Multimodal Transport in Jordan according to the Multimodal International Transport Law No. 29 of 2018 (Comparative Study)

This research aims to evaluate the provisions of Multimodal International Transport Law No. 29 of 2018 in comparison with the latest international conventions in this field (Rotterdam Convention of 2008 and Multimodal Arabic Transport Convention of 2009). The problem of the research was concerned with answering the following question: did the national legislations and international or regional conventions succeed in achieving the unity of the legislative regulation of multimodal transport contracts at the international level? Or are we still in need of a binding, unified, international convention under the lack of enforcement of United Nations Convention of 1980? To answer these questions, the study was divided into two parts. The first part discussed the establishment of Multimodal International Transport Law by stating its concept, parties, and form. The second part was concerned with the implementation of multimodal international transport contract according to the provisions of Law No. 29 of 2018, where the contract parties’ responsibility and the claims and suits were explained. After analyzing the Law of (2018), the researcher came to believe that it is beneficiary to conclude a developed and balanced international convention which regulates multimodal transport in hope that it will be more effective than the United Nations Convention of 1980 to bridge the legislative gap in multimodal transport contracts at the international level

Evaluation of the electronic bill of lading as an alternative to the traditional bill of lading in proving the maritime transport contract in the light of Jordanian legislation, a comparative study with modern international agreements

This research aims to evaluate the electronic bill of lading as an alternative to the traditional bill of lading in proving the contract of sea carriage of goods. The problem of our research revolved around knowing the extent to which the electronic bill of lading serves as a guide to the traditional bill of lading in proving the contract of maritime transport of goods in the light of Jordanian legislation. In order to answer this problem, we divided this study into two sections: The first topic dealt with the nature of the traditional bill of lading and its role in proving the maritime transport contract. The second topic is devoted to presenting the electronic bill of lading and its role in proving the electronic shipping contract Returning to the answer to the problem of our research, it became clear to us the need for the Jordanian legislator to intervene, whether in the Maritime Trade Law No. 12 of 1972 or in the International Multimodal Transport of Goods Law No. 29 of 2018 by establishing a direct legislative regulation of the electronic bill of lading, as such direct regulation will help to Apply unified legal rules to the transfers that take place with the electronic bill of lading, without referring to the Electronic Transactions Law No. 15 of 2015 as the general law that regulates electronic transactions in general. Consequently, the door will remain open for the implementation of the Hamburg Agreement in force in the Kingdom without any complications

Influence of feed form and age of broilers on energy utilisation of feed ingredients : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Animal Science (Poultry Nutrition) at Massey University, Palmerston North, Manawatu, New Zealand

The accurate determination of the available energy of feed ingredients is crucial to optimise their inclusion in feed formulations and to improve the profitability and sustainability of poultry production. The metabolisable energy (ME) is commonly used for energy evaluation and formulating the diets for poultry. However, there are some limitations and several factors that influence the precision of the evaluation of the ME content of feed ingredients and diets. The current thesis investigated some of the unexplored research gaps on the ME of the commonly used feed ingredients in broiler diets. The first study presented in Chapter 3 was conducted to investigate the influence of feed form (FF; mash vs. pellet) on the apparent metabolisable energy (AME) and nitrogen-corrected AME (AMEn) of 7 single feed ingredients, four cereal grains (wheat, sorghum, barley, and maize) and three protein sources (soybean meal; SBM, canola meal; CM, and meat and bone meal; MBM). The influence of broiler age AMEn of cereal grains was investigated in Chapter 4 (direct method) and Chapter 5 (substitution method). The fourth experiment reported in Chapter 6 examined the effect of broiler age on the AMEn of protein sources. The experiments discussed in Chapter 7 were unique in that a novel methodology was developed for the quantification of the ileal endogenous energy losses (IEEL) in broiler chickens and for the correction of apparent ileal digestible energy (AIDE) to true (TIDE) ileal digestible energy of cereal grains (wheat, sorghum, barley and maize). The last trial of the thesis reported in Chapter 8 was conducted to refine-tune the IEEL methodology developed in Chapter 7 and to determine the influence of age and dietary cellulose contents on the IEEL estimates in broiler chickens. Data reported in Chapter 3 demonstrated that FF influenced the AMEn of feed ingredients. Pelleting increased the AMEn of all cereal grains by an average of 0.22 MJ/kg. However, for protein source ingredients, FF influence was ingredient-dependent. Pelleting increased the AMEn of CM by 0.57 MJ/kg, had no effect on that of SBM and decreased the AMEn of MBM by 0.56 MJ/kg. The experiment reported in Chapter 4 investigated the influence of broiler age on the AMEn of cereal grains using the direct method. The assay diets were formulated with an inclusion of 962 g/kg of each grain in the diet and pelleted. The data revealed that the age of broiler chickens has a significant impact on the AMEn of cereal grains. The first week of age recorded the highest AMEn for all cereal grains. Thereafter, the AMEn decreased either linearly (sorghum) or quadratically (wheat, barley and maize) with the advancing age of broilers. In the study reported in Chapter 5, the effect of broiler age on the AMEn of cereal grains, from the same batches used in Chapter 4, was examined using the substitution method. A maize-SBM basal diet was formulated and test diets were developed by replacing (w/w) 300 g/kg of the basal diet with each cereal grain. The results showed that the effect of broiler age on the AMEn varied depending on the grain type. Whilst the AMEn of barley and maize were unaffected by age, the AMEn of wheat and sorghum increased with the advancing age of broiler chickens. The determined AMEn values differed between direct and substitution methods, with the substitution method generating lower AMEn values. Data reported in Chapter 6 demonstrated that the AMEn content of SBM and CM was influenced by age of broilers. The first week showed the highest AMEn value for both SBM and CM, followed by reductions for both ingredients up to week 3 and increases thereafter. The studies reported in Chapter 7 present a novel approach to quantify the IEEL in broilers and correct the AIDE of cereal grains (wheat, sorghum, barley and maize) to TIDE enabling comparisons with AMEn. The IEEL was estimated to be 1.45 MJ/kg dry matter intake (DMI) in 21-d old broilers, following the feeding of a glucose-based purified diet and used to calculate the TIDE. The apparent ileal digestibility of dry matter, nitrogen and starch were positively and highly correlated with the TIDE than the AIDE or AMEn. The studies reported in Chapter 8 were conducted to refine the proposed methodology for the estimation of IEEL proposed in Chapter 7 and to investigate the influence of age of broilers and the dietary cellulose contents on IEEL estimates. It was found that the age of broilers had no impact on the IEEL estimates. The IEEL was affected by the cellulose content and the IEEL increased from 0.37 MJ/kg DMI for the diet without cellulose to 1.80 MJ/kg DMI for the diet with 75 g/kg inclusion of cellulose. The findings reported in the current thesis demonstrate that the application of AMEn values determined based on assays using mash diets might result in over- or under-estimation of the available energy content of ingredients in commercial pelleted broiler diets and highlights the need for the use of pelleted diets in energy evaluation assays. The findings also revealed that the effects of age and methodology are relevant in the determination of AMEn of feed ingredients and question the validity of using single AME or AMEn values for feed ingredients in broiler diet formulations across different ages. Another notable contribution was to develop a novel approach to quantify the IEEL in broiler chickens for the first time. The thesis research also provides preliminary data on the TIDE of common cereal grains and highlights the possibility of applying the TIDE as an alternative to the ME system in poultry feed formulation

Combining EEG source connectivity and network similarity: Application to object categorization in the human brain

A major challenge in cognitive neuroscience is to evaluate the ability of the human brain to categorize or group visual stimuli based on common features. This categorization process is very fast and occurs in few hundreds of millisecond time scale. However, an accurate tracking of the spatiotemporal dynamics of large-scale brain networks is still an unsolved issue. Here, we show the combination of recently developed method called dense-EEG source connectivity to identify functional brain networks with excellent temporal and spatial resolutions and an algorithm, called SimNet, to compute brain networks similarity. Two categories of visual stimuli were analysed in this study: immobile and mobile. Networks similarity was assessed within each category (intra-condition) and between categories (inter-condition). Results showed high similarity within each category and low similarity between the two categories. A significant difference between similarities computed in the intra and inter-conditions was observed at the period of 120-190ms supposed to be related to visual recognition and memory access. We speculate that these observations will be very helpful toward understanding the object categorization in the human brain from a network perspective.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for 2016 IEEE Workshop on Statistical Signal Processin

The impact of hospital nurse staffing, work environment and patient-centeredness on the quality of care and patient safety

The healthcare industry is complex in nature. The quality of care and patient safety has become a national and international priority. Limited efforts have been made on improving nursing care in order to optimize the outcomes of care. This study empirically investigated the impact of hospital nurse staffing and work environment on the quality of care and patient safety in the medical and surgical wards in Malaysian private hospitals. The mediating effect of patient-centeredness on the effect of both hospital nurse staffing and work environment on the quality of care and patient safety was also investigated. A cross-sectional survey was conducted on 12 private hospitals. Data was collected, through questionnaires, from 652 nurses, with a 61.8 % response rate. The stratified simple random sampling was used to allow nurses from all shifts to participate in the study. Regression analyses and the Hayes PROCESS macro were conducted to test the hypotheses. The results showed that staffing had an insignificant negative impact on the outcomes of care, whereas work environment had a significant positive impact. Moreover, it was found that patient-centeredness significantly mediated the effect of both staffing and work environment upon the outcomes. A model for improving the quality of care and patient safety was proposed. The practical implications indicated that patientcenteredness suppresses the negative impact of nursing shortage and shift length, and complements the positive impact of work environment on the outcomes of care. Further mediators are recommended for future research on the impact of both hospital nurse staffing and work environment on the quality of care and patient safety

A Transfer Learning End-to-End ArabicText-To-Speech (TTS) Deep Architecture

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A typical text-to-speech system converts a language text into a waveform. There exist many English TTS systems that produce mature, natural, and human-like speech synthesizers. In contrast, other languages, including Arabic, have not been considered until recently. Existing Arabic speech synthesis solutions are slow, of low quality, and the naturalness of synthesized speech is inferior to the English synthesizers. They also lack essential speech key factors such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Different works were proposed to solve those issues, including the use of concatenative methods such as unit selection or parametric methods. However, they required a lot of laborious work and domain expertise. Another reason for such poor performance of Arabic speech synthesizers is the lack of speech corpora, unlike English that has many publicly available corpora and audiobooks. This work describes how to generate high quality, natural, and human-like Arabic speech using an end-to-end neural deep network architecture. This work uses just $\langle$ text, audio $\rangle$ pairs with a relatively small amount of recorded audio samples with a total of 2.41 hours. It illustrates how to use English character embedding despite using diacritic Arabic characters as input and how to preprocess these audio samples to achieve the best results

Assessment of toxicity and clastogenicity of sterigmatocystin in Egyptian Nile tilapia

The increasing presence of genotoxic pollutants in the aquatic environment has led to the development of quick monitoring methods. Sterigmatocystin (Stg) is closely related to mycotoxins and has the carcinogenic potency in the experimental animal models. The exposure to genotoxic agents will give rise to alterations of DNA structure that can lead to abnormal changes of DNA fingerprints. Therefore, we have applied the random amplified polymorphism DNA (RAPD) method to evaluate the genotoxiceffects of Stg and to determine if the Egyptian montmorillonite (EM) has a protective effect against Stg. The experiment was conducted in vivo to evaluate the ability of EM at a level 0.5 mg/kg body weight(bw) to prevent the toxicity and genotoxicity induced by Stg in the Nile tilapia fish. Fishes were orally administrated with EM in corn oil with or without Stg (1.6 ìg/kg bw) twice a week for 4 weeks. Blood andtissue samples were collected at the end of the treatment. The results revealed that Stg had genotoxic and toxicopathological effects in Oreochromis niloticus fish. The genotoxic effects were indicated byappearance of some changes in polymorphism band patterns including lost of stable bands or occurrence of new bands. There also exists a distinct distance between the band patterns of exposed fish and protected or control fish samples. The effects on the tissues were manifested by different histopathological lesions in different organs including hyperplastic proliferation of branchial epithelium, necrobiotic changes in hepatic tissue and destruction of components of the spleen. These responses were virtually abolished or markedly decreased when fishes were exposed to EM combined with Stg. It could be conclude that addition of EM resulted in the inhibition of the toxicity andclastogenicity of St

ANTIBACTERIAL, ANTIOXIDANT, AND REPELLENCY POTENTIAL OF THE ESSENTIAL OIL FROM SPARTIUM JUNCEUM L. GROWN IN LEBANON

The goal of our present study is to assess the pharmacological potential of essential oil extracted from Spartium junceum cultivated in Lebanon. This oil was obtained by hydrodistillation using the Clevenger apparatus. Then, an organoleptic characterization and an evaluation of its antioxidant, repellent/insecticidal, and antibacterial activities have been evaluated. The obtained results showed that this oil had an antioxidant activity reaching 82 % dependent on the dilution used. In addition, it showed an insecticidal effect and an antibacterial effect