Cancer Incidence in Egypt: Results of the National Population-Based Cancer Registry Program

Background. This paper aims to present cancer incidence rates at national and regional level of Egypt, based upon results of National Cancer Registry Program (NCRP). Methods. NCRP stratified Egypt into 3 geographical strata: lower, middle, and upper. One governorate represented each region. Abstractors collected data from medical records of cancer centers, national tertiary care institutions, Health Insurance Organization, Government-Subsidized Treatment Program, and death records. Data entry was online. Incidence rates were calculated at a regional and a national level. Future projection up to 2050 was also calculated. Results. Age-standardized incidence rates per 100,000 were 166.6 (both sexes), 175.9 (males), and 157.0 (females). Commonest sites were liver (23.8%), breast (15.4%), and bladder (6.9%) (both sexes): liver (33.6%) and bladder (10.7%) among men, and breast (32.0%) and liver (13.5%) among women. By 2050, a 3-fold increase in incident cancer relative to 2013 was estimated. Conclusion. These data are the only available cancer rates at national and regional levels of Egypt. The pattern of cancer indicated the increased burden of liver cancer. Breast cancer occupied the second rank. Study of rates of individual sites of cancer might help in giving clues for preventive programs

Palestinians in Lebanon: Chains of Misery (Bound by the Law and the Market)

Insecurity and instability could be general characteristics attributable to a large part of the Palestinian Diaspora, but the unique situation prevailing in Lebanon deserves to be given particular attention. This is because the degree of political, economic and social exclusion towards Palestinians is unique in its extent which in turn creates an ambiguous status quo for Palestinians; from which the present difficulties arise. This ambiguity serves to create a legislative vacuum, which in turn leads to the absence of a foundation for a clear relationship between both the Palestinians and the Lebanese. By discussing the current status of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon it is impossible to overlook the grave conditions that most refugees find themselves living in. This research focuses on Lebanese labour laws and how these serve to further stifle the livelihood of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. It will be argued that the ministerial memorandum of June 2005, which granted Palestinians the right to work in some professions which were previously forbidden, in reality serves only to generate false hope as it will not have a meaningful effect in ameliorating the living conditions of Palestinians. Firstly, a historical overview on Palestinians in Lebanon serves as an important pre-requisite for understanding the factors which led to today’s complicated scenario. Though not comprehensive in its coverage, the section below aims to highlight certain events of relevance to the topic of this research amidst an otherwise saturated and intricate relationship between both the Lebanese and the Palestinians

On the Reliability of ODMRP in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In response to the important role that multicasting plays in wireless mobile multihop ad hoc networks, we study in this paper the reliability of the On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP) in terms of the delivery of data packets. Using GloMoSim 2.0, the simulation results have shown that using ODMRP, the average miss ratio does not always increase with increasing the speeds of mobility of the mobile hosts in the ad hoc network. Instead, there is a "sweet spot" of values of the mobility speeds of the mobile hosts. In addition, the average miss ratio decreases with increasing the number of multicast group members, which indicates that ODMRP has more packet delivery capabilities for denser multicast groups

Assessing call centers’ success:

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is becoming one of the most growing industries in 21st Century and a significant workforce in the global economy. Revolution in telecommunications, free trade agreements, and cultural behavior in a number of developing countries paved the way for the growth of BPO industry. Technology based BPO services are those services provided by Call centers, services that vary from receiving simple phone calls, to marketing services, sales services, and up to remote diagnosis and technical support services. This paper introduces a model to evaluate the performance of call centers based on the Delone and McLean Information Systems success model. A number of indicators are identified to track the call center’s performance. Mapping of the proposed indicators to the six dimensions of the D&M model is presented. A Weighted Call Center Performance Index is proposed to assess the call center performance; the index is used to analyze the effect of the identified indicators. Policy-Weighted approach was used to assume the weights with an analysis of different weights for each dimension. The analysis of the different weights cases gave priority to the User satisfaction and net Benefits dimension as the two outcomes from the system. For the input dimensions, higher priority was given to the system quality and the service quality dimension. Call centers decision makers can use the tool to tune the different weights in order to reach the objectives set by the organization. Multiple linear regression analysis was used in order to provide a linear formula for the User Satisfaction dimension and the Net Benefits dimension in order to be able to forecast the values for these two dimensions as function of the other dimension

Information systems performance evaluation, introducing a two-level technique: Case study call centers

With the emergence of Information and Communication technologies, and the relatively cheap cost of calls (voice and data), the use of call centers to provide new services to citizens has grown extensively. Evolution in call centers technologies, systems and infrastructures allowed the transformation of industries and services in big enterprises and organizations, customer support services, marketing services and after sales support are examples of such transformations. The objective of this paper was to introduce a new technique that can support decision makers in the call centers industry to evaluate, and analyze the performance of call centers. The technique presented is derived from the research done on measuring the success or failure of information systems. Two models are mainly adopted namely: the Delone and Mclean model first introduced in 1992 and the Design Reality Gap model introduced by Heeks in 2002. Two indices are defined to calculate the performance of the call center; the success index and the Gap Index. An evaluation tool has been developed to allow call centers managers to evaluate the performance of their call centers in a systematic analytical approach; the tool was applied on 4 call centers from different areas, simple applications such as food ordering, marketing, and sales, technical support systems, to more real time services such as the example of emergency control systems. Results showed the importance of using information systems models to evaluate complex systems as call centers. The models used allow identifying the dimensions for the call centers that are facing challenges, together with an identification of the individual indicators in these dimensions that are causing the poor performance of the call center

ReMHoc: A Reliable Multicast Protocol for Wireless

In this paper, a reliable multicast protocol for wireless mobile multihop ad hoc networks (ReMHoc) is proposed. ReMHoc ensures the eventual delivery of the multicast data to all the multicast group members. ReMHoc is receiverinitiated NACK-based and it makes use of feedback suppression in order to avoid negative acknowledgement (NACK) and retransmission implosion. The loss recovery burden is distributed over the multicast group members in order to reduce recovery latency and end-to-end delay. Simulations (using GloMoSim 2.0) have demonstrated the scalability of ReMHoc

World Scientific Publishing Company Machine Translation of English Noun Phrases into Arabic

The present work reports our attempt in automating the translation of English noun phrase (NP) into Arabic. Translating NP is a very important task toward sentence translation since NPs form the majority of textual content of the scientific and technical documents. The system is implemented in Prolog and the parser is written in DCG formalism. The paper also describes our experience with the developed MT system and reports results of its application on real titles of theses from the computer science domain

Prediction of Post-Cardiopulmonary Bypass Cardiac Output by Venous Oximetry

The present study evaluates two equations for predicting the post-cardiopulmonary bypass cardiac output (CO) in 10 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting. One equation is based on the relationship of CO with mixed venous oxygen saturation (SVO2), while the second equation is based on the relationship with oxygen extraction (1 - SVO2). Each patient served as his own control. During bypass, when the patients were normothermic and perfused with a pump flow of 2.4 L/min/m2, the SVO2 was monitored by an in-line Bentley oxystat Meter. Just before termination of bypass, the pump flow was decreased to 0.4 L/min/m2 and the left atrial pressure was increased to 10-15 mmHg; the resulting SVO2 was recorded. The post-bypass CO was predicted in every patient by the two equations. Immediately after weaning from bypass, the cardiac output was measured by thermodilution. The thermodilutional CO measurement was correlated with the CO predicted by the two equations. Correlation analysis suggests that CO prediction is more accurate and approaches the 1:1 ratio when the calculation of predicted CO is based on the relationship between cardiac output and oxygen extraction