Extreme Secularism vs. Religious Radicalism: The Case Of The French Burkini

The French theory of Laïcité, or assertive secularism, has rapidly developed to become a significant part of the French constitutional legacy, which subsequently brought out what should have been expected: conflicts between the right to self-determination, local culture, religious freedom, and the state interest in curbing radicalism and extremis

MODELLING THE FISHERIES OF LAKE MANZALA, EGYPT, USING PARAMETRIC AND NON-PARAMETRIC STATISTICAL METHODS

Much attention has been given to the economic aspects of the fisheries in Egypt, while building a statistical or mathematical model for fish production has received little attention. This study is devoted to a comprehensive assessment of Lake Manzala fisheries; past, present and future. Lake Manzala is one of the main fisheries resources in Egypt, and there is evidence that the fisheries have been over-exploited in recent years. The study objectives were to determine the factors that affect fish catches by individual vessels, to compare between parametric and non-parametric models of the fish catches, and to produce a mathematical model of stock behaviour which can be used to suggest policies to manage the Lake Manzala fishery. A new method of estimating the carrying capacity of the lake and intrinsic growth rate of Tilapia and its four species has been developed. Simulation had to be used to get error estimates of the biomass parameter estimates using the new method. Three catch strategies have been investigated and assessed, with discounted utility of future yields. Two ways of modelling individual vessel catches in relation to their effort characteristics, a parametric and non-parametric analysis, have been investigated. Using generalised additive model gave an improved fit to the survey data compared with the parametric analysis. It also gave a lower allowable fleet size which leads to more conservative management policy. A simulation approach was used to investigate the uncertainty in the predicted catches and stock levels, and to give insight into the risks associated with various levels of control. There was no evidence that a management strategy which aimed to fish at maximum sustainable yield would put the stock at risk

Secularismo Extremo vs. Radicalismo Religioso: El Caso Del Burkini Frances

La teoría francesa de Laicidad, ó secularismo asertivo, rápidamente ha llegado a ser una parte importante del legado constitucional francés, un legado el cual ha logrado demostrar lo que se había de esperar: conflictos entre el derecho a la autodeterminación, la cultura local, la libertad religiosa, y el interés del estado en reprimir el radicalismo y el extremism

AutoCure: Automated Tabular Data Curation Technique for ML Pipelines

Machine learning algorithms have become increasingly prevalent in multiple domains, such as autonomous driving, healthcare, and finance. In such domains, data preparation remains a significant challenge in developing accurate models, requiring significant expertise and time investment to search the huge search space of well-suited data curation and transformation tools. To address this challenge, we present AutoCure, a novel and configuration-free data curation pipeline that improves the quality of tabular data. Unlike traditional data curation methods, AutoCure synthetically enhances the density of the clean data fraction through an adaptive ensemble-based error detection method and a data augmentation module. In practice, AutoCure can be integrated with open source tools, e.g., Auto-sklearn, H2O, and TPOT, to promote the democratization of machine learning. As a proof of concept, we provide a comparative evaluation of AutoCure against 28 combinations of traditional data curation tools, demonstrating superior performance and predictive accuracy without user intervention. Our evaluation shows that AutoCure is an effective approach to automating data preparation and improving the accuracy of machine learning models

Studying the effect of high substrate temperature on the microstructure of vacuum evaporated TAPC: C60 organic solar thin films

Organic solar cells (OSCs), also known as organic photovoltaics (OPVs), are an emerging solar cell technology composed of carbon-based, organic molecules, which convert energy from the sun into electricity. Key for their performance is the microstructure of the light-absorbing organic bulk heterojunction. To study this, organic solar films composed of both fullerene C60 as electron acceptor and different mole percentages of di-[4-(N,N-di-p-tolyl-amino)-phenyl]-cyclohexane (TAPC) as electron donor were evaporated in vacuum in different mixing ratios (5, 50 and 95 mol%) on an ITO-coated glass substrate held at room temperature and at 110 °C. The microstructure of the C60: TAPC heterojunction was studied by grazing incidence wide angle X-ray scattering to understand the effect of substrate heating. By increasing the substrate temperature from ambient to 110 °C, it was found that no significant change was observed in the crystal size for the C60: TAPC concentrations investigated in this study. In addition to the variation done in the substrate temperature, the variation of the mole percent of the donor (TAPC) was studied to conclude the effect of both the substrate temperature and the donor concentration on the microstructure of the OSC films. Bragg peaks were attributed to C60 in the pure C60 sample and in the blend with low donor mole percentage (5%), but the C60 peaks became nondiscernible when the donor mole percentage was increased to 50% and above, showing that TAPC interrupted the formation of C60 crystals

Design and Analysis of Microwave Devices Based on Gap Waveguide Technology

Among state-of-the-art guiding structures, the Ridge Gap Waveguide (RGW) is a promising technology, as it minimizes the losses in high-frequency applications and supports wide operating bandwidth. There is another form of the guiding structures that utilize the idea of the Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) surfaces such as Groove Gap Waveguide (GGWG). It has the same advantages as the RGW in terms of losses, and immunity to leakages without the need for electrical contacts, but with different dispersion characteristics. The RGW supports a quasi-TEM mode while the GGWG supports TE modes as it's a different form of the rectangular waveguide. Therefore, GGWG has high power capability comparable to the standard waveguides. As currently, interest is increasing of millimeter wave and microwave applications, the RGW and GGWG are excellent candidates for these applications due to their low loss. It is quite essential to develop microwave components with superior electrical characteristics for such applications. The anisotropic materials have useful physical properties that can benefit the microwave devices, due to their enormous advantages such as high stability and wide bandwidth in the millimeter wave band. Ferrite is an example of such anisotropic materials. Their properties can be deployed to improve the performance of the millimeter microwave devices in terms of higher stability, wider band, and high power handling. Taking advantages of the above characteristics, the research work in this thesis is focusing on their use for microwave and millimeter wave frequencies. The presented devices are responsible for the feeding of the antenna systems. Moreover, they can be deployed in different applications such as antenna beamforming. In this thesis, the differential phase shifters and the orthomode transducers (OMTs) are realized by different technologies that are suitable for both of the microwave and the millimeter wave bands that serve different applications of the wireless communication systems. The research work done can also be summarized in two parts. The first part starts with the study and investigation of the ferrite material properties and their role in the microwave devices. Then, later providing a new accurate model with mathematical formulas for the differential ferrite phase shifter. Moreover, a new design methodology for those phase shifters is presented. Later, the ferrite is applied in the conventional waveguide, Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW), and RGW technologies. In the second part, study, design, and analysis of different types of the orthomode transducers are presented. They are devices responsible for combining and separation of two orthogonal polarizations. The presented OMTs has a compact size with excellent performance. Several OMT types are considered such as the one-fold symmetry, asymmetric, and two-fold symmetry. The first mentioned two OMTs are realized by deploying the waveguide technology, while the two-fold symmetry OMT is based on the GGWG technology. It has the ability to design a feeding network for an array of antennas based on the GGWG technology. Moreover, this OMT is fabricated using 3D printed technology that uses the carbonated plastic material, in which two copper layers are covering all the structure surfaces by electroplating. This fabrication is a new promising technology that is not expensive, lightweight and less complex than traditional machining. However, there are some concerns about power handling and high temperature withstanding. Such problems might have a solution in the future with a more accurate 3D metallic printers

LINC based amplifier architectures for power efficient wireless transmitters

Wireless communication trends Performance measuring of a communication system Power amplifiers and transmitters Power efficiency enhancement techniques Design and Optimization of LINC transmitter for OFDM applications LINC concept LINC signal decomposition LINC efficiency and combiner technologies Design optimization of LINC system Mismatch (imbalance) effects Advanced LINC transmitter architectures The 2X1 LINC transmitter system The 2X2 LINC transmitter system Mismatch effects