Gendering Death: A Study of Oppressive Stereotypes Underlying Muslim Funeral and Burial Rituals in Egypt

This research explores how Muslim funeral and burial rituals in Egypt are shaped by gender stereotypes and socio-cultural norms that predispose masculinity and femininity. It examines the experience of research participants in the context of these gendered rituals and how it affects their participation in them. I adopt a qualitative methodology using personal narrative and auto-ethnography. Analysing physical and emotional experiences, I assess how the regulation of female bodies impacts women participants’ understanding of their bodies. Gender stereotypes, such as the association of women with irrationality, are scrutinised in regards to how they influence ritual and ceremonial practices – such as sex segregation – and in turn affect the emotional experiences of participant women. Furthermore, I address the performativity of masculinity imposed by the ceremonies and assert that Muslim burial and funeral rituals are a norm, a form of power demarcated by gender stereotypes. The gendered nature of the rituals shapes our experiences as males and females, rendering it unequal

From Rebellion to Riots

This article aims to explore the phenomenon of political violence at Egyptian universities after the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime on June 30, 2013.  It is a critical analysis to identify the underlying causes and factors leading to this excessive violence and its impact on the Egyptian universities.  The article drew on qualitative methods by interviewing 16 Muslim Brotherhood students from four public universities.  The results indicate that frustration, injustice, the collapse of democracy, and interference of the security in universities played an initial role in the students violent behaviors.  The forms of violence varied from clashes, throwing stones, and destroying university facilities and infrastructure.  The effects of violence on the university were large such as, cancelling study several times, eliminating student political and cultural activities, infrastructure losses, and many arrests, injuries and victims between students and staff.  Keywords: 30 June events 2013, political violence, Egypt revolution, student protests

GAdaboost: Accelerating adaboost feature selection with genetic algorithms

Throughout recent years Machine Learning has acquired attention, due to the abundant data. Thus, devising techniques to reduce the dimensionality of data has been on going. Object detection is one of the Machine Learning techniques which suffer from this draw back. As an example, one of the most famous object detection frameworks is the Viola-Jones Rapid Object Detector, which suffers from a lengthy training process due to the vast search space, which can reach more than 160,000 features for a 24X24 image. The Viola-Jones Rapid Object Detector also uses Adaboost, which is a brute force method, and is required to pass by the set of all possible features in order to train the classifiers. Consequently, ways for reducing the whole feature set into a smaller representative one, eliminating those features that have non relevant information, were devised. The most commonly used technique for this is Feature Selection with its three categories: Filters, Wrappers and Embedded. Feature Selection has proven its success in providing fast and accurate classifiers. Wrapper methods harvest the power of evolutionary computing, most commonly Genetic Algorithms, in finding the set of representative features. This is mostly due to the Advantage of Genetic Algorithms and their power in finding adequate solutions more efficiently. In this thesis we propose GAdaboost: A Genetic Algorithm to accelerate the training procedure of the Viola-Jones Rapid Object Detector through Feature Selection. Specifically, we propose to limit the Adaboost search within a sub-set of the huge feature space, while evolving this subset following a Genetic Algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed GAdaboost is up to 3.7 times faster than Adaboost. We also demonstrate that the price of this speedup is a mere decrease (3%, 4%) in detection accuracy when tested on FDDB benchmark face detection set, and Caltech Web Faces respectivel

An Investigation on the Effect of Conserved Hinge Histidine on Influenza Hemagglutinin(HA2) Protein Conformation Using MD Simulations

Hemagglutinin is a protein on the surface of Human Influenza Viruses.1 It is composed of two glycopolypeptide domains, the HA1 and HA2 domains. Previous studies have found that across different strains of Influenza viruses, HIS435 residues remain conserved.4 In studies where mutations occurred in hinge-site histadine residues, the Influenza virus was inactive.4 These investigations indicated a significant role of HIS435 (hinge-site histadines) in virulence. Four systems were created using Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Each system was composed of an Isolated HA2 trimer solvated in a 150 mM NaCl rectangular water box at 310 K under isobaric and isothermal conditions . Conditions after endosomal acidification were simulated in two of the systems by protonating their HIS435 residues. Two systems remained with neutral HIS435 residues to simulate conditions before endosomal acidification. This experimental model was implemented to study the role of HIS435 on the mechanistic change in HA2 after endosomal acidification. The simulations were run for one microsecond. During this timeframe, all systems exhibited small-scale conformational changes, however a large-scale conformational change was not observed. This investigation is a continuation of previous research which had studied the microsecond-level conformational change of the full Hemagglutinin protein as it relates to pH and hinge histidine protonation states using molecular dynamics simulations

An Investigation on the Effect of Conserved Hinge Histidine on Influenza Hemagglutinin(HA2) Protein Conformation Using MD Simulations

Hemagglutinin is a protein on the surface of Human Influenza Viruses.1 It is composed of two glycopolypeptide domains, the HA1 and HA2 domains. Previous studies have found that across different strains of Influenza viruses, HIS435 residues remain conserved.4 In studies where mutations occurred in hinge-site histadine residues, the Influenza virus was inactive.4 These investigations indicated a significant role of HIS435 (hinge-site histadines) in virulence. Four systems were created using Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Each system was composed of an Isolated HA2 trimer solvated in a 150 mM NaCl rectangular water box at 310 K under isobaric and isothermal conditions . Conditions after endosomal acidification were simulated in two of the systems by protonating their HIS435 residues. Two systems remained with neutral HIS435 residues to simulate conditions before endosomal acidification. This experimental model was implemented to study the role of HIS435 on the mechanistic change in HA2 after endosomal acidification. The simulations were run for one microsecond. During this timeframe, all systems exhibited small-scale conformational changes, however a large-scale conformational change was not observed. This investigation is a continuation of previous research which had studied the microsecond-level conformational change of the full Hemagglutinin protein as it relates to pH and hinge histidine protonation states using molecular dynamics simulations