Renaissance or Revolution? Legacies of Pan-Arabism in the Egyptian Arab Spring

This project explores the degree that Pan-Arabism influenced in Egypt\u27s Arab Spring and how the Arab Spring represented the unfinished goals of decolonization in Egypt. The evidence suggests that the relationship between Pan-Arabism and the Arab Spring is complex. The promises of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century were economic and political independence with self-rule, explicitly separate from the influence of the colonizing powers, the British and French, Pan-Arabism promised social and political unity based on shared language and ethnicity and included broader goals such as the liberation of Palestine. During the decolonization campaign Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970; PM 1954-56; Pres. 1956-1970) inexorably tied Pan-Arabism to Egyptian Nationalism. Many activists and leaders grew up under the influence of Nasser\u27s ideology and charismatic personality. The failure to deliver on the promises of Nasser\u27s ideology after 1952 resulted in the disenfranchisement of Egyptians and a renewed call for the promises of decolonization; free and fair elections, an end to emergency powers and military rule, decreased unemployment and inflation. The Arab Spring as a series of revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen represented the continuation of shared identity and Pan-Arab ideas decades after decolonization. It will be argued that even after 2011, questions of justice, leadership, and shared identity remain central to Egypt and beyond. In particular, evaluations of the Arab Spring and the negotiations between feminist organizations, religious organizations, and youth organizations in the development of a post-Arab Spring government are particularly relevant in light of the ongoing protests in Iran

Correlation of immunostaining findings with demographic data and variables of Oxford classification in IgA nephropathy

Background: Oxford classification for IgA nephropathy (IgAN) did not include pattern of immunostaining in the analysis. Objective: The aim of this study is to determine the potential correlation between the immunostaining data and morphologic variables of Oxford classification (MEST) and various clinical and demographic data of patients with IgAN. Patients and Methods: The pathologic diagnosis of IgAN requires the demonstration of IgA-dominant mesangial or mesangio-capillary immune deposits through immunofluorescence (IF) microscopy. The immune deposits were semiquantitatively assessed as 0 to 3+ positive bright. These were correlated with various clinical, demographic and histological variables of Oxford classification. Results: A total of 114 biopsies were enrolled to the study (70.2 were male). Mean age of the patients was 37.7 ± 13.6 years. This study showed that, only C3 deposits had a significant correlation with serum creatinine. Other antibodies (IgA, IgM and IgG) had no significant association with serum creatinine. This study also showed that IgA deposition score had significant positive association with endocapillary proliferation (E) and segmental glomerulosclerosis (S) variables of Oxford classification. Moreover, IgM deposition score had positive association with S variable. There was no significant association of IgG deposition score with four morphologic variables of Oxford classification. There was significant association of C3 deposition score with S and E variables too. Conclusions: The significant relationships of IgA and C3 deposits with some of the Oxford variables need more attention. We propose to further investigate this aspect of IgAN disease. © 2013, Society of Diabetic Nephropathy Prevention. All rights reserved

Review of Person Re-identification Techniques

Person re-identification across different surveillance cameras with disjoint fields of view has become one of the most interesting and challenging subjects in the area of intelligent video surveillance. Although several methods have been developed and proposed, certain limitations and unresolved issues remain. In all of the existing re-identification approaches, feature vectors are extracted from segmented still images or video frames. Different similarity or dissimilarity measures have been applied to these vectors. Some methods have used simple constant metrics, whereas others have utilised models to obtain optimised metrics. Some have created models based on local colour or texture information, and others have built models based on the gait of people. In general, the main objective of all these approaches is to achieve a higher-accuracy rate and lowercomputational costs. This study summarises several developments in recent literature and discusses the various available methods used in person re-identification. Specifically, their advantages and disadvantages are mentioned and compared.Comment: Published 201

Learning to Detect Touches on Cluttered Tables

We present a novel self-contained camera-projector tabletop system with a lamp form-factor that brings digital intelligence to our tables. We propose a real-time, on-device, learning-based touch detection algorithm that makes any tabletop interactive. The top-down configuration and learning-based algorithm makes our method robust to the presence of clutter, a main limitation of existing camera-projector tabletop systems. Our research prototype enables a set of experiences that combine hand interactions and objects present on the table. A video can be found at https://youtu.be/hElC_c25Fg8