Islamist state: Various visions?

This thesis analyzes original texts produced by ideologues and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qaeda and Islamic State to deduce their vision for the Islamist State. The thesis reveals the positions of the three movements from the institutions of Caliphate, Sharia, and Democracy, in addition to their tolerance of using violence as a strategy to install the Islamist State. The thesis concludes that the three movements are willing to install the Islamist Caliphate and apply Sharia law. Yet, they disagree on the strategy that has to be applied to achieve this end. The thesis explains the reasons behind the disagreement between the three movements either through their conditions of foundation, which affected the primary objective that the movement was founded for, or through the deficiencies in the knowledge base on Islamic political regime. The thesis starts with a literature review that sheds the light on the Muslim and Islamist visions for the state in Islam. The review also briefly tackles the Islamist movements. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 introduce the Muslim Brotherhood, Qaeda and Islamic State texts. Each chapter starts with introducing a general overview of the movement’s history and ends in a conclusion and summary of the movement’s vision through the studied institutions of the Islamist State. Each text analyzed is associated with a brief introduction on the author (if known) and the context in which the text is released

The Perspective of the Egyptian Ministry of Investment on Development Assistance Programs

Egypt has been and continues to be one of the major recipients of development assistance in the third world, yet very little effort has been made to assess the overall impact of this aid on Egypt A symposium was held on December 10th and 11th, 1983 in Oriental Hall at the American University in Cairo, organized by Cairo Papers in Social Science with financial support from the Cairo Office of the Ford Foundation. Egyptian government ministers, officials from representative donors and scholars experienced in development were invited to make formal presentations to the symposium. The essays presented in this issue were all presented at the symposiumhttps://fount.aucegypt.edu/faculty_book_chapters/1890/thumbnail.jp

Elderly versus young patients with appendicitis 3 years experience

AbstractBackgroundAppendicitis in the elderly continues to be a challenging surgical problem. Patients continued to present late with atypical presentations. Results might improve with earlier consideration of the diagnosis in elderly patients with abdominal pain, followed by prompt surgical operation. We aimed to present our experience with a series of elderly patients with acute appendicitis who were subjected to appendectomy to find out the difference in the course and outcome of acute appendicitis in elderly patients.Patients and methodsWe reviewed medical records of elderly patients (aged>60years) who underwent appendectomy for acute appendicitis at our hospital. Variables selected for analysis included age, sex, presenting symptoms, operative approach, operative findings, duration of hospitalization. Patients were compared to a control group, less than 31years admitted during the same period.ResultsTwenty-three patients’ records aged>60years with acute appendicitis were compared to a group of 40 patients aged<30years. There were significant differences between the two groups with regard to duration of symptoms preoperative hospital stay and total hospital stay. All young patients group had an uneventful postoperative recovery only two cases (5%) had wound infection. There was one death in the elderly group thus mortality rate was 4.3%. These two groups of patients showed significant differences in relation to the stage of disease at operation and postoperative complications. Elderly group of patients had perforated appendix in 16 cases (69.5%) while in group II patients eight cases (20%) had perforated appendix.ConclusionAcute appendicitis in the elderly remains a challenge for practicing surgeons and continues to be associated with high morbidity and mortality. Results might improve with earlier consideration of the use of CT abdomen for diagnosis in elderly patients with abdominal pain, followed by prompt surgical operation

Retrograde (fundus first) Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy in Situs Inversus Totalis

Situs i nversus totalis (SIT) is an uncommon anomaly characterised by transposition of organs to the opposite side of the body in a mirror image of normal. It may cause difficulties in the diagnostic and therapeutic management of abdominal pathology due to the mirror-image anatomy. We report the management of a case of symptomatic cholilithiasis with emphasis on its surgical technique

Evaluation of Different Manual Placement Strategies to Ensure Uniformity of the V-FPGA

Virtual FPGA (V-FPGA) architectures are useful as both early prototyping testbeds for custom FPGA architectures, as well as to enable advanced features which may not be available on a given host FPGA. V-FPGAs use standard FPGA synthesis and placement tools, and as a result the maximum application frequency is largely determined by the synthesis of the V-FPGA onto the host FPGA. Minimal net delays in the virtual layer are crucial for applications, but due to increased routing congestion, these delays are often significantly worse for larger than for smaller designs. To counter this effect, we investigate three different placement strategies with varying amounts of manual intervention. Taking the regularity of the V-FPGA architecture into account, a regular placement of tiles can lead to an 37% improvement in the achievable clock frequency. In addition, uniformity of the measured net delays is increased by 39%, which makes implementation of user applications more reproducible. As a trade-off, these manual placement strategies increase area usage of the virtual layer up to 16%

V-FPGAs: Increasing Performance with Manual Placement, Timing Extraction and Extended Timing Modeling

Virtual FPGAs (V-FPGAs) are used as vendor-independent virtualization layers, to retrofit features which are not available on the host FPGA and to prototype novel FPGA architectures. In these usecases, the achievable clock frequencies of V-FPGA user applications are a major concern. The abstraction layer inherently induces overhead, but this aspect is reinforced by nonuniformity effects: When V-FPGA cells perform worse locally, basic architecture modeling generalizes these worst-case path delays to the whole device, limiting applications to a lower frequency than theoretically achievable. We propose three approaches to attenuate these effects: First we introduce uniformity metrics and manual V-FPGA placement strategies for more uniform placement, improving achievable frequency by 16 %. Second, we propose a framework for automated timing extraction, enabling individual characterization of each V-FPGA design. Third, after evaluating Vivado synthesis strategies, we extend the timing model for non-uniform timings, achieving improvements of up to 28 %

Elucidating the mechanistic impact of single nucleotide variants in model organisms

Understanding how genetic variation propagate to differences in phenotypes in individuals is an ongoing challenge in genetics. Genome-wide association studies have allowed for the identification of many trait-associated genomic loci. However, they are limited in their inability to explain the altered cellular mechanism. Genetic variation can drive disease by altering a range of mechanisms, including signalling networks, TF binding, and protein folding. Understanding the impact of variants on such processes has key implications in therapeutics, drug development, and more. This thesis aims to utilise computational predictors to shed light on how cellular mechanisms are altered in the context of genetic variation and better understand how they drive both molecular and organism-level phenotypes. Many binding events in the cell are mediated by short stretches of sequence motifs. The ability to discover these underlying rules of binding could greatly aid our understanding of variant impact. Kinase–substrate phosphorylation is one of the most prominent post-translational modifications (PTMs) which is mediated by such motifs. We first describe a computational method which utilises interaction and phosphorylation data to predict sequence preferences of kinases. Our method was applied to 57% of human kinases capturing known well-characterised and novel kinase specificities. We experimentally validate four understudied kinases to show that predicted models closely resemble true specificities. We further demonstrate that this method can be applied to different organisms and can be used for other phospho-recognition domains. The described approach allows for an extended repertoire of sequence specificities to be generated, particularly in organisms for which little data is available. TF-DNA binding is another mechanism driven by sequence motifs, which is key for the tight regulation of gene expression and can be greatly altered by genetic variation. We have comprehensively benchmarked current methods used to predict non-coding variant effects on TF-DNA binding by employing over 20,000 compiled allele-specific ChIP-seq variants across 94 TFs. We show that machine learning-based approaches significantly outperform more rudimentary methods such as the position weight matrix. We further note that models for many TFs with distinct binding specificities were unable to accurately assess the impact of variants. For these TFs, we explore alternative mechanisms underlying TF-binding, such as methylation, co-operative binding, and DNA shape that drive poor performance. Our results demonstrate the complexity of predicting non-coding variant effects and the importance of incorporating alternative mechanisms into models. Finally, we describe a comprehensive effort to compile and benchmark state-of-the-art sequence and structure-based predictors of mutational consequences and predict the effect of coding and non-coding variants in the reference genomes of human, yeast, and E. coli. Predicted mechanisms include the impact on protein stability, interaction interfaces, and PTMs. These variant effects are provided through mutfunc, a fast and intuitive web tool by which users can interactively explore pre-computed mechanistic variant impact predictions. We validate computed predictions by analysing known pathogenic disease variants and provide mechanistic hypotheses for causal variants of unknown function. We further use our predictions to devise gene-level functionality scores in human and yeast individuals, which we then used to perform gene-phenotype associations and uncover novel gene-phenotype associations