Sexuality, Development and Non-conforming Desire in the Arab World: The Case of Lebanon and Egypt

[W]e have a lot of problems here – torture, violations against street children, we are full of problems… To come in and talk about gays and lesbians, it is nice, but it’s not the major issue. It’s like I’m starving and you ask me what kind of cola I want. Well, I want to eat first. Then we can talk about cola! It’s a luxury to talk about gay rights in Egypt. (Negad El Borai, in an interview with Azimi 2006) In many developing countries, sexual rights are commonly depicted as trivial concerns pertaining to wealthy citizens of a ‘developed’ Western world. The ‘developing’ world is often thought to have more pressing problems to deal with, such as poverty, violence and corruption. As the prominent Egyptian attorney and human rights activist, Negad El Borai, pointed out in the preceding statement, it is ‘nice’ to talk about gay and lesbian rights in Egypt, but the matter is ranked low in a hierarchy of critical human rights issues. Indeed, it is sometimes not considered to be a human rights issue at all. While it is important, when analysing Borai’s statement, to consider his precarious position as a human rights activist in what was, at the time, a long-standing dictatorship, such skeletal/unfamiliar representations of sexual rights risk obscuring the gradually emerging links between sexual rights and other aspects of human development. In his statement, Borai does not reject the pertinence or question the efficacy of a ‘globalized narrative on sexual identity’ in Egypt (Cornwall 2014: 427) – something we discuss in the report. Rather, he attempts to play down the gravity of the Egyptian state’s acts against ‘sexual perversion’ by dissociating it from other ‘major issues’ in the country. Providing an alternative perspective on the matter, Armas (2007) elaborates on the links between sexual rights and development by examining the relationships between sexual rights and the right to health (mental and physical), education, political participation, work, and migration. He argues that their interdependence is testament to their indivisibility as basic human rights. Subscribing to the latter perspective, this report focuses on the rights of sexual and gender nonconformists in Egypt and Lebanon. It explores the somewhat similar social attitudes towards sexual and gender nonconformity and follows the divergent trajectories of both countries with regards to sexual rights activism. The report attributes this divergence to differences in socio-political conditions in each country that have allowed for the development of a somewhat organised, selectively functional sexual rights movement in one context, while encouraging the open oppression of almost all forms of sexual dissent in another.UK Department for International Developmen

Interactive boundary element analysis for engineering design.

Structural design of mechanical components is an iterative process that involves multiple stress analysis runs; this can be time consuming and expensive. Significant improvements in the eciency of this process can be made by increasing the level of interactivity. One approach is through real-time re-analysis of models with continuously updating geometry. Three primary areas need to be considered to accelerate the re-solution of boundary element problems. These are re-meshing the model, updating the boundary element system of equations and re-solution of the system. Once the initial model has been constructed and solved, the user may apply geometric perturbations to parts of the model. The re-meshing algorithm must accommodate these changes in geometry whilst retaining as much of the existing mesh as possible. This allows the majority of the previous boundary element system of equations to be re-used for the new analysis. For this problem, a GMRES solver has been shown to provide the fastest convergence rate. Further time savings can be made by preconditioning the updated system with the LU decomposition of the original system. Using these techniques, near real-time analysis can be achieved for 3D simulations; for 2D models such real-time performance has already been demonstrated

Review on sheet metal forming process of aluminium alloys

The application of aluminum alloys in automotive and aerospace industries has been growing significantly in the last 20 years. Due to their high specific strength, aluminum became a strong replacement for steel particularly at automotive manufacturing. However, to deform a complex panel part from aluminum is quite challenging specifically at cold forming condition in which the formability is quite low. Many attempts have been processed to improve the formability problem of the aluminum alloy such warm forming, hot forming, superplastic forming and Hot forming and cold die quench (HFQ) processes. This paper presents a critical survey for different forming methods and identifying the advantages and drawbacks for each method. This review will help researcher to be familiar about the history, development and state of art of metal forming processes of aluminum sheet alloys

The development of stress based continuum damage mechanics model for predicting the formability of Magnesium alloys under cold/warm stamping processes

This paper presents the development and application of the novel 2D-stress based continuum damage mechanics (CDM) model for prediction of the formability of magnesium alloys under cold/warm stamping conditions. The CDM model is divided into parts; firstly, a set of uniaxial viscoplastic damage constitutive equations is determined from tensile data. Secondly, a set of multiaxial viscoplastic damage constitutive equations is formulated and calibrated from the forming limit diagram (FLD) data. The experimental uniaxial tensile data for AZ31B magnesium alloy (at different deformation conditions (temperature range of 20°C to 300°C and strain rate range of 0.001 and 0.01s-1) and FLD at the temperature of 250°C were published by Wang et al., [1] and were used to formulate and calibrate the CDM model. A good agreement has been achieved between the experimental and numerical data. Using the newly developed plane-stress unified viscoplastic damage constitutive equations, the FLD of materials can be predicted at different temperatures and strain rates with complex strain path forming conditions

Basic biosecurity manual for tilapia hatchery technicians in Bangladesh

With the onset of Tilapia Lake Virus (TiLV) outbreaks in several Asian countries, WorldFish, in collaboration with Bangladesh’s Department of Fisheries, has developed a program to improve biosecurity in the tilapia industry throughout the country. As the first step, a training program has been designed and conducted to train a group of specialists called Master Trainers on improving tilapia hatchery biosecurity. This manual is a result of that program. The Master Trainers will use this manual for training tilapia hatchery technicians countrywide on how to improve biosecurity in hatcheries

A bacteriological study of the natural flora of edible oyster, Crassostrea madrasensis

The total viable bacterial populations in the oysters and the sea water from the edible oyster farm at Tuticorin were in the range of 10 super(3) to 10 super(4) per ml and 1 super(2) to 10 super(3) per ml respectively. The maximum most probable number of faecal coliform recorded during the one year period of study of both the oysters and seawater were 33 per 100 ml. Pathogenic bacteria (Salmonella sp., Vibrio cholerae, coagulase positive staphylococci and faecal streptococci were absent in oysters and farm water. Study of 197 (98 taken from oyster liquid and 99 from oyster farm water) randomly isolated cultures indicated that gram negative asporogenus rod-like bacteria of the Vibrio, Flavobacterium, Achromobacter and Pseudomonas groups were the dominant flora of the oyster liquid as well as seawater

Hybrid sliding mode control of DFIG with MPPT using three multicellular converters

International audienceThis paper deals with hybrid sliding mode control of Doubly Fed Induction Generator DFIG with Maximum Power Point Tracking MPPT connected by rotor side to three bridges of Multicellular Converters MCCs. The hybrid aspect of the converters is taken into consideration which includes the continuous and discrete states of the converters. The vector control is used to command the DFIG speed and reactive stator power. The currents in Park d-q reference are controlled using hybrid sliding mode. The sliding surfaces are developed using Lyapunov stability method. The developed controller allows decoupled control of the stator active and reactive power. The final results are illustrated at the end of this paper to present the advantages of the control method developed in this paper

Degradation of methomyl by the novel bacterial strain Stenotrophomonas maltophilia M1

The use of microorganisms in the degradation and detoxification of many toxic xenobiotics, especially pesticides, is an efficient tool for the decontamination of polluted sites in the environment. A novel bacterial strain (M1) was isolated from several water samples contaminated with methomyl which is capable of degrading methomyl pesticide (1000 ppm) in the presence of 0.05% glucose. These water samples were collected from different irrigation sites in Egypt where methomyl is heavily applied. The partial sequence of 16SrRNA gene of the isolate showed the highest similarity to Stenotrophomonas maltophilia . Restriction fragment patterns of isolated plasmid DNA showed that this strain harbours two different plasmids PMa (8Kb) and PMb (5Kb). PMb succeeded to be transferred to Escherichia coli DH5\u3b1 strain. This transformed strain (M2) acquired the ability to grow in the presence of methomyl (1000 ppm) and 0.05% glucose. So it was deduced that the gene responsible for the degradation process was encoded by this plasmid. The ability of the two strains M1 and M2 to degrade methomyl was detected by using solid phased extraction coupled to capillary liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (SPE-LC-ESI-MS)

An enriched finite element model with q-refinement for radiative boundary layers in glass cooling

Radiative cooling in glass manufacturing is simulated using the partition of unity finite element method. The governing equations consist of a semi-linear transient heat equation for the temperature field and a stationary simplified P1 approximation for the radiation in non-grey semitransparent media. To integrate the coupled equations in time we consider a linearly implicit scheme in the finite element framework. A class of hyperbolic enrichment functions is proposed to resolve boundary layers near the enclosure walls. Using an industrial electromagnetic spectrum, the proposed method shows an immense reduction in the number of degrees of freedom required to achieve a certain accuracy compared to the conventional h -version finite element method. Furthermore the method shows a stable behaviour in treating the boundary layers which is shown by studying the solution close to the domain boundaries. The time integration choice is essential to implement a q -refinement procedure introduced in the current study. The enrichment is refined with respect to the steepness of the solution gradient near the domain boundary in the first few time steps and is shown to lead to a further significant reduction on top of what is already achieved with the enrichment. The performance of the proposed method is analysed for glass annealing in two enclosures where the simplified P1 approximation solution with the partition of unity method, the conventional finite element method and the finite difference method are compared to each other and to the full radiative heat transfer as well as the canonical Rosseland model

High-order finite elements for the solution of Helmholtz problems

In this paper, two high-order finite element models are investigated for the solution of two-dimensional wave problems governed by the Helmholtz equation. Plane wave enriched finite elements, developed in the Partition of Unity Finite Element Method (PUFEM), and high-order Lagrangian-polynomial based finite elements are considered. In the latter model, the Chebyshev-Gauss-Lobatto nodal distribution is adopted and the approach is often referred to as the Spectral Element Method (SEM). The two strategies, PUFEM and SEM, were developed separately and the current study provides data on how they compare for solving short wave problems, in which the characteristic dimension is a multiple of the wavelength. The considered test examples include wave scattering by a rigid circular cylinder, evanescent wave cases and propagation of waves in a duct with rigid walls. The two approaches are assessed in terms of accuracy for increasing SEM order and PUFEM enrichment. The conditioning, discretization level, total number of storage locations and total number of non-zero entries are also compared