A Brief History of Coptic Personal Status Law

Coptic Christians comprise the largest non-Muslim population in Egypt (12-17% of Egypt’s total population). For over a millennium, the Coptic Church has administered and adjudicated personal status matters (i.e., family law) for its members using Biblically-based principles that are vastly different from those of Shari’a Law. The Egyptian government, however, has advocated for a universal right of divorce for all Egyptians modeled on Shari’a Law, a development that would significantly impact Coptic Personal Status Law. * Using interviews conducted with Coptic bishops, priests, and parishioners in Egypt, along with primary and secondary sources, this article traces the development of Coptic Personal Status Law from its origins to the present day. Particularly noteworthy is the examination of the Bill of Personal Affairs for Copts, the current code governing Coptic Personal Status Law. The authors conclude that the establishment of a universal right of divorce in Egypt is incompatible with Coptic laws designed to protect the inviolability of divine, sacramental marriage and will significantly undermine the Coptic Church’s jurisdiction and authority

A Brief History of Coptic Personal Status Law

Coptic Christians comprise the largest non-Muslim population in Egypt (12-17% of Egypt’s total population). For over a millennium, the Coptic Church has administered and adjudicated personal status matters (i.e., family law) for its members using Biblically-based principles that are vastly different from those of Shari’a Law. The Egyptian government, however, has advocated for a universal right of divorce for all Egyptians modeled on Shari’a Law, a development that would significantly impact Coptic Personal Status Law. * Using interviews conducted with Coptic bishops, priests, and parishioners in Egypt, along with primary and secondary sources, this article traces the development of Coptic Personal Status Law from its origins to the present day. Particularly noteworthy is the examination of the Bill of Personal Affairs for Copts, the current code governing Coptic Personal Status Law. The authors conclude that the establishment of a universal right of divorce in Egypt is incompatible with Coptic laws designed to protect the inviolability of divine, sacramental marriage and will significantly undermine the Coptic Church’s jurisdiction and authority

H-SLAM: Hybrid Direct-Indirect Visual SLAM

The recent success of hybrid methods in monocular odometry has led to many attempts to generalize the performance gains to hybrid monocular SLAM. However, most attempts fall short in several respects, with the most prominent issue being the need for two different map representations (local and global maps), with each requiring different, computationally expensive, and often redundant processes to maintain. Moreover, these maps tend to drift with respect to each other, resulting in contradicting pose and scene estimates, and leading to catastrophic failure. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that makes use of descriptor sharing to generate a single inverse depth scene representation. This representation can be used locally, queried globally to perform loop closure, and has the ability to re-activate previously observed map points after redundant points are marginalized from the local map, eliminating the need for separate and redundant map maintenance processes. The maps generated by our method exhibit no drift between each other, and can be computed at a fraction of the computational cost and memory footprint required by other monocular SLAM systems. Despite the reduced resource requirements, the proposed approach maintains its robustness and accuracy, delivering performance comparable to state-of-the-art SLAM methods (e.g., LDSO, ORB-SLAM3) on the majority of sequences from well-known datasets like EuRoC, KITTI, and TUM VI. The source code is available at: https://github.com/AUBVRL/fslam_ros_docker

Changes in global teleconnection patterns under global warming and stratospheric aerosol intervention scenarios

We investigate the potential impact of Stratospheric Aerosol Intervention (SAI) on the spatiotemporal behavior of large-scale climate teleconnection patterns represented by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), El Ni&ntilde;o/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) indices using simulations from the Community Earth System Models (CESM1 and CESM2). The leading Empirical Orthogonal Function of sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies indicates that greenhouse gas forcing is accompanied by increases in variance across both the North Atlantic (i.e., AMO) and North Pacific (i.e., PDO) and a decrease over the tropical Pacific (i.e., ENSO); however, SAI effectively reverses these global warming-imposed changes. The projected spatial patterns of SST anomaly related to ENSO show no significant change under either global warming or SAI. In contrast, the spatial anomaly patterns pertaining to AMO (i.e., in the North Atlantic) and PDO (i.e., in the North Pacific) changes under global warming are effectively suppressed by SAI. For AMO, the low contrast between the cold-tongue pattern and its surroundings in the North Atlantic, predicted under global warming, is restored under SAI scenarios to similar patterns as in the historical period. The frequencies of El Ni&ntilde;o and La Ni&ntilde;a episodes increase with greenhouse gas emissions in the models, while SAI tends to compensate for them. All climate indices&rsquo; dominant modes of inter-annual variability are projected to be preserved in both warming and SAI scenarios. However, the dominant decadal and interdecadal variability mode changes induced by global warming are exacerbated by SAI, particularly in the Atlantic-based AMO.</p

Designing power aware wireless sensor networks leveraging software modeling techniques

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are typically used to monitor specific phenomena and gather the data to a gateway node, where the data is further processed. WSNs nodes have limited power resources, which require developing power efficient systems. Additionally, reaching the nodes after a deployment to correct any design flaws is very challenging due the distributed nature of the nodes. The current development of WSNs occurs at the coding layer, which prevent the design from going through a typical software design process. Designing and analyzing the software modules of a WSN system at a higher abstraction layer than at the coding level will enable the designer of a WSN to fix any design errors and improve the system for power consumption at an early design stage, before the actual deployment of the network. This thesis presents multiple Unified Modeling Language (UML) design patterns that enable the designer to capture the structure and the behavior of the design of a WSN at higher abstraction layers. The UML models are developed based on these design patterns that are capable of early validation of the functional requirements and the power consumption of the system hardware resources by leveraging animation and instrumentation of the UML diagrams. To support the analysis of power consumption of the communication components of a WSN node, the Avrora network simulator was integrated with the UML design environment such that designer is able to analyze the power consumption analysis of the communication process at the UML layer. The UML and the Avrora simulation integration is achieved through developing a code generator that produces the necessary configuration for Avrora simulator and through parsing the simulator results. The methodology presented in this thesis is evaluated by demonstrating the power analysis of a typical collector system

Evaluating a low-fidelity inguinal canal model

Purpose: The inguinal canal anatomy is of paramount clinical significance due to the common occurrence of direct and indirect inguinal hernias. However, the inguinal canal is often an area of great difficulty for medical students to understand. The aim of this study was to evaluate the use of a low-cost, low-fidelity inguinal canal model as a teaching and learning aid. Methods: A low-fidelity inguinal canal model was introduced as a learning aid in an anatomy tutorial on the inguinal region. Students were randomised into intervention (n=66) and control (n=40) groups. Following the tutorial, all students completed a multiple-choice question quiz on the inguinal canal. The intervention group also completed a questionnaire evaluating the positive and negative aspects of the model. Results: Students taught with the inguinal canal model achieved higher scores (mean: 88.31% vs 81.7%, p=0.087). Positive aspects of the model as described by the students included its simplicity and ability to improve their three-dimensional understanding of the inguinal canal. Students requested more hands-on time with the model during the tutorial. Conclusion: The present study supports current literature in that low-fidelity anatomy models are a useful adjunct to aid students’ learning of complex anatomical concepts. Students may benefit from creating their own inguinal canal model to retain as a personal study tool

Experimental Nonlinear Control for Flutter Suppression in a Nonlinear Aeroelastic System

Experimental implementation of input–output feedback linearization in controlling the dynamics of a nonlinear pitch–plunge aeroelastic system is presented. The control objective is to linearize the system dynamics and assign the poles of the pitch mode of the resulting linear system. The implementation 1) addresses experimentally the general case where feedback linearization-based control is applied using as the output a degree of freedom other than that where the physical nonlinearity is located, using a single trailing-edge control surface, to stabilize the entire system; 2) includes the unsteady effects of the airfoil’s aerodynamic behavior; 3) includes the embedding of a tuned numerical model of the aeroelastic system into the control scheme in real time; and 4) uses pole placement as the linear control objective, providing the user with flexibility in determining the nature of the controlled response. When implemented experimentally, the controller is capable of not only delaying the onset of limit-cycle oscillation but also successfully eliminating a previously established limit-cycle oscillation. The assignment of higher levels of damping results in notable reductions in limit-cycle oscillation decay times in the closed-loop response, indicating good controllability of the aeroelastic system and effectiveness of the pole-placement objective. The closed-loop response is further improved by incorporating adaptation so that assumed system parameters are updated with time. The use of an optimum adaptation parameter results in reduced response decay times

On the space of ergodic measures for the horocycle flow on strata of abelian differentials

We study the horocycle flow on the stratum of abelian differentials H(2). We show that there is a sequence of horocycle ergodic measures, each supported on a periodic horocycle orbit, which weakly converges to an invariant, but non-ergodic, measure by SL2(R). As a consequence, we show that there are points in H(2) whose horocycle flow orbits do not equidistribute towards any invariant measure

Effects of race and ethnicity on perinatal outcomes in high-income and upper-middle-income countries:an individual participant data meta-analysis of 2 198 655 pregnancies

Background: Existing evidence on the effects of race and ethnicity on pregnancy outcomes is restricted to individual studies done within specific countries and health systems. We aimed to assess the impact of race and ethnicity on perinatal outcomes in high-income and upper-middle-income countries, and to ascertain whether the magnitude of disparities, if any, varied across geographical regions. Methods: For this individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis we used data from the International Prediction of Pregnancy Complications (IPPIC) Network of studies on pregnancy complications; the full dataset comprised 94 studies, 53 countries, and 4 539 640 pregnancies. We included studies that reported perinatal outcomes (neonatal death, stillbirth, preterm birth, and small-for-gestational-age babies) in at least two racial or ethnic groups (White, Black, south Asian, Hispanic, or other). For our two-step random-effects IPD meta-analysis, we did multiple imputations for confounder variables (maternal age, BMI, parity, and level of maternal education) selected with a directed acyclic graph. The primary outcomes were neonatal mortality and stillbirth. Secondary outcomes were preterm birth and a small-for-gestational-age baby. We estimated the association of race and ethnicity with perinatal outcomes using a multivariate logistic regression model and reported this association with odds ratios (ORs) and 95% CIs. We also did a subgroup analysis of studies by geographical region. Findings: 51 studies from 20 high-income and upper-middle-income countries, comprising 2 198 655 pregnancies, were eligible for inclusion in this IPD meta-analysis. Neonatal death was twice as likely in babies born to Black women than in babies born to White women (OR 2·00, 95% CI 1·44–2·78), as was stillbirth (2·16, 1·46–3·19), and babies born to Black women were at increased risk of preterm birth (1·65, 1·46–1·88) and being small for gestational age (1·39, 1·13–1·72). Babies of women categorised as Hispanic had a three-times increased risk of neonatal death (OR 3·34, 95% CI 2·77–4·02) than did those born to White women, and those born to south Asian women were at increased risk of preterm birth (OR 1·26, 95% CI 1·07–1·48) and being small for gestational age (1·61, 1·32–1·95). The effects of race and ethnicity on preterm birth and small-for-gestational-age babies did not vary across regions. Interpretation: Globally, among underserved groups, babies born to Black women had consistently poorer perinatal outcomes than White women after adjusting for maternal characteristics, although the risks varied for other groups. The effects of race and ethnicity on adverse perinatal outcomes did not vary by region. Funding: National Institute for Health and Care Research, Wellbeing of Women.</p