Use of fresh cow's milk in infant feeding

As a substitute for breast feeding, cow's milk is the best food that has yet been found, from the point of view of economy and adaptability. For infant feeding, definite standards in the composition and in the cleanliness of production are essential. Fresh cow’s milk, even whole, is perfectly digestible by the normal infant, even under three months old; but in certain cases of impaired or feeble digestion some sort of modification is necessary. An exact way of "humanizing" cow’s milk has not yet been devised; but good results are found from many modifications, viz. boiling, citrating, diluting and acidifying

Delay and Cost Overrun Risks in Sudanese Construction Projects: QuantitativeApproach

It is quite observed and frequently iterated in the risk literature that construction projects are prone to various and interrelated risks. Risks that span over a wide spectrum such as delays, cost overrun, safety, design, construction, environmental, weathering, legal and operational risks. Delays and cost overruns are considered among the leading threat risks that a project can experience and suffer. Quantifying those risks is intricate due to the complex and interrelated nature of construction projects and risks encountered over them. Isolating and quantifying the effect of those risks (delays and cost overruns), apart from the overall interacted effect of other risks, is an important performance indicator. Moreover, it can serve as a useful predictive and proactive tool for Sudanese construction project management professionals in formulating risk response plans. In order to achieve such a goal, special circumstances and conditions shall hold valid. Conditions as holding still the key other risks that are expected to affect the overall project risk interaction. The aim of this paper is to develop predictive models in order to quantify the magnitude of delays and cost overruns. This is sought by incorporating non-probabilityreadily accessible sample (n=19) of solely-steady funding, defined scope, contractual time frame and cost projects. This is meant to isolate (as much as practical) other than delays and cost over runs risk factors. To achieve the stated goal, regression statistical techniques and Monte Carlo simulation are utilized using Minitab, SPSS and @risk softwares. Comparison between the results obtained by the Monte Carlo simulation and the actual finish durations and costs was conducted. It was found that the uniform distribution is the best fit for the actual project durations and Pareto distribution for the actual cost. It was also found that there is a significant difference between the actual and contractual durations, which resulted in significantly large delays. In the author opinion this is can be attributed to one or collateral of the scenarios of owner imposed contractual time frame, non-compensable time extensions, changes and variations, contract miss -management and lack of accurate project scope definition

Attitudes of Media and Political Sciences Students towards the Way Palestinian Television Addresses the political Division: A Field Study

This study aims at recognizing the attitudes of mass communication and political sciences students towards the way Palestinian Television addresses the issue of political division within the framework of several theories, namely: the functional perspective of mass media and the theory of dependence on mass media. To achieve the study objectives, the researchers employed the approach of “surveying the audience of mass media” based on a sample of (400) students from different universities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This sample has been chosen by the stratified random sampling from Al-Najah National University in the West Bank and the Islamic University in Gaza. The study has come up with the following results: (62.7%) of the study sample population watch Palestine T.V, whereas (37.3%) do not. The item related to the evening period of watching T.V gets the highest average value which stands at (1.52). Keywords: Attitudes of Media, political Division, West Bank, Sector Gaza, Palestine T

The Intersection of Early Life Experiences and Serotonergic Gene Expression on Behavior and Physiology.

Adverse early life experiences (aELEs), such as childhood abuse, neglect, or trauma, increase lifetime vulnerability for mental illness. Interactions between aELEs and polymorphisms in serotonergic (5-HT) genes can further increase risk. However, understanding of how aELEs shape the serotonergic system remains limited, despite extensive clinical evidence implicating 5-HT abnormalities in mental illness. This thesis work investigates the long-term consequence of maternal separation (MS), a rat model of aELE, in c57bl/6 mice. Specifically, changes in the expression and DNA methylation of tryptophan hydroxylase 2 (TPH2), the rate-limiting enzyme in neuronal 5-HT synthesis, as well as associated behavioral and molecular correlates, are evaluated. In parallel, a transgenic TPH2 knockdown mouse line is characterized to evaluate the effect of decreased TPH2 expression on behavior. Brief (MS15) and prolonged (MS180) maternal separation affects long-term decreases in midline dorsal raphe TPH2 mRNA without altering DNA methylation. These changes are concurrent with shared decreases in raphe serotonin transporter mRNA, increases in dorsal hippocampal glucocorticoid receptor mRNA, and decreases in anxiety-like behavior. The expression and behavioral patterns are in contrast to reported changes in MS rats, indicating a unique response to MS that affects a convergence between MS15 and MS180 c57bl/6 mice that resembles patterns reported in early-life induced ‘resilient’ rats. Underlying convergence, maternal behavior during the MS paradigm is transiently increased as a function of separation duration. This implicates enhanced maternal care as a moderating influence on early life stress, promoting later-life ‘resiliency’ in c57bl/6 mice. In parallel, transgenic knockdown of TPH2 affects a significant decrease in anxiety- and depression- like behavior, supporting a functional role of decreased TPH2 mRNA in shaping long-term behavioral changes during early development. In summary, this thesis work demonstrates that low TPH2 mRNA during early development alters long-term behavior, affecting a phenotype of decreased anxiety- and depression- like behavior. Moreover, it suggests a unique response to MS in c57bl/6 mice, in which maternal mediation not only mitigates aELEs, but can also promote lifetime ‘resiliency.’PHDNeuroscienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97907/1/aureias_1.pd

A novel scalable representative-based forecasting approach of service quality

© 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature. Several approaches to forecast the service quality based on its quality of service (QoS) properties are reported in the literature. However, their main disadvantage resides in their limited scalability. In fact, they elaborate a forecasting model for each quality attribute per service, which cannot scale well for large or even medium size datasets of services. Accordingly, we propose a novel scalable representative-based forecasting approach of QoS. The QoS is modeled as a multivariate time series in which the values of service attributes are evaluated at each time instant and forecasted based on three stages. First, a data aggregation function is applied to the multivariate time series data. Then, principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to the quality attributes to determine the most relevant ones. The reduced data is then clustered, so that, a representative for each cluster is computed. Finally, a forecasting model is built for each cluster representative for the sake of deriving other services’ forecasting models. A set of extensive experiments are carried out to assess the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approach on a dataset of real services. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is up to 75% more efficient than direct forecasting approaches using time measurements while increasing the number of forecasted services and that the elaborated forecasting models enjoy insignificant forecasting errors

Portable Electron Microscopy for ISS and Beyond

Advances in space exploration have evolved in lockstep with key technology advances in diverse fields such as materials science, biological science, and engineering risk management. Research in these areas, where structure and physical processes come together, can proceed rapidly in part due to sophisticated ground-based analytical tools that help re-searchers develop technologies and engineering processes that push frontiers of human space exploration. Electron microscopes (EM) are an example of such a workhorse tool, lending a unique blend of strong optical scattering, high native resolution, large depth of focus, and spectroscopy via characteristic X-ray emission, providing exquisite high-magnification structural imaging and chemical analysis. Ground-based EMs have been essential in NASA research for many years. In particular, in mineralogy and petrology, EM is used to understand the origin and evolution of the solar system, particularly rocky bodies. In microbiology, EM has helped visualize the architecture of tissues and cells. In engineering/materials science, EM has been used to characterize particulate debris in air and water samples, determine pore sizes in ceramics/catalysts, understand the nature of fibers, determine composition and morphology of new and existing materials, and characterize micro-textures of vapor deposited films. EM is highly effective at investigating a wide variety of nanoscale materials/biomaterials at the core of many of NASAs inquiries. Despite exquisite optical performance and versatility, EMs are traditionally large, heavy, and have high power consumption. They are also expensive so they tend to be housed at universities and large research institutions, or at major industrial laboratory sites with support staff, supplies, and skilled operators. Since most organizations cannot support their own EM, samples are often sent to these large institutions and service centers to be imaged, at great expense and of-ten with delay of weeks to months for complex analyses. Complexity, high cost, and maintenance associated with collecting EM image data has until now severely limited fields in which EM is used. Making EM accessible outside constrained terrestrial laboratory environments will bring EMs performance and versatility to a much broader range of scientific and engineering endeavors, including in space

CEO stock-option compensation and the use of credit default swaps in relation to European bank risk

This thesis investigates two main aspects related to the use of credit default swaps (CDS) by European banks. The first area of investigation focuses on the relationship between the CEOs’ risk-taking incentives generated by stock option compensation and the usage of CDS by banks.This thesis contributes to the existing literature in risk management with derivatives, which initially assumes that the use of derivatives is intended to reduce firm risk, by distinguishing between CDS use for hedging purposes and CDS use for trading purposes. The relationship between CEOs’ risk-taking incentives and CDS use in banks, and the influence of CDS use on bank’s risk are investigated based on the purpose of CDS use.This thesis utilises the estimates of the Black-Scholes sensitivity of executives’ stock option portfolios to stock return volatility (vega) to test the relationship between CEOs’ risk-taking incentives and CDS use. In addition, this thesis distinguishes between the effect of risk-taking incentives on CDS use for hedging purposes, and the effect of risk-taking incentives on CDS use for trading (speculating) purposes.The second key aspect of this thesis is to examine the effect of CDS use on bank risk by distinguishing between the effect of CDS use for hedging purposes and CDS use for trading purposes. The purpose of CDS use that depends upon the managers’ risk-taking incentives and the use of CDS can have different implications to the risk profile of the bank.Data for the period of 2006 – 2011 were hand collected from the annual reports of sixty European banks. The sample comprises publicly listed banks from European stock market indices and premier indices of the European Union countries (EU-27).In conducting the empirical testing, the two stages regression approach was used to adjust for the potential endogeneity that could arise between the risk-taking incentives of stock option compensation (vega), and CDS use.The results show a significantly positive relationship between CEOs’ risk-taking incentives generated by stock option compensations and CDS use in banks for trading purposes. This implies that higher risk-taking incentives (vega) are associated with greater CDS use for trading purposes. Furthermore, there is a negative linkage between CEOs’ risk-taking incentives and CDS use for hedging purposes at weak levels of statistical significance.The results also show strong evidence of a positive linkage between CDS use for trading purposes and bank risk. CDS use for trading purposes is associated with a higher bank’s beta and lower distance to default. Further, the results show a positive and significant relationship between CDS use for hedging purposes and bank risk. CDS use for hedging purposes is also associated with a higher beta of a bank and lower distance to default. These results are consistent with the theoretical predictions of Smith and Stulz (1985), who suggest that stock options can influence managers’ decisions to use derivatives and lead to greater alignment between the interests of managers and shareholders by mitigating managerial risk aversion. Thus, stock options provide managers with incentives to take on risk.Overall, the evidence presented in this thesis suggests that CEOs’ risk-taking incentives derived from stock options compensation is a key determinant of CDS use in banks. Moreover, banks’ CDS use increases bank risk regardless of the purpose of its use. Both hedging and speculating CDS activities are associated with a bank’s higher risk.This thesis provides an integrated understanding and builds a comprehensive picture of how CEOs’ stock option compensation can affect the purpose of CDS use, and how this use influences bank risk. It primarily extends previous empirical literature, which initially looked at derivatives as a risk reduction instrument, by distinguishing between CDS use for hedging purposes from CDS use for trading purposes

The Role of the Saudi University in Meeting the Needs of Female Students as Perceived by Females in Two Saudi Universities

The problem of this study concerns the needs of female students and their perceptions of satisfaction with the role of the two female institutions of higher education in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: King Abdul-Aziz University (KAU) and the College of Education for Girls