NPs were previously made with a conjugate of poly(lactide-co-glycolic) acid (PLGA) and LMWC (PLGA-LMWC) and showed pH-sensitive surface charge. However, this preparation method has disadvantages such as production complexity and difficulty in drug encapsulation. We used an alternative surface modification method based on dopamine polymerization, which formed a layer of polydopamine (pD) on NP surface allowing for conjugation of LMWC to the preformed NP cores. When compared to PLGA-LMWC NPs, PLGA-pD-LMWC NPs had superior control over drug release. Additionally, obtained PLGA-pD-LMWC NPs had similar cellular interactions to that of PLGA-LMWC NPs, achieving cellular uptake in cancer cells under mildly acidic conditions, which was not achieved with PEG coated NPs. However, when tested in vivo, there was no significant difference between LMWC and PEG-coated NPs in terms of tumor growth suppression and tumor accumulation. While the exact reason behind the poor in vitro-in vivo correlation remain be confirmed, it is hypothesized to be premature drug release or protein corona formation

Recognizing contextual valence shifters in document-level sentiment classification

Sentiment classification is an emerging research field. Due to the rich opinionated web content, people and organizations are interested in knowing others\u27 opinions, so they need an automated tool for analyzing and summarizing these opinions. One of the major tasks of sentiment classification is to classify a document (i.e. a blog, news article or review) as holding an overall positive or negative sentiment. Machine learning approaches have succeeded in achieving better results than semantic orientation approaches in document-level sentiment classification; however, they still need to take linguistic context into account, by making use of the so-called contextual valence shifters. Early research has tried to add sentiment features and contextual valence shifters to the machine learning approach to tackle this problem, but the classifier\u27s performance was low.In this study, we would like to improve the performance of document-level sentiment classification using the machine learning approach by proposing new feature sets that refine the traditional sentiment feature extraction method and take contextual valence shifters into consideration from a different perspective than the earlier research. These feature sets include: 1) a feature set consisting of 16 features for counting different categories of contextual valence shifters (intensifiers, negators and polarity shifters) as well as the frequency of words grouped according to their final (modified) polarity; and 2) another feature set consisting of the frequency of each sentiment word after modifying its prior polarity. We performed several experiments to: 1) compare our proposed feature sets with the traditional sentiment features that count the frequency of each sentiment word while disregarding its prior polarity; 2) compare our proposed feature sets after combining them with stylistic features and n-grams with traditional sentiment features combined with stylistic features and n-grams; and 3) evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed feature sets against stylistic features and n-grams by performing feature selection. The results of all the experiments show a significant improvement over the baselines, in terms of the accuracy, precision and recall, which indicate that our proposed feature sets are effective in document-level sentiment classification

Camus and Sartre: The Unsettled Conflict on Violence and Terror

The broad purpose of this paper is to bring attention to the subject of terrorism. In the paper two plays by are compared which both treat this matter somewhat differently. The first play is "Les Mains Sales" by Jean Paul Sartre and the second play is "Les Justes" by Albert Camus. The two authors who are both descendents of the existentialist time period have quite differing views on the subject. Sartre was known for his belief in action while Camus was known to be more of a pacifist. Both of these issues are portrayed in the paper. This paper also goes one step further because it looks at the literary aspect of both plays yet also places them and their theories into today's context. Both of the plays look terrorism from the eyes of the terrorist. This is something that is not very common even today in the middle of the all the terror that exists around the globe. However the issues and theories presented here bring some insight into the terrorists mind and how that affects the world today

Inter-organ control of gut sexual dimorphism by steroid hormone signaling in Drosophila

Suggestive evidence points that exogenous exposure to steroid hormones has detrimental consequences that are not well explored specifically in the gut, where nutrient uptake occurs. The human gastrointestinal (GI) tract expresses endogenous steroid hormone receptors in the crypts and the enterocytes but their functions are not well understood. Accumulating epidemiological data suggest that GI tumor progression in most cases maybe endocrine dependent. Given the complexity of the mammalian gut yet, the genetic amenability of cell-type specific gene manipulation in Drosophila melanogaster, I studied the effect of exogenously fed or endogenous steroid hormone signaling on the gut and its implications during homeostasis and disease. In this PhD thesis, I discover the gut to be a sexually dimorphic organ that is regulated by steroid sex hormone: 20-hydroxyecdysone (20HE), which binds EcRUsp receptor complex and activates downstream target gene transcription during aging and after mating, but not after stress (the receptors have non-overlapping functions). 20HE stimulates intestinal stem cell (ISC) division in a biphasic manner when fed for 16-20hrs, with males being insensitive to the 1st peak and both sexes competent to divide at the 2nd peak of ISC division. EcR functions in the ISCs cell autonomously and in enteroblasts (EBs) non-autonomously to regulate the ISC division. Females have higher levels of circulating 20HE than the males and I identified the ovaries as an endogenous ecdysone source to control mating-induced ecdysone-dependent ISC mitoses and post-matingdependent gut growth to promote optimal egg-laying. This reproductive advantage given by the highly active female gut comes at the expense of a faster aging epithelium and higher propensity to tumors. Interestingly, exogenous 20HE feeding to males overrides the restricted ability of male ISCs to divide and abolishes the sex differences in ISC division accompanied by transcriptional regulation of metabolic and cell-cycle related genes and subsequent gut growth. All in all, this study identifies sexually dimorphic 20HE levels as a regulator of ISC behavior and intestinal growth at the expense of gut deterioration and aging

Affect/Emotion - Orientation Matters: A Conversation between Sigrid Schmitz and Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at the Goldsmith College, University of London. With her books "The Cultural Politcs of Emotion" and "The Promise of Happiness", she had a strong influence on feminist and queer discourses in affect studies. Sigrid Schmitz had a conversation with her about the different facets and framings of the terms 'emotion' and 'affect', and about the relations between bodies and sensations. The following dialogue addresses the ambiguity of meanings and wordings in the affect discourse and the use of 'feminist killjoys' in feminist debates and political activism