Impact of piracy on Somalia: Society, economy, and state building

Somali pirates have hijacked more than 270 ships and attacked over 1,100 vessels from 1995 to 2014 (IMB, 2014). Reports by the International Maritime Bureau estimate that more than 3,700 crew members have been held hostage in various parts of Somalia from 2006 to 2014. During those years, pirates have collected millions of dollars in ransom. Ironically, in the narratives surrounding the emergence of piracy in the Horn of Africa, a great deal has been written about the threats it has posed to global security and world trade (OBP, 2013). Yet missing from these accounts has been the impact of piracy on the immediate region of East Africa and particularly on Somalia. In this chapter, we examine the negative effects that piracy has inflicted on Somali society, economy, and security, and on its state-building activities.Scopu

Measles on the Rise: The importance of vaccination

non

Enhancement of Antimicrobial Sensitivity of Salmonella and Escherichia coli Strains Isolated from Chickens Using Silver Nanoparticles in Assiut Governorate

Before the era of complete resistance to antibiotics due to their extensive use in poultry farms, new strategies were discovered, one of them was the use of nanoparticles to enhance the action of antibiotics. Therefore, this study was carried out to find out the antibacterial effect of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) either separately or in combination with antibiotics. The obtained data showed the antibacterial activity of AgNPs against the tested Escherichia coli and Salmonella strains with MIC level of 0.85 µg/mL. Synergistic effects of AgNPs with antibiotics against E. coli revealed two-fold drop in MIC of ciprofloxacin and amoxicillin. Meanwhile, there was three-fold drop in MIC of gentamicin, cefotaxime and neomycin. Significant finding was observed in the case of the synergism of AgNPs with amoxicillin and gentamicin, the examined E. coli O2 resistant to amoxicillin and gentamicin became sensitive when the antibiotics were combined with AgNPs. It could be concluded that AgNPs can be easily produced by Rosemary aqueous extracts as low-cost, eco-friendly method for generating AgNPs. New generations of bactericidal compounds containing AgNPs could be successfully used in poultry farms for prevention and treating E. coli infections

Oscillation Criteria for Some Higher Order Integrodynamic Equations on Timescales

We study the oscillation behavior for some higher order integrodynamic equations on timescales. We establish some new sufficient conditions guaranteeing that all solutions of theses equations are oscillatory. Some numerical examples in the continuous case are given to validate the theoretical results

Evaluating the Effects of Human Activity over the Last Decades on the Soil Organic Carbon Pool Using Satellite Imagery and GIS Techniques in the Nile Delta Area, Egypt

The study aims to clarify the relationship between soil organic carbon (SOC) and human activity under arid conditions, in the east area of the Nile Delta, Egypt. SOC is one of the critical factors in food production and plays an important role in the climate change because it affects the physio-chemical soil characteristics, plant growth, and contributes to sustainable development on global levels. For the purpose of our investigations, 120 soil samples (0–30 cm) were collected throughout different land uses and soil types of the study area. Multiple linear regressions (MLR) were used to investigate the spatiotemporal relationship of SOC, soil characteristics, and environmental factors. Remote sensing data acquired from Landsat 5 TM in July 1995 and operational land imager (OLI) in July 2018 were used to model SOC pool. The results revealed significant variations of soil organic carbon pool (SOCP) among different soil textures and land-uses. Soil with high clay content revealed an increase in the percentage of soil organic carbon, and had mean SOCP of 6.08 ± 1.91 Mg C ha−1, followed by clay loams and loamy soils. The higher values of SOCP were observed in the northern regions of the study area. The phenomenon is associated with the expansion of the human activity of initiating fish ponds that reflected higher values of SOC that were related to the organic additions used as nutrients for fish. Nevertheless, the SOC values decreased in southeast of the study area with the decrease of soil moisture contents and the increase in the heavy texture profiles. As a whole, our findings pointed out that the human factor has had a significant impact on the variation of soil organic carbon values in the Eastern Nile Delta from 1995 to 2018. As land use changes from agricultural activity to fish ponds, the SOCP significantly increased. The agriculture land-use revealed higher SOCP with 60.77 Mg C ha−1 in clay soils followed by fish ponds with 53.43 Mg C ha−1. The results also showed a decrease in SOCP values due to an increasing in land surface temperature (LST) thus highlighting that influence of temperature and ambient soil conditions linked to land-use changes have a marked impact on surface SOCP and C sequestration

Residual and Past Entropies of Concomitants from Lai And Xie Extensions of Case-II of Generalized Order Statistics and its Dual

In this article, we consider a new extensions of Morgenstern family is Lai and Xie extensions and discuss their concomitants for case-II of generalized order statistics and case-II of dual generalized order statistics. Additionally, recurrence relation between moments is found for the recommended models. We have also derived the expression for the joint distribution of concomitants for case-II of generalized order statistics and its dual. The residual and past entropies are shown last

A Deep Learning Approach for Vital Signs Compression and Energy Efficient Delivery in mhealth Systems

© 2013 IEEE. Due to the increasing number of chronic disease patients, continuous health monitoring has become the top priority for health-care providers and has posed a major stimulus for the development of scalable and energy efficient mobile health systems. Collected data in such systems are highly critical and can be affected by wireless network conditions, which in return, motivates the need for a preprocessing stage that optimizes data delivery in an adaptive manner with respect to network dynamics. We present in this paper adaptive single and multiple modality data compression schemes based on deep learning approach, which consider acquired data characteristics and network dynamics for providing energy efficient data delivery. Results indicate that: 1) the proposed adaptive single modality compression scheme outperforms conventional compression methods by 13.24% and 43.75% reductions in distortion and processing time, respectively; 2) the proposed adaptive multiple modality compression further decreases the distortion by 3.71% and 72.37% when compared with the proposed single modality scheme and conventional methods through leveraging inter-modality correlations; and 3) adaptive multiple modality compression demonstrates its efficiency in terms of energy consumption, computational complexity, and responding to different network states. Hence, our approach is suitable for mobile health applications (mHealth), where the smart preprocessing of vital signs can enhance energy consumption, reduce storage, and cut down transmission delays to the mHealth cloud.This work was supported by NPRP through the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation) under Grant 7-684-1-127