Salaries and promotions of Saudi women in private sector

This thesis examines the issue of Saudi women\u27s salaries and promotions in the private sector. It explores the reasons behind the observed gap in salaries and discrimination in promotions and provides recommendations to mitigate the problem. The thesis is based on qualitative research methods, particularly on interviews with educated young and middle-career employees in companies in Saudi Arabia. Findings demonstrate that the main problem is not in Saudi labor law formulation, but in the implementations of these laws. Interviews show that there is a gap in salaries and financial promotions between Saudi female and male employees in most of the private sector companies. These private companies discriminate against Saudi women by giving them compensation packages that are lower than those awarded to men. Interviewees attribute the differences in managerial promotions between the Saudi female and male employees in a large number of private companies to discrimination, as some Saudi male employees do not accept the concept of a female as a supervisor to them. Interviewees identify two factors as related to this gap: lack of awareness about the Saudi labor policies and laws and weak implementation of these laws. Additionally, a company\u27s specific compensation system is crucial to fair pay schemes to its employees. Interviewees note that the reason behind gender discrimination is the cultural values and not religion, considering that Saudis traditionally perceived men as being superior to women. Interviews also show that companies that fear for their reputation and seek to avoid penalties give Saudi females fair salaries based on their abilities

Strain Mapping in Teeth with Variable Remaining Tooth Structure

Problem: The effect of remaining tooth structure on strain in compromised teeth is not fully understood. Different remaining tooth quantities may affect stress and strain concentration within the remaining structure and potentially the longevity of the related restoration. Objectives: The aim of this project was to map and evaluate tooth strain levels at different stages and areas of structural tooth loss created by dental preparation (simulating caries created lesions) or soft drink demineralisation (simulating external acid erosion lesions), before and after restoration, and to evaluate and compare different strain measurement techniques: strain gauges (SG), the surface displacement field measured using digital image correlation (DIC), electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI), and finite element analysis (FEA). In addition, testing teeth affected by erosion required testing and verifying different acid demineralisation protocols. Material and methods: Part I: Enamel samples (sound, polished) were subjected to extended 25 hours (hr) soft drink immersion protocols (accelerated, prolonged) with different salivary protection conditions (no saliva, artificial saliva, and natural saliva) to compare enamel surface loss. Moreover, enamel surface loss of extended erosion periods simulating different levels of clinical erosion lesions was calculated by different imaging methodologies. Microscopic analysis was performed to compare subsurface changes of early and extended erosion protocols. Part II: Strain under static loading was compared in teeth with different stages of unrestored occlusal and buccal accelerated soft drink demineralisation lesions and after restoration using different techniques (strain gauges, electronic speckle pattern interferometry, and finite element analysis). Part III: Strain under static loading was compared in prepared teeth with different remaining tooth dimensions and different restorations using strain gauges and digital image correlation techniques. Results: Part I: No statistical significance was detected in enamel thickness loss between sound and polished enamel samples in the accelerated erosion groups under all salivary conditions or between early and extended erosion groups tested. Part II: All testing methodologies measured an increased strain reading after 1 day in occlusal erosion group followed by gradual decrease, while, continuous increase in strain was observed with buccal erosion progression. For both groups, all restorative materials used were able to restore strain close to pre-treatment level. However, strain distribution pattern was more favourable in ceramic and gold occlusal onlays than composite onlays. Part III: for both strain gauges and digital image correlation, remaining tooth height ≥ 3 mm and width of 1 to 1.5 mm of the remaining tooth structure had a positive effect on strain. Tooth compositions of enamel and dentine resisted strain better than dentine counterparts at all dimensions. Both core restorations (with and without cuspal coverage) were found to support the remaining tooth structure and reduce strain. However, only cuspal coverage recorded significantly lower strain than their unrestored counterparts. Conclusion: Restorations bonded to advanced erosion induced lesions restored strain levels to pre-treatment condition and produced a more favourable strain distribution pattern highlighting the role of adhesion in reducing strain. Remaining tooth structure suffers less strain under loading when enamel is part of the structure and when the minimum dimension of 3 mm in height and 1.5 mm in width is preserved. Bonding of core restoration or cusp coverage aids in reducing strain under loading. All strain measuring methodologies were comparable, where similar strain behaviour was recorded. Remineralisation of enamel and dentine is effective in the management of initial erosion

Predicting the Emotional Intensity of Tweets

Automated interpretation of human emotion has become increasingly important as human-computer interactions become ubiquitous. Affective computing is a field of computer science concerned with recognizing, analyzing and interpreting human emotions in a range of media, including audio, video, and text. Social media, in particular, are rich in expressions of people\u27s moods, opinions, and sentiments. This thesis focuses on predicting the emotional intensity expressed on the social network Twitter. In this study, we use lexical features, sentiment and emotion lexicons to extract features from tweets, messages of 280 characters or less shared on Twitter. We also use a form of transfer learning – word and sentence embeddings extracted from neural networks trained on large corpora. The estimation of emotional intensity is a regression task and we use linear and tree-based models for this task. We compare the results of these individual models as well as making a final ensemble model that predicts the emotional intensity of tweets by combining the output of the individual models. We also use lexical features and word embeddings to train a recently introduced model designed to handle data with sparse or rare features. This model combines LASSO regularization with grouped features. Finally, an error analysis is conducted and areas that need to be improved are emphasized

Shrinkage Behaviour of One and Two Part Alkali-Activated Mortars: Factors and Mitigation Techniques

Alkali-Activated Binders (AABs) are promoted as sustainable alternatives to ordinary Portland cement (OPC) due to their promising characteristics and ability to reduce the global greenhouse emissions of construction materials. Despite many years of research, volumetric stability (i.e. shrinkage) of AABs, which has been scarcely investigated, is hindering their wider implementation in the construction sector. Hence, the initial attempt of the current study is to fully characterize and understand the shrinkage behaviour of AABs considering different factors. These factors included precursor materials, activator types and concentrations, and curing temperatures. Moreover, the effectiveness of shrinkage reducing admixtures (SRA) as a shrinkage mitigation technique and its interaction with AABs were evaluated. Two preparation methods for AABs, namely one-part (i.e. powder binder-powder activator) and two-part (i.e. powder binder-liquid activator), were also tested for comparison. Fresh properties including workability, setting behaviour, and heat evolution along with hardened properties (i.e. compressive strength) were explored. Results revealed that shrinkage for fly ash-based alkali-activated mortars was the lowest followed by blended fly ash/ slag, while alkali-activated slag-based mortars exhibited the highest values. Regardless of the preparation method, the higher the activator concentration, the higher the shrinkage. There is a strong link between AAB’s matrix rigidity and shrinkage behaviour. For both preparation methods, SRA was more effective in reducing shrinkage strains for slag-based alkali-activated mortars at different temperatures. Similar to OPC, SRA addition had induced a reduction in the compressive strength for all tested ABBs mixtures. However, the reduction in AABs mixtures strength was significantly lower than that for OPC mixtures

Sistem Penjadwalan Perawatan Alat Berbasis Web Menggunakan Algoritma Genetika

Merujuk pada pentingnya sistem informasi secara berkala oleh karena itu CV. Limbo Elektric membutuhkan sistem informasi yang mampu meningkatkan efisiensi manajemen perawatan alat. Hasil perancangan sistem informasi dapat mempermudah pelaksanaan manajemen perawatan dan pengelolaan data-data terkait. Ketersedian rekapitulasi data kerusakan dan perawatan alat membantu untuk mengambil keputusan-keputusan yang berhubungan dengan aktivitas perawatan seperti jenis komponen yang diperlukan dan biaya perbaikan alat. Kondisi alat yang dipelihara dengan baik maka dapat membuat produktivitas semakin meningkat. Sistem ini akan dikembangkan agar petugas lapangan dapat melakukan pengambilan keputusan memasukan alat ke bagian layak pakai atau tidak layak pakai untuk masuk ke list maintenance dengan menggunakan sistem pakar dengan algoritma genetika. Kondisi alat akan didata dengan menggunakan beberapa kuesioner. Dengan kuesioner tersebut akan menghasilkan data keputusan alat akan dimaintenance atau masih layak pakai dengan menggunakan algoritma genetika. Pembangunan sistem informasi ini menggunkan metode waterfall dengan Unified Modeling Language (UML) digunakan sebagai alat bantu dalam perancangan sistem ini. Sedangkan Bahasa pemrogaman yang digunakan adalah Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) dengan MySQL sebagai manajemen database-nya Pada pembuatan sistem ini dilakukan dengan pengujian blackbox dengan hasil 100% yang berarti sistem telah layak digunakan

Freezing of fresh Barhi dates for quality preservation during frozen storage

AbstractFresh harvested dates are perishable and there is a need for extending their shelf life while preserving their fresh like quality characteristics. This study evaluates three different freezing methods, namely cryogenic freezing (CF) using liquid nitrogen; individual quick freezing (IQF) and conventional slow freezing (CSF) in preserving the quality and stability of dates during frozen storage. Fresh dates were frozen utilizing the three methods. The produced frozen dates were frozen stored for nine months. The color values, textural parameters, and nutrition qualities were measured for fresh dates before freezing and for the frozen dates every three months during the frozen storage. The frozen dates’ color values were affected by the freezing method and the frozen storage period. There are substantial differences in the quality of the frozen fruits in favor of cryogenic freezing followed by individual quick freezing compared to the conventional slow freezing. The results revealed large disparity among the times of freezing of the three methods. The freezing time accounted to 10min for CF, and around 80min for IQF, and 1800min for CSF method

CENSOR: Privacy-preserving Obfuscation for Outsourcing SAT formulas

We propose a novel obfuscation technique that can be used to outsource hard satisfiability (SAT) formulas to the cloud. Servers with large computational power are typically used to solve SAT instances that model real-life problems in task scheduling, AI planning, circuit verification and more. However, outsourcing data to the cloud may lead to privacy and information breaches since satisfying assignments may reveal considerable information about the underlying problem modeled by SAT. In this work, we develop CENSOR (privaCy prEserviNg obfuScation for Outsourcing foRmulas), a novel SAT obfuscation framework that resembles Indistinguishability Obfuscation. At the core of the framework lies a mechanism that transforms any formula to a random one with the same number of satisfying assignments. As a result, obfuscated formulas are indistinguishable from each other thus preserving the input-output privacy of the original SAT instance. Contrary to prior solutions that are rather adhoc in nature, we formally prove the security of our scheme. Additionally, we show that obfuscated formulas are within a polynomial factor of the original ones thus achieving polynomial slowdown. Finally, the whole process is efficient in practice, allowing solutions to original instances to be easily recovered from obfuscated ones. A byproduct of our method is that all NP problems can be potentially outsourced to the cloud by means of reducing to SAT

SandDriller: A Fully-Automated Approach for Testing Language-Based JavaScript Sandboxes

Language-based isolation offers a cheap way to restrict the privileges of untrusted code. Previous work proposes a plethora of such techniques for isolating JavaScript code on the client-side, enabling the creation of web mashups. While these solutions are mostly out of fashion among practitioners, there is a growing trend to use analogous techniques for JavaScript code running outside of the browser, e.g., for protecting against supply chain attacks on the server-side. Irrespective of the use case, bugs in the implementation of language-based isolation can have devastating consequences. Hence, we propose SandDriller, the first dynamic analysis-based approach for detecting sandbox escape vulnerabilities. Our core insight is to design testing oracles based on two main objectives of language-based sandboxes: Prevent writes outside the sandbox and restrict access to privileged operations. Using instrumentation, we interpose oracle checks on all the references exchanged between the host and the guest code to detect foreign references that allow the guest code to escape the sandbox. If at run time, a foreign reference is detected by an oracle, SandDriller proceeds to synthesize an exploit for it. We apply our approach to six sandbox systems and find eight unique zero-day sandbox breakout vulnerabilities and two crashes. We believe that SandDriller can be integrated in the development process of sandboxes to detect security vulnerabilities in the pre-release phase

Social media analytics for nonprofit marketing: #Downsyndrome on Twitter and Instagram

Social media listening and monitoring of user-generated content (UGC) in commercial marketing is central to measuring social media users' perceptions of a brand or company. Applications of social media analytics (SMA) have become common practice in marketing and are employed to predict consumer behavior. However, critical reflections on SMA applications to nonprofit marketing are lacking, despite the increased usage of SMA by nonprofit organizations.Output Status: Forthcoming/Available Onlin