Vaccination control programs for multiple livestock host species: an age-stratified, seasonal transmission model for brucellosis control in endemic settings

Brucella melitensis causes production losses in ruminants and febrile disease in humans in Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Although traditionally understood to affect primarily sheep and goats, it is also the predominant Brucella species that affects cows in some endemic areas. Despite this, no licensed vaccine is available specifically for use against B. melitensis in cows. The mainstay of most control programs is vaccination of sheep and goats with a live vaccine, Rev-1. The aim of this study was to investigate how critical vaccination of cows might be, in order to control B. melitensis on a mixed sheep-and-cattle farm

The effects of using screencasting as a multimedia pre-training tool to manage the intrinsic cognitive load of chemical equilibrium instruction for advanced high school chemistry students

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The Determinants of Tourism Demand in Turkey

Using data of the inbound tourist arrivals to Turkey from France, Germany, UK, US, and Netherlands over the period 1986-2012, we applied autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to test for cointegration, and we estimated long run model and error correction model for tourism demand. The results referred that the most significant factor determines inbound tourist flows are the real per capita income and real effective exchange. We found weak effects for price and financial crisis, but the political events played a strong role differed from country to other. The added value of this article is the estimation of international tourism demand in Turkey using new approach and the newest data for Turke

The Struggle for Sufficient Housing in Santa Clara Countuy

This study examined the role systemic racism plays in shaping people\u27s ability to acquire sufficient housing in Santa Clara County. The purpose of this study was to identify historical and contemporary forms of institutional racism through the narratives of residents or former residents of the San Jose Family Homeless Shelter [SJFS] in San Jose, California. Of particular interest is evidence of housing discrimination and what Neubeck and Cazenave (2001) call welfare racism. Clients of the SJFS represent those directly affected by welfare reform and least protected from oppressive housing policies or practices. Through semi-structured open-ended interviews with former residents of the SJFS and several key informants, the process of how obtaining housing manifests on the ground, identifying the barriers to finding sufficient housing, and discussions on the respondents\u27 inability to find units that fit their own definitions of sufficient housing were explored. The paper concludes by suggesting that these narratives identify a need to explore sufficient housing more specifically. Furthermore, the need to inform our collective efforts to resist systemic racism and create more equitable housing policies/practices in Santa Clara County is critical and must be addressed

Failure in the air: activist narratives, in-group story-telling, and keeping political possibility alive in Lebanon

Failure is often taken as an endpoint: anathema to political organizing and the death knell of social movements. To the degree that radical movements themselves dwell on failure, participants often consider the focus pathological. This article explores how, in the aftermath of the falling apart of long‐term initiatives, Lebanese political activists were able to maintain their capacity to engage in transformative action. At a time when activists felt ‘failure in the air’, narrating prior political experiences communally, in formal and informal contexts, became crucial to (re)imagining one another as activists. Such stories narrated failure to compel collective action in the future, making failure itself a political resource; not the end, but a beginning. Throughout, this article engages in an affirmative anthropology that keeps alive the costs of failure even as it shows how radical political actors generate their capacity to act and their potential to imagine otherwise

The dissensual everyday: between daily life and exceptional acts in Beirut, Lebanon

In discussing how people make political use of public space from below, recent writings either emphasize the repurposing of monumental spaces, like Tahrir Square, or else look to how the poor and marginal produce facts on the ground through their everyday interactions without explicit political intentions. In the Hamra neighborhood of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, the daily life of politicized youth was, in the years following the Arab Spring uprisings, something more than passivity and something less than constant avowed resistance. Through their dissensual everyday inhabitation they made Hamra a compelling political site that was good to fight for and in which it was good to fight. Building on attempts to affirm possibility in anthropological engagements with urban life and political activism, I suggest that such spaces, containing an experiential, embodied, and enspaced memory of radical engagements, can maintain political actors in the face of defeat and setback, and provide encouragement for future political action

Cultural Aspects of Arabicisation: Past and Present

The aim of this article is to examine the cultural dimensions of arabicisation, past and present. The article traces the rise and fall of arabicisation and its ramifications for science, knowledge, research and education in and through Arabic. Arabicisation has been at the heart of linguistic and cultural debate since the dawn of Islam, a debate intensified when the Arabs and their new religion came into contact with different civilizations and cultures. The rise of the Islamic empire in mediaeval times consolidated Arabic and Arab culture, attracting scholars from around the world to research different areas of science and knowledge through the medium of Arabic, which in turn became, and remained for centuries, the global donor language of knowledge and learning. With the decline of the Arab/Islamic empire, however, Arabic and Arab culture started to lose their world standing. Today, Arabic and its culture occupy a marginal position when compared to other languageslike English for instance. For different internal and external reasons, Arabic has lost its status as the major language of innovation and creative thinking. But this is not because it cannot handle the concepts of modern civilization or is unable to express them; rather the cultural position of Arabs seems to be the main reason. Instead of being the predominant language of science and technology, Arabic has been competed by other foreign languages in its own territories. The widespread use of European languages, the languages of the colonizing powers, has undermined its role. Furthermore, the lack of pan-Arab policies on language planning has contributed to the emergence of different and often disparate models of arabicisation. Transformation in the objectives and scope of the process reflects the historical developments and decline of Arab culture from medieval times to the present day. 

Comparative Advantage and Cost of Achieving Self-sufficiency for Vegetables and Fruits in the Sultanate of Oman

The Sultanate of Oman has not achieved self sufficiency in the production of vegetables and fruits. This situation is due to the rapid growth in population that leads to a tremendous increase in the demand for these commodities and this deficit can only be sustained by imports. However, an increase in imports requires the use of more foreign exchange, which could otherwise be used for the importation of other important commodities. The expansion of domestic production would entail increasing the use of domestic resources thus raising the competition for the use of these resources. Therefore, the objective of this study is to determine the level of comparative advantage that Oman has for the different types of fruits and vegetables and the cost of producing these crops that will lead towards self-sufficiency in the country. Secondary data on the production of vegetable (tomatoes, cucumber, pepper, watermelon, melon and cabbage) and fruit crops (dates, lemon and banana) were collected from various government sources for the years 2000 to 2004. In order to estimate the cost of self-sufficiency this study analysed data on government intervention through the Nominal Protection Rate (NPR) and the Effective Protection Rate (EPR). The level of comparative advantage was analysed by using the domestic resource cost (DRC), resource cost ratio (RCR), net economic benefit (NEB) and social cost benefit (SCB) ratios. Based on the analysis of this research, the study found out that the country is self-sufficient only in pepper and dates while for the other selected crops the level of self-sufficiency was varied. The cost of achieving self-sufficiency for selected crop was estimated between R.O. 118,517 and R.O. 3,648,636 for the period under consideration. Additionally, government intervention on vegetable and fruit production showed that the average NPR of vegetables production under the import substitution regime ranged between 11% and 39% for vegetables and between 15% and 17% for fruits; whereas the average EPR ranged between 92% and 132% for vegetables and between 47% and 105% for fruits. Moreover, the RCR value of vegetable and fruit production generally showed that the country had a comparative advantage in the production of most of the crops to enable import substitution with the exception of lemon which recorded an RCR value of more than 1. This finding emphasised that through import substitution and an increase in domestic production, the Sultanate of Oman could save or earn foreign exchange