On the Brink in Ras Beirut: An Ethnography of Livelihood Struggles Amid Economic and Political Discord

This paper is a study of how people in Ras Beirut are coping at a time of severe economic crisis. During Zainab Alawieh’s research, which took place between April and September 2021, she roamed around different neighbourhoods within the Ras Beirut area – Hamra, Ain Tineh, Raouche and Qouraitem – and conducted more than 40 surveys with residents and business owners, discussing how their livelihoods were affected by the economic collapse and high unemployment that Lebanon is going through

Exploring spatial reuse effects on performance enhancements in wireless multihop networks

Recent years have witnessed a remarkable interest in wireless multihop ad hoc networks that need little or no infrastructure support. Such networks have enabled the existence of various applications ranging from the monitoring of herds of animals to supporting communication in military battle-fields and civilian disaster recovery scenarios as well as providing an emergency warning system for vehicles on the road. Currently, the distributed coordination function (DCF) of the IEEE is the industry dominant MAC protocol for wireless multihop ad hoc environment due to its simple implementation and distributed nature. Nevertheless, the DCF access method does not make efficient use of the shared channel due to its inherent conservative approach in assessing the level of interference. Moreover, the implementation of DCF in multihop ad hoc networks suffers from the exposed and hidden terminal problems; both of these problems highly affect the spectrum spatial reuse and accordingly causes serious throughput deterioration. To date, various methods have been proposed to enhance the throughput of the DCF; namely, tuning the carrier sensing threshold, the transmission attempt probability through changing the binary exponential backoff, controlling the frame transmit power, adapting the physical transmission rate of data frame, and the use of directional antennas. In this thesis, we develop mathematical tools to study the effectiveness of the interplay among the various tunable parameters and propose suitable protocols for achieving better utilization of the wireless spectrum

Self-Propagating Reactive Fronts in Compacts of Multilayered Particles

Reactive multilayered foils in the form of thin films have gained interest in various applications such as joining, welding, and ignition. Typically, thin film multilayers support self-propagating reaction fronts with speeds ranging from 1 to 20 m/s. In some applications, however, reaction fronts with much smaller velocities are required. This recently motivated Fritz et al. (2011) to fabricate compacts of regular sized/shaped multilayered particles and demonstrate self-sustained reaction fronts having much smaller velocities than thin films with similar layering. In this work, we develop a simplified numerical model to simulate the self-propagation of reactive fronts in an idealized compact, comprising identical Ni/Al multilayered particles in thermal contact. The evolution of the reaction in the compact is simulated using a two-dimensional transient model, based on a reduced description of mixing, heat release, and thermal transport. Computed results reveal that an advancing reaction front can be substantially delayed as it crosses from one particle to a neighboring particle, which results in a reduced mean propagation velocity. A quantitative analysis is thus conducted on the dependence of these phenomena on the contact area between the particles, the thermal contact resistance, and the arrangement of the multilayered particles

The Impact of Innovation on the Quality of Education Provided by Training Centres

The world is changing and pushing toward the improvement of the educational system which is moving forward with technology. This change in the educational system should be accompanied with the continual assurance of providing a quality of education service by the educational organization. Education could be provided by universities, schools and vocational schools or other academic institutions. One of the education service providers is the professional development training centres. Although a lot of research papers tackled the quality of education, however very little research discussed the quality of training services provided by training centres. This article attempts to specify the ten innovation parameters that could affect the quality of education and the business model in the training centres. It also shed the light on the quality score that could be used by different stakeholders as a tool to pre-assess the quality educational level provided by the professional development training centres. Keywords: Quality; Education; Innovation, Business model DOI: 10.7176/JEP/13-29-07 Publication date:October 31st 202

Projection sous les contrôles de distance par paires

International audienceVisualization of high-dimensional and possibly complex (non continuous for instance) data onto a low-dimensional space may be difficult. Several projection methods have been already proposed for displaying such high-dimensional structures on a lower-dimensional space, but the information lost is not always easy to use. Here, a new projection paradigm is presented to describe a non-linear projection method that takes into account the projection quality of each projected point in the reduced space, this quality being directly available in the same scale as this reduced space. More specifically, this novel method allows a straightforward visualization data in R 2 with a simple reading of the approximation quality, and provides then a novel variant of dimensionality reduction

Projection under pairwise distance control

International audienceVisualization of high-dimensional and possibly complex (non continuous for instance) data onto a low-dimensional space may be difficult. Severalprojection methods have been already proposed for displaying such high-dimensional structures on a lower-dimensional space, but informationlost on initial data is not always easy to use. A new projection paradigm is presented to describe a non-linear projection method that takes intoaccount the projection quality of each projected point in the reduced space, this quality being directly available in the same scale as this reducedspace. More specifically, this novel method allows a straightforward visualization data in R^2 with a simple reading of the approximation quality,and provides then a novel variant of dimensionality reduction

The determinants of sustained adherence to COVID-19 preventive measures among older Syrian refugees in Lebanon

Acknowledgments The authors thank the participants at the Economic Research Forum annual conference in March 2022 for comments. Funding: SA and HG received the ELRHA Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises award (Number 51538) for "Tracking adherence of older refugees to COVID-19 preventive measures in response to changing vulnerabilities: A multi-level, panel study to inform humanitarian response in Lebanon". This work was supported by ELRHA’s Research for Health in Humanitarian Crisis (R2HC) Programme, which aims to improve health outcomes by strengthening the evidence base for public health interventions in humanitarian crises. R2HC is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), Wellcome, and the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). The views expressed herein should not be taken, in any way, to reflect the official opinion of the NRC or ELRHA. The funding agency was not involved in the data collection, analysis or interpretation. ELRHA: https://www.elrha.org/programme/research-for-health-in-humanitarian-crises/ The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD