Production of Self - Compacting Concrete Using Jordanian Oil Shale Ash

The potential of using Jordanian oil shale ash (OSA) as partial replacement of the cement on fresh and mechanical properties of self-compacting concrete (SCC) was investigated in depth. Six SCC mixtures were prepared with limestone filler and varying cement mass replacements of 0-30% OSA. The binder materials content was kept constant at (350 kg/m3) while the water-to-binder ratio was changed from 0.5 to 0.68 depending upon the amount of mixing water needed to achieve the required fresh properties. Standard cylinders (100x200 mm) were cast, then cured in water for 7, 28 and 56 days before being tested under compression to evaluate the mechanical properties of SCC. The strength of the SCC concrete decreased with higher OSA replacement contents although maintaining a higher value than that of conventional concrete made at almost the same cement factor. In general, replacement contents of cement by OSA not larger than 10% imparted limited negative impact on obtained mechanical properties. The SCC mixtures studied experienced high flowability, filling ability and resistance against segregation as indicated by the several tests carried out on fresh mixtures

Towards Customer's Emotion Management in Marketing: The Role of customers' Emotions on Their Experience

This research study aims at understanding the role of the customers' emotion towards a certain product/service in their experience. In another word, this research aims at finding the relationship between the customers' emotions and the way it influences their experience in a certain purchasing process. A questionnaire was distributed on a random sample of mall visitors through a period of 30 days (month) and it was based on variables including; A) shop clerk's sex, uniform and emotional behavior B) shop's environment C) clerks' friendliness. The results show that positive emotions of the customers which are connected to a positive shopping experience is influential and hence can lead to a positive purchasing decision, in addition to that, it was found out that the shop clerk's positive emotions is very important in supporting the client with a good shopping experience in the store. The gender was also a notion that worth to be noted based on the idea that the results supported that concept of the opposites meet. Finally, the uniform and dress codes for the shopping assistants appeared to be the least influential factor of all. Keywords: Customer emotions, customer experience, in-store customer emotions, provider/buyer encounte

Factors Affect Patients Satisfaction in Emergency Departments in Palestine

Background: Emergency care can make an important contribution to reduce avoidable deaths and disabilities. Assessing health care quality and improving patient satisfaction have become a global health-related issue, particularly among health care suppliers and customers of health care due to increase of customers’ knowledge and awareness regarding health care services. Patient satisfaction is a patient’s perception of care received compared with the care expected. Patient satisfaction was considered as an essential indicators of emergency care. Methods: A descriptive and cross-sectional design was utilized in this study. All patients above 10 years who attended private and governmental hospitals in west bank for all potential health conditions were recruited (n=1150 patients). The Arabic version of the self-administered questionnaire of "Brief Emergency Department Patient Satisfaction Scale (BEPSS)" was used. Results: The majority of the subjects was men in (21-39) year old category, and were living in villages. More than half of the subjects were attendees of ED in private hospitals during night shifts. Duration of subjects’ waiting to see physicians and nurses was less than 15 min. Subjects were satisfied highly as ranked ordered in for different items in the BEPSS scale domains. There were significant differences between groups on BEPSS related to educational level and place of resident (F=6.14, p=≤0.00) and (F=3.50, p=0.03) respectively. Conclusion: This study shown that overall patients’ satisfaction score was 3.77 over 5 and this reflect an acceptable level of patients satisfaction Emergency hospital services and healthcare providers in Palestine. Keywords: Emergency Department (ED), Palestine, Patients Satisfaction.

Fuzzy-Based Histogram Partitioning for Bi-Histogram Equalisation of Low Contrast Images

The conventional histogram equalisation (CHE), though being simple and widely used technique for contrast enhancement, but fails to preserve the mean brightness and natural appearance of images. Most of the improved histogram equalisation (HE) methods give better performance in terms of one or two metrics and sacri ce their performance in terms of other metrics. In this paper, a novel fuzzy based bi-HE method is proposed which equalises low contrast images optimally in terms of all considered metrics. The novelty of the proposed method lies in selection of fuzzy threshold value using level-snip technique which is then used to partition the histogram into segments. The segmented sub-histograms, like other bi-HE methods, are equalised independently and are combined together. Simulation results show that for widerange of test images, the proposed method improves the contrast while preserving other characteristics and provides good trade-off among all the considered performance metrics.This work was supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research (DSR), King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, under Grant DF-374-135-1441

Large-Scale Analysis of Pop-Up Scam on Typosquatting URLs

Today, many different types of scams can be found on the internet. Online criminals are always finding new creative ways to trick internet users, be it in the form of lottery scams, downloading scam apps for smartphones or fake gambling websites. This paper presents a large-scale study on one particular delivery method of online scam: pop-up scam on typosquatting domains. Typosquatting describes the concept of registering domains which are very similar to existing ones while deliberately containing common typing errors; these domains are then used to trick online users while under the belief of browsing the intended website. Pop-up scam uses JavaScript alert boxes to present a message which attracts the user's attention very effectively, as they are a blocking user interface element. Our study among typosquatting domains derived from the Alexa Top 1 Million list revealed on 8255 distinct typosquatting URLs a total of 9857 pop-up messages, out of which 8828 were malicious. The vast majority of those distinct URLs (7176) were targeted and displayed pop-up messages to one specific HTTP user agent only. Based on our scans, we present an in-depth analysis as well as a detailed classification of different targeting parameters (user agent and language) which triggered varying kinds of pop-up scams.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figure

A Fusion-Based Approach for Breast Ultrasound Image Classification Using Multiple-ROI Texture and Morphological Analyses

Ultrasound imaging is commonly used for breast cancer diagnosis, but accurate interpretation of breast ultrasound (BUS) images is often challenging and operator-dependent. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems can be employed to provide the radiologists with a second opinion to improve the diagnosis accuracy. In this study, a new CAD system is developed to enable accurate BUS image classification. In particular, an improved texture analysis is introduced, in which the tumor is divided into a set of nonoverlapping regions of interest (ROIs). Each ROI is analyzed using gray-level cooccurrence matrix features and a support vector machine classifier to estimate its tumor class indicator. The tumor class indicators of all ROIs are combined using a voting mechanism to estimate the tumor class. In addition, morphological analysis is employed to classify the tumor. A probabilistic approach is used to fuse the classification results of the multiple-ROI texture analysis and morphological analysis. The proposed approach is applied to classify 110 BUS images that include 64 benign and 46 malignant tumors. The accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity obtained using the proposed approach are 98.2%, 98.4%, and 97.8%, respectively. These results demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively be used to differentiate benign and malignant tumors

Assessing the Psychological and Social Impacts of the Refugee Crisis on Members of the Refugees-Hosting Community: A Survey Study of the Jordan Community

ملخص: هدف البحث الحالي إلى تقييم الآثار النفسيّة والاجتماعية النّاتجة عن أزمة اللجوء لدى أفراد المجتمعات المستضيفة للاجئين، وقد تكوّنت عيّنة الدّراسة من (3152) فرداً، تمّ اختيارهم بالطريقة المتيسرة.ولتحقيق هدف الدراسة، تم تطوير مقياس الآثار النفسية والاجتماعية الذي تألف من (42) فقرة بحيث وزّعتْ على مجالين هما: (الآثار النفسية، والآثار الاجتماعية).وأظهرت نتائج الدراسة أنّ مستوى الآثار النفسية كان منخفضاً؛ بينما جاء مستوى الآثار الاجتماعية بدرجة متوسطة، كما أظهرت النتائج وجود فروق ذات دلالة إحصائية في الآثار النفسية تعزى لمتغيرات الجنس، العمر، وطبيعة العمل، وعدم وجود فروق دالة إحصائيًا تعزى لمتغير مستوى التعليم. في حين أظهرت النتائج وجود فروق ذات دلالة إحصائية للآثار الاجتماعية تعزى لمتغيرات الجنس، والعمر، وعدم وجود فروق دالة إحصائيًا تعزى لمتغيرات مستوى التعليم، وطبيعة العمل. وأوصى الباحثون بضرورة تبني نهج مؤسسي تخصصي للاهتمام بالصحة النفسية لأفراد المجتمع الأردني، والعمل على استحداث برامج للتأهيل المهني والاجتماعي للباحثين عن عمل.Abstract: The current research aimed to assess the psychological and social impacts on Jordanian. The Convenience sample consisted of (3152)To achieve the aim of the study, measure were developed to the psychosocial and social impact scale, which consists of (42) items, The results shown that the psychological effects are low, and social effects are moderate. The results also shown a significance difference on psychological effects to gender and age and work, but there were no significance differences on education level. The results also shown a significance difference on social effects to gender and age, but there is no a significance differences on education level and work. So, The researchers recommend to adopting a specialized institutional approach to take care of Jordanian's mental health, and working on rehabilitating the unemployed individuals functionally, psychologically and socially

Reinforcing synthetic data for meticulous survival prediction of patients suffering from left ventricular systolic dysfunction

Congestive heart failure is among leading genesis of concern that requires an immediate medical attention. Among various cardiac disorders, left ventricular systolic dysfunction is one of the well known cardiovascular disease which causes sudden congestive heart failure. The irregular functioning of a heart can be diagnosed through some of the clinical attributes, such as ejection fraction, serum creatinine etcetera. However, due to availability of a limited data related to the death events of patients suffering from left ventricular systolic dysfunction, a critical level of thresholds of clinical attributes can not be estimated with higher precision. Hence, this paper proposes a novel pseudo reinforcement learning algorithm which overcomes a problem of majority class skewness in a limited dataset by appending a synthetic dataset across minority data space. The proposed pseudo agent in the algorithm continuously senses the state of the dataset (pseudo environment) and takes an appropriate action to populate the dataset resulting into higher reward. In addition, the paper also investigates the role of statistically significant clinical attributes such as age, ejection fraction, serum creatinine etc., which tends to efficiently predict the association of death events of the patients suffering from left ventricular systolic dysfunctio

Femoral Shaft Fracture Occurring as a Result of Physical Manipulation: A Case Report

Treatments including physical manipulation maneuvers have been widely used for the management of various pain complaints. These maneuvers, although generally considered safe, can be associated with serious complications. We report the case of a 37-years-old previously healthy male patient, who presented to our emergency department (ED) for severe right thigh pain and inability to bear weight that developed during a chiropractic session. Imaging done at the ED showed a displaced distal femoral shaft fracture. The majority of the complications of manipulation maneuvers can be as simple as sprains, however, can be drastic or life-threatening in certain cases causing cerebrovascular accidents or major orthopedic fractures. Such complications are rare and definitely underreported. A femoral shaft fracture occurring as a result of physical manipulation has not been previously reported in the literature. We report a distal femoral shaft fracture that was induced by forceful chiropractic manipulation. It is the first to be reported in the literature. This complication should be noted, reported, and the necessary precautions are taken to avoid such major adverse events