Solid state image sensor research

Solid state image sensing devices developed for meteorological satellite application

Development of a breadboard multielement star detector Final report, Mar. 1967 - Sep. 1968

Breadboard model of star detector device consisting of thin film photosensitive and high dielectric material

Impact of chronic war trauma exposure on PTSD diagnosis from 2006 -2021: a longitudinal study in Palestine

© Crown 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Background: Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) are a common result of the occurrence of natural and man-made disasters, the refugees are one of these traumas in which some resulted from political conflicts. Today, Palestinians are the largest refugee population in the world after the Nakba in 1948. This study aims to discover the impact of chronic war traumas on PTSD diagnosis and symptoms from 2006 to 2021. The current study is a follow-up of 607 adolescents and adults, aged between 10–30 years of which are also those children who participated in the 2006 study. This research used an adapted PTSD scale (PTSD-SRII, 33 items) from a validated original questionnaire developed by Altawil in 2008 to measure PTSD based on symptoms reported in DSM-IV and ICD-10. Results: The main findings show at least 97.2% of participants had experienced at least 6 traumatic experiences up to the year 2006 and 100% of the participants were exposed to traumas in 2021. This study found four categories of responses to chronic war trauma: (a) Acute group (n = 321, 52.9%) shows high PTSD symptoms in 2006 and in 2021; (b) Remitters group (n = 54, 8.9%) shows high PTSD symptoms in 2006 but did not show significant PTSD symptoms in 2021; (c) Delayed group (n = 204, 33.6%) shows no PTSD symptoms in 2006 but showed significant PTSD symptoms in 2021; (d) Resilient group (n = 28, 4.6%) had no PTSD symptoms in 2006 and did not show PTSD symptoms in 2021. Conclusions: The authors conclude that Palestinian children, youth, adults and their families in the Gaza Strip are continually at a huge risk of developing PTSD and other psychological problems. This means that Palestinians will suffer for a long time from PTSD, which should be called Chronic Traumatic Stress Disorder (CTSD) rather than PTSD. This PTSD or CTSD cannot be changed unless the root of the problem is solved by ending the 74 years of living under occupation.Peer reviewe

Impact of chronic war trauma exposure on PTSD diagnosis from 2006 -2021 : a longitudinal study in Palestine

© Crown 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Background: Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) are a common result of the occurrence of natural and man-made disasters, the refugees are one of these traumas in which some resulted from political conflicts. Today, Palestinians are the largest refugee population in the world after the Nakba in 1948. This study aims to discover the impact of chronic war traumas on PTSD diagnosis and symptoms from 2006 to 2021. The current study is a follow-up of 607 adolescents and adults, aged between 10–30 years of which are also those children who participated in the 2006 study. This research used an adapted PTSD scale (PTSD-SRII, 33 items) from a validated original questionnaire developed by Altawil in 2008 to measure PTSD based on symptoms reported in DSM-IV and ICD-10. Results: The main findings show at least 97.2% of participants had experienced at least 6 traumatic experiences up to the year 2006 and 100% of the participants were exposed to traumas in 2021. This study found four categories of responses to chronic war trauma: (a) Acute group (n = 321, 52.9%) shows high PTSD symptoms in 2006 and in 2021; (b) Remitters group (n = 54, 8.9%) shows high PTSD symptoms in 2006 but did not show significant PTSD symptoms in 2021; (c) Delayed group (n = 204, 33.6%) shows no PTSD symptoms in 2006 but showed significant PTSD symptoms in 2021; (d) Resilient group (n = 28, 4.6%) had no PTSD symptoms in 2006 and did not show PTSD symptoms in 2021. Conclusions: The authors conclude that Palestinian children, youth, adults and their families in the Gaza Strip are continually at a huge risk of developing PTSD and other psychological problems. This means that Palestinians will suffer for a long time from PTSD, which should be called Chronic Traumatic Stress Disorder (CTSD) rather than PTSD. This PTSD or CTSD cannot be changed unless the root of the problem is solved by ending the 74 years of living under occupation.Peer reviewe

Vegetation traits of pre-Alpine grasslands in southern Germany

The data set contains information on aboveground vegetation traits of > 100 georeferenced locations within ten temperate pre-Alpine grassland plots in southern Germany. The grasslands were sampled in April 2018 for the following traits: bulk canopy height; weight of fresh and dry biomass; dry weight percentage of the plant functional types (PFT) non-green vegetation, legumes, non-leguminous forbs, and graminoids; total green area index (GAI) and PFT-specific GAI; plant water content; plant carbon and nitrogen content (community values and PFT-specific values); as well as leaf mass per area (LMA) of PFT. In addition, a species specific inventory of the plots was conducted in June 2020 and provides plot-level information on grassland type and plant species composition. The data set was obtained within the framework of the SUSALPS project (“Sustainable use of alpine and pre-alpine grassland soils in a changing climate”; https://www.susalps.de/) to provide in-situ data for the calibration and validation of remote sensing based models to estimate grassland traits

How Can Bullying Victimisation Lead to Lower Academic Achievement? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Mediating Role of Cognitive-Motivational Factors

Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Bullying involvement may have an adverse effect on children’s educational outcomes, particularly academic achievement. However, the underlying mechanisms and factors behind this association are not well-understood. Previous meta-analyses have not investigated mediation factors between bullying and academic achievement. This meta-analysis examines the mediation effect of cognitive-motivational factors on the relationship between peer victimization and academic achievement. A systematic search was performed using specific search terms and search engines to identify relevant studies that were selected according to specific criteria resulting in 11 studies encompassing a sample total of 257,247 children (10 years and younger) and adolescents (11 years and older) (48–59% female). Some studies were longitudinal and some cross sectional and the assessment for each factor was performed by various methods (self, peer, teacher, school and mixed reports). Children involved in bullying behaviour were less likely to be academically engaged (k = 4) (OR = 0.571, 95% CI [0.43, 0.77], p = 0.000), to be less motivated (k = 7) (OR = 0.82, 95% CI [0.69, 0.97], p = 0.021), to have lower self-esteem (k = 1) (OR = 0.12, 95% CI [0.07, 0.20], p = 0.000) and lower academic achievement (k = 14) (OR = 0.62, 95% CI [0.49, 0.79], p = 0.000). Bullying involvement was also significantly related to overall cognitive-motivational factors (k = 17, OR = 0.67, 95% CI [0.59, 0.76], p = 0.000). Cognitive-motivational factors, taken together, mediated the association between bullying victimisation and academic achievement (k = 7, OR = 0.74, 95% CI (0.72, 0.77), p = 0.000). Bullying victimisation was negatively related to cognitive-motivational factors, which, in turn, was associated with poorer academic achievement. These findings were moderated by the design of the studies, assessment methods for the bullying reports, mediators and outcomes, country, age of children in the sample and/or types of bullying. The findings are of relevance for practitioners, parents, and schools, and can be used to guide bullying interventions. Interventions should focus on improving internal and external motivational factors including components of positive reinforcement, encouragement, and programs for enhancing academic engagement and achievement amongst children and adolescents.Qatar National Research Fun

Ransomware detection using deep learning based unsupervised feature extraction and a cost sensitive Pareto Ensemble classifier

Ransomware attacks pose a serious threat to Internet resources due to their far-reaching effects. It's Zero-day variants are even more hazardous, as less is known about them. In this regard, when used for ransomware attack detection, conventional machine learning approaches may become data-dependent, insensitive to error cost, and thus may not tackle zero-day ransomware attacks. Zero-day ransomware have normally unseen underlying data distribution. This paper presents a Cost-Sensitive Pareto Ensemble strategy, CSPE-R to detect novel Ransomware attacks. Initially, the proposed framework exploits the unsupervised deep Contractive Auto Encoder (CAE) to transform the underlying varying feature space to a more uniform and core semantic feature space. To learn the robust features, the proposed CSPE-R ensemble technique explores different semantic spaces at various levels of detail. Heterogeneous base estimators are then trained over these extracted subspaces to find the core relevance between the various families of the ransomware attacks. Then, a novel Pareto Ensemble-based estimator selection strategy is implemented to achieve a cost-sensitive compromise between false positives and false negatives. Finally, the decision of selected estimators are aggregated to improve the detection against unknown ransomware attacks. The experimental results show that the proposed CSPE-R framework performs well against zero-day ransomware attacks

Co-producing a digital educational programme for registered children’s nurses to improve care of children and young people admitted with self-harm

Despite the increasing prevalence of hospital admissions for self-harm in children and young people (CYP), there is paucity of registered children’s nurse (rCN) training or involvement of children to improve care for this often stigmatized patient group. This article describes a participatory approach towards using co-production with CYP and rCN to develop a digital educational programme to improve nurses’ knowledge, attitudes and confidence in caring for CYP with self-harm injuries. A priority-setting workshop with rCNs was used to establish consensus of information needs. This was followed by an e-learning content development workshop undertaken with CYP whom had previously experienced hospital admissions for self-harm injuries. Findings from the nurse priority-setting workshop identified three educational priorities: (1) knowledge of self-harm, (2) effective communication and (3) risk management. The CYP subsequently developed these topic areas to ensure the contents and design of the e-learning resource had fidelity by reflecting the experiences of CYP and needs when cared for in hospital. This article illustrates that involving service users to co-develop educational materials is a feasible and important step in designing educational resources and ensures the content is relevant, appropriate and sensitive to both the recipient of care and those responsible for its delivery

Practitioners’ perceptions, attitudes, and challenges around bullying and cyberbullying

© 2020 The Author(s). Practitioners’ perceptions and understanding of bullying in schools is vital and can help to tackle bullying. The aim of this study is to investigate perceptions, attitudes, and challenges towards bullying amongst 135 practitioners (psychologists, social-workers, and medical professionals) (56.9% women; mostly aged 26-50 years) in Qatar. The practitioners answered self-report questionnaires on the definition, causes, and consequences of bullying as well as the presence of bullying and anti-bullying policies at their workplace. The findings revealed that practitioners have a clear understanding of the definition, causes, and consequences of bullying and recognise bullying and cyberbullying as a problem in Qatari students. Higher bullying knowledge and experience were related to higher perception of bullying as a problematic behaviour, better identification of bullying characteristics, more support of anti-bullying laws, and more bullying guidelines in their workplace. There is a great need for practitioner training in issues concerning bullying and to design suitable anti-bullying policies and interventions in schools.Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), National Priority Research Programmes (NPRP5 - 1134 - 3 - 240)https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/6512