Structural behaviour of precast concrete sandwich panel using recycled aggregate concrete under transverse load

Previous studies have been focusing on finding alternative materials in a composite building system in order to provide a strong, environmental friendly, low cost material to be used in the construction industry. In this research, recycle aggregate, RA, has been used instead of natural aggregate. This study presents the viability of RA with different ratios of 25, 50, 75 and 100% in Recycled Aggregate Concrete Sandwich Panel, RACSP. The structural behavior of the RACSP was investigated experimentally and analysed in the context of transverse load capacity, load�deflection profile, load strain curves, cracking patterns and mode of failure. LVDT was used to measure the mid-span deflection and the slip between both wythes of RACSP. Strain gauges were used to measure the strain on the surface of concrete wythes. It was found that the strength of the panels with RA decreased nonlinearly with the increase of percentage replacement of RA in concrete. Control Panel with NA showed the highest value of ultimate load in comparison with others. The percentage of reduction in the ultimate load of panels with RA was about 15% for an increase the replacement percentage of RA whereas the maximization in the ultimate load was about 31% in comparison with Control Panel. It was observed that all the slab ultimately failed by tension steel failure. It was noticed that the first crack occurred at about 48-67% of the failure load. Influence of the RA and the impact of transverse load on the ultimate strength of RACSP specimens have been discussed. Cracks were observed in both wythes

Politics, terrorism and the news media: a case study of Saudi Arabia (2006-2007).

With the enormous development of communications and the transmission of national news to all parts of the world in seconds, it has become important to consider the treatment of national crises in the media and the challenges that may be encountered in the production of news during such crises. This is especially important in relation to the transnational problem of terrorism. This study chooses to examine the ways in which the Saudi Arabian national media have treated terrorism news between the period 2006-2007, given the complex position of Saudi Arabia in relation to Islamist terrorism. Therefore, it will focus its theoretical part on examining the political, economic, ideological and social factors that may affect the shaping of news production, and on terrorism news in particular. Then, it will move on to studying the different theories of news framing, and the framing of terrorism news. Then, the empirical part will be focused on content analysis of different news-related stories of terrorism, taken from different Saudi sources, based on Iyengar's theory of news coverage, as well as our own set of categories in order to reveal a deeper explanation of news coverage of terrorism in the Saudi media. This importance of this study comes from the fact that very few studies have focused on examining the performance of the Saudi news media in the rise of terrorism. We hope that this study can help Arab Gulf media in testing and improving the performance of their news media coverage, especially now that incidents like terrorism and the Arab Spring have shown wide public discontent towards the efficiency of news coverage during such events. We also hope that the results of the empirical part can help in shaping a new policy that provides a better vision and framework for news production, as most of the media organisations in this part of the world are state-owned and their methods of news production have arguably not reflected public needs

Vulnerability of the Emirati Energy Sector for Disaster: A Critical Review

Infrastructure in all its forms is a valuable asset and vulnerable to any natural or manmade hazard. The protection of infrastructure is thus one of the most important and difficult tasks for any government. The energy sector dominates in the UAE and consists of various assets - electricity, oil and natural gas that are geographically dispersed and connected by systems and networks. The protection of these systems and assets and within the energy sector especially, the safeguarding of oil and gas infrastructure from any and all internal and external threats should become top priority in the UAE. Threats to geopolitical and economic stability that need to be considered and prepared for include tectonic activity, climate change, nuclear energy, terrorism and war. This paper explores the disaster vulnerability of the Emirati energy sector with specific focus on Abu Dhabi and Dubai cities. It is based on secondary data, taken from various academic and professional sources, and primary data from a questionnaire survey administered on site at two electricity-generating plants in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Forty questionnaires were distributed and 35 were returned back- 20 Abu Dhabi and 15 Dubai. Oil and gas sectors were identified as the most vulnerable energy sources in both Abu-Dhabi and Dubai. Risk from terrorism was thought to be the greatest hazard with every single respondent choosing it. This was despite the fact that respondents believe it to be one of the threats that the energy sector is prepared for

Exploring The Value Of Folksonomies For Creating Semantic Metadata

Finding good keywords to describe resources is an on-going problem: typically we select such words manually from a thesaurus of terms, or they are created using automatic keyword extraction techniques. Folksonomies are an increasingly well populated source of unstructured tags describing web resources. This paper explores the value of the folksonomy tags as potential source of keyword metadata by examining the relationship between folksonomies, community produced annotations, and keywords extracted by machines. The experiment has been carried-out in two ways: subjectively, by asking two human indexers to evaluate the quality of the generated keywords from both systems; and automatically, by measuring the percentage of overlap between the folksonomy set and machine generated keywords set. The results of this experiment show that the folksonomy tags agree more closely with the human generated keywords than those automatically generated. The results also showed that the trained indexers preferred the semantics of folksonomy tags compared to keywords extracted automatically. These results can be considered as evidence for the strong relationship of folksonomies to the human indexer’s mindset, demonstrating that folksonomies used in the del.icio.us bookmarking service are a potential source for generating semantic metadata to annotate web resources

Creating structure from disorder: using folksonomies to create semantic metadata

This paper reports on an on-going research project to create educational semantic metadata out of folksonomies. The paper describes a simple scenario for the usage of the generated semantic metadata in teaching, and describes the ‘FolksAnnotation’ tool which applies an organization scheme to tags in a specific domain of interest. The contribution of this paper is to describe an evaluation framework which will allow us to validate our claim that folksonomies are potentially a rich source of metadata

The role of the Muslim Brotherhood the post January 25 Egyptian political system

This thesis analyses the development of the Muslim Brotherhood since their creation until their fall from power in the 30th of June Uprising

Oil revenue of the Arabian gulf Emirates: patterns of allocation and impact on economic development

The study aims to analyse the oil revenue, its allocational pattern and impact on economic development in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE from the commencement of commercial oil production to the end of 1970. Chapter I, briefly presents the geographical features, discusses the economic activities and fiscal policies of the pre-oil period, and outlines the evolution of the Sheikhdom political system, pinpointing important factors still influencing the utilisation of petroleum resources and oil revenue. Chapter II, discusses the petroleum industry's development, importance, potential, and non-revenue impact on the local economies. Chapter III, assesses the actual oil revenue received, discusses factors influencing it, and explores relevant considerations for an optimum level of oil revenue. Chapters IV-VII, explore the allocational trends and patterns of the oil revenue in each of the Emirates, (the oil revenues examined represent about 88% of the total received in the period studied). A model, built to investigate the allocational patterns provides the basis for deducing the contribution of the oil revenue to different items through assessing the public revenue, expenditure and reserve. Chapter VIII brings together the findings of Chapters IV-VII, confirming an overall allocational similarity. A major and increasing proportion of the revenue goes on current and transfer expenditure. An exploration of underlying influential and determining factors takes up the greatest part of the chapter. Chapter IX examines the desirable relationship between oil revenue and economic development, notes the improvement produced in some aspects of the economies, in the social services, the standard of living and consumption. It also shows the limited impact of the oil revenue on structural change and prospects for sustained development, and discusses some problems impeding progress. In conclusion the need for alternative approaches is discussed together with considerations relevant to a development-oriented approach

The graduate training programme of Jubail Industrial College, Saudi Arabia : a case study of the status and relevance of the graduate qualifications

This study examines the status of the technical qualifications accorded to graduates in the training programme at Jubail Industrial College, one of two English-medium colleges in Saudi Arabia, and in particular attempts to assess the relevance of these qualifications to their employment, from the points of view of the graduates and of their employers.The study uses a sample population taken from technical graduates and their employers in the six cities of the Eastern Region, to evaluate the attitudes of these two groups by means of questionnaires (90%) and interviews (10%), intended to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the College's training programme. As an adjunct it also seeks to examine the expectations of students who have undertaken their Co-operative Training Programme but not yet entered into employment. It uses the One-Sample T-Test to determine the mean levels of satisfaction of the individual groups and then of the three groups together. The Analysis of Variance Test (ANOVA) and Pair-Wise Comparison Test (Tukey HSD) are used to test differences between the means of the three groups.The study is divided into nine chapters. Chapter I sets out the aims of the research and describes the College's role in training students for work in industry. Chapter II gives an overview of Saudi Arabia, including its educational system and especially technical education and vocational training. Chapter III describes the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu and then focuses on the College, highlighting its mission within the country's economic development and detailing its programmes. Chapter IV describes the policy of economic diversification to reduce dependence on oil and Chapter V reviews the relevant literature on technical and vocational education in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Chapter VI reiterates the aims of the study and explains the null hypotheses associated therewith, as well as the associated factors and elements. Chapter VII presents and analyses the data obtained with respect to the respondents' levels of satisfaction with the factors and elements, and thereafter Chapter VIII discusses the results and draws conclusions about the validity of the null hypotheses, identifying possible causes for the levels of satisfaction expressed. Finally, Chapter IX provides a summary, makes recommendations for the improvement of the College programme, for industrial organisations and for policy makers, and gives suggestions for further research