Occupied childhoods: discourses and politics of childhood and their place in Palestinian and Pan-­Arab screen content for children

This thesis explores changing discourses of childhood and the ways in which power relations intersect with socio-cultural norms to shape screen-based media for Palestinian children. Situated within the interdisciplinary study of childhood, the research is an institutional and textual analysis that includes discursive and micro-level analysis of the socio-political circumstances within which children consume media in present-day Palestine. The thesis takes a social constructionist view, arguing that ‘childhood’ is not a fixed universal concept and that discourses of childhood are produced at specific historical moments as an effect of power. The study has a three-part research agenda. The first section uses secondary literature to explore theories and philosophies relating to definitions of childhood in Arab societies. The second employs participant observation and semi-structured interviews to understand the history and politics of children’s media in the West Bank. The final part of the research activity focuses on the impact that definitions of childhood and the politics of children’s media have on broadcasting outcomes through an analysis of (a) discourses on children’s media that circulate in Palestinian society, and (b) local and pan-Arab cultural texts consumed by Palestinian children. The analysis demonstrates that complex ideological and political factors are at play, which has led to the marginalisation, politicisation and internationalisation of local production for children. Due to the lack of alternatives, local producers often rely on international funding, and are hence forced to negotiate competing definitions of childhood, which while fitting with an international agenda of normalising the Israeli occupation, conflict culturally and politically with local conceptions of childhood and hopes for the Palestinian nation. While the Palestinian community appreciates the positive potential of local production, discourses and strategies around children’s media show that Palestinian children are constructed as vulnerable, incomplete and in constant need of guidance. Pan-Arab content presents a slightly less didactic approach and in certain cases presents childhood as a dynamic space of empowerment. However, by constructing children as ‘consumercitizens’, it alienates Arab (and Palestinian) children from disadvantaged backgrounds,as the preferred audience is middle-class children living in oil-rich countries of the Gulf

The case for validating ADDIE model as a digital forensic model for peer to peer network investigation

Rapid technological advancement can substantially impact the processes of digital forensic investigation and present a myriad of challenges to the investigator. With these challenges, it is necessary to have a standard digital forensic framework as the foundation of any digital investigation. State-of-the-art digital forensic models assume that it is safe to move from one investigation stage to the next. It guides the investigators with the required steps and procedures. This brings a great stride to validate a non-specific framework to be used in most digital investigation procedures. This paper considers a new technique for detecting active peers that participate in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. As part of our study, we crawled the μTorrent P2P client over ten days in different instances while logging all participating peers. We then employed digital forensic techniques to analyse the popular users and generate evidence within them with high accuracy. We evaluated our approach against the standard Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) model for the digital investigation to achieve the credible digital evidence presented in this paper. Finally, we presented a validation case for the ADDIE model using the United States Daubert Test and the United Kingdom’s Forensic Science Regulator Guidance – 218 (FSR-G-218) and Forensic Science Regulator Guidance – 201 (FSR-G-201) to formulate it as a standard digital forensic model

Neural Toxicology and Pathology of Domoic Acid

Domoic acid is a potent neurotoxin when intake via contaminated seafood in bulk quantity, results in neural tissue necrosis. It caused an outbreak of human poisoning in Canada in 1987 by the consumption of contaminated blue mussels (Mytilus edulis), produced by red alga Chondria armataand and the genus Pseudo nitzschia. Domoic acid targets the glutamate receptors and the poisoning was characterized by memory impairment and brain disorders which led to the name Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning (ASP). Domoic acid has intoxicated wild animals and contaminated coastal waters since the 1987 incident. Hence it poses a global health and safety threat to significant human and wild animal lives populated at the shorelines. The present review aims to extend the understandings of ASP, DA induced toxicology and pathology which are critical for human health and wildlife safety. Keywords: Domoic Acid, Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning, Neurotoxicology, Neuropathology

A reinforcement learning-based approach for imputing missing data

Missing data is a major problem in real-world datasets, which hinders the performance of data analytics. Conventional data imputation schemes such as univariate single imputation replace missing values in each column with the same approximated value. These univariate single imputation techniques underestimate the variance of the imputed values. On the other hand, multivariate imputation explores the relationships between different columns of data, to impute the missing values. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a machine learning paradigm where the agent learns by taking actions and receiving rewards in response, to achieve its goal. In this work, we propose an RL-based approach to impute missing data by learning a policy to impute data through an action-reward-based experience. Our approach imputes missing values in a column by working only on the same column (similar to univariate single imputation) but imputes the missing values in the column with different values thus keeping the variance in the imputed values. We report superior performance of our approach, compared with other imputation techniques, on a number of datasets

Knowledge, attitude and perceptions about tetanus and rabies among family physicians; results of a survey at a teaching hospital in karachi, pakistan

To assess the knowledge, attitude and perception among family physicians about tetanus and rabies. Setting: This study was conducted at the International Family Physicians Conference held at the Aga Khan University. Method: It was a cross sectional study of convenient sampling. The participants were asked to fill a pre-tested questionnaire comprising of 26 questions. Both open and close ended questions were included. A total of 111 doctors fulfilling the inclusion criteria filled in the questionnaire.Result: Out of 111 doctors who participated in this study, vast majority were working in the urban area (86.5%). 59.5% had not seen a case of tetanus and 71% had not seen a case of rabies in the preceding 6 months. Only 37% would use both tetanus toxoid and tetanus immunoglobulin in case of a dirty wound; 30% would administer tetanus toxoid and anti-tetanus serum in such a case. About 65% knew the current recommendation on rabies vaccination whereas 58% knew the correct post-exposure prophylaxis in case of suspected rabies.Conclusion: The level of knowledge about tetanus and rabies was clearly found to be deficient. More than half of the doctors enrolled in the study did not show correct knowledge on tetanus and rabies vaccination. The reasons for these deficiencies in knowledge appear to be inadequate teaching about these important diseases in the medical school. In addition, lack of reading habit and non-availability of continuous medical education programmes at the government level also contributes

Pemetaan Sistem Penyediaan Air Minum (Spam) Cabang Barat Kota Semarang Berbasis Webgis Menggunakan Software Mapserver

One of the obstacles faced by PDAM Tirta Moedal, Semarang is SPAM network maps that can only be accessed through Mapinfo software and the lack of availability of facilities such as program / licensed applications that can be used as a tool to support these services . One alternative that is done to overcome it is the use of applications that are open source ( OS ).Geographic Information System ( GIS ) is defined as an information system that is used to input , store , retrieve, manipulate , analyze and output geographically referenced data or geospatial data , to support decision making in the planning and management of land use , natural resources , environment, transportation , municipal facilities , and other public services

Mixed-Criticality Scheduling with Dynamic Redistribution of Shared Cache

The design of mixed-criticality systems often involves painful tradeoffs between safety guarantees and performance. However, the use of more detailed architectural models in the design and analysis of scheduling arrangements for mixed-criticality systems can provide greater confidence in the analysis, but also opportunities for better performance. Motivated by this view, we propose an extension of Vestal\u27s model for mixed-criticality multicore systems that (i) accounts for the per-task partitioning of the last-level cache and (ii) supports the dynamic reassignment, for better schedulability, of cache portions initially reserved for lower-criticality tasks to the higher-criticality tasks, when the system switches to high-criticality mode. To this model, we apply partitioned EDF scheduling with Ekberg and Yi\u27s deadline-scaling technique. Our schedulability analysis and scalefactor calculation is cognisant of the cache resources assigned to each task, by using WCET estimates that take into account these resources. It is hence able to leverage the dynamic reconfiguration of the cache partitioning, at mode change, for better performance, in terms of provable schedulability. We also propose heuristics for partitioning the cache in low- and high-criticality mode, that promote schedulability. Our experiments with synthetic task sets, indicate tangible improvements in schedulability compared to a baseline cache-aware arrangement where there is no redistribution of cache resources from low- to high-criticality tasks in the event of a mode change