UNRWA: An Indispensable Agency

This study examines what necessitated the continued existence of the UN Relief and Works Agency for the Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA, for over seventy years. Since the start of their plight, the Palestine refugees have had their fundamental human rights protected by the Agency. The research takes a realist approach based on a qualitative method of analysis to examine why UNRWA’s original purpose as a temporary agency for a temporary problem was eventually changed to become an invaluable agency for a seemingly never-ending problem. The paper contends that UNRWA’s continued existence was made necessary due to the lack of political will by the international community to solve the root cause of the problem. UNRWA has then become the easiest way to deal with such a complex situation, where the refugees are denied their right of return, the possibility of integration, and the chances of resettlement under a different UN agency. Additionally, what made UNRWA invaluable is its humanitarian and developmental roles, which also translate into security and stability for the region. For the Palestine refugees, UNRWA is the guarantor of their fundamental human and developmental rights pending the presentation of a just solution. For the host nations and the regional governments, UNRWA, through its humanitarian and developmental roles, provides regional security and stability, and occupies a very significant power vacuum left by governments who are unable or unwilling to provide crucial services to the refugee population

A GIS-based EPIK Model for Assessing Aquifer Vulnerability in Irbid Governorate, North Jordan

Vulnerability assessment has become an important element for wise resource management and land use planning. This work examined the sensitivity of karstic aquifers, in the area of Irbid governorate northwest Jordan, to surface contamination by applying the EPIK method, and then compared this susceptibility evaluation to water-chemistry data collected from wells and springs within the area. An additional objective was to demonstrate the combined use of the EPIK and geographical information system (GIS) as an effective method for groundwater pollution risk assessment. Using this method of investigation, the pollution susceptibility map classifies 3% of the study area as having low pollution susceptibility, 63% as having moderate pollution susceptibility, 33% as having high pollution susceptibility, and 1% as having very high pollution susceptibility. The northern and southern parts of the study area were dominated by very high and high vulnerability classes; while the eastern and western parts were characterized by moderate vulnerability classes. When comparing these modeling results to water-chemistry data from wells within the study area, two samples with the highest concentration of major cations and anions are found within regions of high pollution potential, and many wells with high nitrate contamination are found within regions of moderate pollution potential. This confirms the usefulness of the predictive modeling approach for assessing aquifer pollution susceptibility. Excessive concentrations of chemicals in water samples are explained by the intensive agricultural activities and wastewater contamination. The GIS technique has provided efficient environment for analyses and high capabilities of handling large spatial data

Convergence analysis of a highly accurate Nyström scheme for Fredholm integral equations

© 2019 IMACS A stable and convergent Nyström scheme is proposed to solve Fredholm integral equations (FIEs). Our approximation is based on the barycentric rational interpolants. By introducing barycentric quadratures to the integral operator that appears in the FIE and modifying the standard Nyström scheme, we demonstrate that the new Nyström scheme is a viable option for the numerical solution of FIEs. Convergence rates of the method are proved taking into account the effect of grading the domain. The final convergence result shows clearly that one can choose an optimal domain grading. Numerical examples and comparisons with competitive methods of tunable accuracy are provided to support the theoretical analysis and illustrate the efficiency of the proposed numerical scheme

The Relationship of Creativity Domains with Personality Traits and Academic Environment in Higher Education

Creativity assessment is the cornerstone of effective creativity development in higher education It is one of the main topics in creativity research as it is one of the most difficult skill to measure in any of the 21 st century skills We argue that in additions to the big five creativity in higher education is related to the environment and that more research is needed to understand this relations Therefore this study aimed to investigate this relations specifically creativity domain with personality traits and the academic environment Measures for these constructs were administered to 103 Malaysian undergraduate students In order to examine the nature of the relations between creative personality and other constructs we used Structural Equation Modeling The results indicate that the model is valid and reliable for assessing the creative person of higher education students This study showed that both personality traits and academic environment are important to assess the creative personalit

Identification problems for degenerate parabolic equations

summary:This paper deals with multivalued identification problems for parabolic equations. The problem consists of recovering a source term from the knowledge of an additional observation of the solution by exploiting some accessible measurements. Semigroup approach and perturbation theory for linear operators are used to treat the solvability in the strong sense of the problem. As an important application we derive the corresponding existence, uniqueness, and continuous dependence results for different degenerate identification problems. Applications to identification problems for the Stokes system, Poisson-heat equation, and Maxwell system are given to illustrate the theory

An information security awareness program to address common security concerns in IT unit

Educated and trained people are critical success factor in any IT work environment to minimize threats or misuse of the organizational assets that may damage the growth, excellence, and efficiency of any business. However, humans are always the weakest point in any security plan. Awareness is by far the most successful technique that does not cost much when compared with training and education and may reduce the total expenditure on security. Having a properly planned information security awareness program greatly impact the raising of the awareness level among the organization\u27s staff. Information Technology unit represents a critical success factor in knowledge management and plays a major role in the decision-making process within any organization. We assess that the initial step in delivering any security awareness plan to the business should start from within IT unit, and this is aligned with the perception that security is the sole responsibility of the IT department. Most of the former studies proposed general information security awareness programs and guidelines, but few of them targeted IT unit. The purpose of this research is to propose an information security awareness program (ISAP) to be used by IT unit to enhance the level of information security standard regardless of the organization type. Our research study differs from other studies in that we targeted the IT unit when building ISAP. Furthermore, we identify several awareness knowledge areas for each sub-division. © 2014 IEEE

MATLAB-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Data Mining as a Tool for Environment Management

Abstract—The application of data mining to environmental monitoring has become crucial for a number of tasks related to emergency management. Over recent years, many tools have been developed for decision support system (DSS) for emergency management. In this article a graphical user interface (GUI) for environmental monitoring system is presented. This interface allows accomplishing (i) data collection and observation and (ii) extraction for data mining. This tool may be the basis for future development along the line of the open source software paradigm

Nurses’ Attitudes and Practices towards Inpatient Aggression in a Palestinian Mental Health Hospital

Background: Inpatient aggression can occur for many reasons and there are many factors that contribute to this occurrence such as patient factors, staff factors and environmental factors. There are strategies to prevent and manage aggression. Aims: The aims of this study are to explore nurse's practices and attitudes of inpatient psychiatric aggression to identify the way the nurses handle aggression by patients and exploring the effects of patients, staff and environmental factors on the occurrence of aggression. Participants and methods: The study was conducted at a Mental Health Hospital in Palestine. All nursing staff in the mental health hospital who had worked for at least one year at the time of the study was recruited (67 nurses). The participants ranged in age from 20-50 years with a mean age of (35.1) (±SD = ±7.8) and included 30 females and 37 males. A questionnaire was used which has three scales: Attitude Toward Aggression Scale (ATAS), Management Of Aggression and Violence Scale (MAVAS) and Demographic Scale.Results: Nurses were inclined to perceive patient aggression as destructive, violent, intrusive and functional reactions. They were less inclined to view aggression as protective, communicative or acceptable normal reactions. Female nurses in this study were more likely to view aggression as having an intrusive role whereas, on the contrary, male nurses were more likely to view aggression as having a communicative role and they believed that the aggression could be managed in general. Longer professional experience was significantly associated with a higher frequency of the management of aggression in general. Nurses from the admission ward (male and female) were in less agreement with the Protective and Communicative Attitudes scales than the nurses from the other inpatient wards. On the other hand, nurses from admission ward (particularly female) and recovery ward (male and female) had a higher rate of violent and offensive reaction to aggression than nurses from the other wards. The nurses from the chronic female ward had a higher intrusive scale than nurses from the other wards. The highest level of the scientific grade group is a Master of Mental Health with a high level mean regarding the attitudes to the acceptable normal reaction scale, violent reaction scale, functional reaction scale, offensive scale, communicative scale, destructive scale, external causative factors scale, situational/interactional causative factors scale, Management: general, and Management: use of medication. The nurses agree that there are internal, external and interactional factors to inpatient aggression. Nurses believe that patients may be aggressive because of the environment of the psychiatric hospital. Nurses believe that aggression develops because staff does not listen to the patients, there is poor interaction between staff and patients and other people make patients aggressive. Nurses believe in the use of medications, restraint and seclusion widely, on the contrary, they believe in the use of non-physical methods like negotiation and expression of anger. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that there are different attitudes of nurses toward patient aggression in psychiatric inpatient settings. This study found that aggression is negatively viewed by Palestinian psychiatric nurses. These attitudes are reflective of the opinions of lay persons in our society. There is a need for training programs to reorient the opinions of nurses in relation to inpatient aggression. These programs should contribute to improved patient care and reduction in the frequency of aggressive acts within inpatient units. Keywords: Aggression; mental health, nurses; ATAS; MAVAS

LiFE (Logical iOS Forensics Examiner): An Open Source iOS Backup Forensics Examination Tool

In this paper, we present LiFE (Logical iOS Forensics Examiner), an open source iOS backup forensics examination tool. This tool helps both researchers and practitioners alike in both understanding the backup structures of iOS devices and forensically examining iOS backups. The tool is currently capable of parsing device information, call history, voice messages, GPS locations, conversations, notes, images, address books, calendar entries, SMS messages, Aux locations, facebook data and e-mails. The tool consists of both a manual interface (where the user is able to manually examine the backup structures) and an automated examination interface (where the tool pulls out evidence from known files). Additionally, LiFE is designed so that the evidence located in files would retain its integrity. It is important to note that most of the evidence examined by LiFE is parsed from SQLite databases that are backed up by iTunes. LiFE also offers an extensibility option to the user, where an examiner can add new evidence SQLite files to the application that can be automatically parsed, and these known files are then automatically populated in the automated GUI’s toolbar with an icon added to the investigator’s liking