Charity and Nationalism: The Case of ‘Abd Allah al-Nadim’s Islamic Philanthropic Society

My paper argues that charity can be used as a lens to examine nationalism. Due to the transformation of the institution of charity in late nineteenth-century Egypt new charities were developed. In the nineteenth century charity was changing due to the state centralization policies of Mehmed ‘Ali (r. 1805-48), who founded state-run shelters and soup kitchens and enacted prohibitions against begging. Later because of decentralization policies under Said Pasha (r.1854-1863) and Khedive Ismail (r.1863-1879), there was a move away from state control of charity, and the gradual erection of a number of private charitable associations that aimed to help the “public” poor. I look at how the evolving nineteenth-century institutions of charity, both changes under Mehmed ‘Ali and later under his successors, differed from the “pre-modern” period. Is nineteenth-century charity similar to early charity, in particular the ‘awqaf (endowments) of Mamluk elites that became a symbol of the rulers’ beneficence? What did donation and beneficence mean in late nineteenth-century Egypt? And did the new charitable associations of the late nineteenth century, that were not an individual endowment (waqf) or state-controlled charity, begin to use their power of beneficence to improve the social conditions of people with the goal to mold a particular type of Egyptian citizen? This connection between charity and the modeling of a better citizen will constitute a central theme of my argument. My research concentrates on one Islamic charity created around the period of the 1881-2 ‘Urabi revolution, which are the years that are considered as the coming of age of the Egyptian nationalist movement. As such, my project’s periodization falls between 1879 and 1892 in order to obtain a detailed picture of charity within the early Egyptian nationalist movement. It focuses on the Islamic Philanthropic Society (IPS), founded in 1879, by ‘Abd Allah al-Nadim. The IPS was a nationalist organization, where both Egyptian territorial nationalism and Islamic nationalism were at work, with a mission to educate young poor Egyptians against what was perceived to be a growing foreign hegemony caused by the British occupation. Specifically, I will study how the IPS evolved, how its charity was donated, how it was received and perceived by its recipients in the late nineteenth century. My work expands on the current literature by looking at the connections between charity and nationalism, rather than looking specifically at the school/education side of the IPS alone. Instead of the individual contributing for themselves, or establishing their own endowment, like the many waqfs created to fund a madrassa or a kuttab, the new charitable associations of the late nineteenth century could be erected as joint charitable ventures, working not only for spiritual “reward,” but for the betterment of citizens

Autonomous Small Scale Data-logger for Temperature Mapping

Modern manufacturing processes require minimal human intervention and a high degree of automation to meet industry demands. Due to variability in industrial process conditions, custom systems are often sought for these applications. These systems must be compact, economical, and capable of operating under different environmental conditions. This work presents the development, fabrication, testing, and validation of a low cost small scale temperature data-logger used as a monitoring system for automated applications. The proposed system is battery powered and packaged in a manner able to operate in temperatures up to 100oC, with exposure to chemicals such as Isopropyl Alcohol, Propylene Glycol, and De-Ionized water for a period of 2 hours with accuracy of ±0.5oC. The hydration process used for contact lens manufacturing is proposed as a target application for the developed system. The developed system was bench top tested and validated using a convection oven and the three chemicals Propylene Glycol, Isopropyl Alcohol, and De-ionized Water. In addition, the system was tested “in-situ” in the hydration lines of a contact lens manufacturing process. The development process illustrated in this work including the system design, fabrication, and testing can be used as a base to develop the “best fit” monitoring system for multiple other applications

WIRELESS OFFSHORE PLATFORM STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING

Oil platforms are known for their operation in dangerous environments. The most recent technology adapted is the unmanned platform which is a remotely operated platform without any workers on the platform during the operation to lessen the losses occurs in the platforms. To ensure the safety and the reliability of the new platforms a safety monitoring system is required to be developed. In this report, a new structural health and safety monitoring system for unmanned platforms is proposed and developed. The objectives of the project are to develop a system which processes electrical signals to represent structural parameters, develop the proper communication between different parts of the system and test the feasibility of the system. The new system integrates microprocessor technologies and communication technologies to meet the objectives of the proposed system. The project focused on testing the proper connection between the microprocessor and the measuring devices, and studying and simulating the wireless and underwater communication. The system was tested using strain gages to measure strain and half-cell to measure corrosion. The readings obtained were validated against commercial acquisition systems. The results show the efficiency of the system in different applications to measure different structural parameters. The underwater transmission was simulated using OMNET++. The simulation results show low efficiency of acoustic communication which requires further study and investigation

Harvesting Energy of Radio Frequency

Renewable Energy sources are the center of attraction for research and development all over the world nowadays. Oil and Gas are no more the main source of Energy, consequently the demand of a lasting cheap source of energy that is environmental friendly, is the main challenge recently. During the last decade, power consumption has decreased opening the field for energy harvesting to become a real time solution for providing different sources of electrical power. Energy Harvesting is a new technology that is going to make a revolution in the coming decade. Energy Harvesting is a technique to provide alternative sources of energy that are environmental friendly and low in cost. Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting is one of the methods to provide electrical energy from the ambient Radio Frequency Energy that already exists in the environment. For example Hand phones can be directly charged from Radio frequencies in the environment like 915 MHz. Laptops can be charged by frequencies like 2.45 GHz. RFID passive tags can be powered by these radio frequencies without the supply of any batteries increasing the range of passive RFID tags to longer distances with lower cost. Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting can provide a world with batteryless devices. With RF Energy Harvesting, the true mobility can be achieved where mobile devices do not depend on centralized power sources for charging. Instead they make use of the existing energy in the environment

Comparison of multiplex reverse transcription-PCR-enzyme hybridization assay with immunofluorescence techniques for the detection of four viral respiratory pathogens in pediatric community acquired pneumonia

The burden of illness due to viral respiratory pathogens in the pediatric population is increasingly being recognized. Children are considered among the groups at highest risk for viral pneumonia-associated morbidity and mortality. Clinical discrimination between different causative agents is extremely difficult. The main problems have been the lack of ‘gold standard’ method for obtaining viral etiology (Liolios et al., 2001). We believe that the identification of these viruses as causes of respiratory disease in these patients is the first step in determining how frequently they may cause serious problems and, hence, how hard we should push with accepted treatments. In this study, our aim was to compare between two modalities for diagnosis of viral illness among children with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). Multiplex reverse transcription-PCR-enzyme hybridization assay and immunofluorescence antigen detection techniques for the detection of four viral respiratory pathogens (Influenza viruses A & B and Respiratory Syncitial Viruses A & B) were targeted to evaluate their diagnostic yield for these patients in our study. Among 56 respiratory samples were evaluated from children with clinical and radiological criteria of CAP; twenty-one patients had viral pneumonia proved by multiplex RT-PCR and/or IF technique with disease prevalence 35% (95% CI: 23:49). All 21 specimens were positive by multiplex RT-PCR, while 20 out of them were positive by IF. All results showed no discordance of detected viral pathogen. Initial comparison of IF results to those of RT-PCR generated a sensitivity 100% (95% CI: 83:100), a specificity 97.2% (95% CI: 85:99.9), a positive predictive value 95% (95% CI: 23:49.6), and a negative predictive value of 100% (95% CI: 74:99).Conclusion: Multiplex reverse transcription PCR has an excellent potentials for diagnosis of viral pneumonia with a cost effective advantage in assessing simultaneously multiple clinically significant viruses. Rapid antigen tests for diagnosis of variable respiratory viruses, can be useful in etiological diagnosis of community acquired lower respiratory tract infection as well specially with the proved high sensitivity and predectivity in our study

Hyperchaos in acetylcholinesterase enzyme systems

Burst generation via a complex bifurcation scenario is discussed using a two compartments model of an enzyme system with substrate inhibition kinetics affected by the production of hydrogen ions accompanying the reaction (e.g. acetylcholinesterase enzyme system). Evidences are given to support the existence of homoclinicity associated with this complex dynamics, including the generalised criterion developed by Rossler et al. [1] for the application of Sil'nikov's theorem in the case of four-dimensional systems. Complex bi-stabilities are observed in certain regions, and the structure of some attracting sets occurring near homoclinic orbits are discussed. The results support the use of such fundamental models for different dynamical modes generation and analysis. The results relate to the transition of small and large frequency oscillations to periodic bursting and vice versa in excitable cells and many biophysical systems

Hidden fuzzy Markov chain model with K discrete classes

International audienceThis paper deals with a new unsupervised fuzzy Bayesian segmentation method based on the hidden Markov chain model, in order to separate continuous from discrete components in the hidden data. We present a new F-HMC (fuzzy hidden Markov chain) related to three hard classes, based on a general extension of the previously algorithms proposed. For a given observation, the hidden variable owns a density according to a measure containing Dirac and Lebesgue components. We have performed our approach in the multispectral context. The hyper-parameters are estimated using a Stochastic Expectation Maximization (SEM) algorithm. We present synthetic simulations and also segmentation results related to real multi-band data

Casing Failure Analysis for API N-80 Grade in Sudanese Thermal Oil Recovery Production Wells: Case Study

Implementation of the Cyclic Steam Stimulation (CSS) and Steam Flooding as thermally Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods increase the commercial value of the existence Field through increasing oil recovery and field extension. When the steam is generated, processed and injected with high peak temperature into shallow wells (total depth of 700m) for oil recovery, it may result in high thermally induced stresses, which might exceed its design limit of the material and lead directly to the plastic deformation in the casing and thread connection. The objective of this paper is to premineraly investigate and analyze the reasons behind the casing failure in some well candidates at Fula North East (FNE) thermal oilfield based on the analytical analysis targeting the related structural and operational aspects of these applications. There are several casing failures have been reported; but so far no enough evident to correlate these failures to the mentioned stresses. Therefore, Ensuring adequate structural integrity and seal ability of the connections over the full service life of a thermal recovery well is a significant challenge. In this work, the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) on premineraly manner has been used through correlation of the problem to casing’s grade and materials, cement formulation, sand production and steam injection parameters and thermal insulation process, by using step by step methodology. The results show that some supporting measures are recommended in order to minimize the casing damage and extend the life time of the thermal wells in FNE oil field. The above mentioned methodology has been used as the first time in Sudan to analyze casing failure in thermal oilfield