Saudi Arabia’s Solar and Wind Energy Penetration:Future Performance and Requirements

Saudi Arabia fully depends on fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas to generate its electricity. Fossil fuels may have limited life and a history of fluctuating costs, which will lead to multiple issues that can affect the energy security of this country in the long-term. Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) is a concept different to “energy security”, which must consider the solar and wind energy as basic sources of energy supplies in Saudi Arabia. Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) and Brownian Motion (BM) approaches were employed to predict the future behaviour of solar and wind energy, along with long-term temperature performance, based on 69 years of historical daily data. MCS and BM were employed to provide a wide range of options for future prediction results. A validation exercise showed that the north-western region was the most highly recommended region for deployment of solar and wind energy applications due to an abundance of solar and wind energy resources with low temperature supported by a clearer sky during the year. This is followed by the southern region, which exhibited good solar and wind energy resources. This study can be considered as a roadmap to meet the climate and sustainability goals by providing a long-term overview of solar energy, wind energy, and temperature performance in some countries that have a lack of long-term future prediction analysis such as Saudi Arabia

Impact of E-Marketing on Consumer Buying Behavior

In this modern and mechanized world the businesses area doping a number of tools and techniques for marketing. However all the tools are deriving results but the most updated method of marketing is the electronic marketing. It is the method of marketing that derives more target customers as compared to the other techniques. Researchers have sown that since the technology has updated and today the customers are aware of the technology. The customers are more interested in the social media websites and the applications. Hence these applications have becomea good spot of advertisements and promotion. Similarly the search engines are offering adds policy that derives the customers in thebusiness and ultimately maximizes the revenues for the business

Extra-oral appliances in orthodontic treatment

Extra-oral appliances are used in orthodontics to apply forces to the jaws, dentition or both and the popularity of these appliances is cyclical. Although the use of retraction headgear for the management of Class II malocclusion has declined over the last 20 years with the refinement of non-compliance approaches, including temporary anchorage devices, headgear still has a useful role in orthodontics. The use of protraction headgear has increased as more evidence of its effectiveness for the treatment of Class III malocclusion has become available. This paper describes the mechanics and contemporary uses of headgear in orthodontics for primary care dentists and specialist orthodontists. CPD/Clinical Relevance: Extra-oral appliances have specific uses in orthodontic biomechanics. Clinicians using retraction headgear and protraction headgear should be familiar with their clinical indications, the potential problems and how these can be avoided. </jats:p

Animal species classification using machine learning techniques

Animals recognition is one of the research areas in which few effective technologies have been proposed, especially in the predator animals' domain. Predator animals present a great danger to people who are camping or staying in outdoor areas and they are also a menace to livestock. In this paper, a multiple feature detection of predator animals is proposed. This method focuses on the face of the animal, explicitly the eyes and the ears. A database was created by collecting the features of ears and eyes from 10 animals and an experiment was conducted using machine learning techniques such as SVM and MLP to classify them as predators or pets. The evaluation results achieved the classification accuracies of 82% for MLP and 78% for SVM, which justify its effectiveness for the proposed method

The use of globotriaosylsphingosine to detect and monitor Fabry Disease

Fabry disease (FD) is an X-linked lysosomal storage disorder caused by a deficiency of the α-galactosidase-A (α-gal-A) enzyme. The lack of enzymatic activity results in the accumulation of glycosphingolipids (GSLs) in the lysosomes of various tissues and organs. Globotriaosylceramide (Gb3) and Globotriaosylsphingosine (Lyso-Gb3) and their isoforms/analogues have been identified and quantified as potential biomarkers. This study aimed to develop an HPLC-MS based method for the quantitation of plasma and urinary Lyso-Gb3 and its analogues in Fabry patients to evaluate its utility in diagnosis and monitoring FD. The results showed that plasma Lyso-Gb3 as a reliable diagnostic biomarker for FD, as plasma Lyso-Gb3 levels could easily discern classical Fabry patients from controls. Moreover, plasma Lyso-Gb3 could also distinguish male cardiac variant Fabry patients from control males. Nevertheless, cardiac variant Fabry females showed an overlap of Lyso-Gb3 levels with controls, hence a positive value in this group would be considered diagnostic but a negative value could not exclude FD. In a small cohort of our patients on ERT there was a trend towards falling Lyso-Gb3 levels with time suggesting that Lyso-Gb3 has a potential value in monitoring these patients. Urinary Lyso-Gb3 levels were substantially different between classical and cardiac variant Fabry patients, and the lack of detectable urinary Lyso-Gb3 and analogues in controls allowed us to differentiate between these patients and healthy controls. The total levels of urinary Lyso-Gb3 and its analogues proved particularly useful in differentiating between classical and atypical Fabry patients of both genders. In the course of the study, a novel rapid MALDI-TOF-MS based Method for measuring urinary Gb3 in Fabry patients has been established. Collectively, the final findings demonstrate that urinary Lyso-Gb3 is superior to urinary Gb3 as a diagnostic biomarker for FD, where the later has been shown to be found in healthy subjects. Our study subsequently led to development of regional laboratory service for testing Lyso-Gb3 in Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, UK. This service is now open to Fabry patients across England. In conclusion both plasma and urinary Lyso-Gb3 levels are useful diagnostic and monitoring biomarker in classical and cardiac variant males patients, but have questionable utility in cardiac variant females due to overlap with healthy controls. Although we studied the role of Lyso-Gb3 in diagnosing FD further studies are needed to establish its role in disease severity assessment and a larger study required to test our initial finding related to monitoring disease in patients on treatment

The Translation and Translation Verification of the PIRLS Reading Questionnaires for Saudi Students

When translating psychological measures from their original language to another language, after translation an assumption is made that the measurement assesses the same construct(s) in the original language and for those in the group of the translated language. If this assumption is not met, a translation problem occured and then the measurements are not comparable across cultures because they are not assessing the same variables. This study investigated the quality and accuracy of select variable translations of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) for Saudi Arabian students. This study only focused on the quality of translation of three reading affective constructs (reading motivation, reading attitude, and reading confidence). In their translation and verification procedures, the IEA used the Expert Translation Method (ETM, Mullis et al., 2009); they did not use a common method (given citations here) known as Backward Translation Method (BTM, from English to Arabic and then from Arabic to English) as a step of translation validity from English to the Arabic language. This investigation conducted the Backward Translation Method as a step of validation to evaluate whether the final Arabic PIRLS affective scales version were the same for those three constructs. After comparing between the IEA ETM translation version and the BM translation version, the researcher found that certain items were translated by the IEA ETM for Saudi students were above their level of reading understanding and thus comprehension while other items were not semantically equivalent. Results of this study advise researchers to proceed with caution as some attitudinal affective items are not comparable across the two cultures and not within the Saudi culture

Skeleton based gait recognition for long and baggy clothes

Human gait is a significant biometric feature used for the identification of people by their style of walking. Gait offers recognition from a distance at low resolution while requiring no user interaction. On the other hand, other biometrics are likely to require a certain level of interaction. In this paper, a human gait recognition method is presented to identify people who are wearing long baggy clothes like Thobe and Abaya. Microsoft Kinect sensor is used as a tool to establish a skeleton based gait database. The skeleton joint positions are obtained and used to create five different datasets. Each dataset contained different combination of joints to explore their effectiveness. An evaluation experiment was carried out with 20 walking subjects, each having 25 walking sequences in total. The results achieved good recognition rates up to 97%