DIVERSITY OF ETHNICITY AND STATE INVOLVEMENT ON URBAN INFORMALITY IN BEIRUT

Urban informality has become the dominant feature of urban growth on Beirut City and its periphery. Beirut context, as the rest of Lebanese cities, sheds light on a new era of controversy on urban informality. The appearance of urban informality in Beirut is due to the ways that the state being involved on such areas and its affect on shaping the urban fabric, the ways that the influence of various sociopolitical circumstances the country being passed through by which informal areas being established, and the complexity of ethnicity structure within Lebanese society. Understanding the diversity of the state power and ethnicity structure of the society during various periods of the establishment of informal housing areas would enable the state and housing professionals to provide a clear policy strategy to tackle urban informality. Each marginal area needs special treatment according to its religion and ethnicity structure‚ to be remolded within the society.informality; urbanization; state; ethnicity; Lebanon.

Computational methods for the analysis of functional 4D-CT chest images.

Medical imaging is an important emerging technology that has been intensively used in the last few decades for disease diagnosis and monitoring as well as for the assessment of treatment effectiveness. Medical images provide a very large amount of valuable information that is too huge to be exploited by radiologists and physicians. Therefore, the design of computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) system, which can be used as an assistive tool for the medical community, is of a great importance. This dissertation deals with the development of a complete CAD system for lung cancer patients, which remains the leading cause of cancer-related death in the USA. In 2014, there were approximately 224,210 new cases of lung cancer and 159,260 related deaths. The process begins with the detection of lung cancer which is detected through the diagnosis of lung nodules (a manifestation of lung cancer). These nodules are approximately spherical regions of primarily high density tissue that are visible in computed tomography (CT) images of the lung. The treatment of these lung cancer nodules is complex, nearly 70% of lung cancer patients require radiation therapy as part of their treatment. Radiation-induced lung injury is a limiting toxicity that may decrease cure rates and increase morbidity and mortality treatment. By finding ways to accurately detect, at early stage, and hence prevent lung injury, it will have significant positive consequences for lung cancer patients. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to develop a clinically usable CAD system that can improve the sensitivity and specificity of early detection of radiation-induced lung injury based on the hypotheses that radiated lung tissues may get affected and suffer decrease of their functionality as a side effect of radiation therapy treatment. These hypotheses have been validated by demonstrating that automatic segmentation of the lung regions and registration of consecutive respiratory phases to estimate their elasticity, ventilation, and texture features to provide discriminatory descriptors that can be used for early detection of radiation-induced lung injury. The proposed methodologies will lead to novel indexes for distinguishing normal/healthy and injured lung tissues in clinical decision-making. To achieve this goal, a CAD system for accurate detection of radiation-induced lung injury that requires three basic components has been developed. These components are the lung fields segmentation, lung registration, and features extraction and tissue classification. This dissertation starts with an exploration of the available medical imaging modalities to present the importance of medical imaging in today’s clinical applications. Secondly, the methodologies, challenges, and limitations of recent CAD systems for lung cancer detection are covered. This is followed by introducing an accurate segmentation methodology of the lung parenchyma with the focus of pathological lungs to extract the volume of interest (VOI) to be analyzed for potential existence of lung injuries stemmed from the radiation therapy. After the segmentation of the VOI, a lung registration framework is introduced to perform a crucial and important step that ensures the co-alignment of the intra-patient scans. This step eliminates the effects of orientation differences, motion, breathing, heart beats, and differences in scanning parameters to be able to accurately extract the functionality features for the lung fields. The developed registration framework also helps in the evaluation and gated control of the radiotherapy through the motion estimation analysis before and after the therapy dose. Finally, the radiation-induced lung injury is introduced, which combines the previous two medical image processing and analysis steps with the features estimation and classification step. This framework estimates and combines both texture and functional features. The texture features are modeled using the novel 7th-order Markov Gibbs random field (MGRF) model that has the ability to accurately models the texture of healthy and injured lung tissues through simultaneously accounting for both vertical and horizontal relative dependencies between voxel-wise signals. While the functionality features calculations are based on the calculated deformation fields, obtained from the 4D-CT lung registration, that maps lung voxels between successive CT scans in the respiratory cycle. These functionality features describe the ventilation, the air flow rate, of the lung tissues using the Jacobian of the deformation field and the tissues’ elasticity using the strain components calculated from the gradient of the deformation field. Finally, these features are combined in the classification model to detect the injured parts of the lung at an early stage and enables an earlier intervention

Characterization and therapeutic targeting of Parkinson’s-related LRRK2

More than a decade ago, and during the attempts to understand Parkinson’s disease (PD), scientists identified Leucine-Rich Repeat Kinase 2 (LRRK2) as a protein related to PD development. Since then, different research groups have focused on developing tools to investigate and target LRRK2 function and activity. LRRK2 is a uniquely large protein, that becomes active upon dimerization, i.e. when two units of the protein come together. Although a number of LRRK2 inhibitors has been developed over the past few years, these inhibitors result in side effects that were observed during animal and preclinical studies. Thus, different strategies to regulate the activity of LRRK2 are needed.In the work presented in this thesis, we provided an alternative approach by targeting the LRRK2 dimerization process. We designed, tested, and proved that small peptides can be used to occupy the site at which the two units of LRRK2 stick together. In this way, we prevented the formation of the active dimer form of LRRK2 and reduced its activity. Importantly, this approach didn’t result in the same side-effects of classical inhibitors upon testing in human cells. In order to better understand the function of LRRK2, we also identified nanobodies (small protein that can specifically bind to a target of interest) that can bind LRRK2 and regulate its activity. These nanobodies will help identifying the exact structure of LRRK2 and developing of new therapeutics

病原性グラム陰性細菌における薬剤耐性遺伝子の伝播に関する可動性遺伝因子の役割

内容の要約広島大学(Hiroshima University)博士(学術)Doctor of Philosophydoctora

Judicial activism in the Egyptian state council

According to the democratic principles of the separation of powers and judicial independence, the judiciary has to apply the law and only the law to the facts before it. However, this principle is not actually applied in many countries where we witness intervention in judicial judgments. While judges adjudicate cases before them and try to find legal solutions under the application of law, they may also rely, in some cases, on both the letter of the law and the overarching activism directives behind it at the same time. Accordingly, a judge legislates according to his own particular interpretation of a certain legal provision in a manner that may broaden or narrow its scope of application in order to achieve justice from his personal point of view. This process of making law is the judicial activism of judges. Such intervention may take place in human rights cases where judges interpret the notions, conceptions, definitions, and limitations of freedoms and liberties according to their ideological basis; consequently, judicial activism differs from one judge to another. This study highlights the existence of judicial activism through reviewing several actual cases from the Egyptian State Council. The massive conflicts in State Council jurisprudence can be understood in light of judges\u27 distinct education, culture, persuasions, experience, environment, and way of thinking. This is the rational explanation that may clarify the significant mental differentiations among judges to comprehend certain subjects, despite the fact that such subjects are governed by specific and fixed legal provisions

Early-Age Shrinkage of Ultra High-Performance Concrete: Mitigation and Compensating Mechanisms

The very high mechanical strength and enhanced durability of ultra high-performance concrete (UHPC) make it a strong contender for several concrete applications. However, UHPC has a very low water-to-cement ratio, which increases its tendency to undergo early-age shrinkage cracking with a risk of decreasing its long-term durability. To reduce the magnitude of early-age shrinkage and cracking potential, several mitigation strategies have been proposed including the use of shrinkage reducing admixtures, internal curing methods (e.g. superabsorbent polymers), expansive cements and extended moist curing durations. To appropriately utilize these strategies, it is important to have a complete understanding of the driving forces behind early-age volume change and how these shrinkage mitigation methods work from a materials science perspective to reduce shrinkage under filed like conditions. This dissertation initially uses a first-principles approach to understand the interrelation mechanisms between different shrinkage types under simulated field conditions and the role of different shrinkage mitigations methods. The ultimate goal of the dissertation is to achieve lower early-age shrinkage and cracking risk concrete along with reducing its environmental and economic impact. As a result, a novel environmentally friendly shrinkage reducing technique based on using partially hydrated cementitious materials (PHCM) from waste concrete is proposed. The PHCM principle, mechanisms and efficiency were evaluated compared to other mitigation methods. Furthermore, the potential of replacing cement with wollastonite microfibers was investigated as a new strategy to produce UHPC with lower carbon foot-print, through reducing the cement production. Finally, an artificial neural networks (ANN) model for early-age autogenous shrinkage of concrete was proposed. The evidence and insights provided by the experiments can be summarized in: drying and autogenous shrinkage are dependant phenomena and applying the conventional superposition principle will lead to an overestimation of the actual autogenous shrinkage, adequately considering in-situ conditions in testing protocols should allow gaining a better understanding of shrinkage mitigation mechanisms, the PHCM technique provides a passive internal restraining system that resists deformation as early as the cementitious materials are mixed, wollastonite microfibers can act as an internal restraint for shrinkage, reinforcing the microstructure at the micro-crack level and leading to an enhancement of the early-age engineering properties, along with gaining environmental benefits, and ANN showed success in predicting autogenous shrinkage under simulated field conditions

Digital all-computer simulation in managerial problems

Management problems are becoming more and more complex. True scientific management demands the exact consideration of all the factors that are significant to the problem under study. In dealing with practical problems, one cannot tease out separate psychological, economic, or technological aspects as the problem mostly always involves working with a total integrated organizational unit. Due to the abundancy and interrelation of these factors, it made it more difficult if not impossible in many cases to reach a solution by the analytical methods. Thus, many managerial problems if they are to be accurately identified and quantifiably solved, should be simulated. Simulation has become a very important process or tool available to modern managers. But, to be a useful tool, it should be used effectively. Realizing: 1. The usefulness of the simulation process to managers to the point that in many cases it becomes imperative to simulate if a system is to be precisely understood or a problem is to be correctly solved. 2. The degree of controversy that has flared-up about the exact definition of simulation to the point that it has become difficult to state what is simulation and what is not. The researcher has chosen to direct this research towards discovering a practical and systematic approach to simulating managerial problems. There are different types of simulations that are used for different purposes. All types are to be mentioned and defined in this research. But, due to the fact that Digital all-computer simulation is the type mostly used in solving managerial problems, it is to be the purpose of this research. This research has been organized in the following manner: 1. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 explain in detail the concept, definition, and the different phases of the simulation process in order to set the stage for a detailed and practical discussion of a simulation application. 2. Chapter 4 presents an inventory control problem together with its solution via a digital all-computer simulation. The reason behind choosing such a problem is that inventory problems are the most common problems that managers encounter especially in the U.A.R. where inventory control has not received enough attention and where it is the problem to most if not all sectors (Government, public, and private). 3. Appendix I has been added to the research in order to provide the reader with the exact definitions of the terms that are mostly used in such operations. As uncertainty in business is more the rule than the exception, most of its models are proba­bilistic in nature. Appendix II has been added to introduce the elements of the probability theory and the most commonly used and encountered probability distributions to help the simulator in designing, manipulating, and reaching conclusions in such a context

New Current-Mode Bandpass Filters Using Three Single-Output ICCIIs

New current-mode bandpass filters using three single outputs inverting second generation current conveyors (ICCII) are introduced. The first circuit uses two ICCII+ and one ICCII−, and realizes an inverting bandpass response. This circuit has one floating resistor and no independent gain control. The second circuit uses three ICCII− and realizes a noninverting bandpass response. The third circuit uses three ICCII+ and realizes also a noninverting bandpass response. The second and third circuits employ four grounded resistors and two grounded capacitors and have independent control on Q and on the center frequency gain by varying a single grounded resistor. Spice simulation results using 0.5 um CMOS transistors are included to support the theoretical analysis