L’ entrepreneuriat social, une contribution aux efforts du développement : cas des projets INDH de la province de Sidi Slimane

Les trois dernières décennies, malgré des périodes longues de forte croissance économique dans beaucoup de pays, la pauvreté et les inégalités n’ont pas été éradiquées. Tout développement nécessite, certes, une forte croissance économique mais aussi une amélioration des indicateurs non monétaires du bien-être. L’entrepreneuriat social, sert les indicateurs du développement, en contribuant à l’émancipation et au renforcement des capacités des bénéficiaires de ses actions, à détecter et à concrétiser des opportunités économiques. Dans cet article il est question d’explorer comment l’entrepreneuriat social contribue aux efforts de développement. Pour ce faire, nous avons touché par un entretien semi-directif les porteurs de 16 projets financés dans le cadre de l’INDH de la province de Sidi Slimane entre 2010-2015. Les résultats de l’anayse des entretiens montrent que la prinicpale motivation à l’entrepreneuriat social est financière : créer, améliorer et rendre durable un revenu pour les bénéficiaires. La contribution de l’entrepreneuriat social au développement, dans ce contexte, améliore d’abord les indicateurs monétaires, ceux non monétaires viennent en second lieu.  &nbsp

Study of the relationship between organizational commitment and individual work performance: Case of employees in the automotive sector in Morocco

The search for performance engages managers in a process of continuous improvement in several areas. These include prospecting for new customers, retaining existing customers, innovation, etc. However, managers are aware that the room for maneuver on these aspects remains very limited. In this sense, several studies have shown that human resources are a real differentiating factor for the company in a highly competitive market. Consequently, managers must take actions aimed at employees in order to increase their motivation and involvement at work. In this perspective, our research work consists in exploring the relationship between organizational commitment and individual work performance, and tries to provide managers with an idea on the mechanisms able to improve the performance of their employees through the development of their commitment to the organization. To this end, we administered a survey to 480 employees in the automotive sector in the Rabat-Sale-Kenitra region. The structural equation model method was used to explore the relationships between the independent and dependent variables. The results show that organizational commitment has a positive effect on individual work performance. JEL classification: L20, O15 Type paper: empirical researchLa recherche de la performance engage les dirigeants dans des processus d’amélioration continus visant plusieurs axes. Parmi les axes on trouve la prospection de nouveaux clients, la fidélisation des clients existants, l’innovation, etc. Cependant, les dirigeants sont conscients que la marge de manœuvre sur ces aspects reste très limitée. Dans ce sens, plusieurs études ont montré que les ressources humaines constituent un réel facteur de différenciation de l’entreprise dans un marché en pleine compétitivité. Dès lors, les dirigeants doivent mener des actions à destination des employés en vue de croitre leur motivation et leur implication au travail. Classification JEL : L20, O15 Type du papier : Article empirique Dans cette perspective, nous travail de recherche consiste à explorer la relation entre l’engagement organisationnel et la performance individuelle au travail, et tente de fournir aux dirigeants une idée sur les mécanismes en mesure d’améliorer la performance de leurs employés à travers le développement de leur engagement envers l’organisation. Pour ce faire, nous avons administré un questionnaire à 480 employés du secteur automobile de la région Rabat-Salé-Kénitra. La méthode du modèle des équations structurelles a été utilisée pour explorer les relations entre les variables indépendantes et dépendantes. Les résultats montrent, en effet, que l’engagement organisationnel agit positivement sur la performance individuelle au travail

Text-to-picture tools, systems, and approaches: a survey

Text-to-picture systems attempt to facilitate high-level, user-friendly communication between humans and computers while promoting understanding of natural language. These systems interpret a natural language text and transform it into a visual format as pictures or images that are either static or dynamic. In this paper, we aim to identify current difficulties and the main problems faced by prior systems, and in particular, we seek to investigate the feasibility of automatic visualization of Arabic story text through multimedia. Hence, we analyzed a number of well-known text-to-picture systems, tools, and approaches. We showed their constituent steps, such as knowledge extraction, mapping, and image layout, as well as their performance and limitations. We also compared these systems based on a set of criteria, mainly natural language processing, natural language understanding, and input/output modalities. Our survey showed that currently emerging techniques in natural language processing tools and computer vision have made promising advances in analyzing general text and understanding images and videos. Furthermore, important remarks and findings have been deduced from these prior works, which would help in developing an effective text-to-picture system for learning and educational purposes. - 2019, The Author(s).This work was made possible by NPRP grant #10-0205-170346 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors

Spa treatment for primary fibromyalgia syndrome: a combination of thalassotherapy, exercise and patient education improves symptoms and quality of life

Objectives: To study the effect of a combination of thalassotherapy, exercise and patient education in people with fibromyalgia. -\ud Methods: Patients with fibromyalgia, selected from a rheumatology out-patient department and from members of the Dutch fibromyalgia patient association, were pre-randomized to receive either 2 weeks of treatment in a Tunisian spa resort, including thalassotherapy, supervised exercise and group education (active treatment) or treatment as usual (control treatment). Primary outcome measure was health-related quality of life, measured with the RAND-36 questionnaire. Secondary measures included the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire, the McGill Pain Questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory, tender point score and a 6-min treadmill walk test. -\ud Results: Fifty-eight participants receiving the active treatment reported significant improvement on RAND-36 physical and mental component summary scales. For physical health, differences from the 76 controls were statistically significant after 3 months, but not after 6 and 12 months. A similar pattern of temporary improvement was seen in the self-reported secondary measures. Tender point scores and treadmill walk tests improved more after active treatment, but did not reach significant between-group differences, except for walk tests after 12 months. -\ud Conclusions: A combination of thalassotherapy, exercise and patient education may temporarily improve fibromyalgia symptoms and health-related quality of life

Domain Adaptation for Arabic Machine Translation: The Case of Financial Texts

Neural machine translation (NMT) has shown impressive performance when trained on large-scale corpora. However, generic NMT systems have demonstrated poor performance on out-of-domain translation. To mitigate this issue, several domain adaptation methods have recently been proposed which often lead to better translation quality than genetic NMT systems. While there has been some continuous progress in NMT for English and other European languages, domain adaption in Arabic has received little attention in the literature. The current study, therefore, aims to explore the effectiveness of domain-specific adaptation for Arabic MT (AMT), in yet unexplored domain, financial news articles. To this end, we developed carefully a parallel corpus for Arabic-English (AR- EN) translation in the financial domain for benchmarking different domain adaptation methods. We then fine-tuned several pre-trained NMT and Large Language models including ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo on our dataset. The results showed that the fine-tuning is successful using just a few well-aligned in-domain AR-EN segments. The quality of ChatGPT translation was superior than other models based on automatic and human evaluations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on fine-tuning ChatGPT towards financial domain transfer learning. To contribute to research in domain translation, we made our datasets and fine-tuned models available at https://huggingface.co/asas-ai/

Expression of Bcl-2 in inflammatory sites from patients with active Behçet's disease.

Behçet's disease (BD) is a current systemic vasculitis of unknown aetiology. Eyes, skin, joints, the oral cavity, genital system, blood vessels, central nervous system and lung are usually involved. Defective regulation of programmed cell death (apoptosis) may play a role in the development of (BD), and the proto-oncogene Bcl-2 is involved in the control of apoptosis in immunocompetent cells. We therefore wished to investigate the expression of Bcl-2 in the peripheral lymphocytes and in two inflammatory sites of patients with active BD: bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) lymphocytes. Levels of Bcl-2 expression in the lymphocytes of patients with BD and, for comparison, in the lymphocytes of healthy controls and non-inflammatory neurological diseases (NIND), were studied by two-colour cytofluorography and RNA analysis. In BD patients, a significant proportion of T cells expressed increased amounts of Bcl-2 protein, both in peripheral blood and in inflammatory sites. Mononuclear cells of patients with BD showed increased amount of Bcl-2 messenger RNA. The in vitro incubation of T lymphocytes with IL-10, significantly increased the Bcl-2 expression, specifically in T lymphocytes from inflammatory sites. In active BD, stimulation of HSV-1 T lymphocytes slightly increased Bcl-2 expression, not significantly different from unstimulated HSV-1 T cells. The occurrence of circulating T lymphocytes with abnormally high Bcl-2 expression in peripheral circulation and in inflammatory sites may be explained in part by the increased in vivo activation levels, and by aetiopathological agent(s): our findings seem to indicate an important role in the chronic inflammation in BD

Levels of soluble Fas/APO-1 in patients with Behçet's disease.

The aim of this study was to quantify soluble Fas/APO-1 (sFas/APO-1) protein in the serum of patients with Behcet's disease (BD) in active and inactive stages, compared with patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Soluble Fas/APO-1 was quantified using a sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Increased serum sFas/APO-1 levels were observed in active BD, compared with inactive BD, RA patients and SLE patients. Increased serum sFas/APO-1 levels were correlated with the presence of neurologic manifestations or pulmonary involvement in active BD. In conclusion, increased levels of sFas/APO-1 occurred frequently and exclusively in active BD patients. Preliminary evidence suggested that elevated levels of sFas/APO-1 are associated with the clinical stage and clinical manifestations in BD

Sexual Propagation of the Tunisian Spinescent Opuntia ficus-indica (L.) Mill., Morphogenetic Deployment and Polymorphism

The most common means of Opuntia ficus-indica (L.) Mill. propagation is through the use of asexually methods without genetic recombination which has been extensively studied for commercial purpose or to reduce erosion and desertification. However, seeds are important units to be considered for maintaining the species genetic variability. With the aim to undrestand the morphogenetic polymorphism deployment of the Tunisian spinescent Opuntia ficus-indica from the juvenile to the advanced stages, we search, firstly, the optimal conditions permetting to ensure the highest germination rate during the shortest period with sulphuric acid scarification in ten levels time of dipping. The best germinated rate (68.0%) is reached within 30 min of treatment exposure. Some germinated seeds showed polyembryony phenomenon. The highest rate (29.3%) was recorded after 25 and 30 min of pretreatment. Occurrence of morphogenetic abnormalities: tricotyledony, dissymmetried, coiled and adhered cotyledons in percentages varying from 12.8 to 20.0% was also reported. Secondly, a morphogenetic tracking of Opuntia ficus-indica young seedlings to adult plants during seven years (2009-2015) from the germination of seeds to the production of seeds was performed. This essay allowed us to report major seedling characteristics, their growth and phenotypic polymorphism: vertical succession of varying numbers of basal cladodes, future plant trunk formation, development and arrangement of secondary cladodes in the space, spinescence polymorphism and the first flowering and fruiting

Antibacterial, Antioxidant and Anti-inflammatory activities of Honey.

Abstract: Honey has been widely characterized as a valued food and a medicine by the humankind since ancient times, traditionally it was used as a nutritious supplement and also to treat a variety of diseases from wound healing to cancer treatment. this therapeutical effects of honey, including antioxidant activity, antibacterial activity and anti-inflammatory activity, is due absolutely to its contents and compounds such as: flavonoids, phenolic compounds, vitamins…  and his physicochemical properties : acidity, osmolality, water activity, hydrogen peroxide activity… Different types of analyzes, either in vivo or in vitro, have been carried out on honeys to prove these activities such as: Radical-scavenging effect on DPPH (2, 2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl), Radical-scavenging effect on hydroxyl radicals and Radical-scavenging effect on superoxide activity for the antioxidant activity, percentage inhibition against certain bacteria for antibacterial activity and the Inhibition of ROS (Reactive Oxygen Species) and the percentage of Ulcer Index (UI) for anti-inflammatory activity.