The Barriers of Implementing Governance Module in NGO in Arab Country: (The Case Study of Jordan)

The NGOs governances are always in continues development due to the changing life variables. As such, the previous studies of the NGOs performances and challenges always build a solid background for other researchers since they agree with many findings and conclusions globally and regionally. Therefore, this study represents a review that discussed the NGOs governance in Jordan as a case study of the Arab countries to conclude their barriers and obstacles. The article directed the knowledge for governance limitations in the developing countries in general and in Jordan in specific. Accordingly, it offered an enhancement on the theoretical background that can assess further studies. The NGOs in Arab countries have faced different barriers and challenges. These challenges could be divided to the international and regional levels. The main challenges that are categorised as  international level includes conflicted opinions during strategies creation, ideological stereotyped for possible associates , the situation framing that led to a competition for reaching the targets, the anxiety to fail that creates the depression of current rules and policies,the covering strategy that hides doubts, inner conflict, and disappointments. Whereas, weak governance, poor communications and poor internet usage are the main regional challenges of NGOs. According to the studies, the NGOs in Jordan are suffering from the mentioned obstacles besides the great lack of IT and internet usage, the significant social gap and weak regulations. As such, the consistent assessment of the NGOs governance progression will always be required. Keywords: NGOs, governance, barriers, Arab countries, Jorda

The Molecular Background Associated with the Progression of Hepatitis C to Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a major health problem worldwide. The DNA PM of cancer-related genes plays an important role in the development and progression of HCC. The data reported in our studies provide evidence that PM of p73, p14, and O6-MGMT is associated with HCC, whereas PM of the APC gene is more common in chronic hepatitis (CH) cases. Thus, it could be used as a maker for early detection of HCV-induced chronic active hepatitis. A panel of four genes APC, p73, p14, and O6-MGMT independently affected the classification of cases into HCC and CH with accuracy (89.9%), sensitivity (83.9%), and specificity (94.7%). Also, the detection of PM of APC, FHIT, p15, p16, and E-cadherin in peripheral blood of HCV-infected patients is a highly sensitive and specific. Therefore, blood could be used as efficiently as tissue biopsies to assess PM of different genes. This could help in the follow-up of CH patients and early detection of HCC. We did not observe a significant difference in the methylation status according to the virus type HBV versus HCV. So, plasma DNA is a reliable resource for methylation studies in the future, irrespective of the type of hepatitis infection

Improvements to deep convolutional neural networks for LVCSR

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are more powerful than Deep Neural Networks (DNN), as they are able to better reduce spectral variation in the input signal. This has also been confirmed experimentally, with CNNs showing improvements in word error rate (WER) between 4-12% relative compared to DNNs across a variety of LVCSR tasks. In this paper, we describe different methods to further improve CNN performance. First, we conduct a deep analysis comparing limited weight sharing and full weight sharing with state-of-the-art features. Second, we apply various pooling strategies that have shown improvements in computer vision to an LVCSR speech task. Third, we introduce a method to effectively incorporate speaker adaptation, namely fMLLR, into log-mel features. Fourth, we introduce an effective strategy to use dropout during Hessian-free sequence training. We find that with these improvements, particularly with fMLLR and dropout, we are able to achieve an additional 2-3% relative improvement in WER on a 50-hour Broadcast News task over our previous best CNN baseline. On a larger 400-hour BN task, we find an additional 4-5% relative improvement over our previous best CNN baseline.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Link between distal sensory polyneuropathy, insulin-like growth factor-I and bone mineral density in elderly diabetics

Background: The association between Distal Sensory Polyneuropathy (DSP) and systemic osteopenia was studied before in type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (DM), however, is not all clear, with scanty researches in type 2 DM. In addition, Insulin-like Growth Factor-I (IGF-1) could be the most important mediator of bone growth, and an important neurotrophic factor for peripheral sensory neurons. Therefore, the aim of this study was to study the association between bone mineral density (BMD) and DSP, in elderly patients with type 2 DM, and the link between IGF-1 and both BMD and DSP.Methods: Eighty eight elderly patients, aged ≥60 years, were involved in this case (43 diabetics with DSP and 17 diabetics without DSP) - control (28 non diabetics) study. BMD and IGF-1 were measured.  Results: There was no significant difference between cases and controls regarding T score of either lumbar spine or femoral neck or IGF-1 (P = 0.83, 0.96 and 0.17 consecutively). DM without DSP had higher IGF-1 than both DM with DSP& the control group (P = 0.011 and 0.010 consecutively). IGF-1 was a significant predictor of T score of both femoral neck and lumbar spine, only in the control group (P = 0.008 and <0.001 consecutively) (OR=1.44 and 2.4 consecutively) (CI=1.1-1.9 and 1.9-3.1 consecutively). Neither DSP nor IGF-1 was (were) a significant predictor of BMD in diabetics.Conclusion: There was no association between type 2 DM and BMD. IGF-1 was higher in diabetics without DSP than those with DSP or the control group. IGF-1 was a positive predictor of BMD only in the control group.

Vision algorithms for hypercube machines

Several commercial hypercube parallel processors with the potential to deliver massive parallelism cost-effectively have been announced recently. They open the door to a wide variety of application areas that could benefit from parallelism. Computer vision is one of these application areas. This paper develops a general model for hypercube machines, and uses it to show how vision algorithms can be executed on hypercubes. In particular, the steps in the problem of thick-film inspection are used as a concrete example. The time needed to complete a typical inspection is used to demonstrate the performance of hypercube machines. Experimental results from a hypercube machine illustrate the potential use of such machines.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/26820/1/0000379.pd

Thermochemistry and Kinetics of the Thermal Degradation of 2-Methoxyethanol as Possible Biofuel Additives

Oxygenated organic compounds derived from biomass (biofuel) are a promising alternative renewable energy resource. Alcohols are widely used as biofuels, but studies on bifunctional alcohols are still limited. This work investigates the unimolecular thermal degradation of 2-methoxyethanol (2ME) using DFT/BMK and ab initio (CBS-QB3 and G3) methods. Enthalpies of the formation of 2ME and its decomposition species have been calculated. Conventional transition state theory has been used to estimate the rate constant of the pyrolysis of 2ME over a temperature range of 298–2000 K. Production of methoxyethene via 1,3-H atom transfer represents the most kinetically favored path in the course of 2ME pyrolysis at room temperature and requires less energy than the weakest C α − C β simple bond fission. Thermodynamically, the most preferred channel is methane and glycoladhyde formation. A ninefold frequency factor gives a superiority of the C α − C β bond breaking over the C γ − O β bond fission despite comparable activation energies of these two processes. © 2019, The Author(s).Scopu

Long-term field and laboratory leaching tests of cemented radioactive wastes

Experiments with real and simulated radioactive cementitious wasteforms were set up to compare the leaching behaviour of cementitious wasteforms containing nuclear power plant operational waste in field and laboratory test conditions. Experiments revealed that the average annual Cs-137 leach rate in deionised water was about thirty-five times greater compared with the measured average value for the 1st year of the field test. Cumulative leached fraction of Cs-137 for 1st year (3.74%) was close to values reported in literature for similar laboratory experiments in deionised water, however more than two orders of magnitude higher than the 1st year leached fraction of Cs-137 in the repository test (0.01%). Therefore, to compare field and laboratory test results, a scaling factor is required in order to account for surface to volume factor difference, multiplied by a temperature factor and a leach rate decrease coefficient related to the ground water composition. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Synthesis of some quinoline thiosemicarbazone derivatives of potential antimicrobial activity

5-Acetyl (or 5-benzoyl)-8-hydroxyquinoline-4-substituted thiosemi-carbazones (IIa-m, IIIa-m respectively) have been prepared via the condensation of . The thiosemicarbazones (IIa-l, IIIa-f) were subjected to cyclization into the corresponding thiazolidinones (IVa-l, Va-f) by the reaction with ethyl bromoacetate in the presence of anhydrous sodium acetate. The structures of the thiosemicarbazones as well as the corresponding thiazolidinones were assigned based on both elemental and spectroscopic evidences. The prepared compounds were also evaluated for antibacterial and antifungal activities