Barriers to Education for People with Disabilities in Bekaa, Lebanon

This paper presents the findings of a recent study on the educational situation of people with disabilities in Lebanon. The main findings of a survey conducted with 200 participants in the impoverished rural Bekaa region illustrate the inadequate educational situation of people with disabilities. The focus of the paper is on a discussion of the barriers that people with disabilities face in pursuing their education. Participants identified the following difficulties in pursuing their education: educational system barriers, inadequate finances, health issues, transportation difficulties, and family pressures. Although the focus of the article is not on factors that can facilitate educational achievement, some of these supports are identified, including family support and personal motivation. The article concludes with a discussion of current and planned community responses such as the development of an interdisciplinary community action network (The Inclusion Network), the provision of literacy courses, and a pilot project to foster the inclusion of children with disabilities in mainstream schools

Surface Roughness Contribution to the Auger Electron Emission

Scanning Auger Microscopy (SAM) experiments have shown that z height and θ slope relative to the analysed spot are parameters that contribute to the measured Auger intensity I(z, θ). For greater analysed areas specific to Auger Electron Spectroscopy (AES), the knowledge of height and slope statistical distributions P(z) and P(θ) is required. These functions have been determined by means of profilometric data. The spatial resolution of the used tactile profilometer is similar to that which characterizes AES. A mathematical relationship I { P(z), P(θ) } has been set up for Si samples whose roughness is well defined. On the other hand, Auger images can be compared to level sections

TAR channel access mechanism for VANET safety-critical situations

International audienceVehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is among the most relevant forms of mobile ad-hoc networks. VANET helps improving traffic safety and efficiency. By exchanging information between each others, vehicles can warn drivers or even prepare for dangerous situation. These warnings can be about critical situations like vehicles merging in a highway. Detecting and warning about such situations require a reliable communication between vehicles increasing thus the need for an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol. In this paper, we propose to apply Transmit And Reserve (TAR), an ad-hoc medium access protocol, to vehicular communications. We integrated TAR into NS-3 simulator and evaluated its performance compared to IEEE 802.11 DCF in a vehicular network context. The evaluation results show that TAR is an efficient medium access protocol for VANET critical situations as it increases the throughput reduces the medium access delays and provides close to optimal short term fairness

INVESTIGATION OF THE EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL FLEXURAL BEHAVIOR OF INNOVATIVE TOTALLY ENCASED COMPOSITE BEAMS

Composite steel-concrete beams have been widely used in long span construction and high rise buildings due to their favorable behavior in terms of high strength, stiffness, and ductility. In this research, the flexural behavior of an innovative steel-concrete composite section is investigated experimentally and verified numerically using ABAQUS software. The studied section is composed of steel tubular specimen or steel hollow pipe totally encased in concrete in the absence of any flexural or shear reinforcement. Instead, steel mesh wraps are used around the tubular steel specimen to provide sufficient steel-concrete bond. All of the studied beams have the same 3m length and T-section dimensions to provide adequate comparison of results. The influence of using different percentages of steel mesh wraps around the steel specimen and the structural steel shape effect on the failure mode and ultimate flexural capacity were investigated. It was found that the ABAQUS model has provided excellent simulation of the flexural response of the studied beams with acceptable difference in results as compared to those obtained from experimental testing. Besides, the presence of steel mesh wraps at highly compressive damaged locations have prevented concrete spalling and crushing in these zones by ensuring sufficient steel-concrete bond

An Overview of State Criteria for Declaring a Public Health Emergency

https://digitalcommons.unmc.edu/coph_policy_reports/1006/thumbnail.jp

CAV-2 Vector Development and Gene Transfer in the Central and Peripheral Nervous Systems

The options available for genetic modification of cells of the central nervous system (CNS) have greatly increased in the last decade. The current panoply of viral and nonviral vectors provides multifunctional platforms to deliver expression cassettes to many structures and nuclei. These cassettes can replace defective genes, modify a given pathway perturbed by diseases, or express proteins that can be selectively activated by drugs or light to extinguish or excite neurons. This review focuses on the use of canine adenovirus type 2 (CAV-2) vectors for gene transfer to neurons in the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system. We discuss (1) recent advances in vector production, (2) why CAV-2 vectors preferentially transduce neurons, (3) the mechanism underlying their widespread distribution via retrograde axonal transport, (4) how CAV-2 vectors have been used to address structure/function, and (5) their therapeutic applications

Comparison of the technical performance of a discretely supported slab track system and an embedded slab track system in a high-speed railway

Slab tracks are increasingly used for High-Speed Railways (HSR) as opposed to the conventional ballasted track. This is due to many factors, including increased durability and sustainability, as the slab track can sustain higher dynamic loading with less maintenance and disruption to railway services. In line with this, this paper reports on preliminary work on the development and application of a 3D structural model using the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software ABAQUS. The research aims at evaluating comparatively the behaviour of two types of slab track systems; namely, the RHEDA Track System (RTS), which is a German system, and the Balfour Beatty (UK) Embedded Rail System (ERS). The modelled track structures consist of a rail fastened onto a slab laid on a suitable foundation. The foundation comprises a Hydraulically Bound Layer (HBL) placed on a Frost Protection Layer (FPL) overlaying the subgrade soil. The paper reports on findings of static loading on a straight railway section investigating the relationship between slab the thickness values and the corresponding displacements (deflections) and related stresses along the load path. Ongoing research is further developing the model to assess the dynamic behaviour of HSR slab track including the railway geometry-structure interaction particularly at bends

SciTS: A Benchmark for Time-Series Databases in Scientific Experiments and Industrial Internet of Things

Time-series data has an increasingly growing usage in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and large-scale scientific experiments. Managing time-series data needs a storage engine that can keep up with their constantly growing volumes while providing an acceptable query latency. While traditional ACID databases favor consistency over performance, many time-series databases with novel storage engines have been developed to provide better ingestion performance and lower query latency. To understand how the unique design of a time-series database affects its performance, we design SciTS, a highly extensible and parameterizable benchmark for time-series data. The benchmark studies the data ingestion capabilities of time-series databases especially as they grow larger in size. It also studies the latencies of 5 practical queries from the scientific experiments use case. We use SciTS to evaluate the performance of 4 databases of 4 distinct storage engines: ClickHouse, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, and PostgreSQL

Configurable structure tree as a means to manage configurable business processes

© 2017 IEEE. A configurable Business Process (BP) is an abstract BP that engineers customize with respect to specific requirements. To keep track of the multiple and recurrent customizations that lead to a set of derived BPs, this paper proposes a knowledge-based approach that uses a new Process Structure Tree called configurable PST (cPST). A cPST abstracts a separate variability option of the configurable BP. All cPSTs should be equivalent to the set of all PSTs associated with the derived BPs that could originate from the same configurable BP. This paper also proposes a logic-based configuration model for capturing configuration details on the cBP and describing the cPST computing