Globalizing Higher Education and its Impact on Indian Expat Students (A Case Study of Indian Expat Students Living in UAE)

Education is the backbone of a progressive society as it is clear from the statement of Thomas Jefferson “educate the masses” as he believed that in order to make changes in a society, the whole masses should be educated. The term ‘education’ is a popular and common term used by everybody but understood by very few in its right perspective. In educational text books it is defined as a purposive, conscious or unconscious, psychological, sociological, scientific and philosophical process that brings about development of the individual to fullest extent and also the maximum development of society in such a way that both enjoy happiness and prosperity. Despite the existence of infrastructural facilities, economic status and availability of various educational courses, the attitude towards higher education and learning is not found to be positive among the Indian expat students. The ultimate objective of this study is to find out the factors that influence the attitude of the students towards higher education and recommend sufficient measures to improve it

Deep Multimodal Image-Text Embeddings for Automatic Cross-Media Retrieval

This paper considers the task of matching images and sentences by learning a visual-textual embedding space for cross-modal retrieval. Finding such a space is a challenging task since the features and representations of text and image are not comparable. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end deep multimodal convolutional-recurrent network for learning both vision and language representations simultaneously to infer image-text similarity. The model learns which pairs are a match (positive) and which ones are a mismatch (negative) using a hinge-based triplet ranking. To learn about the joint representations, we leverage our newly extracted collection of tweets from Twitter. The main characteristic of our dataset is that the images and tweets are not standardized the same as the benchmarks. Furthermore, there can be a higher semantic correlation between the pictures and tweets contrary to benchmarks in which the descriptions are well-organized. Experimental results on MS-COCO benchmark dataset show that our model outperforms certain methods presented previously and has competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art. The code and dataset have been made available publicly.Comment: 6 pages and 2 figures, Learn more about this project at https://iasbs.ac.ir/~ansari/deeptwitte

Physical activity and aging research: a bibliometric analysis

Physical activity and aging research has burgeoned in the past few decades. Despite the increase in scholarly publications no attempts have been made to summarize the publication landscape and to identify works that had great impact to physical activity and aging research. We conducted a bibliometric analysis and collected publication data from 1980 to February 6, 2015 in the Web of Science Core Collection. Of the overall 9,935 publications most were published after 2007 and almost 60% were in the category of Geriatrics and Gerontology or Sport Sciences. Highly cited publications (n=45) were mostly authored by researchers from US institutions and were quantitative in nature. Publications that reported on the associations or effects of physical activity on health in older adults made up 60% of the highly cited publications. We expect more scholars from various backgrounds and geographical regions to join the conversation on physical activity and aging

Foreign body aspiration leading to complete lung collapse due to left bronchus obstruction: A Case Report

Foreign body aspiration(FBA) is a common life-threatening condition in pediatric emergency medicine that can lead to airway obstruction, asphyxia, and severe respiratory distress. An 18-month old female infant referred with the complaint of dry cough and wheezing with a sudden onset of dyspnea. At the time of admission, her oxygen saturation was  89%. Chest X-ray (CXR) showed a significant opacity in the left lung and the mediastinum shifting to the left side. Complete collapse seen in the left lung was associated with consolidation in the residual lung parenchyma. Rigid bronchoscopy revealed the corn kernels, which were taken out accordingly. The air trapped in the involved lung parenchyma was absorbed, and signs of shrinkage and collapse as consequences of the obstruction occurred in distal parts of the obstruction point. An emergent therapeutic decision is crucial in the early stages of management

Effect of 8 weeks resistance training on sphingosine-1- phosphate level and gene expression of SK1 enzyme, isoforms of MHCs in skeletal muscles of male Wistar Rats

Background and Objective: Sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) is involved in regulation of proliferation, differentiation, hypertrophy and anti-apoptosis and activation of satellite cells. This study was done to evaluated the effect of 8 weeks resistance training on sphingosine-1-phosphate level and gene expression of SK1 enzyme, isoforms of MHCs in skeletal muscles of male Wistar rats. Materials and Methods: This experimental study was done on Twenty four 8-week-old 190-250 gr male Wistar rats. The rats were allocated randomly into control (N=12) and training (N=12) groups. Resistance training was done using a 1 meter height ladder with 2 cm grid with an 85 degree incline, and weights attached to rat's tails. The content of S1P present in the chloroform layer was determined by means of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Determination of relative mRNA expression was performed by Real-time PCR. Data were analyzed using SPSS-17, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and independent t-test. Results: Resistance exercise training increased the total content of S1P in FHL (fast-twitch) and soleus (slow-twitch) muscles in comparison with control group (P<0.05). Resistance exercise training changed the gene expression of FHL SK1, SOL SK1, FHL MHC I, Sol MHC I, FHL MHC IIa, Sol MHC IIa, FHL MHC IIb, Sol MHC IIb, FHL MHC IIx, Sol MHC IIx in comparison with control group (P<0.05). Conclusion: This study showed that S1P level and gene expression of SK1, MHCs increased at skeletal muscles after training

Investigation of long-term, basin-scale thermohaline trends in Qatar's marine region in response to environmental and climatic change

The Arabian Gulf, an economically and geopolitically important marine area, is a semi-enclosed and shallow basin with an average depth 36 m. The Gulf is one of the seasonally warmest (i.e., in summer) and most saline marine regions, which naturally experiences extreme seasonal heating, cooling, and evaporation cycles. Recent economic development and industrialization along with climate change also have introduced significant anthropogenic pressures on this naturally-stressed marine environment. Due to its semi-enclosed, shallow morphology and unique climatic setting, the impacts of environmental pressures are increasingly manifested in the hydrography and biogeochemistry of the Gulf. Oceanographic data collected within the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of Qatar, although limited in space and time, indicate that physical and biogeochemical properties exhibit high spatial and temporal variability. Previous observational and numerical studies of the region conclude that increased field observation activity is required to better investigate the physical and biogeochemical dynamics of the Gulf. Long-term, continuous, and integrated monitoring of the marine environment, therefore, is essential to understand the status and seasonal/interannual variability of marine physical and biogeochemical dynamics as well as to predict any significant future changes in water column and ecological properties in response to environmental pressures and climatic changes. In this study, basin-scale oceanographic data collected in Qatar's marine region in the recent years are comparatively analyzed with available historical observations to assess thermohaline trends in water column structure and continental shelf circulation, to identify spatial and temporal data gaps, and to provide recommendations regarding optimal time and space coverage for future observational studies.qscienc

The role of microRNAs in neurobiology and pathophysiology of the hippocampus

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding and well-conserved RNAs that are linked to many aspects of development and disorders. MicroRNAs control the expression of genes related to different biological processes and play a prominent role in the harmonious expression of many genes. During neural development of the central nervous system, miRNAs are regulated in time and space. In the mature brain, the dynamic expression of miRNAs continues, highlighting their functional importance in neurons. The hippocampus, as one of the crucial brain structures, is a key component of major functional connections in brain. Gene expression abnormalities in the hippocampus lead to disturbance in neurogenesis, neural maturation and synaptic formation. These disturbances are at the root of several neurological disorders and behavioral deficits, including Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy and schizophrenia. There is strong evidence that abnormalities in miRNAs are contributed in neurodegenerative mechanisms in the hippocampus through imbalanced activity of ion channels, neuronal excitability, synaptic plasticity and neuronal apoptosis. Some miRNAs affect oxidative stress, inflammation, neural differentiation, migration and neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Furthermore, major signaling cascades in neurodegeneration, such as NF-Kβ signaling, PI3/Akt signaling and Notch pathway, are closely modulated by miRNAs. These observations, suggest that microRNAs are significant regulators in the complicated network of gene regulation in the hippocampus. In the current review, we focus on the miRNA functional role in the progression of normal development and neurogenesis of the hippocampus. We also consider how miRNAs in the hippocampus are crucial for gene expression mechanisms in pathophysiological pathways

Prospects for climate-scale regional numerical modelling for the Arabian Gulf and Qatar's marine region

Physical oceanographic studies at the Environmental Science Center (ESC) entail observational and numerical aspects. The main objective of observational studies is to build a reference time series for Qatar's marine exclusive economic zone (EEZ), in which prominent spatial and temporal gaps in physical oceanographic knowledge exist due to scarcity of historical observational data. Numerical modelling studies are conducted to counteract the sparse nature of available marine observational data by complementing this space with simulated output. Numerical modelling of ocean circulation along with coupled atmosphere and marine ecosystem components involve high performance computational tools and model coupling interfaces. A high-resolution, multi-component regional numerical model capable of producing short and long-term data products for the Arabian Gulf and Qatar's EEZ is currently being implemented. The model system features a lower trophic level ecosystem module (nutrient-phytoplankton-zooplankton-detritus - NPZD) coupled to dynamical downscaling models of regional marine and atmosphere circulation. The output from this study is expected to: (i) provide a simulated picture of the present situation of Qatar's EEZ, as validated by historical and recent observational data; (ii) provide insight on the interaction among various components of the marine environment (i.e., atmosphere, ocean, ecosystem); (iii) predict regional marine physical-biogeochemical status as forced by forecasted natural and anthropogenic drivers; and (iv) assess and forecast marine resource availability for food, water, and renewable energy.qscienc