The Ripple Effects When a Refugee Camp Becomes a University Town: University Teacher Education in Dadaab, Kenya

Dadaab, Kenya is the site of the first university teacher education program created by a consortium of institutions (UBC, York, Moi, Kenyatta) within the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees. Dadaab is also the host town to what has been described as the largest protracted refugee camp, at its peek nearly a half million residents. Here, four program graduates, who are secondary school teachers in Daddab tell their stories of the impact that their education diploma and degrees have had on them and their communities. Their stories are of leadership, resilience, and hope

Estimation of sleep problems among pregnant women during COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Objective To estimate the sleep problems among pregnant women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eligibility criteria English, peer-reviewed, observational studies published between December 2019 and July 2021 which assessed and reported sleep problem prevalence using a valid and reliable measure were included. Information sources Scopus, Medline/PubMed Central, ProQuest, ISI Web of Knowledge and Embase. Risk of bias assessment tool The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale checklist. Synthesis of results Prevalence of sleep problems was synthesised using STATA software V.14 using a random effects model. To assess moderator analysis, meta-regression was carried out. Funnel plot and Egger’s test were used to assess publication bias. Meta-trim was used to correct probable publication bias. The jackknife method was used for sensitivity analysis. Included studies A total of seven cross-sectional studies with 2808 participants from four countries were included. Synthesis of results The pooled estimated prevalence of sleep problems was 56% (95% CI 23% to 88%, I2=99.81%, Tau2=0.19). Due to the probability of publication bias, the fill-and- trim method was used to correct the estimated pooled measure, which imputed four studies. The corrected results based on this method showed that pooled prevalence of sleep problems was 13% (95% CI 0% to 45%; p<0.001). Based on meta-regression, age was the only significant predictor of prevalence of sleep problems among pregnant women. Limitations of evidence All studies were cross-sectional absence of assessment of sleep problems prior to COVID-19, and the outcomes of the pregnancies among those with and without sleep problems in a consistent manner are among the limitation of the current review. Interpretation Pregnant women have experienced significant declines in sleep quality when faced with the COVID-19 pandemic. The short-term and long-term implications of such alterations in sleep on gestational and offspring outcomes are unclear and warrant further studies. PROSPERO registration number CRD42020181644

Mapping and Deep Analysis of Image Dehazing: Coherent Taxonomy, Datasets, Open Challenges, Motivations, and Recommendations

Our study aims to review and analyze the most relevant studies in the image dehazing field. Many aspects have been deemed necessary to provide a broad understanding of various studies that have been examined through surveying the existing literature. These aspects are as follows: datasets that have been used in the literature, challenges that other researchers have faced, motivations, and recommendations for diminishing the obstacles in the reported literature. A systematic protocol is employed to search all relevant articles on image dehazing, with variations in keywords, in addition to searching for evaluation and benchmark studies. The search process is established on three online databases, namely, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science (WOS), and ScienceDirect (SD), from 2008 to 2021. These indices are selected because they are sufficient in terms of coverage. Along with definition of the inclusion and exclusion criteria, we include 152 articles to the final set. A total of 55 out of 152 articles focused on various studies that conducted image dehazing, and 13 out 152 studies covered most of the review papers based on scenarios and general overviews. Finally, most of the included articles centered on the development of image dehazing algorithms based on real-time scenario (84/152) articles. Image dehazing removes unwanted visual effects and is often considered an image enhancement technique, which requires a fully automated algorithm to work under real-time outdoor applications, a reliable evaluation method, and datasets based on different weather conditions. Many relevant studies have been conducted to meet these critical requirements. We conducted objective image quality assessment experimental comparison of various image dehazing algorithms. In conclusions unlike other review papers, our study distinctly reflects different observations on image dehazing areas. We believe that the result of this study can serve as a useful guideline for practitioners who are looking for a comprehensive view on image dehazing

Pathogenic Activation of Mesenchymal Stem Cells Is Induced by the Disease Microenvironment in Systemic Sclerosis

Objective: In systemic sclerosis (SSc), a persistent tissue repair process leads to progressive fibrosis of the skin and internal organs. The role of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which characteristically initiate and regulate tissue repair, has not been fully evaluated. We undertook this study to investigate whether dividing metakaryotic MSCs are present in SSc skin and to examine whether exposure to the disease microenvironment activates MSCs and leads to transdifferentiation. Methods: Skin biopsy material from patients with recent-onset diffuse SSc was examined by collagenase spread of 1-mm–thick surface-parallel sections, in order to identify dividing metakaryotic stem cells in each tissue plane. Adipose-derived MSCs from healthy controls were treated with dermal blister fluid (BF) from patients with diffuse SSc and profiled by next-generation sequencing, or they were evaluated for phenotypic changes relevant to SSc. Differential responses of dermal fibroblasts were studied in parallel. Results: MSC-like cells undergoing active metakaryotic division were identified in SSc sections (but not control sections) most prominently in the deep dermis and adjacent to damaged microvessels, in both clinically involved and uninvolved skin. Furthermore, exposure to SSc BF caused selective MSC activation, inducing a myofibroblast signature, while reducing signatures of vascular repair and adipogenesis and enhancing migration and contractility. Microenvironmental factors implicated in inducing transdifferentiation included the profibrotic transforming growth factor β, the presence of lactate, and mechanosensing, while the microenvironment Th2 cytokine, interleukin-31, enhanced osteogenic commitment (calcinosis). Conclusion: Dividing MSC-like cells are present in the SSc disease microenvironment where multiple factors, likely acting in concert, promote transdifferentiation and lead to a complex and resistant disease state

Identification of two novel autism genes, TRPC4 and SCFD2, in Qatar simplex families through exome sequencing

This study investigated the genetic underpinnings of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in a Middle Eastern cohort in Qatar using exome sequencing. The study identified six candidate autism genes in independent simplex families, including both four known and two novel autosomal dominant and autosomal recessive genes associated with ASD. The variants consisted primarily of de novo and homozygous missense and splice variants. Multiple individuals displayed more than one candidate variant, suggesting the potential involvement of digenic or oligogenic models. These variants were absent in the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) and exhibited extremely low frequencies in the local control population dataset. Two novel autism genes, TRPC4 and SCFD2, were discovered in two Qatari autism individuals. Furthermore, the D651A substitution in CLCN3 and the splice acceptor variant in DHX30 were identified as likely deleterious mutations. Protein modeling was utilized to evaluate the potential impact of three missense variants in DEAF1, CLCN3, and SCFD2 on their respective structures and functions, which strongly supported the pathogenic natures of these variants. The presence of multiple de novo mutations across trios underscored the significant contribution of de novo mutations to the genetic etiology of ASD. Functional assays and further investigations are necessary to confirm the pathogenicity of the identified genes and determine their significance in ASD. Overall, this study sheds light on the genetic factors underlying ASD in Qatar and highlights the importance of considering diverse populations in ASD research

Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Background: In an era of shifting global agendas and expanded emphasis on non-communicable diseases and injuries along with communicable diseases, sound evidence on trends by cause at the national level is essential. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) provides a systematic scientific assessment of published, publicly available, and contributed data on incidence, prevalence, and mortality for a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list of diseases and injuries. Methods: GBD estimates incidence, prevalence, mortality, years of life lost (YLLs), years lived with disability (YLDs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) due to 369 diseases and injuries, for two sexes, and for 204 countries and territories. Input data were extracted from censuses, household surveys, civil registration and vital statistics, disease registries, health service use, air pollution monitors, satellite imaging, disease notifications, and other sources. Cause-specific death rates and cause fractions were calculated using the Cause of Death Ensemble model and spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression. Cause-specific deaths were adjusted to match the total all-cause deaths calculated as part of the GBD population, fertility, and mortality estimates. Deaths were multiplied by standard life expectancy at each age to calculate YLLs. A Bayesian meta-regression modelling tool, DisMod-MR 2.1, was used to ensure consistency between incidence, prevalence, remission, excess mortality, and cause-specific mortality for most causes. Prevalence estimates were multiplied by disability weights for mutually exclusive sequelae of diseases and injuries to calculate YLDs. We considered results in the context of the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a composite indicator of income per capita, years of schooling, and fertility rate in females younger than 25 years. Uncertainty intervals (UIs) were generated for every metric using the 25th and 975th ordered 1000 draw values of the posterior distribution. Findings: Global health has steadily improved over the past 30 years as measured by age-standardised DALY rates. After taking into account population growth and ageing, the absolute number of DALYs has remained stable. Since 2010, the pace of decline in global age-standardised DALY rates has accelerated in age groups younger than 50 years compared with the 1990–2010 time period, with the greatest annualised rate of decline occurring in the 0–9-year age group. Six infectious diseases were among the top ten causes of DALYs in children younger than 10 years in 2019: lower respiratory infections (ranked second), diarrhoeal diseases (third), malaria (fifth), meningitis (sixth), whooping cough (ninth), and sexually transmitted infections (which, in this age group, is fully accounted for by congenital syphilis; ranked tenth). In adolescents aged 10–24 years, three injury causes were among the top causes of DALYs: road injuries (ranked first), self-harm (third), and interpersonal violence (fifth). Five of the causes that were in the top ten for ages 10–24 years were also in the top ten in the 25–49-year age group: road injuries (ranked first), HIV/AIDS (second), low back pain (fourth), headache disorders (fifth), and depressive disorders (sixth). In 2019, ischaemic heart disease and stroke were the top-ranked causes of DALYs in both the 50–74-year and 75-years-and-older age groups. Since 1990, there has been a marked shift towards a greater proportion of burden due to YLDs from non-communicable diseases and injuries. In 2019, there were 11 countries where non-communicable disease and injury YLDs constituted more than half of all disease burden. Decreases in age-standardised DALY rates have accelerated over the past decade in countries at the lower end of the SDI range, while improvements have started to stagnate or even reverse in countries with higher SDI. Interpretation: As disability becomes an increasingly large component of disease burden and a larger component of health expenditure, greater research and developm nt investment is needed to identify new, more effective intervention strategies. With a rapidly ageing global population, the demands on health services to deal with disabling outcomes, which increase with age, will require policy makers to anticipate these changes. The mix of universal and more geographically specific influences on health reinforces the need for regular reporting on population health in detail and by underlying cause to help decision makers to identify success stories of disease control to emulate, as well as opportunities to improve. Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 licens

AfriMTE and AfriCOMET : Empowering COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages

Despite the progress we have recorded in scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) models and evaluation data to several under-resourced African languages, it is difficult to measure accurately the progress we have made on these languages because evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics like BLEU that often have worse correlation with human judgments. Embedding-based metrics such as COMET correlate better; however, lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with a simplified MQM guideline for error-span annotation and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET, a COMET evaluation metric for African languages by leveraging DA training data from high-resource languages and African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-Roberta) to create the state-of-the-art evaluation metric for African languages MT with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (+0.406)

البنيات الصوتيّة التوليديّة في دعاء كميل بن زياد (استعراض وتطبيق في ضوء ملامح علم الأصوات

الموضوع الذي تتناوله هذه الدراسة هو أسلوبيّة دعاء كميل في ضوء الدلالات الصوتيّة، بحيث درسنا فيها أسلوبيّات الدعاء خاصّةً تحت أضواء علم الدلالة الصوتيّة ومحاورها المتشعّبة التي تنتهي إلي توليد المعاني الغزيرة، ومنها دلالات الطبيعة الصوتيّة للحروف العربية والنبر والتنغيم والدلالات التط يوحي بها المقاطع الصوتية المثيرة. ومن أهمّ النتائج التي توصّلت إليها هذه الدراسة هي أنّ كثيرا من الأصوات بطبيعة صفاتها الذاتية تدل علي معانيها وتساعد علي خلق واجهتها التصويرية بشكل فعّال، وكذا أن الصيغ المقطعية في الدعاء تصور المعني بأجلي شَكلٍ، كما لا يمكن أن نتنكر لأهميّة النبر والتنغيم ودورهما الفعّال في تنشيط الدلالة وتحضير الأجواء الموسيقيّة في الدعاء، والتي تمتّ إلي خلق الواجهة التصويريّة-المعنويّة فيه بشكل مباشر. وكذلك إننا اكتشفنا أن هناك عوامل عدّة أثّرت في سياق الدعاء من حيث الإيحاءات الصوتيّة المباشرة ذات التصوير الموحي، إذ جعلتْ هذه العوامل للدعاء سياقًا صوتيا متماسكا وسَلِسًا من فاتحة الدعاء حتي خواتيمه. وأخيرا فإن جوانب عديدة من المعاني تمّ الحصول عليها بواسطة هذه البنيات الصوتيّة الهادفة التي تمّ نوظيفها في هيكليّة الدعاء والتي لعبَتْ دورها بشكلٍ بارز في تنسيق المفاهيم المتنوّعة وتقرير الحالات المتغيّرة لدي الداعي بصورة خلّابة ومؤثّرة، كما جعلتْ بانسجامها مع الوجهة التركيبية صورة تمثيليّة نابضة من القضايا التي تثير اهتمام القارئ في هذا الدعاء الجليل

المشكلات الادارية والقانونية والمالية في النظام الضريبي العراقي

تهدف هذه الدراسة الى بيان الهيكل الضريبي في العراق وإيراد كل نوع من أنواع الضرائب وكذلك التعرف على المشكلات الإدارية والقانونية والمالية التي يعاني منها هذا النظام، ومحاولة إيجاد الحلول لها. واعتمد البحث على المنهج الاستقرائي باستخدام الأسلوب التحليلي. وتوصلت الدراسة الى جملة من الاستنتاجات منها: تبين من خلال البحث صحة الفرضية التي تم اعتمادها وهي أن معالجة المشكلات التي يعاني منها النظام الضريبي سوف يساهم في زيادة حصيلة الضرائب، وان المشاكل التي يعاني منها لإدارة الضريبية  هي ضعف الثقة بين الإدارة والمكلف، ويعتمد الهيكل الضريبي في العراق وبنسبة كبيرة على الضرائب غير المباشرة، والاعتماد على التشريعات القديمة وغير المتجددة لا توافي الزيادات الحاصلة في النفقات، وان التهرب الضريبي بأنواعه المختلفة يترتب عليه اثارا اقتصادية واجتماعية ونفسية سلبية في المجتمع، كما وإن مساهمة الضرائب في تمويل الموازنة منخفضة في العراق، وذلك لان الدولة تعتمد بشكل رئيسي في تمويل النفقات على النفط وإيراداته.