Telepsychiatry And Mental Health Care For Syrian Refugees In Turkey

The Syrian conflict is now in its fourth year and has produced one of the largest humanitarian disasters since the Cold War. Violent fighting and aerial bombings in many of the country’s major cities have resulted in massive numbers of internally and externally displaced Syrians, many psychologically traumatized and in need of expert mental health attention. The influx of refugees into Syria’s neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey has stressed already strained health systems. The ability to deliver mental health care is inextricably linked to the existing health care infrastructure—a dynamic and often unstable institution as refugees migrate from one region to another and as local government and social factors influence refugees’ access to services. This thesis attempts to provide a framework for understanding the challenges to providing mental health care for Syrian refugees. Telepsychiatry is proposed as a potential modality to help bridge the mental health needs gap. Emphasis will be placed on the southern Turkish province of Kilis, were we carried out a pilot telepsychiatry assessment (PASSPORT study) discussed later in the thesis

Fetus safety in motor vehicle accidents

Motor vehicle accidents are statistically the major cause of accidental severe injuries for pregnant women and fetuses fatality. Volunteers, post mortem human surrogates, anthropomorphic crash test devices and computational occupant models are used to improve human safety in motor vehicle accidents. However, due to the ethical issues, pregnant women and their fetuses cannot be used as volunteers or post mortem human surrogates to investigate the effects of crashes on them. The only anthropomorphic test device representing pregnant women is very limited in design and lacks a fetus. There is no computational pregnant occupant model with a fetus other than 'Expecting'. This thesis focuses on understanding the risk of placental abruption for pregnant drivers involved in road accidents, hence assessing the risk to fetus fatality. An extensive review of existing models in general and pregnant women models in particular is reported. The time line of successive development of crash test dummies and their positive effect on automotive passive safety design are examined. 'Expecting', the computational pregnant occupant model with a finite element uterus and a multibody fetus, is used in this research to determine the strain levels in the uteroplacental interface. External factors, such as the effect of restraint systems and crash speeds are considered. Internal factors, such as the effect of placental location in the uterus, and the inclusion and exclusion of a fetus are investigated. The head of the multibody fetus is replaced with a deformable head model to investigate the effects of a deformable fetus head on strain levels. The computational pregnant driver model with a fetus offers a more realistic representation of the response to crash impact hence provides a useful tool to investigate fetus safety in motor vehicle accidents. Seat belt, airbag and steering wheel interact directly with the pregnant abdomen and play an important role on fetus safety in motor vehicle accidents. The results prove that the use of a three-point seat belt with the airbag offer the greatest protection to the fetus for frontal crash impacts. The model without a fetus underestimates the strain levels. The outcome of this research should assist automobile manufacturers to address the potential safety issues at the design level

Modelling and Optimization of an Off-Grid Hybrid Power System for Supplying Unmanned Offshore Installations in Eastern Malaysia

In this project, investigation about the potential utilization of hybrid power system in the Malaysian offshore environment is examined. An unmanned offshore installation was selected for the study. The solar and wind energy potentials in Malaysia were investigated and the feasibility study of the project was proved by using meteorological data from the project location at Southeast China Sea. In addition to that, the installation power demand was estimated based on the load profile from Cutter Platform, World first unmanned offshore platform to be operated totally by renewable energy in the North Sea. Moreover, a hybrid power system topology was proposed to supply the loads on-board the offshore installation

The Nature of Word-Accent in English With Special Reference to Duration and Perception

This is mainly a study of accent-based durational differences in syllables in British English. A framework for the study of accent is described. It is characterized by considering the two often separated domains (i. e. one-word utterances and longer utterances) as a single domain. The durational manifestations of the different degrees of accent are then studied. The method adopted is that of comparisons of the durations of syllables with identical syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures, with the average margins of difference being assessed in terms of significance against a reference duration of 40 msec. The condition of identicality in syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures is sometimes abandoned, however, for the sake of widening the scope of the material analysed or studying factors modulating the accent-duration relationship (e. g. speech-rate). The factor of syllable-position is occasionally used as a variable that affects this relationship. The hierarchy proposed for accentual degrees is found to be consistently manifested by duration in a directly proportional relation unless other variables are operative. On the basis of syllable-durations, the dissociation of so-called "word-accent" and "sentence-accent" has been found to be implausible. Comparisons of the durations of syllable-tokens in one-word and longer utterances have been found to produce significant durational variations only when one of two factors is involved: final lengthening, and the change from primary tonic to primary non-tonic accent and vice versa. Both factors are known to operate in both domains. The results of various Tests confirm on the basis of syllable-durations the inconsistency in the marking of secondary accents in the English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD). It is proposed that further studies of other parameters in relation to accent would find it worthwhile to keep the syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures of syllables constant. Various tenets and theories in the field of perception are then reviewed with respect to accent in the light of the results of a Perception Test. The results of the three Groups of judging informants (i. e. native linguists, native and phonetically naive, and non-native) were found to bear positively on the motor theory of speech perception. Familiarity with linguistic concepts was also found to be one of the factors that positively induced correct judgements. The advantage of native speakers of English over non-native ones was found to be maintained both in terms of the average percentage of correct judgement and of the patterns of incorrect judgement (e. g. opting for another prominent syllable in the word or for a non-prominent one). The deviation of the scores of correct judgements and the patterns of incorrect judgements in the case of given types of word (e. g. deliberately misaccented words and compound words) from the general percentages and patterns were also individually accounted for

A Template Functional-Gage Design Using Parameter-File Table In Autodesk Inventor

A systematic approach using Autodesk Inventor to design the functional gages of Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing (GD&T) is presented. The gages can be used to check straightness, angularity, perpendicularity, parallelism, and position tolerances of a part when geometric tolerances are specified with Maximum Material Condition (MMC). Four steps are proposed to accomplish the task: (1) creation of two-dimensional (2-D) initial template files, (2) generation of hierarchical folders for the template files, (3) creation a 3-D gage model from a specific template file, and (4) dimensioning and generation of the gage drawing. Results show that, by following this approach, students can effectively generate correct engineering drawings for functional gages