EXPLORING KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS FOR TOURIST GUIDES: EVIDENCE FROM EGYPT

Tourist Guides, like all employees within the travel (Tourism) industry must be aware of the needs of travelers (Tourists) and adjust their service and products accordingly, to accomplish this goal TGs are expected to process knowledge of guiding. This paper measures the degree of the influence of the area of study and the level of knowledge on experienced TGs through a study conducted on 200 of 6846 the working population of TGs in 2005, licensed to work in the field by the Ministry of Tourism in Egypt. The study used a self-administered questionnaire that revealed important results showing defects in the areas of study and shortage in the knowledge background of the TGs to a certain extend. The conclusion of the study will propose a guiding scheme to develop a certain standard of education and knowledge needed by TGs in Egypt in their drive towards professional recognition, in order to be able to perform effectively in an increasingly competitive field.tour guides (TG), area of study, knowledge background, Egypt

FlexiWi-Fi Security Manager Using Freescale embedded System

Among the current Wi-Fi two security models (Enterprise and Personal), while the Enterprise model (802.1X) offers an effective framework for authenticating and controlling the user traffic to a protected network, the Personal model (802.11) offers the cheapest and the easiest to setup solution. However, the drawback of the personal model implementation is that all access points and client radio NIC on the wireless LAN should use the same encryption key. A major underlying problem of the 802.11 standard is that the pre-shared keys are cumbersome to change. So if those keys are not updated frequently, unauthorized users with some resources and within a short timeframe can crack the key and breach the network security. The purpose of this paper is to propose and implement an effective method for the system administrator to manage the users connected to a router, update the keys and further distribute them for the trusted clients using the Freescale embedded system, Infrared and Bluetooth modules

Molecular and Genetic Regulation of Sensory Quality of Climacteric Fruit

The sensory quality of fruit has become a major criterion in making the purchasing decision by consumers. Breeding programs have mainly been directed, from the post-harvest stand point, towards improving shelf-life. Chance seedlings or mutants with improved agronomic traits and/or extended shelf-life have been used for introgressing the long shelf-life character and eventually improved sensory quality traits in commercial genotypes of apple, melon or tomato. Because the plant hormone ethylene plays a central role in both storability and ripening of climacteric fruit, the generation by biotechnology of ethylene-inhibited fruit has offered a powerful tool to better understand, at the molecular and genetic level, the interrelations between storability and sensory quality. In the melon, inhibition of ethylene synthesis results is a strong inhibition of the synthesis of aroma volatiles while the accumulation of sugars is not affected or is even improved. The softening of the flesh is strongly affected but not abolished. Mid or long shelf-life melons generated by classical breeding present the same behavior. The generation of recombinant inbred lines by crossing a typical climacteric melon (Cantaloupe Charentais of the cantalupensis group) with a non climacteric melon (PI161375 of the agrestis chinensis group) allowed to demonstrate that the climacteric character is conferred by 2 duplicated loci only, which are of great importance for the regulation of storability and sensory quality. Due to the importance of aroma volatiles in sensory quality and to the strong negative correlation between aroma production and ethylene synthesis, we have developed a research program aimed at isolating genes involved in the synthesis of aroma volatiles. We will report on the recent advances in the field with special emphasis on the characterization of genes responsible for the synthesis of esters, a family of compounds crucial for the flavor of many fruit

Sensor Fusion to Detect Scale and Direction of Gravity in Monocular Slam Systems

Monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is an important technique that enables very inexpensive environment mapping and pose estimation in small systems such as smart phones and unmanned aerial vehicles. However, the information generated by monocular SLAM is in an arbitrary and unobservable scale, leading to drift and making it difficult to use with other sources of odometry for control or navigation. To correct this, the odometry needs to be aligned with metric scale odometry from another device, or else scale must be recovered from known features in the environment. Typically known environmental features are not available, and for systems such as cellphones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), which may experience sustained, small scale, irregular motion, an IMU is often the only practical option. Because accelerometers measure acceleration and gravity, an inertial measurement unit (IMU) must filter out gravity and track orientation with complex algorithms in order to provide a linear acceleration measurement that can be used to recover SLAM scale. This paper will explore an alternative method, which detects and removes gravity from the accelerometer measurement by using the unscaled direction of acceleration derived from the SLAM odometry

ACC Synthase Genes Related to Cold-dependent Ripening in Pear Fruit

The differential regulation of ACC synthase genes has been studied in pear cultivars that either require a long chilling treatment before they are capable of ripening (‘Passe-Crassane’, PC) or not (‘Old-Home’, OH) and in OH x PC hybrids having no (A16) or intermediate (A50) cold requirement. Among the seven Pc-ACS cDNAs isolated, four of them (Pc-ACS1a/b and Pc-ACS2a/b) showed differential expression in relation with cold requirement. Pc-ACS1a transcripts accumulated specifically during chilling and ripening of cold-dependent cultivars while Pc-ACS1b transcripts were detected only during ripening of cold-independent genotypes. Pc- ACS2a mRNA was expressed specifically in cold-dependent genotypes and negatively regulated by ethylene while Pc-ACS2b transcripts accumulated only in cold-independent genotypes and positively regulated by ethylene. Pc-ACS3, 4 and 5 transcripts accumulation was similar in all genotypes, independently of coldrequirements

Internet of Things Security Using Proactive WPA/WPA2

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a natural evolution of the Internet and is becoming more ubiquitous in our everyday home, business, health, education, and many other aspects. The data gathered and processed by IoT networks might be sensitive whichcallsforfeasibleandadequatesecuritymeasures.This paper describes the use of the Wi-Fi technology in the IoT connectivity, then proposes a new approach, the Proactive Wire- less Protected Access (PWPA), to protect the access networks. Then a new end to end (e2e) IoT security model is suggested to include the PWPA scheme. To evaluate the solution?s security and performance, firstly, the cybersecurity triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability aspects were discussed, secondly, the solution?s performance was compared to a counterpart e2e security solution, the Secure Socket Layer security. A small IoT network was set up to simulate a real environment that uses HTTP protocol. Packets were then collected and analyzed. Data analysis showed a bandwidth efficiency increase by 2% (Internet links) and 12% (access network), and by 344% (Internet links) and 373% (access network) when using persistent and non- persistent HTTP respectively. On the other hand, the analysis showed a reduction in the average request-response delay of 25% and 53% when using persistent and non-persistent HTTP respectively. This scheme is possibly a simple and feasible solution that improves the IoT network security performance by reducing the redundancy in the TCP/IP layers security implementation

Image Classification with CondenseNeXt for ARM-Based Computing Platforms

In this paper, we demonstrate the implementation of our ultra-efficient deep convolutional neural network architecture: CondenseNeXt on NXP BlueBox, an autonomous driving development platform developed for self-driving vehicles. We show that CondenseNeXt is remarkably efficient in terms of FLOPs, designed for ARM-based embedded computing platforms with limited computational resources and can perform image classification without the need of a CUDA enabled GPU. CondenseNeXt utilizes the state-of-the-art depthwise separable convolution and model compression techniques to achieve a remarkable computational efficiency. Extensive analyses are conducted on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets to verify the performance of CondenseNeXt Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture. It achieves state-of-the-art image classification performance on three benchmark datasets including CIFAR-10 (4.79% top-1 error), CIFAR-100 (21.98% top-1 error) and ImageNet (7.91% single model, single crop top-5 error). CondenseNeXt achieves final trained model size improvement of 2.9+ MB and up to 59.98% reduction in forward FLOPs compared to CondenseNet and can perform image classification on ARM-Based computing platforms without needing a CUDA enabled GPU support, with outstanding efficiency.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, conference, published IEEE Conference pape

Vitamin D Signaling in Inflammation and Cancer: Molecular Mechanisms and Therapeutic Implications

Vitamin D and its active metabolites are important nutrients for human skeletal health. UV irradiation of skin converts 7-dehydrocholesterol into vitamin D3, which metabolized in the liver and kidneys into its active form, 1α,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3. Apart from its classical role in calcium and phosphate regulation, scientists have shown that the vitamin D receptor is expressed in almost all tissues of the body, hence it has numerous biological effects. These includes fetal and adult homeostatic functions in development and differentiation of metabolic, epidermal, endocrine, neurological and immunological systems of the body. Moreover, the expression of vitamin D receptor in the majority of immune cells and the ability of these cells to actively metabolize 25(OH)D3 into its active form 1,25(OH)2D3 reinforces the important role of vitamin D signaling in maintaining a healthy immune system. In addition, several studies have showed that vitamin D has important regulatory roles of mechanisms controlling proliferation, differentiation and growth. The administration of vitamin D analogues or the active metabolite of vitamin D activates apoptotic pathways, has antiproliferative effects and inhibits angiogenesis. This review aims to provide an up-to-date overview on the effects of vitamin D and its receptor (VDR) in regulating inflammation, different cell death modalities and cancer. It also aims to investigate the possible therapeutic benefits of vitamin D and its analogues as anticancer agent

Eotaxin, RANTES and tumor necrosis factor alpha levels in allergic rhinitis

AbstractObjectivesThe objectives of this study were to estimate the levels of eotaxin, RANTES and tumor necrosing factor-∞ in allergic rhinitis and their relation to disease severity.Study designProspective study.SettingMansoura University Hospital.Patients and methodsTwenty nine patients suffering from allergic rhinitis were included in this study (19 patients with allergic rhinitis and 10 patients control group). The patients underwent estimation of eotaxin, RANTES, TNF-∞ in the nasal wash using Elisa technique. The patients were divided according to the disease severity into mild allergic rhinitis, severe allergic rhinitis and control groups.ResultsThe mean values of eotaxin, RANTES, TNF-∞ in severe allergic rhinitis (33.6±11.07pg/ml, 72.17±87.61pg/ml, 25.47±4.04pg/ml) were statistically higher than in mild allergic rhinitis (9.80±6.79pg/ml, 10.50±6.90pg/ml, 12.99±3.27pg/ml) and the mean values of all these parameters were higher in both groups compared to control group (0.6±0.69pg/ml, 0.65±0.74pg/ml, 0.63±0.54pg/ml).ConclusionThis study suggests the role of local chemokines in the pathogenesis of allergic rhinitis as well as their possible relation to the severity of the disease which may direct the attention to therapeutic trials against these locally produced chemokines