The Entanglement of Class, Marriage and Real Estate: The Visual Culture of Egypt’s Urbanisation

A majority of scholars consider Egypt’s urban development a product of the neo-liberal political economy facilitated by the country’s central government. In this article, we want to shift our attention towards the public and its demand for housing. We describe the urban everyday experiences of a population within a country in which a visual culture established via public media creates an urban imagination that does not reflect the lived social, spatial, and economic reality of the majority of the population. Exploration of the general public’s attitudes towards media narratives that focus their advertisement campaigns on high class residential projects launched this investigation. The argument that follows is based on empirical studies within the Greater Cairo Region (GCR). In this setting, a puzzling trend from our collected data guides our central research question: Why aren’t ads for luxury housing—a market segment clearly beyond the reach of most Egyptians—condemned by those who cannot afford it? To tackle this phenomenon, we shed light on how the pre—and post-marital demand for housing among young couples and their families influence the market, and particularly, the market for upscale and luxury housing in Cairo. The research consists of four phases, including (1) field interviews with Uber and Careem drivers, (2) an online survey targeting inhabitants across varying urban and social segments of the GCR, (3) the first author’s personal story, which posits that marriage culture acts as a key driver for real estate narratives, and (4) a visual analysis of a real estate advertisement. To conclude, the article discusses how far a hegemonic visual culture that caters to socio-economic links between class, marriage, and real estate engages the support of a large part of the population, which in turn, co-produces a spatially unjust urban development scheme that works against their own interests

The Effectiveness of a Program Based on Augmented Reality in Developing Some Scientific Concepts and Science Skills for a Kindergarten Child

The purpose of the study was to determine the effectiveness of the program based on augmented reality technology in developing some scientific concepts (The Vertebrates), and basic science skills observation - classification - thinking - conclusion - prediction - communication for kindergarten children, and to verify the relationship between the development of basic science skills, and the development of scientific concepts in the kindergarten child. The researchers chose Al-Faisaliah School Kindergarten - 6th of October City to carry out the program to (64) children; they were separated into two groups: an experimental group of (32) children and a control group of (32) children. The researchers used the Scale of scientific concepts, the Scale of basic science skills, and the form for observing the basic science skills of the kindergarten child - prepared by researchers - to reveal the effectiveness of the program. The quasi- experimental design was chosen due to its appropriateness to the topic of the study., The results resulted in a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the children of the experimental and control groups on the scientific concepts scale in favor of the children of the experimental group. In favor of the children of the experimental group after applying the program; This indicates the effectiveness of the program. the results revealed a direct correlation between the development of basic science skills, and the scientific concepts of the kindergarten child. The research concluded with many recommendations for curriculum developers, program designers, kindergarten stakeholders, and proposals were made for further study

本邦におけるステロイド治療による心サルコイドーシスの予後に関する研究

Tohoku University下川宏明課

Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Mixture of Orthogonal Experts

Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) tackles the long-standing problem of endowing agents with skills that generalize across a variety of problems. To this end, sharing representations plays a fundamental role in capturing both unique and common characteristics of the tasks. Tasks may exhibit similarities in terms of skills, objects, or physical properties while leveraging their representations eases the achievement of a universal policy. Nevertheless, the pursuit of learning a shared set of diverse representations is still an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for representation learning in MTRL that encapsulates common structures among the tasks using orthogonal representations to promote diversity. Our method, named Mixture Of Orthogonal Experts (MOORE), leverages a Gram-Schmidt process to shape a shared subspace of representations generated by a mixture of experts. When task-specific information is provided, MOORE generates relevant representations from this shared subspace. We assess the effectiveness of our approach on two MTRL benchmarks, namely MiniGrid and MetaWorld, showing that MOORE surpasses related baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art result on MetaWorld.Comment: Under revie

Health Justice: The Entanglement of Quality of Life and Neoliberalism

Covid 19 pandemic sheds light on the entanglement of urban planning and public health in neoliberal urban contexts with special attention to justice. “Good health and wellbeing” is one of the sustainable development goals. This article argues that neoliberal urban practices result in a good Quality of Life for privileged populations, but negatively affect the vulnerable and lead to health injustice from the perspective of urban planning. Hence, Quality of Life is negatively affected since health is a crucial aspect within the discipline of Quality of Life. The spatial determinants of health-related Quality of Life are essential to be considered when speaking about justice in cities. This article aims to promote health through raising awareness of these spatial determinants and suggesting some recommendations aiming for the prevalence of health justice

Health Justice: The Entanglement of Quality of Life and Neoliberalism

Covid 19 pandemic sheds light on the entanglement of urban planning and public health in neoliberal urban contexts with special attention to justice. “Good health and wellbeing” is one of the sustainable development goals. This article argues that neoliberal urban practices result in a good Quality of Life for privileged populations, but negatively affect the vulnerable and lead to health injustice from the perspective of urban planning. Hence, Quality of Life is negatively affected since health is a crucial aspect within the discipline of Quality of Life. The spatial determinants of health-related Quality of Life are essential to be considered when speaking about justice in cities. This article aims to promote health through raising awareness of these spatial determinants and suggesting some recommendations aiming for the prevalence of health justice

Making Sense of the Big Data Mess: Why Interdisciplinarity Matters in Smart Cities

Smart cities use vast amounts of (big) data, often creating what we call an urban "data mess". In this article, we show the diversity and complexity of data that make up this mess and outline examples of urban data processing. Furthermore, we point out problems with the sector-specific perspective that is usually taken when dealing with smart cities. We argue that a collective way of dealing with data across sectors and disciplines needs to be found. To achieve that, we advocate for more interdisciplinary cooperation between different disciplines and stakeholder groups. The Pandemic Recovery Dashboard of the City of Los Angeles gives a first impression of how this could work. We aim to show that approaching data in smart cities from an interdisciplinary angle may help deal with the data mess in smart cities - both for researchers and city developers."Smart Cities" stützen sich auf große Datenmengen ("Big Data") - wobei die unterschiedlichen Daten häufig in ungeordneter Form vorliegen (engl.: "data mess"). Im Beitrag widmen wir uns dieser Diversität im städtischen Datenbestand und skizzieren Beispiele urbaner Datenverarbeitung. Dabei verweisen wir auf Probleme und Herausforderungen einer engen, an einzelne Bereiche gebundenen Datennutzung: Aus unserer Sicht fehlt bislang ein gemeinschaftlicher, sektorübergreifender Ansatz zum Umgang mit Smart-City-Daten. Aus diesem Grund sind mehr interdisziplinäre Kooperationen erforderlich, d.h. die Zusammenarbeit unterschiedlicher Disziplinen und Stakeholder-Gruppen. Das Pandemic Recovery Dashboard der Stadt Los Angeles gibt einen ersten Eindruck davon, wie urbane Daten erfolgreich genutzt werden können. Wir argumentieren dafür, dass Daten in Smart Cities am besten in ganzheitlicher Perspektive bearbeitet und der städtische Datendschungel so übersichtlicher gestaltet werden kann - für Wissenschaft und Praxis

Effect of Boswellia on Adjuvant Induced Rheumatoid Arthritis in Experimental Animals

Arthritis is the most common systemic connective tissue disease. About 1% of the world's population is affected by RA; women are three times more often than men. Onset is most frequent between the ages of 40 and 50 years, but people of any age can be affected. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, systemic inflammatory disorder that may affect many tissues and organs, but principally attacks flexible joints. Although the cause of rheumatoid arthritis is unknown, autoimmunity plays an important role in both its chronicity and progression.The new trend of medical treatment of rheumatoid arthritis seeks new drugs with more efficacy and fewer side effects. Since tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) as well as other cytokines act as key players in the development of arthritis.Studies in the United States and Europe have shown that their use is less common in clinical settings, but has become increasingly more in recent years as scientific evidence about the effectiveness of herbal medicine has become more widely available.  The present work investigates the effect of Boswellia on Adjuvant induced RA in Experimental Animals