CAN DATE PALMS PLANTED FOR URBAN LANDSCAPING PURPOSES SERVE IN THE PRODUCTION OF EDIBLE FRUITS? AN EVALUATION OF TISSUE ELEMENT CONCENTRATIONS, FRUITS QUALITY AND HEALTH RISKS

More than 80.000 date palms are grown for ornamental purposes as part of public urban greenery in the city of Al Ain. The fruits that these palms produce, are often not valorized as food for humans, due to the fear that they might contain potentially hazardous pollutants, such as heavy metals. When palms are grown near roads or in urban environments, pollution might arise from the exhaust and dust produced by vehicles, industrial activities, as well as through urban waste material deposition, including irrigation with treated sewage effluent. On the other hand, many date palms grown for landscaping purposes might have a high potential to contribute to food production and security, should analyses reveal that their fruits are safe for consumption. The aim of the present study was thus to assess the overall quality of date fruits obtained from urban environments and roadside plantations in and around Al Ain. As part of this, possible heavy metal pollution of the fruits was investigated. In total, 34 date samples representing 11 date varieties were analyzed. All sampled palms were under long-term irrigation with treated sewage effluent. Element analysis of the potentially marketable dates revealed that their Fe, Zn, Cu, Mn, or Cr levels were too low to cause toxicity in humans, even at high daily consumption rates. In fact, concentrations of these trace metals, as well as other nutritional elements such as Ca, Mg, K and P in the sampled dates were in a rather low range compared with other plant-based food. This meant that the contribution of the date fruits to human supply with nutritional elements would be comparatively small at standard consumption rates. The concentrations of Pb, Co and Ni were in a safe range for human consumption, but Cd concentrations were slightly elevated across all analyzed samples. Ingestion of the sampled dates would exceed maximum permissible daily Cd intake at a rate of 50 – 70 g dry fruit pulp per day. This would correspond to 130 – 180 g fresh date fruits. Washing of the date fruits did not reduce their element concentrations. The latter were also in a similar range across all sampling locations and maturity groups.The findings of the present study suggest that the use of date fruits produced in urban environments and along roads would be possible, given that Cd concentrations are closely monitored, and sources of Cd pollution identified. The elaboration and implementation of valorization strategies for fruits harvested from urban dates would be facilitated by the ability of the site engineers, workers, and researchers to distinguish between the different date varieties. Experience with the date sampling pertaining to this study suggested that most workers and laboratory technicians are not able to do this. For this reason, a simple flowchart was developed as part of this thesis, based on which the most widely grown date cultivars in Abu Dhabi can be easily distinguished and classified. This decision matrix was accompanied by a reference photo repository, included into the literature review

A Distributed Approach for Networked Flying Platform Association with Small Cells in 5G+ Networks

The densification of small-cell base stations in a 5G architecture is a promising approach to enhance the coverage area and facilitate the ever increasing capacity demand of end users. However, the bottleneck is an intelligent management of a backhaul/fronthaul network for these small-cell base stations. This involves efficient association and placement of the backhaul hubs that connects these small-cells with the core network. Terrestrial hubs suffer from an inefficient non line of sight link limitations and unavailability of a proper infrastructure in an urban area. Seeing the popularity of flying platforms, we employ here an idea of using networked flying platform (NFP) such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones, unmanned balloons flying at different altitudes, as aerial backhaul hubs. The association problem of these NFP-hubs and small-cell base stations is formulated considering backhaul link and NFP related limitations such as maximum number of supported links and bandwidth. Then, this paper presents an efficient and distributed solution of the designed problem, which performs a greedy search in order to maximize the sum rate of the overall network. A favorable performance is observed via a numerical comparison of our proposed method with optimal exhaustive search algorithm in terms of sum rate and run-time speed.Comment: Submitted to IEEE GLOBECOM 2017, 7 pages and 4 figure

Resources and Evaluations for Multi-Distribution Dense Information Retrieval

We introduce and define the novel problem of multi-distribution information retrieval (IR) where given a query, systems need to retrieve passages from within multiple collections, each drawn from a different distribution. Some of these collections and distributions might not be available at training time. To evaluate methods for multi-distribution retrieval, we design three benchmarks for this task from existing single-distribution datasets, namely, a dataset based on question answering and two based on entity matching. We propose simple methods for this task which allocate the fixed retrieval budget (top-k passages) strategically across domains to prevent the known domains from consuming most of the budget. We show that our methods lead to an average of 3.8+ and up to 8.0 points improvements in Recall@100 across the datasets and that improvements are consistent when fine-tuning different base retrieval models. Our benchmarks are made publicly available.Comment: REML @ SIGIR 2023; 9 pages, 8 figure

Understanding the Relationship Between Use of Innovative Technology and Employee Performance: A Case of the Bank of Jordan

Technological implementation and innovation are considered highly critical in today’s competitive and dynamic business environment. This study aimed at analysing the role of innovative technology and work practices on employee performance within the Bank of Jordon. Quantitative methods aligned with survey technique were used to gather data from managerial and non-managerial staffs of the bank. A close ended questionnaire was used for data collection. Further, statistical analysis using correlation and regression was used to explore research objectives comprehensively. This study found positive correlation between technology implementation, innovative work practices, employee attitudes and employee performance.  Employee attitudes were least correlated with performance outcomes. Further, results suggest that innovative technology implementation, work practices and employee attitudes have significant impact on employee performance within the Bank of Jordon. The results of study are not generalisable considering the methodological limitations and sample size. Further researchers can expand scope of this study by incorporating large samples by taking into account triangulation approach. Keywords: Innovative technology, Employee performance, Bank of Jordo

The Effect of using Learning Strategy Mastery in the Collection of the Ninth-Grade Students in the Study of Islamic Education in Ma'an.

The educational curriculum considered as one of The main  Education Tools  in achieving its objectives, it’s a tool for interaction between the teacher and the learner; therefore  the civilized nations takes   great importance to the design  process on a sound basis, and to oversee their implementation in adequacy and effectiveness, and  evaluation and development processes in scientific methodology, it is considered a matter of national priorities that acquires the most of their attention (the hill et al., 1993). And the success of the process of implementing the curriculum and learning processes, education, depends largely on the presence of qualified teachers that they able to accommodate the educational philosophy of the educational system and the goals of the community, and the processes of development and modernization of the curriculum; to keep pace with developments and global changes in various fields; and the  curriculum needs of strategies for teaching and evaluation; to contribute in the Giving learners' knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to live in the developed and variable world, and away from the traditional methods of teaching and evaluation. It is no longer the role of the teacher in this era to indoctrination information, and facts, but its role  became  prepared for the learning and educational environment , is where the acquisition of knowledge, skills,, values and attitudes being  and  the educated started to have different thinking skills and the  objective educational of Mastery  that the modern education seeks to achieve; which required from teachers to realize it; and therefore the development of tactics, and methods of teaching; to keep pace with those objective and variables alrhmh (1987). Shows Sparks (Sparks, 2000) that the teacher should be able to diagnose students' needs, and understands how to learn every student, and that he should be familiar with the subject under consideration by, and roads that must be used to teach students, and owns stock a wide range of teaching strategies; that can choose what suits them learning educational situation. And the educationalists indicate to the close relationship between the teacher and teaching effectiveness, and that teaching provides a platform rich with opportunities, which provides the challenge for each student; to discover and invent applications of knowledge; to be used in solving problems, revealing the relationship between generalizations and concepts of realism and uses it, and the effectiveness of teaching keep teacher familiar strengths and weaknesses of the students, and make it able to adjust its strategies in education to suit requested (Selden, 1999). Sawa See (Sawa1995)that the teacher and teaching should be evaluate based on the appropriateness of the teachers strategies  and their impact on learning, and the ability to make optimum use of  teaching strategies, and building  meaningful class events  to teache students'

Non-small-cell Carcinoma Localised within the Pulmonary Artery Misdiagnosed as Pulmonary Thromboembolism

In this case report we describe a 69-year-old male ex-smoker with non-small-cell carcinoma localised within the pulmonary artery, misdiagnosed as pulmonary thromboembolism. This case indicates that non-small-cell carcinoma can be localised within the pulmonary artery. Furthermore, it emphasises the importance of performing a positron emission tomography scan and diagnostic intraluminal biopsy in unexplained lesions in the pulmonary artery to reach the proper diagnosis at the early stages of the disease. The patient is currently undergoing concurrent chemotherapy and radiation therapy

ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems traditionally relies on hand annotations for input queries, passages to retrieve, and responses to generate. We introduce ARES, an Automated RAG Evaluation System, for evaluating RAG systems along the dimensions of context relevance, answer faithfulness, and answer relevance. By creating its own synthetic training data, ARES finetunes lightweight LM judges to assess the quality of individual RAG components. To mitigate potential prediction errors, ARES utilizes a small set of human-annotated datapoints for prediction-powered inference (PPI). Across eight different knowledge-intensive tasks in KILT, SuperGLUE, and AIS, ARES accurately evaluates RAG systems while using only a few hundred human annotations during evaluation. Furthermore, ARES judges remain effective across domain shifts, proving accurate even after changing the type of queries and/or documents used in the evaluated RAG systems. We make our code and datasets publicly available on Github.Comment: NAACL 202