The people and place of al-Hattaba: a socio-temporal juncture

This thesis focuses on a neighborhood located in Historic Cairo called al-Hattaba. It is a neighborhood that is located on the citadel wall, houses over 500 families, and is considered a buffer zone to the citadel with an urban fabric that speaks to a different time and place that has managed to survive, rupture and challenge our own perceptions of mainstream urban planning trends. I focus on rhythms of change and the experiences of temporality in the everyday as entry points into al-Hattaba and its people. The times of al-Hattaba cannot be reduced nor contained into a linear progression of events; but rather people’s experiences are temporally thick and multiplicitous, constituted in practices and relationships that traverse the past and anticipations of the future, narrated through the lived experiences of the present. I demonstrate how al-Hattaba reveals through an analysis of rhythms (speed, slowness, intensity) and experiences of duration (how time and its depth is experienced as long, short, near, distant, simultaneous, heterogeneous) many possibilities that can emerge and how people’s practices can change, alter, or challenge plans of urban renewal or development. This is what then allows me to describe the thesis as an exploration of the complex, ordinary, yet paradoxical relationship al-Hattaba and its people have with time, and how such a multiplicitous relationship has shaped the way the residents navigate and maneuver through disruptive events that threaten their everyday, histories, and futures. The way in which residents navigate their lives takes on many different manifestations, but a common thread through all of these navigations is the making of their everyday through a reworking of their relationship with time, space, and the social. Their relationship with time is evident in their oral histories, architecture of their homes, crafts, ovens, photographs, the urban fabric of their streets, their relationship with the historic monuments that surround them, and the Citadel and Citadel gate. This relationship with time is also marked in their daily interactions with each other, with different governmental institutions, and with Megawra BEC as well as other places outside of al-Hattaba to which el-Hattaba residents are connected

Non-linear Analysis Of Liners For Rigid Pipe Rehabilitation

Most damaged pipelines are structurally safe, but due to hydraulic requirements renovations are required. One solution is to apply an internal polymer liner. The critical external fluid pressure at which the liner may collapse is the target of this research. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is used and a rigorous non-linear interaction analysis allowing for large deformations and material plasticity is developed. Liners are assumed to be either perfectly circular or circular with some initial local or global geometrical imperfections. The typical local imperfection is defined as a wavy intrusion into the liner. The global imperfections take the shape of an ovalization in the damaged host pipe or an eccentric position of the loosely fitted liner relative to the damaged pipeline. A parametric study is undertaken to determine the effect of the geometrical parameters (e.g. liner thickness to radius ratio, imperfection size, ovality and size of gap between the liner and the host pipe). A comparison is made with experimental data available for circular liners, and there is good agreement with the numerical solution.;It is shown that critical external fluid pressure depends heavily on the ratio of liner thickness to radius. Thick liners experience a modest stability increase as a result of host pipe support compared to the significant stability increase for thin liners. Local geometrical imperfections have a very substantial effect on the buckling strength. The imperfection sensitivity is particularly significant for thin liners. Ovalling in the host pipe decreases stability somewhat relative to circular host pipes. Stability of loosely fitted liners degrades seriously if a significant gap exists between the liner and the host pipe, particularly when the liner is thin. Generally, the pressure which causes yield in the liner materials represents the peak value that the structure can sustain, and inelastic stability can reasonably be estimated using that point of first yield. The current ASTM design practice employs a single stability value for all liners which is not conservative for thick liners. The thesis presents an efficient new design approach based on the parametric study which includes the effect of the liner thickness to radius ratio, liner ovality, and local imperfections

Naomi Wallace's "In the Heart of America": The Portrait of a Woman's Body As an Ideological Text

This paper shows how a female body, considered a representative of its nation’s ideology, is often the main target of political violence and violations. Naomi Wallace’s In the Heart of America uses the sexual frustrations of all its women characters to reflect the violent physical and mental pressures of imperial war and its consequent times. Their physical defects signal the hostile times they live in, which are usually reflected on the female body as carrier and displayer of the ideologies and social constructions of the era, turning women’s bodies into representatives of their nation’s sociopolitical ideology. They have their regions’ ideology inscribed on their bodies as physical wounds, making these bodies battlefields on which colonizers and soldiers demonstrate their political muscle. Wallace demonstrates how the female body, through its sexual orientation, its color, its exposure, and its movements and gestures, can tell the whole story of violence and create a drama of great effectEste trabajo muestra cómo un cuerpo femenino, considerado representativo de la ideología de su nación, es a menudo objetivo principal de la violencia y las violaciones políticas. In the Heart of America, de Naomi Wallace, usa las frustraciones sexuales de todos sus personajes femeninos para reflejar las violentas presiones mentales y físicas de la guerra imperial y sus consecuencias. Sus defectos físicos indican los tiempos hostiles en que viven, que a menudo se reflejan en el cuerpo femenino como portador y estandarte de las ideologías y las construcciones sociales de la época, convirtiendo a los cuerpos de las mujeres en representantes de la ideología sociopolítica de su nación. Tienen la ideología de sus regiones inscrita sobre el cuerpo como heridas físicas, convirtiendo a esos cuerpos en camp os de batalla donde los colonizadores y los soldados demuestran su potencia política. Wallace demuestra cómo el cuerpo femenino, mediante su orientación sexual, su color, su exhibición y sus movimientos y gestos, puede narrar toda la historia de la violencia y crear un drama de gran efecto

Seismic Performance of Steel Helical Piles

Recent earthquakes have highlighted the need for safe and efficient construction of earthquake resilient structures. Meanwhile, helical piles are gaining popularity as a foundation for new structures and retrofitting solution for existing deficient foundations due to their immense advantages over conventional driven pile alternatives. In addition, helical pile foundations performed well in recent earthquakes, proving they can be a suitable foundation option in seismic regions. The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the seismic performance of helical piles by conducting full-scale shaking table tests and nonlinear three-dimensional numerical modeling using the computer program ABAQUS/Standard. The experimental setup involved installing ten steel piles with different configurations and pile head masses in dry sand enclosed in a laminar shear box mounted on the NEES/UCSD Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table. The loading scheme consisted of white noise and two earthquake time histories with varying intensity and frequency content. The performance of different moment curve fitting techniques used for reduction of shake table experimental data are compared. The experimental results are presented in terms of natural frequency and response of the test piles. The effects of the loading intensity and frequency and the pile’s geometrical configuration and installation method were evaluated. The dynamic numerical model constructed accounted properly for the test boundary conditions, employing tied vertical boundaries. In addition, the nonlinear behavior of the soil during the strong ground motion was simulated by considering a strain-dependent shear modulus and applying Masing’s loading-unloading rules by the overlay method to account for the soil non linearity more realistically. The numerical model was verified employing the full-scale experimental results, then was used to conduct a limited parametric study that investigated the effect of pile stiffness and the location of helix on its lateral response. The experimental results show that the natural frequency of the driven pile was slightly higher than that of the helical piles. However, the response of the helical pile was close to that of the driven pile, which illustrates the ability of helical piles to perform as good as conventional piles under seismic loading

The IS Core IX: The 3 Faces of IS Identity: Connection, Immersion, and Fusion

From the time of the first ICIS conference in 1980, the debate over the identity of IS research continues to flare. Accompanying this debate is an endless quest for the core of the IS field and its boundaries, as well as the identification and articulation of its reference disciplines and research methods. This debate most recently crystallized in the dialectic between the Benbasat-Zmud-Weber position around narrowing the field to center around the core of the IS artifact --- and the Alter position around broadening the field to be a work-centered systemic interconnected view. This paper argues that there is nothing inherently wrong with either of these two perspectives, but that they are just alternative models of reality which bring particular central features of phenomena to the foreground and hide other features. The paper further argues that there is at least a third critical perspective that can be equally argued for. It characterizes these three perspectives of IS identity as connection, immersion, and fusion, and articulates their commonalities and distinctions. Like the Three Faces of Eve in the classic 1957 Hitchcock movie thriller, each of these faces of IS identity reveals particular aspects of the IS persona. This paper contends that it may be time for a natural shift of emphasis from the Connection view to the Immersion View to the Fusion view as IT continues to morph and augment its capabilities. The paper explains the differences and similarities among the three views, and articulates each of them. The Fusion view is one that is not yet apparent in the IS field. This paper alerts the IS scholarly community to pay attention to it, and suggests ways of doing that

Personal Information Systems for Strategic Scanning in Turbulent Environments: Can The CEO Go On-Line?

Empirical evidence suggests that scanning for information becomes an increasingly salient activity for top executives as enviromental turbulence increases. A critical part of scanning for top executives in such environments is scanning to identify strategic threats and opportunities. This is the focus of this papen We seek to understand the strategic scanning behaviors of top executives in order to provide some guidelines for designing computerbased systems to support and enhance strategic scanning processes. The paper first tries to understand the characteristics of the strategic scanning process through an empirical study of 37 chief executive officers (CEOs) of small to medium-sized high technology companies in northern California\u27s Silicon Valleg Thmugh a semi-structured interview with the flavorof an eventprotocol the CEOs were asked about various aspects of their strategic attention behavior in relation to three strategic threats and opportunities which they were experiencing. Several general questions pertaining to their use of information sources for strategic information were also asked. Informationsources were classifiedbased onthe locationof the information source (external or internal to the organization), and based on the directional specificity of information transmission (personal or impersonal). The results showed that the CEOs relied to a greater extent on external sources for the strategic information, than they did on internal sources. The results indicate thatthey did not frequently delegate scanning for strategic information totheirsubordinatesorassistants,norweretheywillingtodoso. Theresultsalsoshowedthat the CEOs used more personal than impersonal information sources for strategic information, and that the number of sources was limited. These results in combination suggest that the CEO\u27s personal scanning filter (rather than the organizational filter) is of prime importance in identifying strategic issue& \u27Ito types of strategic scanning information were identified by the CEO\u27s. The first type was general surveillance information which was not necessarily coupled with any specific threat or opportunity, but which changed the frame of reference through which they interpreted furtherinformation,implyingthatsecond-orderlearningisa featureofthe strategicscanning process. The second type was information coupled to identifying specific threats or opportunities Four modes of strategic scanning were identified: routine monitoring, problemistic search, unsolicited reception, and coincidental surveillance. The results showed that the strategic information scanning method was more often proactive than reactive, and that CEO\u27s most frequently used the routine monitoring mode for strategic scanning, indicating that they are very systematic scanners, andthatthere are certain habitual sources thatthe CEO monitors and consults The paper then draws some conclusions and implications for the design of computer based information systems for supporting strategic scanning. The empirical results suggest that in terms of strategic attention, the CEO\u27s information system is very personal and somewhat decoupled from the organizationalinformation system. Thus a computer-based information system to support and enhance the CEO\u27s strategic scanning would probably have to be a customized personal system, with inputs being made by the CEO himself. This points in the directionof some kindof tickler file system whichhas some verysimple inputmethods, but sophisticated classification and manipulation capabilities with qualitative verbal data- The emergence of idea outlining software is a step in that direction. A further step would be to incorporate some learning features into the software to adapt to changing frames of reference. Given the absence of the tight coupling requirement between a strategic scanning system and the organizational system, and given the small database, portable lap computers are identified as an appropriate medium for such an application

A Strategic Vision for Information Technology: What, Why, Who, Where, When and How?

Advances in infonnation technology to date have changed the way in which organizations can manage their in€ormation resources. Managers of business subunits are inaking IT decisions every day on their own without supervision from the IS subunit. They may be operating in a vacuum and their decisions will, therefore, likely reflect a lack of continuity and organizational purpose. The purpose of developing and communicating a sirategic vision for IT is to inculcate that vision throughout the organization so that all organization membe;s have access to this critical view of the tole of IT in the organization a i d can make their decisions based on this understanding. Suategic vision for IT is, fherefore, critical to an information-intensive organization

Phygitar - Envisioning the Rhythmic Phygital Ecosystem in 2050

This paper takes us to a possible future world called Phygitar - a rhythmic phygital ecosystem in 2050 where the co-existence of people, technology, and nature flow in rhythmic synthesis, and where digital and physical are seamlessly fused. Using the approaches of futures-studies, this envisioning is done to better understand concepts from 2050 and see how we can engage with and use those effectively in 2023 for IS theory development and management practice. We use the 2009 movie “Avatar” by James Cameron as the playground of our imagination. We apply illustrative elements to depict some key characteristics and concepts from of this rhythmic phygital ecosystem and show some ways of navigating through it. We hope this will trigger the imagination of scholars of what might be out there in the next generation of post-digital IS theories rather than being rooted in the mindset of what is or what has been

Electronic and Student-created Dictionaries for Enhancing EFL Pronunciation and Vocabulary Usage

The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of using electronic dictionaries combined with student-created dictionaries on English major students' pronunciation and vocabulary usage. Students' perceptions of this learning experience are also examined. The study combines both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. Tests for pronunciation and vocabulary usage were designed and administered to73 English major students at Jouf University, KSA. Two questionnaires were designed to investigate students' perceptions. Results of the study revealed that the usage of electronic and student-created dictionaries improved students' pronunciation as well as their vocabulary usage abilities. Results also revealed that participants are willing to use both electronic and student-created dictionaries in vocabulary learning. The most frequent perceived benefits of electronic dictionaries are the speed of accessing the meaning of new vocabulary and getting clear correct pronunciation of them. The most frequent perceived benefits of student-created dictionaries are long retention and internalization of new vocabulary. Participants face some difficulties when using electronic dictionaries such as the inability to find accurate meaning of some vocabulary items and some technical problems. Participants face some difficulties with their student-created dictionaries such as difficulty in constructing illustrative sentences and time-consumption. The study recommends the incorporation of electronic and student-created dictionaries in vocabulary learning