The environmental causes of cancer distribution in Syria

In the last decade Syria witnessed a boost in cancer incidences, as well as high mortality ratios. This research aims to illustrate the geographical distribution of cancer over Syria in details and to trace the expansion of incidence through time according to risk factors like age, gender, human behaviour. The paper consists of four parts: 1- Introduction to the topic (cancer and the environmental influence of its distribution) and explanation of the used terms. 2- The relationship between cartogeographical sciences and the topic of the paper. 3- Building a Geographical Information System according to the major district in Syria. 4- Building a Geographical Information System for the southern part of Syria (the most infected place). 5- Results and discussion. The study employed the geographical tools to investigate the geographical distribution of cancer disease and the environmental factor that controls this distribution. The used methods are the statistical, systematic, analytical descriptive, comparative and the cartographical which were employed differently according to the data characteristics. Personal and spatial data were collected from treatment points in a questionnaire that allowed adjusting each of them on the electronic interactive map. Data was analysed statistically and cartographically depicted. Accordingly parallel descriptive and comparative data were added for reaching the final conclusions. Thematic maps were the final product of using GIS. The cartographical product helped to analyse the epidemiological cluster and the accumulated risk factors. The resulted maps were an analytical tool revealing the concepts of spatial data. Natural risk factors were the main focus in addition to people nutrition habits. The studied factors were depicted in three map scales. The recorded incidences for 2002 till 2008 were depicted as well. The output is an atlas of: 1- 1/2000,000 Syria maps showing the big clusters of the disease and the risk factor. 2- 1/2000,000 Choropleth maps showing the ratio of incidence to the census of each Syrian district, 3- 1/200,000 for the southern part of Syria which showed the highest incidence ratios (Al-Souida county). The study showed many clusters based on the kind of cancer and the kind of risk factor and drew the attention to some risk factors that people disregard (the frequent relative marriage in the region of Al-Souida) and some uncommon ones like rock type (Al-Souida). Tracing pollution in time line helped to link the earlier influences and the accumulated factor to the recent incidence. the geographical risk factors were the minor reasons for the cancer clusters (elevation height, solar radiation, rock type, polluted gases in the atmosphere and water wells), meanwhile people habitual activities were the major reason (kind of job, smoking and nutrition system). Considerably some urgent risk factor caused the small clusters up on different groups of people (eating food exported to the city of Dier al-zor which was polluted by radiation)

Financial Development: A Pre-Condition for Foreign Direct Spillover Effects in Egypt

The paper investigates the hypothesis that financial development is the leading channel through which the foreign direct investment (FDI) positive spillovers accelerate growth rate. A simultaneous equations model (SEM) was specified using quarterly data within period (1993-2005). The estimated model evidenced a unidirectional causality from economic growth towards FDI. However, the reverse equations traced the indirect impact of the FDI on economic growth through its dualistic influence on both the financial sector as well as domestic investment. Therefore, further financial liberalization is highly recommended if and only if the planned institutional and regulatory reforms are politically supported. Then, financial derivatives were proposed as a part of the liberalization scenario from one side and as a tool towards managing risks in the Egyptian financial market from the other side.Financial development, foreign direct investment, financial integration, financial instruments

The Capital Asset Pricing Model: An Application on the Efficiency of Financing Higher Public Education in Egypt

In the Markowitz (1952) mean-variance model as well as the Capital Asset Pricing Model of Sharpe (1964) and Lintner (1965) agents make their investment decisions based solely on the expected return and variance. On the other hand, human capital theory does not consider uncertainty in its return function except recently initiated by Harmon et al. (2001) who distinguish between the level and the years of education and incorporate uncertainty in Mincer’s Model (1974). This study has twofold objectives: First, estimate the risk-return trade-off of the public higher education capital stock in Egypt to indirectly evaluate the performance of its current financing system, and second, investigate the inter-linkage between real investment (human) and financial investment (lost opportunity or access to funds), then draw the channel through which they can affect the economic growth.Human capital investment, financial capital investment, capital asset pricing model

Suboptimal greedy power allocation schemes for discrete bit loading

In this paper we consider low cost discrete bit loading based on greedy power allocation (GPA) under the constraints of total transmit power budget, target BER, and maximum permissible QAM modulation order. Compared to the standard GPA, which is optimal in terms of maximising the data throughput, three suboptimal schemes are proposed, which perform GPA on subsets of subchannels only. These subsets are created by considering the minimum SNR boundaries of QAM levels for a given target BER. We demonstrate how these schemes can significantly reduce the computational complexity required for power allocation, particularly in the case of a large number of subchannels. Two of the proposed algorithms can achieve near optimal performance including a transfer of residual power between subsets at the expense of a very small extra cost. By simulations, we show that the two near optimal schemes, while greatly reducing complexity, perform best in two separate and distinct SNR regions