Psychometric properties of two Islamic measures among young adults in Kuwait: the Sahin-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam and the Sahin Index of Islamic Moral Values

Given the importance of developing reliable and valid measures in the psychology of religion, and recent growing interest in developing empirical studies within an Islamic context, the present study discusses the properties of two specially designed instruments: the Sahin-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam and the Sahin Index of Islamic Moral Values. Data were provided by a sample of 1,199 students, selected from secondary schools in six educational districts in Kuwait. The sample comprised 603 males and 596 females; 812 were 17 years of age and 387 were 18 years of age. The data support the internal consistency reliability and construct validity of both instruments and commend them for further research

An Analytical Investigation of Thermal Buckling Behavior of Composite Plates Reinforced by Carbon Nano Particles

The research used analytical and numerical methods to test thermal buckling activity for a composite plate structure with a range of Nano fractions. Experimental program with mechanical properties for the Nano composites were carried out and have been validated from previous work. In addition, both mechanical and thermal expansions were tested from previous work experimentally and used in numerical and analytical methods by the Nano composite. The general motion equation for thermal buckling load was derived and then, the results were compared with the numerical results. The analysis showed that the average outcome error was not greater (2.49%). Ultimately, the results showed that the thermal effect results in a buckling of Nano particle strengthening (1%) volume fraction for the adjusted structure of the plate leads to increase thermal buckling strength (63,4%). This achievement modified a high thermal buckling strength with low percentage of Nano volume fraction compared to the previous work in this field

Evaluation of the Practicum at College of Arts and Sciences - University of Nizwa

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the practicum at University of Nizwa. The study identified the necessary skills that were acquired by student-teachers attributed through the practicum. It also aimed to identify whether there were significant differences in the evaluation of practicum due to the variable of program. The instrument used in the study consisted of 66 items. The samples of the study consisted of (48) student-teachers who were enrolled in the practicum at the college of arts and science at the University of Nizwa during the academic year 2014/2015. The results revealed that the level of evaluation of practicum was high and positive in general. Flaming of teaching, classroom management, then evaluation and feedback domains were the highest

A CROSS SECTIONAL STUDY ON ESTIMATING THE PREVALENCE OF POTENTIALLY INAPPROPRIATE MEDICATIONS AMONG ELDERLY PATIENTS ADMITTED TO KING ABDUL-AZIZ MEDICAL CITY EMERGENCY CARE CENTER

Introduction: Medication management in elderly patients is truly a challenge for all health care professionals. Age-related changes, poly-pharmacy, and co-morbidities are factors for Potentially Inappropriate Medications [PIMs] prescribing that will increase the risk of Adverse Drug Events [ADEs]. STOPP [Screening Tool of Older Persons’ Prescriptions] criteria are the most updated screening tool for detecting PIMs in elderly patients. Objectives: To estimate the proportion of potentially inappropriate medications among the elderly visiting Emergency Care Center [ECC] at King Abdul-Aziz Medical City – Central Region [KAMC-CR]. Methods: Prospective cross-sectional study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board. The study includes 300 patients, conducted over two months from October-November 2014 at an ECC in KAMC-CR. The inclusion criteria: elderly more than 60 years old, patients from both gender and have polypharmacy [more than 4 medications] prescription. Exclusion criteria: patients who are non-eligible to be treated in KAMC-CR, and who don’t have medications history in KAMC-CR pharmacy computer system. The data were collected from the hospital electronic system and patients’ charts. The statistical analysis was completed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences [SPSS] 19.0 software. Results will be reported in terms of frequency, percent, and p-value. Results: 1200 patients who were admitted in ECC at KAMC-CR conducted over two months from October-November 2014. As a result, our study consisted of 300 patients [male 54% female 46%], the majority of patients were between 60-79 years old. PPIs are prescribed to 206 out of 300 patients. The results showed that the most frequent prescriptions resulting in PIPs by STOPP criteria were the PPI [20%], duplicated drug class prescriptions and long-term opiates in those with recurrent falls [11.7%] and vasodilator drugs with postural hypotension [11.4%]. Conclusion: > Poly-pharmacy was independently associated with PIMs especially in patients aged over 65. > These findings have significant implications that will help us identify areas of improvement in the overall medical care of geriatric patients and focus on avoiding inappropriate drug use, reduce unnecessary medication, drug interactions and related adverse events. > Comparing with other international findings, our institutions need to pay more attention to prescribing in the elderly population. Keywords: STOPP, Polypharmacy, PIMs, Elderly, ADE

The Arab Gulf Cooperation Council (AGCC) is not just and organization for security, but it is an organization for cooperation in all fields.

This thesis examines the main purpose for establishing the AGCC, and proves that it was not created just as a defensive alliance as it is generally perceived in the West. The AGCC was formed for cooperation in all fields among its Member States. To demonstrate this fact, this thesis discusses the historical events that led to the establishment of this organization and analyzes the cooperation of the member states in area of politics, security, economy, as well as the development of human resources. The analysis indicates that the formation of the Shura Council (Consultative National Councils) was the first step in the right direction in building suitable political institutions. They allow the citizens of the AGCC to participate in the decision making process. Also, the thesis examines the external and the internal threats to the region and the AGCC relations with the West. It finds that the AGCC States must enhance the existing (Gulf) Island Shield Force and maintain its alliance with the West. The Study examines the economies of the AGCC States and shows that the AGCC States are still largely oil-based economies. It suggests additional and aggressive economic diversification programs which are needed and essential to base the economies on sustainable resources. The AGCC State must maximize an use oil returns to diversify their economies away from oil. Additionally, the thesis discusses the human resources development and emphasizes the investment in human capital which should be the objective and the priority of the AGCC States. Also, the thesis suggests that the educational system of the AGCC States needs radical reforms to meet the demands of modern economy. Finally, the thesis provides general recommendations to strengthen and move the AGCC forward in the futurehttp://archive.org/details/thearabgulfcoope10945798

Development of Analytical Method for Detection of Some Pharmaceuticals in Surface Water

Purpose: To develop and validate a simple method using solid – phase extraction along with liquid chromatography–time of flight mass spectrometry for the analysis of pharmaceuticals in surface water of Tangkas River, Malaysia.Methods: Liquid chromatography (LC) was performed on a Dionex Ultimate 3000/LC 09115047 (USA) system equipped with a vacuum degasser, a quaternary pump, an autosampler and UV-Vis diod array detector. Chromatography was performed on a Thermo Scientific C18 (250 mm x 2.1 mm, i.d.: 5μm) column. The injection volume was 20 μL. All  compounds (hydrochlorothiazide, gliclazide, diclofenac-Na and mefenamic acid) were analysed in negative ion (NI) mode and eluted off the column with a mobile phase consisting of (A) 0.1% formic acid (FA) in deionised water (DIW) and (B) 40% acetonitrile (ACN) in methanol (MeOH) at 0.3 ml/min. Mass spectrometry was performed on a time of flight (TOF) instrument.Results: The linearity range, 5 - 500 ng/mL, provided a determination coefficient (R2) > 0.99 for all compounds. The limit of detection (LOD) ranged from 65 - 136 ng/L while recovery ranged from 45 - 111.2 % in the river water. Two pharmaceutical compounds were detected in the surface water samples: diclofenac sodium and mefenamic acid at concentrations of 340 and 545 ng/L, respectively.Conclusion: The developed method is linear in the range 5 - 500 ng/mL, and precise and acceptable recoveries were obtained. In addition, this method is suitable to identify and quantify trace concentrations of diclofenac sodium and mefenamic acid in surface water.Keywords: Diclofenac, Mefenamic acid, Electrospray Ionization, Mass spectrometry, Solid phase extraction (SPE), Tangkas river, Collision energy

Finger texture verification systems based on multiple spectrum lighting sensors with four fusion levels

Finger Texture (FT) is one of the most recent attractive biometric characteristic. It refers to a finger skin area which is restricted between the fingerprint and the palm print (just after including the lower knuckle). Different specifications for the FT can be obtained by employing multiple images spectrum of lights. Individual verification systems are established in this paper by using multiple spectrum FT specifications. The key idea here is that by combining two various spectrum lightings of FTs, high personal recognitions can be attained. Four types of fusion will be listed and explained here: Sensor Level Fusion (SLF), Feature Level Fusion (FLF), Score Level Fusion (ScLF) and Decision Level Fusion (DLF). Each fusion method is employed, examined for different rules and analysed. Then, the best performance procedure is benchmarked to be considered. From the database of Multiple Spectrum CASIA (MSCASIA), FT images have been collected. Two types of spectrum lights have been exploited (the wavelength of 460 nm, which represents a Blue (BLU) light, and the White (WHT) light). Supporting comparisons were performed, including the state-of-the-art. Best recognition performance was recorded for the FLF based concatenation rule by improving the Equal Error Rate (EER) percentages from 5% for the BLU and 7% for the WHT to 2%

An Analytical Framework for Control Synthesis of Cyber-Physical Systems with Safety Guarantee

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are required to operate safely under fault and malicious attacks. The simplex architecture and the recently proposed cyber resilient architectures, e.g., Byzantine fault tolerant++ (BFT++), provide safety for CPS under faults and malicious cyber attacks, respectively. However, these existing architectures make use of different timing parameters and implementations to provide safety, and are seemingly unrelated. In this paper, we propose an analytical framework to represent the simplex, BFT++ and other practical cyber resilient architectures (CRAs). We construct a hybrid system that models CPS adopting any of these architectures. We derive sufficient conditions via our proposed framework under which a control policy is guaranteed to be safe. We present an algorithm to synthesize the control policy. We validate the proposed framework using a case study on lateral control of a Boeing 747, and demonstrate that our proposed approach ensures safety of the system

A Compositional Resilience Index for Computationally Efficient Safety Analysis of Interconnected Systems

Interconnected systems such as power systems and chemical processes are often required to satisfy safety properties in the presence of faults and attacks. Verifying safety of these systems, however, is computationally challenging due to nonlinear dynamics, high dimensionality, and combinatorial number of possible faults and attacks that can be incurred by the subsystems interconnected within the network. In this paper, we develop a compositional resilience index to verify safety properties of interconnected systems under faults and attacks. The resilience index is a tuple serving the following two purposes. First, it quantifies how a safety property is impacted when a subsystem is compromised by faults and attacks. Second, the resilience index characterizes the needed behavior of a subsystem during normal operations to ensure safety violations will not occur when future adverse events occur. We develop a set of sufficient conditions on the dynamics of each subsystem to satisfy its safety constraint, and leverage these conditions to formulate an optimization program to compute the resilience index. When multiple subsystems are interconnected and their resilience indices are given, we show that the safety constraints of the interconnected system can be efficiently verified by solving a system of linear inequalities. We demonstrate our developed resilience index using a numerical case study on chemical reactors connected in series