Arabic Codes in Hebrew Texts: On the Typology of Literary Code-switching

In the late 1950s, Iraqi Jews left or had to leave Iraq for Israel. In the course of their encounter with a new society, with Hebrew as the national language, most Iraqi Jewish authors found it impossible to continue writing in Arabic in Israel and had to face the literary challenge of switching to Hebrew. As bilinguals, Iraqi Jewish novelists have employed Arabic in some of their Hebrew literary works, including code-switching. Conversational Code-switching is traditionally divided into three types: intersentential code-switching, intrasentential code-switching and tag-switching. This paper focuses on the typology of code-switching in literary texts. It investigates Arabic codes used in three Hebrew novels written by Iraqi Jewish novelists. The paper suggests three main types of literary code-switching in view of the mutual relationship between author, text and reader. These are Hard-Access, Easy-Access and Ambiguous Access codeswitching

Non-human tools for the evaluation of bitter taste in the design and development of medicines: a systematic review

Taste evaluation is a crucial factor for determining acceptance of medicines by patients. The human taste panel test is the main method used to establish the overall palatability and acceptability of a drug product to a patient towards the end of development. Non-human in vitro and in vivo taste-evaluation tools are very useful for pre-formulation, quality control and screening of formulations. These non-human taste-assessment tools can be used to evaluate all aspects of taste quality. The focus of this review is bitterness because it is a key aspect of taste in association with the development of medicines. In this review, recent in vitro (analytical) and in vivo (non-human) tools are described for the assessment of the bitter taste of medicines. Their correlations with human taste data are critically discussed. The potential for their use in early screening of the taste of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) to expedite paediatric formulation development is also considered

Smear Layer Removal Using Two Different Ni-Ti Instruments with Two Different Irrigating Systems. An Invitro Study

Objectives: To evaluate and compare smear layer removal in root canals instrumented with two single Ni-Ti rotary instruments with two different irrigating systems. Materials and Methods: Sixty recently extracted single-rooted mandibular premolars teeth were decoronated to a standardized length of 14 mm. Roots were divided into two main groups (n=30) according to the rotary NiTi file used for instrumentation either with One Shape (OS) file or with One Curve file (OC). Each main group was subdivided into three subgroups according to the methods used to agitate the irrigating solutions either sonically or ultrasonically as following: Group A was subdivided into Subgroup A1: One Shape file and Endo Activator (EA) (n=10) Subgroup A2: One Shape file and Passive Ultrasonic irrigating (PUI) (n=10) Subgroup A3 (control group): One Shape file and passive needle irrigation (n=10) Group B was subdivided into: Subgroup B1: One Curve file and Endo Activator (EA) (n=10) Subgroup B2: One Curve file and Passive Ultrasonic Irrigation (PUI) (n=10) Subgroup B3 without activation: One Curve file and passive needle irrigation (n=10). During instrumentation: In all groups, 3 ml of freshly prepared 2.6% NaOCl irrigating solution was delivered using 30 G NaviTip closed end needle. The final irrigation protocol included 3 ml of freshly prepared 2.6% NaOCl followed by 3 ml of 17% EDTA solution then 3 ml of normal saline as final rinse. After dividing the roots in half, the specimens were analysed under SEM magnification at (X1000) to assess the smear layer and perform statistical analysis. Results: In all groups a statistically significant difference was found between (Apical) and each of (Coronal) and (Middle) groups, where apical third showed higher smear layer scores followed by middle third and the coronal third. As regards total mean scores of all canal thirds, passive needle irrigation had the highest smear scores followed by PUI then EA. OS file showed higher smear layer score than OC file and there was no statistically significant difference between them. Conclusions: Within the limitations of this study, it could be concluded that: Machine-assisted irrigant activation techniques are reliable and promising methods that improve the cleanliness of root canal. None of the techniques was able to remove smear layer completely from the root canal. Heat treatment of OS file did not have significant effect regarding the ability to remove the smear layer

Rare Suprasellar Chordoid Meningioma with INI1 Gene Mutation

Background: Chordoid Meningioma is a rare brain tumour characterized genetically by loss of genetic material from chromosome 22q at cytogenetic level resulting in mutation of NF2 gene. Objectives and case report: In the present report, we described a rare case of suprasellar chordoid meningioma, which presented in a 32-year-old-woman. Her only complain was throbbing headache. Neurological examination showed left temporal hemianopia, decreased visual acuity (3/6), and no physical abnormalities related to Castleman syndrome were noted. Cranial magnetic resonance (MR) images demonstrated a 28x15 mm mass in the sellar region, which showed iso-to low intensity that enhanced vividly after gadolinium with upwards displacement of the Optic chiasm. Total surgical excision of the tumour was performed and subsequent histological examination of the tumour showed typical histology pattern of chordoid meningioma grade II according to the WHO classification system of meningiomas. Genomic DNA was extracted and mutation analysis for INI1 gene using primer of exon 4, 5, 7, and 9 showed mutation involving exon 9. DNA sequencing showedheterozygosity C­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­-T mutation in exon 9 of INI1 gene leading to change of amino acid serine to phenylalanine at (codon 63). The details of this case are presented with a review of the literature

Medical students' perceptions of complementary and alternative medicine therapies: A pre- and post-exposure survey in Majmaah University, Saudi Arabia

Background: Evidently, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is increasingly a recognized medical practice that efficiently uses multiple treatment therapies and techniques in promoting the health  and wellbeing of people as well as preventing and managing a variety of human disorders. Research in CAM, which courses exposure to diverse healthcare professionals, is important from many perspectives including improvement in teaching skills of faculty, enhancing capacity building, and  innovative curriculum development. This pre- and post-design crosssectional study aimed to assess perceptions, training needs, personal usage, use in office practice, and knowledge of two batches of medical students toward CAM therapies in Majmaah University, Saudi Arabia.Materials and Methods: The second year medical students of the first (year 2012-13) and second (year 2013-2014) batch [n=26 & 39, respectively] were selected for this study. A reliable 16-item  self-administered questionnaire was distributed among all students for answering before and after the 48-hour specific 19 CAM therapies course, in terms of CAM therapies are clearly conventional or  alternative, training needs, effectiveness, personal use, use in practice, management of two clinical cases by CAM or conventional therapies, and views about which evidence based approach strongly support individual CAM modalities.Results: Medical students' knowledge and perceptions of CAM therapies significantly improved across some sub-items of CAM questionnaire with a positive trend in the rest of its items including their views about CAM therapies, need for further training, personal use of therapies and advising patients regarding CAM practices strongly supported by randomized clinical controlled trials and published case studies.Conclusion: CAM course tends to have positive impact on the knowledge and perceptions of medical students, in addition to need for further training, and personal use and use of CAM therapies in practice in line with strong evidence-based data regarding therapeutic efficacy. The preliminary results of this study call for further research in specific CAM modalities with a larger sample in academic settings across the nation. Key words: Medical students; Complementary and Alternative Medicine; CAM course; CAM therapies; pre-post design study; Saudi Arabia

What About my Privacy, Habibi? Understanding Privacy Concerns and Perceptions of Users From Different Socioeconomic Groups in the Arab World

This paper contributes an in-depth understanding of privacy concerns and perceptions of Arab users. We report on the first comparison of privacy perceptions among (1) users from high socioeconomic groups in Arab countries (HSA), (2) users from medium to low socioeconomic groups in Arab countries (LSA), and (3) as a baseline, users from high socioeconomic groups in Germany (HSG). Our work is motivated by the fact that most research in privacy focused on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. This excludes a segment of the population whose cultural norms and socioeconomic status influence privacy perception and needs. We report on multiple novel findings and unexpected similarities and differences across the user groups. For example, shoulder surfing is more common across LSA and HSG, and defamation is a major threat in LSA. We discuss the implications of our findings on the design of privacy protection measures for investigated groups

Utilisation of an operative difficulty grading scale for laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background A reliable system for grading operative difficulty of laparoscopic cholecystectomy would standardise description of findings and reporting of outcomes. The aim of this study was to validate a difficulty grading system (Nassar scale), testing its applicability and consistency in two large prospective datasets. Methods Patient and disease-related variables and 30-day outcomes were identified in two prospective cholecystectomy databases: the multi-centre prospective cohort of 8820 patients from the recent CholeS Study and the single-surgeon series containing 4089 patients. Operative data and patient outcomes were correlated with Nassar operative difficultly scale, using Kendall’s tau for dichotomous variables, or Jonckheere–Terpstra tests for continuous variables. A ROC curve analysis was performed, to quantify the predictive accuracy of the scale for each outcome, with continuous outcomes dichotomised, prior to analysis. Results A higher operative difficulty grade was consistently associated with worse outcomes for the patients in both the reference and CholeS cohorts. The median length of stay increased from 0 to 4 days, and the 30-day complication rate from 7.6 to 24.4% as the difficulty grade increased from 1 to 4/5 (both p < 0.001). In the CholeS cohort, a higher difficulty grade was found to be most strongly associated with conversion to open and 30-day mortality (AUROC = 0.903, 0.822, respectively). On multivariable analysis, the Nassar operative difficultly scale was found to be a significant independent predictor of operative duration, conversion to open surgery, 30-day complications and 30-day reintervention (all p < 0.001). Conclusion We have shown that an operative difficulty scale can standardise the description of operative findings by multiple grades of surgeons to facilitate audit, training assessment and research. It provides a tool for reporting operative findings, disease severity and technical difficulty and can be utilised in future research to reliably compare outcomes according to case mix and intra-operative difficulty

Applications of Nature-Inspired Algorithms for Dimension Reduction: Enabling Efficient Data Analytics

In [1], we have explored the theoretical aspects of feature selection and evolutionary algorithms. In this chapter, we focus on optimization algorithms for enhancing data analytic process, i.e., we propose to explore applications of nature-inspired algorithms in data science. Feature selection optimization is a hybrid approach leveraging feature selection techniques and evolutionary algorithms process to optimize the selected features. Prior works solve this problem iteratively to converge to an optimal feature subset. Feature selection optimization is a non-specific domain approach. Data scientists mainly attempt to find an advanced way to analyze data n with high computational efficiency and low time complexity, leading to efficient data analytics. Thus, by increasing generated/measured/sensed data from various sources, analysis, manipulation and illustration of data grow exponentially. Due to the large scale data sets, Curse of dimensionality (CoD) is one of the NP-hard problems in data science. Hence, several efforts have been focused on leveraging evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to address the complex issues in large scale data analytics problems. Dimension reduction, together with EAs, lends itself to solve CoD and solve complex problems, in terms of time complexity, efficiently. In this chapter, we first provide a brief overview of previous studies that focused on solving CoD using feature extraction optimization process. We then discuss practical examples of research studies are successfully tackled some application domains, such as image processing, sentiment analysis, network traffics / anomalies analysis, credit score analysis and other benchmark functions/data sets analysis